"Sephora is a smoke monster, a rainbow, a Mobius strip of promises. There's no getting a grip on it. There is no end."

"There's only more. You can chase the dragon of self-improvement slash self-enhancement slash self-acceptance until the day you die; there's always a new fragrance, a new lip color, a new miracle cream right around the corner...."

You go in for a lip balm and come out with body polish, dry shampoo, BB cream, and Kat Von D's "Sinner" smoky eyes palette. (The are over 100,000 videos titled "Sephora Haul" on YouTube to watch should you have any doubts.) Oodles on display, a myriad of options, infinite possibilities. When you think you've finally found the solution, the crutch, the key, either you run out and need more; they stop making it and it vanishes like so much sparkly Guerlain Terra Cotta dust; or you find that what once satisfied you no longer does the trick.

100,000 videos. I tried watching one and got a couple minutes in... about 20% through. It really is a form of madness. You need to be careful going in. It's quite bizarre. You've got to admire the design of the place. A shop is a psychological manipulation and it's impressive when it's done well, but — as I said — you need to be careful.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 15, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Dog in Charge" [Hardcover] K. L. Going (Author), Dan Santat (Illustrator) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.02)

... and 79 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Commerce!

An expansive, shapely hairdo.

Source: flickr.com via Barneys on Pinterest

That's Richard Avedon photograph, at the Barneys New York Pinterest site, which pictures some things you can buy at Barneys and some thing that (presumably) expand your mind into a shape within which you might decide to buy some things at Barneys.

The Sandy Hook massacre should "force us to confront yet again the ways in which ever more of our lives are lived on a screen, in the cloud, via our computers and phones and tablets...."

Says Michael S. Rosenwald, noting that:

Except for using the bathroom and eating his meals, getting a haircut was just about the only thing Lanza couldn’t do online.

Adam Lanza got haircuts, went to the bathroom, and ate food. Are we not forced to confront yet again our eating of food, getting of haircuts, and going to the bathroom?

[Lanza] seems to have found “an illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.... Lanza didn’t need to trek out into his town....

Shop owners in tightknit Newtown didn’t know him, I think, because he had no reason to know them. Amazon could deliver anything he wanted to his door by the next day.

The time we spend shopping is in decline.... The local stores we once loved visiting have been replaced by UPS drivers we rarely see....

Now, it's a problem that we don't spend enough time schlepping around at the mall? The cashiers at The Gap and Banana Republic were supposedly keeping us minimally socialized? Or is it that "tightknit Newtown" had shop owners who reinforced the social structure of the picture-book town — kinda like Mr. Gower, the drugstore man, in "It's a Wonderful Life"...

The mystery of why 50-year-old men suddenly...

... stop buying new clothes.

"Tiny monkey in a little coat runs amok in IKEA store..."

Notes Drudge, with tiny pic:



Linking here:

The primate's owners, who had been shopping in Ikea, came forward after the incident. They now face $240 fine for having an illegal pet.

The rhesus macaque species is not endangered but it is against the law to keep the animal in Ontario....

Yes, it's cruel to keep it in Ontario.

News of a monkey in a coat visiting Ikea quickly went viral on social networks. On Twitter, #Ikeamonkey trended and there are least two parody accounts. There is also an Ikea Monkey page on Facebook.

"[T]he less comfortable you are during the seasonal shopping spree, the more money you’ll spend."

"So stores crank up music, repeat the same songs, over and over again, pipe in smells, race shoppers around to far-flung points of purchase and clog their heads with confusing offers. All of which makes it more likely we’ll part more readily with more money."

Oh, really? I'd say it makes it much more likely that smart, sensitive people will shop on line. (Preferably, going in through the Althouse portal.) You can play any music you want, enjoy blissful silence, or — as I'm doing — listen to your loved one softly singing "Golden Slumbers."

Side note: I love the illustration by Sam Vanallemeersch (at the first link).

Katie Roiphe tries to fathom the depths of why she's buying really expensive shoes.

She writes about herself in the second person saying things like: 

You have read Adorno. You are able to think critically about your desire for the shoes. Furthermore, you have a healthy class-hatred for people who dress habitually in clothes from this store...

And:

If you do walk out with the shoes...  they work like a drug—the anxieties that were plaguing you before you enter the store have lifted. As you step out into traffic, the still and stagnant city is suddenly charged with possibility

The parties you have scribbled in your calendar seem more glittery or interesting or fun, and you in the shoes, more daunting, more sylphlike, more free, more invulnerable....

Do you want to be the kind of person who sacrifices, overreaches, for a pair of shoes, who imbues them with a romantic overlay that a material object cannot possibly sustain?

That's where the internal argument ends up, and obviously she buys the shoes. Obviously, there's a huge mental element to consumerism, both before and after the purchase. Note that anxieties must be stirred up to provide an additional argument: I need to dispel these anxieties! She gets off on the purchase.

My question: Why shoes? There's some discussion of how shoes "will transform you into someone else" — special shoe magic. (See "The Wizard of Oz.") There's oddly little reference to sex. Roiphe ignores Freud, who famously saw shoes as vagina symbols. Roiphe wants — or wants "you" — to be daunting, sylphlike, free, and invulnerable.

A sylph is a female fairy. In Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," "women who are full of spleen and vanity turn into sylphs when they die because their spirits are too full of dark vapors to ascend to the skies." (Here is "The Rape of the Lock," with the illustrations by Aubry Beardsley, for only 99¢ on Kindle!)

So, maybe, why shoes? Why not dresses, jackets, jewelry, sweaters? I think it's that you've got to specialize — unless you're actually rich — if you're going to shop in the really expensive places. You can trick yourself into thinking you've been indulged. Still, why specialize in shoes?

"Breasts."

One of the titles on the NYT "100 Notable Books of 2012."

Obviously, this is a good source for gift ideas. (And here's that Amazon portal again.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Kirk Parker said links to the Clive James poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered," which has this verse:

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots —
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun."

ADDED: Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs... ... I mean Florence Williams's Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History makes the NYT 100 list... yet we don't see Naomi Wolf's Volume of Vulva... I mean Vagina: A New Biography. That's gotta hurt. Poor Wolf-lady! It's like a deliberate affront. A taunting. History... biography... breasts... vagina... it's so unfair... so... delicious....

Gift suggestion.

This may seem ordinary and overpriced, but it is fantastic. If you know someone who likes to wear fingernail polish but has trouble keeping the stuff from chipping within a day or 2 and is either wasting a lot of time redoing nails or just not bothering anymore, she — or he! — will love the Butter London Top and Tails Set. They may not immediately realize how great it is, but they will thank you later. I'm not kidding. I have never encountered a cosmetic product that was anywhere near this superior to everything else in its category.

"The souks of Aleppo, a maze of vaulted passageways with shops that sell everything from foods to fabrics, perfumes, spices and artisan souvenirs..."

"... are a tactical prize for the combatants. They lie beneath the city's towering citadel where activists say regime troops and snipers have taken up positions."

Ahmad al-Halabi, an activist based in Aleppo, said residents were struggling to control the blaze with a limited number of fire extinguishers and low water supply: "It's a disaster. The fire is threatening to spread to remaining shops," he said. "It is a very difficult and tragic situation there."

Ahmadinejad's underlings in Manhattan go shopping at Payless, Costco, Walgreens and Duane Reade.

They love America... in the form of discount stores:

The two-term president was criticized at home for bringing an estimated 140 people along for his final UN speech as Iran’s leader.

“Many . . . have only traveled there for a picnic,” sniped Mansour Haghighatpour, deputy head of the parliamentary committee on national security.

The delegation insider disagreed, saying the guests wanted no part of jewelry stores, boutiques or high-end retailers — like the plush Lord & Taylor directly across Fifth Ave. from the Payless.

Instead, they preferred any drugstore where they could stock up on over-the-counter medication....

The cut-rate shopping sprees come despite an assortment of landmarks within walking distance of the hotel: Central Park, Rockefeller Center and Carnegie Hall... [But] the Iranian visitors did make sightseeing trips to one unlikely destination: The Statue of Liberty.

Unlikely? Really? Stores with shelves and shelves of cheap shoes and cheap Tylenol are a big thrill. Maybe not for you, but if it is for them, that says something about the liberty we take for granted.

"Hand dryer in the men's room... It's very posh, but I don’t like it."

"You have to put your wet hands between two blowers, that are motion-activated. It’s a small space, and you need to have the steadiness of a jewel cutter not to touch the sides – and pick up some stranger’s shit spores. It’s almost like playing Operation, and who needs that kind of stress?"

The Dyson Airblade is just one of 8 things about Sam's Club that bug Jeff Kay. (Via Metafilter.)

At the Cautiously Spontaneous Café...

... it's an open thread for all your reflections.

(The photo is from Fargo.)

Summer reading for kids and teens.

Amazon has a nice selection.

Want my personal favorite from childhood? Here.

MSNBC takes Romney's "WaWa" remark out of context for the purpose of mockery.

Shame on Andrea Mitchell and Chris Cillizza for their clown work in this travesty of journalism.

You've got to watch the clip, knowing how completely out of context it is. Look at the bullshit blank disbelief mugging they do for the camera. How embarrassing!

Here's something else out of context:

Now I don't need no WaWa
And I know how sweet life can be
So I get myself free... of WaWa
I don't need no WaWa

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man said:

Wawa is the best convenience store chain in the country!...

Also, it isn't WaWa, that would be ridiculous. It is named after the town of Wawa, Pennsylvania.

Yes, there's no internal capital W. I  checked the company's website. I was carrying over the error made a the WasHington PoSt website.

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh is opening his show today with this story. MSNBC is doing it again, he says, connecting it to the doctoring of George Zimmerman's 911 call. "It was blatant and they got caught... and now everybody is ridiculing them."

Top 100 political best sellers.

100 that you have to pay for,plus 100 that are free as ebooks. (The #1 free political ebook is "The Communust Manifesto." I just downloaded one of the top free ones, but not that one. If you need a Kindle to read ebooks, you can get one here. Actually, I usually read my ebooks using the Kindle app on my iPad... which is something you can buy here.)

And please buy whatever you want through the official Althouse blog Amazon portal. 

Shopping tip.

Get your dad something for Father's Day.

Or buy something for yourself.

At the Bead Shop Café...

... you can string words into sentences.

(The photograph is from West Lafayette, Indiana — in part of a grand old place called Von's, which is mostly a bookstore, where I bought this book, which contains the sentence "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.")

At the Animal Beads Café...

... get to know your inner rabbit/wolf/armadillo...