Dorothy Parker's description of LA certainly applies to Ms. Hilton. There is no there, there.

I don't know anyone with a brain in their head who thinks of Paris Hilton as any kind of "role model" for young women or symbol of empowerment in general. She's just a spoiled little rich girl who's become something of a one-woman freak show.

I thought this bit of Forrest's piece was particularly astute:

Paris's unwavering confidence in her position as hottest in the room is matched by her and her followers' belief that everybody wants to be American. She is the ultimate symbol of where this country finds itself: the world is at our disposal; cost is not an issue as long as I look good and feel good now. As our mass media pander more and more to the prolonged adolescence of America, Paris and her crew - Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Jessica Simpson - have become the nation's 'Mean Girls', the high-school 'Heathers' of our psyche. Paris has the glorified life of so many American college girls: living off Daddy's credit card, partying nonstop, revelling in her new-found sexual power. It's 'Girls Gone Wild - Billionaire Heiress Edition'. And the thinner she gets, the more Paris consumes. It has become customary to see her toting in one hand her tiny dog Tinkerbell and in the other a fur Dior handbag to go with her mink-lined Mukluk boots. This is a key image. Because not only has fur become acceptable in the States, but starlets are lining their handbags with it. The undertone in US Weekly's breathless retelling of her latest fab outfit being: the world is probably about to end in madness, so let's just screw each other, the environment and all the animals we can on our way out.

Maybe all this stuff's true, or maybe she's just a pretty gal.

Sometimes it's just a cigar, you know.

(All rights to shovel my own precious trunkloads of inane rhetoric at a later date reserved)

Frank--That's Gertrude Stein on her home town, Oakland.
And that Madonna bought anything with her money isn't much of a defense. She's a short-fingered vulgarian if ever there was one.

Why would we expect Vanity Fair to be anything but commonplace and commercial?

"Short-fingered vulgarian"! "Short-fingered vulgarian"! "Short-fingered vulgarian"!

Kate, if I were a man, and you weren't married, and I believed in marriage...I'd marry you!

That's my favorite phrase ever from Spy Magazine.

Kevin Roderick posts from Gatsby on Friday, now Spy Magazine here on Sunday night. Banner weekend.

PS For those not in the know, the orginal SFV is a man with an orange combover who says "You're Fired" for a living these days.

I just read Forrest's piece and totally agree. The contradictions pointed out in her piece are right on - we were once a nation who celebrated the underdog, the nerdy girl, the one with out a chance and all the women were comforted by this reminder that no, you don't have to wax every hair folicle and then skin everything else that grows hair because you need something to cover 3 inches of your mystic tanned skin to be considered beautiful. Girls growing up with this kind of example are costing an entire generation its common sense and setting redundant standards that they will be hard pressed to live up to when Daddy's card runs dry and they have to (ahem) get a damn job based on something thier plastic surgeon has no control over. I have to go back to work, and because of my job, I might be a little out of the loop, so to say, but just FYI - not every American is into fur. And I'm hoping I don't actually find any basis for the claim that Paris actually gave away Tinkerbell because he grew too big. Not that Tink isn't better off without her - that can be said in a lot of different aspects, but subjecting a dog to living along side of the skinned remains of her wardrobe was too much for me to stomach to begin with. Hopefully she found him a nice home far far away from the graveyard of her closet.

Those trunks of inane rhetoric mentioned earlier? Here they is:

> Paris's unwavering confidence...

Interior conditions! My favorite! In pieces like this, an author has to pretend to read them like neon, even though he can't. Because they're, y'know, interior.

> Girls growing up with this kind of example
> are costing an entire generation its common
> sense

Even if that's true, that generation probably doesn't want to be lectured about it by the elders who lost so much ink to Cher and Liz Taylor. Are these people really meant to be exemplary? Were they ever less venal, or selected for popular fascination by some more righteous judgment?

When it becomes the fashion to wear a rusty rail spike through the temple, we shouldn't blame the fashion icons: It's a trend. That means a lot of people are doing it, and the ones at the fore are front-runners, not leaders. They're not choosing the path, they're scrambling to stay in front of the herd.

> Again, whatever you think of her music,
> Madonna spent her money...

Why are we being asked to care anything about Madonna beyond her music? This writer wants it both ways. He wants to belittle the interest we take in these people as shallow, but readily declines to pass judgment on any actual work these folks produce. (If he did, he might of come up with something as interesting as what Seipp saw on the Hilton TV show a couple years ago [paraphrasing]: "These insane girls are actually polite and courteous.")

> they will be hard pressed to live up to
> when Daddy's card runs dry and they have
> to (ahem) get a damn job

That's an important point. Jonah Goldberg once wrote of Madonna:

- She recently explained to the Sunday
- Mirror, "I don't have any problems
- with [diapers], because I have never
- changed one." Tell that to the thirty-
- year-old single mom who works as a
- hairdresser, and who had great fun
- one night as a teenager following
- Madonna's example.

Still, we have to remember that the masses chose Paris, she didn't choose them. If the masses confuse their amusement with admiration, growing drunk on the fantasy of easy living and boundless indulgence, it's their own damn fault. Meanwhile, these forces are so powerful that there must be something useful and good happening, along with the stupidity. Reynolds has an important theory:

- http://www.techcentralstation.com/082102B.html

> hardcore sex... wasn't even what made the
> Hilton video a national talking point. It
> was the fact that she takes calls on her
> ever-present cell phone during coitus.

No. It was the naked fucking. Some of us don't see that from pop figures every day.

> Infinitely more sinister, the lie
> behind Hilton's dead-eyed gaze is:
> 'You want me.'

As a lethargic, middle-aged, horndog video tech, I *DO* want Hilton. (At least until the wind flips the magazine page over to Eva Longoria.) But not because she has sinister powers of supernatural mind control. It's because she's a skinny young woman with good skin and a nice rack. We shouldn't overthink, especially when admiring some of the most thoughtless people who ever lived.

Abby's right, going back to work is a pain.

I was appalled to get Vanity Fair in the mail and see Paris Hilton on the cover. I'm no great fan of Madonna, but at least she does something arguably creative. The only thing Paris Hilton has ever done is pose for photos and party, which she parlayed into a so-called reality show premised on her being a spoiled airhead, and now mega-millions endorsement deals (which her sister says is so much WORK - yeah, right, let's trade places, bitch).

It's clear that Paris' only talent is generating publicity - and however talented she may be at that, what does it say about our society that this is enough to earn $7 million a year on the assumption that people should and will emulate you?? Is it collective bad taste, or just a sure sign of the impending apocalypse?

My favorite Paris inanity in the VF article is where she says, of the sex tape - "Everyone has sex - everyone makes tapes." Um, no, on both counts - particularly among those in their late teens/early 20s.

Crid, "we have to remember that the masses chose Paris, she didn't choose them"? That's total bull. That girl hunted the paparazzi like a starving dog- she wanted to be famous and was a joke on every red carpet before that porn tape 'broke without her knowledge'.
And this isn't her first Vanity Fair article. A truer account of Paris is in a vintage edition with Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover from back in September 2000. (My mom throws away nothing and I read it at random a couple months ago). It's talking to the whole Hilton family and every picture of Paris has her titty out- and people still bitch about the Janet Jackson thing...

So she had a long, draining, difficult climb to the top of the heap... But it was over before she was old enough to buy a beer! As you clearly suggest, wanting to be famous is not the same as actually becoming famous. She got the gig: She's the one the people want to see on magazine covers. She's been selected by acclaim, not Graydon Carter. The fact that several other slender 20-year-olds didn't have it happen to them makes the point.

We can be sure her life is pretty good, but the attention isn't all about flattery. Remember when Cosby's son was murdered? He'd been famous for thirty or forty years at that point, and it happened the same week he was convincingly accused of adultery. His wife came off the rails a little bit. But on that first night, Cosby walked out of his brownstone through the most intense burst of flashbulbs I've ever seen with his back straightened. He was hurting and he was somber, but he wasn't bitter about the press being there. I think he understood that having made such a good living being watched while he was happy, people had some right to see how he handled grim stuff.

Hilton probably won't do so well when bad things happen, but the people who care what she wears on the red carpet will be watching her poise in the dark hours, too.