purejuice

There are things which just give me brainfreeze, and I stand in front of them and I just can't do what I'm supposed to do, what I'm being told to do, what I have to do to pass for normal on this planet.

The most recent case of this was at the botanical garden indoctrination, when we were taken out of the class room and set before the ibis enclosure at the zoo and asked to describe "the ecosystem".

I stood there dumbstruck for 10 minutes until a wild duck flew in from the duck pond, bogarted some Purina Ibis Chow, and flew away. I said, there, that's kind of an ecosystem. (A lot of that happens at the biopark, which I'm pretty unhappy about. Today, another instance of their fuckery which I may or may not get back to.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, one I've had from the beginning of time is that movies are taken seriously. I just can't begin to believe it.

And this morning, looking at an ad for the iPad in the NYT and thinking about my books, who are, aside from being excellent objects, also the witnesses of my history, I simply cannot believe that anybody who reads books is going to abandon them for anything of the ilk.

People who don't read? Fine. But as my brilliant Old Hell Freezes Over Friend said, as we stepped over the tire-tracked remnants of somebody's Palm Pilot in the middle of Connecticut Avenue, Don't go throwin' away your pencil.

the_macnab, for all his pipes and leather elbow patches and professorial demeanor, is actually a fashion and design maven of penetrating discernment, right up there with

gloeden and

ericaceous.

Cate Blanchette's pink shoes have brought us to the very cusp of the heart of the aesthetic of fug.

I say they're skeevy white girl shoes, meaning making an allusion to some kind of sexiness and failing big time. The MacN says they're not sexy to him, and questions the classification as skeeve.

Which brings me to this. I wonder if hott skeeve, which I can't define but everybody knows what it is when they see it, is not fug.

And skeeve which makes you feel like sex is icky and for bad, unnattractive people you wouldn't even want to think about doing it -- ew ew ew!!! -- is very close to the heart of fug.

See, I think Amber Rose is hott skeevy and Rihanna is skeevy. Which is why, now that I think about it, my heart was broken when Amber Rose and not the dreadful Ri won the Fug March Madness. Amber is still sort of cute and Ri is a thang. Yipes. (The Fug Girlz' latest cult studs discourse on Rihanna vs. Gaga is headlined Rude Fug, and has forced the nice young fug ladies to coin the phrase "labial wedgie". FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUG. Enough to get all you genders into granny panties and squeeky clean flannel Lanz nightgowns with Scotty dogs all over them. For months.)

( Brief Thang Digression )

What makes Cate Blanchette's pink suit skeevy, as Glo and 'Caceous suggest, is the kind of rancid whiff of mutton dressed as lamb that the color -- a little girl's dress color, as well as slyly erotic, as in Surrender the pink -- emits. That the shoes match, sort of, and are slashed with a painful-looking, high contrast, and possibly orthopedic strap is also a kind of clumsy erotic allusion. And as Glo brilliantly points out, the tailoring on the jacket is just bad. The lap wrinkles in the skirt, suggesting sleazy fabric.

We're also going for the Miuccia Prada thing, I submit, of frumpy, anti-fashion June Cleaver erotic costume garment ironized by the po-mo stilletto freak-me shoe. Except Cate's shoes aren't hott n skeevy.

I have to go look at Amber Rose's shoes to ascertain the difference here. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!! I swear to God I think Princess Letizia, who is also skeevy in a hot and nasty kind of bulimic way, has the same black lace shoes!