Tag: media

Edie Sedgwick, slight return

The Los Angeles Times Magazine has been in decline at least since 1986.

They have tried to recast themselves as the New York Times Magazine, as a Southern California Lifestyle Thing like Sunset Magazine, as maybe four other things. Nothing works.

This week they managed to hit a new low with a feature article on a young woman named Cory Kennedy.

Cory has been internet famous since she was 15, which was in 2005. Someone took pictures of her and posted them, and the phenomenon grew as those things can. She is a pretty girl, and her prettiness is of the gamine waif variety. She will look 15 until she’s 25.

The Times Magazine article is the typical deploring/promoting titillation piece. They at once portray her as the “grew up too fast” pop culture victim and as a high-flying teen hottie. They play this game very well. They also made sure to post forty-four pictures of her to accompany the article on the Net.

Ephebophilic disasters like this aren’t new. The current crop probably started with the Guess? ads in the 1980s. The “new” men’s magazines are all over it. It’s creepy. The way this article presented it was particularly damaging, though. She’s presented as someone who did this of her own initiative and was in charge all along. It started when she was 15. This appears to confirm predators’ belief that their young victims are behaving as adults and not being manipulated.

Edie Sedgwick died in her 20s. I wonder how long Cory will make it?

As goes the nation, goes the LA Weekly

The neocons take over in the expected putsch after the New Times bought them.

I assume the OC Weekly is on the list for the same treatment. Should be easier here, since finding someone who isn’t a right-wing loudmouth is nearly impossible.

Nothing is enough for these people. They’re not satisfied with owning the national news media outlets, the cable TV news, the newspapers, the magazines. They have to go after the free weeklies where seldom-read lefties tag along after the entertainment listings, and root that out too. It’s not like Harold Meyerson et al. were hugely influential — everyone reads a paper like that for the listings and the ads — but the Big Right-Wing Crusher Hand has to get everyone.

And now the New Times neo-con talk-radio-style tabloid monster has eaten almost all the notable free weeklies in the country.

These people want more than a voice. They want to reverse and destroy every single thing about the rebellion of the 1960s, go back and win every argument they lost about the war and Watergate and race and gender, eat and shit out every pop culture item that might contain subversion, and burn down the universities where their professors confused them with suspiciously foreign intellectualism.

Welcome to Talk Radio Nation: Boomer sell-outs, ignorant neo-cons, privileged post-literate suits, and their slaves.

Long live the LA City Beat.

Old Ladies Kick Ass.

Country stolen by criminals with intent to devastate
4/4/2006

Dear Editor,

I am 92 years of age and I have followed politics in this country for nearly as many years. There were tough times. I became an RN during the Great Depression and have known times of very little; never, however, have I feared more for this country than now.

Our country has been stolen by criminals who I fully believe intend to devastate all of the poor and working classes to benefit this small group of extremely greedy people, the same people who planned to steal our government and managed to pull it off.

I call radio shows and I send letters to members of Congress and to the newspaper. My hope is to make all aware that our government is in the worst of hands largely because of crooked trick voting machines. I have observed that even in very small voting places one machine can deliver several thousand more votes for the neo-con candidates. That is several thousand more then they have registered to vote. Many call for recounts where this kind of things happens only to learn that recounts are not possible. These machines were deliberately designed with no permanent records so there is nothing that can be recounted. That is exactly what has delivered to us the quality of leaders who are presently devastating our country.

I am calling upon all who care, as I do, to do all that we can to bring back honest elections. To make good members of Congress aware of how bad this problem is. We need to try as hard as we can to save this country from devastation. Be assured that the greedy cons have no plans for giving up any of what they have stolen and they are the type that will cheat in all ways they can and probably as much as they need to hang on to it all. I believe our country is truly at stake and we must do what we can to save it.

Alyce Fretland
Eureka

From today’s Eureka (CA) Reporter: ( http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=9771 )

So, Timmy. Do you like movies about… bloviators?

  1. The Condoleeza Hairdo Alert System has been activated. Please make a note of it.
  2. You may not have to constrict your anus 100 times in a row. Try improving your brain function with a cellphone ringtone! Ah, the Mysterious East.
  3. North Korean dictator/space alien Kim Kong Il remembers all the nation’s phone numbers, according to his press agency. Then again, there’s maybe 8 phones in the country. It could be a trick question.
  4. Here’s a weekly collection of misleading blurbs that may explain why a huge steaming pile of dog poop gets some good reviews.
  5. Extra multilink bonanza roundup: The captive audiences media industry is growing like crazy. Asshole companies who trap you in elevators or at the gas station are doing great. The next frontier is TV covering the floor too: FLASMA!
  6. To cheer you up from all that, here’s an unusual cat.

You’re welcome.

This heaven gives me migraine

Waiting for my mother at the doctor’s office just now I picked up a magazine called “Organic Style”, thinking “this should be good!”

It does not disappoint. A more descriptive name would be “The magazine for women who need to be so healthy and virtuous and beautiful that they are all hot yoga adepts and Jane Goodall and Susan Sarandon at once”.

Ads for Shell Oil face editorials decrying Arctic drilling. A product sidebar touts a $249 “earth/peace scapulare” that makes a statement in 14k “recycled gold”. There are many, many skin moisturizers and breakfast cereals. One is commanded to indulge everything, always.

The best part was a Dove ad. It was actually an ad for an advertising campaign (!). Dove wishes to celebrate “real beauty” of “women with curves” who are not size 2 models. They laud their own ad campaign, in which they stand firm for real women and unretouched photographs and celebrating… Anyway the women in the ad for the ad are impossibly hot twenty year olds with perfect everything laughing in their underwear. I guess it’s okay to be a size 4 catalog model now, gals! Size 0 is no longer mandatory!