Someone's salary

If you can't make out the copy on the bus stop in this volkswagon ad, it says, "5-cylinder engine, integrated MP3 audio jack and 6-speaker sound sysetm. It's a sign things just might be turning around." And, yup, that's a homeless guy who's stuffed his "The End Is Near" sign into the garbage can, his notion rendered trash because cars this awesome only cost $17,000 dollars! Maybe everything about this ad is offensive?

A stupid question

From 3/1/07 issue of Time Out NY: "Where can I find a bar that uses Schweppes minibottles in their gin and tonics? I hate the tatse of soda from a gun." Arhem. Schweppes. Minibottles. Boo.

I still recognize you

Nice try, Prune Juice!

Fun Stuff

I watched Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story the other night. The resolution is terrible, but still worth watching. Apparently back in 1987, when he made the film, people didn't know a whole lot about anorexia.
Also watched Heil Honey I'm Home! a really un-funny, albeit fascinating, sitcom about Hitler and Eva Braun living next door to a Jewish family in late '30s Berlin. It's a weird idea, partly because you sort of know the premise has perverse funny potential, made weirder by the fact that the Holocaust is looming, rather than passed. Set in the 1950s maybe you can buy the living incarnation of evil has learned something, feels some remorse, and almost allow yourself to watch him be a bumbling, funny man without wanting to vomit-- not so when all of his deeds are still waiting to be done.
Finally, from today's Times, the best thing about the Scooter Libby trial, bar-none. The conversation they must have had! Sketch comedy gold:
Before the jurors departed on Wednesday afternoon, they filed into the courtroom, all but one wearing bright red T-shirts with a white valentine heart over their clothes, to the uncertain laughter of many in the courtroom.
But as one juror, a retired North Carolina schoolteacher, rose to speak, Judge Walton became visibly anxious that the juror might say something inappropriate that could threaten the trial. Jurors are not supposed to speak and are supposed to make any concerns known through notes to the bench.
The juror said they were wearing the shirts to express their fondness for the judge and the court staff on Valentine’s Day. He then added, to the judge’s growing discomfort, that they were unanimous in this sentiment, but they would all be independent in judging the evidence in the Libby case.
The sole juror who apparently declined to wear the shirt was a woman who had been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Don't call it a backlash

Angelina Jolie's appearance at the Globes may have pissed some people off, but having seen the offending interview between Jolie and Ryan Seacrest I don't think the response can appropriately be termed a "backlash." Caryn James' description of Jolie's demeanor on the carpet is inaccurate. Seacrest's "questions were drivel" James writes, "but that was no reason to sneer the words “Cereal, we made cereal” when asked how the family had spent the morning." Jolie wasn't sneering, she was smiling, and those two facial expressions, however insincerely the latter is applied, are mutually exclusive. In the interview Jolie let Brad do most of the talking (they were there for his movie after all) and pretty gamely answered the lame-o questions Seacrest forced her to. Jolie always comes across as arch and cold, and sure, she came across as a little of both here. But she was actually doing the damn carpet walk, the biggest concession she's made to Us Weekly style "celebrity" in a long while. If people got riled up because of this interview, it's not evidence of a backlash so much as evidence that no one ever liked her and have just been looking for an excuse to say so.
And why? Because she calls her newborn baby a blob-- which is, really, the awesomest thing in the whole world. Newborns are blobs! The casts of both Sex and The City and Seinfeld would welcome this woman with open arms. Here's a parent with a little perspective, who knows not everything their kid does is interesting and cute. The reason people find this comment so offensive is that it proves, once again, not only that Jolie is heartless, but that she basically has superpowers. No one thinks their baby isn't amazing and smart and beautiful-- No One-- even though the fact that everyone thinks this about their baby is incredibly annoying. Once again, Angelina Jolie has proved how different (i.e. how much better) she is from the rest of us—hotter, luckier, more charitable, more interesting and more lucid. Who the fuck does she think she is? Can't she behave like a loser sometimes? Apparently, she can't. So we'll all just have to rag on her for treating Ryan Seacrest like the tool we all, at least in a our more level-headed moments, know that he is.

"The Executioner's Song, then, was to be a novel of the West"

Spotting a kindred spirit, J Diddy comes to Norman Mailer's defense, 28 years ago. "I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the one heard in The Executioner's Song, is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down," she opines in classic, moody fashion, that's also the typical mix of self-effacing and important, given her own obsession with capturing the Western mood.

Three makes a trend

I don't know what to make of sex-change operations as the new plot-point. Hard to imagine that "America" approves, but maybe it's so new the haters have gotten organized yet. You know soap opera writers are psyched-- someone's always been saying, "this would work if Montana Moorehead was a man," and now everyone can agree.

.1'' from complaining about the cold

When I saw this today, I wondered, why is there ash in the air? Then I remembered that other kinds of flakes come out of the sky in New York City from time to time.

Separated at birth, joined at the plastic surgeons