Day: April 10, 2010

Now that I’ve located some decent Chrysler building machine-gun footage from Larry Cohen‘s Q: The Winged Serpent, it should be a small matter for some enterprising CG whiz kid to find the right clips of Russell Brand and paste them onto one of the two cops who get eaten. (You first have to get past the Michael Moriarty-Cathy Clark argument scene at the beginning.)

This trailer is brilliant, by the way. Inspired. Particularly the transition from Richard Roundtree‘s line (“What I wanna know is, how the hell does this tie in with the murders and mutilations?) to Candy Clark‘s “whah?” expression.

This pic is more than a month old (snapped at Vanity Fair‘s post-Oscar bash) and no big deal, but I was struck by (a) Katy Perry‘s look of tingly delight and transportation and (b) a thought that it’s awfully nice to be the recipient of such a gaze. Then again these inner-light expressions tend to happen more often within the first few months of a relationship than after a year or two or three. Perry has been with Russell Brand, a three-time winner of the Sun‘s shagger of the year award, since September ’09, so that fits.

Then again Perry may have spotted the photographer, knew a shot was coming and decided to slightly “act” the part of a love-struck, recently engaged fiance. Just as Brand decided to act the part of a cool hawk-eyed hustler, scanning the room for his next opportunity.

President Barack Obama‘s likely nominee to replace retiring Chief Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is said to be solicitor general (and former Harvard Law School dean) Elena Kagan. The general understanding is that she’s (a) quite brilliant, (b) ideologically centrist if not conservative (Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday that “replacing Stevens with Kagan would shift the Supreme Court substantially to the right on a litany of key issues”), and (c) openly gay.

If Kagan is in fact nominated Team Obama will be viewed as having gone the cautious if not vaguely chickenshit route, considering that Kagan’s conservative leanings will make it hard for Republicans to sqawk all that loudly and will deprive them of an election-year issue. Unless, of course, they want to play the anti-gay bigot card.

Yesterday’s posting about that Nike/Tiger Woods ad led me to an anonymously-penned piece about infidelity in the current Esquire. The opening reads as follows:

“I’ll tell you why I cheat. I need to. Infidelity makes me remember things. The details that expand to fill my life (my upcoming performance reviews, the aches and pains of training, the recovery of my 401(k) ) and the ones that deaden it (my guilt, my smug self-satisfaction, my fake epiphanies about my progress in this life) — all of that drops away when I look down at the naked spine of an unfamiliar woman, twisting slightly in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto the sheets of a Hampton Inn in some nameless suburb.

“This is the most absolute choice I can make. I am there on my own. Against every code, rule, and set of mores I pretend to obey. Against better judgment, against every lesson of hindsight and every shard of wisdom that comes with age, I have no regrets in that moment, because I am naked, or without pants, and I have chosen to be there. I have voted by my presence, declared it, and I feel the blood moving in me again. So it’s the blood. That’s who I am. That’s why men cheat.

“Men don’t cheat because they can. Men cheat because they must, because they need to. This is the male struggle. Need compels us to try again. Because copulation is not in any way about fate. It is not about two individuals destined to meet on some dark night. It’s about random collisions.

“If you cheat, you must believe this much: that fated love is a lie, and monogamous love a deception. If you cheat, these two sentiments are your guiding light. Doesn’t mean you’re incapable of love, doesn’t mean you don’t want what love — or even marriage — can offer. It’s just a paradox. You have what you believe, and it is never the lie. You train your sentiment to fit inside the lie. Your rules fit right inside that sentiment.”

“The odds greatly favor death coming with a sudden terrible shock,” a friend once told me, “or from a long agonizing illness.” Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria, and several Polish political and military leaders have ducked the second scenario. Their plane hit a treetop as it attempted a landing in heavy fog this morning near Smolensk, about 225 miles southwest of Moscow, and then broke apart and exploded into flames. Awful. The mind reels.

Polish president Lech Kaczynski, Barack Obama in 2009.

Kaczynski, 61, was arriving in Smolensk “for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Red Army as it invaded Poland,” a N.Y. Times story reports. TV footage “showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest. An official with the Russia’s Investigative Committee said possible causes were bad weather, mechanical failure and human error.

“The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, killing what may be a tenth of country’s top leadership in one fiery explosion.”

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and wife Maria