Girls: Beware of "Thin Gandhi Types"

You got to love this lawyer: Defending his client Anand Jon, a purported fashion designer who used his fashion credentials to rape scores of young models, Ronald Richards describes him as a "thin Gandhi type". I find this amazing: you insert the word Gandhi into a sentence involving an Indian guy and basically hope someone will confuse this unspeakable pig with the Mahatma. What a sleazebag.
I wonder what Mr. Richards really thinks of his client. According to the NYT article, the evidence against Jon is pretty damning. But as always happens with sexual assault, just because some of the young women didn't go crying rape to the police immediately, Richards is portraying them as calculating hussies. I just hope the jury doesn't buy it.
However, I am always amazed at the willful suspension of healthy mistrust that some people exercise in the name of fame or attention. Who in this day and age doesn't know that the modeling industry has its own circle in hell? Where are the parents of these young women? Check this out:

The father of a 19-year-old college student in Texas said that Mr. Jon contacted his daughter through her MySpace page in 2005, when she was in high school, and told her she had the fresh look he was seeking in a model. Mr. Jon soon flew to Dallas, where the father picked him up at the airport, and with the girl’s mother, a child psychologist, grilled the designer about his intentions. “We said, ‘We’re worried about this industry,’ ” said the father... Mr. Jon told the girl’s parents, the father said, “I treasure the feminine being. I got all this spirituality from my grandmother and my mom.” But a few hours later, he forced the teenager to have oral sex at the hotel where he was staying, the father said. “I drove him to the hotel, where he raped my daughter,” he said ruefully.

Ouch. So even when people are trying to keep their wits about them, predatory criminal assholes will try to have their way. It is amazing that he was able to do it for so long. I hope they nail the bastard.

Fuck the Olympics

The next Olympic games are taking place in China next year. The Olympics are a country's highest p.r. coup. For three weeks everybody pretends the country in question is full of wonderful, happy, well-fed citizens and the world unites in We are the world bullshit, cue NBC bombastic music. Unless you are a five year old, there must not be a soul on Earth that actually thinks that this is about fair competition and gamesmanship and peace on fucking Earth.
In 1968, the Mexican government massacred hundreds, some say thousands, of students that were protesting the government in Mexico City a week before the Olympic games. The peaceful protests were crushed with snipers on top of buildings and plainsclothes agents in the crowd shooting at unarmed people. The games should have been suspended after that, but they weren't. Business as usual.
Next year the Olympics take place in China, a country with an appalling human rights record. It behaves horrendously towards its citizen dissidents, towards Tibet, and it is apparently in bed with the monstrously evil Sudanese government that has inflicted such horror on the poor Africans of Darfur.
Muslim Arabs killing, raping, maiming non-Arabs and not an Arab sheik doing anything to stop it.
So Mia Farrow (adopter extraordinaire) and Steven Spielberg (powerful guy in Hollywood and consultant to the Chinese) are pressuring China to rethink their support of Sudan or endure a really bad p.r. campaign right in time for the Olympics. Forget the images of hundreds of thousands of people suffering in refugee camps, the stories of inhuman evil. What works is to threaten to put a damper on the stupid Olympic games. Whatever works.
I think that countries that want to host the games should have to show a spotlessly clean human rights record (which probably means that the games could be held only in Scandinavia and Lichtenstein).
If you want the good p.r. you have to earn it. China is a joke.

Go Harvey!

The only thing I regret about this thoughtful op-ed piece by Harvey Fierstein in the New York Times is that we don't get to hear him read it, with his fantastic voice that sounds like he swallowed a burning pack of cigarettes.
I applaud Harvey for mentioning the strange selectiveness that Americans exercise in their prejudices. It's acceptable to be outraged, and rightly so, over vulgar racist comments, but over other equally despicable prejudices, nobody says anything. Harvey is completely right to call out homophobia.

Since I’m a second-class citizen — a gay man — my seats for the ballgame of American discourse are way back in the bleachers. I don’t have to wait long for a shock jock or stand-up comedian to slip up with hateful epithets aimed at me and mine.

Forget shock jocks or comedians, just stand anywhere with your ears open and you'll hear it from ordinary citizens. As Harvey mentions, the President, members of congress and generals at the Pentagon express unbridled homophobia. They want to make it official. Even Cheney with the lesbian daughter condones his own party's prejudices. So the deck is quite stacked. Gay rights are the next frontier in civil rights. As long as gay people are discriminated legally, this country will be living in darkness.

So, how do you people choose which hate to embrace, which to forgive with a wink and a week in rehab, and which to protest? Where’s my copy of that rule book?

I hear you, Harvey. Or rather, I wish I could hear you say it.

My two cents on the Imus

The Don Imus thing. Who listens to that pickled, shriveled, anachronism? Has he taken a good look at his tumbleweed hair? Anyway, what he said was despicable, not only because the Rutgers players are black, but also, and nobody has mentioned it, because they are women.
Nappy headed -- hideously awful. Hos -- makes it even worse, because it insults their blackness and their femaleness.
Someone made the point on a letter to the Daily News, that this kind of language is par for the course in rap records and videos. People have complained about that forever, and it doesn't change. In fact, it gets worse. No rappers are getting fired for their indiscriminate abuse of women, in both word and image. Their record contracts are not being cancelled, their appearances are not being yanked, their record companies are not trying to extricate themselves from them. It's a thing that makes you go hmm...
We do subscribe to the wise criteria of "I can trash talk my own people, but you can't." That's how it works. Blacks have the prerogative to use the n-word and debase themselves and their women as much as they want. Others don't. A Jew can jokingly call another Jew a kike, and it will not be that amusing. But others certainly may not. However, one thing is clear, if certain people are in the habit of trashtalking about themselves all the time, they run the risk of making it a commonplace and they make it easy for others to think it's okay to do it as well.
Still, I think that black men calling women hos is not the same as them calling themselves the n-word. It is much worse. Think about it: would you abide anyone routinely calling you a whore? The last time somebody called me that, (it's a long story) I jammed a burning cigarette in their back.
I wish the Rutgers players, who are going to meet with the Imus, (whose contrition feels rather forced, insincere, pathetic and gutless), would take the opportunity to remind all the other people who use those terms, to zip it once and for all.

The Feminist Art Show

I have not seen the Feminist Art show at the Brooklyn Museum. Just the title makes me not want to go. It's as if you invited me to a Soviet Realism show. Similar shit. Similar tendentious propagandistic statements. For the most part, I don't like art that functions mainly as a calculated political gesture. I don't like art that works as a manifesto. One of the main images of the show, is a photograph of a fat, tattooed feminist suckling a fat baby. Why is this photograph worthy of a museum exhibit? It is not particularly accomplished. The easy answer: it's supposed to subvert and update the traditional figure of the Madonna, yada yada. But that is just a gimmick. It could be one of those postcards they sell in tacky souvenir shops in St. Mark's Place in the Village. So why bother? It's not that it isn't art. It's that it is bad art.

The rules of engagement

I know this may be of interest to only the most devoted bloggers but it's been distracting me for days.
I find it a fascinating instance of the difference between the internet medium and the rest of conventional media.
A Gawker editor, Emily Gould, was grilled and creamed by Jimmy Kimmel, substituting for Larry King on CNN and it was painful to watch. Emily seemed woefully unprepared for the onslaught of hostility that greeted her. She reminded me of Nixon sweating buckets in the Kennedy debate.
Why did this happen?
It is one thing, as I'm sure the good people at Gawker can now tell, to hide behind the security and relative anonymity of your computer screen, as we bloggers do, and quite another to appear on TV, where there is nowhere to hide. You are indeed a deer in the headlights. That is the intention. So if you are going to appear on TV to be interviewed by an Olympic-sized asshole like Jimmy Kimmel, you have to be prepared.
It seems to me that Emily's only strategy was to deploy charm. It doesn't seem that the people at Gawker thought they should have specific soundbites to communicate, a brand to represent even, but that is the nature of television, as many politicians have painfully learned. Well, when it immediately becomes apparent that you are met by three hostile bullies, charm alone may not be the best strategy. As you can see from the tape, this interview was a personal Kimmel vendetta against the Gawker Stalker feature of the blog. Somebody said he was drunk one night and all of a sudden he lost his sense of humor. This should have been the message: You are a comedian; Gawker Stalker is meant to be entertaining, ironic and funny, so lighten up, pal. And yes, we do have a right to make fun of the rich and famous, that's the price they pay. They can cry all the way to the bank.
That would have disarmed Kimmel. What comedian, or anybody else for that matter, is going to attack humor? With humor you are supposed to get away with almost anything. That is the concept. Instead, poor Emily used the unfortunate words "citizen journalism" (I can't even start wrapping my mind around that one) and she was unfairly, viciously attacked by three grown goons. She had ample opportunity for turning the tables on their shrill humorlessness and didn't. I don't blame her, since the deck was completely stacked against her. Still, when your site is best known for manufacturing snark, or smart, ironic commentary, if you will, you'd better be at your snarkiest and/or smartest, which was not the case. In the end, these guys were such lousy self-important windbags, and Kimmel was so obviously vindictive that he lost the battle when he cut her off, like a bully. But as a lessons learned for Gawker, next time they decide to venture out into the merciless world of broadcast media, they should do their homework and not send an unprepared, unscripted envoy to the wolves.

They say the neon lights are bright...

...on Broadway... tarara ta tarara ta-ta.
I was at the Great White Way twice recently. First, with Little Enchiladita and her husband who were in town on vacation and wanted some cultchah at night, after ransacking the stores by day.
We went to see Spring Awakening, a musical that got very good reviews, with music by Duncan Sheik, based on a Franz Wedekind play from the turn of the XIX century. I don't know if it's me, but I was completely disappointed. In fact, I kind of hated it. My brother in law was not impressed either. He said it was like a high school production with sex. He was right. It sucked.
In my view, all the songs sounded exactly the same. They were perfectly nice songs to listen to in your ipod while you're driving, but they seemed to have no dramatic impulse, no real storytelling. There was one song I really liked and the rest, I couldn't tell one from the other. Man, I saw Rent, which is probably the most godawful musical I have ever seen, and this and I'm declaring a moratorium on "rock" musicals. Please. Also, somebody please explain to me why there has to be a ladder going nowhere with people climbing it like monkeys for no apparent reason.
Spring Awakening is supposed to be very risqué because it talks about the budding sexuality of a bunch of repressed German kiddies in the Weimar Republic. Which I think is good considering we are living in the age of an evangelical president and of right wing nutjobs with sexual panic. And it is rather bracing how explicit the show tries to be. But it was pushing the sexuality quite banally just in order to be shocking, while everything else about the play was mired in the most commercial and conventional theater clichés. This made the sexual explicitness quite vulgar, as opposed to eyeopening or moving or even sexy. The kids who perform are all quite talented, and with one glaring exception, likeable. But the play seems half baked and I felt embarrassment. It failed to move me.
So then I got preview tickets to Frost/Nixon.
1. Because Frank Langella is in playing Nixon, and once you see that man on stage, you want to see him again. He is a monster actor. 2. Because the play is by the ubiquitous Peter Morgan, author of the screenplay of The Queen and Last King of Scotland, a smart writer obsessed with the powerful and the media. 3. Michael Sheen, (Tony Blair in The Queen) plays David Frost. Hot ticket.
Well, once more, either I am becoming exceedingly curmodgeonly and hard to please, or I need to get laid. Frost/Nixon is fun and entertaining and you will have a good time, but I expected something darker, less crowdpleasing, more sinister, more satirical. I think the play has been directed with the hope of pleasing all the tourists from Peoria. So instead of sharp and smart, it is just blah. That's a pity, because it has potential.
The production is really ugly, and I don't know if this is on purpose, but it is quite unimaginative.
There is some sort of a chorus that explains either what we are about to see, what we are seeing or what we just saw, and most of these comments, even if nicely rendered by Remi Auberjonois, can be excised and the audience will not miss anything. In fact, the device of the chorus seems to take away suspense instead of adding it.
BUT and this is a big BUT, there is Frank Langella playing Richard Nixon and he ROCKS.
Now, he has made Nixon a rather sympathetic character. This seems to be a trademark of Peter Morgan. His interpretations of historical figures like Elizabeth II or Idi Amin are nuanced and he finds empathy for those in power. Somehow Nixon seems really smart, really articulate, almost likable. He gets the cracking voice and the lumbering graceless movements down pat, but more than anything, he plays a character, not an easy impersonation. He is a wily, cheap loser, a pathetic clownish figure, but Langella finds some grandeur in him still. He has one drunken speech which is worth the price of admission, and his final acknowledgement of error has to be seen, though you are startled with the choice of watching him through a big TV screen, or directly with your eyes.
I was surprised that there was less antagonism between Frost and Nixon than I thought, but one of the points of this play, while anticlimactic, in fact anti-dramatic, is that Frost paid Nixon a lot of moolah for the interview. As is characteristic of the Morgan oeuvre it turns out that both men have much in common. The Morgan thesis being that the media and power are in cohoots with one another. Sad, but true, especially now.
The one thing you think during the entire play, is that we wish we had Nixon and his stupid scandal, instead of the satanic moron we have to endure today. You can see that what he did to disgrace the presidency is still very much alive today: the lack of dignity, the lack of respect for the office, the contempt for democracy and the people, but man, compared to the disaster in chief, at least he was smarter, and much more interesting. Bush somehow will never be a tragic figure because he is incapable of insight or self-examination. He has no hubris. It also makes you pine for the time when the mainstream newsmedia had cojones, and they were not the bunch of smug, kept cocksuckers they are today. Shame on them and their parent whoring companies.
Who could have thought that someone would make one pine for the likes of a Nixon?

I miss my blog!

Darlings... I miss you so much. I feel awful that I simply don't have time to write here anymore because right now The Man is sticking it to me (but paying for it, so I'm not complaining). Alas, I feel like I abandoned my baby and haven't fed him in weeks. So without further ado, a digest of my cultural life this week:

Passover: Great dinner at my friend Cathy's, who is the queen of brisket and macaroons and everything in between. We acquitted ourselves nicely with some singing in Aramaic and much talking about the meaning of the seder and more talking about food. Cathy has adopted my grandmother's recipe for gefilte fish veracruzana style which is a feast for the gods (sorry, the God). And so her seders remind me of home. Yum.

Also, I happen to be invited to an Easter Sunday feast as well, so the stuffing isn't over yet.

I will post separately on my going out to the theater, but I have something to say about the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar Lunch Counter: God Bless it!
As I am working in midtown these days, I find the lunch counter an oasis of real food in a wasteland of delis. Also, the place is probably one of the few left that actually feels like New York. It feels like you are inside an Edward Hopper painting, which is a good thing.
One big bowl of clam chowder (I favor the Manhattan one) will set you back a little over 5 bucks and it comes with a little warm roll and butter and some crisps and it rocks. The waitress today actually offered to give me another roll, I must have looked ravenous.
The fried oyster po-boy is also quite good and humongous. The place is civilized, urbane and very old New York. I adore it. If it disappears, I will rend my garments.

What up, Susan Miller?

Hey it's April 2. Do you know where your April horoscope is? Well it's certainly not in astrologyzone, the Susan Miller online horoscope I consult at the beginning of every month (in protest, I'm not linking you to the site. Do your own homework). What is going on?
Is this a conspiracy to make us pay for the cosmic info? Is it an April fools' joke? An internet glitch? Or worse: Mercury retrograde????
Whatever it is, Susan, I do not appreciate it. I count on you to know my fate, more or less, for the coming month and you have sorely disappointed me. Now I don't know what to expect in terms of romance, or finance or work or health.
A dear friend, who hates horoscopes, tells me, oozing contempt, that she can't believe I profess to be an atheist and yet, I consult Susan Miller. Well, it just so happens that God has never told me what to expect next month, but Susan has. And eerily enough, she quite frequently nails it.
Of course, I love the fact that during the month of March, which coincidentally happens to be the month before tax murder, Susan announces that there may be an unexpected, huge, financial setback coming up. Well yeah, one third of my income going to the IRS! And weekends for some mysterious cosmic reason always tend to be the stellar days for romance (things that make you go hmmm). Yet I consult her, with a giant grain of salt, because it is uncanny. She seems to know.
So sue me.
Where's my April horoscope?

Is Mexico City the new New York?

Recently, Mexico City has passed some very liberal laws, such as gay friendly laws and now hopefully a pro-abortion law. It's about time.
This makes me think that soon DF will resemble NY not only in the copycat trendy restaurants and rising level of hipness, but more importantly in being a center for progressive politics and culture in a country that for the most part is still mired in conservative traditions. I think it's great.
The Catholic church has historically caused much damage to the poor in Mexico with its intransigent, unrealistic policies on family planning which only burden the poor and offer no real solutions. There is no compromise in contraception, no tolerance for abortion in the strident, irresponsible, deeply hypocritical stance of the Catholic church. Meanwhile hundreds of women may die or become infertile every year because of illegal abortions which everybody, both rich and poor, are having anyway. The poor run the risk of horrid illness or death from home remedies and gruesome procedures. The rich walk into private doctor offices, pay a few hundred dollars and get it done safely, though in secrecy. Luckily, Mexico still is a secular state with a strong separation of church and state and the despicable, unwelcome interventions from the Church are met with fierce resistance. But it is had to counter centuries of religious superstition and backwardness, especially among the poor, who have neither the education nor the resources to protect themselves from the thorough brainwashing of organized religion. I hope that the abortion law passes in Mexico City and at last all women in a dire situation will have resort to a healthy, dignified option to their predicaments, instead of the threat of fire and brimstone and premature death that is the Catholic Church's prescription.