The Business End

If it is true that having ones picture taken can steal ones soul, photographer Nick Saglimbeni's camera is, right now, starving to death. Behold, the Kardashian Christmas card:

If you stare into the abyss long enough, it stares blankly off camera.

I'm going to admit to you now with no small amount of pride that I don't really follow the exploits of the Kardashians, and in fact wouldn't be aware of them if their name wasn't so similar to a certain race of alien space-fascists from Deep Space Nine.

"Feast my pretty, feast on their joy..."

That said, I find myself transfixed by the way the 2011 Kardashian family Christmas card so expertly scoops out the joy from one's very heart, inserts the business end of a pastry bag filled with all that is the opposite of the human spirit and then squeezes, thus creating a misery-filled heart donut that is then fed to a purse full of starving Maltese's. Like for real. As I've mentioned before, I'm not the biggest Christmas fan but compared to them I'm Bob Frelling Cratchit. Here are three of the many, many reasons this card murders cheer:

"Yeah, like Merry Christmas,
or whatever. We don't care."

1: You can't tell what any of them are looking at. I've extrapolated the family's dead stares in an attempt to determine just what the hell they all find more interesting than the task at hand. Except for matriarch/V creature Kris (whose eye-lasers are boring directly into the camera), no one in the photo is able to meet our gaze. What's up with that? Are they afraid their eyes might give them away as the soulless automatons they are? 'Cause we already know that.

2: The set is confusing and not-to-subtly dirty. They're posed on stairs that lead nowhere except archways with no openings. Where are they supposed to be and why do the archways all look like nipples? It's like they wandered onto a college theatre program's production of Lysistrata and got bored (but then, who wouldn't? Take that Aristophanes!)*

To really give the place that warm, homey feeling of the holidays the set-designer went with
fake blue stucco, doric columns and classic Greek nipple-ways.

'tis the season, for naked
commercialism. 

3: It's a goddamn commercial. I know they're not so much a family as they are a brand, but seriously, click on the Daily Mail story. If, for some reason you wanted to dress like this pack of vapid, photoshopped mannequins, simply roll your cursor over the blue dots that speckle the photo and it brings up a link to Piperlime where you can 'Get the Look!' Yup, they've cross-synergized their holiday greeting with online marketing thus making them whorey on like three new levels.

Perfume and carbon nano-fibers?
Is there anything her ass can't do?

On the other hand, by telling us where we can get our hands on whatever material is able to contain Kim's, um, only marketable feature, the Kardashians may have inadvertently invented the space elevator. For years now scientists have been searching for something to make the tether out of that is strong enough to withstand the intense forces of geostationary orbit yet light enough to be worn by someone whose physical activity is limited to modeling and dancing with Mark Ballas. Are you paying attention Nobel Prize Committee?

Kim Kardashian is literally sitting on the solution to metamaterials.

*That right there was the only time my B.A. in Theatre has come in handy. The only time.