Is it possible that there is a drop of honor in Pig Palin's resignation? Like, maybe she's realized what a national disgrace she is and has determined she'd be doing the world and herself a favor by stepping completely out of public service and fully into her new, more appropriate--not to mention more lucrative--role as a straight-up 'winger celebrity? Cuz I mean if she does I might be able to enjoy her again. She's always been such a weird combination of authentic Pop (lunatic!) Superstar and Shameful Political Joke.
Eh, then again...Pig Palin and honor in the same sentence? JMZZ probably has better guesses, but she's probably resigning in advance of (another!) major scandal breaking OR to clear the way for a presidential run. Or something even more frightening.
Hell yeah.
The "Ellen" producers totally busted out the Luscious Jackson "Ladyfingers" song cue to introduce longassfingernails-lady Lee Redmond to the show! Luscious Jackson! Remember, they were like positioned to be, basically, the Beastie Girls. But they were always a little too smoove-sounding to assume that mantle, and anyway their crossover potential was always limited by the fact that in general Beastie Boys fans probably weren't inclined to taking a ladyband seriously, even if the ladyband was pretty good.
And Luscious Jackson was pretty good, I had a few EPs. Badly dated, but wouldn't you say the same of the Beastie Boys were their music to arrive at your ears now, unburnished by familiarity or success? When you think about it, in hindsight: Beastie Boys, kinda LOL. And uh huh, yeah yeah yeah, I'm familiar with Paul's Boutique.
I wonder if even fingers this crazylong would fit as symbols of Thorstein Veblen's concept of conspicuous leisure--I recall a passage about long fingernails being conspicuous displays of a female/wife's economic inutility, and therefore deliberate symbols of economic surfeit and waste--or if after a certain length of keratin was achieved these fingernails ceased being symbols of anything but Serious Yuck.
Anyway, I think Ellen does a superlative job in this clip of playing what-a-freak! with this woman for her audience's amusement without ever being actually mean to the lady. Which I suppose is Ellen Degeneres' entire job, but still.
(Via D'arcy.)
See how rusty I am? That headline doesn't even make sense.
Feyfriends' grand return--which I suspect won't even really be so grand, though the work Bmad's done on the site thus far is pretty spiffy! Everybody clap!--is still a work-in-progress, but even without any compelling information or insights to share my desire for a daily audience has prematurely led me back here for the first time in months.
But what to tell you? Should I talk about my personal life and everything that's happened to me in the time since I last blo**ed? I would, but there's NOTHING TO TELL! My body and brain went into cryogenic hibernation after my last bl*g post and only came out of deep freeze the moment Movable Type booted up and I began composing this boring, subjectless thing. What to you probably felt like an excruciatingly Fey-less eternity felt to me like the merest, pleasantest blink of an eye. Really, YOU should be blogging to ME about what's been happening in the world!
WHOA! IRAN! That's awesome! Oh, except it's not. But...HOPE!
OMG Michael Jackson! Well, that's a relief, isn't it? Are people saying it's a relief? As I see it, he'd taken that body as far as it would go, that fragile container filled with more torments and miseries than even a healthy body could bear. (Quick Poll: Do I sound more like Larry King or Liz Taylor right now?)
Can you imagine what it felt like to inhabit his skin? What a phantasmagorical Disney World Haunted House ride his consciousness must've been? BOO! Eek!
Oh, and some other people died too.
That brings us pretty much up to date, doesn't it?
Boo/Yay! But mostly boo. The bad news is that I was trying to tweak FeyFriends' design and I erased the entire stylesheet with no backup. Which is why it looks totally fucked up like this. I hate myself! The good news is that FeyFriends is planning a triumphant return. (When I rewrite the entire style sheet..)
What better way to end a nearly month-long Fey hiatus than by
resurrecting one of our least popular features...Bobo's movie reviews!
Even I don't read these things, and I'm the one who writes them! And
seriously, Star Trek? Half the audience I saw it with at the Arclight was totes homo, but an LA movie theater makes for a misleading sample set, as LA is where all gay sci-fi/horror/fantasy nerds go to die (alone)...I'm still pretty sure I'm getting something wrong about our audience by bothering to write a review of this movie. But um, at least one of the actors in the movie is a well-known geigh! And, um, some of the guys--especially Karl Urban as McCoy--are really cute! And, um, Star Trek slash!
Anyways, having just seen and really enjoyed Star Trek I have one of those movie critic thesis statements to unload on you: Star Trek is the first truly post-Obama Summer movie.* I know rebooting the franchise at this moment was 100% a commercial decision and could just as easily--and accurately--be used as exhibit "Z" in some amateur insider cocktail party convo about Hollywood being "out of ideas," but through some happy accident of the zeitgeist it just feels really right to watch a big budget epic where all the heroes are smart, skinny and unapologetically technocratic. The movie's first act, when we follow the--well trained and educated and coed and multiethnic!--Starfleet crew being assembled for the first time, is just like the first few weeks of the Obama Administration when he put his team together. It's both refreshingly throwbacky--to a time before pop and political culture had turned deriding expertise into our national pastime; which is to say, to the time of the original Star Trek--and pleasantly of the moment to have these kinds of heroes onscreen.
These guys care about the rule of law! They discuss the importance of preserving (alien) cultures and languages! Their stated mission is "humanitarian" and "peacekeeping," not warmaking! They pay unflinching obeisance to (Starfleet) regulations! They refer to the big bad Nero as a "war criminal," not a terrorist! And they give their enemies a meaningful shot at surrender before blasting their ships into space dust!
And above all else...they're so fucking skinny! The only people in the film who look like they weigh more than 150 pounds are the villainous Romulans. All of our heroes--even Chris Pine's Kirk, who by contemporary event movie logic should be five inches taller and carry an additional 50 pds of muscle mass packed on specifically for this part, so that Men's Fitness could do a profile on his pre-shooting training regimen to coincide with the release of the film--are brainy bantamweights...
Just like Obama himself!
(I'm right about this.)
*This is the kind of dumb-but-impossible-to-argue-with blast of rhetorical bombast Armond White pulls out of his butt(s) every week, except his statements are at least charmingly perverse and nonsensical. Like if he were writing this review, he would say something like "Quinto and Pine's human-Vulcan buddy movie dynamic attain new heights of racist risibility not seen since 'The Jazz Singer.'"
Just ignore this!
Instead of posting this anti-gay ad already posted everywhere else online, I thought I'd take up Videogum's challenge:
Update: Unfortunately, YouTube (via "copyright claim by NOM") took the video away, but you can still watch it after the jump.
There's nothing funny about this new ad called "Gathering Storm," in which actors from all walks of life pretend to be people from all walks of life who claim their lives are affected by gay marriage and call for a "rainbow coalition" (oh no you DID NOT) against it. Oh, except that it's stupid, and the organization behind it is called "NOM: National Organization for Marriage." And also someone should set this ad to "It's Raining Men."Ask and ye shall receive:
Update: Unfortunately, YouTube (via "copyright claim by NOM") took the video away, but you can still watch it after the jump.
Continue reading The Gathering Storm (Raining Men Remix).
As part of a recent Fey Friends fact-finding mission to the United Kingdom, *we* discovered that, despite the nation's profound state of mourning over the tragic, untimely loss of its greatest treasure -- JADE GOODY -- many of the Queen's subjects took solace in this tune by the Teenagers. It may be a little old, but it's still totally OFFENSIVE.
I spent the better part of an hour trying to decide between calling the trampy, tattoo-loving tweens in this commercial "nymphets" or "whores."
Thanks to Darcy for the tip!
This weekend, Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine, wrote about the release of its Power 50 list — also known as the outing issue — One reason he gives for the magazine's policy is that the people on the list are "member[s] of a glass closet" who have "never publicly acknowledged [their] sexuality." While this semantically dubious label might offer him enough cover, under an appeal to a reader's sophistication (i.e., only clueless rubes still don't know that ______ is heterosexual), it doesn't really answer why Hicklin thinks it's up to him to take "the final step" to come out for those who he admits "are not willing to."
Two additional glass closet cases join the list, a distinction they may not appreciate. One has earned opprobrium from gays for his Republican-supporting positions, while the other is a married media mogul.*Hicklin goes on to suggest that being in the closet isn't really a personal choice or decision, but rather an anachronistic symptom of a collective, and as yet unfulfilled, struggle for civil rights (e.g., the legalization of gay marriage) — gay equality.
The first president to acknowledge gays and lesbians in his inaugural speech is now busy undoing years of Bush's political mischief. Perhaps my days of outing people will soon be over.But who else will coyly argue that gimmicky stunt covers that force people out of the closet by acknowledging that it is "so bullying and judgmental" without actually bothering to deny that it isn't?
*Answers: Matt Drudge and Barry Diller, respectively.
