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June 22, 2007 - June 15, 2007
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Hillary's Marble
Brassiere
Victoria's Secret is calling it the Imperatricks.
Victoria's Secret is calling it the Imperatricks.
ROLE MODEL. We found this courtesy of The Corner, along with this bit of explanation:
New York, NY- July, 26 2006—- A
presidential bust of Hillary Clinton is set to be unveiled at the
Museum of Sex on August 9, 2006 at 10 am. Accentuating her sexual power
and bolstered by the presidential seal, The Presidential Bust of
Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Woman President of the United States
of America will be officially open for public viewing on August 9 for a
limited six week run.
Artist Daniel Edwards describes this new sculpture as capturing Clinton “with her head held high, a youthful spirit and a face matured by wisdom. Presented in a low cut gown, her cleavage is on display prominently portraying sexual power which some people still consider too threatening.”...
Artist Daniel Edwards describes this new sculpture as capturing Clinton “with her head held high, a youthful spirit and a face matured by wisdom. Presented in a low cut gown, her cleavage is on display prominently portraying sexual power which some people still consider too threatening.”...
...Edwards’ inspiration for the piece
was derived from actress Sharon Stone’s controversial quote earlier in
the year about challenges that would most likely be encountered should
the Junior Senator from New York run on the ’08 ticket. “I think
Hillary Clinton is fantastic,” Stone said. “But I think it is too soon
for her to run. This may sound odd but a woman should be past her
sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power and I don’t
think people will accept that. It’s too threatening.”
We're not sure 'threatening' is the right word. If she attempted to show them off to us like this in person, we might very well run away, but not because we felt threatened. It's that something's wrong with the image -- the head doesn't go with the, well, bust. For example, doesn't this look more natural somehow?
Yeah, it does. The sculpture being
peddled by the Museum of Sex is a fraud. We're not being shown female
power here, but male power. Take a look at the head up top again. The
eyes are not Hillary Clinton's but Julius Caesar's, bent on conquest
and absolute power. That may be some part of her ambitionm but it's no
part of her supposed compassion, understanding, and female caring.
That's why we'd run away. We 're repulsed rather than attracted by men
with female bodies. Part woman and part anything else
is a turn-off. We'd feel the same way about a sphinx, a gorgon,
or a, er, harpy.
If you want to have sex with it, go ahead.
Sorry.
If you want to have sex with it, go ahead.
Sorry.
posted at
10:52 am
by
The Replacementz
The Uncredited
Generation
Happy
Birthday, Mick.
ROCK ON. Mick Jagger is 63 years old today. Does that fact strike anyone as remarkable, interesting or ironic? Yes, he's old and a strutting anachronism, as the following complaint from a June 4 essay in the Toronto Star makes clear:
The injustice of it all. "I've seen the
Stones many times," complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a
few years ago. "I don't feel they play as good as we do. You've got one
hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their
thing."
He could be speaking for members of Guns N' Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree.
He could be speaking for members of Guns N' Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree.
A bit harsh, really. I've seen both Aerosmith and the Stones in recent years, and they're both still hugely entertaining, despite the current fad of bashing Mick and the boys simply because they're old. Witness this piece by a young U.K. reporter who was forced to disembark from this particular bandwagon:
I have come here to witness the launch
of the European leg of the Rolling Stones’ £120 million A Bigger
Bang Tour, which arrives in the UK next month.
I have never seen the Stones perform before. Indeed, I’ve never felt the urge to.
At first blush, they’re a pretty tragic-sounding bunch, aren’t they? A national joke, some might say....
So what is it about the Rolling Stones?
Extraordinarily, and against my better judgment, the thing that makes them cool is that in the (very wrinkled) flesh, they still ooze charisma, charm and, yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, sex appeal.
On Monday, as they swaggered into the pre-concert Press conference, I found myself craning, staring and cheering like a star-struck groupie.
‘God, they’re cool,’ muttered the bearded man next to me as ‘Keef’, looking like an extra from Pirates Of The Caribbean (eye-liner, crazy hair and lashings of rather tired-looking bling), giggled and smirked like a naughty teenager with Ronnie Wood, 59... Then came Charlie Watts, recovered from throat cancer but still looking morgue-fresh in his immaculate pinstripes and crisp white shirt. And, finally, in strode Jagger, resplendent in violet blouse and eye-wateringly tight dove-grey satin suit, and sporting clean, fluffy, freshly-dyed hair.
In barely ten seconds I am utterly won over by this crumple-faced caricature of a sex god. And clearly, I am not alone.
‘Oh my God, just look at him,’ comes a stage whisper from a pretty Dutch reporter in front. ‘Oh Jesus! I’ve never seen anything like it…’
Together, the Stones are the very essence of Rock Gods — the genuine article in an industry stuffed with pale imitations.
I have never seen the Stones perform before. Indeed, I’ve never felt the urge to.
At first blush, they’re a pretty tragic-sounding bunch, aren’t they? A national joke, some might say....
So what is it about the Rolling Stones?
Extraordinarily, and against my better judgment, the thing that makes them cool is that in the (very wrinkled) flesh, they still ooze charisma, charm and, yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, sex appeal.
On Monday, as they swaggered into the pre-concert Press conference, I found myself craning, staring and cheering like a star-struck groupie.
‘God, they’re cool,’ muttered the bearded man next to me as ‘Keef’, looking like an extra from Pirates Of The Caribbean (eye-liner, crazy hair and lashings of rather tired-looking bling), giggled and smirked like a naughty teenager with Ronnie Wood, 59... Then came Charlie Watts, recovered from throat cancer but still looking morgue-fresh in his immaculate pinstripes and crisp white shirt. And, finally, in strode Jagger, resplendent in violet blouse and eye-wateringly tight dove-grey satin suit, and sporting clean, fluffy, freshly-dyed hair.
In barely ten seconds I am utterly won over by this crumple-faced caricature of a sex god. And clearly, I am not alone.
‘Oh my God, just look at him,’ comes a stage whisper from a pretty Dutch reporter in front. ‘Oh Jesus! I’ve never seen anything like it…’
Together, the Stones are the very essence of Rock Gods — the genuine article in an industry stuffed with pale imitations.
Making fun of their age helps baby boomers, in particular, forget the significance of their age, which is what the Toronto Star essay quoted above is really about. The writer, Phillip Marchand, points a finger at several musical dinosaurs:
Paul McCartney now looks like an old
lady, Bob Dylan resembles one of those unfortunates who line up at the
Scott Mission, and Mick Jagger looks like his face has not so much aged
as congealed, yet they remain irreplaceable icons. What would you
rather tell your friends — that you had lunch with Mick Jagger or Joey
Kramer?
Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s? I saw playwright Edward Albee in an on-stage interview at the St. Lawrence Centre a couple of weeks ago, and the theatre was full of people who very likely had not seen or read anything produced by Albee in the last 40 years...
This is not baby-boomer nostalgia, even though we are talking about the '60s. Albee is not a baby boomer. Neither is McCartney nor Jagger nor Dylan nor Keith Richards — these rock stars were all born in the early '40s. They were lionized by the boomers, but they were not of them. All the baby boomers did was buy their records and attend their shows.
The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.
It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows. [emphasis mine].
As Marchand explains, rock music is only one aspect of the dominating
influence of a generation that isn't even identified by any particular
name -- they're just the ones born too late to fight in World War II
and too early to be part of the Baby Boom. Yet they have led and
outshone the Boomers in multiple fields:Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s? I saw playwright Edward Albee in an on-stage interview at the St. Lawrence Centre a couple of weeks ago, and the theatre was full of people who very likely had not seen or read anything produced by Albee in the last 40 years...
This is not baby-boomer nostalgia, even though we are talking about the '60s. Albee is not a baby boomer. Neither is McCartney nor Jagger nor Dylan nor Keith Richards — these rock stars were all born in the early '40s. They were lionized by the boomers, but they were not of them. All the baby boomers did was buy their records and attend their shows.
The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.
It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows. [emphasis mine].
On May 21, The New York Times Book
Review carried its ranking of "the best American fiction published in
the last 25 years." The winning novel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the
four runners-up — Don DeLillo's Underworld, Cormac McCarthy's Blood
Meridian, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, and John Updike's Rabbit
Angstrom tetrology — were all written by authors born in the 1930s....
It is "startling to see how thoroughly American writing is dominated by this generation," wrote the author of the article, A. O. Scott. "Startling in part because it reveals that the baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics and business, has not produced a great novel." ...
Other legendary figures of the 1960s were of this generation — Mohammed Ali [sic], the last athlete to attain mythic stature, was born in 1942. Ken Kesey, who attempted to smash open the doors of perception, and his chronicler, Tom Wolfe, who helped revolutionize journalism, were both born in the 1930s. So were Gloria Steinem, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, who made cinematic history in the '60s. Martin Luther King, born in 1929, and Albee, born in 1928, were also virtually of this generation.
It is "startling to see how thoroughly American writing is dominated by this generation," wrote the author of the article, A. O. Scott. "Startling in part because it reveals that the baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics and business, has not produced a great novel." ...
Other legendary figures of the 1960s were of this generation — Mohammed Ali [sic], the last athlete to attain mythic stature, was born in 1942. Ken Kesey, who attempted to smash open the doors of perception, and his chronicler, Tom Wolfe, who helped revolutionize journalism, were both born in the 1930s. So were Gloria Steinem, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, who made cinematic history in the '60s. Martin Luther King, born in 1929, and Albee, born in 1928, were also virtually of this generation.
Marchand goes on to offer four reasons for the ascendancy of the in-betweeners. 1) Their generation, raised during the Depression and wartime was smaller and, though he doesn't say this specifically, perhaps more disciplined by parents and circumstances. 2) They were the last generation to grow up without television, which may have prevented them from acquiring the passivity of their successors. 3) They accomplished their early successes in a much more monolithic media environment, which gave their careers more attention and momentum. And 4) they were the first generation since before WWI to come of age in a time that had the (post-war) prosperity affording the luxury of profound cultural rebellion. They were free to plumb long postponed doubts and new ideas their own forebears were simply too busy surviving to explore.
Now do you find Mick's age interesting or ironic? He's not simply a superannuated kid like so many of the graying boomers who attend his concerts. In more ways than one, he's actually an elder, an opportunity to experience the genuine inspiration that has outlived -- both physically and artistically -- multiple generations of his disciples. Rock stars come and go, and frequently die of their imitative excesses, while this Ramses the Great of Rock and Roll goes on, prancing and sneering on the graves of his figurative grandchildren. McCartney and Dylan have survived too, but they really are old. No one would say of them that they -- how did the young U.K. reporter put it? -- "ooze charisma, charm and, yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, sex appeal."
Marchand's list of factors doesn't account for this particular phenomenon. I'd like to propose a fifth -- humor. The easy wisdom of the baby boomer music critics has it that Dylan and the Beatles were the genuine article, while the Stones, though great, were lesser artists who succeeded as much by self-promotion as by talent.
Having lived through the radical sixties, I always had a different view of it than that. Yes, Dylan and the Beatles reflected their times beautifully, giving voice to the angst and the doubt and the sincere search for something new and transformational. But the Stones, and Jagger in particular, did them one better. They stood above the times in which they were nonetheless major protagonists, looked at the goings on with a razor-sharp eye, and laughed out loud. The real triumph of Jagger's output was its embedded mockery -- sometimes musical, sometimes lyrical, sometimes vocal, sometimes sartorial, sometimes contextual, sometimes overt, and sometimes concealed. His Satanic apostrophe in Sympathy for the Devil was, regardless of the (too) obvious political satire of its lyrics, an extremely subtle satire of the burgeoning cult of pop star gurus like John Lennon and Bob Dylan. He was making fun of it all -- his own image, the quasi-religious overtones of the British invasion, the hubris of musicians who thought they were sages, the naivete of pot-smoking kids who thought they could remake the world with shocking fashion statements, and the eternal appetites that lie in wait to corrupt the self-righteous.
The mockery has been there throughout the Stones' long career, manifested brilliantly in dozens of different ways, so pervasively and almost casually that I have wondered for decades whether Jagger's genius is conscious or unconscious. But it's undeniably there. His falsetto is the signal of the jester getting down to work, and he doesn't have just one falsetto voice; he has four or more, all in the service of a continuous wry commentary that, whatever his stated political views may be, rolls out against every possible constituency that takes itself too seriously.
On one of his single albums, he has a song called "War," which begins with the lyric, "I was born in a war." Needless to say, that war was the same war Roger Waters's persona from "The Wall" was born into. They were both in-betweeners, but they took different lessons from the experience. Waters has become a metronome, tapping out the exact same beat for every turn in world affairs. Jagger chose instead to laugh, and he became -- oxymoron of oxymorons (how perfect!) -- the Evelyn Waugh of rock music, one of a tiny handful of gifted satirists popular music has produced in the last 50 years. If the baby boomers still can't see that they have been one of his perpetual targets for derision, well, that's par for the course for a group that has never had a sense of humor about itself or its countless affectations. But Jagger is still laughing. Maybe there's a lesson there for the next generations. The ones that will have to pick up the pieces after the curtain finally comes down on the Baby Boom farce. But until we get a new star of this magnitude, we'll have to make do with the old one. Shidooby.
Many happy returns, old man.
posted at
1:30 pm
by
InstaPunk
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
The Olber-Fuehrer
A GANG OF ONE. We feel guilty about this. We really do. We've already trashed Keith Olbermann here, more than once. He can't help being stupid. It's just that he 's soooo stupid, we can't not make fun of him.
Here's his latest exploit. Does it tell us anything new? No. He's still the deranged boob we honored here, here, and here.
So sue us.
