Rich from around the corner looks pimpalicious for the Village Halloween parade.

 

 

If you're an adult and you dress up on Halloween, don't half-ass it. Nothing says "I'm a raging chump" more than a costume that looks like you put it together in 10 minutes at Rite-Aid. Oh, and make it gory. We all love a sexy
nurse, but let's face it, they don't exactly scream "spirits are abroad tonight." Which is why we love the Marie Antoinette costume that Nicole Magne created for this year's frightfest. If you see her out and about be sure to offer her some cake.

Some spirits are naturally connected to the celebration of a special occasion, but come on — you really don’t need a special occasion to head to your liquor store to buy yourself a treat. Granted, for us it is easier to try these nice things because they kind of show up in the mail. In fact, they arrive in boxes with press materials with such regularity, we couldn’t possibly cover them all in the pages of the magazine. Here’s a sampling of this week’s gold:
 
Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage 1997 ($26): Back when this liquor dripped out of the still, few had ever heard of Osama Bin Laden and the Green Bay Packers were our NFL champs. It was a simple, more innocent time. But there’s nothing simple about this bourbon. It is layered and complex with sweet-honeyed wood tones picked up from its nine years in oak. We’re surprised this whiskey isn’t selling for double its price tag.
 
Laurent-Perrier Grand Siecle ($110): The chinchilla of Champagnes (we don’t know what that means, but it sounds nice), the Grande Siecle (“the Grand Century”) is a celebration of France in the 1600s during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King.” This Louis was the first French king to drink Champagne, and so Laurent-Perrier has named its top shelf Brut after King Sunny. The bottle is shaped like a 17th-century champagne bottle. The wine is half pinot noir and half chardonnay. Rich nutty flavors are followed by the tingle of the bead, which is then followed by a hint of almond and pear. We love it.  

It’s a cliché to complain about idiotic political campaigns. But, in the 2006 midterms we’ve really outdone ourselves. We’ve made political campaigns so stupid that they now beggar belief. Can we really be this dumb as a nation?

One thing is certain: We’ve come a long way. In Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he wrote the following about the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

“The first of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858, in Ottowa, Illinois. Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of their encounters had been much lengthier and more exhausting. For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a thee-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined. What kind of audience was this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours or oratory? It should be noted, by the way, that Lincoln and Douglas were not presidential candidates; at the time of their encounter in Peoria they were not even candidates for the United States Senate. But their audiences were no especially concerned with their official status. These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education, who took them to be an integral part of their social lives, and who were quite accustomed to extend oratorical performances. Typically at county or state fairs, programs included many speakers, most of whom were allotted three hours for the arguments. And since it was preferred that speakers not go unanswered, their opponents were allotted an equal length of time….Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk?”

If you have the misfortune to live in a state where the races are too close to call, you are deluged with political discourse that would be appropriate for Jerry Springer. We have hyperbolic assertions in the Missouri referendum to permit stem cell research. We have amazing allegations in Ohio between gubernatorial candidates Ted Strickland and Ken Blackwell and senatorial candidates Mike DeWine and Sherrod Brown. And the well-publicized ads run by Republican Bob Corker against his opponent in the Tennessee senatorial race, Harold Ford, are so imbecilic that you can’t imagine anyone falling for them.

Now we are confronted with an even more looney-tune act of mud-slinging in the Virginia senatorial election, with Republican candidate George Allen issuing the following press release about the literary endeavors of Democratic candidate Jim Webb:

“Most Virginians and Americans would find passages such as those below shocking, especially coming from the pen of someone who seeks the privilege of serving in the United States Senate, one of the highest offices in the land: [From Webb’s 2002 novel] Lost Soldiers: ‘A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.’”

We aren’t naïve enough to expect courtesies or the discourse of Solons from our elected officials. As Roscoe Conkling used to say, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” At least in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago or Boss Cox’s Cincinnati political underhandedness went forth under the cloak of darkness. Anyone caught uttering this sort of stuff in public would be horse-laughed off the stage. What’s clear is that our degraded political process now attracts only a low quality of human being to seek what is euphemistically referred to as public service.

We’d like to think people tune out ridiculous claims and ads, just as they tune out TV advertisements. Maybe not. Maybe you can’t get too stupid for political gain. Let us remember H.L. Mencken’s assertion: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

After all this campaigning, who doesn’t need a break? So instead of taking potshots at the president's policies, staff, or meditating on the cost of war, we'll just point and laugh for a change. You know, like we used to before all this got so serious. He may know the name of Pakistan's president now, but the congressional candidates he endorses? Not so much.

On the one hand, I don't know what we all did before the iPod. I recently threw away a horrible little mp3 device, the cross-branded Nike Rio something, which held a pathetic 128 MB of music. That's two, maybe three albums' worth. It was hailed as the wave of the listening future when it came out, years ago. Then the iPod came along with its gigs upon gigs ofstorage and blew this piece of crap (for which I had paid a few hundred bucks) out of the water.

But back before that, we actually listened to CDs. We would have stacks of them by the stereo. We would take them out of the five-disc changer and pile them up because it was easier than hunting down jewel cases or the proper pots in our CaseLogic 500-disc black nylon wallets. The surest sign of psychotic tendencies was the ability to keep one's CD collection organized.

I loaded my iPod up when I got it, now three years ago, with over 4,000 songs. Such a number was mind-blowing; it seemed close to infinity. Now it seems very small. I have 4,161 on my iPod right now, but they're not my 4,161 favorite songs. They're just what's there, so they're what I listen to. When I first got the iPod, I was excited by the prospect of tending this vast garden of music, of dutifully adding and subtracting songs on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

God what a pain in the ass. Who wants to sit in front of a computer for hours sorting out the good from the bad? I will be on the subway and hear a terrible song; by the time I've gotten home I can't remember what it was, nor do I really want to run straight to my computer to delete it. So it stays, it lurks on, waiting for the chance to jump up and suck again. I have four entire albums by Eric B and Rakim on my iPod — I probably like about six songs. But I can't remember which six. I have cool new CDs sitting on my desk by Hot Chip and El Goodo, passed on to me by music editor Tim Mohr, but I haven't added them to the iPod yet because there is no room, because I won't delete all those unwanted Eric B and Rakim songs for fear of losing
the ones I like. It's gridlock.

For the sake of some slight thematic unity, I decided not to put any jazz, classical or country music on my iPod. I like those genres plenty, but they don't work well in the 4,161-track shuffle. Consequently I have not listened to any jazz, classical or country music in three years. I left Bob Dylan off as well — Dylan is, well, Dylan, and he sounds best played with a lot of other Dylan. Not sandwiched between Eric B and Rakim and Hot Chip. I left most of my Elvis Costello and R.E.M. off not because it's not poppy enough but because, for technical reasons I don't understand, their songs play much quieter than everything else. Maybe I need to get the remastered versions or something.

I opened a giant black nylon CaseLogic 200-disc wallet the other day, almost by accident, and was gripped by a sadness. There before me was The Old 97s' Too Far to Care, an album I loved very much. I used to listen to it all the time three years ago, before I had an iPod. Before I zipped all my black nylon CaseLogic 200-disc wallets shut, and what was left in them unloaded to the iPod became as good as dead to me.

I guess I need more than one iPod. I need a jazz iPod, a classical iPod, a country iPod. And then I need an iPod for music I'm just testing out and am not sure I will like, and I need an iPod for the true 4,000+ soundtrack of my life. The rest of which I would spend organizing my various iPods.

It was easier to fault the Dixie Chicks back in 2003, when Natalie Maines spouted off that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Back then, there was still the possibility that she was wrong about the war and George Bush. Certainly, a lot of people thought so, and the Chicks suffered accordingly.
 
Of course, in 2006, Natalie and the Dixie Chicks are looking smarter, and are the subject of “Shut Up and Sing,” an upcoming documentary on the controvesry. However, according to Billboard, two TV networks — NBC and the CW — are refusing to run commercials for the movie, claiming the ads bash George Bush. Playboy interviews the Chicks in the December issue (on sale next week) and we asked Natalie — with the war clearly failing and the president’s popularity at an all-time low — what would happen if she made the same comments today. “It would be a blip,” she says. "They might talk about it on some morning shows. But that just makes me feel more justified that I didn’t do anything wrong."
Apparently, NBC and the CW don’t agree.

So I am sitting at my computer trying to think about how to write about sexy Halloween costumes. I was going to go with the mundane: "Halloween is the one holiday when women have the excuse to vamp it up which is why it is one of my favorite blah blah blah …" Instead, out of nowhere, five of the sexiest women imaginable poked their heads into my cubicle. What are these five Playmates going to be for Halloween? Well, there is one adjective they all used.

Deanna Brooks, Miss May 1998: "At first I was going to dress like a character from Waiting for Guffman but I have a friend who does body painting so I will probably have him do me in black and go as ‘Miss October’ or ‘The Ghost of Playmates Past.’ And, yes, I will be sexy."

Stephanie Larimore, Miss June 2006: "I am going to be a sexy kitten. The outfit is all patent leather and fishnets."

Sarah Elizabeth, Miss November 2006: "For the troops I am going to be a sexy marine."

Hiromi Oshima, Miss June 2004: "I am going to be a sexy sailor. I am not sure exactly what sailor but the outfit is very cute."

Colleen Marie, Miss August 2003: "Actually I have a wedding this weekend but we are encouraged to dress-up! I have this cute pink skirt that will complete my sexy cheerleader outfit."

Gentlemen, start your fantasies.

Filmmaker David Lynch’s new three-hour operatic freak out of a movie, Inland Empire, has been confounding both critics and audiences since its dual premieres at the Venice and New York Film Festivals in September.

Shot on video, mostly by Lynch himself, using a prosumer-level Sony video camera, the picture is, like its predecessor Mulholland Dr., another surreal, investigative journey into the subconscious of a Hollywood actress, here played Laura Dern. Where the earlier film surprised viewers with a climatic last act that rearranged its earlier, seemingly disparate scenes into a wickedly coherent, deeply satisfying narrative, Inland Empire offers no such solace to even the most patient viewer.

By turns profoundly disturbing, absurdly funny, and mind-numbingly dull, the sheer length of the piece and Lynch’s adamant refusal to build it along even tangentially conventional lines forces you to surrender preconceived notions about narrative tension, story climaxes, character arcs and the rest, and to submit to a free floating atmosphere of fist-clenching dread. At times I thought I was watching a 21st-century update of a German Expressionist masterpiece, with a woman imperiled in a series of haunted Hollywood mansions and derelict apartments; at other times I thought the whole thing was a self-indulgent disaster and wanted to get up and leave. I’m glad I stayed.

As unpleasant as it sometimes is, it’s definitely a real movie experience, completely transporting the viewer who stays with it — warts and all — into a sui generis world. As to what it means, Lynch himself is not saying, but that’s par for the course with him. What he is talking about are the wonders of shooting on video and how for him “film is completely dead.” Coming from a filmmaker who has created some of the most startlingly beautiful images ever put onto a celluloid strip, this is at once exciting, as one looks toward a new medium’s growth with Lynch onboard; and a bit depressing, knowing what’s getting left behind. Ever the iconoclast, Lynch has convinced his main backer, France’s Studio Canal, to let him self distribute his flick stateside. Look out for it in December.  

A member of our top-notch copy staff, Rob Horning, is quite the economic philosopher, and we are fortunate that he has decided to enlighten us about an interesting debate being waged in academic circles on that is always an intriguing topic: polygamy. Take it away, Rob:

What if polygamy wasn’t just for renegade Mormons? Recently captured polygamist Warren Jeffs has garnered a somewhat surprising endorsement for his liberal attitude toward wedlock from Nobel-Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, who sounded off on the subject not long ago on the blog he co-writes with jurist Richard Posner.

"Women choose their partners, and refuse to marry men who they do not want to marry, regardless of their parents' feelings or the ardor of suitors," argues Becker. "In this world, a woman would not have to enter into a polygamist household if she would not want to. Would-be polygamist men would have to persuade second or third wives that it is worth it, because of their wealth, good looks, kindness, or in other ways. If she is willing to become an additional wife, why should laws prevent that?" Why, indeed.

Not everyone has the combination of "wealth, good looks, kindness," to pull off such a lifestyle. But if laws permitted anyone to set up their own harem, what would the consequences be? Posner, writing in response to Becker, believes that this would "reduce the supply of women to men of lower incomes" and "increase the demand for prostitution" — ironically among those least likely to afford it. Also, because of the concentration of children in a series of related polygamous households, wealthy polygamists could form clans that "can become so powerful as to threaten the state's monopoly of political power." Extrapolate that logic, and it would seem that Posner would have us believe that beyond monogamy lies megalomania — that Warren Jeffs was a budding potentate, a would-be Ghenghis Khan who had thrown off the marriage bond en route to staging a coup d’état. No wonder some conservatives are so keen on “defending marriage.”

 

A traveling troupe of Playmates: Colleen Marie, Miss August 2003; Deanna Brooks, Miss May 1998; Stephanie Larimore, Miss June 2006; Hiromi Oshima, Miss June 2004; and Sarah Elizabeth, Miss November 2006.

 

One of the many fun things about living in L.A. is that you get to hear those cool New York journalists talking about you behind your back. Or, because we’re in L.A., people in New York won’t even bother with the behind-the-back stuff — they’ll lecture us to our faces, as if we were a surly teen in need of adult guidance.

The latest is Kurt Andersen, writing in New York magazine. Ostensibly, he’s attacking the Los Angeles Times (which we like to consider our hometown paper, faults and all) but like many before him, he pretty much takes a large swipe at the city itself, which he finds unworthy of a having a major newspaper.

Kurt has never lived in L.A., he’s quick to admit, and so he uses as his main source Michael Kinsley, another journalist. The problem here? Kinsley never lived in L.A., either, despite the fact that he ran the Los Angeles Times editorial pages in 2004-2005. He’d commute from the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan Seattle, spend two weeks a month in a downtown apartment (and trust me, a third-generation Californian, no one actually lives downtown), refuse to come into the office and, on weekends, he would drive at random to a suburban Target store, buy and T-shirt and return to Seattle confident he had gotten to know the real L.A.

When the Times fired him, he was bewildered. How could such a thing happen? Certainly this tells us something awful about the Los Angeles Times, which might want the man helping to shape local thought to be somewhat local himself. And it tells us something awful about the city, which would allow such a newspaper to exist. He’s been complaining about it ever since.

Since the Los Angeles Times has become the poster child for problem-ridden newspapers you’ll be reading lots of stories by people like Kurt and Michael. Here’s the key thing to remember: The Times often sucks as a newspaper. And the reason for that is that misguided corporate types — from outside L.A. — turned the paper over to people also not from L.A. The result has been New Yorkers putting out a newspaper for New Yorkers that apparently New Yorkers don’t like very much — in L.A.

None of this has much to do with those of us who live in L.A., by the way. But it does have a lot to do with people like Kurt Andersen and Michael Kinsley, who really don’t know what they’re talking about, but who either end up talking about the Times or, worse yet, running it.

It is a big, big world out there, folks, and there are women wherever you go. I am involved in the herky-jerky selection process for our Babe of the Month page, and therefore spend some time learning about sex symbols with cult Internet followings. Yeah, work is hell. Yet the answer from the boss is always the same: "I don't care how big she is in Ecuador, if she doesn't speak English she can't be Babe of the Month." Fair enough, but that doesn't mean these fair foreigners don't deserve just a little attention. Enjoy these vids.

1. Argentinian VJ Carla Conte. This is no more risque than what you see on MTV, but it's clear why male viewers like her so. There's no sound, but your Spanish probably isn't that good anyway

2. Japanese model Reon Kadena grooving on her iPod. She is not technically naked, but it's pretty sexy, particularly the worm's-eye-view of her dancing on the table around the two-minute mark — might want to be careful at the office with this one.

3. Italian "showgirl" Ainett Stephens, known as "La Gatta Nera." This is a clip from what looks like an Entertainment Tonight kind of program, so of course a boob pops out for about 5 seconds. I believe it is required by law over there. If seeing a boob pop out is frowned upon in your workplace (it isn't here), you might want to watch this one at home.

A great game name sticks in public consciousness for a few months, but an awful game name is forever. The fine folk over at Game Revolution have posted their picks for the 50 worst game names ever. Whether you're partial to the bland (Beyond the Beyond), the suggestive (Booby Kids, Sticky Balls) the unpronouncable (XEXYZ), the radically non-fun sounding Tech Romancer, Princess Tomato in Salad Kingdom), or the breathtakingly lapidary (World Soccer Winning Eleven 5: Final Evolution), you'll find something to snicker at derisively before going back to