Jam magazine - brings nothing new to the Charlie Sheen nightmare

The News of the World launches men's supplement Jam - what a very sad and tired retread of masculine fetishes it is. The title alone is a pre-Loaded memento mori - y'know, bedroom air guitars. Nasty lank hair. Wanking.

Cover boy Liam Gallagher is a '21st Century Boy' when the b/w pic harks back to the mid-90s. Yellow-toothed David Bailey snaps the portrait, sooo 60s, darling.

The John Lydon Glenda Slagg page snarls into sundry confusions: he tells us that he calls the Royal Wedding the Royal Weeding - 'because there will be a bit of cross-pollination in the family for once.' Gardening question: what has weeding to do with cross-pollination?

Did someone edit this magazine or was it thrown together by celebrity bookers weathered by eye-rolling riders?

Another 90s-looking relic, in the shape of Prof Brian Cox, boldly recycles his old uni notes to tell us about a star that blew up 700 years ago. Nothing more recent from the atheist campaigner? The accompanying eye-like nebula photo would be better placed in a Specsavers ad, with Cox as the 'before' case study.

Jam being a cliche-in-progress, the feature on organised crime groups inevitably follows. With street crime rates on the rise, this is just what the world needs - another magazine crime polish for the enlargement of mirrored scrotism.

It's just as well the publication is a giveaway: anyone in mags will tell you dark covers don't sell. And a near-monochromatic inside, with bits of spot colour (in the few ads mainly), associates dreary notions of fantasy machismo with psycho cellar dwellers. If you want to give someone a nervous breakdown in this fragile little world suggest a piece on trannies and whether they dress right or left in drag.

I once wrote apropos of Tony Parsons, and an idiotic piece he disgorged in GQ about his soldier daddy and his (Tony's) love of guns, that cultural masculinity thrives on the degree of harm it causes: the more others are deprived of something the more the depriver - the hapless male catalogue reader - feels valued as a man. Jam brings nothing new to this Charlie Sheen nightmare.

One bit of hope is in the editor's letter, pre-written in spirit in another age by aging scrote James Brown, the founder of Loaded, now proud owner of the Sabotage Times website: 'Most men [don't read magazines],' writes Mark Hayman. The poor chap must be a professional masochist.

Rachel Johnson's A Diary Of The Lady: Masterly at the authorial hand-job

Over the weekend Rachel Johnson was canny enough to send me a fan letter in which she told me I was mentioned in her book A Diary of The Lady: My First Year as Editor.

I had wondered whether Madame Arcati might make an apperance in her pages because I'd earlier this year described The Lady as 'the cunties' weekly' in a short piece about the magazine's readership and masturbation. But I'm adept at delaying gratification myself: I fancied I might happen on my name years hence as I leafed through a dog-eared copy in a secondhand book store (in Arundel perhaps).

This fancy was discarded instantly on receipt of Rachel's email: Madame Arcati is responsive to stroking, and judging by the contents of her book, she is masterly at the authorial hand-job.

If you don't know or care, Rachel is the editor of The Lady magazine, once an incarnation of all things nanny-ish and scone-ish. Then she barged in with her Sunday Times ponciness and pals and imported nasty things such as 'lady gardens' (pubes) and erections (euphemism: 'Everests') - these alone from a Jilly Cooper Jump!extract. The Lady's venerable owner Mrs Budworth regularly channels outraged reader reaction, calling Rachel a 'monster' and 'sex-obsessed'. This is all splendid for Rachel's CV.

Now, I said I'd review her book but in all honestly it's too late for that. A Diary came out in late summer. Instead, I have a few observations to make which touch upon my own preoccupations. What is first so striking about her day-to-day life at her mag, described with staggering frankness, is the evident ghastliness of many of the London writers and editors she encounters and of whom Madame Arcati has already demonstrated an insightful and notorious dislike.

For instance, you may think unwarranted my occasional barbs at AA Gill's prolific and dyspeptic smugness. Yet dip into this book and witness him, with Rod Liddle, mocking Rachel at a party for being dumped by their cash cow, the Sunday Times. The paper's editor John Witherow dumps her after promising he wouldn't - then thoughtlessly rubs her nose in it later by praising her replacement as 'grrrreat!' William Cash - he of the sad heiress-wives fixation - staggers about drunk at a party feeling sorry for himself and volubly moaning that no one of his generation (ie his Oxbridge milieu) has done anything worthwhile, including Rachel's husband Ivo. Even the down market Kelvin MacKenzie pops up in Rachel's office and fills it with his special mix of noxious methane.

Nicholas Coleridge, the world's worst novelist and the MD of Condé Nast, comes across as a gracious and generous house host, even if one who insists on memorialising, in annotated albums, his every social interaction with those deemed sufficiently important. I read elsewhere he also collects animal corpses: all this is beyond anal, doncha think?

In the (Boris) Johnsonian tradition, the slights, betrayals and insults (and there are many more) are borne lightly by our heroine. She'd be perfect in a war. But she too is not averse to gross insensitivity. I'm not sure Roger Lewis will have been entirely happy to be described as the least attractive writer she's ever met, as he name-drops Michael Winner at their first meeting. And I can't imagine what the daughter of Rachel's predecessor, Arline Usden, must have felt to be characterised as a rather hapless and hopeless member of staff. Indeed many contributors will have delighted in Rachel's grouchy view of a lot of the journalism submitted (each piece requiring the effort of eight emails on her part) after fulsome and luvvie-ish encouragement.

As for Lady Antonia Fraser... well, she always looks slightly appalled anyway.

In other words, A Diary of The Lady is entirely riveting. Any student contemplating a life in journalism (high end, facile) should get this book for Christmas - as a warning. Robust souls may relish the rough and tumble, and Rachel makes for a marvellously blithe dame (in the Eton College sense). Oh, and Madame Arcati gets her name-check on pp 261-262: if there were an index, I'd be under M for masturbation.

One last thing. How can Rachel Johnson have lived as widely and well as she has and not know who Duncan Fallowell is? She should search him out on Madame Arcati: I think even Mrs Budworth might approve of him.

Rachel Johnson film on The Lady, knitting and chutney - click here.
Rachel's website

Vote for Roger Lewis to be Oxford's next Professor of Poetry!

Esteemed Arcatiste, legendary memoirist and wit, Roger Lewis, has been nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry. Oxford grads such as Duncan Fallowell (can a knighthood be that far away?) Lynn Barber (a damehood?), Rachel "The Lady" Johnson (the sack?), and many Bright Young Things (pah!) in publishing / the media/ journalism, have rallied to his cause, God bless them.

Oxonians need to (a) register to vote by June 4th and (b) actually vote. Polls open on May 21st and close on June 16th. This can all be done online - click here. This is a new departure for Roger; I just hope he is not robbed of his comic ingenuity in the process. I shall be most displeased. Very.

In the past people had to turn up in person in Oxford, so the dons always had it all sewn up, the tarts. Madame Arcati won't be thwarted.

Reward Showbiz™: The 10 most pointless celebrity books and TV shows

I'm a great follower of reward showbiz™ (© Madame Arcati 2010) - gigs bestowed upon slebs only because they have a name. Many showbiz or media projects are dreamt up simply as an excuse to get a star to front them. Such projects have three essential characteristics: 1) a star; 2) a journey, quest or list; 3) pointlessness. Here's my latest top 10 rewardees:

1. Joanna Lumley for Joanna Lumley's Nile, a new four part series on ITV1 starting this week. No earthly reason why the Nepalese goddess should be associated with this river, but it's an opportunity to wallow in cultivated mellifluousness as she bears her polished teeth at familiar sights - such as a lookalike camel - in various gurnings of rapture. Oh look, there's a pyramid.

2. Quentin Letts for his throwaway read 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. The Daily Mail's right-wing attack dog is a professional frother who appears to favour a return to Feudalism and the use of the rack. An utterly pointless addition to the listerature genre - he is after all part of the problem.

3. Michael Palin and his various TV/book tie-in travels, from the Sahara to his Hemingway Adventure. Nothing in Palin's career quite prepared us for the unedifying sight of a perfectly credible comic actor turning into a Phileas Fogg freebie tart. If he has shed new light on any part of the globe do let me know.

4. Andrew Marr for History of Modern Britain. Any excuse to get this gesticulating barker on the box. Rest assured, his "history" will be referenced by no serious scholar; it's just a loafer's guide to event whatnots, the sort of crap Reader's Digest might have once published for leisurely reads.

5. Jeremy Paxman for The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (book and TV series). What does he know about art? The book was substantially written by someone else in any case. A great vanity juggernaut to keep a familar face on the screen.

6. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman for Long Way Round: TV series and book. A chance to ogle at two leather clad arses in different international locations. Shamelessly the book's publisher writes on Amazon "The fact that those men are figures with notable film connections ... may be the reason the book got written ... but so what?" How sad are the punters?

7. Richard Hammond for all his TV shows but Top Gear. TV looks for any excuse to have him either blowing up things or testing things that may blow up, all because he nearly got himself killed once. Each promise of doom leaves us cruelly tantalised.

8. Sophie Dahl for Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights (book/TV show). A Nigella Lawson copycat  - famous surname + food erotica. The book boasts Dahl's "Matisse-like line drawings" destined for no public exhibition. Only two years ago or so she was presented as the great white hope of literature after a spell as a waif on catwalks.

9. Peter and Dan Snow for 20th Century Battlefields (book/TV series) - lanky father and son become visibly excited in the historical presence of slaughter. Where's a swingometer when you need one?

10. JLS - for all those fucking endless music rundown shows they've been fronting since they didn't win The X Factor but went on to become the show's biggest boy band stars. Testicle hugs and downward spastic finger thrusts conduct their guides to Michael Jackson and others. The tiny one especially requires treatment.

AA Gill: If a rat's worth £2000, what's the value of a shot baboon?

Silly cunt AA Gill strikes a pose

A rat's life has been valued at £2,000. This is ITV's fine for the killing and eating of the rodent on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! by famished contestants. The Australian RSPCA explained that the creature suffered unnecessarily for 90 seconds before death. "The animal was killed for a TV show, that's not appropriate," it added. Report.

Quite so. I wonder then how much the Sunday Times TV and food critic AA Gill would have been fined by the Australian RSPCA in similar circumstances. Last year he admitted in one of his wittering restaurant reviews to the killing of a baboon on a Tanzanian jaunt. He shot the beast just to see what it was like to kill a primate. He wrote: "A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot." Baboons live in troops not tribes.

Plainly, the baboon was shot for copy. To write a few entertaining paragraphs for his paper. Whether it died instantly we cannot know, but certainly its "tribe" was distressed. Given that baboons are highly intelligent with a likely sentience similar to our own, what do you think? £50,000? Perhaps his paper would like to make a donation to a charity.

Christmas books: Madame Arcati's supremely discriminating gift guide

The white beard you can keep, but Madame Arcati is happy to recommend a few books as gifts this Christmas. Unlike certain other media types who take their cues from old buddies in orthodox publishing, Madame Arcati does not discriminate between the self-published and the unself-published and the vanity published: I do not need the approbation of mediating editors to tell me whether a book is worthy of publication. I'll decide, thank you.

My few titles come under two categories: the recommended are under Tomes for the Tights (aren't stockings rather Joan Collins these days?) and the worthless mingers under Tomes for the Cheese Grater (I was shocked to learn that the slave kids of Haiti are punished by being forced to kneel on cheese graters). As I wrote in the below post, shredding a pointless book with your cheese grater (1) promotes wellbeing and (2) creates debris useful for rodent litter or snow in one's Nativity tableau (vivant or toy), as recommended by a reader who put Madonna's Sex book to this excellent use. All Tights titles are hyperlinked for easy purchase; all Cheese Grater titles you can find for yourself. So ....

Tomes for the Tights

Roger Lewis' Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it is Lived is an absolute must this Yuletide - by far the funniest memoirs published in years. Even his father's terminal "bum cancer" is framed by comic poignancy - ideal for those contemplating copping out at the Dignitas death camp in Muslim-hating Switzerland.

As comic, but set exotically, is Duncan Fallowell's travel book Going As Far As I Can, the pb of which came out in August. We head for the trog-world of New Zealand in the company of a merciless champion of Western secular culture: the resultant clash of aesthetics (and phwoar of cock-cockings) is both pyrotechnical and exhilarating. DF's prose is the bastard child of an aristo-plebby one-nighter. Reading him is like being fucked at an egalitarian orgy.

As creator of the cock-cunting and cunting-cock neoligisms, it's only right then that Madame Arcati recommends the German title Vulva by Mithu M Sanyal.  The vulva is one of history's Cinderellas - feared, ignored, abused. Yet today we have the designer "yoni puppets" to pat and stroke. What could these be? Well, learn German and find out and delve into the history of the vulva, bitches.

An Arcati fave is the ever notorious Farah Damji and her glorious, playfully-titled autobiography Try Me. It is both mea culpa (frauds, darling) and breathtaking tease: in one chapter she mocks the naive for falling for her pose in the redemptive confessional: as if! Its dishonesties are likely subtle, between the lines; in grey areas. Her story as told feels broadly true. Media, sex, drugs, slebs, jail - they're all here. Trashy novel content in classy narrative.

And for total teeth-chattering joy do buy Jonathan King's memoirs 65 My Life So Far, which I shall review shortly. How could I not like a book that favourably name-checks this blog on p570? We all know what JK was done for: over-worked cock-cunting newspaper scrotes have decreed a persecution. Yet this book is an immense surprise: gossipy, revealing, insightful, scandalous, huge fun. A recommended gift for the multi-millionaire maiden aunt who refuses to die and whose legacy you impatiently await. She'll die usefully with a pre-rot rictus on her wrinkled mug. You won't be charged with her homicide.

Me: The Authorised Biography by Byron Rogers is the blissful tale of how one of Britain's most stylish writers became the object of an intense infatuation: Does Mr Rogers have a cock as big as that of his former employer, Prince Charles? The title may or may not reveal all.

For cookery lovers, may I introduce you to the Rt Hon The Countess of Shannon alias the global mystic guru, Almine. A few years ago Almine gave up her life of ermined British privilege and turned into an international goddess served by angels. So who better to pass down tips on puff pastry? She has two titles: Cooking with Class and Memoirs & Meals (click here). Makes Nigella and Delia look like the raucous lower class cook Mrs Bridges in Upstairs, Downstairs.

Shena Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories was released in late 2008 but who cares? A more wonderfully surreal short story writer you will not find: her quirks are encoded not manufactured: queerness and peculiarity run through her soul. She is most otherly. I want more, more, more.

Philip Hoare's Leviathan gets it wrong on sperm whales - no,they cannot swallow a grown man. Never mind. His prosaic quest to commune with the warm blooded spurters of the seas helps to cutefy the whale kingdom: a species to be protected must first have the ah factor.

Interior designer Nicky Haslam's memoir Redeeming Features reports that Wallis Simpson's Edward was once a bisexual drag artist and that Lord Snowdon cock-cocked with the author. Wallis herself may have been hermaphrodite because her maid once whispered that the old girl's knickers were stained with urine always at the front. Gorgeous society flim-flam in which people merge at times with their stylish inanimate objects. So that at one point I became convinced Tallulah Bankhead was a wallpaper.

For the less demanding, Katie Price's novel Sapphire should not be scorned: her ghost writer Rebecca Farnworth is as smart as they come, weaving in sly digs at her subject (Katie Price aka Jordan) in a fictionalisaton of the tabloid-trimmed life that requires dark orange model flesh topped up daily by 18-minute sessions in a carcinogenic sunbed. Simply mindlessly thrilling, dearies.

A few months back I reviewed the novel Dazed & Aroused by handsome male model Gavin James Bower. I hadn't read the book and still haven't but I don't see why that should inhibit me from recommending the British version of Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama. Your OK!-reading brats will adore it - I believe Kate Moss has a walk-on part, but I don't know. Perhaps someone will confirm or correct.

And finally, the "psychic barber" Gordon Smith has a book out titled Why Bad Things Happen. Why was my pet pussy run over by a cripple in his fucking cripple car? That question is not asked or answered, more's the pity (for that's what happened to my Prudence aka Pruce), yet this famous medium tries to shed light on the question of misfortune's purpose, with insights on the next life. Derren Brown is a very poor substitute for this sort of thing.

Tomes for the Cheese Grater

Clive James' The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years is fatally hobbled by its author's incessant need to remind us of how brilliant/famous he is. Whether working through Linguaphone to read a classic in its original tongue or telling us why he deigned to take a phone call from Tina Brown, his book reeks of a clever juvenile wanker locked in a mirrored closet.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution is Richard Dawkins' latest piece of propaganda against faiths - even though his brand of science is akin to faith, such is his messianic zeal to mix facts with popular theories. Though Dawkins reviles all divination, he has never researched such lowly topics as palmistry or mediumship. Very scientific!

Some time back I wrote an affectionate item about a strange little one-man industry called Chas Newkey-Burden. He churns out about half a dozen books a year - many of them in the genre of listerature. Since then the Julie Burchill once-time co-writer and right-wing squirt has foolishly picked an argument with me, so the first casualty of this is all his books. Let's see:  Simon Cowell: The Unauthorised Biography; Amy Winehouse: The Biography; Michael Jackson: Legend 1958-2009: all manically churned mayfly productions that suffer expiry after a brief fuck of publicity. The sound of a writer is tap tap. The sound of Chas is snip snip.

Illusionist Derren Brown is quite a talented caricaturist as his book Portrait demonstrates. However, his demeanour irritates me. He should not be encouraged.

Worst, most successful writer in the world Dan Brown released The Lost Symbol this year as part of his mission to keep Tom Hanks busy. His quasi-mystical thrillers are rutted with awful clangers: is the Pope a Protestant?

Most pointless book ever is The Atheist's Guide to Christmas by Ariane Sherine. Silly cunts like Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown, Ben Goldacre, Jenny Colgan, David Baddiel, Simon Singh, AC Grayling, Brian Cox and Richard Herring contribute their tips both serious and not. Yet for most, Christmas is already just a secular exchange of gifts, with carol song as sentimental soundtrack to retail park festive forage. No real need for a Church of Atheism, then.

Though a late 2008 release, foodie tome Table Talk: Sweet And Sour, Salt and Bitter by the Sunday Times writer AA Gill affords an opportunity to remind people that he recently shot dead a baboon, to see what killing a primate was like, or at least he made this claim in a restaurant review. The minor Twitter controversy this provoked must have disappointed the fathead ligger.

Stephen Fry in America (pb out last May) and its TV series may have persuaded the cultural Zelig to piss off to LA. If he goes, re-cut 'n' paste this under Tights. Job well done.

I detest family photo albums so why the pompously titled Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare should be an exception I do not know. Should it not be titled Snapshots in History's Footnotes? The cover pic of young handsome Gore is very Freeman's catalogue: longevity is his undoing.

Last and least, a title can ruin a book for me. Ant and Dec's Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story is very Mike and Bernie Winters. Get it out of here!

AA Gill: Whatever happened to the Mickey Mouse phone?

Very naughty. Almost as naughty as shooting a baboon for fun. Let's give the baboon a name - Melanie sounds nice.