This cruel Grim Reaper of an economy has gone too far. It came for magazines. It came for books. It came for banks. But now, it has come for our Muzak.

McCain couldn't beat Obama by painting him as a celebrity. He is a celebrity, and people love it! But other celebrities are getting greedy now. They're trying to work their way into the Obama cabinet.

Did you know that hip hop videos have been scientifically proven to subtly embody everything you need to know about the state of US popular and political culture? Proof in four easy examples:

A German billionaire killed himself after hefty stock losses. A French money manager committed suicide after losing billions to Bernie Madoff. Is shame confined to the Old World?

All subversive things in our culture must eventually be co-opted by the very things that they subvert. It's the American way. The American Apparel ad spoofer—who had a months-long run of fame for creating super-porny ripoffs of AA ad posters (which eventually turned out to be Photoshop fakes by the people at Stereohell)—has now become the subject of an actual American Apparel ad. In Vice magazine, naturally! Click through for photos of Dov Charney's victory over artistic mockery:

Small Businesses. Our old friends at Losanjealous happened to spot two signs posted around Melrose, usually stacked and taped to telephone polls, advertising : 1) a lonely L.A. Public Library employee who's recently made a little money on the side with a self-publishing business, and 2) a rare first edition of a comic book by Wolverine's very own adamantium-fortified little girl, entitled Super Hello Kitty Girl's Adventures I Love My Daddee. Also available: Taco Bell, The Smurfs, movies. Call now! [Losanjealous]

Prepare to die, entitled Conde Nasties! Conde has always had a well-deserved reputation as the most opulent and self-important of all magazine publishing companies. Those days are coming to an end. The (gender-neutral!) diva culture that spawned The Devil Wears Prada and a million young aspiring media people who thought that a magazine employee could live the lifestyle of an investment banker—it's all on the way out. We come to bury you, Conde Nast culture, not to mourn you. Contemplate this, special ones: you may soon be forced to travel in (and pay for) common taxi cabs, like the poors! And it gets worse:

Jesus Christ, while you weren't paying attention Disney has been busy insinuating itself into every niche of your consumer lifestyle. Do you consider yourself a fashionable person with fancy urban tastes who would never be caught dead wearing the winking Goofy sweatshirts and Tinkerbell baby-tees that are so popular in America at large? Better check your labels. Disney is determined to be included in your style, at all costs! The Death Star-like company is branching out, launching "exclusive" fashion lines that are only sold at upscale stores, home furnishings, and other products designed not for those people who love Mickey Mouse. Repeat: you may own a Disney product that does not have Mickey Mouse on it.

You know what was sort of fun? When like around the year 2000, comedies about men stopped being about complete fucking idiots and the sassy exasperated women who love them and became comedies about slovenly yet lovable dudes who may chase the muff around, but in the end really just want to fall in love. They weren't the most progressive of films, but they were funny (Wedding Crashers, Old School, etc.) and at times endearing (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up). But you know what isn't fun? The odious culture of Bro that Daily Intel is righteously angry about that sprang up like a nacho-cheese-smelling weed in the newly tilled field of gender studies created by these films. I mean look: there are now books like Brocabulary: The New Man-i-festo Of Dude Talk and a social networking site called BroBible that allows dudes to "share stories of weekend revelries and exchange tips on romantic endeavors" (so basically, eHighFiving about Jaeger and pussy). There's also The Foggy Monocle—a site we admit to sometimes enjoying, except when there are posts like this. And, as the coup de grâce, there is the Brody Jenner reality program, punnily called Bromance. It's just gone too far! Beer and farts and pretzels and bikinis and boorishness and messy rooms and unwashed hair and sloppy Band of Brothers-isms and all that is sort of endearing for a bit, but the minute it becomes so hyper-commodified like this, co-opted by big ol' marketing strategies, it, like so many other trends, becomes so epically embarrassing that I can barely bring myself to admit that a book called The Bro Code even exists. But what's the corrective for it? I mean, is the bro-ness blowback from the cult of Ladybusiness that was heel-clacked and button-snapped into existence by Sex and the City? Will this dudenami eventually ebb back into the sea of the gender war, and we'll have another placid few years of mild Friends-ian sexual dynamics to apathetically contend with? At this point, I sort of hope so. Because if I hear one more thing about guy code (even though it is used in the hilarious It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) or bro-ness, I just might have to get all up in your face with hilariously clueless karate moves or like a little kid with glasses or an Asian chick or something. You know, something that's bro-funny. Actually funny bro-ness:

Islam people: they're just like us! They go on Facebook and start groups and then spend hours and hours arguing with each other over bullshit. Except they're arguing about, like, god, instead of The Hills or whatever. You thought that the battle for Arab hearts and minds was playing out in the slums of Iraq? No, it's all about some upper middle class grad student nerd in Egypt talking shit online!

What do you call a party with a huge proportion of women with huge proportions, bleached blond hair and garish makeup? If you picked: "Just Another Night in Hollywood," or "Just Another Night at the Strip Club," or "Just Another Night in My Bedroom," take a number and go to the back of the line. Rather, the party in question —held at the appropriately named World of Wonder gallery on Hollywood Boulevard— was for a very specific, large-proportioned, bleached-blond beauty. No, not Jenna Jameson. This would be someone with actual talent, not to mention a huge gay following. OK, fine, I'll tell you. Dolly Parton! Co-curated by E! Online columnist Marc Malkin and Steven Corfe, the Dollypop exhibition featured over 40 artists, all of whom answered their call for Dolly art with a certain fervor. "We were actually surprised actually how responsive people were when we just told them, 'Dolly Parton,'" said Steve. "There's a lot of closet Dolly fans out there." Of course, an event such as this inspires people to pay homage. So, it was appropriate that we were greeted by a Dolly Door Girl. Inside, we were seeing double and triple Dolly's. There were even look-a-likes for other celebrities who seemed to have gotten lost. There was a Rick James look-a-like, and a Sophia Loren dead ringer that had us completely confused for five minutes. James St. James interviewed some of them for his show on WOW TV. (I thought I was hallucinating and seeing New York club kid Richie Rich's body double, and then, realized OMG, it kind of was Richie Rich's body double!) No detail went unnoticed. Pink champagne (what else?) was served. Some guy with a contraption on his head was hanging out and taking in the Dolly art. [Ed. Note - That's the TMZ "Dollhouse Dude".]

The New York Times announced today that it's (finally?) starting a dedicated Media desk. The beat has been split between the Business and Culture sections, but now the paper is pulling a dozen reporters together and moving them to the third floor—the floor between the other two sections, and where the top Times editors now sit. Symbolic! It's all about "convergence," they say. But why now? And, look who's not going to be assigned to the Media desk: The Times' most visible media writer and newly minted authorial rock star, David Carr! We've emailed NYT Culture editor Sam Sifton for an explanation. Regardless, this has to be interpreted as a move that assigns more importance to the media beat. The Times currently gives over the bulk of its Monday business page to media stories, and there's no indication that that will change. The selection of that page's editor, Bruce Headlam, to head the new desk is a major promotion for him. A united media beat, though, will presumably be better able to coordinate its coverage so that it's competing every day of the week—which will become ever more important as the Wall Street Journal continues its own transition into a general-interest, business-friendly paper. The WSJ's media coverage is heavy on marketing, but it is naturally the Times' biggest competitor for the most important media stories. The full memo from the Times:

Hello, class. Welcome to Punk Rock 101. Today's lesson is about the seminal LA punk band the Germs, who are finally getting thanks to a new biopic called What We Do Is Secret (playing for the rest of this week at the Nuart). For those of you who are not familiar with the band or why they're deserving of a movie, here's a quick cheat sheet. The Germs made history because they were A) completely insane and B) their singer, Darby Crash, committed the self-mythologizing move of killing himself back in 1980. Unfortunately, he happened to pick the day before John Lennon was murdered to intentionally overdose on heroin, so most people didn't even notice. Flash forward nearly 30 years. In order to support the film's release, three of the original members of the Germs (including former Nirvana/Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear) have been playing shows around town with Shane West, the ER hunk who portrays Crash in the flick. I saw one of the shows the new-and-improved Germs played this weekend, and I'm here to answer a few pressing questions, like: Did they suck? Did Shane West suck? Would people bleed? How hot was Bijou Phillips?

Hey everyone, IvyGate would love to introduce you to a charming new member of Princeton's incoming class, one "Stephany Her RoyalHighness" of Facebook. Probably DYING to escape the sweltering heat and unwashed rubes of Plano, Texas, Stephany has penned something of a manifesto for her freshman year, and posted it to the Princeton 2012 Facebook Group. Sure, it's a wildly elitist piece of work, starting with "do not let ANYONE tell you that you are not better than them, because you are," and continuing on to, "You have deserved this. You are Hitler the fourth, Alexander the Great the Second, Napoleon the Fifth, here to destroy the world we know." But also, and perhaps more importantly, it's a sort of cartoon Ivy League elitism as plausibly imagined by someone from a politically conservative Republican family in a place like, say, Plano, Texas. So maybe the post is a mocking satire? Or an escapist fantasy? You try figuring it out:

I can't remember any other politician in recent memory who has inspired artists as much as Barack Obama. From the moment I saw the Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster, I knew that Hillary Clinton's presidential bid was toast. Just as she had inspired t-shirts eight years ago that gave an indication she was gaining enough buzz to enable her to win the Senate seat, I knew that Obama had captured the imagination of the general public when his visage turned into iconography. But for all the artists who have been jumping on the Obama bandwagon of late, there's one artist who has been dedicating his time to making art about the politician long before it was trendy. Ray Noland, aka Cro (Creative Rescue Organization), presented a blink-and-you'll-miss-it show at the HVW8 Gallery last weekend. Tag along as I take you on a quick-run through the inspiring exhibition.

You know the night is not going to go smoothly when your frazzled blonde waitress still hasn't brought your wine out, despite the fact that it's been 20 minutes since the second time you checked in on it. Thanks to this oversight, now your bladder is full from drinking water and you're about to eat the table because the only reservation you could get at this hot shit new place was 9:30pm. Welcome to Gjelina, a new eat local, small-plate, outrageously trendy restaurant which soft opened on Abbot Kinney on July 20. The chef, Travis Lett, did time at Tengu, and the general manager, Robert Schwan, comes from the stellar Japanese locale Wabi Sabi. Unfortunately, our first visit to Gjelina only got worse from there.At least the restaurant itself was nice to look at.

Ladies and gentlemen, the proud new owner of the FSU Middlebrow Remix Version of Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men is Andrew Krucoff-the former "Gawker Mascot" once fired by Conde Nast for leaking to this website. He was also recently called a "pussy" by the author in question, Keith Gessen! You can see the circle of life turning, turning. So what will become of this coveted and (we daresay) historic volume? All can now be revealed:

As an ex-New Yorker who is brand spanking new to L.A., the concept of downtown being a dead zone is quite strange. And having only driven through late at night (going the wrong way, on a one-way street, natch) I was curious to see what an L.A. downtown art walk would be like (held every second Thursday of the month from 12 to 9). Art Walks in Seattle’s Pioneer Square were fun, but were too often filled with "Look ma, I has knitted you a rainbow hat!"—a/k/a bad hippie art. And the Chelsea Art Walks in NYC were impenetrable and thick with snobbery and unintentional comedy: rich people wearing all black, posing seriously in front of pictures with their heads cocked just so to the sides. L.A.’s version proved to be far more pleasant and interesting—exhilarating even. Won't you join along as I take you on a photographic tour?

The $7 hot dog has new competition at Shea Stadium: the homey slurry of deliciousness that is Kozy Shack pudding. "Kozy Shack, which is based in Hicksville, N.Y., is trying to position its products as a healthy alternative to the foods that most people look forward to at a ballgame." Since it's a mixture of cream, sugar and eggs, a baseball stadium is probably the only place that Kozy Shack is, by comparison, healthy. Custard-skeptics argue that "Walking into a game, that's the last thing that I'd want." These people have never experienced the raw pleasure of spitting tapioca pearls through a straw at people 3 rows in front of you. Kozy Shack will continue to give out free pudding one day each month through September. The next pudding day is July 25. Let's hope Kozy Shack has invented a flavor in orange and blue by then.