Goddesses, Nymphs and Tramps

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

Allow me to apologize in advance.

You see, I’d already had quite a day.  For some reason, I took a hike in the Hills even though I was already dying from leg day at the gym.  Then my spray tan was accidentally set at level two.  I always use the lowest setting for completely natural looking color and never get clocked so this was potentially disastrous.

Tanning: Brazilians do it better (Photo: L.Luna)

Then, after an hour of negotiating a steamy L.A. while trying not to sweat—because, of course, perspiration is the enemy of the faux tan—my favorite bartender Kevin made me a couple of strong margaritas at St. Felix Hollywood as I navigated the dearth of images streaming in from the Paris shows.  So you’ll understand that when I finally plopped down in front of the television Sunday evening, tired and a little fuzzyheaded, VH1’s Tough Love: Miami seemed like a really good idea at the time.

So Sue Me, Seema

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

This will no doubt be the most post-modern post I’ve ever written.  This is a comment to a comment left on Thursday by Seema Kalia, whose trials and tribulations I commented on in an earlier post.  The Daily Beast has also commented on this combustion of comments with two words: “No comment.”  This post itself will no doubt draw further comment, perhaps even some fire from Seema in the form of a frivolous lawsuit.

I should sue myself for not only having posted this image in an earlier story, but having Photoshopped it. However, I'm in America, snuggled under a blanket called the First Amendment, unlike John Galliano, who is facing prosecution in France for expressing himself.

Why frivolous?  Because the basis of Seema’s complaint against me, as well as The Daily Beast, is defamation, which as any TV legal drama will tell you is extremely difficult to prove in this country.  However, despite having a Juris Doctor degree that should teach her better, or perhaps because of it, Seema has limitless resources and seems to be keen to use them to tidy up her image.

As the old ad campaign goes, there are some things money cannot buy.

Every Clown Has a Silly Lining

TUTTLE MODE

by James Tuttle

Gentle reader,

It took me a while to get around to finally seeing Bravo’s new show Million Dollar Decorators because the commercials for it were so awful.  It looks like a bunch of douches with dueling egos who don’t even know each other outside the show pretending to do some fake design projects for the benefit of the cameras.  Just name it “Real Housewives of Interior Design” and call it a fucking day.

What recession? The stars of Million Dollar Decorator have BUDGETS, baby.

The show actually begins Housewives-style with the five pretentious Los Angeles-based interior designers making grand pronouncements and then posing awkwardly while crossing their arms and stuff.  The attractive Jeffrey Alan Marks proclaims, “I don’t follow the trends, I set them!”  Well, he was attractive before he opened his damned mouth. 

Omnia Vincit Phallus

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I’m trying to make this follow-up post about massive cock a little classier with a title in Latin, which means “phallus conquers all,” a twist on the popular, hopeful gay armband tattoo “omnia vincit amor,” or love conquers all.

Given what has happened in the past few days with hits to our site since the Big Penis Book post, as a content company we have to comment on the effect salacious text and images have on internet traffic.  This is also an excellent opportunity for us to post more images from the Taschen books.  Out of consideration for our token Str8, the beleaguered Eric Baker, whom I imagine is sitting there in Jersey with his head in his hands regretting his association with the feral, smut-minded Gheys of PFC, we are including images from the Big Book of Breasts as well:

There's no point provoking the good burghers of WordPress with naked erections as the lead image. Plenty of room for that later. Well, as much room as all of this flesh can leave.

Just a quick tangent: I have been asked by a few readers why I sometimes use “Ghey” and other times “gay.”  Ghey is the noun, gay is the adjective; e.g., I am a Ghey who makes outrageously gay statements.  And henceforth, “Str8” is the noun, “straight” the adjective.  There is no rhyme or reason for this; this is my sandbox, my content, I make the rules.

Desert Lesbian Realness

The best thing about these blogs is I sit here tinkling away at the keyboard some evenings — and you’d think I was high as a kite the way they come out, but I’m not, haven’t even had a drink since New Years — grinning like Liberace rolling on E while he plays the Turkish March for the blue-rinse brigade in Vegas.  Sometimes I will write something that catches me completely unaware and I snort and Coke Zero goes through my nose and onto the keyboard.

It’s not Spanking Galliano that gets me going these days, that’s sort of sad in a twisted way, and it’s certainly not the Satanic Natalie Portman.  It’s Mama Gaddafi from the House of Gaddafi.  I’m feeling a need to repost that image from an earlier blog with the caption:

Still furious about his exclusion from the seminal documentary on black drag queens,"Paris Is Burning," Mama Gaddafi from the House of Gaddafi vogues Pan-Arab Tyrant Realness while Our Fearful Leader tries not to giggle, lest Miss Thing bomb a United jumbo this time, now that Pan Am has gone out of business.

Correction: Natalie Portman IS Satan

Whaddaya know, it turns out I was prescient about Natalie Portman.  There I am trying to lure readers with silly, lurid post titles like Natalie Portman Carrying Satan’s Child, and the next thing you know, Repube presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is jumping on my bandwagon and attacking her, too.  The difference is, he’s serious.

Natalie Portman rules in hell. Let's face it, the Black Swan was so much cooler than the White, who deserved what she got, that simpering ninny. I bet there will be moments when Nats looks at her bf like this when she's giving birth.

Or Huckabee was serious until he back-pedaled and then said he was glad that Nats was marrying her boyfriend, as if the impending marriage made it all okay and legitimized the pregnancy and the relationship and crap-wallah-wallah-crap.  Okay, Mike, let’s forget for a minute how offensive that comment is to the underclass ten percent (at least) of this nation who can only legally marry their fag hags.  Actually, let’s not forget.  Cleverer political commentators than I can poke more accurate holes in you and your idiocies.  I just need to underscore how outrageous this whole marriage thing is, period.  Why don’t we simply ban the whole institution, already, there’s bound to be something unconstitutional about it.

Lady Gaga’s All-You-Can-Eat Vag Buffet

I have to admit, I briefly joined my nieces, Savannah (7) and Uma (5.5), as a fan of Lady Gaga after Bad Romance was released last year.  I thought it was stompin’ good fun, not to mention that it kept me company whenever I thought about my love life.  But she has lost me with this:

In a nutshell, it’s a very expensive sophomore art school project.  She is trying too hard and the results of her efforts fall short of her earlier video work.  And, yes, that last sentence was rewritten several times; Galliano has homos worldwide stopping themselves before they go too far with what they really think.

Even though my nieces are Episcopalian Hindus — also known in the more rarified circles of Tribeca as ‘Piscadoos’ — at the risk of sounding like an avuncular prig, I’m not sure I want them to see filmed reenactments of the Black Goddess Kali giving birth to the cosmos as might be interpreted by H.R. Giger.  I can just imagine explaining this video to them.

“Uncle James, what is Lady Gaga doing with her cooch-cooch?”

“She’s letting her vagina enjoy a David Cronenberg moment, darling.  And stop calling it cooch-cooch, you’re making it sound like a region in West Bengal.”

“What do you mean what you just said she’s doing with her vagina, then?”

“We’ll talk about it when you’re old enough to watch twisted R-rated psycho-dramas funded by the Canadian government.  How about we watch something appropriate, like The Tudors?”

They love The Tudors.

It’s a Shithole, So Keep Digging

Look at what I found on the stairwell of my tenement-slash-college dorm this morning:

Hey, as long as it's got carpeting, it's a bed.

He’s part of the musician crew from the studio apartment across from mine, the place I described in an earlier post as reminding me of how many musicians you can fit with their instruments into a phone booth.  They’re the ones who have no furniture, so they all sleep on the floor and vacuum once a day rather than making the bed.  So glamorous.

I went on a hike yesterday with my friend James Tuttle up to the Hollywood Sign and around Hollywoodland.  When we were still at the base of the hills, we were treated to another ultra-glamorous sight of some smack-head weaving past us, stopping his car, rolling down his window and projectile vomiting onto the street.  Because we were on foot, we had to walk past a streak of barf now decorating the path.  Ten yards later, he stopped again, opened the door this time and spewed once more, even more copiously.  Given that both Tuttle and I are gay men named James with rapid-fire, caustic senses of humor, it was astounding that we didn’t have much to say.  I believe I was processing a thought something like: if a black cat crossing you path is bad luck, what is someone puking across it?  Is it sort of reverse bad luck like when a bird shits on your head, and whoever is with you snickers in that way that means he’s really smothering a hefty schadenfreude-laden guffaw, and says, “That brings good luck,” after which you feel like cracking open his idiotic head like a fortune cookie?

Like spitting in a really butch way, projectile vomiting is a talent, as demonstrated on "Little Britain."

A few yards up the road, the guy pulled into a driveway and was met by another pasty-faced junkie who handed him what I assumed were drugs, but handed them over just like that, cool as can be, not even bothering to hide the transaction from the two revolted homos tramping up the hill trying to get their cardio in and commenting on the houses and how they’d do things differently if only they could afford something more than their current respective shitholes (well, Tuttle’s is a considerably nicer shithole than mine).

Later Tuttle told me that Moby, who as I also mentioned in a previous post has bought a mini-castle on a peak in Hollywoodland called Wolf’s Lair, left his door open one night and awoke to find some druggie passed out in the front hall (or something like that, we’re trying to locate the story; stand by for verification).  Moby being Moby, having started his career playing at raves, allegedly just put a blanket over the kid, and the next morning he was gone.  This makes me feel better about the phone booth musician passed out on my Hollywood shithole’s stairwell this morning.  I should have put a blanket over him rather than kicking him in the ribs as I walked by.  But that’s why Moby’s a rich vegan and I’m a poor carnivore.

The gatehouse to Moby's new 8-bedroom faux French château at the entrance to Hollywoodland. Bastard.

A side view of Moby's new castle, Wolf's Lair. See, if I were him, I would pour boiling oil on junkies who tried to scale my walls and sleep in my foyer. But I'm not a vegan.

The Health Department came today for an inspection of my apartment as well as the  studio across the hall, which is being rented by the lead phone booth musician, a 19-year-old named Corey, who is much more the right demographic for this building than I am.

Let me backtrack a second to explain how I ended up here to begin with: a couple of better options fell through suddenly; I needed a place to move fast; I was staying around the corner at Tuttle’s; I saw this place listed on Craigslist, went to see it, met the handsome manager, was totally charmed, moved in the next day.  I felt so good about my producerly efficient handling of a mini housing crisis.  Two months later, psycho Susan Blais fired the manager, who was by now my drinking buddy and good friend, and now she’s after me, presumably because he was my drinking buddy and good friend.

So the lovely Persian woman from the Health Department showed up chatting on her iPhone with her grandmother, from what little Farsi I understand.  After she’d noted the shameful condition of my toilet, we went across the hall to the musicians’ phone booth and knocked on the door.  It was 2 p.m.  I’d warned Corey this was happening today, but I knew he’d fuck this up when I heard him still partying at 3 a.m., so I mustered my best parental knock in order to rouse someone in the phone booth to come and answer the door, which I accomplished with evidently more success than the stairway sleeper, who had been shut out of the room all day.  A musician I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before (they all look the same with that hair in front of the face) answered the door and I strode in with my best avuncular stride.

“COREY!!  HEALTH DEPARTMENT’S HERE!!”  I barked.  He was asleep in the master bedroom, better known in real estate argot as the walk-in closet.  I kid you not: Corey really was sleeping behind the sliding doors of the walk-in closet.  Adorable.

The reason I was so loud is I was getting my own back for being kept up last night.  Having been a 19-year-old artist into heavy Class A drugs myself, I know there is nothing better than being roused from a nice coma in a shag-carpeted closet following an all-night bender by your avuncular neighbor’s fog-horn voice announcing the presence of government inspectors.

This necessary unpleasantness — I need to prove to the court that this is indeed a shithole, ergo the call to the Health Department — was capped by a spat with the new manager of the building, a sanctimonious Born Again Christian who keeps saying, “Hey, man, I’m just doing my job,” which is the kind of statement that makes my eyes want to pop out of their sockets with the sheer force of steaming rage arising from pressure-cooked moral indignation.

I needed to get away, so I hopped on the bus and headed east, which is where I should have headed to begin with four months ago rather than moving into Susan Blais’s Trap for Runaway Suckers just because the building manager was handsome and charming.  For Christ’s sake, I’m a filmmaker, I should have seen the most obvious forewarning: the Greyhound Bus Station is two blocks away.  The bus stations in New York and Hollywood are a movie-of-the-week cliché.  This building is for kids who come to Hollywood/New York with their dreams stuffed in their guitar cases, who walk up the street, see the “For Rent” sign, think, Wow, this isn’t bad, and like Corey move in, only to find themselves out on their asses a few months later because of the bedbugs, or because they’ve fallen behind of the rent, or whatever, and Susan Blais has fucked them for their deposits, because what they didn’t realize is that this is really the gingerbread house from a Grimm’s fairy tale, which lures the young uns in so that the evil witch can bake them in a pie.  If they’re lucky, they escape and  follow the bread crumbs back down to the bus depot and home they go, lighter for the guitar they hocked to give their last penny to the Wicked Blais.

I was never meant to live in this place.  It was a total accident.  I shall never rent with my dick again.

So after being slathered with sanctimony by the building manager, I headed east to my friend Ricardo’s furniture store; I knew he would be trapped there and thus an unwitting victim to my need to mewl.  The whole notion of having to call the Health Department and fight back against this insane woman had given me indigestion, and I hadn’t even eaten.  Of course, as always on buses in LA, there was the ubiquitous schizophrenic talking to himself, a Bus Schizo.  He was quiet until we got to around Silverlake, and then the tirade began.

“SHALOM!” he yelled, which was a nice way to start seeing as it was Friday and it was almost sundown; this was a Jewish Bus Schizo.  After singing a little rhyming ditty, he launched into a diatribe on comparative religion for the benefit of the mostly Latino passengers, the gist of which was that all the “damned Catholics” on the bus should “go to hell because we Jews don’t believe in hell anyway, HAHAHAHA!”,  which actually made some perverse sense.  Unfortunately, his bellowing “SHALOM!” set off another one-eyed Bus Schizo in the handicapped seat behind the bus driver, who started whimpering to himself and rocking back and forth.  All I could think was, Where is John Galliano when you need him?  Imagine him in this scene all coked-up and boozy, personality splintering everywhere, collagened lips a-flapping with racist invectives, hurtling himself down the bus at some militant Jewish crackpot who is screaming, “SHALOM!  I’m meshugana!  Can’t you tell?  All you damned Catholics are going to hell!”  (He really said that.  I copied it verbatim on the notepad on my Blackberry.)

Ricardo’s new store (Freespace Modern, 1282 Sunset Boulevard) is in Angelino Heights sandwiched between Silverlake and Echo Park.  Or maybe it’s just after Echo Park.  I dunno.  It’s pre-hip and it’s over there, near downtown, where I should have moved in the first place, if I’d only taken my lazy ass a bit further than just a block away from Tuttle’s place.  Ricardo is selling his formidable collection of mid-century furniture and lamps at  insanely good prices compared to what others just down the road sell the same thing for.

FreeSpace Modern on Sunset Boulevard in Angelino Heights, the next Silverlake.

It was good I made that trip east today;  I needed a chilled, balancing Ricardo Diaz infusion.  I need a plan for whatever happens after my court date with the execrable Susan Blais next week, because whatever happens, I am out of here.  Going to East Hollywood is a good idea for the time being.  I’ll miss my stomps through the Hills with Tuttle and waving to Moby, but sometimes you gotta be a little Californian and follow the signs, you know what I mean, dood?  One minute you’re chilling in your shithole-slash-dorm room thinking about what to do, where to go after this, so you hop on a bus, listen to a rousing schizophrenic Jewish racist tirade, and the next thing you know, the road ahead is clear, lined with florescent yellow bricks.

Indeed, Hollywood: everything is for a reason.

I, Monster

I check my look in the mirror
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.
— Bruce Springsteen, Dancing in the Dark

The caption for this photo on the site I poached it from said, "Springsteen made it acceptable for men to wear bandanas around their heads." Bwahahahahahahahahahaha.

Ever since that song was first released, I have been puzzled.  I can understand Bruce changing his clothes and his hair; the Jersey Boy look can be sexy if you have an eye for what old school queens call “rough trade,” but it’s never stylish, and in the 80s the clothes and the hair from the Swamps Beyond The Bridge and Tunnels were almost as bad as they are now, as showcased on The Show That Cannot Be Mentioned on MTV.  But why would a man as handsome as Bruce Springsteen want to change his face?  After all, a man’s face is something that should not be changed by anything other than time.  For the fair sex, it’s as my former lover Daniel, the Giant Spanker of Celebrities, used to say: “Every vooman has a second face.  It’s called make-up.”

All I can think is that some irate ex-girlfriend of Spingsteen’s must have screamed the truth about his one facial imperfection during a heated smack-down Jersey-style breakup moment: “So you think you’re fuckin’ sexy, huh?  So does half the fuckin’ world!  But let me tell you something.  Do you have any fuckin’ idea how fuckin’ difficult it is to kiss a guy with an underbite?  Huh?  You practically have to hang upside down like a bat to do it properly.  And I’m sick of it!  I’m outta here!”  Which led Bruce to sit down and pen that song.  From then on, if he was going to dance, it would be in the dark so that no one could look at his underbite, which is a pity because it’s the key to his sexiness.

At the risk of being hauled up for cyber bullying with my relentless pursuit of Galliano, this post does pick up from the earlier pieces about him not just because of the work John has had done to his face, but because he’s got me thinking about my play Hatter and narcissism.  What makes anyone take a look in the mirror and not just want to change his clothes, his hair, his face, but take a scalpel to it and rearrange as much of it as he can afford?

A computer impression of what Michael Jackson would have looked like had he not had plastic surgery. I firmly believe that had he left well enough alone with his face, those traumatized boys wouldn't have sued.

Hatter is an extended riff on the Mad Tea Party, in which the Mad Hatter is now Matt Hatter, the Galliano/McQueen/Tom Ford rock-star fashion designer character, and Alice is a fashion journalist who has the goods on him.  One of the tropes I carry over from Alice in Wonderland is the looking glass, the mirror, how people perceive themselves.  The fashion designer, I state in the play, is the mirror that people hold up to themselves: he tells you how to dress, what you look better in, who you are going to be today.

I stumbled on the notion of the fashion designer-as-looking glass when I was writing the piece.  Actually, I stumbled on quite a few things when I was writing it, both intellectually and physically, but I’ll expound more about that when we get closer to production and I shed my inhibitions.  It wasn’t until I was living with a philosophy professor a couple of years later that I realized that this notion of the exterior world being a mirror of the self, in particular the libidinous self, is central to the teaching of modern French philosopher Jacques Lacan.  Basically, Lacan’s mirror stage, “typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body image.”  I’ll leave it there and let you follow the Cliff Notes on Jacques Lacan via my Wikipedia links if you’re interested.  I need to keep this blog as light and fluffy as a Galliano tulle gown if I’m going to keep my readers, i.e., the fashion folk and the Amanda Seyfried breast-loving pervs, happy.

A fluffy Galliano-designed tulle gown. I just can't wrap my mind around how someone who can produce such beauty, and such vast quantities of such beauty, season after season, can reflect such ugliness.

Narcissism, as I discovered during an extended “spack out” I had in London over the fall/winter 2008-09 season, isn’t the same as having a dollop of normal vanity combined with healthy self-confidence.  The cause of said spack out, as the British call flipping out, was that I was taking the oncoming Recession personally.  It had to be my fault that everything was collapsing around me, only I was to blame that a trillion dollars of wealth had vanished, leaving the indie film business — never exactly a booming, flush industry to begin with — with nothing in the collective bank.  See, we rely on the discretionary capital of high-net-worth individuals to close most independent film deals, and suddenly there was nothing left, nothing was moving forward, and we were all tumbling towards nothingness.  In good ol’ Anglo-Australian-American fashion, I saw this as entirely my doing: my small overdraft at the bank had collapsed the world economy in a butterfly effect.  That had to be it because I was raised to believe that had to be it; all problems in our lives are our fault, aren’t they?  And the only possible explanation for this colossal, recession-causing fault of mine was that I had a major personality disorder.

So I hopped onto Our Lord Google, Omniscient God of Everything and Everything Else, and scoured directories on mental illness, the DSM IV, the WikiWonderWorks, you name it.  Then I found the cause of it all:  Narcissism Personality Disorder, a.k.a. NPD.  That was me.  It spoke to me, it rang true.  Years of running from the horrible truth were over.

But a blind test was in order.  I needed proof before I committed myself to an institution, and if not an institution then to intensive outpatient psychiatric care courtesy Her Majesty’s NHS.

I printed out a list of the symptoms without a heading or an explanation and handed them with great drama and flourish to the aforementioned philosophy professor, who shared my bed and knew me best.  “Read this, Jonathan.  And tell me who this reminds you of.”

Jonathan read.  “I dunno, who does it remind me of?”

“Me?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on.  You mean I don’t have even one of these characteristics?”

“Not really.  No.”

I was crushed.  I needed not one, but at least five to be considered an NPD.  But there was still hope: why should I believe the one person that I had purposely brought into my life to convince me I was sane and wonderful when I clearly wasn’t?  Just having Jonathan around was part of the pathology of my NPD.  Luckily, our friend Helen, a psychologist and social worker who spent her days “sectioning” people, which is the British equivalent of forcibly committing people to mental institutions, came over for a cup of tea and a “rollie.”  Helen is a great character: soothing alto voice, big Amy Winehouse black bouffant, fifties glasses, bright red lipstick.

“Go on, Jonathan, tell her,” I said.

“James thinks he’s a narcissist,” Jonathan said.

“And he doesn’t believe me,” I added.

“You’re not a narcissist, darling,” Helen said with calm authority while she finished rolling her cigarette.  “You’re just an American.”

In the end, Jonathan and Helen and Mayoclinic.com convinced me I didn’t have NPD nor any major personality disorder.  All I have is somewhat elevated levels of vanity by British standards, but relatively normal levels of it for an American.  And just because most hours of the day I tend to be preternaturally confident when many people around me aren’t, doesn’t make me a narcissist.

Damn.

True narcissists are delusional.  When I say that there are a lot of narcissists around here, it’s because Hollywood attracts people who really do have NPD.  It’s what makes this “Hollyweird.”  Like all completely or partially insane people, their inner Lacanian mirrors are cracked or warped, as I believe Galliano’s might be, even though it would be up to his shrink to diagnose him, not some blogist who caused him to be spanked one night seven years ago in Paris.

Having said all that, it’s time for me to admit I don’t really fancy myself the gay Hugh Hefner, as I’ve stated in earlier postings.  It just sounded sensational. I’m not even sure I like his baby oil regimen, which I was inspired to try after that NY Times article about him; I feel more leathery, not less.  Actually, I feel parchmenty.

George Clooney's neck wattle, which makes him the straight James Killough.

What I really delude myself as being is the gay George Clooney.  This is not just because both he and I are getting sexier as we get older; although, truth be told, anything is sexier than when I was a tall, lanky, out-of-shape youngster.  The main reason I am the gay Clooney is because we both have the same drooping wattle folds between our chins and necks.  I noticed his the other day while watching The American.  I am a bit younger than Clooney, so I just have one wattle, which is starting to come in like a wisdom tooth.  No doubt it will be joined by another soon, and I’ll be more like Clooney than ever.  They’ll be my wisdom wattles.

I don’t know if Clooney does anything to his face, if he botoxes or fills in wrinkles.  I don’t intend to, even though my sister thinks I should inject something in the accordion action happening around my neck.  Nah.  Just cover the mirrors, people, cos I’m going out like Eastwood, making movies and lookin’ like a Shar Pei puppy.

I shall leave you today not with a celebrity tit picture, we’ve moved on from those, but with a joke a young friend just shared with me via text.

Question: If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?

Answer: Clawing at her coffin.

Apparently that is from Chuck Palahniuk.

Post-Spanking Stress Disorder

Yet another salacious headline to rope you into reading this.  I’m not really stressed.  I’m thrilled, actually.  The reaction to yesterday’s post was gratifyingly positive, not to mention the cause of a huge surge in hits to this blog.  It’s a new record to beat.  I’ll have to start inventing scandalous encounters with celebs to keep up with myself.

Bettie Page getting spanked yet again. Some girls ask for it, over and over again.

A big thank you to the gravelly-voiced Lady in Black, my old friend Madame Diane Pernet, for posting the Galliano piece on her site.  My trusty WordPress dashboard tells me she is almost entirely responsible for driving readers to my blog.

Not that I need to clarify this because everyone seemed to get it, but the point of the Spanking Galliano post was not just to relate some humorously titillating anecdote about a fallen star, or to further participate in mashing that star into the black hole he has made of himself.  The major purpose of the blog was to spank him again, this time myself rather than having some child giant do it for me, as evidenced by the last few paragraphs of the post.

Not the sharpest needle in the sweat shop, Galliano arrives for his arraignment in Paris.

I honestly didn’t anticipate the hits from the Galliano post to be that many. I thought that would happen from scandalized Indians upset that the 1993 Miss India pageant was rigged, but there was nary a peep from them about that.  Hits to the blog remained completely flat the day before yesterday, when I finally came clean about the rigging after long years of suffering in silence, guilt strafing my soul like fighter jets over Taliban strongholds in Helmand Province.  I’m apparently the only one who is still haunted by the outraged wails of gorgeous, long-legged Punjabi lasses backstage behind that awful peacock set when they realized their chance at the crown had been stolen by the daughter of some local industrialist, who allegedly bought it for her.  Oh, well.

Whenever there is a major disaster, and the Galliano dismissal is something of a fashion 9/11 — Who will replace him? Who has the same energy and breadth of vision? Will Dior survive? Will couture itself survive? — conspiracy theories are never far behind.  The more extreme rumor mills are saying that Galliano has been such a catastrophe-in-waiting that LVMH has been trying to get rid of him for years.  They are saying that the people who took the video were sent by the Evil Suits in the Boardroom to goad him on and film him being his naturally racist drunken self.  To wit, LVMH stock barely batted a heavily lashed, gold-leafed Pat McGrath eyelid on the news of Master Galliano’s exile.

I don’t believe the conspiracy nonsense.  No matter how well framed the video was, I think it was coincidence.  I don’t know how old the people taunting him were, but I remember that when I was a bratty youngster hanging out in the Marais I was very cheeky with celebrities.  We feel we know famous people because they so much a part of our lives.  When they are friendly to us, the next thing you know we’re talking back at them like they’re dotty aunts we’ve been teasing since childhood.  Celebrities in the arts are bona fide eccentrics: they’re artists, so they will tend to talk and banter back.  And fight.

I’ve been monitoring a bit of the chat on gay sites regarding the sinking of Battleship Galliano.   It is as usual confused and a bit bird-brained; the ninny gene can run strong at times in Homolandia.  Half of them seem to want to rally around a talented sister they feel was goaded into doing what any self-respecting drunk troll with severe body dysmorphia is entitled to do, which is to lash back with any random bitter-old-queen invective at hand, the nastier the better.  That was Galliano’s own brand of Eau de Vitriol we heard, limited edition.  The out-of-control barbed tongue is a self-defense mechanism most gays recognize, which arises from being taunted and humiliated during childhood at school.  Again, this doesn’t excuse John his behavior; I stand steadfastly behind my spanking with a firm hand.  But for what it’s worth it is something of an explanation.

Recalling my encounter with Galliano, I’ll tell you honestly what my assessment of him was when I got back to London from that trip to Paris: he wasn’t very bright intellectually.  I had met a genius who wasn’t at all cerebral, and that was a first for me, and of course something I needed to process intellectually.  It explained a lot about the fashion world, where it is often difficult to have a sustained “serious” discussion of any depth with anyone, and yet this doesn’t mean they are stupid.

This led me to further investigation into the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I’ll let you explore more in the link if you’re interested.  Having said this, I have met and befriended a number of fashion designers in my time who are equally creative and intellectual, it’s just that none of them were quite at Galliano’s creative level.

Muhammed Ali was a genius in his own way, but I can think of plenty of other people I would rather sit next to on a non-stop flight to Asia with the entertainment system down and nothing to read.

I’m now a firm believer in multiple intelligence.  I’ll never forget watching this lunk of a trainer at my gym working out on the boxing bags.  Not even if I trained a whole other lifetime would I have such assured physical genius as his.  And yet I couldn’t hire him as my trainer because the thought of spending an hour or two a week trying to make conversation with him in between sets was inconceivable; you could tell he could barely understand half of what I said.

Going forward,  I’m going to stop the puerile attention-grabbing and not put up any more pictures of poor Amanda Seyfried’s breasts.  A big apology to my virtual friend Old Ancestor, who was enjoying those.  That joke has run its course, served its purpose.  Thank you Amanda, and Natalie Portman for being such a sport about my teasing.  You too, Brooklyn Decker, whoever you are.  I will start expanding the scope of this blog soon and include reviews, contributors and interviews.  I’m seriously enjoying this.