Category: Shallow

Who knew trash-documentary producer Nick Broomfield was such a history buff? It just has to be the crazy and conspiratorial Broomfield who produced a documentary that aired on the History Channel last night entitled, “The Men Who Killed Kennedy: The Guilty Men,” which alleges that Lyndon Johnson was somehow involved in the assassination of President Kennedy 40 years ago.
Wait, sorry. It turns out one “Nigel Turner” produced this edifying film for the History Channel, but LBJ’s presidential foundation is pretty plum pissed off regardless of its origin. Apparently having learned nothing from the conservative task force that set out (and subsequently succeeded) in preventing this month’s airing of CBS’s “controversial” Reagan miniseries, Johnson’s family members and former aides had the temerity to allow this thing to air!
According to an AP story, LBJ Foundation Chairman Tom Johnson stated, “We left the decision on editorial content and accuracy up to the History Channel.” What a nimrod!
“He and Jack Valenti, another former Johnson staff member and current president of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued a joint statement on behalf of the Johnson family and others.
‘Sadly, President Johnson and the staff members who are wrongly smeared by the conspiracy theorists are no longer alive to defend themselves,’ the statement said. ‘In televising this production, The History Channel has distorted history beyond recognition.'”
Tom Johnson, incidentally, is not related to the former president. He is, however, “a former president and CEO of CNN.” This probably has nothing to do with the foundation’s going after the A&E-owned History Channel.
That would be both crazy and conspiratorial.

And in other local alternative press news, I’ve been seeing Jim Knipfel‘s name popping up in The New York Press as a B-movie DVD critic.
Maybe the jokes on me here, but how can Knipfel be a film critic, since he’s, like, blind? Knipfel is a decent writer, but, I mean, can he really be a film critic?

Part of The Village Voice‘s recent redesign is the inclusion of a weekly cultural essay, creatively named The Essay. I’m all for this, since it might give me a chance to one day repurpose some of my old college papers (anyone out there wanna see yet another piece on Muhammad Ali and Norman Mailer?), but this week, The Essay goes over the deep end.
Using Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant and The White Stripes’ album, um, Elephant as a jumping off-point, the impressively-named Leland de la Durantaye treats us to a 1442-word essay on… elephants called “The Cleansing of the Elephants: Trumpeting, flapping, crying: a cultural history, from Ding Yunpeng to Gus Van Sant.”
I skipped it.
This is the sort of thing Entertainment Weekly could’ve done in a 200-word charticle.
Next week, we’ll be treated to 2,000-words on little people using The Station Agent, Elf, and Bad Santa.

It’s you who’s taunting me
Because you’re wanting me
To be the stranger
In the night…
Is that scary for you baby
Am I scary for you oh boy
Is it scary for you big baby
Is it scary for you
You know the stranger is you
Is it scary for you big baby
From “Is This Scary,” by Michael Jackson from Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix
You know this kid is scared.

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.”