Check Out The New Addicted To Strangers Blog!

THE NEW & IMPROVED ADDICTED TO STRANGERS BLOG:

http://www.addictedtostrangers.com/

ENJOY!

xxo HH

MK & A = Inversion of Homeless Chinese Man

Ever since Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen stopped shooting kids' movies and Full House episodes, they have created a sensation in the fashion world due to their artful ability to layer sleep clothes with street clothes. This "homeless chic" look seems to result from their lifestyle of constant jet-setting, which forces them to wear some of the contents of their luggage directly on their bodies. MK & A dress like they are ready for anything: rain or shine, lunch with Martha Stewart or downtown rave with Jay-Z.

In China, instead of idolizing billionaires who dress like vagrants, style gurus are making a fashion icon out of an actual homeless man. Talk about gauche. He has been dubbed "Brother Sharp," for his striking good looks and his finesse for sporting multiple jackets at once. His followers say that he looks more like "a vagabond" than "a beggar," and fashion critics rave that he does an affordable version of Dolce & Gabbana menswear. If "Brother Sharp" is anything like the Olsen twins, I see a lucrative collaboration with Wal-Mart in this homeless man's future.

Pimp of the Week: Kathryn Bigelow Rocks It

I was delighted and dismayed to realize that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman in history to win the Oscar for best director. 2010 strikes me as a late date to start recognizing the creative artistry of women in cinema, but such is life.

Kathryn Bigelow strikes me as a person with her head on straight. She makes ballsy action films, even in Jordan, and she doesn't preach about being a "feminist filmmaker." Maybe that's why she was the first woman director to be recognized by The Academy.

Never mind that she was married to a famous Hollywood director and womanizer, because Bigelow is just a woman with a talent for making movies, and she doesn't focus on feminine issues or designer shoe brands. But why is it so illegitimate/un-Oscar-worthy to make movies about 'female trouble'? A war movie about men deactivating bombs is considered serious, but a film about a divorced woman raising her daughter is labeled "melodramatic." Maybe next year a female director will win for making a movie about a girl who is fired from her day job when her boss finds out she is pregnant, forcing her to sell cupcakes door-to-door in order to save enough money to find true love. Wait--that cliché just got horribly confused.

Film Review: Chloe, The BPD Escort Girl

The new sexy psychological thriller Chloe subverts a few conventions of mainstream romantic cinema. The waifish blonde escort girl is played by Mamma Mia's doll-faced Amanda Seyfried, but instead of following around a married older male benefactor, her character follows around an older married female benefactor (who also happens to be a gynecologist, which seems like a crude coincidence to me).

Julianne Moore plays the gynecologist whose wanker-husband is flirting with his students and generally skipping out on his marriage to embrace a mid-life crisis. So the wife hires the escort girl to seduce the husband, just so she can verify that he is a cheater. The film tries to be edgy and psychologically circuitous in the vein of a Hitchcock great, but it falls flat and devolves into a good old-fashioned lesbian sex scene. I suppose some of you will go running to the cinema now that I have said that, but I'll take a classic S&M-inspired dark comedy over a maudlin pseudo-lesbian flick any day.

Wanker of the Week: Misinformed Modelizer

While hovering on the Parisian sidewalk with my pro-health signs up against the crowds of fashion editors, photographers, and models, a man shouted out to me, "Size zero kills -- I have to disagree. Designers should be able to do whatever they want!" I argued with him, rambling on about the fact that top designers have a responsibility to consider the broader impact of their aesthetic decisions. To put it plainly, requiring models to fit such tiny measurements is sadistic and creepy. To put it elaborately, the prevalence of size-zero models spreads body dysmorphic disorder in consumers the world over.

As I battled it out with this modelizing fiend, his nonsensical rant quickly devolved into the wanker-worthy comment: "But thin girls just look beautiful in clothes! It looks better!" I quickly realized that he was not a reputable fashion editor or artistic director but merely a random straggler taking his Sunday stroll through the Tuileries Gardens. Perhaps he was lurking outside the Karl Lagerfeld tent hoping to find a wafer-thin waif to stand in front of him and "look beautiful in clothes."

Size Zero Kills: A Performance Art Piece Part 2

My experience on the fashion frontlines at the Karl Lagerfeld show in Paris was full of unexpected good fortune from strangers. After an hour of lying frozen in the same position on the ground of the Tuileries Gardens, wearing nothing but tights and a few trash bags, my limbs were trembling and I had lost all feeling in my hands and feet. I had my eyes closed to maintain the image of being dead, when all of a sudden I heard male voices circling around me.

One Louvre security guard crouched down close to me and started saying that I had to get up and clothe myself, because he was worried that I would become gravely sick. Since the Tuileries Gardens are the property of the Louvre Museum, it is the security guard's problem if some deranged performance artist freezes to death on the premises. They scooped me up off the ground and seized my "Size Zero Kills" signs, refusing to give them back and threatening to call the police. But the young, adorable security guard who helped me off the ground seemed to be genuinely worried about my health, and said, "It's a great cause!" He escorted me to the gates overlooking the Obélisque de Louxor in the Place de la Concorde and advised me to exhibit my signs at this strategic entryway.

As I stood with my shield-like signs in hand, my trash bags flapping in the wind, all the paparazzi, socialites, models, designers, and editors walked by to leave the fashion show, each with their own reaction of disdain, excitement, or merely a flash of their iPhone cameras. One statuesque fashionista smiled and shouted, "I'm not a size zero--I'm a size 4!"

Another woman approached me and commented, "But you're not a size zero." I replied, "No, I'm a size 4. I was a size zero and I almost died of anorexia." Her response was: "You look great. You're not too big, you're not too small, you're perfect!" She was so submerged in the fashion industry that even her compliment remained constricted by the 'thinness institution.' Nonetheless, it felt like a Chanel ballet flat in the right direction.

SIZE ZERO KILLS: A PERFORMANCE ART PIECE

Today I am doing a performance art piece in the Jardin des Tuileries Espace Ephémères, outside of the Karl Lagerfeld show for Paris Fashion Week. I will be lying on the ground feigning death, my body partially covered in black trash-bags crisscrossed with white ribbons and mesh covering my eyes. My face will be painted white with blue lips to accentuate the death imagery, my legs will be covered in black tights, and my feet will be in Chanel ballet flats. The white signs propped next to me on the ground will read: SIZE ZERO KILLS.

I spent my early adolescence poring over fashion magazines and skinny models, and by the time I was 20, I was hospitalized for anorexia. I finally realized that viewing thin models and absurd retouching contributed to the serious distortion of my own body image. When I was in the hospital, I was horrified to meet 13-year-old girls on feeding tubes, barely alive, still worshipping Chanel and Vogue as though the fashion industry was their savior.

Karl Lagerfeld has promoted the illegitimate claim that size-zero models are better at selling products than models at healthier weights. He famously lost 90 pounds in a year and uses the anti-obesity card as a way of deflecting from the anorexia issue. Our culture is struggling with a problem of extremes, and if the media's beauty ideals return to a more balanced vision of naturalness and health, then perhaps it will encourage the same in the general population.

We are bombarded with images of impossible perfections that feed on our insecurities, driving people to dangerous dieting, plastic surgeries, and in the extreme case, anorexia ending in death. Too-thin, too-young models perpetuate a culture that is afraid of embracing beauty as a thing of depth and variety that spans across all ages, races, and shapes. The new female beauty ideal starts with changing the sample size from zero. The concept of beauty has always been tied to the saturation of images in a given time, and if those images are created by society, then they can be changed by society too.

Pimp of the Week: Luca Bassani Antivari

In the Marilyn Monroe classic, Some Like It Hot, there were a few of my favorite things: train travel, cross-dressing, and big boats. But these days, not even a classic yacht off the coast of Florida satisfies the appetite of a high roller. And that's why the international yacht man du jour, Luca Bassani Antivari, has teamed up with Hermès fashion house to create a boat that is so big it's actually an island.

Luca Bassani Antivari is the president of the famous Monaco-based yacht company, Wally, and he unveiled his futuristic creation at the Abu Dhabi yacht show. Antivari says, "Everybody's dream is to live on an island, in complete freedom, without constraint." It sounds like the attitude of a pimp who likes to live outside the law and maybe even abduct some willing captives.

"shabby people"

While skiing in the French Alpine resort town of Val-d'Isère, I encountered many a Slim Aarons situation. From the lounge chairs at the foot of the slopes, to the Frenchies drinking mid-afternoon red wine in those lounge chairs, it was a surreally elegant ski experience.

From my early years, I recall awkward moments at ski school involving a combination ski suit with suspenders and a desperate need to go pee while riding on the chair lift. I always wanted to become that girl in the snow bunny outfit like some Bavarian ice princess at her chalet in Gstaad sipping slope-side champagne and wearing furry boots that look like animals.

This time around, my sartorial choices were more 1970s-pimp than 1980s snow princess. But no matter what sort of Italian magenta jumpsuit or rabbit fur chapka hat you wear, the awkward mountaintop experiences of youth still abound. Ski boots inevitably make you walk like you have a load in your pants, and falling on your ass is practically a requirement.

The Bay of Bengal

Jet setting is the best, especially if it is on the arm of a dashing man or woman who has piles of money to spend on plane tickets and lavish hotel suites. In theory. In the movies, that is.

A flight attendant friend of mine makes a lifestyle out of meeting men in the first class cabin. She's seen most of the globe and has more stories of luxury travel at the top than Hugh Hefner, or Condoleezza Rice.

She was recently invited for a romantic last-minute trip from Barcelona to New York. Unfortunately, when she arrived to the Manhattan hotel room of her gentleman friend, she picked up his cell phone and found that he had sent the same text message invitation to a multitude of women. It was an international chain text message booty call, and she was the unlucky one who responded. This time the Wanker of the Week met a literal Princess in Flight.

A Street Urchin

Since I live in Paris' red light district, everyday I walk by a slew of sex shops and strip clubs with names like "Pussy," "Glamour," "Two Asses" (as in the animal), and (my personal favorite) "Sexodrome." But since I was in the mood for a glitzy highbrow version of all that synthetic lingerie, I went straight to the home of burlesque, the Moulin Rouge.

It was an internationally appealing and well-choreographed spectacular. There was even a sultry blonde woman who dove into a glass tank while wielding multiple snakes. The costumes were minimalist, and tended to involve pink feathers and reflective beads. I came out of the theatre in a daze, having seen more firm female bare butts than in all my life. And unless I plan on taking up a job in hip-hop video production or the porn industry, I don't think I ever will again. Conclusion: the real Moulin Rouge is much better than the Nicole Kidman version.

Pimp of the Week: Leonardo DiCaprio

I know I talk about him a lot, but Leonardo DiCaprio is something special. His charms are part-boy, part-man, which lend him the appeal of being both prince and pimp. As the apple of Martin Scorsese's eye, Leo stars in the new epic thriller, Shutter Island. The film takes place at a hospital for the criminally insane in the 1950s. As my father says, "It seems pretty heavy duty." But even with the strangely feminized French dubbing of Leo's voice, I was riveted.

Leo is not only a ravishing screen specimen, but he is also into solar roof panels and boats made from recycled plastic bottles. He promotes clean energy, attracts lovely women, gives away millions to worthy causes, has his own production company, and is on the cover of Esquire magazine smoking a cigar and splashing a low ball of scotch. If he's not a Pimp of the Week, then there's no hope for the rest of us.

The Pedagogue

There is a stereotype about The French that they only like to travel so that they can complain about how inferior every country is to France. But I recently read that some French travelers are searching for a genuinely thrilling experience in their next vacation: they are paying a minimum of $1,200 to Ultime Réalité for someone to kidnap and imprison them for four hours.

If they are true high rollers, then they'll opt for a package that is more expensive and custom-designed to their mental histories (and most likely, mental illnesses, considering that they are paying to be tied up, gagged, and carted away). It makes me think of Michael Douglas in the classic psychological thriller of capitalist malaise, The Game. The only birthday gift his brother can think to get him is the most elaborate "abduction package" money can buy.

"You certainly get around."

I was recently in an emergency situation. As usual, my friend and I had drunk too many espressos, and the nearest toilettes were in a café in the center of Paris. My French friend spoke to the waiter at the bar and he pointed her toward the downstairs bathroom. But when I followed behind her, the snotty waiter stood in my way. I asked him in perfect French if "the toilets were forbidden to Americans," and he responded in his haughtiest tone, "Oui."

It was such an absurd display of rude Parisian service that I had to laugh -- but I tried not to laugh too hard, as I still hadn't found a bathroom that wasn't restricted to Americans.

Film Review: Valentine's Day

The new romantic comedy, Valentine's Day, is a rompish series of vignettes chock full of amusing stereotypes and clichés. Within the first ten minutes you get a glimpse of the bare legs and asses of most of Hollywood's hot actresses, but my personal favorite was the young starlet and country singer, Taylor Swift, playing the ditzy blonde high schooler who just can't get enough of her hunky boyfriend and the giant white teddy bear he gives her for Valentine's Day.

There is an ultimate scene of romantic revenge, in which the sweet girl-next-door humiliates her cheating wanker boyfriend in front of his wife during their fancy Valentine's dinner. And perhaps the most cinematic incident of the film involves an 18-year-old boy in the nude, his guitar, and his girlfriend's mother, but I'll leave the rest to your wild imagination. I also enjoyed that they cast funny boy Ashton Kutcher as a florist.

The moral is: romance can be charming, but love is messy -- love is torturesome ... and you're lucky to find someone honest who is enjoyable to be around for more than seven seconds, so grab on tight (and pray that their mother doesn't walk in on you naked).

A Somnambulist

I recently attended an AIDS fashion couture gala in the Bois de Boulogne, a scenic area of Paris currently famous for its prostitutes and formerly famous for the opening scene of Gigi with Maurice Chevalier.

At this particular champagne-soaked evening there was a striptease spectacle involving men in hot pink Lycra and transvestites dressed as geishas. I have always had a penchant for beautiful drag queens, so I felt in my element, sporting a mink stole and gold leggings, which would be considered gauche in any other venue.

Surrounded by fashion designers, dapper gay men, and their fancy ladies in waiting, I decided that my favorite character of the night was a sixty-year-old man from the Great American South. He became a modern dancer and directed fashion shows in 1970s Paris. Now he leads a gospel choir and writes operas. When he returns from a nightclub or party, he makes a wistful comment about how 'things are not like they used to be, at Studio 54.'

Pimp of the Week: Owen Wilson

Owen Wilson dazzled me as a pot-smoking male model (mimbo to the max) in Zoolander. And then he stole my heart when he co-wrote and co-starred in the eternally iconic film, The Royal Tenenbaums. And now Owen Wilson is rumored to be starring in Woody Allen's next movie with French first lady and anti-monogamist, Carla Bruni.

Wilson calls himself a bad boy, and, like any proper pimp, he knows how to turn nothing into something. At age 16 he was expelled from his straight-laced Dallas prep school. But then he found a way to make a career out of dicking around with his best friend, Wes Anderson, and his brother, Luke. They turned 5 million dollars of Texan petty cash into the well-reviewed, poorly received film, Bottle Rocket.

By some ignorant film-goers, Owen Wilson is known for his distinctive nose, which was been broken many times, but I think it's just another sign of a life lived to the max.

The Ogres

My Swedish neighbor in Montmartre once told me that Paris is lovely for a year or two, but after a while its "crumbling glory" starts to aggravate anyone accustomed to modern conveniences. I lived next-door to her in a studette apartment for several months. A studette is a charming term that French landlords have adopted to describe an apartment that is smaller than a studio but slightly larger than the miniature chambre de bonnne (maid's quarters) so prevalent on the eighth floor of Parisian buildings without elevators.

Unfortunately for me, my studette recently devolved into a slumette. One morning a troop of construction workers covered my only window with scaffolding, started jack-hammering and drilling at the outside of my wall, and I never saw the light of day or heard the sound of my own thoughts again.

After months of 8-am wake-up calls from sledgehammers, I didn't even receive a one-Euro reduction on my monthly rent from my evil wanker landlord. The banging became so intense that my wall cracked in two, and a gaping hole formed. The sound of my sobs sent the construction workers dashing into my apartment to repair the 'crumbling glory.' They made a habit of knocking on my door when I was still in my pajamas, in order to "check up on" the state of my ancient Parisian wall. One of the creeper construction workers even tried to kiss me while I was crying on the phone to the frustratingly French electricity company. Charm is easily overwhelmed by disaster.

Restaurant Review: Lasserre Paris

I bet the snobbiest restaurant in Paris was booked to the max with Russian tourists for Valentine's Day. Restaurant Lasserre, just off Avenue Montaigne and near the Grand Palais, serves exceedingly expensive French Haute Cuisine involving foie gras, cepe mushrooms, things infused with truffles, and the requisite touch of caviar.

But the most exciting dish (in my adolescent sweet tooth's opinion) is the "Vacherin aux fruits exotiques" -- translation: "meringue cake filled with exotic fruits." Or you can have one of the adorable elderly male waiters wheel over an elegant silver cart and prepare you a Crêpes Suzette for two people.

As if the whole scene weren't nauseatingly Valentine's Day enough, the ceiling of the dining room literally opens up to reveal the beautiful night sky above you. I guess the words of Martha Stewart come to mind when I think of institutionalized displays of romance: it's a good thing. But I personally spent Valentine's Day with my two girlfriends, burning incense, cursing off men, and eating Italian amaretto cakes. But I'm sure Martha would say, "That's a good thing too."

A Screen Memory

My Canadian friend living in Paris usually dates people whom she meets through reputable connections, preferably at black tie functions. I was astonished to discover that she recently pulled a creeper move straight from my toolbox of 'meeting men' tricks.

She exchanged stolen glances with an attractive gentleman seated in the next box at the Comédie Française. When the curtain rose, she left her phone number dangling on a grocery receipt at the edge of her seat. He succeeded in noticing the strategically placed errant paper, and they exchanged text messages, and they met, and they dated. And they had long romantic lunches in cozy Parisian bistros -- and even longer strolls through idyllic Parisian parks.

But two months into the relationship he left his cell phone on the café table while he went to the toilettes, and it began to ring. She glanced at the caller ID to read the name "Poupée" (translation: "doll"; a.k.a. "baby doll"; aka "my baby doll"; a.k.a. "my other lover"; a.k.a. "my other girlfriend"; a.k.a. the owner of this iPhone is a Wanker of the Week).

Maybe true love is not found in random theatre boxes. But as Edith Wharton would tell you, the other woman definitely completes the scene.

Smarming

I cut right from India to the land of the colonizers themselves. During my weekend in London I took advantage of that dry British humor by passing my time with a gaggle of Etonian boys. My host resided alone in the drafty townhouse of his parents, studying law by day and drinking G&Ts by night. His parents visit him on occasion, bearing sausages from their hog farm.

On this particular evening of "drinks with a view to dinner" (in the words of my well-bred host), the dinner menu involved the most surprisingly to-die-for dessert that I've had in years. In Britain people use the slightly unappetizing word "pudding" to refer to any form of dessert. And this night's pudding involved a steamed sponge cake soaked in Treacle, accompanied by a whipped cream. There is something about Treacle that fails to disappoint. It is a golden syrup laced with lovely soporific effects. I slept soundly in the drawing room, visions of Aloysius dancing in my head.

Upright Position

While resting my legs after a long day of touring Indian temples, I settled down in the empty hotel bar to savor a non-alcoholic chai nightcap. But before I knew it a very drunk man approached my table with a lascivious glint in his eye. He was a creeper to the core.

He started telling me about how he "comes from the land of the snake charmer, where there are a lot of spices..." and then he kissed my hand and stumbled away. But a few minutes later he was back, offering me "a lot of fun" and his business card. He is a banker. From New York to New Delhi, investment bankers and cocktails make for a dangerous mix ending in a security escort out of the building, or hotel in the case of the 'snake charmer.'

Film Review: It's Complicated

The Nancy Meyers film, It's Complicated, is the story of a typical American family: a husband and wife have three beautiful children, they live happily ever after in the upper-class tranquility of Santa Barbara, and once the kids reach adolescence, the husband and wife are fed up of each other and go through a messy divorce ... then the husband remarries a high maintenance and physically fit thirty-year-old ... meanwhile, the middle-aged wife's baking career thrives (in the vein of the Ina Garten empire) and she spends her nights alone.

Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play the estranged couple still forced to see each other on graduation and wedding days. But they manage to take another stab at it, as they find themselves having a passionate affair, thereby turning the whole familial dysfunction in a whole new direction. Steve Martin is splashed in for the amusing romp, which includes an unfortunate incident between a Skype camera and Alec Baldwin's 'bald win,' so to speak.

No matter how Technicolor and Hollywood it gets, It's Complicated rings at the truth of divorce: for a while it seems tragic to all parties involved, but once people move on, the family can never go back to those fond memories of childhood vacations and cozy movie nights. The love is still there -- it's just different.

Chintz-Covered

At Kali Temple in Calcutta thousands of Hindu worshippers line up to give offerings to the Brahman priests, creating a scene of pandemonium I can only compare to that of the New York Stock Exchange. Women congregate at the sacred fertility tree nearby and pray for luck in marriage and pregnancy.

When my male friend and I visited the Kali Temple, a jovial Brahman priest gave us an unsolicited tour. He finished by blessing us with 'sacred' red strings and asking us for money. Then he inquired as to whether or not we were married. My friend replied that we were not married. Then the Brahman priest asked if we were friends. I replied that we were not friends. Then the Brahman priest exclaimed, "Not married, not friend, there is nothing else!" In India dating doesn't exist as an institution of ambiguity as it does in The West. Perhaps I should have joined the women praying at the tree of fertility and conjugal bliss.

Pushing The Envelope

One afternoon in India while wandering an ancient cave site, a great deal of Indian tourists started asking to take my photograph. One young man's mother was delighted when I agreed to stand next to her son and smile into the camera, like we were sitting for an arranged marriage portrait.

After months of being an impossibly un-French American expatriate in Paris, it was refreshing to be around some Indian people who relished my American appearance.

A harmless adolescent creeper approached me and asked where I was from. He quickly exclaimed, "America! Wow! Amazing ... America is the most disciplined country in the world. To us, that is what we believe." I guess they haven't watched very much American reality television in India.