Straight to the point - Boy George b*tches
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PrinceOfCats
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I admire his practicality sometimes. And I totally agree about the Queen is a disgrace, she looks like someone's grandma not a monarch...crown and robes should be compulsory. He's somewhat on the bitchy side though...
As You Like It
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I feel about Boy George and his snarking about the same as I do about Karl Lagerfeld, and that is that neither is really witty enough to get away with their egregious rudeness.
Heroin_Chic
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PrinceOfCats said:
Gaily garrulous
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Boy George can still talk the talk, but Hywel Williams would prefer fewer Buddhist mantras in Straight[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday March 26, 2005
The Guardian
[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Buy Straight at the Guardian bookshop
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Straight
by Boy George, with Paul Gorman
304pp, Century, £17.99
In his introduction, Paul Gorman gives us a pen-portrait of Boy George, whose energies formed so important a part of 1980s excess and exhibitionism. For Gorman, George is both soft and tough, a singer of Irish rebel songs, a manic cracker of jokes who throws tantrums but never tiaras. He gets fractious in the early evenings but isn't too keen on the mornings either as he washes off (with Fairy Liquid) the residue of last night's maquillage at the kitchen sink. Perhaps there are still days when George makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Teresa, but this, it seems, is going to be one of those lives of pop emotion recollected in tranquillity with all addiction spent and a few old scores to settle.
"Portrait of the artist as survivor against all odds" is a familiar recipe for showbiz autobiography. And many elements of the genre are there in this book. There's the continuing dialogue with the now dead father, who veered between the rough and the loving. There's the to-be-expected stuff about finding agreeably spiritual religion. There are also the judgments, the pen-portraits, the assessments - varying between the madly egocentric, the lofty and the charitable. There is, naturally, Marilyn - for some the bad angel to George's wide-eyed Irish innocence but a recurring figure because "we are sisters under the skin". Marilyn still pops in and out of George's life - at least in so far as a chap can while still living with his mother in Borehamwood. Morrissey gets good marks for being savage - but just isn't gabby enough: "We took tea together in a Parisian hotel. I couldn't stop talking and filling the many conversational gaps." The melancholic songster, it is alleged, found our boy "over-bearing". Things are little better with Prince - "The Artist Formerly Known As Get a Personality". These two just can't get it together - not at tea-time, or at any other subsequent time either. Prince has a "shy persona" and the O'Dowd we know, and some of us love, thinks "Shy is for librarians". Meanwhile, it's good to know that the (Boy) George v George (Michael) animus con tinues - the former finds the latter just too preachy and lacking a sense of the absurd. Michael's faith in growing older stands in sharp contrast to George's consistently anarchic fun. Michael the gay evangelist? As our George says: "Please shut up - throw her a cerise boa."
The identification of Culture Club with the 80s was always awkward. The real lineage was the 70s - the decade of glam and punk and strikes, and that sense of being well up for it while everything around you was falling down. This book brilliantly illuminates the bogusness of a later artistic generation's Eminem-like pose of identification with the audience - and shows the necessary reality of the gap between star and fan.
Straight, with its take on the business of being Irish, gay, big, noisy and clever, is disjointed but well-endowed with a shafting wit. Conventional chronology goes out of the window. What this book records with excruciating honesty is the heartlessness, the energy, the materialism, the shifting allegiances and hierarchies, the animosity between the musical styles of those different tribes - the bands, the companies, and the clubs - that contribute to the creativity of popular music.
Much of the book is also a user-friendly guide to gay life and mores over the past 20 years in London and New York. And in that capacity George's natural talent for the one-liner gets a regular outing: "Heat is the enemy of drag"- which is why he refused to go on to I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! And readers on the straighter end of the scale will be grateful for the guidance that a "Muscle Mary" is a man who trains at the gym to look like a construction worker but ends up looking like Jane Mansfield.
But despite all the boas and the feathers, the shoes, the sequins and the hats, it's the make-up that lasts and doesn't run away. George's gayness was an admirably frightening commodity and his personality, in all its angular charm, subverted mainstream gay culture with its easy codes of self-identity. He wasn't feminine like Marilyn (he had the build of a roaring-boy), but with his application of mascara and eye-liner he threatened the precariously constructed codes of fem and butch, camp and straight-acting. George never assimilated and never conformed. And he can still offend, with his observation in this book of the nasal tone of the "cartoon homosexuals", the "cupcake queers". Straight communicates and expresses the energy of an intelligent anarchist holding an anti-bullsh*t device. But for the second edition - please - not so much about "what Lord Buddha did for me".
[/font]
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Boy George can still talk the talk, but Hywel Williams would prefer fewer Buddhist mantras in Straight[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Saturday March 26, 2005
The Guardian
[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Buy Straight at the Guardian bookshop
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Straight
by Boy George, with Paul Gorman
304pp, Century, £17.99
In his introduction, Paul Gorman gives us a pen-portrait of Boy George, whose energies formed so important a part of 1980s excess and exhibitionism. For Gorman, George is both soft and tough, a singer of Irish rebel songs, a manic cracker of jokes who throws tantrums but never tiaras. He gets fractious in the early evenings but isn't too keen on the mornings either as he washes off (with Fairy Liquid) the residue of last night's maquillage at the kitchen sink. Perhaps there are still days when George makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Teresa, but this, it seems, is going to be one of those lives of pop emotion recollected in tranquillity with all addiction spent and a few old scores to settle.
"Portrait of the artist as survivor against all odds" is a familiar recipe for showbiz autobiography. And many elements of the genre are there in this book. There's the continuing dialogue with the now dead father, who veered between the rough and the loving. There's the to-be-expected stuff about finding agreeably spiritual religion. There are also the judgments, the pen-portraits, the assessments - varying between the madly egocentric, the lofty and the charitable. There is, naturally, Marilyn - for some the bad angel to George's wide-eyed Irish innocence but a recurring figure because "we are sisters under the skin". Marilyn still pops in and out of George's life - at least in so far as a chap can while still living with his mother in Borehamwood. Morrissey gets good marks for being savage - but just isn't gabby enough: "We took tea together in a Parisian hotel. I couldn't stop talking and filling the many conversational gaps." The melancholic songster, it is alleged, found our boy "over-bearing". Things are little better with Prince - "The Artist Formerly Known As Get a Personality". These two just can't get it together - not at tea-time, or at any other subsequent time either. Prince has a "shy persona" and the O'Dowd we know, and some of us love, thinks "Shy is for librarians". Meanwhile, it's good to know that the (Boy) George v George (Michael) animus con tinues - the former finds the latter just too preachy and lacking a sense of the absurd. Michael's faith in growing older stands in sharp contrast to George's consistently anarchic fun. Michael the gay evangelist? As our George says: "Please shut up - throw her a cerise boa."
The identification of Culture Club with the 80s was always awkward. The real lineage was the 70s - the decade of glam and punk and strikes, and that sense of being well up for it while everything around you was falling down. This book brilliantly illuminates the bogusness of a later artistic generation's Eminem-like pose of identification with the audience - and shows the necessary reality of the gap between star and fan.
Straight, with its take on the business of being Irish, gay, big, noisy and clever, is disjointed but well-endowed with a shafting wit. Conventional chronology goes out of the window. What this book records with excruciating honesty is the heartlessness, the energy, the materialism, the shifting allegiances and hierarchies, the animosity between the musical styles of those different tribes - the bands, the companies, and the clubs - that contribute to the creativity of popular music.
Much of the book is also a user-friendly guide to gay life and mores over the past 20 years in London and New York. And in that capacity George's natural talent for the one-liner gets a regular outing: "Heat is the enemy of drag"- which is why he refused to go on to I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! And readers on the straighter end of the scale will be grateful for the guidance that a "Muscle Mary" is a man who trains at the gym to look like a construction worker but ends up looking like Jane Mansfield.
But despite all the boas and the feathers, the shoes, the sequins and the hats, it's the make-up that lasts and doesn't run away. George's gayness was an admirably frightening commodity and his personality, in all its angular charm, subverted mainstream gay culture with its easy codes of self-identity. He wasn't feminine like Marilyn (he had the build of a roaring-boy), but with his application of mascara and eye-liner he threatened the precariously constructed codes of fem and butch, camp and straight-acting. George never assimilated and never conformed. And he can still offend, with his observation in this book of the nasal tone of the "cartoon homosexuals", the "cupcake queers". Straight communicates and expresses the energy of an intelligent anarchist holding an anti-bullsh*t device. But for the second edition - please - not so much about "what Lord Buddha did for me".
[/font]
fab_fifties_fille
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anyone see him co-hosting the friday night project?
Elegance.Is.Refusal.
tea time
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yeah i did and all he did was erm 'b*tch'
and that song bring on the cher voice!
and that song bring on the cher voice!
haha I love the friday night project. that song though was awful.
poc so agree on the queen thing. if we pay taxes that become her salary for doing absolutely nothing except be born into the right family the least the woman could do is put a little effort in. I think he totally deserves refusing the MBE it's all a sham anyway, and so political. If he doesn't want it he has every right to diss the queen. I like him.
poc so agree on the queen thing. if we pay taxes that become her salary for doing absolutely nothing except be born into the right family the least the woman could do is put a little effort in. I think he totally deserves refusing the MBE it's all a sham anyway, and so political. If he doesn't want it he has every right to diss the queen. I like him.
