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01/26/2006
Party rallies around UK Lib Dem leadership candidate Simon Hughes after he's caught in sexuality flip-flop.
Last week, when questioned on whether or not he's gay: "The answer is no as it happens. But if it was the case, which it isn't, I hope that would not become an issue."
Now: "I am perfectly willing to say that I have had both homosexual and heterosexual relationships in the past."
New Scissor Sisters album to feature Elton John. (via Pink)
Panty waste: David Beckham spends £1,000 a month on undies from the Calvin Klein Pro Stretch range and never wears the same pair twice.
Alan Cumming: "I like people who put their vanity second to their character. Sadly that excludes most of Hollywood! I think Botox is the worst thing to happen to American screen acting EVER."
Arkansas Christian school dismisses student because he's gay:
"According to Guinn, he was told to not dress in women's clothing, not slap others on the buttocks if he was a member of a sports team, not hug or shake hands with other men for too long, not 'broadcast' his lifestyle, and not tell other students he was gay until he knew them well. Guinn said it was difficult to make friends under the restrictions."
The James Frey Effect: Memoirs by Augusten Burroughs to be slapped with a warning sticker: "Author's note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well." Perhaps they should say, "Don't believe everything you read." I'd venture to guess 100% of memoirs out there have an anecdote tweaked for the mere purpose of entertaining. Stop the madness!
The tribe has spoken: Richard Hatch faces up to 13 years in jail.
Posted 9:00 AM EST by Andy in Elsewhere | Permalink
Comments
He was greedy and too slick. The IRS offered him a deal but he was too cocky and blew the chance.
Posted by: Greg | Jan 25, 2006 5:30:38 PM
I wonder how he will do at the penitentiary tribal council??
Posted by: Blair | Jan 25, 2006 5:37:28 PM
Well he had to keep his name in the headlines some way. Everyone knows you dont screw with the IRS. We all have to pay taxes and so do you!
Posted by: Matthew Schooler | Jan 25, 2006 6:06:33 PM
What an idiot.
Posted by: Brian | Jan 25, 2006 6:09:28 PM
Next on "Survivor: Levenworth"...
Posted by: Rad | Jan 25, 2006 8:38:10 PM
Perfect timing. Society is just about ready to accept 24-hour surveillance of the inside of prisons. Somehow I suspect Hatch will be featured on the debut episode and then after the commercial break, never heard from again.
Thanks Oz!!!
Posted by: Chad Hanging | Jan 25, 2006 9:18:47 PM
That's grand! Who says stupidity isn't painful?
I do pity the poor prison guards who have to spend the next 13 years looking at Hatch's naked butt.
ROFLMAO
Posted by: Jay Croce | Jan 25, 2006 10:28:28 PM
The Brokeback Mountain cast will be on Oprah Friday,1/27.
Posted by: Jack | Jan 26, 2006 5:51:17 AM
The sad part of the Hatch story is that the DA offered him probation and fines 18 months ago and he turned it down...
Posted by: wayne | Jan 26, 2006 8:23:44 AM
who care's about Richard Hatch? I want to know WHAT HAPPES to all David Beckham's slightly used undies???!!!
Posted by: Al G. Bloom | Jan 26, 2006 9:46:29 AM
beckham is soooooooooo Nouveau Riche
when the endoresment deals dry up, he will look back and think how foolish it was to spend aprox $18,000 USA a year on underware
Old money gets to be and stay old money by NOT doing such foolish things.......
Posted by: jimmyboyo | Jan 26, 2006 10:43:17 AM
Technically, all nonfiction has a little fiction thrown into it because, otherwise, it wouldn't be so interesting to read.
James Frey notwithstanding, I happen to like Burroughs.
Posted by: MS | Jan 26, 2006 11:37:45 AM
I think self righteous British actors who feed off the industry and then slap it in the face with criticism are the worst thing to happen to the American Screen.
James Frey is an idiot and Oprah is a fool for defending him. But it sure is good for ratings. She is pure genius it that way and if it hurts a few people who might try get sober in an alternative method as some have suggested...why should it be her concern? She has made the money. And isn’t that what her show is about?
Posted by: Matthew Schooler | Jan 26, 2006 12:29:46 PM
Watch Oprah today! She says she feels duped about the whole Frey incident. The real story is her producers knew that his story was not factual and of course brought this to her attention but she went ahead with the story. She had the chance to apologize on Larry King but refused. Now she feels duped. Damn she is good...I predict tears and record ratings. I got to hand it to her she didn’t get be Oprah without the manipulation of our feelings. Can’t wait to see what she does tomorrow. Anybody know what Friday's show is going to be about?
Posted by: Matthew Schooler | Jan 26, 2006 2:20:30 PM
Oprah deserves this. Finally something she exploited has come back to bite her in the ass.
Posted by: Donald | Jan 26, 2006 3:20:57 PM
Andy,
Thank you for this info re UK Lib Dem Simon Huges.
I mean, he's Not ugly.
=)
Posted by: Gilli | Jan 26, 2006 3:28:42 PM
I'm getting a wee bit weary of Frey-apologists telling us how many a memoir is not entirely factual.
I know that. We know that. We've always known that. Just as we know that it's a completely different story when someone with no claim to write a memoir at all - an unknown, like Frey - paints a hugely fictitious version of his past in order to do so.
Posted by: Jacko | Jan 26, 2006 5:31:26 PM
Frank Rich had an excellent column in the N.Y. Times recently connecting tolerance of James Frey's lies-presented-as-truth to a general societal lack of insistence on integrity and truth, and specifically to the public's willingness to swallow the Bush administration's blatant lies and bogus rationale for starting a war in Iraq. (I am not, repeat not, saying that Andy, because he urges people to go easy on Frey, supports the Iraqi war or that he accepted Bush's lies.) For anyone who's interested and lacks access to Rich's column, here it is:
Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito
By FRANK RICH
IF James Frey hadn't made up his own life, Tom Wolfe would have had to invent it for him. The fraudulent memoirist is to the early 21st century what Mr. Wolfe's radical-chic revelers were to the late 1960's and his Wall Street "masters of the universe" were to the go-go 1980's: a perfect embodiment of the most fashionable American excess of an era.
As Oprah Winfrey, the ultimate arbiter of our culture, has made clear, no one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble. Such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life. What matters most now is whether a story can be sold as truth, preferably on television. The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert's slinging of the word "truthiness" caught on instantaneously last year precisely because we live in the age of truthiness.
At its silliest level, this is manifest in show-biz phenomena like Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, juvenile pop stars who merchandised the joy of their new marriage as a lucrative MTV reality series before heading to divorce court to divvy up the booty. But if suckers want to buy fictional nonfiction like "Newlyweds" or "A Million Little Pieces" as if they were real, that's just harmless diversion.
It's when truthiness moves beyond the realm of entertainment that it's a potential peril. As Seth Mnookin, a rehab alumnus, has written in Slate, the macho portrayal of drug abuse in "Pieces" could deter readers battling actual addictions from seeking help. Ms. Winfrey's blithe re-endorsement of the book is less laughable once you start to imagine some Holocaust denier using her imprimatur to discount Elie Wiesel's incarceration at Auschwitz in her next book club selection, "Night."
This isn't just a slippery slope. It's a toboggan into chaos, or at least war. As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it's the truthiness of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What's remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz" - FEMA's heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It's as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.
Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don't understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.
The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works. From the moment Judge Alito emerged from Harriet Miers's penumbra, his supporters' story line was clear: he'd be presented as a humble exemplar of American values too mainstream to be labeled "out of the mainstream" by his opponents. In his first courtesy calls on Capitol Hill in November, we learned, Judge Alito often cited his father as a proud immigrant who instilled in him empathy for minorities and the poor - an empathy not remotely apparent in the judge's legal record. A particularly poignant anecdote had it that his father had once defended a black basketball player from discrimination in college.
Yet David Kirkpatrick of The Times reported then that "some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in 1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted, including the episode about his support for the black student and the fact that his father immigrated from Italy as a child." No matter. If such questions couldn't stop an Oprah Book Club selection, they certainly wouldn't stop a nominee to the Supreme Court.
Once Judge Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats decided to counter the Republicans' story by coming up with a fictional story of their own, or that's what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their fictional biography cast Judge Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major evidence cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in reaction to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan Justice Department.
Judge Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the R.O.T.C. on campus, adding that he did not remember having "done anything substantial in relation to this group, including renewing my membership." The Democrats plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy's insistence that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP's "repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay pronouncements." In one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation process - a "Sunshine Boys"-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen Specter - Mr. Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP "documents in the possession of the Library of Congress" to hunt down Judge Alito's bigotry.
There was only one problem with the Democrats' fictional story line: it had been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Mr. Kennedy presented it to the nation. Mr. Kirkpatrick reported that he had examined the same papers Mr. Kennedy was threatening to subpoena - as well as some others at Princeton's own library - and found no trace of Judge Alito's involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a major donor. When the Senate committee did Mr. Kennedy's bidding and looked at those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November, calling the senator's bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had for keeping Judge Alito off the court. It says everything about the Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.
THE Republicans would never have been so sloppy. Indeed, hardly had Mr. Kennedy's melodramatic stunt blown up in his face than they came up with a new story line prompted by the other dramatic incident in the hearings: the departure of Martha-Ann Alito from the committee room in tears. She fled while a Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, was mocking the Democrats, not when the eminently mockable Democrats were mounting their lame assault. Whatever. As Time magazine later reported, a P.R. outfit called Creative Response Concepts immediately pumped up the media volume of her supposed martyrdom, breathlessly producing a former Alito clerk to provide eyewitness testimony of her suffering at the hands of those Democratic brutes.
Creative Response Concepts did similar work for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 campaign. Its roster of clients also includes the right-wing Media Research Center, itself the parent organization of something called the Cybercast News Service. For the new year, Cybercast News has an exciting fictional project of its own: just before John Murtha, the tough Congressional critic of the Iraq war, appeared on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, it started Swift Boating him by rewriting his Vietnam history to besmirch the legitimacy of his two Purple Hearts.
If Karl Rove's White House propaganda factory is the NBC Universal or Time Warner of G.O.P. fictionalization, then the Miramax and Focus Features of the right are such nominally "independent" satellites as Cybercast News, the Lincoln Group (which places fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers), the Rendon Group (which helped manufacture the heroic image of Ahmad Chalabi) and the now-dormant Talon News (the fake Republican-staffed news site whose fake White House correspondent, Jeff Gannon, was unmasked last year).
Fittingly enough against this backdrop, last week brought the re-emergence of Clifford Irving, the author of the fake 1972 autobiography of Howard Hughes that bamboozled the world long before fraudulent autobiographies and biographies were cool. He announced that he was removing his name from "The Hoax," a coming Hollywood movie recounting his exploits, because of what he judged its lack of fidelity to "the truth of what happened." That Mr. Irving can return like Rip van Winkle after all these years to take the moral high ground in defense of truthfulness is a sign of just how low into truthiness we have sunk.
Posted by: JOE 2 | Jan 26, 2006 6:56:05 PM
If Beckham sells each once-worn pair of briefs on eBay - under the catchy sales pitch of 'Bend it like Beckham' - he could retire next month.
Posted by: Jacko | Jan 26, 2006 6:59:11 PM
>>he never wears the same pair twice
He should try using toilet paper, or maybe he and Victoria should learn how to use a washing machine.
It's really disgusting that while people starve, Becks can't be bothered to wipe his ass, or wash his shorts. Can you imagine how many starving people could be fed with that money? Nearly $2000 a month!
It's an outrage! There's nothing funny about it.
Posted by: Jay Croce | Jan 26, 2006 8:53:20 PM
The Simon Hughes British MP story is interesting. In that he was elected, when his main political opponent, The openly gay actvist Peter Tatchell, was undermined by the hierachy of his own party and the tabloid media.
" What goes around, comes around"
Posted by: bazza | Jan 26, 2006 10:17:24 PM
Yes, Jimmyboyo, he's so COMMON, isn't he? Would you like a Pims before you go off to play polo? Or are Muffy and Buffy taking you to Newport to the cottage this weekend? Mama will be so pleased if you go with them; she's beginning to think you're a little "light in the loafers," you know. If you actually marry one of them, she'll free up the trust fund! Ta!
Posted by: Bourgeois Nerd | Jan 27, 2006 1:50:22 AM
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