By performing enough spells to burn mid-sized Prussian villages to the ground, flighty mogulista Madonna is now finally rid of ex-husband Guy Ritchie. Which frees her up to try her own hand at being an auteur. This works well! Because there won't be awkward bedroom exchanges that find Ritchie sulking, spouting, "Oh. I'm the filmmaker in this family, but people obviously like your crappy films better than my crappy films! Harrumph," and Madonna groaning and offering, "No, no sweetheart, you're a special person," as she applies witch hazel to her chapped cheeks and swigs a half bottle of Maalox before nodding off. Oh, those olds and their Maalox. Projects that will suffer premature ends then: the album campaign for her umpteenth greatest hits and some finishing school for Malawi girls that she was heading up she was heading up. The barge is already headed for another port, and so on.

Despite the fact that Lara Stone may see her curvaceous, size-4 frame as "fat" when compared with her stick-thin runway mannequin counterparts, the model's rapidly rising star is showing no signs of slowing. Having opened numerous high-profile shows, an entire issue of Paris Vogue dedicated to her (not to mention reappearing recently in the rag sporting blackface and spawning loads of controversy), and gracing an enviable collection of magazine covers, Stone has now caught the eye of Marc Jacobs. According to Women's Wear Daily, Stone will be following in Madonna's footsteps and appearing in the next series of ads for Louis Vuitton.

Here in this post I hold the secret to getting everything you've ever dreamed of, and the secret to Madonna's fountain of youth face. First of all, to gain great riches while working at your dream job, complete with prestige and stardom, apparently all you have to do is ask for it. At least, that's how it happened for Gina Brooke, Madonna's personal makeup artist and Shu Uemura's eyelash-obsessed artistic director. On the morning of her big move to Los Angeles, determined to make the big time in Hollywood, Brooke laid out her makeup portfolios on her bed, and in her authoritative, native New Yorker tone, made it explicitly clear they were not to be touched. This was a New York moving company, so naturally the collection of all of her life's work disappeared. She began desperately reaching out to LA acquaintances for test work, immediately connecting with Caroline Murphy and landing and an agent who helped grant her two initial wishes: to work at the top at Shu Uemura, and to be Madonna's personal makeup maven.

And then you have those celebrity knife fights that you're secretly hoping will be rained on by a downpour of meteors because you can't sympathize with either fighter. Having successfully earned the ire of musical Mensan Mariah Carey, Eminem now creakily adjusts his dated brand of overly-macho pugilism to throw down with Madonna. And while a Madge-and-Em mash-up shouldn't work technically, from a kind of hometown solidarity standpoint, it should be inevitable. Here we have a city cratered with devastation, blight, and utter despair, where houses are go for $100 a pop. And we have a pair of pop stars who have managed to escape the thrashing tentacles of such blight just barely. Pop stars who should be jumping at a chance to make the most of their messianic complexes.

● Although Guy Ritchie claims to “love” ex-wife Madonna, he still thinks she’s “retarded.” [MSN]
● Who would have thought? Kevin Federline doesn’t take care of his house! The owners of his rented Tarzana house want $100K for damages, including cigarette butts and empty beer bottles in the gutter, a bent light post, and drawings all over the walls. [Dlisted]
● Law & Order’s next ripped-from-the-headlines plot will feature a Jon and Kate Gosselin-esque storyline, where the “Kate” character is murdered and the “Jon” is the suspect. [EW]

It's a crude, filthy, perfectly foul world we live in where I rummage through my spam folder to find misplaced e-mails only to read subject lines proclaiming, "Best lust recipe!" while Madonna's preferred method of hawking her new greatest hits collection includes clawing at the withered corpse of Guy Ritchie and their erstwhile marriage. On his show, David Letterman asks, "You were married for eight years?" to which she snaps, "The Bush years." Those of us not in the studio audience and therefore not within her fire-breathing radius meet her outburst with exaggerated eye-rolls. And before further dissection of how such an immortal woman can manage to age so gracelessly, a notable plus working in her favor while in Letterman's company: the hair! It's so full and wavy!

● Despite Madonna’s impassioned MTV eulogy for Michael Jackson, the good vibes were not mutual. In recordings with his spiritual advisor Rabbi Shmuley, the King of Pop says Madge is “not a nice person.” [CNN]
● Megan Fox isn’t one of those celebs that has a Google Alert on her name, ‘cause if she did, Fox would be a “complete lunatic, drug-addled and out of [her] mind.” [Showbizspy]
● One might imagine that mechanic James Jimenez stole Kristen Dunst’s $2,000 Balenciaga handbag from her Manhattan hotel room because she’s a big celebrity. Turns out Jimenez doesn’t even know who Dunst is and "doesn’t care about Spider-Man." [NYP]

Y'know with Mercury being in retrograde, it makes sense that we've found new villains and new pieces of exquisite musicianship to hold dear to our hearts. It also makes sense that other imminent car-crashes have slowed their collision course. Naturally I refer to Lindsay Lohan. The "Rumors" hitmaker and sometime actress was tagged to sub in for Nicole Scherzinger to host three days of concerts at Singapore's Grand Prix. Gushes the star, last seen glassy-eyed with Taylor Momsen, "I like to drive. I like cars. I like fast cars." Slow down, LiLo. Slow. It. Down.

Well, we saw it coming. On one hand, maybe this is how the pop ecosystem works. That is, in order to facilitate the trapezoid of life that governs showbiz, all lesser pop stars must cannibalize on what non-chemical biomatter remains of any deceased pop legend. So that in some shape or form, most traces of the pop star can dissolve into the earth. And then, future pop stars can mint their legacies on flat covers of his hits. In that respect, Janet Jackson and Madonna meeting over greasy banh mi or whatever to talk about how to turn one man's death into career momentum for themselves is a sensible turn of events. But on the other hand, it's disappointing that two surviving pop forces, who both delivered poignant Michael Jackson tributes only recently, are piecing together a collaboration designed to launch them squarely into America's heart.

Last night, a whole lot of stuff happened at a variety show whose name is pronounced, "The Vee Em Eys." For the uninitiated, "The Vee Em Eys" is where people accept metallic statues of astronauts for the hard work of other less-famous and less-pretty people who are able to take their songs and make it evocatively crackle along to between three-and-a-half to four minutes of video footage. This footage may include a storyline, choreography, or a liberal usage of string bikinis. And like any high-budgeted awards telecast on a network desperately reaching for any residual shreds of credibility among viewers aged 12-24, there were winners and losers last night. And then there were those who just made us shrug. And none of this has to do with who won what last night, because everyone knows that the real prize is word-of-mouth.