“The Onion” somehow manages in its satire to describe our country in more truthful terms than so called “legitimate” media does.
You want to laugh until you start to cry.
The Onion Hits The Mark Again
Category: Media
Triumph of the Vulgarians.
I know it’s old news, but the “war” between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell has elicited some witty commentary from James Wolcott.
After O’Donnell questioned Trump’s moral credentials in pardoning a drunk Miss USA in order to further publicize his own “generous” and “forgiving” character, Trump went on a bullying orgy of insult against O’Donnell. She was “a slob” and “an animal” with “no talent” who, due to her lesbianism, “was not fit to judge”.
But it is Trump who shows his weakness. No man of character or strength would expend hours to insult a woman who did nothing more than criticize his public decision to allow an obviously unfit pageant winner to keep her title. Trump is a king vulgarian through and through from his grotesque, cheap, gaudy and pimpy glass towers to his un-modelike marriages. He tried to gloss over his hatred of O’Donnell by throwing in some anti-Bush sentiments such as “lying about Iraq” and “Rosie lied”.
But personal attacks are not political critiques.
Trump may temporarily rule the airwaves, but his architectural legacy is one of defacement. He bought his way into New York society by erecting the cheapest and most expensive whore houses and shouting their virtues into the megaphone. His egotisical skin, like his building facades, is paper thin and easily blown off.
Studio 60: Cancellation Coming Soon.
According to Fock’s News, the cancellation of NBC’s non-hit dramedy “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is coming shortly.
The show, created by the self-esteemable Aaron Sorkin, is a drama about the tragedy of creating a comedy sketch program, much like “Saturday Night Live”. In the episodes I’ve watched, the writing is over the top pretentious and moralistic, such as last week’s segment about finding a “real” black comedian who doesn’t think like a black man is supposed to think according to white stereotypes. Much of the world view and dramatizations of Christian-style characters seems formulated by Jasons, Jennifers and Jareds, those Ivy League graduates from Scarsdale, Glencoe, IL and Great Neck, NY who think Topeka is the capital of Iowa.
Filmed in constant motion, in tight hallways,up the stairs and into jammed control rooms, the claustrophobia and rat-tat-tat dialogue was suspensefully dull. Actor Matthew Perry, however, distinguished himself in his earnestness and believability.
One of the the themes of this show has been the low quality of network TV at fictional NBS. Now that NBC is expected to cancel “Studio 60” look for more reality junk and drunken bimbos who race to eat worms out of glass jars.
Desperate Entourage at Studio 60.
So again I forced myself to stay up until 10pm and watched another episode of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, America’s most uptight program. There is just so much tension and angst, mostly trivial, built up to no dramatic high stakes.
It’s not a funny show. It’s not a dramatic one. It is mostly hard to understand. There was some bit last night between Matt Perry and a writer, with the two arguing about something, I think it was about women and August Strindberg—and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I love a show that is so smart that the audience is left in the dark.
There are certain tics about this show that are just plain irritating:
• Matthew Perry falling over. He accidentally smashed a plate glass window (incidentally, it was not safety glass) with a baseball bat. He also fell backward on top of a suit of armor. Pathetic.
• The Christian comedienne. She has greasy hair and a hound-dog face. She is not funny or dramatic, and her relationship with Perry has no chemical attraction.
• Amanda Peet. She is just unflappable and perfect and always knows the right thing to say. How come nobody else on the show is this unflawed?
• The pace of the show. It’s not slow. It speeds by, turns corners , goes through hallways, upstairs, downstairs, into cars, up elevators, and into cramped offices and grabs a coffee, cigarette and sandwich while we breathlessly try to catch up.
• There is no sunshine. This show is entirely indoors and at night, and it feels claustrophobic. One of the characteristics of 1940’s film noir, was that there was always a morning after the dark night. This show is all dark and gloomy and lit with phony golden stage light.
• The “Broadcast News” frantic hysteria: GET THIS INTO THE CONTROL ROOM… before all hell breaks loose!!! and we got 90 seconds to fill… lunacy. Even if this is the way it is in TV, what is going to happen to the fate of the world if they cannot fill air time? It just doesn’t matter.
I don’t know why I’m going to compare this show to “Desperate Housewives” but I will. DH is high camp, entirely ridiculous, badly written, amateurishly performed and is wonderful to watch. Marc Cherry, the creator, gives us sex, comedy, suspense, drama, laughter and titillation. S6OTSS has no comedy, is not dramatic and is a crushing bore to sit through.
I don’t know why I’m going to compare this show to HBO’s “Entourage” but I will. E makes me feel like I’m hanging out with real Hollywood insiders whose lives are a roller coaster of elation and triumph, frustration and despair with entirely believable characters. I don’t feel like I’m watching: a-dramatization-of a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-top-levels-of-Hollywood-success. S6OTSS always has an artifice and slickness about it that is stagy and off-putting.
Finally, I really, really hate “Saturday Night Live” and anything else that uses that sorry excuse of a late night comedy show as a muse.
Will the Real Katie Couric Please Come Back?
The debut of Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News was not encouraging.
The problem is not Couric. She can read the news. She knows how to apply herself. The problem is the idea that a “personality” is needed to revitalize the news, which itself is dying because its content is no longer news-worthy.
For many years, network news has corrupted itself by devoting less and less time to world events. The stories revolve around America, and American health problems. There is almost no in-depth reporting about the world, such as one sees on BBC or hears on NPR.
Even tonight’s debut of Couric had to pander to celebrity with its teaser of the Vanity Fair cover showing Cruise’s new kid. Do these network executives ever understand that people are tuning out because of the very vapidness of pandering to the entertainment mafia?
It was almost sad, not triumphal, to see the charming, funny, sexy, witty Ms. Couric have to repress all of her humanness to deliver the “serious” news. We have watched her for almost 20 years on “Today” and learned to laugh and cry with her. Now we see her lobotomized and tranquillized into a news-clone and story-pod, in the blank faced style of the raccoon-eyed, rep-tied Brian Williams.
She will not last, I predict, because this is not the right place for her. She should go back to “Today” which will welcome her back with open arms as it too slides in the ratings.
Arianna Roderick?
Kevin Roderick, editor and publisher of LA Observed, the preeminent portal of LA politics, has announced that he is hiring writers who will contribute to his blog.
“Starting now, LA Observed is a group effort. I invited about a dozen writers, journalists and observers of Los Angeles whose eye and voice I respect to think about posting here. Almost all of them jumped at the offer, to my amazement. More are on the way. For the three years that I have blabbered here solo I’ve always benefited from a richly informed and interesting retinue of email corresponders, collaborators and eggers-on. Now the collaboration comes out of the closet, so to speak.”
Some of the chosen (from a dozen names) include:
• Bob Baker : he runs the writing website newsthinking.com. He was a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years before leaving in 2004 to become a novelist and songwriter.
• Cari Beauchamp: she is the author of “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.” She also edited and annotated “Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by the Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and co-wrote “Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival.”
• David Davis the author of “Play by Play: Los Angeles Sports Photography 1889-1989” (Angel City Press). He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles Magazine and a contributing editor for the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s SportLetter. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Business Journal and other publications. He lives in Highland Park.
Unchosen are such bloggers as “Here in Van Nuys”, “The LA City Nerd” and Cathy Seipp. Writers’ tears flow down the canyons today. Perhaps this will help the firefighters.
Here in Van Nuys 
You must be logged in to post a comment.