Yet another salacious headline to rope you into reading this.  I’m not really stressed.  I’m thrilled, actually.  The reaction to yesterday’s post was gratifyingly positive, not to mention the cause of a huge surge in hits to this blog.  It’s a new record to beat.  I’ll have to start inventing scandalous encounters with celebs to keep up with myself.

A big thank you to the gravelly-voiced Lady in Black, my old friend Madame Diane Pernet, for posting the Galliano piece on her site.  My trusty WordPress dashboard tells me she is almost entirely responsible for driving readers to my blog.

Not that I need to clarify this because everyone seemed to get it, but the point of the Spanking Galliano post was not just to relate some humorously titillating anecdote about a fallen star, or to further participate in mashing that star into the black hole he has made of himself.  The major purpose of the blog was to spank him again, this time myself rather than having some child giant do it for me, as evidenced by the last few paragraphs of the post.

I honestly didn’t anticipate the hits from the Galliano post to be that many. I thought that would happen from scandalized Indians upset that the 1993 Miss India pageant was rigged, but there was nary a peep from them about that.  Hits to the blog remained completely flat the day before yesterday, when I finally came clean about the rigging after long years of suffering in silence, guilt strafing my soul like fighter jets over Taliban strongholds in Helmand Province.  I’m apparently the only one who is still haunted by the outraged wails of gorgeous, long-legged Punjabi lasses backstage behind that awful peacock set when they realized their chance at the crown had been stolen by the daughter of some local industrialist, who allegedly bought it for her.  Oh, well.

Whenever there is a major disaster, and the Galliano dismissal is something of a fashion 9/11 — Who will replace him? Who has the same energy and breadth of vision? Will Dior survive? Will couture itself survive? — conspiracy theories are never far behind.  The more extreme rumor mills are saying that Galliano has been such a catastrophe-in-waiting that LVMH has been trying to get rid of him for years.  They are saying that the people who took the video were sent by the Evil Suits in the Boardroom to goad him on and film him being his naturally racist drunken self.  To wit, LVMH stock barely batted a heavily lashed, gold-leafed Pat McGrath eyelid on the news of Master Galliano’s exile.

I don’t believe the conspiracy nonsense.  No matter how well framed the video was, I think it was coincidence.  I don’t know how old the people taunting him were, but I remember that when I was a bratty youngster hanging out in the Marais I was very cheeky with celebrities.  We feel we know famous people because they so much a part of our lives.  When they are friendly to us, the next thing you know we’re talking back at them like they’re dotty aunts we’ve been teasing since childhood.  Celebrities in the arts are bona fide eccentrics: they’re artists, so they will tend to talk and banter back.  And fight.

I’ve been monitoring a bit of the chat on gay sites regarding the sinking of Battleship Galliano.   It is as usual confused and a bit bird-brained; the ninny gene can run strong at times in Homolandia.  Half of them seem to want to rally around a talented sister they feel was goaded into doing what any self-respecting drunk troll with severe body dysmorphia is entitled to do, which is to lash back with any random bitter-old-queen invective at hand, the nastier the better.  That was Galliano’s own brand of Eau de Vitriol we heard, limited edition.  The out-of-control barbed tongue is a self-defense mechanism most gays recognize, which arises from being taunted and humiliated during childhood at school.  Again, this doesn’t excuse John his behavior; I stand steadfastly behind my spanking with a firm hand.  But for what it’s worth it is something of an explanation.

Recalling my encounter with Galliano, I’ll tell you honestly what my assessment of him was when I got back to London from that trip to Paris: he wasn’t very bright intellectually.  I had met a genius who wasn’t at all cerebral, and that was a first for me, and of course something I needed to process intellectually.  It explained a lot about the fashion world, where it is often difficult to have a sustained “serious” discussion of any depth with anyone, and yet this doesn’t mean they are stupid.

This led me to further investigation into the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I’ll let you explore more in the link if you’re interested.  Having said this, I have met and befriended a number of fashion designers in my time who are equally creative and intellectual, it’s just that none of them were quite at Galliano’s creative level.

I’m now a firm believer in multiple intelligence.  I’ll never forget watching this lunk of a trainer at my gym working out on the boxing bags.  Not even if I trained a whole other lifetime would I have such assured physical genius as his.  And yet I couldn’t hire him as my trainer because the thought of spending an hour or two a week trying to make conversation with him in between sets was inconceivable; you could tell he could barely understand half of what I said.

Going forward,  I’m going to stop the puerile attention-grabbing and not put up any more pictures of poor Amanda Seyfried’s breasts.  A big apology to my virtual friend Old Ancestor, who was enjoying those.  That joke has run its course, served its purpose.  Thank you Amanda, and Natalie Portman for being such a sport about my teasing.  You too, Brooklyn Decker, whoever you are.  I will start expanding the scope of this blog soon and include reviews, contributors and interviews.  I’m seriously enjoying this.