I once melted off various chunks of my hair because I wanted to have white stripes in it and was chatting with a friend while leaving 40 volume bleach in my hair extra-long. Parts of my hair were literally reduced to mush. Fortunately, I have thick hair to begin with and I was wearing it in stripes anyway, so it didn’t look as disturbing as it might have otherwise.

My best friend in ninth grade had naturally platinum blonde hair and I saw Heavy Metal that same year. Seeing white-tressed Tarna chopping off heads in her leather underwear was a formative moment for me. Whenever there is a real albino in a movie with humans (as opposed to cartoons), they often end up being a villain. I think the whole lack of pigment thing strikes some people in a primal off-kilter way which makes them associate it with danger.

Punk rock hairstyles are partially based on trying to evoke this response in others. I know, I know, you have a blue mohawk solely because you like how it looks, and you totally hate it when anyone stares at you in the street or when you frighten annoying passers-by or when anyone thinks it is sexy.

Maybe I wouldn’t have a thing for dangerously sexy if I hadn’t seen Heavy Metal when I did. But, not a lot of English language movies came to the theater in the country I was living in at the time, so I was going to go see whatever came through, whether it was an old movie or R-rated or even if it was a wretched doomed romance movie. I suppose, given that I still hate doomed love flicks, and I saw those at the same formative age, perhaps Heavy Metal is not wholly to blame/credit for my adult tastes.

So I admit that I watched and enjoyed the first season of America’s Next Top Model where the cool sorta rivethead chick with the good work ethic won. I stopped watching ANTM some time during the second season when I suddenly realized that Tyra Banks was appallingly egocentric, sadistic, and disingenuous and wasn’t really trying to select a top model at all. How this took me until the second season I do not know. Maybe it is something about Tyra Banks. Many years ago, when Trya Banks was a big deal model but not yet a brand, a sibling of mine scouted her for his modeling agency while she was on a date with John Singleton. Without noticing that she was, ya know, already a model.

So ANTM has apparently made it to its thirteenth season now or “cycle 13″. I guess they do more than one season a year. Part of each season includes an episode where Tyra dominates the wannabes by forcing them to get disturbing makeovers they have no say in. A lot of people (well, a portion of the people who don’t have pay cable and thus watch The CW) are all in a tizzy because Tyra Banks had three of the contestants this year get bleached kind of albino, eyebrows included.

Now I think albino features are seriously hot, but why is Tyra Banks suddenly all about albinism? A couple of models currently making a splash include Shaun Ross and Diandra Forrest, both from the Bronx. If Shaun Ross and Diandra Forrest were from Tanzania, however, their lives would be much less fabulous. Albinos in Tanzania have been being hunted. Tanzanians have been systematically murdering albinos and chopping off their body parts to harvest for supposed medicinal or magical properties or maybe for fun. These sorts of creepy things are difficult to parse when they happen in an alien culture. I think of Tanzania as a happy place with interesting animals because my grandparents lived there when my grandfather was helping Tanzania learn to utilize their leather resources. (Yes, leather, the apple doesn’t fall that far from the tree.) But I guess it has its downside. Ugh. Anyway, the Tanzanian government announced this week that it will be getting tough on albino killers and hanging some soon. Hopefully that is a deterrent. Positive Exposure is an organization working to help the victims of albinism discrimination in Africa.

Anyway, I think white hair looks lot. And soon it may even be sort of in. I would prefer, however, that fashions I like come into style because of factors other than genocidal events. But that’s just me.

Ashton Kutcher is the pretty much undisputed leading twit on Twitter. As of this moment, he has 2,839,413 followers, outflanking people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey, and even CNN and Twitter itself. He has held the number one spot for quite some time. So, when Ashton Kutcher tweets that his wife Demi Moore has gotten a mohawk, people listen.

I know an awful lot of extremely physically beautiful people, yet, even among celebrities, Ashton Kutcher is so freakishly good-looking that I remember him being in the movie Reindeer Games, even though I don’t think his character had a name. And I think his part was so small it consisted pretty much of stumbling into a bathroom or something at the wrong time. So I stop and think about it and realize that I can’t come up with any other movie Ashton Kutcher has ever been in. I know he was on a TV series called That 70’s Show which ran for a long time, but I don’t even know what network it ran on. So I go and check IMDB and I have actually never seen Ashton Kutcher acting in anything other than Reindeer Games. Yet he is clearly up there at the top of Mount Celebrity. I’ve apparently never really seen him act, yet I know that he dropped out of a biochemical engineering college program to become a male model.

Ashton Kutcher has managed to parlay a certain kind of famous access into something far larger than most. He is a perfect spokesman for digital cameras and micro-blogging services because he has managed to commodify certain parts of his existence in such a flawless and innovative way that, in 2009, the rest of society is panting to catch up.

The Punk’d reality show Ashton Kutcher co-created with producer partner Jason Goldberg at Katalyst Films took the Candid Camera genre to a whole new level. By playing pranks on recognizable people, Punk’d made the viewer feel much more invested in the show; it made the show feel ironically more real and most of the punked celebs more humanized. Maybe this makes some sort of statement about the alienation of modern man and how so many people feel more connected to famous faces on television and online than their, err, IRL peeps. Punk’d was spoofed on The Simpsons as the show Chop Shop with the pranked person crying out anguished “Why would you do that?” in response to their car being chopped for the purpose of filming their reaction for reality television.

Why would Ashton Kutcher do that? To get paid? To become a powerful producer? To be feared? To amuse himself? To get MTV to foot the bill for expensive pranks he wanted to play? To be able to have people to play pranks for him? To come across as more of a man’s man and less of just a pretty boy? To become that special sort of celebrity of the new millennium where he is nominally a famous actor, but the real description is much more complex . . .

So anyway, it appears that Demi Moore would look really hot with a mohawk. But the widely-covered haircut is just a photochop (Chop Shop!) Ashton Kutcher posted to his Twitter via TwitPic. Most of the news covering Ashton Kutcher punking the news media with what is not the most convincing photo manipulation say that Ashton Kutcher actually photoshopped the image. Never mind that minutes after posting the chop with the tweet ” wifey just got a new hair cut what do you guys think? I love it”, he tweeted, “@mrskutcher I”m just playing baby but I think you’d look great with that cut”. Which apparently was enough to convince a large proportion of the news media that Demi Moore actually had gotten a mohawk hairstyle. Because the Punk’d guy would never play the prankster in such matters. And apparently some pundits have poor reading comprehension. Which is ironic, given how many serious think pieces I have seen about Twitter decreasing people’s aptitude to comprehend complex thoughts. How much more complex than j/k are they themselves capable of? And what makes them think Ashton Kutcher did that photoshop job? Surely someone, who can pay other people to do pranks for him, has people for that.

When I started writing this article, a short time ago, the Demi Moore mohawk TwitPic had 179,571 views and now it has 181,371.

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.

Every now and then, I will use my TiVo to download a bunch of music videos. I download a bit of everything and then watch them briskly and efficiently. No reality programming in between. No commercials. If I don’t like the beginning of a music video, I fast forward to the mid-point to see if it gets better once it gets going. If not, I’m on to the next one.

I never heard of Justin Moore before, but I just got through playing his “Back That Thing Up” video about five gajillion times. “Back That Thing Up” has what Tapeheads fans would know to call serious production values. For those of you who must shamefacedly admit to never having seen Tapeheads, allow me to illustrate:

Mo Fuzz: All this video is missing is production values.
Ivan Alexeev, Josh Tager: Production values?
Mo Fuzz: Yeah. Tits and ass.

If muscles on video vixens and tight faded jeans on singer boys are coming back in style, I think I owe some deity a sacrificial goat now! Maybe two goats for the drummer still having tattoos and a mohawk. If “Back That Thing Up” is representative of Justin Moore’s body of work, he falls somewhere between Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks on one side and Motley Crue and AC/DC on the other. There are at least as many appalling sexual double entendres in “Back That Thing Up” as there are in “Big Balls”. I loathe puns. Unless they are sex puns. Then I love them.

Justin Moore has a mischievous smile, an easy charismatic stance and delivery style, and a smooth Southern voice both speaking and singing. Justin Moore has enormous star quality and looks really good in tight faded jeans and a cowboy hat. I usually don’t like cowboy hats (even though my foot was once photographed with one for Playboy.) He has an uncomplicated comfortable way of moving in his country duds which just works very very well. According to The Valory Music website, Justin Moore’s parents were deeded a fifteen-acre farm from his grandfather in a 272 person town called Poyen in Arkansas. His bio includes such American small town pastimes as high school baseball and gospel choir. I know country performers tend to talk about their mad farming skillz the same way rappers represent their drug-dealing resumes. Justin Moore is kind of being pitched as both flawlessly country and kind of indie, although it sort of looks like he is a Universal recording artist and he did get an awesome music video directed by Wes Edwards and produced by Brittany Hailes.

I have lived in both Georgia and North Carolina and, when I was thirteen, there were a lot of accent fetishist New Yorkers who wanted to date me for the five minutes I really had that Southern twang, until the moment passed. There is still the occasional word I say with a Southern accent, but I do not now identify as Southern nor have I ever identified as Southern. I have never thought of country as my community or culture. So I don’t care if Justin Moore’s comically country music-ready resume is over-spun or not. Apparently Country Music Television is a little wound up about the content in the video, so too racy for CMT is certainly a selling point in my book.

I know, I know, I get all excited about some media thing. I research it. Then I have to ponder whether it is real or not. In my defense, the YouTube comments on the cowboy singer’s videos tend to be mostly girls saying they are super “cuntry” and way better than those “Playboy whores” in the “Back That Thing Up” video. Except for the one gay guy who wanted Justin to back his nice thing up into some dick. This was apparently very offensive to some country fans. Some “cuntry” girls also complained that the video was degrading to women, but they were un-eloquently debated by other posters who apparently ran the lyrics through a rap filter and felt that it was good that “at least” it was not what they had come up with. Yeah, ’cause Justin Moore is more talented than they are.

This all brings me back to what was really my only point:

There is this kinda new singer Justin Moore and his catchy and nicely performed song “Back That Thing Up” has an incredibly cool video out directed by Wes Edwards. The end.

For Thanksgiving this year, I went to a potluck buffet at TheDeathKnight’s killer house. He is one of those rare people with the decorator instinct and no need to conform to convention. The whole place is done is a sort of medievalist occult opium den sort of style.

2008 Thanksgiving factoid #1: Hunter Jackson, talented illustrator of GWAR arch-nemesis Techno Destructo fame, tells me that the Indians did not come up with scalping. Europeans actually developed the practice because they placed different sized bounties on the heads of members of different tribes. As different Indian tribes had distinct hairstyles (see Will Judy’s History of the Mohawk), the easiest way for bounty hunters to get paid accurately was for them to bring back scalps.

2008 Thanksgiving factoid #2: My mother tells me that a law passed last month named the holiday as Native American Heritage Day. Just for this year. Well, that will certainly make up for bringing all that scalping to the New World.

I loved the Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller film adaptation of Sin City. It was an aesthetic triumph. I recently re-watched it when Forrest Black and I went clubbing in Portland with DJ Mohawk Adam and Sin City is still fun when re-watching it on a large screen in a goth-industrial nightclub.

Truthfully, the actual comic book Sin City turned me off though. Frank Miller was instrumental in getting me into comics with his Dark Knight re-envisioning of Batman in a much grittier world. But, when I got to the part of Sin City where the chick is all freaking out about how the bad guy made her watch while he ate her hand, I just rolled my eyes and pretty much gave up on reading comics. I didn’t mind giving Sin City a chance to entertain me as a movie because there was no fond memory of a book it could destroy.

The other major factor in me becoming less satisfied with the comic book medium was that I read Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Watchmen is the most perfect comic anyone anywhere has ever done. It is hauntingly emotionally beautiful, vividly memorable, philosophically and politically insightful, and still a great action tale. Once I had read Watchmen, nothing else in the field could really compare.

Because Watchmen was an important work, I feel like it is news that the trailer for the long-rumored Watchmen movie has been released. I post it here, if you’d like to view it.

It has been widely reported that author Alan Moore is not happy with the film adaptation of his seminal graphic novel. If it turns out that Alan Moore in fact does not like it, then I will personally almost certainly avoid seeing the movie.

Yes, I know Alan Moore should not have taken the movie industry’s money in a deal which allowed them to pervert his vision. I give Frank Miller huge kudos for making a deal on Sin City where he could be happy with the outcome. I give Robert Rodriguez huge kudos for giving up his Directors Guild membership in order to be able to give Frank Miller proper credit on Sin City. Robert Rodriguez lost some big deal work for going against the DGA, but he produced something damn excellent in Sin City by doing so.

V is for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell were also made from Alan Moore comic books. IMDB has the following quotes from Alan Moore on his feelings about movie adaptations of his work:

“The answer I always fall back on is to quote Raymond Chandler. People said: ‘Raymond, don’t you feel devastated by how Hollywood has destroyed your books?’ And he would take them into his study, point to the bookshelf and say, ‘There they are. Look, they’re fine.’ The film has got nothing to do with my work. It has a coincidental title to a book I’ve done and they’ve given me a huge wedge of money. No problem with that . . . the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise . . . League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the reason why I decided to take my name off all subsequent films . . . I want them to say, ‘We’re not going to give you any money for your work, you’re not going to get any credit for it and we’re not going to put your name on it.’ To see a line of dialogue or a character that I have poured that much emotional involvement into, to see them casually travestied and watered down and distorted… it’s kind of painful. It’s much better just to avoid them altogether.”

Given all that, it seems messed up that so many of Alan Moore’s works have been optioned for film. I’m assuming he had to have signed off on this at some point in time, but I think the problem is that it is very difficult to have one’s work widely seen in comics without being published by Marvel or DC Comics and they both tend to retain things like movie rights. My understanding is that, when development started on Constantine, Alan Moore rejected both payment and credit for having created the Hellblazer character, giving his share to the comic book artist who first drew the Constantine character for the Alan Moore Swamp Thing scripts for DC Comics. That shows at least belated integrity, even though perhaps the best thing would be for Alan Moore to have never cashed corporate checks, if he wanted to be free of corporate masters.