Month: November 2003

Accuser’s face has been obscured to respect privacy
New Inauguration Day ‘groping’ charges rock California Governor

Poor Marty Amis. His latest novel, Yellow Dog, has garnered the nastiest notices of an otherwise charmed career. The first, and loudest, of these reviews came from crap novelist Tibor Fischer, disemboweling Amis in a career-making piece for the Daily Telegraph. “It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating,” he soberly notes.
Could any novel really be “masturbating uncle” bad?
It’s true, Amis walks into his typical traps. There are the hugely unfortunate sentences:
And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery.
Or even better:
…for the first time in his life he was contemplating the human vulva with a sanity that knew no blindspots…
There are too the rampant pontification and cheerless self-importance, but these failings have been forgivable in the past, even part of what makes Amis great. But lately it would appear that Amis is guilty of a sin even worse than plagiarizing one’s own mediocre think-piece from Talk Magazine.
Mister Amis has become uncool – enfant terrible grown ancien regime or further evidence of Sick Boy’s Unifying Theory of Life. Even the typically high-minded Walter Kirn accuses Amis of using tactics that “might have raised eyebrows 50 years ago…” And in Amis’ universe, uncool is a capitol crime.
Evidence of Amis’ complete dissociation from contemporary culture has played out lately amid his spacy declarations concerning the internet. Confer Grandpa Amis’ recent nap on “Topic A with Tina Brown,” in which he explains, “I’ve never looked at [the internet], because I don’t know how to use a computer,” here Tina politely chuckles, “and I’m often quite relieved that I can’t.”
Hardly a crime, but based on the evidence, perhaps it would be best for Amis to avoid including the transcripts of emails, or “e’s” as Amis labels them, in any future novels. Amis’ fictionalized e-mail exchanges feature lines more suggestive of a Prince song than any correspondence I’ve ever received. Below are excerpts from “Yellow Dog’s” “e’s” alongside some fakes. Can you separate the real crap from the fake?
& i no th@ if i ever find some1 2 spend the rest of my days with…
y o y, clint, do people use 6 2 infl8 their own gr&iosity?
tell u l8r. just u w8 & c.
u should go @ it 40ssimo
& per4ms the usual r&y stunts with a lady-in-w8ing!
4 him, the sun shone out of my *…
[Answer Key: They’re all real.]

Yes, Fair Use and parody and the First Amendment and blah, blah, blah. Why can’t editors—and members of a publication’s art department—be arrested and jailed for stunts like this? I mean, can’t we at least fine them for thought crimes or something?
Let’s hope that the litigious Mr. Lee does the right thing and Spikes this in a court of law. Is The Jewish Journal finally getting their revenge on Lee for the allegedly anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews in Mo’ Better Blues, or are they just idiots?
[Thanks Marc Weisblott!]

A.O. Scott reminded me of something I’d intended to write about a few weeks ago: those incredibly annoying respectcopyrights.org ads that run before the trailers at movies lately.
Let’s set aside how offensive it is that the highly paid producers, studio heads, and chairmen of the entertainment conglomerates are using these ordinary working Joes to guilt us out of pirating movies. What I found really offensive was that one spot, the one with stuntman Manny Perry (far left), features clips from Enemy of the State (directed by A.O. Scott’s namesake and doppelganger, Tony Scott). This movie was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, whom Entertainment Weekly recently deemed the most powerful man in Hollywood.
Should we really be taking advice on what’s right and what’s wrong from a guy whose former partner, the late Don Simpson, used to get off on beating up hookers and making them drink out of the toilet while he urinated in it? (You can read all about Simpson’s fast times and early death in Charles Fleming’s High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess.) Is Jerry Bruckheimer in any position to tell us how we’re mistreating Hollywood’s underlings? What’s next, a commercial with Scott Rudin‘s assistants telling us we’re making their lives a living hell? Maybe a spot with some Korean animators telling us how we’re destroying Disney?

In “Who’s Smoking Now,” an article on High Times Magazine’s re-branding by John Leland in The Times ‘Styles’ section, Richard Stratton, the magazine’s new publisher and editor-in-chief envisions the new magazine as “‘an outlaw version of Vanity Fair,’ with a dash of Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado… a magazine for epicurean libertarians who may or may not smoke marijuana.”
A noble goal, to be sure, but he should be careful about that Vanity Fair comparison. Many are the magazines (and, oddly, restaurants and resorts) that have sought to compare themselves (or were favorably compared by others) to the venerable magazine of moguls, royalty, disposable stars, and Christopher Hitchens and fallen flat on their faces. Here is but a sampling:
Radar: “it’ll be Spy meets Vanity Fair.”
Heeb: “Think of it like a Jewish lowbrow Vanity Fair.”
Playboy: “could be the sexual Vanity Fair.”
George: “Vanity Fair of politics.”
Praxispost.com: “the Vanity Fair of medical writing.”
Wired: “the Vanity Fair of the internet generation.”
Eat: “Think Dazed & Confused meets Vanity Fair.”
The Millennium Restuarant: “The Vegetarian Times meets Vanity Fair.”
The Oxford American Magazine: “kind of like Spy meets Vanity Fair with text from The New Yorker.”
The Costanoa resort in California: “It’s Outside Magazine meets Vanity Fair.”
Seed Magazine: “Scientific American Meets Vanity Fair.”
Sense Magazine: “Town & Country meets Vanity Fair.”
Luxury Magazine: “ROBB REPORT meets VANITY FAIR.”
Melbourne Magazine: “wallpaper meets vanity fair.”
Savoy Magazine: “African-American Vanity Fair.”
Los Angeles Magazine: “aspired to be a west-coast Vanity Fair.”
low culture: “The Vanity Fair of blogs.”

This message is intended for FOX Entertainment President, Gail Berman, but you can read it, too.
Why on earth isn’t FOX condemning Paris Hilton and distancing itself from her like they did when it was revealed that “Frenchie” Davis, of American Idol had posed topless (and masturbated) for a porn site called Daddy’s Little Girls? (No link here, you can find it yourself.) If an over-weight Black girl with an amazing singing voice does some softcore to make some money, she’s a whore. But if a white, spoiled, anorectic cave bitch who’s never had a job in her life allegedly appears in ten hardcore tapes, she’s just a lovable wild child, someone who needs to learn about The Simple Life?
Talk about hypocrisy!
And don’t tell me there’s a difference because Paris never got paid for her dirty work: Sarah Kozer got paid for her foot fetish films, yet she was still a finalist on Joe Millionaire. (As did Kozer’s suitor, the similarly hotel-product-placement named Evan Marriott for his softcore early work.) So, Gail: these untalented white people can do porn and demi-porn and still appear on your air but Frenchie couldn’t? Try explaining that to Bernie Mac at the FOX Christmas party this year.