“Write your own Thomas Friedman column!”
Michael Kubin, The New York Observer, May 19, 2004
“CREATE YOUR OWN THOMAS FRIEDMAN OP-ED COLUMN: DISORDER AND DREAMS IN [COUNTRY IN THE NEWS]”
Michael Ward, McSweeney’s, April 28, 2004
In preparation for the film’s July release date, Paramount has begun to reveal its marketing materials for Jonathan Demme’s upcoming “The Manchurian Candidate”, which is, of course, an oh-so-necessary remake of the John Frankenheimer-directed Cold War original.
Their campaign includes the release of teaser ads for the film appearing at the currently-in-progress 2004 Cannes Film Festival, as shown here and re-created above.
Advertising for a summer blockbuster at the Cannes Film Festival, alongside what was once ostensibly a gathering for artsy films…something seemed very “off” about this particular marketing ploy, until we stumbled upon the solution, below.
This week’s issue of Broadcasting & Cable breaks a scandal that most assuredly affects America’s core values of fairness, equality, and democracy. (NB: if that lead sentence had been published in the entertainment section of some mid-level newspaper reaching a metropolitan audience of about 50,000 people, you might have seen a greater effort to unimaginatively give the impression that this “scandal” is in some way connected to recent events in the Abu Ghraib prison, but alas, you’ve instead been subjected to this awful, self-reflexive introduction. Sorry.)
Deborah Starr Seibel’s “American Idol Outrage: Your Vote Doesn’t Count” offers a fair share of anecdotal evidence that, contrary to the seemingly democratic voting process promoted by the producers of the beloved show, millions of fans’ votes are disappearing into the ether. And speaking of vacuousness, the article, subtitled “An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed voting system,” might have better read, “An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed America.”
How else to explain some of the quotes and actions attributed to one Dee Law?
But as the show speeds toward its May 26 conclusion with three songbirds left, the 40-year-old Pennsylvania homemaker couldn’t care less about the outcome. A Clay Aiken fan, she lost faith in the process after making a shocking discovery last year: No matter how often she tried, she couldn’t place her vote.
Law says she tried to dial “five or six hundred times” on the final night of competition but hasn’t tried since. “I’m not gonna get suckered into voting again,” she says. “Why should we sit here and waste two hours of our time when our votes aren’t going to be counted?”
Shudder.
Anyway, putting aside a range of misanthropic feelings for the moment, we at low culture would like to take this moment to actually assist (yes, help) those poor sad-sack losers who have chosen to devote two nights of their week to feverishly clutching their handset while shrieking inconsolably as Diana Degarmo erupts into so-called “song”.
Below, we’ve coordinated (all in one place, and sorted by manufacturer or service provider) a series of links to speed-dialing instructions at various telephone manufacturers’ websites, such that hardcore Jasmine Trias devotees (or fans of Fantasia Barrino, or Diana Degarmo, or Crystal MacAzure, or Jacinta DuPres, or who-the-fuck-ever) can learn to get more votes in during those precious two hours.
Brother
Cavalier Telephone
Cisco
Z-tel
Meridian Digital
AT&T
Nokia
Panasonic
SBC Communications
Oh, fuck it. However immoral this may be:
Cool Ways to Kill Yourself
On some indeterminate date between A.M. Rosenthal’s leaving his position at the New York Times in 1999 and subsequently penning his column for the Daily News, Crazy Abe really lost it. I mean, totally, completely, lost it.
How else to explain the tormented editorial screed appearing (via Romenesko) in today’s New York Sun? In reading Rosenthal’s psychotic litany, we’re privy to the Times’ former executive editor’s musings on the media’s coverage of the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and, in particular, the manner in which the media failed to provide proper context for the abuses and the concomitant photos.
What context, you ask? Perhaps some Sy Hersh-esque examination of abuse-related directives having come from the top down? No? Well, maybe some broader examination of a climate of governmental deception, in the tradition of Rosenthal’s own 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning Times coverage of Poland’s misdeeds? No, you are soooo wrong, young whippersnapper!
That prisoner-abuse context that the media failed to provide over the past few weeks was Saddam Hussein and his since-toppled government’s having used “poison gas on civilians they wanted to eliminate, like the Kurds.” Thank you for the refresher course, Abe Rumsfeld.
Furthermore, Rosenthal continues, “We are uneasy even at the very idea of bringing up the mass Iraqi torture and murder. That is an insult to all those murdered masses of Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Jews, and Iranians. It is essential that we remember, ourselves, and the young members of the American armed forces know that they are fighting a government that is fascist in organization and in its slavering sadism.”
Bear in mind, then, that the next time you see images of prisoners of war chained to bedframes with panties on their heads, the reason these sundry havoc-wreakers, as well as uncharged shopkeepers and wives of Ba’athist officials, are naked and/or have undergarments covering their visages is due to Saddam’s having gassed 100,000 Kurds during the Reagan and Bush I administrations fifteen years earlier. And on a factual basis alone, please disregard Rosenthal’s assertions that America’s armed forces (his tense, not mine) “are fighting a government”, contrary to the image of American forces having helped to famously topple Saddam’s statue one year ago, and their current occupation of the Republican Palace in Baghdad.
And back to that “litany” idea again, Rosenthal repeats, “Since the latest torture story, many editors have failed to present background stories about the millions killed by Saddam.” That’s right, “millions”, even though the heretofore-most-liberal estimates of deaths under Saddam’s regime maxed out at 300,000 or therabouts. But, much like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s being drastically off the mark a few weeks ago in his own detailing of the number of American military casualties in Iraq, numbers are notoriously flexible when you’re trying to provide support for an otherwise reprehensible idea.
Finally, there’s this indignant gauntlet from Rosenthal: “In the years before World War II, officials of the New York Times shamed the paper by squeezing stories about millions of Europeans suffering and dying in the Nazi concentration camps, into meager and insufficient space. Years later, the paper tried to find out exactly who made those decisions. It could not, but it published an apology from its heart.” Except, as far as “context” is concerned, those were current events at the time.
Dear, sweet, Abe: perhaps newspaper editors can feel comfortable about revisiting the events of the late 1980s on their front pages as they pair those particular Kurdish history lessons with coverage of that era’s U.S. government support for both Afghanistan’s various insurgencies and Saddam Hussein himself in his war with Iranian Shiite fundamentalists.
See, that’s the problem with “context” and “history”: unlike President Bush’s war of Good-vs.-Evil, there are no absolutes.
From Reuters, “Shrek Finds More Beauty in Being Ugly in ‘Shrek 2′”:
“Shrek 2” zeros in on a cultural obsession with image, and there’s no better place to do that than in Hollywood.
From The Sun, “Diaz Sends for Zit Squad”:
Beauty Cameron Diaz sent an SOS after bursting out in zits before the Cannes premiere of Shrek 2.
(Click here to see Time‘s actual cover for this week’s issue.)
We live in a world full of sneaky journalists and duplicitous editors who hide the subtexts just below the, um… well, the text. How is a reader supposed to understand what an article is actually about if everything is all coded and coy?
That’s where The low culture Subtext Finder comes in! Using our patented formula, we unearth a given article’s subtext and bring it to you, the reader. Today’s sample: A Mobile Link for 90 Mutual Friends from The New York Times‘ Circuits section. Using our formula, this article would be renamed Cool New Tool to Get You Laid. Now, read the new article with the subtext in the text (and in bold):
Gone are the nights when Brian Battjer left barhopping in New York to chance.
He took control of his social fate when he signed up for Dodgeball.com, a free social-networking service that is becoming popular with young singles. The site uses cellphone text-messaging to wirelessly connect thousands of friends, and friends of friends, to get laid.
Just hours after he subscribed, Mr. Battjer, 27, received his first Dodgeball message: Alyssa, a friend of his friend Greg, it read, was at Luna Lounge, only two blocks away. Mr. Battjer had never met Alyssa, but inspired by the thumbnail-size picture sent with the message, he decided to find her and get laid.
[…]
“Dodgeball has changed the social fabric of everything,” he said. “The technology augments [getting laid] in a way that has never been done before.”
[…]
Based on the mutual-friends model popularized by Web sites like Friendster, Dodgeball helps users meet up with their friends or new acquaintances – but while they’re out on the town instead of sitting in front of their computers, where it’s harder to get laid.
[…]
“It’s like a shortcut,” said Alexander Clemens, 36, a political consultant and Dodgeball user in San Francisco. “All it takes is one quick note to tell my friends where the party’s at so we can all get laid.”
[…]
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of communications at N.Y.U., predicts that with a little time and fine tuning, software that “caters to users’ geography rather than their affinities” will [help you get laid] with the same force Friendster did two years ago.
“It has already been successful [getting people laid],” Mr. Shirky said. “But eventually, Dennis and Alex are going to figure out uses and applications they hadn’t even thought of before.”
Like, um, totally getting your ass laid!
Related: This article is like a Gothamist Interview Reunion: Brian Battjer, Dennis Crowley, Clay Shirky. Someone needs to cut Andrew Krucoff a check.
From “Telephonic Interview of the Vice President by Tony Snow, Fox News,” a.k.a, “Speed Dating with Tony Snow and Dick Cheney,” The Vice President’s Office, 11:08 A.M. EDT:
SNOW: Thirty seconds. Why is Ted Kennedy so mad at you?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Me personally?
SNOW: Yes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn’t know he was.
SNOW: Okay. Vice President Dick Cheney, I want to thank you for joining — and by the way, is “Red River” really your favorite movie?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: (Laughter.) Well, it’s right up there at the top of my short list.
Click here for another stellar interview with the Vice President.
Father, and son: Nick Berg and his family
While the media reacts with outrage over the release of videotaped footage of the beheading of 26-year-old civilian contractor Nick Berg in Iraq this week, the bigger story seems to have fallen through the cracks.
Namely, we’ve finally found that elusive connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda that the American public heard so much about from the President and his advisors for the past two years.
“An Islamist Web site posted a videotape Tuesday showing the decapitation of an American in Iraq, in what the killers called revenge for the American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
The Web site said the man who carried out the beheading was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant linked to al-Qaeda who the Americans believe was behind some of the deadliest terrorist attacks here.”
Admittedly, America-hating lefties may point out that this new connection technically falls under the rubric of a “post-Saddam Iraq”, and, furthermore, the occupying American army more or less created the terrorist-supporting circumstances which lead to this connection, but regardless: Well done, guys!
In tribute to this development, and to our baseball-loving commander-in-chief, I’m off to go watch a film about the American pastime, Field of Dreams. You know the movie…”If you build it, they will come.”
(NOTE: This entry has been ‘corrected’ from its originally-posted form. See comments for more info.)
The Guardian reports that encouraging teenagers to engage in oral sex could prove the most effective means of curbing teen pregnancy. Not only does low culture applaud such bold initiatives, but we would like to provide a few of our own. Teenagers need never be “troubled” again.
First the problem, then the solution:
Gang Violence – Encourage your teen to become a sulky loner
Bulimia – Encourage your teen to develop other insecurities. Acne, lack of popularity, and athletic inability are all excellent alternatives.
Secret Cutting – While secret cutting affects untold numbers of teens, public cutting never hurt anyone. Even successful, well-adjusted rock stars like Iggy Pop, Britney Spears and Richey Manic are doing it.
Huffing Glue – Move out of the trailer park.
Underage Drinking – Although alcohol is an omnipresent danger for teens, Ecstasy users typically drink water instead of liquor. Try to give your teen a roll before he goes out for the night.
Oral Sex – If your teen is engaging in oral sex to avoid pregnancy, encourage him or her to experiment with anal sex.
Anal Sex – Do you suspect that your teen is having anal sex to avoid having oral sex to avoid getting pregnant? Try turning your teen onto pregnancy-safe alternatives such as foot fetishism, bdsm or homosexuality.
Social Difficulties – Does your teen have trouble fitting in at school? Teach him or her to give a really good hummer. Everyone loves a slut.
