Five-fingered, four-eyed, obsessed to the point of criminal lust. From the AP:

MILWAUKEE — A Chicago man is accused of stealing more than $45,000 worth of eyeglasses from suburban Milwaukee stores because he enjoys being around eyewear.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jerry Lowery was charged today with three counts of armed robbery and one count of fleeing an officer. The charges carry a maximum penalty of more than 120 years in prison and a $310,000 fine.

Prosecutors say Lowery walked into three shops between April and July and said he had a gun. They say he took more than 500 pairs of high-end glasses including Prada and Gucci brands, but didn’t take cash.

The criminal complaint quotes Lowery as saying he “really likes to be around glasses.”

He told investigators he tries them on in front of a mirror and then discards them.

Online court records didn’t list a defense attorney Monday.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Lowery had been paroled in January in Chicago for a similar crime.

I just returned from an uproarious under-the-stars screening of Sunset Boulevard, which I hadn’t seen before but which I now love a lot. We cheered and laughed and piled sloppily on blankets, but we were given pause when we thought of our Norma Desmond, our Norma Jean, our MJ, whose post-gender iridescence won fans but whose streak of sideshow desperation, embodied by his beloved Bubbles the Chimp, lost many. And owning a chimpanzee, after all — changing its diapers, mourning its passing, picking out the “white, pink, bright flaming red” satin that will line its child-sized casket — tends to be associated with feelings of loneliness and alienation, a desire for an otherness otherwise afforded only to primates.

As Mr. DeMille says, looking particularly wise with tortoise shell frames hanging about his gnarly digits, “Thirty million fans have given her the brush. Isn’t that enough?” OR, as it’s said in the weird parlance of  our greatest media colloquy, “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”

I really wanted to post this essay from Slate about movies with effed-up, vagueliy evil children — a genre that just happens to include some of my favorite films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Good Son, The Omen, and, though it isn’t mentioned in the article, Let the Right One In, the high-formalist, high-Scandinavian thriller that cashed in on both the current (and inexplicable) pubescent vampire craze and the in-crowd’s (equally inexplicable) love of mid-80s genteel poverty. (One friend, who refused to sit through the whole thing, dismissed it as “Hipster Twilight,” citing its Sofia Coppola look-a-like ingénue. Though, for its birch trees and gothic sexuality, it’s more Bergman than Baumbach — and, most importantly, it’s purtty scurry.)
 
Anyway, no specs to be found. I think Kirsten Dunst may wear a pair of steampunk-inspired shades in Interview with a Vampire, but that movie blows.  So here’s a picture of Jonathan Lipnicki looking pretty demonic/urchiny.

her name is franni franken? well congrats anyway, minnesota!

Thinking, since I’m headed straight into the fray, of shutting this sucker down…

As usual, the New York Times — which is a billion dollars in debt, by the way — is spending its summer publishing obvious observations about innocuous people with money to burn doing vaguely interesting, but mostly quite boring, things. This week: buying round sunglasses. The article includes shout outs to Harry Potter, Le Corbusier, and Dominick Dunne (though not, as I do, to Herman Hesse and Piet Mondrian), but nary a nod to Whoopi Goldberg, clearly the look’s most active proliferator.

Still, no match for the bespectacled cover of New York, which never fails to cultivate the Jewinyou.

The accompanying essay, with its prophetic subtitle, eventually just collapses into reductive lists of Jewish-American touchstones: Groucho, Roth, the Mets, Lenny Bruce, Seinfeld, Seinfeld, and, finally, Sarah Silverman’s  joke about the tattoo her grandmother got at “one of the nicer concentration camps” ( “it said ‘bedazzled’”). But the article does direct you to the web site oldjewstellingjokes.com, so it’s not a total waste.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the work of another great product of coastal Jewish diaspora: my father, Jeff Gamso. He’s launched his own gravely serious, sometimes irreverent, always insightful weblog, Gamso — For the Defense, on which he waxes about all things legal, constitutional, and cultural. Check it out!!!

I was just cleaning off my desktop (to reveal this flaxen photograph of Neil Young mid-keen) and found a screen cap from a few weeks ago of dowdy conservative columnist David Brooks flanked by ads for Urban Outfitters’ latest attempt at diffident irony.

I don’t remember what the column was about — though it’s easy to guess, from the first two paragraphs, that it’s just more desperate apologism from the most embarassed conservative around. Or maybe it’s about glasses. But I doubt it.

He didn’t convince anybody to move into a grain silo, but Buckminster Fuller did have nice glasses — even if this isn’t the most flattering image of him. (Looks like Powder.) Anyway, I just saw the great retrospective of his life and work at the MCA. Many gaunt hipsters, many impressive — but not really — pairs of eyeglasses, stubble, etc.

Oh, and here’s a video clip of him philosophizing:

Lil’ Kim, who’s been shaking her ass (and I don’t mean figuratively) on Dancing with the Stars, and Kim Jong-il, who launched a warhead yesterday, see the world through rose-colored aviators. And things are looking hawttt.

As Obama said: Provocative!!

Please watch this. It’s “FaceOff,” an apparently annual forum on ABC’s Nightline with obscure celebrities and, like, hucksters and an audience. This year — it aired March 26 — it was on the existence of Satan, which is obviously a pressing topic. Mark Driscoll, a supremely douchey Seattle preacher who wears t-shirts with distressed gothic typeface, and Annie Lobért, a born-again call girl who founded an organization called “Hookers for Jesus,” go toe to calloused toe against spirituality’s most eminent ballers:

Deepak Chopra, the always (and surprisingly so) profound Vivekananda-Dr. Phil amalgam (and one of the greats when it comes to eyeglasses)

and Bishop Carlton Pearson, the reformed coat-check clerk — or so it would seem — at Oral Roberts University who has been trying to duuuuurrrrraggg evangelism into this short but torrid century of ours. (Or so this episode of This American Life would have me believe.)

And guess who won?

Of course. Obviously. The effeminate, bespectacled set in the futuristic clothing. The right and just, and also correct, team.

I didn’t see it on TV. Instead, I watched it online, where the other years’ episodes, “Does God Exist?” and “Addicted to Porn?,” paint a charming tableau of American life. Watch clips such as “Kirk Cameron on Evolution” and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without FaceOff. And, as usual, the cult of paranoia will win again.