Tag Archives: Real housewives shows

Real Housewives Crimes and Misdemeanors and How To Tell Which Is Witch

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Four score and a self caressing housewife ago, the ghost of GhostWriterGate, or Hashtag-Bookgate– was conjured and is still haunting this season’s Real Housewives of New York City’s reunion, the lit-up boards at Vulture magazine and ever peripherally, clanking chains in the inner recesses of my sleep deprived mind on a loop-dee-loop to infinity and beyond. Thus, with all endlessly imagined, or inflated slights and shrill cat fights over stolen dresses and side-eyed shade-casting, one-upping, cauldron-stirring, spell-casting, apple-poisoning, envy-frothing, mud-slinging, bad acting, teeth-gnashing, teeth-spitting, finger-pointing, mouth-frothing and boy-toy-banging during way-too-dirty-martinied well-hung and laid-overs on Scarey Islands and Humpty Hamptons aside, we must ask if these women can cast the seeds of a true bane in another’s existence.

Simply put, Aviva Drescher put out there, for the whole world to see in rerun perpetuity, the head-swirling idea that Carole Radziwill’s bestsellers were authored by someone else. A spell, maddeningly impossible to uncast, nor banish once seeded in viewers’ minds.

As this potential real crime began to emerge from the rabble rubble of shrill and petty misdemeanors, I took some weirdly personal umbrage at said ghostwriter branding, or wounding of character that the abhorrent monopede, Aviva Drescher, inflicted onto Carole Radziwill until what is turning out to be the end days of creation or the last breath of Bravo–whichever comes first. The latter, I bet, can be brought upon only if the endless world-wide supply of these delusional gaggles of narcissistic, self caressing women, teetering in their Louboutins and on the verge of their mid life crises, were to refuse to willfully appear on these shows that we loathe others a little more than ourselves for loving.

We know this universal boycott wish ain’t gonna happen, so we’re left to ponder and morally distinguish why this emerges as unpardonable sin or crime from the endless vortex of inane and forgettable Housewife misdemeanors and buggery. Was the succubus Aviva accusation comperable only to that of Brandi Glanville’s near-mortal blow to Adrienne Maloof for outing Adrienne’s secret option to choose birthing her children by a proxy-for-hire? Clearly, we’re in the embryonic era of a Brave New World–literary references considered and made to sit down and shiver in the corner where resignation meets and greets the brutal reality of what the one percentile is by privilege allowed, with or without our consent, nor apologetically cowering moral compass. Needless to say, as a mere aside, why would Adrienne Maloof, if she were anyone in this world, think they could keep a literal vital secret while riding that scud missile into those 15 minutes to infamy?

Provable or not, true or untrue, these spells do cross into what Lisa Vanderpump so eloquently described as “character assassination” when some accusations were being hurled her way and she distinguished them as posing non negotiable threats to one’s livelihood or self image that can live on in TV land perpetuity, wreaking damages from which there’s no simple return .

Why did it bother me–a two-bit music writer–to the tune of making me take to a rant and a holla via a recap? Because it is shizzle like thissle that can actually–and probably should– bring about a head scratching moment in time to resemble a crisis of conscience. After all, we get to clearly see how the monopede Aviva goes to a place of no return in our great Anthropological Experiment. A place where we can only shrug to imagine we would never want to meet her, nor find ourselves. A most tenebrous junction where the soul is traded as currency to buy into that last millisecond stretch before the 15th minute ends in a terrifying death rattle. All this merely to throw such bought-and-sold soul back into the vertiginous, black- hole-depths of anonymity where Jill Zarin’s screams echo through eternity, and where Andy Cohen checks his Twitter feed in glee–despite and–instead.

So, for those of you that missed it, as I might have posted a quivering link before, here’s my half assed attempt at recapping this less-forgivable-moment-in-time for shits and giggles. Or better to say that this is what I wrote over a year ago about this unsavory and ghoulish spell we still can’t awaken from:

Raspberry Bouquet for Real Housewife of New York City Aviva Drescher

What can I write about the abhorrent Monopede Real Housewife of New York City that is Aviva Drescher that won’t get me thrown in the Pen? In just the second episode of this season’s Lowest Upper Eastside Homies And Thugs In Cocktail Dresses, she has degraded herself from housewife we all loved to hate, to housewife we wish to sick The Bogo Most-Wretched-Fraternal-Sisters From The Faraway Hill Kingdom Of Beverly onto to hide her prosthetic leg during a Hamptons lawn game played with a mallet. But, judging from previews, that seems slated for a later episode—so we’ll just have to go to the refrigerator first.

What is this fauxest pas she has committed to not only piss off most couch potatoes-at-large (we may not come in one-size-fits-all as the descriptive implies, duhhlings) but an additional and more underestimated subspecies among them known as Irate Writers? Yours truly may well be leading the pack as this is being freshly penned by one of Sonja-With-A-Sexy-J’s interns known as Pickles.

Aviva has made the viably slanderous and unpardonable—among writers, particularly—accusation, aka Hashtag Bookgate, against Real-Life-Writer-And-Princess-Carole-Of-The-Radziwills , claiming that said Princess had her book ghostwritten. Does this mean that we’ll have characters named Quentin, Angelique and Barnabus from Dark Shadows joining the cast any time soon? No, duhhlings, this is much scarier than a mid-seventies, mid-afternoon Mock-Goth-Soap. This veers, clearly, into territory where the more aptly applicable vernacular of themz is fightin’ words best describes.

Aviva further insults and outright lies to Real-Life-Writer-And-Princess-Carole-Of-The-Radziwills’s face by declaring that writing is “fun” and that Aviva herself wrote her own book as just a “long email”. And this is where I part company with, take umbrage, leave no prisoners, come to the rescue of said Real Princess and my fellow Real Writers and declare this heresy not only utterly offensive but bogus! Shouldn’t the longest email amongst this bunch be typed by Wonky-Eyed-Ramona and acted out as a striptease—or Caburlesque—by Sonja-With-A-Sexy-J, instead?

TV Eye mirrors society’s veiled misogyny through Bravo’s Real Housewives shows

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In waxing philosophical and anthropological about one of my main mainliners–my addiction with Bravo’s Real Housewives of All Perdition shows– I take an Imax view into the darkness that the TV Eye reveals as it dispassionately prods beneath the frothy upper layers of my beloved shows. Here’s what I see.

The part about misogyny is something that is always bubbling just a tad beneath surface level for me. But that, in a grander scheme that we know to be far greater than the strange microcosm of the Real Housewives shows, is made all the more tangible by the invasive gaze of the TV Eye trained on these women. TV Eye. I’m going to blatantly use the Iggy Pop song that brought a merciless end to the sixties with its raging roar, to refer to the camera. I credit the brilliantly reckless and timeless Iggy Pop with putting an end to the “Love” decade with the beginning of that song’s defiant roar.

I’ve found myself using the words TV Eye in a few of my posts this week because I can hear the roar that heralds a wake up call. Here’s what I see when I use those two words in my own words from an article about the end of an era and the beginning of another:

“I wasn’t there but wish I could have been–without cowering under the table of music history.. Have you seen the footage, grey and grainy, on YouTube? Iggy Pop and The Stooges at some hippie dippy festival in–was it 1969? There he is, in all his sinewy shirtless glory, with his garage band scowling at a dumbstruck audience that still clung to the wilted, post-Altamont, trampled hope of peace, flower power and all you need is love, love, love. The hippies looked scared, but above all, their doom was heralded by the unleashed whirring raw power of the first chords in “I Wanna be Your Dog”, then sealed with the deeper, primal roar of “LOOOOOVE” that started the jittery roller coaster ride of “TV Eye.

“Love”—that catch word that they so embraced, was brutally hurled at them as a rhetorical defiant question, or insult. A reminder of their utopian bubble being burst by the merciless new Proto-Punk sounds raging from the amps. Poor hippies were clearly under siege by this nihilistic new reality bulldozing their dream, condemning it to the realm of all short lived and unfulfilled promises that time would not allow a generation to keep. And so came the love decade to its screeching end.”

There’s more, but you get the jest. I adore music and have been–and above all, still am (ridiculously enough) a two-bit music writer while I’m doing stranger things I never could have imagined. Still, I think in music, if you will. Dunno if it’s a crazy and convoluted way to say that Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes are all around us and altering what we know as the sum of our experiences as never before. Are we ready for this next paradigm shift? It’s here with or without us.

I happen to think that Iggy is a genius and although he first scared me (as even Bowie did), I recognized the raw power of genius and someone that is credited– with Bowie–to have steam rolled another era in music–or in Bowie’s case, “to have forced the world into my scheme of things.”

I think the TV Eye is now part of our altered shared experience. I think Warhol’s 15 minutes have changed television. I think reality shows can’t help but pick up what’s already there and shine its blinding mirror glare back at us so we have no choice but to see it. I think no one remains the same while that TV Eye is silently trained on this new Su-Reality. And it coldly mirrors a society that has always devalued us in it. Only now, we have to rubber neck at the train wreck that we’ve been helpless to prevent.

Please read me with a Bill Murray inflection, because that’s how I truly sound in my head and try to picture the defiance and insurmountable perseverance of Joan Rivers so it sounds funny while it screams.

Why are we surprised? About the world we live in and how it really sees us? Not just us as women, but men, too, as human beings with preassigned roles like well tailored straight jackets. Let’s go back to Bowie and how just visually he stuck his finger down his throat at it way back!

Anyway, I always say that my go-to hair fix for a bad hair day is a burqa…but, think about it. So what if it’s PI? I also say there’s no room for PC in comedy. I’ve learned to say what I want and I’ve had to say it louder–sometimes with a roar. Especially in that silly little boy’s club that music was and still is. I did resort to using just my initials for a first name–and while at it, threw in another for my MN–cause I didn’t have one–back in the day. Dunno if it was to gain that foot in the back door of music, or to watch the expressions when I entered for an interview. So Phuket!

Why are we shocked that it’s all darker than we expected? It’s been just as dark without the TV Eye. It’s just that now that thingie is making us uncomfortable by flaunting it. Everybody wants it to stop. But Reality TV is running rampant. And I like it, ’cause it’s making us remember things we want to forget. How strange that we’ve come here for escape or guilty pleasure–but bigger still, how wide awake now!