Archive for October, 2009

Newer Entries »

Playboy Puts Marge Simpson onCover

October 9, 2009

And straight men continue to flee. Playboy continues its descent into complete irrelevance.   Putting naked Marge on the cover is sure to be a big newsstand seller&;not.  New CEO Scott Flanders (no, not that Flanders) says the idea is to attract readers in their 20s to a magazine where the average reader&;s age is 35.   While one should give him points for facing the Kevin Bacon problem, pulling a character from a tired 20-year old cartoon sitcom isn&;t going to tear 20-year olds from their iPhones and XBoxes. Playboy remains out of touch.  I have a modest proposal&;why not a &;spread&; with the &;real&; Marge Simpson, Julie Kavner&;you&;ll get a threesome with Patty and Selma as well? Update: here it is courtesy of TMZ.   A turn-on, no?  Playboy has become Mad Magazine.

Tags:Julie-Kavner, Kevin-Bacon, Marge-Simpson, Ned-Flanders, Playboy, The-Simpsons Posted in Playboy, Secrets of Men's Magazines, Sex and Society | 1 Comment &;

KCRW Broadcasts ObscenityAgain

October 8, 2009

At 9:17AM today, Thursday, October 8, 2009, during the &;Morning Becomes Eclectic&;, KCRW 89.9FM broadcast a rap song with the word &;Motherfucker&; proudly unbleeped.  Jason Bentley I believe identified it as Clint Eastwood by Guerrillaz The arrogance from a national public radio station holding a government license is unbelievable.  This is the second time within four months KCRW has broadcast an obscenity during daytime hours when children could be listening.  Artist Ed Moses said &;Bullshit&; on a &;Politics of Culture&; show, no doubt waking up the somnolent crowd. This time, I filed a complaint with the FCC.  I haven&;t subscribed in two years because of this, but it is time for longtime station manager Ruth Seymour to go.

Tags:FCC, FCC-complaint, NPR-arrogance, on-air-obscenity, Ruth-Seymour Posted in KCRW-FM, Obscenity, Radio | 1 Comment &;

2012: Sick withCGI

October 7, 2009

The Mayans are coming!  The Mayans are coming! Or at least the supposed Mayan prophesy about the end of the world in 2012.  As the website for the movie 2012 states, &;With the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, a large group of people must deal with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, typhoons and glaciers.&; Personally I&;m more concerned with the Iranians getting the H-bomb, but then I&;m not trying to sell a movie overstuffed with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and Hollywood hooey. Saw the 2012 trailer before  Zombieland last night, and was repelled by the overuse of CGI. 

Fake cars falling off the fake freeway.  Santa Monica&;s palisades crumbling into the sea.  Fake meteorites hitting the fake highway where John Cusack is driving his RV.   The arms falling off the Brazilian statue of Jesus.  Michelangelo&;s Last Supper, cracking.  St. Paul&;s Basilica, topping over. Fake floods toppling a fake monastery.  Planes flying over a digitally crumbling city. Cusack, usually a great actor, trying to scream on the green screen.

 &;Find out the truth.  Search 2012.&; The truth is that 2012 may make Armageddon look like a classic.  CGI is becoming so horribly overused in action movies that only the exceptions stand out.   District 9 looks so impressively/depressingly &;real&; that the audience is happy to accept people in &;prawn&; suits.  And Gladiator  won the 2001 Visual Effects Oscar, even though it had only 90 special effects shots, as opposed to the 350 in the favored Perfect Storm with its monstrous tidal waves. Unfortunately, filmmakers have not learned from Ridley Scott&;s judicious use of CGI in Gladiator, which he used to enhance the Colisseum and even bring Alan Bates (Proximo), who died during filming, back to life. When will filmmakers learn that with CGI, less is more?

John Cusack in 2012

Tags:2012-The-Movie, John-Cusack, overuse-of-CGI, Ridley-Scott Posted in Hollywood, Hollywood Follies, Hollywood-turkeys, Uncategorized | 1 Comment &;

Hypocrisy Detector Set toHigh

October 2, 2009

Contrary to popular belief, most journalists do not have an agenda, unless you consider skepticism of what they&;re told an agenda.  Many, however, like myself, have a real aversion to hypocrisy.  Obviously, politicians who legislate public morality while&;ahem&;falling short personally are high on this list, like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, and former Senator Larry &;Wide Stance&; Craig. But we are equal opportunity scourges of hypocrisy.  Some examples I find distasteful: Non-profit journalism groups with hidden agendas or built in conflicts of interests, like ProPublica, which can never really independently investigate one of the biggest stories of our time, the financial collapse of 2008, because its founders made their money in option-ARM mortgages &;Progressive&; publishers who don&;t pay contributors  (although since you handed me my LA Press Club Award, I do have a soft spot for you, Arianna Huffington) Right wing pundits who blast Obama for huge deficits and government takeovers of business&;and ignore GW Bush&;s drunken spending Left wing pundits and Hollywood types who call for the release of Roman Polanski so he won&;t miss his Swiss lifetime achievement award&;without doing his time for the sex charge against a child he pleaded guilty to. Unfortunately, there are many more examples of &;do as I say, not as I do.&;  This is just a taste.

Tags:death-of-journalism, hypocrisy, shrinking-mainstream-media Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment &;

ProPublica: The Scandal Journalists Won&;tTouch

October 1, 2009

At a recent CORO seminar, journalist Joe Mathews (author of a definitive Arnold Schwarzenegger political biography)  noted that though he now works for the New America Foundation, he didn&;t trust non-profit journalism sponsored by foundations&;&;They have more of an agenda than advertising supported newspapers ever did.&; I pounced on his point and asked him about one of my pet peeves: ProPublica.  ProPublica is one of those nonprofits.  It funds investigative journalism to the tune of many millions of dollars&;but where the money comes from is always worth knowing. Maybe the newspaper &;ad goons&; the LA Times James Rainey remembers weren&;t so bad after all. ProPublica was founded by Herb and Marion Sandler, a husband and wife team Time Magazine listed in their exclusive round-up, &;25 people to Blame for the Financial Crisis&; due to their &;pioneering&; use of option ARM loans at World Savings.  They sold World Savings to Wachovia for $2.3 billion dollars, walked away and watched as Wachovia imploded from the weight of all the bad loans.

Will the journalists of ProPublica rake this very prominient muck?  No, and certainly not when Paul Steiger, ex editor of the Wall Street Journal,  made $570,000 in 2008 at ProPublica.   Worse, with the desperate straits of journalism, other journalists (with the exception of Slate&;s Jack Shafer) seem very unwilling to question what they see as a liferaft to the drowning. I wrote a letter to the editor at the LA Times after this glowing pro ProPublica story and another to Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) which devoted four (four!) articles in a recent issue about the exciting future of non-profit journalism.   Neither was published; perhaps CJR was miffed when I told them to go sell some ads (they had a page and a half paid in the issue I looked at.)  As for the LA Times, they use ProPublica stories, (provided free to participating publishers) so apparently they&;ll brook no criticism. Meanwhile, these high-minded philanthropists follow the lead of the dynamic Ariana Huffington, a pioneer of progressive unpaid journalism.  A non-profit startup will use 120 unpaid Berkeley journalism students as &;slave labor&; to cover the area. I could use some (paid) work but I&;ve probably blown my chance at a ProPublica job.  So here&;s the letter I wrote to the LA Times:

To the Editors:   As a long-time journalist struggling with the economy and the &;secular decline&; of print (read &;paying&;) media, I&;m glad nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica exist.  However, this &;new phenomenon of philanthropically supported newsrooms&; bares some uncomfortable similarities to the often self-censoring journalism practiced by what Stephen Engelberg calls &;the big corporations.&;   The &;California philanthropists&; he works for, Herb and Marion Sandler, were founders of World Savings.  They were named to Time Magazine&;s exclusive list, &;25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis&; in 2008, due to what Time calls their &;misleading&; promotion of the option arm loan, which led to the implosion of Wachovia after the Sandlers pocketed $2.3 billion in the sale of their bank. If ProPublica practices investigative journalism to &;hold powerful people accountable&;, Engelberg doesn&;t have far to look for his next story.   Michael Goldstein

Tags:cowardly-journalists, death-of-journalism Posted in Journalism, ProPublica | 1 Comment &;

Newer Entries »