I’ve been watching MSNBC for the last two hours, and it’s kind of disturbing to see all the old Nixon thugs come out of the woodwork. With numbing predictability, Pat Buchanan has been ranting like the odious brat he is, insisting over and over again that Deep Throat was a traitor and possibly a criminal. And now Chris Matthews is talking to that upstanding citizen Chuck Colson. I’m sure that if Ehrlichman and Haldeman were still alive, all the networks would be giving them the elder-statesman treatment—instead of the public whipping that they, and all the others, deserve. This is why I almost never watch TV news.

This seems like a perfect moment to post one of the best publication covers in my personal collection. I acquired this excellent artifact in 1997, during a year I spent living and working in D.C. One day in the late spring or early summer, I was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle during my lunch hour when a homeless guy walked over to me with the complete Washington Post from August 9, 1974—the day after Nixon stepped down. This guy didn’t just have the front page or the front section from that historic day—he had the whole paper. He offered to sell it to me for $20. I offered him $10, and we had a deal.

Oh, jeez, I’ve still got MSNBC on, and I’m starting to get a little terrified. At the moment, the panel consists of Al Haig, Gordon Liddy, Joe Scarborough, Monica Crowley, and Pat Buchanan. Of course all these people are going to criticize Felt for what he did. Why not elicit the opinions of some prominent Nixon antagonists from the Watergate era—the Republicans and Democrats and independents who actually worked hard to ensure that a reckless, criminal administration was held accountable for its crimes? Oh, wait, I know the answer: Because it’s TV news.

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categories: News and Politics

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In 1992, The Atlantic Monthly published a classic article by James Mann that laid out a convincing theory regarding the identity of Deep Throat, the famously anonymous Woodstein source who helped bring down the Nixon Administration. Mann believed there was a good chance that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 or No. 3 man at the FBI during the Watergate years. I first read Mann’s article in about 1996—near the beginning of my long and enduring obsession with Watergate—and I found his case far more convincing than most of the other Deep Throat theories that had been bandied around since 1974. (Kissinger? Come on. L. Patrick Gray? A bumbling functionary who was totally out of his depth at the FBI. Al Haig, William Rehnquist, Diane Sawyer? Shut up and stop wasting my time.) Partly because of Mann’s article, and despite the existence of a handful of other strong candidates, I’ve spent the last decade believing that Felt was Deep Throat. As it turns out, he was.

Until not long ago, the Mann article was freely accessible on the Atlantic’s website. But sometime in the last year or two, the magazine began hiding the article behind a subscription wall. Now, for obvious reasons, the article is public again, and you should go read it.

In a series of articles for Slate since 1999, Timothy Noah had also been a strong proponent of the Felt theory.

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categories: News and Politics

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I was going through some unopened mail today and came across a direct-mail pitch from a fledgling magazine. I don’t know how long this sealed envelope had been sitting in my apartment, but I decided to slice it open and check it out. The pitch is made up of several different components, including a letter from the publisher that is so flattering it made me blush. In his letter, the nice publisher assures me that “only a select few will receive this exclusive invitation.” I have been chosen for this offer, he explains, because I am someone “with a curious nature, an acute sense of style, a level of sophistication that matches our own, and a quick and agile wit. … Someone who appreciates good conversation, great writing, and exquisite design.” I don’t know how he knows these things about me, but of course he’s right. Well, okay, I don’t know how sophisticated they are, so I don’t know if their sophistication level matches mine. But the other flattering statements are definitely true.

Anyway, it looks like this magazine is totally filled with celebrities and stuff, so I’m sure it’s awesome. Below is the most elaborately designed component of the pitch; it’s a foldout, so it has built-in suspense. I love all these wacky facial expressions—they totally make this magazine seem so much more fun and sophisticated than all those other magazines that fawn over celebrities:

And then, when you open the final fold, you get this:

[Continue reading "Direct-Mail Time Capsule"...]

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categories: Magazines

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When my thoughts turn to women being fed into grinders, light comedy is not the first thing that leaps to mind. See the two images below: The first, a print ad currently appearing in various national magazines, is part of HBO’s marketing campaign for The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow’s mock-reality-show sitcom, which debuts on June 5. The second is Hustler’s notorious June 1978 meat grinder cover, a major entry in the pantheon of misogynist iconography. Were the people in HBO’s marketing department actually unaware of this visual echo? Hustler has basically owned the woman-in-a-meat-grinder concept for the last 27 years; did the people at HBO think they could steal the concept and rehabilitate it with help from a cute and wacky sitcom actress? I’m guessing the Hustler connection never even occurred to them. But who knows.

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categories: Magazines, TV and Video

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Ourmedia.org is a potentially transformative website that launched a few months ago with the help of lots of impressive advisors, including the noted film archivist Rick Prelinger. (If you’re not familiar with Rick’s work, go to his site RIGHT NOW.) As the Ourmedia FAQ explains, “People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on Ourmedia’s servers forever, as long as they’re willing to share their works with a global audience. … [Our] goal is to expose, advance and preserve digital creativity at the grassroots level. … We want to enable people anywhere in the world to tap into this rich repository of media and create image albums, movie and music jukeboxes and more.”

I haven’t spent much time on Ourmedia yet, because—warning!—it crashes Safari every time I try to load it. It seems to play well with Firefox, though, so yesterday I used that browser to do some poking around the site. One of the first things I unearthed was a fantastic and original music video for a song by Sam Bisbee, a guy I met a handful of times in the late ’80s or early ’90s when we were attending the same college. The video, which was directed by Tobias Perse, has an ingenious visual gimmick: It’s an animated video composed almost entirely of small photo prints, which accumulate swiftly into a big pile that’s occasionally refreshed by hands that reach into the frame. The song is called “You Are Here,” and it’s pretty catchy. I love this video. I’m going to link to the actual video file, instead of to the site itself, which should bypass the coding problem at Ourmedia that is causing Safari to crash. Here’s the video:

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categories: Music and Audio, TV and Video

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The latest issue of Stay Free! contains an excellent and lengthy interview with Bill, the man primarily responsible for the flash-mob phenomenon of 2003. Bill is a very smart man, and he has lots of smart things to say about the phenomenon he inspired. Here’s an excerpt:

I had conceived [flash mobs] specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there’s something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn’t have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

The interview was conducted by Francis Heaney, whose blog you should be reading.

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categories: Art and Design

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The Summer 2005 issue—no, wait, the “June/July/Aug/Sept 2005” issue—of Bookforum is coming out in a week or so, and it contains a special section on Thomas Pynchon. Check out the section’s stellar list of contributors:

The man on the cover is Irwin Corey, a loopy comic actor whom Pynchon sent to represent him at the 1974 National Book Awards. When the time came for Pynchon to accept the fiction citation for Gravity’s Rainbow, it was Corey who went onstage and accepted the award from a baffled Ralph Ellison. Corey then delivered a bizarre humdinger of an acceptance speech. You can listen to a short excerpt of it here (Windows Media format). And you can read a transcript of the whole thing here.

The 1974 National Book Awards took place on April 18, a mere two and a half weeks after what is perhaps the most famous streaking incident of all time: On April 2, a streaker named Robert Opel bounded across the stage as David Niven was presenting an award at the 1974 Oscars. Toward the end of his Pynchon acceptance speech, Corey expressed his thanks to “Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium.” (The transcript indicates that a streaker actually ran across the stage during the ceremony, but I don’t think this is true—I couldn’t find confirmation of it anywhere online. For a couple of minutes, though, I was thinking, “Yes! A streaker! At the National Book Awards! Awesome!” How fucking hilarious would that have been?)

[Side note: According to a website I stumbled onto a few minutes ago, the German term for streaking is Nackerblitz, which translates roughly as “nude lightning.” However, there are only about five Google hits for Nackerblitz, so the word is apparently not widely used.]

Update, May 26: Some content from Bookforum’s summer issue is now online, including part of the Pynchon section.

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categories: Books, Magazines

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Don DeLillo’s America is by far the best website devoted to DeLillo’s work. The site’s proprietor, Curt Gardner, just added a couple of cover scans to the Japanese Editions page. The handful of book covers on that page are pretty excellent and weird. Here is White Noise:

In February I posted about an annotation of the first page of White Noise that was published in the Austin American-Statesman.

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categories: Books

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Received in the mail the other day: issue No. 4 of Esopus, the elegant and quirky biannual magazine designed and edited by Tod Lippy and published on very thick paper stock. My ultracool friend Lila recently gave me a one-year (two-issue) subscription as a gift, which only confirms her ultracoolness. I love the cometlike blob of melting ice cream on the cover:

Here’s how the magazine describes its mission:

Esopus is a twice-yearly arts magazine featuring fresh, unmediated perspectives on the contemporary cultural landscape from artists, writers, filmmakers, playwrights, photographers, architects, designers, musicians, and other creative professionals. It includes long-form artists’ projects, critical writing, fiction, interviews, and, in each issue, a CD of specially commissioned music.

In November of last year, David Carr of The New York Times wrote a gushy feature about Lippy and Esopus. You can read it here.

I haven’t had a chance to delve very deeply into the new issue yet, but it looks gorgeous. I’m looking forward to reading Daniel Tannehill Neely’s article “Soft Serve,” which the Esopus website describes this way: “A musicologist combed archives and spoke with a number of truck drivers and inventors to chart the evolution of that perennial summer anthem, the ice cream truck jingle.”

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categories: Magazines

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According to this gossip column posted yesterday on E! Online, the brilliantly antic Fox sitcom Arrested Development will be returning for at least one more season. The show’s low ratings (in a very bad time slot) led Fox to shorten the show’s second season from 22 episodes to 18, and the network seemed unlikely to give the show another chance. Few people, myself included, actually expected Fox to green-light a third season. Anyway, if the facts in the E! Online column are true, this is fantastic news indeed:

Earlier this week, a friend here at E! interviewed Jason Bateman at a charity event with his good friend Ben Stiller. When asked the status of Arrested Development, he lit up like a banana stand: “Actually, great. Supergreat. There is a heartbeat. There is no flatline. And there may be twins. I’m going to let Kristin figure out what that means. I can’t comment any further, but there will be an announcement next week.” … But glory be, after much badgering and pestering, two rock-solid Fox sources, who have never failed me before, caved and gave me the lowdown. Arrested Development is coming back! These highly placed sources confirmed late Friday it has been renewed for a full season of 22 episodes. How freaking fantastic is that? Initially, Fox president Peter Liguori’s plan was to order two seasons—hence, the “twins” reference—in order to keep the licensing fee down. But ultimately he went with a single season. And hey, I’ll take it. According to these insiders, even though the ratings weren’t exactly American Idol numbers, Liguori, bless his perceptive little heart, has faith that the show will do well in a different time slot. He also wants to bring AD up to the magical episode number required for syndication and feels the show will do very well in repeats and also in DVD.

This is a relief—I thought I might have to brandish Lucille’s rape horn to help save the show.

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categories: TV and Video

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By the way: If you’re wondering what the name of this site means, or what the word’s origins are, you might be interested in reading the first item I ever posted, way back in mid-January…

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categories: Miscellany

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Power-pop deliciousness is on the way: Fountains of Wayne is releasing a two-disc collection of B-sides, non-album tracks, and other rarities next month. From the band’s e-mail newsletter, which was sent out yesterday:

Fountains of Wayne’s Out-of-State Plates, a specially priced two-CD collection of non-album tracks and previously unreleased songs spanning the band’s entire career, will be released in the US on June 28th. The first single, the brand new song “Maureen,” will be at radio stations in mid-May.

Here’s a tracklisting. I have copies of about a third of these tunes. A few of them are clunkers, but most of them are great. The collection will include the band’s fabulous 1999 cover of Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time.” It’s basically a straight cover, not an ironic takedown, and it uncovers the great pop song that Spears and her producers buried under layers of elaborate production.

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categories: Music and Audio

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I generally can’t stand to listen to George W. Bush say more than about ten words in a row, so strong is my contempt for the man. But this is worth a listen: An Australian musician and sound collagist named Tom Compagnoni chopped individual words and phrases out of various Bush speeches to create “Imagine This,” an ironic reimagining of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

[via fd5000.]

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categories: Music and Audio

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A decade or two ago, a weird pop trio from somewhere in Europe appeared on television to perform a borderline sociopathic interpretation of the Bonnie Tyler hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” The video will leave you utterly transfixed:

And this is one of the loopiest and most artistically misguided videos you’ll ever see (and the music sucks too):

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categories: Music and Audio

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A new dance craze is sweeping the world. It’s called “disco,” and this elderly, white-suited Scandinavian is going to show you all the moves.

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categories: TV and Video

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