by Steve Lowe
What next? Maureen Dowd’s new column reveals “Woman Finds Happiness with Sister’s Widower . . . riveting True Story in Glamour . . . Of course they still miss her . . . And the next thing they knew, they were having sex.”
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BABY NAME BOOKS
Nobody has ever found a good name in a baby name book because most of the entries are things like Hadrian, Dylis, Mortimer, and Binky. Oh yes, and Adolf.
The UK’s Collins Gem version genuinely points out under the entry for Adolf/Adolph that “Adolph and the latinised form of the name Adolphus have never been common names in this country and received a further setback with the rise of Adolph Hitler.”
Setback? I’ll say.
BAD BOYS
“We know it’s wrong, but they’re just so . . . so . . . likely to commit random acts of violence! Yeah?”
Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil. Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. Kate Moss and Pete Doherty. Pamela Anderson and every man she’s slept with except Scott Baio. It’s official: For today’s thrill-seeking chick, a bad boy is the ultimate accessory. Essentially, if your man has never been charged with assault while dealing out meth from his Harley, is he even a man at all? Booooring!
In Observer Woman magazine, British socialite and ex-Mrs. Noel Gallagher, Meg Mathews, revealed: “Bad boys are always the most attractive . . . When I look back at all my exes, they’ve all of them either been in prison or rough-and-ready or rock-and-roll. The last one was in prison for 10 months. I thought it was great. I thought I was in Married to the Mob. I used to go on the visits all dressed up.” And if she was really lucky, he’d shiv her initials into his cellmate. Oh well, at least this finally explains the popularity of Prison Break.
Next week: “My new man is Radovan Karadzic. He’s been on the run from the UN War Crimes Tribunal for murder, plunder, and genocide since 1996! Genocidal Bosnian Serbs? That’s hot!”
BAR TOILET ADS FOR BAR TOILET ADS
REACH AN AUDIENCE OF THOUSANDS EVERY DAY!
IT’S CLEAR WHY 12,000 PANELS LIKE THIS ONE CAN REACH AN AUDIENCE OF 15 MILLION.
It makes a nice change from photos of women going insane thanks to Axe Body Spray, or begging pleas to please watch Spike TV. But it’s not a good ad for ads, as they have no ads, just ads for ads telling you how effective their ads would be, if they had any. Which they don’t. And that’s not a good ad for their ads . . . them not actually having any. Adman, you’re a bad adman, man.
BLACKBERRIES
What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing to yourselves?
BLING
Louis XIV was big pimping. Imelda Marcos is a powerballin’ bee-yatch. Zsa Zsa Gabor? The motherfucking bomb.
By the late 1990s, hip-hoppers had abandoned all pretence of fighting the powers that be. Instead, most had become the kinds of cartoon money-grabbing capitalists that could slip neatly into a Soviet propaganda film—except replacing the bushy mustaches and top hats with hos. Once it took a nation of millions to hold them back. Now it takes a nation of millions to hold their coats.
The word was bling—a coinage from New Orleans rapper B. G. of the wonderfully named Cash Money Millionaires collective (hmm, definitely a money theme developing here) to describe light glistening in diamonds. His 1999 U.S. smash “Bling Bling” portrayed a fantastic world of Mercs, platinum rings, diamond-encrusted medallions, helicopters, and drinking so much fine booze that you end up vomiting everywhere (bet you didn’t know that was cool, did you?).
In a startlingly widespread display of Stockholm syndrome, the ideal for urban kids suddenly involved transforming yourself from ordinary human into monomaniac money machine. By 2004, the Roc’s PR Strategy, a business plan for Jay-Z/Damon Dash’s* Roc-A-Fella music/clothing/ booze/jewelry corporation, was laced with terms like mother brand, brand equity, and product seeding. Dash described himself as “a lifestyle entrepreneur. I sell all the time. Whether it’s music or sneakers, it’s all marketing, marketing, marketing, 24 hours a day. My whole life is a commercial.” Clearly these new capitalists are better than the old ones, though. They don’t get rich off the backs of others—they do it just by being fly.
Oh, hang on: Ultimate blingster P. Diddy—who produces his own custom-made Sean John diamond-encrusted iPods—destroyed his image as a shrewd businessman in December 2003 when confronted by Lydda Eli Gonzalez, a nineteen-year-old former factory worker from Honduras. She asked him how come the people who made his $50 Sean John T-shirts were paid 24 cents per shirt, limited to two toilet breaks a day, and forced into unpaid overtime. Puffy said he didn’t know anything about it. It’s okay, though: When he looked into it and discovered what she said to be true, Diddy did right and made sure the factories’ conditions were improved. Possibly among the improvements: diamond-encrusting each employee’s sewing machine.
For all but a handful, of course, bling is a glaring lie: 50 Cent’s 2003 album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ should more accurately have been called Highly Unlikely to Get Rich, Far More Likely to Die Tryin’. But as Public Enemy’s Chuck D recently claimed: “Hip-hop is sucking the nipples of Uncle Sam harder than ever before.” What he failed to report was how P. Diddy actually manages to suck the nipples of Uncle Sam and his great mate Donald Trump at the very same time. That makes four nipples. But then, as we know, he is quite a guy.
JAMES BLUNT
James Blunt is the perfect singer-songwriter for the busybusybusy generation who don’t have time to consider what a song might actually mean. Literary conceits swallow up valuable minutes that might be spent . . . oh, we don’t know, cracking up or having a really massive latte.
Given these constraints, the smartest, sharpest title for a song about a woman being beautiful is surely “You’re Beautiful.” And why call any song that concerns the pain of saying good-bye to a lover anything other than “Goodbye My Lover”? From this perspective, it’s hard to see why anyone gets stewed up about this songwriting game. It’s quite straightforward. A fucking monkey could do it.
“Goodbye My Lover” was the emotional core of Blunt’s huge-selling debut album Back to Bedlam. As the title implies, the song in no way involves saying “hello” to a lover. The situation departs from the pleasures that come with welcoming a lover almost completely. It could equally have been called “Farewell My Lover.” Or “See Ya! My Lover.”
Blunt—the “epitome of 21st-century chic,” according to Britain’s Daily Mail—has probably said good-bye to quite a lot of lovers. If the tabloids are to be believed, he can’t keep it in his trousers: sort of like a posh-rock Charlie Sheen. But those were merely casual lovers. The lyric of “Goodbye My Lover” explores the crucifying angst of losing a woman whom Blunt apparently “pretty much considered the one.” Interviewed on James Blunt at the BBC, the queen-guarding balladeer called the story “very tragic.” And, in many ways, he is right.
The song begins by questioning whether he failed his departed lover, before his thoughts turn back to the early flowering of romance, depicting himself as some sort of victor (that would be the army background, presumably). His powerful presence caused his new lover temporarily to lose her sight. So he decided to take, not forcibly but with a certain righteous zeal, what he considered his property by an everlasting, possibly even divine, covenant. Continuing this reverie, Blunt imaginatively plants his mouth over various parts of his ex-lover’s body before recalling how they would both sleep under the same sheets. This is the reason he can then claim intimate knowledge of her physical odor. In the chorus, he repeatedly bids his lover farewell before revealing she was probably the only woman for him in the world. The implication is that he can never love again. That’s it. He is spent. Good-bye to love, perhaps.
The second verse finds the war-hero-turned-singer still urgently envisioning his former girlfriend and imploring her to remember him, too. He has watched her at various times, he reveals, while she was crying, while she was smiling, and also while she was sleeping (but not for
that long, he also assures her—not so long that it would become fucked up). You see, he would happily have sired offspring with this woman and spent all his born days with her. Actually, you know what? If she isn’t there, if she has definitely disappeared for good, then he is genuinely unsure about whether he can carry on living. It’s almost “Don’t leave me or I’ll kill myself!” But it’s not quite not that, either. Self-harm, possibly?
The chorus then repeats the claim that she was his only hope. Everything is ruined. And so on. We’re nearing the end now, but he must still detail the haunted nights; the nights when, lying in bed, he actually feels her hands. Honestly, it’s like she’s really there. She’s not, though, as we hope we’ve established. At the song’s climax, he brings out what we have already surmised: that this heartrending experience has left him an empty husk. To emphasize this point, he repeats it six times.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking his life has any meaning. Because it hasn’t. Okay? Selling lots of records in America? He’s not bothered. “People have said it sounds like she died or something like that,” he admitted. He’s very hunky with his top off and all that. But wouldn’t you chuck him, too? The moaning fucktard.
BODY ART
Actually, we think you’ll find it’s called a tattoo. When Picasso painted Guernica, it was not, as we understand it, a toss-up between a nightmarish pyramid arrangement of horrors in black, white, and gray representing the effects of fascist bombing, or a big eagle with MOM written underneath it. We could be wrong.
BOOKMAKERS
It is not true what your granny tells you: that no one makes money from gambling and the bookies always win. Very rich people who own horses make money from betting, as they have the information and connections to get on to a good thing. It’s old men who hang around in OTBs all day smoking, cheering for horses and dogs in a very quiet, desperate, defeated way, often abbreviating the name as if using the full name of an animal that will, in all likelihood, only cause them pain is just too much for them, who tend not to win.
If bookies look like they’re going to lose—that is, loads of people start betting on something that is likely to actually happen—they slash the odds to the point where no one will bother. If that doesn’t work, they close the book and stop taking bets. They would call this “sound business sense.” We would call this “being a bunch of cunts.”
So it’s okay to go in to the bookies and say, “I’ll put ten bucks on Mystical Dancer in the two thirty. I have it on the excellent authority of a man down the bar that it is a very fast horse indeed, certainly faster than all the other horses in this race, which is, after all, the nub.” And they just say, “Okey-dokey, pal.” At no point do they say “Mystical Dancer? Cock Dancer, more like. It’s a fucking donkey, mate. Save yourself the cash: Unless all the other horses fall over during the race, you haven’t got a fuck of a chance. And even then there’d be no guarantee, it’s fucking garbage.” But if you go in and say, “I’ll have one hundred crisp green dollar bills on Big Bag of Bullshit by Pompous O’Bastard to win the Booker Prize at 66–1” and some guy in Miami has done the same, and they think you know something they don’t and they might lose a few bucks, they say: “Sorry, chief, 66–1? Oh no, that should have read 1–20—slip of the pen—and, erm, anyway we’ve closed the book for fear we might not make loads of money.” Bastards.
BOOKS ON CD (EXCEPT FOR BLIND PEOPLE)*
We may not know much, but we do know this: Books are for reading.
Being read is one of the key characteristics of your actual book. If you don’t like reading, you’re just not the sort of person who wants to get involved with books. And this isn’t rocket science: We learned it in preschool.
The second most insane example of the audio book is the complete Ulysses by James Joyce. Now, this is by no means an easy book. It is a very long book—with long words in it and, famously, a really, really fucking long sentence. Not being a booky type, you may decide it’s not for you. Fair enough. But what sort of freak who doesn’t wish to read Ulysses buys the Naxos 22 CD set of someone else reading it for them? You can’t be bothered to read it, but you can be bothered to listen to 22 CDs? Freak.
But the first most insane example is Finnegan’s Wake (also by Naxos), a book that even people who really like reading get frightened of. Indeed, people who like reading so much they do precious little else, who like it so much they majored in Double English Literature with Extra Reading at college just so they could do a shitload of reading, have been known to run off down the street when someone produces a copy of Finnegan’s Wake, shouting “Stay back! That’s too much reading!” For this reason, we firmly believe that all the Finnegan’s Wake CDs are actually blank.
BOTOX
NewBeauty magazine, dubbed by the London Times “The new magazine for the Botox generation,” has helpfully collected “40 Uses for Injectables.” It’s “highly experimental,” but Botox can potentially “inhibit the nerve impulses that make you feel hungry.” Furthermore, sticking it into the armpit can “completely shut off the production of perspiration.” So Botox can save you from sweating or getting the munchies. That’s right: just like Barbie.
It’s not all post-sweat, post-comestible fun, though. High-powered bankers are injecting Botox to stop looking all frowny and stressed after regularly working eighteen-hour days. One told Time magazine: “It’s important to look your best . . . like you can take it in your stride.”
Of course, injecting yourself with bacteria to look like you’re not tired when you really are very tired would make you a living metaphor for the age. Which is sort of cool. Hopefully, we’re on our way to a big-bosomed, non-frowning utopia. Hey, maybe we should all dye our hair blond and put in blue contact lenses, too? Wouldn’t that be perfection?
When the Botox generation dies, what will its ashes look like?
BRATZ
Look, here’s saucy leatherclad Roxxi, one of the Bratz Rock Angelz, playing a flying-V rock guitar and showing off her midriff and high heels. Kind of like when Britney dressed up as a Nazi dominatrix. “Hi! My name is Roxxi,” says Roxxi. “My twin calls me Spice because I like to spice things up!” Twins, eh? Eh? Wicked!
Bratz are taking over. You might have thought they were just a line of dolls, purple-spangly teenage dolls in “funky” outfits slathered in makeup. But you would be wrong. The Bratz doll is not a doll. Well, it is a doll, anyone can see that. But it’s also, according to Paula Treantafelles, who initially created the toys, a “self-expression piece.”
How this “self-expression” piece expresses itself is mainly through the prism of having the right trinkets, phones, accessories, and shoes. (Without shoes, the Bratz dolls have no feet. It’s kind of a metaphor.) They are “the only girls with a passion 4 fashion!” It’s a sort of celebutard training course for six-year-olds.
Doll designer Lui Domingo insists: “We are not making a deliberate effort to sexualize these dolls. We are making them fashionable, and coincidentally the fashions these days are rather sexy.” Not trying to sexualize them? They look like a series of Hollywood central casting whores made out of plastic!
Then there’s the passion 4 dating guyz: the “Secret Date” range of Bratz includes a dolled-up doll, plus a mystery date (one of the Bratz Boyz) and—oh yes—champagne glasses! Why not go the whole way and chuck them naked into a Jacuzzi? Bubblicious!
Then there are the Bratz Babyz—sort of what babies would look like if they decided to become strippers. And there’s a Babyz Night Out fashion pack and Brattoo Parlor playset. Because if there’s one thing babies need it’s more nightz out and tattoos. They could go out and compare their new markings: “Look, I’ve got a spider, what about you?” “Mine says ‘soul’ in Chinese.”
Bratz Big Babys (yet another range) have “Designer Diapers”—lovely frilly knickers, which they set off with highly peculiar coquettish poses. Oh yes, and earrings. And a bikini bearing the slogan I BLOW BUBBLES! This is also a coincidence. Th
e fashion among babies is definitely for looking like little sexpots. Oh no, hang on . . . Even the Bratz Babyz Ponyz have colored highlights and makeup. So they’re sexualizing ponies now? Come on—if you’re sexualizing ponies, you’re definitely taking the sexualizing way too far. Or is this a coincidence, too? Are there slave-to-fashion ponies out there now, right this minute, having their tits done?
Hey, we know! How about a Babyz Self-Harm Kit? Or at least just supply the Secret Dates with Rohypnol. Or is that going too far? How does one judge? Anyway, let us be thankful that children are not generally impressionable or easily led—or we may end up with a generation of stifled, consumer-crazed fuckups. Another one.
BRITAIN’S ROYAL FAMILY
All shit.
Well, except for Prince William, whom even we—heterosexual males with strong anti-monarchist beliefs—have to admit to finding so unbelievably beautiful that we almost want to cry. Lord knows, we didn’t want this to happen. But just look at him!
Sometimes, we actually find ourselves wondering whether it’s love and start spinning involved romantic fantasies in which we both write each other poems and laugh and giggle and laugh some more.
Then, in our darker moments, we can’t stop thinking about being taken roughly from behind by Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi.
BROADBAND SERVICE PROVIDERS
While broadband service providers maintain the illusion of competition by vying to have the stupidest name, they actually collude in keeping us in a state of roiling panic.
One day, according to their fiendish plan, you might be up and me down. The next day, the situation might be reversed with me on top, cackling with a glass of something nice, while you’re down in the pit feeling abandoned like an abandoned dog feels abandoned when it’s been abandoned. Fucked, essentially.