Nobody Knows Anything

I’ve subscribed to Vanity Fair for years. Years. Maybe twenty years. I had a roommate in college who subbed to it, and she described to me its wonderfulness, with pictorial spreads of Giorgio Armani clothing (I had to say, “Who’s that?” because I was so out of it) and gushing suck-up articles on celebrities, balanced with really wonderful and intelligent in-depth political and global work that was clearly being paid for by the pictorial spreads and gushing suck-ups. So be it.

During the oh-so-crucial shopping season of September through December, during which glossy magazines swell like so many Octomoms with their endless advertisements, Vanity Fair led me to invent a new verb, “to vanityfair,” which means, “to rip out the gigantic quantity of ads from the magazines, sometimes reducing its thickness by over a third.”

Every so often I’d say, “God, this magazine sucks, I have to stop getting it,” but then they’d have another article that was totally wonderful and unexpected and I’d start liking it again.

But they’ve done it. They’ve finally managed to get me off my ass and cancel my subscription.

Last month, they had Jessica Simpson on the cover. Why? I don’t know. The story was all about how she’s not fat, she’s gorgeous. I don’t know that much about her, and I knew when I first heard the “Jessica Simpson is fat” stories that they were all an attempt to get some attention and sympathy. To have Vanity Fair waste my time with that story made me go, “Oh, please, do we really not have any celebrities any more?”

(In fact, we don’t, not really. The reason we have Brad and Angelina on the checkout stand every week—well, maybe you do; thankfully, my supermarket does not have checkout tabloids, yay Lunardi’s—is that they are recognizable to a vast audience and have great crossover appeal. The great expansion of the entertainment infosphere through hundreds of channels and the internet and iPods and such has led to inevitable schisms of domain—now there are tons and tons of celebrities, all of whom are known to a smaller and smaller audience. Movies are targeted to extremely narrow audiences: the likelihood that anyone over the age of 35 knows the name Shia LaBeouf, let alone what he looks like or how to spell his name, is pretty damn low, which is why he was in that stupid Indiana Jones movie last summer.)

But no, it wasn’t even Jessica Simpson that did me in. It was their 87 millionth article in a row on the great travails caused by Bernie Madoff.

They could not say any louder that they are New York-centric; they couldn’t be any clearer that the magazine is designed to be read by people that range from the Upper West Side to the Long Island Expressway. They have lots of New York things and nothing else. It’s tiresome and incestuous, it really is.

I know Bernie Madoff did a very bad thing. But it’s really not Topic #1 everywhere in the country. It’s really not the most interesting thing to happen ever, you know?

No, apparently Vanity Fair doesn’t know, because in this month’s issue (possibly my last), there’s another goddamn Bernie Madoff article.

The obvious criticism, of course, is that Bernie Madoff is exactly the kind of uber-successful, high-flying financier that Vanity Fair has extolled and sucked up to for years. Their endless investigations of the criminality of the Bush years does not make up for their continual praise of the Bush gang while things were good. (Really bugged me at the time too.)

Anyhow, in case VF is wondering why they lost another subscriber, that’s why!

This has been a test of the MacJournal 3.1 posting system. If this had been an actual entry…well, you know, it could happen.

…that I oughta post that I am still alive, even if I’m not posting. For whatever reason, I’m in no mood to post right now, and I don’t even know what I’d post about if I were going to post. (I considered last night posting some of my reactions to Sam Harris’s The End Of Faith (precis: religion really, really bad, and if you’re a religious moderate, you’re just aiding and abetting the problem), except I’m only a chapter into it and it’s pretty heavy-going.

Other books on the nightstand: Hex and the City by Simon Green, the latest installment of a supernatural noir PI series. I like this series, but when the locale, the Nightside, is billed as the supernatural side of London, I expect a few more details that evoke London in the story. The Nightside has nothing to do with London, except for funny spellings.

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Also, made bread yesterday from a recipe that called for 2 teaspoons of compressed fresh yeast. Note to self: always consult yeast equivalencies chart before adapting recipe to type of yeast you have. Instant yeast and active dry yeast you can use in roughly the same quantities; compressed fresh, not so much. In fact, according to The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

100 percent fresh yeast = 40 to 50 percent active dry yeast = 33 percent instant yeast

So let’s just say the bread I made was yeasty. Finally got that “BREAD!” smell I’d always wanted, though.

I’m making new bread today.

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And for the last, I leave you, via Darby, John Cleese’s Revocation of Independence:
Read more…

We went to see Catch Me If You Can this evening. Good movie, but I am too drained to do the review now. I am going downstairs to read a little more of the current novel I am working my way through, Colleen McCullough’s The October Horse and then (hopefully) get 5 or 6 hours straight before Simon wakes me up for his middle-of-the-night chat session.

I’m not in the groove of writing the journal yet. I think about things I want to write, but when it comes to actually writing the entry I find I don’t know where to begin.

The past week has completely messed up everyone’s sleeping schedules, most especially (of course) Fia’s and Simon’s. Fia finally agreed to go to bed (after an hour or so of Mommy and Daddy just ignoring her other than to say, “It’s quiet time now, sweetie”) and in doing so woke Simon up. So I had to take him into the guest room and nurse him back to sleep, which I was hoping to get out of that routine. Then Fia wanted me to read two bedtime books to her…followed by Daddy reading her a third. We said no, she gets two…and the screaming started. It’s 9:30 and I’m not convinced that both of them are down for the night yet.

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We went over to Tamar’s today for a journaller brunch — Mopie was there, as were Kymm and Steve. It was fun, as going over to Tamar’s always is — if nothing else, watching Sophia and Damian tear around after one another is always great. (They manage to set one another off, they really do. It’s hilarious.)

Anyhow, this being a group of journallers and all, we started gossiping — and if you’re wondering, yes, we were talking about you. The topic of infidelity came up. More specifically, who was practicing it. I probably sounded like a reactionary conservative with my attitude toward the subject, which surprised me even as I was saying it.

It’s been interesting to note the difference in my attitude toward two of the people we talked about. One I already didn’t like for a variety of reasons (some of which we also discussed at the brunch) and one I absolutely adore. With the first revelations of infidelity made me say, “Oh brother, why am I so not surprised?” (Even though, somewhere, deep down, I was surprised to find out that I had been right about suspecting hanky-panky.)

And with the second…finding out that this person is less than completely admirable has really hit me harder than I would have expected. I liked this person an awful lot given that all I had to go on is their writing, and now that I’ve found out some more about who they really are I find I’m reevaluating the writing.

Never find out about people. It’s not worth it. Better to keep the illusions.

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Ooo. I hear quiet emanating from the other rooms. Time to put Simon back in his crib and put me in my bed. I’ll try to do more tomorrow.

Or, There And Back Again.

We’ve just gotten back from our annual Christmas pilgrimage to the wilds of Northern California. We had planned to be back by 5; we didn’t get on the road until 1, which meant we couldn’t get back until 6:30 at the earliest; and due to circumstances such as a 10 mile backup on Highway 5 (“Say…isn’t this supposed to be the fast way?”) and Simon screaming at the top of his lungs (which required a long comforting session in the parking lot of a Carl’s Jr. that had the filthiest bathroom I’ve ever had the, uh, pleasure of using), we didn’t get back until 9.

And due to extended car napping, no one of the child persuasion wants to go to sleep, and it’s 10. People of the parent persuasion desperately want to go to sleep.

Because I’m so fuzzy-brained at the moment, all the posts I want to make–such as introducing you to Simon or telling you what’s going on with Darin or what not–will just have to wait one more day.

(The 999 Miles, by the way, refers to the trip odometer. Just as we pulled into the garage it ticked from 999.9 to 0.0, which we thought was mightily cool. And Darin added, “Or, There And Back Again,” just because he has Tolkien on the brain.)

Jason saying that my journal’s return is a cool Christmas present for the entire world has just completely fucking made my week.

In case you were still under the impression that the Brits are way, way more staid than are we, check out The Guardian’s end of the year quiz. Mind you, The Guardian ain’t The Sun, you know what I’m saying? They’re not the kind of paper that sets everything in 36-point type and has a Page Three Girl. But boy — you sure can get racier things into a serious British paper than you can into any paper over here (right on down to The Enquirer).

Check out, say, Question 9. It’s about Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears and an aspect of their relationship I didn’t need to know about. Learning the term “bumjob” was interesting though.

Or Question 10. You can say that in the papers? (Over here you can say “fuck” in Vanity Fair, but not in the “family” newspapers.

The Guardian quiz is difficult but a great deal more fun than the King William’s General Knowledge Paper, which is also an end of the year tradition. The KWGKP is just difficult.

Another quiz you might enjoy is Jon Carroll’s Christmas quiz. The answers can be found in the next day’s column, so you won’t go crazy looking for them.