As a kid I grew up with my mother and grandmother’s copies of Rona Barrett’s Hollywood and The National Enquirer scattered around the house.

My grandmother especially was unapologetic about the gossip rags, and her ardor made it all the easier for me to revel in them too.

Some of my sweetest memories involve everyone in my family lying around on Sunday afternoons discussing Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand having sex together on the set of The Way We Were. Or at least how we imagined they were having sex together. Tabloid time like this was considered quality time in my family.

To this day I still argue with friends about the veracity of The National Enquirer, and why I still read it — explaining how the potential threat of high-cost litigation keeps the paper trustworthy. This pretty much guarantees that whatever sort of outrageous revelation they are publishing is fact-based (well, maybe).

And The Enquirer consistently releases lusciously lurid humdingers — year after year upping the ante to compete with the seemingly endless circle jerk of celebrity gossip blogs.

Within three days I must have read thirty different online spins on Star Jones‘ gastric bypass. One of them involving an alien probe theory that actively held me catptive until I realized I’d landed on a spoofing website. (more…)

Forget Clint-Obama-Rama. And our economy sliding over a cliff.

At Sunday’s Grammy Awards a cataclysm of titanic proportion occurred when Beyonce Knowles introduced a waiting-in-the-wings Tina Turner to a drop-jaw audience as … “The Queen.”

Come Monday an irritated
Aretha Franklin, always and forever to be known as The Queen of Soul, declared the following about the supposed contretemps:

“I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy.”

Franklin then made like Storm from the X-Men superheros team and with a severe sweep of her arm annihilated dozens of neighborhoods in Beyonce’s hometown of Houston Texas.

What Aretha may have lost in of-the-moment pop music relevance during recent years — where her musical output has been scattershot and weakly received — she seems to be making up for in sheer mass and madcap, could-give-a-fuck fashion chutzpah. (more…)

Super Bowl? Frankly, we prefer the Oscars.

Super Bowl for us is about the new beer commercials where guys make ever bigger jackasses of themselves and, of course, the always good for a laugh half-time show. (Will Britney be this year’s surprise, wowing the fans as she runs onto the field in straight jacket, amid screams and white-smocked orderlies chasing after her with butterfly nets? Only to be met by Dr. Phil rising out of the stage in a sinister puff of smoke, joining his bullfrog basso to her moany contralto for a kick-ass rip on Joey Ramone’s I Wanna Be Sedated. We can only hope.)

As for the actual football game that is played at the Super Bowl: not really our thing, darling. Football players, however … another story entirely.

And apparently we’re not alone. (more…)

Merry Christmas!
Somewhere between pornography and ironic post-modern art
lies Francesco Vezzoli’s trailer for an imaginary remake of the notorious Caligula

At this time of year, when the moon turns orange and the witches fly, we think back on Rosemary Woodhouse, the unwitting mother of Satan’s son from Rosemary’s Baby, and Marguerite Perrin, the batshit-crazy “God Warrior” from Trading Spouses.

One is fictional, one is very literally in the flesh, but both are sisters under the skin.

Rosemary and Marguerite have each, in their different ways, decided that the world is full of witches — and not the Molly Weasley cook up some dinner with a spin of the wand kind, but malevolent, soul-sapping hags — give or take a Ruth Gordon chatterbox with a Noo Yawk accent and a brash way of barging into your apartment to quiz you on the price of the drapes.

At first Rosemary — sweet, hip, Mia Farrow-esque Rosemary, so proud of her edgy Vidal Sassoon boy bob — laughs at the idea ("in this day and age!") Then a good friend hands her the book All of Them Witches, which holds a clue to the true nature of her neighbors, the baby she is carrying, and the strange dream she had at the time of conception that involved a wolf-like beast with claws and slit pupils. (more…)

John Waters is one of the icons of these post-Andy Warhol times.

Once hailed as a “Master of Sleaze”, the man with the creepy pencil mustache and the look of a drained vampire shunning the sun behind big swoopy sunglasses, John Waters has, with his films and books, subtly shaped the atmosphere of hip taste and pop intellectualism. It now drapes around him as comfortably as a well-made suit.

As the picture at left quietly attests, he is the essence of courtliness and chic, reminiscent, oddly, of Zachary Scott, the silky, duplicitous playboy who so brings our Joan to grief in Mildred Pierce. Yes, the bard of Baltimore has become stylish — after all.

Stylish and one of our sharpest gay humorists.

More culture critic, than funny man, his refreshing — at times, startling — takes on recent cultural events such as Britney’s MTV debacle or his own surprising commercial success with the musical Hairspray were on offer in an interview he gave a North Carolina newspaper, The Independent, before his talk there at Duke University. (more…)

Ah, the flotsam and jetsam of television.

When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Thankfully, we have The Soup to act as a pop culture strainer, capturing the Very Best of the Very Worst. Of course you’ve seen The Soup, the E! channel’s weekly review of celebrity gaffes and reality-show low points.

But even if you’re not a connoisseur of truly terrible TV, there’s still one terrific reason to tune in: sardonic host Joel McHale, right, a 6′ 3″ vision of hotness served up as the emcee.

At first glance, he could be a stubbly J. Crew catalog model or a Brit Pop frontman or one of those guys who turn up in straight porn as randy plumbers and pizza deliverymen. He is, in fact, the perfect guy, a combo of playful sexiness and a wicked streak of humor.

That a channel like E! would present a wet-dream like this is something of a miracle. E!, after all, is a low-rent netlet whose content consists of a drip, drip, drip of studio press releases, inane celebrity news, fawning star profiles, dopey Hollywood crime documentaries, and staged true life series devoted to bottom-of-the-barrel “personalities.” E! makes FOX look like PBS. (more…)

Macbeth in the buff — why hadn’t anybody thought of it before?

The idea was as natural as …well, as Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland and bubbling “I know! Let’s set Shakespeare to music!” And Judy bubbling back “But lets do it in Swing!”

When a theater company in Arlington, Virginia decided to put on a Macbeth for the 21st Century, director Jose Carrasquillo wanted something tribal and violent, something suggestive of “an animal-like clan and society.”

“Twenty minutes,” decided the critic for the Washington City Paper. “That’s about how long it takes to get used to the nudity in José Carrasquillo’s eerie, intelligent, and visually arresting Macbeth.”

A tad more skittish about the balls-out production, with its cast of mostly male actors (give or take a few witches), was the reviewer for the A.P. wire service: “Folks in the front sometimes cringe and move back a few rows during intermission,” the scribe reported sheepishly. “One man watched the play with a programme in front of his eyes, blocking out the lower half of his field of vision.” (Awwwww, the poor fragile darling. What? Were all the showings of Evening sold out?) (more…)