Hell, Ukraine

Kooky Europeans on TV


Ruslana (photo from ESC website)

Few Americans have ever heard of it. Even fewer recognize it as the ur-American Idol. But it's really hot stuff over there. I allude to the venerable Eurovision Song Contest, that quaintly mega European pop talent show and ethnic prejudice showcase whose lasting legacy to airport lounge singers everywhere is the song "Volare." To participate in this Olympics of Bubblegum, each country sends a representative pop star, songs are sung in native tongues, nationalist fervors are multiplied, votes are cast according to political convictions, and eventually a winner emerges from the televised trainwreck. The kitsch appeal is considerable; of drinking games the show has spawned not a few. Some of Eurovision's alumni: Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John, Plastic Bertrand, and of course, ABBA, who won in 1974 with "Waterloo," an event that altered the course of world history. The Swedes have yet to live it down. Suggests Eurovision aficionado Pat Kenny at the esctoday website :

"Sweden should not have won with ABBA in 1974, because from that very day on every uptempo number from Sweden is called "ABBA"-clone. The only song reminding me of ABBA was the 2001 entry. I can't see any similarities between ABBA songs and the 2003-entry. The Swedes should consider the following instructions in order to prevent themselves from being accused of sending in another ABBA-esque entries:
1) No uptempo song
2) Don't use guitars
3) Don't use nice harmonies. Go for Stockhausen style.
4) Don't use a piano
5) Don't talk bands
6) Don't go for a catchy phrase
7) Don't send in a song that might be considered as a favourite. Other countries might be afraid that Sweden could win."

This year, Ukrainian hottie Ruslana, dressed in the traditional Xena Warrior Princess costume of her homeland, took home the prize. Her comically mediocre song, Wild Dances, sounds exactly like something you'd hear on the boombox at a greasy little carry-out gyro joint.

From the ESC website: "And how had Ukraine reacted to her victory? Ruslana read out an SMS message she’d just received: 'Hell, all the TV channels in Europe are talking about you. Hell, Ukraine. Everybody’s going nuts. All bars in the streets are playing your song. Ukraine is a mess!'"

The Burden of Accuracy

How appending perfectly decent nouns with the wrong participle is destroying society

I'm fed up with the use of -laden as a suffix. Especially in writing about food. What set me off today is the column in this week's RFT which describes the rarebit at Llewellyn's Pub as "dark beer-laden" (not surprisingly, this sentence also includes 3 more adjectives from my list of verboten food-writing phrases: creamy, cheesy, and savory; only golden and crispy are absent--oh, wait! here they are in the next paragraph. Of course, this is a writer who also uses proverbial to describe things that aren't proverbs).

What's my point? Besides the fact that the word this guy wants is laced, which more accurately describes the process of having added an intoxicating substance to a sauce? Well, laden doesn't mean "full of," it means "weighed down" or "burdened." It connotes labor, strain, struggle. Incessant toil and insurmountable obstacle. Finally, death from exhaustion and burial in a pauper's grave.

I've been experiencing a waxy yellow build-up of anxiety over this issue for years. It began when one of my editors suffered a nervous collapse and changed my phrase "puck of effrontery" (I was describing a crab-cake) to "effrontery-laden puck." The flame of my outrage, subsequent to this incident, burned with considerable warmth. My editor's lunatic hyphenation had turned the crab-cake into a sympathetic character, making it sound as though it were an innocent victim suffering the undendurable burden of some externally-applied insult. The truth, so awkwardly obfuscated, was much bleaker: the puck was conceived as a footsoldier in the war against human decency by a villainous brute masquerading as a chef. Delivered to my table without regard for the Geneva Conventions, it had absorbed to its full capacity its creator's poisonous soul. Though physically composed of depravity and black bile, it presumed not only to be a crab-cake, but to be edible. The mere fact of the puck's existence was, in fact, effrontery itself.

I still haven't gotten over it.

In any event, I submit that when a lazy food editor signs off on the -laden construction, she is actually contributing to the decline of Western civilization by inadvertent participation in President Bush's disinformation campaign. Tabbouleh, to use an example from an internet recipe site, cannot be "parsley-laden"; a preponderance of parsley is no burden for a parsley salad. Quite the opposite, in fact; relieving a tabbouleh of its parsley would greatly impede its ability to be tabbouleh. Once you accept that a tabbouleh is parsley-laden, what's next?

Mind control, that's what. George Orwell called it blackwhite, "the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

But collaboration in the global collapse of truth doesn't stop lazy authors and hyphen-crazy editors from ladening left and right. Cookbooks are recipe-laden. Thai food is pepper-laden. A sauce for prawns is spice-laden. Israeli menus are latke-laden. The foodservice economy is layoff-laden. It's madness!

Lyric precision is what separates us from the talk show hosts. Please, join me in the fight against hackneyed expression and imperfectly deployed participles. Speak out against this laden-laden writing "style." Also, boycott all large corporations, and vote Anyone But Bush.

Thank you.

O!

Oprah, friend of my youth, why hast thou forsaken me?

So what gives with Oprah?

I sure do miss my big, homely, friendly pal. You remember. The gal who used to say useful stuff like "hey, girlfriend, you gotta get out of that abusive relationship!" or "get an HIV test!" She was the Martha Stewart of getting your shit together. She sold the fantasy of empowerment to millions of pathetic dishrags, and of big bucks it made her not a few.

Then the Patriarchal Femininity Mandate started stinking her up. I hardly recognize her now. She shrunk herself down and started sending mixed messages, like that time she inexplicably showed up disguised as a hooker on a Vogue cover. What was this bizarre quest for Beauty all about? Was it no longer enough to be pretty on the inside? Did we have to start embracing our Outer Slut as well?

Oprah has never actually achieved conventional hotness--mostly on account of her persistently bizarre hairdo (for the love of God, why doesn't somebody tell her? Her entire staff must suffer from that diffusion of responsibility crowd-paralysis thing)--but women love her for trying, and they love to watch other women trying, too. Segments like "Family Makeover Madness" feed the pathology of shame amongst her viewers, suggesting that anyone's life can be improved through better-dressed loved ones. She poaches guests from other makeover shows, too, most recently the odious Trinny and Susannah, who have made a career out of forcing plain women to abandon their favorite sweaters on national TV, and in their new book are now "sparing women from the sartorial uncertainty that clouds many of the important occasions in their lives."

But often the shows are just about Oprah. And why not? She is as much a phenomenon as the next guy. The Magnificent Life of Oprah, the Richest Woman in Showbiz: The camera follows Oprah around for a day; Oprah pays a surprise visit to an invalid fan; Oprah remodels her office; An exclusive look inside Oprah's closet (revealing enough Manolo Blahniks to cripple an entire South African village). Oprah gives shoes (alas, not Manolos) to 50,000 South African orphans (this gambit has its own brand name: ChristmasKindness ®).

When duty calls Oprah to raise public awareness about the various sordid underbellies of suburban America, she does a shock show. The FCC has been petitioned (albeit by Howard Stern listeners, but remember: we may tolerate Stern now that he uses his show exclusively to hurl tasteless epigrams at the president) to slap an indecency fine on her for a show on how suburban 10-year-olds are all living secret lives of wild, orgiastic dissipation. Last week she featured suicidal 6-year-olds who want sex change operations. The other day it was survivors of a psychopath suburban kidnapper. The teaser: "Hidden in an underground bunker, these women lived through months of unspeakable torture. Today, they're speaking out." Speaking out! Against what? Unspeakable torture? At last, courageous whistle-blowers alerting the slumbering masses that unspeakable torture sucks? Like there's an epidemic of supafreaks imprisoning women in "underground bunkers"? This kind of sensational crap masquerading as empowerment-speak really chaps my hide.

Now she's even infiltrated PBS, appearing as a contestant or a fake villager or whatever in the new historical anachronism reality show "Colonial House," on the subject of which she pronounces, with her preternatural Empowering Insight ® that, yup, life was hard in the 17th century. Hard on the eyes, that is. The bulk of her awe stems from her observation that those courageous Puritan women somehow survived without makeup and cell phones.

So now Oprah, friend of my youth, is just a gross plastic gasbag-head, and what's even grosser is the way her adoring public comes completely unglued at the very sight of it.

Long Horn Index

number of results from a search on Oprah.com for the word makeover: 934
number of results from a search on Oprah.com for the word rape: 105
number of results from a search on Oprah.com for the word empowerment: 34

Courtesy Shave

Feeling unempowered? Maybe it's your razor.

Hey, what gives with body hair removal? I ask because I recently went shopping for a new razor blade to facilitate my seasonal tidying-up of the hirsute physique. I was shocked to discover that they no longer make blades to fit the razor I bought only 2 years ago. Planned obsolescence would force me to buy a new one. The thing is, they don't make razors anymore. They make creepy lifestyles with blades. There appears to be a competition to see how many cutting edges, as well as things called "lubricating strips," can be crammed into a single cartridge. Another aspect of the contest is "who can make the ugliest razor in the history of the toilette?"

The one I ended up with is called "Mach III Turbo." It looks like a psychosex video game, all black rubber and silver plastic. I was all like, what kind of so-five-minutes-ago masochist willingly inflicts upon herself an "X-treme" shave? And these "lubricating strips," it turns out, emit a repulsive greasy slime.

Let me come right out and say it: there is no part of my body upon which I desire to superimpose greasy slime of any origin, and on those parts which get shaved, least of all.

I should have realized that razors have gender, and that I had bought a man's razor. I saw a commercial for the Mach III Turbo on the Manly Channel. The theme song was a magnificent, swelling riff on the Army's seminal "Be. All That You Can Be," with a passionate cheeseball crooning "Gillette, Gillette, the best a man can get!" The message was clear: shaving is about poontang, and the slime-oozing Mach III Turbo is Viagra and a stealth fighter jet and anabolic steroids rolled into one. Regular use will induce sexy models fitted with angel wings to beat paths to your door, and will also turn you into Mohammed Ali.

Now wholly sensitized to the subject of shaving in the New Millennium, I subsequently espied a commercial for a woman's razor. Like the Mach III Turbo ad, empowerment through depilation was its general gist, but rather than suggest that the razor will transport the user into a world of ejaculatory adventure, it instead presents the razor as a sort of coping mechanism.

To wit: stupid, half-naked women are hopelessly incapacitated when it comes to shaving their legs. That's because razors which are not sufficiently pink spurt--whoops!--from the grasp, riccochet off the bathroom mirror, and can even knock the occasional half-naked girl off balance, causing a painful header onto the floor. With their clumsy girl-fingers and poor grasp of the laws of physics, how could these hapless gals expect a silky-smooth shave? Shaving is just too hard! Enter the Shick Silk Effects Plus, a pink razor the size of a 40-ounce. Shaped like a woman's decapitated plus-size torso, it has eighty-six blades and "aloe strips" that ooze more of that slime. Thanks to Shick's breakthrough discovery of the "unique contours" of the female body, it is now possible to shave without suffering a concussion!

So, to recap: men's razors turn men into superheroes. Women's razors not only reveal that women, though they comprise over 50% of the world's population, are "uniquely shaped," they also simplify a dauntingly complex task into something even a dumb broad can manage.