Back around 1992, I bought a pile of cassettes from a cutout rack somewhere. One was The Stone Roses, by a Manchester band of the same name that produced this breakthrough album before becoming entangled in legal problems. Even though the album was released in 1989, SR sounded to me like a jumble of Dave Clark Five, Kinks and Doors with a bit of the wall of sound thing going on.

I Wanna Be Adored

She Bangs the Drums [Read more]

When I saw that Shia LeBeouf told the media that he had "hooked up" with Megan Fox, I was not surprised. After all, I have hooked up with him, as well

Yes, friends, I, noted comma user, William K. Wolfrum, have hooked up with Shia LeBeouf.

The first time was on the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We both figured we'd never work again, so what the hell?

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I've always dreamed of someday meeting the Dalai Lama (hasn't everybody?); sitting down with him, picking his brain, asking him the questions of the day:  What do you think about war and famine and global warming?  If I knew I was actually going to have the chance, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be working up a joke to tell him.  But then I'm not Australian anchor Karl Stefanovic, who had been saving his best joke (I'm guessing) for his best interview ever only to find it painfully lost, in translation and everywhere else.  Watch this.

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I caught one large summer flick this weekend, X-Men: First Class, and one small art-house film, Still Walking. 

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Hey, you heard it here first at the site that specializes in the hottest entertainment news! It seems The Penis in the Anthony Weiner Penis Pic Controversy has accepted a spot on a new reality show with Donald Trump!

The title of the show will be "Trump & The Junk"and highlight the pair's wacky shenanigans around New York and the world, trying to raise awareness for Donald Trump. [Read more]

I liked this short ...

I'm a documentary fan, and even with my other-worldly Internet research skills, I often come up dry when searching for a new documentary. Thus, I am creating this post where you, the reader, can tell me, the documentary watcher, what to watch.

I'll give a list and some comments of some docs I've seen:

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father: I'm still in tears from this one.  [Read more]

I read once that the original Phoebe Snow was a media creation. Railroads were trying to show that diesels were much cleaner than coal, so they invented this ephemeral socialite named Phoebe Snow who could travel the rails wearing white, and emerge unsoiled by soot. The name carried to an Erie Lackawanna passenger train, and Phoebe Ann Laub borrowed it for the stage.

The LA Times has an obituary: [Read more]

The New York Times takes a look at the contract disputes that have been delaying production of Mad Men. (But Deadline Hollywood suggests that the show is now a go, even though the fight with series creator Matt Weiner is not over.)

What's enlightening is the nature of the dispute. The network is ready to make Weiner very, very rich. But they demand that he turn in a slightly shittier product. From the Times:

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Elizabeth Taylor was the most beautiful human being on this earth for so many years you had to wonder if her not-of-this-world violet eyes didn't have something to do with it.  Because, honestly, who else on this earth ever had violet eyes?  But beyond her beauty, she had something else that most incredibly pampered child stars never had: an ability to look outside herself and see the other half of the world.  She worked tirelessly to bring attention to HIV/Aids, bringing honest assessments and putting human faces on a scourge that others chose to ignore because it was only a "gay issue" and didn't affect the rest of us.  Except it did, and she showed us  [Read more]

Good Morning America has reported that actress Elizabeth Taylor has died at the age of 79. The Today Show has also reported the news, which is now being reported by all major news agencies. [Read more]

After the chitchat about Washington, DC on Articleman's post, I was thinking about the time I rode Beach Drive with a young girl who was visiting MD (I just got in trouble for writing that BTW). About all I remember is that we rode up Linden Lane so I could show her the odd little buildings of the National Park Seminary, like the Pagoda pictured above.

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We made our art in the Gilded Age, 
the time of having and having
not.  
My gaze and your eyes made
the pictures of those days
in the treelined boulevards of tenements
and New York sweat.  Pictures 
of stickball boys and jumprope girls
and nighttime songs from soulful lips.  Women tottering 
too early to trains on heels, aproned men to markets
hawking wares in carts.  We froze seconds in each frame 
we put our hands around, each paintbrush 
stroke:  on their porchstoops, in their ill-lit 
apartments up narrow stairs, in the dusky basement
bars where we met them all, 
our many glowing selves.
 
Since those gilded days, the sun rose and sprayed  [Read more]

Okay, this was the week of Charlie Sheen.  He was all over the place (in more ways than one) and actually set a Guinness World Record  by opening a Twitter account and getting a million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes.  (Thereby giving some credence to his semi-delusional "Rock Star of the Planet" claim.) 
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Jon Cryer isn’t all about winning. Jon Cryer is happy with a draw.

Jon Cryer’s best-known role as an actor was as Ducky. And he’s Ok with that.

If a neighbor asked Jon Cryer to pick up their mail while they were on vacation, Jon Cryer would do it. Maybe he’d miss a day, but he would never let the mail pile up.

Hardly anyone actually hates Jon Cryer. On the flip side, no one’s completely obsessed with him. And Jon Cryer thinks that’s Ok.

Jon Cryer is fun at parties but likes to leave early because he likes to get up fairly early. [Read more]

I went to see The King's Speech, because it was nominated for all those awards and because Monday is Five Dollar Night. I like the actors in it a lot, but I'm glad I didn't spend more than five dollars. The King's Speech may well win the Oscar for Best Picture, but that just goes to show that you don't need originality, drama, artistic perception or a compelling story to win an Oscar.

From the opening moments of that film I was forced to think, once again, a thought that's been building up slowly and irresistibly over the past several years of movie-going:

I am really, really tired of the Great Depression looking so goddamned pretty.
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This is awesome on more levels than actually exist. Let me present Ukranian sensations, Kazaky: 

Just try and feel sad now.

--WKW

Joanne Siegel has passed away. She was the model for the first sketches of Lois Lane and the wife of Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel. That gives her the best claim to being Lois Lane that any real person has ever had. In her later years, she was a fierce advocate for her husband's intellectual property claims. I've thought a lot about the Superman creators over the years, and part of me is tempted only to blog about intellectual property. But the truth is that Lois Lane has probably shaped the course of my adult life more than any other fictional character has, without me thinking about it.
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Update: Rather than push Stardust's piece down, I'm updating here. Mother Jones has a photo essay on phone sex operators, which will ... probably not be so good for business. The woman above writes:

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