The NBA finals gave ABC a lead in the ratings this week , which they used to humiliate themselves by airing promos for this piece of clown shit called “Whodunnit?”
It’s a murder mystery reality show about a fake murder:
Because I was completely incapacitated with wanting to see San Antonio slap the smug look off Lebron James’ face, I could only form partial thoughts whenever the promo aired:
Dinner theater reject jerkoffs… ghost hunters if they used focus groups…. what is this CW?… how do you blow a lead with 26 seconds???
When grown people who aren’t actors pretend to be in life-threatening situations in which they clearly know they are not, it’s a special kind of stupid. It’s like whenever somebody does one of those “children’s news” broadcasts where kids dress in suits and read news stories, you either have to pretend you’re an imbecile and enjoy it or succumb to feeling embarrassed on behalf of everyone involved.
Having a show involving forensics (a field of science) performed by people who appear to have auditioned via YouTube (a field of gregarious slothfulness) isn’t a bad idea, neither is taking a show like CSI and replacing the actors with ex-cheerleaders and bounty hunters, or adding a stereotypical British butler named “Giles“, or setting it in broad daylight in a house called “Mystery Manor”, or… wait, those are all terrible ideas.
I obviously don’t know Lena Dunham, so I can’t speak to her person, but I find the cult of her personality to be as grating and obnoxious as anything squeezed out of pop culture’s birthing canal, from Kanye West to Ke$ha to that idiot who makes those Girls Gone Wild videos. Which is why I really want her to fight a kangaroo.
Let me be clear, kangaroo boxing is serious business. This isn’t some cartoon fantasy that ends with Dunham being placed in the kangaroo’s pouch and bounced merrily away like in some Pixar movie. I’m talking a traditional Australian dust-up– hind legs flailing and everything. Dunham would have to hold her own for what could be 30 to 45 minutes of intense battle with one of nature’s most aggressive territorial creatures.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “K.G. is being such a typical man, bothered by a strong, empowered feminist who succeeded in writing where he failed. He’s probably never even watched an episode of Girls” No, no, yes, and never.
Hipster culture is a stuffy, elitist mob that takes the worst elements of aristocratic and bourgeois society and somehow wields it into something seemingly counter to those cultures, even though it values nothing that isn’t superficial and self-indulgent. And while this is nothing new to hipsters, hipster culture, just like the Beverly Hills housewives and the Kardashians, is now treated with proud openness by the worst stewards of its behavior– people of means obsessed with their location, their social status, and the clothes they wear. Lena Dunham’s audience, basically.
Luckily, kangaroos don’t care about any of that. They enjoy grazing for food and engaging in highly ritualized fights meant as competitive social exhibitions to determine mating and access to drinking spots. The ability to use Twitter to make facile statements about roles of race and sexual equality doesn’t help or hinder the kangaroo’s ability to kick, slash, and disembowel using strong hind legs. A kangaroo doesn’t know anything about exhibiting quirky behavior, unless he’s ripping out blades of dry grass as a means of intimidating an opponent prior to a fight.
This is not a metaphor. The kangaroo doesn’t illustrate anything archetypical, nor is there any secret joke or hidden meaning behind this post. I simply want to see Lena Dunham put on boxing gloves, maybe get pumped up in the dressing room listening to some shitty obscure band, then walk out to the boxing ring where she will stand face-to-face with Macropus Rufus, otherwise known as the Red Kangaroo. The lights in the arena will go down, the bell will ring, and there will be silence. Lena will start to make some vapid point and the ring announcer will say “Shhhhh… stop talking, Lena. It’s time for combat.”
When I was a child, Father’s Day meant buying my father a tie, and maybe my mother would cook something special. There wasn’t the same kind of urgency to create magnificent memories and spend a ton of cash trying to enjoy some other shade of Christmas, which is what most of these holidays have become.
Father’s Day this year has left me horribly sunburned and that kind of hungover where you question all of your life’s decisions that lead you to drink a case of Longboard over an afternoon. My reward for setting such a fantastic example for my child was being horribly awoken in the middle of the night with him shrieking in such a loud and pained manner that I thought he was being kidnapped by something with hands made of needles and fire. He was just hungry. Having our first child this year has taught me very little about fatherhood other than babies have sharp nails and are really fucking loud. He’s too young to teach anything other than holding a bottle or walking, which means my role as a father is more mammy than anything else. All the fun stuff– biking, hiking, teaching him to love Bob Dylan and hate Jimmy Buffett, is still to come.
It took me a few hours last night to fall back asleep, and in that time I thought about all those colorful father figures from entertainment that remain the unsung role models of popular culture. While they may not be considered the world’s greatest fathers, I think each taught us valuable lessons about parenthood:
1. Daniel Plainview
The alpha parent in the film classic “There Will Be Blood”, Daniel Day-Lewis takes his son hunting, teaches him about the family business, then slaps a preacher senseless when his son becomes deaf because hey, pass this on to your God.
2. That badass from Shogun Assassin
“When I was little, my father was famous. He was the greatest Samurai in the empire, and he was the Shogun’s decapitator. He cut off the heads of 131 lords for the Shogun. It was a bad time for the empire. The Shogun just stayed inside his castle and he never came out. People said his brain was infected by devils, and that he was rotting with evil. The Shogun said the people were not loyal. He said he had a lot of enemies, but he killed more people than that. It was a bad time. Everybody living in fear, but still we were happy. My father would come home to mother, and when he had seen her, he would forget about the killings. He wasn’t scared of the Shogun, but the Shogun was scared of him. Maybe that was the problem. At night, mother would sing for us, while father would go into his temple and pray for peace. He’d pray for things to get better. Then, one night the Shogun sent his ninja spies to our house. They were supposed to kill my father, but they didn’t. That was the night everything changed, forever. That was when my father left his samurai life and became a demon. He became an assassin who walks the road of vengeance. And he took me with him. I don’t remember most of this myself. I only remember the Shogun’s ninja hunting us wherever we go. And the bodies falling. And the blood.”
Every time I hear this I get chills. Liquid Swords. Bong bong. Respeck.
3. Viggo Mortensen from “The Road” / Rick Grimes from “The Walking Dead”
They’re pretty much the same thing– fathers towing a difficult moral line while attempting to keep their sons alive in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but Viggo Mortensen gets an edge for being cold as frickin’ ice:
4. Darth Vader
This one is a no-brainer.
5. Godzilla
Technically he did have a son. This little thing called “Minilla”. When Toho wanted to court a younger audience, they created this unbelievably annoying dough boy humanoid believing that children would daydream about playing with Minilla on Monster Island. Of course, a baby Godzilla would be the size of a Macy’s, so they gave him shape-shifting powers that allow him to become child-size and also talk with a goofy, Barney voice. What makes Godzilla such a great father is that he can’t stand what an annoying pussy his son is, so he kicks him or steps on his tail in order to bring out his destructive tendencies.
6. Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”
In the right context, “The Shining” is about a father attempting to save his mentally disturbed son from his overly permissive wife. Or, if you watch the film “Room 237“, it’s about Indians, Nazis, Minotaurs, and America faking the moon landing.
7. Liam Neeson in “Taken”
Liam Neeson will stop at nothing to rescue his 30something teenage daughter.
8. Emperor Marcus Aurelius from “Gladiator”
Commodus is a massive prick who wants to be Emperor, so his father, Marcus Aurelius, tricks him into traveling from Rome to Germany (back when travel was even worse than it is today) just so he can tell him to piss off:
9. Don Draper
Classic Don!
I’ve discussed this before, but Don Draper is probably the closest thing to Superman we’ll have in a portrayal of a realistic world. A drunken, womanizing, slick talking ad man (and let’s face it, con artist), he’s like that dad in the song “House of the Rising Sun”.
10. That dad in the song “House of the Rising Sun”
Because everyone on this planet is pure evil, the results aren’t shocking:
“Until today, no one had tallied the cost of this parasitic segment of the nonprofit industry or traced the long history of its worst offenders. Among the findings:
–The 50 worst charities in America devote less than 4% of donations raised to direct cash aid. Some charities gave even less. Over a decade, one diabetes charity raised nearly $14 million and gave about $10,000 to patients. Six spent no cash at all on their cause.”
I didn’t read past those paragraphs. I don’t need to. I can pretty much fill in the rest with my imagination.
This is James Reynolds Jr., Executive Director of The Breast Cancer Society, and his wife, Kristina “hot stuff” Hixson, who acts as the Director of Operations and Public Relations. (Courtesy CFIR).
Just look at these two slippery eels, smiling because they thought they got away with it. Their lust for each other was matched only by their lust for stealing from cancer victims. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyway because it got them off. And at night as they lay in bed, her tufts of hair draped across the pillow, she would look out the window into the night sky and whisper, “Why do we do it, James?” And he would roll over and smile and say, “Kicks, baby. We do it for kicks.” Probably.
The list of the guilty companies are here. Their company addresses are here.
One Million Moms is (are?) at it again. This time the bible-thumping K-Mart lizards are upset over a Kraft ad featuring a hunky picnic enthusiast named “Zesty Guy”. From their press release:
“Last week’s issue of People Magazine had the most disgusting ad on the inside front cover that we have ever seen Kraft produce. A full 2-page ad features a n*ked man lying on a picnic blanket with only a small portion of the blanket barely covering his g*nitals”
They’re exaggerating when they say “most disgusting”. Remember the one where Andy Griffin was wearing the strap-on made of cheese? Because somebody needs to think of the children, I haven’t posted the ad, but you can click the link to view the ad here. (Zesty Guy, not Andy Griffin)
I’m glad my wife didn’t turn into a fucking moron after becoming a mother. She only gets outraged when the “Ula Ula” ad plays. Rightly so. Just try and get this out of your head…
Back in 2000, Tarsem Singh directed a film called “The Cell“, in which actress Jennifer Lopez leads the audience into the mind of a serial killer in an attempt to locate a missing woman. HBO’s “The Newsroom” is a lot like “The Cell”, if instead of a murderer the audience were dragged into the narcissistic, self-indulgent mind of the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, without any means of escape.
Aside from the show’s cliched scenes involving office karaoke outings and characters with secret crushes that just almost barely but don’t get revealed is a no-holds-barred game of “listen up, stupid” where Jeff Daniels recites well known liberal talking points whilst acting like he’s blowing the lid off some unreported conspiracy. HBO’s marketing team has been hard at work promoting Season 2 with a nonsensical teaser campaign involving cactus and Jeff Daniels’ giant fucking head.
My distaste has nothing to do with the show’s political sentiments, some of which I agree with, some I disagree, and has more to do with television’s love of punditry and having some dickhead project their anger at me for ratings. Ironically, while the show attempts to take down talking heads like Nancy Grace (which was brilliant, I’ll give them that), the show embodies the kind of nasty, agenda-driven, politically saturated garbage that it is supposedly holier than.
Last week, Magnolia Pictures released “Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie”, which examines the life of Robert Downey Jr’s father the television talk show host who helped turn traditional television journalism into a bunch of caustic spitfires–
I’m watching this movie for two reasons:
To live vicariously through his smoking
In hopes of seeing him dowsed with a fire extinguisher during ‘Piper’s Pit‘
The media landscape is now so riddled with these kinds of personalities it’s difficult to figure out which ones are engaging in performance and which ones are legitimately crazy. Personally, I always had a soft spot for Wally George (seen here battling punk rockers Rebel Rebel), but feel free to share your favorite angry prick in the comments if you feel so inclined.
