This Week In Terrifying Hybrids
1. The Bucket List – fiction + television + Jeff Probst's vulture brain = Live Like You're Dying
Well, for once those final, "in memorium"-like montages that usher out departing reality show contestants won't seem heavy-handed.
While a reality series about fulfilling the wishes of terminally ill people is a great idea for those terminally ill people whose dying wish is to be the star of the most maudlin reality show ever conceived, for humanity as a whole it's maybe not the best idea. There's a reason why the Make A Wish foundation isn't a weekly television show. Besides being grossly manipulative, making grave illness into a spectacle is just gross. (Coincidentally, so is Jeff Probst, who obviously has the brain of a vulture for thinking of something like this.)
Probst promises, "The focus of the show is not death. The story we're going to tell is about living." They cut out the part where he added, "But about living when you're about to die, which is like extreme living to the max. It's Maximum Living. Didn't you see The Bucket List? It's skydiving and road trips and laughs! Then they die. Boom: Gravitas!"
2. Pharrell – music + Eames + lots of mannequin parts + the misguided notion that everything Pharrell does is art = This chair.
We all know what inspires Pharrell's music: thinking about what it would sound like if a robot was farting in space while moving. But what inspired Pharrell to make this chair, which is currently on exhibit at an art gallery in Paris? Was it one too many viewings of A Clockwork Orange? A lazy afternoon spent surrounded by Eames chairs, mannequin legs, and Krazy Glue?
Personally, I think Pharrell just told his assistant, "What if there were, like, human legs on that Eames chair? That'd be so hot. Make it happen. Then call a gallery, cause that's art. Also, find out what else I can endorse." Thus, Pharrell: Visual artist was born.
3. Mad Fold-Ins – humor + Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen + buckets of narcissism = Influence
What's great about making an entire coffee table book about your influences is that your extreme narcissism is obscured (at least initially) by other people–but ultimately it shines through like a pair of burning red suns. Yes, Mary-Kate & Ashley, Influence is about the people and things that influenced you two, but "you two" is the most important phrase in that sentence.
The only way this book could have any redeeming value is if you could fold in that picture of the twins with Terry Richardson to reveal a picture of Bea Arthur laughing, or something.