Will Boris break America?

The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming! Boris Johnson is breaking out the pom-poms; his office, no doubt, is already fretting over possible photo-ops with pert cheerleaders. Yesterday, the mayor of London revealed that he is to spend £75,000 on USA day, a celebration of American culture. Yes, come October, we’ll all have the chance to sample the cross-the-pond culture of, uh, Big Macs, beamers and Britney.

Although Dave Hill (do my eyes deceive me?) thinks it’s a good idea all-in-all, the project has its critics. Steve Hart, regional secretary of the Unite union, said: “We remain very upset that the mayor ended the biggest anti-racist festival which also had a very clear direction of celebrating cultural diversity in London. It is remarkable he is subsidising predominantly wealthy Americans.”

But for Boris-watchers it is not very remarkable at all. Some pundits predict that David Cameron will one day be butchered by BoJo on his ongoing quest to be the nation’s top Tory, but, as Johnson has himself predicted, “My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.” This is because what he really intends to be is leader of the free world. “Boris had once confessed to Charlie Althorp, the brother of the late Princess of Wales and his room-mate at Eton, that he wanted to be president of the United States,” his Oxford pal Toby Young has revealed.

And he stands a far better chance than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born in New York, Johnson was raised in Connecticut, until the age of five. A move Stateside is almost inevitable. As much a celebrity as a politician, everyone knows that all the big acts have to break America. Much of his rhetoric will already have endeared him to Republicans. As a hack, he was famously rebuked by Alastair Campbell for tackling Bill Clinton on Monica Lewinsky (Actually, Johnson later added, “I rather supported Clinton over Monica”. I’ll bet he did …) Boris was also one of the very few flag-wavers for Dubya in his day. “Whenever George Dubya Bush appears on television, with his buzzard squint and his Ronald Reagan side-nod, I find a cheer rising irresistibly in my throat,” he wrote. “Yo, Bush baby, I find myself saying, squashing my beer can like some crazed reneck: you tell ‘em boy.”

And his schtick seems to have endeared him to the American media. “Imagine William F Buckley Jr with a serious political career (a shot at the presidency, even) and Hugh Grant’s dishevelled charm,” gushed Vanity Fair. And this despite serious gaffes. When Mayor Bloomberg flew over from New York to meet him, Johnson was presented with a crystal apple from Tiffany’s. In return Johnson fumbled about in his desk and found a button-down dress shirt covered with a map of London’s subway system. “I’m a proud citizen of New York, a point I would not hesitate to remind you of,” Boris later added.

When first observing Johnson on the campaign trail, the Sunday Times journalist AA Gill described Johnson eyeing up a voter’s baby as if it were “Sunday lunch”, so you can imagine he might stare at an American audience like Henry VIII presented with a basted swan.

Although many will, no doubt, continue to begrudge the scrapping of multicultural festival Rise, Johnson’s office appears to be suggesting that the £75,000 to be lavished on “USA day” will be an American-style speculate-to-accumulate venture. Promise a few free hotdogs – and hope hotel bookings triple. A spokesman explained: “In a highly competitive environment and with the global economic situation, it is vital we continue to promote what the capital has to offer American tourists.” Of course, more money might be raised if the US embassy coughed up the £3.5m it has racked up in unpaid congestion charges – but perhaps that’s another matter. Johnson’s bid to become Captain America must continue apace.

All hail Frances Bean

Looking back, what will the Noughties be remembered for, pop-culture wise? Social networking, YouTube, The X-Factor and reality television (which meant everyone spent most of the decade under the bright lights of fame, if only thanks to the beam of their own webcam), or really high-profile celebrity deaths, of which this decade has seen many?

This year, as you crossed your fingers and hoped Pete Doherty would die (if only to prove that Mr Pork Pie hat was a real rocker) bigger stars copped it instead, including – in no particular order – Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson and Jade Goody. Last week even Peaches Geldof (never one to miss a trend) had a near-death experience, Twittering en route to Disneyland: ‘Just actually experienced a full on car carsh [sic] with the IDGAF [I Don’t Give A Fuck] crew. Wow, I guess we really don’t GAF… Honestly can’t believe were [sic] alive after that. And that the front of the car is totally fucked up and yet were [sic] still carrying on to Disney!?’

You know what, Peaches, I can’t either. Was the Grim Reaper having an off-day?

St Bob’s daughter, along with her celebutante sisters Pixie, Paplova, Pistachio and Heavenly Piranha Tiger-Lily, are part of the trend that rides tandem with death as a defining trend in this celebrity decade – that of the children of famous people becoming famous purely because they’re spawned by someone famous. In a way this is inevitable: as we’re all destined to be famous sooner or later, it makes sense that those birthed in fame get chased by the paparazzi from the cradle. And so we have an endless parade of models, actresses and popstrels all cut off a platinum-selling umbilical cord. Every Rolling Stone daughter has a contract with a modelling agency, while Lily Allen makes records, Jaime Winstone turns out to her brother Alfie’s film premieres, and Kelly and Jack Osbourne and Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and Otis Ferry and Amber Le Bon attend the opening of so many envelopes…

So it’s all the more remarkable that the decade ends with a story about one celebrity offspring you’ve most likely never heard of: Frances Bean Cobain, born in 1992, only child of the late, great Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. To date we know that she’s named after the guitarist in The Vaselines rather than Frances Farmer; that her unusual middle name is a homage to the fact that Kurt thought she looked like a kidney bean when in Courtney’s womb; that Drew Barrymore is her godmother; that she weighed 7lb 1oz when born in Los Angeles; that she has interned at Rolling Stone (where she dressed funny); that she has given only four interviews and celebrated her Sweet 16th with a ‘Suicide’ party where a competition was held to find the partygoer that looked ‘the most dead’.

As a woman and mother Courtney Love has always been unconventional. As John Peel recalled of one of her concerts after the death of Kurt, ‘Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, as well as on the collar of her dress, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam. After a brief word with supporters at the foot of the stage, she reeled away, knocking over a wastebin, and disappeared. Minutes later she was onstage giving a performance which verged on the heroic… Love steered her band through a set which dared you to pity either her recent history or that of the band… The band teetered on the edge of chaos, generating a tension which I cannot remember having felt before from any stage.’

Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, is brilliant. And for Kurt, who described her as ‘a goddess who sweats ambition and empathy’ in his suicide note, she was (and I quote from The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People) ‘the one’: ‘Seattle Police Department reports from the couple’s many domestic disturbance calls reek of animalistic rage – Courtney throws a glass at Kurt’s face; Kurt chokes her on the floor and slashes her arms with the broken glass; both parties refuse any medical treatment.’ ‘Somebody asked me recently about our celebrity lifestyle’, Courtney said in interview with The Sunday Times. ‘Did they think we were going to Eden Rock and driving around in an Aston Martin? We did not even have a Lexus and we lived in a shithole.’

As a parent, however, she’s fared pretty well. Frances isn’t much interested in the fame game. ‘I get [why people are interested in me]’, she told Harper’s Bazaar. ‘I really do but at the same time it’s creepy… I haven’t done anything. If you’re a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I’m not my parents.’ She has already turned down a host of opportunities offered to her on the basis of her genetic inheritance and so it seems rather sad that she’s now a news story: Courtney has lost custody of Frances, and Frances has moved in with her grandparents.

With a bit of luck Courtney will get herself back on track once again and this will be the last time Frances is troubled by the press. As an anguished Courtney wrote on Facebook, ‘She should go be a writer or an a…rtist which I support 100% but this is a circus and it pains me cos I know she hates it.’ And as Frances has said, ‘You want to be famous? Work your ass off and make decisions that could potentially catapult your career into a lasting one.’ I’d toast to that in the coming decade.

Why pink doesn’t stink

Pink is on the brink. According to a new campaign group called Pinkstinks, “the culture of pink invades every aspect of girls’ lives”, and the relentless march of pinkification must be stopped before the nation’s six-year-olds set out, en masse, to shred the last 50 years of the women’s movement by setting their hearts on careers as manicurists and go-go dancers in a rose-tinted haze of glee for girliness.

Justice minister Bridget Prentice has pledged her support to the campaign. “It’s about not funnelling girls into pretty, pretty jobs, but [about] giving them aspirations and challenging them to fulfil their potential,” she said. “We want to say to organisations like the Early Learning Centre that we rely on them to be progressive about encouraging girls to think of themselves as equal, and not to reinforce the old stereotypes.”

This is all well and good, but what’s the colour got to do with it? When I was a child, I loved pink. Couldn’t get enough of it. Granma would dress me in pink frilly knickers. Mum would get me home and change them immediately. At seven, I was demented in desire for a pink Barbie bath set. My mother, a staunch feminist, screamed with her face pressed into a cushion when Aunty Sara bought me one for what seemed at the time my best birthday ever.

But I’m over it. Nowadays I’m working as a journalist – as opposed to queuing up outside Boujis every night on a great, glittering quest to become a Wag – and go to work dressed head to toe in black (appropriate attire for working in an industry so perky right now that one may as well be working in an undertaker’s and taking style tips from Morticia Adams.)

For some reason little girls really like pink. They like princesses and ponies and perfume and pastel and all sorts of other horrible things that make adult feminists wince. But they grow out of it. And shops provide what customers want to buy – not the other way around. No one appears to be suggesting that boys will grow up wanting to be wrestlers due to the noxious influence of the WWE figures on offer for them at Toys R Us.

Yet Emma Moore, co-founder of Pinkstinks, is adamant. “Ask yourself what we want girls and boys to learn from an early age. Is it that pink, passive and pretty is for girls and that blue, bold and challenging is for boys?” Interestingly, until the 1940s pink was apparently used to dress boys as blue was seen as a more dainty and delicate colour appropriate for girls.

What is more worrying is the culture of pinkification in the adult world. As Libby Brooks has pointed out, the appropriation of the colour for breast cancer awareness risks prettifying the disease rather than tackling it head-on: “In her excoriating essay Cancerland, the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich describes induction into the pink and perky world of breast cancer, following her own diagnosis in 2001. ‘In the mainstream breast cancer culture, one finds very little anger … Let me die of anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that [ribbon-branded] teddy bear.’”

But pink itself is no bad thing: Picasso had a pink period; Pink Floyd were a great band; gay pride has adopted pink as its colour; in Thailand it is, apparently, the colour of those born on a Tuesday; Elvis drove a pink Cadillac; and the popstar Pink is held up as a role model for young girls by … uh … Pinkstinks.

The late high priestess of pink, the chiffon dame, Barbara Cartland – who uniquely favoured the colour following a trip to Tutankamen’s tomb in the 1920s, where she liked the tint of the walls so much that she forsook all other colours – didn’t let the dainty shade curb her ambition. On average she wrote a novel a fortnight, and appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific novelist, with estimated worldwide sales of one billion copies in 36 languages. As Christian Dior once noted: “Pink will prevail.”