Last night VH1 held it’s Save the Music 10th Anniversary Gala at New York’s Lincoln Center, and Sir Paul McCartney auctioned off a stage-played, autographed guitar to raise money to fund music grants for underprivileged schools in the US. Bidding started at $30,000.
Other stars at the event included Bill Clinton, Mariah Carey, Quincy Jones, James Blunt, John Mayer, Jon Bon Jovi and Mya.
Conan O’Brien helped with the live entertainment, saying,
“If any of you watched the MTV Video Music Awards, you saw that more than ever we need music education.”
Ain’t that the truth.
Source: “Paul McCartney’s guitar auction” [Female First]
Image courtesy of Picture Perfect, for use on Gone Hollywood
One thing of note, most of the comedians were on the show during the same time period. This is when Saturday Night Live was the funniest, IMHO.
10. Bill Murray
With his trademark smirk, Murray simultaneously celebrated and lambasted the sketch-comedy genre. Thrust into an impossible situationÂessentially replacing the too-big-for-his-britches Chevy ChaseÂMurray added both knowing smarm (nerd kid Todd DiLamuca) and blank-faced understatement (“cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburgerâ€) to a cast lacking both. He established such an indelible cool-guy persona that 20-plus years later, we’re still incapable of holding missteps like Garfield against him.
Best bit: Nick the Lounge Singer
9. Dana Carvey
He makes the list owing to the sheer number of breakout characters he created and embodied: the Church Lady, Garth, Hans, Carsenio et al. No player in the show’s history counts more to his or her name. Throw in his gift for mimicry—George Bush, Jimmy Stewart, Ross Perot, even cast mate Dennis Miller—and it’s no wonder that Carvey was featured in roughly 92.5 percent of all scenes during his seven-year tenure on the show.
Best bit: “Chopping Broccoli”
8. Molly Shannon
The most underrated performer in SNL history, and one of the few woman cast members who was too dark, manic, and, well, weird to shepherd into a window-dressing role. Oh yeah—and her Mary Katherine Gallagher orchestrated a much better pratfall than Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford ever did. You almost felt sorry for the chairs into which she careened.
Best bit: Delicious Dish on NPR (a.k.a. Schweaty Balls)
7. John Belushi
He got more laughs with a single arched eyebrow than Horatio Sanz did with 25 minutes of nonstop madcap antics. Whether touting the nutritional bona fides of donuts or wistfully reminiscing while visiting the graves of former cast mates, Belushi boasted more range than most classically trained stage actorsÂand could still pull off fart jokes with aplomb. Had he not been derailed by substance-abuse issues, he’d have morphed into a hell of a character actor by now.
Best bit: Samurai Delicatessen
6. Gilda Radner
The show’s most joyous performer, Radner’s sunny smile masked a serious anarchic bent. Unlike most of the show’s early-era legends, Radner was as comfortable fronting a band (as Patti Smith sound- and sleaze-alike Candy Slice) as she was at the “Weekend Update†desk (where she weighed in as confused pundit Emily Litella and hygiene-obsessed Roseanne Roseannadanna).
Best bit: Lisa Loopner
5. Chris Farley
Forget that he weighed half a ton and, toward the end of his run, couldn’t scratch his ear without breaking into a massive sweat. Farley trumps his idol John Belushi and every other comer as SNL’s most physically agile comedian, whether destroying thousands of dollars worth of sets as hopped-up motivational guru Matt Foley or retreating into himself as the sheepish host of “The Chris Farley Show†(to Paul McCartney: “You remember when you were with the Beatles?â€).
Best bit: Chippendales audition
4. Eddie Murphy [my personal favorite]
Of all the 300-odd SNL cast members, none has been asked to carry the show by him or herself like Murphy was—and none could have pulled it off with such seeming ease. Without Eddie Murphy, in fact, SNL wouldn’t have survived the lean years between the original troupe and the Carvey/Hartman/Nealon era. For that reason, it’s easier to forgive him for his sharply reduced effort once 48 Hours punted him into the comic stratosphere.
Best bit: James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party
3. Dan Aykroyd
By far the most versatile player in the original troupe, and one of the few who excelled equally as a performer and as a writer. Aykroyd also ranks among the few players who could bounce easily between political sketches (especially as President Nixon in “The Final Daysâ€) and stoner silliness (“Fred Garvin: Male Prostituteâ€). Is there a way to legally stop him from beating The Blues Brothers even further into the ground?
Best bit: Super Bass-O-Matic ’76
2. Will Ferrell
He cheered and danced and sang. He took off his shirt. He reveled in character-specific details (grizzly beards, cowbells, etc.). And oh!, the impressions: He played Unabomber Ted Kaczynski as a glib everyman, Neil Diamond as a porn-addicted hothead, and James Lipton as…well, James Lipton. Then as now, Ferrell is constitutionally incapable of not wringing every bit of funny out of a gag.
Best bit: Anything involving Harry Carey, Robert Goulet, Janet Reno, or Bill Brasky
1. Phil Hartman
His on-set nickname, “Glue,†tells you everything you need to know about the role he played during SNL’s late-’80s/early-’90s resurgence. He elevated everything and everyone with which he came in contact—his beatific grin during “Chopping Broccoli,†for instance, merits almost as big a laugh as the skit’s premise. Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, the Anal Retentive Chef, Bill Clinton visiting McDonald’s…In honor of his ego-free comic eminence, say it once more, with feeling: Sassy!
Best bit: The Sinatra Group
Gerald R. Ford, who at 93 was America’s oldest living President, has died. This was one of our best and this truly saddens me.
In a statement released by his wife Betty, no cause, place or time of death was named. Ford had been in and out of the hospital the past several months, and was most recently treated for pneumonia.
“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in the statement, issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”
President Bush called the former leader a “great American” in a statement issued by the White House, and offered sympathy, along with First Lady Laura Bush, to Ford’s wife and surviving family.
Former First Lady Nancy Reagan also issued a statement of sympathy, saying she felt that Ford’s early support of stem cell research “has been important in getting the U.S. Congress to debate the potential lifesaving cures and treatments that may result.”
Page Six have just obtained this crazy email from Lindsay Lohan, which she sent out to her lawyers and a bunch of friends. She is preparing to clean up her image and go to war with the media with the help of a high-powered friend – former Vice President Al Gore.
She truly has lost it. I’m sure she’s sent a few emails to “E.T.” in an attempt to “phone home” too. A line from the movie “As Good as it Gets” comes to mind. One of my favorite movies. “Sell crazy somewhere else… we’re all stocked up here”. [heh]
“Al Gore will help me. He came up to me last night and said he would be very happy to have a conversation with me,” Lohan wrote last week in a rambling, semi-literate e-mail to her friends and lawyers.
In the bizarre message read by Page Six, Lohan burbled, “If he is willing to help me, let’s find out. Hilary [sic] Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Evan Metroplis [sic], and John Daur who works with them would be willing, if we just ask. If we just ASK.”
Lohan was apparently inspired to send out the e-mail by a Page Six item on her “mean girls diva fit” at a GQ magazine party in L.A. Referring to a supermarket tabloid report claiming she had overdosed on drugs, she wrote, “Let’s sue the tabloids for saying the things they say. Defamation of character.”
Invoking what she puzzlingly calls the “way of the future-Howard Hughes,” her desire is to “release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite [sic] letter to the press.”
Lohan says she wants to state her opinions on “how our society should be educated for the better of our country. Our people . . . because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see.”
Lohan then mentions taking a mystery person she refers to as “LR” to court for “what she’s done to me.
“It’s my life. I want to live it. People cannot lie and think that it is okay to continue on having done so. I have had many ups and downs, as do we all. But to make false accusations to one girl is unjust in my opinion. I am willing to do anything I need to get my life the way it should be.”
Lohan said she wanted to “hold a press conference” and “will do anything necessary to do so.” She said she is at “such a young and tender age in a woman’s life. It’s enough already, I’ve had enough and I am going to be the one to make a change.”
Lohan’s representative, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, had no comment.
The “LR” she is probably referring to is Lindsay Ratowsky, Lohan’s former assistant. Their split was not amicable.
Photos of French Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal in a turquoise bikini have sparked major controversy in a country where politicians are still accustomed to a great deal of privacy.
Paparazzi photographs of Socialist presidential hopeful Segolene Royal in a turquoise bikini have raised eyebrows in Fra22nce and underlined the spread of celebrity culture into France’s traditionally sober political coverage. This week’s edition of celebrity magazine “Closer” included a cover picture of Royal on holiday in bathing suit, cap and sunglasses as part of a survey of “50 stars at the beach.” Its rival VSD followed up with a similar photo of Royal juxtaposed with a picture of Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative she may well face in next year’s presidential election, jogging on the beach over the headline: “Duel in the sun.”
The photos have sparked widespread radio and newspaper comment including a long article in the ultra-serious Le Monde.
Both politicians are shrewd at using the media to push their image as modern politicians ready to breathe life into France’s hidebound political system and both have faced accusations they place style and image over substance.
That has played into the agenda of a celebrity press devoted to the doings of actors, singers and other personalities referred to in France as “les people.” “Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy are the ‘people’ of the vacation season,” VSD deputy editor Marc Dolisi wrote in an editorial. “The public watches their smallest actions and gestures because they have used their private lives as a political weapon with such mastery.”
The comment is undoubtedly true but it may also have been aimed at warding off complaints about intrusion. The French media has traditionally been very discreet about covering politicians’ private lives, steering clear of sensitive issues and sparing them the relentless attention faced by their counterparts in countries like Britain. But the facade has started to crack. Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin last year threatened legal action against Paris Match for unauthorized pictures of himself on holiday in bathing trunks.
Unmoved by flattering commentary on her figure in Closer (“And to think she’s 53!”), Royal herself initially considered taking legal action but eventually decided against it so as not to whip up even more interest in the issue. Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu took a more jaundiced view, showing a bikini-clad Royal lying on the beach under a television camera and asking her partner, Socialist Party head Francois Hollande: “Can you rub a bit of cream in?”
The story is sparking tons of media coverage throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Gulf Daily News (Bahrain): “Bikini shots of Segolene Royal, the Socialist favourite for France’s presidential election – printed opposite snaps of her main rival jogging on a beach – have rattled the status quo in a country where politicians’ private lives have long been taboo.” They add that, “the Royal pictures – the first to show a French woman politician in small attire – seem to confirm politicians are now seen as fair quarry for the country’s gossip Press.” The reason it’s so controversial, they explain, is that , “Protected by the law – and a widespread aversion to intrusive tabloid methods – French politicians long managed to keep their extra-marital affairs and illegitimate children tightly under wraps. French communications expert Dominique Wolton said the bikini shots were a ‘dangerous drift’ towards British-style tabloid journalism but that France was ‘still a long way from the gutter Press’ seen across the Channel.”
But recently two processes have gone hand-in-hand. On the one side, the market for “people” magazines in France has sky-rocketed. There are now more than half a dozen major weeklies – with names like VSD, Closer, Voici, Gala, Public – each printing up to half a million copies.
At the same time, with the April 2007 election looming, the two front-runners – Ms Royal and the right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy – have both made the same calculation that wooing the popular media is an unavoidable part of modern-day campaigning. Both have arranged for themselves lavish spreads in Paris Match and other glossies. Mr Sarkozy’s long-running marital problems with his wife Cecilia have become a soap opera, and their recent reconciliation was the occasion for a succession of happy-couple shoots. And Segolene Royal, 53, who underwent a major image change before launching her presidential bid – what the French call un relooking – has also shown every inclination to court coverage. That explains why her apparent anger at the latest paparazzi-pops rings pretty hollow.
The Times of London, also noting that “The magazine Closer was the first to break the unwritten rule banning pictures of female politicians in their swimwear,” expands on that aspect to the story:
Like her closest rival for next year’s presidential elections, the centre-right interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, she has skilfully exploited a sudden boom in “la presse peopleâ€, as celebrity magazines are known, even inviting photographers into the maternity ward after she gave birth to one of her children. It had the desired effect. In a poll for the magazine FHM, her countrymen voted Royal the sixth sexiest woman in the world.
Marc Dolisi, VSD’s editor, said Royal and her rival had themselves to blame for the coverage. “Royal and Sarkozy have both been happy to put their private lives on display when it suited them,†he said.
All of this is rather odd from an American context, where the First Amendment has always protected this sort of thing. There is no small bit of irony, either, in the French getting all atwitter over a photo of a politician in a swimsuit given how much they lectured the sexy obsessed Americans for getting upset over Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes.
For the record, the Closer magazine cover in question is thumbnailed at right.
Mandy Moore is distressed by 70′s show dweeb Wilmer Valderrama’s claims on the “Howard Stern” show that he took her virginity and bedded several other celebrity hotties.
It’s like being back in the classroom again. Poor Mandy Moore has had to deny claims that a certain young Hollywood gent took her virginity. Appalled at former boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama’s boasts that she’d lost her V plates to him, on the Howard Stern radio show in April, Mandy has spoken out. She says his chat is “utterly tacky, not even true”.She went on to say: “It hurt my feelings because I like him.”
But it seems she’s not the only one a little miffed by Wilmer’s loose tongue. During the interview, he also claimed to have slept with Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
[...]
Jennifer Love Hewitt is surprised by the That 70′s Show star’s claims, saying: “I was told that we had all these very steamy encounters and I was like, ‘Really? Well, I would have loved to have been there!”
Apparently, having sexual fantasies about women does not constitute actually having sex with them. This is the opposite of Bill Clinton’s problem, where he was having sex but didn’t think it really counted.
Anna Quindlen argues that it’s long past time to let the Miss America pageant die with dignity.
Feminism killed off Miss America, but not in the way originally intended or predicted. It didn’t manage to overthrow unrealistic and bizarre standards of female beauty; if it had, Hollywood wouldn’t be chockablock with bobblehead starlets who think an oyster cracker is an entree. And it didn’t succeed in liberating women from being seen as sex objects, not when porn star Jenna Jameson can natter away on television about her career as though she were a bank manager.
But the revolution offered women many more outlets for the pursuit of power and prominence, outlets in which they didn’t have to walk around in the truly strange combo of swimsuit and stiletto heels. And make no mistake: the pageant was about the single-minded pursuit of power and prominence at a time when women had to pretend little interest in either. (Apparently the pageant folks ditched the Miss Congeniality title because all the contestants voted for themselves.) When I was a kid, Miss America had clout. Schools and hospitals and rubber-chicken dinners jockeyed to get her to come and say a few words. Incredible as it seems today, everyone knew her face. Like Paris Hilton, but with white gloves. And clothes.
A good line although, technically, Paris Hilton pretty much always has clothes on, except in her infamous sex video.
There are better contests today, with much better prizes. Katherine Anne Couric, from the great state of Virginia, wins the anchor seat at CBS and a reported annual salary equal to the gross national product of an emerging nation. Hillary Rodham Clinton, resident of New York, waits in the wings (or at least the Senate) for a possible stint as the leader of the free world. Granted, both require tap dancing and fixed smiles. But the white gloves are off and there are no dummies involved.
Some institutions simply run their course, falling beneath the wheels of progress. It happened to Schrafft’s, and John Wanamaker’s. But at least they died with dignity and aren’t hanging around, trying to remake themselves as McDonald’s with mac and cheese, or Old Navy with a tearoom. The people who run the pageant are embarrassing themselves and all the Miss Americas who were Miss America when Miss America meant something, although no one was entirely clear what it was. Kids get to stay up until midnight all the time now. Jiffy Pop goes in the microwave. And Miss America is cooked. Let it go. Just let it go.
While it doubtless true that winning the Miss America pageant is no longer the pinnacle of achievement for women, Quindlen undermines her argument throughout the piece, with its references to porn stars, reality television, and other cultural competitors. The pageant died, not because young girls aspired to anchor the network news or be president but because it has been rendered incredibly lame by the passage of time.
By trying to be all things to all people–a “scholarship pageant,” a talent show, a platform for cultural awareness, and a beauty contest–it wound up being amateur hour. Other television venues do all of those things better. Want smart people demonstrating knowledge of trivia? Try “Jeopardy” or “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Amateur talent shows? The old “Star Search” and now “American Idol” don’t have baton twirling. Want to see some skin? There’s Cinemax and pay-per-view and the Internet.
Frankly, a girl would be better off trying to be the next Miss America than the next Katie Couric. The skill set is about the same–cute, perky, nice legs, and poise under pressure–and the odds much better. And winning a beauty contest is probably a more promising route to being a television news reader or morning chat babe than J-school. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, anyway.
And Hillary Clinton? Please. The woman is incredibly bright, to be sure, having graduated at the top of her class at Yale Law. But almost everything she has accomplished has been by virtue of having hitched herself to Bill Clinton’s wagon. You can’t get much more 1950s than that.
“If any of you watched the MTV Video Music Awards, you saw that more than ever we need music education.”
