September 27, 2007--I Need A Break From . . .

Ahmadinejad and Lee Bollinger; MoveOn and General Betray Us; gay marriage; the Holocaust (sorry); Senator Craig and his “wide stance”; Senator Vitter and his hookers; whether or not Bill O’Reilly is a bigger racist than Don Imus; the doings of Lindsay, Britney, and Paris (whatever happened to her anyway?); and lest I forget, the leading Democratic candidates who in their debate last night refused to say they would end the war by the end of their first term—by 2013. You heard me . . . 2013. So you can only imagine how relieved I was to see in the NY Times Styles section the article linked below about all those people proliferating on TV who make a career out of dissing the clothes so-called celebrities wear on the Red Carpet. This is just the sort of thing I need today to cogitate about. I go back to the time when the only person who engaged in fashion policing was Mr. Blackwell who appeared at the end of each year to talk about his Best and, deliciously yes, Worst Dressed List. I recall how millions of us pulled out Barcaloungers right up close to our televisions to catch a glimpse of grossly-overweight Liz stuffed into some designer atrocity. What pleasure we got from seeing her and Liza looking awful. And we took even greater delight from what Mr. Blackwell himself was wearing. How could this man--if he in fact was such (snicker, snicker)—how could he allow himself to be seen in public wearing That! Thank God we didn’t have a color set. His ties alone would have blown out the tube. Now, as the Times notes, not only do we have the Fashion Police, What Not to Wear, and Full Frontal Fashion, but even the vaunted Today Show has a fashion guru of its own, Lloyd Boston (where do they come up with these names?) who, ruing the fact that the WE Network and TLC and the Style Network are willing to put anyone on the air and call them fashion experts. Why, Lloyd says, about the bottom-feeding competition, “If you’re not detaching a limb and putting on a more svelte one with a tennis bracelet, they’re not interested in you as a style expert.” I’m not sure I get all the references, but talk about bitchy, bitchy, bitchy. (I think this version of the B-word is still PC.)