Tag Archives: Urkel

Role models defined loosely

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Disney studio actress contracted for next five High School Musicals
Call me a prude, but I don’t think a children’s studio should renew the contract of a young actress who has adult photographs circulating on the web. Particularly if she’s meant to be a youth role model and especially if the wholesome character Vanessa Hudgens portrays is younger than her real-life age. Imagine if paparazzi caught Urkel or Gary Coleman drinking at a bar for example.
 
Likewise do you wonder if a pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears should retain her tweenager role at Nickelodeon’s Chastity High? How are young viewers to reconcile Zoey of abstinence 101 with the tabloids which will describe Zoey the young mother? Is it the unspoken result of a mindless sitcom episode they might have missed?
 
But I also find it unseemly for Disney Channel actresses to be mascara’d like Bratz Dolls. It’s the painted lady look. Where is the Disney piper leading our children? To the sex service industry?

Ugly Betty’s ugly Golden Globe

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The actress who plays Ugly Betty said she thought it was awesome that America has embraced a completely new face.

Ugly face of American comedyNew face, her ass! Ugly Betty is a new face like Urkel was not Webster, Gary Coleman, Fat Albert, and Kid Dynamite. Like Alf was not Ronald Reagan.

The best thing I can say about Ugly Betty –I learned tonight from the acceptance speech– the show is about hispanic American immigrants, a faction of our population sorely lacking in heroic protagonists on Anglo TV. Too bad the creators consider Hispanic ugly.

Ugly
What does Ugly Betty say about how Americans see themselves on TV when to see ugly, we have to fit an actress with prosthetics, bad hair, braces, and a fat suit. And of course, eyeglasses. Ugly is artificial. We seem also to want to say that ugly is genetic and it’s for keeps.

Although the dental braces indicate Betty is consiously on track for self-improvement and TV normalcy, her transistional ugliness is also a movie insider’s ugly. It’s the stereotypical Hollywood beginner’s ugly where female Horatio Algers start out as caterpillars but everyone is already assured a happy ending because from the begining they could recognize under the familiar cliched trappings the butterfly that is going to emerge, usually a recognizable beautiful actress. The actress who accepted the Golden Globe award was of course very pretty.

Except where most story lines dealing with appearances are guided by the idea that beauty is only skin deep etc, Ugly Betty is self-consciously inferior. struggling as she is every episode to prove and improve herself.

Though not enough to dress better. A superficiality that strikes me with Ugly Betty is the insistence on ugly clothes and support shoes. How many ugly people do you know address corporate boards in their grandmother’s worst frock? One of the glaring aspects about unattractiveness in the real world is the insistence of some homely people to dress like they are not.

World Cinema, like typical domestic independent film, is distinguished by actors who look like authentic people. The faces are real, the complexions imperfect, the looks asymmetric, the hair whatever it is. Their stories are thus easier to communicate and identify with. In Hollywood, plastic is real, and the audiences who watch the blockbusters don’t get anything from the experience but adrenaline.

Why did I not see the Hispanic component in Ugly Betty before -except for the dad who doesn’t speak English and who gets a visit from the INS? Because Ugly Betty’s caricature masks every nuance of reality. Her artificial face shows cultural, social or racial feature. She is a potato head with four or five “ugly” accessories, one of them being race.

Bush admits existence of own gulag archipelago

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Cannot tell a lieBush lied. Is that news?
 
Bush admits to existence of clandestine extrajudicial prisons. Bush admits to condoning torture. Bush admits to authorizing domestic surveillance program. Bush admits Iraq had no WMDs. Bush admits Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
 
We knew all this already. That’s not the story. Bush lied. And we knew that all along too. That’s not the story.
 
Is there anything more to ask Mr. Bush? We’re only ever going to get a lie and we know that already. Was Bush complicit in 9/11? Is Bush running up the deficit on purpose? Are we in Iraq for oil, for Halliburton? We know it already.
 
The question needs to be posed to the media: why do we keep looking to the president to tell us what he’s doing?

The president is lying., not about having an affair in the White House, about everything. About everything to do with our civil rights, our treasury, the lives of our sons and daughters. Bush has his hands around the neck of our democracy and our media can only ask, are your intentions, sir, honorable?

Bush has got to laugh at our deferential timidity. Who do we think he is, Urkel? Bush has never portrayed himself as anything but the brush-clearing, fun loving frat boy. Asphyxiation, date rape, mumble, mumble, what an absurd accusation.

Only when the bruise marks are irrefutable will Bush admit he got a little rough. He might argue that calling attention to what he’s done will only impede his efforts to continue. He might argue that the assault was consensual. With regard to the media, he’d be right. I don’t believe Bush will admit what he and the Neocons are doing until the marks are permanent and the Grand American Experiment is a corpse, with its coin purse gone.

Slandering Pat Tillman maybe

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Pat Tillman might have gone into Afganistan for the same reason he loved football: because it’s licensed violence. Was it Norman Mailer or Studs Turkel who postelated that the reason many men go to war is because on a very primal level it is fun.

The other day in a west coast harbor I watched a group of military divers, taking off from the dock on their launch. Watching them gather and load up, it became easy for me to visualize men at war. What was it that projected their aggression? Not necessarily their jocularity, their fraternal back slaps, wide smiles and machismo handling of their gear. It was their collective testosterone like a malevolent shield of old spice sprayed in all directions to offend every male not in their clan.

The flat bottomed diving launch resembled an infantry landing craft. I could imagine at it cruised by me in the harbor what a war party would look like in the eyes of forces defending the shore.

To some males this is what attracts them to football and hockey and fist fights and brawls. The rest of us see unnecessary risk and injury and death, they see a schoolyard game of king of the hill. In peacetime this game is played through salesmanship and office politics, in war this game is much more primal and carries with it the advantages of the spoils: the occasion to rape, the occasion to pillage, and the power to decide another person’s life or death.

Was Pat Tillman a patriot, or another alpha male? Maybe he gambled that playing an ultra-violent game in a stadium in return for a million dollar contract would pale in comparison to the thrills of warfare and the spoils of war.