EXILE
Self Published
It’s Weekly World News meets Might meets, and this one is the most accurate, The Onion. A Russian tabloid where DEAD-ON FUNNY American ex-pats in Moscow take the piss out of everything that is Eastern Europe. That means: shitty cooking, dumb shopping sluts, bad food, and, of course, Putin’s obsession with judo (which Exile manifests as Harriet Tubman being a cantankerous ghost constantly challenging him to a duel). I guess the only difference between Exile and The Onion (besides the obvious geographical thang) is that Exile wasn’t started by a male stripper named Dave that liked to fuck 16-year-olds.

—Christi Bradnox

Rebel Heart: An American Rock and Roll Journey
By Bebe Buell with Victor Bockris
St. Martin’s Press
List of men Bebe Buell fucked: Todd Rundgren, Steve Tyler, Elvis Costello, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Ron Wood, Rod Stewart, Jack Nicholson, David Bowie, Jimmy Page. Times Bebe Buell claims she is not a “groupie” in Rebel Heart: on almost every page. “Todd says I’m too classy to be a groupie. At least I’m not a coke whore. He would never call me an idiot. I felt like Grace Kelly.” Bebe Buell is the epitome of Almost Famous. If she hadn’t given birth to the ripe and ready-for-fame Liv Tyler, I’m not sure I would have ever even heard of her. And I would’ve missed out on this incredibly bad/good book.
Bebe’s delusions are fucking hilarious: Todd Rundgren was influenced by Bowie because of me. I sabotaged my modeling career on purpose. I felt like the Yoko Ono of Aerosmith. If I hadn’t dated all those men, and posed for Playboy, I would’ve been a rock star in my own right. Todd would be fucking nondescript tramps, whereas I would be fucking major icons.
My favorite Bebe fantasy concerns Elvis Costello. After many torrid weeks of love and intimacy, Elvis went back to his wife. Bebe called and called; no answer. She wrote letter after letter; no response. Bebe showed up at his concert and was banned from the backstage. Why is Elvis doing this to her?
“Now I understand why he couldn’t respond: He cannot see me again because I am irresistible to him. He says it in his songs. He can’t get too close because he’ll fall for me again.” Ow. No. He dumped you, Bebe, because you’re a psycho groupie, and he got all scared of you. Now you got me all scared of you, too.

—Lisa Gabriele

Permanent Food
Every Issue
Art Money
So some lunatic rich-ass artist sits on a pile of magazines, cuts out his favorite pages and glues them together into his own magazine. There’s no credits (besides the occasional accidental page number) and the scanning is shit – so why isn’t he getting sued? I guess the number one reason is that most magazines, including these fags, would KILL to be included.

—Jeff Lemmelson

Nobrow. The Culture of Marketing – The Marketing of Culture
John Seabrook
Vintage
John Seabrook can write. He’s been doing it for long enough. The 32-year-old, culture academic has been overanalyzing commercialism for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Harper’s since Coca Cola took out their first classified. He does it in that University professor way where you make up a word like “taste hierarchy” and you’re so chuffed with yourself you repeat it endlessly like a mantra. A bit pedantic but at least it’s insightful.
Our real beef with this aging hipster however, is his newfound obsession with, as he puts it, “hip-hop and then the subgenres of hip-hop like gangsta” or “the rich ground between techno and hip-hop—acid, trance, jungle, big beat, ambient.” Dude had better check himself because he comes across like a Dad in glo-sticks with this shit. When he sticks to what he knows the book is all right but when John starts waxing about his niggas the lines are truly embarrassing. Like check this out for example. He’s quoting Biggie Smalls’ “Fuck the past/ Let’s dwell/ On the 500 SL/ The E&J and ginger ale” and he starts talking about how he learned to speak rap and can translate it for us. He says, “The 500 SL was a Mercedes … E and J … hmm … oh, Ernest and Julio Gallo.” What are you talking about, John? Have you ever seen Biggie? Wine and ginger ale? I think, just maybe, Biggie meant E&J whiskey, you hilarious nerd. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

—Jessica Lo