By Xeni Jardin
HOLLYWOOD, California – Inside Club Privilege, Christine “ForBiddeN” Dolce – the “Queen of MySpace” – is celebrating her imminent nude debut in Playboy, and everything looks and sounds a lot like her MySpace page.
Girls and boys with RGB-colored hair strike MySpace portrait poses for roving photographers. Internet fame seekers on the dance floor dress in the equivalent of the HTML “blink tag” – not so elegant, but you can’t take your eyes off, either.
Comments fill the air, while music blares from speakers along the white walls – just like the embedded players on the popular social networking site. There are 700 or so packed into rooms only zoned for 500, max. And the long line outside could be waiting for MySpace’s pokey web pages to load.
…ForBiddeN is here in the flesh, pouting in platform heels on a white leather banquette beneath the DJ booth, surrounded by a bevy of similarly surgically-enhanced babes.
“Much love, kisses, bites, chokes, hand shakes, milk shakes, butt shakes, whatever you like… to you all!!! :o),” Ms. Dolce bids her fans on MySpace, “Love u all <3.”
In person, things are different.
I step forward to snap a Polaroid. She shrugs and says something I can’t hear over the Bee Gees trance remix. I snap the pic, but a towering security guard grabs the photo as the camera spits it out. “Go away!” he screams. “No more pictures. You! Get out of here, go, go! Now!”
And that’s where the similarities between MySpace and this Hollywood club end. Online, self-styled narcissists practically beg you to take their picture. Here, the successful ones hire beefy bodyguards to keep snappers away.
But others are more accommodating. One subject, decked in bargain bling and a red hoodie, identifies himself as Joe Blow, an internet entertainment entrepreneur.
“Yo, I’m not trying to get all up in your business or anything, but my brother is a bomb-ass hiphop artist and he is going to be huge,” he shouts in my ear over the club din. “I’m not frontin’. He’s gonna be bomb-ass huge. Check us out on MySpace!” He types a url into my Treo and saunters off.
…On the other side of Hollywood, the punk pinup site SuicideGirls is kicking off a nationwide burlesque tour at Club Dragonfly. The crowd includes Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis, musician Dave Navarro, comedian Sarah Silverstein and celebrities like Kevin Federline, Carmen Electra and Paris Hilton.
On stage, the pierced pinups perform a skit impersonating Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and Ms. Hilton, who ends up being beaten up. In the crowd, the real Ms. Hilton snaps pictures with a digital camera.
Shortly after leaving the club, Hilton is pulled over by police for “erratic driving.” She fails a field sobriety test with a .08 blood alcohol level and is promptly arrested for DUI.