Style Snatcher

City Commission/CRA Meeting 12/21/2009

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I attended the City Commission/CRA meeting today at City Hall along with David Ballard. The upshot of the meeting is that following the CRA presentation and citizen comments, the CRA did not receive approval to go design phase of Plaza redevelopment.

The CRA had made no alterations to the proposal it submitted to DRAB last week. In the presentation, the CRA did make repeat acknowledgment of the importance of music to the success of the Plaza, although these statements were qualified to reflect CRA belief that music/arts should not drive the Plaza design. Rather, the Plaza should be functional across other uses, on a 16-hour-per-day basis. These uses included, but were not limited to: urban market, pedestrian thoroughfare, and gathering place.

A closer look at the CRA proposal shows that with the proposed design, the CRA feels that their redesigned Plaza will be a place of congregation for UF students (who will gather prior to going to the clubs), dinner/theatre patrons (who will gather prior to attending Hipp shows and eating at restaurants, and an after-work or weekend meeting place for neighborhood residents.

I noted once again that the portion of the CRA proposal that showed desirable parks in other cities also contained a photo of ballet dancers on the existing Plaza stage. Other Plaza photos were supplied to show the Plaza as completely vacant; these seemed chosen specifically to portray the Plaza as a dark and deserted place.

It is the CRA's contention that the Plaza "functions as a separate place," not one that is integrated into the greater whole of downtown Gainesville. The Free Fridays concerts and the farmers' market were spoken of as "positives," but the space was called "negative...the rest of the time." Not taken into account were the multiple citizen-produced events that take place during the year.

A major comparison has been made to Bryant Park in New York City. In making this analogy, which was based on relationship of park to large public building (i. e. Bryant Park to the New York Public Library and Bo Diddley Plaza to the admin. building), there was no mention of the large numbers of homeless who gather in Bryant Park.

CRA feels that Bo Diddley Plaza "does not contribute to downtown (and is a) non-descript, ancillary feature."

The CRA goal is to reposition the Plaza as a "site of great concerts and an urban market." Again, more mention was made of the concert series in this meeting than was made in last week's DRAB session. The CRA stated that the Plaza is above all a "vacant, neglected space" with "infrequent" concerts," and that the ultimate goal should be to "prioritize daily activity."

The issue of visbility from University Avenue through to the Hampton Inn was again stressed. This would involve demolishing the existing stage. The CRA said that although one did not need a degree or particular background in urban redevelopment, that urban designers had been consulted about their proposal and that the urban designers had specifically mentioned the lack of visibility with the current stage in place.

The CRA ended by saying that they would like to move forward into design, although they would not go into design detail at today's meeting.

CITY COMMISSION REMARKS:

Member Lowe suggested that money be spent on more event programming and also to bring in more vendors. Member Lowe commented upon the acoustic value of the existing stage and its other functions. The CRA countered that there were at present no specific design suggestions, and Member Lowe's comments ended with reiterating that there should be more of an investment in activities.

Member Donovan stated that the Plaza had been a three-year concern of his and spoke of the "dirty language and behavior around the 'shelter' (his term for the Plaza)"; the bandshell/stage was "irritating to walk by."

Member Donovan stressed that the biggest obstacles in the existing design were the bandshell and the bathrooms. He cited the bandshell/stage as the reason people did not use the Plaza as a thoroughfare: "You wonder when the lions will be released." Member Donovan is in favor of demolishing the bandshell/stage and suggested relocatin the performance area to the raised area where the homeless currently congregate towards the back of the Plaza. Further, he proposed an activities director for the Plaza.

Mayor Hanrahan mentioned the "large number of e-mails from the music community" and acknowledged that the Plaza functions well for special events and that the number of attendees at these events has grown. She asked how much of the problem was structural and how much of it was a set of circumstances. When asked by Mayor Hanrahan if there were to be no permanent bandshell, the CRA replied "I'm not sure what you mean." CRA used Mayor Hanrahan's question to return to the issue of "flexibility for everyday use."

During Mayor Hanrahan's comments, the concerns of the "music community" were brought up, and it was stressed that the "music community" was not the entire community, and although that community's input was important, it was not reflective of the city as a whole. (Note: I am not a member of the music community and neither is the Civic Media Center, which was also represented. It was my feeling that too much stress was put on the feelings of the music community, which did not take into account the reactions of the 18,000 people who came to a Free Fridays concert this past season.)

Anthony Lyons of the CRA spoke next. Although he said he "loves concerts," he called the Plaza a "dead space" and was the second CRA member to remark that he didn't know what Mayor Hanrahan meant in her question about a permanent bandshell.

Member Mastrodicasa asked Mr. Lyons what feedback he had received on the proposal when it was submitted to DRAB last week. Mr. Lyons said DRAB had been "appreciative" of his direction and that there was not a "negative." Based on last week's DRAB meeting, DRAB suggested a proposal that was inclusive of performing arts.

Member Mastrodicasa supports events and mentioned that UF had invested in creating a better bandshell space on the UF campus. She asked if it were possible to update present bandshell and stated that she was in favor of asking for public input.

Member Henry spoke next. He mentioned the problem with the current programming, which is geared towards the evenings, and asked to add daytime programming along with food vendors. He stated that the "dip" in the amphitheatre was not "people-inviting."

Commissioner Hawkins closed out this section of the meeting by reiterating the "visual obstacles" that caused for a new design. He stated that, at minimum, the new design must incorporate a permanent top (roof) for the performance area and that permanent electrical outlets must be installed (at present there are neither of these items in the design). Commissioner Hawkins asked Mr. Lyons to obtain citizen input and acknowledged Mr. Lyon's prior statement about obtaining business input. He asked for a follow-up presentation with a minimum of three options, but possibly five to seven, that would differ on the basis of context areas. Commissioner Hawkins felt the bandshell should be oriented away from downtown and that a gazebo in the southeast corner might be a solution, utilizing "temporary acoustic background."

David Ballard of Cultural Affairs spoke about maintaining the functionality of the present bandshell and offered a counterproposal of a music park. Mr. Ballard reported 18,000 concert attendees in the 2009 season and presented survey results that indicated the percentage of people who frequented downtown businesses before or after a concert.

Bob McPeek, Cathy DeWitt, and Joe from Civic Media also spoke.

CRA Meeting Agenda, 12/21/2009

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Meeting Agenda
December 21, 2009
3:00 PM
City Hall
200 East University Avenue
Gainesville, Florida 32601
City Hall Auditorium
Community Redevelopment Agency
Thomas Hawkins (Chair)
Lauren Poe (Vice-Chair)
Jack Donovan (Member)
Pegeen Hanrahan (Member)
Scherwin Henry (Member)
Craig Lowe (Member)
Jeanna Mastrodicasa (Member)
Persons with disabilities who require assistance to participate in this meeting are
requested to notify the Office of Equal Opportunity at 334-5051 or call the TDD phone
line at 334-2069 at least 48 hours in advance.
Community Redevelopment Agency Meeting Agenda December 21, 2009
CALL TO ORDER
ROLL CALL
ADOPTION OF THE CONSENT AGENDA
SECRETARY CONSENT

090640. Downtown Community Plaza (B)
The Lunch box Café is moving forward. The lease is being routed for execution,
construction plans are complete and the contractor has applied for the building
permit. The CRA is pursing an expedited building permit for this project, and
assuming the application is processed in a timely manner, site mobilization and
construction will begin in late December. This construction schedule will allow
for project completion in late February, with a Grand Opening soon to follow.
The CRA is also considering the Plaza as a whole. Through a series of
discussions, stakeholders have identified elements of the Plaza which contribute
both positively and negatively to function of the space. With the help of design
professionals, the CRA is using this information to explore new possibilities for
the site and its relationship to the adjacent downtown area. Two design teams
have provided suggestions for the Plaza. Both the Plaza and these concepts are
being evaluated by a third party reviewer with expertise in urban design. Staff
will provide a presentation detailing the findings, and will summarize the
challenges and opportunities of the Plaza, including the significance of the role
that a public plaza plays in a downtown and how it both influences and is
influenced by the surrounding context. The presentation will also analyze the
challenges and opportunities associated with reconfiguring the Plaza, and
identify specific issues that will impact the future design, and provide imagery
to help explain the issue.
Explanation:
$138,587.18 is budgeted in General Government account 332-M660-5190. The
CRA is authorized to utilize these funds for Bethel and Plaza improvements.
Fiscal Note:
1) Hear presentation from Staff; 2) Provide input as
necessary.
RECOMMENDATION
090640_DIAGRAM_20091221.pdf
090640_PP_20091221.PDF

BO DIDDLEY COMMUNITY PLAZA DEMOLITION

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:13:00 +0000

Fellow Artists,

Many of you have questions about CRA-proposed changes to the Gainesville Bo Diddley Community Plaza. The Gainesville Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) has just revealed a conceptual drawing for the Plaza that would eliminate the current stage and bandshell (including the bathrooms) as well as flatten the audience area levels and raise the whole Plaza to street level. For concerts and other performances they propose to “integrate platform for temporary bandstand into design of the park”. We believe that this will be detrimental to the City’s “Free Fridays,” the Farmers' Market and to other concerts/events as well as the many wonderful citizen-produced events. The "Plaza footprint," i. e. the lawn space for audience seating, would be greatly reduced. It seems to be CRA’s opinion that the primary purpose of the Plaza should be changed from a performing arts facility to a retail “urban market” (their term). Please spread the word and let your opinions be heard by City government. This is just in its initial stages and your input can have an effect in shaping this project!

Below is contact info for our City Commission. You may also visit the City Commision Web page at:
http://www.cityofgainesville.org/GOVERNMENT/MayorCityCommission/tabid/362/Default.aspx

On their webpage you can get direct email addresses for the Mayor and Commissioners by clicking on their pictures.

Below is general info for contacting the Commission as a body.

Location:
City Hall. Address:
200 E. University Ave.
Gainesville, FL
32601-0490
Phone:
352.334.5015

Email:
CityComm@cityofgainesville.org

Mail Box:
PO Box 490, Station 19
Fax:
352.334.3119

Of Dead Presidents, Popes, and Pop Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:02:00 +0000

This Friday, the body of Michael Jackson will be on public display at Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. Gary, Indiana, would like the body, or would like to be next in line to receive the body. Gary Mayor Rudy Clay thinks the corpse would be a great addition to a mass public memorial to be held on July 10th at the U. S. Steel Yard that is home to the Gary Southshore Railcats.

Gary, one of the most tragically blighted urban areas in the U. S., is Jackson's hometown. Mayor Clay said that he "believed the body would lie in state here." He sounds quite optimistic about Jackson's final tour, yet one wonders if Mayor Clay realizes that Jackson cannot technically lie in state unless Barack Obama designates (strictly, a Capitol Rotunda viewing), because he is not the current President nor was he the former President. But this is a petty semantic quibble and, obviously, the term is elastic when a popular figure of Jackson's fame is the body in question.

Popes lie in state in the Vatican.

Jackson will also not lie in honor, a designation reserved for non-Presidents who are distinguished Americans, unless Congress deems it so. Lying in honor is also conducted at the Rotunda. Rosa Parks lay in honor, as did two Capitol police officers who were killed in the line of duty in 1998.

Jackson can, theoretically, lie in repose, "repose" meaning "death." Anyone dead can and does, although the term as used in the United States is often interchangeable with lying in state.

This is very confusing.

Ronald Reagan made a final lap around the U. S. upon his death, appearing both in California and in Washington. Ronald Reagan, however, wasn't drawn as a cartoon character.

There is a Disney-esque, freak-show vibe surrounding the planned viewings. Jackson in a glass coffin, the glass Prince of American Pop, broken into a million tiny pieces by opiates, an asshole of a father, allegations of molestation, and a secretive, self-protective lifestyle now said to have involved a fake relationship with a chimpanzee. His death has the feeling of a dream sequence done up in gaudy Technicolor: Here lies Tinkerbell.

If we clap long and loud enough, will he awake?

Jackson still had millions of fans, as evinced worldwide by the innumerable makeshift memorials, tear-streaked faces, and panicked "tweets." These were the people--or some of them--who would have clapped for Jackson as, at age 50, he threw himself back onto the concert stage. He would have whipped his 112 pounds around like a dervish, frantically summoning the Big Eighties all over again, that nightmare time of intensely synthesized pop and bad fashion circumstance.

We weren't ever going to get to know Michael Jackson. The man was a recluse, and, in death, has reclaimed the public stage on which he had shortly intended to perform. The fans get their closure even if the performer is inanimate; denied the right to see him sing "Beat It" live, they get to see his body dead.

This type of memorial is in a class of its own, and even more so when you consider that Mayor Clay is jockeying for the remains as if they were something that belonged, de facto, to the City of Gary. It has all the makings of a spectacle (or, more crudely, a clusterfuck) and you can bet that should the spectacle get to Gary that it will be seen as something by which the city is glorified; you can almost feel Mayor Clay at work, writing his tribute speech. Gary also wants the body under home turf and has politely argued for its local burial. There, finally, is the reinvigoration of Gary...as a tourist attraction.

Think about it: Perhaps a theme park could spring up around the gravesite. This is only fitting, since Jackson kitted out his Neverland as an eternal playground. In the center, the body molding à la Lenin. A formal, although whimsical, mausoleum to be etched with bluebirds and happy lyrics from "I Won't Grow Up." Around this edifice, a 24-hour detachment guards against grave robbers (mandatory villains). A whopping 500 acres (bigger than Disneyland!) provide the lucky visitor all manner of attractions and 60 thrill rides. All major international cuisines and crafts are represented at various colorful pavilions. There is a magnificent light show--wait for it--preceded by a montage that projects images of the American flag, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Grilled Chicken and Jackson as Cinderella, the local ragamuffin who made good, very good.

So it isn't the most innovative theme park around. It doesn't have to be. It's in Gary.

It's a sponsor's dream come true. Any suspicion that Jackson might have been guilty of pedophilia will be forgotten when there are millions to be made on branding. Who is going to opt out of that?

There is ample parking for all.

What a happy and unexpected ending. Northwestern Indiana has been hit hard by the economic fallout. Furnaces have been shut down at the steel mills and men who once worked as engineers are now shift janitors. The auto industry is in deep doo-dah, not zippity. All of these good, solid citizens will now have jobs and they won't have to wait for Barack Obama to get them jobs riveting bridges or fiddling about with windmills.

Welcome to Michael-Land!

God Bless the USA!

We'll Always Have Paris, Or Will We?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:49:00 +0000

Yesterday's most popular (that is, most e-mailed) article in The New York Times travel section was one entitled "Frugal Paris." The City of Light and all things chicer than thou beat out articles about Puerto Rico and gangster hideouts in Wisconsin, as well it should. The "Frugal Paris" article, by Matt Gross, is lyrical in tone, speaking of a "ruffled, fractal edge of the trees in full green bloom" and "low pale buildings with their amber lights just turned on."

And this is just in the first paragraph. Paris does that to people. Writers are especially susceptible. Countless bad novels have been set there, as have unwise and sudden romances. The article goes on to explore the writer's desire to seek out nostalgie de la boue, which is described as a keen appreciation for the gutter (NB: Read The Maids, mes amis). The writer argues that Paris, with its boulevards and monoliths and haute couture, is misperceived as being too expensive. The reader with an appreciation for France's second-greatest export--fine fragrance--would disagree. I, for one, would be unable to board the plane home without having purchased a bell jar of Muscs Koublaï Khän, that infamous scent of riding hard across the Mongolian steppes on a very sweaty horse.

What makes the American lust after Paris, and what separates Paris from Grand Rapids or anywhere else in America? On our own domestic front we have cherry blossoms on the Mall, rogueish graffiti in Brooklyn, and the La Brea Tar Pits, not to mention Death Valley, the Idaho Panhandle, and Mt. Rushmore. The French have rien on the windswept desolation of Little Big Horn Battlefield, so why isn't the sad vista of Custer's Last Stand inspiring the next generation of postmodern novelists?

The answer is romance. America is not romantic (Canada is even less so). It's too practical throughout most of its mass and it is home to too many silly, albeit useful, inventions that are hawked on the Home Shopping Network. The French, on the other hand, imbue their butter keepers with elegance. They aren't concerned with popping massive numbers of corn kernels in a dry, fat-free environment. Who are we kidding? We're starving. No wonder articles like Gross's are so appealing.

There are many permutations of romance possible in Paris, outside of the sexual. Indeed, most of the romance is sensuous and may involve large numbers of pistachio macaroons or the criminal act of eating, without fear of penalty, real heavy cream without FDA intervention. Horse meat? It is better than you think, a real historical chomp, and it is low in fat.

For the creative--the painter and the poet--the opportunity to reculer pour mieux sauter must seem inescapably alluring. Not being of Paris is experiencing a setback in one's lifestyle, so what better place to learn to work harder and better?

So evocative of missed romance is Paris that the reader is tempted to breach it in August. That the whole of the city pretty much shuts down during that doggy month isn't mentioned. There could be soggy sexual skirmishes à l'apres-midi for those of us evincing a persistent American bravery. And don't forget that being drunk in Paris is far more fun than being drunk in Bayonne.

Most everything is better in Paris, and the French know it. That is why they sneer at us over our shoulders. We do not know how to live and when we do live we live in denial and self-abnegation. Big business would shudder to a stop should Americans adopt any French (or European) habit of lingering over coffee and small gossip. That this might contribute to a betterment of American health seems not to have crossed our minds as we race through our days, constipated with rising interest rates and choking on the bile of the impossible health-care system.

A short list of things that are better in Paris, or at least with a French accent:

--Pastry

--Museums

--Dirty words

--Body odor

--Wine

--Lingerie

--Pig trotters

--Absurdism

--Political wives

--Extramarital sex

Our longing for Paris is a case of melancholy for places that we have never been. In a strange psychological quirk, humans develop mysterious funks for bridges, illuminations, apartments, and trains, none of which most of us will see. This explains the sudden and deep pangs felt upon seeing a neighbor's pictures of impenetrable lines of German tourists in front of the Louvre or stumbling upon a photo of a pissoir taken by an anonymous stranger and shared with the world via Flickr. This then creates an unhappy envy, but guess what? Garlic breath really does smell better in the Bois de Boulogne.

Goodbye, All-American Girl

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Two months after America celebrated its bicentennial, a new television show debuted on ABC. America would soon celebrate this show as "Jiggle TV," a form of entertainment not marked by its theatrical assets. The show was Charlie's Angels, a female detective series that made actress Farrah Fawcett into a seventies supernova.

Fawcett wasn't unknown to America when Charlie's Angels debuted. By the time the first episode aired, Fawcett-Majors' (still married to the actor Lee Majors) iconic poster, showing off her teeth, hair, and erect nipple had become one of the 1970s bestselling pop culture items.

Some say the 1980s marked the end of America as we knew it, but the truth is that the end of the 1970s--the Super Seventies--was the real terminus. The 1970s were a silly era, full of junk food and just plain junk and the last of the great Detroit muscle cars. It was an era of cheap and cheerful invention, not just limited to the hairstyle that Fawcett popularized and which was erroneously adopted by thousands, including some men in rock bands best forgotten. The 1970s gave us Pop (and Pet) Rocks and The Midnight Special, Ron Popeil and Deney Terio. Worse yet, we lived happily with a narrow worldview in the age that was the beginning of our international undoing.

Television was responsible for a lot of the tossaway inanity, and yet opposites existed peaceably: For every clever Carol Burnett Show there was a brainless Dukes of Hazzard. In hindsight, a viewer's options were severely limited. You had your three majors, PBS, and a couple fuzzy UHFs that refused to be tuned by the rabbit ears. Despite this lack of 24-hour, complex programming (and porn), people watched TV more then than they do today. The reason for this, of course, is the personal computer, which at the end of the 20th century turned into a warm and welcoming personal burrow. In the 1970s, you either watched TV with the family or you shut yourself in your room with Led Zeppelin III and a Thai stick.

Those of us with less sappy mindsets will recall the 1970s as a time of embarrassment and polyester.

Fawcett was the ultimate All-American blonde and she began her career advertising those products so iconic they were almost patriotic: Ultra-Brite, Wella Balsam, and Noxzema. Take a look at Fawcett lathering up Joe Namath's face in the shaving-cream commercial. Broadway Joe's shit-eating grin and sloping, dopey eyes make him look as if he'd have been right at home as a Sweathog in Welcome Back, Kotter, giving Vinnie Barbarino a run for his money in the doofus department. Fawcett had that effect on men general; it's a safe bet that most of those 12 million posters were sold to satisfy the urgent libidos and prurient minds of young male America.

Females were not immune either, hair type be damned. Within weeks of the poster's appearance, hairstylists had learned not to attempt to dissuade those patrons who were either too old or whose hair was too straight for Fawcett's leonine style. Open any yearbook of the Class of '76 and you will see the Farrah Do, as it was known, on most of the student council, with the exception of the sour-looking girl whose favorite pastime was breeding beef cattle. That girl had a sensible Dorothy Hamill haircut, the Dorothy Hamill being the decade's second most popular coiffure. The Hamill was functional, though, and there may have been grounds to claim that the Hamill was born of a fervent need to unsex. Hamill you could take home to meet Mother, yet the similarly sporty Fawcett was priapic fantasy.

Guided by super-manager Jay Bernstein and superstar husband Lee Majors, Fawcett filmed one year of Charlie's Angels and then quit. Angels had no redemptive qualities or serious ethical questions to tackle (at the time, this was strictly the purview of dull old PBS) and Fawcett romped through it unruffled. She then lagged as a movie star and had a small and surprising success in the off-Broadway play Extremities. She appeared with her hair straightened, which in Fawcett's case looked like the mark of an emerging serious actress. Fawcett was a slight woman who, though at least partially responsible for the "Jiggle TV" term, was seriously out-jiggled by another Bernstein client, Suzanne Somers. Nothing again would resonate with the public the way the poster and the series had; had Fawcett replaced Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer we'd never have forgiven her for betraying her earlier, sexier self, born of Texas but decisively a product of California.

The truth about Fawcett was that she and the Super Seventies had a happy and serendipitous alliance. Had she been born a quarter-century earlier and hit Hollywood during the era of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, we might never have made her acquaintance. Fawcett looked like the Seventies, perhaps more so than the Seventies looked like Fawcett; she had that slim body type and that breezy, unfettered optimism that went along with the feeling that we were in our greatest era of achievement yet. We had, after all, the Chop-O-Matic. How wrong that was. Our corn-fed youth became sick and fat on sugar and grew bigger, taller, and indolent; we hurried to buy the first of the Japanese cars and crowed about their superior mileage, snickering at our Ford LTD-driving neighbor. Technology changed things, and suddenly we became sluggish and stupid, the international laggarts. Our entertainments changed and we popularized plastic breasts to the point that someone like Fawcett, who relied upon God-given sex appeal alone, would have been shown the gate (or at least the door of the top plastic surgeon in town).

We owe Fawcett a debt of thanks for her beautiful impact on that last naive and foolish era. We'd grow hipper and we'd mature out of that goofy phase where Fawcett's blonde waves were like that native waving wheat, golden in the sunset, on our domestically televised plains. We made Friends, and even in their own hysteria these friends were not like Fawcett at all. Somehow, we'd lost what made stars special in the first place, that remove between them out there in the Hollywood galaxy and us here at home in our suburban Barcaloungers. We had become one and from there on in only our salaries were different. We sucked on the same straws, ate the same French fries. This was the new nation, the one in which the pauper dines with the king and goes home ruing the hell out of genetics. In 1976, we thanked our lucky stars that strokes of good genetic fortune created Fawcett and led her onto the intimacies of our small screens. Wasn't it a great time to be an American television viewer? Wasn't it a great and mindless time overall? Have a nice day, have a Billy beer, tie a yellow ribbon, goodbye American woman, goodbye All-American girl.

Phil Spector: Da Doo Gun Gun

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Chances are that Phil Spector will die in prison. Last week, a judge sentenced Spector to life imprisonment for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson; Spector will not be eligible for parole until 2028, the year he turns 88.

Spector wore a sober shag wig to his sentencing. The hairpiece made Spector look like a fossilized Mod from Swinging London '67 and not as if a lofty intolerance for style caused him to exert undue influence over electromagnetic currents.

As a record producer, Spector shone early and then faded into the 1980s. His major achievement in the past decade was in being dumped by England's Starsailor. Back in the mid-nineties, something went awry with Celine Dion. Those fruitless projects spanned seven years of his career. Then, a jury says he put a gun into Lana Clarkson's mouth, pulled the trigger, and wrote the coda for his both his career and for his life as he knew it. It's hard to say what life Spector knew; he holed up in his Pyrenees Castle and, by a good number of accounts, menaced people.

The circumstances of Clarkson's death are odd; she was found slumped in a chair in the foyer of Spector's home, spine either fully or partially severed, with a purse hanging from her shoulder. Spector claimed this was an "accidental suicide," shortly after he said that he thought he shot her. Oops! Another mysterious accident for the tabloids, kiddies, right up there with the death of Paul Bern, the suicide of Thelma Todd, and other sordid Hollywood classics. The Black Dahlia. Of most recent vintage, Bonnie Lee Bakeley springs to mind.

Spector had an assortment of guns worthy of the Forge of Vulcan. He was a recluse who raved about his home in a Batman costume. During his trial, a few women swore under oath that he had terrorized them with his weapons; one, who had been assaulted after a party, went back the following week for another party before deciding never to be alone with Phil Spector again. A stripper testified she'd been forced to fellate him at gunpoint and Spector's third defense attorney strongly suggested that Lana Clarkson had been going down on the gun when she accidentally pulled the trigger.

What a wild night! You hear kinky stories from Hollywood, but this one has the added thrill of lethality. In this scenario, the dame misjudges what will turn Phil on and blows herself into oblivion instead. Indignant, Phil calls her a "piece of shit" on an audiotape that later becomes part of the defense.

It's one hell of a story.

Clarkson had the better narrative, though, because of its dull arc of endeavor. She lived the fundamental lie about Hollywood: If anyone "makes it," so can you. Why can't that anyone be you? Can anyone truly say what separates diamonds from roughage? Whereas Bonnie Lee Bakeley was a grifter looking to fleece entertainment has-beens, Clarkson simply wanted to be a star in the land of black holes. Friends testified that she had been very recently depressed; she saw herself as a Monroe Moderne and then had failed to achieve much more along those lines than sharing a hair color and dying a puzzling death. Clarkson knew she had washed up and struggled against it. Someone said Clarkson was "humiliated" by taking the hostessing job at the House of Blues. Meantime, all around are greater successes; they peer down from billboards and win awards and buy big houses that are threatened by fires in Malibu Canyon.

It was a titanic struggle. A career that consisted mostly of fitful casting in B-grade sci-fi movies was set against a desire to perform exquisitely broad comedy, as shown in her latest project Lana Unleashed, a reel she hoped would break the restraint that was keeping her from reaching stardom. What else could it be but lack of notice, of apathy? Lana Unleashed sounded more like a porno flick than it did a serious marketing tool, but perhaps in the twisted provocation of the title lay reason to at least take a peek.

With a voiceover looming, Clarkson hadn't quite disappeared into the hole, but she had begun to hang above it by a thread. The gravitational pull was strong, hence the hostessing job. She was making a major effort to keep up without understanding the basic Hollywood rule of thumb, which more or less requires applying a multiplier of 1.5 to any age over 30. By that measure, Clarkson was 60 years old and soon to approach the employability of Nick Nolte. Still, Clarkson had more success in Hollywood than most, even if by Hollywood standards she was no sensation and would, outside of death, never be. She fell early and hard into Amazon roles, a special typecasting reserved for tall women who look as if they could kick the shit out both men and scary alien monsters. Another highlight of her career was a sequel to 9 1/2 Weeks cleverly titled Another Nine & a Half Weeks (in France, the rather more romantic Love in Paris). In this, she was billed as "Woman at Fashion Show." Clarkson's type of actress is generally offered Bitchslappin' Babes II before The English Patient winds up on her doorstep.

This is where Spector came in. The culimination of their meeting resulted in a lot of speculation: Just what was Clarkson doing going over to Spector's home in the middle of the night? She hadn't any idea who he was when she barred him from entering the VIP party at the House of Blues and then there she was in his limo, heading out to Alhambra. Hollywood is nothing but a web of chance associations, old-boy networks, and inflicted karma. Spector/Clarkson fell into the first category, that of the random run-in with the famous. It happens all the time and most people live to tell about it and to post documentary evidence of it all over cyberspace, sometimes unflatteringly. Maybe Clarkson thought Spector was a lucky break, or maybe Spector was so physically exciting that Clarkson couldn't resist his overtures. Marilyn Monroe had her own diminutive champion in Johnny Hyde. Hollywood places such merit on the physically beautiful that it is sometimes hard to see value in difference; Spector may have been a champion Lothario with alluring and chivalrous entreaties, or he may just have been Hollywood lumpen with a deadly misogynistic streak. It doesn't really matter. Whatever happened, Spector looked attractive enough that Clarkson went home with him.

He had on one of his better wigs.

These tales are rarely uplifting. The horror isn't blunted because it happened in the Hollywood you aren't supposed to see. Hang on a minute. We will see it on cable television. Somewhere, someone is optioning a script. HBO will make a movie out of this. It's better than the Bonnie Lee Bakeley story, because the victim was sexy, attractive, and the only bang in the house that night was the gunshot.

Sex and Susan Boyle

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:30:00 +0000

Remember "Sex"? "Sex" (David Soller) turned up in Manhattan for two consecutive So You Think You Can Dance? auditions. He couldn't dance. He couldn't comprehend why no one thought he couldn't dance. Looking as if he failed PE at PS 101, "Sex" jerked through a second audition that he claimed represented "the male sex image." What he really represented was hubris, that overarching human tendency to believe so strongly in one's abilities that one is not able to see the truth about oneself. In Soller's case, this translated into complicity with the show's producers, who gleefully featured him as a "very special treat." Soller got his airtime and the producers got their jape.

The joke is, of course, that humans can be unfortunate creatures who crave recognition and admiration far beyond their limited capabilities. This tendency is best exploited if the human in question has an appearance to match the lack of aptitude. Such was the case with Soller, who stuffed his sweatshirt into baggy shorts and who, to use cruel modern parlance, looked as if he might have come to the audition on the short bus.

Something similar was slated for Susan Boyle, the dowdy Britain's Got Talent contestant who shocked both Britain and an international cyber-audience with her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream." The confluence of frumpish appearance, doleful back story, and emotive lyrics moved grown men to tears and advanced Boyle into the semi-final rounds.

Last evening, Boyle won her semi-final round and will move to next week's finals.

Boyle can sing, despite what sounded like a momentarily wobbly start to "Memories" from Cats. Her performance was not quite so stunning as her first, because the element of surprise had been removed. The world had already responded to Susan Boyle, and despite another evocative song choice, Internet opinion was divided. Why was this? "Memories" may be barely more mawkish than "I Dreamed a Dream" and more illuminating of Boyle's less remarkable lower register, but has the singer crested because worldwide adulation can only be a brief and fleeting affair regardless of original merit? Or because we now can no longer steal humor from pathos?

The shock of the initial audition turned into allure because of Boyle's image; in her sashed lace dress she appeared as if she had just come from church and was nervously preparing to slice an Easter ham. Predisposed to this type of contestant on talent shows and understanding that early rounds are mostly peopled by the earnestly misguided, viewers were instead moved, as if inside each and every one of us resided an ugly and untalented duckling. Boyle touched our hopes, but she also touched our fears. Her triumph was a dream or her dream was triumph, and within a week it didn't matter which came first.

Still, her triumph had a hollow ring.

There have been many beloved singers whose appearances did not fall within a pre-set definition of beauty. Kate Smith, Janis Joplin, Placido Domingo, and Maria Callas are but a few. All of these perfomers achieved iconic status without their looks playing a role. No one was stunned that Smith could sing, and although Joplin was known to be insecure about her own looks, she staggered the Monterey Pop audience not because she was unattractive and could sing, but because she sounded like no one else out there, not at that festival and not anywhere else either. Time has remembered these singers as the sensations that they were. It has not remembered them as genetic flaws with good voices.

Reality shows have turned people like Susan Boyle into curiosities. They exist both to give people who might otherwise have gone unnoticed a chance, but they also exist to dramatize the assumed "sad" qualities of an individual. A presumed unattractive appearance has become a talent, alongside whatever other talent someone might possess, even when that talent comes with quotation marks and with an extreme lack of self-awareness.

The public isn't suddenly drinking of the milk of human kindness. It seemed as if they were; it seemed as if Boyle were to be generously forgiven for a lack of standard beauty by hearts that might otherwise be dour. Her impact was that of pleasure and satisfaction, not of mockery, but this is not what Britain's Got Talent so brilliantly exploits. It isn't Susan Boyle who is being exploited, it is us. It is our need to have the unglamorous drained of any feeling of compassion (or pity) and then a scheduled approval when the opposite occurs. Susan Boyle isn't even about Susan Boyle. She's about the thrall of malice towards others and how arousing it is to mock things in others that are outside of their personal control. When the cheap excitement of ridiculing the ridiculous was tired, we were firmly put in our places by the English with a slick gotcha! moment that was easily predictable yet not lessened in impact by the obviousness of its premise. That there is an individual at the center of this doesn't matter. We have been played for the fools we are and then told that we weren't really fools at all, just a world of hard-hearted disbelievers and aren't we really sort of terrible for always seeing the bad side of things?

How you interpret Susan Boyle depends on how you interpret the human race. It can be a complicated matrix that says quite a bit about the human condition. There are those who feel passionately about the redemptive qualities of the story and there are those who feel yanked about by Simon Cowell. Somewhere in the middle are those who judge on merit alone. Disturbingly, Boyle feels plotted as a character in someone's narrative, with a predestined conclusion that would not have happened outside of the reality platform. Since the story began with this premise and is continuing along a calculated arc, what ending would ultimately be the most rewarding? What would be the most profitable in terms of epilogue?

Maybe we should give up having to have tragic losers in our lives. That would solve the whole thing and maybe we'd be a whole lot happier. We could just walk off into the sunset feeling good about other people, instead of feeling that we have superior skill in determining which deserve our endorsement. But then reality TV would cease to exist and we might have to do something else with our time. This might be the end. We might not recognize ourselves.

Brad Pitt Is Happy, Are You?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:55:00 +0000

In response to a flood of rumors about the state of his marriage, Brad Pitt has announced that he is happy. Happy. He is hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival. He has a beautiful family. He might make more family. He is not banging the nanny or trying to look up nuns' habits or whatever else he might do out of desperation to telegraph to the world that he is miserable.

This is wonderful news from Brad Pitt, who has begun to look as if he is suffering the disturbances of suburbia. It's a very curious state of affairs. The more beautiful his wife becomes, the more Pitt appears as if he is covered in atomic ash. He has become the banker on the 5:15, the guy with the broken rake, the swimmer with the college medals who now blows up the kiddie pool and finds himself short of breath.

As a result of the innumerable inquiries into the Pitt-Jolie marriage, one cannot avoid Brad Pitt even if one wants to avoid Brad Pitt. Recently, one magazine called out another for manufacturing Pitt-Jolie drama solely for the sake of selling magazines. The horror of this is unfathomable. Since 2005, the offending magazine has run 21 cliffhanger covers, each of which claimed the couple was done, or almost done, or done as soon as it was revealed that Angelina Jolie was really a man. Or that Brad Pitt was made to wear a French maid's uniform (with frilly pink panties) while bending over and serving Angelina Jolie escargots en croûte and other homely French comestibles.

From a cheap physical standpoint, the best of Brad Pitt came early in his career, when he became the subject of the national swooning experience. This type of attention becomes a physical challenge for the subject, but not fot Pitt, who now enjoys the experience of middle age yet who no longer causes fans to go into a dead faint.

This is really rather unfair. Pitt has failed to live up to expectations. He has jowls, dull hair, and there probably won't be any post-mortem revelation that he was a belligerent drunk with a bad case of cystic acne on his ass. His last movie was sketchily based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short and Pitt cocooned himself nicely in its special effects; he has made moves since he was moved on by Jolie in the useless Mr. & Mrs. Smith. There were tenderer questions and a willingness to be shown in the process of balding. There is always the gleeful implication that he has betrayed himself as amuse-gueule of the vagina dentata, but keep in mind to whom that vagina belongs. If Jolie seemed more exciting during her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, you remember Thornton's fear of antique furniture and wonder if this and perhaps other idiosyncrasies led to her healing rush towards maternal nature.

Pitt has not seemed to be the propulsive force in his marriage; the tabloids would have you believe that he lives in a constant state of romantic Sturm und Drang, with hurled knives and mental imbalances and the looming threat of potential lesbian alliances. He is Euro-pastel in his Cannes ensemble, but he was never a sartorial lion in the first place. He has too many influences at hand: David Niven, Noel Coward, Sonny Crockett. What if he wanted to play nude hacky-sack on the beach at Juan-les-Pins instead of sitting through a screening of Inglourious Basterds? He keeps busy; he has 12 films in development.

He looks as if he might be at home behind a lawnmower. This is the great secret of his happiness. He might one day rebel and burgle a neighbor's home to steal the neighbor's wallet, but not today. He is a lucky man. Sometimes, you barely notice him. Go to his house, he might break out the bridge mix.

You could probably borrow his tools. He is happy. Are you?

Adam Lambert, the Drive-Through Idol

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:04:00 +0000

As fast-food is to the national diet, so Adam Lambert is to American Idol. The likely winner of Season Eight is a prime piece of fast-food entertainment. Both show and singer would have us believe that Lambert is new heir to a long line of peacockish androgyne rock stars. The feminized sexual plumage of English glam-rock, Hollywood hair-metal, and the New York Dolls has been sanitized for safety by either the singer or the franchise or both, leaving Lambert neutered. Despite vocal flexibility reminiscent of, but not nearly so wrenching as that of Freddie Mercury, Lambert's packaging puts him closest to camp costume, to Elton John or to Liberace. His digestibility as a rock star puts him closest to a Big Mac.

Ever since Lambert snaked into Michael Jackson's "Black or White" in Week One, he has been careful to keep his sexuality netted away while trolling for rock credibility. When asked for his sexual orientation, he has been coy. His non-answer has further stoked the fire for truth so that finding that truth has become something of a national pastime. With hundreds of thousands of searches for "Is Adam Lambert gay?" being performed hourly, the public must be convinced that somewhere in the bowels of cyberspace, someone has the answer. That the public is seeking confirmation to such a wide-scale degree sounds ridiculous, but then again, this is the same public that kept after Clay Aiken well beyond any semblance of sanity. It's hardly damnable behavior, but it makes one wonder about the richness of intellectual life beyond such queries. If there is to be an answer (and you can be fairly sure there will not be), will it strike us like lightning and catapult us out of our beds?

Absolutely.

Like a boy with a Mr. Microphone and a mirror, Lambert has styled himself into a specious authenticity. He seems vivid against the likes of Jordin Sparks, and yet dismissed contestant Allison Iraheta was the more credible rock performer. There is something about his studied wardrobe and precision haircut that rings false, and yet it is that falseness that makes him perfect fodder for Idol. He is the ideal Idol because he is so ideally constructed, without a shred of creative anarchy. Lacking in artistic desperation, he becomes merely the carrier of sound rather than the sound itself.

This is a win-win for Idol. Lambert is unlike any other contestant in the show's history, and the show has carefully trained its camera not on his dramatic persona but on his theatrical singing, thereby denying what Hollywood calls "the whole package." By abjuring the native eroticism so evident in casual snapshots of the singer, Idol gets half the goods and yet understands that this is more than good enough for the music-buying public.

Lambert's many weeks on Idol show him to be devoid of cockiness, rage, or rebellion, all qualities that have heavily colored the rock genre. His showmanship is so calibrated as to seem the result of hours of practice; by Idol's lights he is the tidy antithesis of rock's bad boys and whatever inner demons or proclivities led them to Wagnerian levels of destruction.

All of this aside, Lambert is a technically proficient singer and supple performer whom one can imagine waltzing into other genres with as much ease, if not as much discussion, as he has into rock. The elastic eerieness of "Ring of Fire" could just as easily be applied to a jazz standard, and the swagger would not be lost on any Tom Jones standard. This is a compliment; it is this quality that separates him from the pack, even if we were not treated to it during the show's run. Doing away with the Broadway night was an error, as was eliminating Big Band night, both of which presumably held little interest and less awareness for the television public. By last week, Lambert was caterwauling, pushing his abilities into sonic scratching on U2's "One." Early hints of subtlety disappeared, and had Danny Gokey not scraped the last note of Aerosmith's "Dream On" as so many sharp fingernails on chalkboard, Lambert's weakness would have been that much more apparent: He nearly veered out of control while digging for gut emotion.

Lambert has knocked back Season Eight as speedily as you can knock back an Extra-Value Meal. You don't parse the meal in terms of gustatory integrity and you don't parse the singer in terms of indie cred. This is true of all Idol winners and runners-up; if one breaks from form it comes as a pleasant surprise (see: Iraheta). Lambert's lack of rock verisimilitude and his fitting, Johnny Bravo-like, into what Idol sees is the rock costume, makes him nearly analogous to Jordin Sparks, winner of Season Six. Although Sparks was a Cheez-Whiz low point for the franchise, Lambert is also identically processed. Both singers learned how to execute a formula and to do it exceptionally well, most of the time.

Idol is a highly commercial show in search of a highly sellable singer. These it has produced, in Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and Chris Daughtry. It's cunning in its design. By convincing us that someone like Lambert is "different" and worthy of legendary rock iconography, Idol is proclaiming its hipness, vitality, and relevancy. It's a good move, but don't be fooled: Before they'd have let us dine out on the likes of Freddie Mercury, they'd have served up Davy Jones of the Monkees, with an apple pie for dessert.

Zip It Up, Boys, Big Brother Is Watching!

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:01:00 +0000

It seems fairly likely that at some point, someone hiking along the rim of the Grand Canyon looked around furtively, lowered his zipper, and had a healthy pee into the gorge. Urinating in national parks is a right of passage, supplanting spitting into the wind as an act of art for young men in dire need of such fruitful seasonal activity as working at a concession stand.

Boys will be boys, but the boys who urinated into Old Faithful had bad aim. Caught live on Web cam by a park visitor, the two miscreants were dismissed from their seasonal jobs and lightly fined. It might even have been possible for the event to be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection, since Old Faithful is one of those active monuments--unlike the Lincoln Memorial--that has a Web cam trained on it constantly.

A day in the life of a concession worker is a challenging and fraught experience. You don't realize how difficult it can be until you wipe up the mess from the child who threw up after drinking four 50-ounce cherry Slurpees. Otherwise, it is the monotony of hot dog, hamburg, wheat or white bun, and Coca-Cola in 43 permutations. If you think this sounds like fun, a summer in a national park would be valuable work experience on your way to becoming Head Hotdog Honcho at Six Flags Over Mid-America*.

So let's say that on the day in question, best pals Ray and Bunny were chewed out by their manager, who reacted poorly to their seeming inability to change the grease used for the park's french fries. This is a fairly serious offense and both boys were given a warning: Uncle Sam doesn't only make money on the park admission, oh, no, but on the concession stand as well. Where's your sense of patriotism, boys? Why, your father and his father before him and maybe even your great-granddaddy would be appalled, not to mention that relative who got his butt whupped by the Lakota at Little Big Horn. Shame!

Ray and Bunny spend the entire day plotting their revenge. They are distinctly non-violent types who are always horrified by government workers who use post offices as shooting galleries. They shed at tear at Oklahoma City and they vowed to wreak havoc on anyone who might overly soil the restrooms near their concession stand.

When the work day is over, they have lost interest in activating their revenge as originally planned (spitting into the mustard), but they realize that they are terribly, terminally bored. Boredom is not supposed to afflict seasonal workers, but it does. Even those with the most exciting seasonal jobs, like running a Skee-Ball stand, suffer from it occasionally. Ray and Bunny get to talking about hot chicks, and how there weren't any today and not yesterday either, only fat Midwestern housewives in polyester pants and helmet hairstyles who, neither boy realizes, are carbon copies of their own wives, thirty years from now.

They count out the money, lock up the stand, and realize that they are in the middle of nowhere. Yellowstone is a big park and the worker dormitories are full of annoying college students majoring in forestry and in parks management. Ray and Bunny quickly realize that if they want to have a good time, they won't be having it anywhere but here; it would take two hours to get out of the park and then where would they be? In the Teton Wilderness, that's where. There's nothing in that part of Wyoming anyway. They could theoretically go up to Bozeman, except that Ranger Rick has been known to fire workers who show up shitfaced for their morning shift.

The realization that they are in one of the remotest corners of America is liberating as well as confining. Freedom has its advantages. When the boys leave work, they fire up a doobie as soon as the parking lot is out of sight and then they meander off the officially delineated trails, which constitutes a serious park infraction. You can't imagine what can happen to someone who goes boldly off the beaten path. If they are ever seen again, it will be as a mangled bit of undigested scalp in the belly of a bear. There have been recent sightings of the Yeti up near the western entrance gate, something the park service has taken great pains to conceal, especially now when the numbers are down due to the economy. Ray and Bunny don't mind taking this risk, they've been doing it every night after work for the past three weeks and they both agree that looking at the Big Dipper while stoned on Durban Poison is a true thing of beauty.

After they get high, Bunny suggests that they continue their nightly ritual of peeing into Old Faithful. The hope is that the act will eventually result in thousands of golden droplets of urine spewing all over families who still believe in America the Beautiful. Take that, tourists! Land of the Pee, Home of the Brave! Bunny shouts as he fires away. They are too ignorant to remember that America was once mostly a land of national pride; they do not recognize Smokey the Bear on sight and they are too young to remember the commercial in which an elderly Indian was made to cry by careless morons who tossed trash out of their cars as they thoughtlessly cruised America's vast interstate highway system.

They fantasize about one day committing a similar act of bodily secretion in Death Valley National Park, where both have applied for next year, not realizing that they might find themselves needing to drink their metabolic waste when they become dehydrated and near death after losing their sense of orientation.

This is where the boys badly miscalculate. You can't go anywhere these days without being observed, monitored, or otherwise spied upon. Think your neighbors aren't aware that you like to spank your wife on Saturday night or that your co-workers aren't hip to your failure to flush your turds down the office toilet? Think again. Nowhere is safe. It is no longer possible to so much as fail to cede your subway seat to an old biddy without being caught and fined. What used to pass for harmless delinquency in the youth of America is now subject to immediate legal repercussion and a criminal record that will ruin any chance of renewing a fishing license or of owning a zero-percent-down condo in a marginal area of suburban Detroit.

What a downer. Instead of gliding effortlessly through young adulthood, Ray and Bunny have come face-to-face with the new reality: Someone is watching and someone will tell; the need to snitch trumps the need to mind one's own business, each and every time.

*Unfortunately rebranded as Six Flags St. Louis.

ASU to Obama: You Are Not a Coffee Achiever

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Sarah Palin Book Deal: Of Moose and (Wo)men

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Books by politicians have never gone out of fashion. A politician is not the normal hack who piles up rejection slips and who spends a good deal of time bitching about literary trends. The politician needn't concern himself with aggravated post-postmodernism or with the difficulties of creating compelling dialogue. He is writing an autobiography, not a novel. It is nearly assured his work will end up on The New York Times Best Seller list, next to such books as Why We Suck by Denis Leary.

Some politicians have written compelling books about compelling lives. For the most part, they are people of distinction and merit, not people who blundered into success by fluke occurrence.

It was by such a fluke that Alaska governor Sarah Palin stumbled onto the McCain Presidential ticket. Now, HarperCollins has signed Palin to a deal; the book will be released in the spring of 2010.

Palin is not Barack Obama. She's not Benjamin Franklin, either. She isn't completely writing her own book, but lightning will most assuredly strike twice in the same place. Palin is still quite capable of a direct hit.

If Palin's writing is anything like her speaking, the co-writer is mandatory despite Palin's journalism degree. HarperCollins assures that the thoughts will be all Palin's.

Palin's life is ripe material for a book, although it is hard to say where she falls in the spectrum of feminist literature. Categorically, she appears to fall somewhere between feminine mystique and cultural feminism. She will no doubt present herself as a modern woman with modern concerns, stressing the overplayed "soccer mom" angle she used to convince the public that she was one with the motherly masses.

In her attempts to convince America of her ordinariness, she inadvertently presented the opportunity for more than a single book, and certainly more than mere autobiography. Her experience is such that the following books could be penned, most from her convoluted recent history:

WHITE CHICK, WHITE HOUSE (Fiction, psychological thriller. Palin foolishly accepts publisher's title after being told that color contrast to current administration is essential to maintaining her dwindling fan base. Publisher uses Palin to prove that white is not drained of color)

THE SHILLA FROM WASILLA: (Non-fiction. A ghostwritten account of Palin's brief tenure as Vice Presidential nominee and Republican Party shill)

NO SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE ALASKAN! (Poetry, therapeutic. Bristol and Sarah Palin collaborate on a series of villanelles dealing with mother-daughter conflicts and women's hidden hatred of men.)

OF MOOSE AND (WO)MEN: (Fiction, novel. The struggle of an average-looking and outdoorsy girl to homestead in Alaska and simultaneously compete in beauty pageants. She loses the crown but wins a prize for growing a monster cabbage)

THE SEDUCTION OF SARAH (Fiction, romance. Sarah is seduced and ruined by a powerful and dangerous cabal of conservative Floridians)

LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT GUN: (Non-fiction, instruction. A shooting manual and guide to cosmetic application for housewives whose husbands may develop a wandering eye)

ALASKA AND ME (Fiction, travel. A harried female executive leaves Anchorage for the wilderness and falls in love with both Mt. Denali and the bus driver who has made the ultimate sacrifice of driving tourists around it)

Palin has covered a lot of ground. Alaska is a big place. So is the national political stage. She has, in less than a year, excited the landscape with amusement and alarm. There is no common thread running through the narrative. It takes some doing to combine firearms with soccer and Wasilla with Tahari, not to mention the confusion with basic geography and the inability to answer straightforward questions about which newspapers one reads. This deficiency has since been smartly rectified. Palin is quoted as saying that she has read and admired the autobiography of Katherine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post. This is a clever choice to cite; Graham neatly verged into the feminist movement of the 1960s after overcoming a self-doubt that is apparently outside of Palin's experience. And why should doubt go hand in hand with gender? She was never a quivering wreck in the face of greater knowledge. She has pressed her (red) suit with peculiar virtues that either are or are not Alaskan, and if they aren't, they weren't going to bring in the big tourist bucks anyway. Her book will be more successful than her bid. People may move to Alaska because of it. More than that will seek hunting licenses. Young girls may enter beauty pageants, and the rest of us may do something disdainful, like re-reading Plato's Republic.

Miss California: And the Winner Is...

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:02:00 +0000

Lest anyone think that the Miss California USA organization takes the same view of gay marriage as current Miss California Carrie Prejean, it has issued a public service announcement stating that it believes...in the beauty of California. The "beauty of California" encompasses freedom of speech (spoken respectfully), open and honest communication (communicated respectfully), and diversity of opinion, opined respectfully. Oh, and love.

Employing current and former titleholders, the organization that was unable to determine if Ms. Prejean should be permitted to keep her crown quickly engaged in damage control. "I believe..." the titleholders say, echoing the first two words of Ms. Prejean's infamous statement of personal dogma. As one would expect, the attractive and well-(if shortly) spoken women all believe in the same non-offensive, crowd-pleasing things. Also, isn't California great?

Implied in the ad is that Ms. Prejean wasn't respectful when she joined forces with the National Organization for Marriage, directly breaching her contract, and probably not when she posed topless, either.

You can see the creative minds at work on this exercise: What do the folks at the California pageant organization believe in, anyway? We all know what Ms. Prejean believes in, but what about past winners? For God's sake, what about the nascent and corruptible value system of Miss California Teen USA? Best to come out with a counterstatement to the intellectual path Prejean is ripping over there with the religious libertarians of NOM.

Everyone thinks California is a little kooky anyway. It's home to Perez Hilton, who, had Prejean kept her mouth shut following the pageant, might have found his tiara in the gutter. Hilton treated his role as a pageant judge disrespectfully when he rushed away to video blog his response to Prejean's non-answer about what tack individual states should take on the gay marriage issue.

It's all very confusing.

Round One: At the Miss USA pageant, Miss California Carrie Prejean is asked a question by Perez Hilton, blogger famous for brilliance in self-promotion, if not in syntactic or artistic skill. Hilton asks what tack Ms. Prejean thinks states should take on the gay marriage issue. Prejean, apparently not grasping the question, fumbles through an answer that she (in her country, in her family) does not believe in "opposite" marriage. Aside from a few audience boos, the matter would have dropped off the radar in a few days had not Hilton used the moment to record a scorching video blog in which he calls Ms. Prejean a bitch. That alone resulted in Prejean's being called upon to defend herself on the national stage, over and over.

Prejean could have taken this one simply by staying quiet or by saying she had misunderstood the question in a moment of high anxiety. Hilton took Prejean's answer as a personal attack and the matter quickly devolved into a discussion of Prejean's assumed homophobia. However, given the public distaste for Hilton and the rarity of a pageant judge attacking a contestant ad hominem, Hilton would shortly have run out of steam when Lindsay Lohan or Jessica Simpson was caught going commando or was found to be pregnant by a hunky nightclub bouncer named Manuel.

Although pageant panels have always been of dubious expertise , assigning a seat to the vulgar Hilton was an enormous mistake. Still, Donald Trump has used the blogger as an expert on Celebrity Apprentice, so why not here?

Winner: California, for reinforcing the dumb-blonde stereotype. Both Prejean and Hilton qualify.

Round Two: Ms. Prejean, for unknown reasons, gets into bed with the religious libertarians at NOM, who had recently frightened a good portion of America with an advertisement called "A Gathering Storm."

Winner: The National Organization for Marriage, for the additional opportunity to scare the bejesus out of us.

Round Three: A topless photo of Prejean surfaces, wearing a pair of pink panties that someone at Victoria's Secret can date to the year 2006, sometime after Prejean claims to have taken the photo. Three more photos are said to be floating around, waiting to be loosed upon an eager public.

Winner: Men who keep Victoria's Secret catalogues in the back of their closets.

Round Four: The Miss California USA organization calls a press conference in which it ultimately passes the responsibility for Prejean's fate to Donald Trump, who owns the Miss USA franchise. The organization's public relations firm, Neal Public Relations, pens a press release that shows a literacy level only slightly greater than that of Perez Hilton. Whoever wrote it has evidently never been to the City by the Bay: "From the sandy beaches of San Diego to the beautiful peaks of Yosemite, from the farm land outside Fresno to fisherman's warf in San Francisco..."

Also on the agenda is the reintroduction of a Beauty of California ambassador, a title quickly and cagily given to Ms. Prejean's runner-up. "When our state title holder's are unavailable," it reads, "the ambassador will support our message and hammer home our state's strengths and diversity throughout the state and beyond."

Why was the ambassador program abandoned in the first place? How convenient to have it at hand now.

Winner: Literacy advocates.

It shoujld also be noted that California pageant executive co-director Keith Lewis realizes that Prejean is as dim as Hilton has claimed. Lewis states that Prejean is a victim of NOM, which has encouraged her to violate the conditions of her contract without understanding what she was doing. Lewis provides an apologia for Prejean, who, if she were that dim, shouldn't have been allowed in the contest to begin with. There was the possibility that she was not mentally competent enough to understand that she'd be asked to parade in a bikini. How about the boob job? Did she understand what she was getting into there? Does she know the things can leak and cause autoimmune disorders?

While no one suspects contestants in the Miss USA system of intellectual competence, it is amusing to note that the organization has now fallen back on what it suggests is the outright incompetence of Prejean. Otherwise, they seem to feel, they are held in a bad light for letting a bonehead get that far in the first place.

As it stands, Donald Trump is to decide Prejean's fate today. Trump has years of experience in such matters, including bouts with Apprentices both celebrity and non-. Who better than he to judge morality, mental acumen, flagrant abuse of pretty straightforward contracts and implanted breasts?

Winner: Wanda Sykes, for bumping Prejean out of headline news for a few short hours on an otherwise uneventful day.

Nipples, Wedgies, and Burgers: The Burger King Kingon

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Suppose that McDonald's grew tired of fighting the coffee wars with Starbucks and decided instead to reinvent its icon as a modern provocateur with a pervy streak. Kids today are no longer amused by mere clowns, especially clowns that make nice and commit charitable acts. Kids today want to explore confrontation, especially with a perverse undertone, or so it seems from the latest set of Burger King ads.

Starring the Burger King King as a "Kingon," the advertisements are merchandise tie-ins with the recently released Star Trek movie. Most of the spots involve the "Kingon Defense Academy" and feature more concept than technique, no matter what the "defense academy" claims. The ads instruct the unwary how to avoid the "Neon Nurple" and a "Warp-Five Wedgie" and also how to deliver low blows to male genitals. In the event that "Nurple" isn't clear as "nipple," there's a second ad that forthrightly delivers what is known as the "Kingon Nipple Pinch."

The ads are silly, commanding, and are enormous social signifiers.

The Burger King King wasn't always a sadist. A year or so ago, he was a serious lover, perhaps bisexual in orientation. Before that--long before that--he did magic tricks, which made him far safer than McDonald's felonious Hamburglar.

Then Crispin Porter + Bogusky took over. The Miami-based ad agency realized the King as a freakish plastic head on a middling Caucasian body. Moreover, they foregrounded the King's meatier side and later his kinky streak, forever subverting the idea that advertising mascots should be do-gooders who uphold the values of the Eisenhower era. CP + B couched the BK mascot in such a way that Ronald McDonald seemed contemptibly timid and probably neutered. It was a brilliant contradiction and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Every now and again, we need to be reminded that we have a strong and proud prudish streak and that we are nothing like the Europeans, whose habits we might find excitingly suspect. This is an American imperative and as much as we enjoy the antics of the Germans or the Dutch and like to sneak voyeuristic peeks over our shoulders, it's still a remote experience. We may want to aggressively twist someone's nipples or heave their pants up so high that they end up cleaved, but we like to keep these private aggressions...private. Marrying the thrill of possibly deviant (and hostile) eroticism with Star Trek drinking glasses edges the border of no-man's-land advertising, and it also confirms that kids aren't kids any longer. They spring from the womb aged 20, wearing Axe deodorant and generally not lacking in a violent point of view.

CP + B's gambit has made the King a childhood cynosure, a guide who debunks any rationalization that children should be kept from adult vagaries. As much as The Three Stooges were blamed for inciting the children of the 1930s-1960s to explore their violent sides, today's iteration of the Burger King King invites early concupiscence and novelty kink. There is absolutely no distinction made between a five-year-old and a young adult male, a strange fact of modern society that CP + B brilliantly grasps. It's not about the Star Trek merchandising any more than the Subservient Chicken campaign was about chicken fries. Those are the false premises. What's really going on, beyond the surface wackiness, is a disquisition on assumption. The ads are the most truthful things on TV, or would be if they weren't so bizarre.

Wendy's had a famous ad that asked "Where's the beef?" It featured elderly women and the concern was the shrinking weight of competitors' hamburgers. Today, Burger King proves that the beef is of little importance--it's our urgent need to have it our sexually combatant way, no matter if we are barely out of training pants.

Is Adam Lambert Gay? Does Danny Gokey Love Jesus?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:02:00 +0000

So much for the revitalization of American Idol. It was rumored last year that the franchise might lose Ryan Seacrest, but instead it found songwriter Kara DioGuardi, whose relatively prolix comments wreaked havoc with DVRs. Idol also changed up its opening montage and debuted an awkward, Vegas-style judges' introduction. All this was done to facelift the franchise, which is now nearing the end of its eighth season.

The season has been notable mainly for Adam Lambert, the flamboyant screecher who last week found himself in the "bottom two," quotes necessary for reasons of semantics and irony. As Lambert's fans gasped in fear, the fearful falsetto of Matt Girard sang itself out on the Idol stage. This elimination left Lambert, Kris Allen, Allison Iraheta, and Danny Gokey as the final four.

Season Eight has mostly mirrored Season Four, where clear favorite Carrie Underwood enjoyed an inane manufactured rivalry with Bo Bice. No one has emerged from the Top Ten to threaten a presumed shoo-in or to play electric guitar with basic competence. The appearance of such a threat last year cost David "Archie" Archuleta the title. There has not been a "shocking elimination" (and this is the week for it if one is to happen) and no contestant has beat-boxed his way to the runner-up slot.

There has been no Jordin Sparks and no Taylor "Hot Tics" Hicks. Despite some statistical evidence that Allison Iraheta has an increasing voting bloc, Season Eight seems to be spooling towards an Adam Lambert/Danny Gokey finale. The bland Gokey has not been in the Bottom Three, yet is he really a threat to Lambert?

Such a showdown seems anticlimactic, and yet here is a stunning opportunity for Idol to have its most electrifying finale ever. This is the year for the Pagan/Christian Smackdown.

What a beautifully brutal encounter this would be! This is the time to let the real Adam Lambert loose upon the world. Watch as he taunts and torments the square choirboy Gokey! Finally, the flaming backdrop so artlessly deployed for Idol's "rockers" can be used appropriately.

This will be a television first, a battle so spectacular that it will rock the foundation of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. Ratings game? They'll go through the roof. Batting his feathery wings, Gokey descends from Heaven into the pit of Hell, where Lambert squirms in abbreviated boy-shorts and does things with his tongue so outrageous that right-wing mothers grab for the phone, not to vote for Gokey but to call 1-800-DEARGOD. Meantime, those of us who have suspected Lambert of dialing back his true persona roll wildly about on our living room floors in ecstatic pornographic convulsions. If this isn't enough excitement for one evening, we thrill to Lambert skipping around with a burning Yule log. Gokey, meanwhile, realizes he has a hard act to follow and turns into a fearsome God whose most masterful acts are not those of charity but of condemnation.

Surprisingly enough, Gokey's act is every bit as terrifying as Lambert's.

It's the tightest contest ever.

The entire nation will be shocked by the daring of American Idol to venture into this controversial territory and to do so in such a bold and uncompromising manner. Initially storyboarded as a confrontation between Good and Evil or Straight Against Gay, the cagey Paula Abdul proposes that only Sanctimonious versus Satan will do. Idol has been slouching along since Season Four and now must purge itself of the past. It becomes impossible to get a ticket; it is rumored that Zac Efron has a whopping three and that Miley Cyrus has been denied admittance. Nationwide, battle lines have been drawn. Fox News goes into a pietous frenzy, as does Miss California Carrie Prejean. Mothers turn against sons, husbands turn against wives, playground battles erupt and someone sets fire to the headquarters of the National Organization for Marriage, which retaliates with the blatantly hostile commercial "Burn, Baby, Burn," featuring a close-up of Adam Lambert's crotch. Other Gokey supporters who also happen to be proponents of Proposition 8 create a bumpersticker featuring a picture of Gokey and the slogan "Setting the World Straight." It is an immediate sell-out but nowhere near the runaway success of a Lambert-themed cheeseburger dressed with wads of goopy mayonnaise.

For one brilliant night, we forget about Dick Cheney, about waterboarding, about disappointment in Obama, about swine flu and about outsourcing. We sit mesmerized in front of our televisions, our bored and restless eyes fixated on the magnificent spectacle. For the first time, some of us experience the warm throb of corruption and like it. Streets are empty. Alligators roam the sewers. Telecommunications are paralyzed by frenzied callers and non-enemy combatants take this opportunity to gently bomb the Lincoln Tunnel; this non-lethal act of violence permanently separates the West Side from Weehawken and the bilge from the boroughs, much to the delight of certain New Yorkers and those spare-the-air types. On the West Coast, the trembling of Los Angelenos causes that city and all that surrounds it to slip gracelessly out to sea, trailing Perez Hilton behind it like a jellyfish after the Titanic.

Simon Cowell makes good on his threats to quit, realizing that the show will never top itself. This is a good decision for Cowell, who understands the limits of excess. He retires to Cornwall, where he learns to make an outstanding stargazey pie. The flash-frozen mackerel savoury becomes Britain's largest food export and is responsible for saving the lives, if not the breath, of millions starving worldwide. Cowell is now a major philanthropist. Later, complaints will be uttered that Cowell has turned the humble and oily mackerel into a delicacy rivaling the fatty belly of tuna, but the Japanese have yet to voice any objection.

Randy Jackson, blinded at the finale by a small-scale suitcase bomb planted by religious fundamentalists, becomes a monosyllabic local attraction who sits outside the Kodak Theatre shouting "Aw-ight!" at uncaring German tourists. Shortly after Season Eight ends, he is forced to sign an agreement that he will never again say "You worked it out" unless he is referring to mathematical equations. If asked, he will tell you that he is happy and that the only time he uses the term "Dawg" is in reference to the errant mutts hiking on the hydrants of Hollywood Boulevard.

Kara "Who?" DioGuardi becomes a legend when she wins an Academy Award for the soundtrack to the Disney feature "Dyke Academy III, The Butch Years of Our Lives." She is invited back for the ninth season but declines due to an unspecified itch that causes her to squirm as much as she speaks.

Paula, bless her, is finally recognized for the savant she really is. Her prowess with the physics of the intergalactic medium was carefully hidden from the viewing public during her long tenure on Idol.

This is the only satisfactory finale. All memories of Blake Lewis are erased. We feel cleansed, defiled, rapturous, smutty. We are united in horror and wonder, in peace and war, in beauty and ugliness, in love and in hate. We are, for one night only, a free nation.

Retiree Stimulus: It's Later Than You Think

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:13:00 +0000

Those economic stimulus payouts are really very cleverly designed, aren't they? The idea is that the recipients of the payouts--the latest being the 50 million retirees who will receive $250.00 each--will blow the money right back in the economy's direction. In the case of the retiree payouts, the anticipated windfall to the economy is in the neighborhood of 13 billion dollars. Thirteen billion dollars is a whopping sum by anyone's estimate, but taken in individual $250.00 units it seems little more than mad money, and mad money is, by definition, money used impulsively. In today's sour economy, that impulse is probably to pay off debt and to eat. What it isn't is substantial enough to do much of anything else with. It's just enough to spend without guilt or to buy 20 six-packs of beer but not enough to save Detroit or to buy a condo in one of those developments that are the empty concrete sentinels of the Florida coastline. That's not the point. It is enough to toss something towards an overdue bill or to toss 35 Hooverish chickens into a pot, stuffing and green bean casserole aside.

What would happen if those recipients who were born before 1940 stuck the $250.00 under the mattress? That would be a bit more than five million dollars that didn't go back into the economy. Somewhere around 20 million of the recipients are the children of the Depression. Had their parents received a similar payout, it would have been in the neighborhood of sixteen dollars apiece, which doesn't seem like much today, but it was and is enough to stop someone from starving for a few months if one is a conservative eater. That still helps the economy, whereas tossing it into a tin can in the closet does not. According to prevailing economic theory, those in the worst shape spend and those with assumed financial flexibility provided by a job do not.

The deputy administrator of the Social Security Administration, Mary Glenn-Croft, equated helping the economy with the beneficiaries getting an assist with daily living expenses. How dull that sounds. It sounds much more exciting to help the economy by luxuriating in the good things in life rather than by buying blood pressure medication. Seniors are now the designated spenders. The economy is hurting, bleeding, dying, withering; it is bruised, battered, agonized, and aching. Seniors, consider yourselves hired: It is now your job to provide relief.

At last reckoning and despite metaphoric efforts to the contrary, the economy isn't mortal. It can't go blind, walk with a limp, or, for that matter, die. It doesn't take risks even as people take great risks with it. The retirees parked on the edge of mortality are encouraged, by means of incitement to spend, not to save. And why should they? The lethargy of saving is a luxury for the young, young being anyone who is not yet "retirement age" and who has not yet been laid off.

This is what we have come to. Our youngers have failed us. They didn't spend. They didn't make use of that extra few bucks in their weekly paycheck. We are now asking people who may have distant memories of a very difficult era in American economic history to spend governmental mad money on the silly pursuits of normal living expenses, until the money runs out. Buy those frivolous chickens, throw in some celery, enjoy yourself on the banality of glaucoma medication; the message is that it's later than you think.

Will Strip for Cash: Change We Need

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:07:00 +0000

Take heart. CNN Money reports that certain Fortune 100 companies are hiring, including Wal-Mart, which has jobs so numerous they are numbered in the "thousands." Wal-Mart is a whole-hog employer in these less than meaty times and is seeking employees from cashiers to pharmacists to staff new stores. If the Great American Big Box isn't your thing, then there's the smaller box of Bank of America, which is unironically seeking wealth managers (and other white-collar workers).

Somewhere in between these two extremes is UPS, which needs more of the guys in brown to handle our delivery needs, and Lowe's, which has a garden department and might theoretically attract botany students in search of a weekend job and a 10% discount on Burpee seeds.

And for the genetically gifted or surgically bettered, there is The Body Shop, West Hollywood's famous strip club. The Body Shop, reopening after a fire in December, has put out the call for five hundred strippers. Five hundred strippers is 350 more than the 150 (clothed) office workers sought by Hewlett Packard. It's also a job that pays, by the club's estimate, up to one thousand dollars a shift. Granted, a job this lucrative depends upon hefty tipping and making nice to flâneurs, but isn't this good news for the beleaguered economy?

The particulars of the jobs aren't all that demanding when one considers that the aforementioned wealth-management job is not only one of the riskiest of the open positions, it also requires advanced knowledge of complex financial issues. Both of the jobs, however, require experience in dealing with high-net-worth clientele.

The news that The Body Shop needs five hundred strippers is something to exalt over. We may be despondent over the present economic climate, but The Body Shop knows that the good people of Los Angeles are not suffering so much that they cannot afford a lap dance. And what better antidote to depression than a meditation on carnality?

While it's tempting to cite Gypsy Rose Lee as a trailblazer for strippers becoming mainstream, the truth is that the venerable dancer performed in burlesque, which is quite a different thing than what The Body Shop offers. And yet, strippers have become so ho-hum commonplace that even their utility as rock-and-roll decoration is 20 years past notability. There was a time in Los Angeles when having a stripper girlfriend or having strippers dance on stage with your band was de rigueur. Even the saddest of bands knew that at a minimum one needed imaginary stripper friends.

Somewhere over the last 20 years, stripping has become wholesome. Pole-dancing classes are taught at university and the trade in six-inch platform shoes is brisk. Hollywood stars install poles in their bedrooms to be used not by visiting call girls but by their wives.

The Body Shop is the ideological showcase of a happy new economy, at least in Hollywood. We need light entertainment in times like these, even if it collectively costs eighty-four times more than a ticket to 17 Again. Who needs Hollywood anyway? Their best movies recently have been violent ones, and television isn't much better, not with the non-event that is this year's American Idol and the ongoing fascination with Rachael Ray.

Even those who find stripping somewhat less than emotionally salubrious might agree that a stripper of a Body Shop caliber is more pleasing to the eye than Bill O'Reilly.

Those who struggle to buy a frozen Banquet entree will be cheered by the fact that a hard-working Body Shop stripper can singlehandedly make a great contribution to the flagging marketplace, just as President Obama encouraged. Someone has to give us this hope, even as the rest of us are suspended in an act of Beckettian waiting and Fox News fear-mongering.

Things are looking up. Maybe the change we need is anatomical, not political.

Lindsay Lohan: Die Laughing?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:01:00 +0000

When you hit rock bottom--by Hollywood standards--and have nowhere else to go but self-mockery, you post a video of yourself on Funny or Die in which you spoof those irritating eHarmony ads, with (presumably) a full understanding that you are exactly the type of drug-using, binge-drinking calamity that eHarmony (and Hollywood) wants absolutely nothing to do with.

If this opening sentence seems too excitable, it is only because there is no other way in which to describe Lindsay Lohan's latest media outing. There was the limelight of the lesbian break-up, then the plaintive confessional in Us Magazine. This week, it's the eHarmony lampoon.

The personal-ad lampoon is presently playing to millions, or far more than saw Lohan's last film outing (I Know Who Killed Me, seen by a grand total of 857 Lohan fans, all of whom were later treated for post-traumatic stress disorder due to repeat exposure to the porn-gore flick). Lohan has been trying to kill herself, rather publicly, with some rather shrewd attention if not any particular insight.

Other highlights of Lohan's career include a DUI arrest, three stints in rehab, and then really nothing if you discount the surprise romance with Samantha Ronson. After the recent demise of the relationship, Lohan nimbly returned to public spectacle, apparently gauging the market for both sympathy and sales potential.

Or at least this is how Hollywood sees things, but this is only because Lohan has kept up appearances. She does not look like Nick Nolte and her hair is in far better shape than Phil Spector's.

The eHarmony clip might be seen as what marketing professionals call an "integrated activity" whose goal is to place the product in a desirable position. Self-exploitation is a zippy part of this activity, even if the self being exploited is enormously friable.

It's not a bad move, insofar as the shifting of perspectives is concerned. Lohan is hostage to a certain reputation, so why not celebrate it? If the clip lacks acid humor, it still shows that Lohan is becoming less mawkish in her attempts to publicly deface herself. Lohan might seem to be lost in the world, but you imagine her not quite seeing herself as perishable. Instead, she turns out to be someone who is fully aware of the absurdity of the eHarmony ads, which is really sort of hopeful. Hooray, you think, Lohan isn't really as desensitized by cocaine as you previously thought.

Some might decry the clip as fatuous, but this is missing the point. Hollywood is already taking notice of the numbers. This demonstrates that Lohan is smart enough to abandon one tactic for another when the first failed to receive positive encomium. Lohan understands that only the present minute counts. The blink-and-you-miss-it quality of modern communication operates in favor of the well imagined. Lohan has quickly changed from a negative shape into a positive one, thanks to the new point of view. That this will only last three minutes is a testament to the tragic effects of social media: We know too much, too soon. And are more bored than ever before.

Lohan failed at confessional, because she wasn't all that interesting a confessor to begin with. Sure, she was more interesting than the homeless guy who claimed to be Peter Criss of Kiss, but she hasn't reached the apogee of confessional, which spot is held by Judy Garland and her vituperative autobiographical tapes. So she switched it up and as of today has become medium-interesting, but only because she was poking fun not at herself but at a symbol of romantic mediocrity: dating someone who is just like you are.

In Lohan's case, this might be just the ticket; you can tell she wants more drama out of life, as should we all if we would just stop whining that our lives are dull and do something about it.

Is Adam Lambert Gay? Is Liberace Alive and Well and Living in Des Moines?

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Here's a piece of old news: Much of America is consumed with the burning (and apparently very pertinent) question of American Idol contestant Adam Lambert's sexuality. To a lesser degree, America is likewise concerned with what Lambert's sexuality might mean to the American Idol franchise should Lambert be crowned the Season 8 winner.

Neither question is terribly interesting. The New York Times ran a column on this hot topic, as the contestant himself continues to perform in what looks like upscale Hot Topic apparel. The Times piece mentioned Liberace, who spent the better part of the seventies under the tabloid media glare as he feebly attempted to present himself as heterosexual. Lambert hasn't presented as anything other than someone with a poser's taste in stage attire; he'd be laughed out of the Lower Haight and probably out of the Folsom Street Fair as well. San Franciscans take their leather garb very, very seriously. But San Francisco is also home to hundreds of Adam Lamberts, only they don't sing nearly so well and their falsettos sound more like acts of kinky scrotum torture than they do the eerie banshee wail that is Lambert's gift and genius.

Lambert immediately polarized the show's fans. Fan forums took on the passionate language of political forums, with very little middle ground. In fairly short order, pictures of Lambert that linked him strongly to gay eroticism popped up, and Lambert became a new media sensation.

The question of sexuality is the same question that plagued Season 2 contestant Clay Aiken, whose attempts at obfuscating his own orientation proved that ultimately, such coeval questions are really finite ones. In the end, the question has been more important than the answer.

So what if Lambert appears onstage in a pale-pink aura? Idol fans and the media both suffer the chronic condition of being hard-wired to seek scandal, and when they find it, their nervous systems erupt in delight. In the case of Lambert, there was a lot to find. Pictures of Lambert kissing other men, pictures of Lambert in wigs, in feathers, in messy glitter eyeshadow surfaced almost immediately. There isn't much that is hidden about Lambert's visual grammar, just as there wasn't all that much to ponder about Antonella Barba's.

The truly provocative thing about Lambert is how much he has had to tone down in order to appear on America's No 1. television program. American Idol must seem like another universe to Lambert, one in which a white-bread roster of singers plays by a very specific set of performance rules. There is no crotch-cupping of the type Lambert did at an Art 4 Life benefit in 2008, there is no mincing, bumping, or grinding, and there is certainly no hint that the male Idols might have very arousable...packages.

Idol is a forum for most contestants to chase tin dreams. Unlike most, Lambert can and does sing, organically and efficiently. He might even win the thing, unless his is the most shocking elimination in the history of the series, a case scenario in which the mostly uninteresting Matt Giraud takes the title and goes on to an exciting career in obscurity.

The everyday reality of Idol is that it is a show for mainstream America. Lambert is an accumulation of many flamboyant elements, and watching how many of these are permissible on the show is a fascinating business. Tight pants are in, tongues are out. Exploring the volume of one's voice is allowed, feeling for the tumescence of one's male member is a no-no.

Lambert is the anti-bourgeois contestant whose make-believe is being heightened by the strictures of the Idol franchise. There is no greater authority on fashion idiom than the stylists who okay Allison Iraheta as a grotesque Pollyanna and lace Lambert into pants that would have had Ed Sullivan in deep spiritual crisis.

One doesn't get the sense, however, that Lambert feels in any way that he is betraying himself by playing down his more peacockish tendencies. On the contrary, he seems to have gone along with this cheerfully, even losing his radioactive maquillage in favor of simple black eyeliner and acne cover-up. Gone also are tiny shorts that left little to the imagination and anything more controversial than what would label Lambert a rock-and-roll poseur.

Still, the potential for future "misbehavior" is tantalizing, and that's what makes Lambert the show's most exciting contestant ever. Lambert doesn't look like someone who molts easily; even in his mall finery he is still in full plumage.

The question really should be: Is Adam Lambert a revanchist and what strides will he take to recover lost ground? Will the real Adam Lambert please stand up? How big is his...morals clause?

God Created Man, Man Caused Disasters

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:01:00 +0000

It is a relief to know that we no longer have enemies and that we no longer make war. We now make "overseas contingency operations," the "operations" sounding like something surgical and precise. We also do not militarily surge (like the tide), we...haven't quite decided what it is we do when we send troops "overseas," and while what we do might be tide-like in its swell, it is likewise unnamed even as it increases and crosses over the ocean.

We now have "man-caused disasters" instead of terrorist attacks. The new euphemism--however less than belletristic--serves notice on the use of "disaster" the way most English-speaking countries use it, as a broad and casual term for something that didn't quite pass muster. A bad Internet date is a "complete disaster," as is spilling a creamy caramel latte onto your white linen slacks. "Disaster" in its most common modern usage is then diminished and, if not reversible, is at least recoverable. There will be other dates. Drycleaners are ubiquitous, especially in Manhattan.

The Obama administration equates disaster to attack and does away with terrorists entirely. They no longer exist and it follows that we then cannot be terrorized. We cannot be "mannized" either, but this is outside the rhetorical scope. Or is it?

Terrorists are now "man," metaphysically, as in God vs. Man, Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Nature. Man vs. Himself. Terrorists are human beings, all good men coming to the aid of their party, even if that party is one to which we never again wish to be invited.

Since we can no longer be attacked, we now must be disastrophied. Again, an impossibility. It is the imprecision of language that is in atrophy.

Man-caused disasters are separate from Acts of God (or natural disasters). Legally, Acts of God are funny things, at least in the insurance industry. A flood, as original an Act of God as is conceivable, is not recoverable from the Hartford. Men often fail to read their homeowner's policies closely and pay out of their own pockets. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in selecting the term "man," you wonder if the euphemism's author chose it specifically for its oppositional qualities.

We could be catastrophized or calamatized, but we cannot be disastrophied, which makes the selection of "disasters" seem unbalanced and impossible, lacking in a dynamic flow-through. It is purposeless language without a natural endpoint, whether hostile or not. Worse, it sounds like bushwa propaganda designed to rid America of any notion that we might, at times, engage in warfare. It also strongly implies that even a nation perceived as war-mongering can suddenly become bland.

On the other hand, the new lexicon removes defiance and aggression from the language. This might not be so detrimental as it appears. The language of the Bush administration had the unsettling thrust of mid-century American hegemony. We surged, we attacked, we...neutralized.

Today, there is no true north with language. We have now abandoned one language for another, trading too much emphasis for too little elucidation.

We may not want "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, but we are presently at risk of becoming both enemies and prisoners of our own language.

Image: Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam

Fleeced!

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:01:00 +0000

There are some benefits to living in a small town. You are never invited to amateur productions of Mother Courage, arguments rarely erupt over the correct temperature at which to roast squab, and a traffic jam means a box of strawberries has fallen off a truck at the intersection of SR 20 and SR 51.

On the other hand, living in a small town has its drawbacks. Replacing a tire on a popular model of Japanese SUV involves having the tire rolled in from Atlanta, "upscale" and "J. C. Penney" are synonymous, and you get left out--by reasons of geography, not good sense-of the Snuggie pub-crawl craze. This last is reason enough to leave the air potato vines behind and move immediately to Chicago.

You've probably seen the Snuggie, a reasonably functional blanket with arms, on its infomercial. If you missed that advertisement, the cast and crew of The Today Show donned the garment in what can only be deemed an act of mass hysteria. Or perhaps you bumbled into one of over 300 YouTube parodies while looking for a rerun of F-Troop. If you still don't know what a Snuggie is, then you live somewhere frigid in Europe and have chicer ways of staying warm in wintertime.

The Snuggie isn't a new concept. Zip-front, quilted body bags with arms have been around since at least the 1970s. Snuggie loses the zipper and allows the user mobility and bathroom breaks, something its predecessor did not. Infomercials aren't a new concept either, only the neologistic term is. Late-night television in the seventies was peppered with ads for Ronco's slicing, dicing food processors, as well as for Ronco's egocentric broadcasting system, the Mr. Microphone. Watching these ads 30 years later, you are struck by two things: Ron Popeil is smarter than you are and despite the speed at which technology changes, the infomercial is still plodding along at a fuel-saving 30 mph. The production values of the Snuggie spot are virtually interchangeable with those of the Popeil Pocket Fisherman.

Somewhere in Beverly Hills, Ron Popeil is screaming with jealousy.

The Snuggie infomercial hawks the synthetic fleece, cozily wearable blankets as a two-fer, for $19.95. In classic Popeil fashion, there is a gift with purchase: a clip-on book light. Presumably, this light has been included in the hopes of encouraging literacy. The blanket, which is available in burgundy, royal blue, or sage, resembles a monk's robe in style, if not always in color.

It is part of the human condition to seek out those vivifying things that will aid in identification and acknowledgment by a group, a trait that is known in psychological circles as "collective behavior." This is the behavior that fuels a fad or a trend, and the list of fads that have us behaving collectively and embarrassingly is cheerfully long. Apparel is only part of this list:

Members Only jackets
Pet Rocks
Primal Scream Therapy
Fern bars
The Fonz
The Hustle
Furries

Although fads tend not to cross classification boundaries, the Snuggie seems to cross not only the Rubicon but several lines of mania. Somewhere, there are people who bought the Snuggie for its intended purpose; they are part of a growing minority. The remainder of the Snuggies have been purchased expressly for the purpose of belonging to a growing cult whose sole mission it is to have a rollicking good time while shrouded in something that makes no apologies for not really resembling the coat of a wool-bearing animal. The Snuggie is totemic (like Pet Rocks), wearable (Earth Shoes), behavioral (goldfish-eating), functional (fondue pots), alarming (the Red Scare), and, in its unintended incarnation, of dubious value to society as a whole. There are also similarities to Big Mouth Billy Bass in the alarming way the Snuggie explosion has detonated in places that ought to know better, like San Francisco. But these are tough times and tough times call for desperate and revolutionary measures.

In the case of the Snuggie, a fast onset of blanket fever has emerged. There are over 500 Facebook fan groups and dedicated Snuggie Web sites. And then there is the guerrilla takeover, the storming of the city, that is the Snuggie Pub Crawl, which involves the anarchic act of getting brazenly shit-faced while looking like an unmade bed. In our present time of troubles, such activities can only be said to improve culture, much as the Ottoman millet system improved and protected the culture of the Orthodox Greeks.

Where do we go from here? Must there be a response to this mania, an overreaching and dull intellectual effort to counteract the madness that is Snuggie mania? Shall we sit down and discuss the worst of French cinema or shall we acknowledge defeat when we see it, accept it, and be menaced in good cheer?

The Roar of the Dandelion/The Smell of My Overgrown Lawn

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:01:00 +0000

The Roar of the Dandelion / The Smell of My Overgrown Lawn

By David Ballard

I share a driveway with a couple of neighbors. It is a dusty lime-rock road that meanders lazily through a stand of woods and leads to a 15 acre tract of country land on which the three of us have built our homes. "It bothers me to see these sticks on the ground!" says one of my neighbors after stopping his fancy riding mower with its attached over-piled garden cart to chat and seemingly chastise. He had obviously just picked up all of the fallen small branches on either side of the entry lane and was hauling them off to his burn pile to join the heaping collection of other sticks he has collected from elsewhere on the property. "It's pretty common for sticks to fall on the ground in the woods," I replied. "Well, it bothers me every time I drive by one and see it there," he asserted. "Doesn't bother me at all," I countered, ignoring his implication that I should perhaps assist him with his obsession. "But," I continued, "Wouldn't it be better for the environment if you just tossed those sticks into the woods rather than burning them?" My neighbor just stared at me blankly, completely unable to comprehend such an alien way of thinking. "You can't just throw sticks into the woods," he insisted and to stymie my ready reply that sticks naturally return to soil in the woods all the time, he immediately blathered, "When you gonna mow your lawn? Its two feet tall!" I turned to look at my "lawn" and saw a combination of seeding grass stalks, clovers, clumps of spiderwort with clusters of small blue flowers, numerous wild gladiola plants (that were two feet tall), irises, amaryllis, hanging wisteria and a myriad assortment of small and colorful wild flowers, some of which I don't even know the name of but particularly enjoy. "I love my flower garden," I retorted, "especially the dandelions. Don't you?" My neighbor's mower roared and reared; the pile of sticks sprung high into the air above the garden cart and fell back down again, whaaappp! Lurching forward, my lawn Scrooge rumbled mercifully away leaving me to choke on my laughter in the gathering clouds of our drought's proverbial dust. I observed that he immediately steamed over to commiserate with our third neighbor, who like himself, also grew up in the 1950s in suburbia, imprinted with the need for the uniformity of close-cropped manicured lawns as they were then becoming a national obsession. "I am fortunate," I once told them both when being scolded and ganged up on that "I moved to the country to be far away from neighborhood societies and busybodies who assume any right to enforce their highly prejudiced lawn bigotry upon me." My neighbors determined and have steadfastly maintained that I must simply be too lazy (or worse) to care for my lawn as it is seemingly incomprehensible to them that I actually prefer a yard "overgrown" with a plethora of wild, colorful and aromatic "weeds" over a homogenous sea of unscented monochromatic green. I think I overheard them say it was un-American. Unfortunately, that does seem to be the current, concerted majority opinion.

In the not too distant past, sweeping green lawns were the sole province of high society. Being labor intensive, only the very wealthy could afford a staff of gardeners to maintain these monoliths. It was an in your face show of wealth and position. Then, in the post- World War 2 era, power mowers became affordable for most households. "Just add water", in copious amounts, was made feasible by hoses and sprinklers and municipal water supplies. Chemical companies eager for a post-war market for their war-time products churned out synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The social-climbing, status- building competitions for the grandest, greenest swaths of perfect outdoor carpeting were on. The U.S. Golf Association and Garden Club of America had combined to create a standard for lawns that was "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged." The garden club even held contests for best lawns and campaigned that it was one's "civic duty" to have one. My neighbors and my neighbors' parents were obviously convinced. And so were my parents and millions of other Americans who have righteously passed this predisposition on to their progeny and condemned and legislated against those who would dare to let their hair ...um...grass grow longer. In my opinion, lawn work is over-rated.

Today, Americans spend billions of dollars annually on lawn care. We dump tons of synthetic fertilizers and poisonous pesticides into our environment to maintain them. Fifty to seventy percent of residential water use is for landscaping, most of it to water the grass even in times of drought and growing water shortages. Pollution from a cacophony of smoke belching power mowers is a significant contributor to global warming.

As we have watched the myths that were created and accepted in society about the strength and fairness of our financial system unravel in scandal, so might we also question many other myths that have been foisted on us as fact by our corporate society. Perhaps we need question our learned perception of the benefits of the perfect lawn. As many of us tighten our belts and do with less in these times of a weak economy, perhaps we might also consider in these times of an uncertain environment; cutting, fertilizing and watering our grass less often, thus saving money, being kinder to our planet and instead of the roar of the mower learning to enjoy the roar of the dandelion.

Photo of "overgrown lawn" © David Ballard

Fast Times at Stooge City

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Funnyman Sean Penn has been cast to play Larry Fine in the Farrelly Brothers long-anticipated Three Stooges movie. In light of his recent slapstick turn in Milk, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, and the comic flop All the King's Men, Penn is the natural choice to play the most reactive of the Stooges.

If this casting seems surreal, rest assured that it is probably based on nothing more than a very slight facial resemblance, which is often reason for Hollywood's making many perplexing and obtuse casting choices. Penn has very little experience in comedy. But wait, didn't Penn turn in the ultimate comic-stoner performance as Jeff Spicoli? Wasn't Spicoli enough indicator of true comic talent to glue Penn into a wiry Fine wig?

Penn's best comic turn was not as Jeff Spicoli. Spicoli was nothing compared with Daulton Lee, Penn's sniveling, rat-mustached traitor in 1985's The Falcon and the Snowman. Of course The Falcon and the Snowman dealt with the pretty serious business of espionage, the selling of top-secret information to the Russians. The movie was a cautionary (if dully paced) tale aimed like a Proton rocket at the entitled and spoiled hearts of the Baby Boom generation.

Daulton Lee, as played by Penn, was all whining nasal vowels and inimical fecklessness. While this may be a true portrait of the real-life Daulton Lee, who was presumably not a model of aesthetic refinement, the voice sounded like a cheap tic and Penn's appearance was done in by what appeared to be a glued-on mustache. If it wasn't falling-down funny, it was all you could do not to look at Penn and snigger.

Penn's playing such a role straight on the heels of his big Oscar win is similar to Halle Berry's Bond caper following her award for Monster's Ball. Although an actor is frequently signed for a role well before any annual awards nomination, it often appears that for whatever brainbell reason an intellectual, subtle actor (Penn, that is) elects a decorative role over a deeply structural one. And that makes you wonder if the actor isn't quite so smart as you thought. It might make you buy a ticket, though, just to see Penn in the wig version of Fine's electroshock hairstyle.

Jim Carrey is to play rubber-ball Curley in the movie, and while this makes a good deal of sense given Carrey's range of movement and expression, it is balanced by the bizarre suggestion of Benicio del Toro as the gaily sadistic Moe. While Carrey is understandable, del Toro is terrifying. Surely, Moe Howard's extravagant bowl haircut ran against all known sumptuary rules, but this is no reason to consider del Toro for what one suspects is that actor's equally extravagant hairline.

The movie is not a biopic. Rather, it is a whole new story that will introduce the Stooges, displaced from their Depression milieux and their roots in the great tradition of Jewish vaudeville, to modern audiences. It seems a perfect fit for the Farrellys, yet one is left with the idea of a parallel universe in which the real-life Stooges suddenly acquire a hitherto-unsuspected intellectual language when they find themselves dangled precariously above the farcical casting of the Farrelly Brothers feature.

Kevin Smith: I'd Rather Be F-ing My Wife

noreply@blogger.com (Suzanna Mars) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:01:00 +0000

If Kevin Smith has not been the profoundest of filmmakers, he certainly has been the most accessible. Since his 1994 Clerks debut, Smith has made himself readily available to the public via social media (Myspace, Facebook, and his own View Askewniverse message board).

Recently, Smith sat down with fellow filmmaker and Huffington Post author Lee Stranahan for an extended YouTube interview in which Smith discussed his freshman attempt at directing a screenplay he didn't write himself (A Couple of Cops, starring Bruce Willis) and a recent epiphany about the dangers of making himself too get-at-able.

Smith wasn't talking about stalking, a physical danger sadly present in any public figure's life. He was referring to the psychological danger inherent in interacting with the very community he built as a marketing tool, and also of the very real and present danger of reading reviews of his own work.

The epiphany (this may be too elegant a word; in Smith's case it seems more of a whack-a-mole V8 moment) came after the Toronto International Film Festival, where Smith's latest film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, was in the line-up. The film grossed only two million on the Halloween Friday it was released in the States and Smith spent the month of November Web-AWOL from a fear of being "shredded" and "killed" for creating the "lowest-grossing Seth Rogen movie."

Smith read all of the reviews after the film festival, but nothing further. He liked his movie too much to read anything negative about it. Instead, he wrote and played poker and came to the conclusion that, at age 38, he no longer felt that his opinion had to be the final--and the correct--one.

Ultimately, he says, he noticed the unsettling tendency of people to write "the worst shit about you...about your wife, about your f-ing kid...try to peer deep into your soul and write heinous f-ing things...take you into Bizarre World and write the opposite of everything that's true and maintain to the world in general that it's true...and it's only really recently that I realized that they can do that and they can't affect your f-ing ability to earn, to love, to be loved, to have a good day..."

He latently realized what we all know: the world now fits on a pinhead. If there is someone out there to say it, someone will, and someone outside the MKAD in Moscow will read it and believe it. And then add his own shit thing in return: затейник!

From here on in, the whole world will believe that Kevin Smith is a prick.

Smith said he questioned why he'd be wasting his time on line, reading critical commentary not just on his work but on his wife's appearance. when he could be "sticking it in her ass on a regular basis." Or cruising eBay for some Wayne Gretzky items like the rest of us.

Wake up call!

Look at your life, you won! he says his colleagues exclaimed. The game of life, he means, the Hollywood game, winning suggesting that life is something competitive and something that can be beaten. It's an interesting, Hollywood/Wall Street-centric philosophy, and despite Smith's explicit interpretation, is really reason for hope, perhaps more so than any governmental promises of affordable health care. It was a slapshot for the common man in his penalty box and should be required listening for all students in the eighth grade, which many would agree is a formative developmental juncture. Smith was on target, easily digested, and plain spoken:

From the interview, we learned:

--Not everyone can be pleased. This is why there are so many flavors of Doritos, especially in England.

--People say the nastiest things. And are perfectly charming at the family dinner table.

--Anonymous strangers think they can do your job better than you. They can, in select, egregious instances: George W. Bush, anyone?

--We all love bush shots. Note lowercase.

--If you find yourself verbally sparring on line with a fourteen-year-old girl, you should probably get a life. Or a life sentence, depending on the context.

Stranahan's interview wasn't a critical profile of Smith, nor should it have been. It was a refreshing accumulation of emotional responses and, in an Artaudian way, a felling of any remaining wall with a modern filmmaker who has tumbled most of them already.

Lee Stranahan interview with Kevin Smith, Part Four: The Dark Side of the Internet