For Some Reason, Vanity Fair Will Publish an "Abstract Nude" Photo of Its New West Coast Editor and Weird Dick-Riding Flake Olivia Nuzzi

What is an "abstract nude"? I don't know. I imagine it's a nude photo which has been digitally altered with various effects and geometric pixelations so you can't see her beaver.

And based on reports, you'll be among the very select group of people who haven't seen her beaver.

This is the media now. This is "journalism."

And do we want to see this? I grant you that she does not have any particular feature which would disqualify her from being "attractive." She's not hugely overweight, she's not decrepitly aged, she has the full complement of limbs and teeth.

But beyond that, is this... "beautiful"? As literally every media outlet demands you believe?

She's a Panera Bread 5.

But whatever, you're going to get to see a picture of her beaver as digitally altered by an Instagram filter. Maybe her beaver will have wacky year 2000 New Years Eve glasses on it or something.

My headline "Olivia Nuzzi's Got a Fuzzi and Wants All the World to See It" turns out to have been prescient, no?

Almost as if I owned a time machine, which I will have assured you, in the future, that I do not have.

Vanity Fair's glossy Hollywood issue will feature an abstract nude portrait of scandal-plagued editor Olivia Nuzzi -- even as staffers privately gripe that she has failed to carry out core duties since joining the magazine, according to a report.

The portrait, drawn by artist Isabelle Brourman, will appear in the new print edition that is scheduled to hit newsstands on Dec. 2. No image of the drawing appears to have been circulated publicly, and it's unclear if renderings of the drawing have been produced or circulated among Vanity Fair staffers.

Oh it's a drawing? So it'll be like a cubist sketch of her beaver?

Will it be Escher-like? Will we see various older men walking up and down non-Euclidean stairs into her beaver?

The sketch was commissioned months before the latest wave of allegations engulfed the 32-year-old writer, according to Status.

Brourman previously collaborated with Nuzzi during her tenure at New York Magazine, which ended weeks after it was learned that she had a "sexting" relationship with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The inclusion of the abstract sketch in Vanity Fair's marquee issue has fueled internal backlash at a moment when the publication is already struggling to contain the fallout of her most recent controversies.

Apparently some staffers complain that, apart from lining up her next affair with a Democrat politician forty years her senior, she doesn't seem to work very much.

Inside Vanity Fair, the controversy has collided with mounting frustration over Nuzzi's limited output. Staffers told Status she has skipped routine meetings and failed to turn in assigned work.

Two people told the newsletter that one of her other editing assignments for the most recent issue of the magazine was not completed, leaving colleagues scrambling as the publication closed one of its most scrutinized annual issues.

The turbulence has placed newly appointed editorial director Mark Guiducci under immediate pressure.

Guiducci, who took over in June, has addressed staff at least twice since the allegations resurfaced, according to the Status report.

At a team meeting Thursday, he explained how he first met Nuzzi and tried to calm anxieties inside the newsroom, the newsletter reported.

He also downplayed the allegations, calling them "difficult to investigate because they occurred while she was employed elsewhere," according to Status.

But some staffers remain skeptical that Nuzzi can continue in an editing role when she has produced little work while generating heavy turbulence, according to Status.

Is her talent of such a high level that she's worth all of this "turbulence?"

Well, having skimmed excerpts from her sexual tell-all book American Canto -- which reportedly will feature some of the dirty sexts she exchanged with RFKJr. -- I would say that, as a writer, she's no Ryan Lizza.

Not enough bamboo, for one thing.

She begins by discussing the fires that consumed the Palisades, and asserts that the Palisades fires were very much like the negative publicity she received after her sexting affair was exposed.

A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough.

You cannot outrun your life on fire.

Below, apparently her cute gimmick is to refer to RFKJr. only as "The Politician," even though we all know who she means and in fact her publisher's publicity department is out there selling the book by promising RFKJr.'s sext messages.

I would take a bullet for you," the Politician said. He always said that. "Please don't say that," I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible.

What?

I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.

I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. "Baby, don't worry," he said. "It's not a worm." A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.

Let me interrupt to say that Sex and the City ruined would-be female writer.

That show established the terrible trope that female writers are supposed to always look at some very mundane, very trivial AWFL consumer purchase and then make "clever" observations about it and spin that into some (let me get out my supply of Superfluous Quotes) " " " " deep " " " " point about life and -- especially -- dating and sex.

Like, for example, Sarah Jessica Parker will be munching an everything bagel and wondering if all the spices clash with each other and then begin babbling about whether or not one can or should try to have an "everything relationship" or if one should have separate bagels -- different people -- to fulfill different needs. Maybe we need a Sex Bagel and a Confidante Bagel and a Going Shopping on Sunday Bagel. Maybe it's wrong to expect or even want an Everything Bagel for every situation.

I don't know how that monologue would continue because I just shot myself through the temple. Good-bye Cruel World.

Avenge me.

You get what I'm talking about though, right?, I asked ghostilly. This horrific trope has infected so much female writing that... okay, I just basically won't read modern female writers. I pre-judge them. I assume that they're going to do the Sex and the City "clever" observations thing and I say: No.

This reminds me of John Scalzi's quote: The failure state of "clever" is "asshole." In other words, if you try to be funny but the joke doesn't land, the failure state is that you weren't funny. If you try to make a serious point but fail to convince, the failure state is that you did not persuade your audience.

But if you try to be "clever" -- meaning, what you're really saying isn't about the joke or the statement, it's about you, and it's about you trying to convince people that you're oh-so "clever" and smart -- the failure state isn't just that you failed to be clever.

The failure state is that you're an asshole.

I think that's true. Yes, I don't like failed jokes, but I really despise failed "cleverness." Cleverness is a particularly smug, look-at-me form of expression that really rankles when it fails. (Which is often.)

Olivia Nuzzi and Her Abstract Nude Fuzzi does not quite cross into Sarah Jessica Parker talking about bagels territory, but you can see the damage that that terrible show (written entirely by gay men) did to future female writers.

...

As a child, I became convinced that death was not random, that life was the process of investigating what the point of it was, and as soon as you figured it out, in that very instant, you would ascend. God would eliminate you from this plane. He could not risk a leaker walking among the ignorant. The assignment was to crack the case for yourself. And when I would find myself thinking too hard about the central question, I would back away slowly, thinking, Well, I will return to this matter some other time when I feel more ready to possibly meet my end. What if I guessed correctly?

The unsolvable puzzle. Tripping once, on a balcony in Washington overlooking the National Cathedral. Smoking what I did not know was my final cigarette. Unless someone offers me a Capri, which does not count. The great cosmic riddle, I figured I had solved it. The joke was that the joke was never done being told.

Maybe we need a Philosphical Musing Bagel that we can make gaseous philosophical speculations with.

The wildfire is over my shoulder now, over the hill. The waxing gibbous moon is over my head. A thought bubble, it shines blankly. Across the country, the Politician is the guest of honor. Across the country with his wife. With Mike Tyson for some reason. People are mocking the photos, asking where I am, asking how she could stand there after all that.

I know how. The earth here is hot. Inside the bonfire, what evidence can I burn? I think of all I turned to ash in hotel rooms. I think of how you cannot burn a cloud. I think of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, how there were so many, how the officials did not know what to do with them, and how fire seldom seemed to occur, though the White House and the president's properties are studded with fireplaces. Too easy. I worry.

She really thinks her life is like the Palisades Fires, which killed, what, like 20 people?

I worry about evil. If it is a force, if it is like the Santa Ana winds, if it may come on suddenly, if it may grab hold, if it may depart but not completely, if it may leave word, if the word might sound good, if I might again believe it. The snake charmer, the man-eater, the devil himself. Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, "Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin." This politician did not wear one of those.

Midnight, 3,000 acres burning.

A politician's greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

People ask me now about anger. About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged? I think this over. I scan the terrain of my body. My chest, my spine, behind my belly button. I look for pale pulses of idle fury, waiting for the alarm to sound at the trip wire of my veins. There is nothing there. There is nothing there because I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

You cannot live in America without thinking about guns, without thinking that one day you might not live anymore in America, and the reason will be a gun. 46,728 lives ended in America in 2023 because of a gun. 27,300 suicides. 17,927 homicides. 604 police shootings. 463 accidents. 434 undetermined. On the 405, a billboard announces that gun injuries are the number one cause of death for American children. You think: A gun will protect me from guns. Then you recall the statistic, that a gun in your home doubles your chances of dying by homicide. Still I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

God, I know You have more important matters on Your mind, but: Why do You allow this evil?

The existence of Olivia Nuzzi's writing proves that God cannot both be all-good and all-powerful.

Now back to "The Politician." Shit, even there she's aping Sex and the City, as Carrie only referred to her real estate millionaire fuck-buddy as "Mr. Big." I don't think they revealed his actual name.

...

Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.

The spark, the flame, the rumor fulfilled. The labyrinth on fire. The Palisades fire.

10:30 a.m., 10 acres burning.

10:50 a.m., 20 acres burning.

What the fuck are you talking about, Madam, and would you mind stopping talking about it?

She continues likening her out-of-control life to the California wildfires and then gets back to Mr. Big, I mean, The Politician.

A politician's greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

It was the flag. When I close my eyes in search of the end or the start, the place at which before stopped and beyond which now began, that is what I see. The blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white, stretched and folded, pulled apart, undefined yet unmistakable, the flag. There was no one day, one moment, one event, one decision, one word that marked the change. There was the flag as it mutated from metaphorical to literal weapon, as it was marred by a corruption of the American character that could not be understood or even fully observed through the prism of the partisan binary. Which is to say that it was the flag, but it was not about the flag, not about notions of patriotism or nationalism or idolatry. It was the flag that thrashed in psychedelic distress, suggested a bend in lanes of reason, a tear in the fabric of consensus reality.

Maybe she needs a Flag Metaphor Bagel, too.

You see what I mean? This is just Carrie Bradshaw Does Politics. She's obsessing over a mundane physical thing, a flag, and attempting to babble about it until she accidentally uncovers the secrets of the universe.

In this period of now, from 2015 to 2025, in which the man through whom the culture was synthesized achieved dominance, I found myself fixated on the flag, on the way the flag expressed how the country was warping, and yet the magnitude of this change could not be categorized appropriately or cataloged completely amid such amnesia. At the southern border or the White House or the Midwestern auto factory or the boat in the Atlantic or the truck rolling beside the Pacific, the very flag that had been clutched like pearls at the turn of the century was refashioned as costume jewelry. Red, white, and blue asphyxiated blue, gray, and black. Stars and Stripes a backdrop for the star of the country. One stripe remade a banner across which his campaign slogan crawled.

She's talking about a flag, but, get this, she's really talking about Trump.

Clever.

And you know what they say about the failure state of clever.

...

As the edited flags waved strange and ominous, my job was to bear witness to the processes of American presidential politics, to travel the country and attempt to understand those who sought or wielded or influenced executive power. I had never been interested in politics, exactly.

Really? You don't say. I couldn't tell that you were not at all interested in politics from the way you were babbling about the outer perimeters of politics while trying to remain focused on what really matters, the worm in the Politician's brain.

Here she continues babbling some nonsense vaguely about "politics." As she's already confessed, she's not interested in politics, but she's writing a book that purports to be about politics, and this is the best she can offer: fractured sense-impressions half-remembered from that time she took magic mushrooms while watching Abby Philip interviewing Brian Stelter.

Everything seemed suddenly flexible. With all information available at all times to all people, all matters appeared potentially negotiable. Fine fractures splintered deep, fanned out far, cracked up for good. The parties were over. The system was moot. Vast interconnectedness and mass overstimulation gave way to individual isolation and nihilistic boredom so total that it all but invited the ascendant mob-mentality politics of comic relief and sadistic catharsis.

Our more flammable world. Arson, the national pastime. Self-immolation, well.

Just like everything is Bagels with Carrie Bradshaw, so with Olivia Nuzzi everything is fire.

...

Events lost context. Words lost meaning. Denier. Nothing could be believed because everything was subject to change. Truther. Everything could be believed because anything was possible; this was at once inspirational slogan and active threat.

Psst: She's still babbling about Trump, in case you fell asleep six vague paragraphs ago.

A promise was only a suggestion. A suggestion was only a joke, unless you were not moved to laugh; then the joke was on you.

In this reality, reality ceased to feel real.

Shots rang out. The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical. My phone rang again. "I need you to take a bullet for me," the Politician said. "Please."

New York closed in. City and magazine. New York I fled. I drove west. I did not feel alone now. Not yet.

What I felt was that the country had snaked its hand up my skirt. What I felt was that I had been lanced by the teeth of a trap set by a man who could not let me go; that as I tried to free myself, the man for whom I worked had run off with the key to the padlock; that the contradiction in terms, the man I trusted most, the Politician, had walked by the scene whistling, and when he saw me there, a mob on the horizon moving closer, he reached out to me, not to lift me to my feet but to pin me down, to drive the teeth of the trap deeper into my flesh, to hike my skirt higher, to wave the mob over to look, to invite the country to lay its hands on me.

This is her very overwrought way of saying, "RFKJr. asked me to lie about the sexting affair for him and I was hurt that we would ask that."

But it sounds so mundane when you say it that way. So instead we get a lot Jazz Odyssey riffing about hands going up skirts and flesh being torn by steel traps.

Also, I'm pretty sure, we'll be hearing about The Fire That Is My Fabulous Life again shortly.

And flags. Weaponized flags.

In the news, the Politician offers a united front and a rewritten history. My vow of silence does not feel like enough. I wish to fall silent on myself too. I wish to sink into the sea. To flee behind the curve of the earth. To emerge a new shape, a stranger. To stop giving fake names in coffee shops. To never see myself, the character of myself imagined by others, viral allegory of hubris, female avatar of Icarus, stripped and left for dead in a pool of wax. I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.

As Shakespeare observed: Brevity may be the soul of wit, but padding the hell out a few trivial incidents is the only way to extend an anecdote into book-length form.

Birds of prey circle. It is inconceivable, it seems, that someone would choose to allow a crisis to go to waste, would not want to make of their attention more attention, would not want to reap some kind of short-term profit from the mess of their life.

The paparazzi, the calculating ones, write to tell me where their colleagues are staking me out. New York. Washington. Outside my brother's house, where they get into an altercation with a neighbor. Never anywhere I am. They think that if they do me this favor, I will cut a deal and agree to be photographed by them in exchange for what they advertise as control over my image. My Image, a ship that has sailed and sunk. The offer includes a promise that doubles as a threat: If I accept their terms, I will be left alone the rest of the time, which means that if I do not accept their terms, I will not be left alone.

Let me put that more directly: Reporters are calling her asking for comment on the sexting affair. She doesn't want to answer.

The fire burns.

...

I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.

Trump had its way with America like RFKJr. had his way with her?

What?

A long time ago I listed to a podcast by the We Hate Movies guys about the Steven King movie Dreamcatcher. A joke they kept making was that Steven King was in his coke phase -- meaning, "his entire career" -- in which he never edited, revised, or trimmed anything he wrote. Everything just came right out of his head, unpolished, straight to the page and then straight to typeset and publication.

"Clickety-clack," they kept saying, to simulate the sound of Steven King's never-pausing typewriter vomiting up words.

Olivia Nuzzi is a clickety-clack "writer" herself. Is my life like fire? Clickety-clack. Maybe it's like a bear trap tearing into my ankle? Clickety-clack. Maybe Trump's seduction of America is like RFKJr. seducing me? Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, we're contractually obligated to deliver 80,000 words to the publisher by next Tuesday and we absolutely cannot afford the time needed to evaluate whether any of this makes sense and we definitely cannot afford to start cutting words. We have to just add words, and add words, and add more words, whether they make sense when arranged next to each other or not.

Clickety-clack.

In the discourse someone I have met before jokes about my murder. Others contact me to warn me that such a thing is not a joke but a possibility. I was not going to sleep anyhow.

Spoiler: She was not murdered.

People often, often people I do not know very well, reach out to tell me that I have appeared in their dreams. I wonder if this is because I sleep so little.

Clickety-clack.

If the version of me who lives on the plane of dreams tires of waiting for me to release her to action, if she goes out searching for places where she may exist without my permission, if she identifies the minds of those who have felt any kindness toward me, if she thinks that within their dreams she might get to live freely instead. I wonder, too, if this is a function of being a visible face but a veiled personality. If my impression contains empty space that renders me an adaptable idea and thus a useful device for subconscious minds. It is nice to think of this, that I might still be in some way, to someone, of use.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Remember, she's not interest in politics. That's why we're now Eight Deep into an extended narcissistic fantasy about her appearing in other people's dreams.

I mean to tell you as best I can what it was to face the unrealness, to stand so close that it seemed at times almost plausible, to tiptoe along the edge of the abyss, and to balance there just long enough to forget that the plates would soon shift.

Shorter version: "My life felt unreal to me." But you're not going to hit 80,000 words with sentences like "My life felt unreal to me."

Clickety-clack.

I mean to tell you of the canyon where voices carried. The place where monsters spoke to me. Where I listened. Where I found that, as fortune or curse would have it, I knew the language of monsters....

Because I care about you, I'm going to do what Little Miss Clickety-Clack will not do and edit this and end this fresh prologned digression about nothing. But she continues babbling about monsters and canyons.

No I lied, I'm including it. You've all been disappointing me recently and this is what you get.

I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want. That you feed the monster, and the monster wants only more. That here you have surrendered to the endless transaction, and through the terms on which you meet the monster you are transformed monstrous, too, for the day that the monster is done wanting is the day that the sun does not rise; want makes the monster as sun makes the day.

Okay but I will show mercy and cut it there.

I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think.

As to the latter: I'm sold, baby.

...

The flag winked beside the lanes that bent to borders that faded to barriers that fell to the lines I crossed.

Back to this metaphor which stands for nothing at all.

..

When I open my eyes I see, still, the blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white.

I mean to tell you now as best I can.

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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