Many folks who fancy themselves individualistic iconoclasts like to imagine that there is some 80’s movie villain guy or some beautiful blonde debutante girl (with huge knockers) who is holding them back. The dismal reality is that counterculture fails to be stronger because, too often, it eats its own.

Comedian Chris Rock does a joke about how the reason women do not rule the world is because they hate each other i.e. when a man sees his buddy with a great girl, he thinks he wants one like that, and, when a woman sees her pal with a great guy, she thinks she wants that guy. Many disadvantaged groups, from Bohemians to Blacks, have to deal with some pushback from the overculture and undermining in their own culture. Black community leaders have addressed some of the issue within their community by political action, forging ahead, and coining phrases such as “hater” to describe sometime peers who seek to destroy those like them who find any success.

Counterculture community leaders deal with this cultural cannibalism by posting that they are totally going to stop tweeting on Twitter. Next time you feel like you just can’t get a break, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself when was the last time you said something supportive to or about someone in your community and when was the last time you said something destructive. And stop blaming Barbie and Biff.

Although I spent actual NYE contemplating my goals for 2009 and feeling pretty good for a change about how well I did on my 2008 resolutions, I did go to champagne brunch this morning. I haven’t quite determined all my primary goals for the New Year, but Blue Blood just turned Sweet 16, so we’re all pretty celebratory about that, so that should tie in with those resolutions somehow I think.

Although this is Blue Blood’s first and only Sweet 16, my friend Sabrina has a fabulous Sweet 16 birthday party every year. She is a brilliant event planner, so her events tend to be varied and fun. When I say she is a brilliant event planner, I don’t mean in the Cartman tea party fantasy way some people claim they are good at stuff, but in a she just got a hundred million dollar budget to plan events for 2009 kind of way.

Today’s festivities involved getting a whole bunch of us our own colonnade sectioned off from the beautiful Chateau Marmont patio. (I could tell what a colonnade was in context, but, if you were wondering about the precise definition, according to the dictionary, a colonnade is “a series of regularly spaced columns supporting an entablature and usually one side of a roof”.) Apparently Sabrina had to bump some other party of twenty for us. She explained the details of how this was accomplished, but, really, she just cannot be denied. We were all much better behaved for champagne brunch than we were at her birthday. Certainly, I was.

There were a few people at brunch who I totally had zero recollection of having met before. Hopefully they didn’t think I was being stuck up saying “nice to meet you” and asking for names. In my defense, we all drank so much champagne at Sabrina’s most recent Sweet 16 that we actually ran the dinner restaurant entirely out of champagne. Our party literally drank every bit of champagne in the restaurant and a couple of people had to make a supermarket run to replenish.

Afterward, we went to this surreal karaoke bar which fortunately (or possibly unfortunately for remembering everyone clearly) was still well-stocked with champagne. We did start out with Rotari and then move to Moet, which is kind of backward, but we did play a drinking game to see who could drink a split with no hands. (Apparently not me.)

The karaoke place seemed like something out of a gangster movie. It didn’t appear to have signage and was just on this particular floor of this Korean office building. There were these semi-private rooms with black stone floors and it just seemed very much like there should be a high level mobster meeting going on. (We had thought the rooms were entirely private, until the staff informed us that there were certain things we could not be doing in there, and it turned out the walls were one way glass.) I’ll try any weird food once, so I did eat some of a chicken thing which left a very peculiar taste in my mouth, but it was worth it for the adventure points.

I still have my place setting name tag. Sabrina made them out of these sort of Barbie style dolls and customized each one to the person they were a place setting for. As Chateau Marmont scolded us for taking pictures, allow me to share a crazed Barbie art gallery with you all, photographed by the talented Forrest Black. My seating tag doll had a mohawk and come on her mouth. Very elegant . . . in a Barbie with a mohawk and come on her mouth sort of way.

A few years back, a number of members of Blue Blood sites started writing in to say someone was making dolls of various Blue Blood hotties. As I recall, Mistress Domiana and Fetus de Milo were two where there were specific dolls folks felt were based on photos Forrest Black and I had shot of them. Maybe there were other girls; it didn’t seem at all significant at the time, and the Bratz have changed enough over time that the Jury in their recent court battle (more on this soon, even though it is not technically a sex trial) asked whether they could find for the plaintiff in the first generation Bratz and against for later ones. To the best of my knowledge, neither I, nor Forrest Black, nor anyone I’ve photographed has ever met any of the brass at MGA Entertainment, the company who launched Bratz as their primary toy line in either 2001 or 2002, depending on who you ask. I guess MGA Entertainment is headquartered in Van Nuys, which is at last geographically close to Hollywood, if not culturally. So who knows.

Blue Blood hottie April Flores got in her prototype this week from Topco. The prototype is of the Wild Fire Celebrity Series Voluptuous CyberSkin Pussy. So that appears to be working out, but I’ve never really found a ton of business value in that type of merch, so I never gave much thought as to whether Bratz were or were not inspired by Gothic Sluts or whatever.

Some folks who did give it a lot of thought and were positive Bratz owed them an intellectual property debt were at the doll manufacturing and marketing powerhouse Mattell, home of Barbie. Now we could start comparing Barbie and Bratz. We could discuss how generations use fashion to define themselves. We could hear opinions from parents who feel Barbie (which they played with) is classic and wholesome and Bratz (which their kids want to play with) just teaches little girls to be whores. We could go into the radical feminist view that both Barbie and Bratz give girls unrealistic ideas of what a woman’s body will and should be like, setting the stage for adult eating disorders, antidepressant abuse, promiscuous sex, and excessive submission to the patriarchy.

Those might all be valid views, but the case, presided over U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson, this week was not, as many people supposed, about the ways Bratz is or is not similar to Barbie. The Bratz concept was developed by someone while he was working under exclusive contract for Mattel. His exclusive contract specifically stated that all such creations devised while in their employ were property of Mattel. This is a pretty common type of agreement for development teams. The idea is to prevent someone, especially someone with tons of access to proprietary info, from cashing their future competitor’s checks, while coming up with what they intend to market as a hipper and more current version of their employer’s product. Basically, this type of employment contract is explicitly to prevent precisely what the Bratz creator did.

So Judge Stephen G. Larson found in favor of Mattel. Mattel and MGA Entertainment have a couple of months now to decide whether to make Bratz and perhaps MGA a Mattel subsidiary, sell Bratz to MGA, license Bratz to MGA, or force MGA and all wholesalers and retailers to return any remaining My Hip Little Hoochie Barbies Bratz and then stack them up in the parking lot at 16380 Roscoe Blvd., pour newly less expensive gasoline on the clubby doll pile, and light it up.

These might all be valid courses of action.

Laughing Squid reports that the Art 94124 gallery in San Francisco will be presenting the 6th Annual Altered Barbie Art Show this week. This gallery group exhibit showcases the works of a variety of artists with different takes on the Barbie concept and place in the cultural zeitgeist. The Altered Barbie site has more information and gives you the opportunity to buy the gift for that hard-to-shop-for friend who has everything i.e. an $8,000 Barbie. Bet most folks you know don’t have one of those yet. Actually, even as I type this, I feel the certainty coming on that I must know at least one person who does.

With The Sun reporting that the new Black Canary Barbie, based on the DC Comics superhero character, could be called S&M Barbie, edgy artists will need to pull out all the stops. I have faith that Art 94124’s artists will be up to the challenge. But, yes, Mattel is actually releasing a superheroine Barbie clad in motorcycle jacket-cut PVC, hotpants, fishnets, and fetish boots. I’d ask what the impact of such media on little girls is likely to be, but I saw Olivia Newton-John in Grease when I was the right age for Barbie. Grease clearly taught that the best thing was to be a nice girl like Sandra Dee, but to dress like a dangerous black-clad uber-slut. Taking my own experience as an example, obviously eleven-year-olds don’t take any weird lessons away from such media. I mean, look how I turned out.