The public and their colleagues have sided with Conan while Jeff Zucker and Jay Leno become the evil empire

And this, you see — the part where we the viewers come in — is part of the public outrage being stoked here. It isnt just a fondness for Big Red. Theres a collective scorn for the way that NBC has so openly pooped on its audience like Triumph the Insult Dog: replacing its 10 p.m. lineup with five nights of cheap, clunky Jay Leno shows because theyre easier than, I dont know, creating something new that doesnt suck? Well, fuck you, too. Theres nothing like swaggering around in your “too big to fail” pants to summon the gods of ironic punishment, now, is there, Jeff Zucker? So excuse us if were Googling the German word for that derisive pleasure gained by watching a networks lazy contempt for the American public fail spectacularly.

via Conan OBrien – Salon.com.

Looks like Conan may be on Fox in the fall.

Not a good idea Jay.

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35. For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

Yours,

Conan

via Conan O’Brien Statement: I Will Not Follow Jay At 12:05.

I hope he lands somewhere at 11:30.

The movie biz that it is.

On male and female directors being held to different standards, as Dargis suggested in comparing Bigelow [the director of Hurt Locker who is female] and Michael Mann in her piece: Do you think that a woman would have been able to get forty million dollars to make a puppet movie the way that Wes Anderson has been able to make, bringing to bear all the publicity and advertising budget of Fox? After two movies that didn’t make a lot of money? I think this is true for a lot of black filmmakers too – they’re held to a higher standard. And an unfair standard. You can be a male filmmaker and if you’re perceived as a genius – a boy genius or a fully-formed adult genius – that you are allowed to fail in a way that a woman is not allowed to fail.

[…]

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they’re morons, three they’re insulting panderers who think they’re making movies for the great unwashed and that’s what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don’t know what’s happening. I think it’s depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they’re about men. All power to Apatow, but he’s taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. ….We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow. But what are his movies supposed to be about? Nominally about the relationship between a man and a woman, but they’re really buddy flicks. Funny People was supposed to have an important role for a woman, but she was uninteresting and an afterthought.

On representations of women onscreen: There’s a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It’s a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She’s Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.

via “Fuck Them”: Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck – Manohla dargis interview – Jezebel.

Read the whole interview. Its good. Dargis also expresses her disappointment that at one point all four majors were run by female executives and yet it didn’t change the dynamic within the film industry. That’s not surprising. Studio executives aren’t tasked with finding great movies, they are tasked with finding movies that make great money. Maid in Manhattan wins over Million Dollar Baby by that measure.

As Dargis says: independent companies are the way to go if Hollywood is to be diversified. Cosby Show changed the face of television with his sitcom, Spike Lee changed theaters and Oprah changed daytime TV, but they came after others fit themselves into much less inspiring or lower profile spaces in their genres (e.g. The Jeffersons, Peebles and Gumbel [i know, i know lame attempt to draw parallels but you get what I mean]).

Its kind of the public dynamic being experienced between Obama and the far left of the Democratic party (those left of that didn’t trust Obama much anyway). He is the black and liberal studio exec that is supposed to represent and uplift liberals for liberals and supposed to represent and uplift blacks for blacks through his work. And now he is the HNIC/HLIC so he has to do it not now, but RIGHT now. We forget, most of his campaign was simply running to be the competent exec representing a competent and fair constituency. Asking for much more may be expecting more than the reality of his term allows and more than he promised.

My neighborhood isn’t the world’s best, but nor is it the world’s worst. After dark, the streets fill with dog walkers. A couple per block, at least. In the winter, they’re the only people on the streets. Without them, the neighborhood would be lot emptier, and the streets would feel a lot more forbidding. Placing a couple of poodles — and my neighborhood has a lot of poodles — on the landscape really does wonders. Developing neighborhoods should give some sort of tax credit for dog ownership.

via Ezra Klein – Why dog owners make the best citizens.

This is just about the dumbest sh*t I have ever seen Klein write. One, Klein should consider the dog owners that consitently do not curb their dogs and create sanitation issues throughout a mostly residential neighborhood like mine (a very walkable one, thank you). When two feet of snow dropped a few weeks back, even more dog owners took that as an excuse to run their dog outside, let them drop a deuce and leave it on the sidewalk. So much so that a walk to gym, work, coffee shop, supermarket, transit, laundromat or a local watering hole leaves me playing hop scotch around dog sh*t.

Two they add to the need for food import, increased meat consumption

Three, too many pups aren’t spayed/neutered before they can birth litters that overwhelm Animal Control Services here in Philadelphia. So yes, dog walkers are out, but so are a bunch of people who are going to and from the watering holes and coffee shops in the Graduate Hospital/South Square/Fitler Square area.

If a neighborhood is safe for adults to walk through and has adult friendly destinations (restaurants, bars, entertainment) but is primarily residential and well lit, the dog walker point is moot.

Screw his poodle petter’s tax credit. Owning a dog is a luxury. Should have a un-curbed dog tax!

Breckenridge, Colorado based artist John Fellows is interviewed about his craft by FuelTV.

Full Disclosure: I’ve known John since I played rugby with him at Drexel and with Schuylkill River Exiles RFC here in Philadelphia. I took over a sublet from him about 5 or 6 years ago and prints he left behind were always up on the walls.

Katherine Heigl starred in Knocked Up and called it:

“a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”

via Vanity Fair, January 2008: Katherine Heigl press release | vanityfair.com.

To balance out the suffering she endured on Knocked Up and the punishment of being on the hit show Grey’s Anatomy, she took an empowering role as a stiff woman in The Ugly Truth opposite a chauvinist ex-Spartan

Katherine Heigl’s history of making ill-advised, self-aggrandizing comments in public has made her a figure of scorn, which is too bad, because Heigl actually has a winning screen presence. But she doesn’t make it any easier on herself when she stars in witless, regressive chick-flicks like The Ugly Truth, in which she plays a career woman too fussy to achieve her true purpose in life: landing a man. Gerard Butler plays the loutish self-help guru who helps Heigl tap into her inner sex goddess, but nothing about their boy-meets/loses/etc.-girl story has anything to do with how actual grown-ups behave. Like too many romantic comedies these days, The Ugly Truth is about the irritating quirks and shallow goals of stock characters.

via The 19-plus worst films of 2009 | Film | Best of | The A.V. Club.

The NY Post, never failing to demonize rap

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

via Times Sq. gunman held weapon like rapper – NYPOST.com.

Or maybe the character from a Netflix classic movie? It seems the sideways gun hold is a symptom of the “Yagottahavescarfaceitis” aka where rappers imitate the Hollywood elite playing gangsters.

To look Hollywood, of course. Journalists and gun experts point to the 1993 Hughes brothers film Menace II Society, which depicts the side grip in its opening scene, as the movie that popularized the style. Although the directors claim to have witnessed a side grip robbery in Detroit in 1987, there are few reports of street gangs using the technique until after the movie came out. The Hughes brothers didn’t invent the grip, though. In 1961’s One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando used it, as did Eli Wallach in 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Directors may prefer the style because it makes it easier to see both the weapon and the actor’s face in a tight camera shot.

via Why do rappers hold their guns sideways? – By Brian Palmer – Slate Magazine.

Yes, its the Brando-Wallach gun grip, Lazy New York Post writers.

Idiot.

Controversial Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton is cooling his heels in a Miami lockup, suspected of plotting to sell cocaine. Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents said Banton, 36, will be charged with conspiracy to possess more than 11 pounds of cocaine with intent to deliver.The Grammy-nominated star, whose real name is Mark Anthony Myrie, has homes in Jamaica and Florida. He was arrested last week and faces up to 20 years behind bars. Legions of dancehall reggae enthusiasts view Banton as one of the most prolific voices of the Jamaican poor; critics say his lyrics incite violence by calling for attacking gays.

via Grammy-nominated Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton faces 20 years after 11-pound cocaine bust.

I woke up with a hangover. They wake up like this.