guilt

Happy Birthday, Julie Falconer!!!

And curses to you, Bethesda Barnes & Noble! Last night I went there in search of the latest issue of heat (a guilty pleasure; see below) and they didn’t have any! This is the only store I’ve found in the metro DC area that sells this magazine, and they’ve never not had any copies in stock. I’m paranoid that they stopped selling it because no one else in or around Bethesda (aside from me) is ridiculous enough to spend $6 on a British celebrity gossip magazine. I ended up buying issues of British Cosmo and OK! as consolation prizes, but they are poor substitutes for the real thing. I also scored a huge and lovely pictorial Anne Frank book for only $14.95. It contains photos of every room of the Secret Annex (as it looked in the 1940s and as it looks now) and Frank family photos, as well as excerpts from her diaries. So yeah…Cosmo, OK!, Anne Frank. A hot trinity of reading material.

Well, this got me thinking about my guilty pleasures. And there are a lot of ’em, trust me, so let’s begin!

Celebrity gossip magazines and tabloids (both British and American). Oh, I love this shit. Truly. The Sun, Star, heat, Reveal, People, you name it. This genre is so shallow and salacious, but I heart it.

Trashy women’s interest magazines from Britain. God almighty, do I love these things. Their sweetly abrasive klaxon call never ceases to lure me to their forbidden shores. Last time I was in Britain (in Scotland in 2003), I bought so many of them that I embarrassed even myself. But Missy, who shares this passion of mine, outdid me when she went to Ireland last November. She bought so many of these trashy magazines, their publisher should’ve given her a medal.

Richard informs me that my two favorite cheesy mags, Chat and Pick Me Up, are aimed at chavs, which I guess makes me a chav in spirit? (I do own a trench coat with Burberry lining, purchased a few years ago at a secondhand shop. Hmmmm.) Tortured and killed BY MY SON! screeches Chat. I turned to CRIME to pay for IVF! blares Pick Me Up. And I am hopelessly smitten. Yes, I do want to hear about your family being slaughtered on Christmas Eve! I really do! Chat and Pick Me Up, you had me at “hello.” Or “love rat’s sickening deception,” if you will.

Even if America got its own version of, say, Chat, it just wouldn’t be the same. Because in America, an article about a cold-blooded killer wouldn’t include the line “Would you like a cup of tea, love?” And it wouldn’t include such quaint words as “settee.” In Chat, someone is always getting stabbed to death or raped on a settee. As I once pointed out to Richard, if I knew nothing about Britain except what I read in these magazines, I’d be under the impression that:

1) 90% of the men in Britain are monsters
2) the other 10% are too good to be true
3) everyone starts pumping out babies when they’re like 20 years old
4) hardly anybody is married
5) even the ugliest people have no problem snagging an endless stream of significant others

Footballers’ Wives. Glorious trash TV. Utterly glorious. This show was what single-handedly made me surrender my huffy boycott of BBC America. (I started boycotting them when they yanked EastEnders off the air a few years ago; I still watch EastEnders on PBS, but it’s not the same, because A) those episodes are five years old, as compared to BBC America’s current episodes, and B) BBC America used to air five episodes in a row each week, whereas PBS only airs two episodes a week.) Although Footballers’ Wives has been somewhat sedate lately, in the past it made me yell “Oh no they di’int!” at the TV screen more times than I can count.

Days of Our Lives. What a ridiculous show. Nonetheless, I have been watching it every day since 1993 (and I used to watch it sporadically during summer breaks as a teen, too). The DOOL board on Television Without Pity is downright splendid; we love nothing better than to viciously and snarkily fillet this show that we just can’t seem to quit.

Easy listening. A glimpse at a dark corner of my iPod: Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, Air Supply, Bread, Styx, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers (not the country stuff, but the Lady/Through the Years stuff), Christopher Cross, Linda Ronstadt, Peter Cetera, Phil Collins. My hollers of glee ring from the rooftops when I hear Endless Love!

Little House on the Prairie. There are gonna be people who don’t think this is a guilty pleasure because it’s okay to like LHotP in a sarcastic hipster kitsch kind of way. But, uh, that’s not how I like the show. I like it in a genuinely corny, heart-warming kind of way. And because of that, there are going to be people who don’t think it’s a guilty pleasure because it’s okay to like wholesome TV fare that warms the cockles of the heart. But the thing is, I’m kind of ashamed to like wholesome TV fare. I do think it qualifies as a guilty pleasure, because I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve got a reservoir of wholesomeness inside of me—one that induces a love of Little House on the Prairie, Doc, and Touched By an Angel.

I’ve seen every episode of LHotP like 30 times, and it was the only show I watched religiously during my year abroad. It meant having to wake up early on Sunday morning and stake out a seat in one of my dorm’s two TV lounges, which were constantly hijacked by a cluster of geeks who did nothing but sit and watch TV in silence for hours on end, so I could have control of the TV when LHotP finally came on the air at 11:20am. But waking up early on a Sunday and sitting through two hours of Rawhide reruns was oh so worth it just to experience the medicinal salve known as LHotP.

Again, the fine folks on the LHotP board over at Television Without Pity are gorgeously merciless with eviscerating the show’s corniness (especially the baby battering ram episode and the raped-by-a-mime episode), but all the same, we love it. We love every blasted episode. And I still tear up when Jack the dog dies of old age and Bunny the horse has to be euthanized with Grandpa Ingalls’s gun after she falls and breaks her leg. Oh god, and when those anonymous backwoods brutes threw a sealed bag of puppies into a pond so they’d drown? Can’t even watch it. I know that Laura and Mary rescue them and the dogs all end up in good homes, but still.

Degrassi. My pleasure is guilty because this is a show about teens, for teens. And I’m 32. When I first started watching it, I was a teen. In fact, I was only a year younger than the main characters. So liking the show was cool and acceptable. But now that I’m 32 and still freak out at the thought of missing a single episode, and I even own a book about Degrassi? Not so cool and acceptable.

True crime books. I was never a big fan, but Missy and Antoinette are both hooked on the true crime genre, and its greasy veneer eventually wore off on me. The other day I pumped my fist in the air and growled “YES!” in a gutteral baritone when I found a copy of a true crime book called BERSERK! for only a buck at a used bookstore. I generally don’t buy true crime books (instead, I borrow them from Missy), but when I’ve got one in my possession, it’s hard not to get sucked into the filth.

Disaster books and films. This is a trait I inherited: both my mom and grandfather are fans of movies like Earthquake in New York, The Day After Tomorrow, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, etc. I’m particularly fond of the end-of-the-world subgenre (with nuclear disaster at the forefront).

Bad reality TV. Honestly, I’m not a huge reality TV buff. I stick mainly to American Idol, The Amazing Race, and my latest acquisition, Project Runway. But sometimes I do like to indulge in the seedier aspects of the genre; namely, Trading Spouses. And when Amish in the City was on the air, you can be damn sure I caught every. single. episode. The same goes for America’s Got Talent, which, thanks to my coworker Susan, has snagged me in its corrosive net of addictive awfulness.

So there you have it. My guilty pleasures. And, you know, we’ve all got them. We all like at least one movie/book/hobby/song/collectible that induces cringing in other people. It doesn’t make you less of a person if you were once so addicted to Melrose Place, it affected your ability to function in daily life. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Seabsy.) Frankly, I think guilty pleasures are a big part of what makes people interesting. It’s always fun to meet a tightly laced academic with a secret love of 90210 (which is a former guilty pleasure of mine, along with Saved by the Bell). Or a feminist hippie who secretly loves Snoop Dogg. And that’s not just me rationalizing!



song heard most recently before posting: Vissi d’arte—Giacomo Puccini