Boring as nuts

that be Paris Hilton's party...

Nobody famous in sight. They've all flown down to Cannes this time of year. Just lots of rubberneckers, with botox, nose jobs, boys with comically side swiped bangs just like you see them in the mags, the token funky japanese guy with a perm, blondes with clothes-pins on their nips, lobotomized giraffes everywhere, a guy with chest long braids. It was funny, and then sad, and then boring.

The red carpet in front of the VIP room is long, and strewn with petals. I am alone to walk it going in and nobody clicks a photo. Normal. I'm not a celebrity. Descending down the pink hole, a very warm and overly musky-sweet entrance. Paris is obviously the prom queen of the vagina parade. Into the rat hole, we amuse ourselves with free pink cocktails and examine the various disasters among us.

All the girls in here are tanned and breasty. 67% are clad in skin-tight low-rise jeans and grabby top. A large number have observed the pink rule. What is this? An OC fashion show? Even more atrocious are the rolls of fat creeping over the hips... if your jeans fit that way you just went from J-Lo nasty to mall-mom nasty.

Thibault and I are checking some girl with her Marc Jacobs double-t top and her way too low-cut pants. White panties are showing. Lucky... I was afraid she was going to do some Aguilera string trick on us. Thibault, totally bored and feeling frisky, decides to, *ahem*, fart in her general direction. While usually I'm disgusted by public tooting, this particularly well aimed missile gets our little blond giraffe a few puzzled looks, before she's doused with the second round of Paris perfume.

Actually, the party was to promote her eponymous perfume. Everybody gets bombed, oops, misted on the way in. This ensures a fart-free zone. But, ironically enough, permits a certain laxity with letting them go since nobody can smell anything else around.

After standing around for a couple of minutes, we head towards the doorway. Everybody else has the same idea. In each corner of the club somebody is perched strategically, every single eye glued to the pink stairway down, waiting for her. You've never seen anything like it. Cellphones, credit card size cameras, watch-cameras, palm pilot cams, everything pointed towards the doorway in a wall of miniature illuminated blue screens. I felt more like I was behind the cordon on a red carpet at Cannes than in some chic Champs Elysees party.

But that's the Champs Elysees these days. Faux lux, North American trash, Virgin megastores, and miles of sweatshop clothing hidden behind stunning marble facades. The crowd tonight was typical. Nobody famous, nobody important, nobody interesting. Just plastic, botox, and tanning. Even the fashion is less than inspiring. Paris imitating California, and doing a wretched job to boot.

So, sometime after the stroke of midnight, the pumpkin arrives. She descends, escorted by large musclemen, in a turquoise top and white tennis skirt. Nothing extraordinary, nothing plus. The cameras go wild for minutes upon minutes, until it suddenly dawns on me that it won't end. That the wall of cameras that surrounds her is permanent. Even Voin's "à poil" cries seem feeble. You don't play hanger-on nor heckler to these kind of mega-bitches. For them it's as normal as... whatever could be considered normal for people like them.

We get a close brush-by as she wangles past to get to the stage. She's exactly like she is in photographs. She's a walking image. She's a candy-dripped cardboard cut-out. She's something else, an anorexic beast fed on camera flash. She's our favourite biatch because she's the richest, dirtiest, best american ever: a real whore. Boring as nuts.

After the brush-by, my curiousity was sated. I really didn't know what to expect anyways. We didn't come here to dance, or have fun, or meet people. We came to gawk with all the other rubber neckers. It isn't anything really worth explaining. It wasn't my fête de Mme Bovary. To be crass, it wasn't anything more interesting than a car crash on a sidestreet. Flat, not phat.