Writing I Like

Val Kilmer in The Thaw

I rarely read showbiz news. It can be very Dickensian and fascinating, but it usually begins to troll along the bottom of the sea of boredom, and all the breath-taking characters that one had fallen in love with at first sight begin to look like drudgery and resemble morning-after people that Jason Lee mused about in Dreamcatcher, as he posed the Meg Ryan question, "Where's the cat?"

I mean, really I try, but this Lamar Odom thing is an extremely tangled skein. No matter how much I read or listened to She-who-must-be-obeyed chatter on about it, I do not understand what's going on.
I mean, Chloe is not a licensed doctor, so what's is she trying to do with a fellow who - by some accounts - is brain dead?
Is there an inheritance at stake?

And Scientology truly baffles me. I mean, when I first heard the word "scientology" about 50 years ago, I thought "What a stupid name!"
I still do.
It brings to mind Aristotle puttering about with Dr. Praetorius in some quaint laboratory with sparking Van der Graff generators and vast distillation appartus filled with bubbling liquids and humors with a chorus line from The Producers, does it not? A mix of... well, I suppose "science" and "logy"...   or "logos", Ancient Greek and all that.
(Or a compact car version of Hugo Gernsback's  "scienti-fiction" and "logy".)


So I read The Guardian today.

 
I read about showbiz.
There was an article about Val Kilmer.
Who could resist?

I have not seen any bit of his oeuvre since The Thaw, so why not?

Well, there was much more.

Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde's Lost in showbiz: high fives all round as Val Kilmer whoops about his new Top Gun mission
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2015/nov/20/lost-in-showbiz-val-kilmer-iceman-top-gun-2-daniel-radcliffe-kardashian#comment-63634401


There was a bit about Daniel Radcliffe's life choices, one of which may have been setting up as role-models the actors Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole.
"Ten pints for Gryffendor!"

Then there was the Kardashian Xmas Kard, which has been around ever since "Anno Beast"...!
Anno Beast?
What is that?
I looked and looked, but it smelled to me strongly of Rapture Palooza (Anna Kendrick, Craig Robinson... a film which could have been great with just a little bit more work on the script...).

Who writing about showbiz would cite Rapture Palooza? About non-Rapture Palooza subject matter?

Then it ended with a conjuration around the Kardashian annual card with "annus" ( = "year" in Latin)
and a trilitteral texting vulgarism beginning with "WT_" which again pointed back to "Anno" (ablative case of "annus", don't you know), as well as a homonym reference to Beast and a line in Rapture Palooza...

...and all the puns that one might possibly derive from Schopenhauer's observation"

Obit anus, abit onus.

which I won't even translate, because there are too many levels of Swiftian puns here.

Tolle, lege

Pick up and read!

--