In the words of the French philosopher:

GASP! GASP! Je GASP!

Fasten your safety belt. Hide all sharp objects. Get a friend to scrape you off the wall once you’re done!

From the New York Daily News:

STEAMED ABOUT RICE!
Russian pol unleashes rant
Russian pol Vladimir Zhirinovsky says
what Condi needs is a man.

Condoleezza Rice might want to see if there’s room in one of those “black site” terror-suspect prisons for Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The wacko leader of Russia’s Liberal and Democratic Party has surpassed his earlier screeds with a misogynist attack on our secretary of state.

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Before women’s lib. Before Maude. Before Harriet Miers — there was Endora.

FACT FILE: Endora is a 1,000-year-old witch — though if you saw her pop up suddenly on top of a lampshade — a favorite perch — you’d swear she couldn’t be a day over 999. With her radioactive-blue eye shadow, Lucy red hair, and brilliant lips, Endora tends to be as much Auntie Mame as Wicked Witch of the West. She has eschewed witchy weeds for flowing diva robes in clashing purple-green combos. (more…)

Beware the Eyes that Hypnotize!

In Part I of our Faye extravaganza, we were reminded that like the psychic photographer she played in Eyes of Laura Mars (above), we gay men have always seen fantastic things in the Faye face: (more…)

Faye Dunaway is one of the great movie stars who act with their eyes — or perhaps that should be one of the stars who act greatly with their eyes — in a class with the ocular fireworks of a Bette Davis, as well as the glistening searchlights of the ever-vivid Joan Crawford.

Faye, of course, played Joan Crawford — quite notoriously — in Mommie Dearest, bringing to the proceedings a whole glary-starey madness that had nothing to do with the Joan feeling , that was all Dunaway, and yet captured the truth of the Crawford persona anyway — in the way that art can often say more with one bold stroke of color than with multiple daubs of nuanced photo-realism. (more…)

“Nature has done what the Civil War couldn’t do,” writes author Anne Rice in a New York Times op-ed this Sunday morning. The drowning of New Orleans has laid “this strange and beautiful city” to waste, she laments, “with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.” (more…)

Italian strega Camille Paglia — author of my favorite book of the summer: the electric hot-pink Break, Blow, Burn (a poetry primer for brainy imbeciles) — has finally assumed the role I always knew, always hoped, she would: Pagan High Priestess rumbling out spooky Pop Icon Prophecies that she channels from magazine photos and Access Hollywood.

Case in point: Kabbalah kibitzer Madonna and her recent tweedy romp through the August issue of Vogue:

Camille, like myself, didn’t want to miss that issue, but unlike the rest of us who casually scanned its series of staged Grand Lady Madonna photos, Paglia saw misfortune in the photos. And yet what were they but typical Vogue fare (at least to the naked, uninitiated eye). There was Madonna feeding chickens … Madonna in cozy bed with children … Madonna on the lawn in a summer dress that foamed like a wave on the ground … Madonna on horse… (more…)

"Well, she’s drunk all the time on champagne."

Such is the envy and bile, the gossip and bitchery you must deal with when your are the grandest Diva in the entire known world. Oh, you can talk about your Judy Garland, your Maria Callas and even — poor thing, if you are so bereft of queer references — Madonna, but two of those are dead and the other, while increasingly pathetic, is not yet fabulouslY, self-destructively insane. No, on the earthquake scale of Diva-locity, Shirley Bassey is a full-tilt 27.9 (more…)

Fuck this Aging Gracefully shit!

Exhibit A: Joan Collins, who at 72, still looks good enough to eat and recently took the 40-something hottie at right to husband.

Exhibit B: Shirley Bassey, 68, (below), who was awarded Damehood in 2000, probably because she’s the High Priestess of drag queens everywhere, thanks to her big, bossy renditions of such affirmations of identity as This is My Life ("and I don’t give a DAMN for lost emotion!") and I Am What I Am.

Not only do these old gals look great, they continue to create sparks with their unending critique of everyone and every- thing that crosses their path. Just the sort of Diva Trash Talk that makes our hearts go pitter-pat.

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