Love objects - The Globe and Mail

Sarah Boesveld

Published on Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009 5:51PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Aug. 21, 2009 10:05AM EDT

The sky was grey and the winds blustery the day Erika LaBrie met her soulmate.
It was freezing in Paris, that day in January, 2004, when she and a friend set eyes upon the Eiffel Tower. When they entered, a special feeling came over her; one she can only describe as intense love, a chemical attraction. That feeling of finding The One.
“Everyone was all bundled up and I felt so warm inside,” she says, recalling the moment with fondness. “I thought, ‘I don't feel cold, I feel so much warmth coming from the Eiffel tower.'”
For three years, the professional archer from San Francisco would visit the object of her affection, going for weeks at a time, spending all day touching the tower. And then on April 8, 2007, Erika LaBrie became Erika Eiffel in a commitment ceremony before 10 of her closest friends.
“It was one of the best days of my life,” she says. “I felt like I was setting myself free.”

Erika Eiffel: ‘If I go and tell everyone how I’m intimate with the Eiffel tower, I basically cheapen something that’s very special to us.’

Miley Cyrus says goodbye to Twitter with a rap; Courtney Love's account is removed

October 11, 2009 |  1:09 pm

Twitter continues to lose some of its most-followed music celebs. Days after teen star Miley Cyrus removed her account, perpetual ranter Courtney Love has disappeared from the social-networking service. Love's Twitter disappeared without warning, but its removal came soon after Love's teenage daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, laid into young Ali Lohan.

Cyrus, however, isn't disappearing so quietly.

With rumors that she left Twitter at the behest of her supposed love interest Liam Hemsworth, the tween star and their friends channeled all their non-tweeting free time into a short, cheesy rap. "I stopped living for moments, and started living for people," Cyrus sings, adding, "Everything that I type and everything I do / All those lame gossip sites take it and they make it news."

Cyrus admits to some withdrawals, as well as missing Dane Cook's latest updates, but promises no more "fake feuds" with Demi Lovato. If the result of Cyrus leaving Twitter is more charmingly bad videos like the one above, Pop & Hiss applauds the move.

Cyrus was leaving Twitter while she was on top. According to data from BigChampagne, Cyrus had the third-most Twitter followers among musicians as of Oct. 6, with more than 2.2 million users tracking her pimple updates. Only Britney Spears and John Mayer had more.

But Cyrus and Love aren't the only high-profile musicians to disappear from the site. British singer Lily Allen, who ranks No. 9 among active Twitter musicians, hasn't updated since Sept. 28, going quiet after taking heat for her views on Internt file-sharing. Earlier this year, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor stopped updating his account, declaring on July 17 that "flesh and reality are calling." 

In May, rapper Kanye West ranted against the service, writing in his "Caps Lock" glory, "I'M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I'M NOT AND I'M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN'T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF."

Although she wasn't nearly as blunt, it appears Cyrus would agree.

-- Todd MartensMiley Cyrus says goodbye to Twitter with a rap; Courtney Love's account is removed

Kevin Spacey tries to explain Twitter to David Letterman. No luck.

Kevin Spacey tried to explain Twitter to a technologically clueless David Letterman last night.

Without much success.

"Does it cost you money to be on Twitter?" Letterman asks.

"A penny for every letter. So expensive, Dave," Spacey jokes.

"Right now, I have over 800,000 people following me," Spacey goes on. "What would you like to say to 800,000 people because you will never get that many people watching tonight?"

Letterman is horrified that Spacey has to type his Tweets with his thumb and not very impressed about hearing "Hello" from so many people.

"I can go out here on 53rd and Broadway and get people to say hi to me," Letterman brags.

Is Letterman turning into the new Andy Rooney?
Does anyone else really understand Twitter?

Demi versus Perez? See Twitter -- latimes.com

And thanks for drawing MORE attention to your daughter's behavior and your parenting skills (or lack thereof). U r real smart!

-- Perez Hilton to Demi Moore

twitter.com/PerezHilton

you really have no clue what you just started with me! You have 5 jobs! I have one job making your life a living HELL!!!

-- Spencer Pratt to Ryan Seacrest

twitter.com/spencerpratt

Reflection and restraint are not the traits that have made NFL star Terrell Owens famous. Yet the outspoken Buffalo Bills wide receiver initially managed to check his temper with reporters after he failed to catch a single pass in a recent game.

But Owens couldn't hold back once former NFL player and NBC analyst Rodney Harrison labeled him "a straight-up clown" on the air. He shot back that Harrison was "a loser & a cheater" for using human growth hormone when he played for the New England Patriots.

The outlet for his anger: Twitter, the new go-to site for celebrity feuds.

First embraced by entertainers as a promotional platform, Twitter has evolved into a forum for candid and surprisingly crass postings by actors, singers and athletes. The intimate, instant and unvarnished nature of the microblogging site, which allows users to post public messages of 140 characters or less, is serving as a fertile incubator for the unchecked emotions of stars.

And they're increasingly using it to rant about each other. In the new and expanding twitterverse, where the rules of etiquette and exchange are still being written, celebrities are establishing a level of discourse that won't soon be confused with the Sunday morning political talk shows.

"MEAN PEOPLE TAKE A . . . HIKE!!!" Kirstie Alley, one of the most prolific celebrity tweeters, wrote last month in a somewhat typical response to those who take issue with her opinions on everything from Scientology to drug use.

The last month has seen an explosion of celebrity Twitter fights: Demi Moore traded insults with blogger Perez Hilton, singer Chris Brown took a swipe at talk show host Wendy Williams, reality show star Spencer Pratt went after Ryan Seacrest. Kanye West was bombarded with angry postings from fellow entertainers such as Pink after he interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards.

In rushing to rumble on Twitter (twitter.com), stars are bypassing publicists long entrusted with shaping their images and offering a peek at the unadulterated personalities behind their public facades. The blunt postings alarm public relations professionals, who have traditionally exerted stringent control over what clients dole out to their fans.

"Giving some celebrities Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded gun," said Allan Mayer, head of the strategic communications division at the publicity firm 42West. "Twitter can be enormously valuable as a branding tool. But like everything else, it's a double-edged sword, and if you have impulse control problems -- which strangely a lot of celebrities seem to have -- it can be very dangerous."

Courtney Love got into hot water earlier this year after she tweeted nasty comments about a fashion designer who then sued her. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban had to pay $25,000 to the NBA after he questioned a referee's call on Twitter in March.

And last month, we were treated to an online squabble between an Emmy-nominated actress and a gleeful gossip blogger. After Hilton accused Moore of being a bad mother by letting her 15-year-old daughter dress in scanty outfits, the actress attacked him for posting photos of the underage girl. Hilton retorted that Moore was "delusional and slightly senile."

Tellingly, celebrities who willingly engage in Twitter brawls clam up when their publicists get involved. Neither Moore nor Hilton responded to requests for comment. A representative for Alley said she was not available for comment.

Indeed, there's a wide gulf between what entertainers say on Twitter and in their carefully modulated public statements. After Seacrest joked on his radio show about Tasering reality star Heidi Montag, Pratt, her husband, fired off a stream of furious tweets challenging Seacrest to a fight.

"Does that radio make you feel invincible because your not and I'm going to tear you apart!!!" he wrote.

He had less bravado in his statement to US Weekly on the matter. "It is irresponsible and offensive for someone with your platform to promote violence on this level," Pratt said.

Stuart Fischoff, an expert in media psychology, noted that the nature of Twitter makes it feel deceptively private. While celebs are confronted by a bank of cameras and shouting reporters in other public forums, tweeting is a solitary activity.

"There's a kind of faceless anonymity," said Fischoff, senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology. "And because it's done in 140 characters, you lose sight of the fact that it's accumulating, that it's building up an image for the hundreds of thousands of fans who are watching you."

Perhaps that's why Brown thoughtlessly fired off a tweet last month joking that one of the male photographers who tried to snap his photo at a New York airport "looked like wendy williams or was it the other way around . . . . lol." It was hardly a politic statement for the R&B singer, who was sentenced in August to five years' probation for assaulting fellow entertainer Rihanna.

Williams fired back on the air, saying: "At least if I was a man, then I would spend my time bullying other men, perhaps, and not other women."

A spokeswoman for Brown said he had no comment. But the singer quickly deleted the offensive tweet and tried to make amends, writing: "OMGGGGGG!!!!!!! LOL MY TWITTERS MAKIN HEADLINE TV NEWS NOW. . . . LOL. . WENDY. I GOT NOTHIN BUT LOVE FOR U BOO. . JUST JOKES."

In an interview, Williams said she was appalled by how many celebrities were sniping at each other on Twitter.

"If you really have something to say, be a man or woman and say it directly," she said. "It's really easy to be a cyberspace gangster. We're building a generation of people who are bad communicators, who only know how to say it like they mean it when they're hiding behind something."

In fact, some entertainers are now getting nervous about the public nature of the forum. Last week, Miley Cyrus deleted her Twitter account after tangling with bloggers on it over coverage of her love life. Within hours, "#mileycomeback" was the leading topic on the site.

But for some celebrities, the unchecked nature of Twitter matches their outsized personas. Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco -- whose prolific tweeting appeared to prompt the NFL to ban players from posting on social media networks during games, as well as 90 minutes before and after -- frequently mixes it up with the public on his page. "Dude you suck, you look like Hannibal Lecter in your account picture," he wrote in one typical missive to a critic.

Others show a side of themselves that the public may not know. On her Twitter feed, Alley relishes in bawdy jokes, lashes at figures such as Roman Polanski and snaps back at those who correct her frequent misspellings of such words as "pagan." "PAGON PAGON PAGON. .OH WHO THE HELL CARES IF IT'S SPELLED WRONG?," she tweeted.

Jeffrey Cole, who studies new media at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, noted that the explosion of combative posts marks a shift in how celebrities are using Twitter. Instead of simply posting mundane messages such as "In bed going to sleep" (a recent Paris Hilton tweet), many are now offering unprecedented access to their personal thoughts and petty grievances.

"To be in the middle of some of these celebrity feuds just takes celebrity presence in your life to a level that People magazine and 'Entertainment Tonight' could never have imagined," said Cole, director of the school's Center for the Digital Future.

"Twitter may have touched on something where you actually get to see a celebrity's real personality."

Demi versus Perez? See Twitter -- latimes.com

Sun Records Owner Shelby Singleton Dies at 77 - Spinner UK

Shelby Singleton, the country music mogul who resuscitated Sun Records in 1969 when he bought the label from Sam Phillips, died last Wednesday, Oct. 7, in Nashville, Tenn. following a battle with brain cancer. He was 77.

After a stint in the Marine Corps, Singleton got his start in the music business working in the promotions department of Mercury Records' Shreveport Branch and eventually rose to the ranks of a producer and A&R executive. He had had his major first success when he put unknown singer Jeannie C. Riley into the vocal booth for what became the 1968 country and pop chart-topper 'Harper Valley P.T.A.'

Singleton took his profits from that smash and bought the rights to the Sun Records name and the thousands of master recordings Phillips made with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and many others. In the 1970s, Singleton wisely reissued many of the label's recordings, rekindling interest in the influential early rock 'n' roll artists that were part of its stable.

In advance of acquiring Sun Records, Singleton had signed one of its flagship artists, Jerry Lee Lewis, in 1963 when his career had stalled. Singleton and his longtime collaborator Jerry Kennedy helped reignite Lewis' career and kept him on the Country singles charts through the late '60s and early '70s.

"He was one of the best all-around record men I've ever been in touch with," Kennedy told the Los Angeles Times last Friday. "He did so much and did it so well: promotion, marketing, production. He was even involved in publishing and merchandising. He did it all."

Singleton is survived by his fourth wife, Mary, four children, several grandchildren and his younger brother John, who worked with Shelby at Sun.

Sun Records Owner Shelby Singleton Dies at 77 - Spinner UK