R.I.P. Dennis Hopper: A symbol of a generation

The New York Times said in a profile of Hopper last month:

DENNIS HOPPER — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he has played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he has made it through the good, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring into a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He has been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next big thing, the last man standing.

Dennis Hopper, the ultimate misfit, has died of cancer at age 74. Is there anyone that stayed in the public eye longer that embodies the best spirit and the worst excesses of the second half of the 20th century more than Hopper? From James Dean to 'Easy Rider' to his reclusive, written-off days to the drug problems to the constant redemption and reinvention, he seemed to set the tempo for a generation of Americans he wasn't even a part of, the Baby Boomers.

Or maybe, since he was born in 1936, he is the perfect symbol of the Lost Generation of Americans, too young for service in WWII, too old to be a Boomer, the generation that looked to James Dean's 'Rebel Without a Cause' as a rallying cry for the youth of post-war America. Outside the showers of glory history bestows on "The Greatest Generation," and preceding the ultimately insufferable Boomers' sense of entitlement and ego (yes, I'm being general), the Lost Generation had to move the country along in between very opposite towers of attitude and self-righteousness. They fought the rigidity of post-war suburban groupthink and Cold War paranoia. They laid the template for '60s-era rebellion that invariably turned commercial and commodified. It's like they fell in between the cracks of American history's golden boys, but did just as much as either The Greatest Generation or The Boomers ever did, if not more, to advance our culture and make sense of an era -- beginning in 1945 and ending whenever you'd like -- America may never emulate.

Where is the Dennis Hopper of today? Who is it? Who embodies America in 2010?

Time Life's Nazi-propaganda lampoon: Advertising at its most exploitive, fearmongering best

I don't know if dark Nazi humor was their intention, but the creators of the ad for Time Life's "The Nazi's [sic]: A Warning from History" were either trying to lampoon and/or vamp Third Reich-style propaganda or they know the animalistic perversions of Americans (WWII buffs or not) all too well.

I caught the ad on Current TV (Al Gore's station, ironically). The beginning is a bit disturbing, but so blatant, it's hard not to laugh. I'm not trying to diminish the atrocities of the Nazis, but this is quite the tone. As images of smiling Germans, set to the soft voices of singing children, appear on the screen, the baritone voiceover booms:

They laughed, sang, played ...

Then in an instant, that voice goes demonic, and gunshots ring out.

... they murdered millions! It was history's most horrible nightmare. This is what evil looks like up close.

The voiceover now bellows as some relatively graphic footage of hangings, firing squads and syncopated saluting Germans plays. It claims to be the first documentary set "from inside the Reich." They apparently unearthed "unnerving" German archive footage. $59.95! Call now and get $10 off! Call this minute, no shipping and handling! (Zoom footage to feature the whites of the Germans' eyes) "Watch as everyday people turn into killers overnight!" The BBC says, "It's bursting with new facts."

"If you believe we can learn from the past, this is one collection you must own!" fires the voiceover. I wonder what the aim is there. I hope we have learned from that era, but are they alluding to a present danger? I may be looking into this too much, but who is the target audience? Older Americans, I'd say. History buffs, yes, but this inflammatory style of ad strikes at a paranoid and delusional mindset that very much exists. Far too many people toss around the Hitler label, and I think this ad isn't afraid to ride that conspiratorial fear.

They're out there. This is no surprise.

I can't embed, but here's the link for the ad. (Anytime I can plug SHOPTV: Canada, I do so.)

There's even a German spoof of a Time Life documentary on Nazi leaders. I wish I could read German.


Time Life Hitler - MyVideo

The brilliance (and sadness) of The Office

I just caught The Office's "Scranton Rap" from a few seasons ago on TV. Classic. While this rap is The Office at its best, the episode (in which employees, including Jim, of Dunder-Mifflin's Stamford branch come to work in Scranton) exhibits the repressed-memory sadness of the ever desperate Michael Scott. As buffoonish as he is, there's a deep, clinical case smoldering.

The Office - Lazy Scranton | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

The Fox News empire

It's sad when it's left to comedians to discern fact from fiction amid the money-hungry, ethically-devoid wasteland that is the mainstream media (especially cable news) in America. The New York Times documents The Daily Show's hounding of Fox News, the propagandist noise machine for the Right masquerading as a news channel.

In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”

In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”

Fox is alternate-reality news and a living, breathing example of the merging of a party with a news outlet. What does it say when they are the number-one rated news channel in America?

The Great Karl Rove-Chelsea Handler Rivalry

Everyone's favorite talking pile of mashed potatoes Karl Rove made it into today's New York Times profile of comedienne Chelsea Handler:

Signing copies of her book for about 300 fans who had waited around after her first show in Seattle, she muses on the fact that “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang” had come out the same week as Karl Rove’s memoir. And that it was her R-rated book — topics include third-grade masturbation and black Cabbage Patch Kids — and not one from the former Bush adviser that hit No. 1.

“I picture Karl Rove sitting there in his underwear, staring at that list,” Ms. Handler says. “I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Who the hell is Chelsea Handler?’ ”

But Karl Rove aside, I didn't know much about Handler -- other than that she had written a book or two and had a show on E!, or some such -- until I read some recent reviews of her show in Slate and Salon. The Slate piece (unflatteringly titled The drunken-slattern shtick of Chelsea Handler) described her as thus:

Here's the vibe: Imagine Handler hungoverish at the 10-items-or-less counter at Safeway, swinging her basket of goods—a home pregnancy test, a Boston cream pie, a handle of designer booze—up to the conveyor belt. She snatches a glossy tabloid from the rack for a greedy eyeful of hot-pink messes. Sniping aloud at the tackiness within with vulgarity in kind, she rolls her eyes so hard that she gags as she slaps enough magazines on the conveyor belt so that now she's buying 12 items. She swipes her platinum card with a contemptuous gesture.

[...]

Those who would yawn at her act as a played-out "trangressive" role-playing might turn to the second page of Handler's current best-seller, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, with its compound sentence on the author's preadolescent addiction to her intimate anatomy: "I wasn't prepared for what kind of ride this little magic muffin was going to take me on, but I reminded myself that we never choose who we fall in love with, and I had no choice when my little hot pocket in a pita took over my life for the good part of the third and fourth grades." While any healthy man will squirm in contemplating this image, the more discerning of them will acknowledge the craft in the way the sentence pivots from puerile snack-time metaphor-making to a lilting bittersweet statement and back again.

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams was a little more assured of Handler's shortcomings in her critique, titled The unfunny business of Chelsea Handler:

I speak on behalf of slutty, Belvedere-imbibing women from New Jersey when I say: I want to like Handler. But every time I hear how outraaageous she is, I wonder what I'm missing. This is a woman who delicately refers to the female anatomy as a "Pikachu" and defecation as "shadoobie," so excuse me if I'm not seeing the transgressiveness. On her talk show, "Chelsea Lately," she never seems like a loose cannon, ready to do something crazy at any moment. Instead, she's as stiff and rote as any other late-night host. She just gets bleeped more often. It also doesn't help her badass rep that she spent four years dating Ted Harbert, who, in addition to being filthy rich and 20 years her senior, is also the president and CEO of Comcast -- which owns "Chelsea Lately." The heart wants what it wants and all that, but therein lies the paradox that is Chelsea Handler: She's built a career on being the crazy chick with a taste for vodka and hookups, but what could be more conventional than a pretty girl dating the boss?

[...]

The sad truth is that, outside of her "I love to drink! Look at my ass!" comfort zone, Handler has remarkably little to say. But, hey, if college taught us anything, it's that a girl can go far on "I love to drink! Look at my ass!" Like, say, the New York Times bestseller list. Hey, Chelsea Handler is pretty and she seems nice enough and, wow, she's daring enough to opine that Jon Gosselin is "disgusting." She'll be around forever and bury us all. In that sense, I suppose, Handler is a groundbreaker. Like Dane Cook or Jeff Dunham of any number of high-profile, low-wit stars, she's proven that a woman in comedy can be just as lame as any man.

I have not seen her outside of a few clips on ads for her show. So it's hard for me to judge. But it sounds like Handler's act, like Rove's, is probably not as novel and everlasting as it seems to be at first glance.

Escape hatch/deep thought for Easter weekend

You get in a bind this Easter weekend, trapped in a corner with dear Aunt Spanish Inquisition, try this discussion topic on her: The holiday versions of ourselves are much less substantial than who we really are.