‘Tis a Pity These Bitches Are Hoes

I knew that one day the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of my mainlining Real Housewives and that of the Big Top, otherwise known as Music, would have to collide simply because I share a starved, near exhausting, yet unrepentant passion for both. Still, why did it have to take none other than the shocking death of David Bowie to make this otherwise inconceivable thing happen ever at all?

Two months later, while I remain yet inconsolable, on this immensely bluer and unspeakably flat-lined planet Earth now, without Mr. Bowie, I must say, I was the last to have seen it coming. But as so many truly terrifying, unwelcome, paradigm shifting events in the brief history of time and particularly that of our strange existence, this one snuck up and hit like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for our species to theoretically and hypothetically evolve–depending on which way you view such a disposable spectacle as the Grammys.

This tenuous chasm, then brings us to this debatable point of why this mash-up and little tempest in one of Lisa Vanderpump’s gilded, petal pink tea pots should be dragged on a stage where Intel sponsored a Grammy tribute to an artist as vastly influential and as great as a veritable modern day Mozart. Yes, beautiful people, take heart in your time of darkness, in knowing that you have lived in an era where David Bowie also graced our planet. So let’s get that established and out of the way, while I go about shaping this little ditty that could be written in the stars already, somewhere in the relative and unphathomable recesses of-space-time .

It starts with a title for an article that screams to be born (“Tis a Pity These Bitches Are Hoes”) after which I will take my striped tail in my paw and bow profoundly to the late and truly great Mr. Bowie–because, let’s face it, after that Oompa-Loompa-as-Elvis, Grammys debacle that Lady GaGa delivered as tribute to the inimitable Starman-now-returned-to-the-stars–how could I have anything else on my aghast mind–still?!

I know it came from a good place (a tequila fueled Tuesday karaoke night at Andale’s in Puerto Vallarta) and I know she’s one of the millions of circus acts in music who pledge their entire career to him–as they should!–but what in this world, where Adrienne Maloof is nuthin’ but a nobody, would I expect from a cheesy award show that squanders gramaphone statuettes on the likes of Meghan Trainor–the veritable Anna Kendrick of music!–instead of handing them to the more deserving winner of this year’s talent show at your local junior high?

All I wanna say is that I should have known not to expect anything profound nor moving from the Grammys, and I should have saved whatever tears I continue to shed for the late, great genius I can’t help but know is nowhere to be found in this sorry world where Adrienne Maloof is but a nobody and YoFo (Yolanda Foster Hadid) should be made to ride behind Kimbecile’s (Kim Richard’s) flatulant Disney ponies through meandering Malibu canyons, in perpetuity, for being a persnickety, insufferable, tick bitten bitch.

Sooo, how did I veer off into GaGa doing a cheap Elvis for Bowie? I’ve got that title stuck in my mind for a Real Housewives ditty and it, like many magical, wildly beautiful and often, imperceptible, yet nonetheless shimmering things that have been gifted to us on this planet, it, too, came from the Starman-now-returned-to-the-stars.

“‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” is the title of a song from Mr. Bowie’s last and miraculous album, “Blackstar” (conceived as he was dying!) and inspired from an obscure English play of days of yore. I think it’s a great title to tweak just enough to fit in with our Real HoWos (Housewives) we hate others more than ourselves for loving. As for the Grammys–that soggy cake that Richard Harris left out in the rain back in ’69 and that Milli Vinnilli made us eat up in 1990–I hate them vehemently more and more each year. As much as Brandi Glanville can hate this stupider, bluer planet now, in which she’s a knock-kneed has-been and wherein Adrienne Maloof should have been never, all of these years.

As two of you may know, I used to do my most emphatic writing via Vulture posts. But now, I’ve taken to ranting on Spacebook, instead. Considering I’ve not written much lately, due to grief, I’ll take it wherever I can get it out of me.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss Mr. Bowie. It’s unending. He was my hero of all heroes. Paradoxically, the finality of his death just swims in a luminous, dream-like-lack-of-substance. January proved beyond brutal and February was no better as these awful corporate wiener roasts–I’m looking at you, too, Superbowl Half-Time-Tin-Tinny-Show!–are garish and not even campy ghoulish. Just frigging garish. As much as the frigging, glaringly garish, shrieking at nothing that the Real Screech Owls and Howler Monkeys of the O.C. can summon, dressed in their ill-remembered 80s dayglo, lace gloves and single earring at a Bunco party gone to h-e-double-hockey-sticks in a hand-basket in less time than it takes to collectively weed out the need for a word like porte a cochere.

As for Meghan Trainor–she’s one step below the bleachers at the junior high talent show. I do guffaw to my bad self when I call her the Anna Kendrick of music–and please imagine Anna’s pinched face as being frozen, thus unable to have ever delivered a single note with it–and please don’t let me say rodent face, for Jimmy Crackcorn’s sake!, as that may be cruel, still, neither of us really cares.

Oh, and as for Taylor Swift getting her billionth Grammy–oh-why-oh-why wasn’t she made to have received it outside in the Staples Center’s parking lot this time?! And where was Kanye when I needed him most this year to help show her the way?

As the Austrian Emperor declared to a bewildered Mozart after his sublime “The Abduction at the Serraglio” opera’s premiere in “Amadeus,” “Too many notes” and not ever enough dignity–especially where a smidge of such should have been summoned, for an artist as singularly influential and as fiercely original as Mr. Bowie. But alas, it proved impossible to ask of people who hear music the way that most patients in insane asylums laugh at Three Stooges skits after their thorazine’s kicked in.

With all due respect to Ms. GaGa who is an ardent Bowie fan and performed from her heart and not her nose, I’m sure, I have to insist both she and the iconic Thin White Duke would have been better served by the Mother of Monsters if she’d just settled down and did one or two of his beautiful songs, while Intel did whatever the fuck they thought the sheeple and the Corporate Grammys agreed the rest of us deserved–no?!

In the beginning, where GaGa lent her likely brokenhearted face, like a canvas that was morphing into liquid colors that Intel used to paint on holographically ethereal, iconically other-worldly Bowie personae we’ve all come to know–and through which he changed our entire species–throughout his brilliant career, well,that made me cry–but I continued to cry from sheer and unbelieving shame as it all devolved into an Adderal fueled, third rate, two-bit, off the strip, cheap Vegas act. It was beyond hideous and simply grotesque. Bordering on unwittingly offensive, even.

There are countless, profoundly grieving and fiercely impacted music artists that don’t fit into the teeny, commercialized, corporate box that Intel and the Grammys try to pass off–or genuinely wouldn’t know–as original art, that would have done this fiercely original modern day Mozart wondrous and solemn justice as tribute to his passing, but alas, the Grammys and the music world at large, has no ear and wouldn’t know a Mozart if one fell to Earth to completely and forever change it during his 69 years of borrowed time here.

In whatever constitutes this perceived, yet forever altered reality now, how can I be sunnily disposed after witnessing both the Superbowl and the Grammys on a planet where no one could do half of the audacious and truly magical things that Bowie did for 40 years –some of them in his sleep, even? Sigh. The stars really do look very different today. What more can I say? ‘Tis A Pity These Bitches Are Corporate Hoes and that Time–The Mother Of All Bitches and Hoes–is the biggest of them all. Yet, Time is also the Great Equalizer, so stay tuned for how profound and truly worthy of a tribute it’ll exultantly pay to the late and truly great David Bowie. A tribute like none of us mere mortals could have dreamed to bestow, least of all, dared imagine.