Lawrence Grobel's 1990 interview with Charlie Sheen in the old MOVIELINE magazine.

http://www.movieline.com/1990/08/charlie-sheen-guns-n-neuroses.php

Fascinating and rather sad reading--and quite prescient of the quagmire that Charlie's currently living out in his mid-40s.

RIP COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/keith-olbermann-countdown-over_n_812506.html?igoogle=1
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/olbermanns-msnbc-exit-was-weeks-in-the-making/?hp

So, as with Phil Donahue before him, Keith Olbermann finds himself a victim of changes in American politics (including a temporary false-equivalency form of discourse etiquette which will let the likes of Beck, O'Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, Palin, Malkin off the hook) and what looks to be ill winds blowing onto NBCUniversal from its soon-to-be-new-owner Comcast (or Kabletown, as 30 ROCK euphemistically calls it).

Sidebar #1: Early in 1975, the Smothers Brothers began a short-lived comeback variety series on NBC.  In their opening monologue, they joked about how they were evicted from television when Richard Nixon became President--and then were re-hired after Nixon's resignation.

Sidebar #2: It's really difficult to perpetuate an opinions-and-commentary show when your network is part of a too-sensitive-to-controversy corporate empire.  Just ask Bill Maher, dropkicked by Disney/ABC from POLITICALLY INCORRECT in 2001 when he made the statement about the 9/11 hijackers not being cowards

Sidebar #3: Keith Olbermann's show probably peaked when he, along with the rest of the mild-to-moderate progressives making up the audience, could rail in unison at the perfidies of the George Butch Jr. administration.  I'm presuming Olbermann felt squeezed by the NBC brass when the "change we can believe in" incense of 2008 Barack Obama wafted away to be replaced by the acquiescent, "demonize the Left" Republicratism of 2011 Barack Obama.  And, very likely, the temptation of NBC to dispose of Olbermann (attempted late last year when he was harassed for, as a host of a "commentary" show, making donations to political candidates--including the recently-wounded Gabrielle Giffords) and claim a victory for "civility" was huge.

Feuding isn't just for literary communities--witness New York Film Critics in action.

http://www.nypress.com/article-22053-indecent-exposure.html
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/j_hoberman_on_a.php

Favorite quote from the Armond-said/Jim-said back-and-forth:
J. Hoberman:  "...imagine, as I wrote at the time, if I had written something about him [Armond White], rather than posting something he wrote [a negative comment about fimmaker Noah Baumbach's mother, former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown]!"

Sounds like something that has occurred before on SoCal poetry listserves....

Expecting a lot of "He went toooo farrrrrrrr" comments re Ricky Gervais hosting Golden Globes.

Not-nice-but-hilarious, or just random meanness?  You be the judge.
Here's a link to Ricky Gervais' Golden Globes monologue from last night:
http://tv.gawker.com/5735192/watch-ricky-gervais-extremely-uncomfortable-golden-globes-monologue

It would be rather riveting television if Ricky guests soon on LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN--with back-and-forth anecdotes about Dave's mild "Uma/Oprah" one-liner being considered too irreverent for the annual Oscars ceremony vs. Gervais' take-no-prisoners Friars Club-roast approach.

New poem on gun control: HOSTILE ACRES

HOSTILE ACRES




I help till the soil at Hostile Acres.

Almost everyone carries a gun except me.

Tried to learn once.

Almost shot my big toe off.



Some people came looking for work the other day.

Didn't take long until the hired hands began talking:

"They're taking our jobs."

"How do you know whether or not they're American?"

"Make them carry IDs."

"What about injecting digitized guest-worker chips under their skin?"

"Let's just tattoo a citizenship barcode on their forearms."

And so on and so forth.



Then a few shots rang out.

This is what I heard a few minutes later:

"It was a lone nutcase with a gun."

"The nut's still alive."

"No, he's dead for sure."

"Thank God we can carry guns in public for protection.

The maniac got dropped

and we just let him bleed out."

"There was a little boy caught in the crossfire.

Don't know who shot him.

Don't know how he got hit."



Next day, we heard the President

on the field radio

saying that, at the very least,

automatic weapons should be banned

from use by the general public.



A chorus of disapproval:

DON'T TAKE OUR GUNS AWAY!!

NO GUNS, NO SAFETY!!!!

WE'LL BE KILLED FOR SURE!!

HE'S NOT OUR PRESIDENT!!

And so on and so forth.



Then I heard a round of gunfire.

The radio was destroyed immediately.



The overseer yelled:

PUT AWAY YOUR GUNS!



And we went back to work

tilling the soil at Hostile Acres--

happy to hear nothing

except the sounds of our own voices

voicing the beliefs

we don't need education for

because we know in our guts

how right we are.

Rick Lupert: SoCal poetry's Hall Monitor.

So I went over to the Cobalt Poets Yahoogroup to check on whether a certain reading was going to occur this week, and I read something about an open mike charging $5.00 [actually, it was $5 for a coupon to buy coffee and goods at the coffeehouse] and there's a discussion that isn't totally positive [not discussing a somewhat more contentious one involving fundamentalism and homophobia a few posts later].  Here comes the Cobalt Cafe host Rick Lupert to express his usual discomfort (boldface added by me):
More importantly, it would be nice, kind and even more human if we didn't jump

on opportunities to critique others, their readings or projects in a cynical or
sarcastic way. If that's your preferred style of communication, please contact
the intended recipient directly as it is not welcome on this list.

This is essentially a "don't say anything un-nice about anyone; I only want this list to be announcements only because I like control better than dealing with variables" announcement.

While one can at least respect Rick as a poet and long-time community pillar, one can't help but long for the days of the Cobalt list when people could disagree (and sometimes quite forcefully) with each other without being almost immediately told to shut up and take it elsewhere or suffer banishment.

Perhaps it's better for people to be themselves every so often without masks and hypocrisy.  It makes it easier to see which community poets you want to be friends/allies with--and which ones to avoid.

Chilling article in the aftermath of Saturday's Arizona shootings--Glock pistol sales go up.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-11/glock-pistol-sales-surge-in-aftermath-of-shooting-of-arizona-s-giffords.html

The above is a really scary and sad example of the "Don't Take Our Guns Away" mentality.

And it was roughly a year ago that Kevin Smith's make-a-comic-cop-picture-like-other-directors-do COP OUT was advertised with what now is an extremely unfortunate tagline:
"Rock Out With Your Glock Out!"

Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream shares his lack of love for the common people and their musical tastes.

From the current issue of the UK music magazine NME, here's an excerpt from Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie waxing elequent on the little-known John Phillips solo album JOHN, THE WOLFKING OF L.A.:
''Most of the records I like never gained the wider recognition.....I guess you could call them cult records, which I think should've been massive and sold millions.  Maybe they're too good to sell millions...most people in the world are f---ing dull and I think the records that sell millions are made by dull people and bought by dull people.  They're really f---ing straight and boring.  The really interesting, individual records become cult records because it's an acquired taste and it's maybe too out there for most people to process."

The above seems like stunted thinking to me, because there are those occasions when "interesting, individual records" do intersect with mass tastes and go on to sell millions (one could think of the Steve Albini/Nirvana collaboration IN UTERO as one example).

But, in a lot of cases, people merely like what they're told by mass media/advertisers they should like.  Doesn't mean they're completely "f---ing dull"--as Mr. Gillespie so humanistically remarks.