The new Guns n Roses album is here! The new Guns n Roses album is here!
And I couldn’t be happier. First off, because I get me a FREE bottle of soda.
Everyone in America * has until 6 PM EST on Monday, November 24 to get a free 20 oz. Dr Pepper...
Apparently the demand has been so great, their server keeps crashing: “To resolve this, we are increasing our server capacity and making a toll-free number available (1-888-DRPEPPER or 1-888-377-3773).”
Reason #2?
The release of the album allows voice of this generation Chuck Klosterman to write the following:
Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?
and this:
Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N’ Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N’ Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues.
and this:
Still, I find myself impressed by how close Chinese Democracy comes to fulfilling the absurdly impossible expectation it self-generated, and I not-so-secretly wish this had actually been a triple album. I’ve maintained a decent living by making easy jokes about Axl Rose for the past 10 years, but what’s the final truth? The final truth is this: He makes the best songs. They sound the way I want songs to sound. A few of them seem idiotic at the beginning, but I love the way they end. Axl Rose put so much time and effort into proving that he was super-talented that the rest of humanity forgot he always had been. And that will hurt him. This record may tank commercially. Some people will slaughter Chinese Democracy, and for all the reasons you expect. But he did a good thing here.
Grade: A-
Reason #3
You can actually listen to the album. And I must agree with Chuck. He did a good thing here.
Exciting news from two of ATL Film Festival’s most happening alums: Oscar-winner Ray McKinnon and Walton Goggins landed a new series on AMC—home of the great series MAD MAN and BREAKING BAD.
Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount are joined by Walton Goggins to celebrate the Oscar win for “The Accountant” as best live-action short. The film qualified for its Oscar by winning the Atlanta Film Festival
AMC is developing a legal-themed drama with “Breaking Bad” exec producer Mark Johnson.
Walton Goggins, of FX’s “The Shield,” is set to star in “Rectify” as a man released from a lengthy prison term after being exonerated by DNA evidence.
Script was penned by Ray McKinnon, who won an Oscar for his 2001 live-action short “The Accountant.”
McKinnon will exec produce along with Johnson. Goggins is set to co-exec produce along with Stephen Kay.
“Ray McKinnon’s script beautifully weaves together the legal drama surrounding a wrongful conviction into a great character-driven family drama,” said Christina Wayne, AMC’s senior veep of scripted series and miniseries.
Johnson has been a key player in AMC’s push into original series as one of the stewards of “Breaking Bad.” The gritty drama earned an Emmy for star Bryan Cranston in September.
In addition to “Rectify,” AMC’s series development slate includes a fantasy drama “Red Mars,” based on the classic sci-fi tome by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Were they inspired by Slamdance prizewinning film Abel Raises Cane?
Alan Abel: The Master
Abel (as Jim Rogers) wants to Ban breast feeding:
Or was this an opportunity to refine the covert grassroots techniques he invented—an elaborate campaign promoting a fictional phenom called House Humping—to promote the release of his real estate musical OPEN HOUSE?
What a tangled web he weaves: Dan Mirvish online
Either way, looks like Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish and sometime Slamdance Prize winning director Eitan Gorlin (THE HOLY LAND) have pulled off a doozy:
A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.
Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?
“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.
(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. ...)
Eitan acts up
They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.
“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.
Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.
An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”
But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.
The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.
The original YouTube posting
Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a bit of news media attention.
When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.
Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”
Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.
The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.
It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media. The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had nothing to do with this.”
Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on YouTube.
Green = Greed!
In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.
Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.
In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.
Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.
Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”
But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out.”
And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding that the news media could learn something from him.
“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an interview.
And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?
Thinking of boycotting Park City (will little Stevie record a new song, I…I….I, ain’t gonna play Park City?**) in 2009 in response to the Church of LDS flooding cash to support Prop 8 in California banning gay marriage? How about striking a company like Yahoo?
I opened my Yahoo! mail this morning, and was greeted by this ad:
Whenever I think about the Orioles’ old road jerseys, and it’s usually during those quiet moments at home while I’m soaking in a tub with a glass of wine and the lights dimmed, I envision Boog Powell wearing that gray jersey with “Baltimore” written across the chest.
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