The Passion of the Stamos



John Stamos is beginning to appear as kind of creepy. Okay, really, really Hollywood creepy. Stamos is creepy in that oily, overcosmeticized, ex-Soap Opera actorish kind of way. He could easily be an agent. His unfortunate, soft porny work in "Jake in Progress," where he portrays "The Male Id" unrestrained, doesn't really help matters for "Uncle Jesse." (Averted Gaze)

While we generally don't approve of the art of eavesdropping which Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove does quite well -- it also nearly got Grove into a fistfight with Howard Stern -- we thank him for his labors. How else would we know that Rebecca Romijn dumped John Stamos' ass because he has anger issues:

"'Did you start dating instantly as soon as your marriage broke up?' (Oprah interior decorator Nate Berkus) was heard asking John Stamos' ex-wife, whose flack officially announced their separation in April 2004, after five years of marriage.

"'Yeah, but we'd actually been separated a year before we told the press about it,' Romijn confided. 'We were in couples' therapy before and after we separated, and we briefly got back together. But we fought from the very beginning, and we just fought and fought. I just got so sick of John being mad all the time. He was always so mad.'"

Stamos comes out of that significant cultural institution known as the Soap Opera. Very few people on soap opera's think of it as being anything other than a paycheck and, quite possibly, an audition to bigger and better things (The Corsair actually dated a Soap Opera minor character
for a few months)

Thus, The Corsair -- mirabile dictu -- has made a study of the "Soap Opera face." It is the triumph of the plastic surgeon's art. Observe "The Bold and the Beautiful." This celebration of pure facial excess serves our purposes adequately.

The overcosmeticization of the soap opera faces on "The Bold and the Beautiful" is quite simply insolent. The "jutting cheekbones" offend puritanical sensibilities, and, in close quarters, can put someone's eyes out. The "overpouty lips" are naught else obscene. The industry standard "cleft chin in the form of an infant's ass" (May I slap him?) can only be properly construed as jejeune. Finally, the fixed prehistoric raptor gaze is awesome to behold.

And the names. Rococo names like (Averted Gaze), "Thorne," and (huffs) "Dakota," and (The Corsair growls) -- most improbably, "Dorian Lord."

As if!

Such is the atmosphere in which "Stamos" evolved, and that -- we surmise -- is why he is as he is thus. Perhaps ... we should not judge Stamos. Stamos works in mysterious ways. Anger, maybe, is the expulsion of toxins gained toiling in such a manifestly plastic cultural regime as the American soap opera.

(The Corsair drapes a cape over himself a la James Brown)