Larry King Busts a Move

Interview with a 'Business Week' Vampire

Former Business Week writer Sarah Lacy coughs up an interview phelgmball in this public forum SXSW chitchat with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

I've had bad interviews. But at least, I didn't publicly humiliate myself. Poor woman.

That being said, here are some tasty snippets from Media Bistro Fishbowl NY's transcript:

2:21: Lacy accuses Z. of having 'hurt look on your face like, 'Waah, I was talking.'' New Yorkers behind us: 'This is mad awkward.' She's talking to an intelligent billionaire like he's a five-year-old. Wake up Lacy, we're in Web 2.0 and Z's since cleared kindergarten.

...

2:43: 'Speaking of management changes, you've had somewhat of a revolving door.' Zing! Clearly Lacy's reading mediabistro.com. Might we recommend some of our fine service articles on interviewing?

2:44: Lacy: 'I think it's good that you fire people when you they don't mesh. People should do it more often.' Great, Sarah. You're fired.

2:53: L. reveals that Z. has bound books on site and where it's going, dating back through four years. He writes them in longhand. Lacy thinks this is sooo significant, persists in making it about her declarative baloney. We know more about her than we will ever in 18 lifetimes care to know, and too little about the real sensation in our midst.

2:54: Lacy accuses Z. of giving her another 'Leslie Stahl moment' to which he sweetly shoots back: 'You've got to ask questions.' Audience goes nuts, with cheering and applause, bonding over their mutual hatred of her. This is as feel-good a moment as they come.

2:56: Z: The part of the story you left out is that I destroyed them..
L. 'You burned them. How dramatic is that?'
Z: 'I did not. You made that up.' Audience goes crazy. If Lacy gets out of here without having anything thrown at her, we'll drink 11 more coffees within the hour. Wait, that sounds good.

2:57: In response to booing, Lacy whines to crowd: 'You try doing what I do for a living.' Every day, every way. lady.

Updated to add: A few techies have lambasted the backlash of Lacey as charges of sexism.
MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier says, "I think some of the there's some degree of sexism. Because she's a chick, her ingratiating nature is taken as ass-kissing. If it were some guy at Forbes asking the same questions in the same manner, we just would have thought he was drawing Mark out."
Lacy twitters, "Seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things."

Bottom of the Well

My teeth are falling out again. According to the FreakyDreams.com, this translates into a "loss of honor, fear of failure and feeling out of control." Spot-on. They're like the frickin' SparkNotes of Subtext Becoming Rapidly Text.

I'm standing in my family's foyer. It's Christmasy all around. Sweet Baby Jesus is lying in the manger. My cousin is a six-figure MD, sitting out on the porch with his recently Botoxed missus. My other cousin is a Baptist preacher.

And I'm standing in my family's foyer with my pants bunched around my ankles, smoking a pathetic looking spliff through cud chewers.

But at least, I seem happy.

Crossposted: Nocturnal Admissions

Isn't It De-Lovely

Torchwood's John Barrowman talks to Now Magazine about accidentally pooping his pants onstage.

Lucky bastard.

The Hills Are Alive with the sound of suck

Heidi Montag told Us that she cried herself to sleep after YouTubers suffered emotional spasms and mild dementia while watching her grade-Z ripoff of Madonna's "Cherish" video.

My favorite part of the song? The high-hattin' cheapcore Casio keyboard with the Three 6 Mafia elevator-crunk riffs. Ms. Montag ripped me a new asshole.

But don't be too hard, guys. After all, she's "just a girl from Kansas...following her dreams."

An Open Letter to Maureen Dowd

Dear Maureen,

Have I told you lately that I love you?

To wit:

Instead of carving out a separate identity for herself, Hillary has become more entwined with Bill. She is running bolstered by his record and his muscle. She touts her experience as first lady, even though her judgment during those years on issue after issue was poor. She says she’s learned from her mistakes, but that’s not a compelling pitch.

As a senator, she was not a leading voice on important issues, and her Iraq vote was about her political viability.

She told New York magazine’s John Heilemann that before Iowa taught her that she had to show her soft side, “I really believed I had to prove in this race from the very beginning that a woman could be president and a woman could be commander in chief. I thought that was my primary mission.”

If Hillary fails, it will be her failure, not ours.

Burn!

A Flawed Feminist Test

Deconstructing Grammy

The Grammys at 50 are showing their age," crows the latest headline from Newsday. Have the Grammys ever showed anything but? It takes years for them to even deign career artists buzzworthy enough for the Best New Artist trophy. (The most glaring example? Alt country siren Shelby Lynne taking home Best New Artist prize 13 years into her career.)

Yes, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is about as hip as sitting through an Al Gore earth documentary on Current.

For a better gauge of 2007, bless sweet Robert Christgau's still-kicking "Pazz and Jop" poll. The Pazz and Jop poll is decided by a slag of chain-smoking copy monkeys at alternative weeklies and magazine biggies across the states. Published by Christgau's former employer, The Village Voice, the Pazz and Jop poll is the music journo's version of the anti-Grammys.

Prize perennials such as The National's Boxer and Panda Bear's Person Pitch will never be totally at home in the National Recording Academy of Arts and Sciences' annual commercial unit penis measuring contest. Hmpfh.

But 2007 was the year of indie crossover, and the Grammys reflect this nugget. Sort of.

Leslie Feist's Technicolor iPod commercial with her song, "1234" was damn near inescapable. It was an indie-rock mini-musical filled with cascading horns and colorful getups too saucy for The Polyphonic Spree. In fact, right now, a waifish hipster in Williamsburg is blasting Feist's wispy voice through his earbuds on his way to American Apparel. I kid you not.

But Feist represents a middle ground for Grammy voters. Nominated for four Grammys for her modern classic, The Reminder, Feist has almost wriggled the cusp of the soccer mom votes. She's still hip, but she hasn't reached complete Starbucks overkill yet. But give her time. (She won the Shortlist Music Prize this week, an award for artistic achievement by artists who sell less than 500,000 copies.)

The biggest snub? Radiohead's screw you to Hillary Rosen, In Rainbows, was decidedly left off Grammys' radar. That's a shame. Not only did "In Rainbows" stir the dander of industry gatekeepers, it represented Radiohead's most solid work in more than a decade.

While OK! Magazine fixture Amy Winehouse racked up nods for her mind-numbingly good R&B revival, Back to Black, her sterling producer Mark Ronson was only represented in the Producer category. But Ronson would rather have a BRIT award on his trophy rack. "I think the Grammys are a bit like the international industry standard for achievement," Ronson told reporters. "But there is something about the BRITs. There is more of a camaraderie - it's like people are saying this artist is one of our own. It is very special."

Ronson's genre-spanning Version was its own tour-de-force, and it's unlikely that he will perform a medley a la The MTV Video Music Awards. But as the Grammys cross over into Matlock-watching territory and earlybird specials in Ormond Beach, will the award show be able to give the music fans what they want? It's a question on everyone's mind.

"People don't need to see more Beyoncé. Everyone is done with Beyoncé. Sirius Radio's Rich McLaughlin told Newsday. "Been there, done that. People want to see someone newer."

Random Thoughts

Dear Kimya Dawson,

I'd never thought I would say this. However, if I have to hear your damned cutesy-wutesy "Juno" song one more time, I might just shoot myself in the face.

Overheard in New York

Man on cell: Don't go near the elevator. There's a pile of doodoo there. I tried to clean it up the best I could, but there's still some there. Be careful. I don't want you to smear it.

New and noted

The Magnetic Fields
Distortion

The Skinny: Indie-pop misanthrope Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, deemed by Bob Gould as the "most depressing man in rock," studies his The Jesus and Mary Chain fixation with heaps of prickly distortion, er, as advertised in the album title.

Why You Should Buy It: Merritt exists in his own vacuum-sealed idiom. He told The New York Times, "I cannot name a record by anyone in 2007." As for his rapturous scrutiny of influential Scottish noise-pop band The Jesus and Mary Chain's 1985 debut album Psychocandy? "It's the last album that sounded shockingly new, to me anyway."

Song You'll Love or Hate: The gnashingly frontal lobe assault of album opener, "Three-Way," which basically consists of Mr. Merritt shouting the title over rippling riffs.

Kate Nash
Made of Bricks

The Skinny: Discovered on MySpace by Lily Allen, 20-something Englander Kate Nash makes an album about the struggles of upper-class strife. She sounds like a brainier version of The Spice Girls, for better or worse.

Why You Should Buy It: Nash's cockney Brit accent, flowing pen verses and sly pop cultural shout-outs - hell, she manages to namecheck CSI at one point - are 10 times better than the CHR-pop Hannah Montana dreck infiltrating American top-40. Plus, let's just say that it might be awhile before Amy Winehouse releases another Back to Black.

Song You'll Love or Hate: Produced by Bloc Party producer Paul Epworth, Nash finds lyrical inspiration in the mundane. Her song about mouthwash, titled "Mouthwash," of course, is an exercise in lyrical frugality. The hummable melody will stay in your head for days.

Bill Brantley claws the shit out of 'The Little Mermaid'

Ben Brantley's my idol. After much consternation, it goes something like Maureen Dowd, Jesus, Nellie McKay and Bill Brantley.

His recent review of Disney on Broadway's adaptation of The Little Mermaid was chockful of candy-coated zingers.

Best line? "The whole enterprise is soaked in that sparkly garishness that only a very young child — or possibly a tackiness-worshiping drag queen — might find pretty...In like manner, most of the performers approach their characters with the forced jocularity of actors marking time in a theme park until a better job comes along."

Zing!

Overheard in New York: The Watersports Edition

Black man singing while peeing at urinal: Oh, Lord, when can I go to heaven? Oh, Lord, when can I go to heaven? [Finishes urinating abruptly.] Thank you, Lord Jesus. Hallelujah!

--Staten Island Ferry

Overheard by TVontheFritz (overheardinnewyork.com)

Radiohead: In Mist

Best YouTube Music Moments in 2007

YouTube killed the video star.

In 2007, while MTV plugged the umpteenth episode of "Parental Control" and the so-real-it's-fake tragicomedy,"The Hills," video sharing website YouTube raked in record numbers.

According to a Harris Interactive poll, 65 percent of American adults say they have watched a video on YouTube with 42 percent of the surveyed adults making regular treks to the site.

Major labels such as Warner Music inked a library-spanning content deal with YouTube this year, promising the site vids from the Warner vault. But the site's main selling point remained the guitar-strumming everyman and everywoman. These bleary-eyed rubes uploaded teary bedroom confessionals to an ever-growing legion of tubers.

In the spirit of giving, Manhattan Project has decided to dole out a few year-end awards to the best music moments on YouTube.

Best Deceptive Advertising By A Major Label
Hollywood Records' Marie Digby



Marie Digby's harmonically straightforward and cocksure cover of Rihanna's No. 1 hit, "Umbrella" raised a few eyebrows. It's raised almost 4 million eyebrows since its summer debut to be exact.

Framed in a lily-white bedroom, Digby plucks chords with a husker's ease. She's the girl next door, if your life resembled a Hollister advertisement. Call Digby "the Lonelygirl 15 of acoustic-pop."

In September, the Wall Street Journal suggested that Digby was a ploy in Hollywood Records' "astroturfing" campaign to deliver the singer to bigger masses through YouTube. In a blog entry, meanwhile, Digby wrote that the YouTube uploads were a response to a "desperate" lack of promotion from Hollywood Records.

Best Use Of Hand Flatulence
Gerry Phillips' cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody"



The manualism movement is worthy of a cover story in The Believer. Flanked by his hambones, internet "musician" Gerry Phillips was the unlikely YouTube celebrity of 2007 with his moist rendition of Queen classic, "Bohemian Rhapsody." In his fuzzy dark-blue sweat shirt and Hank Hill glasses, Phillips let it rip with a flawlessly spot-on take. In August, Jimmy Kimmel Live featured Phillips on the Internet Talent Showcase segment. Sadly, Hollywood Records wasn't behind this one.

Best Unintentionally Shameless Christmas Parody
The Kings College staff's Band Aid tribute



The Kings College staffers didn't intend to become YouTube sensations in 2007, per se. Their cynical take on the Bob Geldof's altruistic bombast anthem, "Do They Know It's Christmas" complete with mimicry of Bono's hubris, was like finding pixie sticks in our stockings come Christmas morning. It was completely unexpected and offered a satisfying jolt of energy.

Best Unintentionally Funny Performance
Fergie's appearance at Movie Rocks

Ya know ya did. If you've seen the Dutchess' nearly insufferable interpretation of Wings' "Live and Let Die" at Movie Rocks on YouTube, you're not alone. About 20,000 YouTubers watched the wretched four-minute clip, with Fergie's voice sounding like a cat suffering from a seizure. The song itself lurks from amped-up Slash guitar licks to drunken karaoke lounge singer ballads in the course of one measure. Fergie lags the background track, tossing off a thickly coated "Ya know ya did" a few seconds after the phrase is uttered by her backing vocalists. But all is forgiven in the name of the pyrotechnic gods who spray wisps of sparks to the irregular beat.

The Assland Chronicles

I always wanted to be good kid. But I liked terrorizing my babysitter much better.

My babysitter, Miss Ruth, was elderly woman with grey hair in a neat bun. She had an affinity for mannish pantsuits and she always smelled suspiciously of saltine crackers.

She really didn’t have anyone in her life. She talked mostly about her cats and found escapism in afternoon soaps such as Another World and Days of Our Lives.

But it was this afternoon that I had found myself in the time-out corner on my parents’ couch. Miss Ruth, fed up finally with my 6-year-old terrorism, had decided to call my father at work. She wanted him to spank me and teach me a lesson.
I couldn’t say in the past that I didn’t deserve it.

There was that time that Miss Ruth allowed me to watch Another World with her bridge team. And instead of sitting on the couch like a good little boy, I decided to mimic the sex scenes displayed onscreen in my Sesame Street playhouse.

I would strip down, completely naked in Sesame Street playhouse’s bright green plastic facade, and would then nestle up beside my Garfield pillow.

“I’ve always loved you,” I would tell my Garfield pillow, gently stroking the smirking cat face as I whispered sweet nothings in its ear. “And I’m never going to leave you, never ever!”

Miss Ruth stumbled upon my bare 6-year-old butt, humping the Garfield pillow.

“Joe, what in tarnation do you think you’re doing?” she asked. She was mortified and suffice to say, her bridge team was never invited back.

Now, you would think that I would be indebted to Ms. Ruth. She mentioned nary a peep about my sexual intercourse with the Garfield pillow to my father.

But again, it was today that I found myself on the couch, awaiting my father’s fists of justice. I had never really been spanked before. My ass was hankerin’ for a spankerin’.


“You’re going to sit there and wait for your father, too,” Ms. Ruth said, peering down from behind her Benjamin Franklin glasses as she glanced over the pages of The Nashville Banner. She wet her thumb and crooked her finger through pages of the Style section.

“No six-year-old child of mine is going to urinate in my Metamucil and expect to get away with it.”

The clock ticked in painstaking seconds. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest, collapsing around my lungs. It was the moment of eminent doom, lurking around the corner.

And Ms. Ruth sat there for every sweet second, leafing through the Nashville Banner as she eyed the clock.

That elderly woman with grey hair in a neat bun and an affinity for mannish pantsuits, that always smelled suspiciously of saltine crackers. She still doesn’t have anyone in her life, a mere 18 years later.

Ms. Ruth now lives in a dingy retirement center. She lost her cat to the mange, so
she rarely has things to talk about. Another World was canned back in 1999 by NBC Daytime execs, in search of that ever elusive “younger” demographic.

But I go over to the retirement home on occasion. I remind Ms. Ruth of the times we shared over a brittle tin can of crackers—the Garfield pillow, Carolyn Crudell and yes, pissing in her Metamucil.

Because to paraphrase her beloved soap, I’ve come to realize a very important lesson in all of this: “No one should live in this world alone.”

I feel a poke coming through...on you

Best line: "The way that you shake it on me/Makes me want you so bad sex-ually/Oh girl"
I can't fathom ever listening to this band as a pubescent.

Vagina Power

Don't say I didn't buy you no scrimps.

Precious gays

The Landlord

I had visions of Candace Bushell-whimsy for my first post-college apartment in New York City. It was to be sex with the modern homosexual as I sipped cosmopolitans and thumbed through the racks of haute culture.

But ambition led to an inevitable wake-up call.

Instead of Sex and the City brownstone, I found myself schlepping in a dismally gray, pockmarked railroader in working-class Queens, with light fixtures caked in dust and a homeless cat named Squints who suffered from the mange.

The stairwells reeked of dried dog feces, too. My landlord's 90-year-old mother, bless her heart, stockpiled metallic buckets of the stuff in her kitchen window, letting them bake in the summer sun.

The smell wafted, causing the building to drown in that dry, putrid odor, one that broke my Sex and the City dreams near in two.

After snorting through the muck for weeks, I decided The Health Department of New York City would provide my final comeuppance.

My roommate Kevin advised against it. "Our landlord will go ape-shit," he warned.
But I drudged up Sarah Jessica Parker, thinking that she wouldn't stand for it. I went through with the call.

The next day, Kevin and I woke to a pounding on our front door. It was a ferocious thudding that nearly rattled the cracked glass window out of the paper-thin door. We both knew it was our landlord, Jan Urie.

Kevin shot me a look of "what the hell are we supposed to do?' I shot him a look back of 'I don't know' unbridled terror. We finally decided to reluctantly open the door, finding Jan Urie and her Polish sexagenarian henchman huddled over our stoop.

Jan Urie had an electrical edge about her with a look as if she could spit nails.
"Who called the Health Department? Did you call the Health Department?" she screeched while jabbing her crooked finger in Kevin's gut.

I saddled up behind Jan Urie. It was time to come clean. "You know, I'm actually the one who called the Health Department."

"You?" Jan Urie pounced. "After everything I've done for you including giving you that couch."

Long silence. "First of all, that couch has pee stains on it," I casually reminded her, "secondly, anyone who lets her own mother live in filth is real bitch who
deserves to have the Health Department called on her."

Yes, this exactly wasn't the right thing to say at the moment. Jan Urie let out a howl like a wild banshee and began hurling obscenities my way. "She's calling the police department on you. They're going to arrest you for verbal assault," the henchman taunted.

I slumped over on the couch with pee stains on it. "Kevin, what are we going to do?" The words fell out of my mouth with a quiet exasperation.

Kevin didn't know the answers to that question, either. We did know that police wouldn't arrest me for verbal assault despite Jan Urie's belligerent reassurances that I was in a "Mexican street gang back in Nashville."

A few weeks later, the Health Department ordered Jan Urie to make a few changes around the building, which she grudgingly accepted.We weren't any closer to the Sarah Jessica Parker-ideal, but things were certainly getting better.

My Shameful Addiction

American Idol pol pot Simon Fuller, fresh off cementing Clay Aiken to late life career of panty-wetting Manliow-esque arena tours, has greased the wheels of fluff-pop further by unleashing Idol spin-off The Next Great American Band on unsuspecting FOX viewers in dire need of their Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? fix.
Instead of chirpy Mariah clones ransacking stanzas for superfluous melisma, The Next Great American Band forks over well coiffed Nickelback facsimiles and calls it even.
Band cribs an entire chapter from the American Idol playbook with an acid tongued old codger in the “Simon” role (Australian Idol’s Dicko Dickinson), a sympathetic sister-in-arms in the “Paula” role (Shelia E.) and Goo Goo Doll Johnny Rzeznik filling Randy Jackson’s nonsensical blather. Below, I've charted the show contenders.



Light of Doom
The Skinny: A butt-rockin’ fivepiece comprised of 12- and 13-year-olds with wispy golden locks and vapid Children of the Corn gapes, Light of Doom has been panned by online tropiocolotes as a “metal Hanson.” The parents of these sleaze glam guttersnipes have yet to tell them that Superunknown snuffed Whitesnake’s career.
Vegas Odds: 8:1. Dicko calls them, “creepy and gimmicky,” but the aw-shucks factor is hard to resist.

Dot Dot Dot
The Skinny: A synth-riddled mess, Dot Dot Dot’s fashion-challenged frontman liberally dabs eyeliner on his painfully emo peepers and hops around onstage like Crispin Glover on Ritalin. Their frenetic midtempo take on Elton John’s uber-ballad “Your Song” could be considered a form of torture under some bylaws of the Geneva Convention.
Vegas Odds: 15:1. We’ve already got a Brandon Flowers. We sure as hell don’t need another.

Denver and the Mile High Orchestra
The Skinny: The swing music revival crumbled with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s This Beautiful Life, but Belmont University music business alums Denver and the Mile High Orchestra have yet to receive the oxidized memo. Lead vocalist Denver Bierman lays on the schmaltz extra-thick with a cavalcade of brassy horn arrangements punctuating his every calculated over-emotion.
Vegas Odds: 10:1. Judge Shelia E has nearly pegged Denver and the Mile High Orchestra as the second coming of Chicago. But we can’t take Ms. E too seriously. She was the TV bandleader for The Magic Hour.

Sixwire
The Skinny: Warner Bros. Nashville evictees Sixwire smidges a tweak of twangy git’tar and then lobs almost criminal Appalachian a cappella harmonies down our willing Sing Out throats.
Vegas Odds: 2:1. For unleashing the banal countrypolitan vanilla better known as Carrie Underwood, it’s the least Mr. Fuller could do to let those Sixwire boys win.