Defining Deviancy Down

Count me as unimpressed by Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the 22-year-old "struggling musician" (ok, it beats "aspiring model/actress," but not by much) whose intimate company cost Gov. Spitzer around $2000 an hour plus a whole lot of interest. The delightful Socratic discussion on her MySpace page aside ("What we Want is my latest track. It’s really about trust, something my past has made very difficult for me to feel. This one was inspired by a guy, who taught me not to confuse my dreams with the sounds of the city…"), Dupre is a startling mediocrity who wouldn't merit more than a passing glance on the B Line.

After all one hears about high-class hookers, seeing Ashley is a bit like opening the door of a Lamborghini and finding out that it's really just a Camry with big tires underneath it all. I see a dozen girls equal to or hotter than her at the 21st Amendment every night, and this is Boston we're talking about, which makes her a nobody by Manhattan's significantly higher standards of pulchritude. OK, to be fair, it's not like I'm going to get to fuck any of them either, and unlike Spitzer, I'm not old enough to be their father, though I am getting closer to dirty-uncle territory. That's not my point. Prostitution, it seems, is suffering from the same sort of grade-inflation that's seen realtors list every condo with street parking, yellow pine floors and brand-new Kenmore appliances as "luxury living."

For a compare-and-contrast, check out the French-Canadian beauty about 3/4ths into this MSNBC clip on the subject. Now that one has a little bit of the "goddess" quality to her.

Daaavid, I yam your Faaather...

Welcome to the dark side, David Mamet! I don't know if my liberal friends have ever considered the Cambridge-dwelling playwright to be one of their team, or at least not for some time--if Glengarry Glen Ross had the sense of the American Tragic of Willy Loman, The Edge dared to suggest that its billionaire protagonist was a billionaire precisely because he was a man of superior abilities and ethics.

So it's less than a surprise that Mamet announced in today's Village Voice that "I am no longer a 'Brain-Dead' Liberal:"

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.

Needless to say, even if he is now referring to Thomas Sowell as "our greatest contemporary philosopher," Mamet is still casting that mannequin named Rebecca Pidgeon in his movies, so I must withold judgment on the "brain-dead" part of his claim.

OMFGROFLOLz

It takes one hell of a pair of balls for Geraldine Ferraro to say that Obama is where he is because of pseudo-crypto-affirmative action:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a
woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very
lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Of course she's right--a white man was in that position--his name was John Edwards, and he didn't stand any more chance than a possum crossing a highway in mating season.

Is Fat the New Punk?

You know why fine art has gone into the shitter over the past century? There's nothing left to push against. Who can look at Michelangelo's Last Judgment without imagining the painter contemplating the uncertainty of his own eventual fate? Even that hack Madonna got to wring a little outrage out of Catholic iconography. Britney Spears could be photographed with Amy Winehouse banging rails off a crucifix shoved up her ass and people would yawn. They have nothing but the abyss of their own drug-fueled insanity to peer into.

Then again, I wonder if we aren't at the dawn of a new age of art. The bourgeois is never eliminated, it simply comes under new management. If today's housewives in Wellesley are into transcendental yoga and a little recreational pony play (don't Google that at work) now and then, the new religion is the temple of the body. Smoking, eating red meat, and drinking more than the FDA-recommended two units of antioxidant-rich red wine before driving home in your emissions-exempt 60s muscle car is the new antisocial.

My friends, we're all theater fags now.

I Love the 90s

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine about women's haircuts--and no, I don't care how gay that sounds. I was ruminating on the nature of trendiness, and trying to understand how what looks so au courant today will invariably glare out laughingly at us from pictures ten years hence. That's a subject for another time. Earlier in the week I'd heard a Letters to Cleo song on the muzak in a coffeeshop, and I was hit with an intense bout of nostalgia.

No one would mistake the Cleos for an "important" band. True success eluded them, and they didn't break any new musical ground. But, they plowed familiar fields deeply, and their video for "Awake" is like a triple-espresso shot of mid-90s grunge-pop, rich with all the cliches of that era. It's also perfect for a game of "I've been there!" and a slightly bittersweet reminder of how much Boston has changed in the decade or so since.



Perhaps today's teenagers will one day watch this video and feel the same way I do when I see this one from Journey, AKA the Greatest 80s Video Ever. Duran Duran's Girls on Film is a close second, but loses by virtue of the fact that the music is not nearly as dated as Journey.