Solid gold creativity

Anyone who reads this blog will know by now that I like a good contrast. Serious … silly … serious … silly … is how my mind works. Previously, I might have been described as having catholic tastes if only the word hadn’t died, if not by disuse then surely by association. If I’d been born in the 18th century and not a woman, I might have been described as a dilettante. 

Well, the catholic-minded dilettantes out there might just relate to this month’s round-up of quotations.  First, the girls at Go Fug Yourself (“fugly is the new pretty”), and second, David Runciman in the LRB on someone who became, unexpectedly, my favourite blogging character of the year: Bill Shakespeare (aka Clinton).

*****

If Heather and Jessica at Go Fug Yourself had been born in the 18th century and not women, they’d have been Jonathan Swift.  They nail celebrity “culture” as firmly as ever did the Houyhnhnms Gulliver.  They are merciless, very silly and extremely funny.  Here they are on someone called Daphne Guinness (could that be the beer heiress?) …

This is totally Lady Gaga plus Annie Lennox plus Elvira with a touch of Nefertiti and a splash of Anna Wintour — just a splash — multiplied by a head injury and then divided by a vat of absinthe.

(And if you want to know what something like that looks like, I’ll put it here (but be warned it’s seriously disturbing)).

Here they are on the actress Anne Hathaway in a deeply unfetching dress.

And I guess Anne Hathaway just didn’t notice that the bodice makes it look like her boobs sprang a leak and are slowly deflating. She’s going to be mighty surprised when she accepts delivery of the tiny bike pump I’m clearly going to send her for Christmas.

I get a laugh just out of their tags which include:  JUST … WOW, WTF, FRUMPATHON, OLD FOR HER AGE, and my favourite, SCROLLDOWN FUG.  Which looks like this:

And out of their imaginary dialogues, like this one between the two actresses, Christina Ricci and Mandy Moore.

CHRISTINA: Oh my God.

MANDY: What, what?

CHRISTINA: You are GIANT.

MANDY: Maybe you’re just small. 

CHRISTINA: Maybe, Gargantua, but you are TALL. You are a tall drink of water. Except you’re wearing black, so I guess that’d be unfiltered water.

MANDY: Your dress interests me. It’s very graceful and interesting, and yet it also looks like my bathtub after a shower, with all the hairs that fell out of my head lying tangled on the porcelain.

CHRISTINA: Poetic, Luke Skyscraper. And yours kind of looks like a cross between Angelina Jolie and Mary-Kate Olsen. With a dash of nightgown. I don’t know what to think.

MANDY: I think, somehow, we might BOTH be rocking it.

CHRISTINA: You might be right, Tallda Swinton.

MANDY: Okay, enough with the names, I get it. I’m tall.

CHRISTINA: Seriously. Your legs START practically at my boobs!

MANDY: Let’s just throw this to the poll and call it a night.

*****

David Runciman in the LRB also does funny, though as you’d expect from a Cambridge don in Politics and a former Guardian journalist it has a little more politesse (while I’m on the subject is it strange that he should end up a Cambridge don at early-40-something while starting at The Guardian? Is it a natural career path?  He is an heir to something, though definitely not beer, so perhaps that helps?) 

He’s also helped by his marvellous subject, my old friend Bill Clinton, as featured in the new biography by Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House.  He opens with a great study of George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s former aide and press secretary. 

Stephanopoulos, apparently, wrote a memoir of his time at the White House in which he made it sound “thrilling, monstrous, deranged.”  A time in which,

a group of super-smart men … fought around the clock to pin down their super-smart, hopelessly promiscuous president (promiscuous with his time, his interests, his attention, rather than in the more obvious ways).  Speeches got written at the last moment, policy was endlessly being reformulated, old enemies were reached out to while a train of new enemies was picked up along the way.

At the heart of it all, Runciman continues, there was George, “fixing, fighting, cajoling, despairing, scheming, outwitting, getting outwitted, and all the time feeding off the power.” 

Why do I keep thinking George Costanza?  Maybe because of this:

At one point, our hero (George, not Bill) takes a fancy to Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze’s costar in Dirty Dancing, and he gets his people to sound out her people about whether she fancies a date … He goes to gatherings of Greek-Americans and they crowd round wanting to know when he is going to lift the curse of Dukakis (which says that short Greek men can’t get elected president, because they look ridiculous in tanks.)

How’s that?  Even Clinton’s henchmen make for funny lines.  As for the man himself, Runciman via Branch paints a picture of an immensely vain, often odd individual.  Some quotes:

… Clinton has more kind words to say about Major than he does about Tony Blair, who was perhaps too much of an easy catch for Clinton’s tastes, as well as being a bit squeaky clean.  Clinton liked politicians who played dirty because they made him feel better about his own peccadilloes.

There are moments when his inability to waste any piece of information makes Clinton seem, frankly, a little mad.  After Major’s defeat by Blair in the 1997 election, Clinton tells Branch that he still has a soft spot for him, “despite their political differences, and remarked oddly that Major seemed to slump forward because the back of his head was square rather than round.”  How do you respond to that?  Branch [who was interviewing him at the time] doesn’t even try, and instead moves swiftly on to a discussion of Iranian clerical politics, about which, unsurprisingly, Clinton is very well informed.

The most compelling scene in the book comes near the end, with an extended account of the meeting Clinton had with Gore after the election was finally lost.  The ideas was for each man to say what he thought had gone wrong, in a spirit of reconciliation, but they are soon baring their teeth.  Gore can’t get past Lewinsky, and Clinton can’t get past the fact that Gore is still using Lewinsky as an excuse for all the failings of his campaign … Gore wants Clinton to apologise to him personally for what he did, whereas Clinton feels he has been doing nothing but apologising.

… Bill appears here to be genuinely fond of his wife, and genuinely frightened of her.  He is thrilled when she becomes a senator and he shows plenty of respect for her political judgement — she spots that Colin Powell is all medals and no trousers well before he does.

*****

Images: Go Fug Yourself (the women); George C’s mind (the man)