I’m too tired to get all up in arms again and make it artful because Dick Clark wasn’t about art – Google Brad Laidman and Dick Clark for the things I’ve written about him in the past.

Here’s one which people didn’t understand had a comical but basically true tone to it Happy New Year: Dick Clark is still the Anti-Christ

Here is what I posted on facebook – it’s not grammatically correct or well thought out. Dick Clark doesn’t deserve that.

I knew it would happen but it’s killing me today that Dick Clark is somehow being praised as a great liberator of black music when in fact he was largely responsible for providing the dead years of rock and roll with Frankie Avalon Fabian and Bobby Rydell – when the Payola hearings happened Dick Clark was 100 times more guilty than Alan Freed but Dick Clark promised to stop being so naughty and profited on the white backlash while Freed who truly loved the music died penniless – Do some research today Dick Clark was a parasite to real artists – he insisted on lip syncing, he tried to kill Soul Train by ripping it off with his own sterile version until it was protested off the air – he created the American Music Awards so that popular became more important than artful – all he ever cared about was making money he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body and anyone who had said good things about him in the past only did so because he was so powerful that they had to do so to protect their careers – i don’t wish death on anyone, but i’ve always been amazed that supposedly the truth has to take a vacation on the day you die

Doesn’t the big opening of Hunger Games sort of prove that our society is actually now really that ignorant and decadent?

Hunger Games is all sort of a ripoff of a Japanese film called Battle Royale. Oddly, I found out about Battle Royale from Quentin Tarantino, who oddly enough basically just ripped off an Asian film when he made his first film Reservoir Dogs. It’s pretty ironic if you think about it.

Sometimes something is so gleefully stupid that it becomes a revelation of brilliance.

I loved the television show 21 Jump Street. I was frightened to death that the movie version was going to defecate all over my memories, but perhaps there was a reason why Johnny Depp seemed 100 times more willing to do a cameo in the movie spoof of the show that made him a star than he was to actually do it the first time around.

First I saw the trailer, which was somehow terrible. It must be hard to take a movie this funny, and it’s the funniest, raunchiest movie since Superbad (the first time Jonah Hill was too old to go to high school), and make a trailer that bad. After seeing the trailer, I not only didn’t want to see the movie, but I was actively enraged that the movie was even going to exist. Then the good reviews started to come sputtering out, and I figured they were merely a case of a film that everyone thought was going to be terrible, being sort of passable, but that’s not true. It’s actually a parody of such comedic genius that it’s on par with Airplane and Blazing Saddles.

That’s all I’m going to say about it because hopefully the trailer was so bad because the film industry for once didn’t want to give away all the movie’s joyous surprises, so who am I to ruin the experience for you. All I’ll say is that yes Johnny Depp did his cameo; yes he thankfully brought along fellow McQuaid brother Peter Deluise; and yes it was all kinds of awesome.

21 Jump Street came out in 1987, which was my junior year in college, and fulfilled all kinds of personal fantasies for me. Like Jonah Hill’s character in the movie, I went through high school two years ahead of everybody mentally and two years behind everybody physically. Take my word for it, I made the best of it, but like high school does to everybody it left me scarred for life.

By 1987, I’d filled out a bit and wanted to go back so badly that a close college friend of mine and I actively discussed doing it on a regular basis. As for the TV show that helped to build the Fox Network, it was ten times better than it had any right to be and most of it had to do with Johnny Depp. His Tom Hanson was supposed to be something of a square, but the vintage blue Mustang that he drove was the exact car I wanted to be driving and Johnny Depp was well Johnny Depp. There was an episode where Depp went undercover as a Hispanic gang banger and he even managed to pull that off.

Depp might have hated doing the show, but he was great in it and he and Deluise had such wonderful chemistry together that they somehow even pulled off a multi-part episode that seriously paid homage to Oliver Stone’s Salvador. Anyone watching Depp in those years knew that he was going to be a huge star and the only thing that delayed it for a decade or so was Depp’s own discomfort with the idea of stardom and personal predilection for off kilter, character roles in quirky movies.

As for Hill’s movie, it works on pretty much all levels. It enjoys the fantasy of returning back to high school, while simultaneously reveling in how much things have changed since the invention of the iPod, that it is every bit the time travel satire that the first Austin Powers movie was. Best of all, it doesn’t even ruin the original show for me. Depp gets the result he so clearly always wanted, but someone could still do a serious reboot of this franchise, because this one exists in a weird alternate universe where two of the most delightfully dimwitted, mismatched friends somehow managed to graduate from the Police Academy. This is the version of 21 Jump Street that the Three Stooges would have been proud to have made.

Sometimes comedy truly is as simple as a tall good looking guy having a short loser as a best friend. It worked for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and thanks to a lot of raunch, inappropriate drug humor, and sexual innuendo it still does in riotous fashion.

I wasn’t old enough to experience the Monkees the first time around, but these two clips from the Brady Bunch are forever etched into my memory.

Look how concerned Davy is when he hears about Marcia’s plight. Then again why doesn’t he just leave the recording booth and talk to her and save a trip to the Brady’s?

If it weren’t for Davy Jones than David Bowie would be Davey Jones and I bet the Brady’s woudn’t leave Marcia unsupervised in their living room with him.

Everyone my age knows that “how about the flip side” line almost as well as “Marcia Marcia Marcia”

I’ve written many times that the Monkees are no different than the Temptations and should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So now you can add Davy’s name to Clarence Clemons’ for being snubbed until it was too late to honor them.

Someone who apparently wasn’t Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Maybe it’s the fact that I grow more and more into Charlie Brown every day, but I really think the above art is a million times more relevant to the whole world than the Mona Lisa or anything that Caravaggio (random artist I learned about in High School Humanities – I couldn’t identify a Caravaggio if my life depended on it) painted.

Look there is a real Caravaggio. Kind of creepy isn’t it?

Unfortunately, just putting any one strip into a museum would miss the point since Charles Schultz ended perhaps thirty gazzillion strips with it.

First of all, Lucy is not going to ever let Charlie Brown kick that ball and Charlie Brown knows it. Lucy is always going to go Lucy on him, but he keeps on trying. Is this the sign of a true never say die romantic or just another idiot falling pray to the same stupid mistake over and over again?

I suppose that it’s inspirational that he never gives up and refuses to change his outlook on life, but shouldn’t Charlie Brown’s dad come home from that f-ing barber shop and teach him about life and women and all the other hazards out there?

You could argue that Schultz sort of ripped off the myth of Sisyphus so props to the Greeks for coming up with it first.

And yet me and all my heros keep embracing the Charlie Brown role. I’ve felt like this at least 12 million times in my life, with probably an equal amount of sort of sympathetic people telling you that you have to get your act together.

I think there is a line from Rosie Perez in White Men Can’t Jump where she says something like “You better get yourself a new life honey because the one you got ain’t working for you.”

And yet who doesn’t love a martyr after they are dead and gone?

Oops, now that I think of it she said that to Spike Lee in Do The Right Thing.

This ad keeps coming up on my Facebook page for criminalrecordfind.com. Could this be any more racist than it already is? Is there really an epidemic going on out there of gigantic hulking black males wearing red prison jumpsuits attacking innocent old ladies?

If you have time to look up a potential criminal threat on the internet it’s probably more likely to come from a bald white guy with a pen than from whoever the man is in this picture. It doesn’t even look like a real person. It looks like they incompetently CGI’d a black face onto the Fantastic Four’s Thing.

“Honey there is an African American monster walking down our suburban street. Quick look on the internet and see if he has a criminal record!”

I just checked Google Adsense for the first time in four years. My earnings for my web site so far $84.11 and I don’t get paid until I hit $100. C’mon just tinker around on the site and hit various ads for a minute. I’m begging. There’s some nudity in here too. Consider yourself to be on a scavenger hunt.

I need that C note. I have bills.

A payment will not be issued this month. Your unpaid earnings prior to February 1, 2012 was calculated to be $84.11. Payments are issued within 30 days after the end of the month in which your unpaid earnings reach $100.00

Bill Hicks wasn’t exactly right almost 20 years ago – he said it would be for Taco Bell

From Facebook the night that Whitney Died –

Brad Laidman: I never want to see somebody die, but personally I can’t stand Whitney Houston’s bombastic Star Spangled Banner or I Will Always Love You – I kind of liked Saving All My Love for You, but it all seemed pretty soul-less after that
Michael K. McIntyre Mental note to family: If I should happen to die, don’t tell Brad. He doesn’t even wait until the body is cold.

That’s a Cleveland Plain Dealer Columnist who I impressed!

I sort of halfheartedly offered this to the Morton Report, but I didn’t really feel like having to defend it. I sort of thought that I could, but sometimes people read you and just don’t care how articulate you are or aren’t they just hate you. So I start trying to apologize for it as I write it, until the whole thing is bollocks.

Here is what my charitable friend said about it

“It’s not actually as mean as you think it is. If you take out about 3/4 of the “I’m going to hell” apologies, I think it’s pretty straightforward and reasonable. You don’t call her a bad person, you just imply she was a product of a taste-corrupt system and a wasted talent. I don’t think that’s all that controversial.

And for what it’s worth, aside from the 5-too-many apologies and inferences that you’re afraid to go to hell for this (which you’re not) it’s well written.”

He said “Good Job” too – what a guy!

OK now that I’ve again apologized for the nature of this essay here it is for those of you who aren’t offended by me saying that I wouldn’t trade Whitney Houston’s entire catalog for “My Prerogative” by Bobby Brown. I literally only liked her debut “Saving All My Love” and then she became quite annoying to me. I should have probably rewritten it so that it would be publishable, but nonetheless here it is.

I come to bury Whitney Houston, not to praise her.

If I don’t go to hell for that murder spree I committed back in ’08 then I’m definitely going there for this.

Exactly how long after a person’s death are you allowed to point out that you never particularly liked them in the first place? If it is family, the answer is probably never, but I really only knew Whitney as a pop, titan, superstar, femme-bot with iron lungs, bad taste in men and a serious crack addiction. So with apologies to her family, I was never particularly a fan.

Frankly, I don’t really even believe that she’s dead. You see I’m one of those guys that think record executives like Clive Davis, and well, especially Clive Davis, are super evil geniuses willing to sell out friends and family for an extra two dollars and fifty cents, and this death just seems to damn convenient.

Since Clive probably has much better lawyers than I do let’s just refer to him as the record industry, albeit one who is hosting a huge pre-Grammy party. If you are the record industry, you have to be ice cold and look at your assets like a bean counter with no soul (did I mention that for a soul singer I never found Whitney Houston to be particularly soulful? – Hi, Satan – honest it was just an opinion). One of your biggest assets used to be Whitney Houston. If we look at Whitney Houston in real estate terms, she was once the biggest mansion in the world. When she sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl she was as nice and palatial as Hearst Castle in its heyday.

Unfortunately, that was a little over twenty years ago, and now the castle is more like a dilapidated housing project. There are rats everywhere and everybody wonders if it’s still filled with crack dealers and junkies.

Now if you happened to own this asset, what you need is one of those Michael Jackson “Neverland” renovations. You know the one that instantly wipes clean all of the artist’s bad decisions and years of irrelevance and gives them back that “I Will Always Love You” sheen. You all know that it’s true so please don’t kill the messenger, but nothing rejuvenates a dead music career quite like death, and right before the Grammy’s is absolute perfect time to begin a marketing assault.

Yesterday, people were likely mocking Whitney as a used up crack … I’m not going there, I really don’t want to go to hell that badly, but tomorrow all of those same people will be crying, singing tributes, and telling anyone within hearing range how much The Bodyguard changed their life. Don’t look to see who won the lottery tomorrow, because we already know that it was won by the Whitney Houston estate and her record label. Personally, as a lover of all things human, I really hope that Clive gave Whitney her own island paradise to enjoy, while the rest of us mourned the suspicious timing of her death.

By the end of the week, Whitney will not only be saluted for her amazing vocal talents, but more than likely will be given credit for winning the first Iraq War, the one whose Orwellian nickname has escaped me at the moment. By the end of the week, there will surely be a live special hosted by Oprah Winfrey and they may even let Bobby Brown back on television. Expect an appearance by no less than our current President Barack Obama, who will reconnect with his base by shedding a tear and remembering something personal and touching that Whitney once whispered into his ear.

I know I’m coming off cold right now, but frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if by Wednesday even I was crying my eyes out and watching 24-7 coverage of the Whitney aftermath, switching frantically between E!, CNN, and VH1.

Here’s what will be missing from the coverage. Someone pointing out that despite the fact that Whitney Houston had perhaps the most powerfully, gifted vocal instrument of the 20th Century, her music although high on technical proficiency and at a perfect 100 on the level of difficulty chart, was bombastic and overwrought. With all sympathy to her family and friends, I won’t remember Whitney Houston as a sensitive artist with unparalleled vocal empathy. I won’t even remember her as another sad, crack riddled, cautionary tale.

I’ll remember her at her peak, over singing the national anthem and turning a Dolly Parton love song into something to be amazed at rather than loved. Before the drugs wore down her metallic sheen she was a perfect looking, passionless robot with guns always set on overkill. Whitney Houston is the winner of every single year of American Idol, but her music always failed to touch my heart where it should have counted most. I’ll remember her as a neighbor with the biggest and best stereo in town, who sadly insisted on playing all the wrong records at full volume in the middle of the night. Bring on the posthumous Grammys (an award that is all about selling records and nothing about art) the queen of pop has left the building.

The wrong way: (I find it overblown and at the time a bit militaristic and jingoistic)

The right way: (Lovingly)

This probably deserves more attention than I’m willing to give it at the moment. Sadly, lately I’ve beceome a little bored of me. I think I’m pretty funny and all at times, but really everyone is stuck with themselves 24-7-century and then you die. I’m probably my biggest fan and I don’t want to be with myself most of the time.

I’d totally rather be Sean Lennon. If someone came to me now and said “you will have a father who was basically the coolest guy ever, one that was so devoted to you that he gave up being the coolest guy ever for five years just so that he could take care of you, but he will die violently in your youth leaving you to forever long for the father and the life that you should have had”, it would sound kind of like a drag at first, but when you look into it more you realize that you get to look like John Lennon, and sound like John Lennon, and you have access to an estate that your mother has been growing like ripe tomatoes your whole life I don’t think it’s really that bad. I’d take that deal still. I would be ok hanging out instead with Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, and Michael Jackson. How could that ever suck? You have a great life and yet have a rightful license to have a chip on your shoulder and be angry at the government and the world for your whole life. That doesn’t just sound like a life it’s almost a myth and I’m stuck with me all the time instead. What a drag indeed.

How could that possibly not make you want to read more?

Nevertheless, Crazy/Beautiful is like the greatest movie of all time. Stay with me. It’s not like I have a fetish for teen cinema that gets creepier and creepier seeming every year. Oh wait, that is me. It’s like an amazing celebrity Red Shoe Diaries movie that actually turns out to be a good movie too.

Kirsten Dunst plays this incredibly romantic and completely bonkers out of her mind teen who wants to have sex with her new boyfriend for the first time in front of an exposed glass slide door in her bedroom with her congressman father right outside. I actually don’t remember for sure if her dad was a congressman, but I’m pretty sure that he was really rich and important. Kirsten’s mother committed suicide when she was younger and her father is married to a woman almost as old as she is.

So basically, a hot girl with serious father issues, wanting to act out sexually at any time, and if you watched it with a girl friend you could still convince her that it really had a good message and a really happy somewhat deserved ending? What could be better than that?

You could watch this movie with the sound off and it would be enjoyable, but it like actually turns out to be a good romantic movie at the end.

Ok, my hat is in the ring for most meaningful film critic of 2012. Someone alert Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby!