THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

I don’t watch non-scripted TV anywhere near as much as Tuttle does, but when I’m rained into some hotel in Bumfuck, Florida with a rewrite staring and pouting at me from lack of attention, I will turn to the Food Network and watch just about every show, even Iron Chef in Japanese.  Anything not to write.  It’s also because like to cook, usually extremely spicy Asian food, or at the very least chow that’s packed with flavor.

I said “just about every show” because when that noxious Southern fat bitch Paula Deen comes on, I switch it off and actually start to scribble.  The crap she concocts makes my eyebrows knit together in a toupee across my bald pate.  It really is no wonder No Reservations host Anthony Bourdain calls her “the worst, most dangerous person in America.”  This is because she does things like tell an obese nation that it’s okay to eat cheesecake for breakfast.  What a hick.

Like a true autodidact, I have taught myself how to cook; I find it hard to follow recipes.  I can watch someone make a dish and take it from there, but words on a page—measurement, lists, techniques—confuse me and I invariably fuck up the meal.

I started speaking French the same way.  After years growing up in a country that spoke a Romance language, Italy, with endless French classes and tutors, I finally got the hang of it one night in a bar in the Marais in Paris when I was nineteen.  I was so drunk I was almost falling off the stool, but I just opened my mouth and spoke fluidly, and never stopped.  Then, on the monitor over the bar, which was playing the video of “Love Is A Stranger,” Annie Lennox took off her wig in the back of a limo and I was so shocked that she was really a man that I did fall off the stool.

How I cook is I can taste the ingredients in my mouth as they combine, and savor the final result more or less accurately without having to try it.  I’m sure it’s some sort of Aspergers-ish trait, which would be nice because as we all know I’m dying for a decent personality disorder.

Being the smoking, alcohol-binging health nut that I am, I can also count calories as they go into a dish, and this is why Deen’s show revolts me so much.  She’s always cooking for some event, some party of friends, but I’m convinced they must all look like Weebles.

Well, it is no shock that Deen is about to announce that her years of being Irresponsible Queen Fat Bitch have upped and smacked her doughy southern puss: she’s got Type 2 diabetes, which comes from eating the sort of food she’s been peddling on TV.  Of course, she has already wrangled a multi-million-dollar deal to become the spokeswoman for the diabetes medication Novartis.  The cynicism of this move is so galling it’s almost enviable.  I imagine the creative director for Novartis pitched it to her agent as “Supersize Me meets Love and Other Drugs.”

As The Daily says: “Maybe she’ll retire “Paula’s Brunch Burger” [from the menu in her restaurant], which features a fried egg and bacon atop a burger served between glazed doughnuts instead of a bun.”

Shit like that makes you wonder why we bothered fighting a civil war to keep “charming” Southerners in our Union.  We should have cut them loose and fed their fat, boorish, homophobic asses to the Mexicans and annexed Canada in their place.  Just imagine our political process then: Ahhhh.  Civilization at last.

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Never ones to be outdone by anything other than themselves, much less Islam, the Scientologists have leaked plans for their new Super Power Building in Bumfuck… sorry, Clearwater, Florida.  Known as the cult’s “Flag Mecca,” this Mother of Centers promises disciples “infinite powers.”  The Village Voice has an in-depth breakdown here.

There isn’t a joke that hasn’t already been said about Scientology.  I have to admire how they go about life with their fingers in their ears like kids in the playground, “Neener-neener, I can’t hear you! Sticks and stones may break…. Etcetera.”  But so do all religious people.  At least Scientology is honest about the sci-fi elements of all religions, and even draws a line under them.  If you not only buy the joke but take it seriously enough to pay huge sums for it, then God bless you, my child.

I have to say, skimming through the images in the Voice, I’d like to stay in the Super Power Building.  It’s like an Apple Store designed by Armani as a hotel if it were located on a massive cruise ship.  From a pure design standpoint, the interiors of the building—the exterior is a rather indifferent, lumpen classical revival of some sort—are pretty decent, in a Dubai sort of way.

Two elements are drawing the most attention: the Oiliness Table in the Perceptics Lab (tee-hee), which people are guessing measures your oiliness with its rather scary drills; and the massive city-block-wide running room, in which adherents cleanse themselves by running around a column of light for twelve hours straight.

Apparently there was a riff among the higher ups of the Org over New Years when the outgoing CEO of the Super Power facility sent out an email accusing church leader David Miscavige of turning Scientology into a giant fundraising machine.  Which begs the question: How can rich people be so dumb and gullible?  And another question: Why are there so many of them?

It just goes to prove my point: wealth is more often than not a total accident, which is why I am so grateful when I stumble on “smart money.”

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For those of my friends and early supporters of this blog who became concerned that I was getting “too pornographic” when I began publishing pieces like “Mark Zuckerberg Has a Small Dick,” this week all of those concerns must needs go bye-bye.  All we did was post a pic of a Caio Cesar’s ass and after it was picked up by Ohlalamag.com, page views have increased over a hundred percent over the past few days.  That’s the power of booty, baby.

The big news is that the PFC reformat is coming imminently.  Promise.  We are working on it over the next couple of weeks, and colleagues in India are helping our intergration and migration.  Don’t worry: it’s going to look more or less the same, it’s just we’ll be ripping off Tina Brown even more, until we too own Newsweek for a dollar.

As I said to James Tuttle in a text yesterday, “We should stay with the sort of gay raunchy-but-clever Maxim model, tongue-in-chic Sun page 3,” meaning lots of babes of either sex in various states of undress, preferably one: completely naked.

Of course, no sooner do I decide on this direction than I stumble on Treats! Magazine, which The Daily Beast is calling “High-end fashion’s new Playboy” a subtle reminder that there are often a lot of straight men involved in the fashion world, just not very many, and the models don’t confide in you like they do in us, neener-neener.

The first issue has a spread by a very straight British photographer, Terry O’Neill, with whom I worked once when we shot his ex-wife, Faye Dunaway, unfortunately with a camera and not with a gun, although you would swear the shoot was going to end like that.  Luckily, all that happened was she tossed a bowler hat at Terry after he made a snide remark like she was that hefty Japanese assassin in Goldfinger.  The Hasselblad parried it deftly.  Then she and I fell into adventure, but that’s for another blog post.

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This is where I do one of those very clever PFC twists and reverse myself somewhat by inserting another image of Thomas Horn, but this time it’s because the poor young fella had the bad luck of being featured on this year’s recipient of the PFC Warm Enema Award for the Worst Key Art for a Film in the Running for an Oscar, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  In fact, it’s the worst poster I’ve seen in years, anywhere, and his crooked pinkies really bother me.

I’m being oh so film biz, but for those who aren’t in film distribution or marketing, “key art” is the term used for the graphics on movie posters, cos it gets used for more than just the “one-sheet,” as the posters themselves are also referred to (as opposed to an eight-sheet, which is a billboard).

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I really need to mix up the Schizo of the Week because to be honest I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here in Hollywood, and what’s in that bottom is pretty gnarly.  I did have a wave and a chat with an intriguing specimen this morning on Sunset, who was wearing some sort of shawl made of pressed felt bits that looked like one of those mysterious items you’d find in the back of an auto body shop.  He’s always very pleasant when I pass.  Why, only two nights ago when Rain Li and I were riding back from the Arclight Cinema he bellowed, “CHRIST WAS A JEW AND SO WAS HITLER!”  Such powers of observation and association don’t come unless you wear a helmet of aluminum foil.

Unfortunately, he looks like his face is falling off, and that just isn’t right for a blog that aspires to be a gay-ish raunchy-but-clever Maxim magazine that features tongue-in-chic Sun babes of either sex.  So I’m going to have to mix it up a bit and announce a Fantasy Cellmate of the Week, which going forward will run intermittently with SOTW.

This week’s Fantasy Cellmate is Valdet Gjeloshi.  Valdet hails from Bumfuck… sorry, Tampa, Florida, is twenty-nine years old (I know, that’s pushing it for me, but this is prison), and is presumably Turkish or Kurdish, or from some place that eats pita with a cucumber-and-yogurt dip regularly.  He was turned in by his two-year-old son after his wife and father told cops he wasn’t home, when he was really hiding in the attic.  Junior is clearly already reading Oedipus Rex.

On a scale of how many cigarettes I could pimp Valdet out for to my fellow desperate prisoners—one to ten—Valdet gets a six.  Under ordinary circumstances he might get a seven, but he plucks his eyebrows too heavily, which means he depilates elsewhere, and that’s a huge turnoff.