Andy, where have you been? If you’re a 9-year-old, the marketing place is your first voting booth. It’s much sexier than those stalls. And all those tricky consumer options. At that age, I’d rather be voting for SoulDecision to stay on TRL than for state comptroller. I do find it strange that a 9-year-old was perplexed by how to characterize her generation. A puzzle like that sounds an awful lot like the verbal equivalent of how JonBenet Ramsey was all dolled up. Icky, but I’m intrigued.
Ickier is that headline in today’s New York Times “Art and Leisure” piece about that illegal Gone With the Wind parody. After the story goes out of its way to make clear that its subject, Alice Randall, hated the novel and movie’s “birthin’ babies” line, some smart-ass on the copy desk used it in the hed. The term got on her nerves, the piece says. Well the Times gets on mine sometimes. It’s such absurd, sardonic characterization of the piece that I’m laughing as I type this. But way to kick Ms. Randall in the balls. They should hand her some of that “race series” Pulitzer dough. Such a bitch-slap. Worse is that it’s just another hassle for David Kirkpatrick. I don’t know this guy. But I’m starting to feel for him–sorta. First that nightmare with Dave Eggers, which was about as crafty, creepy, and nail-biting as any airport thriller; then what seemed be a temporary demotion in “Business” picking up the journalist lint; now a bum headline. Maybe it’s karma. Maybe I should abandon the whole thing before I get hexed, too.
On to Michiko Kakutani’s dry assessment of the return of the ‘80s. The collage at the top of the piece way oversold it. I’m not sure which came first, the text or the art. It read like she was trying to keep up with all the images, like they were falling from the rafters and she was running around trying to catch them with her keyboard. It reads like a series of idea drive-bys and semi-pithy mentions, the kind of which she excoriates authors for deploying in her five-star book reviews. Newspaper cultural coverage bugs when it tries to jam a magazine piece in a daily format. It’s the difference, for me, between putting Shaq in a compact and putting him in a limo. In the process, her point pulled a muscle. I guess her ‘80s are different from mine. All the signs are open all night to interpretation, but she failed to persuade me that Millionaire, Survivor, and The Sopranos signify the ‘80s’ return–plus where’s this new brat pack she mentions? Again, I’ll get out before a hex befalls me.
Anyway, don’t tell Wesley Snipes, but Roger Moore thinks it’s time for a black Bond, and he nominates Cuba Gooding to sip the martinis. I think he’s crazy–about Gooding, not a black 007–but check it out. Can we be frivolous on our last day? Please?
I have to deal with the not-apocalyptically-bad-just-regular-old-(if-not-fascinatingly)-OK Town and Country. Later.
Wesley
