I really like Spencer Ackerman. The guy is hilarious, amazingly smart and writes about foreign policy in such a clear, abrasive manner that I think we could use more of. His longform stuff, which isn’t as snarky (in a good way), is excellent too. We need more Ackermans in the liberal blogosphere, people who know a lot about the military and defense issues and can approach them from a left-wing standpoint without communicating contempt for the military. So, yeah, read his series about the development of counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and the US military establishment (Parts One and Two).
But Spencer’s seething attack on David Plotz and Jeffrey Goldberg for their running Slate commentary on The Wire is pretty unfair to both of them, but especially Plotz. Ackerman goes totally guilt-by-association to say that Plotz hated the Sun subplot because he’s a writer for Slate, meaning that his stuff gets published because it’s “clever, not what’s, you know, true.” There’s something to the Slate is too cute critique, they do, after all have Steven Landsburg writing for them. But in the case of Plotz, he shows how “cuteness” can make for some really good stuff. Look at this “Blogging the Bible” series. THis was the ultimate Slate gimmick. Here was a secular Jew who had never really read the Bible, who was going to read the whole thing and liveblog his way through it. Would there be any particularly original Biblical commentary? No, but it sure was fun to read. And it was cute.
His indictment of Jeffrey Goldberg is much more serious, however. Goldberg is one of those neocons who just so happens to be a pretty well respected journalist. In his days at the New Yorker, he was one of the most passionate advocates for the Iraq War. He wrote not just about WMDs, but also about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that turned out to be bogus. He was hardly a skeptical war supporter, as his Slate series with Bob Wright shows, he was full on calling opponents of the war immoral for being soft on fascism and genocide. Goldberg has never really come to grips with his pre-Iraq advocacy and journalism, and understandably, many anti-war folk hold him in contempt. But Ackerman says that Goldberg is “a reporter who does not care about whether what he writes is true or false, no matter what the consequences to peoples’ lives are, and who has no problem evading responsibility for his actions. Templeton is guilty of misdemeanors by comparison. If I were Goldberg, I’d whine about the show too. David Simon has his goddamn number.”
Why this is certainly one way of framing the case against Goldberg, I question its relevance to his discussions of The Wire. Just about every journalist, including Spencer’s American Prospect buddies, thought the journalist plot was overwrought and lame. And it was Simon’s fault, not Goldberg’s for calling out how obvious the good and bad guys were. While Simon claims, and I believe him, that his real point was to expose how they weren’t covering the systemic failures of Baltimore institutions, it only real came out why anyone should give a rat’s ass about the Sun in the final episode. Until then, it just seemed like Simon’s obsession and him working out personal vendettas, and it was just an annoying ancillary to other, much more compelling plot lines.
While the case against Goldberg is a strong one, it’s not clear how it relates to Wire criticism.
I live in an almost laughably upper-middle class liberal household (and I wouldn’t have it any other way). By that, I mean that we are enamored with NPR, PBS and regularly get into disputes over who gets to read the most recent issue of the New Yorker or The Atlantic. It’s no surprise, then, that when Mark Levin wrote this, I was a little taken aback:
As I think about it (although not for long), perhaps David Brooks fancies himself the next William Safire in that he feels an obligation to show his far-left editors and colleagues that he is a “new kind” of conservative, i.e., a non-conservative. The more he is criticized, the more he is ingratiated into the Gray Lady’s fold. I expect he’ll become a regular on many of the talk shows who can use him as the house conservative. Let’s see.
Umm, I guess Levin hasn’t been a semi-regular viewer of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for the last 17 or so years, but David Brooks appears weekly on it as the “house conservative,” and has been doing so for quite a few years. So I guess we’ve already seen.
At first glance, the GawkerStalker cell phone picture of 14 year old Gossip Girl star Taylor Momsen wearing a short skirt on a subway is just creepy. I mean, can it just be possible for a girl to ride a subway without being groped, oggled or have pictures taken of her for a snarky gossip blog? And on second, third and fourth glance…it’s still really creepy. But once you get over the creepiness, or at least just accept it, this has to be one the most surreal blog posts ever. Why is it surreal and not just gross?
Taylor Momsen plays Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl. What “Gossip Girl” refers to in the show is a blog written by an annoymous sleuth who reports on gossip among Upper East Side teens. In the show, what often happens is that some teen will take a picture of one of the main characters in a compromising situations — say Serena buying pregnancy tests. The tipster sends the picture to Gossip Girl, and within minutes, the picture and an explanatory caption show up on her blog and is sent out to the cell phones of the “Upper East Side Elite.” “Gossip Girl” is basically a small scale version of Gawker for this make believe universe.
Coming back to real life, Taylor Momsen was in a compromising situation — wearing a short skirt while sitting on a subway — and a sleuth took a camera-phone picture and sent it off to the gossip blog. The only real difference between real-life and TV in this case is the name of the person involved — Taylor Momsen instead of Jenny Humphrey. Surely Jean Baudrillard or Marshall McLuhan would have had some profound insight into this seminal moment in media cross-pollination and self reference, but I just think its weird.
The big problem with watching election coverage on CNN/MSNBC/FOX is that while it’s live, meaning there’s a high probability of production and technical snafus, it’s also incredibly boring and slow. All the important information that everyone wants to know is easily provided on the crawl — you don’t need Anderson Cooper to tell you that with 24 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton has a three point lead. So, the anchors and the analysts basically screw around for hours, always looking for more half-baked analysis, interviews and messing with their cool graphics. Thankfully, Slate V has a video of the five most awesomely bad election night TV moments.
Can anyone blame me for deciding to watch The Devil Wears Prada instead of this festival of horrors?
While I’m not a huge fan of primary debates, now that the field has narrowed and the debates are happening reasonably close to an actual vote, I was considering turning in, especially with the Redskins-Seahawks game basically over. But apparently ABC decided that they hate West Coast bloggers and is tape-delaying the debates. That means I can’t start watching until 7 PST. I imagine that die-hard political junkies who follow multiple liveblogs of debates aren’t a huge part of ABC’s audience, but they certainly lost them tonight.
I’ve gone over, in detail, how Gossip Girl’s demographic fantasy (no Jews!) doesn’t really detract from the show, but this week’s episode had one egregious example of total “un-realism” and one very odd bit of plot development. The first was a little detail at the gang’s illicit pool party: while it’s certainly true that, on occasion, teenagers gather without their parents knowledge and consume alcohol, it is highly unlikely that said alcohol is consumed in expensive glassware and prepared with silver shakers. Even though Gossip Girl is supposedly dealing with a group of people financially and temperamentally above red plastic cups bought at the local convenience store, it’s frankly absurd that anyone would have the wherewithal or the foresight to bring such expensive crystal to an impromptu pool party.
The second complaint (spoilers follow) is Serena’s insistence that her mom can’t get together with Rufus because then she would have to end things with Dan. Why, exactly, can’t step-siblings date? They aren’t related, meaning no taboos would be violated, and they haven’t grown up together, meaning there would be no awkwardness. In fact, step-sibling romance has been fairly well explored in teenage drama. In Clueless, Cher Horowitz finds love with her “ex-stepbrother” played by Paul Rudd. The entire conceit of Cruel Intentions was how Sebastian was attracted to his stepsister Kathryn. While the movie clearly wanted us to think that their attraction was somehow taboo or illicit, it never struck me as particularly noteworthy. Again, they weren’t related and didn’t grow up together. It was implied that their parents, or as they called them, the parental unit, were both on second or even third marriages, so it wasn’t like they were an especially cohesive family anyway. So it Lilly and Rufus were together, why would that have to negatively impact Serena and Dan?
The second minor complaint is howLilly feels like she needs to get married at all, and especially to Bart Bass. In the episode where her mother shows up, we find out that she received the entirety of her inheritance for ditching Rufus, so we can assume that she’s financially independent, and in the show, there are no signs that she can’t manage things on her own. The obvious reason we have this contrived marriage is so that GG can more obviously follow the OC. Notice how Bart Bass and Caleb Nichol are both overbearing, incredibly wealthy, work/money obsessed and even have the same haircut! Come on Josh Schwartz, let’s see some originality!
Now you, fair reader, may be wondering why I find it necessary to go on at such length about a teen television drama. And it’s a fair question, and the answer is simply that I’ve watched every episode, my friends watch it, and there’s a lot in the show to talk about. Oh yeah, and I just wanted a good excuse to get a picture of Blake Lively on the blog. I think the site could use more of her.
I promise, more serious blogging over the weekend. We’re allowed to be a little frivolous on Friday, right?
Phoebe Maltz fires off another missive pointing out that, shockingly, a prime time teen soap bears little relation to reality. Specifically, Nate and Serena being pushed into engagement at 17. Not only are these types of arrangements becoming rarer and rarer everywhere, among Manhattan’s (or any city) young elite they are practically unheard of. Ultimately, Phoebe concludes that GG is attempting to be some fantasy of a past era while at the same time is framed by a cutting edge cultural form:
But combined with the non-speaking minorities, what this ultimately adds up to is that the show is meant to be a fantasy version of another era. Whose fantasy is unclear–as is which era–but the show clearly does not take place in 2007. Or does it? Isn’t the whole show centered around a blog that the mysterious Gossip Girl is updating via some kind of hand-held device? I, for one, expect more from a prime-time teen soap opera that I half-watch while cooking dinner.
It’s important to recognize a few things about GG. The most obvious is that it is much more similar to teen soaps such as the OC than different. The drama is still the same — sex, drugs, betrayal of friends by having sex while on drugs - and all that jazz. It’s just framed in this amazingly anachronistic, Jew-free, Upper East Side that hasn’t existed for decades. To answer Phoebe’s question of whose fantasy GG is trying to depict, I’d say it’s most everyone’s who lives outside of the tri-state area. For someone who regularly depicts the foibles of NYC, it’s easy to point at GG and say “it isn’t really like that.” But outside of the immediate NYC area, “Upper East Side” still means rich WASPs with funny sounding names and parents that don’t love them going to school’s with silly names. Oh yeah, and they’re all beautifully dressed and do lots of coke (so far GG hasn’t quite explored that angle). And more importantly, the fantasy of the silent-minority, Wasp enclave that is GG’s Upper East Side isn’t so shockingly out of place for most people, especially in comparison to the standard departures from reality that are part and parcel of the teen soap genre. By which I mean the never being in class, never doing any homework, the totally unrecognizable college admissions process — one of the most infamous examples being Summer Roberts getting good SAT scores and then realizing that she ought to go to Brown – and the various HUGE and substantively misleading deceptions that all teen dramas engage in. It’s possible to imagine being a teenager in GG’s Upper East Side, it’s impossible to imagine being a teenager and having school be such a secondary part of one’s life.
So, the GG creators have an audience that is willing to accept fabrications and deceptions that are built into the genre and have a vintage vision of the Upper East Side, so why not go all out and make it totally fantastical? Very few of their viewers are as discerning as Phoebe.
Yglesias links to this Deborah Solomon interview with Gossip Girls creator Josh Schwartz, wondering where all the Jews are:
Why are the characters uniformly white, with old-money names like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen that hark back to a time when high society was not integrated? Why are there no Jewish characters? It’s interesting, because on “The O.C.” I went out of my way to make those characters Jewish, not what you would expect to find in Orange County. But in New York, weirdly, I failed. I was working off of the source material.
This is confused for a few reasons. There are plenty of Jews in Orange County, especially in the wealthier Laguna/Newport areas. So Schwartz may have been going for “diversity for diversity sake” but it wasn’t all that inaccurate.
Yglesias notes that the source material is clearly wrong when it depicts a world of exclusive New York City day schools without Jews, and he’s right — the Upper East Side is plenty Jewish. But Cecily von Ziegesar, who actually attended Nightingale-Bamford, the school that Constance Ballard is based on, surely knows that the Upper East Side isn’t the WASP enclave she depicts. She isn’t trying to create an accurate representation of the Upper East Side that Yglesias or people like him will recognize. She is instead creating a fantasy world that American teenagers can aspire to. This means fantasy New York, with silly waspy names and a lack of Jews and minorities. To America, Jewish New Yorkers are intellectual and/or neurotic , in the model of Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, hardly the fodder for an American fairy tale aimed at teen girls.
Seth Cohen, who took the classic Jewish traits of neuroticism and intelligence and put them into a clever, good looking package, was an aspirational character for Jewish teens as well as a familiar archetype for the TV watching audience. The Gossip Girls characters — Waldorf, Archibald, van der Woodsen — are too familiar archetypes that won’t disturb the book and TV audience’s perceptions of their imaginary Upper East Side. Throw in a smart, bespectacled Jew named Yglesias and everyone would just get confused.
I just watched the premiere on TiVo, so yall can get my immediate reactions. In bullet points!
I’ve decided that teen shows are profoundly depressing. I’ve just started my senior year in high school, which means I’m supposed to be as old or older than most of the characters on any teen drama. Jenny Humphrey, is supposed to be a freshman, which means she’s 14 or 15. I’m 17. This is disturbing in all sorts of ways. (According to Wikipedia, the actress, Taylor Momsen was born in July of 1993 — making her 14, nearly 3.5 years younger than me)
Chuck is one of the creepiest characters in TV teen memory. I’ll agree with Reihan on this one, at least with Luke on the OC, he was this big, blonde Aryan water polo player. He was more ridiculous than scary. Luke said things like “Welcome to the OC, bitch!” while Chuck says little and is just total prick. On a more lighthearted note, where’s the pet monkey?
I loved the Gossip Girl books, but parts of show were difficult to watch. Seeing the parents of Serena, Nate and Blair act in such a ridiculous, callous manner was unsettling. I realized that with the books, just reading people act so awfully towards each other and be so manipulative and duplicitous could be entertaining. The books are breezy reads (I could read an entire bookin a free period at school — 45 minutes) and so whenever people were being so mean, it would quickly move on to a great description of whatever party the gang was going to, with the accordant ridiculous dropping of luxury brand names. With the show, however, seeing Blair and Serena so obviously hate each other — and pretend to be friendly, and then go back to open warfare was just depressing. Also, watching parents blatantly insturmentalize their children (Nate’s father telling him to get back together with Blair so he candle her mother’s IPO) is just sad, even if it’s just TV. I couldn’t breeze past the words that described the duplicity and amorality of the characters. I had to sit there and watch it.
A good guide to what our society values in 2007. Allowed on TV - Minors having sex, attempted date rape (twice!), large alcohol consumption and blatant drug use. Not allowed on TV - cigarette smoking. Allow me to amend that, cigarettes hand rolled with marijuana is cool, tobacco is all bad.
Allow me to speak as a teenager. When Serena goes the to the party and instantly everyone at the party texts each other to deliver the news…that never happens.
It’s lame to criticize what is essentially a fairy tale for not sticking to realism, but the entire device of the omniscient blogger who narrates the lives of high school students is just weird. The “Gossip Girl” is either a profound loner, desperate to carry Serena and Blair’s lunch, or just a creepy pedophile. I mean seriously, who on earth would read a gossip blog about people they know and go to school with? Can’t they just talk to their friends about such things?
Gosh Chris Matthews, professional talk show hosts aren’t supposed to creepily come onto their colleagues live on air. The lack of professionalism Matthews displays is pretty shocking, and he should probably apologize. While I’ll be the first to admit that Erin Burnett is quite attractive, it’s simply offensive to treat a fellow anchor that way. And besides, doesn’t Chris know that borderline inappropriate commentary on female journalists appearances is the tried and true realm of, oh I dunno, young male bloggers. Where have people’s sense of propriety gone these days?
Here’s the clip - WARNING - extreme creepiness, in all seriousness, I stopped watching at the 15 second mark around six times before I managed to finish the entire thing. It’s like The Office except not funny, just creepy.
I love Entourage, but there’s one weird thing about it. Ari’s wife, identified by the Tivo info page and HBO as “Mrs. Ari,” does not appear to have her own name. The meaning of this, I do not know.
The best hour of TV these days comes every Sunday on HBO - Entourage followed by Flight of the Conchords. Plenty of others have attested to both of the shows’ hilarity, so it will suffice to say that I agree, both of them are absolutely hilarious. The interesting thing that struck me when watching my TiVO infused run of last Sunday’s episodes is how the two shows juxtapose certain male stereotypes and behaviors. The guys on Entourage are guys, through and through, they mindlessly go after sex and are incredibly loyal to each other. Ari, the biggest swinging dick of them all, is a bit more nuanced. He’s a loud asshole, but also intimidated by his wife, an anxious wreck, and dependent on his gay assistant.
FotC, on the other hand, makes a common show of sending up male stereotypes with Bret and Jermaine’s antics. Bret especially displays characteristically feminine qualities - whether it’s having body image issues or feeling heart broken after getting used for sex by Lisa (or was it Felicia). Having a woman do the entire “I’m shipping of to Iraq tomorrow, I’m a sniper in Delta, I need to have sex with you” bit was pretty funny, if not just for inverting a situation that’s already ridiculous. What makes FotC so great when they do this transgressive stuff is how little they take themselves seriously when they’re doing it. On the surface, it’s just a very funny show about 2 Kiwis trying to make it in the big city, that they’re able to slip in parodies of stereotypical gendered behavior is just icing on a comical cake.
The Zorro of the blogosphere, Digby, rakes Scalia over the coals for his oh-so-pathetic invocation of Jack Bauer’s All-American Awesomeness:
The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
Digby dutifully points out how stupid this is, and she’s right. But if you put your mind in the right place, cock your head the right way and are willing to let crazy counter intuition flow into your mind, I think that 24 actually is a great demonstration of why torture is so shitty. I’ve argued before that the exoteric and overall plots of many 24 seasons are very anti-hawk, but this argument is a bit less obvious and involves a bit more interpretation that is hardly obvious from the show and probably not intended by the writers. Here we go
The most obvious way that 24 doesn’t support torture is that the pure cruelty and sadism is displayed so vividly; like when Jack tortures his brother, he may think he’s trying to get information, but in reality he’s working out all sorts of issues that are secondary to the actual interrogation. Additionally, when Jack tortures people, it looks so awful and painful and really drives home what torture is.
This is where I’m getting to into heavy interpretative mumbo jumbo that may not make sense, but bear with me. The fact that Jack is so successful at his torture is some the best evidence a TV show can provide to prove that our current policy of allowing and encouraging torture is a bad one.
Jack basically always gets it right, the people he tortures are usually all actual terrorists and he regularly gets the information. Any intelligent viewer knows how unlikely that is to happen, that the people you torture have information and that you are able to extract actionable intelligence from torture. Jack’s constant success, in a contradictory way, is so extraordinary that it drives home just how unlikely torture is to work. Additionally, Jack himself is personally extraordinary - he is brave, virtuous, committed, patriotic and self sacrificing, if we had to pick someone to torture, it would be Jack Bauer.
This is where the pro torture crowd that cites 24 as an example of what we need to, hoists themselves by their own petard. JACK BAUER ISN’T REAL, and smart viewers know this. There is NO ONE in the government who would ever actually do government sanctioned torture like Jack Bauer - hell, there are no humans like Jack Bauer. When Scalia and Tancredo say that they want “Jack Bauer justice,” they’re making total asses out of themselves. If torture is acceptable only when done by a super-virtuous, skilled, smart FICTIONAL character - that is the best proof that authorizing torture is a bad idea. Because back in the real world, actual human beings will do the torture, not super heroes dreamed up by Joel Surnow.
Via Yglesias, the Clinton Campaign decided to make a spot portraying Bill and Hillary as Tony and Carmela in the infamous final scene of the Sopranos. Call me cautious, but I don’t think it’s the best idea for a couple who spent the better part of the 90s fending off accusations that they ran something of a mafia in Arkansas to pretend their America’s most famous mob couple.
In case anyone cares, the Hillary campaign picked Celine Dion’s “You and I” as the official campaign song. Hillary just lost my primary vote, well, that is if I could vote in the California primary. I mean, she’s clearly decided to orient her campaign to half deaf, muscially retarded, weepish middle aged people who are responsible for the 1997 Oscars Best Original Song travesty, you can hardly blame for feeling a bit alienated from the cause.
I caught HBO’s new comedy following the antics of “New Zealand’s 4th most popular folk/parody group” on the TIVO tonight, and let me say, the entire Zeitlin family was in stiches for most of the show. It’s like A Mighty Wind except much, much sillier. I mean, the song lyrics are excelent and when during the video of their track “The Humans are Dead” when Brett breaks into a binary solo, the sheer epic ridiculousness andsillness of the entire thing comes to a head, and you realize that this show is definitely a keeper.
Here’s the link to watch it online for the next week.
UPDATE: Loyal commenter Cain points out that there a bunch of their clips on YouTube, including this great one of their classic “The Humans are Dead”
Jewish mothers across the world constantly fret that their beloved sons and daughters may go off into the world…and marry non Jews. The opportunity has never been greater, and the social stigma has never been lower; so it really is a great chance for young Jews to expand past their cultural and traditional boundaries, because you never know how these things may change.
There is however, in this bleak world of intermarriage and diminished identity, hope. And Hope’s name is “Natalie Portman and Andy Samberg are dating.”
In the words of a “Portman source”- “A nice Jewish boy would be good for her.”
PS - I’ve had a crush on her since I visited my brother at school and saw her in a bar/restaurant there…it was love at first site, but I don’t think she saw me.
First off, thank you GFR, for writing about Heroes, I’ve been waiting to use that line as a title for almost as long as I’ve had this blog (a bit less than a month, but who’s counting). Now, I’ve had my own unfair, capricious, and yes frivolous criticisms of Garance’s previous culture piece/article (how’s that for splitting the difference) for TAP, but I have real, substantive things to say this time.
The main thrust of the article is that Heroes is the left wing response to 24, where Bauer and Co. almost gleefully torture any suspect, Heroes shows the pitfalls and dangers of governance by fear in the wake of terrorist attacks:
More than that, the show represents the passing of the moment in which fear of terrorists and fear of the president ruled, and both were used to justify actions that undermined America’s values, legal traditions, and citizens’ ability to freely criticize their leaders.
Having never seen Heroes, I’ll just assume this is a correct description - thought GFR’s mention of “storm troopers of the post-attack Department of Homeland Security with Matrix-like superpowers and samurai swords” makes me a bit more interested. The problem with this dichotomy is that, as Kevin Drum has argued, before, season after season 24 has grappled with the exact same issues and has come out on the exact same side - the hawks that use fear to justify extreme actions are nearly always wrong:
In Season 2, a hawkish cabinet uses its 25th Amendment power to relieve the (Democratic) president of power because they consider him weak and indecisive for refusing to retaliate against a Middle Eastern country that has detonated a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil. But the hawks are dead wrong: it turns out that a group of shadowy businessmen fabricated the entire plot in order to push the U.S. into war and drive up oil prices. The liberal president is vindicated.
Season 4 starts out with a new (Republican) president who’s killed midway through the season. The conservative, hawkish vice president who takes over turns out to be hesitant and incompetent. He’s saved from disaster only by the advice and counsel of the liberal president from Season 2.
In Season 5, the hawkish president gins up a terrorist attack in order to give him an excuse to invoke the military terms of an anti-terrorism treaty and secure U.S. oil interests in central Asia. The plot is discovered and the president hauled off to jail.
Season 6 (the current season) stars a cautious, liberal (Democratic) president determined to protect civil liberties in the face of terrorist threats. His reward? An assassination attempt by a cabal of hawkish White House aides that leaves him in a coma and allows the vice president to order an unjustified attack on an unnamed (as usual) Middle Eastern country. You can guess how this is going to turn out.
Reading that, you’d think that the editorial staff for the Nation is writing the show. The weird thing is, Joel Surnow - the creator of 24 - is quite the conservative himself, and he is responsible for the basic exoteric message of the show - fighting terrorism requires kicking ass without questions. The broad plots of many of the episodes show the exact opposite tendency, that massive retaliation and restriction of civil liberties is often imprudent and unlikely to stop any future terrorism. The “schizophrenic” nature of 24, and crazy plot conundrums of Heroes, perhaps calls into question the utility of using TV shows as a gauge for anything greater than the show itself, but that’s an argument for another day.
PS - If you’re like me and have never seen Heroes, you have to read the entirety of GFR’s piece/article, the bizarre “fake mutant president plot” she describes at the end is just too ridiculous. And one more thing, “before declaring a false victory against the mutants in the form of a “cure” that is really a poison. ” - where have we heard that before?
From TMV, we have the sad, sad news that after his many years of sleeping with the models and hosting The Price is Right, Bob Barker is retiring. I, having had to go attend school nearly the entire time my life and The Price is Right intersected, never got to watch it very much. But the man is a cultural icon and will surely be missed. The show reached it’s peak with this surreal episode:
The backlash has been coming for a long time, the people have been agitating against this mousy, over-sensitive, not super talented actor being the voice of our generation. And, in the blogosphere at least, Ross has finally cracked - declaring him to be “a no-talent poseur.” The Wise Old Ezra, perhaps showing some solidarity for a fellow member of the tribe, doesn’t entirely go the full Ross, but sure is happy to see Gawker launch a devastating attack on him.
The “I Hate Zach Braff” founding document is, of course, Josh Levin’s classic Slate article of the same name. It is, in fact, absolutely hilarious and hits on all the right reasons why those of us (well maybe not me, I might be a tad young for Braff’s generation) should be disgusted that this guy is our culturo-generational representative. Here’s the nut:
What has Braff’s keen ear picked up about the nation’s young people? If Garden State is to be believed, they spend their days squinting and staring wistfully while slowly learning that it’s OK to feel and, like, live. When they do speak, yearbook quotes come out. For example: “Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” In The Last Kiss, Braff furrows his brow solemnly and ponders a question that’s paralyzed millions: Should I replace my incredibly hot girlfriend with an incredibly hot college student?
Yes, this is really why people find him annoying. Because he writes movies that has him sleeping with multiple incredibly hot women, or in Garden State, just one. And then he wraps up his translucent lust in lame profundity, gets more hot girls, and the ressentiment comes on pretty quick.
It’s odd because many of the Braff haters are probably, like most men between 16-35, huge Entourage fans. Entourage is just about how an actor and his hanger-on friends use a scintilla of acting ability to get with a bunch of girls. Zach Braff, by all accounts, does this in real life. So, I think we should all just step off, and respect Braff’s gangster. Don’t hate the player, hate the fact that you (and me) aren’t able to play the game.
PS - I have watched many episodes of Scrubs much more recently that I’ve seen Garden State, and I’ve never seen The Last Kiss, so maybe I’m just more predisposed to being sympathetic to Braff.
This is how Garden State’s infamous “this song will change your life” scene should have turned out:
I was scanning HBO yesterday when I chanced upon Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an HBO film about the various machinations around the infamous Wounded Knee massacre, and the scene I saw had Ulysses S Grant discussing Indian policy with various advisers and military officials. But this just wasn’t any President Grant, the man had a deep, folksy voice, and looked “like a novelty candle that had been melted under a nuclear blast“It was none other than soon-to-be presidential candidate Fred Dalton Thompson. Though US Grant was an incredibly interesting, conflicted man who was incidentally a great writer, he was something of an awful, corrupt, easily manipulated president.
Since most voters don’t really have strong feelings about US Grant and his opponents can easily point to Grant’s incompetence as president, this may not have been the best role for Fred. Additionally, those who have strong feelings for Grant probably have negative feelings towards him because of his Civil War heroism may have been for the wrong side.
