As I am sure you're all already aware, it is World Goth Day. It is, after all, a hot topic. The four-year-old holiday began with two DJ's from the BBC, Martin OldGoth and Cruel Britannia. Celebrate by taking in some black-and-white photos of bats and graves from goth's history, and don't forget to respect your subcultures. Just because a heart is black doesn't mean it doesn't beat.
Is Kanye Gay and Secretly Dating Fashion Designer Riccardo Tisci? Kim Kardashian was humiliated after Vogue editors cropped her floral print bowling ball dress out of every shot of Kanye at the Met Ball. "But Kim's humiliation ran much deeper than jabs about a gown. Some online commenters speculated Kanye, 35, is in a romantic relationship with the man who designed her controversial dress, Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci." AIRHORN! "Kim freaked out. If it turns out Kanye is involved with Riccardo, she will be utterly embarrassed, more so than she's ever been in her life." But she's done so many embarrassing things! "There are some facts Kim can't deny. Kanye has spent her entire pregnancy living close to Riccardo in the French capital — 5,600 miles away from his girlfriend. And Riccardo recently purchased an apartment less than half a mile from Kanye's in NYC's Soho neighborhood." A source says, "Kanye is obsessed with Riccardo. They have a very deep bond." HOW DEEP? "The whispers got even louder when Bryan Boy, one of the most popular and respected fashion bloggers in the world, linked Kanye to Riccardo in January." Bryan Boy tweeted, "Wait so Kanye West is gay? He and Riccardo Tisci were…lovers? And Kim Kardashian is a beard? Why am I the last to know?"
Us Weekly
Diane Keaton: "Oh, I'd like to get married … What happened was nobody ever asked me." La di da.
Things Ryan Lochte Says:
Hey, everyone! Did you know that singer/songwriter/Brandy-brethren/I-guess-famous-person Ray J once slept with definitely-famous-unfortunately person Kim Kardashian? Without opening Wikipedia, wanna take a guess at how many years ago that was? Here, watch this short film while doing a little mental math and racking your brain for all the garbage that takes up the place where you should be retaining information about Monsanto or whatever, and then click below for the answer.
The Rock Had a Tough Childhood: "Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has a reputation for being the ultimate showman, playing badass tough guys in movies like G.I. Joe Retaliation and The Scorpion King, and winning over WWE wrestling fans with his charisma, sarcasm and million-dollar smile. But behind his confident facade, it turns out the 41-year-old actor has been hiding the truth about his heartbreaking past — one in which he's had to overcome the pain of an alcoholic, unfaithful father and his run-in with the law." I love The Rock so much. "Dewey had a really hard time as a child growing up because he never saw his dad," according to Luan Crable, who had a "25-year-long romantic affair with Dwayne's father, former pro wrestler Rocky Johnson." Oh, my god, his father was a wrestler??? "Rocky was on the road 12 out of every 14 days" and "Dwayne must have worshipped his father, having followed Rocky into pro wrestling after a severe back injury ended his early football career." Man, this is Shakespearean.
Sometimes movies slip through the cracks and, for better or worse, I catch up with them. Here's a handful, all directed by a range of men, from an Italian visionary to some dude named Robert Redford.
The Place Beyond the Pines, directed by Derek Cianfrance
A slow-burning drama told in three connected movements, all featuring an unusually haggard, unusually good Eva Mendes. The first has Ryan Gosling doing a version of his Drive persona, a bank-robbing, tattooed stunt biker living in Schenectady (a Mohawk word that gives the movie its title). The second miscasts Bradley Cooper as a lawyer turned cop in the same town. The last has two fantastic performances from Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan, whose relationship to each other and the rest of the movie is basically from the people who brought you Romeo and Juliet.
What Cianfrance has written has scraps of surprise and a fine chase sequence, but it doesn't reach for the stars or the emotional cosmos — or, at least, it doesn't know how to get there. He's given us plot points and episodes in search of thriller and tragedy. But no suspense. His previous movie with Gosling, 2010's martial-disaster drama Blue Valentine, was similarly unsure about how to build into something greater than shouts and murmurs. This time, you wonder whether Cianfrance reached the film's final third and realized that this was his movie, two high school burnouts who fascinate each other. But he had Gosling and Cooper and probably couldn't turn back. Once Ray Liotta shows up as his umpteenth crook, it's tempting to believe that a piece of software made the whole movie happen.
Jake meets Kim to show her the pictures he took while tailing Scott in Atlanta. First, though, she makes him get in her car and drive to some presumably less-conspicuous location, like their transaction is going to involve space plans on microfilm. Even Jake, the professional private investigator, seems to think this level of subterfuge is a bit much. The envelope with the pictures in it is a regular tan mailing envelope that says SPECIAL INVESTIGATION FILE on the front. Is there a private-detective office-supply catalogue I can order stuff like this from? I have a lot of questions for Jake.
Kim seems nervous to finally see the pictures, like it's only just occurred to her that the SPECIAL INVESTIGATION FILE could contain some un-unseeable imagery. "Are they bad?" she asks Jake.
"They're subjective," Jake says.
We never get to see what's happening in the pictures, but Kim looks at them and says, "Oh my god."
Bradley Cooper & Leonardo DiCaprio? "Bradley Cooper is getting a lesson in no-strings-attached hookups from Hollywood's ultimate bachelor, Leonardo DiCaprio! The guys [both are 38 years old] got to know each other during awards season, and Leo took Bradley under his wing. Bradley was moaning about finding Mrs. Right. But Leo told him to chill out and enjoy all the beautiful women. Leo, who has romanced a string of catwalkers, explained his master plan to the Silver Linings Playbook hunk." Leo says, "He's going to date as many supermodels as possible before he's 40, then he'll settle down with a good woman." Ohhh, good for yoooou! "Bradley's been following his pal's advice — good times with no committment."
Shia LaBeouf appeared on Letterman and spoke about his Broadway beouf with Alec Baldwin. "Now what did you do to him?" asked Letterman, a friend of Baldwin's. Short answer: two impulsive people clashing and creating "fireworks," tension between the two "as men — not as artists, but as men," and definitely not the PR-generated "creative differences" that were cited as the reason behind LaBeouf's departure. But we knew that already.
Full disclosure: I still haven't watched last week's episode, which aired while I was on vacation, so I have no idea what it was about. Smart money's on "ridiculous rich people doing rich-people things," which is also what we're presented with as this week's episode opens. Kim and Kourtney climb aboard personal watercraft for some of the least-needed R&R in history, except someone's tied some complicated-ass knots in the ropes securing the personal watercraft to the boat they're moored to. Scott remarks on this repeatedly. Like, seriously, who tied up these personal watercraft with these goofy knots? You crazy for this one, knot-tiers! It's not the greatest cold open. Eventually the knots are undone, and off Kim and Kourtney go, across the water and out of sight, and for a moment we all get to imagine what it would be like if they never came back, but they do. They always do.
Katy Perry & John Mayer Break Up: Call me a naive sucker, but I really thought these two could go the distance. They made it almost a year, which is like a decade in John Mayer relationship time. As recently as March 2, she tweeted, "My boyfriend is taking me to a kitten shelter in his truck. I can't think of a more perfect Saturday." In the time since then, something must have gone down, because by March 18 she was tweeting "ATTENTION: Mercury is OUT of retrograde today. Thank GOD." The split has now been announced in People, which means it was probably confirmed to them by either Mayer's or Perry's rep. So what went wrong? Let's do a postmortem.
Kim comes home from vacationing in Italy with Kanye and tells Kourtney all about it. There's a makeup artist working on Kourtney's face. Said face displays a total lack of interest in what Kim is saying. Kim almost got kicked out of the Sistine Chapel because you're not allowed to take pictures in there. And then afterward in Saint Peter's Square, she and Kanye "did, like, a full photo shoot — we had our roses, and my new little bag, and we were, like, posing," and it was all perfectly delightful and dreamy until "people started taking, like, phone pics." The nerve of some people. Celebrities should be free to stage impromptu photo shoots in crowded public places full of camera-toting regular people without those regular people getting all up in the business they're minding. I'm pretty sure the new Pope would agree with me on that one. Kim says a fan came up to her crying and saying something about how her sister was going through an awful divorce: "I was like, 'Aren't we all?'"
In February, lawyers for Brooklyn Nets power forward Kris Humphries — who's seeking an annulment of his marriage to Kim Kardashian on the grounds that said marriage was a sham — deposed one Russell Jay, a co-executive producer of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and related offshoots. This week Life & Style Weekly obtained a leaked copy of that deposition and published excerpts in which Jay admits to three things:
Kim goes to get something called a "blood facial" from, I don't know, the vampire doctor, I guess? "I like anything that makes you look and feel youthful," she says, and while she doesn't add "especially if it also seems like something a witch would do," it's sort of implied. Shit gets real Cronenbergian real fast. The doctor draws Kim's blood, centrifuges out the platelets, and then re-injects them into her face with a device that we're told has nine tiny electric needles in it. BLOOD FACIAL, America. Celebrities: They're just like us! Kim's face is a mask of tiny blood drops and also agony. She vows never to get a face-lift if it hurts like this. I would like that in writing. Nothing about this sequence is surprising except the fact that Kim's using her own blood and not poor people's.
Kim Kardashian Adjusts to Pregnancy: "Kim is well aware that she's famous for her amazing body and had no idea that pregnancy would change it so much." She probably thought she'd have a cute lil' pregnant belly, like her petite sister Kourtney did during her pregnancies. Kim has been "looking at old pictures of herself on her computer and phone for literally hours at a time, pining for her prepregnancy body. She is seriously melting down!" She's been posting even more photos of her old bod than usual for "Throwback Thursday" on her Instagram. A "celebrity weight coach and body expert" named Alicia Hunter says that Kim "looks like she's put on an insane amount of weight in such a short amount of time." She estimates that Kim has gained close to 70 pounds, instead of the 25-35 lbs. recommended. Kim knew that she would get bigger, but "she never expected such a drastic transformation so early on." Secretly she's "desperate to stop gaining so much weight" and it's making her depressed. "She cries every other day, and she's scared to see how big she'll get." While Kim is "grossed-out by her body, she's become obsessed with food." Her cravings take her to Pinkberry nearly every day. "She thinks it's healthy, but it's full of sugar." But, yogurt!
