Archive for the ‘Duh Media’ Category
Michael Jackson, Nazi?
Among the millions of words said about Michael Jackson in the last five days, here’s something I haven’t seen mentioned. That video the media keep showing of his last rehearsal performance at the Staples Center? The one of the song that seems to be titled, “They Don’t Really Care About Us”? Michael and his dancers are goosestepping.
What’s up with that, Adolf? Are we meant to interpret that the “uncaring” people who don’t care about “us” are Nazis? Or, oppositely, are we meant to infer that the called-for response to being uncared-for is Nazi aggression? Was Michael appropriating fascist tropes because they seemed fashionable to him? Was he attempting to make Naziism cool again, make the world safe for it by introducing it as the latest dance move? Or was all this just an unintended, ill-thought-out, anything-that-works mistake, yet another example of the fuzzy thinking that can be found in so many of his songs?
No one on TV is talking about this because no one wants to go there at this particular moment. (The goosestepping occurs about 28 seconds into the video, around the time — just to make the choreography as inappropriate as possible — Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech starts playing). Musn’t speak ill of the dead, and all that. But if somebody doesn’t point this out, goosestepping, and all it evokes, just might become as cool as moonwalking once was. That would be a revolting and dangerous development. And something to keep in mind while the world mourns the loss of this “visionary” artist.
You Don’t See Too Many Commercials Like This Anymore.
3 A.M. Revised.
Courtesy of Gawker:
“Once” Was Enough.
Every Oscars contains at least one terrible mistake, and this year it was Jon Stewart’s inviting back to the stage Marketa Irglova, co-writer of the winning song from Once, to give the acceptance speech she’d been prevented from making because her partner, Glen Hansard, used up all the team’s alloted time making his. (His speech had seemed to speak for both of them, but I guess not.)
I think the young lady deserved her moment in the sun, but she and her partner should have worked out a way to share between them the time they knew they’d be alloted.
To set things right, the Oscars now need to air a make-good show to allow every costume designer, sound mixer, makeup person, film editor, production designer, and director of an animated short subject they’ve ever cut short to come back and finish. It could take nine hours, but since Oscar is now in the “nice” business, fair is fair.
Parsley Sage.
Ellis Weiner has written a lot of funny columns, articles, books, jeremiads, polemics, philippics (never the desultory kind) and screeds, but this one from The Huffington Post today—about CNN’s right-wing election commentators Ralph Reed (above) and William Bennett—especially tickled me. Weiner has a way of making the reader froth at the mouth with indignation and laugh at the same time, which can be messy.
It strikes me that of all the bad names Ellis has for the two of them, the most damning of all (going back to when Reed was in college) is Young Republican.
