Fey again.
I have had a little blowback from my recent post on Tina Fey, so I watched 30 Rock earlier this evening. Eh. But what a melon on that Alec Baldwin. What’s NBC’s steroids policy?
Friday, October 31, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Thank you for stroking.
At this rate I’m going to have to open a thread on the Buckley family. Let’s see how it goes. News has spread everywhere today that Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F., recently endorsed Barack Obama for president. In short order–so furiously did the reactionaries react–Buckley felt obliged to resign from National Review, the magazine his father founded half a century ago. He notes that his offer to resign was accepted “rather briskly” by National Review editor Rich Lowry. Go ahead: give Buckley his due for standing athwart the snarling posses of know-nothingism; just remember that it’s not going to make Thank You For Smoking any better. Let’s not lose our heads.
(Avoid the film as well.) Here’s Buckley’s endorsement, and here’s a later post by him on the ensuing kerfuffle, though since I’ve just told you everything you need to know, read them only if you’re a connoisseur of underbaked drollery. Or tepid foppishness. Here, meanwhile, is Lowry’s point of view. It is unremarkable–so skip it and instead enjoy his now infamous comments about Sarah Palin’s performance in the vice-presidential debate (italics are all mine, Jack!):
(Avoid the film as well.) Here’s Buckley’s endorsement, and here’s a later post by him on the ensuing kerfuffle, though since I’ve just told you everything you need to know, read them only if you’re a connoisseur of underbaked drollery. Or tepid foppishness. Here, meanwhile, is Lowry’s point of view. It is unremarkable–so skip it and instead enjoy his now infamous comments about Sarah Palin’s performance in the vice-presidential debate (italics are all mine, Jack!):
I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.
Well it certainly seems, on a lonely night in October, that Rich Lowry had it, too–in the hand not holding the remote. And probably has had it many times since. Some things can be learned.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Contra Fey.
Tina Fey, already overrated (30 Rock? Come on.), has metastasized into a general menace thanks to her impression of Sarah Palin on a few recent episodes of Saturday Night Live. I am counting this among the misdemeanors of the Palin candidacy. We are assured that Fey’s turns as Palin are “must-see.” They are “will-see” at any rate, because if you miss them on SNL and can fight back the urge to summon them from YouTube, as I have managed to do, you will–you will–catch repeats of them on any number of network or cable news shows. Or, if your luck is just this bad, people you know will act them out for you. I should say that I don’t actively dislike Tina Fey. (I’ve been known to use the phrase general menace with real affection.) I admit that I’ve laughed at some of her junk. (Never out loud. Inly.) As a comedian she’s moderately clever–and just so painstakingly conventional. Her satire is a carousel of easy potshots. And Sarah Palin, whose potshotworthiness can be seen from space, has made Tina Fey the luckiest person in America–surely the only person in the land, save possibly Palin herself (only time will tell), who is benefiting from this baggy-pants farce of a candidacy. And as to that universally praised impression: Consider how far Fey’s physical resemblance to Palin carries her. Consider how easy it is to do Palin’s accent. (Go ahead–try saying “hawkey mawm” yourself; chirp up a ”you betcha”; plane the g off all your –ing words. Okay? Now try Christopher Walken. Not so easy now–is it, Jack!) And consider how little embellishment Palin’s words require for presentation as satire. I mean, just today–not 72 hours after she was found to have abused her authority as governor in the Alaska Troopergate deal–Palin comes out and declares that, once elected, she and McCain will end–wait for it–”abuses of power.” (Hit the link in Christopher Orr’s TNR post.) Enough already with Tina Fey. No rooster ever owed more to the sunrise.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
William F. Ugly.
Having only recently offered qualified praise of the late William F. Buckley, Jr.–and for his civility at that–you can imagine my dismay at the glimpse we all got last week into his last will and testament, in which Buckley displays an antique cruelty of a sort you don’t expect to find these days outside of a novel by Dickens or Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. One of Buckley’s grandchildren happens to be a child fathered out of wedlock by Buckley’s son, the supremely unnecessary satirist Christopher, author of Thank You For Smoking, The White House Mess, Florence of Arabia, and Supreme Courtship–derivative ephemera that you should not even consider reading since you, too (like the elder Buckley), will one day be dead. Of this child, a seven-year-old named Jonathan–who apparently suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder–William Buckley’s will makes this sole mention:
I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes … shall be deemed to have predeceased me.
Or: “He’s dead to me,” as Tony Soprano might have said–though you can at least imagine Tony unbelting some cash. Meanwhile the child’s mother is after Christopher for an increase in the $3,000-a-month child support she’s been getting–an amount that seems meager even without considering the inheritance that will soon swell the younger Buckley’s bank account by tens of millions. Because, you know, there’s still all that sweet, sweet Thank You For Smoking cash to take into account. The article consults lawyers who say something about Buckley’s likely intention in specifically excluding Jonathan from the will (i.e., keeping him, or anyone on his behalf, from ever making any future claim on WFB’s estate), but it’s not the vagaries of probate law that I’m interested in. What detains me is the language of that sentence, the ugly relish that curls out of those words like a bad smell. It’s as though, poised on the existential verge that is the testament writer’s true abode, Buckley is permitting himself the fantasy of snuffing out the life of this entirely innocent blood descendant, whom he considers as nothing but a stain on the family crest, perhaps in compensation for the discreet abortion that his darkest self believes should have occurred. But of course I speculate in the most irresponsible manner.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
R.I.P.
Paul Newman in a screen test with James Dean:
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Posted speeds, please.
It’s Labor Day weekend, and you will be out there–out there where I am, except that you’ll be out there with your mayonnaises and your gluten breads and your brewskies and boxes of vinegary wine. And your clattering, belching motorcars. You are in savage need of the following highway-safety public-service announcement.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
You tell me.
It’s with no intention to mock Caitlin Upton (Miss Teen South Carolina) that I embed the video of her now famously incoherent response to a pageant judge’s question. Far from it; I mostly feel bad for her, because it’s not her fault–or not primarily her fault–if this is the best she can do. All we can conclude for sure on the evidence of her immaculately unstocked mind and her jaw-dropping ineptitude with language is that the adults in her life have failed her criminally. Also, you can’t decently relish the spectacle of an 18-year-old kid becoming an object of worldwide ridicule over a thing like this, and a notably gleeful and slavering ridicule at that. I’m left wondering how representative of American teenagers Upton is, and thus how panicked I should be about the future of the Republic. My only regular exposure to teenagers these days comes courtesy of my 15-year-old daughter, who–it goes without saying–is nothing at all like Ms. Upton. In fact she’s almost certainly wittier, better-informed, and more articulate than–well, than you are. She’s seen the video on YouTube and tells me that Upton is fairly typical: that most of her peers are little better when required to stand and deliver in the classroom. And another lady of my acquaintance, not so long ago a high-school English teacher, agrees, alleging further that there is even the kernel of a decent idea somewhere in the rubble. (Just don’t ask me what it is.) I, meanwhile, cling to the scrap of a possibility that my daughter, who has a taste for hyperbole, is exaggerating some, and that in Ms. Upton–on whom be peace, and even if she is symptomatic of larger social, cultural, and educational calamities–we have something special. I would be pleased to have your thoughts. In the meantime, here’s Caitlin:
And here she is on the Today show a day or so later, “explaining”:
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Rue Paula.
I can sense it already, a malignancy stirring deep within the coils of this E! Online article: The unprincipled and the inglorious are joining with the unglamorous and the ill-proportioned–urged onward, all of them, by the talentless and the unsmiling–to read the sickest of calumnies into the news of Paula Abdul’s mishap with a household Chihuahua that resulted (for Ms. Abdul) in a broken nose and numerous other injuries (the canine was unhurt). Where does this come from? Surely the post of adjudicator of musical competence for a top-hole American television competition could be won only by persons of exemplary probity, unyielding conviction, and the finest discrimination. And if there is anything in this charming and gifted lady’s past, or in her character, that licenses these disgusting speculations, and could justifiably cause any reasoning mind to suspect that the incident did not occur exactly as Ms. Abdul, no doubt on her word of honor, said it did, then I would goddamn sure like to know what the fuck it is.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
CNN buries the lede.
In a story today at CNN.com about Britney Spears’s recent difficulties (and peace be upon her), a friend of Kevin Federline reminds us what’s really at stake here. The story loiters through 11 or 12 paragraphs about impulsive head-shaving and tattooing and rehab-facility pop-ins before dropping this bomb:
“He [Federline] has put his career on hold right now to focus on his kids and his family–to try and get Britney better,” the pal said.
A news story is supposed to be an inverted pyramid, dudes.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Volume 8: ‘Harry Potter and the Airing of Rumple Foreskin.’
In February the actor Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) will tread the boards in the altogether in a West End production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus.
