Heroes & Villains — Stories for Men, Hollywood Pop Culture and Next Gen Politics

America Needs a War on Stupid

August 18, 2010

We’ve become a nation beholden to idiots and it’s about time we do something about it. America has a long and cherished history of anti-intellectualism. Sarah Palin’s exhortation to ‘Mama Grizzlies’ is not all that different from Davey Crockett’s folksy speeches made on the floor of Congress when he was a U.S. Representative. And both [...]

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Kanye West: Genius or Asshole?

August 13, 2010

I unabashedly love Kanye West. Mostly it’s for his brilliant ability to translate the bling-bling ego of urban hip-hop and translating it into a language that suburban middle-class kids can understand. Instead of hoops and glocks, Kanye’s fascinations include, if we are to believe the latest entries on his blog, “Dioni Tabbers by Masyuki Ichinose“, [...]

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Work of Art’s Erik Johnson Claims Miles Mendenhall Faked OCD

August 12, 2010

Miles is a fake and Erik Johnson is not an art pussy. There’s a winner of the first season of Bravo’s Work of Art: The Search for the Next Great Artist, but it’s not the art world.

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Everything LOST, Now Found (And For Sale)

August 12, 2010

Once upon a time, when a show ended all of its costumes and props would wind up either being tossed or put away into storage, to one day be reused. But that was before Hollywood figured out that all of us would pay big bucks to own a piece of our favorite series. Nowadays, any [...]

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5 Websites Every TV Writer Needs

August 11, 2010

There are thousands of sites out there that talk about the latest industry buzz. Who’s hiring. Who’s got a deal. Who just walked away from one, but surprisingly, there’s precious few sites out there dedicated to the actual art and craft of telling a story on television. As I’ve been slogging away at writing specs [...]

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New Janelle Monae Video: Better than AK-47′s for Breasts

August 7, 2010

While there’s still certainly a lot to say about Lady Gaga, ever since I picked up Janelle Monae’s intergalactic robot doomed love epic, The ArchAndroid earlier this year, she’s been my go-to girl for smart pop. This new video for “Cold War” seals it. Instead of overloading us with dated Madonna references, Monae gives us [...]

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Your Prop. 8 Questions Answered

August 4, 2010

This afternoon, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker found that Proposition 8, the voter ballot initiative which outlawed equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians in California was unconstitutional and overturned it. You’ve got questions?

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Just who are Katy Perry’s ‘California Gays’?

July 20, 2010

As far as I can tell, Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ is the jam of the summer. I want to be clear that I’m not saying it captures the cultural zeitgeist of 2010 or anything — it’s just the song that America has collectively decided to bore into our collective skulls for the moment. And why [...]

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Are Hipsters Monsters? Bravo’s ‘Work of Art’ Has the Answer

July 15, 2010

When I first heard about Bravo’s latest reality offering, Work of Art: The Search for the Next Great Artist, in which a bunch of hipster artistes compete against each other for big big prizes, I died a little inside. The fact Sarah Jessica Parker was producing didn’t help much. However, I gave the show a [...]

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Time to calm our long national freak-out

July 10, 2010

This week’s bizarre scene of U.S. and Russian spies being traded on a tarmac in Austria is just the latest in a string of surrealistic images that have marked a year in which we’ve seen the Gulf transformed into a rainbow-hued oil slick, political candidates alluding to taking back the government forcibly with arms and [...]

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