I finally got a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories (thanks Santa) and have been reading them the past couple of days. I had never read her stuff before. It's lovely. The stories are sometimes a little too narrow in their concerns, and sometimes lack a little polish, but boy do I envy the sharp and concise and brutal quality of her prose. And she has a morbid and slightly despairing sensibility which I understand quite well (although I still retain some youthful idealism to temper this in myself). I read "Big Blonde" first, and it's definitely the strongest of the stories I've read so far. "Here's mud in your eye."

I saw the film Cold Mountain a couple of days ago, which I absolutely, passionately adored. (Then again I'm a sucker for epic historical romances...I similarly swooned for The English Patient, another film directed by Minghella, which many of my friends despised). I spent the first few minutes of the film scrutinizing Nicole Kidman's face for the evidence of plastic surgery (which was very apparent in the piece-of-shit trailer for the Stepford Wives remake), but soon abandoned that habit as I lost myself in the story, the characters, the images. I've muchly liked Jude Law in everything I've seen him in so far, and he doesn't disappoint in this film...he was achingly beautiful, tragic, wonderful. I'm relieved that he, and not Tom Cruise, ended up playing the part of Inman. Nicole Kidman (although her Southern accent was less than convincing) and Renee Zellweger were also damn good. Jack White's cameo wasn't as distracting or laughable as I thought it might be (although it was strange to think that he and Renee were dating at the time the film was made, and that he subsequently broke up with her while she was filming the sequel to Bridget Jones' Diary, possibly due to her weight gain or her "conventional" lifestyle during the film). But as often happens when he appears in a film, Philip Seymour Hoffman stole my heart as the slutty minister. I once proclaimed his hotness to a college friend a few years ago (probably after seeing him in a Paul Thomas Anderson film or something of that ilk), and he rolled his eyes and scrunched up his face in disbelief as he spat out his horror at my girlish confession, presumably because he could not imagine that I would be into a guy who was so unattractive by conventional standards.

So, attractiveness. Virtually all of my friends (especially the gay male ones) have strict physical standards, with few or no exceptions. The guy in question must be thin and/or muscular. If a guy is fat, he is automatically not worth consideration. He must also be very young, or young-looking. He must be stylish and dress well and have good hair which indicates knowledge of hair products. He must have a pretty face with no feature too off-kilter, no aspect too unappealing to their aesthetic sensibility. My female friends are also particularly concerned with height; above six feet tall is preferable. Some friends, disturbingly enough, are only attracted to men of certain races.

I judge male beauty as carefully as anyone else does (and am probably even more exacting in my standards than many of my friends are...I don't see the physical appeal of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Richard Gere, Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, or many other supposed heartthrobs, although I may like some of their films), and dammit I do enjoy looking at pretty boys (such as the just-mentioned Jude Law, and Gael García Bernal of the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien). But I'd like to think that, for me, a guy's appearance is not the main measure of his worth. My friends make fun of me when I cluck my tongue at their judgments of "pretty" or "ugly," and when I say, partly tongue-in-cheek but also partly with genuine feeling, that the beauty of a person's soul is far more important than the beauty of a person's body. (Well, I could examine this perhaps artificial and antiquated division between body and soul, but I'll save that for another post, after I've read more philosophy about that subject). I just hate that so many people, especially people whom I love and respect, judge other people's worth by such superficial standards. Ever since I was a teenager, I've mistrusted what was force-fed to me by the media about what was and what wasn't beautiful, and it still astonishes me that others don't see how arbitrary their standards of attractiveness are, and how little effort they have put into redefining those standards for themselves. It seems so silly, but whenever one of my friends expresses disgust over the ugliness of a person who is overweight, I think about Jeremy, who is indeed a fictional character but is also the kind of person whom I would date and love without question. Why would anyone deny herself the chance to be with someone who is such a lovely person, just because he's fat? I don't know...perhaps I'm naive, or perhaps I'm a hypocrite and not as immune to the pull of conventional standards as I'd like to think.

I love makeover shows, such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but I'm not sure that I agree with the concept of making a straight guy more "acceptable" by making him look more like a supposed ideal. In the end, aren't they taking all these different guys who showcase their individual quirks through their very different appearances, and making them all look the same, i.e. exactly like the guys who are engineering the makeovers (actually, makeover shows seem like a curious method of self-reproduction or cloning)? I remember sitting in a subway train in New York a long time ago, and examining the vast diversity of people seated in the train with me. Very few of them were conventionally good-looking in the movie star way, but they all had a sort of beauty to them. They were all like character actors. And I thought how dreadfully boring it would be if we were all movie stars and none of us were character actors...even though we're all supposed to envy and strive to be like the movie stars. Is it fair that some enjoy the privileges that come with conventional attractiveness, and should those privileges be denied to those who are conventionally unattractive? No, I'm not saying that. But I love diversity, and I strive to not be the person who gives a conventionally attractive person privileges over a conventionally unattractive person. Although I'm probably unconsciously guilty of doing this as well.

So. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Incredibly hot, even with a sweatshirt-covered potbelly and greasy hair and thick-rimmed glasses as he appeared on In the Actor's Studio the other day. A character actor par excellence, and someone I'd quite happily fuck, if his wife didn't mind.