It's Britney, Bitch!

This might well be an actual comeback for Britney, as opposed to the train wreck that was last year's VMAs. This year - almost a year to the date after her latter-years-Elvis impersonation at the VMAs 2007 - Britney is appearing in a couple of commercials for the MTV Video Music Awards. She looks good, happy, sparkly, not particularly clever, and mostly not insane. So normal Britney.



So rather than talk about her past couple of years - the metaphorical elephant in the room - they put an actual elephant in the room. No idea why or what it means.

Best, though, is the inclusion of madcap Brit comic Russell Brand, he of the worst hair ever. Russell, who was the best thing about the forgettable Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has a delightful propensity to bite the hand that feeds him. So I'm looking forward to all of the usual nonsense in early September, as he'll be hosting.

Mostly, though, I'm happy to see Britney is off the suicide watch. I think her meltdown, as catastrophic as it was, is something she'll recover from. And let's give the girl a little bit of sympathy: she has the second worst showbiz mom in the world (thank you, Dina Lohan, for setting the bar so low); she makes worse choices in men than Elizabeth Taylor, and she's no longer getting her body rocked by Justin Timberlake. These are things that would drive anyone to go on a two year bender.

So I have just one more question: there's Britney, but where's Whitney? Duelling comebacks, yo!

Break me off a piece of that Chrysler Car!

This is fantastic: a perfect storm of comedy, marketing genius, and mash-up inanity. The Office? Great, as always. Andy, one of the characters thereon, being unable to remeber the end of the Kit Kat jingle after he calls it the best ad in the world, ever? Even better - especially since it touches on a real-world fear of marketers who are afraid of "good" commericals that don't create any link to the brand. And the fact that someone mashed up all of Andy's incorrect answers with actual Kit Kat commecial footage? Well that's just effing genius.

Facebook equals Crack Cocaine. But much, much worse.

You've all heard about Facebook, the latest and greatest social networking site. You may not know how incredibly popular it is in Canada - more so than anywhere else in the world, actually, even though it started in the US and was unavailable to a lot of Canadian schools (school networks being the only way to join Facebook until last fall). What is it about Facebook in particular that seems to be resonating so strongly with Canadians? My guess is that we like community building tools more than others and that we appreciate the relative Spartan-ness of it as well: it's very simple to connect to and keep up to date with everyone in your network using Facebook, more so than with any other social networking site.

All that being said, we're now using it at Youthography for everything from our own group, to housing a promotion we're doing called Rockstar Hotel, to our own personal pages.

Whether or not it lasts remains to be seen: after all, it wasn't too long ago that Friendster was occupying the same space for many of us, and it's simply not as popular with young Canadians as it once was. We've been speaking forever - or, at least, for a few years, about the blurring between our off-and-0n-line lives, about the increasing connection between personal lives and work, and about the breaking down of barriers that used to keep different parts of our lives separate from each other. Facebook is just the next step forward: a single place, online, that lets you connect to all of the things that matter to you.

For Youthography's official perspective, check out our latest newsletter. The numbers are amazing. And it's only a matter of time before someone makes the owners of this thing an offer they can't refuse: as it stands, there are rumours that it's bringing in $50 million a month in revenue right now (through sponsored groups and other forms of marketing) and that they have already refused an offer for three quarters of a billion dollars. Which may be the most amazing number of them all.

They tried to make me go to rehab...

Britney Spears has shaved her head. Really. it looks like someone drank an industrial-sized bottle of crazy, no? I'm actually interested to see if this career can be saved - we're heading into Michael Jackson territory here, and that's certainly not a good thing.

But at least now we know that the carpet matches the drapes.

Grammy Thoughts

It's the five hundredth Grammy awards, or whatever. Already, it looks like the music industry is apologising as best as it can to the Dixie Chicks. A couple of awards, and the night is just over half done.

But here are some thoughts:

Justin Timberlake will rule the world. Eventually, I think, we'll do nothing but spend time on Google and listen to Justin Timberlake albums. We'll eventually forget to take bathroom breaks or eat or wash ourselves, and future civilisations or aliens will discover us slumped over our keyboards listening to "My Love" or watching "Dick in a Box" with a Google news feed giving us constant updates on Justin and Scarlett and Cameron.

Smokey Robinson can no longer blink. He just performed before Lionel Richie ("Hello," which is so far at the edges of the "terrible song/great video" intersection graph that scientists can't actually measure it) and Chris Brown. The three of them took a bow together with Brown in the middle of an awful plastic surgery sandwich. That poor kid: he did a back flip; he had six year old dancers; he slid down a massive slide in a weird mask - and still he winds up being surrounded by the ghosts of R & B past. It's as if the picture of Dorian Gray was standing to his left and his right.

John Mayer performed with Corrine Bailey Rae and John Legend. Dude needs a haircut, but more to the point, I wish I liked any of his music at all, because he seems genuinely funny and self-deprecating and seems to understand that he's pretty much won the lottery. That being said, when he plays blues guitar he makes one of those scrunched-up white boy faces that makes me think that I know what he looks like when he's having sex. Or passing a stone. As if Jessica Simpson can tell the difference.

Oh, and then the deathroll. My favourite part, because there is an endless supply of country and blues legends that I've never heard of and a couple dozen of them die every year. And the applause is polite, until someone people have actually heard about flashes on screen. Then the place goes crazy, because there's a lot of pent-up mourning there. And then someone leaves James Brown's cape on a mic stand and the thing fades to black, and no one watching who is under 30 understands what the hell just went on. JB is in a better place, though: I guess he's beating his wife and fining band members $50 for not keeping time at the great big Apollo theatre in the sky.

But Keith Urban managed to avoid being a part of this list by getting himself to rehab. And here he is, performing, with a warmth that threatens to melt even Nicole Kidman.

Mary J. Blige is performing with Ludacris and one of the guys from Earth Wind and Fire who clearly ate the rest of the band. Mary is always a fashion disaster - her choices sound like they might work in theory, but in practice, she looks like someone who is styled by Beyonce's mom after a horrendous bender. Oh, wait, that's Beyonce. Anyway, Mary J. is singing in a red haltered-catsuit that she had altered with a camel toe implant. It's classy. Luda, on the other hand, looks great in a fantastic dinner jacket and white vest combination. On his arm, Mary J. looks like an escort. Still, she's fierce and fabulous and other things that gay men say about women they will never get with.

Some girl named Robin Troup just won a competition to sing with Justin Timberlake and after a quick run through of "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" designed to show the world that Justin can play guitar, they launch into "My Love". The girl is doing a good job of not wetting herself, I'll give her that, and she wisely steps out of the way when TI comes in to rap. Why do I not think this is the last time she'll find herself between those two guys this evening?

Tony Bennett and Quentin Tarantino are now out to present together. My television is going to explode. Bennett just did the Bat Dance, I think, and asked QT for work, meaning he'll play an aging hitman's assistant with a predilection for light S&M and a Vicodin addiction in his next movie. Tarantino feels the need to editorialize as he announces each nominee, saying cute things like "Three Nice Girls From Texas" as he announces the Dixie Chicks are nominated. What does he think this adds to the proceedings? Does anyone need context like this? If Quentin likes the sound of his own voice so much, he should just rent Pulp Fiction like the rest of us, except he wouldn't fast forward over all of his scenes.

Oh, look, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers finish their song, reams and reams of treated, shiny ticker tape are dropped on the audience. How wasteful. And here to introduce the next award, it's Al Gore, Mister Environment himself. Ain't that ironic.

But here is the nut of it: The Most Beleaguered Industry in the World (tm) did something right tonight, by giving Carrie Underwood and Justin Timberlake as much airtime as they wanted. These are two legitimate crossover artists with enough star power to draw in viewers, and will at least give the industry a couple more seconds on life support. Which is no to say that the industry is in trouble or out of touch or anything - what can you say about a group that calls one of the prestige awards of the evening "Record of the Year"? Listen up, N.A.R.A.S - it hasn't been records for a long, long time. But congrats to the Dixie Chicks for winning MP3 of the year. Not too bad for Three Nice Girls from Texas.

It's the year of the mash-up. Or the year after! Or the year after that!

It's not just mash-ups in music anymore. I guess it hasn't been for a while. And whether or not we're talking about the sort of video mashing we see on YouTube all the time (using different audio as a soundtrack to existing video) or clothes mash-ups (I saw a "Blondie vs. The Doors: Rapture Riders" t-shirt at a store in San Diego this past week) we are using an unprecedented level of control over our culture to mix cultural elements together like never before.

So here's an example I really like: Marvel vs. Peanuts. The genius of the mash-up, to me, is when it reveals something new about each existing piece by having to make it work with something apparently discordant. Charlie Brown and Peter Parker have more in common than I ever thought: no matter how hard they both try, the world just seems too intent on beating them down.

And Spider-Brown, upside down in the kite-eating tree, getting a kiss from Snoopy? Genius.

Life Imitates Art

If you don't work in an office, or you've never been to an office retreat, more specifically, this might not be as hilarious for you as it was for me.



Or maybe it will be, in the way that similarly-themed bits from both the American and English versions of The Office seem to resonate with non-corporate types, too.

What is it that makes this so funny? Is it the singer's terrifying sincerity? The fact that they've converted U2's "One" - a poignant song about the difficulty of love in the modern era - into a song about a bank merger? For me, this is a perfect-storm of cringeworthiness. It's almost to the point where I wish it had been staged, but no - this is probably happening all around the world in other corporate retreats as we speak, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.