I first saw Russell Brand on The Graham Norton Show. While it’s true (as I have to keep reminding myself) that a person cannot know another person through a television or movie screen, first impressions have to count for something.
I was immediately taken with this articulate, agitated, irreverent young man, largely because he seemed authentic. He had a look in his eyes –- wild and longing -– and I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of childhood he had had.
A few months later, I saw him on a (New York City) comedy special, where he was regaling the audience with anecdotes of his recent stint as host of the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which made his autobiography -– My Booky Wook -– that much more enjoyable at the cottage last summer. He is, after all, laugh out loud funny, and darkly, hauntingly tragic.
I half-heard a few months ago that Brand was dating Katy Perry, a woman who has never caught my attention, mostly because her Ur So Gay and I Kissed A Girl seemed like another pathetic (that is, boring) ploy to garner immediate and widespread notice. Nothing capitally wrong with that, I suppose, but behaviour that seems more in keeping with attention-seeking children, and therefore beyond my interest or patience.
Last night I tuned in to American Idol, a show I watch with embarrassing gusto. (Jambalaya, crawfish pie, filé gumbo…) I think it took me all of seven seconds to ask, “Oh my God –- who is this rude girl?” And rude was only the first word out of my mouth, followed quickly by off-putting, affected and appalling.
That Simon Cowell, who I often like, generally takes a harder line with young adults who come from troubled backgrounds –- watch how he responds to anyone who has survived cancer or suffered a string of foster homes, and see if you don’t come to the same conclusion (I often wonder if he is terrified of being sick, or if he is worried that he will be seen as somehow soft) (or perhaps he is, merely, fatefully, cruel and ungenerous) –- but I find myself extremely irked when that young person can also sing -- Simon casting them away with a flick of his wrist and, if he’s up to it, a sneer.
Last night, a young man named Chris Golightly, at the least a solid singer and, as it happens, an orphan, sang a snippet from Stand By Me. When he finished, I expected the usual cynical comments from Simon Cowell, but I was blown away by the grotesque (postured? gunning for the fourth judge’s seat after Simon vacates? trying to live up to the Russell Brand experience?) response from Katy Perry –- birth name Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson –- who said, in response to Kara DioGuardi’s impulsive, emotional reaction, “This isn’t a Lifetime movie, sweetheart.”
The first word that came into my head isn’t blog-printable, but bitch will do for now. (And what’s with all of these young women and their inappropriate terms of endearment?) Who does this juvenile, hair-dyed, costumed lightweight (this isn’t the UN, after all, or the cure for cancer) think she is, comparing this young man’s life in foster homes and his clearly stated lifetime loneliness –- he was shown speaking, in a clip, about the terrible pain of holidays and birthdays going by without family –- to a Lifetime movie? Is this what comes from having a boyfriend who, so desperately hurt himself (read his book), has had to approach life with his own hawkish acrimony, a lengthy heroin hook, and alcohol and sex addiction? (And I write this with sympathy, having had a mother who was perpetrator and victim of same.)
Chris Golightly isn’t cool enough, standing there in a sweet, ordinary way, waiting earnestly to hear what the judges have to say, his vulnerability making him a target of the typically cutting Simon Cowell and this fabricated, transparent girl of twenty-five?
Hell in a hand basket (as my mother also used to say -- spinning in her grave, her own troubled history in tact -- if she could see what a world we live in now): vulnerability almost always equated with weakness; bad behaviour rewarded, kindness laughed at, empathy all but unheard of (let alone experienced) by so many under-thirties.
Anything for attention. Desperate. Ungenerous. Empty. Mean. Cruel. Tendentious. Callow. Smug. Egregious (they hope). Appalling, disheartening, shuddersome, depressing, bleak.
We sat there last night, mouths open, muttering, “Katy Perry is appalling.”
