Rigfire
05-15-2003, 01:37 PM
Fred's back:
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I worry about movie stars. A website somewhere shows photos of presumed hot tickets in make-up, and then in candid shots in the street. They run from ordinary to ugly. Some have the allure of golf bags, especially the ones trying to look thirty years younger with what seem to be injection-molded cosmetics. (http://www.fredoneverything.net/Grocery.shtml)
What’s the social undercurrent here? Strap in: We’re about to probe a dark rivulet of the collective unconscious. In the groc-tabs, it’s not “Miss Jennifer Lopez” or “Mr. Scott Peterson.” It’s J.Lo and Scott, with the easy familiarity of a high-school sleep-over. The product here is artificial entré. If you’re forty pounds overweight, lonely or wishing you were, and stuck in some boring low-level job at the post office where you can’t even shoot people any longer – why, the Enquirer will put you on a first-name basis with glamorous over-promoted nonentities. For only $2.99, you can do a line of coke with Sylvester, or share a Cellulite Experience with Demi.
Television. That’s what does it. It makes people in trailer parks, which for practical purposes is most of us, think life ought to amount to more than feeding the mortgage monster and bailing ungrateful kids out of whatever disaster they’ve most recently managed to create. In 1900, before television, nobody expected life to be fulfilling. And it wasn’t. You could depend on it. Unless of course you thought it was fulfilling to lead a decent life and raise your kids happily in a small town in Missouri.
You didn’t have any knowledge of the rich and useless. You knew they were out there, like malaria and the chupacabras, but you didn’t have to look at them.
Now the lobotomy box rubs the aggregate face in the rompings of the California glitz kennel, where every guy is a hunk and every gal a babe, by definition golden and happy and smiling, and off to Paris by private jet to interminable gratification.
So people without jets think ponder their lives and think, Is this all there is? Yep.
I don’t understand supermodels either. But the tabs love them. Face it: They’re a mess. They’ve got no breasts, no hips, and no fannies, and walk as if they had something wrong with their feet. You’ve heard crossed eyes? They’ve got crossed ankles. Imagine that a mad Japanese scientist tried to design a human robot and came reasonably close. Or think of women designed by homosexuals.
The poor creatures prance down the runways wearing funny-looking clothes that no real woman would let her dog sleep on, looking pouty and sullen like spoiled adolescents—and they become celebrities. Yes. Everywhere women stop eating: They too want to look like broom handles. I don’t get it.
Super-modeldom is probably treatable. Force-feed them Big Macs with lots of Secret Sauce, give them estrogen supplements, and tell them to drop the snotty expression or you’ll drown them.
The Weekly World News is what really worries me. They should put something in the ink that sterilizes anyone who reads it. May 13: “Viking Frozen in Block of Ice,” plus, “Eight-Year-Old Pianist Has 14 Fingers.” Probably from West Virginia. “Ancient Egyptians Invented Baseball.” I picture Tutankhamen sliding into home, spikes high, while an intermittently swooning Nefertete chomps hotdogs in the stands.
Who reads this stuff? I don’t want names. A phylum will do.
I can understand, barely, reading about the cellulite of some talentless twit who may have been cute twenty years go, but probably wasn’t. Given a choice, I’d rather pound my thumb with a claw-hammer, but I’m a curmudgeon. But movie stars actually exist to an extent. You might want to know something about them. Scientists study those weird funguses on the damp sides of trees that get all orange and purple and goopy. Demi’s cellulite can’t be much worse.
But… “Gal Keeps Hubby’s Corpse in the House”? You can hear the far-off mournful tolling of the bell curve.
I mean, do people actually believe this stuff? “Satan and Saddam Were Partners—and This Picture Proved It!” A Photo-Shopped picture of a cloud over Baghdad with a diabolic visage, in need of braces, peering from it. Sure, an obvious plant by the Bush administration, probably straight from Ari Fleischer, the White House ventriloquist. If you can’t have anthrax, go with a demon, I say. . . .(continued)
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I worry about movie stars. A website somewhere shows photos of presumed hot tickets in make-up, and then in candid shots in the street. They run from ordinary to ugly. Some have the allure of golf bags, especially the ones trying to look thirty years younger with what seem to be injection-molded cosmetics. (http://www.fredoneverything.net/Grocery.shtml)
What’s the social undercurrent here? Strap in: We’re about to probe a dark rivulet of the collective unconscious. In the groc-tabs, it’s not “Miss Jennifer Lopez” or “Mr. Scott Peterson.” It’s J.Lo and Scott, with the easy familiarity of a high-school sleep-over. The product here is artificial entré. If you’re forty pounds overweight, lonely or wishing you were, and stuck in some boring low-level job at the post office where you can’t even shoot people any longer – why, the Enquirer will put you on a first-name basis with glamorous over-promoted nonentities. For only $2.99, you can do a line of coke with Sylvester, or share a Cellulite Experience with Demi.
Television. That’s what does it. It makes people in trailer parks, which for practical purposes is most of us, think life ought to amount to more than feeding the mortgage monster and bailing ungrateful kids out of whatever disaster they’ve most recently managed to create. In 1900, before television, nobody expected life to be fulfilling. And it wasn’t. You could depend on it. Unless of course you thought it was fulfilling to lead a decent life and raise your kids happily in a small town in Missouri.
You didn’t have any knowledge of the rich and useless. You knew they were out there, like malaria and the chupacabras, but you didn’t have to look at them.
Now the lobotomy box rubs the aggregate face in the rompings of the California glitz kennel, where every guy is a hunk and every gal a babe, by definition golden and happy and smiling, and off to Paris by private jet to interminable gratification.
So people without jets think ponder their lives and think, Is this all there is? Yep.
I don’t understand supermodels either. But the tabs love them. Face it: They’re a mess. They’ve got no breasts, no hips, and no fannies, and walk as if they had something wrong with their feet. You’ve heard crossed eyes? They’ve got crossed ankles. Imagine that a mad Japanese scientist tried to design a human robot and came reasonably close. Or think of women designed by homosexuals.
The poor creatures prance down the runways wearing funny-looking clothes that no real woman would let her dog sleep on, looking pouty and sullen like spoiled adolescents—and they become celebrities. Yes. Everywhere women stop eating: They too want to look like broom handles. I don’t get it.
Super-modeldom is probably treatable. Force-feed them Big Macs with lots of Secret Sauce, give them estrogen supplements, and tell them to drop the snotty expression or you’ll drown them.
The Weekly World News is what really worries me. They should put something in the ink that sterilizes anyone who reads it. May 13: “Viking Frozen in Block of Ice,” plus, “Eight-Year-Old Pianist Has 14 Fingers.” Probably from West Virginia. “Ancient Egyptians Invented Baseball.” I picture Tutankhamen sliding into home, spikes high, while an intermittently swooning Nefertete chomps hotdogs in the stands.
Who reads this stuff? I don’t want names. A phylum will do.
I can understand, barely, reading about the cellulite of some talentless twit who may have been cute twenty years go, but probably wasn’t. Given a choice, I’d rather pound my thumb with a claw-hammer, but I’m a curmudgeon. But movie stars actually exist to an extent. You might want to know something about them. Scientists study those weird funguses on the damp sides of trees that get all orange and purple and goopy. Demi’s cellulite can’t be much worse.
But… “Gal Keeps Hubby’s Corpse in the House”? You can hear the far-off mournful tolling of the bell curve.
I mean, do people actually believe this stuff? “Satan and Saddam Were Partners—and This Picture Proved It!” A Photo-Shopped picture of a cloud over Baghdad with a diabolic visage, in need of braces, peering from it. Sure, an obvious plant by the Bush administration, probably straight from Ari Fleischer, the White House ventriloquist. If you can’t have anthrax, go with a demon, I say. . . .(continued)
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