Everyone's An Author: 'Roids, Rage and Redemption!

Laura Bush who? Moving on! In real life, he's Dan Clark, but on American Gladiators, he was Nitro. And, yes, steroids gave him a pair of man-boobs. The Post reports, in a pull-quote to end all pull-quotes:

"Bitch t- -s, man boobs, breast-chesticles is what they're called on the street. Gynecomastia is the scientific name. No matter what you call it, I [had] it," Clark, who was "Nitro" on the smash reality series, reveals in his memoir, "Gladiator: A True Story of 'Roids, Rage and Redemption," out next month. "I hate[d] taking off my shirt. For photo shoots, [I'd] wet my nipple with spit . . . [to] look firm instead of hanging down."

Today in Alt-Weekly Schadenfreude

Farewell, 50-year veteran jazz writer and conflicted Catholic liberal polemicist Nat Hentoff (and 30-year veteran fashion writer Lynn Yaeger), it appears your ad adjacency wasn't enough to save you, as your corporate overlords continue their sacred task of gutting the Village Voice to the point where it's not even worth feeling nostalgic over (sorta like the East Village). Man, is there any content left in the Village Voice? Over on Cooper Square, Jim Hoberman and Michael Musto sit across a table from one another, staring each other down like Kurt Russell and Keith David at the end of John Carpenter's The Thing.

Koosh Ball Or Canine?

Eliza Dushku Will, Hopefully, Bring It On in February

Andrew Bird Is Hardcore Bummed

Johnathan Mahler penned a nice, well-timed profile on singer-songwriter/prolific whistler/our imaginary fake boyfriend Andrew Bird for the Times Magazine this Sunday. There's a lot of good stuff: about how Noble Beast is supposedly going to be Bird's break-the-mainstream pop record (possible, but even if it isn't, it's an incredibly consistent piece of work that we might even like better than Armchair Apocrypha, though it's a little too soon to tell); about how Bird completely gave a former label exec the total face after doling out the unhelpful suggestion he just "act like a rock star" as a marketing plan; about how Bird is a stand-up-and-eat workaholic when he records; about how Bird has always been a musical misfit; and about how Bird tends to become "emotionally destabilized" after a show.

But the thing we can't quite stop thinking about, after reading this story, is the not-so-surprising yet wonderfully gratifying revelation that Bird is a serious loner, like, Bon Iver/Thoreau/Emily Dickinson territory loner. For one thing, instead of hitting on all the skinny girls with glasses who wait for him to play small venues in the hipster area of Chicago, he prefers hanging out in his parents' barn. With his brother. You see, Bird is coming off break-up life support right about now:
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Holiday Movies, Pre-Reviewed, Reviewed: The Secret of the Grain

[In the L's Holiday Gift Guide Issue, we presented a Holiday Film Preview of sorts: Reviews of Movies We Haven’t Seen, banking on the predictability of the holiday-movie industrial complex, and also our own tendency to review movies before seeing them. So let's see how we did. Here, Benjamin Sutton, who wrote the one on The Secret of the Grain, compares his preview to his actual response.]


I said...

The second César-sweeper from Abdel Kechiche (after 2003’s Games of Love and Chance) addresses another uneasy site of racial tension. Small-town Sète substitutes for Parisian slums, where the deposed head of an immigrant family in crisis regroups his kin in hopes of opening a restaurant. Moments of optimism recall Volver, but the mood is decidedly less hopeful, the characters’ morality far more ambiguous.

Video of the Year

It was with his entry in Moving Image Source's Movie Moments of 2008 that Ed Halter introduced your humble film editor to this magnificent greenscreen mash-up, which has so much to say, really, about America and what it wants. Goodbye and good riddance, 2008.

Sunday Video: The Flight of the Red Balloon

Saturday Video: The Beat Goes On