In Which We Find Out Why He Dumped Jennifer Lawrence

The Happy Couple

by DICK CHENEY

Imagine some guy (Chris Martin) is placing his rigid penis inside of you, and then the next day he says, "I've got to spend the day with Gwyneth." You respond how any sane person would; you say, "But she will definitely not be having sex with you, Chris." "Sex isn't everything," he responds, and goes off to consciously uncouple.

It is hard to be Jennifer Lawrence. How do you think that she felt when she was dumped by Chris Martin for a darker-haired version of his ex-wife? I can answer that for you: She felt absolutely terrible. I mean, look at this woman:

Chris' new girlfriend, British actress Annabelle Wallis, is a lot more accomodating than Jennifer Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence has been let down by men before. It's not exactly a phenomenon to which she is unaccustomed. She put out a casting call for boyfriends quite recently, and not a single member of One Direction responded. She intimidates men, probably, but she did something worse than intimidate Chris Martin: she bored him.

Coldplay release their seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, this week. The title comes from the fact that Chris Martin woke up one day and was like, "You know how when we sleep at night, our head is literally full of our dreams?!?!" And the band members were like, "Yes, Chris, we will say absolutely anything to stop you from being depressed about women."

A Head Full of Dreams contains not one single song about Jennifer Lawrence. It pretends that she does not even exist, that she never existed, that she was just a rebound-esque distraction for Chris as he found a more interesting woman with a lot more life experience than Jennifer Lawrence. I mean, when Lawrence reaches back into her life history, what does she really have to tell Chris that is worth repeating in song lyrics? "Let me reminisce about that time I got my period on the set of a multimillionaire movie I wasn't paid enough for." No, he's not interested in that. He misses Gwyneth, and when she used to tell him about the evils of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

"Been around the world looking for someone like you," Chris openly admits on A Head Full of Dreams, essentially, someone like Gwyneth. This is a frightening thought, but to Annabelle Wallis' credit, she seems to have embraced being the faux-coupler. She even sings on the album's best track, "Up & Up". "Army of One" has Chris explaining that he is "going to fight for you," a statement especially galling to Jennifer Lawrence, because he took her about as seriously as a child takes his own mortality.

Chris Martin is a child, but so is his new girlfriend, who grew up in Portugal. "If you get the chance to live abroad, lessons in life it gives you are like no other," she explained in one interview. Then she allowed a photographer to take pictures of her dressed like this:

Fortunately in ensuing months Annabelle has gone brunette, because it is important to Chris that she does not too closely resemble a younger version of his children's mother. On A Head Full of Dreams, Annabelle's singing is basically identical to Gwyneth's in that their voices are both dissembled into the background, superceded by Chris' vocals. The only woman you really hear during the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams is, weirdly, Beyonce. She guests on "Hymn for A Weekend," which sounds like basically every song on the album.

Coldplay worked with various hitmakers instead of writing their own album or letting Brian Eno arrange it. The result is something more in the vein of popular music today than their usual sound that resembles a U2 cover band, so I guess they were successful in what they were going for. The comments from Martin to USA Today recently were downright scary: "If I may speak for the band, sometimes you need a break from the singer," he told them. Yikes.

The only problem with this slight alteration in sound is that Coldplay was actually better at sounding like U2 than the original band, and their music occupied an important niche that appealed to sensitive white men who felt overwhelmed by strong women but unable to articulate exactly why. Instead, the producers of A Head Full of Dreams did a fine job of making the album sound like everything else that is on the radio, just with more ridiculous lyrics. "I want to hold you and sway," Martin explains like some fucking idiot. A Head Full of Dreams is so gleefully enthusiastic the album sounds like inspirational music for atheists. "I'm feeling drunk and high," Chris whines, even though he is neither. He is just thankful to be dating a woman who doesn't demand anything from him.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Up & Up" - Coldplay (mp3)

In Which We Get Pretty Used To Being With Gwyneth

The Clocks Represented Soy Gelato

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a point near the end of the new Coldplay album Ghost Stories where Chris Martin compares his relationship to the mother of his children with the flight of a flock of birds. Like the coordinated journey of such creatures, Gwyneth must fly away in something like a migratory pattern. The implication is that the bearded Englishman hopes that his goop will return.

So fly on
Ride through
Maybe one day I'll fly next to you

What exactly was the problem that led to the conscious uncoupling? Ghost Stories cites several complaints that Martin had with his soon-to-be ex-wife:

- She did not enjoy watching television with him, i.e.  "Late night watching TV/Used to be you here beside me/Is there someone there to reach me?/Or someone there to find me?"

- Sometimes he waited for her call, but she never called, so it was impossible to masturbate without hearing the sound of her voice.

- Despite his elaborate plan to convince Gwyneth that British come had certain restorative autoimmune properties not present in the American editions, she preferred smoked fennel and an orange scented millet.

- She was more interested in other guys at times, especially ones whose albums were not as whiny/complainy, or included musicians playing instruments.

It is difficult to see what Gwyneth saw in this creature from the beginning. On the surface Martin appeared to be the equivalent of a broken jack-in-the-box: sometimes he would write a semi-decent song, the rest of the time he would just pout about wristwatches and fixing ww (white women). Martin is now completely done with ww, having selected a girlfriend ten years his wife's junior, half-Asian model Alexa Chung.

"I wish you could have let me know," Martin "sings" on the Timbaland produced "True Love." Could he not just read her blog?

Other lyrics are even more depraved and pathetic. In "Another's Arms," when he is not kvetching about not having Gwyneth there when he is watching telly, he sings, "Got to put yourself into me," which has to raise some eyebrows. I guess he means a finger or a strap-on? As usual, Martin's vocals are half spoken and half sung except when he reaches into a falsetto for a couplet about how Gwyneth refuses to do some sexual act he grew accustomed to during the recording of Parachutes.

I guess he hopes to make Gwyneth jealous by dating this woman, although he probably could have accomplished much the same effect by cozying up to a human-sized stick of celery and licking it lasciviously at intervals.

It is a virtual certainty, based on some of the subtle references in Ghost Stories, that Gwyneth has what can be charitably described as a unique set of sexual needs. Blowjobs are of course out of the question; "You want to see the mother of your children with a dick in her mouth?" she reportedly once screamed at L.A. hotspot Navarro. Handjobs were more of a grey area, since they usually do leave the other hand free for web browsing.

As subtly described in Ghost Stories' finest track, "Ink", Martin felt he got a tattoo that said "together through life," but instead Gwyneth's changing needs interfered with their coupling. For some reason, Martin explained in a recent radio interview, she demanded that every single door in their home become a 'sliding door.'

When she would emerge through each transparent entryway, she would get this super-disappointed look on her face implying that she was upset by the reality of her life: two adorable children and a husband who cannot sing and constantly demands oral.

The now fractured family spent a sedate Mother's Day at the Paltrow family compound. Even after writing an entire album about how sad he is that Gwyneth prefers to make guys dress up like Richie Tenenbaum and invite her into their fort for some salty seitan snacks and a bottle of gluten-free Riesling, he still has to see this woman on a frequent basis. At times he puts the new album on in the car for his whole family to listen, turning his day-to-day life into a neverending awkward conversation about how "Daddy and Mommy still love you very much."

"Daddy?" their son Lozenge would ask in an extremely grating voice, "Was it really necessary to tell Mommy that her chemistry with Robert Downey Jr. reminds you of the chemistry between Angelina Jolie and the woman who does her makeup?"

Chris Martin answered his child the only way he could, "Iron Man 2 sucked hard," he told the boy. "But your mom never sucked at all."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"True Love" - Coldplay (mp3)

"O" - Coldplay (mp3)

In Which Gwyneth Paltrow Appears Under A Sapphire Sky

Honey You Are A Rock

by DICK CHENEY

At first it was difficult to decide what song exactly I should choose to commemorate the all-too-sudden passing of Gwyneth Paltrow's marriage from this earth. I was pretty much evenly decided between Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" and "Gangsta's Paradise," until I remembered how my wife Lynne quietly whispered, "There's far too much Gwyneth to take in here/More to goop than can ever be found" when Chris Martin initially went outside of his marriage for a consolation prize. Her mane reminded me of a young Simba: Gwyneth can never be surpassed, only glided alongside, like an F-15.

I have been crying all night, and when I stopped crying and trying to make the lyrics of "Magic" apply to Chris Martin's weird affectation of considering pre-come "first orgasm", my tears evaporated. That's when my pride kicked in.

Is there anything she can't do, except you know, be happy?

To console myself, I wallowed in what is perhaps one of GPalt's most underrated performances - her two hour long butchery of an English accent in Neil LaBute's weirdly flaccid Possession. In a rarity for a major actress, Paltrow plays ten years over her age, in a role that would make a lot more sense for her now that she is (1) crazypants and (2) showing the faintest glimpses of a middle age that most prayed would never arrive.

Possession concerns the romance between Maud Bailey (Paltrow) and a young American scholar portrayed by Aaron Eckhart. Together, they pursue the mystery of a literary affair centuries old. Despite ample use of awkward silences and the penetration of the American's anus with a quill pen, the two never quite generate the requisite chemistry to make their romance the slightest bit believable. Gwyneth's accent varies from slightly bad to utter and complete shit, but it's all worth it to watch her play a buttoned-up English professor whose idea of a compelling sexual experience means getting felt up on a weekday.

literary research b4 5mbps internet was so hard guys, you don't even know. So many turtlenecks.

Possession switches back and forth between Gwyneth's genuinely sad accent and a literary romance discovered by the two scholars that took place during the late-1800s. The chemistry between the historical couple (Jeremy Northam and Pride and Prejudice's Jennifer Ehle) is equally lacking, especially since the woman seems to have a greater interest in an extremely attractive lesbian (Lena Headley). In contrast, Gwyneth's sudden movement and prevalence of onesies gets the heart rate moving a bit faster.

It is hard to think of who exactly Gwyneth ever had any chemistry with. She felt a lot more like Iron Man's mom, her version of Sylvia Plath turned her modest, and as Margot Tenenbaum she was so asexual that the only relationship she could ever consummate was with the mirror image of herself (Luke Wilson). She never even had to "consciously uncouple," her natural state was isolated, like an extremely shy owl.

Doing everything he can to resist complimenting the part in her her hair.

Possession is a lot better on mute, since watching Gwyneth swish and strumpet around like she's hunting for the Declaration of Independence in National Treasure begins to take on a momentum of her own when you're not focused on how silly she sounds. You always knew that Chris Martin was in no way the right man for Gwyneth, because she would require a timeless beacon of sexuality that could unnerve her steely veneer, and allow her to come apart without being torn asunder. (I have been reading a lot of Courtney Milan novels, so my apologies.)

At the time it was released, Possession's main story took place in the present. Watching it now, both tales are period pieces. No one has a cell phone, and all interneting is done on Macbooks. A good twenty percent of the film, in fact, is just waiting for the Prodigy service to load whatever Usenet group had good information about the sex life of the unfortunately named Randolph Henry Ash. Things were pretty bad before the internet was instantaneous, but waiting for web pages to load added to sexual tension and brought baby lion cubs closer together.

No woman has ever looked better in a down jacket than this girl.

I alluded to this earlier, but perhaps the main failing of Gwyneth's real life husband was that he thinks everything that comes out of his body is some holy object. The second he starts getting the least bit moist, he loudly exclaims "I'm coming! I'm coming!" and puts on a shit eating grin like he's just found all the differences between the two pictures in those Highlights puzzles.

The New York Daily News reported the two had been separated for some time, a relatively obvious state of affairs given that one can only pretend to take a man who writes a song concerning his adoration of clocks seriously for so long. Gwyneth's initial new squeeze, according to the paper, was a doofy looking entertainment lawyer who actually had the decency to keep up with her website. He would romance her with certain bon mots like, "Saw your website today," or "Good post GPalt" and she would melt into a small, Simba-shaped puddle. It is truly astonishing how little it takes to make some people happy. 

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location and the former vice president of the United States.

"Keep It Real" - Timbaland ft. Ginuwine (mp3)

"Lobster & Scrimp" - Timbaland ft. Jay-Z (mp3)