Red carpet for next year's Teen Choice Awards. (AMC)

Right now in New York, it's snowing outside. It's absolutely beautiful. Everyone should just take a moment and enjoy, because after the events of the last 24 hours we are pretty sure that this is the end of days. At least, for famous people; the rest of us are probably fine.

EXHIBIT A, YOUR HONOR!:

• Justin Bieber collapses during a performance in London and has to be given oxygen backstage before returning to finish the show. His manager Scooter Braun told the worried crowd that Bieber had “got very light of breath, the whole show he had been complaining.”Which...f*ck you, Scooter Braum. He wasn't "complaining," he was letting you guys know that he should be taken to a hospital. Which you did...once he finished the show. Then Mr. Bieber Instagrammed a topless picture of himself, left the hospita and immediately attacked some paparazzi. Look, we know exhaustion is a bitch and that these kind of scenarios are exactly why we don't want to be famous (or we do, but this helps us say we don't), but what do you think the over/under is on Bieber somehow contracting that zombie disease from 28 Days Later? Because whenever someone we know gets ill, collapses after complaining of feeling weak, requires hospitalization and then is suddenly filled with extreme rage, that's usually a sign that you are entering Walking Dead territory.
• Meanwhile, doctors are still trying to figure out why Kelly Osbourne had a seizure last night, when the "personality"--that's what we call her, right? Because she doesn't have a real job or aspirations to act/sing/dance, and isn't a socialite?--had no prior history of falling to the ground and shaking uncontrollably. Things to note: She was in the middle of taping a segment for E!'s Fashion Police, complained of "not feeling good," fell off her chair and started shaking before being carried out on a stretcher to the hospital, where she tweeted a pic of herself in the hospital. She hasn't been released yet, but we'd advise everyone to stay out of her way and do not take any pictures of her for awhile.
•  Kim Kardashian was rushed to a doctor Tuesday night, worried she was having a miscarriage. Her symptoms, which began on her flight back from Paris Fashion Week, began with her feeling a little "ill" and complaining of stomach pain before ended up in a full-scale emergency situation. After she was released and ordered on bed rest, Ms. Kardashian tweeted a link to photos showing her hanging out with friends La La Vasquez, Rachel Roy and Angie Martinez, though the pics appear to be from a March 1st outing. And though she's yet to start foaming at the mouth, rumor has it that she was furious at Kanye West for not coming to her side during her pregnancy scare. Which is understandable, though if we were Kanye, we might stay out of biting range for a bit.

Teddy Wayne.

Teddy Wayne is an iconoclast, at least when it comes to sandwiches. At the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe (his choice) to discuss The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, his novel about a prepubescent pop star, Mr. Wayne looked over the list of so-called “Legendary” burgers.

“Everything here is legendary,” he said. I suggested that the Hard Rock Cafe was a pretty venerable institution—remember all those T-shirts? “No, I feel like from the first day it was legendary. They created their own legend.”

Mr. Wayne, 33, had asked to meet at the Hard Rock in order to draw inspiration from the musical artifacts on the walls. He also wanted to nosh on a burger, the favorite food of Jonny Valentine, the 11-year-old protagonist of his new novel. Described as an “angel of pop,” Valentine is younger and less stratospherically successful than Justin Bieber, but a pretty clear stand-in for the Canadian singer. (It turned out the Nirvana memorabilia on the walls of the Hard Rock didn’t have a whole lot to do with Jonny’s tale.) The fictional child star is not a music lover, but rather more of a tactical, strategic marketer of his own brand.

“I’m a music fan, but I noticed that most literary novels about music are almost invariably about good music,” said Mr. Wayne. “Understandably, most novelists would not want to spend two or three years writing about music that’s bad.”

Mr. Wayne passionately pursues subject matter that most people would consider weird. His only previous effort, Kapitoil, sidesteps the first-novel roman à clef trap and tells the story of a Qatari computer engineer working in oil futures. His “Shouts & Murmurs” columns for The New Yorker are bizarro-
world fantasies about Dick Cheney, Shakespeare and Don Draper rather than the usual commentary on the foibles of wealthy, idle Manhattanites.

“Why not take a chance with subject matter once in a while?” he said. “I have no interest in writing a book about the fraying tensions in a dissolving marriage.”

The new book, told over the course of a few stops on Jonny’s “Valentine Days” national tour, depicts the building pressures on a boy who thinks he knows everything about contemporary music stardom (“The trick, I learned from the guitarist on my first tour, is to focus on a vendor, since the vendors never care about you,” Jonny thinks during one of his concerts). Offstage, Jonny must confront an absentee dad, hard-drinking tour mates, and his manager and mother Jane Valentine, a controlling, coke-snorting but not entirely despicable woman who is a melange of every Us Weekly nightmare of the past decade. Jonny’s career is in danger. So is his sense of self. Then again, the two are interchangeable.

For a person who invested years into a book about a bubblegum pop star, Mr. Wayne is not particularly enthused by the music of Justin Bieber and his ilk. He doesn’t own any of Mr. Bieber’s records. For research, he said, “I’d listen to the music on YouTube. I read a lot of child-star biographies and autobiographies, like Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost and Tatum O’Neal’s Paper Life.” He was also inspired by The New Yorker’s 2012 profile of Ester Dean, the songwriter largely responsible for Rihanna’s meteoric rise. “It shows you how unjust the world is, that the one who’s actually the songwriter doesn’t get the credit,” he said.

Jonny Valentine is self-possessed onstage but thrown into confusion in his life by the sort of family drama and earthly temptation that seem to await every pop star eventually. Mr. Bieber is the natural analogue, though Mr. Wayne doesn’t consider him to be all that flawed yet. Mr. Bieber is, Mr. Wayne observed, “18 now, and soon he’ll start going to nightclubs and bars and dens of iniquity—but he seems to have his head on straight. What if someone were in a position like that but were not self-sufficient? Jonny Valentine does what most of us would do—his insecurity, self-doubt and fear, and not viewing it as a fun, wild ride.”

Teddy Wayne has all the classic trappings of a rising novelist—the clips from Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times (as well as this newspaper), the Whiting Writers’ Award, the gig teaching creative writing in town (at Marymount Manhattan College). But the finer points of late-publishing self-promotion have so far escaped him. “I think I’ve tweeted this—the initial shame of being on Twitter is compounded by the shame of not having any followers,” he said. “Nothing I tweet ever takes off. I’m hopeless on Twitter.” Like a frontier American confronted with the new technology of the camera, he fears for his soul. “Every time I tweet, a little part of me dies.”

But he isn’t chasing after the fame of Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, let alone that of a pop star. “I went through what just about every writer goes through when the first book comes out, which is the shock of a Word document becoming a public book. It makes you very vulnerable. I started wondering, how do actual celebrities deal with it? If I’m getting this worked up over a bad Amazon review, how would you deal with the tabloids?”

Mr. Wayne deals with them quite well, in his writing anyway. In the novel’s metatextual gossip columns, he jumps styles with ease, mimicking Gawker-style bitchiness (“As if we needed confirmation that Jonny Valentine concerts are attended and exclusively by lovelorn prepubescent girls and rapey old men, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that a 57-year-old St. Louis man was arrested after hurling a slew of violently sexual epithets at the Angel of Poop Pap Smears Pop during his live televised performance ...”), self-serious music critics (“Exactly how does a 46-year-old male music critic open a review of a Jonny Valentine concert he is forced to attend? And to maintain proper journalistic house style, must he really refer to an 11-year-old boy hereafter as ‘Mr. Valentine’?”) and the basest tabloid fodder (“Send an RSVP to your local arena: Jonny Valentine is cruising into your city!”).

Mr. Wayne says he is repulsed by self-promotion, even as he riffs on it. “Let’s chalk it up to a late-capitalist contradiction.” (In the novel, Jonny is too young to manage his social media presence, so his mother does it for him.) He objects to “non-
celebrities like us putting photos on Facebook of ourselves drinking and partying. That’s our own paparazzi. We’re paparazzi-
ing ourselves.” (Mr. Wayne’s Facebook has all of three photos uploaded, but he may have only granted The Observer access to a limited profile.)

Though Mr. Wayne has limited interest in Bieber qua Bieber, he is attracted to the mechanics of fame, having initially conceived of Jonny Valentine as a comic novel when he saw a girl at 826 Valencia (where he tutors) reading Miley Cyrus’s memoir. “It’s one of those books where there are a lot of photos and then words on a 10th of a page.” He’d suggested to a frequent collaborator that they work together on a purely slapstick version of the Cyrus book based on the life of a fake pop star, then had another thought an hour later. “I realized, if I take this seriously and don’t play it for laughs, this could be a novel. I started writing it that day, and wrote 3,000 words.”

His publisher, Free Press, is hoping to get the book into universities for incoming freshmen. Given young Jonny’s sexual fixations and reliance on prescription medication to sleep post-concert, one can imagine it being banned instead. Despite his age, Jonny experiences an actual backstage sexual encounter—or an attempt at one, anyway—that is more than a little unsettling.

“In a lot of books narrated by 11- or 12-year-olds, the kids are prodigies, verbal prodigies, and the reason is you can’t have a novel from the actual perspective of a 12-year-old, because ... it’s a 12-year old. So novelists will create a kid who’s a genius, so that adults can read it. I wanted to have some adult-ness to him and some childishness to him.”

Childish to the extent that any child star can be. As with Justin Bieber, who has had his every move documented in real time on the Internet for several years now, Jonny Valentine’s future is far from certain even as the book ends. His career is doing fine, but he still concludes, moments after selling out Madison Square Garden, “I’d work twice as hard. I’d sacrifice everything in my life that held me back.”

editorial@observer.com

Franco does Bieber. (YouTube)

James Franco doesn't have a lot of down time, what with his new book he's supposed to be writing and his Huffington Post award-winning columns and all (plus maybe a movie career). Still, when he gets some time to just let loose, the 34-year-old likes to just let loose, you know? Drink some beer, goof off with friends, and of course, obviously, make tribute videos to his favorite Justin Bieber songs.

Though the cover of Bieber's "Boyfriend" was originally on Mr. Franco's WhoSay account, it has since been deleted. Also, it looks a lot more like Dave Franco than his older, more famously annoying brother, but maybe it's just the hair.

Check it out for yourself below.

Um, good for him! And Ashley Benson! It's like Elizabeth Wurtzel (kind of) said in New York this week: YOLO!

You could never tweet a picture of yourself dressed as a slutty Christmas Barbie who appears to have been left on top of the radiator for too long, but Courtney Stodden can. Maybe that's why she has so many followers than you.

So go on, indulge in the gluttonous feast of celebrity schadenfreude/jealousy. It's a better outlet for your self-loathing and frustration than that annual passive-aggressive fight with your father, at the very least.

A re-creation of what didn't happen to Justin Bieber. (Getty)

During a recent gig at Madison Square Garden, Justin Bieber was not, we repeat, was NOT, strangled to death with a paisley tie and then castrated in a plan hatched by a convicted child rapist and murderer serving time in a New Mexico prison. Once again: this did not happen.

But it almost did.

The strange story begins with Dana Martin, a 45-year-old with a Justin Bieber tattoo on his calf, who is serving out a life sentence in Las Cruces for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Vermont girl in 2000. Mr. Martin met parolee-to-be Mark Staake in prison, and hatched a plan to have Mr. Staake and his nephew Tanner Ruane prune Mr. Bieber of his plums during his November 28 concert at Madison Square Garden. Each testis was worth $2,500, according to The New York Post, which, most tween fans well tell you, is quite a low-ball number (woof) for such pricey family jewels.

The other element of this totally fail-proof plan was Mr. Staake and Mr. Ruane strangling Mr. Bieber to death with a paisley tie. Yes, it had to be paisley. No, the color didn't matter. It just had to be paisley.

Luckily, when the bumbling duo were picked up separately by the authorities, their plan was easily traced back to Mr. Martin, as he had strangled his last victim with a paisley tie.

For now, Mr. Bieber's balls remain safe. And probably insured for much more than $2,500, though lord knows some people *cough*ScooterBraun*cough* would probably be happy to have Mr. Bieber remain a prepubescent castrato for the rest of his life.

Dickdickdick. (Lifetime)

– Chris Brown wants to poop and fart on lady comedian; deletes Twitter account.

– Charlie Sheen once gave Lindsay Lohan a check for $100,000 to help out with her IRS "debt," which is one case of the blinded-by-syphilis leading the blinded-by-syphilis.

– Liz & Dick premiered last night on the Lifetime channel, and Twitter was very excited about it, but apparently it was awful, no d'oy.

– If you ever wanted to know how to destroy Goop, here's Gawker's handy guide.
– Justin Bieber no longer beloved by Canadians, even while being given a White Trash award by the nation's Prime Minster.

Lindsay Lohan, a victim, for once. (Patrick McMullan)

- This weekend's big story was Lindsay Lohan's stalker (or just a guy she was partying with at Double Seven), who allegedly followed her up to her hotel room at the W after they got into a fight about cell phone photos. She escaped him, but then came back to the room so he could physically assault her; it's hard to pick the most batshit part of this whole ordeal. It's a toss-up between the part where the guy was a congressional staffer who has posed for photos with Paul Ryan, and the part where someone let Lindsay Lohan run around a hotel unsupervised.

- Justin Bieber puke-sang his way through a recent concert, and then followed it up with an Anchorman tweet about how "Milk was a bad choice."

- Classy lady Anne Hathaway married a nice Jewish boy. And that's all there is to say about that, because after that Raffaello Follieri creep, she deserves a nice, quiet life. If not with Bruce Wayne, then this guy.

- Did you guys know Kyle Maclachlan has a wine company, and it's called Pursued by Bear? Fine, maybe you knew that. But did you know he has been having tastings in Williamsburg?

- Spotted: The Master’s Paul Dano in a sparkly karate suit, playing basketball with a giant pea pod, a ninja turtle, a goth guy and a lady in a tutu yesterday afternoon in Carroll Gardens. It wasn't for a movie or anything, and it was a little too early for Halloween. But sometimes you just gotta be zany and shake off those milkshake blues, you know?

A month before the song infected American audiences, a handful of college-age kids produced a homemade music video for “Call Me Maybe,” made from lip dub footage shot on their laptop webcams. Kind of like Lana Del Rey’s thing, if Lana Del Rey had a bunch of friends.

Dressed in the YouTube celebrity uniform of expensive sweat pants, knit caps, perfect make-up, and fake mustaches, the kids appear to be having a Glee-style dance party at one of their parents’ pre-fab SoCal homes. The boys vogue with billiards racks and the girls perform stripper moves expertly and with mock embarrassment.

The climax of the video occurs during the bridge, when one teen mouths the words, “It’s hard to look right/at you baby,” as she gazes into the profile of a young man, who looks away.

As he turns, coyly, to meet her lips, his face is revealed. It's eighteen-year-old pop heartthrob Justin Bieber! And the girl serenading him? His girlfriend, nineteen-year-old Selena Gomez, a Disney Channel alumna now filming a Harmony Korine movie. From the looks of it, Mr. Bieber (who fills stadiums at an average ticket price of $129.50), and a half-dozen or so of his friends made a free music video for an up-and-comer from his native Canada—just for kicks. And that’s not their parents’ McMansion; that's the house their exploited youth built.

Although the kids appear wholesome and happy enough to make us forget about the tragic child performers (Britney Spears) and evil child managers (Lou Pearlman) who paved the way for them, the video is not exclusively fun and games. Ms. Jepsen signed to Mr. Bieber's record label, Schoolboy, last month, after Mr. Bieber heard “Call Me Maybe” on Canadian radio and tipped off Interscope execs. Recently both artists made a joint promotional stop on The Ellen Degeneres Show.

And if the video is a wily marketing scheme, it’s working. The lip dubbers' star power, coupled with the song’s catchiness, has attracted almost 28 million hits on YouTube (more than twice as many as Ms. Jepsen's official video), a number surely inflated by people like us, with a “Call me Maybe” tab eternally open, playing the video over and over because we're too ashamed to download the song.

But if (again, like us) you fell out of touch with the Disney channel set sometime around The Bimbo Summit, you will be hard-pressed to identify all the other grainy PYTs in the video. Helpfully, it ends with credits of the stars' Twitter handles, which The Observer has used to compile a dossier on the video's supporting cast. We went deep, reading months of updates from tour and the gym, to discover how these very life-like robots are connected, socially and professionally, and to wildly extrapolate with some conspiracy theories on how they fit into Disney-Nickelodeon’s nefarious youth culture industrial complex.

Click through the slideshow for our paranoid who's who.

Complex just released the cover for their 10th Anniversary issue, which features Justin Bieber. This is odd, because the hip hop lifestyle and culture rag doesn't necessarily cater to the Tiger Beat set. Brilliant, because they found a way to sell it on everyone, from Bieber's most bloodthirsty, sadistic haters to the masochists among the Tiger Beat set: By bruising the face of Justin Bieber to the point of ugliness.

The cover(s):

The profile, by Complex senior editor Joe LaPuma, has some Bieber-iffic gems:

The mood takes a turn when someone on his team hands him a BlackBerry that shows a photo of Swizz Beatz wearing an MCM jacket identical to the one he’s wearing right now—the same one he proudly described as a one of one. Bieber immediately calls his stylist to ask why Swizz had the jacket first. There’s a little bit of tension, but the conversation doesn’t last long and ends with Justin saying confidently, "Well, whatever. I just rocked it here in France and it looks swaggy."

But the issue might as well be a victory lap for the magazine and the web network it's attached to, which has spent the last three years building a pageview minting-machine:

Of course, paginating stories and galleries across ten pages without a print option can help! As can the 87 other sites in the Complex Media Network (which includes, hysterically, FrankOcean.net—obviously not the singer's official page—and something called Basterdly.com), but Complex.com still receives the largest share of the traffic.

A decent haul:

And they clearly know how to celebrate. By bloodying Justin Bieber's face.

If this does mark a stretch for Complex (given other recent, eye-poppingly smart covers), it's promising in the way that gimmicky weekly covers of recent (like, say Newsweek's stunt-tastic issues) are not, the same way George Lois-style "vision campaigns" of the past have been replaced by market-researched cover-lines and focus-group chosen celebrities that make up much of the newsstand's face right now.

Either way, it's fun to watch a street style and hip hop magazine bloody the face of Justin Bieber and chin-check its newsstand neighbors, who haven't producing anything this fun to look at in far too long.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Bieber and Sheen: new best friends? (Getty Images)

Really, there's only one thing to say about the fact that while in Las Vegas, Tiger Blood recipient and 2011's Person of the Year (according to the numerous end of the year listicles, on the Internet) Charlie Sheen decided to a) try to invite 17-year-old Justin Bieber to hang out, and b) do so over Twitter, where he accidentally sent a public message to the Biebs which included his phone number.

Being forced to change your phone number after being bombbared with calls and texts regarding your message to an underage teenage boy? (Which read -- ahem--: “310-954-7277 Call me bro. C”)

Winning.