low culture

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.]