Skip to main content

Bow down to the vulva! Why Gwyneth's Goop Lab isn't all bad

From psychedelics to skipping solid food, the star’s Netflix show sounds like bunk. But – shock horror – there is wisdom here if you look hard enough

Even though her vagina smells amazing, funnily enough the sound of a Netflix show based on Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250m “health and lifestyle” empire does not appeal to me. (The show’s title, the goop lab, is styled all lowercase, though, as it turns out, bell hooks has nothing to be worried about.) For one, I am the antithesis of Goop. I balk at reading Instagram captions about peoples’ “journeys”. Especially when they are, more often than not, to the Cotswolds. Second, this is Paltrow, who once sold something called “psychic vampire repellent” on her website. So I decide to watch it, with the sole purpose of ripping it to absolute shreds.

At first, it seems an easy task. In the opening montage, Paltrow, sitting on a pastel-pink sofa that resembles labia in SheEO mode, tells us she is going to “milk the shit out of” life. Given her track record, I don’t know whether she means literally, and am concerned. The first episode documents a trip to a secluded villa in Jamaica to do a lot of, like, healing, via psychedelics and “the spirit of the mushroom”. From, like, trauma. Annoyingly, the use of mind-altering drugs in psychiatry is a field I am interested in, and psychiatry and psychology in general (I consider Freud a beach read). Even though I check the Liverpool score just as someone is allowing their soul to be entered for the first time (around their sternum, I think), I’m slowly beginning to think that Goop isn’t a total load of goop. Besides, the two mental health professionals Paltrow and Goop’s chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, speak to – not the mushroom shamans, who are one step away from shark tooth necklaces – do have interesting things to say, in particular about the benefits of microdosing.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tXPimz

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV