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Sami Salo’s injured testicle Speaks!

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Sami Salo is down, but his Twitter stats are up

OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW!

Yes, Sami Salo’s not-quite-ruptured-but-seriously-slapshotted testicle has spoken. And to me, no less! Now get your ass over to TheCelebrityIndustrialComplex at TrueSlant and read the article in which I quiz Sami Salo’s ball! It’s the first time I’ve ever interviewed a celebrity testicle. Hell, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen balls that speak for themselves!

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My Stuff: the VF questionnaire

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What do you mean, the entry way isn't welcoming?

What do you mean, the entry way isn't welcoming?

When stuck for a blog post when you’ve already posted every goddam Blogthing and MarriedToTheSea on the planet, rip off Vanity Fair. No, seriously, it works every time. There are vast armies of Ivy League grads toiling away in Fifth Avenue sweatshops to come up with easily replicable, endlessly repeatable ideas, and it is a form of honouring their sacrifices (youth, beauty, education, Grammie’s trust fund) to steal their ideas.

After all, if they can live in Manhattan on an intern’s salary, they obviously don’t need our money, right?

So, we’ve done the Proust Questionnaire. We’ve snarked at the Best Dressed List. We’ve slavered over Lapo, and mourned Dominick Dunne. Having walked several hours today after having eaten nothing between the hours of 10am and 9pm, my brain is having a low-blood-sugar evening, which I am not fighting in the slightest but am aiding with the medicinal application of two and a half  ounces of Appleton rum and lime to the gullet.

Hence the prefab content ripoff.

If the rum makes it all the way to my brain, I may attempt originality; there is no expectation whatsoever of success at this, I’m just giving you the heads-up so if something comes out of left field you can blame it on me and not those poor, Lacoste-clad minions. Selah.

Which I stole from Hunter S. Thompson. But you knew that, right?

My Stuff

And fuck the people who say I have too much stuff; what I have, is not enough house, baby! You know where the Paypal button is; donate to support Operation Global Media Domination today! You think these henchmen come cheap?

My apartment looks like a liquor store and a library collided at high speed and the HAZMAT team hasn’t yet arrived.

Stealing the headings from the Alexander Wang quiz in the most recent VF, with occasional supplementationaryism as I see fit and can remember and hey, if there’s one person they should interview for this it’s Jessica Coen now that I think of it, the new editor of Jezebel, the Once and Future Present Against Her Better Instincts Gawkerite and tell her I sent ya, I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.

Clothes

Jeans: I’m not a jean fetishist. Victoria’s Secret London Jean, straight legged, stonewashed or dark indigo only

Sneakers: awesome wrestling booties I got at DemiCouture’s sale for $10

Watch: I loaned my Movado Museum gold watch with the real lizard strap to my much more responsible, High Modernist neighbor. I use my JesusPhone

T-Shirt: I have 27 Starbucks Gimme Tees from the 7 years I worked there

Loafers or Lace-Ups, I guess the girly equivalent would be Heels or Flats: flats, usually sneakers since I’m walking so far, but I also have some patent leopard-spotted platform 4" heels, for posing on bar stools.

Grooming Products

Shampoo: meh, whatever’s on sale

Presumably they meant to ask about Conditioner too, or it’d feel marginalized. We are all inclusive and shit here. Alberto VO 5 Hot Oil treatment once a week, whatever’s on sale the rest of the time. And Wella Kolesteral once a month.

Moisturizer (they ask men this? Whoa, and I thought the metrosexual was dead) Neautrogena Healthy Skin

Hair Product: Bumble and Bumble Surf Spray and Garnier Fructis Wax
Cologne: Trouble or Chanel 19 or Allure or DKNY Red Delicious or Kenneth Cole Black, which I’m mostly just wearing because it was on an incredible discount and it’s okay. Not great. Okay. Miss Dior Cherie or Dune Homme (which is far FAR superior to the women’s version) or the highly exotic KL would be great. Hint, hint.

Toothpaste: Crest. Are there others?

Soap: Roger & Gallet Lettuce Soap if I have money, Allenbury’s if I don’t (mostly), Juicybath if I’m lucky

Where do you get your hair cut? Future Hair at Cambie and Broadway. It’s a school, but it’s a GOOD school. And when I had to go on tv and was penniless, they did my hair for free.

Home

Where do you live? Vangroover, baby. The Downtown Eastside!

Car: Hahahahahahahahahaha, I can’t afford a bus pass!

Sheets: t-shirt knit in white or off-white or maroon or navy blue solids. Soft, soft, soft.

Coffee-Table Book: The Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones. So large it IS a coffee table. By the way, I hate coffee tables. I prefer end tables; you don’t bash your shins on them, and they’re handier for resting your refreshing beverage on.

Favorite Flowers: white roses, but Wang’s suggestion of white peonies and white cabbage mint roses is delightful. The only thing wrong with peonies is that they don’t smell as beautiful as they look.

Favorite Gadget: the Jesusphone, but specifically the iPod part of it, and the part that plays podcasts. I’m all over FitMusic podcasts, iRelax sleep inducing soundtracks that you mix, Lose it! fitness management, and the built in camera

Favorite Neighborhood Restaurant: The Irish Heather, followed by the Ovaltine

Favorite Cocktail: Hendrick’s Martini or a Plymouth Negroni, depending on my mood.

Favorite Dessert: I don’t really eat dessert; when did that happen? But Mango Pudding is the single greatest food known to humankind, so I’ll go with that.

Favorite Snack: anything small and frivolous-looking. I’m all about the Afternoon Tea and the Canapes.

Inspirations

Necessary Extravagance: magazines. I used to spend $80 a month, but that was back when $80 a month was LESS than my income!

Favorite Place in the World: my favorite place isn’t in this world; it’s in Narnia

Favorite Movies: Ran, V for Vendetta, Henry V, The Thin Man, Big Trouble in Little China. Yes, one is grandiose.

And of these all, the greatest is Big Trouble in Little China.

Favorite Vintage Store: Liberty if I’m on a budget, Value Village if I’m so skint I’m past budgets, and Deluxe Junk Co. if I’ve got actual money.

Style Icons: Catherine Deneuve and Angie Dickinson (hoop earrings FTW!)

Favorite Colour (I like my spelling better!) Silver Grey

Favorite Texture: Feathers!

Favorite Hotel: La Azotea in General Santos, the Philippines

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Casey Johnson and Brittany Murphy: Obit Crit in the Age of Celebrity

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By the time they’d Made It, they were already dead.
[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=Brittany+Murphy&iid=7414099″ src=”5/6/9/4/RIP_Brittany_Murphy_c829.jpg?adImageId=8951466&imageId=7414099″ width=”500″ height=”730″ /]
Casey Johnson may have been a dazzling firecracker of a socialite, and Brittany Murphy a talented, popular actress, both of them rich, attractive, and famous, but there is nothing they achieved in their short, glamorous lives that could have brought them anything approaching the level of fame they reached in death. Once they had fame, they had cultural significance, and in this age of iNarcissism cultural significance is nothing more nor less than the opportunity to examine ourselves.

Brittany Murphy: 18,400,000 Google hits, but only 9,630,000 if you remove results with “Dead” or “Death.”

Casey Johnson: 5,460,000, or 4,930,000 if you remove the ones with “Dead” and “Death,” but she’s gaining on Brittany. She moves fast, for a necronaut.

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=Casey+Johnson&iid=7345303″ src=”0/0/9/3/Famous_Stars_And_d4c1.jpg?adImageId=8951386&imageId=7345303″ width=”234″ height=”351″ /]

“Just noticed that @caseyjonsonJnJ gained roughly 3000 followers since dying. She’s dead you idiots! Thus, she won’t be tweeting anymore.”

TheCajunBoy on Twitter

Some people will do anything for attention. And boy howdy, do they ever get it.

“It’s so boring to do nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s, like, how many days a week can you actually go shopping? You get burned out. And you feel like shit. You think, What have I ever done to alter this world? What will people say? ‘Oh, she had a lot of shoes’?”
Casey Johnson, September 24, 1979 – January 4 (estimated), 2010

Well, now we know what people will say. They will say, in fact, nearly anything, as long as it skews strongly toward the poles of vicious snark or pie-eyed sanctimony. Both offer the warm embrace of community. In the orthodoxy of the church of celebrity, one is either a Gonzo Heretic or a True Believer, and there is no room in the commentariat for sweetly becoming discretion or Victorian scruples. The Silent Majority remains aloof, silent and safely out of the fray, betraying themseleves only by a faint phosphor trail as they page quickly past the comments. It’s mutual. We don’t want their kind ‘round here.

A quick glance through the comments on gossip blogs leads one to conclude the mainstream news sites have been smarter or at least luckier than blogs, free as most of them are from the yawning, existential abyss of the comment box and the braided streams of saccharine toxicity in the trailing threads, dangling off the posts like a comic villain’s seemingly-endless, sputtering bomb fuse.

On the one hand:

OH the pathos of having too much.

OOOOHHHHHH the pathos.

and

[S]he was raised to do one thing: spend money. She had no other contribution to offer the world. […] She was raised as veal with a black Amex.

Her life was a dollar sign and a camera flash.

And on the other:

I know, I know, but Brittany Murphy had diabetes. It turns out, diabetes is a perfectly manageable health condition today. It becomes considerably less manageable when you’re doing lines all day. […] [E]veryone I talk to seems so shocked that Brittany Murphy could have actually died of a drug overdose. It’s all I’ve heard all day: “She was so pretty! She was so cute! I loved her in Clueless! She couldn’t have really died from drugs.”

And, yes,

“[…] [O]ut of respect I wouldn’t rant about her being a cocaine addict. I love King of the Hill and she is the voice of Luanne. I love Brittany Murphy, she was so talented. I find it so shocking that she is dead. As weird as her marriage seemed, I thought that she would end up living a happy life with her husband.”

And why did you think these things, my friend? Because you need to think them. We need to think them.

Depending on who we think we are, if we care at all about the The Celebrity-Industrial Complex even recreationally, we need to believe:

a) that celebrities are out there living beautiful lives that give us hope that somewhere Prince Charming and whichever Disney Princess he ended up with (wasn’t that all of them?) are living happily ever after, probably in Brad and Jen’s old house in Beverly Hills

or

b) that celebrities are out there, lolling, dazed, on Charon’s yacht, being serviced by fifteen pox-ridden Gucci models while chopping Marie Antoinette’s tiara into glittery white lines and snorting them up a straw made of their own hollowed-out femurs.

As a lifelong and semiprofessional Snarketarian, I’d love to smugly conclude that the dividing line between the two groups is an IQ of 100, with the snarksters on the plus side, but unfortunately for my ego that’s just not it. One of the most intelligent men on the internet is Stephen Fry, and he’s notoriously gentlemanly, even to professional vulgarian Jade Goody, who could hardly have been said to have deserved it.

“Jade lived life under a magnifying glass. Magnifying glasses magnify (obviously) but they distort and they burn.”

That they do. And if you look at them just right, they also reflect.

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Welcome to Copenhagen!

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The coalition of the willing, to power

There’s nothing like the wholesome exercise of free speech and the right to peaceful assembly in the presence of the leaders of the Free World.

(remember the Free World? I know, so old-skool!)

Well, for those of you who remember what that was like, here’s a little slideshow of photos taken in Copenhagen during the recent summit by Vangroover homeboy Kris Krug and assembled by Vangroover muse Fiercekitty.

Enjoy?

A little background:

Krug is taking photos at the international summit for the TckTckTck coalition of prominent non-government organizations, including World Vision, Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

“It’s a little strange,” he said of his brush with Danish police.

“I’ve never been in an environment like this. I only kept myself from being arrested by showing my media credentials.”

Despite a wave of more than 1,100 arrests over the weekend, Krug said the majority of people at the conference are working peacefully to lobby through activism and social media campaigns.

And after you’ve watched this, go check the front page of your local paper. What’s on it? Happy Team Spirit Olympics? Adorable Cute Kid Story? Lost Puppy Found in Sitcom-Worthy Mixup? Single Mom of Thirty-Seven Wins Lottery? The Same Damn Thing As On The Other Paper? And then realize: You PAID for that paper.

You can do better.

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Olympic Mural Rises Again

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crying room original olympic mural

original photo by The Blackbird

Have you seen this mural?

Not recently, you haven’t, because it was removed on the orders of Vancouver City Hall, which is apparently in the business of making sure the Olympic Committee don’t get their feelings hurt, rather than in the business of defending the rights of Canadians to the free expression guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The gallery says in 10 years, it has never before been asked to remove any work.

The city issued the order under its graffiti bylaw, but it comes in the wake of a debate over a controversial city sign bylaw that opponents feared would allow officials to stifle anti-Olympic expression.

“It was pretty clear to me that it was because of the context of the work,” says Colleen Heslin, who runs the Crying Room, a small studio focusing on emerging artists.

Ms. Heslin points out that over the years she has hung about 30 murals there, and has never had any trouble. She has also used that space as a giant chalkboard, allowing passersby to write or draw whatever they wanted (which included swear words) and was never asked to remove that either.

In fact, when her landlord, Peter Wong, received a notice from the city telling him to remove the graffiti from his building, he had no idea what they were talking about. “I called them and said I cannot find the graffiti. And they said the sign [the mural] is graffiti…”

Patrick Smith, director of Simon Fraser University’s Institute of Governance Studies, said the removal of the sign is symptomatic of the high demands the “Olympic movement” places on its host cities. He believes Vancouver will be the beginning of a shift away from the modern Olympic era, with communities saying the cost of hosting is too high.

“A lot is asked of communities, and it seems to me this is a perfectly good example of where we’ve gone too far,” he said. “There’s no other way to describe it other than overreaction, but it’s the city trying to protect a brand that’s not the city’s brand. It’s the Olympic movement’s brand.”

Malcolm asked if the one in the bottom right-hand corner was Gregor Robertson.

And there was mourning throughout the land, or at least the Downtown Eastside. Even the revered and untouchable Globe and Mail, which had at first featured the image in its article, got out the virtual putty knives and scraped it right off their website, and the bittersweet little mural was removed from the face of the Earth AND the Googleplex.

But not for long, for over on Facebook a spontaneous, outraged movement started, a movement with sharpie-inscribed samizdat tee shirts and all manner of Olympic Mural as Facebook Profile Pic mayhem, and soon, just like in Peter Pan when Tink is dying and you clap your hands to save her (you DO clap your hands, don’t you? And ring a bell at Christmas, so an angel gets its wings? Of course you do, because you don’t want me to come over there and give your sorry motherfucking ass the beat-down), the heartfelt wishes of the good little boys and girls and the undecideds notthatthere’sanythingwrongwiththat all over the Downtown Eastside were heard and the mural rose again.

Here it is as of now:

Crying Room Olympic Mural Dec 13 2009

And, for as long as it lasts, you can see it in my Flickr stream, in my Facebook photos, on this blog, and at Main and Cordova.

As far as I can tell, it’s the original piece, with a little bit of touching up around the smiley face.

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