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It's been a little over three months since Rihanna missed the Grammys after being allegedly assaulted by her boyfriend Chris Brown. As she more or less announced last week, when she appeared at the Costume Institute Gala in a feisty tux, she's back—and now she has the single to prove it. "Silly Boy," her new song, is a radio-ready dance track that's just about impossible to interpret as not being about Brown. These are the lyrics:
You're calling me more than ever now that we're done/ Took keys back to my place we were having no fun/But you're not ok telling me you miss my face/ I remember when you would say you hate my ways/ I said I'm not coming back.
You fooled me once but you can't have that ego turning/Just too bad for you, that when you had me /Didn't know what to do. Game's over/ You didn't know what to do/ 'cause you had a good girl, good girl, girl/ That's a keeper/ You had a good girl, good girl/ didn't know how to treat her
So silly boy get out my face/ Why do you like the way regrets taste?/So Silly boy get out my hair/ I don't want you, no, get out of here/ Silly boy, silly boy, why you acting silly, boy?
You coming with those corny lines can't live without me/ I'll get some flowers for the day that you are buried/I know people make mistakes but I just think you're a disgrace/ The only thing I want from you is for you to stay away.
The words get more vitriolic as the track goes on, but they're never strikingly raw or angry. If you didn't know the back story, "Silly Boy" would fit right into the oeuvres of both Rihanna and the increasingly fascinating Lady Gaga, who helped write the song, without comment. (Gaga, who the New Yorker's Sasha Frère Jones defended vigorously, and convincingly, here, is simultaneously bringing back freaky leotards and the piano. "Silly Boy" sounds like nothing so much as Gaga's hit single "Poker Face," which, in an unfortunate coincidence, celebrates rough sex.) That means "Silly Boy" will fit right in on top 40 radio. All summer long we're going to be singing and humming about what a silly boy Chris Brown is. It's probably not the word most of us would have picked to describe him, but I suspect it will do.
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The eterally awesomely grouchy Copyranter points to a provocative ad campaign from the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The pair of arresting images features a "woman" as a) a punching bag and b) a slab of meathook-hung carrion. The accompanying copy reads: "IT'S NOT ACCEPTABLE TO TREAT A WOMAN LIKE ONE." Copyranter wonders: "Like what? A woman?"
The ads are akin to PETA's shock-happy petsploitation ads that seem more targeted toward freaking out their viewers than conveying their message. This time around, does positing women as dead meat and punching bags reinforce or counteract the message? Hard to say.
Perhaps this anti-domestic violence campaign learned something from Larry Flynt's infamous Hustler cover featuring a woman being fed into a meat grinder. Not everybody liked it, but who could forget it?
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Last week, Michael Kinsley wrote a brutal takedown of the redesigned Newsweek, attacking it page by page and graph by graph for failing to be readers' "guide through the chaos of the Information Age." It's something that editor Jon Meacham wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek would not "pretend" to be, and that Kinsley thinks newsmagazines totally need to be in order to survive. The assessment was shrewd, but perhaps needlessly vicious, as noted in New York's Jessica Pressler's response, titled: "Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, and We Feel Bad About It." (Full disclosure: I'm particularly sympathetic to Newsweek, since I used to work there. Plus it's owned by the same company that owns Double X.)
But if the new Newsweek's inaugural issue falls short of making sense of the week's chaos, I wonder what Kinsley makes of the New York Times today, which ran an article—ON THE FRONT PAGE, and with a jump to the highly coveted A3 page—about teenagers hugging. That's it. Just, you know, talking about the ways that they hug ("the basic friend hug," "the hug that starts with a high-five," "the hug from behind") and how they feel about hugging ("We're not afraid, we just get in and hug").
The whole thing reads like an Onion parody of what Slate's Jack Shafer mocks as the bogus trend story. It's what we've come to expect of the Thursday style section, which has featured dubious trend-spotting since its inception. But this is the front page. Of the frickin' New York Times. Enter Kinsley's biting assessment of Newsweek, which feels equally applicable here:
[W]hile it's not impossible to get readers by peddling sheer enjoyment, it's a lot easier to peddle necessity, or at least usefulness: You need this magazine to sort out the world for you and to make sure you haven't missed anything.
We need to need newspapers, too, if they're going to survive—which is something I desperately want, not just because I'm in the industry but because it freaks me out to think of a world without them, as it does Double X reader Sophie. And stuff like this—
Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other—the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days.
—is hardly the stuff we need.
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Forbes.com has released its "Celebrity 100" list of the world's most powerful celebrities and the top four slots are held by women: #1: Angelina Jolie, #2: Oprah Winfrey, #3: Madonna, and #4: Beyonce Knowles. Half of the top ten are women, although they make up only a quarter of the top 25. Last time around, Oprah, who made $275 million in the last year, as opposed to Jolie's paltry $27 million, held the number one spot. This year, Jolie proves money isn't everything. Looks are! Actually, Forbes.com sites Jolie's philanthropic work and the tabloid ruckus over the birth of her twins to be significant contributors to her ascent to the top spot. Who knows if rumors swirling around the possible demise of her relationship with Brad Pitt (#9) will hurt her chances next year for topping a list I'm sure she cares not a wit about.
Despite the toileting of the economy, Forbes.com notes, celebrities have proven resilient! "In a year filled with humbling bank failures and violent stock market swings, the earning power of the 2009 Celebrity 100 remained remarkably resilient. The cumulative earnings of the 2009 list totaled $4.1 billion, up slightly from last year's $4 billion haul." Great. I feel so much better now. At least the rich are still rich. Now, I can sleep at night.
Some stars, though, took a rankings bath. Justin Timberlake didn't even make the list. (I, for one, am outraged.) Jennifer Lopez suffered the same fate. Neither did Tyra Banks. Other women of note who made the list: Stephenie Meyer (#26, who wrote the Twilight series), Miley Cyrus (#29), Ellen DeGeneres (#40), Sarah Jessica Parker (#58), Meryl Streep (#64), Serena Williams (#67), and Gisele Bundchen (#72). Who came in dead last? Race car driver Danica Patrick. Bummer, #100.
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For the sixth consecutive week, Kate Gosselin’s on the cover of Us Weekly. “Mommy You Are Mean” screams the headline, while her husband Jon declares, “Enough is Enough” on the cover of People. In Touch and Star are selling the Gosselins as well. Only the Enquirer has chosen an old standard for its cover, Brangelina, and even the most famous couple in the world had to share the front page, with, you guessed it, Jon Gosselin.
Up until a few months ago, chances were good-to-great that if you picked up a tabloid one of the following subjects would appear on the cover: Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, TomKat or Britney Spears. But recently, the attractive, famous folk who have dominated gossip for years and years (even when, as with Aniston, the relevant story happened eons ago), have suddenly, ignominiously been shoved to the side by a rag-tag crew whose members include the Gosselins, Octomom, Susan Boyle and, to a certain extent, Michelle Obama. These women share one characteristic in particular, and it is not an unsettling fecundity: they’re not rich. (Heather Havrilesky just wrote a piece for Salon about this exact same group appropriately titled, “The Triumph of The Uncelebrity”)
The collapse of the economy has plainly altered our taste in celebrities. Conspicuous consumers like Lindsay, Paris and Britney are out. In are a group of women that, if not quite like the rest of us, are certainly not members of the richest one percent. This isn’t the first time serious circumstances have altered our gossip preferences. D.J. Taylor’s group biography Bright Young People, published a few months ago in the States, chronicles the rise and fall of a cohort of rich kids famous just for being famous in 1920s and ‘30s London. (This cadre was also the subject of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing Vile Bodies). They threw the best parties, made the biggest scenes, and dominated the gossip columns. When the war started, and many of them had long since turned into ne’er-do-wells and alcoholics, their hijinks tapered off, seeming out of sync with a more serious time. In other words, Paris et. al. were not the first of their kind to hog the spotlight, or the first to lose it.
Still, I am surprised by the speed with which the tabloids have transitioned to a whole new cast of characters, and how exactly that transition maps onto the recession. Maybe there’s a little cause and effect here. Celebrities, the rich, spoiled, private-jet owning kind, (who had already, as Havrilesky points out, gotten pretty boring) had to curtail their ways, not just for the sake of propriety but because random clubs in Vegas stopped opening and the rest stopped being willing to pay them $20,000 just to show up and drink a Red Bull. The party is literally over, and so are all the related photo ops.
But it’s not as if what the tabloids cover—babymaking, marriages, divorce, breakdowns— or what they fundamentally are—a celebrity making machine— has changed. In that light, the decision to cover the Gosselin’s marital strife and not Brangelina’s, or Michelle Obama’s baby bump and not Katie Holmes’s, or Susan Boyle’s breakdown and not Lindsay Lohan’s becomes a real either/or choice. Us Weekly will write about pregnancy: do they obsess on a celebrities’ experience? Perhaps a young starlet has a bun in the oven? Or do they pick a woman who, if not quite normal, is at least regular, physically and financially (and in the instance of Octomom, actually strapped for cash)? In short, do they pick a celebrity or an uncelebrity?
These uncelebrities are regular in another sense: they've plainly been altered by the tabloid culture of the last decade. Imagine for a second that our collective, societal obsession with famous people actually sent out some sort of dangerous, mind melting, fame rays (actually, you don't have to imagine): These women are the mutant results. There's Octomom, the mother who wants to be Angelina, The Gosselins, a family torn apart (in the tabloid’s estimation) because they've pursued fame, and Susan Boyle, a woman who lost her mind because of spotlight. The tabloids have been obsessed with rich, famous, glamorous people for years and now it’s the uncelebrities turn to be the show. Who will be unlucky enough to come next?
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Willa, it's amazing that Kate Gosselin—and Kate Gosselin's hair—have graced the cover of US Weekly for the past six weeks. And it's clear that hunger for TomKat news has waned. But I've become increasingly skeptical of economy-driven explanations for shifts in mass culture, and I'm not as sure as you seem to be that this preference for reality-based tabloid fodder is attributable to our downbeat financial forecast. Reading the New York Times style section, you'd think that there was no such thing as a trend before the collapse; we just floated merrily along sporting the same bags and shoes, waiting for a crisis to come along so we could finally change our wardrobes, last updated around 1929 or so. People were awakening to the severity of the crisis back in August; Lehman brothers imploded in September. I am hesitant to ascribe our current taste for bright, flouncy skirts to something AIG did last fall.
Strange as it might sound, I think the taste for uncelebrity reflects a more sophisticated tabloid readership. Brangelina cover stories read like ad copy when they're positive and telenovela plots when they're negative. Profiles of people to whom journalists have so little access tend to be unreadable, even in better magazines. Who wants to be spoon-fed publicist drivel in the age of Youtube? Susan Boyle and Octomom are still media constructs on some level, but their publicity teams are clearly less competent, and that's something.
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Have you ever wanted to go on a road trip with David Lynch, but felt trepidatious about taking to the highway with the singular, seminal, strange director of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive for fear it would turn epically bizarre, necessarily lead to you fleeing, as fast as possible, from someone beyond creepy and mysterious, and give you unsettling, extremely vivid dreams likely to involve riddle-spewing dwarfs? Lucky for you, the David Lynch road trip experience is now available to be had without having to get into an automobile with Mr. Lynch and his herky-jerky, non-site specific elocution. You will probably still have freaky dreams.
Lynch's latest endeavor is Interview Project, a 121-part documentary series streaming on the web, composed of short interviews with regular Americans. Lynch's crew found the subjects while traipsing across the country, via car, and each one seems to have come straight from David Lynch's central casting—which is to say, they are stupendous reminders that the truth is stranger than fiction. A lot stranger. Only three shorts into the series (one new interview will be posted every three days for the next year), and we've met an Arizonan who is waiting to get back together with his soulmate after he finishes up probation, for burying someone without a permit, and we've met an extremely effete Native American whose sister slashed his face with a knife. He loves her anyway. It's the WPA oral history project conducted by the guy who made Eraserhead. Best road trip ever?
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Earlier this month, an Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz, undertook an intriguing experiment. What would happen if, instead of traditional journalists, novelists and poets wrote the news? Forward recounts the results in "Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News."
Haaretz is a serious newspaper. In other words, this wasn't like the time Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to guest-edit The New Yorker. In honor of Hebrew Book Week, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent home most of his staff reporters and replaced them with 31 of Israel's top writers and poets, among them: Avri Herling, David Grossman, Roni Somek, Yoram Kaniuk, and Eshkol Nevo.
The results were a meta-mix of odd news bites, first-person impressions, and lines of poetry:
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place ... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points ... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….” The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that “hot” is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?
Haaretz is something like Israel's version of the New York Times—although, of course, the New York Times would never do something like this. Which is too bad. As we all know, newspaper are the dinosaurs of 21st century media. Maybe if they opened their doors to the more literary-minded among us, they might win readers with news that can do more than inform us, and move us.
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Earlier this month, an Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz, undertook an intriguing experiment. What would happen if, instead of traditional journalists, novelists and poets wrote the news? Forward recounts the results in "Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News."
Haaretz is a serious newspaper. In other words, this wasn't like the time Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to guest-edit The New Yorker. In honor of Hebrew Book Week, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent home most of his staff reporters and replaced them with 31 of Israel's top writers and poets, among them: Avri Herling, David Grossman, Roni Somek, Yoram Kaniuk, and Eshkol Nevo.
The results were a meta-mix of odd news bites, first-person impressions, and lines of poetry:
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place ... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points ... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….” The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that “hot” is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?
Haaretz is something like Israel's version of the New York Times—although, of course, the New York Times would never do something like this. Which is too bad. As we all know, newspaper are the dinosaurs of 21st century media. Maybe if they opened their doors to the more literary-minded among us, they might win readers with news that can do more than inform us, and move us.
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Dear Double X readers in NY: Tomorrow is your chance to meet with Double X writers and editors in person. We're co-hosting a meet-up with Guernica, the excellent online literary magazine of politics and culture, from 6 to 10 pm at Le Poisson Rouge at 158 Bleecker Street (please rsvp here). Come join us and raise a glass to celebrate our recent launch. And check out Guernica beforehand if you haven't already. This issue (pleasingly to us XXers) focuses on some smart, independent women: There's a fabulous interview with Geek Love author Katherine Dunn about what drew her to boxing, among other things; a moving excerpt from Katherine Russell Rich's memoir, Dreaming in Hindi, about traveling to India after a remission from stage 4 breast cancer; and a revealing interview with correspondent Michaela Wrong about corruption in Kenya. (Plus, we like the pretty pink looping design that pops up when you scroll over the site logo.)
