“She told me that he was elderly and frail and also very tired, so I would have to lift him out of the taxi and into the wheelchair. I immediately felt unsure about the situation but I did my best to help by carefully lifting the man from his seat. To my horror his face fell sideways against mine — it was ice cold. I knew straight away that the man was dead but they reassured me that he always sleeps like that. So I placed the body into the wheelchair and pushed the man to the back of the easyJet queue.”
-Andrew Millea, a worker at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, reports the instructions given by the widow and stepdaughter of Curt Willi Jarant, who were arrested after they tried to sneak Jarant’s dead body onto an easyJet flight to Berlin. No word yet on whether easyJet plans to institute corpse-handling fees, but that is one airline surcharge I could probably get behind.

“She has this amazing rock ’n’ roll voice and she’s sort of a closet rock ’n’ roll singer. She’s got a lot of balls. For a female rock singer she’s one of the best women I’ve ever heard.” That’s Slash the rock ’n’ roll guitarist, talking about Fergie. Yes, fucking Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Perhaps you’ve heard her singing on such hits as “I Gotta Feeling” or “My Humps” or “Help Me I’m Going To Choke To Death On My Own Vomit But Not In The Cool Way Like Hendrix Or John Bonham Just In The Way That Results From Writing A Long Sentence About Fergie From The Fucking Black Eyed Peas.” (That last one is not a real song.)

Now, I like Slash. He was the lead guitarist for the great Guns N’ Roses. His solos on songs like “Sweet Child of Mine” and “November Rain” achieve a certain kind of standing-on-a-mountain, ripping-the-world-open glory that defined bombastic rock perfection in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which was exactly when certain people from New Jersey might have been most into exactly that sort of thing. Today, Slash is promoting a new album. It is a solo album. And not being a singer himself (if Slash tried to sing, the cigarette would fall out of his mouth), he needed to get other people to sing the songs. He got some people you might expect, like Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. But he also got Adam Levine from the top-40 pop group Maroon 5 and, yes, fucking Fergie with her humps and her hair and her stupid sneakers and shit. Last year, he got Fergie to sing on a really, really shitty remake of the classic Guns N’ Roses song “Paradise City” that also featured the once-excellent rap trio Cyprus Hill not sounding good. The song on the new album is called “Beautiful Dangerous,” and Slash has been bringing Fergie out to sing it and “Sweet Child of Mine” in concert lately. This brings us back to what Slash said about Fergie. Which is stupid and wrong on many levels.

First of all, Fergie sucks-we’ve already established that that is my opinion. Secondly, the phrase “for a female rock singer she’s one of the best woman I’ve ever heard” doesn’t make any sense. What other kinds of female rock singers are there besides women? (To give Slash a break, this part of the stupidity could be due to a poor job of punctuating by the Reuters reporter who transcribed the interview. If what he in fact said was, “She’s got a lot of balls for a female singer. She’s one of the best women I’ve ever heard…” Then that’s different and, clearly, not as stupid. And it actually seems likely that this might be the case.) But still, worse, really, is the bullshit at the root of the statement. There are lots of great female rock singers. Lots with “a lot of balls.” Lots lots better than Fergie, or for that matter, Scott Weiland, the lame male singer for Slash’s lame post-Guns N’ Roses band, Velvet Revolver, the ridiculously unoriginal name of which tells you pretty much all you need to know about just what kind of corporate-construct not-so-super supergroup it is.

Most famous now for being a junkie, Scott Weiland used to sing for the grunge-rock band Stone Temple Pilots, who were about the worst of the many Nirvana knock-offs that flooded the scene around the time Guns N’ Roses went out of style. Stone Temple Pilots hit it big in 1992 with a creepy paean to date rape called “Sex Type Thing.” Here’s a bit of the lyrics, which Weiland wrote:

I am, I am, I am
I said I wanna get next to you
I said I gonna get close to you
You wouldn’t want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too?

[…]

I am a man, a man
I’ll give ya somethin’ that ya won’t forget
I said ya shouldn’t have worn that dress
I said ya shouldn’t have worn that dress

Etc. So, yeah. He sucks. His songs suck. And his voice is as indistinctive in its mimicry of Kurt Cobain as Fergie’s voice is in its recreation of Axl’s wailing on “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child of Mine.” Scott Weiland, Fergie, they both suck. Here’s a quick, easy-to-think-of list of ten female women rock singers whose jock straps neither one of them could hold.

1) Stevie Nicks
2) Chrissie Hynde
3) Joan Jett
4) PJ Harvey
5) Grace Slick
6) Janis Joplin
7) Sinead O’Conner
8) Ann Wilson
9) Courtney Love
10) Pat Benetar

Shit, that’s not even counting Etta James and Tina Turner, who we’ll put in the “R&B;/blues” category just to be gracious. But Debbie Harry, Annie Lennox, Cat Power, Patti Smith… you could go on and and on. Slash needs to get out more.

by Simon Dumenco

The Awl’s Morning Market Report:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped this morning after yesterday’s essentially flat close (at 10970, down 3.5 points for the day), as investors grew increasingly spooked by this AWESOME Taiwanese kid who can out-Whitney Whitney Houston — in her current state, at least. (Just Jared IDs the boy as Lin Yu Chun, and the show he sang on is Taiwan’s “American Idol”-esque “Super Star Avenue.”) Sure, the kid can belt it out, but is being the next Whitney Houston really a good thing? Especially considering that the actual Whitney Houston has just been hospitalized in Paris with “chronic rhinopharyngitis, a swelling of the mucus membranes in the nose and pharynx”? And does this kid now have to find his own Taiwanese Bobby Brown?
• Justin Bieber futures are down sharply this morning as investors expressed fears that Lin Yu Chun’s particular style of bowl haircut could take off as his star rises, potentially reducing market demand for the no-forehead-whatsoever Bieber Bangs look.
• The Nasdaq is also down this morning (after yesterday’s close at 2437, up 7 points) because SCIENTISTS JUST FOUND A MAN-SIZED LIZARD THAT HAS TWO PENISES!

Simon Dumenco is The Awl’s Senior Wall Street Correspondent and Lin Yu Chun Bureau Chief.

How hot is it gonna be today? The Times predicts “record-challenging warmth” with a high of 88. The Post calls it at 91, but you know how they exaggerate. (AccuWeather has it at 90, for what it’s worth.) Anyway, let’s not quibble over a few degrees: It’s gonna be hot. It’s gonna be so hot that everyone who was bitching about the cold and the rain a week or two ago is going to complain about how hot it is now, and then complain again during the weekend when it cools back down that it’s not hot enough. It’s gonna be so hot that Al Gore will walk around with a smug, justified smile all day. It’s gonna be so hot that pictures of attractive, scantily-clad young people perspiring sexily at local parks will be in all three papers tomorrow. It’s gonna be so hot that when you step out on your fire escape to smoke a cigarette, your heaving gut soaking the top band of your pants-it will be hot, but you are not allowed to wear shorts-with its fetid sweat, you will breathe in the humid air and think, “Ugh, can I face a whole summer of this? Again?” Then you will smoke and go back inside. It’s gonna be hot, I tell ya.

Last night I spent some time thinking about my feelings (I have a regular Tuesday appointment with them), and I realized that ever since the firing of Mike Albo as a Times freelancer, I’ve been unable to read much of that paper’s Style sections, much less make note here of any of the stories they publish. And I haven’t been able to look at Albo’s former part-time column, the Critical Shopper, at all, because it just makes me feel bad. Albo was canned in a bizarre twisting of the Times ethics policy, was publicly pilloried and then became a symbol, to me at least, of the disposable freelancer. They wanted his talent but they didn’t want to treat him right-and the Times expressly ignored both the letter and the law of their own ethics policy when they canned him on their stupid little witch hunt. (Their ethics rules say: “In connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept free transportation, free lodging, gifts, junkets, commissions or assignments from current or potential news sources.” In connection with his work for them, Albo never did that.) And so a gray pall hangs over Critical Shopper, like the paper carries on it a dark thumb smudge of bad feeling-even on something as hysterically candy-colored as Cintra Wilson’s Critical Shopper visit to Lilly Pulitzer. And I love the Lilly Pulitzer store unabashedly and her piece is entirely on the nose, but all the fun has gone out of talking about this.

Low-fare carrier Spirit Airlines will start charging $45 for each piece of luggage passengers bring on the plane with them. The airline bills it as a way to “reduce the number of carry-on bags, which will improve inflight safety and efficiency by speeding up the boarding and deplaning process, all of which ultimately improve the overall customer experience.” Meanwhile, budget Irish airline Ryanair is replacing all the toilets in its fleet with coin-operated models that will cost about a buck and half to use. Ryanair hopes that the move will “change passenger behaviour so that they use the bathroom before or after the flight. That will enable us to remove two out of three of the toilets and make way for at least six extra seats.” The joys of air travel! Thank God we’re all too poor to afford to fly anywhere.

“He was worried about the karma, but I just loved the terrace.”
-Patsy Kahn explains her husband Al’s initial reluctance to purchase the Upper East Side duplex most recently owned by Bernie Madoff. Toy mogul Kahn was eventually convinced, and the couple paid approximately $8 million for the apartment.

Would it be okay, now that everyone knows the “surprise” ending of the film Up in the Air, for me to lodge a formal protest against the catastrophic sexual politics of this movie?

I’m not even going to get into how George Clooney tells the “regular guy” who is losing his job that now, after decades spent building a career that is suddenly, unexpectedly ending, now this man ought to go “follow his dream” and somehow become a French chef. (“Let them bake cake”?? Is that what we are reduced to, here, and by Jason Reitman, scion of privilege? Or maybe like in Reitman’s other films, which strike me as being similarly black-hearted vehicles of pure nihilism, he is blackly kidding and we’re meant to feel the total emptiness of Clooney’s now-go-be-a-chef pep-talk.)

Instead, please consider the character of Vera Farmiga as Clooney’s think-of-me-as-yourself-with-a-vagina popsy, Alex. (Spoilers-if this were last year-follow.) This Alex hops around the country in connection with her job, and makes dates with George Clooney now and then so they can go have sex in a hotel. When Clooney begins inexplicably to yearn for domestic bliss, he shows up unannounced at her place only to find that she was married-with-children all along. She sends him off with a flea in his ear. “This is my real life,” she tells him, adding, “you’re a parenthesis,” thereby demonstrating, in addition to her other defects, a serious lack of grammatical discernment. Anyway, at the end, he’s all devastated and alone, etc.

Ms. Farmiga in interviews describes the character of Alex as “delicious” and empowered and dignified, if you can believe. She is “thriving in a man’s world,” according to ScreenCrave:

Vera had the rare opportunity to play a female character who was in control of her romantic situation. Reitman is known for writing powerful female characters, and Up in the Air’s Alex is no different. Farmiga liked her tone and attitude and saw her flaws as strengths instead of weaknesses.

“I thought it was a really interesting portrayal of female desire that you don’t often get to see. Usually when a female character is so demanding in her sexuality and unapologetic she usually lacks some dignity. It was cool to see someone who’s completely self-possessed, had class, had depth and yet was operating in a very masculine way. From the start she set up her parameters and said these are the rules, come in for the enjoyment of it and just think of me as yourself.”

Alex isn’t your run of the mill career driven woman. She has multiple layers that are revealed to the audience in due time during the film.

“This is a woman, complicated, complex has needs, and has certain desires. [I didn’t want] to judge her actions but just embody her and make her as full bodied as possible and human. That’s what’s so incredible about Jason’s characters in all of his films thus far, you don’t necessarily like them or condone their behavior but they are utterly human, [with their] eccentricities and deficiencies and everything that makes us imperfect.”

There you have it. The new, unapologetic, sexually demanding female who is no longer bound by outmoded conventions, and she goes, girl, flaws and all.

But this woman is not dignified, she is psychotic. Also infantile and self-indulgent, without the slightest shred of depth or reflection. What can this woman’s “real life” marriage possibly amount to? Who is taking her kids to their frackin’ piano lessons while she boffs George Clooney in an airport hotel? “Class”? Are you serious?

So women can behave as badly, faithlessly and selfishly as men! (yay!) Now we’re equal. I can’t really fathom what kind of an insight this is supposed to be.

There is so much real grief and pain around the idea of forming working long-term relationships in this culture. In this movie the actual subject is not even so much trivialized as wholly evaded. There’s a really de-haut-en-bas thing of look, what a mess these people are, through what amounts to a monocle of privilege and distanced elitism. Mr. Reitman’s movies give the impression of being very much made about “regular people,” meaning someone else. He’s like the polar opposite of Charlie Kaufman.

When really, it’s imperative that viable means of making these things work be addressed. What we could really use would be some exceptional, excellent ideas about how such relationships can be made more satisfying, richer, better, last longer. It’s not a prescriptive aesthetic/moral position I’d like to see, but an investigational one, predicated on the possibility of finding pragmatic solutions to our loneliness and stuff.

In real life it seems to be quite a widely held view that your free-spirited sleeparounds do not make for even remotely viable, let alone pleasant, long-term companions. The manner in which single people are apt to talk about a potential mate tends to be remarkably free of the above-described Farmiga philosophy. Up in the Air invites women to consider what it would be like to be Alex-but never what it would be like to be married to her. (I guess being married to her would be something like being married to Jesse James?) Unsurprisingly, the cuckolded husband doesn’t make a moment’s appearance in this movie, because it would only underscore the real banality and narcissism at the heart of it.

I don’t believe that conventional domestic arrangements will automatically work for everyone. There may really be new ways that serious relationships can be negotiated. I suspect not, but that is because I am a pterodactyl. At the threshold of adulthood, especially, many of us believe that we will be the first person in the history of the world whose leg will fail to shoot up in obedience to the little rubber hammer of human nature. Okay, maybe so! Experiment away.

But do we have to go back to the nineteenth century to find a love story in which two people have connected with each other and value one another to the extent that they are capable of restraining a certain percentage of their carnal appetites in order to protect that connection? Surely, any marriage worth having in the first place would entirely preclude boffing a sad not-even middle manager in an airport hotel, when schedules permit? I can’t get past the idea that is just not the kind of thing you can do when someone else’s welfare and happiness are in the palm of your hand.

So please, explain this to me, how we’re supposed to watch a movie like this and even countenance these characters, “with their flaws.” No. This woman- she is a cold-eyed monster. How is it possible to admire anything about her, when nobody you know would really want that, for her life?

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Six possible “Lost” spin-offs! I’m pro “SurroKate.” Although I would also accept Hurley starring in a “Touched by an Angel” reboot, since HE DIES TONIGHT. (Spoiler!)