>Let me repeat that: $38 MILLION. Assuming she started work on the project
>a year ago, that comes to roughly $3 million a month, or $104,109 a day --
>not that she worked every day. ... Parker, worshiped for her quirky urban
>chic, was supposed to draw in millions of women who wanted to look just
>like her. Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a New York
>market-research firm, calls it "'Field of Dreams' branding" -- except in
>this case they didn't come. ...
ok. call me an post whore, but excuse me? Women want to look like SJP? I'm sorry, but she's pretty homely without the makeup and the clothes. She's attractive because her demeanor is submissive: coy crossed legs, coy perching on tippy toes crap that makes her attractive to them anyway. oh and the lowering the head, looking up coyly, fluttering eyelashes. gimme a break. the character on SITC was stuck on a guy that mistreated, daddy long legs to the myth that the guy who mistreats you rilly, rilly loves you, you just have to stick by him and if you just wait it out, he'll change and true love will be yours. what a crock.
also, more on schiavoization of the populace. lookee these numbahs!
http://pollingreport.com/news.htm
Kept Not Kept Unsure
Alive Alive
% % % 3/20/05 16 78 6 3/10-13/05 8 87 4
In just a short time, with all that coverage, this freakin' country is in another frenzy of fear. This kind of news just turns on the fear factor. people thinking about their own death or those they love. what do they do: they want to survive. at any cost. not live. survive. and that depoliticizes them even more: "let me keep my own and fuck everyone else who can't. i have to survive, damn it. don't ask me to fight for a life worth living--protect freedom, expand what freedom means to us in the first place, or think about things like justice, the good life, equality. don't make me think because then i might have to risk something. and i'm too fuckin' afraid for that. i don't want to die. i want to survive. live? no, just let me survive."
it's the same pattern repeated over and over. As Leigh Meyers said, and this especially pertains to the post 9-11, the U.S. needs its Lacy Petersens and its Terry Schiavos so we can play out the fantasy of an innocence forever and repeatedly lost -- to steal a line from Hitchens.
We can all imagine ourselves to be some innocent, sweet thing who was horrifyingly murdered for no apparent reason. Who or is in a PSV, her fate subject to the whims of big, lumbering bureaucracies and instituions we don't understand and have been taught to ridicule as THE enemy (instead of the real enemy). Or, hell, we could be some family enjoying a swim at the beach and get attacked by SHARKS!
oh, I have chores and stuff to do. So </rant>. I'll leave y'all with this:
"One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more. The same compound of the credulous and the ahistorical is to be noticed in the newest pile of Kennedy-era books. For the baby-boomers, the Kennedy-Nixon years represent the time when, for them at least, politics became vivid and real: when, to borrow Auden's lapidary words, the menacing shapes of our fever were precise and alive. And it's fair to say that nobody will be poring over, for example, the Reagan-Mondale debates a decade from now. Still less the Bush-Dukakis duel, and least of all the utter post-political vacuity that has descended since Bill Clinton became able (with the help of a fragment of archival footage) to proclaim himself the heir to a styrofoam Round Table and - one is forced to add - all the vulgar perks that went with it."
-- Christopher Hitchens http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n04/hitc01_.html