I had a poster of him on my wall all during high school.

And back when I was a diehard movie fan, I loved him in this period:

Honesty compels me to say that he was not a great actor. But he strived (and strived and strived) to be one, as documented in 1955 by Eve Arnold:

And he was uncommonly generous with the wealth he acquired through movie stardom, setting a great example for future generations of Hollywood stars with a conscience.

Apart from the mischievous look in his eye, what I liked most about him was his plain talk:

Paul Newman on acting:
“Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you. Find out what everyone does on a film set, ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.”

Paul Newman on marriage:
“I’ve repeatedly said that for people who have as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighborhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other. You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

Amen, brother. Thanks for the memories, and rest in peace.

Unable to stir up attention for her most recent movie, washed-up celebrity Winona Ryder apparently made a bid for attention by using a less traditional route—shoplifting (again).

As you can see by following this Google News link, there’s more about the shoplifting than about her movie.*** That’s because the critics weren’t kind, if the NYT’s Manohla Dargis’s review gives any indication:

Oh, yes, Winona Ryder, who memorably starred in “Heathers,” shows up periodically as Death Nell, a mysterious vamp with a Black Widow complex and some nasty black heels. I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing in this film, and I don’t believe that Mr. Waters or Ms. Ryder know either.

It seems like it was so long ago that Winona Ryder mattered to anybody, doesn’t it? Does anyone care about Hollywood anymore?

Richard Corliss recently had the guts to ask three of its biggest stars if they were, well, over:

I sat with three of the most popular actors of the past few decades — Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise — who were promoting their new film, Lions for Lambs. I posed to them an indelicate question: Are movie stars obsolete? Consternation erupted as the three quickly and forcefully dismissed the idea.

Well, they would, since they have not only their livelihoods but their entire egos invested in the notion that the system that has been in place since they can remember will always be there. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Old media is imploding. Not even the movies have a hold over us anymore.

————-

*** Once upon a time (back in 1994, in Rolling Stone magazine), Ryder was lecturing other young stars about how grateful they should be for their success:

“For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress,” Ryder says. “I felt like it was a shallow occupation. I’d go to see a band with friends from school, and people would be watching every move I made. They’ be judging me: ‘Look at her shoes! I bet those cost $400!’ That affected me. I grew up with no money.” …

Ryder often beats me to the next question.

“Why am I so defensive? I’m defensive because it offends me so much when… OK, I don’t want to fuck this up… I knew a lot of young actors who live in these dumps. They have their books scattered, and their mattress is on the floor - and they’re millionaires. That’s fine. That’s their way of living. But the reason they’re doing it is that they’re ashamed. And I’ve talked to them about it. You just want to say, ‘Don’t live this way to show people that you’re real and you’re deep.’ It offends me, because I know what it’s like to be in poverty, and it’s not fun, and it’s not romantic, and it’s not cool.”

Last year, Ryder wrote in a diary: “I feel like it’s OK to be who I am. It’s OK to be a fucking movie star. It’s OK to live in a nice house.”

I can’t help but note that the young actor she was dissing, Ethan Hawke, has gone on to enjoy career success in many different branches of the arts, while Winona Ryder, who had so much promise, has faded from view.

As the celebrity commodification of Barack Obama continues apace, Matthew Yglesias, for one, is made increasingly uncomfortable.

He objects, mutedly, to the shameless self-promotion of celebrities who want a piece of Obama’s action:

I think it’s nice that a certain number of rich celebrities like progressive causes in the United States and certainly I encourage them to both use their richness to provide direct financial support to such causes … But to what extent do they really need to be putting themselves forward as the public face of a political candidacy?

Yglesias doesn’t say it outright, but he seems worried that the”celebrification of progressive politics” diminishes the importance of politics (and, by extension, the policies that politicians are supposed to deliver for us citizens).

Perhaps he’s right—particularly when it comes to this candidate, who  claims that he’s the “real deal,” someone who didn’t “cash in” but chose instead to work as a community organizer. The Oprah, Hollywood, and Camelot  imprimatur, and now the Mac vote, seem to take something away from the “authenticity” of such a candidate, no? These are conflicting image messages, aren’t they?

Yglesias’s commenters, however, see no problem with the different kinds of pitches for Obama:

This is just basic brand building. Target a demographic and associate your brand with people/places/things that the targeted group admires. It’s a bit naive to expect campaigns not to engage in this kind of thing when it’s to their advantage.

Posted by Chris | February 4, 2008 8:42 AM

I’m with Yglesias.

An embrace of the culture of cool is not a good sign for the Obama campaign if it is serious about putting its candidate in the White House.  I think the Obama campaign has fallen in love with “free media”—and itself—to its detriment.

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

Heath Ledger is dead, apparently of a drug overdose:

Heath Ledger, an Oscar nominated actor for the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, has died in his apartment, police officials said today.

Police said a housekeeper found Ledger’s body lying on his bed in an apartment at 421 Broome St. in SoHo at 3:35 p.m. surrounded by pills.

According to police, Ledger had scheduled a massage for that time, and the housekeeper had gone to wake him up for his appointment.

Ledger was 28 years old.

The dirt on Tom Cruise via Andrew Morton’s biography, here:

not gay (though the “evidence” is flimsy)

homophobic (ditto above)

a freak of Scientology

Whatever. I just pass on the reports. You decide.

Oh yes. I almost forgot:

Nicolas Sarkozy Secretly Weds Singer Carla Bruni

Bonne chance to the lovebirds, whom I’ve written about here and here, noting that his advisers weren’t too worried about the affair. They just wanted Sarkozy to get on with it and marry Carla already so that he could get back to steering the ship of state. Ever the politician—and one with huge ambitions—he took their advice. He’s no slouch, that Sarko.

Sarkozy loses it, or abandons himself to the moment—take your pick. A tabloid tale made in heaven, courtesy of the Daily Mail:

Sarkozy’s fiancee ‘pregnant’ as ex Cecilia delivers blistering attack on couple

Sarkozy is “ridiculous, badly behaved and not fit to be president” Cecilia Sarkozy says in a new book, adding for good measure that the women in his life are just a “bunch of slappers” (or des petasses fardees, as the French would have it).

Even the president’s female political colleagues do not escape her barbed tongue: they are just “boring wallflowers, and now that there is no First Lady, he needs to surround himself with pretty young things dressed in Dior”.

It has taken just a few short weeks for the revenge of Cecilia to begin.

Sarkozy, 52, began dating Bruni, 40, just one month after his divorce from Cecilia following a 12-year marriage and his election last May as France’s new president.

Now it is Carla who stays with the president at the Elysee Palace and has been given a £10,000 ring - embarrassingly similar to one he once bought Cecilia.

Very juicy and totally sensationalistic as told by the Mail.

In the New York Times this past week, Sarkozy himself suggested that he’s being very 21st-century:

Sarkozy Says Press Is Free to Ignore His Personal Life

“I didn’t want to lie,” Mr. Sarkozy said of his romance with Ms. Bruni. “And I am breaking with a deplorable tradition in our political life — that of hypocrisy, that of lies.” …

“Really, truly, and it is very satisfying for me, France is moving forward,” he said, his words tumbling out in incomplete sentences. “What was hidden under a mantle of secrecy for one of my predecessors — whom I will not judge — everyone must live as he sees fit.”

It’s nutty, but I’m gonna have to go with Sarkozy here, because of his real defense, which he said just after “everyone must live as he sees fit”:

“Life is so difficult and so painful.”

Indeed, and he wants to feel good. He’s got the right to do it. However, as the much more sensationalistic but also more informative Daily Mail piece tell us, Sarkozy’s behavior affects not only his popularity at home but also France’s relations abroad:

Aside from any pregnancy, a speedy wedding would also mark the end of headaches for protocol planners in foreign countries Sarkozy plans to visit, though he might still be a bachelor when he goes to Saudi Arabia and India later this month.

Dominique Moisin, of the French Institute of International Relations, szaid: “The sooner they marry, the sooner the presidency’s dignity will be restored. …
Sarkozy was disappointed that the Pope declined to receive him with his new girlfriend. Under Vatican protocol it was deemed “inappropriate” for a head of state to meet the pontiff on an official visit, accompanied by a girlfriend.

Meanwhile, the Indian government, which is receiving Sarkozy as a guest of honour at the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 24, has released a half-hearted statement, saying: “It is for the French to decide whether Miss Bruni should be treated as First Lady or not”.

It will be fascinating to see what happens when Sarkozy arrives in Britain for the state visit in March. Since the Entente Cordiale - the end of centuries of war between Britain and France - was signed in 1904 every French leader on a state visit has been accompanied by a First Lady.

So, yeah. He’s got a right to personal happiness, but we’ll see if he manages to hold on to the respect that a politician with his global ambitions needs in order to effect his agenda.

Or perhaps that time has passed into oblivion.

We do live in interesting times, don’t we?

The New York Times wonders if candidates are giving us too much information. Then the paper lets a surrogate act as its mouthpiece:

“I’m all for democratizing dialogue, but this is just much too much information,” Mr. Begala said. “It’s appalling, really.”

Hmmm. Appalling? I wouldn’t go that far. I see all public figures—from politicians to CEOs to movie stars to sports sensations to news anchors to talking heads—as self-conscious performers. They’re in front of the camera—of course they’re performers! Plus, no one can create a public profile in today’s world unless s/he’s got good visuals.

Bottom line: they’re not my cuppa, but they’re here to stay, because as long as there are public figures and cameras, there will be performers

Here’s what I had to say back in February:

Gawker reports on a “Firm Potent Leader with Plenty of Stamina”:

The Post ruined all our breakfasts with their cover this morning (seriously: “Judi gushes as Rudi rushes in”?? Ewwwww!!!)

Check out the placement of her hand on his cheek. And her hair, cascading just so. I’m going to throw up.

I also once posted a picture of The Kiss:

And for a while I was obsessed with making fun of the PDAs of the Chief Monkey of Iran:

 

the many loves of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

July 31, 2006

June 2006

update: Gawker is wondering why the dearth of Owen coverage on TMZ. Good Question! Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus is wondering why all the focus is on Kate’s tragedy. ‘Cause, Mickey, if she’s all sad about it, that makes her a good person rather than the slut she appeared to be in the rumors that were published about her at the time of Owen’s little accident.

Last week, amid the instantaneous global release of the most intimate details surrounding the presumed suicide attempt of the actor Owen Wilson, I wondered what had happened to Hollywood that there wasn’t even one layer of PR protection around this highly bankable star when the ravenous celebrity press got hold of the details.

Today, it looks like—finally—somebody is at home, even if what follows sounds like a fairy tale called “Owen Wilson’s Wonderful Recovery”:

Wes Anderson: Owen Wilson “Doing Very Well”

Actor Owen Wilson is in surprisingly good spirits after attempting to commit suicide on August 26, according to his friend, director Wes Anderson.

“Obviously he has been through a lot this week,” said Anderson, who directed the actor in his latest film The Darjeeling Limited.

“I can tell you he has been doing very well, he has been making us laugh.”

Let us agree from the outset that in the real world where we all live, Owen Wilson cannot possibly be doing “very well.” He was abusing various drugs and alcohol and was reportedly despondent or enraged shortly before he attempted to take his life a week or so ago. Only on another planet—let’s call it Bizarro Hollywood World—could this man be doing “very well.” He is human, after all. Right?

Wrong! He’s a star. Of course he’s doing well! In Bizarro Hollywood World, suicides get better overnight, with the help of their loving friends, family, and business partners.

So this news of Owen Wilson’s fabulous recovery is what I often refer to as PRopaganda ^TM: “dramatic realities” or “dramatic narratives” spun (by PR meisters) from a few legitimate details of a given celebrity’s autobiography and then embroidered with fan-pleasing details. The story-weavers get a peg to hang a plausible tale on (in Wilson’s case, he’s a comic actor, so when he’s being normal and not suicidal, we would expect him to be making people laugh) and run with it, till those of us who want to believe it, ’cause we loooove Owen, actually believe it.

[There's an entire academic and non-academic literature about this stuff, if you're interested. Start with Joshua Gamson's Claims to Fame---a fascinating read. But read it at your own risk: You will never love a celebrity in quite the same way again after you finish it, 'cause you'll know that you've been deliberately seduced. You've been had.]

Helpfully, in today’s WaPo, Shankar Vedantam tells us all about the stubborn human propensity to believe “myths” over reality:

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the most fascinating bit:

[T]he mind’s bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

Have favorite myths (e.g., good triumphs over evil)? Not likely to invest the time and effort need to grasp the facts? That would describe most of us, except when the subject matter is our passionate interest and/or hobby. We’re too busy to pay minute attention. Which is what gives marketers of all stripes—not to mention potential propagandists—their opening:

Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

Yes indeed. They most certainly can.This is where clever public relations comes in—in order to fight a damaged reputation, you’ve got to try to avoid repeating the claims made against you. Vedantam explains the paradox:

“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.

So how to you refute a false claim or reclaim a damaged reputation?

[R]ather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks” — and not mention Hussein at all.

Edward Bernays, the “father of PR”, recommended this tactic. Don’t refute. Fight PR with more PR. This stuff is all around us—in every corner of public life—all the time. Observe, and you’ll see.

By the way, the New York Post has a ways to go to catch up with the rosy picture quoted above about Wilson’s recovery. According to the Post, Wilson is “on the mend.” But he looks like shit.

Now, that’s more like it—slow and easy. Extend the life of the story, give it more room for endless ups and downs (for the next ten years, if Wilson is really unlucky).

The Post, of course, is the undisputed master of PRopaganda ^TM.

Class dismissed.

Every society has its status symbols. In HezbollahLand, anyone associated with martyrdom is in like Flynn:

The mother [whose son was killed in a 1988 Hezbollah operation] explained that she now has a special status among the people who now show her more respect. She is also looked after by the party and is frequently invited to visit religious sites in Syria or Iran. She repeatedly says that “a female Hezbollah official” frequently takes her by the hand when she attends a function and lets her sit-in the front row. She added, “Do not believe that the mother of a martyr is unhappy. She may cry sometimes but she is happy.” The father then turns to me and says, “Do not forget that we gain a lot of support. The Martyr’s Institution covers all our medical, housing, and school expenses.”

Bribery, corruption, intimidation, preying on the weak and needy, exploiting the religious beliefs of simple people, feeding on their anxieties and fears—that is how “charitable” organizations like Hezbollah operate: they’re mini-totalitarian societies. You give what you have—your sons’ lives—to the cause. In return, the party takes care of you and your entire clan for life.

Here he comes to save the day. (Single-handedly!) Mighty Anderson is on the way:

No two ways about it, the Fourth Estate is on life-support — and the public is eager to pull the plug. Once regarded as the noblest of professions, journalism has toppled from the heights of David Halberstam to the muck of Judith Miller.

Still, there’s one decidedly silver lining in this clouded sky — Anderson Cooper, the prematurely gray, ultra-soigné Anderson Cooper, whose award-winning coverage of everything from Bosnia to Katrina has been heralded as creating a new genre of journalist: the “emo reporter.” Capable not only of dealing with disasters both natural (New Orleans) and man-made (Somalia), but doing so with something resembling identifiable human empathy, this feisty yet elegant man-about-the-globe has quickly become the sine qua non of reportorial style. And what complements a celebrated style better than a celebrity scent?

Hey, wait. AC wouldn’t really do that, would he?

Initially Cooper turned him down,

Whew. That’s better. It must be all that good breeding I mentioned a while back. Hold on, though. “Initially” he turned it down? Then what happened?

…  but Mom (that’s Gloria Vanderbilt to you) thinks it’s a swell idea. And being the Marie Curie of celebrity product placement, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. So Cooper is reportedly going to give it some thought.

And why the hell not? It’s not as if anyone respects TV “news” personalities anymore anyway.

Indulging in my Mickey Kaus fix this morning, I was challenged to click a link.

Booker Prize: Ed Rollins and Arianna Huffington, together again! … [For some of why this is a potentially tense pairing, click here] … 2:01 A.M.

At that second link, I was pleased to find a juicy but very inside-the-Beltway blog post by Richard Bradley at HuffPo on the way-way-back backstory of Arianna Huffington’s apparent grudge against Tim Russert. I’m not very interested in that, but I was delighted to find a link to this, from 1996.

I forgot that Richard Bradley was at one time known as Richard Blow and that he was an editor at George. You can read all about the controversy surrounding his book American Son (about JFK Jr.) here.

One Amazon reviewer summarizes it [e.a.]:

This book is worth a read for those who just can’t get enough of the Kennedys, or about how “George” tried to make politics palatable to a mainstream audience by injecting celebrities into the editorial mix.

I wonder what JFK Jr. would make of this brave new media world. So much has changed. It’s hard to fathom that it’s only been 8 years since he died.

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

——–

In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )

Check this:

Jolie, Pitt buy Italian luxury yacht

The passenger cabin will include two 300-square-meter (3,200-square-foot) apartments, plus two guest suites of 150 square meters (1,600 square feet) each.

Other features include a swimming pool, a heliport, speedboats and a small submarine that will allow guests to explore the sea up to a depth of 300 meters (980 feet).

I can see that Angie doesn’t like to be tied down, and I don’t blame her—I’m a little bit like that, too. The thing is, though, the Jolie-Pitts will have to buy a massive security force to patrol their luxury liner, ’cause there’s a lot of piracy in the areas where the family likes to travel. Plus: you never know where Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Hezbollah might strike next.

Yes, it exists. (Charles Paul Freund used to write about it for Reason. I miss reading him.) Not only that, but it’s really popular in the Middle East. And tonight there was a very emotional win on the show Star Academy (an American Idol knockoff, formerly called SuperStar).

For some in battered Baghdad, it’s a reason to celebrate. Local favorite Shadha Hassoun has taken first prize in the Arab version of “American Idol.”

Dubbed the “Daughter of Mesopotamia” by fans, the young woman wrapped herself with the white, red and black flag of Iraq and broke into tears as fans swarmed the stage. The show is broadcast live throughout the Middle East from Beirut.

Iraqis have been glued to their TVs each Friday since December, eagerly monitoring her progress in the “Star Academy” contest.

Here’s what one observer wrote a year ago:

We’ll know the region is a truly different place when we see an Iraqi Idol being crowned, but in the meantime the success of SuperStar, the Arab world’s answer to American Idol on Lebanese satellite channel Future TV, is a pulsating arrow pointing in the right direction.

For where a silly, shallow, modern singing contest can thrive, with aspirants seeking so temporal and decadent a thing as stardom and an audience of over 30 million going nuts over the process, there is hope against the deadening strictures of political and dogmatic religious oppression. It is also extremely significant that the results on the show are in the voting hands of the viewers, and the influence of this normative expression of unfettered democracy on the greater culture should not be underestimated.

All that is true, but unfortunately the region isn’t a different place even though an Iraqi Idol was crowned tonight. But CNN has been covering the story:

Iraqis are uniting to vote for Shada Hassoon, pictured here on the Web site of “Star Academy.”

There are two amazing things about this: 1) Hassoun is secular, and is being celebrated as a pop star: note her uncovered head; and 2) despite (or because of?) this, Iraqis have lost (momentarily at least) their sectarian and confessional fervor:

“You deserve it, you are the star,” one fan wrote to Hassoon in a comment on the Al-Arabiya network’s Web site.

“I wish upon all Iraqis abroad and inside Iraq to vote for Shada, and I wish that all of them unite, and I would like to say one word to the Arabs and the entire world that Iraqis are brethren no matter what sect or confession they belong to,” the writer added.

Hassoon has mixed national heritage. She was born in Morocco to an Iraqi father and a Moroccan mother.

But she is regarded as an Iraqi because nationality is based on her father’s country.

She identifies herself as an Iraqi national and says her dream since childhood has been “to represent my country, Iraq, in arts.”

“We voted for Shada without asking if she were a Shiite or a Sunni,” Hicham Mahmoud Alaazami said on the Al-Arabiya Web site. “We voted for her just because she is an Iraqi.”

One small step for mankind.

How many tennis fans does it take for the bidding to get absurd for the as-yet-unwritten memoir of Andre Agassi?

I dunno how many threw their hats into the ring, but Knopf’s Sonny Mehta won the final face-off. His opponent was HarperCollins’s David Hirshey.

I like tennis as much as any “tennis orphan” can love the game—that is to say, I hated it when my father tried to get me to take up his passion, but I will never forget Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980 or McEnroe vs. Connors at the U.S. Open late that same summer. I appreciate Agassi’s stick-to-it-iveness, but I will always be a McEnroe fan, because his game had an unequaled inherent drama (driven by his unpredictable emotions—and I don’t mean the “temper tantrums”; I mean the pre-volcanic rumbles deep beneath the surface) and because of his masterful touch.

That said … whoever wrote the proposal for the Agassi book is aiming to give Bono a run for his money in the Most Honorable Celebrity in the World Sweepstakes, ’cause you’re there at the creation of a new myth—excuse me: I mean, narrative—about Andre Agassi.

[[See Joshua Gamson's book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I'm coming from with my celebrity obsession. It's the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

Back to that Agassi image-in-the-making:

“I recently had the privilege of meeting with top executives and editors from eight publishing houses,” Agassi said in a statement released Wednesday by Knopf. “Everyone was very impressive, but in the end, I felt the strongest connection with (Knopf head) Sonny Mehta and his colleagues at Knopf.”

“Andre Agassi is one of the world’s most popular and admired figures,” Mehta said in a statement. “He has lived an extraordinary life, and he has a great story to tell — an inspiring story of determination, competition, and what it takes to become one of the greatest athletes of our time. Additionally, he is someone who has chosen to use his success as an instrument for change in the world.”

Galley Cat’s Ron Hogan got there way before me, but: Advantage, Agassi.

This is rich.

Jossip—Jossip!—disapproves of the New York Times doing gossip. Caryn James’s dissection of Angelina Jolie’s career was

a mediocre attempt at camouflaging the Times’ eagerness to capitalize on the brewing uptick in all things celebrity while holding its head high in the same pages that run Frank Rich’s columns.

Methinks the gossips at Jossip are feeling the heat. ‘Cause James (she’s from the NYT, dontcha know) gets access and gives good dish.

Gawker is more in the spirit of things:

Caryn James Is SO On Team Aniston

I have been a fan of Anderson Cooper, because I think his heart is in the right place. Now, not so much.

I can see why CNN would want to be in the business of competing against its much more popular rival, Fox. But whoever wrote Cooper’s script the other night isn’t doing him or CNN any favors. TVNewser reports:

Fox doesn’t react to Klein or defend its broadcasts. Instead, it responds to Anderson Cooper’s comment about “the difference between talking about news and reporting it,”  

Is it really good journalism, as Cooper suggests it is, for one network to jump to the defense of one potential presidential candidate out of a field of thousands?

Will CNN regularly be coming to the defense of McCain, Romney, Clinton, Vilsack, Richardson, and all the others? No, I didn’t think so.

The idea that CNN is somehow morally superior to Fox may play well in your newsroom and the editorial offices, but the audience thinks differently, as TVNewser reports here.

Fox News Channel delivered 4.5 million viewers during President Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Between 9 and 10:03pm, FNC averaged 4,560,000 total viewers, including 1,411,000 in the 25-54 demo.

That’s almost twice as many as CNN, which averaged 2,327,000 viewers with 735,000 in the demo. MSNBC averaged 1,537,000 viewers with 679,000 in the demo (quite close to CNN)…

So, yes, A.C. You had this one coming:

FNC spokesman Irena Briganti calls it “yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news.”

Unless you think that CNN is morally superior to Fox … in which case we should have a little talk.

Back in April, after the New York Times ditched its BoldFace column in the wake of the Ron Burkle non-scandal, I joked “NYT Ditches Gossip Column, Goes Tabloid.”

At least I thought I was joking. Today, however, I note that gossip has gone mainstream: in today’s Times, Caryn James devotes an entire article to analyzing the ups and downs of movie star Angelina Jolie’s popularity during the past few months.

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust.

There are sure to be squeals of distress from media critics, who will cluck about how the Times has clearly lost its way. What has gotten into them? Since when do Times readers care about movie star gossip?

Let me pre-empt them. The gossip is a) fun and b) instructive in a world where the manufacture of images—be they of movie stars or of political stars—is important to understand. Caryn James says this outright [emphasis mine]:

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.)

At least that’s how I’d answer the critics if I had to defend James’s piece. Indeed, I’d write a lot more in general about the celebrity-manufacturing aspect of politics and of all public life. Celebrities have enormous power to grab and hold the attention of the public, and thus to persuade the public; it is only fair that they—the real people behind the public images, that is—be subject to scrutiny.

This applies, of course, to media stars such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hassan Nasrallah much more than it does to, say, the Jolie-Pitts. But the star-making machinery behind both kinds of celebrities operates on the same principles. You can read all about the celebrity-making machinery in sociologist Joshua Gamson’s Claims to Fame and also in Rein et al’s High Visibility.

Or you can read Caryn James and extrapolate a bit. But there’s a lot more to this. As the mood strikes, I’ll write about it.

Gawker uses the “give ‘em enough rope” tactic to excellent advantage against Rosie O’Donnell today in a really, really mean item.

This is the punchline:

To read the setup, click here.

It was enough to make me feel almost sorry for Rosie for about two seconds.

It must have floated up from the O’Donnell-Trump-Walters cesspool. Rachel Sklar sums up at Eat the Press:

 

from bestweekever.tv

Love Note From The Donald, Kiss-Off From Baba Wawa: “That Poor, Pathetic Man”

Yesterday’s story in the New York Post [which is the backstory you need to fully appreciate how---and why---Walters ended up "siding" with Rosie---was delicious, though:

The fight started around 8:30 a.m. when Walters, back from a two-week vacation, walked into the hair and makeup room at ABC studios and tried to hug O'Donnell, whom she hired onto the popular show.

According to spies, O'Donnell recoiled from Walters' touch and yelled, "You kept me in the newspapers this whole time!"

Both "View" producer Bill Geddie and Walters tried to calm O'Donnell. Walters told her, "I did everything I could to squash the story" - prompting Rosie to scream, "You didn't call me for 10 goddamn days, and you didn't tell me what you were going to say on television!"  ...

After O'Donnell's outburst at Walters yesterday, Geddie jumped in and told her, "You've crossed the line." O'Donnell retorted, "Cameras are now outside of my house where my wife and kids are." She turned to Walters and said, "You went all around this and never called [Trump] a liar. You never said, ‘Donald is lying.’ You never called him a liar.”

When Walters tried to defend herself, O’Donnell erupted, “Are you looking me in the face and denying you didn’t tell him you didn’t say this? You’re a [bleeping] liar.”

Cindi Berger, a rep for both Walters and O’Donnell said, “Whatever happened in the hair and makeup room was hardly a squabble. It’s business as usual, everyone has moved on.”

For those of you who confuse the pursuit, consolidation, and maintenance of fame with humanitarianism, here’s how it goes:

At the moment, Angelina Jolie is courting controversy in order to keep herself in the spotlight 

Despite her comments in a French magazine, Angelina Jolie wasn’t trying to criticize Madonna for adopting a child from Malawi, she says.

“The article included many falsehoods,” Jolie said in a statement on Monday. “I said many positive things that were omitted. I feel we must focus on the present and I encourage everyone to be supportive so that every child can adjust nicely to their new home.”

while the father of her biological child (and her two camera-ready Benetton-ad-style children), who is now a major power player in Hollywood,

works his ass off in order to—please, God—finally win an award:

We all know that Dubya failed his world-knowledge tests in the run-up to his presidency. (Obviously, his Yale non-studying habit stayed with him well into adulthood.)

Also, the other day, Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson, filling in on the NYT’s op-ed page, recounted the story of how he was called on to help educate another president:

In the summer of 1975, I was asked by Robert Goldman, President Ford’s in-house intellectual, to participate in a discussion on ethnicity at the White House, one of a series put on for the edification of the president.

America was then going through the so-called ethnic revival. Talk about the recovery of threatened ethnic heritage was everywhere, the beginnings of what later evolved into the multicultural and identity movement. Politicians had been quick to grasp the movement’s potential, and it would become a controversial issue in the subsequent presidential election.

I gathered from our conversation that the unusual nature of Ford’s ascent to the presidency had prevented the normal electoral process of learning that transformed local politicians into potential statesmen, and that the discussions were a crash course substitute.

Okay, we’ve established, more or less, that politicians don’t need to do all that boring reading when they can get the world’s biggest brains to spoon-feed them what they need to know.

But did you know that Brangelina put themselves through the same paces?

On Dec. 9, several of Columbia University’s top climate scientists gathered at their colleague Jeffrey Sachs’ townhouse on West 85th Street to help a new student catch up on the latest research on climate change. Of course, no mere undergraduate could command four hours of the professors’ attention on this unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon. Don’t be ridiculous. No, this session was for Professor Sachs’ good pal, Brad Pitt, who was looking to expand his philanthropic profile beyond adopting Third World children with Angelina Jolie, another Sachs protégé.

According to Paul Wachter, of the New York Observer, this is a good thing, because empty-headed celebrities are otherwise, you know, empty-headed. And having had a one-on-one with a real honest-to-goodness intellectual might rub off on Pitt. Next time he’s asked about climate change,

he might have something truly meaningful to say.

Un-huh.

On the other hand, he probably will not make a fool of himself the way Tom Cruise did.

Which is probably more to the point…

Is it a coincidence that Angelina “Our Lady of Namibia” Jolie started a catfight with Madonna on the eve of the unveiling of this portrait?

This photo provided by Chelsea Galleria shows a painting “Blessed Art Thou,” by North Carolina artist Kate Kretz that features actress Angelina Jolie and her three children hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart. (AP/Chelsea Galleria, Kate Kretz)

 

I report. You decide.

Our Lady of Namibia is morally superior to Madonna.

Angelina Jolie has attacked Madonna for adopting a child ‘illegally’.

She said the singer should never have visited an impoverished African country with the sole intention of choosing an infant. …

‘Madonna knew the situation in Malawi, where he was born,’ said Miss Jolie, who has adopted two Third World youngsters of her own.

‘It’s a country where there is no real legal framework for adoption. …

Miss Jolie, 31, also made clear she was shocked by Madonna’s decision to take David from the country where his father still lives. …

Despite her own harsh words, Miss Jolie said she still felt sorry for Madonna, 48, who has been harshly criticised since taking David back to London to live with her husband Guy Ritchie and her own children, Lourdes and Rocco.

Asked if the saga would put her off adopting more children of her own, Miss Jolie said: ‘I have been horrified by the attacks she’s been subjected to. All that should count is the happiness of her little David.’

Angelina Jolie is the fakest of Hollywood narcissist fakers: a heat-seeking missile of celebrity, a fabrication of a human being. She’s smart and ambitious. She wanted more than anything to be a movie star, and became one (she’s a great actress), just like that. That was too easy and she got bored, so she decided she wanted to do something bigger—(like finish high school, go to college, go into one of the helping professions, perhaps? —ed.). She decided she would solve humanity’s problems by traipsing around looking lovely in all the godforsaken corners of the world. And people lap it up. Well…except for the Superficial:

Angelina Jolie went on Good Morning America yesterday and said she and Brad Pitt want more children and would likely adopt to balance their “mixed-race family.” She says:

“I want Mad (Maddox) to know that as our family grew and we all came together, we didn’t just start having children, biological children. Yes, we have Shiloh and it’s been a wonderful experience, but we want to find another brother or sister in the world for our family. I’m on the pill. You know, now the questions are more when you have a mixed-race family, do you balance the races so there’s another African person in the house for Z? So there’s another Asian person in the house for Mad? Shiloh has Brad and I she can look at. What’s best for the children as they grow? … We don’t just want to have different children from different countries. That’s not the point.”

Five years from now Angelina is gonna run out of races to adopt and start turning to leprechauns and Oompa-Loompas. They’re like Pokemon to her. Gotta catch ‘em all!

The falsely labeled former “queen of nice” is in hot water.

Rosie O’Donnell says she’s sorry for mocking spoken Chinese on “The View,” but an association that represents journalists from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, including Chinese American, says it wasn’t enough.

Will she go? Will she stay?

Who cares?

Steven Soderbergh is accused by three out of three reviewers I read of neglecting his audience in his new film The Good German, which he shot deliberately in a style reminiscent of the 1940s.Here’s Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York:

If Soderbergh is condemning wasteful current productions, he should be reminded that rear projection went out for good reason. And if he’s implying that Hollywood’s wartime chestnuts are fake, he should be corrected. At least those films never forgot who was most important: the audience.

Here’s J. Hoberman in The Village Voice:

Soderbergh isn’t the first to try this particular stunt—Lars von Trier played a similar game in his underappreciated Zentropa, and The Good German is haunted by The Third Man the way Carol Reed’s 1949 classic was haunted by Orson Welles. But neither of those were Hollywood movies and neither one had the same concern with resurrecting something that may never have existed; such voluptuous disillusionment regarding U.S. motives wouldn’t have had a place in a 1946 American movie. …

But if Casablanca was the acme of wartime romanticism, The Good German is its self-conscious antithesis. Soderbergh wants to show the birth of postwar moral relativism. It’s hard to believe in anything—his characters most of all.

Much more damningly, Manohla Dargis calls Soderbergh on the carpet for his cynical disregard of the audience and the degree of his detachment. She also calls a spade a spade in the New York Times [emphasis added]:

In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. … The most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like “Casablanca” aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that of the director alone. …

Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. …

The extent of that disengagement is most evident in the new film’s wildly feel-bad denouement, in which the paradoxically good German of Mr. Kanon’s title, the one who looked away from atrocities, is transformed into a duplicitous Jew. The most charitable explanation for this offensive, historically spurious character is that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Attanasio, in trying to cram the novel’s nearly 500 pages into a 105-minute film, decided to conflate two different clichés into one.

Rather unfortunately, and perhaps with an eye to the present, they end up suggesting that in wartime everyone’s hands can become slicked with blood, even a Jew in Nazi Germany. Somewhere, Jack and Harry Warner, who stopped doing business with Nazi Germany before any other studio in Hollywood, are spinning. They aren’t the only ones.

So Mr. Indie went Hollywood only to become morally bankrupt. How very encouraging.

All grown-up and making lots of sense about his sure-to-be-controversial new movie, Blood Diamond:

The movie has come under fire from the diamond industry, which insists the issue of conflict diamonds took place in the 1990s and has been almost completely eradicated. Did the gemstone industry contact you directly?

I’ve gotten letters, and I didn’t respond to any of them. There’s been a huge PR push to let people get a better understanding that this stuff has dramatically decreased. But certainly if you talk to Global Witness or Amnesty International they’d tell you there are still major problems, especially on the Ivory Coast. They want to end conflict diamonds for good. I don’t want to go out there and project myself as an expert on the issue. I’m not an expert, and this is not what I do full time. I’m an actor who’s playing a part. If the movie does anything, it will bring more awareness to the issue and people will be asking more questions, and the industry is going to have to have viable answers.

Hear, hear.

There’s a candid interview with Mel Gibson in Entertainment Weekly, where he’s the cover-boy for his hideously violent new movie, Apocalypto (the trailer was quite enough for me, thank you).

How is your relationship with Hollywood these days? Do you feel you’ve done enough apologizing for your anti-Semitic remarks?

Those were the ravings of an inebriated, angry person. I don’t know. I think publicly I have done enough. The process continues. The people I know in this town come up to me and say, ”What the f— is wrong with you?” I go, ”Sorry.” They get it. It’s not a big thing. It’s like, ”Okay, so when are we going to work together again?” The people who don’t know me, if I’ve offended them, I’m sorry.

People won’t really refuse to work with you?
No, people aren’t like that. Those are just headlines: Mel Ostracized by Hollywood! Hollywood is what you make it. There is no great pooh-bah up there saying, ”Go! You are condemned!”

What about Disney? Was there any discussion of pushing back the release date of Apocalypto because of the scandal?
I don’t know. They didn’t tell me if they discussed it. I called [president of production] Oren Aviv and he was business