Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 53.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
It’s Monday, and I feel the same way about starting this week as I do about cold tooth pain, which apparently looks…like this.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Cosimo Pori, in for Gabriel this week.
To be queer in America is to know you’re destined for hell. We all grow an abominable familiarity with people thinking us abominations, an intimate sense of unnaturalness towards our own ways of being. You know the deal. But this sense of old knowing and this way of thinking is why Lil Nas X’s new video for his song “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” fills me with joy.
The song itself details the pain of pursuing a new queer relationship with someone who is still in the closet (if you know you know). The highly stylized saga of a music video is a glitzy Blake Kathryn style rendering of The Fall from Paradise including Lil Nas X plummeting from heaven on a stripper pole and ultimately giving a lapdance to Satan himself. Obviously such a provocative video has had a fair amount of criticism, from people negatively comparing it to fka twigs’ “cellophane” (both videos have the same choreographer), to strippers and sex workers bemoaning a persistent theme in contemporary videoland: the appropriation of sex worker practices and aesthetics (the latter critique I find completely justified). Though my favorite criticism in the sea of detraction is the age-old queerphobic adage of “think of the children”.
It is this tired thought that allows me to derive the most joy from watching Lil Nas X straddle Satan on his throne and throw ass in the pits of Hell. The same people who are the fastest to proclaim the hellbound nature of all queer and trans people are lambasting Lil Nas X for glamorously depicting the very future they proclaim is for us. We live in a world where there is so much to be upset about I can’t even distill it into a pithy list, but to see someone so joyously appropriate the violent essence of a statement that we’re still running from and turn it into something beautiful (with a wink), how could you not feel joyous towards the power of something like that?
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
I'm back! And what better way to celebrate the return of ~*Hot Goss*~ than by making a list of all the bald people who are objectively sexier than Prince William, who isn't even close to being in the top 50 of sexy bald men, even if he tried?
Let's back up for a minute: The British Royal Family PR offices have been in overdrive since former working senior royals Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Marklegave a bombshell interview to Oprah Winfrey a few weeks ago and pretty much exposed everyone as nasty bitches who stabbed more backs than Michael Myers did in the Halloween movie franchise. So I was particularly amused to read this story late last week, where a study apparently found that Prince William is the world's sexiest bald man after appearing "a whopping 17.6 million times" in Google searches and online blogs compared to his other bald baddies. Which... LOL.
Listen. There's going to be ample hateration and holleration in this dancerie on this beautifully grey Monday morning because GET THE F-CK OUT OF HERE. First of all, the royal family's PR office needs to all be fired from their jobs because no one in their right mind would ever associate William with the word sexy. Anytime his baldness has been mentioned online, it has always been mocked. Not a joke, just a fact. People have literally been commenting for ages on how poorly William has aged -- a phenomenon attributed to the widely known and now confirmed fact that he's petulant, arrogant, and kind of an asshole to everyone around him. He also has the sex appeal of the wet food bits that get caught in your kitchen sink drain plug at the end of a long shift of doing the dishes after a potluck dinner. Again, not a joke, just a fact.
Now to be honest, I've had a deep-rooted fear of bald men ever since I watched Professor Quirrell unwrap his turban to reveal Lord Voldemort's parasitic face on the back of his head in the first Harry Potter movie. I was 8 years old and now, exactly 3 days away from turning 28 two decades later, I still feel uneasy being in the presence of bald men. So I might be biased when I say that his male pattern baldness isn't even of the sexy kind. The man's just balding in the middle of his noggin' and he tries to do that little wispy combover trick to kind of disguise it a little bit but I'd honestly have more respect for him if he just shaved it all off.
Anyway, here's the promised list of bald men who are definitely sexier than Prince William: Jamal Sims; Stanley Tucci; Common; The f-cking Rock; Tyson Beckford; Djimon Hounsou; Tom Hardy, who has an open invitation to ruin my life anytime he wants to, but particularly when he's bald; Senator Raphael Warnock (i'm so sorry); Mr Clean; Popeye, who eats nothing but spinach from a can and would never cheat on his gal; Jeremy Meeks, who was so sexy that his MUG SHOT landed him a modeling contract ... I mean truly, I could go on and on, but you get my point.
All of this is to reiterate yet again that the royal family's PR people are garbage at their jobs. Because if they weren't and had read the room or Twitter even a little bit, they'd know that no one likes William. And this little stunt has only resulted in him being dragged over the coals yet again when it could have been avoided. Sigh. Just lay low for a long while bbs. Truly, we won't notice.