On last night's episode of the U.K.'s Celebrity Big Brother, heavyweight champ and Arthur remake actor Evander Holyfield said some barely intelligible nonsense about gay people, namely that homosexuality is a choice, like being "handicapped," and fixable.
"Cultural appropriation" is usually understood as a one-way street: A privileged outsider steals from a disenfranchised group and eats the profits. This is an easy enough narrative, but the truth is generally more complicated—see Little Richard's gratitude for Elvis Presley as an "integrator." Or take James Franco and Travis Mathew's new film Interior. Leather Bar, a fascinating instance of cultural "appropriation" that feels like cultural exchange.
Though it's as chic as a marching band and demands that you do that dorky dance along to it (a dance without any acknowledgement of one's hips, no less), perhaps you are like me and find the Village People's 1978 disco anthem "Y.M.C.A." endearing anyway. A feat of subversion that is still routinely played at the heterosexual pride-oriented outings better known as sporting events, the song has kids from 2 to 92 obliviously pantomiming letters along to barely veiled lyrics that tell of public man-on-man butt sex in the insanely debauched pre-AIDS era. In terms of gay culture penetrating the mainstream without the mainstream's knowledge, "Y.M.C.A." stands virtually alone in its reach and stealthiness (though Madonna's "Vogue" comes close—ball culture reached as far as Stephanie Tanner).
You may recognize Justin Jedlica from any of his dozens of TV appearances — his surgery-sculpted face is hard to forget. That, along with the rest of his body (the result of 125 cosmetic procedures in total), has earned him the nickname of the Human Ken Doll. He was profiled in detail on TLC's special My Strange Addiction: I'm a Living Doll last night, on which he described his ongoing surgeries as his "creative outlet." In the clip above, he attempts to creative direct one of them. It's for ab implants. He's previously described his strange addiction as "an art form." We live in a time when all you have to do to make art is label something art, so he at least has a case.
People eat, fuck, say, and do weird shit and I live for watching them do all of it (and more) on TV. Above is a megamix of some of my favorite ridiculous, disgusting, hilarious, shady, inane, nonsensical, and Vera Farmiga-freaking moments of the year in television. I hope you enjoy it as much as the Basketball Wives enjoy saying, "It could go real right or real wrong." I hope you enjoy it as much as that impish little 2-year-old that says, "Wheeee!" loves coffee. (She is, to me, the mascot of not only this video and my TV coverage but 2013 as a whole.)
"I'll be honest, I really wanted to win the Best Rap Video, but this Moonman right here stands for a lot more," the rapper Macklemore said earlier this year, holding the MTV Video Music Awards "Best Video With a Social Message" trophy. The honor was for the video accompanying his gay-equality anthem "Same Love," a song that he called "the most important record" out of everything he's written. "To watch this song in the last year spread across the world is a testament to what is happening right now in America on the forefront of equality," he told the crowd, echoing the song's self-important earnestness.
Last night, E! ran a two-hour documentary detailing the preparation for Britney Spears' upcoming Las Vegas residency and Britney Jean album. The entirety of I Am Britney Jean ran with its picture slightly elongated, which is weird (Britney's not even going through an overweight period) and at odds with the entire concept of documentary filmmaking. But whatever, I guess. This is E!, a place where the hardest news you're going to get is delivered by Giuliana Rancic. We cannot expect much of anything. See above for a scene in which the stretching is particularly noticeable, and also check out this comparison between stills from the movie that aired and the promo that ran in the days before it:
Isn't that adorable?
G.B.F. is a good-natured teen comedy about prom queens in search of gay best friends. Its depictions of affection are chaste and its language is clean. So why does it have an R rating?
Miley Cyrus appropriated Santa's lap as her own personal crotch-warmer at the Jingle Ball on Friday at New York's Madison Square Garden (see above), but she was a no-show at the Jingle Ball Boston show on Saturday night, thanks to inclement weather. That didn't stop the radio station from hosting the festival, Kiss 108, from claiming that she was there throughout the night, though.
Awww. Pop's hottest, most convincingly eternal couple, John Mayer and Katy Perry, stopped by Good Morning America to premiere their "Who You Love" video and, in the process, awkwardly suffered through their first-ever shared interview. They discussed their seating configuration woes ("We don't quite know what kind of body language we're supposed to be exhibiting at the moment—you get too close and it's too touchy-feely, you sit too far away they say, 'I don't see chemistry,'" lamented Mayer) and first date (they had dinner, reported Perry, adding fascinatingly, "We share music as a love together, you know, that's like a common interest so..."). And then Mayer talked about his adverse reaction to watching Perry in the studio:
Talking to director Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York) is about as close to having a conversation with a human embodiment of pre-Giuliani New York as you can get. It is trying and you have the feeling that you could get attacked at any second. Not that I would have wanted it any other way.
For some evil reason, E! devoted an hour of programming to Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt last night. The where-are-they-now special After Shock: Heidi & Spencer caught us up on two people we never wanted to hear from again (he gained 50 lbs., from eating pie and is in law school, she wants babies and is still distracted by shiny things).
"She wanted to make it very personal," said Britney Spears' manager Larry Randolph of the diva's eighth studio album, Britney Jean. Randolph said that back in September, right around the announcement of Spears' two-year residency in Vegas. Last week, the album finally arrived in stores and we are now able to hear for ourselves these confessional songs that are "all custom made for her, based on what's going on with her life and in her head."
Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed's newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of "the scathing takedown rip," Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.
Kanye West has been so present in the media lately, between promotional appearances and his regular mid-concert "visionary streams of consciousness" (as he calls them), that any interview warranting a mention must be pretty damn special. His showing earlier today on New York's Power 105 is one such interview. For over 40 minutes, the hosts (especially Wendy Williams' former sidekick, Charlamagne the God), pummeled Ye with questions, frequently pointing out his contradictions. These included:
