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Friday, January 27, 2006
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 OBSERVATIONS FROM THE INSIDE OF AN EMPTY HEAD: IS LYING SO WRONG WHEN IT PROVES THAT OPRAH WINFREY IS AN IDIOT?
I love debauchery. God, I just can't get enough of it. As a matter of fact, I love debauchery so much that I find that various forms of it interfere with one another. For example, if I catheterize myself with a demerol drip, I can't wear my cock ring. Now, I love my cock ring, but I need my demerol. Decisions, decisions.
On days like these, I need help making up my mind. So, I do what any of you good folks would, I gather all of my girlfriends in a room and put it to a vote. Once I get Lindsay Lohan, Inari Vachs, Jessica Simpson and Elizabeth Wurtzel in the same room, I let democracy take its course. Frequently, it all goes badly and degenerates into an argument over which one will get to fellate me first. Once the fighting gets too vicious to watch, I punge a syringe of dilaudid into my scrotum and go back to bed. I'm really bad at managing conficts.
As you can imagine, it isn't easy being me. And you wonder why I drink so much?
As someone with a lifelong love of debauchery (the scrotal injections began when I was three, and the viens had collapsed everywhere else,) it stands to reason that I would be interested in the controversey surrounded by James Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces.
The book is alleged to be a memoir of frey's decadent dickheadery and sundry visits to various jails throughout the midwetern United States. To hear Frey tell it, he was a world-class badass and a heavyweight retard - something like W. Axl Rose without the talent or high-priced legal assistence. In the book, he describes a crack-fuelled battle with several Ohio cops that landed him in the clink for three months, before he took the fucking coward's way out and went to rehab.
Apparently, Oprah Winfrey fell immediately in love with Frey and his sodden silliness, and immediately added A Million Little Pieces to her little bookclub. As everyone knows, Oprah has a Jim Jones- like relationship with the slackjawed housewives who comprise her audience. Stupified by tranquilizers and despair as they are, said slackjawed housewives need someone to tell them what to read, and their slavish devotion to Oprah makes her a natural choice.
Since Oprah's influence on the publishing industry is exceeded only by history's other great monsters, Hitler and Mao, A Million Little Pieces immediately sold a veritable fuckload of copies upon her endorsement.
That's when the Smoking Gun got involved and things got really entertaining. They conducted a six-week investigation and quickly learned that Frey is full of shit in ways that stagger human comprehension. Now, most writers are full of shit, given as they are to write about cock rings, pharmaceutical abuse, and multiple starlet paramours. But James Frey is different. He is a memoirist, beloved by Oprah's zombie horde of slackjawed housewives. And if there's one thing slackjawed housewives hate more than anything, it's being lied to. Christ, they have husbands to do that!
Futhermore, he wrote of being a Criminal with a capital C (which I understand he actually does in the book. A capital C. What a Douchebag! What manner of Unholy Idiot does THAT?) He was mad, bad, and dangerous to know! Alleged to have beaten up several cops at once! It turns out that his experience with the criminal justice system was limited to a couple of drunk driving arrests. I've met a couple of people who've been popped from DWI, and they were giant, blubbering pussies to the last.
Frey wisely sought to avoid the vengence and fury of the betrayed mongloid housefraus, and had his attorney write a threatening letter to the Smoking Gun. Frey's shyster, Martin Singer, took the unique legal position that, indeed, his client is a multiple felon and implying otherwise legally constitutes a slander upon his name. It is one of the more fascinating legal communications I have ever read.
However, the Smoking Gun not only ran the story, they ran Singer's letter to them. The gig was officially up, and James Frey knew he was well and truly fucked. He did the only thing left to him. He went on Larry King Live.
For the unaware, there is a generally accepted strategy for celebrity damage control. Once you fuck up, you go to one of two people, Larry King or Barbra Walters. They'll pat your head, let you cry, and not do anything too difficult, like ask a follow-up question. And if those two are good enough for Marv Albert and Robert Blake, they're good enough for James Frey, by God!
All things being equal, he did well on King's show (although it's difficult not to.) He kept repeating this one little mantra;
I mean, I think, this is again a case where an incredibly minute portion of the book, which doesn't really have anything to do with the central message of the book, or what the book is about, is being picked apart. You know, it's a memoir, it's a selective recollection of my life. You know, like I said earlier, last, you know, approximately 18 pages of a 432- page document are being disputed.
He never specifically confirms or denies anything. The interview hums along like a thing of Clintonian beauty. When challenged on drunk driving, hitting a cop with his car, and inciting a riot, Frey responded that his was a "subjective memory" of the incident. Beat THAT! I'm pretty sure that I can speak for all of us when I say that if I ran over a cop and incited a riot, my memory of that would be pretty objective.
There was one point where Larry actually laid a glove on Frey, if only by accident. This happened when Frey compared himself to Jerzy Kosinski.
FREY: I don't think -- I think you could probably find people who would dispute every memoir that was ever published. And a lot of them have been disputed. When Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" came out and became a big success several years afterwards, people said, "You know what? Jerzy Kosinski never went through the Holocaust." It's happened with a number of recent memoirs. It tends to happen with a lot of the more high-profile memoirs.
KING: And Jerzy killed himself. I'm not suggesting -- Mondovi, Wisconsin, hello.
Isn't that the single most beautiful thing to ever come out of Larry's mouth?
Now, if I were Oprah, I'd just sit back with head down, thinking that Frey might just pull it off. Of course, I'm not Oprah because I'm not stupid. Okay.... I'm not Oprah-stupid. Many are called, but few are chosen.
I have a strongly held belief about people like Oprah, and about two-thirds of people who are on television on a regular basis. That belief is, "Never say anything in public unless you're reading it from a teleprompter. No good came of it."
What does Oprah do? She calls in. Live. On the air. Without a teleprompter. The results were predictable.
Whether or not the cars' wheels rolled up on the sidewalk or whether he hit the police officer or didn't hit the police officer is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is that he was a drug addict who spent years in turmoil, from the time he was 10 years old, drinking and -- and tormenting himself and his parents.
Essentially, what Oprah is saying is, "Oh, come on! The facts don't matter! Jesus, this is a memoir!
From that point on, it seems as though Oprah is complicit in Frey's lies and cover-up. I mean, she wasn't or anything, it's just that Oprah is retarded. She's Peter Griffith with a better agent. And not animated. And sometimes she doesn't even weigh that much. The story went from big time publishing scandal for Frey and Doubleday to a public relations meltdown for Oprah in the space of one phone call.
James Frey lying in his shitty little book is one thing. Everyone will forget about that in 15 minutes, and in the meantime, another zillion mongloids buy the book because they think they can spot the lies, and James Frey gets even richer from being a fuck-up. But Oprah lives or dies on the goodwill of the slackjawed housewives. And you remember how much they don't like being lied to because they're already married, don't you?
Yeah. So does Oprah. She went into damage control overdrive. As a matter of fact, I haven't seen anything like it since I broke up with someone I won't name about a year ago.
Yesterday, Oprah dragged Frey onto HER show and makes a big production about it being broadcast live. And I've gotta tell you, if you've never seen an idiot giving a dry-drunk the third degree, you really should. It's spectacular television. It was the Battle of the Network Retards, right there in my living room.
Oprah went on about how hurt, disgusted and embarrassed she was to have been so deceived by a drug addict and alcoholic, which is odd, because deceiving people is sort of what drug addicts and alcoholics do. But enough about my love life. I was getting drawn in more deeply by this freak show by the second. Would Oprah start to cry? Would Frey pull out a bottle of Wild Turkey and fall off the wagon on live television? Is Steadman a homo? What happened to Maureen Dowd's face? Was I paying too much attention to her tits all these years?
The absolute best part of the entire shitstorm was the panel Oprah brought together to discuss "jornalistic ethics." Having this panel overlooked one very important point. James Frey isn't a journalist and never claimed to be. He's a guy who writes shitty books for slackjawed housewives. Even better than this was the fact that her "experts" included two columnists from the New York Times. The Times, for those of you who missed it, has recently had problems with making up important stuff. Said stuff includes evidence in the DC sniper case, and WMD intelligence reporting in Iraq. Now, I know that neither of those things is nearly as important as some junkie shithead's flawed recollections of his arrest record, but maybe the New York Times staff aren't the best bunch of folks to criticize someone who was less than forthright. What's next, Oprah getting Charlie Manson to yell at a guy who spanks his kids?
Sure, this post is much ado about nothing (and some of you might say far too much), but it has two elements that are irresitable to me, a media freakshow, and further evidence that Oprah is retarded.
And I can't ask for much more from life than that.
Isn't that.....sad?
PermalinkLabels: Celebrity Skin, Modern Heroes
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