Just In Case
October 24, 2008
Overweight Dyslexic Attention-Whore Fascist Embarasses Herself
I'd stay away from mirrors too.
So it seems this chubby mythomaniac (Ashley Todd) invented a black slasher and live-blogged a faked attack from the “wrong side” of Pittsburgh.
A glance at her blog and you can tell that this hefty Texan is fond of both kinds of Whopper. She writes, of a weekend in scummy, liberal New York:
So, I had an interesting time in my second time in NY. Finding a hotel was hard, since the UN was meeting, and the only Kinds were very skeezy. And i paid 200 bucks for the honour of staying in these usually “by the hour” type places…Ew.
In Manhattan? Really? In the 1970’s, I suppose..? Poor Ashley has been incarcerated in her gated community for so many years wathcing 1980’s movies about suburban babysitters adventuring into New York-by-night to save children from lesbian child pimps and etc…
Here are some more pictures of her Junior Fascist League friends working out their provincial sexual frustrations by, for example, cavorting as folkloric and racist stereotypes:
NDLR: Seems COLLEGE REPUBLICANS have decided to scrub clean their flickr pages of all things Ash Todd.
October 21, 2008
The Deaths of Discretionary Spending
I’m very curious about how the structures around us will change as discretionary budgets wither and blow away into the bleak future.
Especially from Paris, where the shelves are still thronged with musky luxuries and one endless fashion week seems to grind into another (there are eight, I think, if you count Couture and Cruise/interseason). Haute Couture, perhaps the most extravagant example of discretionary purchasing, has been very lucratively repurposed as the face and identity of mass market perfumes. Discretionary budgets, like Satan, fulfill infinite desires. When they become undesirable in one place, or one class, they can be rehabillitated and elsewhere positioned.
In France, ‘Tis also the season of campy ads in which French families orgasmically swallow cheap foie gras, pissy champagne, soy-based chocolate products, and a host of other derivative luxury-market excretions. In France, even the lowest, most vulgar and unelaborated discretionary purchase is still, in some way, a delightful—if unintentional—parody of luxurious refinement.
Foodstuff marketing that strays too far from traditional French notions of taste and portion is scorned. Foreigners in France often complain of what they perceive to be the nationalism of French chefs, the latter never having really welcomed “fusion” cooking considering it a kind of occasionally useful pollution. But this kind conservatism has preserved a degree of diversity, of taste recognition, even among very small children, that would be unheard of outside the most privileged coastal families in America. French discretionary spending is more closely bound to traditional ideas of beauty, utility, indulgence, and refinement. One finds traces of these notions in even the lowest gamme products (tea biscuit boxes in France are printed prominently with PURE BUTTER, for example, because the French understand that a reasonable amount of butter is healthier and tastier than a vat of processed vegetable oils). The vulgar, biased French 8pm news covers the haute couture shows the way American stations cover the must-have back-to-school backpack.
The United States has a slightly more extremist approach to marketing to discretionary budgets.
Discretionary income gives us the shape and color of our civilizations. When a Wal*Mart springs up in Grubbyville, Wyoming, it comes with the intention of tapping our discretionary budgets. The strip of paved austerity it builds will eventually accommodate Bed, Bath and Burgers; Wing Wong Dynasty Restaurant; Shop-Rite; etc. and is laid out in a way to encourage our discretionary spending, as well as our means of hauling home the loot. There’s a gas station at each end of the strip so that we can refuel our vehicles (discretionary purchases?), burger and Chinese joints so that we can swallow or daily 5, 000 calories, bank machines and pawn shops, so that, through credit, we can sink beyond indebtedness and into a state of lavish, gaudy poverty. The clothing, appliances, perfumes, and furnishings are scrubbed free of any cultural indicator, as their manufacturers are allergic to confusing regionalisms. The dreadful miracle in all of this conformity is that American home interiors still clash so garishly.
Even Universities and Museums have been shuffled into the randomized deck of discretionary purchases. Luxury brands are exquisitely careful at concealing their massive sales, their massive scale, their reliance on outsourced (read: cheap, Asian) labor, their mechanization, their homogeneity. So-called “luxury groups,” as Dana Thomas has exposed in her fabulous and shocking Deluxe, have become elegant (and higly retouched) portraits of globalization. Years ago they learned to use the couture dress to sell perfume to office girls. Today, they fund contemporary art. Tom Sachs, with his Chanel guillotine and his Prada concentration camp was one of the first to notice the imposture. During the nineties, a too-long cocaine and fossil-fuelled decade during which “journalists” interviewed “supermodels” at “fashion and music award shows,” television viewers in their gloomy, atomized suburban screening chambers, could watch shimmering, pixillated faces explain: “I mean, it’s just natural…fashion and music and art they just …go together…”
A dress and a song and a fish and a painting and an atom bomb have about the same associative logic. Don’t tell that to Vanessa Beecroft, who, when not working with Kanye West or draping naked women over Vuitton trunks is busy, in Wikipedia’s stilted attempt at Gallery-ese, toiling gorgeously at something “neither performance nor documentary, but something in between, and closer to Renaissance painting.” I totally spotted that. In all fairness, her latest work brings attention to the Darfur genocides. Are those panties LaPerla or Wolford, do you think?
American universities have become glamorous, high-walled affairs, straight out of a Margaret Atwood dystopia. The hypertrophied creature-comfort and customer service elements of today’s higher educational institution make my own pampered college years seem like a particularly dusty episode of Little House on the Prairie.
My question is very simple: when your lifestyle and culture, at nearly every level, is best described as a discretionary budget buster, what happens when the budget is cut? I’m interested in how people will remake the world (in very material terms) now that these excessive decades have come to such an ignominious end.
Americans have confused the international conformity of private property for public space. Our discretionary purchases (homogeneous, mass-marketed, credit-fuelled, gas-guzzling, highly caloric, sexually schizophrenic, ephemeral, low-brow, psychotropic) mirror our lifestyles. In America, discretionary purchasing often is lifestyle.
So what will happen to these American landscapes as discretionary budgets shrink or emigrate? What painful mutations will we suffer? Will less mean better? Will it mean less Sarah Palin, less Grandma Havasu Barbie and Lobotomy Caribou Barbie? Will it mean new regionalisms? Will the Big Box stores really be starved out by high transportation costs? How will retail structures be “repurposed”?
Links:
September 14, 2008
“High” Society: Aspiring Jackie Sez: “One pillbox hat, hold the hat!”
Whistleblower goes on record about “Keating Five” McCain:
Senatorial staff and resources abused in drug theft cover-up of homewrecking booze heiress and recovering addict, Cindy McCain.
September 13, 2008
“High” Camp
Cindy McCain is an American EveryLady, Famous for her natural beauty and understated style.
Listening to Governor Palin’s gurgles, I feel like someone is working a very fine, steel wire into my spine. I’d need some of Lady McCain’s vicodin to get through ten more minutes of hiccuppy retorts from that … animated chignon.
Have you seen THE VIEW?
Those women (though not brain dead former reality show zero, E. Hasselbeck, the right-wing demon on the show’s shoulder) asked him some of the most difficult questions I’ve heard at any point in this odious spectacle.
The clips are below. There are four, I think; stick around for the appearance by a narco-zombified Lady McCain, in all her Sportswear-by-St-John, Valium-bot, barbiturate-barbie, “high” camp :
She REFUSES to give Barbara an exact house count!
And the Xanax-zaniness doesn’t stop there…
Some Gems:
- According to a frail and chalky Senator McCrazy, Sarah Palin is the most popular governor in America. It seems giving out 2,000 dollar checks to all of your constituents helps you in elections. Pitbull Palin also wrested 27,000,000 in federal earmarks for the worthy 10, 000 citizens of Wasilla (that’s 2,700 in federal spending—money from the “lower forty-eight”—per head).
- The Democrats have been in charge of both houses of congress for two years and they’re the ones who really screwed up.
- Sarah Palin is going to reform all of Washington…
- Would Sarah Palin enslave Whoopi Goldberg?
The View averages 3.4 million viewers daily.
September 5, 2008
Today’s Republican
The Republicans, like all extremists, must limit themselves to emotion.
And as so many Americans are, simply put, limited, these limits are actually quite generous.
All of those old, odious hippopotamus women at the RNC convention, Maybelline-spackled and waving their arm fat, are all voting on gilded, garish nostalgia for a past that never happened. There is no reasoning with them. American rightwingers vote on “seems” and “feels” and are stubbornly skeptical of “is”.
They left reality-based existence a very long time ago and have grown fat and cozy in their junk houses eating their junk food and dreaming about their sticky-fingered masturbation years in the 1950’s when the side-effects of junk culture hadn’t yet eroded their beauty and intelligence.
They’ll snooze through nuance, in their XXL “athletic apparel” and drive their SUV to the Obama rally to unroll their JUST FUCKIN’ DRILL banner. There is no reasoning with them. We must accept that. You’d have better luck teaching Mandarin to a walrus.
It’s terrible to say but that whole RNC spectacle – the little Palin-Babe (I forget what Glade scent she’s named after) spit-slicking that pimped out slow baby’s forelock (to an ocean of sickening old-lady cooing! Gack!), to S Palin’s diction-coached middle American housewife gutturals – all of the ape-screaming and breast beating made me think of the emotion and vulgarity of Nazism. “The oceanic feeling” that Freud detected in the sublime and also in fascism. “YOU ESS AY!! -YOU ESS AY!!” And the three minute applause that Ms. Nobody got for shopping that Down’s baby around to all of the tabloids? Pure emotion.
The RNC has become that desperate friend everybody’s mother has who leaves messages on the answering machine saying, “Oh my God Sandra you have to call me I have STORIES!” They found the most obscure country heifer in the world, gussied her up with vaginal pink Babs Walters hot-lamps and a Lifetime-TV-for-Women story and, as they say in Tee-Vee, “they had a hit!”
They worked backwards from a punchline: “Ok, right, so we get some bumpkin with a cracked up family.. say, daughter’s a YouthGroup teen, knocked up on the schoolbus by a redneck, “differently abled” baby, husband to dumb to speak, etc etc… and we take them to Beverly Hills…nonono… to WASHINGTON!”
So they fly up to Methville, AK, take a sniff, and like what they find. They write a fancy speech for her, wind her up, and put her on stage and the charm machine starts grinding out Reader’s Digest-style boilerplate. And Maureen Dowd writes another one of those columns that sounds like it was written by some gin-breath barfly at three am in the Delta lounge at Newark Int’l. And in the irradiated gloom of TeeVee rooms all over the fly-over states fat, failed, depressed, fundamentalist women — women for whom the only title they will ever possess is “Mrs.” and they don’t intend on sharing that with some bagel munching coastal dykes and fags — (and anyway, little Madison or Emilee is already on her second child, though marrying the boy this time..very respectable…) and fine specimens of beer-bellied, jet-skiing, stag-party American Masculinity will tear themselves away from their internet pornography for long enough to give a hazy thumbs up and…
a star is born!
They’re all reassuring themselves that it’s ok to be irrational, that reality has been safely bottled and exiled and sealed up in a log of leaded glass and stored in Yucca mountain.
But Reality, the reaper, walked through the door instead of Jesus (that old so-and-so) and took many forms, none of them very pleasant (the void they displaced when they built their trash houses and has come back in the form of depreciation, the refined sugar diet has become all that arm fat proudly waving — imagine the time American embalmers must spend on all of that fat! — made-in-china petro-plastic flags, the guns that go to school (their destined destination, after all: guns are made to exterminate and effective extermination starts with groups of children cornered in rooms with one door and no fire escape), the JUST FUCKIN’ DRILL dumb-dumb mentality that believes that resources are infinite and if you don’t get what you want you simply shout louder and throw your fat around a bit more) and they’re scared.
They just want a few more years of something-for-nothing.
And it’s not coming.
And they’re scared.
Here’s a video of that classy, enchanting, all-American Palin family.
All of you haters out there saying Bristol Palin is a slut are going to be so very contrite.
September 2, 2008
John McCain Doesn’t Remember Any of These People.
What about McCrazy?
Maybe he should ask the FBI for a clue?
“People familiar with the process said Ms. Palin had responded to a standard form with more than 70 questions. Although The Washington Post quoted advisers to Mr. McCain on Sunday as saying Ms. Palin had been subjected to an F.B.I. background check, an F.B.I. official said Monday the bureau did not vet potential candidates and had not known of her selection until it was made public.”
September 2, 2008
Sex Addict’s Double Life!
Must be hard getting pimped out at four months...
“They didn’t seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before,” said a Republican close to the campaign. “This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.”
