April Fool!
Hee hee. NME makes me giggle. Eminem & Elton John to record album of love songs. Bwahahahaha! That's almost as good as the time The Printmaker and I hid a fake slice of bread in the matzah plate at seder! Oh, stop it guys, you're killing me, here.
Sunday, April 1, 2001 07:15 p.m.

Why I Need to Subscribe to Mean, Part 1
Seriously, what other magazine publishes articles exploring Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory from a Freudian perspective? Mean folks, if you're reading this, please let me come work for you. I'll be your office wit girl! I'll pitch good stories! I'll be the groovy reference librarian you never knew you needed! I'll keep all the pencils sharp! And I'll maintain the greatest clippings files you ever saw!
Sunday, April 1, 2001 12:58 p.m.

Why I Need to Subscribe to Mean, Part 2
The RZA meets Isaac Hayes. Yessss!
Sunday, April 1, 2001 12:57 p.m.

Steven Soderbergh
Well, as many of you know, I have loved Mr. Soderbergh for a while now, and his astoundingly classy Oscar acceptance speech last Sunday sealed the deal for me. So long, Tim Burton. Let me show you the door, Wes Anderson. John Sayles? Who? I'm a one-director woman now. Which means that I'm obsessively retrieving and cataloguing information about the sublimely geeky Mr. Soderbergh. Good thing Rolling Stone selected him as their Cool Auteur for their most recent issue. And thanks to Mim Udovitch's wierd, "I'll write this story as if it were going to run in McSweeney's!" style, I now know lots of facts about Mr. Soderbergh, all presented in the manner of one of those MasterCard commercials:
Number of cups of coffee drunk in his lifetime: 0;
Weight, in pounds: 143;
Height, in feet & inches: 5' 11";
Bump on head: 1;
Provenance of clothing: swanky, but not too swanky.
As if that weren't enough, here's FameTracker's Soderbergh Fame Audit, in which it is determined that his current fame level is his deserved fame level.
Sunday, April 1, 2001 12:48 p.m.

Trailer for Blow
Looks like this is the year for drug trafficking sagas. Not that I'm complaining. I love depictions of the seedy crime underworld. Anyway, this excellently chatty piece is by Ted Demme, the director of Blow, which stars my favourite underrated actor, Johnny Depp. He was so very robbed of an Oscar for Donnie Brasco, and he & Tim Burton deserve some kind of joint award for their consistently brilliant collaborations. He rules the school. Anyway. Ted is by turns funny, scornful, and triumphant in this shooting-from-the-hip story on the making of a G-rated trailer for a movie all about cocaine. I get the feeling that he just talked into a tape recorder and some lackey at the Times transcribed everything he said. Good things that we now know about the trailer: 1) it features the awesome Franka Potente and 2) Ted hates that annoying "In a world..." voiceover guy as much as I do. Rock!
Sunday, April 1, 2001 12:44 p.m.

Oy, Gevalt, We Have No Brisket!
I love this article. The quotes in it read like examples taken straight from The Joys of Yiddish. Check it out:
Dissatisfied, Brisket-less Customer: "What, my money isn't kosher anymore?"
Irate, Harried Butcher: "My supplier brings me something that looks like an oversized kebab and tries to tell me it's brisket."
Harried Butcher #2: "This is a very stressful time for our management team, not to mention my family. I'll have to explain to our relatives why we're having lamb this year."
Give me a break. Who complains about having lamb? It's a treat meat!
Saturday, March 31, 2001 09:14 a.m.

Looper Webjacked?
I'm guessing, based on the upcoming tour dates that he's got set up, that Peacock Johnson, webjacker of Looper's Geometrid site, is a big practical joke. A month-long April Fool, perhaps? Or not? I'm all about reference, right? So let's see what some research turned up: Ahhh, I see. Stuart David's new book, The Peacock Manifesto, is due out on April 5, and this is, indeed, a big practical joke. The book sounds pretty cool, actually -- according to amazon.co.uk, it's "probably the best black comedy you'll read this year. It weaves farce with danger, splicing sensitive undercurrents with brutal reality, sucking the reader into Peacock's well-dressed, badly advised and always utterly compulsive world." I'm hooked.
Saturday, March 31, 2001 09:05 a.m.

Spin's Sleaziest Moments in Rock
I didn't buy this issue of Spin and now I regret it. At least their site has all of the best (or would that be worst?) sleazy moments indexed for our reading enjoyment. I'd hate to have to be the one to select these moments, though. Oh, sure, the Led Zeppelin "Red Snapper" story is a shoo-in, but what are the levels on the index of sleaze (the Sleaze-o-Meter, if you will) that rate Serge Gainsbourg's "Lemon Incest" as sleazier than his in(famous) "I want to fuck 'er", directed at a shocked ("wha-aaat?!") Whitney Houston on live French TV? Clearly, it's a delicately calibrated indicator, that Sleaze-o-Meter.
Saturday, March 31, 2001 08:55 a.m.

Blah Bling Blah, or, Where The Hell is Sophie?

I'm bored, people. I'm bored and I'm busy and I'm lacking inspiration. I'm having a blog-sistential crisis. Well, not a crisis, really. No need for pitas 911. More like ennui, but not even that glamourous. I haven't decided what I'm doing -- kerplink may go, temporarily, to a weekends-only updating situation, or I may take a(nother) full break -- I just think that updates are going to be sporadic for the next while. In the meantime, check out the fine blogs linked over to the left there, and let me know if you find anything interesting. I feel all web detectived out right now.
Friday, March 30, 2001 12:15 a.m.

My Oscars: More Snark, Less Other Crap

The Glama's Back!: Marcia Gay Harden, the Upset Kid. Great dress, great jewelry, great, gracious speech.

Dude, Where's My Sense of Humour?: Russell Crowe. He used to be the very model of a modern major sex on a stick. Sadly, Mr. Crankypants is unwell, and is suffering from an acute case of humour anemia. He's being treated with an aggressive form of giggle therapy, supplemented by several hours of rehabilitative chortling daily. Only one man has been worthy to take his place on the official kerplink stick o' sex, and that man is

Joaquin Phoenix. Yes, folks, it's time to meet The New Boss of Hotness. My suite is known for its loudness. The Lady Lawyer says that she can hear us about 25 feet down the hall, howling & hooting over Survivor or WWF Smackdown (Shut. Up.). Imagine the decibel level when Joaquin was proclaimed Triple Sex on a Stick. My ears are still ringing.

Hollywood Fairytale: Well, you knew Julia was going to win, right? You haven't been living under a rock, right? Right? Seriously, this has been a loooong time coming, and I'm glad it did. She owned that role, and she's made Hollywood gajillions of dollars, and will continue to do so for years to come. Plus, she's a real live bona fide Movie Star. She is, as far as star power is concerned, The Shiznit. And her dress was gorgeous. And I liked her speech. So there.

I'll write more tomorrow. Now I need to sleep. Night-night.
Tuesday, March 27, 2001 12:23 a.m.