I managed to watch this week’s CNN-YouTube Republican debates and I don’t want to be a jerk, but HDTV was not kind to the candidates. Fred Thompson is all crags and jowls, Giuliani’s already enormous choppers tripled in size, and it turns out Mitt Romney’s
Last weekend, during an Ibero-American conference, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar a fascist. Why? It wasn’t quite clear. Current Spanish PM José Zapatero did his dignified best to defend his compatriot, and boy did Chávez give him a bad time—heckling
Looking back on advertising, it is easier to unearth the hidden messages marketers embed in otherwise clear and plain copywriting. For example, look at what they are really saying in these old cigarette ads. You too can be Queen Elizabeth on the couch, a cuban plantation owner, a lazy furniture
In high school, I spent a lot of time in the AV department. It was where the geeks, gays, weirdoes, and Goths hung out—plus the theater types, straight-edgers, pot-smoking jocks, Kids-era ravers, and a few normals—all because a librarian named Magoo let us sit at
My best Halloween costume was in grade school. I must have been eight or nine, and my dad helped me turn a cardboard box into a television set. With aluminum-foil rabbit-ear antennae on a headband and a pillowcase for candy, I was good to go. Halloween in these
Just over 30 years ago, followinginauspiciousbeginnings, a relative unknown starred in a film he’d written about a scrappy boxer with big dreams who miraculously both beats the champ in a title match and turns “yo” into a catchphrase. Equally miraculously, the film went on to win three Academy Awards
Hey, climbing. Another thing that paralyzes me with fear. My boyfriend has been climbing at a gym for a while now, and he loves it, so because I love him, I’ve tried it, but it didn’t take. It’s the looking-down that always ruins it; you’re
A Parisian reader emailed me after my Video Digest about the latest hip-hop dances. Was I aware, she wanted to know, of Paris’s own Techtonik craze? I was, though nowhere as well as I am now. You’ve heard about dances sweeping a city. Well, Paris, she’s
Like revenge fantasies, anti-drug videos are a creative bonanza for those visionaries who know how to exploit both sides of an issue; righteous indignation at the social ills while simultaneously indulging in their lurid details ills. There’s a treasure trove of anti-LSD educational films out there that
Coming home from work the other day, I saw a couple on a bicycle, speeding down 24th Street. Not the steepest of hills, but 24th heading out of Noe Valley towards the Mission is a street pedestrians try to avoid. These two looked fearless. The teenage girl was sitting on
