There is Only US

I know it started, as so many of the worst habits do, in Midtown Manhattan. Working at my first serious career-track post-grad school office job, I had a Daily Commute. I hummed It takes its toll, to play the happy prole to myself every morning on the subway platform, assumed what I hoped was a world-weary/wry expression, and waited for rescue. My signals– which in hindsight rendered me just another manic-depressive/drunk smirker on the F train—would, I hoped, mark me as alien to the office-bound species; a deer lost in a terrible land of wolves, financial planners, and groupacles. Perhaps some keen-eyed fellow commuter would notice the wry-expressioned deer on the train and kindly restore me to my native habitat, waving goodbye as I gratefully scampered off into the forest, or Brooklyn, or a bar. In between anthropomorphic escape fantasies, I read books that complimented my internal soundtrack– clearly non-commuter, non-Midtown titles. First person fiction about a drug addict/alcoholic/tortured young man seeking to connect in the absurd yet horribly beautiful world through black humor and one ultimately futile attempt at a relationship generally satisfied the ever-widening 9 to 5 hole in my heart.

After work: exhausted, disgusted by the foot smell of the 59th street subway station, shocked by the perversity of office casual, sucked of life juice and the will to create anything more than the next day’s hangover, well, I needed something for that long ride back. The book of the morning was too depressing at this point in the day, too many words, too much actual feeling, too much thwarting. And the Harper’s that I often had stuffed in my bag, I mean, God. I needed something heavy on images only, something completely junky, something that defied thought and refused to treat me like an intelligent, concerned citizen of the world. I needed US Weekly.

Though it’s been almost two years since I left that job, I still have a habit, and it’s getting worse. Where once there was just US Weekly, now there is US, Star, and some twenty odd websites that must be checked regularly. I used to buy US Weekly in the subway kiosk without shame, able to answer the patronizing stares from my book-reading fellow-riders with the smug satisfaction born of active literacy. I too read books; there were in fact books and a Harper’s in my bag, just waiting for me to finish catching up– ironically, obviously– with Brit-Brit. The Harper’s subscription is just for show at this point. I don’t even look at the god-damned Index anymore.

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I was thinking about how I would reach out to Lindsay, because I’m concerned. She’d probably ask me who the hell I thought I was and do her little “yeah, motherfucker I’m fine” routine and get really combative in that adorable Long Island scrapper way of hers, but once she saw that no, Lindsay, I am staying right here until you listen to me, we’d get to talking. We’d ease into it, because I wouldn’t want to seem like an authority figure right off the bat. So I might start with something relatively mild, like the mystic tanning. I’d point out that if she insisted on emulating Kate Moss, she might look to the English rose skin example she set rather than her nocturnal habits. I might even– in the conspiratorial tone that lets her know I’m not all business, I’m fun too!– point out that Lindsay’s mother is working the orange, leathered look enough for the both of them. I’d cool it with the mom stuff at this point, knowing that attacking her mother—as much as she deserves it for setting no limits, ‘partying’ with her child, and exploiting her daughter’s success with cynical and Jade Barrymore patented abandon– would set Lindsay on the defensive. I’d maybe segue from the issue of self-tanning abuse to her other habits thusly: ‘and no degree of copper coloring is going to disguise those bags around your eyes, sweetie. You are looking tired, beat, worked, haggard, strung out. When you’re not dead-eying the camera, you’re looking hysterically ecstatic. Add to this your recent embrace of gold lame, hot pants, and porny nude bikinis and we reach one conclusion. Cool it with the disco dust, little lady. Experimentation, fine, but when you’re on your fourth ‘exhaustion’ trip to the hospital, when producers publicly call you out on your handy ‘dehydration’ excuse and threaten to sue you unless you stop getting ‘dehydrated’ in Southland bathrooms and start showing up for work, when Anna Wintour commands you to stop going to the powder room at her Vogue party and orders Karl Lagerfeld to reign you in, when every blind item relating to promiscuous hoovering starlets is immediately identified as you, it’s time to stop. Which also leads me to a little issue that I think might be linked to your well-documented daddy issues, but also somewhat to the bathroom exploits. The men, Lindz. First of all, and here I might just surprise you, I actually enjoy that you don’t have some faux virginal image; that you seem like an agent of your own rather aggressive sexuality. In other words, I like that you’re a little slutty. But the rate of your manhood inhalation is starting to seem more like a compulsion than like something you enjoy. And with your rivals’ boyfriends? I know you were robbed of actual childhood and high-school experiences, so maybe you never learned this, but that’s just juvenile, insecure girl-hating. You don’t need to bone Paris Hilton’s Greek heir to prove you’re ‘hotter’ than she is. You have talent, and style, and a non-lazy eye! Don’t even get me started on Jared Leto; suffice to say, he is Jordan Catalano no more. I know you want to show us you’re not that adorable little girl we loved in “The Parent Trap” anymore. But you might want to think of how– if not as a child star– you want people to view you? Because right now you’re riding that train wreck coke-whore thing all the way to burnout city. Imagine the public is like a kindly old Wilford Brimley grandpa with a freckly granddaughter whom he adores. Now imagine Wilford entering a room in which his beloved granddaughter is blowing rails off of strippers while taking it from behind and screaming, “I’m not a kid anymore!” Why would you want to hurt Wilford Brimley like that?

As with any addiction, there is a ritual to preparing and consuming my tabloids. I almost always get two, US Weekly & Star, the US being the ‘good stuff’, the Star a cheaper and dirtier rush. While I know that I might be muddying the palate by sipping off the Gallo box before chugging the Barbaresco, I need the Star to ease me into my celebrity worship mindspace. Star, with its tissue thin pages, its questionable gossip, its tired dependence on the ‘too skinny’ filler, and its blatant rip-off of all US features, is there to cushion me from the too good too quick high of the US. It also makes me feel better about the quality of US, the elder statesman of glossy celebrity tabloids. (Life & Style and In Touch are even worse than Star, and I won’t buy the American version of Hello!, which sets a new low for copy editing & press releases as journalism. People doesn’t really count, since they litter their pages with ‘real people triumphing’ stories.) I bring my magazines home, I lay them out, and I take them all in: the smell, the feel, the hysterically pitched headlines that promise me I need this information now, now, now. Despite its adventures in font colors and embrace of expensive paparazzi photography, Star still looks like the paper tabloid rag it was before its luxurious relaunch, which I find charmingly honest. I’m mesmerized by how glossy the cover of an unread US is, the appropriately oily feel it has to the touch, that impossible sheen which promises to make everything shallow and plastic vibrant, important, ecstatic!

Once I’ve opened that cover and started down the hole, I focus on the tangled politics of Hollywood feuds, the interweaving love lives of my favorite starlets, the perfect abnormality of celebrities doing normal things while being photographed, the possible baby bumps, the cries for help that only the tabloids can hear and answer, the celebrities who will do anything to be photographed (i.e. Jennifer Love Hewitt, often photographed actually posing with an issue of US), the little bits of gossip which are generally far tamer than what I’m receiving on the internet, and finally, the pictures of gorgeous women with unattainable bodies and wardrobes accompanied by how-to tips for attaining/buying those bodies/wardrobes. At the exact instant when I have finished perusing the pictures of the Fashion Police (while avoiding the aggressively unfunny captioning from the Wacky Morning-DJs they employ), US loses its sheen, becomes completely cheap looking, and is done.

I feel the thrill of my new information for a few minutes– Lindsay’s lady parts have inhaled a new boy, the littlest Scientologist baby remains unseen and therefore probably made-up, Ashley Simpson’s daddy bought her an entirely new face– before the crash. I look at this little piece of trash that has stolen my mind for a period of at least thirty minutes, the contents of which (supplemented by the internet) will continue to consume my energy and imagination for hours and days and weeks to come. In lieu of the name of any leader in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran or Syria, I will instead be able to recall the history, intricacies, and ever-changing alliances of the Paris vs. Nicole, Mischa, Lindsay & Olsen twins wars. At the slightest trigger I can and do discuss the personal details of musicians whose music I do not like, actors and actresses whose acting I do not respect, ‘celebrities’ whose very reason for being famous I cannot quite pin down. This is the ritual of the tabloid in my life, and no matter how many times I swear I don’t care if the under-educated, over-sexualized young pop star/actress/socialite gets divorced/cleaned up/some flesh to cover her clavicle, I will return to them again and again, week after week.

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Towards the end I was buying my tabloids at the big chain bookstores, making like an old man asking for Barely Legal, nervously attempting conversation with the clerks. Usually they recognized the shame in my voice and simply smiled thinly, not asking that question, the obvious one floating in front of my face like a horribly reasonable mosquito: why would anyone buy a tabloid at a bookstore? Everyone knows that at Barnes and Nobles and the like you can read about twenty of those magazines without being pestered; if you need to do the hard research on the Paris-Nicole conflict before publicly commenting, the spacious magazine section will serve as your well-appointed, Starbucks-supplemented library. As a bonus, you’re sticking it to the Man! You have no intention of buying their corporate coffee or their books; you’re just browsing for two hours! I used to get my fix this way, but those were the halcyon days of dabbling. Now I needed to own, to hold that thin glossy volume of beautiful trash in my hands and in my home. Books went unread so that I could understand the desperate state of Britney’s marriage, about which I was genuinely concerned. The websites, which I once regarded as the more intellectually compatible way to sate my celebrity gossip needs, were no better. No degree of ironic commentary, no matter how clever, could obscure the fact that I needed to know where Lindsay Lohan was last night.

Rock Bottom: I was talking about the Firecrotch incident, like I do. Why did no one in the media fail to connect Brandon Davis’ perpetual bloat-sweat with cocaine? For that matter, at what point would the quaint euphemism ‘partying’ stop being employed to describe the clear bathroom coke-whoring of the young Hollywood set, a group of girls who actually expected me– a terribly proficient drug-taker in my day– to believe that all it took to dance on banquets until six in the morning before giggling on the Today Show was an endless supply of Red Bull and pluck? Perhaps there was a genuine lady problem plaguing the starlets of Los Angeles necessitating these continual trips to the bathroom; a scourge of urinary tract infections besieging the celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe’s client list? Could Zoe, the nefarious harbinger of the oversize accessories con undersized girls look, be the carrier, the source of her clients’ mysterious fat-eating viruses? I was building my thesis (Every Skeletal Girl With a Teen Audience in Hollywood has Herpes, a Drug Problem, and a Really Great Hermes Satchel), when I was interrupted.

“Who is Brandon Davis?” asked my friend.

And then, perhaps two years too late, it hit me. I knew all about Brandon Davis. I knew he was the grandson of an oil tycoon. I knew he had gone to UCLA for a bit, and called himself an ‘art dealer’. I knew that he had been photographed at a Taco Bell, on a Hawaiian veranda, perusing a Mercedes lot, and at innumerable clubs with his girlfriend Mischa Barton, with whom he had shared a tempestuous relationship before she dumped him for Cisco Adler. I knew all about his on again-off again friendship and present co-habitation with Paris Hilton, who giggled with him the night he called Lindsay Lohan a ‘poor’ ‘firecrotch’. I knew about the history of obesity in his family that drove him to his sweaty embrace of the good old uppers diet, a favorite on the Hollywood scene since the days of Judy Garland. I knew he had a very fat brother who had dated Courtney Peldon. I knew who Courtney Peldon was. And I was about to poison someone else– an innocent! A concerned citizen of the world whose guilty pleasures were blogs like Talking Points Memo!– with this useless, corrosive trivia. I had a problem, much as Brandon did, and I intended do something about it, though not at Promises Rehab Clinic in Malibu. I don’t have that kind of money.

No magazines, no cable, no internet gossip; I decided to clean up. There was a period of withdrawal, a shameful relapse or two. A trip to the grocery store was derailed by Kate Hudson’s divorce scandal. While I have no particular interest in daughter-of-Goldie, her marital problems as covered by US seemed infinitely more important than produce, and I may have been asked to stop loitering and actually purchase the assorted food stuffs and popscicles that sat melting in my cart as I binged on her personal misfortune. At home, I sat at my dining room table, not checking websites, not reading magazines, trying to reorder my mind. I wondered what Lindsay was doing, and who was photographing it, and whether I should be concerned. She seemed like such a stranger, and I missed the certainty I felt about her life, a certainty which just doesn’t seem to apply to a lot of other situations. Who was there for me to arbitrarily love or hate, based on some illusory sense of intimacy? What club was I supposed to want to get into, what expensive designer bag should I crave, what celebrity should I envy? Whose image and entire public persona could I consume and judge? It was easier with them in my life, less lonely, more skinny. Without them to distract me, what was I left with? A lot of wars, and grocery club cards, and myself.

And now that it’s all fading, I feel a bit wistful. It is a zen tree koan made base: if Britney is photographed barefoot and curlered while holding her baby in a precarious position and I’m not reading about it, did it happen? I don’t even remember what it felt like to feel sympathy for Denise Richards, or concern for Nicole Richie, or hatred for Wonkey-Eye Hilton.

I focus now on my life free of tabloid: I work, I talk to people with whom I do not [often] discuss the brainwashing of Katie Holmes; I read books with many multi-syllabic words and no pictures; I cook dinner without asking myself whether it is in keeping with the Latest Celebrity Diet Insured to Produce The Hottest Beach Bod; I do crossword puzzles whose answers are never related to tabloid subjects; I listen obsessively to NPR, amazed at how much news and information I’d been able to block out, and at my capacity to absorb it now; I watch movies starring actors whose personal lives are completely and purposefully foreign to me; I wonder why I feel so much better about my body; I go to restful sleep and never dream of Lindsay. I take one step at a time, and I repoen the Harper’s.

Click here to see the cartoon.

They continue to run the interview with Death Cab in a little bubble on the lower left quarter of the screen, and as Ben talks about the Show Box theatre the wide shot focuses on: anonymous video slut bending over in a blue satin ‘porn star interprets classy’ peekaboo dress, complete with strategic absences of fabric around the ass and fake boobs. Then, as Ben continues to prattle about great indy venues, the nameless P.R. whore taking up the majority of the screen slithers her body to full vertical glory: she convulses her chest and hair back and swivels her hips’n'butt while throwing her best ‘come-hither for I shall verily blow you’ look at the assembled cameras. I imagine it’s a reenactment of the particularly skeezy pole dance she performed in order to secure her ‘50 Cent Entourage’ Grammy ticket. She’s essentially stripping for the camera, and though no one seems to know who the hell she is, well, when a big-booty-ho has, in her one desperate bid for fame, decided to flash her goodies for the camera, that trumps Seth’s favorite band any day.

But then, because maybe your attention is starting to wane as you realize that she will not actually be performing a ping-pong from the hoo-ha trick on cable: in the top right hand corner comes an image of a tuxedoed teenage boy playing an electric violin! And Ben Gibbard is still talking! I love E!

Mickey Rooney, looking every inch the toupeed blueberry in a navy leisure suit, toddles towards us on a sound stage in front of the ORIGINAL Andy Hardy house in order to speak a little bit about his hit musicals (please remember, Andy Rooney was once THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE WORLD! AND HE BANGED AVA GARDNER! BEFORE SHE COULD EVEN GET A WALK ON IN ONE OF HIS SENSATIONAL MOVING PICTURES! THE DOLLS LOVED HIM BECAUSE HE WAS THE BIGGEST BRIGHTEST SHINING STAR IN THE MGM GALAXY! ) Thankfully Mr. Rooney here refrains from waxing creepy on his famous conquests. Instead he introduces a bit about the Mickey & Judy musicals and his frequent co-star, Ms. Judy Garland. “That’s Entertainment!” was released five years after Judy overdosed on the uppers and downers she’d been addicted to since her teens. But here’s why “That’s Entertainment!” is the finest in studio system delusion: Andy Rooney, putting his all into a fine imitation of youthful naiveté, exclaims, “Where we got all that energy, I’ll never know!” Boy, Mr. Rooney, I don’t know either! Maybe it’s just the excitement of putting on a show with the whole gang! I sure would like to see some clips from those pictures, testaments to the incredible energy reserves available to adolescents kept on a strict studio-enforced amphetamine regimen. Oh yes, l’il Rooney, I would love to see some clips! Boy, that was a simpler time, wasn’t it? Look at the soda shops, look at the hay dances, look at the black-face number. Wait. Oh. Yup, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a fantastic song-and-dance number in which Rooney and thirty other male dancers are in blackface. This is awkward. Maybe we could go back to the more comfortable terrain of drugging adolescent girls.

The fantastic stupidity of “That’s Entertainment!” is that scenes like this are not rare, and that there is absolutely no self-consciousness about their offensiveness. We wouldn’t want to tarnish the studio’s name by mentioning that Uncle Louis B. gave little Judy magical thin’n'perky pills, but there’s nothing wrong with showing you some of our fantastic, dazzling blackface numbers! What? What’s wrong? Oh look, here’s Peter Lawford, one of our galaxy of stars you’re not really familiar with. He’s apparently gone for the Charlton Heston aging-salve: the ascot. He speaks about the “original look of an MGM musical” while we see clips: lots of Technicolor feathers and sequins, show-stopping dance numbers full of challenging choreography made even more amazing by the heels and gowns involved, complicated aerial shots and, oh no, not again. Cut to further evidence of “unique look”: two white dancers in black face, doing a “native” dance in front of a sound stage tiki god. Wow! The splendor of choreographed racism! Since I am limiting myself to the first of the “That’s Entertainment!” trilogy, I won’t go into too much detail about the Joan Crawford in blackface musical number featured in “That’s Entertainment III”. A scene like this exists, and you have to sleep at night knowing that.

There is just so much to love in “That’s Entertainment!” BEHOLD: Donald O’Connor, pretending to be straight and wishing he could have worked with the “lovely figured” Esther Williams (who oddly gets a huge amount of screen time. I had no idea she was such a big star, or that she was married to a Lamas). GAZE UPON: Elizabeth Taylor, as she descends a perfectly backlit staircase covered in jewels and a diaphanous blue gown, her black hair bouffanted to the heavens, her heavily lidded eyes filled with barbituates and regret. Hearing her use that kitteny/tipsy voice to expound on MGM musicals as though she’s singing “Is that all there is?” is like gazing into the eyes of pure, intoxicating gay iconhood. But before you start getting too worried about whether Liz can stay awake long enough to introduce her clips, BE CHARMED by little Ms. Spunk herself, the incomparable Ms. Debbie Reynolds! Just writing about Ms. Debbie Reynolds is exhausting, and as much as I like her, I am distrustful of such unfailing adorability. It’s like she’s still on Uncle Louis’ happy pills, which, given the 1974 release date, is a distinct possibility.

All sarcasm aside, I love many of these musicals, and I am perfectly capable of watching “That’s Entertainment!” 1, 2, & 3 back-to-back for the clips of Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly alone, and because I am capable of many great feats of movie nerdery. All of the “That’s Entertainment!” pictures feature long montages dedicated to Garland (the first is introduced by Liza!), and you really do have to be a heartless bastard not to love her. It’s awful that the same studio responsible for hooking Judy on dope and dumping her when the drugs ultimately (some twenty years later) hurt her performances can then take so much credit for her career, but her history makes the absurdity of MGM’s back-slapping clear. And though you know how horribly it all turned out, watching Judy Garland sing on screen makes all the Dazzling! aspects of the MGM musicals fall away, because all she needs is her voice to make the movie. Whitewashing, far too many utterly awful musical numbers, and too much Esther Williams? Oh yes. But also: more stars than there are in the heavens, the dream factory’s self-regard on Uncle Louis’ speed, & Singin’ in the Rain.

I was not instrumental in its creation, as I had some very important “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” to review. My hypothesis: Courtney B. Vance’s DA character never, ever wants to actually try cases. Every episode of the Vincent D’Onofrio hour (last night our man dipped into his pool of knowledge to hold forth on the 1930’s American Cup winners, Argentinian-Jewish dialects, 19th century poisoning methods, and Siddhartha, and that was just two episodes) comes to a momentum-killing standstill when Mr. DA man shows up to reject Vincent’s brilliance. This mid-hour buzz-kill is as reliable as the final, utterly satisfying 8 minutes of the show, when D’Onofrio gloriously chews all visible scenery while needling, stuttering, screaming, and spasming full confessions out of supposed criminal master-minds. Because he is THAT smart, and he is always right.

So why, given Vincent’s 98% success rate (lest we forget his near-misses with his nemesis and symbolic other half, the psychopathic and very charming “Nicole”), does the DA always refuse to lift even a finger to help Vincent attain a warrant/arrest/known criminal? I understand that his role within the drama is to be the naysayer/bureaucrat whose inability to grasp even the simplest theory of a murder case that OBVIOUSLY centers on a 17th century theological debate forces Vincent to plumb even greater depths of ephemera, but it gets very tired. Mr. DA doesn’t just refuse to help; he is openly hostile with our brillliant, if socially awkward, D’Onofrio, and seems to want him to stop investigating and simmer down. It’s almost like he hates our man Vincent, and I think it is clouding his DA perspective. Last night he wanted to CLOSE a case that was very clearly about a mind-controlling young Herman Hesse-acolyte using his asexual charms on the ghonnorrea-plagued teenaged girls of his island community in order to get them to kill people and, when necessary to cover his tracks, themselves. He didn’t even hide his derision for D’Onofrio’s completely lucid theory, which really gets my goat every time. Here is me halfway through each C.I.: “How many murderers have you found using your freakishly superior intellect, Mr. DA man? None! That’s right, so get that smug ‘I don’t want to hear about mini-Mansons on the Channel Islands’ look off your face! Why are you the DA? Are you really just a very patient defense attorney in DA costume? Why are they making you (I am now hopping the fourth wall and addressing the very talented actor Courtney B. Vance here) do this same scene again and again?! You are better than this! None of the other Law and Orders treat thier DAs with this kind of derision! Stand up for yourself, Courtney B. Vance, for you are married to Angela Basset, and she stood up to Ike Turner!’”

All of this, and so much more, has led me to my hypothesis: Mr. Courtney B. Vance DA hates trying cases, and is a depressed man desperately in need of a mid-life career change. Mr. DA man does not like his job, and he is very irritated with this twitching police detective who keeps wanting him to actually try people for murder. He complains about D’Onofrio to Mrs. DA every night. Can’t this jittery Rain Man po-po see that trying people for murder without an elaborate full confession is hard? Why should he, the DA for New York, have to, like, ask questions, or build a theory of the case, or present evidence? If he could, he would settle every single murder case, and then retire upstate to a nice farm, maybe raise a couple head of cattle, focus on those neat model trains he’s always admired.

So after I collected the necessary nightly CI report and yelled about Courtney B. Vance while swilling a very minerally white wine, I had some of the stuffing Dan had been making while I’d been “studying” the TV. Though the polenta was not firm enough to be cubed as the recipe requested (their mistake– THEIRS!– as the time they allotted for chilling in the recipe as written was insufficient), it was nonetheless delicious, as Dan’s polenta is the finest I have ever tasted. It is full-bodied and creamy, with a complex and rich flavor that I find unusual in the often one-note world of polenta. Since the polenta wasn’t firm, however, the stuffing was more of a mash, hence my (COPYWRITED) recipe name. The sausage gave it a great kick, and though the recipe called for sweet sausage as opposed to the spicy style we used, I liked the mild spice. In fact, my only note is that without the spicy sausage, the taste is a bit too mild. I would definitely recommend using this recipe, especially with some quality spicy italian sausage and firmer polenta. I would also recommend that the producers of Criminal Intent either a) let the DA excitedly issue a warrant and express his delight at the prospect of a big old-fashioned jury trial or b) throw him a festive retirement party, at which D’Onofrio grudgingly presents a specially iced cake (he probably studied the art of the medieval gateau in culinary school) to his old sparring partner before they share an awkward but heartfelt man-embrace.