Now that the tide of celebrity bloodshed seems to have ebbed somewhat, we can finally get back to focusing on tragedies that can’t be abetted by fun video montages or John Mayer pulling on his “sad guitar face.” For some, this week was probably a welcome return to vapidity, to lose ourselves in the fantastical stories of wizard boys and wise Latina judges. For anyone who doesn’t work at Goldman Sachs, however, it was just another week of reminders that we’re all still teetering on the edge of being jobless—and even around here we’ve discovered that it’s time to economize, lest we find ourselves peddling sarcastic quips for nickels on street corners.
With that in mind, after much interoffice discussion and only a few girly slapfights, it’s been decided that this will be the last supersized, weekly digest edition of Friday Buzzkills. But wait! Before you go rending your garments over the loss of all those purpled paragraphs choking on their own endless dependent clauses, here’s some good news for people who like bad news: Starting Monday, I’ll be breaking these up into a Daily Buzzkill—and getting them up much, much sooner as a result. True, it probably means losing some of the pretentious thematic structuring and belabored segues, not to mention the collective wallop of so much detestable crap delivered in one shot, but it also means no more posting these at 8 p.m. CT, or giving over my entire Friday to researching and compiling. I hope you’ll grow to accept it the same way you’ve learned to tolerate these, i.e. grudgingly and/or indifferently.
So, for the last time (in a Jay Leno sense): It’s Friday Buzzkills!
Anywhozit… Are you surprised that we’re still talking about the economy? Us, too—because after all, even though most companies are sticking their fingers down their throat and purging employees like Gwyneth Paltrow after she accidentally swallowed an amino acid, by all other superficial bellwethers, things seem pretty okay out there. Baseball is in swing, the “moon landing was faked” conspiracy theorists are getting their annual airing out, the space-time rift that allows aliens with no concept of how actual humans talk or behave to vote in the Emmys every year has resulted in yet another nomination for Entourage—in other words, shit’s pretty normal. But there’s an awful lot of crybabies on the news talking about an impending Depression still, to which we have to say: Dude, don’t worry, because Ryan Seacrest is going to be fine. America’s favorite buffer zone recently signed a contract worth $45 million—the biggest for any reality show host ever (cry digital tears into your plastic-coated pillow tonight, Julie Chen)—to keep pulling Simon Cowell’s pigtails for another three years of American Idol, which works out to roughly $15 million per season, more than a 200-percent raise on his current annual salary. And of course, that doesn’t even factor in all the income from his other jobs, which include pretending to care about Lady Gaga for Los Angeles radio; pretending to care whether Jennifer Aniston is dating yet, or whether her vagina should be put down like an abandoned dog for E! News; and pretending that Kim Kardashian’s family makes for interesting television and other crimes of dispassion committed in the name of executive producing. The American Idol deal will keep Seacrest on the air until 2012, meaning he’ll be around to inject his usual level of affability into reporting the apocalypse.
Ryan Seacrest isn’t the only pretty, pretty princess who’s been able to stay comfortably ensconced in his own recession-proof bubble: You’ll be happy to know that impossibly privileged fashion models now have a secluded, rigorously secured hideaway to unwind and get away from it all, after many years of being forced to endure the sticky, surrounded-by-middle-class-people-in-sweatshirts horrors of the local Starbucks if they want to shed those extra ounces of urine in between Fashion Week appearances. But fortunately, FEMA finally took notice of the urgency of the situation and swiftly set to work creating a salon where models could relax, loosen their diamonds, and just be all model-y, whether having a snifter of port and trading Rabelaisian quips about those coarse and gnarled cloth-merchants, or merely hot-boxing their own essence, which probably smells a bit like lavender mixed with buttered-up babies. Hence the über-exclusive Delicatessen lounge, admission to which is come one, come all, provided you’re a “tall, svelte, beautiful female with representation from a major modeling agency.” Those lucky gazelles granted access to this modern-day Noah’s Ark—which allows them to stay afloat on that rising flood of obese people with neglected pores—will receive free drinks, free snacks (insert your own joke here), and free Vans sneakers, plus the security (thanks to its “no male models—or men of any kind—allowed” policy) that comes from knowing they won’t have to endure conversations with “egotistical guys.” Sound the bells—finally, the female models’ arduous struggle for special treatment is over!
Believe it or not, we’re not really being sarcastic: In a way it’s sort of reassuring that, even as the chasm separating the rich from everyone else gets so expansive that tourists are probably gonna start taking burro rides into it any day now, the amount of ass-kissing bestowed upon our tactlessly wealthy remains unwavering. Take, for example, the typically no-nonsense civil servants at the DMV, who are just now getting around to calling your number so they can process the address change you first got in line for in 1998: Even they are not immune to the aura of celebrity—no matter how mottled or shaped like a giant question mark it may be—as in the case of Paris Hilton, who recently had her assistants call ahead to the Santa Monica DMV before picking up her driver’s license to ensure she wouldn’t be forced to wait. They not only complied—they genuflected before every single demand, including asking all of its employees to turn off their cell phones so no one could sneak a picture, and then allowing Hilton to pose for five different license photos until she found the one that most perfectly limned her ethereal countenance. Afterward, Hilton stepped lightly back out into the real world, her twinkling toes finding their foothold on the low-hanging moons and star-fields created by the Milky Way of flashbulbs, and smiled inwardly as she reflected on her charmed life and the way her radiating joy always seems bring out the best in everyone. Then she told her cunt of an assistant to get her the fuck home already, because she was done with “normal stuff” now, okay?
While Paris continues to reap 10 times her share of just rewards like some sort of karmic succubus, unfortunately the same cannot be said of her Algonquin Round Table (Covered With Blow) compatriots like Lindsay Lohan, who these days probably couldn’t skip the line at a public drinking fountain. The undulating waves of indignities that came rolling in with this weekend's sad-trombone ABC Family broadcast of her supposed comeback vehicle, Labor Pains, swept right back out again with the undertow of a Hustler-produced Lindsay Lohan porn parody [link NSFW] that made the rounds this week. Hustler’s Untrue Hollywood Stories: Lindsay Lohan doesn’t even bother with the usual “names and events changed to protect our asses” auspice under which most eroticized satire operates, featuring only slightly fictionalized accounts of Lohan’s storied on-set behavior, romantic dalliances with Sam Ronson, and on-and-off friendship with Hilton—broken up by only slightly fictionalized scenes of hardcore doing it, of course—and it will obviously make more money and be seen by more people than Georgia Rule and I Know Who Killed Me combined. When Lohan makes her glorious, phoenix-like resurgence, you guys are all gonna be so sorry you jerked off to this.
And since you’ve already got your violin out for Lindsay, go ahead and keep your bow rosined for Mischa Barton, whose heroic volunteering to keep the tabloids busy while Amy Winehouse got clean—including drawing headlines both for being scary thin and scary bloated—came to a boiling point this week as police took her to Cedars-Sinai and placed her under involuntary psychiatric hold (also known as a “5150,” for all the Van Halen fans out there). The timing was especially unfortunate, as Barton was supposed to attend tonight’s première of her own comeback vehicle, Homecoming. Oh, if only this country’s wheels of commerce weren’t greased with the lifeblood of innocent young actresses, and they were allowed to lead lives of relative leisure, instead of being our Atlases, burdened with the weight of the world on their slender shoulders!
After all, you just don’t understand the pressures of being an entertainer. Take Madonna, who just wanted to put on a nice show for the nice people, and erect a stage big enough to hold her giant disco ball crucifixes and hydraulic riding crops and all the other elaborate set-pieces necessary to distract focus from her arms and make men under 30 stop feeling like they’re being clumsily seduced by one of their mom’s drunk friends—and what happens? It collapses and kills two people in France, and now she’ll have to find a way to fit in a moment of silence somewhere in between the “Like A Virgin medley” and the “dry-humping four shirtless gay guys” portions of the show. Oh, cruel fate, how little you care for choreography. And then there’s vindictive assholes like Hole co-founder and guitarist Eric Erlandson, who has the nerve to question Courtney Love’s right to reform the band without him—a reunion that, thus far, exists only in the Seussian alternate reality of Love’s typically fevered ranting anyway—just because Erlandson signed a contract saying that there is no band without him when they broke up. Strong words from a petty man, Erlandson; did you not stop to consider that Love has a Twitter feed and is not afraid to use it?
uh i just hear that a former guitar player is saying i cant use my name for MY band, hes out of his MIND, he may want to check the trademark and his amex “Disease Model Tour” Bills, and umm, lets see his 99 usage of that amex and his 01 usage of wow 298K?198,000DOLLARS? Hole is MY Band MY name and MY Tradmark he also might want to check his TAXES versus my redone Taxes on a bogus ssn, and talk to @Perezhilton’s Crook CPA Accoutancy Firm COUGHS then VOMITS< who pay themselves something liek 350,000 a week and then dump 38,ooo into shell corps In 2006 Steves went and s corped the name HOLE INC noone knows where probably Deleware, But its NOT worth getting into illtell you that Buying me some Fish Fingers in 1989 is not really a concept i can relate too after stealing from me and particpating in stealing from mykid
So take your “contract” and stuff it, Erlandson: You, um, used Courtney Love’s credit card once, and she did some fake tax returns using a CPA she found through Perez Hilton, who then vomited up some fish fingers in Delaware. Or something. In conclusion, SHE HAS A KID!
If all the sisters doing it for themselves—and by “it,” we mean very publicly self-destructing—has got you down, and you find yourself grieving the dearth of positive female role models, take heart: A third installment of Bridget Jones’ Diary is in the works, Bridget Jones And The Obligatory “You’re 40 And Need To Have Kids, Otherwise You’ve Wasted Your Life” Zany-thon, which will once again find Renée Zellweger boldly (!) gaining 15 pounds and appearing on approximately four dozen magazine covers between now and a month after the film’s premiere, in which she will alternately discuss promoting a “healthy image of normal beauty” and how she shed all that disgusting weight in under a week merely by squinting extra hard for several hours a day. Take heed, ladies: All of your charming quirks and imperfections, your quest for a life that balances careerism and realistic romance—all of that pales in significance to your duties as an aircraft carrier commissioned for the sole purpose of transporting and deploying ovaries, and if it takes one “fiercely independent lady suddenly realizes she’s going to be a dried-up old spinster if she doesn’t get some man up inside her soon” comedy per month to make you realize it, well, Hollywood’s more than up to the challenge.
While chick-lit authors like Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell are in the pink of health, and no doubt will be until well after they’ve dragged their respective archetypes through all the requisite stories about the ups and downs of menopause and ribald discussions of “sag” in their august years, one of no-qualifier-needed literature’s contemporary greats is edging ever closer to his own epilogue: Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt is said to be in grave condition and is not expected to live much longer, according to his brother. McCourt is currently in a New York hospice with his “faculties shutting down,” having beaten melanoma only to recently contract meningitis. The author’s rags-to-riches story is one of the more compelling ones ever told, having grown up in extreme poverty as a child to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling author after he turned his hardship into a stunning, affecting memoir. Of course, just as it is for the rest of us, all the money in the world can’t save him—it’s just made the interim slightly more comfortable.
In Memoriam:
As one of the most simultaneously celebrated and reviled figures in the New York art world, Dash Snow was a part of a group of artists who took inspiration from the streets—despite his decidedly upper-class upbringing. like Basquiat (an artist who he’s already begun drawing parallels to), he got his start doing graffiti and soon became the most recognizable icon of a new “artistic underworld.” His love of the subversive, violent, and perverse was well documented: He took Polaroids of his friends snorting coke off of erect penises and ended up in the Whitney; one of his more recent pieces involved making collages of tabloid photos and headlines dealing with corrupt cops, which Snow then covered in his own sperm. (Snow titled it “Fuck The Police.”) As legendary as his thirst for documenting hedonism was his own prodigious drug intake, something long hinted at in his work and accepted as read by most of the people who inhabited his circle. Unfortunately, as so often happens in that sort of environment, Snow pushed his luck too far: He died this week of a heroin overdose at the age of 27, leaving behind one of the more controversial legacies in modern art, as well as a two-year-old daughter.
Have a super weekend!