(Above: the Daily Terror, and below that the Sunday Terror, caught up in a feeding frenzy over the Bingle. Screen caps, so no hot links, links below).
Warning: scroll down and you'll find a potentially NSFW image. Well it's safe in my workplace, but you might end up like a Macquarie banker.
Sometimes I think that the reason blogs get hits is that other bloggers go to other blogs to get stills to illustrate their blogs about other bloggers. It's a virtuous circle, as we used to say when writing reports explaining why governments should piss money against the wall on new economic multiplier schemes designed to turn the arts into the engine room of the economy.
No need to actually worry about the contents of said blogs - just 'here's a tasty image', and 'ta, I'll have that thank you very much', just what I needed to illustrate my indepth dissertation on the significance of Marilyn Monroe's tits.
Did I say tits? Well sadly, it's come to this. I must lay out my web of tasty stills to titillate the vast unwashed horde of bloggers, who will then turn up to borrow the stills I've borrowed, and so complete the virtuous circle, and so meaning is established in the world, because we all get hits.
By the way, did you catch Jon Stewart's analysis of web trends and Chatroulette?
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Tech-Talch - Chatroulette | ||||
| ||||
Why did I think of The Punch's attempts to be trendy and relevant? And why so forlorn and desperate? Why stick Jon Stewart in the middle of an item to make sure readers click through to watch the best American comedian going around do his thing?
Well you see this is the second Sunday in a row we don't have Akker Dakker aka Piers Akerman's column in the Sunday Terror to contemplate. Last week I advised people to go read his greatest hits and mammaries (oh those tits, they keep bobbing up everywhere), but frankly that strategy is a bit long in the tooth.
Meanwhile Chairman Rudd is laying waste to the country, ruining everything, and fat cat scientists in black helicopters are devising clever schemes to rule the world, under the guise of global warming, and where's the noble warrior at the Sunday Telegraph battling against the fiends? Gone MIA (and anyone who's watched Rambo will know exactly what that means). That only leaves a few comrades - valiant expert scientists like Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt - to carry on the fight. Or the tilting at windmills.
Instead, Kate DeBrito, doing her Miss Lonelyhearts impersonation, snares top spot in the blogs front page splash, and this week she's helping out a couple who earn over $200k a year and donate $450 a month to charity, and now the wife is pregnant. (Charity starts at home). They earn over $200k a year and they write to Kate for financial advice? Who on earth are these people?
So casting around for something earth shattering, something totally meaningful, that had preoccupied not just the tabloids, but the chattering classes, I came up with Lara Bingle nude.
Now I'm a little slow on such matters. The best bloggers have already tasted the low hanging fruit, but since I had only a vague idea of who Lara Bingle was, had even less of an idea who Michael Clarke might be (it turns out he's a cricketer), and had never heard of Brendan Fevola (it turns out he's an AFL footballer), you can see that I was starting behind the eightball.
So where better place to start than the Daily and Sunday Terrors, which in lieu of Akker Dakker, has devotedly kept a Lara Bingle splash (as above) on its front digital page for what seems like a couple of days on end.
By golly, this Bingle has star power, and so of course I clicked and was immediately transported - like accepting a magic carpet ride from an obliging genie - to Sydney Confidential's Annette Sharp doing one of the most incisive and moving studies of popular culture - handily illustrated by a bikini clad Lara Bingle - in Where the bloody hell did Brand Bingle go wrong?
This is such a deeply existential question - the bloody hell wrongness of Brand Bingle going - that if answered might well contain the seeds to a solution for human unhappiness and misery around the world. And of course once they'd hooked me, they just reeled me in with Jonathon Moran and Elle Halliwell's equally incisive and poignant Lara Bingle faces reality (so much more exciting than Portia Faces Life).
When writing this kind of story, it's important to do a chapter and verse history which allows the writer to trawl over all the past Lara Bingle incidents contained in the tabloid archives. You know, bad boy here, silly girl there, bad boy there, silly girl here, culminating in the latest incident, which has seen Fevola allegedly release a mobile phone snap of Bingle in the nude, and then allegedly Bingle copping $200,000 to tell all about it in Woman's Day, and in the meantime allegedly proposing to sue Fevola, and Fevola allegedly saying he dun nuthink.
And now - if the Sunday Terror is to be trusted - it seems that Lara allegedly wants to be packaged as a Paris Hilton-type reality star for a cool million (yep, I wanted to work in a reference to Nathanael West's A Cool Million, available here at Project Gutenberg).
I say allegedly, because frankly I don't have a clue. As I trawled through Sharp's masterwork, slowly getting an oily, greasy glutinous feeling, I realized I had indeed seen Bingle on the box, in that disastrous Where the bloody hell are you tourist campaign, which seemed designed to remind people why you should never trust government agencies to mount a decent advertising campaign.
Well I can understand a tabloid getting into the action - even if reading Sharp or the million dollar beat up is like gorging on a serving of tropical fruit pavlova - and this sort of thing is grist to the mill of Woman's Day, who had first bite with Lara and Michael: The nude photo, the footballer ex and the public meltdown.
But then it turns out that heavy hitters were also deeply vexed and engaged. Why over at The Sydney Morning Herald Peter Fitzsimons is devastated in Naked truth is Fev has hit a new low. And Jessica Lake delivered an exceptionally solemn piece headed Sorry Lara, we have no right to privacy.
As if a model in quest of the spotlight was in search of privacy, so much as public exposure and private life on her own sweet terms. Show me the money!
Dear sweet lord, even colourful Sydney identity Charlie Waterstreet - on ya Charlie - gets into the game with Serve it up Lara, noting that Lara has been photographed more times than a Mossad agent. And over at Crikey, an indignant Andrew Crook gets agitated by the media circus and the clowns in The whole Bingle Bungle, and hands out Wankleys all over the place.
And that's just for starters. If you use one of these fancy new aggregators - leeches on the soul of honest Chairman Rupert Daily and Sunday investigative journalism producing content of the highest quality, well worth a subscription - the Bingle produces so much copy you could waste a life time reading it (yes, Interceder, I'm talking about you and your kind).
Why on earth are so many loons squawking on the pond about Lara Bingle?
And then it came to me in a flash. It's just tits. Presumably in their youth men sucked on them as a way of getting healthy nutrition, while building up useful disease preventing antibodies, or else had to settle for a bottle and a deep yearning, and given half a chance in later life, they still like to suck away, ostensibly to give the woman pleasure, but we know the truth about all that ...
... and look at tits endlessly, and fondle them, and then - when actually confronted with real boobs in actual photographs - generate moral panics as if a tit might herald the downfall of Rome - and then in extreme cases, turn around and write about the filth on the intertubes, and the need for censorship and a great big filter, excepting of course for the salacious rubbish churned out by Chairman Rupert's minions, which is serious quality journalism about the deep reality check (or is it a 200k or million dollar cheque) confronting imperilled Lara Bingle ...
Come on down Woody Allen ...
And as a result of these media follies, driven by an unhealthy fixation on tits, which suggests that weaning is still poorly understood in Australia, Bingle's going to make out like a bandit and pocket a healthy slice of $200k, with talk of zillions to follow.
Now tell me, who's the clowns in all this. Bingle or the media, slavering and slobbering after a look at her tits?
Sure it's not nice for someone to publish a photo of someone nude on the intertubes without their consent - castration might be a sound cure in some cases, or at least joining the Catholic church priesthood so they can get fixated on boys instead - but my anxiety was ameliorated by hitting the intertubes in search of the photo.
What's the first image that came up in an unfiltered search? As sampled by those naughty Web Wombat people?
Sure there was a little seismic tremble, the earth moved a little for my partner, but amazingly Rome is still standing, and the barbarians haven't made it through the gate.
It turns out that Bingle has been featured on the German GQ in the nude, and got into an argument with Zoo about some other snaps of an explicit kind.
I'm told that alleged images of Bingle allegedly posing in the nude are not all they seem, and that allegedly she alleges she was deceived by the photographer in question. Well it takes a fair kind of deception to take off your top and pose in front of a camera while a photographer clicks away, and then say you were allegedly not aware of what you were allegedly doing.
Luckily, aware that the camera lens would fracture, I've never felt the need.
So what on earth is the fuss all about? Well it's just another day in a very parochial media, obsessed with football and cricket stars and their consorts, and if you pardon me, I'll just cruise on past this storm in a teacup.
Just remind me again the next time News Ltd talks about the dire state of the intertubes, that cant and hypocrisy and humbug and pious platitudes are the stock in trade of the tabloids and the women's magazines.
My advice? If you see Lara Bingle featured on the front page of a rag, don't stop to buy, just walk on by. Content you should pay for? In your dreams Chairman Rupert ...
Cash in the paw only eggs them on, when they all deserve a good Freudian egging ...
(Below: anyhoo, here's another snap for those bloggers).
Oh exquisitely done.
ReplyDeleteNow the only orphan of the Nat West Quartet is Balso Snell. But I confess I never did read that one, I got seduced into the Alexandria Quartet instead (of which my alheimered memory protectively declines to allow me to remember anything).
PS, on the vanishingly small possibility that you may not have previously encountered this, I thought I'd post it:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe
It's the third one, of course. Funnily, I've previously heard that sentiment, but aimed at British Justices rather than at inconsequential journos.
The oldies are always the goodies, and I hadn't thought about it or him for years, but now prompted and reminded, think it splendid all over again! Thanks.
ReplyDelete