I’m Not a Cat Lady

Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew: Tales From the Crypt

Not necessarily on purpose, I caught up with the Season 3 premiere of VH1's Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew today and I am still reeling from the retina-scorching plastic-surgery-gone-way-past-wrong mess that is Heidi Fleiss, and the so-haggard-it-hurts-to-look-to-look-at-her Mackenzie Phillips.

Just look at these mugs. And trust me, folks, this is nothing compared to seeing them on a big screen in glorious, unforgiving HD.

 

Heidi reminds us more than once that she's 43, because Lord knows we'd never guess from the butchered state of that puss. Poor Mackenzie has never been a looker, but somebody please get that girl a tub of Max Factor Pancake and a sponge. There's no need for a costly, clever anti-drug campaign ever again: Just slap these ladies' faces on a lifesize poster and the job's done.

Yes, this season's bunch is definitely the ropiest yet. There's a true trilogy of terror in scary monster Dennis Rodman, who seems to think he's there because of a court order; super-creep Tom Sizemore, who—hey! casting coup!—was convicted of assaulting ex-lover Fleiss in 2003, and a freshly Saran-wrapped Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, who shows up with a weeping abscess caused by shooting up but still seems rather robust for a drug addict, if you ask me.

 

Rounding off this particularly motley crew we've got the requisite bosomy Playboy model, a meatball from The Real World, some country singer or other and a contestant from America's Next Top Model who's quite pretty but, c'mon, had about as much chance making it as a model as Heidi Fleiss has of passing for 43. 

This show is frequently revolting and vaguely obscene. There's no celebrity trainwreck Dr. Drew isn't willing to exploit, even after his "good friend" DJ AM turned back to drugs and killed himself after hosting his own rehab series last year. And yet… Yeah. I'm gonna have to watch.

 

... and a Happy New Year! I'll be back in January 2010—see you then!

Today's Moment in Déjà Vu

Is it just me, or is there something kinda familiar about Where the Wild Things Are?

Sonia Sotomayor is a Lahd-TIIIIIIIIna!

Go ahead a call me petty, but this has been catching my ear a lot lately. As I've been listening to news updates on NPR over the last couple of days, Sonia Sotomayor's nomination as associate justice of the Supreme Court has been continually mentioned. She is, as we all know by now, the first Latina to ever win the post. And listening to the announcements, I am once again struck by the way newsreaders pronounce the word Latina. Doesn't matter if they're of actual Latin-American heritage themselves or direct descendants of the Mayflower pilgrims—they all seem to go out of their way to infuse the word with every ounce of Latin flair they can muster, pronouncing it: Lahd-dtiiiiiiinah!

It's one thing to honor a person's preferred pronunciation of their family name—in this case, Soto-mai-yohr—but is it necessary to put on such a performance when merely stating an ethnonym? Take Lakshmi Singh. Have you ever heard her introducing her weekly show? "From National Public Radio, it's Lahd-dtiiiiiiino USA!" Up to "it's," she sounds like any standard American-accented NPR-style newsreader. And then, just like that, she's Charo. She should go the whole hog and say "Lahd-dtiiiiiiino Oo-ess-ah!"

Okay, so her mother is Puerto Rican. (And with a name like Lakshmi Singh, who knew?) But I've heard newsreaders and announcers who don't have a drop of Hispanic blood in their veins make a meal out of Latino and Latina. Or the names of Latinos and Latinas. Like Gasia Mickaelian, on KTVU Channel 2. In the promo for her News at 5, the voiceover guy practically bursts an artery when he says her name: "Gaaaaaa-theeya Meee-kaiii-YAAAAYAAY-yian!" Why is that?

I don't hear people do this for names of people in other ethnic groups. Nobody suddenly lapses into Chinese tonal inflections when reporting about Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Perhaps it's in deference to the fact that the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing sector in the country right now. Who knows: One of these days Spanish will be the majority language, so it's probably a good idea to start brushing up. Si?

Sex and the City Pipe-Lady Style

All prescription drug commercials are pretty vile, but I saw one recently that really made me stop in my tracks and go, Huh? It's that ad for the bladder-control drug Vesicare, starring three women made out of shiny brass pipes telling us all about their leaky-bladder issues.

I can only guess that some advertising whiz came up with the leaky-bladder-as-faulty-plumbing concept. Which is fine. But who made the leap to animated characters composed entirely of pipes? And why do these pipe-ladies have no spigots? How come they have a normal-looking furry little dog when the pipe men have a dog made out of brass cans? Also, I'm really not getting the whole Sex and the City vibe here. Are stick-figured women who parade around in high heels while laden with shopping bags really the appropriate demo for this particular drug?

The other leaky-bladder commercial, for Enablex, which features a bunch of chubby, Disneyesque water balloons doing the conga at their Class of '68 high school reunion, suggests that advertisers think cartoon renderings are the only way illustrate this pesky and potentially embarrassing affliction. Which is pretty condescending. But at least this Enblex has got the demo right.

Three Things I Need To Say About Russell Brand Right Now

While scouting the Daily Mail today—which I do now and then when craving some good, juicy celeb gossip with extra lashings of lowbrow—I was struck by this photo of Russell Brand enjoying himself a nice New York summer.

Two things:
1. He has a woman's figure.
2. Freakishly tall!
3. Doesn't he look a lot like Tiny Tim?

I know he can be charming and funny, bit still—I can't believe this guy's a sex god in the UK.

Daily Mail: Russell Brand Steps Out in Matching Outfit With His Latest Lady Friend

The Teenagers Have Spoken: Twitter Is for Tw@ts

I'm a great big slobbering fan of Choire Sicha and his brainchild, The Awl. Between his Twitter feed, his awesome Awl posts and his daily Awl emails, I can't get any work done: He keeps pointing to all these articles I have to drop everything to read and sites I need to explore and bookmark.

Like this post today about a 15-year-old Matthew Robson, a Morgan Stanely intern in the UK (yep, they start 'em  young over there, Oliver Twist–style), who wrote a memo that basically blew all the myths about teen media consumption clear out of the Atlantic.

Among his observations:

• Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average.

• Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless.

• Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.

Predictably, mediaworld has gone nuts over this. Even better, Matthew's report prompted two he-said, she-said responses that pooh-poohed one or two things, which are equally illuminating—and pretty damn hilarious.

Like this:

...any teenager could tell you that paying for things is unpopular and Facebook has infinite importance over Twitter. After all, the only people that use Twitter are celebrities with nothing else to do and bored old people who think they're connecting with the younger generation. Does anyone care that Miley Cyrus is "eatin' an apple".

And this:

Our generation has become near-on obsessed with soaps ranging from the sickeningly American lives of those in The Hills to the gritty social problems discussed in Skins, girls and boys alike.

British teens are obsessed with our sickeningly American lives! Bless their worn sooty socks.

This, however, is the most insightful perspective on news-consumption habits of any generation I've seen yet:

Robson seems to feel that all teenagers read freesheets. However, he seems to have forgotten that these are only available to those living in towns and cities, leaving the majority of teenagers forced to get their news fix either from the school library, a self bought paper (which, I must agree, are usually tabloids) or may catch the front page story when their parents are reading it. Reading a quality newspaper seems to be a case of nurture and varies with each family's political persuasion and perception of the mass media, rather than be a case of not having the time to do so.

None of these pronouncements is exactly earth-shattering, of course. But with isn't it refreshing to hear them from actual members of this obsessively analyzed demographic for a change?

The Guardian: How Teenagers Consume Media: The report that shook the City

The Guardian: Teenage Media Habits: Was the whiz-kid correct?

The Awl: Morgan Stanley Intern Is Voice of His Generation

Brüno Hits America, Goes Soft

 

What a difference an umlaut makes.

While Brüno was the No. 1 movie this weekend, according to the New York Times, its actual earnings weren't all that. Ticket sales have added up to an estimated $30.4 million versus Borat's $26.5 million opening in 2006. But Brüno opened in a few thousand more theaters, and its comparative per screen average of $11,040 is well short of Borat's $31,607.

(Time magazine thinks it's Twitter's fault. Now there's an angle!)

Sacha Baron Cohen was the flavor of the year when Borat came out. This was comedy tailormade for all the hip, knowing young subversives and ironistes raised on a diet of The Daily Show, Jackass and the US version of The Office. I was struck by how anxiously critics and cultural commentators jumped on the Borat bandwagon—even the fogeys on NPR were gushing, as if hoping to score points with a younger demo and say, "We're cool! We get it!"

I thought Americans were missing the anti-Americanism of SBC's humor and getting off on their own superiority—sort of, "Hey, it's those Americans he's taking the piss out of; I'm not one of those Americans so it's fine  .... and it's hilarious!" If you didn't love it, then you didn't get it—which meant, well, if you were a critic or cultural commentator, you'd passed your sell-by date and would probably lose your job.

I've never been a huge fan of Sacha Baron Cohen. I always sensed a certain hubris about this guy, from Ali G on down. Borat made me laugh, a lot—SBC has a sublime gift for mimicry and physical comedy—but I also thought his targets were too easy. So America is full of Ugly Americans, tell us something we don't know! And I don't care if Cohen is Jewish—the scenes in the B&B run by the kindly older couple, with Borat carrying on about "shape-shifting Jews" and throwing money at cockroaches, pushed it way too far. (Even though the couple whom SBC tricked into filming those scenes, the Behars, are heroically magnanimous about what happened and are big SBC fans now.) But between the jumbo-sized censor bar dancing below Borat's groin during the infamous wrestling scene, Borat posing in that banana hammock in Cannes, and Brüno's junk-hugging outfits, I also think SBC is just a little bit too infatuated with his own footlong. So you're a big guy there, Sacha. Lucky Isla. Congratch!

So I've been fascinated by how many critics have done a dizzying about-face on SBC and his humor now. On Rotten Tomatoes, Borat scored 97 percent from the "top critics" on the Tomatometer. Brüno scored a relatively meagre 69 percent. Take a look at the contrasts.

In Manohla Dargis's Borat review in the NYT, she likens "Mr. Baron Cohen" to "the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel" and glowingly declares that "the brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy" and that "just when you’re ready to cry, you howl."

Her fellow critic AO Scott, however, calls Brüno "a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes" and harumphs, "It’s not all that hard to find people in America who will expose their fear, ignorance and hatred on camera, as anyone with access to YouTube during the last presidential election knows. Derision, though, is not the same as insight, and 'Will you look at those dumb rednecks' is not much of a punch line."

Let's see what the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has to say. In his Borat review he reverently ponders the cultural and  intellectual method behind SBC's madness: "...it is as if he were outraged by the business of our being human—as if, in laying bare our follies, he were just quickening the process by which we already make fools of ourselves." And yet, for Brüno, he has grown weary. "Its main target area, as before, is the United States, or, as Baron Cohen sees it, a vast barrel writhing with shootable fish. Forget satire; this guy doesn’t want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick."

While New York magazine did a whole zeitgeisty feature on Borat and the new "squirm comedy" called So Funny It Hurts, their Brüno piece is called Mincing Minstrelsy and poses the question, Are we laughing with Brüno or at him? (They're asking now?)

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon was somewhat tentative about Borat, but she had high praise for SBC, conceding that it was "an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is." However, she ditches the gloves for Brüno: "Cohen's methods and aims are more scattershot, and his shtick is more stock: Setting out to "prove" how dumb Midwesterners are doesn't qualify as great satire. It's really just superiority."

You don't say.

There's one more thing I need to say about Sacha Baron Cohen. His shtick isn't even original. Way back in the 70s, the Australian comedian Garry McDonald created a character called Norman Gunston, a nervous, sweaty, bumbling Hollywood correspondent with permanent shaving nicks on his face who routinely ambushed celebrities with painfully inane questions. For better or worse, he was a national hero. I think SBC owes royalties to this guy.

NYT: No Swagger Like 'Borat,' but 'Bruno" Opens on Top

Generation Woe Is Me

Catching up with yesterday's New York Times Sunday Styles section, I read the article about all those poor college graduates whose dreams of going on a road trip or landing a cushy internship or spending the summer in Rome or moving to New York on Daddy's dime have been crushed by this pesky bad economy. It got me thinking about this generation, born between 1980 and the early 90s or up to 2000, depending on who you ask, which has the most designations of any generation that has gone before. They're called Generation Y, because, well, duh, they come after Generation X (1965 to 1980). They're also called the Echo Generation, because they are, it's said, the offspring of Baby Boomers—which doesn't quite ring true because it's entirely possible that Gen Xers who had kids in their early 20s now have kids who would fall into that category too.

They're also called Millennials, which makes no sense at all because they were born before the actual millennium, so where does that leave all the babies who were actually born in the millennium? And they're called Trophy Kids, because they grew up in a time of ultra-competitive kids' sports when the powers that be declared that there were no losers, only winners, so everybody takes home a prize.

For the last, oh, five to ten years now, this overly scrutinized generation has been the subject of endless articles and documentaries and 20/20 reports analyzing and speculating on everything from these kids' digital prowess to their consuming habits to their aversion to print to their fashion sense to their multitasking abilities to their computer addictions to their Rainbow Parties to their oversharing tendencies and on and on ad infinitum. It wasn't so long ago—last year, to be exact—that we were hearing all about how  Boomer bosses were scrambling to cope with this new generations' haughty attitudes in the workplace, where they sauntered about oozing with entitlement, plugged into their iPods, refusing to make coffee or run errands and expecting to be allowed to update their Facebook pages all day long and still get paid.

Now, these poor young souls don't even have a workplace in which to be misunderstood.  We've robbed them of the be-anything-you-want-to-be future they were born to inherit. Doesn't your heart just bleed?

I think they deserve a fifth designation: Generation Woe Is Me.

Yes indeed, it must be just horrible to be a young person today. After all, no generation ever before has experienced a setback of these proportions. Not that huge generation who came of age during the Great Depression, or the lean, mean 70s, or the dotcom-9/11 double-whammy earlier this very decade, or—gee, golly—the panic of 1819. No, it's this generation whose whole entire life has just been like totally ruined.

Generation Woe Is Me just needs to get a grip. One of the things I've noticed happening more now that ever before in my whole entire life is the tendency of Young People to brag about how young they are, and how they revel in using their youth as an excuse for ignorance. I used to work with a girl like this, at a magazine whose main subject was television. In editorial meetings, references to landmark classic shows surfaced all the time: All in the Family, for instance, or Maude. And she'd kind of poke out her lip and shrug and say, a bit too cheerfully, "I don't know that show, I'm too young!" And then, I swear, she'd preen as she said it, all "cutchie cutchie coo, look at me, I'm just a sweet young thang!"

It used to annoy the crap out of me, mostly because I'd never have dreamed, at her age or any other, to walk into a meeting and brag about what I didn't know. Bizarrely, she scored points for this with the editor-in-chief, who was relatively new to the job, in his fifties, and, to be frank, a big dunderhead who soon made it clear that he was much more interested in what pretty young girls had to say than people who knew what the hell they were talking about. (To be fair, this place was also full of fifty-and-beyond-somethings who loved to reminisce about Howdy Doody; everything about that place was so annoying, I developed an eye twitch.)

I thought of this whole sorry situation when I watched that recent episode of Real Time With Bill Maher when Paul Begala went off on a nervous, babbling, out-of-her-league Meghan McCain for pulling the same trick. There was a discussion about whether Obama places too much blame on the previous administration. McCain—who by the way was as heavily made up as Lindsay Lohan trying to cover up the previous night's coke binge— said she thinks he does; Begala said he thinks he doesn't do it nearly enough. He went on to mention that Ronald Regan had a habit of pointing his hoary finger at Jimmy Carter for every little thing, and she interjected  defensively, "I wasn't born yet so I don't know." And Begala shot back, "I wasn't born during the French Revolution but I know about it."And the audience roared.

I wish I'd said something like that to Miss "I'm Too Young" back at that meeting that day. I guess I'm saying it now, to every single crybaby in that whole generation.

Say Hello to Underachieving, NYT

Stephen Moyer on Anna Paquin: "She likes her meat and two veg, know what I mean?"

I found out yesterday that people.com picked up my interview with Stephen Moyer for DirecTV's Access magazine, which I write for all the time and nobody's ever heard of, in which he talks about how hardcore his girlfriend Anna Pacquin is about boxing. Hence, the failure for people.com to give me a name check. But whatever, I'm not exactly up there with Maureen Orth or, gee, you know, Meghan McCain. Still, it's  a bit exciting to have an outtake from a piece you wrote aggregated all over town.

Moyer was a fantastic interview. He was super-chatty and informal and off-the-cuff and funny—he joked around and laughed a lot.  I had to narrow the piece down to 700 words so a ton of quotes got left behind. Here are some of them.

Moyer's a patron at the Brentwood Theatre in Brentwood, in England's Essex County, where he grew up. His mother is the chairman, and it's where he got his first acting gig. "I was about 10 in a show called The Gypsy Baron. And I can’t remember very much about it apart from a song that went [lapsing into an impressive tenor] Up in the morning with the lark…  And I also had to run onstage and say, 'Queen Sheepra is coming!'"

When he hit big as Bill Compton in True Blood, a lot of fans of the show started contributing to the theatre's renovation—including the BillsBabes, a group of middle-aged women who were rabid fans of the character in the Charlane Harris books and now are just crazy about Moyer. I asked him what he thought about the BillsBabes.

"They’re wonderful, and they’re totally insane. We were at the Paley festival this week, it was honoring True Blood, and these ladies had flown in from all over America to come to see us live. And there was a load of BillsBabes in the second row with their BillsBabes T-shirts on. But I've gotta say, what I really love about it is that all these girls and ladies have never known each other before, and they started... twittering, if you will, in the True Blood wiki website, and now they’ve all become friends, and they’ve started this amazing community of people. It’s quite unbelievable really."

I asked him if he ever dreamed anything like this would happen to him back when he was touring with the  Royal Shakespeare Company.

"That I would be followed by some middle-aged women across America?"

Ooo-er, cheeky! (He's joking, ladies.)

He talks about the sexual potency of Twilight vs True Blood:

"Twilight is about a chaste love affair. And in many respects, it’s the same with True Blood, up to a point. And then when the sex happens, it fucking happens, and it’s real and it’s almost breathtaking. You know, you’ve been waiting for it and it’s: Will they? Won’t they? Yes they fucking will. And it’s gonna be dark sexy sex. And you’re gonna see it. And of course you don’t see that in Twilight. And you don’t get to see it on terrestrial television. Luckily on HBO you do get to see that, and I think the viewer does want to see that."

Which gets him going about the hypocrisies in American culture. "I think we live in a puritanical society where we should be able to say to our children, 'No you can’t watch something after 9 o'clock,' and we should be able to watch it on television without having to pay for it. We’re grown ups. I don’t understand that you’re allowed to shoot 200 people in the first 30 seconds of 24 but you’re not allowed to show a nipple? And how are we gonna bring up our kids with that kind of right-wing puritanical…. Oh it drives me fuckin’ nuts."

I asked him if he thinks Robert Pattinson has stolen his thunder. And he gets totally earnest.

"No! I truly don’t. I was in England, I didn’t even know about Twilight. I was in England living my happy little life and being with my kids and walking the dog. So as much as I think people want me to say I am affected by it, I'm not. I wish him all the best. He’s a cracking lookin’ dude and good luck to ’im. There’s room for all of us, there really is."

Moyer has described himself as a bit of a lad, a geezer. He translates, for those who think geezer means old man:

"A geezer is somebody who is confident, who's a little bit cheeky and cocky and maybe a little bit too cocky for his own good. A bit of a lad means a bit naughty, maybe you do things that you shouldn’t do."

I'd read that Moyer had become a vegetarian because Anna was a vegetarian. I asked him if this was true. He's genuinely taken aback.

"Noooo!  Anna’s not a vegetarian. She was at one point." He pauses. "But, she likes her meat and two veg, know what I mean?"

Ooe-er! Nudge nudge, wink wink.