his is another TV show review that's less a review than a discussion. I don't know how one would review Mtv Cribs anyway; do you criticize the camera angles and editing, or what? It's a faux documentary, and it is what it is; superficial tours of superficial celebrities' houses. You pretty well know what you're going to get going in.

Nevertheless, after viewing half a dozen programs, I had a series of semi-organized observations I wanted to get off my chest. And since that's what my blog is for, here they are, archived for all time.

January 27, 2003

A show I was aware of, but had never actually seen until I watched it with Malaya, is Mtv's Cribs.  It's an essentially pointless show, a sort of amateurish, under-produced version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, but focused entirely on the homes and vehicles owned by various B and C list celebrities.  So you get a tour of like, Jean Claude van Damme's New York townhouse, or the Florida or California mansion owned by some football player or record producer you've never heard of.

Rather than hiring a host and overproducing it in cheesy fashion with lots of soft focus visuals, like the original Robin Leach show back in the 80's, the stars themselves appear, leading the cameras through their freshly-cleaned and decorated homes, many rooms of which they are clearly unfamiliar with.  It's interesting for several reasons.

Decorating do's and don'ts.  Mostly don'ts.  It's nice to get regular reminders that money can't buy taste, but when you consider that most of the people on the show are young and grew up poor, and that their contemporaries have decorations of the "page torn from a magazine" style in their tiny one bedroom apartment, we shouldn't be too harsh on them for their tackiness.

About the only ones who have nice-looking decorations (a state not to be confused with expensive-looking decorations) obviously hired a decorator to do it, since it's totally cold and soulless and has nothing to do with the person who owns the house at all.  So you've got some scruffy heavy metal guitarist living in this pristine, museum-like home with all white walls and framed prints and Victorian-styled arm chairs. Looking ridiculous in his torn jeans and black t-shirt, and making the decorations look ridiculous with him in the same picture.

I've seen enough of maybe 8 or 10 shows to form an opinion on their decor, and of those the only ones who had a house that both looked okay, and fit them, were guys who had been smart enough to marry intelligent women and let them run the household.  Or who were just renting some furnished place they lived in several months a year during their nomadic sports life.

Hangers on. The amount of miscellaneous assholes hanging around most of the houses is amazing.  In some cases I'm sure the friends, neighbors, distant relatives, etc are there since they knew Cribs was coming by and they wanted to get on camera. But since the show never shows the other non-celebrity people for very long, and when it does they're usually just in the background; often not even looking at the camera.  It's not like there's a 2 minute section on every show where Jamie Pressley's masseuse, personal trainer, personal assistant, ex-mother in law, high school friend, personal stylist, sister's best friend, etc get camera face time and a chance to shout of "Hi mom!"

My point is that while most people will come and hang around just to be in the background on an Mtv show, it's not like they ever get any major face time, and when they are shown they always appear to be almost surprised at the cameras.  It's like they regard the celebrity's huge house as a sort of free hotel/open bar/restaurant, and just spend all of their free time there, rubbing elbows with someone they knew before they were famous, and eating free food and playing on their pool table.  Which is my whole point; why do these famous people allow all of these hangers on to live off their shit?  You ain't so rich that you gotta give it away to people you don't hardly ever know!

I'm not really including any black musical artist in this, since they invariably have a huge posse of no-talent hangers on and useless body guards and just general poorly-dressed losers the rap star/singer knew back in the old day back in the 'hood, and who the star doesn't feel they can drop since they would be selling out and failing to keep it real, and never mind the fact that the hanger on does them no good and will drop them and move on to greener pastures the instant the money and fame start to dry up. I just feel sorry for those guys, and wonder how much they ever grow up when their 15 minutes are up and all their boys stop coming around when they have to sell off their mansion and the Escalades and the white leather couches and framed Scarface posters.

Closet space. These big houses have an unbelievable amount of closet space, especially the portion of it devoted to shoes. And it's not just women, who are renowned/reviled (usually fairly) for their desire to own far more shoes than they could ever hope to wear or need.  Ladies, there's a very fine line between shoes that are good enough to go with your outfit, and ones that are absolutely perfect.  And I promise, no one but you, especially no man, will ever notice the difference.

So you end up with various rap artists who have closets with a whole sub room that's larger than any apartment I've ever lived in, entirely filled with boxes of shoes, most of them never worn, or only worn once.  Meanwhile the guy has 50 pairs of jeans all of which look just the same, 50 ugly bowling shirts, 40 sports jerseys, and is 70 pounds overweight -- meaning he looks like a jolly bouncer on his day off, no matter what he wears.  At least the women with their 500 pairs of high heels are wearing pretty shoes, and shoes that look different.  Once you're past about 16, sneakers are sneakers, Sir Rapalot.

Those are hiking style boots by trendy brands (with silly names) like Timbaland that look like real hiking boots, but which would actually last 5 minutes on a real hiking trail (which is still about 3 minutes longer than their owner would last).

As an aside; I've been looking to get a new pair of hiking boots myself, since though my one pair of leather Nikes still feel great, they are about 7 years old, and have been worn for thousands of miles, much of it over actual hiking trails, and the soles are beginning to fall apart.  The problem is that every hiking boot I can find is either a big, heavy, plain brown thing (mine are light gray, when not covered in trail dust) that's ugly and yuppie-looking, or else it's a sneaker with extra treads and no high top for ankle support, or it's a plain black or white high top sneaker with slightly different styling.  A poseur boot, in other words.  Something that looks like a hiking boot, but is purely a foot ornament, with insufficient tread or toughness or durability or tight laces to wear in the actual wild.

And no, I'm not sure why this one article of useless clothing annoys me, when most of the rest I'm perfectly okay with overlooking.  Perhaps since other things like $1500 silk dinner jackets and $200 ties are totally off my radar, while the overabundance of poseur boots are cutting into the display area and selection of real hiking boots that I want to own.

Bathroom space. I'm jealous of this one, since I've always wanted a huge tub to relax in, with whirlpool jets and the whole thing, but have never (aside from a couple of hotel visits) had a bathroom thusly equipped.  Funny how one-bedroom apartments and condos don't have bathrooms big enough to put jacuzzi baths with separate shower stalls, double sinks with extra counter space in. But the amount of bathroom space most of the mansions on Cribs have is just ridiculous. Why have a bathroom 20 feet long if you're never going to do anything with the space, and it makes you walk another 10 feet every time you need to pee?

So yes to a tub big enough for two, long enough to lie down fully in, and filled with water jets and air jets and bubble-making capacity, and yes to a large standing shower stall with shower heads on two walls and a bench to sit on and a no-fog full-length mirror for shaving in, and yes to big skylights and live plants and marble counters and mirrors on virtually every wall.

Bad taste in cars. This one is debatable, but the amount of guys who have an eight car garage that's filled with 3 SUVs and a Mercedes is just ridiculous. I guess SUVs are just as trendy (and just as functional) as poseur boots are, but the fact that guys who have never been outside of a city in their lives feel the need to spend $110k on a customized Hummer or Escalade just makes me laugh. It's such a waste of money, and such a lack of originality.  The other thing that bothers me is when their sports car is 1) clearly never driven, or 2) some mediocre half sports car like an Acura or Corvette that they've spent an extra $20k on getting detailed and filled with speakers and chrome rims.

You've got the money, you've got the time.  Get a real sports car.  A Porsche or a Ferrari or something even more exotic like a Lamborghini, and really impress people, and take it out to the track on weekends and blow it up to 170.  Of course they're not practical for daily driving, but neither is your 7 MPG H2, and you never drive it anywhere but to work or parties anyway.

Games and gaming space. Half the guys I've seen on Cribs are pro athletes, so it's expected that they'll have an outdoor full or half court for basketball.  Hell, I'd have one myself if I had the money for a mansion; I enjoy shooting some baskets for fun/exercise, and we could use the flat space for skateboarding or rollerblading or racing model cars or extra parking or whatever.

The thing on Cribs that I can't believe is how often these guys have some huge movie viewing room with custom lounge chairs and such, and then have a tangled box of video game console stuff in a side room with bad furniture and a small TV.  And as the tour continues, they talk about how much Madden 2003 they've been playing.  So why the hell don't they have the Playstation or Xbox out in the main room on the big TV with the comfy chairs?  Or have better chairs and a giant liquid plasma screen in their gaming room?

They often have arcade games or pinball or the like, and I like that, but they drive me crazy with their giant, custom-colored, black felt, rhinestone studded pool tables, which are almost always in a room that's about a foot wider and two feet longer than the table itself.  Ever try to shoot pool without at least 6 feet of space on all sides of the table?  It's a pain in the ass, you have to hit down on the ball, you can't line up your shots accurately, etc.  Put the pool table in a room large enough to play pool properly in.  Mariah Carey's ridiculous NY Penthouse tour had the perfect example of almost everything I talk about in this article: too many impractical shoes, hangers on by the dozen, rooms in her house she never used, and a pool table that was practically in a closet.

No books.  This is something that Malaya pointed out to me, that she'd long observed and been annoyed by.  There are never any books in their houses.  Not even any magazines lying around on the coffee tables.  And if there are, they're clearly just ornamental and decorative.  Where's the mansion with the huge library and floor to ceiling books with one of those cool ladders that rolls in a track on the floor and a shelf up high?  Hell, where's a bookcase with a bunch of old Stephen King paperbacks?  I had one of those when I was 13.

I guess it's no real surprise that the vapid, uneducated, functionally-illiterate jocks and music stars you see on Cribs aren't smart enough to read, but it's still sort of painful for me to see such dumb people with so much money spent on such unimportant and essentially useless things.

No one ever has anything I want in their houses. This isn't entirely true, since I've seen some nice TV rooms and movie theaters and indoor gyms and outdoor pools and grounds and bathrooms and such. But when it comes to things that I really want to make me happy in my future hypothetical mansion, they ain't there.  No books or libraries, as I said earlier.  No one ever has a really great office with tons of desk space and nice decorations and sound system and super comfortable chair and footrest.  No one ever has nice views; and that's one thing I'd really want in a house.  What's the point in building a mansion if the only thing you can see from your big house are other big houses? Some of them have decent gaming rooms, when they've got space enough around the pool table, but I've never seen one that had a big room full of comfortable chairs and huge monitors and a home LAN set up.  (Computers are like, reading. And reading is like, hard.)

And for all these guys love their ornamental cars, why don't they have a driving track, or a 1/4 or 1/2 mile straight away driveway to burn rubber on?  I suppose it really is all about cruising and sitting around in a parking lot drinking Cristal with your posse, with cars that are entirely ornamental, with any potential performance bonuses from the sports cars existing entirely to brag about to your friends.  If I had a house and grounds big enough, I'd put in a long, curving, winding, wide, driveway that I could get my Ferrari up to about 120 as I powerslid through the corners. I'd have guard rails and everything. And ideally no neighbors within about 10 miles, so no one would bitch about the noise.

And as for the rest of the grounds, I've never seen anyone with anything even approaching what I'd want. While some of them have a pool and hot tub, and maybe a basketball court, but no one ever has a house in the woods, or has built paths around their grounds for jogging or biking.  I want a house in the woods, ideally on a big hill, with acres around it.  And I want a steep, hilly, winding path that's a few miles long for mountain bike riding, and another one or a less steep one that's scenic for walking and jogging. With little pagodas off in the distance to stop and rest in, or get out of the rain, or whatever. What's the point in extensive grounds if you don't use them for something other than gardener fees?

And if you're paying gardeners, put them to good use.  How about a big Japanese garden in your backyard, right by the house, or surrounding the pool? Something ornate and beautiful, but that you can still walk through, and sit in and meditate and mellow out within. I can't see having millions and spending it on bad artwork inside your foyer, while living in an ugly house surrounded by acres of dying grass.

I suppose it's better this way, since I'd really loathe the celebs on the show if they had the money to do wonderful things, and actually did them.  Jealousy would tinge my reactions, though I'm not sure if that would be any worse than the loathing and disgust I feel for them now, for their wasted opportunities.  And yes, I realize that if I were the famous/rich one and had Cribs in my house, other people, such as the celebs I'm ridiculing here, would see what I'd spent my millions on and think it was ridiculous and wonder how the hell I could spend all that time reading and relaxing in ergonomic office chairs and huge leather reading chairs in a room filled with mounted, articulated snake and crocodile skeletons, when there were movie premieres and rap album release parties to go to and overpriced champagne to drink at them.

Over all, Cribs is a pretty loathsome program, but I suppose it serves some useful purposes, even if they differ from viewer to viewer. I mostly get a refresher course in how much I dislike celebrities, but I suppose other people might actually enjoy it.

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