Quickly: what color is Hellboy?
“…skin the inflamed, velvety hue of a baked ham,”
Ty Burr, Boston Globe
“…red as sin,”
Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
“…big order of tandoori chicken,”
J. Hoberman, Village Voice
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Month: April 2004
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Separated At Birth? Vol. 2
Ripley-esque George W. and Weirdo-esque John Malkovich
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Time to testify? Time for the fluff pieces
OK, it’s happened before when, during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, Newsweek ran a puff piece on Condi Rice in its December 16, 2002 issue, under the headline “‘The Real Condi Rice’ The Most Powerful Woman In Washington Is Black, Brainy and Bush’s Secret Weapon.” That cover story, however, had at least a semblance of dignified and topical news content, unlike Maki Becker’s “20 things about Condie: You probably didn’t know this about Condoleeza Rice” in the April 4, 2004 New York Daily News.
Selected lowlights:
1. She’s a fitness buff who likes to unwind by working out to music by heavy-metal legends Led Zeppelin, according to People magazine. She wakes up at 5 a.m. and hits the treadmill right away.
4. She loves to shop. “On a Sunday, don’t be surprised if you see me at one of the malls in Washington, D.C.,” she once told Glamour magazine.
7. While in high school, she was a competitive ice skater (l.).
13. She’s a huge football fan and loves the Cleveland Browns. She’s said her “dream job” would be NFL commissioner.
17. In February 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told reporters he was distracted the first time he met her. “I have to confess, it was hard for me to concentrate in the conversation with Condoleezza Rice because she has such nice legs.”
Oh, and Maki? If you’re going to christen the devil in shorthand like that, it’s Condi and not fucking Condie. At least, that’s how she signed my holiday greeting card.
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Quest Love
Quest Magazine (not to be confused with the bimonthly about living with neuromuscular disease) features in its April issue The Quest 400, their annual list of Manhattan’s social elite. The 400, like all of Quest Magazine, does not concern itself with the sordid worlds of show business or pro sports (too many minorities, presumably). No, we are offered only an alphabetized list of Manhattan’s Botox-Boomers, old-money layabouts and John Jacob Astor descendants.
The list was compiled by Quest editor David Patrick Columbia, also known for the dangerously compelling New York Social Diary. Unfortunately the good Mr. Columbia finds no need to explain why or how he determined who gets on the list and who’s left out. In fact, all we get is a White Pages of people with last names like Biddle, Hearst and Pulitzer. Its complete lack of context recalls The Spy List — Spy Magazine’s mysterious column listing only a series of proper names.
As tribute to both of these formidable publications, we are proud to present
Montgomery Clift
Tatianna von Furstenberg
J.P. Getty
Brad Renfro
Horatio Sanz
Bijou Phillips
James Murdoch
Nia Vardalos
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I Hate Him and Want Him To Die
The endlessly irritating James Frey is at it again. Today’s issue of Black Table asks some writers for their thoughts on Kurt Cobain — he killed himself (or did he?) ten years ago today. Frey’s contribution is a little three-act about his ever-shifting opinion of Nirvana. From Act III:
On the first anniversary of his death, I went with a friend to a house in Wicker Park, Chicago. An altar had been set-up with Cobain’s picture, some candles, a hypodermic, a bindle of dope and a small pile of letters addressed to him. A Nirvana disc was in the stereo. There were 10 or 12 people, several were crying…
My nausea had become unbearable, so I skimmed ahead. Spotting “lame,” I felt some relief. But it was not to last:
At that moment, I stopped thinking Nirvana was lame. I stopped thinking Nirvana was a creation of MTV. I realized Cobain spoke for a lot of people, changed a lot of lives, touched an untold number. I bought In Utero the next day, listened to it. I realized maybe Cobain spoke for me as well.
Frey’s little sampler of idiocy brings to mind Martin Amis’ essay on John Lennon from Vising Mrs. Nabokov. Amazon won’t let me “Search Inside The Book” and I can’t find my copy, so I’ve got to paraphrase here. Speaking of the maudlin vigil held after Lennon’s death, Amis writes that if Lennon were still alive, he’d probably be the first person making fun of these people.
From Reuters, “Rwanda’s Kagame Scolds Outside World Over Genocide”, April 4, 2004:
Rwandan President Paul Kagame accused the outside world of deliberately failing to prevent genocide on Sunday, opening a week to mark the tenth anniversary of the killing of some 800,000 fellow countrymen.
The United Nations, the United States and European countries have all faced criticism for failing to intervene during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, which ended in July 1994 when Kagame seized the capital at the head of a rebel army.
“We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community’s failure, which I would in fact characterise as deliberate, as convenient failure,” Kagame told the start of a genocide conference.
“How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as so insignificant by anyone in terms of strategic or national interest?” he told the meeting at a hotel used 10 years ago as a base by military planners directing the massacres.
RELATED:
Worldbank Data for Rwanda
CIA Factbook, Rwanda (Natural resources: gold, cassiterite (tin ore), wolframite (tungsten ore), methane, hydropower, arable land)
Official Website of the Government of Rwanda (www.rwanda1.com…at what point did nations start having to adopt the equivalent of AOL usernames for their WWW domains?)
After due diligence on the part of our friend Sharon in the P.R. department at Paramount Pictures, we at low culture were once again given access to the media goodie bag and allowed to see a pre-release screening of Julia Stiles’ latest film, “The Prince & Me.”
It’s a good thing, too, because we were part of the flock of fans who showed that we “could do it, put your back into it” when we watched this beautiful young Columbia University undergrad take on the mantle of interracial love — and interracial dancing — when she charmingly swept America off its feet in 2001’s “Save the Last Dance.” Well, she’s back, and this time, she’s traded in Ice Cube’s lyricism and the concomitant “street cred” for Freddie Prinze, Jr.’s cool, calm, and collected flirtation with royalty.
First-time helmer Martha Coolidge‘s compelling narrative loosely concerns the trials and tribulations of an average American girl’s behavior when she’s forced to choose between her deeply-embedded principles and that most elusive of sentiments, true love. Of course, this is all “fancy-talk” for saying that she has to choose between a crush on her favorite boy, and the fact that he lied to her by not letting her in on the fact that he was an heir to the throne of Denmark (and yes, there are more than enough self-referential Hamlet jokes sprinkled throughout the film for all you fans of both classic Shakespeare and youth-oriented films).
Stiles takes on the role of college student Paige Morgan with much aplomb, and her experience as an actress shines through on her initial scenes with the young Prinze (who far outshines Eddie Murphy’s rendition in the original film) when they meet at a Greenpeace rally on the steps of the school’s library. It turns out that the Prinze has more than just a passing interest in environmental regulation, though, because he sweeps Paige off her feet with his passionate rhetoric regarding the damage caused by oil spills in the Baltic Sea. Paige, of course, passes off this worldliness as a part of his exchange-student persona, but quickly falls in love with his debonair presence and the humanizingly endearing way he quirkily drops the T’s and W’s from his words when speaking aloud, as all Danes are wont to do.
But, as with all instances of true love, there’s a catch: the Prinze, through a series of escalating misunderstandings exacerbated by his two roommates’ miscommunication, had neglected to inform Paige that he was, in fact, royalty, before taking her virginity. This understandably upsets Paige a great deal, and she calls him a Danish imperialist, which only complicates things further, because the Prinze’s father is in court at the ICC at that very moment for war crimes committed against the neighboring Swedes. The Prinze is crestfallen, as he has spent his entire life modeling himself on becoming all that his father (deftly played by James Caan in a stirring cameo) stood against, including a value system that apparently rules out sleeping with girls with misshapen faces that haven’t aged well as they’ve exited their teenaged years.
The film’s winsome examination of collegiate love-with-princes strikes a heartwarming note when the audience realizes that things will, of course, work out…such is the nature of fairy tales, and such is the nature of true love.
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Jennifer ’98 Lee
Jennifer 8. Lee is the New York Times comer known for her networking skills the New York Sun has gone so far as to suggest that Lee is the second coming of Katharine Graham. And though the comparison may be apposite, it’s unlikely the legendary Washington Post editrix ever used Yahoo Groups to help report her stories.
While the Harvard98 Yahoo Group typically traffics in less-than-rousing political banter and questions about housing in Dallas, subscribers are occasionally met with queries from Jenny 8. herself.
Most recently Jenny inquired about people scared to eat fish because of mercury levels; it’s fair to assume we can expect a Times article on that very topic in the near future.
Don’t believe it? Well consider the following email sent to the Harvard98 group on April 12, 2003:
From: “Jennifer 8. Lee”
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 08:06:03 -0700 (PDT)
To: harvard98@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [harvard98] SARS: affected by sars in seattle (SF/LA)
this has to be one of the stranger requests i have made to this list
does anyone know of people in seattle (most likely with links to asia) who is thinking of/affected by SARS. that is (not in parallel structure), family there, school exchanges that were cancelled, business trips that have been cancelled, local tourist business that is down, quarantined etc.
and if not seattle, people in San Fran and Los Angeles would be good too.
thanks,
jenny
And then treat yourself to her article in the New York Times four days later, In U.S., Fear Is Spreading Faster Than SARS, datelined April 16, 2003 and reported by Jennifer 8. Lee. From the article: Back in Seattle, though, concerns among co-workers led several employers to ask the participants to work from home
Still don’t believe it? Well screw you.
This is not the first time Jenny 8.s Harvard cronies have assisted her. Wonkette has bravely exposed the shadowy cabal of former classmates who have helped make Jennifer 8. Lee the heir to D.C. royalty. The master’s house continues to burn.
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April Fool’s “Hipster Fuck-for-all”
Things we gleaned from various comments, here and elsewhere, after posting our super-special, super-personal, and perhaps all-too-misguided, April Fool’s Day edition:
“i was getting kinda up in arms at the vacuousness of the posts”
“when did this delicious blog turn into a hipster fuck-for-all, replete with cat blogging and musical faves?”
And then there was an exquisitely enjoyable comment, which we’re paraphrasing here, after its having been apparently deleted from the relevant Gothamist post, explaining the author’s thesis that
“April Fools jokes, by their very nature, need to be funny, and unfortunately, Low Culture is not funny.”
Seriously, though, “hipster fuck-for-all” is the best-ever grouping of words we’ve ever come across.