There’s been too little Schwarzenegger in my life as of late. Maybe it’s because I married a dude who’s obsessed with Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier (oh, and speaking of that – um, yeah, Cannes…). Or because getting older means, to a certain extent, letting go of past joys. Or maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones. I suppose everyone has an excuse for having too little Schwarzenegger in their lives, and mine are all good ones, but still. In times of crisis, a lack of Arnold only makes your problems worse. Don’t let it happen to you.

When you first watch this, you’re not quite sure what it is you’re seeing – but you know it’s freaking awesome. I mean, Sheryl Lee shows up. And Leslie Nielsen (RIP). AND STEVE GUTTENBERG!!!!!!!!!!!! And they’re all digitally superimposed onto a beach, singing one of the best songs of all time.

The TV show, apparently, has a retro theme and is dedicated to profiling people who were pretty famous back in the day, but are mostly straight up chilling out of the public eye nowadays. Or, you know, straight up chilling to the extent that such a thing is possible (in the case of Pam Anderson, Mickey Rourke, etc.).

I don’t know whose idea it was to bring “Let It Be” into all of this, but that person deserves a Nobel Prize in a category they need to make up exclusively for such attacks of random genius. I mean, this video made me smile when Tonya Harding appeared. The people who made it knew what they were doing. Ave.

Then, Camille Paglia writes a piece on which some editor cleverly slaps the phrase “the death of sex” (forgetting the standard “ZOMG!!!1!!!ELEVENTY!!!” we of Generation Gaga have been fond of), and it’s game on again.

It goes without saying that Camille Paglia is offensive. She was offensive when she glibly dismissed date-rape. She was offensive when she suggested that Matthew Shepard – murdered by gay-bashers – had somehow asked for his fate. So when The Sunday Times tells me that Paglia is actually “America’s foremost cultural critic”, I’m not going to say that I am offended, because the capacity for offense was maxed out years ago, and replaced by something more akin to the grotesque amusement one feels when one’s senile great-uncle drunkenly pisses into a pot of borscht someone forgot to get out of his way (I will neither confirm nor deny as to whether or not I have witnessed such events live).

I mean, really, Sunday Times. I suppose we had to go there. I work as an editor myself – I don’t hate the playa, I firmly hate the game. If anything, I am grateful for the fact that this platform was given to Paglia instead of Salon, where her writing was allowed to wander all over the place like an untethered, possibly mad cow, and the comments always wound up being more interesting than the columns themselves. There is something resembling a form and style to Paglia’s “explosive profile” of Lady Gaga, and there is surely at least one editor out there who now deserves karma points and a shiny new coffee mug for such a feat, and then some.

Still, we were once again treated to this whole combination of “Camille Paglia” and “sex”, and what the “foremost cultural critic” considers to be “sexy”, and, well, it was just as subtly terrifying as the previous 2,765,137 times the reading public was abused in this fashion. So I don’t know. This entire “explosive profile” debacle is a toss-up both from a journalistic and moralistic point of view.

But I digress.

So Paglia’s overarching take on Lady Gaga was thus: she decided to frame the Gaga phenomenon as a sign that, and I quote, “the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…”

THAT BLAZING TRAJECTORY IS OVER?!?!?!?!?!?!?! OH JESUS CHRIST, NO!!!

This comes as shocking news to me, because here I am in my 20′s, living what I thought was an appropriately interesting lifestyle for someone of my station and shade of bottle-blond – and actually having that lifestyle interact with my art. I mean, no one really knows me or gives a crap about who I am, but I at the very least thought that I had the “symbolic status of sex” thing down pat. A couple of nights ago, when my new play was being discussed at Lyubimovka, a critic who knows me a little too well said something like – “you can’t ignore the fact that this is a play about how an older man teaches a younger woman some things. Note the sexual chemistry between the priest and the girl.” Others disagreed, but I laughed in a guilty fashion. The audience seemed pleased. Blazing trajectory? I got it, babes.

Or so I thought, anyway. Thank God that Camille Paglia is on hand to tell all of us who happen to be Lady Gaga fans that we are, in fact, “marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty.” We don’t feel. And we don’t fuck. Or, if we do, we certainly don’t do it in an appropriately frenzied way – not in a way that critics do when they masturbate to old Madonna videos (sexxxay!).

Now, I personally think that Paglia is trolling – but not in a way that The Sunday Times editors think she is. This isn’t about pageviews, or generating buzz and discussion. Let’s face it: Paglia’s trolling for tits. She wants girls like me to read her latest tripe, get worked up, get a little flush to the face going, and scream: “Hey Camille! You want a blazing trajectory? I’ll SHOW you a blazing trajectory!” Cue metaphoric undressing via confessional blog posts, essays, columns and the like. Cue Camille cackling in the background. Am I right? I’m always right.

It’s funny to me, to read of Lady Gaga being referred to as “asexual” – in an article that natters on about Madonna Madonna Madonna, and then also David Bowie and others. Because… and why I even need to mention this is sort of beyond me at this point… what about Michael Jackson? Does Camille Paglia live in a parallel universe, one in which Michael Jackson never existed nor genuinely moved a generation? Michael Jackson – the freak, the monster, the possible criminal, and the artist – also frequently referred to as “asexual”, also showing up in public in weird outfits at odd places, and someone who was at the epicenter of a global phenomenon that re-exploded again following his death.

I was listening to Michael when I was five years old, living in a bleak late-Soviet high rise, playing with a cheap, knock-off Barbie doll. He shaped my understanding of music and pop culture as much as the Beatles did – and unlike with the Beatles, I didn’t have to play catch-up with Michael. I had no fancy gadgets, back then. People had no idea what text messages were. Were we all, according to Paglia’s fevered imagination, “ruined” (like fallen women as referenced by certain ancient religious texts) already? Was sex dead back then too, and did it get reanimated and lumber around for a while, only to be shot in the head by Lady Gaga’s machine gun bra? Or is Camille really just suffering from a case of “listen kids, back in MY day…”???

I hate to enter into an actual ARGUMENT with a screed by Camille Paglia, because that implies that there was a point to the screed to begin with (aside from the incessant trolling), but there it is. She has managed to genuinely perplex me. Sort of.

Meanwhile, on a particularly hot night this past summer, I was riding in a taxi through downtown Moscow, when Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” came on. I asked the driver to turn it up and obnoxiously sang along. My boyfriend got furious with me.

“But her boyfriend’s like her dad,” I sang back at him while he made faces. Serves him right for dating a younger woman, I suppose. But all kidding aside – there is power, and humour, and weirdness to Lady Gaga. I don’t know if any of it is meant to be sexy, actually. I don’t suppose that all of this somehow means that “sex is dead” – though perhaps for Camille Paglia, it really is dead. Which would be her problem. Not ours.

MY problem is the fact that people like Camille Paglia make more money than I do. I mean, seriously. Come on.

One of these I’ve featured before, but must absolutely include in this collection.

This may crash your browser, but it will still be totally worth it:

“I got the Rap Patrol on the gat patrol
Foes that wanna make sure my casket’s closed”

‘Too many mutha uckas. Uckin’ with my shi-
There’s too many mutha uckas. Uckin’ with my shi”

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning, a cloudburst doesn’t last all day. Ыeems my love is up and has left you with no warning. It’s not always going to be this grey. All things must pass, all things must pass away.”

“Well, it’s hard to love, and not be loved, it’s hard to please your mind. Well, you’ve broken the heart of many a poor boy, but you’ll never break this heart of mine.”

“I feel like I’m Han Solo, and you’re Chewie, and she’s Ben Kenobi, and we’re in that fucked-up bar.”

“There’s some good in the world, Mr. Frodo.”

“Я рок-звезда, идите на…”

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

“To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be. “

We were in this together, whether we loved it or hated it, or grew “meh” about it, or had one of those erratic relationships where you’re screaming at each other one minute, and spoon-feeding each other oatmeal and honey the next.

It’s hard for me, in that light, to talk about the LOST finale, the end of all ends, as it may be, because it mostly requires me to descend into solipsism. That’s all beside the fact that I am still not sure what to say about it, of course. Everything I’m going to say at this point is just going to be stupid. There were parts I liked, and parts I didn’t like, and parts that made me jear, and they’re all knocking about in my head right now – atoms crashing into one another with a life of they’re own.

So I’m just going to tell you about is the other night. This other night, right as the world was gearing up to watch the LOST finale, I was sitting on a mattress in downtown Moscow, watching nothing but the light from other people’s headlights creeping across the ceiling. The man sitting next to me said, “you know, this isn’t forever. Just like me and [name of the woman he is with] are not forever.”

I don’t remember what I told him. I don’t think I said anything of consequence. I did press my knee closer to his knee.

What I wanted to say – what I should have said – is that yes, of course, nothing is forever. However, the thing with love is – it’s just like that church at the end of LOST. It has no now. Years later, the person I have loved will have, like, 6 kids with another woman, or something like that. Even more years later, he and I will both be dead, buried far away from each other. And many years ago, Ivan Bunin sat down and wrote about how the eyeless skull of the woman who once rocked him to sleep every night, his mother, lies buried in the soil, far away, in Russia. And none of it matters, in the end. Because love, by definition, wouldn’t be love if it hinged on things like skulls or who gets buried where or what you do with the rest of your life after having moved on. Love is like its own element on the periodic table, with its own properties. Love outlasts us.

Anyway, these are all the things I should have said, and it would have been neat – with candles burning in the window, and the sound of those cars on the wet asphalt, and an enormous storm cloud in the distance that was occasionally lighting up like a flickering light bulb, like a Morse code message from angels wandering the atmosphere – but that is the other thing, nothing much in life is exactly neat. The edges are mostly frayed and you take whatever ending you can get.

So I sat there with my knee against his, warm skin against warm skin, and I said nothing much. Then we wound up arguing about sci fi and fantasy for a while, both because I wouldn’t shut up about LOST and because one of my new plays is pretty outlandishly fantastical, and he kept going “why, just WHY write that sort of thing” and I had nothing clever to say in response to that as well.

But days later, I wrote him, sent a link to the trailer for the new Christopher Nolan trailer, and lazily paraphrased one of my old articles, in which I talked about how LOST is a show for the twilit reaches of your brain. Except that I said “mind” this time, and not “brain.” Which makes a huge difference, to me.

From the perspective of simple, craftsmanship, I step back, tilt my head way up until my neck starts to hurt, and admire what LOST has managed to accomplish. Even the irate responses to the show as a whole or its many elements (and various fails), are a gift, because LOST inspires people to express some of the best sarcasm available today. It is responsible for such brilliant bitchiness in my Facebook inbox and Twitter feed as of late, that I really ought to take screencaps (and would, if I wasn’t a lazy-ass loser when it comes to this sort of thing).

I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for the high quality of sadness that I feel right now. If you can’t avoid feeling sad, make sure you do it as well as you can.

Mr. President, help me out here:

If you know me, you’ll know that I tend to be cool with most forms of body modification. I think adults can make adult decisions on that front, and I respect those decisions. The amount of hate that people like Renegade Evolution get in the feminist blogosphere – both for getting breast implants and enjoying them – doesn’t just baffle me, it enrages me. “Flames… Flames on the side of my face…” You know what I’m talking about.

I tend to be pretty upfront about the fact that I’d probably get plastic surgery myself at some point, particularly if I end up having kids and, well, if I have the money. Call me shallow, I don’t care. It’s my body, and I get to live in it. Not you.

Addiction to plastic surgery, however, is something worth commenting on. I read about how Heidi Montag has trouble with being able to hug people now. I wonder about why she did this to herself to begin with – why she took things so far – and I can’t help but think, “she thoughts that this would make her more popular and successful.”

Well. Um.

First of all, I understand that she feel hurt when people like Perez Hilton would take her picture and crudely make fun of her chin. Stuck in the crosshairs like that, even people who are mostly comfortable with themselves will wig out from time to time. Still, there are plenty of non-generic people working in the entertainment industry, and they do OK.

Actually, scratch that – you often have to be non-generic in order to achieve major success.

Think about it this way: Angelina Jolie doesn’t look like she fell off the Barbie-mobile. She is memorable and recognizable and that, obviously, is a big part of her charm. It’s the same with anyone from Julia Roberts to Lady Gaga. Hell, it can even be argued that someone like Monica Bellucci – who, in my opinion, has to be universally recognized as stunningly gorgeous (otherwise, there is something wrong with the universe that we all occupy, and an investigation will have to be launched) – might have had a better acting career if she was just a little bit more off-kilter, a little bit more like a Sophia Loren, for example. Granted, Bellucci is an actress who takes chances, and can actually do something with her face and body as opposed to merely display them – and she can also make fun of herself, and that always helps – and I’m not going to throw a pity party for her on this blog, but I do wonder if her looks have been a double-edged sword from time to time.

And then I think back to Heidi Montag. I look at the way her face used to be. I’m not even going to bother with the body right now, I am thinking about the face. Dammit, it was more than just a decent face. It was the face of a woman you can look at and say, “yeah, I can see her getting cast in something.” It was recognizable. It had charm. It was pretty, with that slight Chloë Sevigny-esque awkwardness going on. And it worked, at least as an image.

The woman in the middle picture was different, but also recognizable. I don’t like her nearly as much as the woman on the left, but we could still get along.

And then we get to the picture on the right, and I am immediately bored out of my skull, and I am getting out the nail-file, and I am very pointedly filing my nails.

I’m sure that the new Heidi Montag will still be able to keep finding work. The ongoing drama of being Heidi Montag is work in and of itself, and for now, the media eats it up. But I think it kind of funny, I think it’s kind of sad – that this girl says she can’t go jogging anymore due to the enhanced status of her breasts, and she’s sacrificing all that (I do have an irrational love of jogging, but even if I didn’t, I’d still flinch) for what, exactly? Perez Hilton will probably no longer make fun of her chin, sure. He’ll be too busy to figure out whether to be exasperated or flat-out sympathetic.

We can blame this one on Hollywood, but even Hollywood is not that ridiculous. Getting slammed for your looks is part and parcel of being even somewhat visible, particularly for a woman (and yes, it’s sexist; and yes, I hate how I even need to point that out), but so is being recognized. Jennifer Grey’s career suffered when she got rid of that nose of hers. Just sayin.

The ice outside looks like whale blubber. Nobody is cleaning it up, because that’s something that people in civilized countries do, and it’s not like we can have anyone forgetting where it is they live. It would be vastly unpatriotic, etc. I don’t have any ambitions to prevent myself from falling again, I just hope I’ll avoid breaking any bones this winter. I have written, and rewritten, a play that, much like Paula from “40 Year Old Virgin,” haunts my dreams. I have murdered many shots. I need a break, you guys. And so do you.

Lady Gaga, because you know shit just got real when the lady looks even better without a ton of dramatic make-up on:

Viggo Mortensen, because he is part of our “becoming”:

Elizabeth Wurtzel, because she is hot and cold at the same time:

Lee Pace, because he’s got pathos:

Oksana Akinshina, because she has moved on from playing one of the most disturbing roles of all time, and moved on so well:

Kenan Çoban, because Safiya has good taste:

Zoe Saldana, because she is perfect, and made one of the best films of 2009 even more perfect, and I have good memories of seeing that film in London, and good memories keep you warm:

Cillian Murphy, because he looks like he’ll kill you – and make you like it:

Beyoncé, because you can only avoid stating the obvious for so long:

Alexander Skarsgård, because Eric Northman makes you feel all funny:

Sarah Jaffe, because I love showing off the hot people I work with (be jealous of me, please):

David Tennant, because of flames to dust, lovers to friends (but that doesn’t mean that the good things that come to an end can’t make us happy anymore):

Olga Ostroumova, because she’s the first great beauty who made me cry (in “The Dawns Here Are Quiet,” in case you’re wondering):

Jeremy Renner, because he always had it, even before “The Hurt Locker,” he had it, but I’m glad more people realize this crucial fact now. And here’s the thing, I do not normally like a lot of muscle on men. He just happens to wear it beautifully (it’s all about the forearms, with him), besides being one of my favourite actors. And Anthony Mackie, of course, because he does pissed off like nothing else:

Kathryn Bigelow, because I love smart, beautiful women (and “Hurt Locker” was better than “Avatar,” and I say that as a huge James Cameron stan):

Orlando Bloom, because this really is a trip down memory lane (and, you know, OF COURSE he filmed in Durham when I had already left Durham, but it’s not like I would have been hoping to run into him around town, totally not, I am way more mature than that, you know it, shut up, stop laughing):

And my parents, because you can turn up “Halo,” look at this picture, and have a moment:

“You’re everything I need and more
It’s written all over your face
Baby I can feel your halo
Pray it won’t fade away”

They’re going to say it faded away and was replaced by one of those shitty neon visors American tourists wear whenever they want to embarrass their great nation abroad, but every once in a while I catch them smiling at each other, like I did today, and I know that naw, ya’ll, it did not.

So now I’m all sentimental, and embarrassed for being sentimental. Hope everyone is satisfied.

Dearest sheepie, won't you hold me tighter in this winter of discontent (and sketchy hot water issues)

As you can guess, I admire Anton Pavlovich for qualities I lack. It’s like admiring a purse on someone else’s shoulder – a heart-patterned Moschino, maybe – something you couldn’t afford if you pimped yourself out to every halfway-decent publication in this city. It’s not jealousy per se, it’s more like awe. “Anton Pavlovich, where did you get that heart-patterned… I mean, Anton Pavlovich, how on earth did you manage to keep your cool like that? Is it a genetic thing? An ancient art?”

Because of passport issues, I’m grounded in Ukraine right now. On one hand, this is good, as it forces me to save money. On the other hand, this is bad, because there is nothing that I can physically do to escape the soul-crushing, cold, deep, starless darkness that blooms in vivid, elaborate splotches all over my being, like the bubonic plague. I’ve been depressed since last year, since moving to Amman. But it’s like a fever that’s spiking now. I knew I’ve lost some weight recently, but nothing could have prepared me for the actual numbers when I finally stepped on a scale. It affords me with an excuse to go shopping, and I can’t even muster up enough energy to rejoice about that. Unmoved by bright-lit shops and the swish of plastic. The seventh seal has been opened.

A Vulcan would be bemused by depression. There’s nothing logical about it. Friends will say, “you have a job, a family, and your tits are still fairly perky. Snap out of it.” By all rights, you should. The world does not suffer from lack of tragedy. Your grandmother is in hospital with a crusty rash on her skin that makes it hard to move. Someone tried to rape your friend, and there will be no legal repercussions. Your aunt’s heart has been reduced to a vaguely pitter-pattering piece of gristle after her daughter’s death. Ralph Lauren is threatening people for making deserved fun of its “X-Files”-inspired Photoshop disaster. “Peace is an illusion, says Israel FM.” And so on.

Ultimately, it’s hard to get depression to kick off the blinders and be appraised of its own insignificance. Pain is narcissistic. It’s the belle of the ball. It’s a douchebag with spiky hair, a miasma of Axe, and a publicist.

I have a friend who told me that at 50, he’s going to duel this other dude. Why? Because he’ll be 50. This set me to wondering. Why is 50 the magic number? Why can’t it be 25? What’s the difference? Your cells will be older. You would have seen more, I guess. Maybe experienced some fleeting happiness, or written something halfway decent, or learned, finally, how to cook shrimp in spring onion sauce. Does any of it matter? I mean, sure, for other people, it does. But when you know that you will always be cycling back to this one point – this mixture of dread, cowardice, longing, failure and a profound desire to start screaming your head off in a public place and giving the babushkas simultaneous heart attacks – how do you live with yourself then? How do you even begin to justify passing on such genes to any potential offspring?

Smiling babies make me cry right now. They have no clue how evil world they have recently entered actually is, and they don’t even have teeth to bite back at it. Most of all, I am afraid that if I ever have one, I will give it an inheritance of the “crying at smiling babies” gene. No smiling baby deserves such horrific injustice.

Magnificent animals. Reduced to absurdity by t-shirt makers and Amazon customers alike.

I know you’re rolling your eyes right now. There’s a great scene in a Mikhail Bulgakov story, where the protagonist’s sled is being chased by wolves in the night, and he takes out a gun and can’t fire it out of fear, and then he tells himself, “this is cowardice” (or, in the exact Russian, it’s something called “small-soulness,” malodushie, when your spirit is too small to deal with whatever crap has just come up) and fires the gun, and the wolves get the message. I know that I should fire the gun as well, eventually. In the right direction. It’s just hard when you don’t see the point. When you’re thinking, “wolves are an endangered species, and who the hell am I?”

I will tell you one thing, though: when I visited Anton Chekhov’s grave in Moscow, I had a sense of perfect, religious calm. And I realize now that it wasn’t because I was going, “oh, Anton, your suffering hath now ended, you are strumming a harp on an enormous marshmallow. Alas for those of us left behind.” It’s because I was going, “oh, Anton, you may gone and up on that marshmallow, but you don’t get any worse for wear in my head now, do you? And the world sucks a little less because of that.” Anton Chekhov would never have been able to give me that kind of momentary peace had he been, in fact, a little bitch after all. Most importantly, this Not A Little Bitch thing isn’t just something to be jealous of. It’s more than a commodity. It’s a fire that you light so that others, above all else, can get warm.

I haven’t made very many people warm, but I do amuse my grandmother when I do this really grotesque booty dance because the magazine I work for may have just landed a cool interview. I amuse my brother, because it is amusing for him to be related to someone who quotes Tolkien with a straight face and in mixed company. Maybe all of that counts for something, in the end. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about the Black Gate part in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and just how magnificently it was ruined by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens in the movie adaptation. I love the films, and understand the challenge the filmmakers faced when making them, but I still occasionally get tempestuous when remembering this scene. Whenever I’m depressed, I picture myself at the Black Gate, and wonder if Aragorn would have run away screaming like – say it with me – A Little Bitch, even though he had probably just taken the biggest risk of his entire life and couldn’t be too sure if it would pay off. I like to picture Chekhov there as well (I just came up with the most messed-up, and the most awesome idea for a slash fan-fic of all TIME), even though he’d probably just make subtly cruel fun of the impeding restoration of the snooty Numenorean line, or something. Still, Chekhov was brave, and that’s what you need at the Black Gate. The movie version screwed with my elaborate fantasy hardcore.

In the interest of, if not destroying, then at least containing, the howling wolf (with his blood-spattered muzzle and rheumy, mad eyes), I have, however, been trawling YouTube for ridiculous videos, and have come away with the following brilliant example of what it really means to go into battle against the dark armies, especially if the screenplay has just failed you:

I don’t know about Sauron, but that scares the hell out of me.

Flippant, I know. It’s hard to talk about Roman Polanski’s arrest with any of the gravity it deserves. It’s even harder to keep a straight face when I see famous people whose work and hotness I admire (et tu, Monica Bellucci?) try to present an act of professional solidarity as a noble fight for justice. Seriously, check out the wording in this petition that people like Bernard-Henri Lévy have been signing:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

Like a common terrorist! Everyone knows that prison is for peasants, not Oscar-winners.

I wonder if these smart, talented people – people like Milan Kundera and Mike-freaking-Nichols – even realize that they’re actually inspiring the rest of the world to despise Polanski with rhetoric like this? How out of touch do you have to be if you sign your name below something like this?

Of course, it’s hard to blame Polanski’s friends. I know two people who have known him since he fled to France, and they all describe a charming and intelligent man who does not strike you as the type of dude who could drug and sodomize a little girl. “He has changed,” people say. He’s married to a woman whom he, by all account, loves. They have two children together. One of those children is a daughter.

Yet Polanski has steadfastly refused to pay his debt to society. Despite the fact that the victim has repeatedly stated that she wants to move on – and who could blame her? – accolades and a brilliant mind don’t change the fact that he admitted what he did and then fled the country. Any legal shenanigans that surrounded his case can and should be dealt with – but as judge Espinoza ruled in 2008, fugitives do not get to dictate anything to the courts. Want to deal with the situation? Turn yourself in.

The culture of celebrity worship often reminds me of the worship of particular gods. Gods, as you may know, demand their sacrifices. For the people vigorously defending Polanski, that sacrifice is a pretty thirteen-year-old girl. It’s not the woman that Samantha Geimer, née Gailey, has become – it’s the way she was then, a child whose mother wanted her to make it in Hollywood. Hey, Polanski was a genius, man, he made “Chinatown,” dude, and she was just some jailbait. She wasn’t even a virgin, and everyone knows you can’t rape a slut.

The fact that Hollywood takes pretty young women and does horrible things to them is taken for granted. Samantha Gailey is not viewed as anything special, in that sense. Most girls who have this happen to them never report it. Hell, you don’t have to stray into Hollywood to get raped – most women don’t report it as a kind of rule. In the entertainment industry in particular, though, people see it as a way to pay your dues. Got a tight, young body? Well, great, little girl, but so do thousands of others and you have to work extra hard to stand out from the rest, if you know what I mean.

I sympathize with Samantha, because I could never sit through a court case that revolved around any of the men who have made my life what it is today (I don’t want to be dramatic – I do alright – but I’ve also had to accept the fact that I was changed irrevocably by my own experiences and not all for the better). It would be too much. At the same time, I realize that simply not doing anything in regards to Polanski sends a clear, and disturbing, message.

I liked what Sylvia Peay said in regards to special treatment of Roman Polanski:

Bureaucratic incompetence in the criminal justice system is unworthy of comment by Hollywood when it affects people in lower classes, people of color, people addicted to drugs, and people with mental illnesses. But when the system goes after a celebrated white male artist, the gloves come off and the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system is egregiously insufficient.

It’s true, you know. A plea bargain happened, mostly because the prosecution wanted to spare Samantha the pain and humiliation of a lengthy trial. The facts of the case, however, are out there for anyone to see. Samantha’s testimony is a horrible, brutal thing to read. While I fully believe that the U.S. criminal justice system is, as an old professor used to say, a criminal justice system, becoming a celebrated fugitive in France is not the way to deal with any of it.

I believe that people can change, but I also believe that we must all face the music every once in a while. Polanski has certainly faced a lot of music already in his life – the Holocaust, the murder of Sharon Tate, his pregnant wife – it’s a lot for one person to take. I have no idea what I would have become, had I gone through half of that. None of us do – until it happens to us. But there is genuine human sympathy, and then there are shrugs and excuses.

Dostoevsky once brilliantly showed us how a court of law cannot necessarily determine human guilt or innocence. In reading Lauren’s post on the subject of being raped at 13, however, I’m struck by the human need to get something right everyone once in a while, dammit.

If I was Roman Polanski’s friend, I would tell him to go face the music, again. And that I would be waiting for him on the other side.

I spent a little too much time at the hotel watching Michael Jackson coverage on TV, but I think I can be forgiven. Michael Jackson was my childhood. He was long, cold winters with skies of uniform chrome that seemed to go on forever back then. He was the smell of shampoo in the beanie my mother wore occasionally. He was the glow of the magical new stereo in our crappy car – the stereo you took out and stowed in the glove compartment when you left the vehicle, because it alone would be cause for someone smashing a window and getting in. He was my pretentious sneer as I explained to my younger cousin that no, his hair wasn’t “messy,” it was STYLISH. He was music wafting out over my aunt’s crumbling balcony and into the night, joining the sounds of passing cars, birds settling down to sleep, even the occasional gunshot. He was everything I had imagined America to be – beauty and passion, glamour and grandeur. And, above everything else, I saw in him someone as vulnerable and odd as me – it was in his eyes – only he could pull it off and I couldn’t. And then, one day, those roles were reversed.

I don’t have much else to say about Michael that hasn’t already been said. He was a hero, pariah, scaly monster, ugly punchline and fiery, pulsating star all rolled into one. I’ve always hoped that Michael and all of the people he had touched – both in gruesome and beautiful ways – could find a measure of peace. In my later years, as a teenager, I spend a good deal of time letting go of some of the anger at various events in my childhood by thinking about Michael and how the abuse in his own household contributed to his own behaviour down the road. There were many lessons for me there, and many explanations. While a lot of the stories about his contact with children have, over the years, confused me, I have little doubt that Michael’s damaged personality ended up spilling over onto others. It’s what I had always feared for myself, to be honest.

Yesterday, bobbing on the surface of the Dead Sea like a cork, with a thick layer of mud slowly being licked off me by the oily water, I was thinking about how far away my childhood is. I’ve been running away from it for a long time, while Michael kept trying to re-live his. The path of greater wisdom is not the one that seems most attractive – it’s the one that you are able to handle. Michael didn’t handle things. You could see as much carved into his face as the years wore on. Some people said he deserved to be miserable. I personally have no idea what any of us actually deserve. I know that it isn’t anyone’s place to “forgive” Michael for anything, save for the people he is guilty toward.

But you never forget the music. It is written somewhere deeper than skin.