HUNG UP

by The Stranger

How does a parent, older brother, sister, relative or friend reply to a child’s innocent question “What does THAT mean? ” when they are driving in a car, or walking along a street somewhere these days and they see a signboard promoting the cable TV show HUNG? At which point is a child or youngster expected to know the meaning of that word? And what are we to make of a culture ramming a word like that down our collective throats?

I was channel-surfing a couple of nights ago, and suddenly there was a promo for the new season of Beverly Hills 90210 and here’s what I caught of it: two female high school students talking about a hot guy on the show. And one of the girls says “He’s huge,” and she has both of her hands indicating a width of ten to twelve inches, and the next line she says to her girlfriend is … “BIG AND MEATY!!” This promo was aired on prime time network TV. Again, what does a parent say to a child who asks “What are they talking about, mommy (or )daddy?

What’s happening to us as a country, a culture? One of the things that’s happening is that we are becoming ever more crass, vulgar and cheap by the second. I never imagined I’d be living in a time when things that were once considered too cheap, coarse and in bad taste to be even expressed in mixed company would be exposing themselves to me in my living room during prime time, or there in front of me on signboards as I simply move about the city I live in.

Television is reducing us all collectively to our lowest common denominators. Brainwashing degeneration into us. Think I’m kidding? I’m not. Television is the anti - Christ today. And its addicts walk around like zombies glued to the TV screens that have been reduced to bite size components they carry around in their hands twenty-four hours a day.

When’s the last time you’ve seen a person under the age of thirty-five NOT walking around or driving or doing almost ANYTHING at all when they weren’t glued to a screen in their hand? And the level of addiction appears to grow exponentially with the image these zombies have of themselves as someone attractive, desirable, or upwardly mobile.

Whether or not they actually are any of those things is beside the point - it’s the image they have of themselves that they are, may be, or wannabe perceived that way that glues them to the cell phones in their mitts. To them, using the latest technological gadgets, or to be seen using them are so many proclamations of honor proclaiming “See how hot, how in demand, how connected I am!” But the real question is: CONNECTED TO WHAT??

(Pictyre by http://www.flickr.com/photos/30894058@N03/2934189914/)

The answer to that one is simply how lost and addicted these zombies appear to be to everything that lies outside themselves. How dislocated they appear to be to the well-springs of their own existence - THEIR OWN BEING.

So, Michael Jackson died of an over-dose of drugs. The doctor who gave him the shot that killed him will be made out as the villain. But the doctor who gave him that shot was simply some schmuck who was willing to go just one step farther than the next guy - to make a buck. Michael Jackson put him on his payroll simply because the doc could be persuaded to give the king of pop what he wanted whenever he wanted it. End of story.

Michael Jackson is simply the latest example, as were Elvis and Marilyn Monroe - of the spiritual vacuity that is …. AMERICA - the crassness, vulgarity, and most of all the GREED that has been and is today the life-blood of the land of the free.

A greed that is anything but free. A greed that is costing us as a country, a culture, a land - the innocence of our youth, a constant and unremitting decline in the human values of decency, kindness and good taste that has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment deteriorating everything that once made us - America The Great.

Michael Jackson got everything out of life that he, like our culture at large, lusts after the most. Finally, just before his 51st birthday, Michael Jackson, after years of gorging himself on those values, found himself still alive, if one whose life consists of hiding from life can actually be called to be among the living - simply took matters into his own hands and decided to end it all himself, by having himself shot up with a drug that would end his dis-ease, with himself and his life.

I think the thing that people feel most regarding the death of the so-called and self-proclaimed king of pop - is sadness, not for him per se, but for - ourselves - because it puts us all, on some level, in touch with how separated we‘ve become, as a nation, from all that is real, true - and quite simply, all that is missing in the fabric of how we live our lives in 2009.

Yah, Michael Jackson got everything he ever wanted, all right, except unconditional acceptance from anyone he really cared for, or a genuine intimacy with anyone NOT on his payroll, or even someone who might have offered him real friendship, not for being the king of pop, but for being simply a human being who hungered all his life for the one thing he never received from anyone on a personal, intimate level - unconditional LOVE.

LIPSTICK JUNGLE

by The Stranger
When did it become the norm that male actors on TV began wearing lipstick? I haven’t heard anyone bringing this up. But, surely I can’t be the only person to have noticed this. Haven’t read anything in print either. Is it just me, or is this - or not …. WEIRD?

Recently I purchased one of those new, incredibly clear picture LCD TV‘s. Prior to that, I had an old RCA. It was good enough, but now and again, even watching that TV, I would see an actor on a show, and wonder “Is that guy wearing lipstick? Example: the guy who plays Superman on SMALLVILLE. Well, on my new TV I can see clearly and without a doubt that, this actor DOES, in fact, wear lipstick. And I can see clearly that he’s not alone, not by a long shot.

Guys on TV have begun looking like Michael Jackson in real Life. But WHY? Is it because of Hi Def? Or is it something else? I mean, yeah well sure I’ve always noticed a woman’s lips, as well as her lipstick. That, to me, is part her allure. But what the hell’s going on here? Are we now expected to pay attention to a man’s lips these days? And, if so, who in the Hell came up with that one?

There’s a a new show on the tube called THE MENTALIST. And the actor playing the lead is good. He’s attractive without the hi-lites to his hair, and the lipstick he wears on the show. And I’ve thought that maybe he could be a star. Anyhow, I saw that actor’s face on the cover of a TV magazine that’s out now, and I read some of the article on him in it. And, in the article, he’s quoted talking about another actor’s penis. And, all of a sudden whatever charisma this actor may or may not have, simply went up in smoke. Here he was talking about something that, in my opinion, is simply in bad taste, especially in a family magazine. And, yet its not that dissimilar to a lot of the references to the male organ proliferating TV shows these days. All of a sudden though, that actor seemed to me to be no different than most other performers these days - who are - making spectacles of themselves, whenever they have the chance to expose themselves. What he exposed to me was a lack of class, and taste. And a desire to run with the crowd. I’m not a prude.
But it seems to me that there is one quality these days that no one in show biz no longer knows anything about - MYSTERY.

Movie Stars, some of them, once had that quality. But its gone, baby, gone these days. And the culprit is the boob tube. Most actors these days have about as much charisma and mystery as Regis & Kathy Lee, or Regis and whoever the Barbi Doll is that he’s teamed up with at the present time. OK, I know her name is Kelly Ripa. TV seems to flatten and homogenize performers, chewing them up, and spitting them out. One minute they’re discovered, the next they’re old news; over-exposed. Think Tom Cruise. The only way Mr. Cruise could come up with, to at least offset the jumping up and down on the couch on Oprah, was to completely disappear for awhile. I know he’s due out soon in a new film, but I’m not so sure the public may soon, if ever, forget the weirdness of his TV exposures.

I’d had enough of him before his bad luck run on TV. If I never see him in a film again, I won’t miss him. Tom Cruise never had mystery. But I think people thought he was cute, and I guess his big career on film may have accounted for at least some interest or admiration on the part of the public.

Lastly, there is Clint Eastwood. Opening recently in a new film, Gran Torino. Sometimes I have a kind of admiration for Mr. Eastwood, sometimes I absolutely do NOT. For example, I admired the fact that a couple of years ago with the success of Million Dollar Baby, he escorted his mother to the Academy Awards. I remember feeling “How cool is that?” What a lovely thing to do, and to share with your mother. But then, there are times that I feel Mr. Eastwood is amazingly fond of promoting himself, and in ways that, to me, seem really at odds with the way he seems to want the public to view his image, as a man‘s man.

I remember, in the film Every Which Way But Loose, which I believe he directed in addition to starring in, there was a scene of Clint and his co-star ( the Orangutan, Clyde ) sitting in the front seat of a truck. And I noticed that Mr. Eastwood had his arm positioned in the window of the truck in such a way as to show off his flexed bicep. In other words, he was showing me he wanted the viewer to notice his muscularity onscreen. That he had a hot bod. Or rather, that he thought that he did, and that’s what he wanted the audience to notice. An example of unabated narcissism. Exactly what’s at work again in his image of himself in all the ads for Gran Torino.

No one at Warner Brothers Studio, the studio that bankrolls all of Mr. Eastwood’s films tells Mr. Eastwood what he can or cannot do. He is completely in charge of every aspect of all of his films, including the image of himself that’s used to promote himself in the ads for his films. Having said that, tell me if the image Mr. Eastwood is using to promote in all the ads for that film doesn’t want you to notice how toned and lean and how absolutely buff Mr. Eastwood is? Here’s a dude pushing eighty, who wears a form fitting T-shirt, and angles himself into camera precisely so that you’ll notice how flat his stomach is and what a lean machine he is, and what a hottie this image is supposed to tell us that - he STILL is.

I’m sorry, Mr. Eastwood, but you look more like a geriatric male model than a real person to me in those ads. Also, the rumors floating around that this might be your swan-song performance as an actor are simply manipulation, on your part. You want an Academy Award for your acting, and that’s the way you’re promoting yourself as an actor to get it. By telling the Academy its their last shot to vote for you, their last chance to give you an Oscar for your acting.

Without having to see the film, I can tell from all the promos for the film, you are simply doing Dirty Harry, yet one more time, no matter how you appear to be dressing this project up. Its another example of Clint Eastwood blowing away all the bad guys, by the end of the film. Yah, right its your last role as an actor - until the next script comes across your desk that’s about some old geezer who blows away the next wild bunch of bad guys. And gets to say lines like “I finish things - that’s what I do.” Indeed.

But the truly amazingly disappointing thing to me about you is the fact that, yes, you ARE almost eighty years old, and yet, incredibly - you are still trying to promote yourself as a sex symbol. Instead of giving us a character who looks and behaves like a real person of a rather mature age, a character who’s lived long enough to give an audience something, perhaps a kind of a HUMANITY, or a richness and depth and generosity of spirit we might be inspired by, someone we might be able to identify with - instead, what we get in Gran Torino is yet another of the cartoon macho men/comic book pseudo - superheroes you’ve specialized in your whole career as an actor.

To me, there is something a bit perverse and downright weird about a man your age being so concerned - about his looks, about his own image in the way that you appear to be. And working so damn hard to show us what a truly macho, tough guy you think you are. Yes, I’m feelin’ lucky today, punk - but not quite lucky enough to want to see Gran Torino without knowing how bored I’d be spending a couple of more hours watching YOU onscreen doing what you’ve been doing for far too long now, again in this film, too. But, hey, that’s just me. Oh well, at least, Mr. Eastwood, as far as I can tell from the ads and promos of Gran Torino - you don’t appear to be wearing lipstick.