Category: Shallow

Sitting through the credits of Kill Bill, I noticed one name that stood out from the rest: Perrystrong.com. Ruling out the possibility that somewhere, some parents gave their kid an URL for a name (maybe he’s a relative of The Times Jennifer 8. Lee?), I checked out the dude’s site. Here’s what I learned:
Perry was born in 197X! (Since he graduated college in 2001, I gotta assume he was actually born in 1980: he’s one of those November babies.)
Perry is 6’0″ tall!
Perry is Black, German, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and was raised by Italians!
Perry went to Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn and then Hampshire College in Massachusetts!
Perry is currently looking for representation for both Directing and Acting!

Hey Hip-hop, Fashion, and Marathon fans*:
Do you want to share an intimate dinner with P-Diddy and 12-15 members of his personal entourage? Would you like a dinner companion who changes the location four times, shows up late, answers an endless succession of cell phone calls, talks about how much money he makes, drops the names of his more famous friends, doesn’t ask you so much as what you do for a living, ducks out before the check comes, and probably won’t acknowledge your existence if you should run into him again? Yeah? Then sign up for The New York Post‘s Win Dinner with P. Diddy plus autographed gear Sweepstakes. (Never the innovator, His Diddiness is merely sampling My Dinner with Andre.)
Topics to discuss: The war in Iraq; Will he wear tape on his nipples during the New York City Marathon? What he thinks of the brutality of the African diamond trade. Does he know that Gatsby was shot execution-style at the end of the book? Where the hell is Mase? Also, try not to blush when you see Farnsworth Bentley patting the edges of Diddy’s mouth with a napkin between bites.
*Also fans of really bad Flash openers on Web sites

Apparently inappropriate ad placement isn’t only endemic online.
This week, Frank Rich (AKA, “The Butcher of Broadway”) takes his cleaver to that bloody hunk of wurst, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his weekly Times Arts & Leisure column. Rich uses the ersatz aesthetic of Disneyland (and Disney generally) to critique the image-over-substance election results in California. Some classic Rich vitriol (richtriol?) follows:
It’s Disneyland, not Colonial Williamsburg, that prefigures our future, the action-packed recall ride was nothing if not the apotheosis of the Magic Kingdom. It was fun, it was instructive, it was expensive, it was hawked relentlessly on television, it starred an Audio-Animatronic action figure…
Walt Disney had long despised the rowdiness that up until then defined amusement parks as ‘dirty, phony places run by rough-looking people,’ as he characterized them. He wanted to build instead a beautiful, phony place run by nice-looking people: an alternative America that he could script and control down to the tiniest detail of its idyllic Main Street U.S.A. and whose sovereignty no citizen could challenge…
The original notion of Disneyland lives today not only in the first park, its satellites, and its many imitators; its influence can be found in planned and gated communities, in Rouse-developed downtowns, in the carefully-scripted ‘reality’ programs of network television, in the faux-urban ambience of a shopping mall near you.
And what ad shares the page with this excoriating critique? Why, an ad for Disney’s Brother Bear (“Featuring original songs from Academy Award-Winner Phil Collins”). Whoops! Guess that wall between church and state isn’t quite so impenetrable.
On a related note, Rich’s Disneyland analysis owes everything to Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra” (though, oddly, he never mentions the text in his essay: Rich must have missed The Matrix). Here’s what Mean Jean (Theory Machine) had to say 20 years ago: “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real…”

Okay, last one: Is Dick Gephardt the scary old dude from Poltergeist II: The Other Side?

Howard Dean does the Running Man ten years late while Joe Lieberman throws up a Black Power salute 35 years late.

Crikey! Does Col Allan, the Australian-born New York Post editor, even speak English? (I know that Australians in general don’t speak English: for example, in Australia, they don’t say “beer,” they say “Foster’s,” mate.)
How else to explain this totally inappropriate headline on the cover of today’s paper? According the online Phrase Finder, to tie one on means to get drunk. (All roads lead back to Foster’s, mate.) Does that even make sense in this context? And don’t even get me started on KNOT TO WORRY…

Forgetting everything we all know about crabs in a barrel, David Poland has picked a fight with his fellow online movie and celebrity bottom feeder, Roger Friedman. Here’s the tale of the tape:
Battle of the Online Junket All Stars
In the Left Coast corner, weighing in at 155 lbs.: David “Hot Button” Poland.
And in the Right Coast corner, weighing in somewhere north of 225 lbs., Roger “Fox 411” Friedman.
Poland comes out swinging at Roger the Dodger, throwing the first punch:
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are lies posing as statistics, brought to life by stunning professional ignorance, whether intentional or coincidental. Such is the province of Roger Friedman, internet gossip and a suck-up of the highest order.
In rapid succession, he lands the second:
Friedman goes to town with his unsubstantiated, but “there is no question” analysis of the wins of Oscar screeners past. He starts with Sony Classics, citing Talk To Her, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Winged Migration. Can you spot the spin?
And then, he hits below the belt with a phantom punch:
What were the other fat, bloated studio films that dominated the Oscars before Friedman’s indie heroes saved the world?
Did he just call Friedman fat and bloated? Tune in tomorrow for Roger’s rejoinder.

It’s hard to miss the way that some people hate on Chuck Klosterman. Yes, the guy wrote a book with a bad title, is ubiquitous to the point of saturation, and he somehow managed to convince Virginia Heffernan to buy a Billy Joel CD with her Times corporate Amex. That can be grating. But think about the positive things he’s done, like making it possible for the Brady family to play the Keystone Kops at the amusement park. See, Chuck isn’t such a jinx!

The coffee achievers over at The Stranger put out a great cover this week. I’m jealous because New York’s alt-weeklies have two very lame covers this week. (How lame? They’re not even online.)
Also in The Stranger, an article on the enduring appeal of Death Metal.