Category — the popular culture

We are not fans of that Hollywood staple, the talentless blonde starlet who claws her way to the middle using only her gumption, trout lips and enormous rack. You know, the kinds of women who have been littering Annie Leibowitz’s Vanity Fair covers for the past decade.

Especially when they’re as insufferably in love with themselves as Scarlett Johansson, who followed up her album of Tom Waites covers (no, really) by getting banned from the Cannes premiere of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The official line was that she “wasn’t being a team player”–specifically, that she demanded her own personal cosmetician to the tune of $8,000 a night. And this woman is supposed to give Maxim readers wood? Seriously, how ugly do you have to be to need eight grand a night to be made presentable enough to go see a movie??

Lately ScarJo’s been running around and claiming she has some deep, personal, email correspondence with Barack Obama. Turns out, not so much:

Obama was chatting with the guys on his campaign plane when he referred to his personal assistant, Reggie Love. “She sent one e-mail to Reggie, who forwarded it to me,” Obama said matter-of-factly.

“I write saying, ‘Thank you, Scarlett, for doing what you do.’ And suddenly we have this e-mail relationship.”

Oooh, BURN! (BTW, have we mentioned we <3 Reggie Love? His name is REGGIE LOVE!)

You know, he’s really doing you a favor, ScarJo. You keep flapping those couch cushion lips about Obama, and you’re gonna wind up getting your weave snatched off your head by a pissed-off potential First Lady.

Slate ran a piece “investigating” why bands’ give themselves unprintable names. What it should have done is asked the members of one Midwestern hippie band to reenact that fateful moment in their rehearsal room when the Ketamine kicked in just right and they stayed up all night re-writing the laws of music: finding new notes that were only audible to angels and butterflies. And in the early morning dawn, with tear streaked cheeks and their fingers raw from strumming, they looked at each other and decided that they would no longer be known as “Yonder Light” but as Psychedelic Horseshit. Here’s what the investigation did mange to unearth. Keep in mind, these bands “flirt with sophomoric crudeness” .

Holy Fuck

Fuck Buttons

the Fucking Ocean

Shit Robot

Shitdisco

Holy Shit

At least two bands lay claim Shitty Beatles .

My personal favorite: AIDS Wolf

I’m starting an indie riot girrrlll rockband named the Cuntjammers. Who’s coming (heh) with me?

This man is the foundation which I have built my entire sense of humor on. Carlin is the closest thing my secular family has had to a prophet. We quote his routines like scripture. Michelle from Best Week Ever has a great and poignant post about it. Eerily enough, like Michelle, I also used to recite Carlin’s brilliant airplane routine at age 8 for my parents and their friends– unabashedly and proudly using the terms “cunt”, “brown people” and “porno films.”

I AM DEVASTATED, PEOPLE. FUCKING DEVASTATED.

for more things bouncy and graphic go here.

I skimmed this post on Huffpo. Some crusty white lady seyz:

Lately I’ve been wondering what an Obama White House might mean for the future of bling. For the fate of heavy gold, medallions, below-the-butt denim, the whole hip-hop gangsta fashion habit. What if January 20, 2009 turned out to be.. a watershed fashion moment for teenaged boys?

Ugh. “Gangsta?” This is like when my pudgy sweat-slathered boss says desperately ironic things like “That’s how I roll!”

She goes on to reference: Ed Sullivan. The Beatles. And a winsome 67 year old corrections officer. This is EXACTLY why assisted living facilities should NOT have internet access.

Moving on. Let me holla at this ho: DO NOT confuse bling with jeans that sag from gats, crack pipes, and all the dreadful woes of a Baltimore housing project.

1. Bling is boss. Its not just a red-carpet fashion statement. It’s a deeper set of values: Playing hard, looking good and lapping up the finest. The Bentley, the four finger ring, chilled the Dom Perignon, and the hot jacuzzi. Its about hittin switches in a drop top.

2. Whether its based in crass materialism or in giant meta quotation marks, bling is about being gaudy, sassy, and bold. Right or wrong bling is empowering. Its irreverent, audacious and HONEST. Damon Dash Emporer of Bling says: “I’ve always been addicted to money. I like to have diamonds, jewelery; I like my private jets, my cooks, the fact I stay in a presidential [suite] wherever I go.” Totes. I say, why the fuck not? Brush yo shoulders off and hop on that jet if you got it.

3. Speaking of which, let us not forget Bama’s dog whistle when he brushed his shoulders off at a rally. It was a gloriously authentic moment. A moment that we gleefully understood that the confused boomers missed. Like the fist bump, like Bama saying “Ya, I did a little blow“, its all about the open self-revelatory style. The way Dash unabashedly declares his love for them big bodied Benzes to Bama snorting yeah-yo: its open, its out there, unapologetically. This is something neither the focus grouped Clinton or the Liver Spotted McCain could do.

When Bama becomes president the flossin, the rims, and the bling will not go away . Hopefully, the craggy Boomers who write this moth-eaten drivel will.

We’re highlighting the “Great War Of 2008 For The Heart And Soul Of The Internet” for a couple of reasons. In the before time, the long long-ago, I refreshed Gawker every 30 seconds at my desk. The crew that worked there during 05′-’06 made me want to blog. Gawker was inspiring to a degree, it was proof that talent -at times- could trump dues-paying in this kooky, mixed up internet world. Also, whatever it is that made the cool kids at your school posses that magic and delicious power to make themselves seem twice their natural size, the former Gawker kids have it too.

This goes back quite a while but let’s just try contextualize the recent flurry of snipes:

• Choire Sicha & Emily Gould leave Gawker they announce it in a muddled/”too insidery” post on Gawker . NY mag claimed that Gawker outlived itself. Choire and Emily didn’t disagree. We are sad, the decline begins.

• Meet the painfully highbrow Keith Gessen editor of n+1. He’s a gaping asshole. This dude tosses off Marxist references the way a college freshmen does when he’s trying to bang his buxom vegan TA.

• EMILY STARTS BANGING GESSEN. Dig Emily. Despise Gessen. Worst. Synergy. Ever. Nick Denton, Emily’s former boss at Gawker breaks w/ blogger tradition and eats his young.

• On his fancy NEW weblog, 2 weeks ago, Gessen rips on Choire and Emily :” even when you’re no longer on their [Gawker] payroll, you continue to repeat the same old garbage.” He continued on about the right wing and the cultural elite, it was hard for me to focus with Bang Bus playing on my other browser tab.

• Rejoice! Gessen is now blogging everyday! He muses on the abusive nature of the word “twat” . Former Gawker editor/ editor of Radar Alex Balk calls Gessen a “cunt” and a misogynist. HEY-O!

[Read more →]

via this bearded puddle of clever.

The Catholic Church is desperately attempting to prove they’re “hip” and “down with the young people” in time for their World Youth Day, to be held in Sydney, Australia in July. They took some ads out in the Australian version of Marie Claire that somehow prove Jesus is responsible for all of pop culture ever, amen, including the following:

Click here for larger size.

You hear that, kids? Today’s Catholic Church isn’t just a bunch of crusty old white men creepily obsessed with your sexuality! It’s also a pimp thug who’s obsessed with dank!

(Do the kids still say “dank”?)

Hat tip to copyranter.

After what seems like decades (seriously, that girl he allegedly raped and urinated on is probably a grandmother by now), R. Kelly has finally gone to trial for child pornography. And it’s not going so well.

Apparently Kelly’s lawyer slept through the first day of law school, when you learn never to introduce evidence without first making sure it doesn’t further incriminate your client:

A defense lawyer argued then that since the man in the graphic 27-minute tape did not have a mole, that man could not be Kelly. But on Thursday, video forensics expert Grant Fredericks froze several frames of the sex tape where a dark spot was visible on the man’s back. For comparison, Fredericks showed the jury a still photo taken of Kelly’s back after his arrest in 2002, revealing a dark fingernail sized mole. “There is a mark on the man’s back in the exact same position,” Fredericks said, referring to the tape.

Kelly and his lawyers looked grim and dejected during the expert’s testimony, while prosecutors looked pleased, appearing to smile as they sat at their courtroom table.

Aww, don’t fret, R! We bet there are lots of watersports fans in our country’s fine maximum security prisons. You’re probably going to be on the receiving end, though.

Apparently the Sex and the City movie premier in New York City last night was a disaster.

New Line Cinemas is a cruel cocktease: they overbooked a 6,000 seat theater by like 2,000 — leaving 2,000 women in 4” Prada pumps standing in line for hours only to be denied entry — and if that’s not cause for a riot, I don’t know what is. There are sob stories, too. Ruined birthdays! Thousands of dollars! Surgery!

(I can’t imagine this sort of thing happening at another blockbuster premier where everyone gets dressed up — like one of the Star Wars episodes, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia. If it did, though, the costumes would be way funnier and the offended masses would be armed.)

And then on top of that, the New York Post shat all over it this morning with 1.5 stars: He calls it “a 21/2-hour ‘very special’ TV episode of ‘Sex and the City’ that feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha.” And it gets way grittier. He was totes over it after season five, so this is just backlash, and you know that hell hath no fury like a gay movie critic scorned by Carrie Bradshaw.

I’m gonna keep scanning flickr for photos of Dior-clad East-Side heiresses straining against the velvet rope to swing a a Louis Vuitton clutch like a battleaxe as Chris Noth blows them a kiss. That shit’s gonna be gold.

via Gothamist

REGGIE.

LOVE.

Obama’s personal aide is a 6’ 5” brick shithouse who looks like Stringer Bell and plays basketball with “the boss” every time there’s a primary. Also, he keeps a photo journal of the campaign shot with a Rebel XT, he tried out for the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, and he introduced Barack Obama to Jay-Z.

Seriously, just for the Jay-Z thing, you’re a hero. This is the man responsible for Barack gettin’ that dirt off his shoulders in North Carolina.

Did you see that Hillary? That was a relevant pop culture reference that resonated with his audience. Bravo.

Charlie Young, if you’d been this cool, audiences across America would have screamed failure to suspend disbelief. Thank God for reality.

via New York Times

Here he is putting a pair of panties in his mouth. Further evidence that true genius must come with a measure of insanity.