Saturday, January 13, 2007

again with the celebrities already?

Okay, I'm sure I've said so before, but just to recap:

Yes. Sadly. I. Like. No Doubt.

This has become embarrassing. Their last real album, "Rock Steady," which pretty much universally hated by, like, everyone I know...and loved by tons of people who like hip hop and probably don't care about No Doubt up to then being a ska band. I thought it was okay. Okay enough that I bought Gwen Stefani's first solo album...which I hated. But not at first. I tried oh-so-very hard to like it. But I couldn't. Even now, I'm trying to think of any and all redeeming factors--so much do I not want to hate anything my once-beloved Gwen could create. But, you see. Spelling out the word "bananas" is just annoying.

But it's true that at one point in my life (when I was a senior in high school, to be exact) I thought Gwen Stefani was the most beautiful woman alive. That was back when she had the pink hair I coveted way too much and looked like this:



I never did dye my hair pink. The closest I got was a brassy red that made my mom half-smile and say things like, "Maybe you should go back to the strawberry blonde. That looked nice." I even had to work up to the brassy red by going to strawberry blonde first! I have no courage. It's not surprising, really, that I went to a couple of parties in college with my hair all sticky with pink pomade:



A lot has changed since then. I finished college, got married, moved to California, and slowly began to broaden my musical horizon. Gwen got married, had a baby, stopped whining about not being married or having a baby, and started spelling "bananas" on stage.

So when I was Christmas shopping in the Burbank mall last month and saw Gwen's face the size of a spin wheel on a Hummer, plastered onto the window of the Sam Goody... I guess it was a bit like seeing an old friend that you haven't spoken to since high school...only it was on purpose. Oh, yeah, and she doesn't care and has a lot more friends now.

I stopped walking and just stared at her. I said, "I used to think she was so beautiful." And then John said, "Until everyone else thought she was." It isn't that she's more famous. It's that I liked the way she was before.

Today I ran across a link to her new video (for "Sweet Escape") and I thought it was cute. Poppy. Fun. Not obnoxious. But those pictures... They're awful! She looks like one of the Bee Gees! And then, the more I looked at them, the more familiar they looked. And then I made the connection and this realization:

Jill Greenberg creeps me out.

Over Christmas, the store where I work sold tons of her book, Monkey Portraits, which I thought was cute. Then today it was drawn to my attention that she's the same photographer that made the news over her exhibit made up entirely of photos of tear-soaked children.

What's really disturbing (you know, aside from wondering why all those babies were screaming) is that all the pictures, although incredibly dynamic, all look the same...which was why I started to think Gwen looked like a monkey.




And, now that it's been brought to my attention, a crying child...




I find both a little unnerving.

I kinda always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend /
I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them / And you know it makes me sick to be on that list / But I should have thought of that before we kissed




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