Under the Lava Lamp

This week, watching the lava roll through streets that my feet almost touched, filling the potholes with a vengeance, I found myself wondering whether the Hotel des Grands Lacs and Il Nyeri had been forever erased, and whether the people of the Congo will have hope for a decent life if and when their current civil war comes to an end.

And the chocolate mousse? It was as delicious as advertised -- one final colonial fillip. But later, back in my hotel room, I was kept awake all night by bursts of machine-gun fire that I felt certain must be coming for me -- a dabbler in misery, with 10 dollars’ worth of mousse in his belly.

I know it‘s incredibly September 10th of me, but I couldn’t resist watching Live! From the Red Carpet, Joan Rivers‘ Golden Globes pre-show on E! With her shrink-wrapped cheekbones and exuberant rudeness -- she called the event “fabulously pretentious” -- Rivers is every celebrity’s nightmare. You should‘ve seen the stars dashing down the red carpet to escape her pushy questions, demented aphorisms (“There’s a u-c-k in luck!”) and postmodern eagerness to mix her hate mail into her act. Unlike NBC‘s “official” preview hosted by Dick Clark, who appears to think such events are glamorous -- “the biggest party in town” -- Joan knows the whole thing’s tacky. While Clark was interviewing elder statesman (and NBC star) Martin Sheen, Rivers was talking to Sheen‘s whore-and-rehab son Charlie and fiancee Denise Richards, who flashed her engagement ring like a showgirl who just hooked the biggest Lexus dealer in Tulsa.

Ironically, now that the Golden Globes are seen as a predictor of the Oscars, the show has turned into a terrible drag, outdoing the Academy Awards in its tedious thank-yous and its genuflections to HBO and hard-working agents. Its old freewheeling energy survives only in Rivers’ monologues, on-camera realignment of her boobs and delirious attempts at praise. “I paid retail to see it,” she brayed to Ron Howard, thereby proving her devotion to A Beautiful Mind. If the Hollywood Foreign Press Association members knew what the world really enjoyed about their awards, they‘d get rid of that stupid globe and hand out a statue modeled on Joan.

The death of Talk has elicited the predictable outpouring of articles gleefully dancing on the grave of Tina Brown -- New York compared her to Enron. She’s faulted for being shallow, having an unholy dependence on thuggish Harvey Weinstein and, worst of all, failing to dream up a magazine wholly unlike Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, both of which she‘d, of course, reinvented and revitalized. In fact, by the end, Talk was a pretty decent magazine that was clearly getting better and better. But it fell prey to the grandiose expectations symbolized by its own launch party -- a premature climax, if you will -- and to the remorseless logic of our cultural life. The man who used to run the BBC once told me that, these days, if a TV show isn’t a sensation, it‘s as if it doesn’t exist at all. The same is true of magazines, and though I always defend Brown‘s career to other writers -- she drove up our rates, you idiots! -- I must admit that if anyone championed a world in which you’re either a sensation or a big zero, it‘s Tina Brown, whose earlier brilliance as an editor helped dig the grave in which Talk is now buried.