-
sponsorship
And all along, the secret was right there in the stochastic gradient descent. On Friday, a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” declared itself the winner of the $1 million Netflix Prize, the contest to improve the site’s existing movie recommendations formula by 10 percent. We don’t yet know exactly how the likely winners did it—the winning team is keeping quiet, since other contestants still have a month to beat their entry, according to the contest rules. We do know this: The contest probably wasn’t won thanks to a revolutionary idea about how we form our taste in movies.
While such a concept may still be out there, the Netflix Prize champs appear to have notched a major victory for computer science over psychology. That seems like a safe conclusion based on progress reports team members have published over the years. For a taste, try this sentence: “The values of the parameters are learnt by stochastic gradient descent with weight decay on the Probe data.”
I’m sure BellKor’s final paper will contain some insights into the psychology of taste, so long as you’re willing to ponder the math and computing behind it. A 2008 paper (PDF), for example, outlines how to represent the ebb and flow of a movie’s popularity over time, as well as a model for how an individual’s rating technique evolves. (Cinematch, the model that Netflix uses today, is a simpler formula that correlates lots of data to predict your preferences based on your past ratings.)
As the Times noted over the weekend, the tentative winners are a fusion of four previously independent teams “made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers.” The fact that it took the combined powers of four teams to crack the 10 percent ceiling is another telling sign that the Netflix contest won’t produce some elegant, easy-to-parse theory of movie-watching. That shouldn’t diminish the accomplishment. Even if we won’t understand why it works, we should expect real results—that is, smarter recommendations—as soon as the BellKor et al. solution is implemented. The Netflix Prize is a good reminder that the human brain is an extremely powerful computer capable of juggling hundreds of variables, even when it’s thinking about how much it likes Weekend at Bernie’s II.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 8: "Don Cornelius." Google Trends today are full of searches relating to Sunday's BET Awards, which were retooled at the last minute as a Michael Jackson tribute. Soul Train creator Don Cornelius was just one of dozens of black entertainers who honored Jackson. Over the weekend, Cornelius told Time about the first time he saw Jackson perform in the mid-1960s: "He's only 4 ft. tall and you're looking at a small person who can do anything he wanted to do onstage—with his feet or his voice. To get to that level ... you're talking about James Brown as a performer. Michael was like that as a kid."
No. 40: "8 st 1 oz." The results of Michael Jackson's autopsy were released today, and according to reports in the British press he was bald, needle-pricked and "severely emaciated," weighing just "8 st 1 oz." That's short for 8 stone 1 ounce, or about 112 pounds. Metric is the official system for measuring weight in England, but the stone (14 pounds), is commonly used to express body weight.
No. 45: "Lynndie England." The Associated Press has interviewed former Army reservist Lynddie England, the subject of some of the most iconic pictures in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Today, England lives in West Virginia, where she's unemployed and spends most of her time in her house for fear of being recognized and harassed. England granted the interview to promote a new biography of her: Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs that Shocked the World.
-
sponsorship
In 1915, D.W. Griffith, a Kentucky-born director who'd shot the first-ever movie in Hollywood, Calif., released The Birth of a Nation, a 190-minute film that imported old American horrors into a new medium. The movie is an extraordinarily elaborate piece of Ku Klux Klan propaganda, recasting the Civil War in order to blame secession and the ailments of Reconstruction on black people. Despite its heinous content (and because of it), Griffith's production is regarded even today as a cinematic milestone, the first feature-length film ever to use careful montage—crosscuts, jump-cuts, deep focus—to weave a contrapuntal story on the screen.
In a piece just screened at New York's MoMA, Paul D. Miller (nom de guerre: DJ Spooky) "remixes" Griffith's movie to expose the undergirding of its racism and to explore its success as agitprop. Rebirth of a Nation (also recently released on DVD), introduces what Miller calls "DJ as director"—the idea that a film, like a remixed song, can be composed through a director's selective use of source material.
Miller's version plays with the atmospherics of Griffith's reels—inserting "PDM"-initialed title cards in place of Griffith's notorious "DWG" originals, backing scenes with a contemporary soundtrack (ranging from harmonica blues to light techno), and recutting the film to tighten the story and highlight Griffith's devious art. The shot in which Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant, for instance—a passing moment in the original—becomes, in Miller's remix, sinister: A roving viewfinder zooms in on the generals' handshake as the tobacco tip of Grant's cigar glows red against the sepia projection, signifying not so much peace as a realignment of white interests.
It's easy to regard Miller's remix as the YouTube sensibility gone conceptual—or more conceptual than usual—in the name of historical justice. Yet it's also an effort to beat Griffith at his own game. The Birth of a Nation was itself a project in historical revision, one that also bore the burnish of a new medium. What surprised me most about Rebirth wasn't the way Miller applied today's technology to the prewar film. It was how little was actually remixed. For all the cosmetic revisions and minor structural changes, the arc of Griffith's story (and the raw force of its propaganda) is left intact, even helped along. In doing so, Miller blurs the line between his artistic choices and those of the original, drawing our attention to Griffith's own DJ-like selectiveness. What was The Birth of a Nation, after all, if not a loathsome remix of the history books?
-
sponsorship
For the U.S. national team, the Confederations Cup was a crap sandwich with the crap on the outside. After starting the tournament with feeble losses to Italy and Brazil, Team USA scored five straight goals in ripping through Egypt and Spain. That streak ran to seven goals in Sunday's final, with Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan out Brazil-ing the Brazilians, scoring on the kind of spectacular strikes that usually come off the feet of the guys in the yellow shirts. The Guardian's live commentary, having referred to the Americans as "raggy gits" prior to kickoff, described the action as "frankly surreal." In the last 45 minutes, alas, the gits once again turned raggy, the Brazilians resumed being Brazilian, and surrealism made way for futbol vérité.
Loads of pundits have compared the Americans' win over Spain to 1980's "Miracle on Ice." One major difference: After taking down the USSR, the U.S. hockey team beat Finland to win the gold. Brazil ain't Finland, and after a dominant first half the Americans were lucky to lose by just one goal—a header by Kaká that clearly breached the goal line was, inexplicably, not counted. (If nothing else, international soccer tournaments are a good reminder that the officiating in the NBA could always get worse.) According to U.S. captain Carlos Bocanegra, his squad got trounced by Brazil in group play because they gave the Samba Kings "too much respect." The Americans played a far less-reverent first half in Sunday's rematch, but the underdogs ultimately fell back into bad habits, giving the ball away too easily and failing to shut down Kaká and Luis Fabiano. The United States' loss, however, wasn't a failure of strategy or fortitude. The team with the better players won.
Does the team's second-place finish augur better days for U.S. soccer? ESPN's commentators put a happy face on Sunday's loss by arguing that the national team will now assuredly have greater confidence for the 2010 World Cup. But as the Americans' topsy-turvy Confederations Cup revealed, confidence on the soccer field comes and goes in minutes, not years. More significant than some vague sense of emotional uplift is the possibility that, as George Vecsey pointed out on Wednesday, the national team's impressive showing might earn them an easier draw in 2010. The United States, clearly lacking in skill compared with the likes of Spain and Italy and Brazil, still needs all the breaks it can get. For a game and a half at least, the U.S. got the feeling of scoring and swaggering like Brazilians. It was frankly surreal, and it was fun while it lasted.
-
sponsorship
When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
-
sponsorship
He has strangely colored skin, a legendarily dysfunctional family, and is perpetually 10 years old. No wonder Michael Jackson identified with Bart Simpson. On a DVD commentary track that's part of The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season box set, the show's executive producer, James L. Brooks, says he fielded a call from Jackson early in the show's run. "I love Bart," the King of Pop said. "I want to give Bart a No. 1 single."
Jackson delivered on his promise, ghostwriting the chart-topping "Do the Bartman." (OK, it only went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom; it wasn't released as a single in America.) The song came out in November 1990—a year before 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin starred in Jackson's "Black or White" video—and sounds as dated as every other two-decade-old, light-rap ditty voiced by a cartoon character. (Also see: "Opposites Attract.") "Do the Bartman" did, however, accomplish the feat of uniting two cultural icons. The most-memorable lyric: "If you can do the Bart, you're bad like Michael Jackson."
Around the same time Jackson launched Bart's singing career, he asked Simpsons creator Matt Groening whether he could be on the show. By 1992, when the M.J.-starring "Stark Raving Dad" aired as the third-season premiere, the show was transitioning from a T-shirt-selling fad (the "Eat My Shorts, Man!" era) to a work of pop art. Jackson's guest appearance, well before the era in which the likes of Helen Hunt and Lucy Lawless appeared on a weekly basis, marked him as part of the cultural vanguard.
The greatness of "Stark Raving Dad" has a lot more to do with the The Simpsons' writing staff than with Jackson's voice-over talents. (As with "Do the Bartman," M.J. insisted on keeping his name off the episode; he was billed as "John Jay Smith.") The show's scripters came up with a plot device far more ingenious than simply dropping the singer into Springfield, instead placing the singer's falsetto voice inside a 300-pound mental patient who believes he's Michael Jackson. On the DVD commentary, writer Al Jean says the script run-through at the singer's manager's house was "the most nerve-racking table read I've been to in my life." To Jackson's credit, he didn't flinch at being depicted as a crazy Caucasian. The only two notes he gave on the script: an appeal to replace Prince with Elvis in a joke about mentally unstable musicians, and a request for a scene in which he stays up all night writing a song with Bart.
Put aside Jackson's professed desire to spend the evening with a young (albeit two-dimensional) boy and it's impossible not to be charmed by "Lisa, It's Your Birthday." The minute-long song—written by Jackson but voiced by an imitator because, according to James L. Brooks, M.J. wanted to play "a joke on his brothers"—is one of the least-essential in the singer's catalog. It's also incredibly endearing, a sweet jingle written by a childlike adult for his favorite cartoon. That brief moment on The Simpsons feels like the perfect encapsulation of a life and a career. Michael Jackson: pop genius, forever young at heart, mental case.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 85: "who died yesterday." Though far down on the rankings, this search term pretty much sums up what comes before it. About two-thirds of the list has to do with Michael Jackson, RIP, from song lyrics to the method of death to long-standing associates. Poor Farrah Fawcett was quickly buried in the rankings—but for No. 3, her playboy images, and several misspellings of her name. A confusing addition to this picture is No. 35, "Jeff Goldblum dead," which resulted from Twitter-fed rumors generated by prank Web sites that the Jurassic Park actor had passed away. He has not.
No. 2: "maria belen chapur photos." Seems like people want to know whether South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover was worth destroying his career for. Although The State newspaper, which publicized the pair's steamy e-mails, kept her full name a secret, Latin American news sources tracked down the 43-year-old professional mother of two and tossed her to the wolves. The actual images are so far few and far between, but go ahead and see for yourself.
No. 14: "nancy benoit hustler pics." This isn't your typical porn-star photo search—a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Hustler was wrong to print nude photos of Nancy Benoit, who two years ago was killed by her husband, professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The photos are from 20 years ago, and a suit filed by Nancy's family alleges that she asked the photographer destroy the images as soon as they were taken. A lower court originally ruled for the magazine in October 2008.
—Lydia DePillis
-
sponsorship
Forgive me if I don’t linger on the man’s music.
Thriller was released on November 30, 1982, but it was an album of 1983. The label led with the single “This Girl Is Mine” before releasing “Billie Jean” on January 3. “Billie Jean” was an instant hit for Jackson, but full beatification and canonization was yet to come.
On March 25, 1983, NBC aired “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” featuring a reunion of the Jackson 5, a group the Peacock’s audience no doubt remembered fondly from AM radio play, variety hours, and Saturday morning cartoons. As their medley wound down, volume came up on the predatory beat of Billie Jean; and something new and else began to throb through both Jackson and the audience.
An astonished Fred Astaire was in the home audience of 47 million—the most ever to watch a TV music special—and he was moved to phone up Jackson the next day. The two have similar body types: sylph-like elongations for limbs, responsive to every unlikely command. Astaire had seen what everyone had seen. The fedora, the spangled jacket, the slink, the moonwalk—in sum, the rebirth of the total superstar—but he also saw something else. “You’re an angry dancer,” he reportedly told Jackson over the phone.
The moment I heard he died I watched the Motown appearance on my iPhone. It is thrilling. It belongs to eternity. But it also belongs to something else. It belongs to 1983, an annus mirabilis, in its way, in American life; a year of economic recovery that, in addition to prosperity and the King of Pop, brought us Madonna, Oprah, Jay McInerney, Tom Cruise, Michael Milken, Vanity Fair, and the resurrection of Andy Warhol, downtown impresario behind the Limelight nightclub. Thus Jackson was a central figure in the re-creation of a viable American mainstream, a mainstream dominated by the larger-than-life, if you’re being polite—or credulous. I prefer the noun form of “grotesque.”
What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.
The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.
A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.
-
sponsorship
To anyone who ever bought into the Michael Jackson mythos—for a decade, for an album, for the opening bars of "Billie Jean"—it's something of a cruel and cognitively dissonant indignity that TMZ.com was the coroner at his bedside, scribbling his death certificate. On one hand, we have the "king of pop"—a quaint, archaic title by 21st-century standards. On the other, we have the fiercely irreverent figurehead of the 21st-century gossip-industrial complex, for which there is no such thing as royalty, for which the emperor isn't just naked but naked in a bunch of pictures he was foolish enough to keep on his Sidekick. Michael Jackson famously erected a 30-foot statue of himself in 1995, and the tabloids speeded it along on its way to Ozymandias-style ruin. (At least Ozymandias never had to deal with rumors that his nose was falling off.)
But as tempting as it is to describe a parasitic, inverse relationship between Jackson and the tabloids—as his power and prominence waned, theirs grew exponentially—the coupling was more complex. Jackson didn't go so far as, say, Britney Spears and date a paparazzo, but he paved the way for her brand of tabloid symbiosis in other ways: developing a persecution complex and making antagonists real and imagined the subject of many of his songs; submitting to a Faustian arrangement in which the paparazzi would keep the flashbulbs popping as long as he kept the crazy coming. Jackson's vanity fed into and fed on the vicious news cycle. He never put out for the cameras as much as Spears did at her barefoot, panty-free best, but he never quite slipped the noose the way she seems to have done today, either, cleaning up her act and asserting a degree of control over the situation by turning it into postmodern theater. In part, Jackson's inability to handle the paps comes down to the fact that he was a much, much weirder person than Spears (and, for that matter, Elvis). The only way for him to clean up his act was to haul it to a remote island in the Middle East and do his best to go dark (no pun intended). But in part it's also because of the era he came up in, one that left him ill prepared for the one that followed and that was well on its way out by the time Spears hit the scene: an era in which all meaningful distinction between intense adulation and intense scorn hadn't yet collapsed, in which it wasn't yet written into the standard-issue pop-star contract that, in the end, however it plays out, TMZ gets the last word.
-
sponsorship
When Michael Jackson introduced the moonwalk in 1983, people freaked—and then immediately began imitating him. We haven't stopped. Slate V has collected video footage of our best attempts to top the King of Pop in this great video.
-
sponsorship
Mike: What is your reaction to M.J.'s death?
Susan: In 1983, at the peak of Thriller fever, my father said, "He'll never be as big as Elvis."
Mike: Your dad may be right. For me, M.J. is associated with watching MTV. They showed his videos every 20 minutes. I still think gangland battles are fought in the manner of "Beat It."
Susan: I learned "Beat It" by its inverse, "Eat It." It was the introduction to Michael Jackson for nerds.
Mike: If it's getting cold, reheat it. I also remember being acutely aware of which of my friends was the best moonwalker. I could never really do it.
Susan: The boy who could do it best at our school owned a tie with the pattern of an electronic keyboard. It seems like both of our associations with Michael Jackson begin and end with Thriller.
Mike: He kind of lost me with that face-morphing video, though I did think it was kind of cool at the time. Didn't M.C. Hammer enter the scene at this point?
Susan: Really the next thing I know about Michael Jackson is the child hanging from the open window. I often worry that someone across the way from us in Brooklyn will think I'm a Michael Jackson mother when I hold our baby seven stories above the street and he tugs at the window guards.
Mike: At least we did not nickname our kid Blanket.
-
sponsorship
As saddened as I am by Michael Jackson's death, I'm equally shocked that it didn't happen sooner. A few years back when I covered M.J.'s trial and sat a few feet from him on a daily basis, I found myself constantly marveling at his frailty. Jackson wore his suits tailored tight, with fitted jackets and stovepipe trousers, yet still the fabric billowed around his bird-boned frame. He was always limping down the courtroom aisle, clutching at his ribs, taking shallow breaths. He showed up late to court one day looking on the verge of a violent retching attack. The consensus within the trial's press corps held that Jackson spent his days in a haze of Jesus juice.
Now that he's gone, obsessive Jackson watchers will wonder what hidden truths might at last emerge. Some theorized that Jackson had been paying off his ex-wife Debbie Rowe and perhaps others in an effort to conceal the actual biological provenance of his children. Will anyone come forward now and clear up the origins of Prince, Paris, and little Blanket?
Jackson's many creditors will no doubt lament the death of his ability to tour and to rack up new revenue. They'll squabble over his valuable song catalogs and his less valuable tacky home furnishings.
And then there are the rest of Michael's fans, the millions who loved the music but were unsure what to think of the man. I've always been agnostic on the question of Michael's guilt or innocence and felt that he was, at heart, an 8-year-old boy with the equivalent excitability and moral sophistication. And so I'm mainly sad that the gloved one won't get a chance to bask in his inevitable cultural reappreciation. M.J. was due, somewhere down the line, for a Johnny Cash-style re-emergence. An Elvis-in-black-leather moment. It would have been tinged, of course, with the lingering memory of M.J.'s alleged transgressions. But never underestimate people's thirst for a comeback. Michael would have lit up like a small child at the opportunity to make one more moonwalk across the world's stage.
-
sponsorship
Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. He was 50. Volumes have been written about Jackson's music, his bizarre personal life, and his legal troubles. Here's a selection of Slate's coverage of the King of Pop over the years:
Seth Stevenson filed two dispatches from Jackson's 2005 sexual-abuse trial. Click here to read Part 1; click here for Part 2. During that same trial, Jacob Weisberg didn't believe Jackson was a pedophile, and Dahlia Lithwick wondered whether the threat of imprisonment would make Jackson stop acting like such a freak. Pulitzer Prize-winner Margo Jefferson and Slate music critic Jody Rosen discussed M.J. as a cultural object and a troubled human being. Seth Stevenson charted the evolution of the star's persona by examining his greatest music videos.
-
sponsorship
Directed by John Landis, specially effected by Rick Baker, and choreographed by the step-designer of Broadway's Dreamgirls in collaboration with the moonwalker himself, the "Thriller" video, of course, earns its accolades as the greatest music video of all time. This is not just a matter of its lavish detail or its loving grandiosity. Nor does its distinction owe simply to its self-reflexive wit as a riddle within a video within a film—"the Chinese-box humor," as Robert Christgau once said, worth regarding as "Michael's most effective anti-star move." (Contrary to popular belief, or at least Wikipedia, "Thriller" is not a spoof of zombie flicks but an inside-out horror film connecting R&B lust with the erotics of fear and proposing a superstar as an extrahuman.)
But all that is just the payoff. What mattered was the giddiness of the buildup to the video's MTV debut on Dec. 2, 1983. For the generation that came of age, or thought it was coming of age, in the first half of the 1980s, that afternoon was its "Who Shot J.R.?" moment, a Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan societal spectacle. Maybe its only companion piece was the wedding, two years earlier, of Jackson's pal Diana Spencer. We were gathered around the TV set with everybody after school, practically trying to stick our heads in the cathode-ray tube, and it was the tension of the anticipation that made us jump, as a unit, at that first flick of creepy yellow peppers. Our eyes weren't yet jaundiced, and the hype was the thrill.
-
sponsorship
The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter offers this remembrance of Charlie's Angels icon Farrah Fawcett, who died today of cancer at age 62:
It must be next to impossible for anyone under the age of 30 to understand that there was a time when Farrah Fawcett Majors was actually cool. Looking now at that iconic mid-’70s poster, anyone can see the surface attractions that propelled her to fame: perfectly feathered hair, impossibly confident smile, and—particularly if you were a seventh-grade boy like me, staring for too long at that red bathing suit image masking-taped to the wall—the unabashed alert nipples.
Yet there was a whole other layer to her mystique that eludes today’s eye (to say nothing of the fact that her subsequent crises buried the real person along with the persona). Tits-and-ass primetime programming reached a kind of apogee in the mid-'70s, and while our parents rolled their eyes and tried to switch the dial to PBS, my friends and I devoured it with a pre-adolescent mixture of innocence and titillation. No matter what anyone might try and claim today, Charlie’s Angels was an abysmal way to kill an hour. The inevitable scene in which one or more Angels would get wet could barely justify the ludicrous plots, ritual explosions, and truly crappy acting. Even then, I knew it was bad.
The show, though, wasn’t the point. (At least that, I suspect, today’s youth would understand.) Watching Charlie’s Angels, having the FFM poster on your wall, clipping magazine pictures of the Angels in their bikinis and hanging them on the inside of your locker—these were more like badges, a way of participating in pop culture with as much sexual knowing as you could muster. Actually, as best I can recall, it wasn’t just a boy thing. I would not go so far as to say that the Angels were pillars of feminism, but girls watched the show. Charlie’s Angels was our version of a croquet match in an Edith Wharton novel—a way for almost-men and almost-women to play together politely, pretending to talk about one thing when actually you were checking one another out.
You were supposed to have a favorite Angel—some debased version, perhaps, of once having to have a favorite Beatle. (Kate Jackson was the smart one, but I can’t remember what the distinguishing factor between FFM and Jaclyn Smith was supposed to be, nor did it matter.) In truth, there was no competition—it was Farrah, always Farrah. Why? Blonde prejudice, for some, perhaps. But for me and, I suspect, most of my peers, it was for the most innocent reason of all: She was married to Lee Majors, the "Six Million-Dollar Man," the bionic hero whose cred had been established way before hers, or at least two ABC seasons before. And so I think FFM functioned as a kind of transitional crush, from the young boy’s fascination with physical strength and cyborg powers to the preteen’s need to branch out into a social exploration of sexuality.
When she left the show after the first season, I don’t remember any of my friends watching it any more, and by the time she and Majors split in 1979, the girls I wanted to spend time with had more dimensions than that poster. I imagine for her, the poster was something she wanted desperately to transcend, but for millions of American boys, it was itself a kind of transcendence.
—James Ledbetter
-
sponsorship
One of the strangest moments in Transformers 2—and there's plenty of competition, this being a movie in which John Turturro recommends that a robot's scrotum be the target of an airstrike—comes when we learn that the president of the United States is none other than Barack Obama. You thought Obama already had a lot on his plate? Turns out when he's not worrying about the GM bankruptcy or the latest from Tehran; he's trying to keep a lid on a supersecret alliance between the U.S. military and the Autobots.
Obama is only referred to in passing, in a news report, and we never see his image. But the movie paints an unflattering portrait nonetheless. Galloway, the Pentagon official sent by the administration to oversee the goodly Autobots, is a short-sighted fussbudget. Wielding a letter of authority from the president, he essentially shuts down the operation, accusing heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime of being more trouble than he's worth to the taxpayers of the United States. This is a short-sighted move to say the least, a rash decision that endangers the mission to rid Earth of the evil Decepticons. Way to go, Barack.
The hardly subtle suggestion here is that Obama is a lousy commander in chief. This characterization has led some to wonder whether Transformers auteur Michael Bay might have been taking a potshot at the president. When asked about it recently, Bay said he intended the reference as an affectionate shout out. He explained that he'd bumped into then-Sen. Obama at the Las Vegas airport after seeing him at a campaign event, and they'd had this exchange:
I said, "Hey, I saw you the other night, and I liked what you had to say. I really like hearing your stuff." I introduced myself, and he said, "What do you do?" "I'm a director." He said, "What movies?" I said, "Oh, these movies..." He said, "Oh, you're a big-ass director. I've seen a bunch of your movies." So that's why I decided to put him in.
I'm inclined to believe Bay's story. There's nothing in Transformers 2 to suggest the director contemplated the meaning of anything—he probably just assumed Obama would find it awesome to be president of a big-ass summer blockbuster. And it is sort of an honor, if you think about it. Presidents—some feckless, some brave—are stock characters in Hollywood's summer fare. Usually, however, they're thinly veiled caricatures—Donald Moffat's Reaganesque President Bennet in 1994's Clear and Present Danger is a personal favorite—rather than actual sitting presidents. Brow Beat readers, can you think of other summer blockbusters that have featured the real POTUS? Post your examples in the "Fray."
-
sponsorship
William Eggleston's one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 is a landmark of photographic history—color photography's first-ever solo show at the country's most influential museum. The medium had been maligned as too commercial and too amateurish, but Eggleston's understated photographs of Southern life were an instant hit. Eggleston's major retrospective arrived Saturday at Washington's Corcoran Gallery after having opened last year at New York's Whitney Museum. Its title, "Democratic Camera," calls attention to his populist streak. Eggleston embraced cheap, widely-available materials. His film "Stranded in Canton," restored last year and available on YouTube and DVD, documents life among hardscrabble musicians in Memphis and New Orleans as they liquor up and play; it was shot on a Sony Portapak, the first mass-market portable video recorder. And he exposed some of his most iconic photograghs on Kodachrome, the first commercially successful color film.
The Portapak is long gone, and Kodachrome will soon be: Kodak announced on Monday it is discontinuing the film, after 74 years on the market. What equipment, then, would a young William Eggleston use today?
The obvious analogy with the Portapak is the inexpensive, feature-stripped line of Flip digital camcorders. In photography, cell phone cameras might have enticed a young Eggleston with their widespread use. But both suffer from low image quality. Eggleston's work bucked prejudices against color photography's lowbrow reputation but his technical skill was still evident—his photographs have great tonal range, color balance, and resolution. The pixilation and poor light handling of the Flip and many cheap digital cameras would seem to make them a long shot for MoMAfication—though digital photographs from more expensive, higher quality cameras have already found wide acceptance in the art world. Has Eggleston's niche—working in a popular medium that still allowed for virtuosic expression-really vanished, a victim of manufacturers' bottom lines and the arms race among luxury consumer cameras? Or is there a true digital successor to Kodachrome or Portapak? Post responses in the Fray.
-
sponsorship
"They lived in squares and loved in triangles." About the Bloomsbury group. Heard it on the BBC's "Start the Week" podcast, which is as good an hour of free audio as you can possibly find.
-
sponsorship
The United States' 2-0 win over Spain in soccer's Confederations Cup semifinals was a colossal shocker: Spain hadn't lost since 2006, while the Americans looked horrendous in losing to Brazil and Italy in just the last week. ESPN.com immediately equated the victory with 1980's Miracle on Ice: "Do you believe in miracles?" the headline copy read, echoing Al Michaels' famous call of Team USA's win over the USSR in the Olympic hockey semis. Undercutting the comparison a bit was the poll that ESPN linked to in the next sentence: "Vote: Do you care?"
Within a few minutes, that leading question was softened to the less-suggestive "Vote." The original formulation, however, was a far more honest summation of the American sports fan's traditional relationship to soccer: tenuous at best, dismissive at worst.
That they-don't-score-enough-and-ties-are-dumb attitude is, in some measure, generational, as younger folk who grew up playing soccer and its video-game analogue certainly think more highly of the game. America's rising Latino population has also buoyed stateside interest, as has the increasing prevalence of the American soccer intellectual. (As Bryan Curtis argued in his 2006 Slate piece "Among the Brainiacs," footy has replaced baseball as the sport of choice for this country's scholarly sports fans.)
The sport's defenders can be seen, en masse, in the results of that "Do you care?" poll: 81 percent of the 41,000 respondents (as of 5:15 eastern) say they care about the U.S. win over Spain "a lot." But does the American soccer fan really care about American soccer? ESPN's ratings for the Euro 2008 tournament were higher than its figures for Major League Soccer contests and U.S. national team matches. This year, ESPN killed Major League Soccer's regular Thursday night slot on account of poor viewership; MLS games can now be seen scattered throughout the schedule on a different day from week to week. Meanwhile, the network just bought the rights to air games from Spain's La Liga. For American audiences, Spanish national team stalwarts like Xavi and David Villa make for more compelling television than America's Landon Donovan.
Don't blame American soccer fans for preferring the international product—foreigners play the game better, after all. (It's also true that the best domestic talent leaves the U.S. in search of better competition abroad. See: Tim Howard.) Still, the U.S. national team's titanic upset takes on a different cast when you consider that American soccer fans are more interested in watching soccer when Americans aren't playing. That's ultimately what makes this Confederations Cup win so different from the Miracle on Ice. In that hockey game, our guys heroically took on and overcame the indomitable, faceless Soviets. In Wednesday's match with Spain, our guys heroically took on and overcame an indomitable team—but the foe wasn't faceless. This time, we know our opponent better than we knew ourselves.
-
sponsorship
To mark the release of Whatever Works, Woody Allen's 40th movie, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman has ranked each of Allen's films. As a Woody loyalist—in my book, he's a member of a small club of artists who've made both tragic and comic masterpieces—I commend the effort. But the rankings are so preposterous I wonder whether the list is meant purely as a provocation rather than an earnest expression of preferences.
The first eyebrow-raising choice is Bananas at No. 3—it's a decent slapstick, but it's a slight effort even when compared with Woody's other comedies, like the autobiographically rich Radio Days, the more fanciful Alice (ranked at 32!) or Gleiberman's 10th-place pick, The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Equally shocking is Gleiberman's contention that Match Point is Woody's sixth-best movie. Match Point is nothing more than a poor man's Crimes and Misdemeanors (11th place), lazily shot by a director who obviously doesn't know London well.
One more puzzling decision: ranking September last. Not the greatest Woody Allen movie, I concede, but Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston all deliver solid performances, making September a perfectly watchable little drama. Certainly it's leagues better than the offensive Whatever Works, which Gleiberman mysteriously ranks at 26.
There is, however, one film Gleiberman and I agree on: Manhattan. Gleiberman gives it his No. 1 spot, and while I wouldn't go so far (I prefer Crimes and Misdemeanors), it's certainly Allen's most lyrical film—the most moving love letter ever sent to New York City, perhaps to any city. It's also a great counterpoint to Whatever Works, in part because it deals with the same May-December theme. The relationship between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works is perplexingly asexual and ends in a childishly easy fashion, with Wood explaining she's fallen for a lustier contemporary. Manhattan, on the other hand, is entirely forthright about Mariel Hemingway's sex appeal, the possibility of genuine, passionate attachment across generations, and also the older man's desperation when she's finally ready to move on. Here's the classic closing scene:
Have I been too hard on Gleiberman? Am I too easy on Woody Allen's Bergman knock-offs? Post your thoughts in the "Fray."
-
sponsorship
Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its intention to double the size of the best picture field for next year's Oscar race, from five movies to 10, for the first time since Casablanca won the award in 1943. In addition to ensuring that our national conversation about the Oscars now begins in frigging June, this move opens up the best picture field to movies outside the usual narrowly defined scope of high-minded Oscar-worthiness. It's uplifting to imagine that some of the newly created spots might go to the kind of smaller movie that usually goes under the Academy's radar for the big prize (something like, say, last year's Rachel Getting Married, or even a foreign film like Let the Right One In) but the likely outcome (and, no doubt, the Academy's intention) will be to make the Oscars more, not less, commercial. The expanded field will allow for the recognition of animated fare like Wall-E or popular summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (neither of which made the best picture list last year.) This year, movies that may benefit from the roomier category include Star Trek, Up, and (if there's a just God somewhere) Drag Me to Hell.
This shift will also mean that at least a few of the best picture nominees will be likely to be movies most people have seen. (Let's face it, the great There Will Be Blood/No Country for Old Men faceoff of 2007 was thrilling for us film nerds but baffling to the average Oscar viewer.) The Big Money's Chadwick Matlin makes the point that the 10-movie field may also serve as a kind of Hollywood stimulus package, encouraging studios to spend more money on marketing, audiences to flock to more movies, and TV advertisers to buy more Oscar ad time based on expectations of higher ratings. But there are yet-unforeseen consequences of this shift: The opening song medley and the clip reel of best picture excerpts will both have to double in length, pushing Oscar-night bedtimes (and critics' deadlines) ever closer to the break of dawn.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 17: "Transformers 2 rotten tomatoes." The giant robot blockbuster starring Megan Fox as a beautiful woman opens today and it is, according to rottentomatoes.com, rotten (24 percent on the Tomatometer). The Awl's Choire Sicha has written a harrowing account of watching the film, which Slate's own Dana Stevens calls "loud ... long ... incoherent ... leering ... racist ... and rife with product tie-ins." Still, lukewarm reviews didn't stop Transformers from breaking the 2009 opening box-office record in the U.K. last weekend.
No. 49: "The Hurt Locker." The Hurt Locker is a different story. Opening June 26, media buzz has already crowned the film "The First Iraq War Movie That Doesn't Suck." Directed by Kathryn Bigelow ("Point Break," "K-19: The Widow Maker), The Hurt Locker follows a sweltering, Kevlar-clad bomb disposal unit as they make their way through Baghdad, circa 2004. Bigelow told The Onion A.V. Club, "I think of the film, in a way, as non-partisan. ... I think the script successfully looks at the humanity of these men and their courage, and shares with us what a day in the life of a bomb tech is."
No. 67: "Lisa Kudrow Web Therapy." When it had its online premiere last year, Lisa Kudrow's Web Therapy was hailed as a step forward in the genre Boingboing called "webcam narrative." Lisa Kudrow stars as a weirdo online shrink who consults with her patients via Webcam. The Lexus-sponsored show launched a second season this week on Hulu, but can Kudrow compete in our post-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Internet-video world?
-
sponsorship
The 2009 U.S. Open was a massive shank—too much rain and too little Tiger Woods made golf's showcase event close to unwatchable. For the beloved Dan Jenkins, covering his 200th major tournament, the omnipresent storm clouds were less a deterrent than a welcome source of material. Over the last week, Jenkins filed more than 150 tweets from the Open, quipping about the weather ("If you want to get a swing tip today, try the aquarium"), Phil Mickelson's fashion sense ("Easy to root for Phil; still hard to root for those shirts"), and the tourney's anonymous champion ("I didn't have Lucas Glover in the pool, but good on you if you did. The unsung guy wins over the sung guys").
These 140-character dispatches earned Jenkins kudos from sports bloggers and the old-line media. (OK, that second link—in which "the ancient Twitterer" is described as "a sensation"—goes to a column written by his daughter Sally. But the point still stands.) Jenkins' tweets were the best thing about a bad U.S. Open, but it's worth thinking about whether Tweetdeck is the best venue for the world's greatest golf writer.
In terms of sheer output, @danjenkinsgd destroys Dan Jenkins the long-form writer. After this year's Masters, Jenkins filed a 1,300-word recap for Golf Digest. Add all of his tweets together, and Jenkins has dashed off 3,200 words on the Open. I'd also argue that Jenkins the Twitterer is funnier than his print-journalism alter ego. A slow and steady stream of one-liners plays better than carefully couched jokes—it's the difference between getting strafed by a BB gun and getting nailed by a cannonball. Timeliness is also key here: It makes more sense to joke about Phil Mickelson's attire when your readers can see what he's wearing.
Jenkins' just-in-time delivery wasn't always for the best. Twitter works better for color commentary than for play-by-play, even if the play-by-play man is a genius observer. Jenkins was an ideal companion during the Open's intractable rain delays, passing the time with jokes and historical footnotes. When the golf got more exciting, he didn't add much to the TV coverage or to lengthier, real-time Web writing. A sample tweet from Monday: "Glover fails to birdie the par-15 13th and remains tied with Phil at -4. Ricky Barnes two-putts for birdie and is alive at -2."
Twitter also doesn't do historical breadth. Jenkins made loads of allusions over the last week, everything from a rundown of all the U.S. Opens that ended on a Monday to a quote from Ben Crenshaw circa 1975. While this level of recall is incredible, Jenkins' musings came off as a string of factoids rather than a well-curated collection of supporting details. Luckily, this year's Open—which will be best-remembered for being forgettable—made this a moot point. The story of last year's tournament, in which a one-legged Tiger Woods refused to lose to underdog Rocco Mediate, was best told in a sweeping feature. This year's U.S. Open, played underwater and won by some guy named Lucas Glover, was nothing if not ephemeral. It was a Twitter tournament, and Dan Jenkins was the right man at the right time in the right medium.
-
sponsorship
Variety reported yesterday that the Steven Soderbergh/Brad Pitt production of Moneyball, Michael Lewis' great book about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistics to change baseball, was closed down just 96 hours before shooting began. Apparently, Columbia Pictures chief Amy Pascal read Soderbergh's latest revision to the script, became wary of big changes in it, and pulled the plug, leaving the director casting about for a new studio. One unusual element in the planned film? Soderbergh intended to splice "interviews with such ballplayers as Beane's former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry" throughout.
This news raises the possibility of two grim outcomes: 1) that Moneyball may never get made and 2) that if it does get made, it may not be any good. Although interviews with Dykstra are always entertaining, the plan to include documentary footage worries those of us who are big fans of blockbuster Soderbergh (director of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven movies) and less enamored of his arty, experimental alter ego (director of Bubble and the two-part, four hour-plus Che epic). We'd assumed that Moneyball, the tale of a general manager leading a poor, underdog team to unprecedented success, would be a kind of Ballpark Eleven: A heist movie about a team of likeable smartypantses (including Pitt as Beane, comedian Demitri Martin as number-cruncher Paul De Podesta, and charming ballplayer Scott Hatteberg as himself) sticking it to the smug baseball establishment. But perhaps Pascal got spooked because Soderbergh has something more unorthodox in mind: A star-studded feature film intercut with a semi-documentary meditation on Beane himself. We may never know!
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 21: "tropical storm Andres." Googlers are no doubt wondering whether tropical storm Andres—just recently upgraded from a depression—is headed their way. Forecasts show this storm will stick to the Southwest coast of Mexico before heading off into the Pacific by Friday. Andres is the first Eastern Pacific tropical storm of a hurricane season forecasted to produce six Atlantic hurricanes.
No. 25: "kodachrome." Kodachrome, the 35 mm color film that made Kodak a household name, is going the way of the Polaroid after 74 years of production. According to the Los Angeles Times, digital cameras have reduced sales of Kodachrome to just "a fraction of one percent" of Kodak's still-picture film sales. The requisite campaign to keep Kodachrome alive has already launched, and Kodak is hosting a gallery of shots taken with the film.
No. 31: "Mia Wasikowska." This weekend, Disney released a photo of Johnny Depp made up like an undead hobo clown for his role as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's upcoming remake of Alice in Wonderland. But the big news today is that Burton has chosen 19-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska as his Alice. Wasikowska is probably best known for her stint on the HBO drama In Treatment. "She just had that certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality," Burton told the Daily Mail.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 13: "Ennis house": A downturn seems the perfect time to invest in an architectural masterpiece that's on the brink of falling down a hill. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Mayan-inspired concrete structure, balanced precariously atop Los Feliz Hill in Los Angeles, is for sale. Asking price for the house that starred in Blade Runner: $15 million (plus $5 million to $7 million in additional necessary renovations).
No. 38: "quadruple witching": The recession has thrown some arcane moneyspeak into common usage but probably none so bizarre as "quadruple witching day." Quadruple witching day is the third Friday of every quarter (i.e., today), and it marks the expiration of four types of financial contracts—stock index futures, stock index options, stock futures, and stock options. This should make for a volatile market today, though according to CNBC.com, two out of three quadruple witching days end up in the green.
No. 83: "world's oldest person": Tomoji Tanabe, the world's oldest man, is dead. He was 113. The AP reports that Tanabe, born Sept. 18, 1895, died peacefully in his sleep this morning. On the occasion of his being inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records, Tanabe offered this tip to aspiring centenarians: "Not drinking alcohol is the best formula for keeping myself healthy." According to U.N. projections, Japan will have almost 1 million centenarians by 2050—more than any other country.
-
sponsorship
In a Slate article last week, I described the phenomenon of the orphan tweet: a post left behind by someone who signs up for Twitter, tweets once, and is never heard from again. With the help of Slate intern Jeremy Singer-Vine, I found several thousand such tweets. Our list was nowhere near exhaustive, however, so we invited readers to send along their own examples.
Ryan from Los Angeles wrote in to say that his favorite orphan tweet belongs to BretEastonEllis, whose lone missive reads "Nothing." As Ryan notes, this is not the real Bret Easton Ellis, though the novelist does have a Twitter account. EastonEllis, set up recently at the suggestion of The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear, is home to eight updates.
Stewart from Atlanta flagged a rather puckish orphan tweet, by the user 11am, which reads "getting ready for 11:01." Not that funny—until you consider that whenever someone tweets about planning to do something @11am, they inadvertently link to 11am's profile. This happens a lot.
On June 8, Matt from Orange, Calif., e-mailed to drop a dime on his buddy Kevin, who at the time had only this tweet to his name: "Watching Late night with Jimmy Fallon." (Fans of Fallon, an enthusiastic Twitterer, are surely responsible for untold orphan tweets.) Apparently tipped off about Matt's e-mail, Kevin posted a second tweet ("Sick of Twitter") on June 9, in what seems to have been an attempt to avoid being called out in this follow-up post. Nice try, Kevin.
By far the best excuse we heard for tweeting only once came from Zach, a corporal with the Marine Corps who's currently stationed in San Diego. Actually, Zach had two reasons for quitting, the first being his preference for Facebook over Twitter. The second: "My new membership happening in close proximity to my deployment to Iraq (and thus spotty Internet access)." Can't argue with that.
One of the strangest examples we cited in the original article was from user kttheet, whose lone, mysterious tweet read "Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL)." To our delight, Katie from New York e-mailed to take credit for the post. Katie is on the editorial staff of O, The Oprah Magazine, though she joined up well before her boss helped make Twitter a household word. In fact, she may have been too early an adopter. "I guess I stopped because, at the time (I see that the post was from April '08), nobody even cared about Twitter," she writes.
As for the gigantic T-shirt, Katie reports that it was tossed into the audience at a live performance by the comedic duo Tim and Eric. "Being a superfan, I felt moved to wear it despite it being big enough to fit 2 of me," she writes. Skeptical readers, rest assured: In order to verify that Katie really was the wearer of the gigantic T-shirt, we asked her to post a second tweet. She graciously obliged. It reads: "My clothing is now appropriately sized."
Cick here to see a Google spreadsheet of the 2,848 orphan tweets Slate turned up. Found a great one of your own? Retweet it with the hashtag #orphantweet.
-
sponsorship
I had high hopes when I learned that Taylor Swift and T-Pain were performing together on last night's CMT Music Awards. Two of the most world's most appealing pop stars, mashing up hip-hop, country, and teenpop? A lil' bit of pedal steel, a lil' bit of Auto-Tune? I canceled dinner plans. I switched off the Mets game. And I put myself way out on a limb: I tweeted my excitement.
Bad move. Instead of a live performance, the CMT broadcast opened with a video, "Thug Story," in which T-Pain crooned auto-tune-swathed backing vocals while "T-Swift" flashed a diamond grill and rapped about knitting sweaters. It was, in other words, the latest—the millionth?—example of the White Folks Can't Rap novelty tune, that ubiquitous sketch comedy routine that hammers home a single punch line again and again: Check out this honky rapping—isn't that a riot?
Well, maybe it was in 1983. That was the year of "Rappin' Rodney," in which Rodney Dangerfield reeled off a series of borscht-encrusted one-liners over a thumping beat. Shortly thereafter, Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau masterminded "Rap Master Ronnie," a mildly—very mildly—amusing spoof of President Reagan.
In other words, this joke is almost as old, and precisely as funny, as "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Yet it continues to get told and told again. Weird Al Yankovic has been working the white and nerdy hip-hop angle for at least a decade. Every time Saturday Night Live's writers are stuck, they disgorge a bit like "Palin Rap." ("My name is Sarah Palin/ You all know me/ Vice-prezzy nominee/ Of the GOP.") On YouTube, you can watch endless variations on the theme: white dudes rapping about Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, about their mopeds, about their inability to "keep a damn beat," about ultimate Frisbee, about organic produce, about Vermont. And the geeky white rapper gag isn't just sketch-comedy fodder; it's a career choice. MC Frontalot and MC Hawking (as in Stephen) are leading lights of nerdcore, a subgenre predicated on the inherent hilariousness of rap songs about Boba Fett.
If YouTube viewing statistics and viral blogging action are any measure, this one-note gag continues to elicit uproarious laughter, across the demographic spectrum. Has a hack comedy routine ever had such cachet? When nuclear physicists, Kanye West, and Karl Rove all agree on a joke, can we safely conclude the joke has lost some of its subversive oomph?
The truth is, "Thug Story" isn't just stale, it's outdated. There are plenty of white MCs these days, and very few are like Vanilla Ice, buffoons obsessed with gangsta authenticity. In fact, one of the best white rappers is a comedian. Andy Samberg has become a 21st-century Tom Lehrer by using hip-hop, his generation's musical lingua franca, as a launching pad for daffy comedy. Samberg's rap parodies flip the nerdcore punchline: They're affectionate genre spoofs, based on Samberg's rapping prowess, his ability to impersonate various hip-hop styles precisely. Listen to "Like a Boss," a spot-on sendup of Slim Thug's bombastic Houston hip-hop, and you'll hear a novel joke: a good white rapper sending up a good black one.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 1: "iphone 3.0 release time"; No. 12: "iphone 3.0 update download"; No. 22: "when will iphone 3.0 be available"; No. 35: "ipod touch 3.0 update"; No. 43: "is iphone 3.0 out yet?"; No. 62: "apple 3.0"; etc. It seems an iPhone update comes out today? The iPhone OS 3.0 firmware update was announced back in March and features a number of small to substantial upgrades. Earlier this morning, the update had yet to appear on the Internet, with iPhone users apparently Googling away their frustration. A little after 1 p.m. ET, the update went live, though it remains to be seen whether Apple's servers can handle the influx.
No. 15: "Obama Kills Fly." In this case, a video is worth a thousand Googles:
No. 89 "Firebird Suite." If you haven't gathered as much already from Google's enigmatic front page, today is the birthday of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. (He would have been 127.) Although Google's home-page illustration alludes to the Russian-folklore-based Firebird Suite, the discordant Rite of Spring is perhaps Stravinsky's best-known work, both for its musical qualities and for the scandal it caused at its 1913 première. More recently, a film about Stravinsky's brief love affair with Coco Chanel closed this year's Cannes.
-
sponsorship
"The hidden secret of Joe Buck," HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg said recently about the host of his new quarterly chat show, "is that he has a very dry and unique wit." On last night's premiere episode of Joe Buck Live, the Fox play-by-play man continued to keep that secret incredibly well. It's not that Buck didn't try to be funny. In the show's opening bit, the sportscaster tried to get Brett Favre's word that he would show up for their scheduled interview. "You've been a little flippy-floppy on decisions lately," Buck said, smirkily. Hijinks did not ensue.
While Buck didn't live up to his billing, the famously indecisive QB played his part beautifully. In response to Buck's question about whether he would play for the Vikings this year, Hamlet-in-Wranglers replied: "Maybe." What about his decision not to go to Minnesota for off-season workouts? "I think both sides are right," Favre noted with great equanimity, his feet propped on a table next to a driftwood sculpture.
After the Favre sit-down, Buck screened a short video on athletes and criminality before chatting with one-time coke fiend Michael Irvin and newly christened Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocino. When asked about his team's legal problems, Ochocinco (correctly) insisted they had the wrong man—he's never been in trouble with the law. Still in search of a gotcha moment, Buck asked Ochocinco why he repeatedly embarrassed his quarterback Carson Palmer. Ochocinco said he had no idea what Buck was talking about—"you'll have to pull it up." Buck, no Tim Russert, had nothing on the teleprompter to counteract Ochocinco's denials. (Here's some material for next time, Joe.)
Despite the ceaseless wretchedness of Joe Buck Live, the show's namesake did win my sympathy in the end. During the final segment—a comedy panel featuring Paul Rudd, Artie Lange, and Jason Sudeikis—Lange commenced to roast Buck, slowly and painfully, over an open flame. (You can watch the even cruder, online-only aftershow here.) While a skilled pro might have out-taunted a guest who accused him of surfing the Web site "suckingcock dot com," Buck's rejoinders—"I just pulled a hamstring looking for a segue"—made him come off like a scared first-grader talking back to a bully. Buck wasn't David Letterman taming Joaquin Phoenix; he was Magic Johnson on The Magic Hour getting taunted by Howard Stern (incidentally, Lange's boss). "Sorry to ruin your fuckin' great show," Lange said before the credits rolled. "I appreciate the apology, because you have," Buck said, pretending to be joking.
-
sponsorship
Ah, here's what happened to Bill Forsyth. A lovely article/interview.
-
sponsorship
Every film that receives theatrical release can expect some kind of mainstream media attention—at the very least a capsule review. But the situation is different for books. Publishers in the United States release on the order of 170,000 new titles annually—including about 23,000 just from large general trade houses—making it simply impossible for critics to review everything. To narrow the field, assignment editors rely on four trade magazines: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, each of which offers short reviews of many thousands of titles. Of particular interest to editors are books that receive a “star” for unusual merit.
It stands to reason that titles receiving stars from multiple trades have a better shot at success than those that don’t. Certainly it’s of great interest to publicists, who—on such occasions—send out e-mail blitzes proclaiming a “trifecta.” To give Slate readers a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on in the world of books, we’re launching a regular blog feature that will highlight new titles with at least three stars. The books you see listed here are likely to do well in sales or receive major review attention, or both.
Our inaugural list includes two mysteries, a debut novel, and a nonfiction account of the 1969 moon landing.
---
First among victors is Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse—the only new title we came across to receive stars from all four trades. When Wade Barsad locked his wife’s horses in a barn and burned them alive, she retaliated by shooting him in the head six times. Or did she? Sheriff Walt Longmire investigates. Booklist warns that Longmire’s friend Henry Standing Bear “feels like a tag-along” but assures readers that “Longmire’s shoulders are more than broad enough to carry a book.”
Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
Peter Murphy’s John the Revelator. John Devine’s stuck in small-town Southeast Ireland with his single, chain-smoking, bible-quoting mom. Everything changes when a “Rimbaudian” boy comes to town. Kirkus promises “lascivious anecdotes” from said boy.
Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant. A fancy lawyer who asks New Delhi detective Vish Puri to find his missing servant is subsequently arrested for her murder. Library Journal notes that there’s an “expletives-included” glossary.
Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal
Craig Nelson’s Rocket Men. Story of Apollo 11. Nelson, says Publishers Weekly, “moves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA ground crew.”
Booklist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
"4 Calvin Klein billboard"—Depending on their tastes, New Yorkers have been either titillated or disgusted by a new Calvin Klein billboard depicting three men and a woman in a configuration that suggests nothing more or less than group sex. With its effective censor-baiting, the CK "orgy" ad could be this week's unauthorized Woody Allen billboard.
"16 Perito Moreno Glacier"—Opponents of Obama's controversial carbon cap-and-trade plan are jumping all over news that Argentina's massive Perito Moreno glacier continues to grow in the face of global warming. (They're less thrilled by this report of glaciers disappearing from Ugandan mountaintops.) Scientists are unsure why Perito Moreno continues to thrive when most of the world's glaciers are melting at an alarming rate.
"34 Antonio Castro"—The missteps of world leaders' progeny are always a hit with the Internet; now Fidel Castro's 42-year-old son, Antonio, is getting the Jenna Bush treatment. For eight months, Castro carried out an online affaire d'amour via instant message with a beautiful Colombian woman named "Claudia." But? Turned out Claudia was Luis Dominquez, a Miami-based prankster who wanted to "shatter the myth of [Castro's] impenetrable security system," according to the Miami Herald.
-
sponsorship
In the late '70s and early '80s, a Scottish filmmaker named Bill Forsyth made a handful of whimsical comedies. After shooting a number in and around Glasgow, Forsyth moved on to Hollywood, where he adapted Marylyn Robinson’s acclaimed novel Housekeeping; cut a deft little gem with Burt Reynolds (and a script by John Sayles) called Breaking In; and, finally, wrote and directed Being Human, an ambitious think-comedy—a Charlie Kaufman film before there was a Charlie Kaufman—starring Robin Williams.
Nothing I have ever loved so much has ever disappeared so completely as the films of Bill Forsyth. Why? Forsyth’s L.A. sojourn had come courtesy of David Puttnam, the legendary British producer and then-head of Columbia Pictures. Puttnam shepherded Forsyth’s Local Hero, as well as the triumphs Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields. But Oscars and swooning critics never made up for a perceived sniffiness toward American showbiz; and when Puttnam went down, so, too, did Forsyth. Under the new management, Being Human was butchered from a three hour director’s cut down to 85 minutes. A grating voiceover was added. The magnum now fully separated from the opus, Being Human was left to die a critical and popular death.
Forsyth is regarded as the man who returned contemporary filmmaking to Scotland. And yet, as far as I can tell, he has all but vanished. When the cast and crew of Local Hero—his masterpiece, and the last movie I’d like to watch before wheeling off to eternity—reunited at the Glasgow Film Festival for its silver anniversary, Forsyth did not attend. A washed-out cut of it can be rented on Netflix, along with similarly insulting editions of Housekeeping and Breaking In. Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy, a lovely film about a Glaswegian DJ caught up in an ice cream war, must be watched on …YouTube?
I encourage you to discover Local Hero. If anyone knows what has recently become of Forsyth, an answer unavailable even to the tentacles of Google, drop me a line; if you know how to move the bigwigs at Criterion to create a box set for a wondrous but misplaced director, e-mail me at sdmetca@yahoo.com.
-
sponsorship
Moon, an awesomely creepy sci-fi film that opens in New York and Los Angeles today (and nationwide in coming weeks), begins with an advertisement for a futuristic energy company that has solved the world's problems by mining helium-3 from lunar regolith and firing it back to Earth. "Who'd of thought? All the energy we ever needed, right above our heads ..."
Lonely miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has been stationed at an industrial outpost on the dark side of the moon with no one for company but a sycophantic robot named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). As his three-year contract winds down (along with his sanity), Bell begins to think that Lunar Industries has its own dark side-in the form of a ruthless business model that commodifies its workers in the most literal way.
It's tempting to lump the movie in with Wall-E, Dawn of the Dead, and other classic sci-fi critiques of consumer culture. But there's another, more obvious warning here, that couldn't be more timely: Stay off the moon!
Next Wednesday, NASA will launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—the first step in the agency's costly and ridiculous plan to set up a permanent moon base. (The orbiter's mission: "to create the comprehensive atlas of the Moon's features and resources necessary to design and build a lunar outpost.") The recon mission will cost several hundred million dollars; to set up the base may run the tab into the hundreds of billions. Yet it's not at all clear what the potential payoff would be.
The government's rundown of potential "lunar exploration objectives" does include a Moon-like scenario: We might eventually "create a new energy market based on the moon." But even the most optimistic experts say that the use of helium-3 as a fuel source is a long, long way off.
In any case, the mental breakdown of Moon's main character does make a strong case for another of NASA's lunar objectives, coded "mHH8" on the master list (PDF): "Provide leisure activities to support the psychological health of those living on and visiting the moon."
-
sponsorship
Behold the Comfort Wipe—an 18-inch plastic stick to which you may attach a clump of toilet paper, thus easing the arduous task of wiping your bottom. I'm sure this product serves a vital purpose for some, and, hey, that's wonderful. I'd just like to make a couple of comments about the ad:
First, I think we could have done without the testimonials. Anyone who would actually benefit from use of this product will immediately recognize its utility. No need for a series of fecal narratives from "ordinary" people. And I'd prefer not to ponder the precise physics implied by the fat dude when he says, "Being a big guy certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. This is a great product." (Likewise, the older woman seems disproportionately jazzed about her newfound wiping freedom. I swear she's on the precipice of winking at us.)
Second, the ad claims that the Comfort Wipe is "the first improvement to toilet paper as we know it since the 1880s." I'm not sure what they mean by this. According to the invaluable Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, packaged bathroom tissue was introduced in the United States by Joseph Gayetty in 1857. The next major breakthrough came in 1890, when the Scott Paper Company put TP in roll form.
Anyway, and more distressingly: Comfort Wipe's assertion completely ignores the advent of "wet toilet paper" around the turn of the millennium. Have we already forgotten Charmin Fresh Mates and Cottonelle Fresh Flushable Moist Wipes? Pre-dampened bumwad was a brilliant innovation, as these things go—even if consumers have been slow to catch on.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 28: "digital converter box." If you're Googling this, chances are you woke up to find your TV has gone snowy. Congratulations: You live in one of the more than 1 million homes that are unprepared for today's digital TV switchover! (Slate's Farhad Manjoo explains what just happened to your TV, and why you should be happy about it.)
No. 59: "Banksy." No, bloggers haven't uncovered the infamous graffiti artist/trickster's identity (though not for lack of trying). All this Googling is related to Banksy's new show, which opens tomorrow in Bristol, U.K. It's the biggest exhibition yet for the artist who once sold a painting titled "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit," and in typical Banksy fashion, no one knew about it until the day before its opening.
No. 62: "Pedamundo." Yesterday, singer/songwriter John Mayer coined this word for a made-up holiday that consists of "7 days apologizing for the year's indiscretions, culminating in a nice garden salad." Less than 24 hours after Mayer posted it to his Twitter account (followers:1,299,783) "pedamundo" is strongly trending on both Google and Twitter. The Wikipedia entry for "pedamundo" has already been written and deleted (stated reason: "does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject"), but there's no Web site, yet.
-
sponsorship
With today's release of The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott's remake of the 1974 caper film about a hijacked No. 6 train, I am bracing for another onslaught of nostalgia for New York City in the 1970s. The theory goes like this: Back when the city was nearly bankrupt and everyone looked like Al Pacino in Serpico, New York was scuzzy, but it had soul. (Because it was scuzzy, it had soul.) The lofts of SoHo were hives of funky industry. Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin were trying to strangle each other in the Yankee clubhouse. Television was playing at CBGBs; Bianca Jagger was snorting coke at Studio 54. Everyone was out of work; there was a real-live serial killer on the loose; and when a blackout hit the city, actual looting and mayhem ensued! You know, New York was dangerous, "edgy"—authentic.
This has become a party-line position among New York's arty chattering classes, especially as the economic downturn threatens to teleport us back to the bad old days. A trendy thing to say (in certain New York circles, at least) is that '70s-style deprivation would ultimately be a boon, scrubbing the gilding off the 21st-century metropolis and purging the town of hedge-funders and Eurotrash. The rents would drop, and bohemia would blossom again in the shadows of the condo towers and chain stores.
James Wolcott doesn't go that far in his tone poem to '70s New York published in the June issue of Vanity Fair. But "Splendor in the Grit" typifies the romantic pop-historical vision of the period—a surprise, coming from Wolcott's normally acid-dipped pen.
Wolcott draws reasonable contrasts between the city of then and now, pointing out that New York was "a more egalitarian city than it subsequently became with the rise of the super-rich," and that Manhattan below 14th Street holds less surprise today than it did in the days when "art galleries and Off Off Off Broadway theaters could spring up in shoebox storefronts."
But then he gets all rhapsodic about how hard-boiled the place was. The city, he writes, instilled in its denizens a "jungle-cat quickness ... and fine-tuned a ninja ability to suss out something ugly about to go down at the pimp bar." The tourists "looked scared." (Awesome!) And Wolcott's kicker is a doozy. Evoking the possibility of a "second go-round of the 70s" this time with "those spiky glass buildings that have gone up in recent years ... reflecting our own overreaching folly back at us with sterile mockery," Wolcott concludes: "Really, I much prefer rubble."
Oh, does he? Wolcott may have seen rubble on the front page of the Times when President Carter visited the South Bronx. But I doubt he had to step over any on his way to the art-house cinemas about which he waxes lyrical. I don't know about Wolcott's own circumstances, but I'm confident that many of his fellow travelers in '70s bourgeois-bohemia had a social safety net to fall back on if things really got ugly—namely, parents in a Westchester colonial or a Central Park West classic six with an empty guest room and a full refrigerator.
If you weren't a scene maker, New York's crumminess held a lot less allure. Stagflation, rotting infrastructure, sanitation workers' strikes, and rampant crime didn't just turn New Yorkers into ninjas and jungle cats—it made the city an incredibly unpleasant and often terrifying place to live. I have a memory, from around the time I was in second grade, of a perhaps forgotten New York folkway: the breakfast table distribution of "mugger money," cash that parents would give to their kids before packing them off to school. The idea being that a $20 bill would placate the mugger so he would opt not to blow a child's head off.
Or take some more memories from my family scrapbook. My mother was robbed at knifepoint on upper Broadway two times in 1974. She worked for a time at a city-run drug rehabilitation program in the Bronx, where she witnessed appalling corruption, including the sexual exploitation of junkie prostitutes by the bureaucrat in charge. (Her attempts to report this to higher-ups were met with indifference.) She got laid off in fiscal crisis of 1975 and took a job driving a taxi, which was very scary work, especially for a woman. Eventually, she had to move with her young son to Boston—a far worse fate, as I'm sure Wolcott knows, than living in a New York with fewer storefront galleries.
I hasten to add that my mother was a Barnard-educated professional who grew up in a tony Connecticut town, in the heart of New York's affluent commuter belt. Things were much direr for those teenage hookers in the rehab program and for millions of other New Yorkers whose plight is reduced, in the Life on Mars-Bronx Is Burning version of history, to the backdrop before which scenes of "gritty" glamour unfold.
Don't get me wrong: New York in the '70s was uniquely vibrant. No reasonable person is immune to the charms of Bella Abzug's hats, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album, or Joseph Sargent's crud-caked lens. But the town was also uniquely miserable—not a place we want to revisit. There is something gross about nostalgists aestheticizing squalor that they never really, fully experienced.
As for rubble: It still exists in New York City in 2009, and Wolcott doesn't even have to leave his home borough of Manhattan to see it, although he might need to use his MetroCard. The thing is, rubble looks a lot better from a distance of 35 blocks, or 35 years.
-
sponsorship
Two artists get their revenge on sticky notes by turning them into short films:
Where will the next office-supply masterpiece come from? I've got my money on binder clips.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 9: "Prickly Shark." The prickly shark is an extremely rare shark with dual dorsal fins, and on Tuesday, scientists in Monterey, Calif., captured and displayed one for only the second time ever. A tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was the shark's home for 15 hours before it flipped over in a "hypnotic trance," according to the Monterey Herald. This signaled to scientists that it was time to return it to the sea.
No. 21: "David Letterman Sarah Palin." Last night, Letterman responded on-air to complaints from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that he had made "sexually perverted" jokes about "raping" her 14-year-old daughter on his show Tuesday night. (The jokes were a little perverted but they were definitely not about rape.) Letterman's unapologetic rebuttal was a brilliant judo move: "I can't really defend these: They're just jokes." Whether it satisfied Palin remains to be seen, but the controversy has been good for ratings: Letterman has been beating Conan in the numbers since Tuesday.
No. 35: "Amanda Knox pictures." Tomorrow, 21-year-old Amanda Knox takes the stand in Italy to defend herself against charges she killed her British roommate in 2007 while on an exchange program there. Since Knox was charged five months ago, the case—and its attendant sexy details—has captivated Italy. But Timothy Egan in the New York Times notes that the case against Knox "has so many holes in it ... that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago." The fact that "pictures" is appended to Knox's name suggests many Googlers are subjecting her to their own judgment—namely, whether she's worthy of the nickname bestowed upon her by the foreign press: "Foxy Knoxy."
-
sponsorship
"The true democracy ... where all journey down the open road. Where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. Not by its family name. Not even by its reputation. Not by works at all. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot, and being no more than itself."
—D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman
On this week’s Culture Gabfest we talked about the death of GM. There are two competing narratives when it comes to America’s supposed romance with the car. The first picks up on the longing that Lawrence, the class-bound Englishman, experiences when he thinks of Whitman, the barbaric yawper on the open road, carrying with him nothing more than his own soul, unenhanced. (A similar note is sounded here, in Scotsman Andrew O’Hagan’s impossibly smart elegy to the car: “If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency.”) The first narrative is: We are in our absolute essence a car culture, and we have the icons to prove it: Whitman avant la lettre, Kerouac, Springsteen. Cars express our mobility, our individuality, our optimism, our unembarrassed embrace of the large and the far; once, they expressed our economic dominance.
Alongside this runs another, darker narrative. The Eisenhower highway bill irreparably scarred the countryside and made us dependent on oil; Robert Moses destroyed our cities and turned us into a nation of road enraged, isolated suburbanites, enslaved to the epic commute. As our bogus freedom expanded, our public spaces degraded. This narrative, too, has its icons: Welles' movie The Magnificent Ambersons or The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Moses. I would put exactly between myths No. 1 and No. 2 the magnificent Frank Bascombe books by Richard Ford.
So which is it? My wife took the kids to the in-laws two years ago, and no sooner had the door swung shut, I jumped in the car. I drove down to the Maryland shore, listening to a Mets game on the radio, then The Queen Is Dead and Guided by Voices, as I rocketed south to Charlottesville, Va., to gawp at waitresses and wander through Mr. Jefferson’s serpentine walls. The campus was deserted; the buildings were being locked up at the end of the day. I ran into an old English professor I never expected to see again, himself a deep reader of Whitman. I’d love to say there is some organic connection between driving along at dusk, listening to baseball—if not exactly a soul unenhanced, a haggard new father untethered from the world of dependency—and the magic hour encounter with Mark. And yet my memory of speaking as a somewhat integrated adult with someone who had always discomposed me as an adolescent, is inseparable from the fact that we had passed each other on foot.
We should at least hesitate before we claim Whitman for narrative No. 1; he may even belong more comfortably in narrative No. 2. Maybe the true romance has always been with the American road, not the American car, whatever the advertisers say. It preceded the automobile, and it will, god willing, survive it.
-
sponsorship
Top Chef has deteriorated season after season—elimination challenges have gotten predictable, product placement ever more obtrusive, the contestants more highbrow. Much of what I enjoyed about the earlier seasons was the amateurism of the professionals—few were so accomplished you couldn't critique their creations without thinking, however unrealistically, that you could do better. That feeling has slowly dissipated as more talented contestants have competed, and it certainly completely disappeared tonight, with the premiere of Top Chef: Masters—a competition for already established top chefs.
Given this, I was highly skeptical of the show. But Masters redeemed the franchise. Four professionals are pitted against one another in a chance to win a spot in the final competition. These masters have less at stake than their Top Chef predecessors—they're competing for charities, not for their careers—and they're more experienced, so it's understandable they'd be more relaxed and able to partake in some repartee, which works to the show's advantage. Other highlights: The most cocky of the chefs, Michael Schlow, went down in the quickfire challenge. We saw some great improvisation from cowboy chef Tim Love.
What really won me over, though, was the humble and talented Hubert Keller. He sweetly admitted how disconcerting it is to win a "lifetime achievement" award when his career is going strong. Despite his haute French background, he tickled junior Girl Scouts with his whimsical whipped cream shaped like a mouse (and was genuinely ecstatic when they loved it).
We'll see how the show is the next several weeks when it can't ride on Keller's charm and genius. It has its definite flaws—it lacks a clear Tom Colicchio-type head judge. (James Oseland of Saveur was clearly trying to play that role, but hasn't pulled it off.) Host Kelly Choi hasn't found her groove. Just when you're starting to get to know the contestants, they get kicked off the show. The challenges are as gimmicky as ever. But there was something incredibly gratifying about watching (spoiler alert) Hubert, the traditional old man beat out the hearty young players. Hubert has me hooked, and I plan to cheer him on in the finale.
-
sponsorship
We've just posted this week's Culture Gabfest, in which Steve Metcalf, June Thomas, and I discuss the awesomeness of Stephen Colbert's trip to Iraq, the oddness of the "guest editor" gig, the resurgence of Broadway, the amateurism of the Tonys, the death of GM, and whether the culture of the American road has hit a dead end. Click here to get the episode; click here to respond to it on our Facebook page.
-
sponsorship
I enjoyed Agger’s palate cleansers. But I couldn’t think of any for myself. I was a dutifully dreary Springsteen-head in high school, and about every three or four years, I plunge back in, bellowing along to "Thunder Road" and making muscles in the shaving mirror. Whatever this cleanses, it cannot be the palate.
I have another proposal: albums so painfully beautiful you can only listen to them so often, for fear of compromising, damaging, or effacing their beauty through overuse. The inclusion of Kind of Blue on the cleanser list made me think of it. I can only listen to this (and yes, I’m a precious twit, thank you) once every couple of years. Sunday at the Village Vanguard, in which Bill Evans takes a piano, an otherwise heavy object, and makes it levitate, is about a once-a-year treat. I almost never put on Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. “Long, Long, Long,” the Harrison tune from The White Album; “Blues Run The Game” by Jackson C. Frank, also covered to perfection by John Renbourn (“Catch a boat to England, baby, maybe to Spain …”); "Orange Was the Color of Her Dress" by Mingus. Dylan’s “Up To Me.” This is one I’d love to throw open, but also into Ron Rosenbaum’s court. Ron: Anything you can barely stand to listen to, you love it so much?
Send responses to Michael Agger at michaelagger1@gmail.com.
-
sponsorship
Speaking of aging rappers, it's easy to forget that De La Soul is still alive and kicking it. Their albums aren't wire-to-wire masterpieces anymore—1996's Stakes Is High was probably the last of those—but there are pleasures to be found in their mature material, much of which addresses the subject of maturing in a young man's game. "Everyone cools off from being hot," Posdnous observes on The Grind Date, "it's about if you can handle being cold or not." De La has handled it better than most.
But what to make of their new album? In late April, De La released Are You In?, part of the Nike+ series, in which the sneaker company commissions workout music from indie acts like LCD Soundsystem and Aesop Rock. De La's album has prompted some hand-wringing over whether the group has finally sold out, but I doubt devoted fans are losing much sleep over it, particularly when it's been five years since their last release.
The more interesting question is whether De La has produced good exercise music. Over the weekend, I took Are You In?—which consists of a single 44-minute track—for a 44-minute jog. Appropriately for this runner, it starts lethargically, with Posdnous rapping about how hard it is to get up in the morning. (His first attempt fails, and he retreats to his conjugal bed to "spend another hour curled up, intertwined, like curly fries.") But around the 18-minute mark, the tempo gets faster, and the lyrics lower in saturated fat. "Got to keep up with your cardio," advises Trugoy "so you can have energy to stash." From here on out, the beats are arranged into a series of effectively inspirational crescendos. They're punctuated, however, with refrains borrowed from the Richard Simmons songbook: "Run! Pick up the pace!"
This is exercise music about exercise. Personally, I prefer running to something that makes me forget what I'm doing—something more like the De La exercise playlist I've had on my iPod for years. Despite their reputation as cerebral rappers, De La has always made music that's great to move to. Herewith, my De La Soul running mix, guaranteed to improve your next cardiovascular activity:
"Intro," Stakes Is High
"Respect," AOI Presents- Impossible: Mission
"Eye Know," 3 Feet High and Rising
"Magic Number," 3 Feet High and Rising
"A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays,' " De La Soul Is Dead
"Live @ the Dugout '87," AOI Presents- Impossible: Mission
"Oooh," Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
"Brakes," Stakes Is High
"Verbal Clap," the Grind Date
"Rock Co. Cane Flow," the Grind Date
"Kicked Out the House," De La Soul Is Dead
"I Can Do Anything (Delacratic)," 3 Feet High and Rising
Cool down:
"I Am I Be" Buhloone Mindstate
"Breakadawn" Buhloone Mindstate
As for De La themselves, Posdnous admitted to EW's Music Mix blog that "We're not the biggest of runners." When he does feel the need to work off the curly fries, he listens to Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.
-
sponsorship
Big thanks to everyone who wrote in about the notion that Tom Waits clears the musical palate.
Here's the stuff that you use to reconnect:
Music: Sibelius, Neil Young, Townes Van Zandt (many times), early Frank Zappa, weeks of Steely Dan, a Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers/Little Feat marathon, Kind of Blue (which allows you to feel "pensive and relaxed while engaged and pensive"), and ACDC. ("How many songs can one band write about girls, getting girls, or being awesome around girls while only using A, E, and D chords? It doesn't matter.")
Movies: Most common were various favorites from one's early moviegoing days, followed by Godfather I and II. No argument there.
Books: Even more variation here, with Tolkien and Murakami as the only consensus gatherers. What I'd forgotten about is poetry—sorry, poetry—which many of you turn to when the mind needs a new meadow. One nice discovery (for me) was David Berman's "Self-Portrait at 28."
-
sponsorship
As Dana promised in her alternate reading last week, Sam Raimi's marvelous horror throwback Drag Me to Hell spits you out with your brain buzzing (and your clothes phlegm-drenched). Unlike Dana, I saw this movie with friends, and we puzzled out our own theories afterward. Be warned: Spoilers lurk just around the corner, working their moistened gums and preparing to pounce.
Our question was: Putting aside whether Christine's supernatural torment is real or imagined, what point are Raimi and his screenwriting brother Ivan trying to make with it (besides, of course, scaring us silly)? We landed on a sort of mortgage-crisis allegory. Christine works, obviously, as a bank's loan officer—it's in her eagerness to prove to her boss that she is capable of making "tough decisions" that she denies rheumy-eyed, shark-toothed Mrs. Ganush a mortgage-payment extension, and thereby invites upon herself an ancient Gypsy curse consigning her soul to eternal rot.
This much has been observed, for its recession-era significance: In succumbing to base careerism, Christine jeopardizes her soul. But we can push this further. What I haven't seen discussed is how Mrs. Ganush's curse has the effect of throwing Christine at the mercy of a shadowy, unknowable, bizarro economy: Mediums and spiritual advisers—"specialists" who may, in fact, be con artists weaving an elaborate, greedy fiction—demand various outlandish sums from Christine, both monetary ($10,000 for a séance) and feline ("Here kitty, kitty!"); these prices are free-floating, untethered to any product or service bearing a concrete, determinable value. What better punishment, really, for a representative of the mortgage system, that shadowy, unknowable, bizarro economy full of "specialists" who weaved an elaborate, greedy, and untethered fiction for the ages (of which, it should be pointed out, Mrs. Ganush was a victim)?
In this reading, Drag Me to Hell operates as a wild, spooky riff on postmodern capital. Note how the plot line is built around a series of (frustrated) transactions: The rejected payment extension, the palm reader's fee, the kitten sacrifice, the medium's fee, the pawn shop, the goat sacrifice, and, finally, the cruel reversal—worthy of O. Henry but especially relevant today—in which a rare coin is rendered profoundly worthless and a cheap wooden button becomes priceless. What is the movie's penultimate scene—the one in which Christine digs up Mrs. Ganush's corpse and shoves an envelope into her mouth—if not a visit to one hellacious ATM to make a deposit?
-
sponsorship
Jay-Z may or may not have actual convictions about Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction technology that has made robotic vocal hiccups ubiquitous on hit radio. He definitely knows that publicity stunts are good for business. Which, presumably, is why he recorded "DOA (Death of Auto-Tune)," the broadside that premiered Friday night on New York's rap radio powerhouse Hot 97 and instantly became the talk of hip-hop.
Musically, "DOA" is a snooze. The beat, by (prime Auto-Tune Offender) Chicago producer No ID*, has walloping snare drum hits and soprano saxophone noodling—a stock old-school sound that signifies we are about to receive a schoolmarm's lesson in Real Hip-Hop. Which is what Jay-Z provides, or tries to, in a notably slack and witless recitation of would-be zinger-couplets: "I know we facing a recession/ But the music y'all making go'n' make it the Great Depression"; "This is just violent/ This is Death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence"; "This ain't a No. 1 record/ This is practically assault with a deadly weapon"; etc. To drive home the point that the track is Auto-Tune-free, the rapper's verses are interspersed with some painfully off-key warbling of the refrain from "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."
Who exactly Jay-Z is taking on in this polemic is unclear. You would assume his targets are Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and T-Pain—the highest-profile Auto-Tune freaks—but in an interview on Hot 97, he excused those three on the grounds that their music has "great melodies." (Whether this is a virtue is complicated by a boast in "DOA": "My raps don't have melodies.") In lieu of picking a fight with human beings, Jay-Z disses technology itself, calling out not just pitch-correction software but iTunes and ringtones. (We await the release of the rapper's forthcoming Blueprint 3 album for Jay-Z's rants against the cotton gin and the steam engine.)
In other words, Jay-Z has slipped on his backpack and is playing the curmudgeonly hip-hop purist. This is usually a bad omen—the sign of a rap career in precipitous decline—but Jay-Z is strategically astute. In an interview with MTV, Kanye let slip: "We actually removed all the songs [from Blueprint 3] with Auto-Tune to make the point that this is an anti-Auto-Tune album." Evidently, Jay-Z's disdain for Auto-Tune is late-breaking. Did he listen to his Auto-Tune-slathered new songs, realize he sounded silly—like an old man huffing and puffing to keep up with the kids—and opt to turn this shortcoming to his advantage? Production crazes in hip-hop have notoriously short shelf lives; with or without "DOA," Auto-Tune will soon fall out of favor and die of natural causes. But clever ol' Jay-Z has positioned himself to claim credit for a murder.
Correction, June 8, 2009: The post originally stated that the beat was also produced by Kanye West. Contrary to many published accounts, West had no role in "DOA."
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 1 "laura ling": On Monday, the highest court in North Korea sentenced two Current TV journalists to 12 years hard labor. Laura Ling and Euna Lee were filming a segment about the trafficking of women along the Chinese-North Korean border when they allegedly crossed into the DPRK illegally. Lisa Ling, formerly a host on The View, is pleading for her sister's release. The AP quotes a South Korean professor who says Monday's sentencing has actually "paved the way for ... a diplomatic solution"—by North Korean law "a pardon can only be issued after a conviction and ... the regime's courts were not about to find the reporters innocent."
No. 7 "greg grossman": If you love TV chefs but don't trust anyone over 15, rejoice: The Hollywood Reporter says "professional teen chef" Greg Grossman has a realty-TV deal. Last month, the Chicago Tribune did a Q & A with the 14-year-old molecular gastronomist, detailing his jones for dehydrated anchovy salt and sake foam. "[P]lease don't think it's all flashy and stuff," he said. "I see it as a way of enhancing the flavors of a dish. It's more about decorating the room than building it."
No. 10 "wwdc": Googlers are eager for scoops on the Worldwide Developers Conference—aka the event at which Apple might reveal some amazing new iPhone. While most analysts and rumormongers believe that new software will be today's focus, one of Google Trends' top related searches is "iphone 4g." Examiner.com runs through some of the features that might be included on such a next-gen device: 3.2 megapixel camera! More storage! FM radio!
-
sponsorship
Tony Sunday is a special day for theater queens, people whose dramatic interests center on venues with more than 500 seats located between Times Square and 65th Street, and thrill seekers who set their TiVo to record anything with the words awards and ceremony in the title. Unless you're an All That Chat natterer or take your evening cocktail in one of the fast-disappearing theater bars off Broadway, the Tonys are a three-hour wonder—the one place on the TV schedule where song and dance rules and Angela Lansbury and Liza Minelli are bigger than Brad and Angelina.
This year, though, the excitement started before the curtain went up on the day's matinees, as several fast-thumbed folks live-tweeted the morning's Tony rehearsal. Ugly Betty's Mark Indelicato: "So everyone. I can say that the opening number is EPIC. It shall be remembered forever by all those who love broadway." StageDoorOnline: "Angela Lansbury got an applause at the #Tony rehearsal for just crossing the stage during a comm. break. (It WAS a great cross though.)" And nominee Jane Fonda: "Liza gave me pointers on how to walk and not hurt. Pull up, tuck butt under, swing shoulders sexily, stand with legs apart to balance, etc."
Indelicato was right; the 10-minute opening number was epic. It started with the dude who sang at Princess Diana's funeral and eventually grew to include everyone in the 10020 ZIP code: the Jets; the Sharks; Dolly Parton; at least two West Wing cast members; a green ogre, a donkey, and a princess; the cast of Hair letting the sun shine in; and the members of Poison throwing around their hair. If only Liza had given Bret Michaels pointers on how to avoid the moving scenery, which knocked him flat on his back when he was slow off his mark.
The evening offered few surprises—the biggest being that the creators of Next to Normal, the story of a bipolar housewife, beat out Sir Elton John and Lee Hall of the heavily favored Billy Elliot, The Musical in the race for best score. Otherwise, Billy Elliot tapped and twirled its way to domination of the musical categories, and God of Carnage wreaked havoc over the awards for plays.
My big question was whether the Tony telecast could win back the title of gayest awards ceremony. After all, in the last couple of years the Oscars have featured more same-sex shout-outs and kisses than their Broadway counterparts. There were some missteps along the way; as when the TV cameras confused Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, both nominated for leading actress in a play for their roles as Mary and Elizabeth in Mary Stuart. As Twitterer Kimberly_Kaye put it, "If Broadway can't keep track of queens, who can?"
True enough, Oscar Eustis of the Public Theater pointed to his (mixed-sex) wedding ring as he called for "equality now" while accepting Hair's award for best revival of a musical, but I didn't catch any winners thanking gay partners, and there was no equivalent of Dustin Lance Black's tear-jerking Oscar acceptance speech for Milk.
Still, it's impossible to out-gay the Tonys. An out emcee in Neil Patrick Harris; a win for Liza Minelli; a lifetime achievement award for Jerry Herman ... As Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote in Harris' divine 11 o'clock number (let's see you replicate that at the Oscars, Hugh Jackman): "This show could not be gayer/ if Liza was named mayor/ and Elton John took flight."
-
sponsorship
Stirred by Mr. Agger's call for scoops on cultural sorbet—records that tune up dulled ears, movies that refresh tired eyes, and so on—I spelunked into the den and grabbed the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein-ese blasts the mind clean of caked-on verbal gunk. "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense," she once said. To cope, she cultivated her own sense of sense, in a sense. The book falls open to her portrait of Picasso: "This one was one who was working and certainly this one was needing to be working so as to be one being working. This one was one having something coming out of him." There is structure, and there is cadence, and that is that.
Discovering practical applications for her radical grammar, Stein babbles as clear as a brook. In the last section of the memoir Wars I Have Seen, titled "The Coming of the Americans," she thrills at meeting the first Americans to arrive in Culoz, her adopted home, after the liberation of France. On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of D-Day, check the breeze of its final paragraph. It would be almost unpatriotic not to dig it.
How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado and then everybody was tired out and they gave us nice American specialties and my were we happy, we were, completely and truly happy and completely and entirely worn out with emotion. The next morning while they breakfasted we talked some more and we patted each other and then kissed each other and then they went away. Just as we were sitting down to lunch, in came four more Americans this time war correspondents, our emotions were not yet exhausted nor our capacity to talk, how we talked and talked and where they were born was music to the ears Baltimore and Washington D.C. and Detroit and Chicago, it is all music to the ears so long long long away from the names of the places where they were born. Well they have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America next Sunday and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember.
-
sponsorship
The very day I began vegetable gardening—a day on which I began to heal the split between what I think and what I do; in which I commingled my identity as producer and citizen—I drove down the Taconic Parkway, picked up my Sunday Times, and read Michael Pollan's essay exhorting 2 million like-minded Bobos to take up gardening to "heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen."
This weekend I'm going to drive up the Taconic and find out how my seedlings fared—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc.—their first week out of peat pots and in the soil. I don't especially care that I'm a cliché; you can't, after all, hand someone a copy of Catcher in the Rye, then tell them they don't have to go through adolescence. But I garden with Pollan as a near-constant hypothetical adversary. Consider some themes from Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: overproduction to the point of glut; the alienating power of the commodity; the tendency of laissez-faire to crush the small producer by monopoly fiat.
All very nice. But why have the social hopes of the left devolved onto the consumer choices of the lone individual, with a peculiarly intense focus on eating? So long as the choice is individual and free, my neighbor is also free to choose; to choose to drive a 4,000-lb. leisure vehicle a quarter-mile to eat a Big Mac. Il faut cultiver notre jardin—"We must cultivate our own garden"—is the last sentence of Voltaire's Candide, a weary assertion on behalf of severely delimited autonomy in an otherwise hopelessly fucked-up world. I often think about it as I spade and hoe and commingle my identities.
-
sponsorship
The rapper who vows to leave rap behind for more exciting territory has become something of a cliché. We've seen this play out from the space-freak experiments of Andre 3000 and Cee-Lo to the rock and synth-pop aspirations of Lil Wayne and Kanye West to the (short-lived) retirement of Jay-Z. The motive here is easy enough to guess at: Rappers grow older and grow bored with hip-hop's sometimes-rigid thematic and formal limits. Besides, what better brag is there than announcing that you are bigger than your entire genre?
This narrative overlaps, though, with another, less glamorous cliché: That of the rapper who grows too old to be convincing anymore. All of pop music is steeped in youth, but rockers and chanteuses have found paths to dignified, relevant pastures that have still eluded most rappers. (Jay-Z's post-retirement albums, Kingdom Come and American Gangster, came at this quagmire from different angles, neither with total success.)
Ghostface Killah is the latest MC to address aging in hip-hop—this time in the context of the recession—giving a colorful quote to Unkut magazine about his decision to focus more heavily on R & B than rap with his next record:
[E]verybody don't sell crack no more, man. I don't sell crack, yo. I ain't movin' no bricks or none of that other shit. I ain't shoot nobody in like ... since the early ‘90s, man. How long you gonna be 40 years old and actin' like you still sellin' cracks and you on the block and you doin' this and you doin' that when times is more serious, man. We in a fuckin' recession, B! Ain't nobody gettin' no money, man! We gotta stop lyin' to ourselves and lyin' to the fans. And the fans gotta stop bein' so dumb and ignorant, and know it's time to talk about grown-man situations. Shit that happen in the real life, inside your household, your love life, your personal life, that's just like, "Damn, it's hard for a nigga to get some money!"
This is not entirely new ground for Ghostface Killah (who has already proved that he could transition brilliantly into children's music if he wanted). To hear the closest thing hip-hop has produced to a Johnny Cash moment—a haunting, rageful, invigorating tussle with the gloaming—grab a copy of 8 Diagrams, the largely overlooked last album by Ghostface's crew, the Wu-Tang Clan.
-
sponsorship
On March 28, 2008, American audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster announced that they had unearthed a recording of the human voice made in April 1860, predating Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The find was epochal, toppling paradigms and reconfiguring the history of recorded sound. It was also romantic, with a backstory fit for a steam-punk fairy tale. The recording was made by an obscure Parisian typesetter and inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, using a contraption called the phonautograph, which rendered sound in visual form. (Lab scientists in Berkeley used a "virtual stylus" to extract sound from Scott's soundwave tracings.) The result was a startling sonic resuscitation: a haunting young woman's voice, drifting out of a fog bank of static, crooning a snippet of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune."
Giovannoni and Feaster have continued digging in Paris archives for Scott's phonautograph recordings, or "phonautograms," and last week, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, they unveiled some more astonishing finds, including a poetic recitation in Italian, the earliest audible record of recognizable human speech, dating from sometime in April or May 1860. They also announced a revision to their "Au Clair de la Lune" discovery. Because of a miscalculation in playback speed, the phonautogram released in 2008 was a kind of Chipmunks version of the original. In fact, the performer captured by Scott's machine on April 9, 1860, was not a young woman after all but a man, singing deliberately, a bit haltingly—in all likelihood, the voice of Léon Scott. (All of the phonautograms can be heard on Giovanonni and Feaster's Web site.)
I have played the March 2008 version of the phonautogram hundreds of times in the last year, always relishing the image of a young lady, in a corset and funny hat, warbling into Scott's phonautograph horn. Turns out, the ghostly girl-singer was just that—a phantasm. But the new, slower "Au Claire de la Lune" gives us another, perhaps even more romantic scene to savor: the inventor himself, fiddling with the gizmo that, eventually, would change history.
-
sponsorship
For months, gadget hounds have been lusting after the Palm Pre, the one device that seemed to hold any promise of toppling the iPhone from the apex of smart-phone awesomeness. The wait is almost over: The Pre goes on sale Saturday, but you might not be able to find one—reports suggest that quantities will be extremely limited.
Palm did have a few on hand for the nation's top gadget reviewers, though. Good move—the reviews came out today, and they're full of praise. Edward Baig of USA Today says the Pre "stacks up well against Apple's blockbuster device, and in some ways even surpasses it." The New York Times' David Pogue finds the phone "joyous," and Walter Mossberg, in the Wall Street Journal, names it "potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date." Here's more of what they loved and what they hated:
Pros: Everyone swooned over the Pre's design. "I can't think of a more comfortable cellphone in my hand," Baig declares. The Pre offers two ways to type—an iPhone-like on-screen keyboard and a slide-out physical keyboard. Reviewers found both pretty good. They also loved webOS, the phone's innovative operating system. Unlike the iPhone, the Pre can run many different programs side-by-side, and it lets you switch between them with the flick of a finger. "Play Internet radio while you read a PDF document, or compare two open e-mail messages—you can't do that on the iPhone," writes Pogue.
Cons: There are two big hits against the Pre: It gets terrible battery life, and it doesn't run many third-party apps. Both Mossberg and Pogue reported that their demo phones sometimes ran out of juice in the middle of the day. The app shortage is worse—Palm hasn't given many developers the tools they need to build programs for the phone, in part because it's still working on some bugs. One of those bugs seems to be catastrophic. Mossberg says that when he downloaded a third-party program for the Pre, the app crashed his phone and wiped away all his data! (Fortunately, the phone has a backup system that allowed him to get everything back.)
So should you run out to buy the Pre this weekend? No—wait until Monday, when Apple is widely expected to announce a new version of the iPhone. Mossberg, who often gets a sneak peek at new Apple products, dangles this hint: "Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I'd note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations." Come on, Walt, let's hear some spoilers!
-
sponsorship
As demonstrated by Vulture, by Vanity Fair, by very fine work in the paper of record, by your vituperative correspondent himself, NBC Entertainment has transformed itself into a marvelous object of derision. (Tune in tonight for the debut of The Listener! It’s Bringing Out the Dead meets Medium meets general anesthesia!) This week, NBC News, feeling left out of the fun, got in on the act of degrading the airwaves. Congrats to Steve Capus and his team for reminding viewers just how awful television news can be.
It was one thing on Monday, when, on local late-night news shows, NBC affiliates devoted perhaps twice the time to the launch of Conan’s Tonight Show that they did to the end of GM as we know it. But Monday was followed, as according to custom, by Tuesday and Wednesday, when the network ran a two-part special hosted by Brian Williams and titled Inside the Obama White House. Many have compared BHO with JFK, and the precedents for this program do, indeed, date to the "new frontier"—A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy and a hand shandy by Judith C. Exner.
Speaking of Mafia molls, the special’s dumbest moment was the tracking shot showing Obama walking the portico as if he were taking a date into the Copa 'round the back way. Maybe. There are so many bits of ridiculousness here that it’s tough to pick a favorite. The pulsing dance music scoring a shot of Rahm Emmanuel opening a door? The adrenalized zooming on envelopes labeled "top secret"? The segment pretending to offer an “anatomy of a talking point” that could have been approved by David Axelrod himself?
The president’s opposition couldn’t have been giddier at seeing "the media" so blatantly submerged in "the tank." And his supporters would have been better off spending those two hours reading How to Watch TV News, which ought to be required reading for high-school students, with its clear analysis of a journalismesque business always dancing the "Madison Avenue shuffle." Seriously, NBC could have provided a greater public service by showing Bo play on a PuppyCam.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 11 "tank man": On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Googlers want to know what happened to the man in the famous photos. The short answer: nobody knows. In 2006, PBS' Frontline ran a documentary investigating his fate; there's also a short video of the standoff on YouTube. On the New York Times' Lens blog, four photographers who were there talk about what it was like to shoot the standoff.
No. 15 "michael bastian": "Every time you turn a corner, there's a guy wearing skinny jeans, an ironic cap, a low V-neck tee, vintagey high-tops and a scarf," says fashion designer Michael Bastian in a Wednesday New York Times profile. "It's the equivalent of the ‘Sex and the City' look that was such a thing for women a few years ago." What's Bastian's counter-aesthetic? "In his world," the Times explains, "men are still from Mars. Or at least Dartmouth." Some of the items in his unironic line: "wool tweed trousers, rugby shirts, ski sweaters, two-button suits, polos."
No. 41 "wang dang doodle": Chicago blues singer Koko Taylor, a contemporary of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, died on Wednesday at the age of 80. Taylor's hit tune: 1965's "Wang Dang Doodle." In lieu of flowers, please honor the great Mrs. Taylor by romping and tromping till midnight, fussing and fighting till daylight, and pitching a wang dang doodle all night long. (Also check out this cover version by an extremely young PJ Harvey.)
-
sponsorship
On Monday night, NBC aired what it billed as the "finale" of Medium, the drama starring Patricia Arquette as a psychic crime solver and mother of three in Phoenix. When my partner and I saw that word "finale" in the teaser for Monday's episode, we nearly fainted. In the five years since its debut, Medium has become the only network show we watch without fail every week, and it's right in the middle of several long-term story arcs too juicy to be wrapped up in a single hour. But, mercifully, NBC's teaser was misleading. What the peacock was too proud to add is that after a heated negotiation at last month's TV upfronts, the show was acquired by CBS, where it'll be airing on Friday nights starting in the fall, in between Ghost Whisperer and Numb3ers. This "psychic sandwich" programming makes a certain amount of sense for attracting viewers (even if Medium fans may be irked at the implied equation between Patricia Arquette's smart, complex, grownup character and Jennifer Love Hewitt's busty nitwit). But Friday night prime time is known as the "death slot" for a reason; it's the place networks traditionally move shows on their way to being canceled.
Even sadder than the idea of a world with no Medium is the possibility that the show will lose its character in an attempt to save its skin. The show runner, Glenn Gordon Caron (who also created Moonlighting and the short-lived but much-mourned Now and Again) has sworn that the content and quality of the show won't change at its new venue. I just hope Caron—and everyone involved in producing the show—knows what it is that sets Medium apart from your average "she-sees-dead-people" procedural: The show is the richest and truest portrait of marriage and family life currently on television. As Allison and Joe DuBois, Arquette and Jake Weber make living with the person you love look as annoying, as demanding, and as rewarding as it is in real life. They fight (not cute, made-for-TV squabbles but substantial debates about work, money, and children), they have sex, they kibitz about Allison's latest murder case while going to bed ... and then they grab a precious few hours of sleep before she's awakened by another clue-filled nightmare. The show weaves together the supernatural and the quotidian so skillfully that Allison's job—essentially, she's a professional dreamer for the D.A.'s office—starts to seem like a metaphor for the plight of every working mother, psychic or not. Allison is so overcommitted to both work and family that she multitasks in her sleep.
There are so many other things to love about Medium: Patricia Arquette's unapologetically normal body size, the skillfully drawn secondary characters, and the refreshingly uncute performance of Maria Lark as Bridgette, the DuBois' eccentric middle daughter. (For a glimpse of Bridgette's awesomeness, watch this behind-the-scenes clip.) Please, CBS, don't try to "add value" to your new "franchise" by messing with Medium. Just give Caron, Arquette, and the rest of them the keys to their new offices—and leave them alone to do what they do so well.
-
sponsorship
My brother once lived down the hall from two guys who were music guys. They had a wall of compact discs, neatly arranged. One February, for no apparent reason, they put all of the CDs in the closet—except for 13 or so Tom Waits albums, lined up on the mantle. After a few weeks of listening exclusively to Waits, they resumed their omnivorous listening habits. Waits acted as a palate cleanser, allowing them to care about new sounds once more. When I'm tired of movies, or music, or television, or books, I follow their strategy and rely on certain touchstones to get me interested again: Blue, Solo Faces, Dazed and Confused. Am I alone in this? Send me your cultural palate cleansers at michaelagger1 at gmail dot com.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms “that experience sudden surges in popularity”—is the Web’s best cultural barometer. Here’s a sampling of today’s top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 7 “project natal for xbox”: Bing, the search engine that will (maybe) destroy Google, isn’t Microsoft’s only big gambit of the week. At the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, the company showed off a wannabe Nintendo killer, Project Natal. The gist: It’s a Wii without a controller. If you want to kick a ball, just kick your leg—Natal’s 3-D motion-sensing camera captures how your body moves. Google’s top related search for Natal: “project natal release date.” Hold on to your Wii for now—there isn’t one.
No. 11 “grand view coffee shop”: The opening of a topless coffee shop in Maine made national news back in February, both for what the baristas weren’t wearing and on account of the fact that 150 people applied for the 10 shirt-free positions. The employees of the Grand View Coffee Shop appear to have lost their shirts all over again this morning: The store has reportedly burned down.
No. 14 “carlos araya”: Searchers are digging into a Wall Street Journal article about a laid-off crude oil trader who’s now working as a maître d' at the Palm. The headline: “From Ordering Steak and Lobster, to Serving It.” The story’s lede, which notes Araya’s former penchant for ordering $200 bottles of wine, might suggest that the searching masses are reveling in the riches-to-rags story of a financial-industry bozo. Details from later in the piece—“Recently, their oldest daughter asked Mr. Araya if the family would have to move. … He went into the bathroom and cried”—hint that this might actually be sympathy Googling.
-
sponsorship
Back in March, Saturn launched its unintentionally poignant "We're still here" campaign. While most ads attempt to spur consumer craving, these spots seemed designed to elicit cringing sympathy. Which is not a winning brand image in the long run.
Now, on the heels of filing for bankruptcy protection, Saturn's parent company (for now), General Motors, is taking its own stab at tail-between-legs marketing. In a 60-second spot that hits the airwaves today, GM admits some mistakes, announces some strategic goals, and generally tries to look forward. The imagery is all rebirth and renewal—a sunrise, a butterfly, a prosthetic limb, and literal green shoots.
"Let's be completely honest," intones the announcer as the spot opens. "No company wants to go through this." True enough. I would also argue that no television viewer wants to go through it, either.
Instead of clamoring to get on the air and gab about its failures, perhaps GM should just have shut up for a while. Geez, you went bankrupt on Monday, guys. Maybe give yourselves more than two days to reflect on your sins. The truly contrite put their heads down and make things right. They don't grab the microphone and brag about what's next.
-
sponsorship
The 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters chronicles the surprisingly stirring struggles of Washington algebra teacher and Donkey Kong wizard Steve Wiebe to a) beat the high score of reigning Kong champ Billy Mitchell and then b) convince the close-knit, sallow-skinned cadre of gaming eccentrics that officiates high scores to recognize his feat. (Mitchell sycophants through and through, they are a tough bunch to convince.)
Wiebe, who honed his Donkey Kong skills in his garage after he was laid off from a job at Boeing, smiles wistfully, speaks softly, and never loses his temper or resolve. He's an indefatigable loser-hero and a noble forebear, in this regard, of down-and-out metal striver Lips Kudlow, from this year's Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Billy Mitchell, with tight black jeans, Lorenzo Lamas hair, and a curvy, well-tanned wife, is all too happy to play the villain. He is the cocky ruler of a very small kingdom, deeply lovable in his own way—if the movie hadn't come out six years after the British Office debuted, I'd swear Ricky Gervais had studied Mitchell's tie-flattening, lip-biting, eye-darting tics and outsized self-regard when he was coming up with David Brent.
A fictionalized version of The King of Kong has been reported as in the works, but fans of the original documentary—and fans of underdogs in general—need not wait for a fresh Wiebe fix. He is currently at the annual gaming-industry conference E3, attempting to break Mitchell's reigning score (1,050,200 points) in front of a live audience. A Web site is carrying the video feed. Wiebe's first attempt, earlier today, topped out at 923,400 points (rats!), but as of this writing, he's set to give it another try. Tune in, and as his score mounts, don't be surprised if you find yourself caught up in the dorky, high-stakes drama, screaming at your computer with every leapt barrel.
-
sponsorship
It is now being widely reported that Sasha Baron Cohen's aerial assault on Eminem at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards was staged. This seemed obvious from the outset—no matter how well Eminem's post-addiction 12-stepping is going, it beggars belief that he could react to a prank of this nature with such Zen-like restraint. God knows, men have been pummeled by rappers' bodyguards for lesser offenses than a nationally televised tea-bagging.
And so we are left to contemplate an icky publicity stunt, designed to drum up business for Eminem's new album, Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno movie, and MTV itself. As the cable network, with palpable desperation, sought to replicate its past awards show succès de scandales—Howard Stern's Fartman flight from the rafters; Eminem's showdown with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog—viewers were treated to the spectacle of two talented and presumably self-respecting artists publicly humiliating themselves in a witless shock-comedy sweat-act, complete with schwanz jokes that would have bombed at Grossinger's 60 years ago.
That Eminem and Baron-Cohen, who have both demonstrated comedic genius in the past, didn't recognize the banality of this gag (as Paris Hilton evidently did) speaks to the lengths to which celebrities will go in pursuit of viral-video success, which, these days, is the best promotion, the real fame. Forget the rapper and the comedian and all of the glittering A-listers on hand—the elephants in the room Sunday night were the dancing baby, the "Charlie bit me!" kid, and the Chocolate Rain dude. Of course, the way things are going, at next year's awards there will be actual elephants in the room, moving their bowels on Andy Samberg's head. LOL!
-
sponsorship
The 3-D revival appears to be a success. With $68 million in receipts over its first weekend, Pixar's Up may become the highest-grossing 3-D film of all time. Only 11 3-D movies have ever pulled in more than $50 million over their entire runs-and five of them have come out since last fall.
The 3-D boom interests me for two reasons: First, because I've been a fan of the medium since I was a little kid; and second, because of a prediction I made in April that may soon turn out to be deeply embarrassing. In an article entitled "The Problem With 3-D: It hurts your eyes. Always has, always will," I declared that the 3-D bubble would soon burst because problems with stereo cinema technology had not been fixed. "Eventually, inevitably, perhaps unconsciously," I wrote, the eye strain 3-D movies cause will "creep off the screen and into our minds."
It may be time to start hedging my bets. I still think the future is dim for live-action 3-D movies, and I don't believe Jeffrey Katzenberg's claim that everything will soon be produced in stereo. But I now believe the revival could find lasting success ... in children's movies. Here are three possible reasons why:
1. Kids are too young to remember Jaws 3-D.
One of the problems facing the marketers of 3-D cinema is the medium's sketchy past. The last wave of 3-D films in the early 1980s comprised a run of dreadful horror and sci-fi flicks, from Friday the 13th, Part III to Metalstorm. Hollywood has been aggressive in targeting youngsters this go-round, perhaps because kids are an audience that hasn't been tainted by 3-D's unsavory past. At least seven more animated 3-D children's movies are scheduled for release this year.
2. The 3-D effects are better in animated films.
It takes a lot figuring to get the cinematography right in a live-action 3-D film. For one thing, you have to decide how far apart to place the two cameras during shooting. (In general, the further apart they are, the more intense the illusion of depth, and the more eyestrain for viewers.) But the makers of an animated film have full control of the frame, since every pixel is generated by a computer. It may be easier to correct for imperfections in the stereo effect in computer-generated imagery—and that would in turn lead to a cleaner, more comfortable experience for viewers.
3. Kids may be less susceptible to eyestrain.
No one knows exactly why 3-D movies cause headaches, fatigue, and nausea, but the most intuitive theory has to do with what's called the convergence-accommodation disparity. In short: In order to see the 3-D special effect, you have to point your eyes at the screen while you focus them at a depth somewhere in front of the screen.
If that unnatural state of affairs does cause eyestrain, it may be that adults are more susceptible than children. The ability to change the focus of your eyes gradually deteriorates over the course of your life. It's altogether possible that these age-related changes would affect how we experience convergence-accommodation disparity. Kids might find 3-D easier on the eyes. (They might also be less put off by donning a pair of novelty glasses every time they go to the movies.)
-
sponsorship
Punching in as the host of The Tonight Show—rocking out the first song on his new album, as it were—guitar hero Conan O'Brien did Cheap Trick's "Surrender." Punching out an aggressive mission statement, he blazoned his intent to thrill. The dek of Lynn Hirschberg's Times piece, linked above, restated the question dogging him since he accepted the gig: "Can Conan O'Brien's Brand of Late-Late-Night, Smart-Guy, Outsider Humor Work on ‘The Tonight Show'?" He replied—forcefully, gracefully, wonderfully weirdly—by outrunning the dogs. The cold open roared, "Yes!" And also, "If it can't, fug 'em; I'll do it my way." It was kinda like a formal dedication.
In the earlier half-hour, in the canned interviews promoting the new Tonight on the 11 p.m. local news, Conan had looked old and terribly drawn. The lighting and makeup people hadn't done right by him, nor had the California sun, under which an Irishman such as he, skin as white as lace curtains, ought to be using SPF 3,000. But in this epic remote, he was merely as handsomely gaunt as Dean Wareham (his old schoolmate and exact contemporary) and elsewise all youth and health and vitality. The concept was that this diligent Harvard boy, checking off the mundane business of the day—brushing the teeth and all that—comes to an item reading "move to L.A." The camera lavishes a glance out of a 30 Rock office onto the Chrysler Building, and Conan gives an "Oh, God," as if shocked by the dreariness of abandoning the sexiest icon of the world's greatest city. He thus kisses farewell to sentiment in two beats. Then, a young man in a hurry, he says goodbye to all that and bolts for the door.
The rest you must see for yourself. Look at the purpose in Conan's cross-country stride, the fine line of his back, the slim suit a Reservoir Dog would die for, the flow of his Eero Saarinen hair as he cruises. In the opening sequence of the new Late Night, Jimmy Fallon goes running every show, but it feels as if he's anxious and rushing, as if he'll get fired if he's tardy for work one more time. Conan is swift with confidence.
The setup for the pay-off is gorgeous. Even as your heart swells at seeing the sights of all America—or, at least, of those parts of America hosting the network affiliates Conan has been working to woo—it starts sinking with the worry that the trip will conclude with the host sprinting straight onto his new stage. That would be cheesy. That would spoil the whole thing. The tension is palpable, and then you get that forlorn shot of the forgotten keys and a sweet release.
Conan's hot cold open says this is action, this is a national institution, this is physical comedy as sophisticated as Harold Lloyd's or Jacques Tati's, this is absurdity as deft as John Ashbery's or Spike Jonze's. He wants mom and dad rolling with laughter on the couch, and he wants to go the distance.
-
sponsorship
Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell is the kind of film that shouldn't be seen alone. Not only because you'll need a friendly forearm to dig your nails into during the scary parts but because it's a movie made to be talked about on the way out of the theater. Between the hairpin twists and turns of the plot and the absurdly high stakes of the outcome (unlike most slasher-movie heroines, Alison Lohman's Christine is trying to avoid not just death but eternal damnation), Drag Me puts the viewer through a lot, and after you've lived through it, you feel the need to talk about it with someone else who's done the same. Sadly, I had to see the movie alone at a press screening, and my plans to record a Spoiler Special podcast afterward with a colleague who'd seen it fell through. Now, like the Ancient Mariner, I must roam the world seeking strangers to listen to my tale. For I have a theory about Drag Me To Hell, one that can only be discussed with others who've seen it. If that includes you, click through for an alternate reading of the movie on a hidden second page. But those who haven't seen it and plan to, be warned: Spoilers lurk beyond.
-
sponsorship
If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 1 "air france flight status": Six of this morning's top 10 Google searches are about Air France 447, which has disappeared on its way from Rio to Paris. The plane, which took off in heavy turbulence, last made radar contact near the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha—today's fifth-trendiest search term—300 kilometers off Brazil's northeastern coast. Agence France-Presse quotes a Paris airport official: "We are very worried. ... It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected."
No. 2 "susan boyle hospitalized": The British tabs are reporting that the YouTube sensation, a surprise loser in this weekend's final episode of Britain's Got Talent, has checked into a private clinic on account of "exhaustion." According to the Sun, "the 48-year-old virgin" (also referred to as "SuBo") was taken to the hospital by paramedics after "acting strangely at her London hotel." Eleven spots down the Trends list: searches for Susan Boyle's performance on the BGT finale. Not seen in the top 100: Diversity, the dance troupe that beat out Boyle for the top prize.
No. 8 "eminem bruno": The highlight of last night's MTV Movie Awards, at least Google-wise, came when Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno—"the host of Austrian gay TV"—floated down from the rafters a la Howard Stern's Fartman. Baron Cohen, outfitted in a thong and angel wings, touched down with his crotch in Eminem's face; the rapper stormed off, leading to speculation about whether the stunt was real or fake. Considering that both performers are aggressively promoting new material—and considering that the guy who was "accidentally" teabagged was miked in the audience—evidence points to fake. (Other Google Trends inspired by the MTV awards: "kristen stewart drops award," "new moon trailer official," and "the hills season 6 preview.")
—Josh Levin
-
sponsorship
Welcome to Brow Beat, a new blog where Slate's editors and critics will be writing about movies, music, television, books, advertising, fashion, and anything else you might call culture, whether highbrow or low. Our critics will be able to write more frequently about happenings on their beats—this week, for example, movie critic Dana Stevens will explain her alternate reading of the ending of Drag Me to Hell, our in-house 3-D guru Daniel Engber will consider Pixar's use of the technology in Up, and we'll have a mini-Ad Report Card from ad critic Seth Stevenson. Brow Beat will also give our writers a chance to explore other interests: Keep an eye peeled for music critic Jody Rosen's examination of British chef Jamie Oliver's bizarre new magazine, Jamie!, and expect Troy Patterson and Stephen Metcalf to bring their omnivorous critical appetites, already on display in Slate's Audio Book Club and Culture Gabfest podcasts, to the blog as well. We'll also have regular features tracking the day's Google trends, industry news, and more.