by Martin Amm, via Neatorama
The New York media world is even more incestuous than we imagined.
Can this really be true? Is Nick Denton, the Dark Lord of Gawker Media, really nothing more than the sum of Julia Allison posts? It would explain so much, so very much.
With her shockingly revealing photomontage, Vangroover‘s very own Civixen, in her Gawker alter ego Hez, has dared to open the lid on Pandora’s very box, when most sensible people wouldn’t go near it without a full HAZMAT suit.
Who can we turn to for informed insight on the revolting details of this deal?
Pierre Ayotte, noted in his press release as a “friendly upcoming Internet opportunist”–i.e. not The Devil Himself, just to be clear–would like to rent your soul for ten bucks a week.
Johann Faustus was born in Roda in the province of Weimar, of God-fearing parents. Although he often lacked common sense and understanding, at an early age he proved himself a scholar, mastering not only the Holy Scriptures, but also the sciences of medicine, mathematics, astrology, sorcery, prophesy, and necromancy.
Many have dubbed Johnson the father of modern rock and roll. Of all early bluesmen, Robert Johnson can be considered one of the more prolific. Although he did not live long enough to become as popular as many of the other earlier blues artists, his music has influenced a number of musicians who dramatically changed music history.
I am everything glamorous and I love HOT PINK! I love pizza, chocolate, angels, and aliens, did you know they talk to me? I have many friends. Ooooh have you seen my art? Did you know I was almost the Governor of California? They would have had to make me a BUST by the Hollywood sign! I have thousands of fans and can’t seem to keep men off of me. You can buy my phenomonal self portraits! Join my fan club!
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You know, it’s actually pretty good advice. However much contempt one (nameless now and forever) may heap upon anti-poverty campaigners who themselves somehow end up stinking rich, one can hardly argue with the principle that mo’ meditation, mo’ betta. I, myself, could internalize the second-last of these a little bit better. Or is that “manifest” instead? I always get those mixed up; maybe THAT is the Secret?
From the Financial Times:
- Make yourself stand out
- Choose the right product: easy to sell, impossible to disprove
- Make good use of celebrity endorsement
- Innovate around your core strength
- Charge what the market will bear. If you can persuade people to part with $1m for your world peace fund to go on a training course, then, for heaven’s sake, you should.
- Lastly, let people feel they are buying not just a product, but also a set of values, a lifestyle. The power of Om.
Indeed, my project for the next week is to revamp the business model to um, maximize transcendental prosperity and expansion manifestation opportunities, particularly as they relate to the bottom line.
Speaking of which, it’s time for my yoga…
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I think Joan Rivers must simply have had all the skin on her face removed and replaced with a lifelike latex substitute; that’s the only thing that accounts for the fact she can still pull any kind of an expression at all. When she relaxes, though, she does look like one of those aliens from Communion.
In one of the many, many millions of magazines I have lying around the house lies one article which puts Botox in its proper context. Just as Dominick Dunne put crime into a moral context (which is really the primary context in which those events take place) so this article, which I cannot find, by a woman whose name I cannot recall, looked at cosmetic surgery in a fundamentally meaningful, humanistic context. I do not know why this article is, as far as I can tell, alone in the world. I do not know why no-one else has examined the social and cultural impact of Botox. But I do know, it asked some very important questions.
First among those is:
What will become of a society in which women are unable to express negative emotion?
Do you remember when you were a child, and you’d watch your mother for clues as to what was going on and whether or not it was a problem? What if those clues never came? What if all you had to depend on were her words?
Botox is censorship of the body. You think you’re only banning the bad words, but like an over-aggressive spamfilter that won’t let you open the Breast Cancer Charity fundraising site, it cuts you off from things you may not realize are both negative and positive. How’d you like to discover that too late?
I can’t even imagine being a fortysomething man trying to date age-appropriate, financially secure women; there would be no clues at all in her face if you happened to say something that struck a nerve. You would never know when to back off. You would never see the vulnerability. You would, to a meaningful extent, be cut off from an important part of that woman’s basic humanity.
As would be all other people.
And what must it do to them?
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What a week! And it’s only Wednesday!
Bonus: Guess What Time It Is!
Hacked and hacking, plus super bonus rotten weather meaning I have nothing better to do than sit inside and fret about my poor, dead blogs, the WP.com bug that is replacing all my P tags with DIV tags, and the 1400 people who came to this blog so far today looking for the sex tape of a drug-addled, quite possibly insane woman who is, besides, bloated and criss-crossed with track marks, methface, and surgical scars. Way to go, porn surfers. Your karma must be even more toxic than Britney right about now.
Plus, I’m really, really cranky. If only I could AFFORD some nice brandy, I might calm down. Well, anything’s possible, right?
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raincoaster 