Category: Uncategorized

OLOLOL

Subject: Poisonous insults. They’re used both to signal to your own ideological troops or to tar your critics with an invidious brush. If you can tell me what the hierarchy of venom, let me know. (Whatever the ranking, I think the whole world needs to take a freakin’ time out, or their mothers will be called.) Here are some options:

Is this you?

The car those potato-lovers sold you is an original red (not burgundy) 1985 Mercedes Benz 300D turbodiesel, 4-door (or wagon), with leather (not MBTex) interior, with 150k documented miles +/-, similar to the photo below:

Then you’re in a unique position to stick it to Old Europe and demonstrate your support for Bush’s war. Here’s what you do. Don’t sell it, that’s what Arianna’d do. Not the message you want to send. Instead, give it to me, keys, title, maintenance records and all. Just give it here. Then I’ll take it, and park it prominently in Manhattan and DC. You’ll sleep easy, knowing that your once-embarassing Mercedes is poised to be blown to smithereens in a terrorist attack, an attack that’s only a matter of time now, thanks to those Germans, who sided with the rest of the world (minus Bulgaria) to oppose Bush’s war.
[Note: If you’d like to be notified if/when your former car gets what’s coming to it, please include a self-addressed stamped postcard.]

And they’re hitting for the fence. For years, silence. He’s over, you think. Like oxygen bars and impeachment hearings. Then in 24 hours, BAM! three completely different press mentions. Can you find the level of Deepak’s room?

Other Noteworthy Events (From Different Ends Of The Creative Spectrum)
From the LA Times, Mark Swed’s rather lyrical article about “See Here, A Colloquium on Attention and the Arts,” held at Pomona College. Alumnus James Turrell and others spoke, and works by once-attention-trying composers like Anton Webern were played. [via Peter Johnstone’s Revelator.org]
Something I never thought I’d see – a broadcast version of Paul Verhoeven‘s classic, Showgirls, the first NC-17 film released by a major studio. I kid you not, it’s on VH-1 right now, complete with thoroughly dubbed dialogue and low-budget, digitally inserted bikini tops in the scenes they just couldn’t cut out. [Or settle for the original on DVD.]
What VH-1 should do, is Showgirls: Behind the Music. Space Ghost up some clips from Saved by the Bell, throw in some childhood home-style footage, and interviews with former classmates, and explain to me why Nomi’s so angry.

Big Art Events (Now and Upcoming)

Untitled (Boiling Study), 2002, Ricci Albenda, at Momenta Art’s Benefit Auction 3/15

Now
The Armory Show (through Sunday)
–Scope Art Fair (through Sunday, including Bill Previdi’s always-interesting collector panel Saturday afternoon)
Upcoming (Saturday, March 15)
Momenta Benefit Auction and Art Raffle, at White Columns, bid on/buy some great art and support the program of a pioneering Williamsburg gallery.

Vince Vaughn, US Marshall (Plan evangelist) image: ecalos.com

But one incident really stung.
“Man, it was bad,” says the Rat Pack-y star of Swingers. “These girls saw us and were kind of flirting, and they kept asking us if we were American. Finally we said, ‘Yes,’ and they just took off.
“One girl turns and says, ‘We were hoping you were Canadian.’ Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?”

Welcome to the New World Order, baby.

And I have to say, I look back on Lindsay Law, who was from American Playhouse and was our producer on Safe, and David Aukin, who worked at Channel 4; those guys are so rare, I realise in hindsight how much courage financing producers had to have to stand back and trust you. Now I would look at these dailies from Safe, where Julie was a speck on the screen and the whole film would be played out in a single shot. And he was like, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” But he would never talk to me and never say, “Oh, more coverage” or put in his two cents just to make himself feel more creatively esteemed. That’s so unusual, that kind of courage and I just now realise the extent to which that helped me. So we were really lucky and although we had just under a million dollars to make Safe, which isn’t amazing to think of, but it felt like it. It was tough. But I still had the freedom to do what I needed to do.

From Guy Trebay’s column in the NY Times:

I was too young to get worked up about moving from New York to Indianapolis, but I remember being very nervous about moving from Indianapolis to Raleigh. One day, my 1st-grade teacher took me to Dairy Queen after school to talk about it.
“Well, I don’t know anyone,” I complained, “and there aren’t any famous people from North Carolina.” (New York already had its hooks into me, it turns out.)
“Like who?” Mrs Hershenson asked.
“Like Cowboy Bob.”
Although, at the time I didn’t realize the golden era of locally produced kids’ shows was ending, I had a point.
Deftly skirting a potentially ugly Cowboy Bob-Andy Griffith shootout, Mrs Hershenson asked, “Is that important to you?”
Proto-New Yorker answer: “um, yeah.”
“Well, what about Mister Rogers?”
“But he’s not from Indianapolis.”
“No, you’re right. He’s from Pittsburgh. But his show is on a network, which means it’ll be on in North Carolina, just like it is here. So when you get to Raleigh, you’ll already know someone. And then you’ll make a lot of other friends, too, in no time.”
Thus, in addition to explaining the differences between affiliate and network programming, Mister Rogers (and Mrs Hershenson) helped me to see that my neighborhood extended far beyond my street, and they guided me into to a lifetime of seeking out the friendship of famous people.
Mister Rogers passed away today, after a recent diagnosis of cancer. View a timeline of Fred Rogers’ achievements, including a behind the scenes clip from the first show, and his 1969 Senate testimony where he passionately argued for the creation of PBS, at pbskids.org.

It takes the village paper, the Guardian, to report this story from Urbana, IL:
“The mother who convinced everyone her child had leukemia”

Terri [Mom] fed Hannah [seven-year old daughter] sleeping pills, then took her on long, aimless drives among the strip-malls and cornfields of Ohio until she fell asleep. Afterwards, she would tell her they had been to the hospital, and that she had slept through her treatment again…
Within weeks, [the head of the Mother’s Club at Hannah’s school] had the pupils holding cookie sales and donating the aluminium ring-pulls from fizzy drink cans, which they sold for recycling. “They even had a Hannah Hat Day,” the Urbana Daily Citizen newspaper noted in a report last June, under the headline Community Reaches Out To Little Girl. “Everyone wore a hat, because Milbrandt must wear a hat since she had the chemotherapy and lost her hair.”