Half-ass TV recap: Work of Art, ep 1 and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 2

Hi everyone! I've been missing in action around here, but not for lack of trying. I was truly blocked this week with lots of real-life adventures and live-in-the-moment situations that did not allow for creative blogging as is my wont. And now, it's time for a truly half-ass TV recap that barely counts as a recap at all. Not because the desire isn't there. It is. Oh, yes. But I just don't have any privacy or time to actually watch television and take notes.

So my diabolical plan was to recap every episode of my favorite reality show, Work of Art, Season 2, since I missed out last season. Didn't we all? Work of Art was kind of snuck into the Bravo line-up last year. I don't really remember much promotion for the show. The network almost seemed a bit embarrassed by a fine-art competition. But it turned out to be one of the greatest experiments in entertainment in the 21st Century. A room full of narcissistic creative types, given impossible-to-accomplish challenges using fine-art media and their whackadoo thinking-caps, all in the name of gallery-industry fame and fortune.

Plus New York Magazine's art critic/Work of Art judge Jerry Saltz added even more layers of entertainment with his often self-lacerating blog and its legion of mega-commenters (myself included). Saltz' recaps quoted Goethe and seriously questioned the concept of the show, the commerce of art, and his own role on both counts. How could you not love this show? I ask you. Because Bravo is very stingy with image-sharing from the show (art copyright laws are a bitch), I will provide half-ass line drawings for your visual pleasure.


So episode one of season 2 introduces all the contestant artists, who are looking even prettier than last year. There's no old people (like me), and I can't tell the women apart yet because they're all around the same height, weight, and have straight, longish hair. Not a criticism, but sheesh--last year there was an old person and different body types at least. The guys shuffle in as well. There's a gorgeous French guy named Ugo whose blue eyes during his face-time interviews have me saying, "Hummina, hummina hummina!" There's a guy named The Sucklord, who makes altered action figures. You know he'll be around for a while. There's a performance-artist, Young Sun, who seems to be a prodigy but we'll see. There is nudity and Speedo's when it comes to Young Sun. Leon is from Malaysia and is trying to prove himself as an artist who happens to be deaf. There's more but it's all a blur on the first episode.

The artists are shown a gallery full of crappy, kitschy art pieces and told to pick one and make something high art-ish with the crap as inspiration. It's a glorious beginning! They grab their crap and get cracking. Or some of them do. Lola cannot get it together until the last minute. The judges end up loving her cold, gallery-ready installation of muted paintings and cement structures that represent her longing to settle down in once place. Michelle wins the challenge with an eagle totem and skeletal paper sculpture, evoking a recent near-death experience she had in a hit-and-run car accident. That's about as anti-kitschy a concept as any.

Ugo (hummina hummina) is deemed dull and Keith-Haring-derivative with his red-on-red pattern thing over more other patterned things, and he is out. No more blue eyes. Truly, Bayeté probably should have gone, with his very bad collage that heaped on the cliches of identity and race, or The Sucklord, who made a piece of kitsch art of Gandalf that was even kitschier than the painting of a wizard he based it upon. Plus he's called The Sucklord. Guest judge Mary Ellen Mark saves Sucklord in the end. His work "speaks to her." This somewhat makes sense when I find an article in the Sunday NY Times about her passion for collecting cute little robots. In the end, handsome guy is dropped. But art marches on.


And on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, season 2, Brandi's child peed in some bushes and this became relevant because later at a game party held by Dana, Kim and Kyle called her on that. Camille tried to comfort Kim after Brandi called her a bitch and accused her to doing crystal meth. Kim called Brandi a bitch slut, pig slut, and short-shorts-wearing whore. And Brandi agreed that she was, in all likelihood, a slut. Taylor looked horrified and kept the angry housewives from engaging in fisticuffs and the game party dissolved as a result. I missed the thrilling conclusion because my kid started a pillow fight with me.

Meanwhile at the Vanderpump residence, Lisa's daughter Pandora is finally engaged to her long-time boyfriend, Jason, over formal sit-down family dinner with lots of shiny, mirrored plates and vases. A wedding planner is soon brought on board. He sports a mullet and is like something out of a very late-season, very bad episode of "Will and Grace." Lisa hires him anyway, probably because Bravo will foot some of the bill to keep this obnoxious guy around. There is talk of spending a million dollars for Pandora's wedding, although Lisa would prefer something more "English" in the realm of $150,000. Not gonna happen, even though the wedding planner finds Pandora's wish for a pink-roses-festooned wedding dress to be "tacky." And with air kisses, that's the show. I missed all the earlier episodes. Thank GOD.

Next week I'll do a better job, I promise. In theory.

Half-ass TV Recap: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Reunion Part 2

I hate myself but here's the half-ass recap of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Part Deux (ode to Cedric). So I was really tired and getting over a cold when this aired on Tuesday and I was doing an art assignment in the dark of my bedroom the whole time--typical half-assed TV watching as usual.

The housewives of Part 2 were really shiny with lots of sparkly diamond-looking things around their necks, wrists and earlobes. I guess they were wearing the same outfits as last week, but I didn't even notice then because I was so busy yawning and reading a great book of interviews with comedians called Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgariansby Paul Provenza that is changing my whole existence and entertaining me at the same time. Not like this show, Bravo. Well, changing my life for the worse, I suppose. Where was I? Oh yes, bitching and complaining over my cable TV habit.

The show started off with NYC fight of the century recap: Kim telling everyone that Kyle had asked Camille a bunch of questions about going to Hawaii and was Kelsey going and so forth, and then Kyle just started crying. And Kim was all, "What's WRONG?" And then there was endless fighting and watching of softporn films starring Camille in her 20s and that sort of thing. So we'll never know what really happened between Camille and Kyle in New York. And perhaps we're all better for it.

There was some more Camille-shaming as she was shown in a hot tub in a sky-blue bikini, comparing herself to Jesus. If only Catholic Mass was more like that! Camille sheepishly said, "Uff, Jesus, right. Sorry 'bout that everybody."

On to Cedric-gate. It turns out that Lisa's permanently buffed and ensconced house guest Cedric was a conman, freeloader and overall despicable person. Of course, when Lisa's husband Ken calls him despicable in his proper British accent, it sounds like the worst thing a person could ever be. Not like when an American says it.



Anyway, the Vanderpump/Todd household had been asking Cedric to move out throughout the entire show but he kept bringing up his abandonment issues, even though he's close to 40 years old. A very beautiful-looking almost-40 but still... So even though he had to sleep between his prostitute mother and her boyfriends at the tender age of seven to "keep her from being raped," as he explained over Lisa's daughter's birthday dinner, Cedric had to go. Except he wouldn't. Lisa explained that she one day asked him to pick up his clothes and he freaked out, packed up, and ran off into the mean streets of Beverly Hills. He then insisted on meeting at Ken's office at dawn and tried to "get something from them" or he would "tell all." What a masher! And it turns out he does have family after all.

How could Lisa be so stupid? "I don't know, I must be stupid," she explains. Everyone had warned her about Cedric taking advantage, but I guess his abandoned-in-a-phone-booth-in-Paris back-story really worked on the Vanderpump/Todds, at least for a while. Well, it was interesting watching Lisa try to move her face to match her grief. I was rooting for her to make a proper facial expression and it almost happened.

Then Cedric had his say, interviewed in an unbuttoned shirt which made him look extra conman-like while at acting class. He says that he wasn't thrown out, he left of his own accord and that Lisa was really demanding and she would call him every morning to go work out in the home gym and he was basically her rent-free companion. Jesus--the poor man. And she's a big phony and she's hanging out with people who aren't even her old friends and just you wait, America, the real Vanderpump will show her true colors soon enough and he'll be vindicated. Then he goes back to acting class. To act. We'll miss you Cedric. Oh not really.

Who was next on the chopping block? Taylor and her despicable marriage to Russell. The implication throughout the season was that Taylor married for money and now she's miserable. She and Russell (can I just call him Asperger's Russell? I know that's offensive, but he seriously seems to have it) went to Mexico to work on themselves and they had talks. FASCINATING. They will stay together for the sake of their daughter, I guess. Taylor continues to look miserable. Russell looks blank and uncomfortable.

Intrepid host Andy Cohen then asks Adrian if she would set up one of her brothers with Kim. Adrian: "Eh, no. They're so busy and you're so stand-offish right now, Kim." Kim nods. Great. That wasn't humiliating in the least.

Kyle bullying montage: Kyle is shown throughout the season making fun of Kim's housing and cheese-buying choices. This escalates into accusations of craziness, drunkenness and a slap fight in the back of a limo with Adrian trying to run interference and a camera crew holding everything surprisingly steady. Very professional of the camera crew--I would have been shaking like a leaf in that limo of purgatory. So Kyle looks somewhat mortified while watching her tirade of evil while Kim, across the room crumples further into a Kleenex-dabbing ball. Kyle wishes she could take back everything from "that night." She trades places with Camille to sit next to her sister and while Kim says "I love you and want to work things out with you," Kyle nods but never reciprocates the love thing. She claims Kim never supported their family as she said that night. Oh, sisters. They're delightful.

Lisa defends Kyle and Taylor brings up Kim's drinking gain. Oh, friends. They're the best. Kim refuses to talk about "that night" or her drinking or anything personal. Well, that just proves she's crazy. If she won't admit it, she must be. It's Catch-22, reversed (Catch-44?) and you're living it, Kim Richards. Perhaps she should try becoming a satirist. There's plenty to work with here.

On to Camille's crazy dinner party with the sadistically drunken medium! You know that TV show that just got cancelled starring Patricia Arquette, "Medium"? Well, the real medium that the show is based on, Allison Dubois, was sitting right across from the Housewives at Camille's party, sucking on an electric cigarette and giving Kyle the what-for, I tell you. You missed it? It was the talk of the Internet, dahlings. But in my half-assery, I barely paid attention to that episode and missed most of the dinner party. Then the parts I saw were so excruciatingly uncomfortable that I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing. But basically Kyle demanded a psychic reading and Allison in her drunken craziness complied by saying Kyle's husband would never fulfill her and their marriage was doomed and she could tell when and how she would die and all kinds of cool futuristic things.

Then afer the housewives left, Allison predicted bad stuff for their children and Camille said that Kyle's hot husband and Grammer-realtor, Mauricio, had flirted with her. It was the dinner party of the century, dahlings! So back to the present day, Kyle thought she was set up and Camille denies that but thinks Allison was reading her future with Kelsey, like the psychic wiring of the night must have gotten mixed up over cocktails or something. And I think that's the best "read" of the whole show. Not that Allison was a fucking bitch from hell, but that she read the psychic signals wrong. Lisa puts forth her theory that she was a fucking bitch from hell (but in more polite terms) and we wrap up the show with regrets:

Yes, there were regrets, but what an experience, declares Kim. And what great new friends! The other housewives grunt in unison.

Do I regret recapping the final episodes of a reality show from wealthy-lady hell? No, I live for this moment. Thank you for sharing it with me. Cheers! (*holding up a mug of tea while doing spell-check*) Yes, this is truly living!

I made the effort and recapped Part 1 before I realized it was a two-parter. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have bothered, dahlings.

Thank you Vulture for your helpful and acidic chronology since I refuse to take notes when I watch shiny-garbage TV.

Half-ass TV Recap: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Reunion Part 1

I couldn't help noticing that blogs that post TV recaps tend to get a lot of traffic from fans of the show. With that in mind, allow me to introduce my own concept, thought of right here in the Captive Wild Woman think-tank (family room alongside the wall of my nice thumpy-disco neighbors): Half-ass TV Recap. I don't have time to watch much TV or to even pay attention to most of what I watch (unless it's "The Wire" or some such thing). I will watch a disaster show like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because I want to see what happened to former childhood star Kim Richards, but I don't relish the moment. In fact, I tend to feel suicidal afterwards. Therefore: some random thoughts and feelings as felt by me, suicidal reality-show watcher on last night's Reunion show, Part 1. For those of you who avoided this reality wreck, I commend you.

The Beverly Hills housewives are seated in a semi-circle around smarmy host and interviewer Andy Cohen in the fabulous Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. I think briefly about taking notes or making screen grabs (consisting of me taking a photo of my analog TV screen) but then decide, "Fuck it. It's just this stupid show." I am a committed half-ass. So committed, I didn't start recapping until the post-season reunion show. You're welcome.

Andy Cohen is the last person on earth you want to interview you. I don't care if you're a shallow, mean-spirited rich lady wearing unflattering shiny clothes and giant sparkly earrings that look like chandeliers for a monkey-house. There must be some clause in their contracts forbidding them from calling him a putz as he pelts them with rude questions about their looks, their net worth and their general fucked-upness, all disguised as "America wants to know" email questions. This guy is so oily he should be liquefied and shot into Taylor's forehead for never-ending smoothness.

He starts off asking about their terrible plastic surgery and some of the housewives chime in that they've only had injections and anti-aging agents pumped into their faces. The others sit very still and try not to call attention to themselves, like hamsters in the wild. Some reader wants to know if Taylor will ever remove her lip implant because it's so friggin' big. Taylor defends her implant, saying she's not going to have surgery to please some people. She says Internet commenters have written that her mouth is too big so maybe she should have surgery on that as well. Kyle cackles, "Mouth reduction for you!" and they laugh and laugh. Oh Kyle, you're such a good friend.

There's a question about the price of milk. Kyle and Kim seem to know the most about that, guessing $3.49 for a gallon and less if you shop at Costco. The other housewives look askance and murmur, "Costco? Whatever are you talking about?"

Taylor is asked if it was worth it to throw a $60,000 birthday party for her four-year-old. Taylor looks unsure. "I think so. The guests had a good time...?" she offers. The other housewives sit very, very still except for Lisa who brings up Pin The Tail On The Donkey and how her kids were brought up differently. I love competitive parenting, don't you? It's the best.

Andy points out that Lisa seems jealous of Kyle's new friendship with Taylor. Lisa is all like, "Well, I never! They're just annoying together." As if to demonstrate, Kyle and Taylor link fingers like sixth-graders going steady. Kyle starts calling Lisa "Jealous! Jelly beans! Peanut butter and jelly sandwich!" Lisa rolls her eyes, as do we all. All the housewives imitate them by pairing off and nuzzling one another. It's a botox love-in extraordinaire!

Then there's a lightning-rod focus on Camille's most-hated status in America as dipshit Andy reads off the words describing her among the press and tortured TV-watchers across the country. I'm cheating because I'm using The Vulture's very funny recap here to recall his list of evil traits. Camille, throughout the season admittedly appeared as a creepy, insecure sociopath by being: conniving, passive-aggressive, catty, jealous, cruel, hypocritical, self-absorbed, manipulative, fake, insincere, delusional. Andy smiles as he continues reading. Camille, who was quite gracious on this episode, says it hurts and that people write anything at the computer, but the edit was purposefully made to make her look like that and she's not really such a horror-show.

During the Camille grilling, the camera cuts back numerous times to Kyle in close-up, smirking, looking smug. But when Camille has to re-live her break-up with her Kelsey, Kyle is shown carefully rearranging her face into what appears to be sympathy. Now who has the "bitch-edit"? Way to turn on a dime, Bravo producers.

I'll say this: The camera doesn't lie BUT editing does. I have no doubt that Camille gave the producers plenty of fodder to work with, but having worked with editors, I can attest that the cutting of the footage is everything. It's fairly easy to make a bitchy person look even MORE bitchy, by simply not showing the cause of the bitchiness. I worked on a film that did just that. Just one small additional piece of footage with one sentence of explanatory dialogue changed the entire course of a filmed conversation and gave the bitchy lady in the film a good reason for being so obnoxious in that particular scene. It gave her some humanity at least, even though she came across as a difficult person. You could kind of understand where she was coming from, just from that one extra sentence. Take out the sentence and she was insufferable. Put it back in and she's a complex human: like magic!

So, if Camille claims she got the bitch edit, I can give her the benefit of the doubt. Besides, Kelsey Grammer is just so disgusting. She deserves a big fat settlement just for having her humiliating breakup filmed for the world to see. Jesus. What is wrong with us? I gotta stagger out into the cold gray world and have a moment...

I'm back! So Camille admits she might have been difficult and insecure because Kelsey wasn't calling her all the time and perhaps she thought something was amiss when he moved 3,000 miles away for a year and encouraged her to stay in Los Angeles and star in a reality show known for humiliating its subjects. Perhaps... There's mention of Camille's soft-porn past and how the housewives were all watching it in a limo after a disastrous dinner-party at her house. There was argument back and forth about who was the bigger skank, Camille or Faye Resnick, who posed for Playboy. The argument was not resolved.

Then there was a snit-fit between Taylor and Kim over a dinner-party conversation about the mysterious but epic fight between Camille and Kyle. Look, Taylor, don't torment my beloved Kim Richards, you would-be sister-stealing Heather! Why would you pick a fight with a formerly decent child star? The former child star, even one who probably suffers from acute anxiety disorder, through poise and an innate sense of drama, will always look better. Just give it up. But Taylor's too grotesquely un-self aware to see how this is playing out. By sitting quietly, unruffled, while asking Taylor, "What did you mean when you said you were going to go 'Oklahoma on my ass'--you who run a charity for domestic abuse victims--you were quick to go there," Kim ends up looking like a halfway decent person--not easy on this show. "Were you going to take me out in the back and beat me among the dumpsters?" she continues, making Taylor laugh and pish-posh it away with a "I was JOKING!" But Kim will not be deterred. She starred in Tuff Turf for pity's sake. She knows Taylor's type. "I just thought it was ODD, for someone of your background to get so violent like that." "But I didn't!" Taylor almost squeals. Ha ha! So enjoyable.

The citizens of Oklahoma grumble and start writing emails immediately.

Then Taylor brings up Kim's supposed alcoholism, even though the entire cast drank its way through multiple parties that would have consisted of discussions of shoe shopping without the much-needed cattiness provided by cast and crew. I'm telling you: a normal person would have to drink to get through this season. I don't get all the shocked accusations. Don't most families in America have 2-3 alcoholics in them? Am I projecting? Isn't everyone in Beverly Hills on something? Kim: star in a Lifetime movie about a victim of bullying. It will be great.

Camille and Kyle have it out (AGAIN) about their New York City fight, which was never caught on camera and so consists of "She said She said" accusations. All of which are boring me, so I won't go into it. Something about how no one would care about Camille if it weren't for Kelsey and how Kyle never said that, and she's a liar and she's a victim and she's a phony and she's a bully and "bully" is a (*finger quotes*) "buzz word of the moment" and "No--you BULLY me," and so on. At this point I realize this is only Part 1. No freaking way! I have to watch on Tuesday for the exciting conclusion. You 12 readers better tune in for the half-ass recap.

There's an obligatory montage of Adrienne and long-suffering Paul bickering over clothes and food. Andy calls her out on her obvious disdain of her husband, which makes me like him for a millisecond. But I also like Adrienne, who seems hard-working and decent. She never got in the middle of a stupid fight like the others and she seems to understand that Kim needs support.

Then there's more of Taylor who is accused of stirring the pot of the off-screen fight that never made sense but took up an entire television season (and beyond) to resolve. There's back-and-forth of I didn't stir the pot, I think you did, No I never did. Andy puts in his two cents: I think you stirred the pot. I agree with him.

Perhaps next week there'll be some resolution for sisters Kim and Kyle who apparently aren't speaking to each other after the grand finale blow-up in the limo last week. That was uncomfortable to witness to say the least and never should have been on TV. Well, none of it should, except for maybe Lisa's little dog, Jiggy. Because he was going bald, proving that no matter how wealthy you are, you can still lose your hair, dignity and ass when someone goes Oklahoma on it.