I’m counting on that one person in the universe who either (a) doesn’t bring his phone everywhere he goes, or (b) doesn’t have a camera in his phone, or, best of all, (c) sees no need to photograph every fucking thing that happens to him.
Of course, option B is pretty much out of the question since, as previously reported in these pages, I tried to buy a phone at the T-Mobile store that had no camera in it, only to be told, “There’s no such thing as a phone with no camera in it.”
Want a phone? Then buy a camera. You have no other choice.
Because Life…is Instagram. If it’s not on Instagram, it didn’t happen. The alehouses of 18th-century London frequented by Samuel Johnson and his errand boy Boswell, the Paris bistros described by Hemingway, the gritty back alleys of Los Angeles memorialized by James M. Cain—none of those could possibly have existed because where’s the Instagram? When Stanley went searching for Livingstone, why didn’t he bring back selfies? The least he could have done is stand on his head next to Victoria Falls. The mouth of the Zambezi, my ass—there is no Zambezi prior to October 10, 2010. That’s the day that Instagram launched and the world was truly known.
Travel agents know this. Travel agents scour Instagram looking for new destinations they can package based on photo ops alone.
Let me repeat that. These are professionals who sell $10,000 long-distance journeys to places where the only attraction is the picture you’re gonna take when you get there.
The best-known example of this is Wedding Cake Rock. Wedding Cake Rock is a sandstone formation located in the Royal National Park in Australia. It suffers from three characteristics that will ensure its destruction:
(a) It’s ecologically fragile, being so unstable that it will probably collapse from erosion sometime in this century.
(b) It’s 18 miles from Sydney.
(c) It looks great on Instagram.
In fact, it looks so great on Instagram that people fly to Sydney to perform stunts on its precarious surface. Things got so bad in 2015, with more than 10,000 visitors per month crowding onto a platform that threatens to become landslide fodder at any moment, that the national park service erected a barrier and shut it down. Officials blamed Instagram.
The name for this—because, of course, every example of mass idiocy needs a vaguely academic moniker so that psychologists can pay off their student loans—the name for this is Aspirational Escapism.
Why is it aspirational? Because there’s a perception that you get several degrees of coolness added to your résumé if you make it to Wedding Cake Rock, jump the barrier, and dangle an appendage off the edge—and the proof of your dangled appendage is the perfectly filtered post on Instagram. Money is no object. The 18-hour flight is no object. The four-wheel-drive Jeep rental is no object. You’re getting that selfie.
Okay, it gets even weirder. Some parks have started promoting “responsible geotagging,” specifically to fight against hordes of tourists invading a natural area in search of selfies.
The way it works is that someone popular, usually a young hot white person, photographs himself or herself in a remote location, scores the perfect Instagram photo—Photoshopped, of course, perfected with filters and crops—and inspires thousands of other Instagram devotees to start running to Kayak and planning a trip not just to that country, not just to that park, not just to the same area of that park, but to the exact same location, thanks to the geotag that allows them to know the precise longitude and latitude.
Park rangers say this is wrong, a horrible invasion of national park privacy, because…uh…well…not sure why it’s wrong, but they don’t want thousands of people taking the same selfie in the same place. I don’t want that either, but for a different reason: You people are boring the crap out of me.
They say that these Aspirational Escapists have no respect for the ecology, the biological diversity of the area, the local culture, blah blah blah, but I don’t think any of that stuff is the real reason. I think the real reason is hatred of millennial hipsters.
Of course, because they are millennial hipsters, they have a politically correct solution. The Center for Responsible Travel (CREST, like the toothpaste, summoning up images of people who live in Brooklyn and own the $400 Sonicare electric toothbrush) is an organization dedicated to defeating Instagram at its own game, promoting “tourism that leads to the management of all resources in such a way that economic, social, and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity, and life-support systems.”
Let me read that again. Wait five minutes, I’m gonna read it slowly.
Okay, I’m back. Fuck you.
What they’re talking about here—I know this from other websites that are written with more direct language—is two things:
Numero Uno: “Sustainability.” Not sure exactly what it means but I think it means making sure a place doesn’t become filthy with tourists. I happen to live in a place that’s filthy with tourists—New York City. It’s not a big deal. We manage.
Numero Two-o: “A Diverse Travel Narrative.” Not sure exactly what this means, either, but I think it means more blacks, Latinos, women booking those 737 flights from Luton Airport.
For example, there are Instagram accounts called @blackgirlstraveltoo and @latinaswhohike because, according to an article in Refinery 29, “It’s no surprise that the focus on sustainability is driven by women, people of color, queer people, and other groups that have historically been excluded from tourism.”
Excluded from tourism! Because of all those decades when travel agents and airlines and hotels refused to take money from minorities due to the Tourism Blacklist.
The idea here is that, if we had more minorities traveling and fewer rich white people—and, by the way, it’s mostly rich white people who are telling us this—then there wouldn’t be so much Kardashian-style posing in the Louvre and instead we would have “meaningful conversations” with the populace, an interest in “the day-to-day lives of the people,” and “learning about the indigenous people”—all of these are goals frequently stated in all these “responsible travel” websites—followed by a new era in which “the narrative of travel” (yes, that’s a thing) would no longer be controlled by the white European patriarchy.
Or we could simply follow the Joe Bob Briggs Plan to Rid the Earth of Airhead Travel Bloggers and make it a question on your visa application:
“Are you entering the country primarily because of a photo you saw posted on Instagram?”
And if the tourist answers yes, they get sent to the Instagram Bus, which goes directly to the geotagged site, lines ’em up for selfies at 50 bucks a pop, then herds them back to the airport for their flights home to Osaka and Boise. Several dozen people have jobs, the hipsters are fenced off from the general populace, the foreigners get what they came for, Instagram is awash with selfies, and Earth continues to spin on its axis, geotagged and validated and recorded for posterity on BoreYouToDeath.com.
]]>At my school it was a required course in ninth grade. You had to learn the various aspects of the three branches of government. You had to read and analyze the Constitution. You had to, basically, learn the architecture of the country. And in some states, like Texas and Louisiana, you had to study the peculiar regional laws that only pertained to you.
So when did we get all these clowns who intentionally pass laws that can’t be enforced?
And why are they doing it?
In Alabama they passed a bill saying any abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected is illegal. Since fetal heartbeats can sometimes be detected at six weeks, and since some women don’t know they’re pregnant until twelve weeks or later, it seems like the “undue burden” test is pretty obvious. There are even confirmed cases of obese women not knowing they are pregnant until they actually go into labor, so the fetal heartbeat test, which requires a Doppler ultrasound device operated by a trained professional, would assume that all women of childbearing age are stocking the house with a $5,000 piece of medical equipment so that whenever they have sex they can smear some gel on their suspect tummy and check for fetuses. Yet this piece of nonsense was not only signed into law by a female governor, it was announced proudly as Alabama’s contribution to the advancement of civilization. Did they even bother to read the 1973 Supreme Court decision? The test is “viability outside the womb,” which at the time was assumed to be around 24 weeks after inception. Today it might be closer to 22 weeks, but it’s not six, okay?
But Alabama is not alone in the “Hey, let’s pass a law guaranteed to be thrown out of court” department. In Illinois the legislature passed a bill saying that any corporation based in that state is required to have at least one female on its board of directors and at least one African-American. Again, did any of these esteemed politicians bother to read any of the fifteen or so court precedents from the past thirty years making it clear that you’re not allowed to base anything on race or gender? Were they all absent on 14th Amendment Day in ninth grade? How many times has the university system of California been spanked by the courts for various attempts to circumvent the ban against race-based admissions policies? It’s discriminatory on its face. If, say, a Chinese company decides to relocate to Chicago with a three-person board, they could fill two of the seats with Chinese nationals by bringing a Chinese woman with them, but they would have to search high and low for that African-American with dual citizenship who was also qualified to make decisions about their business. Of course, if they managed to find an African-American woman who understood the textile business in, say, Shaoxing, they would have the perfect board member, but she would probably charge them a million bucks a year just to come to meetings. Chinese companies do a lot of business with Africa, but Kenyans or Tanzanians wouldn’t qualify either—it has to be someone self-identifying as African-American. It’s an unenforceable law that discriminates against race, gender, nationality, and continent.
And speaking of California, normally representing the vanguard of new laws telling people how to live their lives, they were slackers compared with Illinois. The solons in Sacramento passed a bill requiring women to be included on corporate boards, but somehow they forgot to add the African-American part. I personally think there should be a professional bartender and a professional prostitute on every board, but I’m not dumb enough to think my proposal would pass constitutional muster.
At any rate this seems to be the season for lawmakers going into smoke-filled rooms and—well, actually, the rooms are no longer smoke-filled because they’ve outlawed cigars in every legislative hall of the nation and, hey, maybe that’s why they’re so cranky!—but going into purified-air rooms with humidifiers and concocting laws that they don’t realize are dead from Day One.
Or I guess the alternative might be “Yeah, we know it’s unconstitutional, we know it’s already been ruled out by the courts, we know it’s gonna get mowed down by a federal judge, but we just feel like fucking with people.”
And I guess Alabama is so prosperous these days, what with the Mercedes plant in Vance and all those electronic bingo parlors, that nobody minds the legislature running up a lot of legal bills over the next year. California you can kind of dismiss as being full of wacky megalomaniacs who believe they’re so far ahead of the curve that they can set standards for the rest of the world. But Illinois? What happened to that whole Sensible Midwesterner vibe they once had?
Of course, some of these legislatures could be full of States Righters—the guys who started the Civil War—because they actually did believe that no state law could ever be overruled by a federal court.
But I don’t think so. I think the real reason in all these cases is more sinister. I think they’re saying, “We don’t like things as they are, and so we’ll make it really, really expensive for certain people to enforce their rights. We’ll make them fight every day for what should be rightly theirs for free. We’ll take away their birthright. We’ll screw with their businesses and screw with their wombs and screw with their assumptions about what the courts have guaranteed them, and some of them will give up, and some of them will make mistakes, and we’ll just make sure they have many bad days, and eventually they’ll get tired of fighting with us and we’ll get a team of brutal lawyers to take them down and put them in their place.”
Well, okay, I guess it worked with the Indians. Go for it, guys.
]]>Here you have various models, actresses, influencers, YouTube personalities, Patreon performers—99 percent of them are women—and you see a professional photo of that person, then a “Here’s what they really look like” photo, full of wrinkles, bad makeup (or no makeup), cellulite, mussed hair, blotchy dry skin, or whatever body flaw seems to amuse the editors the most.
But they don’t stop at mere surgical scars. They also “expose” women who Photoshop their bodies and faces to achieve a certain look. This is what’s called “the Photoshop facelift” and it’s considered an act of deception worthy of World Wide Web nuclear war. Because inevitably what happens when one of these posts goes viral is that trolls come out of the woodwork to tell the model or celebrity how fat she is, how disgusting she is, how ridiculously fake she is, and how subhuman she should feel now that they’ve outed her. The lesson we’re supposed to glean from all this abuse is that any alteration of the way you look when you roll out of bed in the morning should be treated as a crime against humanity. All you women who buy L’Oréal makeup at the drugstore should be ashamed of yourselves. Quit changing the way you look! Be real or we’re gonna send you to Instagram Hell.
There are dozens of these websites now, and yet they’re not classified as hate sites because they insist that what they’re really doing is empowering young girls. Most of them are run by women between the ages of 16 and 26, and they all have mission statements to the effect that they’re saving children and adolescents from trying to look like Barbie or dress like Angelina Jolie or shape their bodies to look like whatever supermodel most recently graced the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The idea is that “the illusion of perfection” is crippling the minds of young people and causing them to have low self-images. (How self-image can be measured is another subject for another time, but they claim to be measuring it.)
Several questions about this:
Numero Uno: Whose idea of perfection? I’ve seen certifiable supermodels—they’re making the money, they’re on the runways, they have the right agent and manager, they’re in the magazines—who strike me as fairly mundane. So obviously my “perfection meter” is not calibrated to coincide with what’s fashionable at that moment. I’ve also known actresses who are fairly homely in person but become impossible to take your eyes off of when they appear on a screen. With the sheer number of faces and bodies and types that are out there in this crowded media world, the idea that any person sums up “perfection” to anyone is a tough argument to sustain. In some of those “Real” and “Not Real” pairings on the “exposed” websites, I can’t tell at first which is supposed to be the bad picture and which the good one!
Numero Two-o: Why are women targeted? I read bodybuilding magazines, mainly for the articles on “How to Get Rid of Your Beer Gut in 20 Days,” and I’m sure some of the pictures are Photoshopped, and I’m sure many of the ripped men are looked up to by young boys trying to sculpt their bodies in the same way that women sculpt their bodies. This has been going on for 3,000 years, but nobody yet has suggested that we should stop admiring Michelangelo’s David because “David didn’t look like that in real life. In fact, he had acne.” Beautiful men and women have been depicted in sculpture, painting, and photography throughout history, and there’s always been an element of fantasy, an ideal form that’s just beyond reach. The only difference is that today we have editing tools that put the ability to search for that ideal form in the hands of ordinary people. I don’t think anyone felt Arnold Schwarzenegger was a phony for the years he spent sculpting his body. After all, the people of California elected him governor even after it was revealed that some of those results were achieved via steroids. We applaud the young men who devote themselves to bodybuilding—shouldn’t we do the same for young women? We are, after all, the most fitness-oriented country in the world, and in many cases these women are Photoshopping their ideal selves so they can then go fulfill that Photoshop in real life.
Numero Three-o: There’s nothing shameful about plastic surgery or Botox or lip fillers or miracle body creams or whatever else got invented last week. Why do so many people treat the idea of “looking my best” like it’s an egocentric crime against nature?
Numero Four-o: Even if you disagree on all of the above, these sites (and there are dozens of them) are basically communist in nature. They take an abstract social-engineering goal—“protecting the impressionable young girl”—and they carry it out by destroying specific individuals. To use just one example (there are hundreds), the 24-year-old Swiss model Celine Centino was bullied in school for being ugly and flat-chested, so she saved all her money from a hairdressing job, then spent $50,000 to completely transform her body and face, shaping her breasts to resemble those of her childhood idol Pamela Anderson. She made the mistake, though, of blogging about how great she felt after all that surgery and of posting frequently on Instagram, where she racked up 43,000 followers. She was eventually targeted by one of the “exposure” websites—they didn’t have to look far for information, she had already posted all the “before” pictures and blogged about what she had done—and so many trolls showed up to make fun of her that her account had to be suspended.
Of course, it was all for the good of society. So many young girls were saved from making the same mistake she did. Celine said that, before she was eviscerated online, she was “feeling good about myself for the first time.” Obviously she was lying. Besides, she’s expendable. She’s just a person. We feminist crusaders have bigger goals in mind. We’re transforming the minds of young people so that they naturally hate people like her and we don’t have to do it for them.
]]>I didn’t get kicked out of public places. I wasn’t suspected of being a serial killer on my way to a murder spree. Nobody mistook me for a revolutionary trying to inflame the disenfranchised populace.
In fact, people constantly stopped me to pose for pictures. Do you know how humiliating this must be for the makeup artist who painted the jagged Joker smile on my face?
Maybe I was cheating. My Joker was more the 1966 Cesar Romero version, with the green hair and the loud jacket, as opposed to the brooding 2019 Joaquin Phoenix pistol-toting clown suffering from pseudobulbar affect (the laughing disorder) and dealing with self-image problems that are off the scale. (I have to make this distinction because there was a vendor at the Spooky Empire convention selling Halloween masks exactly like the ones worn by Arthur Fleck’s anarchist army in the movie. Putting one of these on would be the equivalent of saying, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I would enjoy setting fire to a few law enforcement vehicles.”)
Despite my abysmal failure as a scary dude, it’s been obvious over the past month that a lot of people are scared of the Joker in ways that were never envisioned by Wes Craven when he invented Freddy Krueger, or by John Carpenter and Debra Hill when they conceived Michael Myers, or, for that matter, by Mary Shelley when she gave birth to the Frankenstein monster.
Even before the movie was released, some theaters warned the public that no one would be admitted wearing masks, even Joker masks, which kind of cut down on the cosplay possibilities. The survivors of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, massacre tried to get Warner Bros. to change their ad campaign and create some kind of megafund for shooting victims and agitate for gun control, presumably because the mentally deranged man who opened fire during The Dark Knight Rises identified himself to the police as “the Joker”—even though the Joker character appears nowhere in that movie. At some venues, metal detectors were installed for fear that Joker wannabes would be packing. Joaquin Phoenix was repeatedly asked to make inane public statements about how he doesn’t really condone violence.
My own view of the character would be that the only people who could possibly be afraid of him would be obtuse billionaires worried that someday the homeless might be organized into armed battalions and mobilized to invade Palm Beach. I’m going to assume that the Hong Kong protesters who donned the Joker makeup were using it mostly as a protest against the Chinese law that forbids wearing a mask, and that they weren’t secretly advocating the killing of everyone in your life who lies to you or puts you down.
Nevertheless, the Joker makeup has been turning up in the weirdest places—Syria, Chile, Venezuela—almost always on the faces of anti-government protesters. This is in spite of the moment in the movie when Arthur Fleck says he’s not political at all and doesn’t support anything like that—but, of course, that’s exactly what an oppressed brainwashed victim of The Man would say, right?
So here’s my question. Is Arthur Fleck a symbol of mental derangement? (Hence the metal detectors and the public freak-out surrounding the release of the movie.) Or is he a symbol of empowerment? (Hence his use in street protests.) I guess it’s possible that the street protesters are saying, “Let’s empower the mentally deranged,” but I doubt it. I think at this point the Joker can be anything you want him to be. Hate your mother? It’s in the movie. Love your mother? It’s in the movie. Resent your parents for puffing you up with false promises? That’s in the movie too. Hate entitled millennials? That’s in a scene reminiscent of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called Subway Vigilante who, after being assaulted in 1981, carried a gun that he used in 1984 to shoot four thugs trying to shake him down on a subway car. (Highly appropriate, since the art direction suggests that Gotham is actually New York City in the ’80s, when every subway car had graffiti, the infrastructure was crumbling, social services were nonexistent, and guys like Arthur Fleck got mugged daily.)
The idea is that Arthur Fleck becomes the Joker because the world refuses to deal with his mental illness, his poverty, his victimhood. The world makes promises and then laughs at him when he takes the promises seriously. Arthur Fleck turns violent when the world hands him a gun, dares him to use it, then punishes him for taking action.
The question is, why would anyone want to publicly identify with that profile? He’s damaged, desperate, and—as far as everyone else is concerned—inarticulate. His final solution is to burn everything down. Do the Hong Kong protesters really want to burn everything down? Do the Venezuelan protesters not realize that everything has already been burned down and Arthur Fleck is incapable of building it back up? Do the grim disillusioned Bernie Goetzes of the world really believe murder is the answer?
On the other hand, Arthur Fleck also wants to kill the glib, self-satisfied talk-show hosts. I could probably get behind that one, especially when the host is played by Robert De Niro in the worst case of Hollywood miscasting in film history. But I’m still pretty sure that no movie could ever persuade me to become a random assassin, no matter how far down the social scale I fell. I’m not even sure the Joker mask works, since the most likely reaction to it at this point is “Huh? That’s interesting that you would wear that! Would you mind if we take a selfie together?”
I mean, come on, that is funny.
]]>But it was art enthusiasts all over the planet who were most horrified by the news. In North America, the J. Paul Getty Museum is probably second only to the Metropolitan in New York on the Treasures-of-Art-History scale, and the fire was raging just a half mile away, with a good likelihood it would travel on down the slopes and start incinerating more buildings. What would happen to the illuminated medieval manuscripts from Aachen, the Rembrandts, the Titians, the Manets, all those masterpieces that Getty brought back from Nazi Germany, Russia, Italy, and Greece?
The answer, apparently, is that nothing would happen to any of them. “The safest place for the Getty treasures,” said the museum director, “is inside the Getty.”
The walls are fire-resistant travertine, reinforced by concrete and steel. The roof is made of crushed stone, so wind-borne embers have no chance of igniting. Even the landscaping on the grounds of the museum is fire-resistant, with a million-gallon water tank ready to be activated anytime heat touches the ground.
But what about the smoke?
No problem, say the Getty engineers. The museum is actually a building-within-a-building, with air systems between the two outer walls that allow the whole complex to be hermetically sealed and for air to be recirculated the same way it’s done on aircraft.
So the Neolithic clay figurines are safe. The Ottonian illuminations are safe. Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier is secure.
What’s not safe are all the homes of the millionaires and billionaires scattered across Mandeville Canyon. Leading to the question: If it’s possible to fireproof your home, and you have millions of dollars, and you live in one of the most fire-prone regions in the world, why wouldn’t you go Getty with your architecture and seal that baby up?
Pets don’t have to worry. Within an hour of the fire breaking out, there were animal shelters in place, and they were subdivided into shelters for different sizes of animals. After all, you don’t want the Tibetan mastiffs chewing on the toy poodles during the many days of forced evacuation. And you certainly don’t want the polo ponies removed to the same shelter as the Shar-Peis, Chow Chows, Akitas, Salukis, and Irish wolfhounds. There are so many Labrador retrievers in the Santa Monica Mountains that you probably need a shelter just for them and them alone.
So the animals are safe. The art treasures are safe. Unfortunately, the landscapers and housekeepers kept showing up for work after the mountain was sealed off, thinking, “Better have the place looking great on the day before it burns up.” There were also misguided evacuees lined up in their Porsches and Lexuses outside the roadblocks, requesting permission to go back into their homes “just for an hour” to retrieve wills, stock certificates, divorce decrees, and sex toys.
Like everything in El-Lay, there was an air of unreality about the fire. It won’t affect me. I’ll be in and out so fast no one will notice. And I’ll send in Regina from East El-Lay to see if she can find that last Persian kitten in the next-door neighbor’s yard. All the rooms are taken at the Beverly Wilshire, the Bel-Air, the Viceroy L’Ermitage, the Peninsula, and the Mondrian, but I just heard about some suites coming open at the InterContinental and, if we have to rough it for a couple nights, the Hollywood Roosevelt. If all else fails, we can get a car service to take us to Pasadena and check in at the Langham Huntington. Tell the kids it’ll be just like camping out!
In other words, it was once again California’s answer to the periodic message from God: “Don’t live here. This is an unnatural environment prone to catastrophe.”
But there’s a great party going on tonight at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I guarantee it. Maybe LeBron will drop in.
]]>We care about victims.
We will get to the truth.
We will go to new levels of dogged investigation to find previously unknown facts about murder cases.
Except the cases are all finished and done. The conclusions are well-known to anyone who Googles them. The perpetrators are in prison, the cops and prosecutors have collected their kudos, the survivors are “searching for closure.” The only new element is Sunny Hostin riding into town to dig up old evidence and tell the relatives of the victims what heroes they are, hopefully while making them cry on camera.
Okay, nothing about this bothers me. This is the essential DNA of true-crime entertainment, or what I call Murder Porn.
What bothers me is Sunny Hostin’s claim in the promo that she “never lost a case” as a prosecutor.
I’m sure it’s true, but it’s nothing to be proud of.
I’ve heard other prosecutors make the same claim—I think there’s one, and only one, defense attorney who’s said this—but being proud of having a 100 percent conviction rate shows a fundamental disdain for the rights of the accused and a blindness about how the system is supposed to work. As a prosecutor, you’re not supposed to decide who’s guilty or innocent—that’s for the jury. You’re only supposed to present the evidence in a clear and convincing way. You should feel equally confident and successful if the jury returns a “not guilty” verdict. The outcome isn’t supposed to depend on your personal feelings. It’s not a game. It’s not a competition. The words “won” and “lost” should never be used by the attorneys involved.
Increasingly, though, these murder-porn shows are all about a crusading cop or prosecutor bent on punishment prior to proving guilt. Trey Gowdy, the recently retired congressman and Trump apologist, apparently had quite a run as a prosecutor in Spartanburg, South Carolina, back in the ’90s, because he turns up on Forensic Files all the time, always preaching vengeance and punishment. Joe Kenda, the highly entertaining Colorado Springs detective who hosts Homicide Hunter, talks about criminals, even criminals who have served their time, like bothersome scum he needs to scrape off his shoe. Every time the Innocence Project turns up DNA evidence that exonerates a guy in prison, it takes three to five years to get him out, partly because the courts, the media, and the victims’ families never believe that the cops and the prosecutors could have been so blinded by their own prejudices that they put an innocent man in prison.
The Soviet Union only had a 98 percent conviction rate, and they had laws that allowed the defendant to be prosecuted over and over again for the same crime. Even Stalin admitted that, once in a while, a defendant was innocent. In this country, where we have dozens of innocent people who have turned up on death row, we should be especially outraged by cowboy, or cowgirl, prosecuting attorneys.
The way it’s supposed to work—the ideal way it was set up through 800 years of case law—is that all indictments come from a grand jury. The grand jury is made up of prominent members of the community meeting in secret, and they don’t decide innocence or guilt—they just decide whether there’s enough evidence to proceed to trial.
Why take this step?
Because being accused of a crime can often be worse than being convicted of the crime. Many lives were ruined in the ’80s and ’90s during the so-called Satanic Panic. Day care centers all over the country went out of business because of false claims that children were being abused by staff, often as part of satanic rituals. (Not a single satanic ritual ever occurred. It was a modern-day version of the Salem witch hunts.) All of these cases could have been avoided had there been grand juries willing to say “not enough evidence to go to trial”—because there wasn’t enough evidence to go to trial, on any of them.
But we’ve put so much faith in the wisdom of law enforcement that we allow cops and prosecutors to file charges on their own, without any review or, at best, with a rubber-stamp review by a prosecutor “walking the grand jury through the evidence.”
A grand jury is actually the most powerful part of the criminal justice system. A grand jury can take any evidence it wants, can investigate in any manner it chooses, can convene anywhere and at any time it desires, can indict or no-bill with no explanation, and is bound by no rules of disclosure. Maybe this is why it’s been totally emasculated by the guys down at the courthouse. They know who’s on that grand jury and they make sure it’s people who have no idea that they’re actually in charge.
Once the indictment comes down, the prosecutor has an obligation to research both sides of the case and present both sides to the defense attorney. The number of times the prosecution “accidentally” fails to turn over a document, or reveal a witness, is so enormous that the appeals courts no longer overturn verdicts simply because of a single “oversight.” They don’t retry those cases because there are so many of them it would set the court schedules back a hundred years.
Of course, there are other reasons you could say you “never lost a case.”
One would be that you’re a chickenshit. You simply don’t take the hard cases to trial.
Another could be that all the cases settle. Ninety percent of all court cases settle before trial. If you prosecute someone for murder but you settle for manslaughter, you’ve technically “won” the case. If you sue someone for $100 million but you settle for $1 million, you’ve still won. This is another reason the words “won” and “lost” should never be uttered by counsel for either side. (There are exceptions. Springing an innocent person out of prison is such a win/win that everyone on both sides should agree.)
In other words, prosecuting cases is not a sporting event. When you can’t get someone on the crime you think he’s guilty of, so you prosecute him for another crime, you’re not only being fundamentally dishonest, you’re destroying everyone’s faith in the system. (Yes, they did that to Al Capone. It’s still wrong.)
We don’t need another lawyer telling us that prosecutors are always right and defense attorneys are always wrong. Instead of talking about “the accused” and “the suspect” all the time, we should start talking about “the merely accused” and “the mere suspect.” All you “originalists” who love the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence should agree with me, because that’s exactly why we were writing a letter to King George in the first place.
]]>But for those ballers who absolutely need to see Rupert within a single day so they can close that deal for the new sports network in Thailand, I offer the following advice for making 20 hours vaporize as though you were teleported through time and space in some kind of Barbarella love tube.
First of all, whatever you do, do not—I repeat, do not—turn on whatever multimedia screen is provided as part of your first-class sleeping pod. You will start watching 12 Years a Slave, even though you have no particular interest in 12 Years a Slave, because you like that two-hour, 14-minute running time. You’re thinking, “As soon as this is over, I’ll be coasting over southern Mexico”—only to find out, when it’s over, that you’re coasting over Jackson, Tennessee. Then you’ll put your noise-canceling headphones that you paid $350 for at the airport electronics store back on your head and watch Only You, the romantic drama based around in vitro fertilization, followed by the remake of Child’s Play, even though you’re still pissed that they didn’t use Brad Dourif to voice Chucky the Doll, and at the end of all that, you’re still 14 fucking hours away from Sydney only now you have a headache from watching too many tracking shots and you have a brain so scrambled that you’re gonna have nightmares about black people having test-tube babies that look like homicidal dolls. You’re ruined for the next week.
Let me list some other things you are not gonna do on your delightful journey to the land Down Under. You’re not gonna pop melatonin. You’re not gonna get a fake prescription for Xanax. You’re not gonna buy those light-emitting doohickeys that claim to combat jet lag. Unless Qantas has a fully equipped gym somewhere on the Boeing Dreamliner, so that you can run, stretch, and lift every three hours—and I’m guessing they do not—what you’re gonna do is…read a book.
But not just any book. You’re gonna read one of the classics of world civilization, a long book, a difficult book, the book you told yourself you were going to read 27 years ago but never got around to it, and you’re gonna read it from beginning to end in a single flight.
Before heading to JFK, load one of the following tomes into your Kindle. Any of them will work, but some work better than others.
(1) War and Peace: This is the obvious cliché choice, the book used as a metaphor for density and length, believed to be the longest novel ever written (it’s not), and a fairly good choice for our purposes because of the war part, not the peace part. Okay, here’s the important caveat: Get the crappy Constance Garnett translation, which is sort of “Tolstoy for Dummies.” Do not accidentally download the acclaimed translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is full of nuance and complexity. (The reason for this will become obvious later.)
(2) Remembrance of Things Past: This might actually be the longest novel ever written, and since everyone knows who Marcel Proust is—or at least everyone at trendy cocktail parties—and yet nobody has actually read all his inner-monologue navel-dwelling drivel, you’ll be able to amaze your friends for the rest of your life with comments like “As Proust once said, ‘Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.’” Of course, you don’t have to get the quote exactly right because you’re the only guy who’s ever actually read the whole novel. (Best to choose a quote later than page 1250.)
(3) Ulysses: Hahahahahahahahahahaha. I know you’re not gonna choose this one.
(4) Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Admit it, you haven’t opened it since sophomore year when it was assigned as part of “Survey of Elizabethan Literature,” and you didn’t get even halfway through Book 2. To break it up, turn to your travel partner and bore him or her with speculation about the proper pronunciation of Archimago, Chrysogonee, Guyon, and Satyrane, as well as the scenes that George Lucas stole for Star Wars.
(5) Poor Fellow My Country: Never heard of this one? That’s because it’s Australian. 850,000 words. It’s written by a guy named Xavier Herbert, runs to just under 1,500 pages, and is full of stuff about Australian patriotism that you won’t understand at all—but hey! Your destination is Sydney! Impress the locals!
(6) Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard: It takes Scientologists years to finish this massive son of a bitch. By reading it on your way to Australia you can hope to someday meet Leah Remini and maybe rescue a cult victim.
(7) Winston Churchill’s four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples: You’ll be the first person in history to actually finish the book that’s in every home library but is frequently mistaken for a leather-bound jewelry box. If that’s too hard, try…
(8) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: At least it has sex and violence.
(9) Stephen King’s The Stand: Make sure you get the 1990 expanded uncut version and not the original, but at only 800 pages, this is for lightweights. It’s actually a good story. When you get to the part about the state trooper named Joe Bob, turn to your travel partner and say, “Isn’t that the character that Joe Bob Briggs played in the miniseries?”
And if you can’t bring yourself to tackle any of these, just because you don’t think your brain can soldier through the density, there’s always…
(10) The Hunchback of Notre Dame: The best 940 pages ever written, especially relevant in the year of the Notre Dame fire.
Now. Here’s what will happen. Any of the above books, with the possible exceptions of the last two, will put you into a deep slumber. Have a little red wine as you read and you’re guaranteed one-hour naps throughout your journey. Whenever you wake up, read another chapter, and before that chapter is over, you will once again descend into dreamland. The combination of needing to finish the book in one sitting, therefore gaining entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, while being trapped on the plane will result in an altered zombie state that will only be broken when you are jolted out of it by the wheels of Qantas hitting the tarmac at Kingsford Smith Airport.
You have survived and you have filled yourself with fascinating trivia that will last a lifetime. Congratulations. You have conquered time and space.
But your butt will still hurt.
]]>In later years Roth would claim that this was not an example of spoiled rock star entitlement but a way to make sure that concert promoters read the entire contract and took care of other, more important provisions. I was actually buying this—promoters can be forgetful and dense at all levels of the business—until the Smoking Gun website tracked down the famous M&M’s rider so that we could read the rest of it. In order to “present to your customers the finest in contemporary entertainment,” Van Halen also needed two dozen English muffins, but not just any English muffins—they had to be Thomas brand English muffins—plus two cases of beer delivered precisely at 6 p.m., two more cases (one Budweiser and one Heineken) delivered to the stage manager at 7 p.m., different food menus for even and odd days, and, just to keep you on your toes in the implements department, “all forks must have four prongs.” Backstage the band also needed one case of Budweiser, four cases of Schlitz Malt Liquor (really?), one half case of Tab (perhaps even more shocking than the malt liquor), three fifths of Jack Daniels Black Label, two fifths of Stolichnaya, one pint of Southern Comfort, two bottles of Blue Nun white wine (whoever that was should lose his rock-star cred forever), three packs of Marlboros (these riders are for one day—is that guy dead yet?), and—the mind boggles—“one large tube of KY Jelly.”
The rider ran to eleven pages and is, in fact, ridiculously demanding. (“Any caterer not providing adequate condiments, utensils or ice will be subject to a $100.00 fine.”)
Meanwhile, those of us who travel at the opposite end of the rich-and-famous spectrum—university jobs, nightclubs, movie theaters—have long suffered the M&M consequences.
Who does he think he is? A ROCK STAR? Do you want me to separate the M&M’s?
And the way this usually plays out is that they suck you in with promises that “we’ll put you up at the greatest hotel in Leadville, Colorado, and pay 100 percent of your expenses,” and regale you with stories about “the most award-winning craft beer pub in America” (every venue sits next to the most award-winning craft beer pub in America) and scenic vistas and tours of historic buildings or charming dive bars (yes, the words “charming” and “dive” are frequently juxtaposed) or, in the case of colleges and universities, tours of futuristic laboratories, gargantuan sports stadiums, and houses once occupied by the pre–Civil War president.
What they never, ever tell you is that nine months later you’re going to be traveling to and from the venue by hanging on to the back seat of the Mad Max gyrocopter.
I don’t just mean you get the middle seat. I mean you arrive at the airport to discover that your ticket requires you to spend fourteen hours jammed into a midget chair (I’m 6 foot 4, 215 pounds, so I have permanent knee injuries to prove the thesis of this article), lay over in places like Columbus, Ohio (an airport notorious for having minimal places to sit and a single overpriced bar), and pay exorbitant fees for seat selection, luggage (not overweight luggage, just plain luggage—up to $100 per bag), carrying bags onto the plane, in-flight food (one airline even charges for water), extra legroom (meaning any legroom), slow Wi-Fi that probably won’t work for most of the flight anyway (not that you’ll be able to use your laptop without elbowing someone in the gizzards), asking the gate agent to print out your boarding pass, or—God forbid—changing the ticket to an earlier or later flight. In fact, don’t even think about altering one of these so-called “basic economy” tickets. That’s the term they use, but what they should really call it is a “Nekkid Transport Shipping” ticket, because the only way you can use it is to proceed directly to your assigned torture chair carrying nothing and wearing nothing and then fold yourself into the equivalent of a Federal Express parcel. Presumably you could sleep by encasing yourself in bubble wrap, but then again, I’m sure they would charge you for the bubble wrap.
Meanwhile, the venue that loves you and is dying to have you and tells you that you have so many fans here describes the fitness club at the hotel (yes, you’ll need that for rehab), the fine dining options in the area, and the horseback-riding trails in the area, while never mentioning that the ticket they bought is going to cost you more than it cost them and will result in your being exhausted both before and after you spend a delightful day in their city.
And it’s not just the tiny horror convention or the impecunious lecture series or the independent movie theater struggling to hang on. I’ve gotten these fake airline tickets from some of the largest universities and well-endowed film festivals in the country. Of course I should have known I was going to have to pay for all those luxury items on my trip to see them—things like bags containing the wardrobe for my appearance—and of course I should have known not to get thirsty on the plane. Because every once in a while I’ll suggest to the booker that perhaps we should create an—ahem cough cough—rider specifying that there’s a certain level of civilized travel expected from all these people who love me. Not first class. Not even business class. But maybe the kind of ticket that can be altered or adjusted?
Who does he think he is? A ROCK STAR? Do you want us to separate the M&M’s?
So thank you, David Lee Roth, for making personal-appearance riders a despised document, symbolic of entertainer excess. If I ever see you, I’m gonna fold you into a pretzel and stuff you into that little metal box with the sign that says “All carry-ons must fit in this space.”
]]>SCIENTISTS CURE COMMON COLD
It was the 85th link in my newsfeed, so I assumed it was some kind of advertising come-on for cold medications. It was actually an article by the Beauty and Style Editor for Yahoo reporting on research at Stanford and the University of California that has identified the single protein that allows the common cold to flourish, regardless of which rhinovirus caused the cold in the first place. All you have to do is neutralize that protein and the cold goes away.
So apparently scientists think they have cured the common cold! The headline once used as an example of “This could never happen, so if it did, it would be huge,” actually happened.
So my question is, how is it not screaming across the top of The New York Times in 96-point Bodoni Bold?
Isn’t this one of those “probably not in our lifetime” miracle stories?
Something has happened to the news cycle. Something has happened to our definition of “news” itself. Among the articles considered more important than curing the common cold were:
(1) A couple dozen lame analyses of the upcoming “impeachment inquiry,” written like boxing-match copy, Pelosi vs. Trump.
(2) Aubrey O’Day complaining that an American Airlines flight attendant made her change her shirt in front of her fellow passengers.
(3) An analysis of the low fertility rate in Japan.
(4) An investigation of subpar jalapeños in Subway sandwiches.
(5) A Metallica tour update after James Hetfield went to rehab.
(6) Stormy Daniels’ settlement for false arrest at a strip club in Ohio.
(7) The salary of the new CEO at Wells Fargo ($23 million).
(8) Robert De Niro calling Trump “a lowlife.”
(9) Justin Bieber posting old pictures of himself.
(10) Dog the Bounty Hunter’s medical condition.
(11) Speculation about moon travel and the ability of the moon to support a colony.
(12) Best time to get your flu shot.
And last but not least:
(13) Several articles on a heated Twitter discussion about whether Kristin Cavallari is too skinny, based on images she posted from a Mexico photo shoot.
This last one doesn’t really even rise to the level of gossip reporting, because it’s essentially just reading through a Twitter thread and then composing four or five paragraphs about “some people think she’s skinny and some people think she’s beautiful” so that you can then compose a clickbait headline.
Then there are all the weird “disappearing drama” stories—video of warehouse fires in faraway cities, car chases photographed by helicopter that continue for a while then vanish, and news bulletins about random homicides wherever they occur. I can’t remember a time when news editors have been so confident that people in Pittsburgh will be engrossed by the minutiae of violent events in Fresno, but apparently we’re in an era not just of hyper-local reporting, but of hyper-local reporting for export. If a city councilwoman in Spokane, Washington, wants to ban e-cigarettes, be assured you can read about it or watch her on video from your condo in Naples, Florida.
If you ask the people who own the newsfeeds about this phenomenon, they’ll point to research showing that the average citizen tends to watch the same type of content over and over again, therefore they feed it to them in advance for their convenience. This is a fiction; in fact, they feed it to them in advance to try to sell more advertising based on how many minutes you spend on that newsfeed and how many times you click through.
The only problem with this consumer-oriented approach is that it assumes that a revolution in, say, Panama, is of no interest unless you watched the previous 347 videos about Panama. Anything that rises to the level of “news” in your brain—meaning you’ve never thought of it before, heard of it before, known about it before—is actually excluded from anything Facebook or Google or Microsoft would send you in a so-called “newsfeed.” And if you happened to purchase, say, panty hose yesterday, the “newsfeeds” will assume you want to read about new underwear microfiber products available in Italy but will not tell you that, because of an incident in Yemen, Iran and the United States are now on the brink of war.
In other words, the original purpose of a newspaper—to organize all the events of the world in order of importance, using fonts, type sizes, headlines, and other conventions to indicate relative importance—has been turned into its opposite: We don’t know what the hell is important, so YOU DECIDE!
I’ve gotta think curing the common cold should be way up there in importance even if I don’t regularly do searches on cold products. When they’re sifting through the ruins of bodies frozen in place from nuclear irradiation, they’ll find a whole lot of people who were checking their newsfeed right as it was happening. They’ll know all about Beyoncé’s next album.
]]>If you really wanna piss me off, use any of the following ten terms:
(1) “That would be a hard no, Joe Bob.” (Variation: “That’s a nonstarter, Joe Bob.”) (Second variation: “That won’t fly at any level, Joe Bob.”)
This is the equivalent of a 7-year-old on the elementary school playground who runs out of arguments and says, “I don’t care what you say! I’m not changing my mind!” It means “I’m tired of listening to you.” It means “Go fuck yourself.” I would honestly rather be told to go fuck myself.
(2) “Woke,” used in any sentence.
This is a way of saying, “You passed the political correctness test,” or “You’re a person that I won’t block on Twitter,” or “You showed a surprising tolerance for the latest pronouncement of Ocasio-Cortez.”
Or just, “I’m surprised you’re not an asshole.”
Don’t call me woke.
(3) “Zeitgeist,” as in “You’ve captured something in the zeitgeist.”
This is a way of telling you that your observation is not that special, and not that universal, it’s just something that woke Germans have been thinking and your investigative skills allowed you to identify it. It has nothing to do with you. If you hadn’t written about it, it would have been discovered by Rush Limbaugh next week anyway.
(4) “Give me your elevator pitch.” This is the idea that anything you’re trying to launch, any new venture, should be synopsized in the time it takes to ride up or ride down on an elevator with someone.
This is a way of saying, “I don’t have time to listen to your stupid idea.” Or it can be, “I might be willing to listen to you for 30 seconds so I can decide whether there’s any easy way for me to take advantage of you.”
I don’t have an elevator pitch. If I’m describing any project worth doing, that’s not enough time.
(5) The “male gaze,” as in “Every camera angle in this movie is corrupted by the male gaze.”
What this means is “There are a lot of beautiful women in the movie and we haven’t thrown mud on them or dressed them in drag.” Calling it “the male gaze” implies that (a) only males appreciate beautiful women, and (b) we hate women who aren’t beautiful. Both assumptions are false and by using the term you’re simply identifying yourself as a body-shamer.
(6) “Basic,” as in “Yes, that would be the basic version, Joe Bob.”
This means you’re an out-of-date conservative boring conventional enemy of change. You have failed to acknowledge the awesomeness of Lanvin low-top sneakers. You are an old fart. By using “basic” you’ve just dismissed the other person out of hand.
(7) “Bandwidth,” as in “We have limited bandwidth for executing that, Joe Bob,” or “If you can find some available bandwidth, we’d like to add three more chapters to that assignment.”
Bandwidth is a substitution for “time,” “manpower,” “energy,” “scheduling,” and many other concepts in the arena of working. When hearing it, you first have to figure out which word the person is trying to use, therefore using up valuable bandwidth, you self-important poser.
(8) “In alignment,” as in “I want to make sure we’re in alignment with the diversity-and-inclusion people, Joe Bob,” or “We need to bring these ventures into alignment with our human-resources mission statement.”
This always means “I disagree with you but rather than hash it out I’m going to cite some universal principle at a higher level than both of us so that you won’t notice I’m disagreeing with you and you’ll have to give in because it’s bigger than we are.”
It’s a way to avoid engaging on any issue. It’s a way to say, “You scare me, Joe Bob, I’m not gonna talk about that at all.”
Spare me, please. I’m never gonna be in alignment.
(9) “Disruptive,” as in “My new company is disruptive.”
Your company is not disruptive. Henry Ford’s Model T was disruptive. The inventor of the internet was disruptive. Cell phones were disruptive. A new app for pet insurance is not disruptive.
(10) “Wheelhouse,” used in either direction—“That’s right in our wheelhouse,” or “That’s pretty far out of our wheelhouse, Joe Bob.”
Life is not the deck of a steamship. You may not have a wheelhouse, because a wheelhouse is a structure larger than yourself, and your brain may be so small that you use the word “wheelhouse” to mean something much, much smaller than yourself. That would make it kind of an idiotic metaphor, now, wouldn’t it?
But then again, it identifies you as a wheelhouse-user, making it much easier to kick you smack in the middle of your basic woke wheelhouse.
]]>Little did I know that the future is now and the much-lampooned blow-up party doll is now the rechargeable Playboy Playmate. Right now you can buy sexually alluring robots that kiss, talk, hug, remember everything you tell them and incorporate it into their responses, wink, nod, turn their heads, talk dirty, make inarticulate sex sounds, writhe in ecstasy, and have orgasms. (Okay, they’re fake orgasms, but men never know anyway, right?) They even have “lifelike body heat” maintained at a constant 98.6.
The prices, if you’re wondering, are anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000. I’m not sure what additional features you get for the extra cash, or what features are lame if you go cheap, but if you’re going this route, I can’t imagine anyone skimping on the extras. The websites are all about the skin—the skin feels like real skin. They harp on the skin so much that these companies probably need to be investigated to find out if they’re robbing fresh graves. At any rate, the more stuff she can do, the more lifelike she is; and the closer you get to that deluxe $5,000 model, the better you’re able to sustain the male illusion that you have a girlfriend.
And because it is a male illusion—I found one high-tech male robot but he looks gay—I think we may be on the cusp of a final solution for the “incel” problem.
The incels are those guys who call themselves “involuntary celibates” because they consider themselves undateable because nobody could ever possibly want to have sex with them. (This is not true, but it’s a topic for another day. Nobody is undateable except those who make themselves so.) It would be easy to dismiss these guys and their misogynist chat groups—they blame women for all their problems—were it not for the fact that a few of them have gone off the deep end and committed horrendous acts of violence. The most notorious is Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old Brit who killed six people and injured fourteen others with a knife, a gun, and a car during a daylong spree in Isla Vista, California. We know from the manifesto he published right before he killed himself that his motive was to murder beautiful women for not sleeping with him and sexually active men because he was envious of them. All of this could be explained as a mental disorder were it not for the fact that the Elliot Rodger Manifesto has made him something of a folk hero among his fellow incels.
So we have all these guys who believe that (a) all women are gold-digging whores, (b) they won’t sleep with me because I’m ugly, and (c) I want one of the gold-digging whores to be my girlfriend forever. I don’t think I’m exaggerating the twisted logic to say that all three parts of this are true, and I would even add a fourth one: (d) women I consider ugly—in other words, female incels—are not welcome. Then there’s another layer of emotion underneath all this, and it goes something like this: “That guy the beautiful girl is dating”—they call them Chads—“that Chad the beautiful girl is dating is an obnoxious creep, and she should dump him and love me because I would treat her better.”
All of these contradictory impulses could be solved overnight by figuring out a way to get the incel in touch with Maya, Michele, Angelina, Amber, Natalia, Olivia, Lucy, Julia, Summer, Grace, Mercedes, Victoria, Violet, Pearl, Coco, Marlin, Jasmine, Crystal, Cindy, Cheri, Britney, Anna, Agnes, or Monique. All of those are “off the shelf” sex robots currently for sale with various types of bodies and hair and, of course, vagina (shaved or unshaved). If I could generalize about what’s popular in this arena, it seems that men want a D cup, a petite girl (5-1 or 5-2, 70 to 90 pounds), long fluffy hair, a 23-inch waist, and a 6.6-inch-deep vagina. (Yes, it gets that technical.) If one of the standard models doesn’t satisfy you, there’s a “build your own” option to create that perfect life companion that, with proper maintenance, will never steal money, insult your manhood, or refuse sex. To the incel who says, “Well, no, I want a real woman who likes me for me,” the answer is, “Well, no, you don’t. You don’t even like yourself. This is better. This is a fake woman who likes the fake version of you.”
One thing you notice about the incel groups on Reddit is that they’re relentlessly focused on physical appearance. So, guys, here it is—pure physical appearance. The technology is pretty good right now and it can only get better. (The manufacturers offer free lifetime software updates as new features are introduced.) She’ll answer any question in a way that pleases you, and since she has a 24/7 Wi-Fi connection, you could probably teach the ungrateful bitch to like all your posts on Reddit.
The only thing you can’t do is slap her around (although I expect this to be incorporated into future updates—“Teach her who’s boss if she doesn’t laugh at your jokes”). There are some disturbing questions in the FAQs of these websites, all related to fears of your girlfriend falling apart on you, such as “Can you pull or bite on a robot companion’s nipples hard without fear of tearing them?” (The answer is “Within reason.”) And “What if I don’t fit?” (The answer is “Use a lubricant, she’s very elastic.”) And “Can a robot companion support itself enough to do doggy style?” (Answer: Yes, but either put pillows under the upper body or bend her over a table or chair.) And “Can I bathe or shower with my robot companion?” (Answer: Yes, but keep water off the head to avoid brain damage and the upper back to avoid damage to the charging port.)
One item that struck me as robot cruelty was the airline traveling case. If you want to take your girlfriend on the road with you, you have to power her down and fold her into a $400 compartment that won’t fit in the overhead bin, and she’s not entitled to ride with the dogs and cats.
And then there are even more frightening possibilities in the “things that could go wrong” category:
“What if a joint breaks?” (Call our technical department and they’ll send a replacement joint and stay on the phone with you until you successfully install it.)
“What if a finger wire pokes through the skin?” (Push it back inside the silicone and patch the hole with a silicone repair kit.)
“If I buy the suntanned version, will the tan ever rub off?” (Only with prolonged dry humping.)
“What if I accidentally rip her flesh?” (Commercial-grade silicone caulking can be found at your local hardware store.)
“Can I use cosmetics on my companion?” (Yes to liquid eyeliner, blush, eye shadow, powder, eyebrow pencil, and lipstick. No to oil-based or cream-based makeup.)
And this one is perhaps the most disturbing:
“Can I send my robot back to you for repairs?” (No, “due to health concerns for our employees.”)
In other words, they won’t touch the doll after you have touched the doll. This should make the incel happy because she can never be unfaithful. If you sent her back to the warehouse, who knows what random Chad the little slut might sleep with? It’s actually better this way. You’re the husband, the boyfriend, the doctor, the stylist, the Uber driver, and the greatest sexual athlete in the history of the world. Everybody wins. And young girls in Santa Barbara don’t get blown away by savage idiots.
]]>Or at least I always thought so.
People are bringing tape recorders into workout clubs to make sure comics don’t “cross over the line.” That would be the Speech Code Line, the one that dwells within the active imaginations of humorless graduates of Sensitivity Training Class. We used to have a motto: “The job of the comedian is to define where the line is, and then deliberately cross it.” Good luck with that today. Someone in the audience might just be a Kamikaze Safe Space Warrior, a person being repeatedly triggered on purpose in an act of self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Yeah, I know—in one sense it’s nothing new. I’ve heard all the stories about Lenny Bruce, how the cops nailed him in a Greenwich Village club for saying the word “cocksucker” and then the authorities hounded him all the way to jail, an experience that pretty much broke his spirit.
And yeah, I know how George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine got trundled up to the Supreme Court by humorless moral scolds.
And yeah, I know how Gilbert Gottfried lost his job as the Aflac duck because he made Japanese tsunami jokes. (That’s the best you could do on offensive Gilbert material? The man anchored the Friars Club roasts for years. If the greatest comedians from both coasts had a life-or-death dirty-joke contest, Gilbert would be the sole survivor—he can tell jokes that make Andrew Dice Clay puke.)
It’s almost like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin made the stage safe for any vile thing you wanna say, so self-appointed censors started finding offstage reasons to heckle comics out of existence.
There used to be a foolproof standard for anything said on the stage:
If they laugh, you can say it.
And it’s a pretty good rule because it eliminates all discussion about good taste, bad taste, off-limits topics, and it puts the comedian in the position of having to constantly outmaneuver the audience’s expectations, which is sort of the definition of comedy. Daniel Tosh has a whole section of his act in which he deconstructs the frequent battle cry of the moral crusader: “But there are some topics that can never be funny. There are matters that are beyond joking.” He then proceeds to tell jokes about rape, dead babies, and other topics that he gets away with because…the audience laughs in spite of itself. People are trying not to laugh but he’s identified some startling central truth that makes it impossible to keep a straight face. It’s not the subject matter, it’s the context, as any good comic knows.
That’s why it was ridiculous in the early ’90s when people who had never seen Andrew Dice Clay’s act started movements to bring him down. He was doing what used to be called “blue comedy” of the type made famous by Redd Foxx in after-hours clubs—intentionally dirty material, mostly about sex—but he was branded a misogynist by people who had never seen his act. They just read the jokes in print or watched a short clip of his nasty nursery rhymes. Dice was selling out shows at Madison Square Garden for audiences who did think his material was funny, but he was brought down by people who would never go to one of his shows and for whom, I’m quite sure, the material wasn’t funny.
The material doesn’t have to be funny for 100 percent of the population!
You can have jokes that are funny to Scots but not to Irishmen. You can have black humor, brown humor, feminist humor, lesbian humor, sexual humor, nasty political humor, and each comic will find his audience while offending people who don’t like him and would never patronize his shows. This is the way comedy works—it’s destructive, it blows up pretension, it vaporizes conventional wisdom. It offends.
But now, for the first time in history, we have every comic living on a knife edge, one joke away from being banished to Moral Scold Jail.
The stand-up stage is a pulpit. It’s a place for secular preachers. They reveal things to us about ourselves that we would rather not have revealed. They go deep into the hidden parts of our subconscious and, like unclogging a drain, unearth all the gross crap down there. It’s exhilarating for people who are self-aware and deeply offensive for people who are self-protective. There’s a reason our president won’t attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner—he’s not only incapable of self-deprecation, he may be incapable of laughter itself. A lot of his fans have the same missing brain lobe. When Kathy Griffin had her picture made holding the bloody head of Trump—a “burning in effigy” gesture made possible by modern special-effects makeup—they actually believed she was advocating cutting off his head. The literalist is the enemy of all humor.
In the early years of America, when preachers could be imprisoned for blasphemy, we developed the idea of the pulpit as a protected free-speech area. Almost every society in the world has some version of this. England has Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where you can supposedly say anything without repercussions, with the sole exception of insulting the monarch. (They give a very practical reason for this restriction: The queen has no right of reply.) Various universities have designated a particular tree, square, quadrangle, or lawn as protected areas for idiosyncratic expression. But our place, in the latter half of the 20th century, was always the comedy stage.
Earlier this year Louis C.K. was working out a show at Governor’s Comedy Club on Long Island, and some of his jokes were takedowns of the Parkland High School survivors. I don’t know whether the jokes worked or not—history hasn’t recorded whether his experiment was successful—but somebody recorded them and posted them so that he could be portrayed as a vindictive bitter hateful specimen of a human being. (The reasoning here was that, because he had previously been outed for sexual abuse, he shouldn’t be allowed to work at all.) Dave Chappelle has been similarly stalked by “gotcha” police. Michael Richards was basically drummed out of stand-up after someone recorded some racist barbs directed at hecklers at the Comedy Store in El-Lay. Even Jerry Seinfeld, who does nothing very close to the edge, says he’s afraid to work universities. And the policing of comedy has crossed the ocean in recent years. Konstantin Kisin, a Russian-born Brit, had to pull out of a show at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London when the school asked him to sign a “behavioural agreement form.” Listen to this language:
By signing this contract, you are agreeing to our no-tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism.
The only one they left out is “banana-on-the-sidewalk-ism,” but they could probably sanction you for that joke under the “ableism” clause. Kisin, who grew up in the Soviet Union, noted that he’d seen this kind of document before, in a totalitarian state, and once was enough.
Comedians have to tell bad unfunny jokes in order to know that they’re bad and unfunny. Posting their rehearsals on Facebook is the equivalent of posting a “Before” picture of a fat person embarking on a weight-loss program. But the goal of all this self-righteous posturing is to bring these guys in line.
Sofie Hagen, the Danish comedian and “fat acceptance campaigner,” told The Guardian that all comedians should simply erase everything potentially offensive from their acts because there are many comics “who manage to say a lot of things without repercussions; who are really, really funny while doing it. It sometimes takes a bit of extra work; you have to be aware of your own privilege and you have to educate yourself so you don’t use damaging language.”
Apparently Sofie never heard the “find the line and cross it” speech. Apparently she doesn’t care about the Lenny Bruces and George Carlins and Paul Mooneys of the world who set off nuclear bombs on the stage so that the world will be freer. (Paul Mooney tells explicitly racist jokes in almost every set he does.) Apparently she thinks that people who use “damaging language” on purpose are beyond redemption and should be banned by the people.
Here’s the list of comics she gives as clean upstanding politically correct entertainers: Hannah Gadsby, Nish Kumar, Sara Pascoe, Mark Watson, Sophie Duker, Mae Martin.
No room for you, Dave. No room for you, Gilbert or Paul or Andrew. Kevin Hart, we’re watching you, too. We’re watching all of you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
]]>Maybe it’s worth it.
Maybe he’s looking at the electric chair and deciding he’d rather get it over with now.
And maybe that’s a good decision—for him, for the criminal justice system, and for the state budget, because those capital murder cases go on forever.
For some reason, people hate it when the accused criminal kills himself, especially when he does it before the trial. Am I the only person who can see the logic of Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine why a guy facing life in prison for charges he’d already served time for—so he knew what life is like for sex offenders in the joint—would be bummed by the unsealing of 2,000 documents containing every type of sex crime known to man, including rape, trafficking, and molestation of minors, not to mention the lesser offenses like pandering and befriending horny presidents.
“He took the coward’s way out.”
Every time I hear this I wonder how killing yourself became the equivalent of running out the back door of a jewelry store. I don’t think Ernest Hemingway was a coward, or Sylvia Plath, or Robin Williams, or Marilyn Monroe, or Kurt Cobain, or Virginia Woolf, or my colleague Hunter S. Thompson. I think suicides sometimes occur because someone already dealing with a horrendous situation—depression, poverty, shame, a criminal past—is hit with a new ton of bricks and is overwhelmed by the burden of staying alive. They’ve seen everything they’ve wanted to see. It hasn’t worked out. They’re done.
The remarkable thing about Epstein’s death is all the attempts to keep him alive. When the federal prosecutors went to court to file a routine motion to dismiss the charges—because the defendant was dead—the judge could have simply granted the motion through the clerk. Instead they had a hearing, and at that hearing federal judge Richard Berman invited twenty of Epstein’s accusers to give victim impact statements. People actually sat in the witness box and hurled epithets at a dead man. It’s some indication of the grandeur of the federal bench that judges now take on the roles of priest and psychologist, conduct séances, and aspire to be St. Peter guarding the gates of heaven and Charon ferrying people to hell.
Killing yourself in prison has always been supremely irritating to the authorities. Perhaps the most famous example is Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander who managed to get a cyanide pill smuggled into his cell before they could hang him at Nuremberg. There have been six successful suicides at Guantanamo…that we know of. The military stopped publishing the number of attempted suicides out of embarrassment, but there were 120 in the year 2003 alone, and three on the same day in 2006. (These suicides are especially easy to understand. It’s not “I don’t want to face trial,” it’s “There’s never going to be a trial.”) Several other Nazis killed themselves in prison after receiving life sentences, including Ilse Koch and Rudolf Hess. Philip Markoff, accused of being the Craigslist killer, offed himself in Boston’s Nashua Street Jail before he could be tried. Richard Chase, the vampire cannibal serial killer from Sacramento, killed himself on death row simply by saving up his antidepressants until he had enough for an overdose. Aaron Hernandez, the NFL player serving life for murder, still had appeals pending when he hanged himself with a bedsheet.
I don’t think any of these people were crazy, I don’t think any of them were cowards, and I don’t think jail guards should be fired or disciplined when they don’t get there in time. The fact that the Director of the Bureau of Prisons was fired over the suicide of a high-profile prisoner indicates that these days the only game in town is vengeance. Denied the pleasure of seeing Epstein packed off to solitary in the supermax, the tabloids felt robbed and so did the people. The implication was that somehow he got away with it.
He didn’t get away with it. He died alone in one of the most depressing jails in the world.
The postmortem philosophizing about, “Well, the families didn’t get closure,” ignores the fact that every family interviewed after an execution says, “There is no closure.” It’s a false concept. It doesn’t exist. If we want to maintain the fiction of it, we can simply regard most prison suicides as early closure.
Unfortunately, in the movies they still make us suffer. Ricky Caldwell, the star of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, pulls the trigger but he’s out of bullets, resulting in three more sequels. The last one starred Mickey Rooney. A cop should have loaned him some ammo.
]]>First come the “You’re Disgusting” people: Women should never wear leggings. Leggings are cheap/immoral/against God.
As far as I’m concerned, these people can just go back to Bible school and shut up. They’re not part of this discussion.
So that leaves five warring factions.
(1) Leggings Are a Form of Underwear: This would include your high school principals, your Girl Scout leaders, your more conservative cheerleader moms who believe that leggings, as churned out in Chinese microfiber factories, are simply an updated form of what were once called leotards or tights. When you wore leotards or tights, you also wore a skirt, a dress, or, at the very least, your boyfriend’s oversize shirt.
(2) Leggings Are a Form of Athletic Wear No Different From T-shirts: This would include your aerobics instructors, your marathon runners, your basketball players. People who never wear anything except athletic clothes.
(3) Leggings Are Booty-Proud: This would be the species that believes the higher the bewtocks ride, the better life can be. Some of them have paid upwards of $20,000 for Brazilian butt lifts.
(4) Leggings Are Comfy So Leave Me Alone: This would be the majority of the population.
(5) Leggings Are Overtly Sexual: This would be people who spend their days worrying about “the dreaded panty line” and “the dreaded camel toe” and “the dreaded cellulite.” These people are full of dread but they wear the leggings in order to do amateur body sculpting.
In every case, the statement the leggings are making is “I just came from the gym”—even if you haven’t been to the gym in three years. Or, if you live in Brooklyn, “I just came from hot yoga spin class.”
By the way, before I dive deep into this subject, I would like to point out that I have closely examined the forefoot of a camel and there’s no resemblance. Who came up with that metaphor in the first place? It had to be either a zookeeper or a Bedouin, and neither one of them has any business linking the vagina to a rather disagreeable pack animal. The Rorschach on that is troubling.
And while we’re on that subject, why is it “the dreaded camel toe” but not “the dreaded bulge” for men who wear leggings, especially ballet dancers who wear leggings? The quick way to get rid of either one is to wear jeans instead of leggings. (Although not jeggings, because jeggings are designed to look like jeans but cling to the skin like leggings.) When I was in high school, jeans were not allowed, so you would have to go to Kmart and buy what we called School Pants—cheap polyester shiny-ass straight-legged dorkarama pantaloons that would be stripped off, wadded up, thrown on the floor, and kicked under the bed as soon as you got home from class, only to be dug out the next morning when you were rushing to make the school bus.
The problem with polyester School Pants is that, like the leggings of today, they overemphasized any protrusions that might occur, if you know what I mean and I think you do. A male during his high school years can get an involuntary erection from a ceiling-fan draft and about a hundred other things a day that come into his field of activity, most of them having nothing to do with sex, and the result is that he can become a walking penis billboard at any moment, especially when wearing School Pants. In my opinion this is much worse than “the dreaded camel toe” because at least that can be solved by crossing the legs and pulling down on the fabric. Pulling down on the fabric in the male case might result in physical injury, ripped fabric, or worse.
So if that is your only problem, simply wear jeans. We suffered in School Pants so you wouldn’t have to.
But here’s what I don’t understand about the leggings controversies that periodically break out across the nation. (In case you haven’t been following, leggings have been banned in high schools, middle schools, Catholic churches, megachurches, United Airlines flights, office buildings, corporate campuses, and universities where students have rebelled with counterdemonstrations called Leggings Pride Day and Yoga Pant Parade Day.) Americans have obviously voted with their greenbacks for leggings, and so China continues to churn them out in a frenzy designed to get as many “high-elasticity” garments stretched across as many American bewtocks as possible before Trump mollifies the Leggings Shamers with restrictive trade policies. Last year was the first time in history that “athleisure pants” outscored blue jeans in import dollars.
So here’s my question. Didn’t we just go through 200 years of telling women that the more skin you cover up, the more modest you are? Now we’ve finally got this product that covers it all up! You don’t see the ankle, you don’t see the leg, you don’t see the thigh or the midriff, and—in the case of the catsuit, the jumper, the bodysuit, or whatever you call Spider-Man apparel—you don’t even see the shoulders!
All you see is the shape. And it’s the shape of the human body.
Let me correct that a tad. It’s the idealized shape of the human body. It’s a way to smooth out all the bumps and crevices and turn human skin into one of those Japanese anime cartoons where the generalized curves make everyone look alike. Admittedly, I’m not sure I understand the appeal of the “belfie” (the butt selfie), which is usually snapped while wearing athletic wear, also called fitness streetwear, also called activewear, also called “athleisure products.” But one reason people like leggings and all their variants is that they can just stuff their junk in there and let it settle.
So let’s not fight it, people. History has already moved beyond the dress codes of—to name a few—Devils Lake High School in North Dakota, Skyview High School in Billings, Montana, Kenilworth Junior High in Petaluma, California, Haven Middle School in Evanston, Illinois, Cape Code Regional Technical High School in Massachusetts, Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, and the Lakewood City School District of Ohio, where leggings, skinny jeans, and yoga pants are allowed only if a second garment “covers the buttocks.”
In the Garment District of Manhattan, once dominated by haute couture guys trying to design the ultimate fancy dress, everyone is now much more concerned with the various ways you can manipulate leggings to make people believe your leggings are different from someone else’s leggings. Hence we have concepts like Anti-Cellulite Leggings, Brazilian Workout Leggings, Luminous Leggings, Embellished Velvet Leggings, Low-Waist Faux Leather Leggings, High-Waist Celebrity-Sponsored Leggings (Beyoncé has a line of them), Mohawk Leggings (stripe down the side), Shredded Leggings, Leggings embossed with your favorite Marvel superhero, Tiger Print Leggings, Butt-Lift Leggings, and Second-Skin Leggings. I’m waiting for someone to design leggings that have a trompe l’oeil drawing of an actual human leg on the fabric. The current athleisure leader is Lululemon, a Canadian company that sold its first pair of yoga pants in 1998, but Athleta, the company formed by the Gap because the Gap was too heavily identified with denim, is close behind, and the hardcore holdouts at Levi’s and Wrangler are keening like bullfighters’ widows.
I have seen the future, and it’s a lot more than just butts in jersey knit cotton. It’s Lycra-blend racer-back tank tops, breathable stretch-knit eco-blend loungewear finished with aloe vera on a yoga romper, and, yes, even a new generation of polyester. There are engineers in Colombia creating microfibers so thin and durable that they’ll be both beloved by Olympic swimmers and decried as pornography by butt-focused school boards. My message to the anti-leggings armies is: Surrender now. Your cause is already lost.
]]>This doesn’t happen.
Directors don’t apologize.
Is this the beginning of a Reparations Movement for predatory directors who steal our time? If so, I’m waiting on Michael Mann’s apology for Blackhat. Unfortunately, when an American director pisses away $70 million, he doesn’t say “I’m sorry,” he releases a director’s cut! That’s what Michael Mann did. “Here’s the movie they wouldn’t let me make.” Then, when nobody liked that one either, “I’m going back to the indie world where I can realize my full vision.”
This is the way it’s done. We probably shouldn’t mess with a hundred years of Hollywood history.
Of course, the $57 million mistake movie I’m talking about was made in Chinawood. It’s called Shanghai Fortress, and it’s about some youthful elite warriors who defend the world against alien invaders. It looks a little like Starship Troopers, which should have been a tip-off to the Chinese producers. Paul Verhoeven spent $100 million on that movie, and even though it’s popular with just about everyone I know, it still hasn’t made its investment back after 22 years.
So here’s what the guy should have said: “We were trying to do Starship Troopers with an Asian twist because we had the two Eastern versions of Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards. Once we had that casting, we had to go with it.”
In other words, turn it into a high-level studio meeting kinda thing.
And actually that’s true. The stars of Shanghai Fortress are Shu Qi and Lu Han. Shu Qi is a Taiwanese babe, just like Denise Richards, and Lu Han is a pop idol. He looks to be about 8 years old, which kind of cuts down on the eroticism of the love story, but hey, it worked for Titanic! Everyone is panning Shanghai Fortress for not using classically trained Asian actors, but I don’t see Denise Richards or Casper Van Dien doing Shakespeare in the Park, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
Anyway, here’s what Teng Huatao, the director, said after the abysmal weekend grosses:
In the past, there were members of the audience who didn’t like my movies.
Okay, Teng, I’m interrupting you right there. Bad start. When you have a stinker on your résumé, that movie ceases to exist. Somebody at the Beijing Film Academy was supposed to tell you this.
But their criticism was always aimed at the movies themselves. But today I saw that some internet users are saying, ‘The Wandering Earth’ opened the door to Chinese science fiction and ‘Shanghai Fortress’ closed it.
Oh my God, three sentences in and he’s already buried himself. Never mention someone else’s film that’s more beloved than your own turkey! Fifty-seven mil is nothing! There are studios that flush that much down the toilet five times a year! You should have gone with the “still trying to find its audience” line. That would have put the whole thing in limbo. Now you’re saying, “Well, I screwed the pooch.”
I am very saddened.
Teng! You can’t be saddened. You have to be all about “I make movies for me and it gives me great joy when people are entertained by them.” This is where you do “true to my vision” stuff.
This showed not only their dissatisfaction with the movie, but that their hopes for Chinese sci-fi were dashed. As the director, I have ultimate responsibility for this. I am very sorry.
Oh. My. God. Do you have no friends who could have talked you out of this? Do you not realize that “Chinese sci-fi” is not even a thing? That it’s a made-up concept like “Scandinavian crime drama”?
Is there some secret reason you did this? Are they gonna put you in jail or something? I have to assume some of that $57 million came from the government, because in China almost everything comes from the government, but I don’t think they look at the grosses and send you to Qincheng Prison and cause your wife to start writing letters to Amnesty International.
But really, if we’ve entered a new era where directors can be stretched on the rack for wasting budgets, then I want my vengeance. Timur Bekmambetov, I’m talking to you.
I had barely recovered from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which cost only $69 million, when they gave you that $100 million Ben-Hur remake where you strapped the GoPro cameras onto the horses. It took not one but two studios, both Paramount and MGM, to decide one of the most famous stories about Jesus should be made by a Kazakh who grew up in the Soviet Union, so yeah, you’ve got excuses, but I mean, come on, man, 125 minutes of togas and sandals and you can’t even deliver on the chariot race? I expect a full and formal apology, the way they did it in the heyday of Stalin.
Okay, your turn, Marcus Nispel. I didn’t say a word when you remade the greatest movie in the history of the world, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and you managed to get away with that by spending $9.2 million on a script that originally cost $50,000 back in 1973. So you get a pass because you had 184 times more budget than the original, and that meant people did not hate the result and the movie made $81 million.
But Conan the Barbarian is a different matter. You should be hauled into court and forced to repay every cent of that $110 million, and Jason Momoa should be required to bring you clean socks every day should you fall behind and get sentenced to Fantasy Remake Jail, but I’ll settle for a lengthy humiliating public apology. This would not include any remarks about what you were trying to do. If you utter the words “the art of Frank Frazetta” at any moment, you will be executed.
Cowboys and Aliens. Jon Favreau, the Iron Man films atone for many sins, but you need to bleed for that $100 million.
Paul Feig, there’s a special place in Remake Hell for the man who destroys the beloved Ghostbusters franchise with $163 million of Universal’s cash. You’re going to get additional time in Purgatory for saying you’re proud that the film won an award. That award was the Nickelodeon prize awarded by children! Have you no shame?
Joe Johnston, I’m going to assume you were shocked by the phone call from Universal awarding you the director’s gig on the $150 million Wolfman remake because, yeah, those Honey, I Shrunk the Kids credits don’t really transfer. But since you used the lamest reasoning ever during the postmortem—the old “I was called in at the last minute on a troubled project” excuse—I’m sorry, but we need you to be flayed forty times in the public square of your choice.
Or we could just ignore Teng Huatao and go back to the old way of doing things, which is to wait twenty years until your movie becomes “an underrated cult favorite.” Then you can hit the convention circuit, have a cast reunion, and show your family that your movie was “ahead of its time.”
Or you can do what Martin Scorsese does. He made a movie called Hugo that was budgeted at $100 million and went over another $80 million. Nobody went to Hugo. Nobody who did go to Hugo will ever go to it again. Nobody cares about Hugo. But here’s why Martin Scorsese will never have to apologize for spending the money:
Eleven Academy Award nominations.
Five Oscar wins.
Plus only twelve more years until it becomes a forgotten gem.
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