Twenty Third & Seventh

Only in New York...

From: the Sydney Morning Herald.  It's time for Chelsea residents to lobby Stanley for avant-garde toilet paper!

It's new, it's avant-garde. Is the world ready for dark toilet paper, asks Penelope Green.

An ink-and-gold Manhattan nightclub, Double Seven, recently carried new accessories in the men's and women's bathrooms: rolls of black toilet paper. You could hardly see them through the gloom, as the club's bathrooms are tiled in black, have black toilets and sinks, and are lit by candles.

Laurie Black, a customer relations manager who was there having a drink with her boss, tugged out a length of the stuff and squinted.

"It doesn't jump out," she said. "You'd think, wow, black toilet paper. Am I going to use this?"

Good question. Can toilet paper make it as an object of design, a touchstone of chic?

Paulo Miguel Pereira da Silva is the president of a Portuguese company called Renova, which has begun testing Renova Black at New York hot spots such as Frederick's Bar and Lounge and La Esquina.

Da Silva says black was an intuitive choice for toilet paper because it signals "avant-garde creative work". "In a design sense, black means irreverence, maybe touching a bit on the core nature of art, which is to break rules and set new ones. Culturally, deep down, Renova Black invites people to break down whatever might be limiting as common sense ideas."

Fashion makes me puke.

"Fashion is for people who don't have style"- Vivienne Westwood.

From some trash peddling website, this piece of unmitigated nonsense about Sienna and 'the Edie look'. I personally will injure any nongs seen wearing Edie hair who can't answer five basic questions about the woman! 

SHAG Salon offers a bold cut inspired by Sienna Miller’s latest ’do in “Factory Girl.” The movie won’t hit theaters until the end of the summer, but Miller’s style and her portrayal of Andy Warhol’s playmate Edie Sedgwick is already making waves.

“It’s sexy, clean, ’60s mod look - ultra short blond on top with hints of chocolate brown underneath and heavy on the bangs - very ‘Quadrophenia,’ ” said SHAG owner Sandy Poirier.

Cosmetic Surgery Atrocities- Courtney Love

As much as we adore Courtney, she really needs to give over on the surgery while she is still recognisable... 

Stupid Ideas Central. New Look Culture Club

This is both silly and totally uncalled for.  The band will look sillier, the fake George can only be farcical.  Sometimes it best to leave dead dogs to sleep where they lie.  Or something..

Culture Club to reform without Boy George

'80s pop group Culture Club are to reform for a tour - but without their iconic frontman Boy George.

Record label bosses want to replace him with a flamboyant singer and performer, but not a carbon copy of the legendary singer.

An advert posted on gumtree read: "We want a unique vocalist with a brilliant voice to take part in a 2007 World Tour and TV series.

"We do not want a karaoke Boy George 'lookalike' but a charismatic and unique performer in his or her own right with something truly fresh, contemporary and original to offer."

The band split in 1997 and reformed in 1998, before splitting up again shortly afterwards.

Sienna No Longer 'Muse'. Journalist finds new adjective shock!

I'm utterly stunned.  It became tedious reporting on every incident of Sienna Miller portraying Andy Warhol's muse Edie Sedgick, even I can only push tedium so far.  In this telling, and a shocking development in the field of journalism, a new adjective to describe Edie has been offered.  We now find out Edie was a DOOMED muse.

Just imagine, we'd all be cultural illiterates if it weren't for Sienna.

Approach with caution- high puke factor:

FROM: Pearce has worked on films where the actors realized the director wasn't going to be any help, so they learned to rely on each other. And he says there's nothing wrong with that.

"On the job I've just done, the Warhol movie -- and I don't want to talk too much about it because it's still being put together -- but Sienna Miller is so switched-on that it's remarkable," Pearce says of his co-star, a tabloid staple for her tumultous relationship with Jude Law after he had an affair with his kids' nanny. "I want to say Sienna is remarkable for a [24-year-old] but, really, age is immaterial. She's this beacon of brilliance. Both of us had moments where we felt insecure, but we knew we could look to each other for help."

Going Salon

Just as the phrase 'to go postal' starts to lose the lustre of immediacy, we have a potential replacement, going salon.  We love this story, a drunken hairdresser in a rage at the mere suggestion that his crimping skills aren't up to speed.  Never piss a hairdresser off, I say.

Salon wrecked in stylist's strop

A HOOLIGAN hairdresser, ticked off by his boss for his poor crimping skills, wrecked the salon during a drunken rage.

Nicky Cranston caused more than £20,000 damage when he smashed up McAuliffe's in Peterlee town centre during the late-night attack.

Durham Crown Court heard the 19-year-old flooded the first-floor shop – and pharmacist Savers below – by leaving taps running and ripping water heaters off the walls.

When salon manageress Maria Arnell went to open up the next day she was greeted by the police who had been called to probe the break-in.

Cranston told detectives and told them he had been at the shop on the night of the attack – but only to get a plaster after cutting his hand on a night out.

He later confessed to wrecking the salon in a text message to Mrs Arnell which read: "I have ruined everything. I am nothing, I realise that now."

Cranston, of Welland Close, Peterlee, admitted two charges of criminal damage in Upper Yoden Way, on November 5, last year.

He has a previous conviction for criminal damage.

Mitigating, Stuart Graham said: "While he had been told off during the course of this employment, this was not a grudge or revenge attack.

"He was very drunk that night and was genuinely shocked when he realised what he had done.

"He says he will never, ever, offend again."

Judge Tony Lancaster passed a 30 week sentence, suspended for 12 months, but Cranston must carry out 150 hours of community work and pay £500 compensation to the salon and £250 to Savers.

The judge told him: "You must learn to deal with your problems in an adult way, and not behave like an undisciplined child as you did on this occasion."

In pictures

The demolition of my neighborhood.

In Pictures

1.  Cloud of Suspicion.  I spotted this strange looking streak in the sky a few mornings ago.  At first glance, I took it to be a plane falling out of the sky. That I was looking toward the very busy flightpath reduces the rashness of this assumption but...  21ST CENTURY PARANOIA!!!!!!!!!!  The streak is nothing more than an unusually shaped cloud caught in the dawn light.

Lindsay Hohan as Brigid Berlin and Even Worse News.

This film must not be made.  I refuse to even be open minded about it. 

May all the low demons of hell torture anyone who seeks to exploit Lennon's death for cash.

Lindsay’s other new project puts her back into the assassination game. She’s going to help Jared Leto kill John Lennon in the movie Chapter 27. Leto plays Lennon’s murderer (Some like to call him an assassin, but aren’t assassinations reserved for political figures?) Mark Chapman, while Lohan plays an obsessive fan who latches on to Chapman a couple of days before he does the deed.

[Lennon WAS a political figure dickwad.  One doesn't need to be an office-holder to be assasinated, just ask Martin Luther King- ed]

L Lindsay Lohan  R Brigid Berlin
The likeness is stunning isn't it?

[Brigid photo by Billy Name- more Max's action can be seen at Post Art]

'Wedding Singer': Back to the '80s

Link: 'Wedding Singer': Back to the '80s.

This sounds like a nightmare on stage.  We have seen about 45minutes worth of the film and found it insufferable.  The portrayal of a Boy George impersonator is graceless and inherently homohating.  It is neither clever, nor funny. 

I'm incredibly disappointed that Kevin Cahoon should take such a role.  He was a Hedwig. I saw him do a superb Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Now he's taking his skills to this pre-passed turd. 

Im glad I did my Broadway binge last year, the pickings are terribly slim this year.

Exceprts from the review give some sense how badly this one might stink.  It's lucky the Hirschfeld is relatively isolated, the smell shouldn't permeate neighbouring shows.

Mainstream musicals were once inspired by Sholom Aleichem, Thornton Wilder and George Bernard Shaw. In an era when we've become far more adept at recognizing brands than genius, though, Broadway is devoting a lot more resources to piggybacking on proven pop success -- the oeuvre, say, of Abba and Oprah.

The Wedding Singer," which opened last night at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre -- without Sandler or his fetching cinematic love interest, Drew Barrymore -- feels like a show composed as much at a board meeting as a keyboard. It's got vim and, in supporting performances by Felicia Finley and especially the appealing Matthew Saldivar, bona fide comic vigor. Yet a premise this flimsy -- one asking for your Joblike forbearance of jokey references to the 1980s -- requires two crucial elements this show does not have: a corker of a score, and a leading man and lady who can do something like spontaneously combust.

Stephen Lynch and Laura Benanti, as Jersey boy and girl in this standard-issue story of boy-meets-girl, are made for musicals, but not for each other. Lynch, a comedian by trade, is all nervous standup energy, and Benanti, a nifty Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway revival of "Into the Woods," is shown to better advantage in parts with an undercoat of steel. These kids don't mix naturally. He's overeager to please, and she seems hardly eager at all.

A more fundamental deficit, however, is the desperate lengths to which director John Rando and book writers Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy go to stir up nostalgia for the 1980s, the not particularly evocative period in which the musical takes place. Although the show mercifully sidesteps the Challenger disaster and Iran-contra, it does reacquaint us with the styling of mullets, the exhibitionism of Madonna and the shoes of Imelda Marcos. ("Flashdance" is invoked not once but twice.) The facile '80s gags go on and on until the final scene, by which time you might feel as if you have seriously OD'd. As in over-decaded.

The show begins, vibrantly, at a wedding at which Lynch's Robbie Hart is the lead singer, accompanied by his band mates, played by Saldivar and, wearing a Boy George getup, Kevin Cahoon. The songwriting team of Beguelin and Matthew Sklar put their best work up front, in the up-tempo opening number, "It's Your Wedding Day," featuring spunky choreography by Rob Ashford. (Sklar and Beguelin are also the authors of "The Rhythm Club," a musical that had a premiere at Signature Theatre in 2000.)

Long after inspiration ceases, the band plays on in "The Wedding Singer." The show might acquire a cachet, as a kind of safe family fallback. But no one has to feel much urgency about getting to it. Soon, another show very much like it is bound to arrive.

Plans were announced this week, in fact, for a forthcoming musical version of "Legally Blonde."