Tag Archives: Real Housewives

‘Tis a Pity These Bitches Are Hoes

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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.

TV Eye mirrors society’s veiled misogyny through Bravo’s Real Housewives shows

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In waxing philosophical and anthropological about one of my main mainliners–my addiction with Bravo’s Real Housewives of All Perdition shows– I take an Imax view into the darkness that the TV Eye reveals as it dispassionately prods beneath the frothy upper layers of my beloved shows. Here’s what I see.

The part about misogyny is something that is always bubbling just a tad beneath surface level for me. But that, in a grander scheme that we know to be far greater than the strange microcosm of the Real Housewives shows, is made all the more tangible by the invasive gaze of the TV Eye trained on these women. TV Eye. I’m going to blatantly use the Iggy Pop song that brought a merciless end to the sixties with its raging roar, to refer to the camera. I credit the brilliantly reckless and timeless Iggy Pop with putting an end to the “Love” decade with the beginning of that song’s defiant roar.

I’ve found myself using the words TV Eye in a few of my posts this week because I can hear the roar that heralds a wake up call. Here’s what I see when I use those two words in my own words from an article about the end of an era and the beginning of another:

“I wasn’t there but wish I could have been–without cowering under the table of music history.. Have you seen the footage, grey and grainy, on YouTube? Iggy Pop and The Stooges at some hippie dippy festival in–was it 1969? There he is, in all his sinewy shirtless glory, with his garage band scowling at a dumbstruck audience that still clung to the wilted, post-Altamont, trampled hope of peace, flower power and all you need is love, love, love. The hippies looked scared, but above all, their doom was heralded by the unleashed whirring raw power of the first chords in “I Wanna be Your Dog”, then sealed with the deeper, primal roar of “LOOOOOVE” that started the jittery roller coaster ride of “TV Eye.

“Love”—that catch word that they so embraced, was brutally hurled at them as a rhetorical defiant question, or insult. A reminder of their utopian bubble being burst by the merciless new Proto-Punk sounds raging from the amps. Poor hippies were clearly under siege by this nihilistic new reality bulldozing their dream, condemning it to the realm of all short lived and unfulfilled promises that time would not allow a generation to keep. And so came the love decade to its screeching end.”

There’s more, but you get the jest. I adore music and have been–and above all, still am (ridiculously enough) a two-bit music writer while I’m doing stranger things I never could have imagined. Still, I think in music, if you will. Dunno if it’s a crazy and convoluted way to say that Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes are all around us and altering what we know as the sum of our experiences as never before. Are we ready for this next paradigm shift? It’s here with or without us.

I happen to think that Iggy is a genius and although he first scared me (as even Bowie did), I recognized the raw power of genius and someone that is credited– with Bowie–to have steam rolled another era in music–or in Bowie’s case, “to have forced the world into my scheme of things.”

I think the TV Eye is now part of our altered shared experience. I think Warhol’s 15 minutes have changed television. I think reality shows can’t help but pick up what’s already there and shine its blinding mirror glare back at us so we have no choice but to see it. I think no one remains the same while that TV Eye is silently trained on this new Su-Reality. And it coldly mirrors a society that has always devalued us in it. Only now, we have to rubber neck at the train wreck that we’ve been helpless to prevent.

Please read me with a Bill Murray inflection, because that’s how I truly sound in my head and try to picture the defiance and insurmountable perseverance of Joan Rivers so it sounds funny while it screams.

Why are we surprised? About the world we live in and how it really sees us? Not just us as women, but men, too, as human beings with preassigned roles like well tailored straight jackets. Let’s go back to Bowie and how just visually he stuck his finger down his throat at it way back!

Anyway, I always say that my go-to hair fix for a bad hair day is a burqa…but, think about it. So what if it’s PI? I also say there’s no room for PC in comedy. I’ve learned to say what I want and I’ve had to say it louder–sometimes with a roar. Especially in that silly little boy’s club that music was and still is. I did resort to using just my initials for a first name–and while at it, threw in another for my MN–cause I didn’t have one–back in the day. Dunno if it was to gain that foot in the back door of music, or to watch the expressions when I entered for an interview. So Phuket!

Why are we shocked that it’s all darker than we expected? It’s been just as dark without the TV Eye. It’s just that now that thingie is making us uncomfortable by flaunting it. Everybody wants it to stop. But Reality TV is running rampant. And I like it, ’cause it’s making us remember things we want to forget. How strange that we’ve come here for escape or guilty pleasure–but bigger still, how wide awake now!

The Rise of Andy Cohen and the Real Housewives of All Perdition

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At first I was afraid—I was petrified— to even glimpse into the worlds of such unabashed fabulousity that would make me drool and want to ditch my simple life without an alternative place to go. No money, no go. No, woman, no cry! Kind of stuff that would make me pity myself to oblivion and beyond. I was intimidated by the worlds of the Real Housewives of any city. Yet, somehow, I got over myself. I tuned in and worse than a strung-out hippie from the sixties, I cannot tune out. I am deliciously, lasciviously and unapologetically addicted.

I gleefully watch and anticipate the shows, collectively, repeatedly, read sublimely written recap blogs and announce to my unbelieving friends that I find them to be beyond mere guilty pleasure and more so on the line of an anthropological study that I must partake in or else my real life would be lessened, somehow. How else would I ever learn the art of flipping a table, spin-twirl an exit and declare, with much unabashed aplomb, “Who gonna check me, boo?”

I’ve watched Andy Cohen rise from his humble roots, broadcasting Watch What Happens Live from what deceptively appeared to have been his parents’ basement a’ la Wayne’s World and foresaw, somehow, that he was indeed the one to watch. I’ve called his ascent into the Ubersphere of TV-land back from the day when he was seemingly just shooting the breeze about his creations—the brilliant The Real Housewives franchise. I thought he wasn’t kidding. I thought he would become Mr. Bravo TV. I thought one day he’d have superstars like Oprah, Cher, Gaga, clamoring to be in his kitschy Clubhouse, falling over their Le Boutins, phoning in from their compounds in Malibu or yachts on the Amalfi Coast—just as riveted and strung out as myself on my Craigslist sofa. I thought—get this!—that Camille Paglia would one day comment on it. And it’s come to pass.

My one regret, that time and reality itself cannot allow, is that the two Andys—Cohen and Warhol— can never be. How fabulous would it have been to have just seen the monosyllabic Andy Warhol at the Clubhouse? Warhol, who in the sixties, thankfully, coined the prophetic phrase that’s now become the cultural phenomenon of the ultimate surreality: In the future everyone shall be famous for 15 minutes. Mr. Cohen makes sure that those 15 minutes are forever caught on camera by following fame-hungry, well heeled and red soled women teetering on the edge of their mid-life crises in selectively privileged enclaves of American society. Ah, the two Andys—together—at the Clubhouse. Just how fabuliscious would that have been?