Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.
PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…
THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…
LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.
THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…
WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!
