Category: Shallow

Sad.
[via Gawker]

Kinks’ Ray Davies shot while thwarting robbery attempt
Singer-songwriter Ray Davies of the Kinks was shot in the leg while chasing thieves who snatched a purse from a woman he was with, police said Monday. He was not seriously injured.

2004 promises to be the year that science fiction fans have been eagerly awaiting since, oh, the 1950s. You know, the year that humankind is conquered and then enslaved by mechanized pseudo-lifeforms. I mean, what else are we to make of the recent onslaught of media appearances by robots?
News:

NASA rover finds Earth in Martian sky
Robot sub used in Red Sea search

Technology:

Sony Introduces World’s First Running Humanoid Robot
President and CEO of Honda Motor Company Takeo Fukui is greeted by ASIMO, Honda’s intelligent humanoid robot

Entertainment:

Will Smith stars in Alex Proyas’ “I, Robot”
Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie appear in the robots-attack-Earth film “Sky Captain”

Oh, and this has nothing to do with anything, of course, but last month, Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean for president.

No Sex Please, We’re American: Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven and William Friedkin can’t make erotic thrillers in Bush’s USA
Sight and Sound, January 2004
(via The Morning News)
Earlier:
No Sex Please, We’re Hobbits
No Sex Please, We’re Geeks
No Sex Please, We’re Too Busy
No Sex Please, We’re British Curlers
No Sex Please, We’re Married
No Sex Please, We’re Students
No Sex Please, We’re Dutch
No Sex Please, We’re Oxford
No Sex Please, We’re French Tourists
No Sex Please, We’re Costco
No Sex Please, We’re Medicated
et. cetera…

“NOTE: We are no longer using the following words: ‘desultory,’ ‘heretofore’, ‘nonesuch’, ‘ineffable’, ‘meretricious’, ‘Vietnam’, and ‘utilize’. We are also discontinuing the usage of the construction ‘and/or.'”—Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern issue 1; 1998
Out Now: McSweeney’s 12: Unpublished, Unknown, &/or Unbelievable, 2004*
*This post qualifies as part of the required seven (7) Dave Eggers-related entries-per-year as stipulated by the bylaws of International Bloggers Union (local 404).

Larry David with Krazee-Eyez Killa (Chris Williams)
I have a friend—let’s call him “the Other Matt”—who refuses to watch HBO‘s Curb Your Enthusiasm because it’s “too decadent.”
I guess Other Matt feels that the comedic travails of “Larry David”—the crankiest multi-millionaire in Hollywood—all revolve around the perils of money: how hard it is to give people gifts, buying a new house, or hosting a benefit party. Of course, he’s right: what Seinfeld did for venality, Curb does for profligacy.
But that’s just the TV Larry David, not the real guy. As readers of The Nation know, Larry is “a long-standing reader” and pitch person for the lefty magazine. Larry’s real-life wife, Laurie, is a committed environmental activist (which may explain why AAA was made the unlikely villain in one episode). Laurie and Larry recently came in for a Drudge-led conservative drubbing for attempting to host a benefit called the “Hate Bush 12/2 Event.” Rich Hollywood liberals? Guilty as charged. Decadent? Probably not.
Say what you will about the decadence of on screen Larry; the offscreen one is fighting the good fight. Okay, he may be trying to screw his former colleagues out of Seinfeld money, but… okay, there’s no ‘but.’ That sucks.
But my point was… what was my point? Oh, that Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the best shows around and that far from being an exercise in decadence, it’s a sly—attention HBO publicists and print-ad writers—brilliant (!) critique of wealth. The way the show skewers rich people’s house envy, trouble dealing with working people (particularly those in industries meant to make their lives easier: salespeople, parking lot attendants, cable repairmen), and the limits of their liberal guilt perfectly nails the contradictions of dumb wealth that falls right into the lap of those who seek it least yet changes their lives the most. (This is clearly an obsession for David, who explored the same theme in his feature film debut, Sour Grapes and again in the perpetually-in-turnaround Envy.)
The money not only corrupts—that’s obvious—but it also simply confuses. What is the great Susie Essman‘s character, Susie, if not completely confused by her husband, Larry’s manager, Jeff‘s money? The only sane person on the show is the one who seems most at ease with her wealth. Larry’s wife, Cheryl (played by the lovely Cheryl Hines), doesn’t feel aspiration pushing her from below and status pushing down from above. The one thing that comes naturally to Cheryl—but seems to elude all the other characters (not least of all, Larry himself)—is class, with a lowercase ‘c.’ It’s the one thing all the money in Hollywood can’t buy, and she alone seems to understand this.
Why, that makes Curb Your Enthusiasm downright radical, don’t you think, Other Matt? Did I mention it’s funny as hell?
Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its new season on HBO, Sunday night at 9:30 PM EST, following a half-hour infomercial for shoes.
Related: Alessandra Stanley unleashes her enthusiasm (within reason) in The New York Times.

Nobel Prize winning Italian playwright Dario Fo as Silvio Berlusconi in The Two-Headed Anomaly.

Tim Conway is Dorf on Golf.

“Men are bad at [threesomes] because they’re too macho to deal.”— Vice Magazine, vol. 10, no. 11, page 84.
“You know what I’d like the Nature Channel to do a special on? The extinction of machismo. It seems like my whole fucking generation is a bunch of faggots and it bums me out. And I’m not even talking about the ‘Chuck and Buck, suck and fuck,’ take-it-in-the-ass type of faggot. Through therapy and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy I’ve learned to tolerate those dudes. My problem is the fashion-victim art fags in the clever hats and too-tight T-shirts and corduroys that think because they dress like a pansy and paint or take out-of-focus photographs they are beyond getting their teeth knocked down their throat.”— ibid., page 95.