PETS! WITHOUT MAKEUP!

Hello who wants to wade into dark waters and partake in a process rife with psychological implications ie. marvel at the passing of time through the prism of my farmyard pets to underscore a common humanity and the unavoidable fact that life is a too short misery alleviated by fleeting moments of self-deception and Orwellian dystopia awaits in very near future?

Just kidding. God, relax. But here are Babs and Claudia, then and now. Like how the magazines do it to show weight loss and weight gain, or Sophie Monk’s lips, or people just getting uglier as they age because it’s awesome to be reminded via magazine that whimpering ruin is imminent and don’t forget it you pig-jowled losers?

 

Sophie Monk Says NO NO NO To Camel Toe

People! Bad news! Sophie Monk has vowed to start dressing in a less slovenly fashion this year. More specifically, she has said NO to camel toe in 2012. Deep though my respect is for the woman, this irritates me no end. Still, remember when she signed up to be a spokesperson for PETA and was caught buying KFC – twice! -  in LA after doing an ad – a naked pin up, of course, because a. it’s PETA and b. it’s Sophie Monk – and releasing a companion video in which she specifically named and denounced KFC: “I think the message to KFC eaters [is that] you should think about what you’re eating. If you’re eating deformed animals that are being induced by hormones, you know, it cannot be good for you.” And remember how she said she was “buying it for a homeless guy”? A three-piece dinner?!! As excuses go, that one is fucking excellent. And by excellent I mean awful, obviously: crushed like a bug beneath the cold boot of truth. Sophie Monk, as I have previously pointed out, is slightly unhinged. This is good. (See: Courtney Love, Billy Bob Thornton, Britney, etc.) She’s also a raging bogan – the type who consider Summernats an example of high culture. This too is good. She is a national treasure.

Anyway. Before my mind snagged on the thought of Sophie Monk rendering her camel-toe obsolete I was intending to focus on more substantial and immediate issues…. Like the fact that my best friend has left the country. This is completely unacceptable. She asked me to go and I said no and she went anyway and now I miss her terribly. Here are the most recent top two reasons why she is my best friend.

1. She sent a card addressed and written entirely to my most treasured cat after he underwent traumatic and invasive eye surgery recently.

2. She started a conversation recently with the words “So I was watching Antiques Roadshow the other day….”

This year we both turn thirty. God.

Now I’m not saying that one thing has anything to do with the other, but it has recently occurred to me that there exists the very real possibility of slipping in the shower and breaking my skull open like a dropped watermelon and lying undiscovered and unconscious in the resulting emulsions for days. Not the most comforting of thoughts. Still, it’s pretty much the only concern I have with living alone and having a near total aversion to people so I guess it’s okay and anyway I’m half trying to bring myself to buy one of those grotesque sticky non-slippy rubber shower mats, which, along with those orthopedic beaded car-seat-cover things and Payless shoes, are just fucking tragic in the ‘I see dead people – most of them are still alive’ sense but the thought still appalls me so I guess I still have some work to do on that front. Whatever ‘that front’ is. I do know that I don’t like my feet to be exposed to strange textures and sensations within the home. I think I have mentioned my carpeted en suite which my mind cannot and will not accept and forces me to spurn it as I would a rabid dog?

Yes, it will be a dark night of the soul if I ever buy and install that fucking shower mat. 

Anyway, she turned thirty a few days ago and I am thirty in six months and while she seems fine (not surprising) a dull sense of agitation is infusing the air around me (not surprising either) but, y’know, I’m not one for wild over-reactions and hyperbole so despite this looming birthday being the occurrence that well may cause the four horsemen to saddle up just let the buzzards do what they will to my carcass before adding my old bleached bones to a collection of sacred relics and continue on with your rank and perky lives now won’t you KAY THANX. 

What? No I haven’t been watching bleak Danish films, but I did watch The Wedding Singer yesterday and that does seem to have laid bare the chilly clockwork of my life somewhat…It’s the Steve Buschemi character, he does it to me every time. “SELF TAUGHT – NO LESSONS, THANKS POP”

Anyways, this has gone way off track. Happy birthday, baby. Mazel tov. A new decade. You are the best bitch ever. Stay in my depressing disaster of a life forever. 

Sohie Monk's Camel-Toe.

Something I learned today: Sophie Monk's camel-toe has a powerful internet presence. More powerful than the rest of her parts combined. Space does not permit a comprehensive survey of the many public appearances of Sophie Monk's camel-toe so I will cite just ten or twelve examples below. Part of me wishes we could return to the age of the cave and escape the babbling horror show that is the internet age. The other part of me is busy feverishly opening multiple tabs to assess the evidence for myself. This post is proof that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. 

"Sophie Monk has been trying to make it in Hollywood for ages now, and no one will hire her unless she gets her boobs out. To add insult to injury, now she's facing some mega stardom competition from her camel-toe, which continues to upstage her in pap photos everywhere she goes.
Showbiz Spy quote Sophie fraking out over the latest blog giving her crotch more airtime than her head. "I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. Another camel-toe!" she reportedly moaned. "Everyone is going to think I have a ginormous ***** because who gets more than one photo of camel-toe? I've got a small *****. I'm here trying to work so hard and all I get recognised for is my camel-toe. It's more famous than me!"

Goddamn, she is awesome. Have I made that sufficiently clear that I love this crazy bitch yet? She says 'ginormous'! She says 'gimnormous *****!' (Those aren't my stars, by the way. Foul language floats my boat. That quote was from an uptight American, and we all know what they're like: easily excited. Janet Jackson's partially exposed breast drives them to absolute hysteria, remember?)

In light of her scene-stealing camel-toe, the logic behind her reason for turning down an offer to pose nude for Playboy - because she was worried about the effect it would have on her career - strikes me as slightly skewed. (This is in keeping with the rest of her, though, which is reassuring.) Two points: 1. What career?? 2. Her rack is all over the internet already and due to her love of circulation-restricting lycra-spandex we have seen the anatomical outline of her snatch more times than anyone even cares to count - that thing should have its own postcode by now - what more is there even to see?

Anyway. Apparently plenty of blog people don't much care for Sophie Monk. Bitches. What's not to like? This raises the question that no one seems to ever ask: Why in the name of sweet Christ on a cracker would anyone want to be famous? A quiet life is brutal enough: always some god-damned thing slashing at you, trying to take you out; but having the world tearing at you physically and spiritually on any given day? What a hell. The mere thought of it incites panic in my mind. I don't know, though. I imagine people like Sophie Monk may suffer similar terrors when they imagine a life of obscure annonymity?

It must have been better in days gone by. Show me something that wasn't. Once a charming drunk called Poppy-John told me about being in jail in the seventies and sustaining himself by writing a series of admiring letters to Barbara Streisand. Isn't that archaic and lovely? She never wrote back, and once he got out he went to work as a grave digger in Tasmania, which is also archaic and quite lovely, come to think of it.

Now there is this paparazzi thing, and the camera phone phenomenon, and have you noticed how now every nut with a keyboard has decided they're the next Walter Cronkite? Ha, ha. Also, everyone seems mean and cold as hell now, and if they're not they're wimpy and twee and Sarah Blasko-esque and that's just as bad. The nineties seem like a really nice place now. Gentle, and kinder too; being, as it were, the last decade before the internet came and changed everything. 

Also - and here is proof that it really was a better time - all those fabulous one-name supermodels were still roaming and ruling the world and bitches such as Miranda Kerr were nothing but a twinkle in the eye of Dolly magazine readers. I remember, because I was one of them. I voted for her - using a landline -  in the model competition she ended up winning. I helped make the smug bitch what she is today. The decline of the supermodel was brought about by the ascent of the celebrity - remember when actual models used to be on the covers of magazines, instead of celebrities spruiking their stupid shit? Remember how Cindy and Claudia and Christy and Naomi and Linda and Helena were the suns around which revolved the lesser planets? Remember the George Michael videos, and Chris Isaak's Wicked Game video, with moody skies and rolling clouds and Helena writhing and pouting in a pair of men's underpants? Yes, times were better back then.

Now we have Mariah Carey giving birth to her twins while her song 'Fantasy' played in the delivery room. I feel like this one fragment of information encapsulates everything that is wack about....everything. On a less existential level it's also one of the more grotesquely narcissistic things I have ever heard.

Anyway, all this is only symptomatic of a much wider trend, which is that of things going to shit. *Cough-that old chestnut-Cough*. Sophie Monk's camel-toe is but one part of this. It's a bad time to be alive and an even worse time to have a public profile, and no time at all to wear lycra-spandex workout wear in the streets. Still, when she's not wearing the lycra-spandex getups she tends to look as if she was styled by a pimp in a New Orleans whorehouse, so the girl cannot win. In this way, at least, she is just like the rest of us. The walls surround us all, the history of humanity does not change, and the internet makes this patently and sort-of painfully clear. It inspires in me a sort of manic weariness; which is alienating, because everyone else, everywhere and at all times, seems perky and self-assured and pleased with their lives and I feel like crystallised meat going through a mincing machine most of the time.      

However. On the flipside there is cheap comfort to be gained from the fiery tar pit that is the internet, because without it I would never have known about Sophie Monk's awkward encounter when her ex, Benji Maddern, refused to speak to her in a restaraunt, and my life would be poorer for it:

"I saw him the other day actually but he wasn't as warm or welcoming as I was. I gave him a hug, but no arms came out, it was the worst! It was so embarrasing. I went out of my way to go to his table and everyone was looking at me so I was like 'Ok, I'll just back out.' Then I had a couple of glasses of wine so I went back and did it again, I thought 'Oh hell, I don't care, I'm bigger than this. I've got no issue with him.' It didn't work again so next time, I might not do that."

Bitch is batshit! She has my full approval, even when I am very tired of everything.

Ok, so that is a lot of camel-toe. And yes, you could probably see it from the moon. But so what. She's the bomb. To show my respects, here's two Bukowski bits that I have randomly written in a notebook:

1. " 'Look,' he said, 'do you have to let your robe fall open like that?'.... I left the robe open. I don't like to take orders."

2. " -'Please close your robe!'
-'There,' I said, 'you see?'
-'I know I see. That's why I ask you to close it.'
-'All right. Shit.'
- I very reluctantly threw the robe over my genitals. Anybody can expose their genitals at night. At two p.m. in the afternoon it took some balls."

Lara Bingle

There seems to be three types of people in this world: those who dislike Lara Bingle, those who are Lara Bingle, and those who bang Lara Bingle - which includes every professional athlete and elite sportsman who lives in, visits, or will ever visit Sydney, as well as random international r&b singers, and, probably, your boyfriend.

I fall into the first category. Lara Bingle shits me. Well, so what. Who doesn't? If all the people who agitate or irritate me were to get their own blog post I would have to become one of those people who are sooooo fucking busy that they feel it necessary - -essential even - to eat and walk at the same time, and thus saunter about the streets choking down hand held food in a grotesque and unseemly manner. No, Lara Bingle gets a post not because she shits me but because she rattles me. More specifically, the flat, crystal emptiness of her eyes rattle me.

I have a strong stomach and steely eye but I cannot - I CANNOT - look into those terrible eyes. They're vacant and clear and they creep me the fuck out. The rest of her face troubles me too, but it's those eyes - devoid of anything one might think of as human - that do strange things to me.

I have a vague theory that Lara Bingle may be Laura Palmer. If Laura Palmer lived in Sydney, in this century, and was a real person and not a father-fucking, coke-whore, prom queen creation from David Lynch's surreal and sick imagination, I mean. Details, details.

Lara Bingle could do well in taking a leaf out of Laura Palmer's book and cultivating an air of seedy intrigue and flesh-creeping mystery. It would make things much more interesting for us: her public. And for her too, I imagine. She could well be carousing in log cabins under the eyes of watchful owls and in One Eyed Jacks type establishments already, of course. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. I imagine Lara Bingle might crackle with sex and its associated psycho-drama; that it might even hang in the air around her to the same degree that Subway stinks up entire streets. And doesn't Brendan Fevola have something of the Leo Johnson about him, only a little less menacing, truck-driving redneck and a little more mouth-breathing jock goon? It's just that Lara Bingle hasn't been murdered so no safety deposit boxes have been posthumously opened and Dr Jacobi-style shrink-tapes have been played so nothing much of a debauched and fabulous nature has been brought to light. This is a shame.




Laura Palmer was Twin Peaks’ sweetheart, she did all that thoughtful stuff for all those weird people – she visited that creepy shut-in Harold and she read to Audrey’s Horn’s wigged-out little brother and as it turned out after she showed up dead “wrapped in plastic!” she also GANGBANGED REDNECKS IN SHACKS FOR KICKS. This is the true definition of ‘it’s complicated’; Lara Bingle, if you’re reading*, none of this trivial ‘how many points do I have left on my license?’ bullshit.

What I'm saying is that Laura Palmer was all complex and tragic and beautiful and doomed, whereas Lara Bingle is about as spoiled and vacant as a Persian cat, with unsettlingly empty eyes and a face that makes me think of nothing so much as Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead barking "Shut your face, kewpie-doll." at some poor bitch. What I'm also saying is that I warned you from the outset that my theory was 'vague', okay?

It doesn't have to be this way, Lara Bingle. Look at Sophie Monk. She's another half-wit blonde hell-bent on some half-baked notion of making it without an end point in sight but instead of arousing animosity or derision she manages to be endlessly endearing. What a difference a personality makes! Sophie Monk is a walking, talking, massive-lipped exploration of frustration and ambition, or frustrated ambition, if you will. The key here is that, in addition to the personality, Sophie Monk seems to posess a degree or two of self-awareness. She also has a charmingly bawdy, Mae West-style sense of humour. I mean, she probably weeps extravagantly while driving in her car some days - don't we all - but she seems to have things in perspective. Not only does Lara Bingle's persepective look to be shot to shit, she also has no discernable sense of humour. This is a fundamental failing from which there really is no recovery. Or none of which I am personally aware, at least. Also, she can't drive for shit. Seriously. She loses her license continuously.

Sophie Monk stands for something; she is a public embodiment of the existential angst we feel as we (I say 'we', I mean 'I') near the end of our twenties and realise all the things we will never be and - this part can be just as if not more troubling - all the things we are.

Here, Sophie Monk emantes a soothing air of 'what-can-you-do' resignation. Her youth gone, style beyond her grasp, she spends her time, which she seems to have plenty of, playing the lead in her own private and frequently, reasurringly public melodrama, yet she still remains someone I would like to know, and even though I don't, feel a great fondness for anyway.

Also, Sophie Monk says some really wack stuff. Like that time earlier this year when she was doorstopped by Hollywood reporters in LA? REMEMBER?? How she told them that Australian Aborigines just “lie around outside and start fires and go to the bathroom wherever they want, but they wear Adidas, which is cool”??? Which led to pap website TMZ.com popinig that "it sounded like the coolest life ever"?? Yeh. Well, compared to life on the D-list, maybe. Still, somebody should really hook her up with the Australian tourism board because Sophie Monk is down with the SHIT.  

One of the keys to happiness, I find, is keeping your expectations low. Another is taking some care to align your ambitions with you talents. This, I feel, is one of the areas where Lara Bingle seems to have strayed from the path of reason and reality. Modest talents – in any field or sense - call for modest ambitions. Balance. Everyone bangs on about balance. The balancing of talents and ambition is a big one. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, y'know? Nor can you polish a turd. Beauty is a talent, yes, and definitely a currency, but undiminished self-absorption and a relentless drive to stay relevant is not a sustainable ambition. Also, even though many of us seem to have an enormous appetite for celebrity, we tend to tire of vacuous bullshit fairly quickly, so unless Lara Bingle is willing to run her train completely off its tracks in the wildly entertaining style of Britney circa 2008 then we really have a limited amount of time and energy and empathy for her. Listen for the bell, Lara Bingle, because it tolls for thee.  

I think what happened with Lara Bingle is that her looks distorted her perspective. That face enabled her to envisage a perfect, blessed future for herself, but ultimately left her unequipped for this drift towards a confused and irrelevant adulthood that is now well underway. I’m all for personal idiosyncrasies but can’t help but feel that this bitch’s problems have become more substantial as ahe seeks to invest herself with some sort of earthly significance. You can see it in her face – just faintly, because it’s a face as impassive and still as the surface of a pond in a pleasure garden – but it’s there; confusion and a dull, dim-witted unease. Terminal overexposure has seen the slow sink into obscurity begin. 
You could say that the culture of celebrity and the fairytale fame narrative have a lot to answer for due to the unrealistic expectations they engender. Alternatively, you could just say that Lara Bingle is the latest but not the last in a long line of girls who fail to realise that while good looks can take them a long way, an over-reliance on those same looks may leave them stranded, without a map and with no direction home.

*Lara was unfortunately unavailable for comment for this story.

Sophie Monk's Camel-Toe has a Stalker

So it turns out I'm not the only one who has indulged in thoughts of Sophie Monk's death. I mean, I assumed we all did, really, but I thought it was one of those occasional, idly lurid trains of musing thought - one of several billion - that most people keep in the sealed chambers of their rotting compost heap heads. (I'm right now sitting atop of my compost heap, flinging handfuls of it around. I believe the official name for this is 'blogging'.)

Sophie Monk said that she recently had a stalker

"who wanted to kill me. That was weird. He thought he could hear me screaming in the corner of his hospital room and thought I wanted to die. So I wrote to him and told him I was fine"

What the shit? I hear the tortured psychic screams of Sophie Monk too!! I see her motel face contorting - as best it can under the weight of the paralysed muscle and those aggressively large lips - with the ongoing anguish of her life of low-rent glamour and the knowledge that oblivion is coming down fast.

Anyway, in regards to her stalker, I believe the key words there are "his hospital room". Not "his gracious drawing room"; not even "his caravan annex", but "his hospital room". Yeh, well, the screams of Sophie Monk are probably the least of his concerns. If I were him I would hasten to turn that particular mental dial up to 'high'. Nurse Ratched's grinning, Vaseline weilding black boys are probably bearing down on him right now, poor soul.

I like seeing Sophie against the sleazy backdrop of Hollywood's dream machine, but do I think it's doing her any good, personally or professionally? Fuck, no. I imagine, for one, that she would have unsavoury men of unseemly persuasions asking her, in all manner of places; "do you come here often?" with a fatiguing frequency, which I firmly feel is reason enough to cash it in and come home.

Also, it seems Sophie has neglected to take my advice (pro bono, by the way) regarding cutting her considerable losses in Hollywood and taking up with an NRL baller back home. I hear Nate Myles - this generation's number one knuckle-dragger - is soon to be back on the market AND is about to relocate to the Gold Coast, which means that she could slide right back into her Marilyn Monroe impersonator role at MovieWorld while he plays for the Titans and involves himself in various misdemeanors off-field (like taking dumps in hotel corridors and enjoying illicit benders with frail and allegedly alcoholic teammates. Yeh. That kind of thing).

I don't begrudge him his behaviour, by the way. Not one iota. I think that, with the head that he has, his entire existence thus far is a remarkable story of against-the-odds success. Because, you know, it's a dwarf head. Don't say you haven't noticed it, LIARS. He has a dwarf head. It's all dented and huge with a big over-inflated forehead - and the kicker is that it sits atop a gigantic, old-growth, behemoth body. That is some 19th century carnival shit right there and ya'll know it. I think he came down from a mansion on a hill in much the same way Edward Scissorhands did - a prototype, loosed on an ignorant and unforgiving world.

So. Sophie Monk and Nate Myles. I am drawing up elaborate plans to make this happen even as I write this - in a rear chamber of my compost heap head that I reserve for my more pathological plans.. *cue descent into hallucionogenic, creepy-crawl daydreams*