All I want to know is whether Tom Ford’s intern had the dress dry-cleaned, or wet cleaned, since Anne Hathaway wore it.

Having just seen Anne Hathaway And Her Amazing Vagina’s heartbreaking rendition of  I Dreamed A Dream at a screening of Les Miserables, I am vomiting from the flurry of attention being paid solely to her vagina. This is where the press needs to take a serious look in the mirror because it is this level of reporting that has effected our society and whatever bits of culture we have left. In the wake of the Connecticut shooting, frankly, we all need to look in the mirror for what it is that we do that corrupts our youth, be it through the kind of imagery we expose them to, the constant cross-marketing promotional jibber jabber and the volume of shallowness in the social media landscape.** But let’s get back to the vagina at hand for now. It has been quite a while since we have been accosted with celebrity vag shots. Not since the Golden Age of Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton did anyone poke her poker out at a camera making much hoopla. Yes, TMZ does report on those moments but who cares about a B or C or even D-List vagina? Yes, you Kathy Griffin. Please do not show that thing to the paparazzi because, quoting Roseanne Roseannadanna here, “Hey, you’re making me sick”.

Anne Hathaway is truly one of Hollywood’s sweethearts. OK, she was major annoying as the Oscars Host, but not any more so than James Franco. My point, though convoluted here, is that, “I don’t need to see that!” (NOTE: Quoting my favorite line from that short-lived HBO Series, The Comeback, starring Lisa Kudrow, who has never exposed her vagina.) Anne’s bravura turn as Fantine in Les Miz is a testament to why talented people should be famous and to hold those who deliver so much joy to be respected. Let’s blame the demise of the Hollywood Studio System where every star’s image was carefully crafted, protected and maintained as opposed to what we get now. Today everyone is vomiting on the red carpet rather than just walking on one and perhaps waving a couple of times. Instead now every farkakteh cable network & fashion blog has a Best & Worst Dressed List (I stopped my Not Best Dressed List because it got old) and dispatch some wanna-be weatherperson to get a sound bite, which has sadly become the Holy Grail or the New Gospel. The web, like cable stations hangs on every word of just about anybody in order to fill endless content time. Yikes.

Back to the vagina. We are living in an era where we are so desensitized that the only people shocked by the attention paid to Anne Hathaway And Her Amazing Vagina is Anne Hathaway And Her Amazing Vagina. We must begin to curtail some of our mindless deviant behavior. Look, I am not a Tea Party Republican here spewing nonsense. But I suggest that we pull back a little from our wanton ways.

I Mean…What?!?

Oh yeah.

Binders Full Of Women spoke loud and clear on Tuesday. Congratulations ladies, and while I am at it, you other ladies (gays) who fortunately all came to your senses in droves and voted for what is right. (Still scratching my head on the 22% gay vote that went to Mitt Romney and would love to interview any of the lesbians for Romney, but I digress). To be clear, when I say right, I don’t mean right and wrong, rather, as in your own rights… as human beings. When push came to shove, in the private moment of doing your duty as citizen by voting, Gays, Blacks, Latinos and Women made history by saying no, by saying yes. If that sounds convoluted, that is because it is!

This campaign season brought out the worst in many of us:

• Our true colors
• Our unwillingness to compromise
• Our best interests being forsaken for the blessed buck
• Our anger issues
• Our ill will
• Our secret resentments
• Our tendencies to hate those who disagree with us
• Our rather not mentions

Oh, come now. We won, it is time to be brutally honest, at least with ourselves. Being human, our foibles are not pretty. But they are there and still will be in 2016. Rather than spend endless hours trying to figure out how the Republicans can make up market share by creating more Binders Full of Women, Gays, Blacks and Latinos, let us use this time WISELY and keep nurturing these groups to stay in the bosom of Democracy–warm, toasty and cared for. Not marketed to by a bunch of transparent gross baboons. No, we must not allow “them” to prevail by spending more billions of dirty dollars wooing our constituencies away from what made Election 2012 poetic justice. Woe is to those who let that happen.

The I MEAN WHAT PARTY plans to fight for Binders Full of Women and Gays and anyone else who will listen.

I Mean…What?!?

Forget Binders Full of Women. That parallax view of women is ancient history even though it was just a few weeks ago that Mitt Romney gingerly pounded his chest saying how pro-women he was. That, of course, turned out to be one of Mitt’s biggest lies on the campaign trail based on the number of women that he actually hired from those “binders” during his reign at Bain Capitol. For some reason Mitt can say whatever he wants because it has become OK to be a racist again. Swarms of white people are lining up to NOT vote for Barack Obama trying to make the claim that, “White is the new black” even though November 6 is after Labor Day. But we in the know know from all the recent Fashion Weeks that black is here to stay.

After reading Maureen Dowd’s Op-Ed pieces in The New York Times about her sister, an undecided white woman that moved into the Romney column, it all came clear. Women who will vote for Romney/Ryan actually like being in that binder. And that is the bind…er that Barack Obama is in. Though I am still confident that Barack will eek out his second term by a hair, I am saddened to know that women like Maureen Dowd’s sister, and potentially even Maureen Dowd, based on her condescending column, The Loin King, this past weekend are consciously willing to believe a guy who has consistently lied to their faces. Is that the same psychological shortcoming that women suffer in all relationships with men? Those women are always willing to believe that the guy is late from work because he was actually busy working? Or the guy was out with his buddies and got home to late to call? Or better yet, text you that he was not going to meet you after work for a drink as planned earlier in the week?

The self-assured, independent, confident Sex and the City generation of women seems to have either gotten married off or have had babies with sperm donors. Standing up for their inalienable rights has become secondary to their new agendas. Binders Full Of Women are willing to trust any guy, liar or cheat? Well #BindersWomen4Mitt, the only thing that you can trust if Mitt Romney gets elected is that your vagina hangs in the balance. In some states it will also be probed–legally–and not from the guy that finally showed up for the after work drink date.

Then you have Ann Romney spewing nonsense that her husband has “women’s best interest at heart”. Yes ladies, you too can be relegated back to the kitchen and cook meatloaf patties with @TheRealMeatloaf. Remember when Hillary Clinton–while campaigning for her husband in 1992–went on record to say, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Hillary is the greatest advocate for women’s rights who also happens to be the most fantastic female on planet Earth. As a man enamored by the words and deeds of Gloria Steinum, Bella Abzug, Erica Jong and even Helen Gurley Brown, I look around at these #BinderWomen4Mitt who are turning their backs and clocks on the Women’s Movement and compromising their own best interests. Instead they are contradicting everything they must stand for in this election as the Supreme Court and their vaginas hang in the balance.

I Mean…What?!?

Marianne Faithful.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: I have had this recurring dream that I am in a dark wooded forest with dripping trees and I am walking up a hill, like I am going into battle. I am a foot soldier walking in the midst of this scene.

ABE GURKO: What are you wearing?

MARIANNE: Foot soldier gear… armor. I’m actually not sure if I’m wearing armor, I think I’m wearing medieval clothes.

ABE: That’s kind of fabulous.

MARIANNE: Yes. And I am definitely going into battle, walking up this hill. It’s how I get through life.

ABE: Plodding up hill?

MARIANNE: Yeah. Don’t you?

ABE: I’m a plodder from way back.

MARIANNE: I’m always hauling myself up in full body armor in the rain, up this fucking hill. And I have my friends with me. I’m not alone.

ABE: At least you’re with people.

MARIANNE: Yeah, it’s a bloody war after all. But I am with people that I trust with my life.

ABE: Can you remember anyone in particular who’s with you?

MARIANNE: It could be you. We’re all under helmets! And it is dark and only lit by firelight, but they’re all my friends. It’s a small group.

ABE: Interesting.

MARIANNE: I am either going towards the battle and other times escaping it. I think it has a lot to do with my mother and father. Because of the Second World War, both of my parents were actually involved; my mother worked under cover in Austria helping Jewish families escape, and my father was a spy. I always felt like that– like I was just crawling out, even as a little child, from under the rubble. I do feel that life is a battle. That I cannot win.

ABE: What? I mean, anyone else would think that you have won. You do know that, right

MARIANNE: Oh, I know, I know.

ABE: I had the grossest dream last night that woke me up in a cold sweat.

MARIANNE: What was it?

ABE: I mean it is so gross; I can’t even talk about it.

MARIANNE: Oh, come on, man.

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ABE: OK, so I am hosting a party for the fabulii and people were starting to arrive, so I quickly went to the bathroom, and whoever was in there last had made such a disgusting mess. I mean the grossest. I didn’t know what to do because if I went to find a staff person to clean it, I was afraid that people would see me leaving the bathroom and think it was my mess. I was so freaked out that I started cleaning it up by myself. And it was really gross. And I was cleaning up all this grossness. It woke me up in horror. I immediately googled “dreams with shit.”

MARIANNE: What did it say?

ABE: It said, “You are not alone, lots of people have dreams with feces which means that you are feeling out of control. Or you are having money issues.”

MARIANNE: I am sure everyone has that kind of dream in one form or another.

ABE: I guess. But it was really intense.

MARIANNE: I had a couple of wild dreams, really crazy dreams when I first got clean and sober in the late Eighties. One of my biggest worries was if I couldn’t drink—and I think everyone gets this—if you can’t drink, you won’t be able to write. If you can’t take the pain you won’t be able to create, that kind of thing. I was really worried about, it. One night I had a dream, in the early ages of sobriety, and this might sound really corny but I was in a beautiful garden and it was daylight, and these tall, seven foot, shining people, who one could call angels, but you don’t have to, but they were really special. They were rather pre-Raphaelite. They just looked very grand.

ABE: What were they wearing?

MARIANNE: They were dressed in a sort of flowy Roman style.

ABE: Like Madame Gres-ish?

MARIANNE: Yes, I guess you can say Madame Gres, but they were men, and wearing beautiful sandals, and they all had wreaths in their long hair.

ABE: That sounds hot.

MARIANNE: The two of them were holding a huge, beautifully bound leather book, and in it were all the songs that I had yet to write—and I wasn’t allowed to read it! They wouldn’t show me the actual words; they just showed me the book and quickly leafed through the pages. The titles were very alluring, but I couldn’t really read them. They kept turning the pages too quickly.

ABE: So they were like creative cock teasing you.

MARIANNE: I was very relieved because I could not write at that time after treatment. Anyway, they were right, and all of the great songs I was going to write from then till now, actually exist. They existed in that book. And I breathed a sigh of relief.

ABE: So they were your muses.

MARIANNE: They really were.

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I Mean…What?!?

Martha Raddatz kicked ass.

UPDATE: Binders Full Of Women, you heard that right. Candy Crowley did CNN proud and kept the boys in line at the second Presidential Debate 2012. Her hair was really fluffy but her resolve was spot on. Candy knew what she knew and called out Mitt Romney on the Rose Garden comment that he made accusing Barack Obama of lying. Guess who lied? Mittens Romney!!! Maybe I will DVR State of the Union this Sunday.

Binders Full Of Women.

Candy Crowley knew that she had to keep her cool and control the temper tantrum boys in the same way that Martha Raddatz kicked ass and broke the glass ceiling once and for all.The difference was that Candy did a live fact check whereas Martha just was not taking any shit.

FROM LAST WEEK:

The Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Paul (Gays Think I Am Cute) Ryan was all sorts of high energy teeth showing coupled with an annoying Eddie Munster-esque widow’s peak. However the winner of the debate was clearly Martha Raddatz. The ABC News correspondent was not taking shit from either of those guys and she made Jim Lehrer’s nelly ass performance seem like it was a distant memory. Actually Jim Lehrer’s performance at the Presidential Debate was a distant memory while it was happening, leaving an open slot for Mitt Romney to wriggle his wormy lies into the lame stream media. For all the oohs and aaahs that Mitt was bestowed by all the bloviators and pundits, I have two words for them: Barack Obama.

Candy Crowley kicked ass, no? Not quite Raddatz but kicked ass plenty.

It gives me great joy to announce that the winner of the #VPDebate was Martha Raddatz, seconded by Joe Biden and the anxious wanna-be bad ass Paul Ryan coming up from behind. Yes, where many gay men would love to be. The sad thing about the gays thinking Paul Ryan is so cute is that it justifies the Log Cabin Republicans who care more about money then their civil rights. Fotz.

I Mean…What?!?

Say your goodbyes. Mitt Romney vows to kill off Big Bird and the whole Sesame Street Gang.

Big Bird fly, Big Bird fly. Into the light of the dark black night. – The Beatles

Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low… bye bye Big Bird. – Nina Simone

Big Bird’s days are numbered. And so is the entire cast of Sesame Street, that is if Mitt Romney has his druthers. What we learned at the first Presidential debate, besides the fact that Mitt Romney will say whatever you want to hear, is that Big Bird and Jim Lehrer’s days are numbered, that is IF he gets into the White House.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Pmx47rGCw

Frankly, I think the whole thing was a bore, Mitt had a bad case of dry mouth because he was hopped up on goofballs and Obama thinks Mitt is a fotz.  The big reveal was that sad truth that PBS and probably NPR will be on the skids if a Republican wins on November 6. But you can save Big Bird, Sesame Street AND Jim Lehrer by Voting for Barack Obama. Don’t just take it from me. Take if from the Kardashians ’cause they love Barack Obama, as much as I do. Their slogan is Vote Bitches!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlJt_MIkUic

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVsbVtQU78g

I Mean…What?!?

Frank Ocean for real.

Anderson Cooper is having a positive effect on celebrities come out of the closet, even for those whose celebrity is questionable. Newest “celeb” to march out of the closet is Frank Ocean, an R&B singer, part of the hip hop collective Odd Future and who has also written songs for Justin Bieber, John Legend and Beyoncé. Ocean’s honesty is admirable since he took a risk seeing that the hip hop community continues to struggle with homophobia. Bravo to people like Frank Ocean and Azealia Banks who are proving to those thugs that their backwards antics are so twelve years ago. Needless to say their music is kind of stale, too. Anyway, just wanted to acknowledge and support Frank Ocean and wish him well. Two snaps up.

Meanwhile, check out what I wrote two days ago about Anderson Cooper‘s coming out party. Prolific? Major.

I Mean…What?!?

When I walked out of Bryan Bantry’s screening of The Intouchables, France’s most successful film of all time, I turned to my friend Alfie and said, “Harvey Weinstein better not remake this movie.” She instantly agreed and we both started vomiting at the thought of an American remake of such a sweet, poignant film. Let’s face it, “poignant American” is an oxymoron and those words cannot sit comfortably in the same sentence. The conversation went something like this:

EXT. WEST 58th STREET – BERGDORF GOODMAN WINDOWS (ACROSS FROM THE PLAZA) – NIGHT

ABE: Ewww, Will Smith as the black guy.
ALFIE: Kill me now.
ABE: Better yet, Will Smith as the white guy.
ALFIE: You know Tom Hanks will be all over this.
ABE: Could be billed at the most annoying pairing since Adam Sandler and Al Pacino.
ALFIE: They did a movie together?
ABE: I rest my case. So annoying, no one saw it.
ALFIE: Meryl Streep, they can make it a chick flick.
ABE: Good one and they can cast Octavia Spencer, who can force feed Meryl the shit pie.
ALFIE: Nicolas Cage, make it a psychological thriller.
ABE: Love it. Russell Brand can be the caretaker and Nicolas Cage figures out a way to kill him, even though he is a quadriplegic, so it is still a happy ending.
ALFIE: No American director or writer can handle this delicate subject matter with the irreverence and respect it needs.
ABE: It will be one patronizing, politically correct hagfest, no doubt. And though I am thrilled for Harvey Weinstein having recaptured his Miramax glory days, but like any Greek tragedy, mistakes will be made to bring down the dynasty.
ALFIE: I hope not with this film.
ABE: Harvey will oversee this remake with a vengeance. And since America’s version of a quirky film will surely permeate, one can only imagine the worst, blandest nonsense.
ALFIE: What a shame.
ABE: Word is that Paul Feig, who directed Bridesmaids may helm the project.
ALFIE: No!
ABE: Subtle? Not in this guys vernacular. He should focus on Bridesmaids II and leave this and well enough alone. He will destroy The Intouchables.
ALFIE: Oh, Harvey.
ABE:I love Bergdorf’s windows.

My review of The Intouchables, May 16, 2012

Every so often a sweet, little movie comes along and warms the cockles of your heart. It makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you appreciate whatever hand life has dealt you. The Intouchables is that kind of film. Based on a true story of friendship between a handicapped billionaire (Francois Cluzet) and his street smart ex-con caretaker (Omar Sy), The Intouchables depicts an unlikely camaraderie rooted in honesty and humor between two individuals who, on the surface, would seem to have nothing in common. (Note: Omar Sy won the French equivalent of the Oscar, the first black actor to do so.)

Don’t you hate when people talk up a movie and say how great it was and then with that level of expectation, it dampens your experience when you go see the film? At the risk of doing just that, I want to say that this movie should be seen… period. I am not going to tell you how tender and immaculate the performances are, especially by Mr. Sy, playing a Bengali adoptee that finds himself in the employ of this lovely gentlemen, suffering the worse fate, becoming quadriplegic from a hang gliding accident. Nor will I expound on how the simplicity of the script makes it so easy to fall in love with these two characters in a buddy film to end all buddy films. Charming, delightful, spirited, heartwarming, delicious, these adjectives apply to movies like The Artist and Slumdog Millionaire. However, if you ask me, which you are not, those films barely hold a candle to The Intouchables. There, I hope I haven’t ruined it for you. Just go see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34WIbmXkewU

I Mean…What?!?

My mom, photographed by Bruno of Hollywood.

I woke up thinking about my mother today, not only because it is Mother’s Day. I think of her often because she was so amazing. She had a wicked sense of humor that inspired my edge. Her downside was stuffing us with food, rendering me rotund as a child. Thank goodness for the drug filled ’70′s that helped me get my body in check. So many people I know have unresolved issues with their parents: guilt, anger, resentment. Yes, parents can be annoying, but so can their children. So it is a wash.

My mom was a concentration camp survivor. The fact that she maintained a sense of humor through that nightmare is a testament to the resilience of her spirit. Maybe it was her sense of humor that saved her. They say, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Then does that which makes you stronger, also makes you funny, too? My father was no slouch either. He escaped the labor camps in Siberia to join the underground smuggling women and children into Switzerland. I cannot fathom what they went through for so many years but I am honored to have their genes. I feel sorry for no one when hearing people moaning on and on about their daily struggles. I have little tolerance and/or no patience for people who have the power to make difference choices but don’t and complain about their circumstances.

I Mean…What?!?

The woman is groovy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYkwziTrv5o

Yes, her venture into the  schmatta business annoyed me, but when it comes to Madonna and her music, she is the grooviest. (Goo-Goo GaGa) I love Madonna’s new video Girl Gone Wild, the ad for her new Truth or Dare fragrance, and the recent performance at the Super Bowl. All the naysayers can take a powder. And when I say powder, I mean some MDMA, and then they should listen to Into The Groove…and you can dance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrLJXp3nYiE

I Mean…What?!?