Posted at 5:53 PM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
Before NCDSUV shutters its doors for the holiday weekend (it is almost time for the Sabbath after all), I realized some of you may be wondering about the absence of commentary regarding Barack Obama’s speech last night at the Democratic National Convention. Well, for one, I was too busy belly laughing over Van Halen’s righteously rockin’ anger at John McCain’s co-opting of “Right Now” to type coherent sentences.
But more pointedly, I have to confess: I wasn’t particularly inspired to sit through the complete director’s cut when I could get the theatrical edit on YouTube and barely miss a beat on the cultural discourse.
Posted at 4:14 PM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
If you’re a child of the ’80s, you eventually developed a sense that you’d gauge your own aging against the deterioration of mega-celebs like Madonna and DeNiro into a withered, elderly state. Or, in the case of Michael Jackson, their transformation into a petrifying (and petrified) middle ground between Skeletor and Sean Patrick Flannery in Powder (a movie, coincidentally or not, directed by a convicted pedophile).
Yes, the Wacko one himself is now a half-century old, having improbably entertained roughly four generations of fans and overcompensated for his lost childhood with a perversely suspended adolescence. And according to an interview with Good Morning America, he’s been spending it the way any hideously disfigured, psychologically traumatized, twice-divorced father of three would: having cake with his kids and watching cartoons─on the site of several alleged incidents of child molestation.
But Michael, in all seriousness, happy 50th. You’ve sacrificed your own sanity to be a human barometer for other peoples’ nostalgia, in lieu of them discovering any true happiness or meaning in their lives. Have fun. Celebrate. Just go easy on the Jesus juice.
Posted at 2:15 PM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
As another follow-up story of sorts, you may remember yesterday’s rant against second-rate Jason Mraz quasi-folkie Eric Hutchinson. Unless, like David Duchovny, you’ve been too busy blinding your memory with relentless sexcapades.
If so, you can only imagine my dismay when I turned on my favorite new televised source of ire, VH1’s Fresh, and caught a clip by young Jon McLaughlin, who’s not only an insultingly underqualified doppelganger for jazz great John McLuaghlin, but makes Hutchinson look relatively redeemable.
Posted at 12:30 PM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
Just when I was finding the strength to emerge in public and revisit my local multiplex, Universal decided to release of a singalong version of Mamma Mia! and crowd the path to, say, Pineapple Express with hundreds more loathsome patrons. Screenings of the film will include song lyrics on the screen, which sounds less like another Rocky Horror phenomenon in the making and more like the Abba-fied movie version of VH1’s bizarre Deep Thoughts digression during their Britney’s Secret Childhood special.
Mostly, I don’t appreciate the manipulative marketing involved. If this were truly about making the film a communal experience in celebration of its source material, the studio wouldn’t have held back the option until receipts were being swallowed by late-summer blockbusters. It’s the cinematic equivalent of record labels releasing “bonus” editions of an album with a DVD and remixes five weeks after it initially hits shelves. Or, in an analogy more suited to my personal lament, when candy-bar manufacturers hold onto a tasty variation of their original treat (I’m looking at you, Big Kat and NutRageous) until profits need a little energy boost.
Either way, I’ll be more than happy to stay glued to my cable all day, Peanut Butter Cups in hand, rather than go anywhere near my local theater before Mamma’s fat lady has sung.
Posted at 10:56 AM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
I feel a bit like a reporter who ran his Watergate update the morning before Woodward and Bernstein released their most damning evidence. Or at least like a blogger who published a piece on mid-life celebrity relapses on the eve of David Duchovny’s sex-addict admission, which is roughly the closest equivalent in this wild world of celebrity Internet journalism.
There's a few things about this story that are by turns troublesome and hilarious. Of course, there’s the art-imitating-life component, given 48-year-old Duchovny’s (same age as Mackenzie Phillips, incidentally) starring turn in Californication. But then there’s the personal redemption aspect, as this announcement is a big fuck you (and anyone else you might know who’s interested in a good fucking) to the countless critics who questioned the actor’s believability in the role of irresistible paramour. And, of course, there’s the public humiliation, especially when his relationship with Tea Leoni seemed like the proverbial “Hollywood marriage that’s gonna last.”
Well, we apparently know David can last alright. We’d make more obvious jokes about his bedroom ednurance, but perhaps we should follow Showtime’s lead on this one and “wish David and his family the best during this very private time.” Jeez. Last time I checked the guy was outed for compulsive adultery, not entered into a facility for cancer treatment.
Posted at 9:00 AM Aug 29, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
It’s only been a couple of days since Mackenzie Phillips ill-advisedly brought cocaine and heroin as party favors to LAX’s security quarters, but it’s still tough to wrap our heads around this unanticipated indiscretion. Maybe we’ve seen too many Lifetime profiles of celebs like Mackenzie, glamorizing their rise from drug-addled Hollywood brat to beacon of charitable energy, but this is one dope arrest that smacked us over our naïve heads like a kilo of bricks. But as we learned from fellow kid star Tatum O’Neal’s recent crack-down, it’s never too late to fall off the wagon, as evidenced by the one-time co-stars and five other 40-plus trainwrecks.
7. Dwight “Doc” Gooden
The storied Mets phenom-cum-Yankees superstar had supposedly put his well-documented struggles with cocaine and alcohol behind him by the late ’90s. It was one of those triumph-of-the-human-spirit stories particularly beloved and glossed over by sports media. And then, between 2002 and 2006, Doc threw his inspired fanbase a curveball by getting busted for a DWI, fleeing the scene of a DUI, allegedly hitting his girlfriend, and showing up to a probation meeting blasted on the white china, which lead to seven months of imprisonment. Meanhwile, Daryl Strawberry somehow managed to stay comparatively clean, even if he still can’t erase “Chocolate Strawberry” from his rap sheet.
6. David Hasselhoff
The ‘Hoff was known as many things during his deceptively illustrious television-and-recording career: purveyor of majestic chest hair on Knight Rider, the casting director of teenage America’s masturbatory fantasies as mastermind behind Baywatch, self-anointed savior of German unification. But during his bizarrely lengthy peak as an A-list celeb (seriously, how many people in the last 30 years had as consistent a stretch run of success─qualitative measurement of said achievements aside─than the curly haired manhunk?), he never had a prevailing reputation as an alcoholic. That was, of course, until he made the mistake of having a daughter. And giving her a video camera.
5. Mackenzie Phillips
Given her less-than-spritely age (48), the too-soon passing of habit-forming musician dad John Phillips and her vocal position as anti-drug advocate, you’d figure Mackenzie had been through enough rounds with the ’ol tourniquet. Or at least one has to presume that was her heroin-consuming method of choice, as her nostrils must have already been occupied with copious amounts of coke. But apparently, we should have waited one day at a time before giving the former sitcom/movie prodigy a pass on her clean bill of abuse.
Posted at 5:30 PM Aug 28, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
I had intended on using this space to comment on RuPaul’s sickly Project Runway appearance (so much for all my jokes about celebrity drag queens being the target demographic for rabid coke addiction), but in my search for the footage, stumbled across this gem: interview footage from a King magazine red carpet, featuring another sexually ambiguous TV star-of-sorts, Thing 2, winner of Flavor Of Love 3.
I actually had a moment of pause during the clips where I realized, “Is this genuinely what the definition of celebrity has come to encompass, and if so, how on earth did my guilty-pleasure immersion in second-rate reality shows lead to my own wholesale acceptance of someone like Thing 2’s worthiness of red-carpet interrogation?” And that's disregarding the fact that she’s desperate enough for fame that it can be dictated on anyone’s terms─even if she’s been branded with an inconceivably denigrating pseudonym─or even the rewind-worthy moment where she praises “Obama for ‘09” because she wants “the economy to go down a little bit” (like, ya know, someone’s temperature when they have a cold).
I think I’m having an epiphany about being kinder and gentler to the Brangelinas and Vivica A. Foxes of the Hollywood world, because at least they represent the sort of completely unapproachable, mega-watt star quality that provides me with the inadequacy and envy I look for in societal elite.
Posted at 4:00 PM Aug 28, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
If you get a chance, sit through the otherwise insufferably redundant VH1 special, Britney’s Secret Childhood, that’s airing this week. One of countless hour-long synopses of her rise to fame and subsequent foibles, it’s a harmless enough─if intellect-diminishing─bio-lite. But one moment truly stands out (unfortunately I was unable to scour it down on YouTube, and there’s not enough hours in the blogging day to procure those kinds of media assets from the network itself) as pricelessly slapdash cable hackery.
Posted at 2:00 PM Aug 28, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
After Jessica Biel made the grave mistake of wearing a billowy summer dress on a recent weekday evening, the press has been rampantly circulating rumors regarding a possible Justin Timberlake-conceived love child (what, more reactions to the reactions to the reactions about the Lindsay Lohan/Sam Ronson vs. Michael Lohan feud weren’t enough to keep their sensationalistic meters running?).
This, of course, leads me to the much larger, more important discussion of the “baby bump.” Celebrity offspring are going to be damaged enough without looking back at a scrapbook of tabloid articles fetishizing their impending birth as if it were their parents’ newest buzzed-about designer accessory. To me, a baby bump could refer to a number of possible things: inadvertently poking the child in utero during intercourse, the foreskin-less stub that is a post-circumcision penis, or perhaps a minor tumor that has yet to entirely overtake an organ. But it seems unfair to extend the humanity we’ve stripped from fully grown celebrities to their unwitting children-in-waiting.
My suggestion? If Biel is in fact bloated with Justin’s egg-fortifying fuck juice, let’s refer to her expanded waistline as her “wellspring of all that is graced with preternatural physical appeal.” Eh, I guess that won’t really apply as believably if the child were being carried by, say, Nicole Richie (NSFW). Baby bump it is then. I digress.
Posted at 12:30 PM Aug 28, 2008
By Kenny Herzog
It’s hard to say if any genre of commercial music is more deplorable than the post-G. Love, Jason Mraz-mired miasma of mellowed-out , semi-acoustic, faux-beatnik jam-tasticness. For lack of a more concise categorization. And while I’m equally leery of arty indieness for its own sake, I’ll take another flash-in-the-pan Pitchfork favorite any day over one more VH1 You Oughta Know-friendly artist like Eric Hutchinson, who’s “Rock & Roll” video is getting heavy rotation on the network, making weekday mornings that much more unmemorable.
Like the Starbucks locations his music no doubt inhabits, the recipe for a guy like Hutchinson is simple: Take the original, gritty concept behind an American institution (in this case, anything resembling resonant rock or R & B) and render it marketably soulless enough to lure in millions of busy consumers with a thirst for something communal without the time or inclination to develop a more meaningful relationship with it.
Watching the clip for “Rock & Roll,” you get the sense Hutchinson was awkwardly coerced into less-than-natural situations (dancing rhythmically, standing in front of a huge marquee with his name on it), but that doesn’t excuse its pandering “everyday people” motif of the artist swaggering and strolling across scenes of authentic city life (look! I’m doing a jig with a kindly old black man on the bus stop!). Nor does he engender any good-humored cred for featuring his biggest fan, Perez Hilton, in the clip (look! I’m talented but I don’t have a weird celebrity ego!). It just makes him look like he has shitty taste in people who have shitty taste. And the flannel-and-jeans, "I'm just an ordinary fella" routine? I'd buy it were it not for the Jonas Brothers haircut.
