Branding is all anyone can talk about these days. It’s how celebrities stay famous. It’s what Twitter is really for. It’s even what the last season of America’s Next Top Model was all about (besides Tyra Banks’s book, we mean). This week saw famed Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney’s birthday — the renowned playboy is 57 years old, if you can believe it. Inspired by the persistence of the McInerney legend even after all these years, we thought we’d give you a brief outline of how to build a successful pop culture persona using two demonstrative models: the aforementioned Jay McInerney, poster boy of ’80s excess, and Lady Gaga, Queen of overblown contemporary pop. Click through to pick up a few helpful tips on how to build your pop culture persona based on these two tabloid legends, and make sure to send us a postcard from the top when you get there.
Although they only released two albums during their short run, Joy Division remains one of the most important and beloved bands of the late-’70s post-punk movement, influencing generations of cold, black-clad imitators. In the three decades since Ian Curtis’s death, he has become one of music’s darkest and most solemnly worshiped cult figures. He has been immortalized in countless books and films, printed on all kinds of T-shirts, and his song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” probably holds some kind of record for teenage mixtape overuse.
But even if you think you’ve seen enough of Joy Division to last you a lifetime, you’ll want to make space for Kevin Cummins’s Joy Division(Rizzoli New York, 2010), a book that combines the author’s striking black-and-white images of the band with photos of their instruments, set lists, and flyers, and Curtis’s lyrics and notebooks.
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”
It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.
Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:
“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”
When J.D. Salinger died last week at the age of 91, the Twitter- and the literatti aligned to mourn the reclusive writer. Charles McGrath wrote a touching obit in the New York Times; Lillian Ross waxed poetic in The New Yorker and Bret Easton Ellis, tweeted, “Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!” Ah, the Twitterverse, where Chilon of Sparta’s maxim “Don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t apply, as long as you can do it in under 140 characters. We turned to the Twitterverse to see how other luminaries, literary and decidedly unliterary, marked Salinger’s passing*.
The relationships in Jay McInerney’s new short story collection How It Ended end pretty much as one would think — with tears, confession, self-hatred, or resignation. And in between there is that time-honored McInerney trope — drug use and impulsive sex. But something else emerges in these 26 stories, written in 26 different years. Read More »
According to MTV News, Harold Ramis says that plans for a Groundhog Day musical are moving forward. Contrary to popular cult opinion, we’ve always found that repetitive flick incredibly annoying, so we can only imagine what a Broadway version — especially with music from Stephen Sondheim — would do to us. Bleeding from the eyes and ears? It’s almost as silly as adapting a Green Day album for the stage. Oh wait. That one is happening too. Read More »
We here at Flavorwire are thankful that Gawker is still picking up the Rielle Hunter beat. Apparently the ex-lover of the ex-dignified John Edwards is back in the New York metropolitan area; they say Hunter’s endless supply of cash dried up when Fred Baron died earlier this year and she was forced to forgo her cushy residence in the Santa Barbara hills. Now she’s crashing with a friend in Northern New Jersey.
If the tag line for a debut novel called THE WRECKING BALL — “Drugs. Booze. New York. Drugs. Booze. London. Drugs. Booze. Parties. Drugs. Booze. Sleep?” — makes you feel tired just reading it, note that the story sprang from the mind of 21-year-old university student, CHRISTIANA SPENS.
She’s still at that age when A.D.D. and boundless energy are as everyday as chain smoking and cocktails, so we’ll ignore it. Plus she’s British — so we don’t judge her as harshly as we would some upstart from the Upper East Side.
Also important to note: Spens took about three weeks to write The Wrecking Ball when she was only nineteen. The result is, there’s not a lot of plot here, just plenty of voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of wealthy 20-somethings (“…I’m just regurgitating an article I half read in VOGUE this morning over my breakfast of orange juice and vodka.”) who blot the pain of their existence in hedonism. So it’s kind like GOSSIP GIRL, but a lot darker.
It’s still way too early to tell if she’s the U.K.’s BRETT EASTON ELLIS or simply good at churning out trustafarian trashy reads, but one thing is for certain: this is a girl who knows the London and Manhattan party scenes well enough to mock the lifestyle.
After the jump, read on for the five completely random people she’d like to take out on the town. Read More »
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by Paul Beatty
