The Culture Czar

Oh David Duchovny. We’re so sad to hear the news that you have checked yourself into rehab for sex addiction. Sex addiction sounds like a totally exhausting thing to have to keep up with, and we can’t even begin to imagine how out-of-control things must have gotten to give a quote to the public about it. We know you’ve asked for respect and privacy for your wife and children (we totally love you too, Téa!), and we totally feel you on that, but here’s the thing we keep wondering. Would it or would it not be less embarrassing (and career damaging) for you and your family if you said the rehab was for some sort of drug or alcohol addiction? Something prescription (of course) and easily mended….  read more »

It's not enough that Brett Ratner, Hollywood's least admired superstar director, has already made commercials for Activision's Guitar Hero videogame featuring those two guys from American Idol whose names you already forgot pretending to be Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Now, according to MTV's Multiplayer blog, Mr. Ratner wants to direct a movie based on the game. (This comes via New York's Vulture blog.)

Here's what the humble Rush Hour director and Entourage self-satirizer told MTV's Stephen Totilo:

I love 'Guitar Hero' and I think it’s a part of pop culture. I would love to do a 'Guitar Hero' movie, if Activision would ever let me.  read more »

Looking for a new movie to see over this Labor Day Weekend? Don't bother. As usual, Hollywood closed up shop for the summer two weeks ago. Maybe it's just us, but doesn't the box-office wasteland that annually occurs during the last two weeks of August feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy? If a good movie were released on Labor Day Weekend, wouldn't it make a lot of money?

We won't get that answer this year, as there isn't a single thing worth noting coming out this weekend. None of new releases look even remotely appealing, and one seems like an affront to all things good taste. (Seriously, if you are one of the people who go see Disaster Movie over the next three days, then may God have mercy on your soul.)

Well if you're in the mood for the multiplex--and not to see The Dark Knight for a fifth time--we have a suggestion. Over on iTunes you can download the thirty-minute Tropic Thunder faux-making of documentary Rain of Madness. For free!

If Tropic Thunder is Apocalypse Now filtered through Zoolander, think of Rain of Madness as the Dodgeball version of Heart of Darkness. Narrated by "German filmmaker Jan Jurgen" (actually actor and Tropic Thunder co-screenwriter Justin Theroux), Rain of Madness focuses on movie-within-the movie director Damien Cockburn (Steven Coogan) and his attempts at actually making Tropic Thunder.  read more »

We have to admit, after all the gushing press coverage that Mad Men received before the launch of its second season, we were more than a little concerned. There is example after example of popular watercooler shows hitting a wall in their sophomore year. Call it “The Curse of the Second Season” (see LOST, Desperate Housewives and, most recently, Heroes.) Would Mad Men be able to maintain the effortless excellence of its first year?

Thankfully, thus far, the answer is yes. Through five episodes, we’ve found the second season to be, quite possibly, an improvement on the first. Year two of Mad Men has actually gotten tighter, more focused and more interesting.  read more »

Remember greedy weirdo Richard Fish on Ally McBeal? He owned the Boston law firm filled with annoyingly quirky characters. His affinity for women with chicken-like "neck wattles"? Well, the actor who played Mr. Fish, Greg Germann, is still around. You might've seen him in Talladega Nights, the 2006 Nascar racing movie starring Will Ferrell that was actually pretty funny. But now you can see him on stage. He'll join the cast in the sex comedy of errors Boeing-Boeing starting Sept. 9, according to Playbill. The play won a 2008 Tony Award-winning Best Play Revival.  read more »

So Michael Jackson turns 50 today, and if you’ve ever wondered what Jacko might have looked like if he hadn’t turned himself into a space alien, wonder no longer. The highlight of a long, dishy retrospective on Jackson in the Daily Mail today is a mock-up of what the King of Pop would have looked like sans surgery, displayed next to the singer’s facial mutation du jour. The comparison is, to say the least, striking. The face on the left, drawn by an “expert,” looks, well, normal—much like any African-American male would on their 50th birthday. The organic Jackson is maybe most striking for the placid smile he wears, as if the decades of drug abuse, financial strain and sexual molestation accusations were a memory from someone else’s life.  read more »

Big news events like the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention usually spark new media technologies and breakthroughs.

Here's one, pointed out to us by Lost Remote. Washington Post reporter Ed O’Keefe recorded the clip above using his cellphone and streamed it live onto WashintonPost.com.

"This is one of the first times a newspaper organization has had the ability to bring this level of live video coverage to viewers," according to a WashingtonPost.com publicist.

The Washington Post and Newsweek.com equipped its journalists with cell phones featuring an application produced by Comet Technologies. According to the company's Web site, the technology has been in development for four years and is the first and only technology that allows reliable video to be transmitted to and from common cell phones. Cool stuff.

A 64-year-old woman named JoAn Karkos from Maine stole a book from the Lewiston Public Library and now she won't give it back because she's afraid it would fall into the wrong hands if she did. The book is It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, which, according to Publishers Weekly, features "two characters—an easygoing bird and an apprehensive bee" and includes charming watercolor-and-pencil art that is "alternately playful and realistic (and occasionally graphic)." (This comes via Bookslut.)

Ms. Karkos has been critical of the book for a while: In September 2007, she checked out two copies of It's Perfectly Normal and refused to return them, paying the libraries for the cost of the books and including a note that read, "I have been sufficiently horrified of the illustrations and sexually graphic, amoral, abnormal contents.  read more »

Did you ever really have that much fun at McCarren Park Pool, whose reign as one of New York’s most popular summer show spots will end tomorrow when Sonic Youth brings the curtain down on two years’ worth of weekend concerts at the waterless Williamsburg swimming hole? Sure, it’s hard to complain about free shows by A-list indie bands (Superchunk last summer was our favorite). But the crowds? The stifling heat and lack of shade? The Porta-Johns? Having to navigate through all those nauseating clown-hipster posses? Maybe we’re just getting old, but we’d rather be lounging at a real pool and listening to Daydream Nation on our headphones.  read more »

From the latest New Yorker's profile of architect Santiago Calatrava, by Rebecca Mead:

For Calatrava, who is one of the world’s most successful architects, sketching with watercolors is an essential part of his creative process. He does not work with a computer or with drafting equipment; each of his buildings begins with a sheaf of paint-dappled pages. His archive in Switzerland includes more than a hundred thousand sketches; he has also had copies of them bound into handsome keepsake books for his clients, a beguilingly artisanal alternative to a PowerPoint presentation.

Mr. Calatrava, of course, is designing the planned World Trade Center transit hub (rendered above), which may or may not be scaled back.