Joseph Mazzello, the Latest Perpetrator of Joseph Gordon-Levitt Syndrome @2:25 PM
Megs alerts us to the current plight of Timmy from Jurassic Park, who is now hot. And in his mid-20s. And in that The Pacific show we're not watching. Sady Doyle notes that this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt Syndrome, which goes something like "first you're like awww, then you're like huh, then you're like WHAAAAAT." THE MORE YOU KNOW. 8
I was going to watch this David Letterman clip because it had an Elinor Burkett joke but I only made it to Letterman saying "Anybody been in a cab in New York City? Well congratulations, you've cheated death!" and I was done. Late night talk show monologues! What is the deal with them! @11:05 AM 2
Every Time There Is a Great New Reality Show Idea I Get Excited But Then…. @3:00 PM
I can't believe I'm going to go through this emotional rollercoaster of excitement and then immediate disgust again, but here we are, Kirstie Alley. And it is true: there many reasons to watch the new Kirstie Alley show, in fact, Halle Kiefer has identified seven of them. (I know, only seven?). They include #2 ("Adorable gay assistant: I LOVE HIM BEFORE I KNOW HIM. He is adorbs, he is made of marzipan and has little glasses like a koala") and of course reason #5 ("According to the show’s website, Kirstie is 'patenting multiple inventions'!!!! WHAT? Paging Dr. Diva, we need some more vanilla frosting for this TIME MACHINE.") Ask me again in the morning after though when I'm sad again. 16
Johnny Weir v. John Locke @9:55 AM
I do wonder a little what happens to Lost's ratings tonight when all the homosexuals suddenly disappear to watch Johnny. (Although homosexuals are historically underrepresented in Nielsen households, obviously!) Anyway—we don't care if tonight's the night that Hurley finally dies. See you next week, eternally irritating TV show! 12
Some Highlights from Today's Kelly Cutrone Press Call @2:05 PM
There are very few people who deserve some measure of fame for appearing on reality TV. Johnny Weir, for one, clearly. And also New York fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone. So here's a very limited (and slightly rough) transcript of Bravo's press conference call today, in anticipation of her reality show "Kell on Earth" next month. (See also: how your tabloid sausage quotes get made!) READ MORE 30
Explaining the Hotness of Stephen Moyer in Six Sentences @10:40 AM
In the wake of the Golden Globes, the Internet has asked: "Explain to me the hotness of this guy in 6 sentences. I do not doubt his attractiveness. But the moisture ratio of lady flowers on the internet about this guy are reaching Draper proportions. THIS INTRIGUES me enough to ask the question but not enough to watch True Blood." God, six sentences? Okay. READ MORE 29
2010: When the Idiocracy Singularity Occurred @4:08 PM
Oh hey! The Idiocracy has happened! We found the proof in this (NSFW) video from Spike TV's new "TV show" that actually exists. It is about straight guys eating things that have been in their butts and laughing at each other, and it is a TV show, on the actual TV, it seems. READ MORE 22
Note From A Fanboy, by Adam Frucci: Ideas For Conan! @3:00 PM
Conan O'Brien really might leave The Tonight Show. He's taken the high road with that letter that you've surely read by now, and good for him. Maybe he'll walk. Is that so bad? Conan's brief run on The Tonight Show has not been great, and I say that as an enthusiast. READ MORE 29
The End of the 00s: Buffy, Season Five, Episode 22, 'The Gift', by Dan Kois @12:17 PM
It was the spring of 2001. I lived in Honolulu, in a house high in the mountains. From our front yard you could see all the way from (gesture) Diamond Head to (gesture) Pearl Harbor. I telecommuted to the DC literary agency that had employed me through grad school, starting work at seven in the morning and kicking off most afternoons around two, when everyone on the East Coast had gone home. We had gotten a puppy at the Honolulu Humane Society, a test case for children one day: If we could keep her alive, perhaps we would do the same with kids. So far she had chewed through her rope and escaped a dozen times; smashed geckos flat with her paws; torn the upholstery off our couch in great strips; consumed a pair of eyeglasses and a roach motel. She was still alive. That was the year that I watched so much Buffy, and the season-five finale, "The Gift," was the ecstatic peak of my fandom. READ MORE 17
Recapping 'The Wire': Episode 2 @12:40 PM
So in episode two of The Wire, our heroes in the police department—and the non-heroes among the bunch, because some of these cops really are the bottom of the barrel!—get their very own office space, in the basement of the police department. Which is "dank," at best. We learn very quickly about the loser cops, because the kind of hot white one with the bad attitude and his dumb friends go into the projects at 2 a.m. all drunk and start shaking people down, and then the awesomeness happens, which is that the people in the projects start pelting them from above with bottles and old TVs and stuff. That is excellent and reminds me of various trips to the projects from my youth! And then the really terrible thing happens. READ MORE 37
Boxed In, with Kia Matthews: Is Taylor Lautner Making Us All Pedophiles? @11:20 AM
Wait, the vaguely Asian-looking werewolf kid from that gay vampire movie is hosting Saturday Night Live?, asked the small percentage of America watching TV on Saturday night. As ridiculous as the Twilight phenomenon is, it's no secret that teenage consumers and their Orange Julius and baby-sitting paychecks are fueling the entertainment industry these days. And yet, Twilight's two main stars are about the world's least-accessible actors. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart could give a fuck about anything besides skinny jeans, vintage band t-shirts and looking so over it. Both are highly uninteresting and seem to be teetering on the edge of a fame-induced nervous breakdown. So as "obscure" as 17 year-old Taylor Lautner may seem, it was pretty smart of NBC to get in on some of that Twilight action with him, rather than his future overdose victim coworkers. READ MORE 54
Daisy Klaber: The New Adventures of Old Men, or, Designing Men @10:40 AM
There are plenty of parts for dudes to play, and lots of them are complicated and interesting, I guess, but that doesn't make most of those roles any more satisfying than the two-dimensional girlfriend parts available for the ladies. Even gay-man characters, whose "emotions" get screen time because gays are like girls, give me heart failure because most TV writers just don't believe that I like men. But I like men! READ MORE 17
Recapping 'The Wire': Episode 1 @12:20 PM
Hey, this show The Wire? It is kind of cool. I think. I don't know if you heard about it—it started on the TV back in 2002, five years before the launch of Tumblr, four years before the launch of Twitter, so I'm not sure how you would have heard about it really? Anyway, I've only watched one episode so far, so here are some first impressions. So: in episode one, a homicide cop named Jimmy (played by Dominic West, who is actually ENGLISH, and who has a delightfully wrinkly forehead), accidentally starts an investigation into a big-time drug lord in Baltimore. READ MORE 122
Meghan Keane: 'The Office' is the Most Depressing Show on Television @2:03 PM
Have you watched The Office lately? The NBC series has become a microcosm of how depressing this recession can get—and not just because The Dunder Mifflin Paper company may fold in the next few episodes. That, after all, seems a fitting end for a company based on a business model that stopped being relevant in 1992. Instead, the show has taken the story of a man with a promising future and given him an interminable present. READ MORE 107
Matt Lauer Loses His Mind on TV @11:32 AM
Today's Matt Lauer, interviewing that LESBIAN Meredith Baxter, known to old people as Mrs. Keaton on Family Ties, this morning: "So this first relationship you had with another woman. Did it create one of those B-movie moments when you go home and you go into the bathroom and you look in the mirror and you go, 'I'm gay!' And then you repeat it six or seven times? Or was it a more subtle—" End verbatim transcript. So. How many questions do you have about this question? For starters, what B-movie is this, and on what cable channel may I watch it immediately, please? And what personal experience of his own does this draw upon? What does Matt Lauer say to his bathroom's mirror? Is it all about Katie Couric still? And, and, and what? 19
Footnotes of Mad Men: Goodbye, All Our Pretty Horses @4:32 PM
Of all the metaphors this season, the strongest seemed to be the horse. That could seem old, pony-furred hat if we were not in the strong hands of the Mad Men writers room. The partner of the wayward man making his claim on the land; the embodiment of stubborn independence; since cigarette ads immemorial, a symbol of virile Americanism. Of course horses are also chattel, and we Americans will gladly take our spirit animals, chop them up and serve 'em to our pups if there is good business to be had, even if we have to lie about it. Also, horses can kill you! (RIP, Papa Whitman.) READ MORE 109
Ana Marie Cox: "Glee," Sincerity, and the Maine Gay Marriage Repeal @12:46 PM
Avril Lavigne songs don't make me cry. Except this morning, listening to the new "Glee" soundtrack: as I was thinking about the lost battle for marriage equality in Maine, the cast's cover of "Keep Holding On" started streaming through my headphones. I lost it.
I confess that prior to hearing the song on the show, ALL I knew about it was that Avril sung it. Kids like her, right? Oh, and it's the fucking theme to fucking Eragon. READ MORE 28
'V' Is That New TV Crack @4:25 PM
There are two types of people in this world, those who cower in the door frames of their homes when the aliens come and those who reach under the floorboard for their trusty Heckler & Koch, grab their Go bags (kept by the front door expressly for this purpose), put on action pants and sprint towards the massive looming spaceship to watch shit get retarded. READ MORE 51
Footnotes of Mad Men: How You Get Your News @4:30 PM
Not to be contrary for the sake of it—because what can you say about November 22, 1963 that hasn't already been borrowed three times over?—but the Kennedy family has only limited emotional resonance for those of us born to the baby boomers. This is particularly true for those of us who grew up in the West, far beyond the sway of East coast political dynasties. Sure, we can identify the Kennedys as a cultural shift, as style icons, as political talking points. We can also relate to the transformational power of their tragedies—hypnotic television coverage, live carnage, and, last night, an unmoored Betty Draper unable to make sense out of any of it. But for us now, that afternoon Dallas is more illustrative of something else: the swift and unscrupulous pace of history. Particularly, recent American history and how it is so phenomenally compressed. In just one generation, the psychic trauma of RFK and JFK has been largely erased. So maybe Don Draper's aloof attitude is enlightened rather than repressive: "Everything's going to be OK. We'll have a new president. And everyone is going to be sad for a little bit." READ MORE 63
Footnotes of Mad Men: Misfits, Horse Meat and Clark Gable @1:51 PM
In Edward Albee's 1962 play,Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George, after having served as a punching bag all night for Martha's verbal roundhouses, decides to have out with it. He and his wife had put on a pretty good act for a their guests, the young and obnoxiously naïve Nick and Honey. Right before George divulges his wife's big secret-it is of Dick Whitman proportions-he starts to peel the label off his liquor bottle. He turns to a confused Honey and explains, "We all peel labels, sweetie; and when you get through the skin, all three layers, through the muscle, slosh aside the organs, them which is still sloshable-and get down to bone… you know what you do then?" Yes: go for the marrow! Nice, horsey marrow. READ MORE 62
Footnotes of Mad Men: The Liberation of Betty Draper–Or Not @4:20 PM
At the end of season two, Betty became convinced that Don was cheating on her. (Crazy, right?) She spent much of a day tearing apart the house, looking for clues of infidelity. Shoving her hands inside pants pockets (smoking), pulling out desk drawers (drinking), reading every scrap of paper in the house (sweating), Betty, in a deflated and droopy party dress, found nothing. Generally, TV shows will afford one scene to this sort of lipstick-on-the-collar scenario, but instead we were drawn into the hunt over the course of the entire episode. READ MORE 17
Footnotes of Mad Men: A Rage For Order, or, The Problematic Episode @1:01 PM
In the intentionally dull world of academic writing, the descriptive word of choice for a thorny issue about race or sexuality is 'problematic.' As in: "Sal only serving as a gay prop this season is problematic." And it was, though not for any kind of politically correct reasons—how eye-rollingly boring would that critique be—but because it makes for crappy drama. Sal's tragic situation and Carla's steely silence during the Birmingham news report was a clumsy plot gimmick. It felt as though the writers were grabbing hold of us by the shirt collars and screaming, "CAN'T YOU SEE? THESE PEOPLE ARE OPPRESSED?!" Well, perhaps we needed reminding. But in this instance, the writers of Mad Men sacrificed their usual elegant nuance for some ham-fisted 'social message.' Fortunately, though some elegance was found in other places—like Disneyland! Yay. READ MORE 42
Footnotes of Mad Men: "They See In Her Disaster" or, Love Amongst the Cheaters @4:41 PM
Monogamy can be such a grind, right? Cheating is tough too, though. There's that terrifying halo of guilt that radiates around you after the act. It serves as both repellent and aphrodisiac, causing one's partner to inch ever-closer to you after a tryst. Then there's a particular upswing from the adrenaline. What a fool you were to put such a thing at risk! After all that comes the slow-boiling and consuming resentment towards your partner, the one who has robbed you of spontaneity and anonymity. You know what helps? A sudden trip and/or a new hairdo. READ MORE 61
The Internet, with Maura Johnston: Martha Stewart Show Embraces Twitter, Grills Founder @10:58 AM
Two weeks ago, MTV's Video Music Awards embraced the liveblogging concept, hiring Internet personality-construct iJustine to preside over mentions of the show on the microblogging service Twitter—and they reaped Internet rewards when Kanye West ran up on stage and sparked a million angry blog posts. Martha Stewart's eponymous TV show took a similar tack yesterday, when it taped a show to air this Friday devoted to what the domestic empress described as "all you need to know about tech and social netwworking" [sic]. Attendees were encouraged to Tweet and blog throughout the taping; there was even an official hashtag that the warm-up comedian confusedly announced to the audience between segments. Martha's studio is as well-apportioned and spacious as one might expect, and the combination of bright-eyed audience members and open laptops kept bringing to mind a particularly well-designed lecture hall on the first day of fall quarter. READ MORE 9
Why Don't You–And Obama–Believe That Torture Is Torture? Because the Culture Industry Said So. @2:37 PM
Back in January, a Washington Post/ABC News Poll asked the following question: "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"
A majority of respondents, 58%, supported the stance, and agreed that torture should never be used, no matter the circumstances. 40% did not agree. So while this poll was heralded as a demonstration that America does not support torture, a full two out of every five Americans supports torture. But not just any torture. READ MORE 32
