Author…Comedian… Ladies Man…Adult movie actor…*
What’s next? I’m betting co-songwriter with The Matrix
* Not online despite aggressive Googling: Back-up ‘funky robot’ dancer for Beck (SPIN, circa 1996)… Jewel bedside interlocutor (Rolling Stone, circa 1998)…
“It did not take Kaelynn Adams-Haack long to decide she wanted to support the re-election campaign of Representative Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. The two met at a dinner party, talked for part of the evening and by the time Kaelynn left she had decided that she wanted to give the congresswoman a $1,000 contribution.
[…]
“‘I knew not to give her too much and not to give her too little, so I gave her $1,000,’ said Kaelynn, who is now 8 and says she hopes to make more donations in the future.'”
Too Young to Vote, Old Enough to Donate, by Glen Justice, The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2004
Adorable!
“It was uncomfortable up there on the cross. Very windy. I almost blew over.” — Jim Caviezel quoted by Cindy Adams, The New York Post, Feb. 10, 2004
Sherry and Bob: The casting couch strikes again.
A Director, Married to the Studio
by Sharon Waxman, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2004:
When Variety published the news last week that the veteran director William Friedkin was attached to a new movie at Paramount Pictures, eyebrows went up in Hollywood. Not just because it is rare in the age-obsessed movie industry for a 69-year-old director to score a major studio assignment, but also because Mr. Friedkin would be making yet another movie at the studio where his wife, Sherry Lansing, is the chairwoman.
Since 1994 Mr. Friedkin, a celebrated director in the 1970’s, has made four feature films, all at Paramount, three of them box office flops, one a financial disappointment.
So the choice of Mr. Friedkin to direct a big-budget movie about the Hollywood lawyer Sidney Korshak is sparking new talk of nepotism at a moment when the studio is in poor financial health.
The more salient question: Why would Sherry Lansing hand her husband such bad scripts like the ones for The Hunted, Rules of Engagement, Jade, and Blue Chips?
President Bush in the Oval Office
From the transcript of Tim Russert’s interview with President Bush on Meet the Press, Feb. 8, 2004:
“…I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind… ”
“…It’s important for people to understand the context in which I made a decision here in the Oval Office…”
“…They’re not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion…”
“…I have shown the American people I can sit here in the Oval Office when times are tough and be steady and make good decisions, and I look forward to articulating what I want to do the next four years if I’m fortunate enough to be their president…”
It’s easy to criticize Maureen Dowd. She gets a lot of guff from the Right for being too liberal, and jabs from the Left for being too nasty. Pundits of all political stripes pretty much think she’s superficial and too in love with her own references and puns.
Yes, her record is spotty (a Pulitzer one year, a series of columns about Barneys the next). Every time she gets up to bat, she’s under a cloud: will she hit a homerun, or will mighty Maureen strike out? That’s why when she knocks it out of the park, you gotta stand up and cheer.
This Sunday’s column, Murder Most Fowl (Feb. 8, 2004) is a great achievement, both rhetorically, and stylistically. Dowd frequently errs too far on the side of style over substance, but writing about Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney this week, she marries (or at least civilly unionizes) the two impulses beautifully:
Now, with the White House looking untrustworthy and desperate; with the national security team flapping around and pointing fingers at each other and, of course, Bill Clinton; with even the placid Laura getting testy; and with Newsweek reporting that the Justice Department is reviewing whether Halliburton was involved in paying $180 million in kickbacks to get contracts in Nigeria at a time when Dick Cheney was chairman, anybody else would be sweating.
Not deadeye Dick. His heavy lids didn’t blink when it turned out he’d blown up a half-century of American foreign policy alliances on a high-level hallucination.
Here he was, fresh from presenting a crystal dove to an obviously perplexed pope, stolidly waiting for the club’s pheasant wranglers to shoo the doomed birds into his line of fire. He had killed only 70 or so the last time out. But this time he was convinced that the bird population could sustain more casualties. Quack and Awe.
“This is our due,” Dick said. He fired a shot: BLAM!
That “BLAM!” (and “This is our due”) is repeated throughout the column, like some angry/resentful incantation by an administration under siege. This is our world, our time, our choices, they seem to be saying. We want the world and we want it NOW!, as Jim Morrison, the deepest poet I read in eighth grade used to say. Dowd may be imagining the thoughts in Cheney’s head while he hunts (domesticated) pheasants, but what emerges are the increasingly desperate—sad, even—rationalizations of a sitting duck who has no idea which way to run.
Dowd’s no birdbrain: she knows Cheney’s goose is cooked, and she’s not afraid to crow about it.
“Oh, [John Kerry] sometimes pretends that he doesn’t care about our special interests. He puts on that callous populist facade. But deep down he cares. Maybe he cares too much. When he’s out on the stump saying otherwise, he’s just being a big old phony.”
—David Brooks, Kerry’s Special Friends, The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2004
N.B.: Not to be mistaken with Philip Roth’s Letting Go, which cannot ship before Valentine’s Day.
(MOSTLY) WHITE PRIDE:Vanity Fair‘s “Hollywood 2004” cover. (Not pictured: Black Actresses)
While the cover may lack diversity (yes, I am aware that Salma Hayek and Lucy Lui Liu aren’t white, but that and a token will get ya’ a ride on the subway), the magazine is positively bursting (like a dried up cactus) with African Americans.
Aside from some ads that feature Black models (Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford are still workin’ it after all these years!) or deeply-tanned white ones, there’s Brett Brooks, the DJ at Fred Segal (and Winona Ryder‘s old roommate—he works at a deparment store, she loves department stores, together, they’re a sitcom!) on page 192, Jamie Foxx done-up as Ray Charles on page 220, a caricature of Rudy Ray Moore, aka, Dolemite on page 332, Janet Jackson as Lena Horne on pages 322-323 (Black performers dressed as older Black performers= hot!), and Janet’s beloved and besieged brother, Michael (save your jokes: Michael Jackson is Black), is featured in several photos (one even show’s him wearing a trucker hat that appears to say “Black Man”) accompanying Maureen Orth’s examination of his child molestation charges beginning on page 384.
But by far, the part of the magazine that reflects the greatest diversity is Graydon Carter’s editor’s letter in which he lists the names of every U.S. armed forces member to die in Iraq. Of the 502 people listed, I’m betting a large percentage were African American.
Well, that’s one way to slip some Black folks into the “mix.”
