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This is the next cover of Rolling Stone.

It is, apparently, a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Guns N Roses' Appetite for Destruction.

Here's the thing about this band that gets me -- and I know it may be that this sort of rock was just going out of style when I began to get seriously interested in rock music but...they just look ridiculous.

I'll admit they look tough next to, say, the guys in Poison:

Or even Montley Crue from that period.

But is there any one of these guys who doesn't look like your little sister could beat him up?

Even with hair-bands as the prevailing trend the guys in GNR must have had special spandex pants created for the big brass pair it would have taken to call themselves a metal band while the guys from Motorhead were still touring, looking like this:

Glam is one thing.

Bowie and Marc Bolan managed to do true glam with a bit of style and edge.

GNR, by comparison, just look ludicrous -- like they put themselves together in the women's section of a Salvation Army that had gotten a lot of oddly-sized donations from an out-of-business S&M shop and then had their hair and makeup done by former beauty pageant contestants who'd just seen a community theater version of Cats.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which hit my mailbox this weekend:

- Great interview with Bruce Springsteen, who's on the cover, but no big surprise there. I think it would take some real skill to write a bad Bruce interview. Some great early pictures of Bruce with the story, including one of him rail thin and shaggy in a pair of jeans, size-small tank top and beat-up black Chuck Taylor All-Stars. He looks like every pseudo-hippie kid I went to high school with.

- More of their kind of crap election coverage by Matt Taibbi, whose continuing assignment to write nasty, sort of obvious things about all of the Republican presidential hopefuls brings him to Mitt Romney this issue. Taibbi shocks and appalls us by revealing that Romney is...a politician! He says things people want to hear (No!)! He uses (gasp!) stock public speaking techniques. He speaks in (for shame!) glittering generalities! Somebody stick a wooden stake in this guy's heart, quick!

- A pretty good piece on Internet gossip-monger Perez Hilton (AKA Mario Lavendeira), who makes his living by posting other peoples' celebrity photography for free and making catty comments about its subjects (as I'll do now, following his shining example).

His ability to post other peoples' work and be snarky about the rich and famous is apparently making him $250,000 a year and he's just landed a television show.

This piece would make me hate this guy even more than I already do...but somehow I can't bring myself to bother. What I do like: the piece reveals Hilton's Bond-villainesque origin as a cranky, chubby, misanthropic little kid whose parents let him lay in bed watching TV 12 hours a day and would bring him meals on trays so he didn't have to get up and go to the kitchen. People were mean to him in high school, so his being mean to famous people who commit the mortal sin of occasionally going outside without makeup really makes perfect sense.

"I think what I do is noble," Hilton says.

Get this guy a Pulitzer! And a swift kick in the nobility!

- A weird "Wheels 07" feature wherein musicians pose with cars, test drive them and offer their opinions. This makes me love The Dropkick Murphys more than I already do, as they test drive an Infiniti G37S. The Boston punks break all sorts of traffic laws in it, squeal into a Dunkin Donuts parking lot excitedly screaming "Dunkies!" and ultimately break the windshield while posing with the car with "props" like a sledgehammer and chainsaw.

"This is the car of a Yankee fan!" bassist/songwriter Ken Casey says after the "accident."

The writer theorizes that he should never have told them the car was fully insured.

Bruce may be down one keyboardist for now, but he's on the cover of the current issue of Spin with Win Butler, lead singer of Arcade Fire.

Here's some YouTube footage of The Boss doing Arcade Fire's "Keep The Car Running" with Win and his wife, Regine, and a duet on his own "State Trooper" as well.

Rolling Stone's Peter Travers chooses the top ten DVD releases of the year in the latest Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #1: The Blade Runner: The Final Cut DVD

Go check out (and groan at, and whine about) the others here.

Great place for Christmas present ideas, at the very least.

Indiana Jones (and that kid from the Transformers movie) are on the cover of Vanity Fair this month.

A good story -- and some great photos by Annie Leibovitz. Some video from the shoot here too.

My favorite may be of Cate Blanchett as an evil, sexy Russian agent (the action has moved to the 1950s in this flick -- when the Ruskies were sinister and hot).

Great, strange Chuck Klosterman essay in this month's Esquire about Norman Mailer, the demise of boxing, fight or flight and, to my great delight, my pet theory that people are rude (and have been getting ruder for decades) because they're sure you won't punch them.

From the piece:

"It is impossible to deny that the culture is coarsening. Everyone concedes this -- even the people who are happy about it. It is now acceptable to say almost anything, about almost anyone, in a public space, and for no reason whatsoever. There is no line to step over, because such lines no longer exist. And I think those boundaries disappeared the moment people really, truly lost the fear of getting punched in the face. Americans have understood this intellectually for decades, but I don't think we accepted it in totality until now. Adults are now so insulated by technology (and so protected by modernity) that the possibility of a physical consequence for any action is a psychological nonfactor. We have removed interpersonal fear from day-to-day behavior. Today, boxers are the only people who get hit for fucking up."

People always think I'm crazy when I say this, but it has always seemed wrong to me that all sorts of behaviors that once would have been thought to be inexcusably rude have become almost commonplace in the society but it has become unthinkable that you would hit someone for any reason. As someone once said, civilized men are coarser than barbarians because they know they can be rude without having their heads split open, as a general thing.

Even recreational boxing -- when I used to box, it was like telling people I enjoyed rape and murder as hobbies. Boxing (and maybe wrestling) are the human sport urge to physically excel and dominate stripped of its dressings - no balls, no goals, no pretty uniforms. Just two people deciding which is physically superior. And for some reason the very idea of that scares the hell out of a lot of people these days.

A new children's book will try to help parents explain their cosmetic surgery procedures to kids. The book, written by Flordia plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer, is featured in this week's Newsweek.

From the article:

"My Beautiful Mommy" is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better." Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.

The text doesn't mention the breast augmentation, but the illustrations intentionally show Mom's breasts to be fuller and higher. "I tried to skirt that issue in the text itself," says Salzhauer. "The tummy lends itself to an easy explanation to the children: extra skin and can't fit into your clothes. The breasts might be a stretch for a six-year-old."

Metalhead Dave Grohl has posted a special message to Metallica through Metal Hammer magazine (for which I came very close to freelancing some years ago -- weird but unrelated story).

The jist of it: the former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman loves them through thick and thin and can't wait for the new album.

However, he does say:

"Good luck. And don't release it until it's kick-ass."

Hear, hear!

Lest you doubt Grohl's trashy metal bona fides:

Rolling Stone has posted George Carlin's first interview with the mag, from 1972.

Wouldn't it be great if they put him on the cover? Talk about a counter-culture hero - an influence on stand up comedy and comedy writing for two generations. I think he earned it.

Barack Obama's on the cover of Rolling Stone again -- this time without "FASHION TIPS FROM PANIC AT THE DISCO!" blaring from beneath or around him. Maybe the best cover shot I've seen of him yet.

In the interview he talks about (among other things) what's on his iPod -- Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Dylan -- and how well he gets along with Jay-Z.

Taking a lesson from John McCain's "Bomb Iran" Beach Boys flap, Obama cannily avoids saying something like "I got 99 problems but Hillary Clinton is no longer one."

Interview here.