Author / DrMabuse

by DrMabuse

The Golden Scam

I don’t have cable. Hell, aside from a DVD every now and then, I barely turn my television on. But Gary Dretzka’s TV Barn column makes me wish I did have cable, if only for an hour. It seems that Trio’s got sixty salacious minutes making the rounds. A modest tell-all ditty from When We Were Kings director Vikram Jayanti called The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret. The doc goes into length on how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the junket whores behind the Golden Globes, is granted endless loot and, well beyond the shameful nod to Pia Zidora in 1982 and other dubious merits, the awards ceremony is inclined to favor young, dumb, and full of come mythos.

Jeffrey Wells has more on the subject: “With relatively few exceptions, the HFPA members are a bunch of eager-beaver pseudo-journalists (a fair portion of them write for publications in Germany and Japan) who smile much too broadly and get far too excited when celebrities are in the room. They’re not ardent admirers of the art of motion pictures as much as people who appreciate huge bowls of tasty shrimp sitting on studio-supplied buffet tables. They’re pigs who squeal on cue in order to flatter Hollywood and keep themselves feeding at the trough.”

It’s not unlike what seems to be going down in the literary world of late, at least as Choire Sicha reports it.

(It looks like there was some serendipity in finding the links, but Greencine Daily led me to Wells.)

by DrMabuse

Rictus in Training?

rictus.jpg

newsomhair.jpgWhat disturbs me more than the mouth is that not one of his follicles is out of place. If ever there was a poster boy for pomade, Gavin Newsom is it. Too bad he couldn’t straighten his tie though. But that could be the hard front lighting.

[1/20/06 UPDATE: I should note that, at the time I wrote this post, I was looking for any kind of chinks that I could find in Mayor Newsom’s carapace, short of cracking jokes about his crumbling marriage. I voted for Matt Gonzalez (he was the long-haired, far left candidate and he lost) and to easily explain the niceties of the 2003 San Francisco mayoral race to out-of-towners, the only way I could do this without droning on for 15 minutes, delineating each candidate by positions and the like, was to concentrate exclusively on each candidate’s hair. Presumably, this spilled over after for a few months after the election and made its way here. But in light of what he accomplished only a few months later, I learned to like Gavin — certainly a lot more than Willie Brown, the slick milliner of hopeless corruption who preceded him.]

by DrMabuse

Nureyev By Subway

Who’s Got the Biggest Balls of All? “Does one really need the perimeter of three subway seats to provide salvation for the sensitive seed?….Bizarre that the same boys who cringed at junior high school calisthenics are now exercising their manhood with the barbaric bravado of Baryshnikov.” (via Maud, who has more to say on the subject).

The odd thing is that here in San Francisco, only the young gangsta wannabes seem to do this. But then the fact of the matter is that our subway cars are too crammed at rush hour to allow for this. But I suspect there’s a correlation to the male need to read while on the crapper. (Oddly enough, while I’ve been known to read in the buff, I don’t like the idea of reading as I defecate. Or shortly after.)

by DrMabuse

An Open Letter to Sara Bauer

Dear Young Woman Who Writes Snotty and Unfunny Open Letters for McSweeney’s:

The first moment I read you, I knew you were the same. The same as all those other passive-aggressive tidbits they seem to publish over there. Here, in the midst of (not amidst?) these publishing conglomerates, was independent prose. Look at her relentless second-person stance! Look at the soft snark extant within the piece, hypocritically unchecked from Julavits and Vida, addressed to no one in particular! How convenient! My partially digested dinner went up my esophagus and out my mouth to you.

I know it’s hard for you. Most McSweeney’s writers are thirtysomething Donald Barthleme wannabes who wouldn’t know funny if it bit them on the ass. I know you deal with wanting to get published, sans compensation, in this environment, and having to proffer the wonted generalizations. Your cowriters like you, but they receive the same rejection notices, because they really don’t understand you. They’ve read the same books you’ve read, they continually revere people like Julie Orringer as sages (“It is extremely important to hang out with non-writers and be interested in things that have nothing to do with writing.” Duh.), and fail to ponder the intellectual value of hunky authors and authoresses salivating over, rather than questioning seasoned veterans like Joan Didion.

You’re lonely. Writing’s a lonely racket. And you want to find someone who will publish you. But you’ve picked the wrong target, missy. That Chain Bookstore Worker’s probably just doing her job, working close to minimum wage, and using any leverage she can get in the smiles department to get through the day, to deal with smug fucks like you, because she’s quasi-literate at best and she’d like to read more. But there’s that second job to get to.

The world, you see, isn’t all about you after all. And should you ever publish a book, I will photocopy your little satire and distribute it amongst workers at Barnes & Noble and Borders. I will watch as they move your book away from a prime spot in the new books section and into some poorly lit corner. Because chain bookstore clerks are people and they do read. And I will laugh my ass off.

Sincerely,

Edward Champion

[1/21/06 UPDATE: Sara Bauer, incidentally, never contributed another piece to McSweeney’s again, nor contributed anywhere else. The only trace that I can find of her online is Ths online petition. Presumably, she has become a busy student at Butler University. Perhaps it had something to do with McSweeney’s online move from letters to bulleted lists. Bauer’s piece, however, isn’t the only time where the mean-spirited streak of McSweeney’s revealed itself. But I do hope that this post helped Bauer realize that snotty, mean-spirited humor, particularly of an elitist and insensitive stripe, is the mark of a one-trick pony.]

by DrMabuse

No More Politics Until March 1

Sure, I’m a bit disappointed. Derek, meanwhile, is ready to draw blood in a post entitled “Motherfucker.” I should remind Derek that in the 1999 runoff, Ammiano lost to Brown by 40,000 votes. Gonzalez, meanwhile, tonight lost by a mere 10,000 votes. Sure, it sucks. But this is progress. By all reports, the Gonzalez campaign was disorganized. The Newsom folks hit upon the brilliant idea of victory by absentees. And the voter turnout in the Bayview/Hunters Point, Visitation Valley, and Ingleside areas was nothing short of abysmal, because neither of the candidates wanted to recruit the downtrodden. But don’t listen to me. Look at the precinct breakdown on the SF Department of Elections page.

But, really, that’s enough about politics until March 1, 2004. This blog, in its return, has become polluted with simplistic liberal sentiments within its slightly more informed opinions on literature and the like. And who needs more of that? It’s about as unpalatable as suffering through another warblog. As such, I shall make every effort not to mention politics until things heat up in the inevitable Dean-Bush showdown next year. You deserve better than my chiaroscuro.

Perhaps I should mention that I’m casually drunk right now.

[8/9/05 UPDATE: Boy, there used to be a lot of posts here put up in the evenings after drinking. In the end, I finally figured out that answering email or composing blog entries probably isn’t wise after a few glasses of wine or whiskey. I should still probably drink much less than I do. One of the reasons I refrain from writing about politics (although not thinking about them) all the time is that such silly statements as the above (“the inevitable Dean-Bush showdown”) become so ridiculously dated in mere months. One of the risks with anyone I suppose.]