Salud, here's to Joan (yeah, she was recently bad)
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http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2014/09/joan-rivers
[font size=5]Joan Rivers' Plastic Fantastic[/font]
By James Wolcott
There's a lot to be said for living to an age where you don't give a faint damn anymore, and for a generation or so that's the age Joan Rivers was their entire lives. Generation X, Y, and into the Millennial beyond only know the Joan Rivers who was the red carpet scourge of E!, the host of her own show on QVC, the talk show guest and stand-up who stuck a hot fork into the pretensions and absurdities of tabloid celebrities, converting every day and every venue into her own personal Friars Roast. Those who came late to the broadcast that was her public life know little or nothing about the Joan Rivers who didn't conduct herself like the fifth and most outrageous Golden Girl, who came up in the same Greenwich Village club scene as Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, appeared in the film version of John Cheever's The Swimmer, and suffered enough personal and career blows to qualify for a Judy Garland purple heart: the falling out with Tonight show host Johnny Carson and the banishment into his permanent Siberia; the subsequent failure of her own late-night show, where she was introduced during the premiere to the brassy strains of "The Bitch Is Back"; the suicide of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, months after the show's cancellation (he had been a producer on the show, the pressure of which, compounded by the heart medication he was on, may have deepened his clinical depression); and too many controversies to count that rocked her cockpit wherever she went. To anyone who came of hazy consciousness later than 1990, say, Joan Rivers has prowled the pop culture stage entirely as a self-caricature, a worthy foil for Miss Piggy of the Muppets. ,,,,
.... ...And because Joan Rivers was a woman, a minority within a minority, she had to be twice as nervy as the guys, and she let the nerves show--all bones and pointy gestures, she never conducted herself with the ripe aplomb of say, Mel Brooks, the board-room assertion of an Allan King with his big-shot cigar. She catalogued her own shortcomings--her storky legs, her small boobs, her homeliness--with a mocking rue that skirted masochism, but by making herself a different kind of spectacle she was able to poke a splinter into the Playboy bunny/bimbo beauty ideal that ballooned on screen and magazine page. Like Cosmopolitan's Helen Gurley Brown, who coined the phrase, she was a mouseburger who would not be denied.
What wasn't fake was her voice, her attitude, her withering line of attack--they seemed if anything more real because they cut against the ha-ha jolliness of our Ryan Seacrest/Jimmy Fallon kissy-poo era. Now that
voice is stilled and there won't be another like it because the world she came up in is as gone as the first sprouting of TV aerials across the rooftops of Eisenhower America.
I'm not going to pretend that I was a big fan of Rivers' comedy, apart from her early days. The jittery rhythms of her joke machinery were too blatant and monotonous--her punchline machinery was almost purely telegraphic, Borscht-belting, with little of the multistrand weave and mulling pauses that you got from a Richard Pryor or George Carlin monologue. But she was a trouper, a tough dame, and with Lauren Bacall, Elaine Stritch, and now Joan Rivers gone, the tough, resilient, raspy New York dame may be truly gone for good.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
It is too big to post here.
Anyone who wants it can see it at time.com here"
http://time.com/3104935/robin-williams-dead-joan-rivers-remembrance/
Or just add ".jpg" to this URL:
http://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/123562943
