Month / June 2007

by Edward Champion

Self-Absorbed Monsters

I made it through fifteen minutes of this film and I had enough. There wasn’t one moment of humility. Not one moment of self-deprecation. Not one moment where the “artistic” worth of the two main subjects was questioned. In fact, the damn thing was a selfish and humorless affair. I felt like I was stuck in a DUMBO hipster hellhole.

The level of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-entitlement contained in Four Eyed Monsters appalled me. Do these two kids not know anything of humility? I understand that this film was a hit at Slamdance. But is this the best that the emerging generation of Internet filmmakers can offer us? Begging for money for their precious pretentious nonsense as if they are entitled to it? Fawning in such a self-absorbed show for the cameras and failing to give us one goddam whit of humanity about the growing development of online relationships? Jean-Luc Godard did this kind of documentary many times before and, compared to these kids, he’s the humblest filmmaker now working in cinema. That’s saying something.

Maybe I’m becoming that grumpy old bastard shouting at the kids to get off my lawn, but, as much as I look out and try to support work by new artists, Four Eyed Monsters is about the most solipsistic cinema I’ve had the misfortune to sit a quarter of the way through. Imagine 70 minutes of lolcats in cinematic form. Sure, it’s cute for the first minute. But can you really sit there and take it for 70 minutes?

Nobody’s going to say it. Because these kids have amassed a tremendous credit card debt. Nobody’s going to say it. Because it’s the dream that everybody wants: to be a self-sufficient artist.

It’s impossible to create after working a nine-to-five job? What a bunch of bullshit.

Glam rock is back, boys and girls. But it’s worse than it was in the 1970s. Because where the glam rock artists realized that their stage presence was a pretense and that there was compartmentalization between this presence and the real life, these new glam rock amateurs, in the form of Arin and Susan, do not.

And the hell of it is that they will be rewarded for their crass irresponsibilities, both fiscal and artistic.

by Edward Champion

Goodbye San Francisco

I lived in San Francisco for thirteen years. All of my twenties. A fragment of my thirties.

I’ll miss the fog and the summers in the Mission and the drum circle on Hippie Hill. I’ll miss the burritos. I’ll miss the Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood that I’ve been lucky enough to call home for the past two and a half years. It’s going to be extremely hard to find a replacement for Rockin’ Java, where many things were written, or the Booksmith or Ploy II or, hell, just everything really. I’ll miss the fag hags, the creative swindlers, the misunderstood people on the more interesting half of Polk Street, the guy who drums the same beat for hours on plastic buckets on Powell Street next to the meticulously groomed evangelist telling all who will listen that sex is evil. I’ll miss Frank Chiu, the tech geek crowd, the strange exhibitionist empathy, and the unapologetically corrupt politicians. I’ll miss Dan Leone’s Cheap Eats column. I’ll miss many friends and acquaintances, those noble soldiers of the Sunday Writing Circle, and I’ll even miss the sneers of some of my enemies. I’ll miss trips to Berkeley and the Great American Music Hall and the Red Vic and the Lucky Penny, easily the worst diner on the West Coast. I’ll miss Ross Mirkarimi. I’ll miss the incongruous automated voices inside MUNI buses, the capacious thatch of Dolores Park, the dogs flitting about Duboce Park, the almost perennial sixty degree temperature, the sex subcultures, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Bottom of the Hill, the Edwardian and Victorian houses, the many confused kids and misfits demanding spare change, the martinis at Blondie’s, the post-2AM crowd at Sparky’s, The Mint, the hills and the valleys, the earthquakes, the smell of oak trees in the Panhandle, the interesting developments around Divisadero Street, the snobs at Reverie, and the pretentious Marina crowd. I’ll miss the Exit Theatre, the Castro Halloween Parade, the lonely people I talked with during Christmas, the nice Russian ladies at the Yellow Submarine, the influx of Indian food in recent years, the notebooks at the Blue Danube, the sand hills near the Pacific, the drunks writing for the Guardian, and too much to list here really.

Goodbye San Francisco. It was a great run.

by Edward Champion

Is the WaPo Manufacturing Journalism?

I uncovered this remarkable Craig’s List ad:

Small publishing company seeks qualified writer to interview director Michael Moore during press conference June 19 in New York. The ideal candidate will have the ability to write and communicate and produce the interview quickly and cleanly. Candidate will have access to Mr. Moore’s press conference. The candidate will have to deliver the article by June 22 with 1,300 words and incorporate the asked questions during the interview (specific questions will be sent to you in order to provide guidance and focus for the article/interview). Payment for the final written article is limited to $200.00. We understand this is amount is low, but the opportunity is unique for a strong writer to interview Michael Moore. Send resume and writing samples to editor Karl Hente by June 12.

I’m wondering precisely how any journalist can “write” or “investigate” a piece, if the journalist’s questions are “prepared” by another party in advance (were these questions, for example, pre-approved by Michael Moore?). A Google search reveals that Karl Hente appeared with Ivan Weiss at a May 2006 conversation, revealing that he copy-edited at the Washington Post (“Current projects: new business development, grantwriting, research.”). Hente’s involvement with the Washington Post is corroborated by his work here on an April 2007 “Community Guide” as copy editor. Although Hente claims to have left the Post, a “Karl F. Hente” is listed on the WaPo staff page.

So what happened? Was a Post staffer assigned the Michael Moore piece? And did he then walk away in disgust when Moore’s staff demanded all of his questions cleared in advance? Did desperate editors proclaim that a Michael Moore piece was too important not to feature, no matter how fabricated the journalism, and did copy editor Hente then continue on in panic? And did this then result in the Craig’s List ad with this “unique” “journalistic” opportunity?

I will be making calls on Monday to determine if this was indeed a Washington Post article or possibly a side project. I certainly hope that such dubious ethics aren’t being practiced by the Post or elsewhere.

by Edward Champion

Giuliani: Ask Tough Questions, Get Arrested

Memo to Giuliani: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

RELATED: Gothamist: “According to Time’s Up!, Robert Carnevale was arrested while videotaping the bike raid after he asked one of the officers for his badge number. Carole Vale, a nurse observing the scene, was also arrested when she asked why Mr. Carnevale was being detained. Mr. Carnevale was held for 22 hours and Ms. Vale was held for 13 hours. Time’s Up!, along with the 6th Street cycling community are asking for a meeting with the commanding officer of the Ninth Precinct to explain the actions of the NYPD and to ask for their bikes back.”

by Edward Champion

New Yorker Contributor Asserts Lockean Right to Write Recycled Claptrap

So Mollie Wilson took issue with John Colapinto’s article, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a Paul McCartney profile riddled with the kind of spoon-fed, been-there-done-that tone of a bona-fide hack. Why, asked Wilson, would The New Yorker, one of the top magazines in the country, revisit the same tired legends? Any remotely educated culture vulture knows very well that “Yesterday” started off as “Scrambled Eggs.” Further, Colapinto idiotically suggests that some hard-core fan asking for an autograph “could have been another Mark David Chapman” and then has the temerity to put this social gaffe in his piece!

colapintotrue.gifBut the story gets even stranger. Colapinto began leaving comments on Wilson’s blog, including this morsel:

As for my re-telling of the often-told tale of “Yesterday” beginning with the nonsense lyrics about scrambled eggs: any true Beatles fan would know that the point of re-telling that story was that Paul has added vital new info–something of which he’d only lately been reminded: that the actual lyrics to Yesterday were written while on a 3 hour car trip from Lisbon to southern Portugal with Jane Asher.

I’m a true Beatles fan. And Colapinto is dead wrong. The information concerning Jane Asher has been floating around for some time. And while my Beatles books are currently still packed, I do know that this information has been reported since at least 2003. (e.g., see “McCartney’s Yesterday had a nudge from Nat” by Maurice Chittenden, The Times, July 6, 2003). In fact, the far more interesting question, which came up around the same time, is how close “Yesterday” is to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me.” Then again, since Colapinto is less concerned about the musical origins of one of the most remembered pop music ballads of the past fifty years and more interested in who McCartney was fucking when he wrote “Yesterday,” one shouldn’t look to Colapinto for compelling arts criticism.

This is by Colapinto’s own admission:

You, instead, wanted an essay on the subject. And that’s why you’re a blogger and not a writer. And, if you can handle hearing this, it’s why you’re barely a reader. You should also understand that the New Yorker is divided into sections; there are feature stories, like the kind I write, and there is the critics, at the back; I do not and never will be a critic. I don’t like them. They’re usually up-their-ass on precisely the matters you and I have been discussing here.

So there you have it. A New Yorker writer, vastly uninformed about the origins of “Yesterday” and their ubiquitous availability to any Beatlemaniacs, isn’t interested in writing, much less reading the kind of in-depth music features that you and I might be interested in. This is arrogance of the first order. And I’m truly stunned that the New Yorker would be dumbing down their features by assigning them to clumsy thugs like Colapinto.

If a 5,000 word essay that goes out of its way to investigate in a way that nobody else has tackled the subject makes one a blogger and not a writer, then call me a blogger any day of the week. Even if my “blog post” is published in a newspaper or a magazine.