A phemonal number of new "hit" songs-are covers. Concert goers know the performer is miming- and they dont care. Brochures for "environmentally safe" products, electric cars, appliances, are printed on glossy paper. Companies can claim a machine recording and press button options, is actually "better service" and shows "commitment" to customer care. Jessics Simpson actually has a career. Supermarkets are cutting back or charging for plastic shopping bags- so you have to purchase a specially made shopping bag, and purchase rolls of plastic garbage bags to do the same thing.
I find that I can use thought, reason, and logic to move towards delusional fantasy if I work at it a little.
You Boob Tube, pt 2 I think if the YouTube phenom proves anything it's that PEOPLE ARE A LOT LESS INTERESTING THAN THEY THINK THEY ARE! Cripes and crimeny, what a lot of crap. It's like they gave video cameras to a bunch of self-indulgent self-involved adolescent fame-whores and said "Go forth and entertain us w/your unique and wonderful 'you-ness'". Oh wait, THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY'VE DONE! Hey, you pimply-faced teenaged twerp, just because you have a video-cam that doesn't mean you have to use it! When Andy Warhol said "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 mins", he wasn't condoning it, for chrissake, he was condemning it. Some people, a lot of people, most people, SHOULDN'T BE FAMOUS. In fact, they should be very very ANONYMOUS. If this keeps up somebody's gonna have to pass some kind of restrictive law similar to those for alcohol: You can't own a video-cam if you're under the age of 21. H
hcour; "Larry King, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric: See above. Walters is the worst of all, her interviews, which of course are really all about her, are practically dripping-wet w/earnestness and sincerity, she just cares so damn much it seems she might implode w/compassion." unqoute You forgot donahue, "for people to care too much". Barf........
acronym, Oh, I could have made a loooong list, I pretty much hate 'em all. They're all so fake. I remember yrs ago just when Larry King was becoming famous on CNN and he had developed this rep as a great, serious interviewer. So when I heard he was going to have Marlon Brando on, I thought "this should be great!" But it was a terrible, terrible interview. It was all about King, not Brando. He kept interrupting him (couldn't let Brando steal the spotlight on his own show!) and his follow-up questions were lame, if he followed-up at all. It was Larry King saying "Look, I'm so great I have an exclusive interview w/Brando! Look at me, look at me!" You could tell Brando was frustated and you could see why he rarely sat down for that kind of crap. It was a really great opportunity completely missed by an incompetent egomaniac. Remember all the exploitation by the media of the Chandra Levy scandal? King was on top of that every night for wks, his show was practically the "Chandra Levy Hour". And look at the Steve Irwin debacle. Yeah, he was a media star, sorry he's dead, but did he deserve all the attention night after night for a couple of wks? King is just as much a media-whore as his colleagues. H
And That's the Way It Is Matt Lauer and The Today Show take this week's hypocrisy prize w/Lauer's interview of beautiful school-sex-scandal star Debra Lafave. I didn't watch the interview (that would be a torture worse than having my fingernails pulled out) but I've seen the clips on other news shows. At one point Lauer asks some inanely obvious question like "Why do you think you got so much media attention? Is it because you're beautiful?" To which she replies "Yes. Sex sells." Lauer, of course, completely misses the irony, he could have just as well replied, "Of course, what the hell do you think this interview is all about? Let's show some more shots of you in the bikini on the motorcycle!" So he did an interview on the issue of sex exploitation by the media that was itself sex exploitation by the media. Oh, the irony. Watching Meredith Viera on The Today Show this wk the first thing that came to my mind was that they must have picked her because of her very strong resemblance to Katie Couric. She even seems to have the same kind of upbeat perky personality and interviewing style. Hey, it's like Katie never left! NBC, smart enough not to fix something that ain't broke. And speaking of Couric, watching her on CBS, am I the only one who thinks she seems kind of, well, lightweight for (supposedly) hard news? CBS made the mistake of having Walter Cronkite record the intro into the new show, this is supposed to give it validation of course, but it really just highlights her inadequacy as a news anchor. Her squeaking speaking voice compared to Cronkite's classic pedantic delivery? Is it just me, or doesn't she sound like she's permanently hoarse? I keep wanting to offer her a cough drop and tell her to come back to work when she's over the fucking flu. Meanwhile over at The View, newcomer Rosie O'Donnell - ok, just kidding, I couldn't watch The View even if it was just to ridicule the ridiculousness of it. Ewww. How do people stand Baba Wawa, w/her moist insincerity? If she ever went on assignment in Iraq and was kidnapped by terrorists, would anybody really want her back? H
Dave and the Alkies What's w/Letterman lately and the hard time he's giving some of his guests these days? Watching his recent interviews w/Robert Downey Jr, Andy Dick, and Robin Williams, all who have had very public stories about their battles w/drugs and alcohol all over the news, Letterman has pushed and pushed in a sensationalistic manner in these segments. No matter how one may feel about addiction and fame, when it comes down to it, it should be a very private thing; obviously, that's why AA ends in Anonymous. Yes, these guys are public figures and it comes w/the territory, and you can tell they expected to be confronted w/it, but Letterman just won't let it go. He pushes too far. He has no grace. It's tawdry. Williams was absolutely a first-class act, entertaining and funny and self-deprecating, but as Letterman kept on him and on him about his addiction, you could see how uncomfortable and dismayed he was that Letterman just wouldn't let it rest and move on. It was 90% of the interview. When the hell did Dave Letterman become Oprah? H
OJ The title of OJ's book is "If I Did It", in big bold letters, the "If" in white typeface while "I Did It" is in, what else, a nice blood red, so of course the latter is emphasized. IOW, "I Did It". OJ gets to have his cake and eat it, finally exploiting what everyone already always knew, w/o actually having to admit responsibility or express remorse. And Judith Regan and the Fox network, along w/the Dream Team and the most corrupt jury one can imagine, have just become accomplices after-the-fact to the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. Not legally of course, but on another level, in a moral, ethical sense. Yes, I know that Johnny Cochran and his team did their job, and did it brilliantly, and every defendant deserves representation, but as far as I'm concerned that does not release them from a moral responsibility. They put on a great show, and there were lots of screw-ups from the prosecution, but the evidence was clear to anyone w/o a biased pov, the blood literally led right to OJ's door. Of course, since it turns out that they had a jury who were apparently not only willing to ignore the evidence, but did not even take the time to genuinely consider it, stacked the odds strongly in their favor. I know little about the law, but as I understand it a jury is not supposed to come to conclusions during a trial, rather they should wait until all the evidence is in and then consider it all during deliberation. How could 12 people examine 6 months of testimony and arrive at any fair verdict in 4 hours? Of course it's impossible, it's absurd. Apparently, for these jurors, the trial was just an annoying formality to be endured before they came to a conclusion they'd reached early on, possibly before the trial even began, based not on the specific evidence of the case, but rather something else entirely, their opinions about racial inequality in an imperfect justice system. When the jury filed into the courtroom for the verdict, one of them gave OJ the classic raised fist,"black-power". What else needs to be said about the mind-set of these 12? Valid cause, wrong venue, reprehensible action. After the trial I thought OJ would slink into a kind of shameful obscurity, a shadow, but he proved himself to be a true sociopath, an egomaniac w/o a trace of integrity or taste. He sought publicity wherever he could find it. In one of his most bizarre and creepy exploits, on some foreign talk-show (back when he still had trouble getting face-time in the U.S.) he actually jumped out from behind a curtain and pretended to stab the hostess w/a banana. Ha-ha! What a kidder! How frustating the last 10 yrs or so must have been. He knows the truth about one of the most famous and horrible crimes ever (The Trial of the Century!) since he did it, but he couldn't exploit this knowledge and use it to his financial advantage. But now, in the age of reality tv, where watching people humiliate and degrade themselves and others has become popular entertainment, he can finally step out into the limelight again. It's just another reality show, but w/death. In the one clip that the Fox network has shown to tease the interview, OJ is saying something about the murder along the lines of: "I don't see how all of them would not be covered in blood." Good for Fox, they got "blood" into their promotion, the promise of an actual description of how this man almost cut off his ex-wife's head and then brutally stabbed the man who tried to stop him. (And make no mistake, Ron Goldman, usually considered only as an afterthought in the whole picture - the guy in the wrong place at the worst time - was a true hero. We can't know the exact details and circumstances of course, but the evidence suggests that the way the crime scene was setup, he had to have initially been some distance from them when he entered the premises and could have turned around and ran, instead he went to Nicole and may have tried to defend her. It's more than wrong place/wrong time, the timing is so precise as to be chilling. How long does it take to cut someone's head off? A few moments? The evidence of Goldman's wounds suggests that he fought like hell.) So many years later OJ finally gets to have his day out of court and in the spotlight and be damned the families of the victims (including his own). Watching that one short clip on Fox (the only one I will watch) is to truly experience the nadir of reality tv. To see this monster get off on the attention he so pitifully and desperately needs by recounting the specifics of how he murdered two people in cold blood and got away w/it is to truly experience the surreal. "You have just entered the Twilight Zone..." The ratings should be thru the roof. Ron Goldman's family has setup a website w/a petition to protest the OJ book and Fox interview: http://dontpayoj.com/index.php Harold
Thats kinda weird . Garish, macabre, ill advised, pointlessly controversial, disrespectful and likely dangerous. It'll be a best seller!!!!!! Fox is promoting this, you say? I am falling out of my chair with surprise.