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Camille Paglia ans. letters on Obama, talk radio, gay rights, abortion.

Grandpa — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:36:02 -0700

Bow-ow-ow: Obama's painful missteps
Let the new president grow into the job -- but he'd better do it fast!

Plus: Readers ask about everything from talk radio, morality
By Camille Paglia

Dear Camille,
In your column, you say, "President Obama has been ill-served by his advisors and staff."
The primary job requirement of a good senior executive is the ability to judge character and ability, in order to be able to select people to whom responsibilities may be safely delegated. If these advisors and staff are inadequate, the responsibility for their failures should be laid at the feet of the person who was ultimately responsible for their selection and placement.
Charles
Pennsylvania

ans:
You are absolutely correct! The buck stops with the top executive. But we all know how little executive experience Barack Obama has had. He was elected for his vision and his steady, deliberative character, not his résumé. For better or worse, Obama is learning as he goes -- and surely most fair-minded people would grant him reasonable leeway as he grows into the presidency, one of the hardest jobs in the world.

At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him -- a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday's news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare's Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.

Enough already! These slips are worsening the anti-Obama backlash, which began with the administration's bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package. Conservatives seem deliriously drunk with their cartoon picture of Obama, to whom is glibly attributed every pathology in the book. Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama's birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama's educational records remains troubling. But I am still waiting for hard evidence about the host of other charges that are continually being hammered against him -- from his alleged fidelity to the crypto-tactics of Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky to the questions raised by right-wingers about the production of Obama's two memoirs. Out of respect for the presidency, conservatives need to put up or shut up about these issues.

I still strongly believe in Obama's promise as a world leader. I was thrilled, for example, by his call this week for an end to nuclear weapons -- a goal that he frankly admitted would not be attained in his lifetime. We have waited a long time for an American president who dreams big. Yes, there are bitter cells of fanatics everywhere who hate America and want a repeat of 9/11. And yes, there will always be petty dictators who covet the bomb and conspire to get it. But the mass of people around the world want to be inspired to a higher good. Whether the Obama presidency succeeds or fails will depend on his ability to sustain his ideals in the face of the testing crises that will inevitably erupt in far-flung regions where ethnic or religious strife has been a way of life for thousands of years. And closer to home, Obama will need to cut the umbilical to his hometown posse, whose inefficiency and poor decision-making took the shine off his honeymoon and brought the dispirited Republicans back from the dead.
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As a former lover of talk radio, I too have wondered why programs with a liberal bent have fared so poorly in the free market. There are two specific factors that may be responsible for the disparity.

1) The vast majority of the talk radio audience listens in their car or from home. People driving around during the day and listening to the radio are probably demographically skewed toward the self-employed or people in some sort of sales. Admittedly, there are a large number of service jobs that require drive time, but I would bet those people are not interested in politics. The entrepreneur or six-figure sales professional is far more likely to be a conservative. People listening from home would either be stay-at-home parents or people working from home. These groups would also tend to be much more likely to listen to Laura Schlessinger than Al Franken.

2) The liberal talk shows I've listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh's program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.
Marty Grant
New York City

Ans:
Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture -- the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington's tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.

However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).
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Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: "The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves." How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They're doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea.

Why do you and others in the press keep misattributing this "magic Negro" comment to Rush Limbaugh? My understanding from listening to his radio program is that the phrase you are referring to from Rush's parody song was first brought to light in an article by David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Why didn't you mention this in your column? Rush merely ran with it in one of his many parodies, which he is notably famous for. Often he takes comments made in the press or by politicians and parodies them -- most often to expose their hypocrisy.

The press has tied Rush to "magic Negro" as if he were the originator or instigator. Thus Rush is unfairly and routinely condemned for it.
L. Bryan
Columbus, Ga.

ans:
"Barack the Magic Negro" was a song parody by a longtime contributor to the Rush Limbaugh Show, Paul Shanklin, whom I consider to be one of the most brilliant satirists of our time. Shanklin has an analytic erudition about popular music, a genius for mimicry, and an astounding gift for creative rapid-response to hard news. The widespread and vitriolic misjudgments about what goes on during Rush's show could and should have been dispelled a decade ago had Shanklin's fiendishly clever parodies been released into general circulation. Yes, they can be purchased in CD collections, and they are also available online to subscribers to the Limbaugh Web site, but that draconian limitation has unfairly confined Shanklin's work to conservative partisans. My all-time favorite in the Shanklin oeuvre is "I Can't Recall," a parody of "Try to Remember" (from "The Fantasticks") with an air-headed Hillary on the witness stand claiming that she just can't remember a single darn thing about that silly old Whitewater deal because her mind has turned to Jell-O ... Jello-O ... Jello-O (fading off in echoes).
When I first heard "Barack the Magic Negro" shortly after the March 2007 publication of the Ehrenstein article (which was partly inspired by a term used by director Spike Lee), I found it very daring and funny. It was timely and had the shock of the new -- exactly like Lenny Bruce's violation of conventional proprieties. But Rush kept playing it and playing it well beyond its shelf date, and after a while it felt gratuitous and dismayingly oblivious to racial realities and sensitivities in the U.S. Although I'm a longtime fan of Rush's show, I started turning the radio off when this skit came on.
Here's the main point: The vocal in "Barack the Magic Negro" mimics grandstanding black ac
tivist Al Sharpton, while the namby-pamby melody is borrowed from "Puff the Magic Dragon," a children's song that when originally performed by folkies Peter, Paul and Mary was widely assumed to be an allegory for marijuana smoking. So the Shanklin parody went well beyond the Ehrenstein article in what was being implied about Obama as well as the turf wars of African-American politics. There are so many other wonderful parodies in the Shanklin collection that more richly deserve repeated airplay. And for heaven's sake, they all belong on YouTube. Unlock the vaults!
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Regarding your observations about the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin and the insufferable snottiness of Dick Cavett and other good liberals: Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? Because of your open-mindedness and your "real feminism" (as opposed to faux leftist feminism).
In the meantime, the torching of Sarah Palin's church in Alaska (children were inside when the fire with accelerant was set) evokes a collective shrug in the mainstream media and other liberal precincts (if you can find any reference to the event at all). Why the all-too-frequent and downright nasty face of contemporary liberalism?
Timothy Condon
Tampa, Fla.

ans.
Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.
The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties," chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don't get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!
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Friends of mine and I have found ourselves at the crossroads of the Washington, D.C., media, gay press and the murder of a straight man at the home of a noted gay rights and marriage attorney. Print may be morbid, but maybe citizen journalism/investigation may fill the void. There is a three-year-old unsolved murder of a straight man who was drugged, incapacitated, sexually assaulted, suffocated, then stabbed in the home of three gay men, one of them being an old college friend. One of the defendants -- not charged with murder, however -- is noted K Street attorney Joe Price, who is active in Lambda legal circles.

The crime scene in Dupont Circle is just a few blocks from where I, my partner and two close friends live. The murder of Robert Wone had all the ingredients of a D.C. scandal: sex, drugs and murder. Yet there is almost zero buzz on the streets about this. The D.C. mainstream print media gave minimal coverage, and you can guess how few column inches or how little airtime the TV guys gave it. The four of us launched a blog, and we've broken news.

Why does the death of a straight man in the home of three gay guys not become "news" à la Chandra Levy? The four of us gay Washingtonians are all plugged into the media in some capacity, yet we can't figure this out. Another question is why the gay media avoids this crime and issue. Some coverage, yet only a little.
The Web site dc.bilerico gave us space for a guest post. A recent Fox 5 / WTTG piece. And finally our site.

Craig Brownstein
Washington, D.C.

ans:
From your description of the appalling news blackout on this crime, it appears to be a blatant case of politically correct censorship. The 11th commandment of the liberal mainstream media is that no evil shalt be spoken of any gay persons, who have been sanctified by their precious victim status, without which liberalism would implode. You and your gay friends are to be congratulated for your passionate truth-seeking. I am very glad for the opportunity to publicize the facts in Salon. Please keep me informed of future developments.
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I'm confused. You say you are an atheist. It seems to me that if there is no God, then we are all simply pieces of animated dirt. To pieces of animated dirt, on what basis can something be considered right or wrong, ethical or unethical? Of what value is life except that which animated pieces of dirt place on it? What would it matter if some place absolutely no value on life?

Abortion is "murder"? That has moral connotations. What is wrong with the "murder of a child"? All pieces of animated dirt eventually become lifeless. What does it matter when or how? Morality is just an invention of animated dirt. What if humans managed to destroy all life on earth? What would it matter? Surely, some other form of animated dirt would evolve to replace us. I certainly don't know there is a God, but I choose to believe there is, because, for one, I don't want to believe that I am just animated dirt.
Bob Ryden

ans.
The ancient Greeks, whose art and thought deeply influenced me in my youth, created ethics as a branch of secular philosophy, detached from religion and its moral imperatives. Like artworks, codes of law and ethics are uniquely human constructs -- conceptual environments that separate us from animals, who are governed by biological instinct. It is rational to debate and define the rules by which any society exists. As a cultural relativist and atheist, I believe that values change over time and that there is no transcendent God who generates and enforces them. But societies have a right to require reasonable compliance from those who enjoy their material benefits.

Your vast panorama of "animated dirt" rising and sinking is actually closer to the Buddhist view of the cosmos -- which I also find inspiring for its contemplative acceptance of things as they are. The operations of the life force have inherent majesty. Human consciousness, when fully expanded, is for me the ultimate value. As Heracleitus said, "All things flow." To demand permanence or personal survival beyond death seems to me a tragically doomed quest. But by power of imagination, we each have the right to live in our own universe. All gods exist -- because thinking makes it so.
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In "Vamps & Tramps" you said that sex "reawakens and heals the 'family romance' of our personal biography." I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on what you meant by "heals." Do you mean that people who had a bad family life can, through their sex life, overcome the negative consequences this had for their psyche? I thought that because sexuality springs from the subconscious one couldn't change anything about it and therefore that no amount of awareness and observation and analysis of one's sexuality could change it. Is sexuality the only language the subconscious understands, a sexual act the only way to "talk" to one's subconscious and, possibly, change it?
Mariana Pinheiro

ans.
When human beings were scrabbling for survival in the nomadic and agrarian eras, sex was a reproductive necessity, a drive as basic and primal as hunger and thirst. However, as civilization developed, personality became more complex, and along with it the pageantry of courtship and romance. Freud's analyses of "family romance" were keyed to the hothouse environment of the bourgeois home. With the new intimacy of parents and children as well as the protraction of adolescent dependence (Shakespeare's Juliet got married at 14), sex became freighted with symbolism that it may never have had in the pre-industrial and pre-Romantic period.
The issue is not an atypical "bad family life" but a universal bourgeois problem of ambivalent over-involvement. Modern identity has gotten far too intertwined with unrealistic ideals of love as well as the embattled theatrics of sexual orientation. However, we're stuck with it, and it's given us a hundred years of fabulous Hollywood movies! My point is simply that the love life of everyone I've known from my baby-boom generation and afterward is a chess board ruled by shadowy forces that long predate puberty. Erotic choices yearningly follow or rebelliously diverge from a cast list imprinted on us in childhood. Changing the template may be virtually impossible. Self-knowledge is the most that we can hope for. But for that we need poetry and art -- not the rigid, sterile political ideology that still paralyzes gender studies.

temps d'automne

gogosushi — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:00:49 -0700

I'm wearing: pashmina beige scarf, Cotton On button down gray sweater, American Apparel high-waisted blue skirt, Ugly Duckling 'Nadia' lace-up ankle boots, CC Skye inspired double wrap bracelet, YSL vintage brown bag.

Brad covers Rolling Stone

LuciLu — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:30:02 -0800

The actor on fame, life with six kids and how playing an old man made him grow up

Brad pitt is having technical difficulties.

"I normally need my kids to do this," he mutters, as he attempts to connect my iPod into his stereo. "They're so beyond me in technology, it's hard to keep up. Our seven-year-old was searching the word 'weapons' on Google the other day and ended up on some white-supremacist site. I'm sure now we're on all kinds of watch lists."

Eventually, Pitt gives up and summons an assistant, and soon enough we're listening to Townes Van Zandt. Pitt has never heard the late, great singer-songwriter before, but he says he digs it. He's been feeling out of the loop when it comes to music these days. "Last new thing I got into was the Black Keys," he says. We're at the legendary Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, sitting in Pitt's large, heavily guarded trailer. Metropolis, Nosferatu and The Blue Angel were all shot here, along with, more recently, Tom Cruise's World War II drama, Valkyrie. Pitt has been here since September to film Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's own WWII epic, years in the making and loosely based on a Seventies grindhouse knockoff of The Dirty Dozen. In it, Pitt plays a lieutenant from Tennessee who, according to a leaked version of the script, leads a black-ops unit assigned to terrorize the enemy by scalping Nazis. Gleefully, Pitt snatches a prop from the coffee table and shows it to me. It's an ornate invitation to a movie screening from "Der Minister Propaganda - Dr. Joseph Goebbels." "All the big guys show up in this movie," he says with a grin.

Pitt, who is 44, has grown a thin mustache for his role, and his hair has been styled in a period frontal swoop. He's wearing a wide gray scarf over a gray zip-up sweater and rough-looking khaki Army pants. For the duration of the shoot, set to wrap sometime in January, Pitt and his family - Angelina Jolie, his partner of three years, and their six children - have rented a massive compound in nearby Wannsee. (It's in the same upscale neighborhood where, in a villa in 1942, senior Nazi officials came up with the plan for the Final Solution.) The property is surrounded by a wall and has three large houses, its own helicopter-landing pad and, when I visit, at least six guards. Pitt also owns a 6,500-square-foot apartment in central Berlin; a longtime architecture enthusiast (and apprentice), he's been visiting the city for years, primarily to work with the avant-garde architecture firm Graft. Their current project together, in which Pitt will be a design consultant, is a planned green, sustainable hotel in Dubai.

Despite the rarefied level of celebrity he's achieved, Pitt, as an actor, has starred in surprisingly few massive hits. There's the Ocean's Eleven series, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and then you probably have to go all the way back to Se7en, his first film with director David Fincher, in 1995. In the late Nineties, beginning with The Devil's Own and ending with the abysmally reviewed Meet Joe Black, Pitt admits this had to do with poor choices. "I got lost in the wilderness of fame a bit," he says. "There are all of these opportunities you're supposed to be taking. And I got really discombobulated." More often, though, his instinct has very deliberately pulled him in the direction of eccentric, less commercial roles, from small, scene-stealing turns in 12 Monkeys and Snatch to his quieter work in more recent films like Babel and last year's brooding, wildly underrated Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is his third collaboration with Fincher, after Se7en and Fight Club. Based on a deeply weird short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benjamin Button is a fable about mortality in which the title character, played by Pitt, is born old and ages backward. The script, by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), has little of the original story's black humor, and fans of the earlier Pitt-Fincher collaborations will likely find the film sentimental. But Oscar voters will almost certainly disagree. There's already talk of a Best Actor nomination for Pitt, who turns in a subtle, impressive performance, and the visual effects are something to behold.

In person, Pitt is warm and funny, but is also, at least while he's being interviewed, an extremely fidgety guy. He paces. He musses his hair. He tears little pieces of dried apricot into smaller pieces before popping them into his mouth. He rubs his knee so intensely it brings to mind Lennie from Of Mice and Men petting a rabbit. All of this might have to do with the fact that, despite his repeatedly proven talents as an actor, Pitt remains, for a large number of people, a creature primarily of tabloid fascination. Did he cheat on his ex-wife with his current partner? Will they have another biological child? What war-ravaged destination might they visit next? Does the mustache make him look hot or porn-y? (I can only speak to the final question, and the answer is clearly porn-y.) The day before my first interview with Pitt, even The New York Times had figured out a way to put Jolie's picture on the front page: by running a story about how masterfully she manipulates the press.

Our interview takes place over two days, first on the set and then at Pitt's compound in Wannsee, in a nondescript house where some of his security guys live. Pitt says he's been enjoying Berlin. Tarantino stages a weekly movie night, and the other night, Pitt took his oldest son, Maddox, to see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Maddox loved it. "I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things," Pitt says. "I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, more and more, it's about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up."

Benjamin Button is your third film with Fincher. Going back to Fight Club, though, I found a quote where he talks about how you're actually sort of similar to your character, Tyler Durden.
In that I don't bathe?

He didn't mention that specifically. He said, "It's probably a character closer to Brad in real life than most people would be comfortable knowing."
[Pitt laughs]

"There is a childlike sense of anarchy....He is kind of a sh*t-stirrer and one of those people who is 'Huh? Is that the current thinking? I don't really buy that.'"
Well, that probably comes from growing up in a religious community. I just found it so stifling, my religion. I know it's very comforting for other people.

Did you go to church every Sunday?
Yeah. And it was too much of what you shouldn't be doing instead of what you could be doing. I get enraged when people start telling other people how to live their lives. It drives me mental. This Prop. 8 thing just drives me mental.

Where were you on election night?
Chicago. I went down to Grant Park, because I was doing Oprah the next day. I walked home from the park to the hotel, which was a half-hour walk. And I could walk freely - no one was interested in me at that point. People were weeping and hugging. The sense of elation in the streets - it was great. That was such a turnaround for us. We captured the original definition of America again.

Do you think Fight Club could have been made after September 11th?
No. Certainly not that ending. We debated it then. There's a line we stuck in, about the buildings being evacuated.

Some critics just didn't get that film.
Did you see the DVD that Fincher put out? He put all the negative reviews in the booklet. Some London critic said, "Not only is it anti-capitalistic, but it's anti-society and anti-God." We were like, "We didn't realize it was that good!"

Benjamin Button and Fight Club actually deal with similar themes: having a finite amount of time in life, and what we should do with it. But they come to such radically different conclusions. In Fight Club, the response to mortality is nihilism, anarchy -
[Laughs] That was a Nineties conclusion. Now we have an Aughts conclusion. I actually never thought of what you just said. But it's probably true.

It's just, Benjamin Button feels very positive, but you could easily come away from that story feeling very bleak.
Yeah, I think it's open to . . . it's your choice. I find Benjamin is about those universal things we all share - that 95 percent that makes us all the same, wherever we are in the world. Our loves, our hopes, but also the loss that we all walk around with and hide very well, and the ultimate notion that we're all expendable. To me, it's a counterstatement to this divisive period we've been in, where we focused on the two, three, four, five percent of ways in which we're different.

[Read the full story in RS Issue 1068-69, on stands December 12, 2008.]

Source

No.

RunawayGallery — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:57:17 -0700

I was going to apologize for this outfit. And then I just decided...no, I'm not going to. Because no matter how random or ugly it is. I did leave my house wearing it. And this is how I dress. Besides, I think we all already know I'm a little quirky. Jacket: Heritage Sweater Vest: Urban Outfitters Dress: Target Tights: H&M Shoes: Steve Madden

Grey & Black

purseaholic — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:40:26 -0800

This is my first look in the look book. The weather is ugly outside and I have to study for midterms! Sweater: Forever 21 Pants: H&M Necklace: Dynamite (super old) Boots: Le Chateau Purse: Chanel

OMG! A Moment With Whitney! Is She Being Phased Out From The Hills? Read the Article for the Real Score..

miz_ayet — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:25:35 -0800

December 18th, 2007 12:24 PM
OMG!| The Moment Meets Whitney Port
By Jonathan S. Paul

Whitney Port from MTV’s “The Hills.” (MTV)

Christmas came early this year for The Moment: on Friday, two of our editors met their style muse, the 22-year-old Whitney Port. (In case you aren’t aware, Whitney has a role on MTV’s “The Hills,” a glossy reality show about a circle of attractive friends in Los Angeles that has gone from being must-see TV for ‘tweens to chic dinner-party fodder.) The Moment met Whitney in the green room before her in-store appearance at Bloomingdale’s, where she was raising money for a children’s charity, promoting perfume and passing out lollipops. While other blogs went undercover to pay their respects, The Moment had all-access, snuggling close to our favorite Teen Voguette. (She was wearing brown suede Prada boots, skinny J-Brand jeans, Clinque makeup and a thick cashmere sweater.) We asked Whitney for the scoop on important issues like whom she’s dating, “Gossip Girl,” Teen Vogue, Heidi versus Lauren, Facebook and her totally amazing accessories.

Whose style inspires you?

I love how the Olsens dress - obviously. Mischa Barton - I think how she dresses is great. And as much as people may make fun of me, I like what Jennifer Lopez wears. I think she always looks stunning. It can be a little out there, but I think she takes a lot of chances.

What do you spend your money on?

I’ll spend my money on clothes mostly…. I’m not so much into accessories. I don’t have that much money; I work at Teen Vogue.

T’s online editor, Jonathan S. Paul, with Whitney. (WireImage)

Where do you shop in LA?

I do a lot of vintage shopping. There’s this dress shop called Shareen’s Vintage - I get a lot of stuff there. And American Rag and a place called Bleu.

Do you buy designer stuff?

It gets really expensive. I live near places like Vionnet and Curve. I’ll get a couple of pieces from there and I’ll have them forever.

Rumor has it you’re getting phased out of “The Hills.” Please, say it’s not true.

That’s all just rumor. I’m still going to be continuing filming.

How do you feel about the Heidi/Spencer/Lauren ugliness?

It’s none of my business. I’ll be there to lend an ear to Lauren. Other than that, there’s no place for me in that situation.

Is any of that feud actually real?

It’s real; it’s very sad. Really. Sad. It’s sad - they were once best friends.

What’s your job at Teen Vogue?

I’m a fashion consultant. It’s kind of a freelance thing - I’ll do anything from styling at photo shoots or working behind the scenes…. Being the communicator between the West Coast and the East Coast.

What’s next for you at Teen Vogue?

I think Amy [Astley, Teen Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief] thinks [Lauren and I] are maybe getting too old for the magazine. It’s a teen magazine - I’m 22.

Want to come work at T? You’re hired.

Sure, I’d love to.

What’s next professionally?

I don’t know if I want to stay working in magazines. It’s a really hard business. [Ed: Amen, girl.] I learned that I really enjoy styling. I’m not sure if I’ll continue doing it for magazines or if I’ll do it on my own. Or celebrity styling?

Are you on Facebook?

No. I was in college but I took myself off.

How famous are you right now? Scale of one to 10?

Three. I don’t get super attention anywhere. One or two paparazzi - but I wouldn’t consider that a lot. When you’re in LA you’re one among so many celebrities. So I’m like nothing.

What’s the scoop on you dating Ben Lyons?

There is really no scoop. He was a nice guy for a little while but I’m not really seeing anyone.

Do you watch “Gossip Girl”?

I watched it and I thought it was so cheesy. My sister loves it…. I’ve also heard that they’re a little corny, the outfits.

Whitney, you need to reconsider “Gossip Girl.” Seriously. What TV shows do you watch?

I’ll watch “The Hills” episode once or twice a couple of days before it comes out.… I watch “Project Runway,” I watch “Top Chef.”

Hey, those earrings are cool.

It’s kind of embarrassing, but they could be from Kitson. I hate Kitson.

Whitney told us she doesn’t love to buy jewelry (clothes are her thing), but that doesn’t mean she isn’t accessorized. Here’s the back story on her bracelets…

Whitney’s wrist candy. (WireImage)

From top:

“This is from H & M, I believe.”
“This is a gift from Clinique…. There are orange sapphires.”
“Lauren got me this in Paris.”

Article From: The Moment
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/omg-the-moment-meets-whitn...

My obsession with ugly boots

Whiplash — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:37:29 -0700

I think I have a problem... I need to join Ugly Boots Anonymous.

First I bought these fug sweater boots last February. And then, in April, I got my controversial Minnetonka Knee-High Fringe Boots

Now I have a new fugly boot love: the Blowfish "Hobbit" ankle boot available here and here.

They are ridiculous but I feel compelled to buy one in ever color. WHY? What is wrong with me?

They look so warm and cozy, I want them so bad. Why can't I lust after pretty, girly shoes?

Henley Style Shirts (a personal fave)

nurdburd13 — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:25:18 -0700

Gap Henley $19.50

Juniors' Mossimo® Red: Crewneck Henley Sweater - Medium Heather Gray $16.99

AE Henley Hoodie $24.50

American Apparel - Unisex Fine Jersey Henley $24.00

Abercrombie & Fitch - Isabella $29.50

Scissor Danie Henley $12.99 (sale) I would usually consider Delias.com for younger girls but I love some of their stuff...like this. It's weird, quirky...maybe even ugly. IDK I just really dig it!

Jelinas Reviews: The Bourne Identity

Livience — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:33:41 -0700

The Bourne Identity (2002)

Matt Damon, Chris Cooper, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox

I re-watched this last night with some friends, in light of the impending release of The Bourne Ultimatum. I'd forgotten what a fun, smart action flick this is! That car chase was sheer genius.

And Matt Damon is hott, hott, HOTT!! I don't know how he makes that ugly, bullet-ridden sweater look so good, but -- MAN!! He is a major HOTTIE!!!

And Chris Cooper is a great actor; so versatile! He can play surly, he can do nerdy -- he's a great supporting actor.

My only big complaint was the presence of Julia Stiles. What the -- what's she doing here??

But this is a great movie, definitely worth a DVD rental fee.

Whip's Movie Trivia - 21st Century Edition

Whiplash — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:03:49 -0700

Same deal, different decade. This is concerned with movies made from 2000 through today. And this one is pretty durned tough!

1. I don't pretend to be a man of the people. But I do try to be a man for the people.

2. He left me with a little something called herpes. Which I then gave to the dog. But thats neither here nor there.

3. I'm not drinking any f*ckin' Merlot!

4. I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. I guess every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses... taking pictures of your feet.

5. I am ugly as f*ck by traditional standards, but I still get with women. Aren't you curious as to how that's possible?

6. Jack Nasty! You didn't go up there to fish!

7. Let me buy you a cheese-burger - sky's the limit, up to seven dollars and eighty-four cents.

8. What is that? Smells like a turd covered in burnt hair.

9. Did they teach you how to apologize at lawyer school? 'Cause you suck at it.

10. Would you please tell the audience... err... the jury what happened?

11. You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How 'bout a geography lesson? My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. Neither one of those is Mexico.

12. When I was your age they used to say you could become cops or criminals. What I'm saying to you is this... When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?

13. Listen to me, I got no reason to lie to you, don't make the same mistakes I made when I was young. f*ck a lotta women kid, not just one woman, a lotta women.

14. I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.

15. This year, the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a most painful death.

16. Now finish up them taters, I'm gonna go fondle my sweaters.

17. I might never have liked you. Point of fact, I despise you. But that doesn't suggest I don't respect you. Dying in our sleep is a luxury our kind is rarely afforded. My gift to you.

18. I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don't feel bad.

19. Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

20. The moonlight shows us for what we really are.