ultranow

rest in peace alaina reed-amini

sesame street's olivia and 227's rose lee holloway, alaina reed-amini, died december 17 after a two-year battle with breast cancer. previously known as alaina reed hall, her roles, besides a 12-year run on sesame street from 1976 to 1988 and five years on the '80s hit 227, include stage roles in chicago and hair, movie appearances in cruel intentions and (gulp) death becomes her and guest-starring roles on shows such as nypd blue and ally mcbeal. 

as she's not an active character, i doubt sesame street will address her death, as they did when the actor playing mr. hooper died and somebody had to explain it to big bird. now if someone could just explain it to me. also explain to me why it took the news until today to cover it. sorry she's not brittany murphy or somebody else skinny and young and uh, you know the rest. no funeral or memorial service will be held, but a celebration of her life is being planned for 2010. i'm sure big bird will be there.

here is alaina in fine form on sesame street.

michael jackson autopsy

reports earlier this week were that jackson was relatively healthy except for some scars, arm punctures, lung damage and arthritis. even his weight was within normal parameters for a 5'9" alien guy. one autopsy i read said he was producing sperm. this was the cryptic last line of the autopsy article. completely appropriate. i didn't know you could attach an autojack machine to a corpse. of course if i were an editor, it would have been my headline. "hoards line up for artificial mj insemination: latoya first in line."

so bottom line michael jackson was basically healthy. um, except for the whole dead thing! yeah.

why billy mays was so damn loud

dead pitchmen billy mays was a cokehead. and i just thought his earsplitting nature was the sound editor's doing. now will they pull his spots off the air? oh right, not as long as they keep selling. urban legend starter: oxiclean is 49% cocaine. enjoy.

don't know what to say about john hughes dying but here we go

59. heart attack. director of movies that mattered so much even if maybe they kinda didn't matter. teens go to the movies just to get out of the damn house sometimes. we didn't count on seeing ourselves all blown up and semi-real and dancing in a library making peace across party lines. princess. jock. brain. basketcase. criminal. breakfast club. back then we were all in it together but didn't even know it. i never had saturday detention for real. i was so goodie jew boy i would have been mortified. but i did get regular detention a few times. and every time was when i was being my real self. amplified. uncensored.

when i used to have cable one of my favorite activities was watching the basic cable partiallly censored version of breakfast club. it is fucking hilarious to see lips moving to the wrong words. what they forget to censor are the ideas. maybe i watched sixteen candes and pretty in pink and breakfast club (and yeah ferris and weird science) needing so badly to see myself on screen just like fags watched bette davis movies and were her.

but damn those were good movies. still digging the weird fake internet in pretty in pink. andrew mccarthy sending images to her via library computers. john hughes knew this is how we would communicate. not because of technology. but because we have to. we are connected.

john hughes understood that pop culture is a language.

and no, he wasn't about to make another breakfast club. and yes, there will probably be a horrible remake of it, just like there is a fame remake coming out that i implore everyone to boycott. please just netflix the original and season 1 of the series. and take a dance class. i like it '80s which doesn't mean so smooth and refined all the time. it's a certain film stock. a certain graininess. knowledge that the present mattered. self-consciousness. damn, these are just movies but mollie ringwald was in annie, okay? and annie potts was in pretty in pink. and anthony michael hall was michael cera before michael cera. and the music was important. omd. psychedelic furs.

i am thankful there were no spin-off tv shows. this week on sixteen candles. the incredible breakfast club. pretty in pink pd blue. they knew it would never work. these films were moments. and i was there. and part of me still is. i was the brain as far as my parents and teachers were concerned. the basketcase when nobody was looking. the criminal when i swiped playgirls from the mall. the jock when i was riding my bike around the winding suburban streets with my too heavy helmet on avoiding suzuki samurais. the princess when thinking about my future and how i wanted to escape to just the right city and school and life.

john hughes was important because we were. and we were lucky he noticed us. all of us.

all eyes back to farrah now thank you

the faux news coverage on michael jackson should be enough to inform us that it's irrelevant (as far as pop culture drivel filling airtime is concerned) whether michael jackson is dead or alive. and i adore low culture but he's off the charts irrelevant to me. i'd say that i care about his children, but they aren't even his. still, i'm up for a good dead michael jackson joke if any more come my way. i'm not kidding.

so it was with great pleasure that i learned [via the wick'd boy news post the objectivism of the hair flip] that our attention could justifiably return to farrah fawcett. prepare to be shocked, though partially for the same reason (in reverse) that people were shocked by susan boyle being able to sing.

linkages of the gayness and the cultural expressions of boredom and music and words

• vintage porn icon jack wrangler died last night.
• the only instance of bill o'reilly not being a total dick and liar happens to be about adam lambert.
• phoenix lisztomania brat pack mashup is fine but someone tell the video editor that kevin bacon was never considered brat pack and just because andrew mccarthy is in the movie doesn't mean mannequin should be in a brat pack montage and someone tell phoenix they sound like bouncetastic they might be giants which is a compliment.

ricardo montalban is like totally dead now

oh no!!! star trek biggies are on their way out. majel barrett-roddenberry passed december 18. today ricardo montalban. which star trek legend will die mid-february? can't be a red shirt. they're all dead already. at this point, no matter who it is, it would hurt, even if it were egomaniac shatner. but see montalban was pretty much the best original star trek villain ever, perhaps second only to the silicon egg laying pizza monster. who else made such an impact from the original series that s/he was brought back to reprise the role (in this case khan) in a movie 15+ years later? plus he had great moobs and broke racial barriers in hollywood and i'm sure was a sweet lay.

still i was kinda seriously creeped out by fantasy island, though i know many loved it. it came on after love boat and i didn't want to lose the light love boat vibe and get weirded out by that damn prop-filled, animatronic, time-distorting, '70s magic island. plus it was kinda on after my bedtime anyway. so i'll remember him as khan mostly but i know he was more than that. it's so difficult to resist the urge to freeze him so he can be revived hundreds of years from now, because that's how khan originated. but we all know freezing just turns everything to mush. still a fuck doll of him would be nice. i'm just saying.

rest in fierce peace eartha kitt

who will be the next celebrity sibling to die?

first mark ruffalo's brother scott russian roulettes himself then dakota culkin got killed by a car. perhaps stephen baldwin is next? the only thing that may save him from doom is that the other two are non-famous siblings of celebrities. he's quasi-famous. you know, he did that bi movie threesome and some crap reality shows and now is a total bible thumper. only the teddy bear knows for sure.

farewell cyd charisse

megastar (yes still dammit) cyd charisse died today at 86. and don't let anyone tell you fergie has great legs. cyd invented legs. and i'm sad.