All right, bitches, I won’t sugarcoat it:

Rome is burning.

Lately, I’m looking at everything — everything — around me and finding it all fucked-up. Mass hysteria has set in. I wouldn’t trust this clown car cast of Republican Presidential hopefuls to give me a passable handjob, much more pull this nation out of decline. All I could do this past Saturday as I beheld international recording sensation Lana Del Rey performing a song on SNL about a chick apparently getting cock-blocked by frickin’ video games while looking like a doped-up cocker spaniel and sounding like an IBM computer that got roofied was think how much dick she had to take to get that record deal. Why is Smirnoff employing a glorified replicant hooker as their spokesmodel? Was Denise Richards busy? Half the cast of Jersey Shore has book deals under their belts, and the other half is presumably preparing albums of spoken word poetry.

I feel like the misanthropic offspring of a doomed one-nighter between Travis Bickle and Tyler Durden, neither paying my ass a dime in child support.

Even gay porn, which used to provide me a shameful thrill and carefree break from reality has been leaving me feeling hollow. Is it that as the condoms have come off the star quality has diminished exponentially? Maybe it’s that the newest title in my library is from 2004? Could it be that I’m sick to my dick of all the callow Timmys, Tobys, Colbys, Kellys, and Rileys whose names end with naughty, naughty boy Y vowels?

Anyway, I was reminded of everything excruciating that currently plagues the medium last week upon receiving an email press release via Cybersocket. Now, there’s nothing more transparently self-serving than a press release, but this bitch — which was blasted to millions of addresses — took the cake. Apparently, some twink named Riley Price is — No! Please! Don’t say it!” — retiring and leaving a huge hole in our collective consciousness. Stop. The. Fucking. World.

The hell are they talking about?, I mused, slack-jawed, as I read this incredible piece of tripe. “WTF!? Who gives a shit!?” my esteemed colleague David K. emailed. What we encountered was akin to the Pethouse Plaything confessional sequence from Amazon Women On The Moon, and I’m still laughing out loud.

Prepare yourselves to believe again. (read the full article)

It was a joke my father told me he once heard a hooker shout out from her corner:

“The fucking’s free — it’s the room that’ll set ya back fifty dollars!”

Let’s just say that line proved all to apt while watching Showtime’s Gigolos — an experience that at once managed to be trashily explicit and lamely skittish about the prospect of men on-the-take letting cameras in on the action.

With virtually every other type of fame whore — aspiring actors, amateur models, celebrity chefs, cut-throat real estate agents, personal stylists, pampered trophy wives, and even lady hookers — having already been expended in the Reality TV landscape, I guess it was inevitable that male escorts would get their turn on the rack. Gigolos would probably feel more at home on Logo or Bravo, its presentation by Showtime justifying the strictly female clientele the men frequent. Male-on-male exploitation (the best kind) is apparently too taboo for even cable, and so we the audience are privy to what I would assume is the comparatively niche-marketed Straight Male Escort scene — Showtime’s cams following around five studs-for-hire from a Las Vegas escort service as they navigate the high-end sex worker circuit. (read the full article)

The top three things that people who don’t do them for a living think are oh-so-simple: teaching, writing, and comedy.

Yes, an actual series has a group of highly-functioning, super enthusiastic, oh-so-well-rounded young men — including a poet, two musicians, a jock, a gymnast, a martial artist, two former cheerleaders, and a Jersey Rapper — vying for the title of best human approximation of a Mattel icon.

“Genuine Ken” is an oxymoron for the ages. I read once that if Barbie with her physical proportions actually existed in reality, she’d be unable to stand upright and would have to move about on all fours. As for ladies’ man Ken, he was always more of a lifestyle accoutrement than an actual love interest, just Barbie’s illegitimate daughter Skipper had to live the lie of being passed off as her sister and black friend Francie was only a token curio. Phony white bitch.

Not sure what’s scarier — the idea that there are really damaged, infantile women who hold a Ken doll up as their ideal mate (that’s what Real Dolls are for, gals) or the realization that it’s this easy to assemble so many men who give off unsettling Andrew Cunanan vibes in one place.

Having said that, I’d still do Blockhead, Hairdo, and Eyebrows just for the hell of it.

…or at least ormolu-varnish?:

“Corbin Fisher is making a public offer to former model Jake Lyons to end months of negotiations and legal wrangling regarding a copyright and trademark infringement case.

Although the company feels it would not likely recover the total judgment amount from Lyons (whose real name is Justin Krueger, aka ‘Justin Lyons’ and ‘Greg’), it feels he should bear some responsibility for his actions and donate to the gay community.”

Money flowing away from hustlers for the public good? Redistribution of wealth!

Watch in fucking amazement! as a lone child systematically assuages all your unsaved Humanist doubts about the Hereafter. See! extremely blonde Gretchen Carlson succumb to her go-to operating mode: wide-eyed “Oh Gosh! Won’t That Be The Day!” astonishment tempered with smarmy, lip-glossed abashment. Hear! a young boy relate his near-death ingress into the Kingdom of God with about as much wonder as it takes to survive an inconvenient nosebleed. Behold! as he describes the Chick Tract-inspired face of Jesus thanks to cue cards located conveniently to his right off-camera. Hurl! as he discloses clandestine family knowledge that could just have easily been gleaned through casual observation, snooping, or gentle coaching! Void your bowels! at the sight of a father ensnaring his child in a transparent pretext for cash and face time.

Coincidentally, I can personally attest that Oz is 100% for realz because I went there last Friday by way not of botched surgery, but with a bottle of Smirnoff Pomegranate Martini on an empty stomach.

The grasses smelled of spearmint, and the trees were ripe with lunchboxes.

Hat tip to The Stranger.

Only two highly symbolic locales ever seem to be perpetually invoked to embody the disparities of our fiscal meltdown: Main Street and Wall Street.

Are Andy and Opie Taylor having to ally with those hillbilly moonshiners in order to continue to afford their fishing lures, and is Patrick Bateman’s Amex Gold Card being refused when he tries to order a coterie of high-end escorts after killing his accountant with a power drill?

But what about Easy Street in Pornopolis? Does no one care about the sacrifices and indignities our favorite gay porn gods have had to endure in a sharp and jagged downturn?

Gay porn is really a subsidiary of the male escort/sex worker scene, lucrative in its own right, but still mainly functioning as a virtual PR firm and calling card for the sex brokers. Long-believed to be recession-proof along with other “vice”-related industries, even All-Male Action has taken a serious hit in the past two years. Revenues not just for DVD and magazine sales are down, but so are the returns for Web-based smut and the dancing circuit. Many is the urban escort who’s resigned himself to turning fewer high-roller tricks in favor of a more economy class clientele, and personal training and/or massage therapy bullet points are not necessarily placed in ironic quotations in resumes anymore. A top-tier star’s name and face just don’t ring up the dollar signs like they did five years ago. (read the full article)

It’s been two weeks since we checked in with Celebrity Psychic, Miranda Celeste-Walters, about the inner worlds of Hollywood’s hottest studs. We needed our fix, so we called her direct line to ask for a personal peek into the daily dalliances of heartthrob, Pierce Brosnan. Here’s the revealing interview that transpired:

Nightcharm: So what can you tell us about Pierce?

Miranda Celeste-Walters: I can tell you that he’s eating a lot of crackers these days, and I don’t know why. (laughs) I’ve just been feeling this from him. These could be health-oriented crackers.

NC: So more likely, these are Triscuits and not Cheese Nips?

MCW: Well, if you compare the nutritional data of Triscuits versus Cheese Nips, you’re going to find a lot of the same things. You’re going to be shocked at how similar they really are. We’re only talking about a 30 calorie difference, per serving, for instance. These crackers, for Pierce, are not Triscuits or Cheese Nips. Maybe Vegetable Thins. (read the full article)

As much as we genuinely care that “Heather Graham got a Methven Satinjet shower head at the Michael Jordan Invitational on January 17 in the Bahamas,” we feel that the tabloids aren’t really keeping us adequately up to date on the down-and-dirty with regards to our favorite gay icons. We barely know a thing.

That’s why we’ve invited Celebrity Psychic, Miranda Celeste-Walters (right), to give us her unique insight into the sexual shenanigans of five prominent gay heartthrobs, and more specifically, why you may or may not want to sleep with them as much as you think you do.

Tom Ford: This looks like good sex, but I’m receiving something else. There’s a note below the surface here, and it has to do with childhood loss, and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. This would not be good sex. I’m seeing antibacterial hand cleanser in almost every room, and also in the car. There is anger associated with shoes as well. Stay away from the shoes.

Elijah Wood: Very pleasant, but needy in ways that would not be immediately visible. There would be a lot of phone calls, and that could be good or that could be bad. Elijah writes angry emails. He doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the throes of sex, his voice is going to be higher than you’d expect. If you find yourself at odds with this delicate man, I recommend gifts of cheese.

(read the full article)

Types. Everyone has one. Everyone is one.

The Boy Next Door. The Dreamboat. Mr. Right. Mr. Vain. Big, Dumb and Slutty. Every cliché exists in life. Some lose ground and become merely quaint. Others gather stream and become iconic. The It Type of the moment: Douchebags. They’re everywhere, and this emerging new type is easy to nail but hard to nail down. Not soulful, tortured or cool enough to be true Bad Boys and too oversexed to be geeks, it seems to be sheer unwarranted self-belief in all-consuming ego that drives them. Hollywood — the lodestar of all that we love and loathe sexually — is churning these dipwads out by the bucketful. With a sea of Summer’s Eve to wade through, how ever does one choose the pioneers?

Now, for your pleasure and edification, the definitive Top Ten Guide to the Douchebag Pantheon featuring a dazzling array of deluded D-bags not soon forgotten:

10. Wilmer Valderrama: Fun-Sized Douche

Like technically hot-from-the-neck down Dax Shepard and Sean “I couldn’t decide on a first name” William Scott, Wilmer is yet another Ashton Kutcher douche protégé. Wilmer really went against type on That ’70s Show by playing a petit, fey man-child with a strange name who could only get young women who had terrible emotional problems to spread for him. His real claim to fame is his role as Hollywood’s preeminent Virgin Surgeon.

All manner of unsuspecting young starlets are drawn to his magnetic douchiness. Either that or his immense tool, which Wilmer is always happy to boast about. Quoth the douche: “Honestly, I’ve been very blessed. This is the place where I will tell you, yes, I am cursed with this gift. It’s over 8 inches.” Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be deflowered by this sawed-off lothario so that he can later rate you on a scale of 1 to 10? Fate has smiled again on Wilmer as he’s now essaying the role he was born for: portraying Francis “Ponch” Poncherello in the upcoming C.H.I.P.s remake, a part once made famous by his predecessor douche equivalent Erik Estrada. (read the full article)