Separated At Birth - Oscar Edition

Maybe it's because I read Spy magazine too much, but when I see televised pageants like the Oscars®, I can't help it when some celebrities remind me of other celebrities. To prove my point, I've put together some photos from the ceremony Sunday night with some random publicity photos of other people. Here goes:

Nicole Kidman	Gwyneth Paltrow
Melissa Etheridge	Hillary Clinton
Will Ferrell	Samuel Jackson
Jodie Foster	Jane Fonda
Ellen DeGeneres	Willie Wonka

And Ellen, I kid because I love. I actually thought your sitcom was funnier AFTER you came out and only started watching then. You may have lost two million viewers, but you gained one for your courage and wit. I saw your interview with Barbara Walters where you talked about starting a family someday, which can be difficult when you don't necessarily have the right plumbing. Just let me know and I'll extend the same offer I have made to other celebrities in the same situation.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Anyone I missed?

Plagiarism Police: Sorkin vs. Spy

I’m a faithful watcher of Alan Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as any reader of this blog can tell since I invented the Studio 60 Drinking Game and held a Studio 60-30 Rock Face Off. I’m also a huge fan of the late lamented Spy magazine having just read and reviewed the coffee table tribute to that snarky pioneer.

This leads to the current case in front of the Plagiarism Police®.

Docket: Aaron Sorkin vs. Spy magazine

Accusation: Lifting fictitious factoids from snarky 90s magazines.

Evidence:

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip "The Christmas Show" by Aaron Sorkin	Spy, January 1991 "The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer" by Bruce Handy et. al.
Matt: They calculated the number of homes with children and the average weight of two presents per child. Danny: What did they find? Matt: He would need 214,200 reindeer pulling a sled weighing 321,000 tons at 3,000 times the speed of sound.	This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons… We need 214,200 reindeer.

Defense: None, he has never been called on this before I just brought it up. My guess is that he would use Yellojkt Plagiarist Excuse® #4. The original Spy magazine article has been widely distributed on the internet with and without attribution. It is so you-biquitous that it merits its own Snopes page.

Closing arguments: If you are going to quote faux-facts, you should at least copy the source correctly. The article assumes two-pounds of presents, not two presents per kid. Sorkin in general plays so fast and loose with his factoids that nobody really expects him to acknowledge his sources. According to some, he barely acknowledges his co-writers.

Verdict: Dismissed for lack of interest.

Sentence: Community service is recommended. Give us more original sub-plots like the New Orleans jazz tribute and fewer ad hominem attacks on the bloggers and the internet that are Sorkin’s uncredited cowriters.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What have you seen suspiciously cribbed from the internet?

BooksFirst - November 2006

Books Read

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
Spy: The Funny Years by Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen, and George Kalogerakis

Books Bought

Spy: The Funny Years by Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen, and George Kalogerakis
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Comments

Michael Lewis is a journalistic genius. His first book, Liar’s Poker, is the undisputed classic of the 80s genre of Big Business Exposé. Proving that he is no one trick pony, he has written authoritative books on baseball and the internet among other topics. He brings a clarity and perspective on any topic that is technical, comprehensive, and enlightening.

This book is a little misleadingly sub-titled "Evolution Of A Game", suggesting a broad history of football, which it isn’t. It does give some overview on the metamorphosis of the left tackle into a highly paid skill position. From my perspective it also sheds light on how and why so many awful quarterbacks from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went on to success at other teams.

Instead, it is a case study of how Michael Oher (not his birthname, but the name he goes by), the large but quiet son of a ghetto crackhead, gets adopted by a wealthy football crazy family and gets Henry Higgens-ed into a star college football player. Not until the very end of the book does Lewis acknowledge that the subjects of the book are personal friends of his, and whether he admits it or not, that knowledge colors the slant of the story.

The tale is told as an O. Henry-ish happy ending about a poor kid that gets a big break. It could just as easily be a cautionary warning about the horrors and hypocrisy of the college football/NFL farm team industrial machine. Oher, whose elementary education was non-existent, gets tutored and dragged educationally through a segregation academy in suburban Memphis because he is big enough to win football games all by himself. Every (admittedly hypocritical and counter-productive) NCAA eligibility rule is abused and loop-holed well beyond recognition. As Lewis admits, nobody is out there searching public housing projects and taking in the future accountants of the world.

While some find this an uplifting tale of overcoming adversity, I found it a depressing acknowledgement of how much human potential is being ignored and abandoned in the slums of our very own country as well as the prevalence of the win at any cost rabidness that infects sports at every level.

The much lamented Spy magazine inspired me to entitle my blogroll "Blogrolling In Our Time". Their publicist friendly movie reviewer, Walter Monheit®, was also the subject of one of my very early blog posts. It turns out that Walter was a real person and a minor socialite in his own right. That is one of the many amusing anecdotes in this large and sprawling history of America’s snarkiest magazine ever.

I discovered Spy about two years into its brief life. After a few newsstand issues, I was hooked into a subscription. After reading it, I would bring each issue to work and donate it to the company library. All the running gags and celebrity exposés became office in-jokes. Then I changed jobs and at about the same time Spy vanished. I found it again years later a mere shadow of itself. The format was the same, but all the wit had been sucked out of it. It read like a high-brow Maxim without the cheesecake spreads (Much like Esquire in it’s heyday was Playboy for guys that really read the articles).

Spy: The Funny Years is borderline coffee-table sized and heavy enough to be dangerous to read in bed. The large pages allow for long full reprints of some of Spy’s epic stories. I had forgotten how dense and journalistic all that side-splittingly droll irony was. The hagiography of Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen is comprehensive, but ultimately lacks a narrative arc. That clubhouse “kids left loose with a mimeograph machine” attitude is described but never evoked. The frequent editorial footnotes leads one to wonder who actually wrote the book since the semantic flair of the magazine is sorely missing.

Carter and Andersen and a lot of the original staff have long been co-opted or assimilated into other magazines in such a way that the Spy DNA is apparent in nearly anything from the newsstand that I bother reading. They taught the world that snark sells, but it has been watered down and made publicist safe. That hell-bent-for-leather damn-the-torpedoes sense of they-didn’t-just-say-that lives on in only the most cynical websites like Gawker where advertisers and celebrities don’t yet call the shots.

In a way, Spy was doomed from the start. The candles that burn the brightest burn the shortest. I will always miss Spy.

Melissa And Friends

Last week was the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival and I was once again a no-show. Since I first learned about this annual event, I have wanted to go, but I fear it is a dream that will elude me forever. You see, I have a penis, and people with those are not allowed. And even if I wanted to, radical surgery wouldn’t gain me entrance since only “womyn born womyn” meet the eligibility standards. Even if they did change their policy, it’s unlikely that I would attend anyways. Camping in the woods in the August heat with several thousand feminists of the most militant variety is not a vacation I would be able to talk my wife into. So I have to just pout in a sour grapes way.

So instead of seeing Jill Sobule and Lez Zeppelin on the MWF mainstage last Thursday, I did something better. I got over my snit that she overlooked me and went to see Melissa Etheridge in concert at Constitution Hall in DC. I’m not sure that the mostly female audience was even aware of the irony of seeing America’s most famous lesbian musician at a venue that once snubbed African American singer Marion Anderson. Still, the DAR hall is a great place to see a show. Our seats were in a box just behind the floor seating. We had great sightlines to the oddly decorated stage, which consisted of a series of boxes that looked like glowing cubist strawberries.

This was my third time seeing Melissa live. We first saw her as the opening act for the Eagles on their Hell Freezes Over tour. She may have been still in the closet to most people, but she wasn’t fooling any of her fans that surrounded our seats. The second time was a few years ago on her solo (but by no means acoustic) tour. With just a guitar and some backing tracks, she rocked the Warner Theater.

At the DAR, we had to share our box with three other people. When we arrived, the first person was already there. She was very young and this was her second time to see Melissa. She had used her MEIN membership to get tickets to the Madison Square Gardens stand before she knew Melissa was playing DC. We had a fun time chatting and sharing celesbian gossip (Jodie Foster has been married for thirteen years, destroying another one of my dreams). Our final two boxmates were a twenty-something high-strung farmgirl that had just come out and her mother. Everyone complimented her mother on supporting her daughter so much. The mother’s attitude was that at least she didn’t have to worry about any unplanned pregnancies.

Melissa took the stage just five minutes after the nominal start time, surprising many of the attendees still lingering in the lobby, and proceeded to rock for nearly three hours. Melissa’s stage style is very Springsteenesque. She interacts with the audience a lot and likes to tell stories and ramble on. She introduced one song with a poignant story of a girl she had a crush on just after high school. The girl vanished one day because her parents had institutionalized her to keep her from spending too much time with the wrong crowd, meaning Melissa. Melissa also made multiple references to wasting ten years with the wrong person. We all knew whom she was talking about.

Good music is good music and Melissa Etheridge makes some of the best. In recent years she has had to carry a heavy burden as a role model and leader in the lesbian community and as a breast cancer survivor. She also plugs the Al Gore movie that she wrote a song for and (as a Kansas bred liberal) touts biodiesel fuels. Despite all this, she rocks hard and gives her fans what they want.

Melissa has a core group of loyal fans that will follow her everywhere. Judging by my boxmates and the enthusiasm of the audience, a Melissa Etheridge concert is part tent revival and part rite of passage. Melissa accepts that she will never be an arena-headlining superstar, which is fine with me since that lets me see her in great intimate venues. I don’t even mind sharing the men’s room with the women’s lounge refugees. And my wife doesn’t worry about any fellow groupies trying to pick me up. I’m just glad to be counted among Melissa’s great fans and friends.

I'm Mad At Melissa

Back in January, I made an open offer to several celebrities to help them with any future desires to reproduce. It seems that Melissa Etheridge, who is about to become a father for the third time, snubbed me for some anonymous stud (in the broadest sense of the word) that earned a few extra bucks for what he probably would have gotten around to doing eventually anyways. At least David Crosby didn’t get the call again.

Melissa’s second wife, Tammy Lynn Michaels, is pregnant with twins, neither of which will have any genetic material in common with me. I mention that Melissa is the father because in my mind the mother is the person that carries a growing mass of tissue for nine months until it eventually either gets pushed through the vagina like a cantaloupe through a toilet paper tube or sliced out with Ginzu-like precision leaving a smiley-faced scar as a momento. The mass of tissue will then start breathing, grow-up to be a teenager, and become completely ungrateful for all the effort put out for it.

The father’s job on the other is to have his hand squeezed in a vice-grip and ineffectually lead the breathing exercises between the screams for more Pitocin. Fathers must also endure years of reminders that they have no idea about the pain and difficulty of childbirth despite having the best view of the whole process of anybody in the room. Fathers also get reminded that they had the fun part of the job, even when it’s been sub-contracted out to a turkey baster.

These rough guidelines get hopelessly muddled by adoption, in vitro fertilization, surrogate birth mothers and the myriad other forms of forming a family. Still, Tammy has conceded that Melissa is the breadwinner, which in the traditional scheme of things makes her the daddy.

Second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience but few people fault Melissa for the break-up with Julie Cypher, the mother of her first two kids. There is clearly no statute of limitations on re-declaring your sexual orientation. Besides, rock stars are supposed to keep the arm candy young and trade down in age every now and then.

Melissa as a rocker cites Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen as her idols. I just worry a little that she may also be emulating Rod Stewart, if not musically, at least romantically. Julie was three years Melissa’s junior (and roughly my age). Tammy is a good thirteen years younger. It would be like me landing Liv Tyler (or Orlando Bloom, if I swung the other way). By comparison, Rod Stewart’s latest baby momma, who made him a proud daddy at the age of sixty, is seven years younger than his oldest daughter. It seems that even in the realm of rock and roll paternity, the ladies have some catching up to do.

Melissa will have a chance to make amends to me in person when I see her perform August 10th at Constitution Hall. I really doubt that she knows or cares how badly she has shattered my hopes and ambitions. Oh, well. At least, if the audience matches the demographics when I saw her at the Warner Theater a few years ago, I won’t have to stand in line for the restroom.

Celebrity Babby-Daddy Wannabe

Angelina Jolie is pregnant and it bodes well for the species that the two most attractive people on the planet are both fertile. Obviously AJ wanted see how bad childbirth hurts and Brad just happened to be hanging around to help out with his part. I wish them both lots of happiness and hope their kids grow up with happy, normal, well adjusted lives. That’ll happen.

Other than that, I don’t think the news affects me personally very much. What’s done is done. Sure I posted a long fawning blog entry declaring her the hottest woman ever, but I admire her more as a Platonic Ideal than a real person. If she doesn’t want to share genetic material with me, I can live with that. I have a long history of famous celebrities neglecting to consider me for fatherhood when they begin the family planning process.

AJ was not my first obsession with a celebrity. Women that are talented and smart are very sexy. I wanted to go to Yale just because Jodi Foster went there. I thought how cool it would be to just meet her casually as a fellow student. Then all of a sudden, trying to impress Jodi Foster became very uncool. Considering how respectful I was of her privacy, I was disappointed when Jodi decided to become a single mom and I was not even on the long list of potential dads.

I tried to redirect my affections to Brooke Shields and Princeton, but neither had quite the same cachet. I suspect they let her in just to stay in the running for the Ivy League school with the most Former Child Actors From R-Rated Movies as alumnae. And that lowered my opinion of both of them. And Brooke's career has never been quite as stellar as Jodi's. I think I made the right choice there.

Much later I developed an infatuation with Melissa Etheridge and her music. She was the opening act for the Eagles on their Hell Freezes Over Tour and my seats were right in the middle of a huge group that must have been charter members of the MEIN. That was when I realized I was not a good fit for Melissa Etheridge for a long term relationship, but it hurt when she chose David Crosby over me as the sperm donor for her first wife.

Now that she is with her second wife, Tammy, I want to make sure she keeps her options open. I don’t hold grudges. And for the record I would never wish any form of cancer on anyone ever, but if not for the Big C we never would of known how hot Melissa Etheridge is totally bald.

Overall, I try to keep my expectations realistic and understand that most gorgeous, intelligent, talented celebrities with loudly ticking baby-clocks don’t travel in the same circles as I do.

But I just can’t help thinking that now that Natalie Portman is out of Harvard, she might want to settle down and start a family. With or without me.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Etheridge, Jodie Foster, pregnant

Walter Monheit Lives!

In fondly remembering the late lamented Spy Magazine (I intend to do for the "late lamented" epithet what Spy did for "short-fingered vulgarian") for my Blogrolling post, I also remembered another feature called Blurb-o-Mat: Capsule Movie Reviews by Walter Monheit™, the Movie Publicist’s Friend. In it, a fictitious dandified monocled movie reviewer gave alarmingly gushy reviews to extremely bad movies. Two of the trademark bits were that everyone deserved an Oscar® (Walter's keen nose would "smell Oscar®" on about anything) and the horrendous adjectives that he would coin using "-iscious" and "-abulous" rather unsparingly. Every movie got 4 monocles and Walter Moheit became industry short-hand for the amazingly large swarm of fawning small market movie reviewers willing to plug anything for a few free movie tickets.

It seems there were turkeys that even these hip-pocket reviewers wouldn't praise, so Sony invented David Manning of the Ridgefield Press, a real newpaper, but a fake reviewer. An industrious ambulance chaser recently won a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the befuddled moviegoers that went to see The Animal starring Rob Schneider on David Manning's advice. Having made a quick thirteen bucks on the recent CD price fixing class-action settlement, I wanted my share.

Supposedly the form to claim you money is at the lawyers' website but all I could find was the class action notice. It seems that in order to collect, you have to swear you saw either “The Animal,” “Vertical Limit,” “A Knight's Tale,” or “The Patriot” in theaters. I've only seen one of these even on video, and I won't confess to which one. Something's just aren't worth the money.