Today at Flavorpill, we listened to the Walkmen cover Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” for the A.V. Club. We considered buying tickets to see Billie Joe Armstrong in American Idiot, where he’s back for 50 non-contiguous performances. We learned how the the Insane Clown Posse plans to celebrate Christmas this year. We looked at lots of photos of John Updike. We had some deep Art Thoughtz. We made a mental note not to wear heels if and when we check out Doug Aitken’s new solo exhibition, House, at Regen Projects. We needed to own very this very angry French bulldog puppy. We discovered that there’s a Maureen Dowd comic book, and that it involves sexy lingerie. We found out how to get student discounts forever. We wondered if Winnie the Pooh really had an eating disorder. And finally, we enjoyed this roundup of the very best font and typography humor — a little too much.
It has been a good week for Ray Parker Jr., a musician best known for writing and performing the Ghostbusters theme song back in 1984. First, Saturday Night Live‘s Keenan Thompson played him in a so-so skit entitled “Celebrity Ghost Stories” — a promo for a new reality show on the Biography Channel about celebrities’ interactions with the paranormal.
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1. Leonard Dicaprio — rumored to be at the top of Martin Scorsese’s list for that Frank Sinatra biopic — is taking singing lessons to improve his odds. [via The Sun]
2. By scooping up Zac Efron’s sloppy seconds, Chace Crawford has made it 100 percent easier for tweens to enjoy six degrees of Kevin Bacon. [via NYDN]
3. The critics’ tweets about the debut of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds at Cannes are decidedly mixed. [via /film]
4. Christie’s will auction off “Little Buddy,” a handwritten poem about a dying dog by a 16-year-old Bob Dylan. He wrote it at summer camp. [via Guardian]
5. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall forgives Maureen Dowd for her “accidental plagiarism” of his work. [via NYT]
Today at Flavorpill, we hoped the Nate Silver — the stats geek who was wrong about several Oscar winners — is just as wrong about New York failing to pass the marriage equality bill. We took a peek inside the new New York branch of the Ace Hotel. We liked the sound of Park Chan-wook’s Thirst — a vampire film that premiered at Cannes and got dubbed “a subversive Twilight.” We finally got around to reading Maureen Dowd’s last column, and found it funny that she called Dick Cheney a “rouge diva of doom.” We were grossly jealous of Donald Glover, a recent NYU grad and writer for 30 Rock who will be starring in that new Joel McHale show, Community. We wish we could go see him at the 92Y Tribeca tonight (he’s doing standup with Leo Allen and Eugene Mirman), but we’ve got to clean our apartment. We were frightened by this Russian Whale Tail trend. (And even more frightened by the tags on that post.) We were shocked to realize how long it’s been since Lindsay Lohan was in a real movie. That you know, like played in theaters. And finally, DON’T JUDGE US, but we are totally excited by the news that Kristin Cavallari will be joining the cast of The Hills. Go Team Kristin! Also: My Life Is Average.
A sassy title choice — “I Ponied Up for Sheryl Crow?” — would imply that even Maureen Dowd felt the gross offense of Sheryl Crow’s inclusion in Northern Trust of Chicago’s wild night of fun last week.
“Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.”
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David Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker; he’s also the author of the recently published book Snark, an important essay which traces the evolution of snark from ancient Athens to Gossip Girl, loosely defining it in its ideal form as so: “Two girls are sitting in a high-school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space. Its intention is to offer solidarity between two or more parties and to exclude someone from the same group.”
In this same scenario we imagine that Denby would be the head of the judiciary society. Not because it looks good on his transcript, but because it’s the right thing to do and he doesn’t care what the cool kids think of him. It’s important to have people like that around. It keeps us honest.
While his argument is not without flaws (as Sarah Weinman notes here), we ripped through the extremely yellow book in a single evening and we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since — especially when we’re sitting at the keyboard. And without a few holes to pick at, where would the interesting conversation start? (Generating a discussion about style, Denby explains, was his goal in writing Snark.)
Our own conversation with the writer after the jump.
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Moved by a Crescent by MAUREEN DOWD – She looks at KAREEN RASHAD SULTAN KHAN, the fallen American soldier and fellow Muslim who motivated COLIN POWELL to publicly back BARACK OBAMA. [NYT]
Palin Clothes Spending Has Dems Salivating, Republicans Disgusted by SAM STEIN – News that SARAH PALIN has spent more than $150,000 on clothing and make-up for herself and her family since her selection as JOHN MCCAIN’s running mate — complete with a slideshow. [HFPO]
Happy Birthday, You Bastard by JOHN SWANSBURG – Why expensive birthday dinners in your late ’20s suck. [Slate]
The punditocracy’s Seven Biggest Plunders of the 2008 election by MICHAEL MADDEN and WALTER SHAPIRO – The title pretty sums this one up — where conventional wisdom has led pundits astray in the past two months. [Salon]
Courtney Sale Ross’ Glorious 740 Park Duplex Very. Very Quietly Asking ‘Over 60 Million’ by MAX ABELSON – In the midst of an economic crisis, this might be New York City’s most expensive apartment deal ever. [NYO]
