• Is there anything more recognizable in pop culture than zombies dancing to Thriller? Following up on the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death, this month’s Vanity Fair features probably the best feature on Jackson and his iconic achievements I have ever read. Mixing interesting facts (did you know the U.S. Library of Congress made Thriller the first music video to be inducted into the National Film Registry?) with candid insight into Jackson’s life at the very apex of his success and cultural relevance, this long form feature flows and informs in the manner of VF’s very best arts and culture pieces. -sy
• And in more Michael news, Toronto writer Rea McNamara wrote and conceptualized a great compendium (which also serves as beautiful reminder of his better days) for This Recording titled, “In which Michael Jackson and Diana Ross become MiDiana.” SIGH. -am
• Let this be clear: I hate Chris Brown. I firmly believe in holding celebrities accountable for their actions (halloooo, like ALL of young Hollywood? and for the rec, Michael didn’t do it), mostly because we don’t and then people blame them for stupid things anyway. Anyway, I’m so not into Chris Brown because it makes me uncomfortable that a) he’s marketed toward very young girls and b) he broke Rihanna’s face. I mean, it’s not like these kids are standing by Brown because of his “remarkable talent” (Kellz comes to mind when I think of another redeemed celeb), but more because he’s hot and always takes his shirt off. Anyway: read this piece by Ann Powers at the L.A. Times if you thought his “LOVE ME, PLEASE” BET Awards cryfest was both horseshit, and troubling.-am
• Moses Znaimer’s ideaCity10 conference recently brought some cool women (and, notably, girls) to Toronto, and they uploaded everyone’s presentations to YouTube a couple of days ago. I recommend checking out Viet-Aussie vlogger Natalie Tran, who brings her lame-on-purpose shtick to a conversation about immigration and awkwardness, and fashion writer prodigy Tavi Gevinson, whom I previously knew only basic stuff about, but who is awesomely uncomfortable as she makes her case for a Sassy magazine revival. “Uhm, yeah, I’m totes a wunderkind, or whatever.” You are! -jc

• McSweeneys can be a veritable minefield of hipster smarm, but you have to give credit for effort sometimes, even when the conceit is conceited. Lynsey G. layers on the analogies, citing Charles Bukowski and essentially calling Disney a bunch of pornographers. This wouldn’t be out of place in Adbusters, so it’s definitely a bit of an ideological stretch, but the prose is quite entertaining from someone who clearly is a soulful writer cum porn columnist. Pun intended.

• There’s no better time to take a closer look at Canada’s obsession with it’s Olympic (men’s) hockey team – something our neighbours to the South have been trying to grasp ever since the Games started. Adam Gopnik is the first one to actually get it though, and in this NewYorker piece he not only manages to explain the utmost importance of something that is trivial to so many Americans, but  manages to put some actual intelligent words down on paper about our “niceness,” unlike some others.

• I’d like to welcome Mr. Jonah Weiner of Slate to my Nicki Minaj appreciation club! With most people either unequivocally hating the rapper or imitating her in biarre displays of loving fandom — neither of which interests me — let me tell you, it’s a lonely club. And while I don’t agree with all of what he writes in his Minaj dissertation, I do definitely agree that Minaj is doing something really fascinating with identity and hip-hop, and that she’s doing it consistently and with purpose. And BIG FAKE BOOBS. Haha sorry. We’ve gotta get our hits somehow. Not too many kids these days googling “identity and hip-hop”. Where was I? Oh right. OMG NIP SLIP.

Whatever boys: if you lost the pink ribbon and sequins, this could be Batman from behind

I feel like an Olympic-themed “What the eff?!” entry should start with a disclaimer:  I know that athlete’s style in play has less to do with what they want to wear than what have to wear.  Whether that’s to  give them a one-millionth of a second’s edge over their competitors or satisfy their leaders’ secret love of clown costume, it’s not fair to make comments on outfits they would never otherwise wear.

Yeah well, you know what else isn’t fair?  The fact that while I will cover these Olympics with the aid of my trusty laptop and cable TV access, this child is at the 2010 Games, reporting on the action while rubbing elbows with the rest of CTV’s J-team elite: Lloyd…. James….Tim…

Eugh- maybe this is more of a blessing than I realized.

Anyway, let’s look at the best of the worst from this week at the Winter Games.

Norway’s Brotherhood of the Travelling Pants

When diamonds are NOT a girl's best friend

Oh man.  I love me some argyle as much as the next person.  It’s ideal for those  “I’m-too-lazy-to-coordinate-something-for-work-I’ll-wear-this-argyle-sweater-Who-doesn’t-love-argyle?” days.  But this…this was less of an offense to the senses than a waving white flag disguised as anything but.  When you’re running (sliding?) around on the ice sporting these, you’re probably also about one pack of Depends away from a nice, long vacation at the Raisin Ranch.  Not exactly intimidating stuff.  Fittingly, Norway’s curlers were outfitted by a Sonoma-based company called “Loudmouth Golf” – I’d say they were roundly warned, but this could be a case of lost in translation.

Ukranian Fashion Foiled!

Ukrainian pairs team Tatiana Volosozhar and Stanislav Morozov trade frills for foil

Again with the disclaimer: It’s a well-known fact that, for as long as 12 year-old girls have made up the vast majority of the world’s figure skating audience, cheeseball costumes have been a neccessity.  The frillier, the fluffier, the more swoon-worthy and similar to, say, Tuxedo Mask, the better.  So it’s almost no surprise how much flack the Ukraine got for their choice to kit out their pairs skaters in a shiny, clinical blue unitard uncomfortably reminiscent of some kind of space-age IUD.  Figure skating may be fruity as hell, but your little sister Jessica just isn’t yet ready for Star Trek’s failed fetish line.  And speaking of figure skating….

Johnny’s Weir-d, Wonderful World

Weird is making campy controversial

Type “Johnny Weir” into Google News’ search field and I guarantee you won’t learn a thing about the American figure skater’s professional career.  You will, however, learn that PETA is not a fan,  that Weir suggests M.A.C. concealer and blot powder to keep skin looking flawless, and that 25 year-old has his sights set on one day launching his own clothing line.  The guy is a textbook example of PR by-the-numbers; with nothing more than some choice embellishments and some netting, he’s got an MTV-generation glued to his every performance for rabid consumption of his next outlandish outfit.

Here’s the thing, though.  I don’t think Weir is a talented, budding designer.  I barely think he’s a competent skater. I think he’s a fun, smart kid who’s discovered the power of wardrobe, who’s jumped on the “Gaga as God” bandwagon, and who’s riding the attention for all it’s worth.  But I will say this:  in a sport filled with no shortage of Wheaties endorsements and squeaky clean soundbites, his interview with Vanity Fair is that cigarette drag you can’t help but savour.  In it,  he fields all kinds of questions about his signature style with the very last question asking, “What do you say to your critics?”

His response?  “Suck it.”

As I strolled the halls of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Vanity Fair exhibit, all I could wonder was; is this a tomb to magazines? Conde Nast was once the gatekeeper of high culture. Now the storied publishing house is struggling simply to stay relevant (and financially stable) closing previously untouchable halo titles such as Gourmet. Under glass at the ROM were editions of Vanity Fair spanning its near century long run, from 1920′s illustrated covers to this January’s latest celebrity ubergloss. To see crumbling manuscripts side by side with todays newsstand product, all under a dust protector, seemed more prescient than perhaps even the exhibit curators intended.

Are magazines obsolete?

Frankly, I’m not qualified to answer that question. But I’m going to anyways, and I believe the answer is yes. Sure, there will always be art publications and high-brow photographic endeavours that continue on, lush and worthy of wasting an afternoon flipping through. The days of titles like Time or Life literally being paper manifestations of the Zeitgeist will likely not ever happen again though, those publications relegated to the exhibits and journals of the anthropological set. The ROM is way ahead of its time in this regard — intentional or not.

What struck me most starkly about the Vanity Fair exhibit though was that although it was a photographic installation, the pictures actually contextualized a greater celebration of the medium itself. Lining the walls were seminal portraits taken from Edward Steichen to Annie Leibovitz, mirroring each other perfectly; Greta Garbo facing Madonna, Babe Ruth meeting Lance Armstrong. It revealed how true the old adage is that the more things change, the more things stay the same. This is, irrevocably, an important lesson for the magazine industry.

Photos are timeless because they capture a moment that can never be experienced again. Regardless of whether this invokes nostalgia or altered perceptions of reality, a picture becomes classic when it reveals a truth we never consciously realized.

Words however are completely the opposite. Unlike photos that provide windows to other worlds, words become immortal when they remind us of what we already know to be true.

The same day I saw the Vanity Fair exhibit, fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also on display at the ROM. Included amongst them was an ancient parchment of Psalm 121 that, religious or not, evoked emotions eminently relatable in modern times. The biblical passage expresses fear, joy, hope, faith… prosaic and poetic at the same time, it is the written expression of human experience that transforms empathy into classic literature.

The Future

On January 27th, the floodgates to tablet computing are going to break wide open. Whether the Apple tablet revealed on that day represents a new vessel for the soul of magazines is irrelevant. What’s significant is that the computer firm cum industrial design boutique is acknowledging that handheld readers are the information medium of the future. Naturally, Apple might be wrong — but it rarely is.

Magazines are obsolete because paper cannot be updated in real time; thousands of pages cannot replace an infinite web of links; and although one photo may say a thousand words, one thousand photos can’t be printed in a single edition. There is no doubting the limitations of magazines as a medium. Yet even with new bells and whistles it is up to writers to pen words worth reading.

That is undoubtedly the greatest problem I can observe with the business of writing today. Simply put: it’s all business, no writing. So concerned with selling ads and paying rent, the product — the fucking words — have taken not just a back seat, but have been shoved in the trunk. Editors are outsourced, stories are machinated and covers are turned into advertorials as publishers lose sight of what exactly they are selling in the first place.

The medium may be the message, but that hardly means the message doesn’t matter. Indeed, if the message is good enough shouldn’t form actually follow function? Hopefully the industry doesn’t lose the forest for the trees as they try to evolve into the digital age, because computers? They’re going to be replaced one day, as will the building they’re sold in and the factories that produce them.

Good writing is going to be around forever.

Ortved says the network refused to participate in the story and, confused about journalism, thought this would be sufficient enough to kill it. Ortved went ahead and interviewed many of the show’s writers, producers and vocal talent anyway, unearthing typical anecdotes of serendipity and elbow grease but also a bad blood tale of envy and acrimony between series creator Matt Groening (who like Fox did not particpate) and unsung hero of the writer’s room Sam Simon.

It turns out Matt Groening was not considered a great asset by many in The Simpsons writers room; he was not a sitcom writer and didn’t really didn’t know how to tell those kinds of stories, and Sam Simon let him know it. Once while discussing a script where Marge finally lets her hair down, Matt really wanted to reveal that underneath her beehive, Marge had Rabbit ears—Sam, of course, said no. One witness to the early days was particularly annoyed that Groening took so much credit for the show’s success, when “the fat fuck just sat up in his office all day, figuring out ways to make more money [with merchandising]” while Sam Simon and the writers churned out brilliant script after brilliant script.

Still, it seems as though all worked out for the best as The Simpsons is not only consistently gratuitous marketing porn, but also the longest-running sitcom of all time. For something so insanely successful on both fronts, a bit of backroom bird-flipping seems typical at worst. You’ve got to love how Ortved paints the journalistic ordeal though; executive producer James L. Brooks telling everyone who matters not to speak and Ortved “poring over court papers” in search of The Truth.

Regardless of which filthy rich bastard is responsible for what, The Simpsons’ real story is its cultural worth — it continues to air, continues to market, and has influenced everything from the way we speak to the way John Ortved writes his bio:

He has won no literary prizes or journalistic distinctions, but is considered an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability,” by the Department of Homeland Security—of which Barack Obama is ultimately the boss.

Aye carumba.