“I thought you were good, Clay. But you’re not good. You’re just another lying old dirty birdy.”
“Clay has such a power over me that I couldn’t turn away from him if I wanted to.”
So says avowed Clay Aiken fan ClaysCutiePie14 over at the Clayboard, and I know how she feels because that’s how I feel … about the Clayboard. I can’t stop visiting that website.
I’ve already compiled a companion piece to my previous post about the Claymate reaction to Aiken’s coming out, but I won’t have everything ready until tomorrow. Still, I couldn’t wait to post this, the campiest Claymate post of all time. It starts off slow, but stick with it and I promise you won’t be disappointed:
It’s hard to pick a favorite quote from Margaret Cho’s new blog post addressing the religious wackos — or, as she calls them, “racist homophobic misogynist fake Christian shitheads” — who’ve been on her case since she criticized Sarah Palin last week. (Because, you know, it’s totally Christian to make rape victims pay for their own forensic exams, as Palin did when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. How offensive of Cho to suggest otherwise! Silly comedian, thinking she could have an opinion about something…) Do you choose the one about God being “a serious bottom,” or the one about God’s love of profanity?
The profanity one is somewhat majestic (“He doesn’t give a shit about the profanity. The bitch fucking invented profanity. He thinks it is hilarious”), but ultimately I think the winner is what she closes with:
If you truly believed in Jesus, you would try to be like him and love us, fags and dykes and feminists all. God bless you, even you. You fucking fuckers.
It has a certain Dickensian quality, doesn’t it? I read it and imagined Tiny Tim saying “God bless us, every one! Even you, you fucking fuckers.”
“And I’ll tell you another thing: I will not be intimidated by Richard Dreyfuss.”
Maybe when you saw that post title you thought I’d write something about Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night. Something about how it left me teary-eyed (which it did, but only in my left eye, which is either politically symbolic or has something to do with allergies), or how alternately thrilling and cathartic it was to hear someone in a position of power stand on a stage in front of the world and articulate the pain, anger, sadness and outrage that everyone who loves and cherishes the founding principles of this country has felt so deeply over the last eight years.
Well, I’m not going to do that. You know I don’t get very personal here. But last night, after hearing MSNBC’s political commentators repeatedly (and rather excitedly) invoke the name of Andrew Shepherd, the character Michael Douglas played in The American President, as they discussed Obama’s speech, I checked the movie’s sales rank on Amazon.
As of 10:50 PM, it was #1,389. Pretty respectable for a movie that has been on DVD for nearly a decade. By mid-morning it had jumped to #699. It currently holds spot #447, outranked in popularity by various and sundry TV shows (the fifth season of NCIS is performing particularly well for something that only my grandmother watches) and an eclectic mix of films ranging from 10,000 B.C. to Babette’s Feast and the forgotten Meryl Streep/Ed Begley Jr. masterpiece She-Devil. It is, at the moment, more popular than 10 Things I Hate About You, the extended edition of The Bourne Identity and Napoleon Dynamite.
That’s how powerful Barack Obama is. People are more interested in 13 year-old Aaron Sorkin-penned movies that might have influenced his speech than Julia Stiles and Jon Heder. If only he’d worked in a subtle reference to Showgirls — maybe something about levitating nipples or Ver-sayce — perhaps the Fully Exposed Edition of that movie wouldn’t be languishing at #3,403 right now.
“Yet again this week I found myself suspecting I might have lesbian tendencies, though this time it had nothing to do with the tingling feeling I sometimes get when I see Jodie Foster in her pants.”
If you guessed it’s an entry from Juno star Ellen Page’s diary, you’re wrong. Or so I’d assume. I mean, if Page has a diary, it’s not like I’ve seen it. And being highly principled and whatnot, I don’t believe in invading other people’s privacy. If I, through some odd series of events, came to possess a diary that’s cover said, in giant letters, “Property of Juno star Ellen Page,” know what I’d do? Not read it, that’s what. (Anyway, I’m going to theorize, based on the fact that Page seems bright enough in interviews, that she had her tendencies worked out years ago.)
If you guessed that it’s something some straight guy wrote about the Subaru Forester, you obviously cheated by Googling the quote because, c’mon, what kind of guess is that? There’s no way you could come up with that on your own.
Color me outraged! Maria Sharapova, who indulged her love of menswear by dressing in a tuxedo top and shorts at this year’s Wimbledon, got her ass kicked by Alla Kudryavtseva today. (If her name is unfamiliar, it’s because Kudryavtseva generally sucks.) The final score was so awful that I can’t bring myself to type it here, but that’s not the source of my indignation. What has me all riled up* is what Kudryavtseva said when asked what propelled her to victory: “I don’t like her outfit. It was one of the motivations to beat her.”
C’mon, Kudryavtseva! You have to give Sharapova some credit for making a bit of a Marlene Dietrich-like, Katharine Hepburn-esque fashion statement at Wimbledon. (For those of you who don’t watch tennis, even the tacky British newspaper The Sun, which initially criticized Sharapova’s tux, later apologized for their rush to judgment. Check out the third picture in the slideshow if you want to see why I think her getup was altogether badass.)
All the dress-wearing gets boring to watch sometimes, and I encourage Sharapova’s fellow WTA player to change things up every now and then, just as I encourage the men of the ATP to consider a little on court cross-dressing of their own. ‘Cause you have to admit, Rafael Nadal would look handsome in a skirt.
* Maybe “riled up” wasn’t all that accurate. Mildly annoyed would be a more apt description, and even that was offset by Kudryavtseva adding, “She’s brave enough to experiment. Sometimes she has good ones, sometimes not. That’s my personal opinion. Maybe someone will tell me I dress terribly.”
But I wanted to post something today, and it was either this or complain about Sarah Bird’s recent ‘blah blah gay son blah blah stereotypes blah supposed satire’ monstrosity at Salon.com. Problem was, I couldn’t make it past the second or third paragraph of the Bird whatsit, so all I could honestly say about it would be this: The way A.O. Scott felt about The Love Guru — in his words, “an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again” — that’s how I feel about Bird’s strenuously unfunny piece.
“Just because a woman owns all eight seasons of Bad Girls…”
You can file this one under breaking news: Valerie Singelton, the beloved British TV and radio host, wants you to know she likes guys. A lot. She loves penis the way Mel Gibson hates Jews. She’s had affairs with men, lots of men, and that talk you heard about her having a relationship with Joan Armatrading thirty years ago? A bunch of bollocks. All she ever did was interview her, and though she doesn’t specify, it sounds like they had their clothes on the whole time and kept their hands to themselves.
Still, the rumor, which Singelton thought was so silly that it would eventually go away on its own, settled in like an unwelcome houseguest — like Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, if you will — making Valerie self-conscious to the point of public rudeness. As she tells The Daily Mail‘s Peter Robertson:
“Many years later, I was approached by Joan as I was leaving Broadcasting House after presenting PM. She said: ‘Hello Val, do you remember me? I’m Joan Armatrading.’
“I thought: ‘Oh my God, I can’t be seen talking to her in the middle of the BBC reception,’ so I rudely rushed past her shouting: ‘Sorry, but I can’t stop as I’m late for the theatre.’
“She must have thought me very abrupt. Apologies, Joan.”
Misconceptions about her sexuality, she claims, plagued her to the point that bartenders and receptionists she’d never met before just assumed she was a lesbian:
“Every single friend of mine has at some point had to deny the rumour. And, even when there’s a denial, you get reactions such as: ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’
“It really is rubbish. I’m very honest and if I were that way inclined I’d have said so.
“The truth is I have always been the complete opposite of gay.”
And just in case there is any lingering confusion about her sexuality following those remarks, Singelton proceeds to list men she’s found attractive (including “gorgeous older cousins”), men she’s made out with (including a young Albert Finney), and men she’s had relationships with (a married coworker and a TV broadcaster who later paid for her to have an abortion).
It must be a real pain in the ass to have everyone think you’re gay when you’re not. I know that from the time I was born it was just assumed I was heterosexual, and that got rather tedious after awhile. Coming out hardly seemed to help anything; it just resulted in classmates and relatives asking “Are you sure?”
“Are you sure?”, for the record, is what you ask when someone suggests doing something crazy, like seeing the new Tim Allen movie. It is not what you ask when someone tells you they’re gay. (We’re not always sure how to spend our movie-going dollars; more often than not, we’re sure what our genitals respond to.) And once you’re fully out of the closet, that thing, that having to declare yourself, never really goes away. You still meet new people almost every day who simply take it for granted that you’re heterosexual.
The only way to avoid having to constantly come out, I think, is to permanently wear a sandwich board that states, in bold letters, “I’m Gay,” and even then you’d have illiterates and people who left their glasses at home to deal with. But Valerie Singelton, she has access that most of us don’t. She can take to the pages of publications as noxious but compulsively readable as The Daily Mail to assure the public of her heterosexuality, even if the end result seems oddly Onion-esque.
“I’m thinking new window treatments for the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Asked who he’d “boff, marry or kill” between Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin (the talented Baldwin, the one nine out of ten dentists recommend) answered that he’d sleep with Hillary and wed the senator from Illinois. Baldwin told The Observer:
“Barack would just be my long-term companion, as they say. I’d have to have sex with a woman because I’m not gay. I wouldn’t want to have sex with Barack Obama or McCain. Obama’s wife perhaps. Anybody’s wife — Bush’s wife, McCain’s wife, but no men — not even operating the video camera.”
Alec baldwin
As for McCain, Baldwin isn’t willing to kill him off:
“Maybe I’d lead him out into the woods and leave him there, and I’d come back and tell you that I’d killed him. But I’d lie, I wouldn’t really kill him. And knowing McCain, knowing his past in Vietnam, he’d make it back, he’d survive.”
alec baldwin
You know, as much as I like Michelle Obama (and I’ve kind of loved her since reading this New Yorker profile back in March) I’m intrigued by the idea of Baldwin as First Spouse. I imagine him promoting literacy to schoolchildren à la Laura Bush, but instead of sitting there all glassy-eyed and quiet he’d pound on desks and say things like, “We’re adding a little something to this month’s reading contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” It would really inspire children to pick up books, I think. Kids love bland, boxy luxury vehicles and free cutlery.
Jackie Warner: Personal trainer or Britney Spears backup dancer?
All of Bravo exec Andy Cohen’s straight female friends are just crazy about Bravo’s Work Out star Jackie Warner, the New York Timesreported this morning. The Times didn’t do much in the way of independently verifying Cohen’s claims, which include him saying, “I’m from St. Louis. When I go home a lot of times I’m amazed by the suburban married women that are coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m in love with Jackie Warner,'” and trotting out the obligatory married-with-children female friend to pontificate on her girl crush. But let’s be honest — does anyone care?
I know I don’t, but I thought I’d point out the Cohen quote in that half-assed way of mine because I, too, hail from St. Louis, andnone of the married suburbanites I know have ever declared their love or lust for Jackie Warner. In fact, I’d be surprised if more than a couple of them could even tell you who Jackie Warner is. (A majority would probably furrow their brows and ask if she’s related to Kurt.) However, they do think the soft butch KSDK reporter who used to co-host Show Me St. Louis is attractive. If anyone at the Times wants to report on that, I can put you in touch with some people.
The new season of Work Out starts tomorrow, btw. Will Jackie find another heterosexual-with-attention-whore-tendencies employee to make out with while the rest of the gang looks on in horror? Will Peeler still be as bald as my seventh grade algebra teacher? And who are all the people I don’t recognize in this year’s cast photo? There’s a preview available on Bravo’s website that might answer some of these questions; I haven’t bothered to look at it yet because my Tuesday night viewing plans are all about Lars and the Real Girl.
It has been a lazy weekend here at Cranky Central, a rare occurrence I’ve done my best to enjoy since it might not happen again for another five or six years. This morning I did all the usual Sunday things: went for a jog, worked on the yard, attended church — and if you believed a word of that, you are, I’m sorry to say, a complete sucker.
There was no jogging this morning, only sleeping late and trying not to trip over the cat as I finally shuffled into the hallway. There was certainly no church-attending, for reasons an upcoming unruly parenthetical aside make clear (but if not, never fear, we’ve previously tackled this subject). There was no working on the yard, just reading (Glenway Westcott’s Apartment in Athens, if you must know) and catching up on some movies I’d recorded off cable. Robert Duvall’s British accent was atrocious in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but Alan Arkin was very cute as Sigmund Freud.
(Just don’t tell my grandfather I said that or he’ll renew his hope that I’ll end up with a Jewish doctor yet. The kind of Jewish doctor with a penis, I should clarify, because my grandma, who is more pragmatic than her crazy dreamer of a husband, has conducted exhaustive research on the matter and found that openly lesbian Jewish doctors do exist. In fact, she’s planning to start a televised nationwide search for one next fall on NBC. Lainie Kazan is currently in negotiations to host.)
I also devoted approximately five minutes of this somewhat dreary, overcast Sunday afternoon to thinking of a decent subject for today’s blog entry. Checking my Google alerts for topics that might be of interest turned up little worth writing about. For example, there was no way lesbian filmmaker Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss wasn’t going to tank at the box office following the financial failures of the approximately 953 recent studio releases about the war in Iraq, so what is there to say about it?
My eyebrows went up a little when I saw that several hours ago, TMZ published a blurb possibly questioning the Penélope Cruz/Javier Bardem romance, but it appears the story, originally titled “No Country for Old Girlfriends,” has disappeared from the site, meaning we might never know how this sentence, previewed via e-mail, ended: “The smokin’ hot actor has been romantically linked to Penélope Cruz for the last year, but Friday, in a little corner at the Chateau Marmont in LA…” (I know that Cruz is a 30-something actress in the international spotlight, which means it’s a matter of time before she marries some biological male type in order to reproduce, but once she extricated herself from painfully unconvincing PR-engineered relationships with her oddball Hollywood costars and started wearing suits and grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass in public, I briefly hoped she’d turn into something of a rebel.)
As I dutifully purged my inbox of links to wacky right-wing editorials about the evils of homosexuality and reviews of regional productions of Edward Albee plays, it hit me: Why not take this opportunity to celebrate the lovely and talented actress Emmanuelle Béart? It might be considered a bit off-topic, as it doesn’t have anything to do with the previously introduced subjects of today being Sunday (FYI, I have it on good authority that Béart is attractive all week long), or Javier Bardem, or homophobic editorials, or “The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?” being staged in New Hampshire, either, but that doesn’t make it a topic any less worthy of discussion.
Béart, who was born in 1963, has worked steadily since the early 1980s and came to international prominence with a starring role in Claude Berri’s Manon of the Spring in 1986. (It was the second of four films she would make with her future ex-husband, the actor Daniel Auteuil, who will probably earn his own “In praise of…” here eventually because I’ll continue to love him no matter how many bad comedies he makes.)
Tutoring Isabelle Huppert on the art of seduction in 8 Women
It was Chabrol who famously described Béart as having “the face of an angel and the body of a whore,” a comment that, nearly fifteen years later, still appears in every fourth article about her. (Curiously, he said nothing about François Cluzet, her L’enfer costar, having the face of Dustin Hoffman and the body of your next-door neighbor.)
While she is undeniably gorgeous and frequently appears in sexually charged material, the fact of the matter is that Emmanuelle Béart is a talented and underappreciated actress whose characters are often complex, conflicted women whose curves are irrelevant. Even in a fluffy musical comedy like 8 Women, there is more to her French maid Louise than meets the eye, like the revelation that her indiscreet affair with the man of the house was borne less of desire than from a twisted need to ease the marital burdens placed on his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve), the true object of her affection.
If you’ve seen 8 Women, you know that Deneuve’s haughty character ends up in a clinch with her sister-in-law and arch-nemesis, a bisexual schemer played to perfection by Fanny Ardant. But unless you’ve seen director Anne Fontaine’s relatively obscure Nathalie…, you’d have no way of knowing that Béart and Ardant went on to have a kinda-sorta lesbian entanglement of their own.
Béart is a prostitute in Nathalie…, an inscrutable character hired by the troubled Ardant, who believes her husband (played by Gérard Depardieu) is straying, to seduce him and report back with all the pornographic details. If it sounds tortured and psychosexual and hopelessly French, that’s only because it is. What makes this movie memorable is that the only real tension in its bizarre love triangle is between Béart and Ardant, who is obsessed with other people’s sexual desires because she’s unable to express her own.
With Fanny Ardant in Nathalie…
Don’t seek out Nathalie…, a somewhat tedious exercise in painstakingly crafted art-house ambiguity, expecting to see a lesbian love scene. The closest you’ll come in Béart’s oeuvre is some kissing in one of her early efforts, a gauzy David Hamilton film about teenage girls and sexual awakenings; and a brief but explicit sex scene with Pascale Bussières La Répétition, which was directed by Catherine Corsini. (Yes, the same Pascale Bussières who left her Calvinist college and boyfriend to experience a lesbian awakening of her own under the big top in Patricia Rozema’s ridiculous When Night is Falling.)
There’s no love to speak of in La Répétition (and be warned, the title is an apt description of the screenplay), just obsession — a frequent theme in Béart’s movies — and about 87 varieties of fuckedupness. The actresses play friends whose bond is fractured in college; they are reunited ten years later, by which time Béart’s character has become a successful stage actress and Bussières a raving lunatic with stalkerish tendencies.
Their dysfunctional relationship eventually takes a sexual turn despite a serious lack of chemistry between the pals, who, in a small detail that might explain why the scene contains little in the way of eroticism, seem fundamentally straight. Though it’s the pathological behavior of the Bussières character that drives the plot of the movie, the murky motives of Béart’s insecure actress steal the show.
Related viewing: Béart’s lesbian-tinged films are hardly her best, though they’re overlooked enough that I wanted to give them some space here. A good overview of her work that’s available on DVD in North America would include Manon of the Spring, Un Coeur en Hiver (also known as A Heart in Winter), Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud and 8 Women (for the fabulous ensemble cast more than anything else). Hopefully André Téchiné’s The Witnesses, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, will come out on DVD this year and join the list.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
