I have stopped watching TV altogether, not because I've suddenly gone all highbrow on you.  Mostly because the living room, where we keep the TV, is drafty, and during the winter months when I'm home it's so much toastier upstairs in the Jungle Room with a cuddlebuddy or two (I like to multitask). 

I also prefer watching clips on the internet, after they've been pressed and strained and forced through the Series of Tubes.  You get less pulp that way.   

Of course there are historic moments you're supposed to want to see live right along with everyone else — no one TiVos the ball dropping in Times Square to watch it the next morning.  And if you missed Barack Obama's victory speech in Grant Park (and didn't gasp in horror along with the rest of the nation at Michelle's choice of evening wear), well, sorry, but you missed the bus.  Might as well give up.  You'll never catch it now. 

If it's not live, there's still some elevated status in being able to say you saw it first, although it's not entirely clear why.  Especially in an age when we're more or less force-fed the same images from the same point of view ad infinitum.  But we all know the pleasure of bragging "yeah, I was a pretty hardcore fan back in the day, before they sold out."  And we've all felt the sting of injustice when a friend tells us she heard it (whatever it is) from another friend who obviously didn't tell her he heard it from us first. 

Of course, watching history made live — or at least watching it at the same time everyone else does, taps into that need we find in religious ritual and spectator sports to meld with the mass, to contribute our lonely little feelings to some mega-emotional state.  It's the difference between striking a match and detonating a multi-megaton bomb.  This is something about our essential nature as a species, about how we actually function in concert, that the illusion of personality and personal autonomy won't admit.  Every screaming crowd is an organism, and every voice in that crowd wants to be one with it.

Point is, I'm taking a little break from the zeitgeist. I haven't been watching TV lately.  I didn't watch the ball drop in Times Square on CNN, and only heard about Kathy Gifford's "dicks" gaffe a day later.  Is it too zeitgeisty to have a little crush on Anderson Cooper?  He's so cute I just want to spank him till he dies in a giggle fit right over my knee with his knickers round his ankles.  And I get the feeling it could happen.  He's the cable news world's equivalent of Tickle Me Elmo. They're actually dating now, y'know. 

But all that's second hand news.

Still, I don't know anyone who's getting it first-hand.  Nobody's watching TV like they used to back in the day.  Remember when they'd play the National Anthem at midnight and then it was nothing but the test pattern till the morning news shows came on?  Now that was quality programming.  I was watching Chapter 27 with a fat Jared Leto the other day.  It's about Mark David Chapman — the three days he was in New York back in 1980 to shoot John Lennon — and there's a scene where he checks into a hotel room right as the National Anthem's playing.  And you're thinking, why the hell is the National Anthem playing?  And then you hear the "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" of the test pattern, and you remember what it was like before twenty-four hour cable news and QVC.

I had come to Chapter 27 via Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, by the way, which I watched a couple of weeks ago, along with Pi in preparation for The Wrestler, Aronofsky's latest.  I'd got to thinking, that Jared Leto is so cute and talented, why don't we see more of him?  Well, be careful what you wish for, is all I can say...


I’m not sure it’s necessary for someone like Leto to go through this kind of kafkaesque metamorphosis to prove that he’s serious when no one needs or expects him to be serious in the first place.  I mean, does he think we think he's Robert DeNiro?  For Jared Leto, cute is enough.  There are so few people you get the uncomplicated, unguilty pleasure of looking at just for the sake of looking at them, that for them to go and purposely make themselves so unsightly seems unnecessary, and frankly not a little hurtful. (Hopefully Anderson Cooper won't go and get any crazy ideas.)

Here's what I want to say to Jared Leto:  If you’re such a great, hot-shot actor, you should be able to convince us you’re a big, fat loser without having to actually be one.  And for the love of God, lay off the eyeliner, bitch.

I was talking about it with my pal Paolo over dinner last night, and as for stunning physical transformations on film, he mentioned Christian Bale's in The Machinist....

...a well-made and superbly acted paranoid thriller, but probably coulda done without that image, if you want to know the truth. 

Take a page from George Clooney's playbook.  Sure he packed on a few pounds for Syriana, but he only got cuter and cuddlier with the spare blubber.  Sure, they probably could have gotten yummy Ricardo Chavira from Desperate Housewives, or New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to play the role at a discount.  But Clooney did OK.  The trick is not to go over the score. 

Truth is, unless you're Oprah Winfrey, nobody cares if you put on a hundred pounds.  And at this point nobody but Oprah Winfrey really cares that she has.  But when you have your own media empire, you can be forgiven for mistaking your big butt for breaking news.


Good thing that in the new spirit of bipartisanship being ushered in by her buddy Obama, Oprah's Book Club has chosen Ann Coulter's latest, Skinny Bitch: The Ann Coulter Cookbook, as this month's offering! 

In it, Coulter reveals the secrets that have allowed her to hang onto that tricky figure despite her punishing MtF hormone regimen. There's an actual recipe for Salted Sawdust and Rat-dropping Canapés in it! 

Weighty issues in the news.  Kinda makes me wish I hadn't missed the bus.