Entries Tagged 'Media' ↓

Everything but the helmet: LeBron James meets his doppelganger

“Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell said the magazine ‘sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game’ for the magazine’s annual issue devoted to size and shape.

“‘We think Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover,’ he said.”

“But magazine analyst Samir Husni believes the photo was deliberately provocative, adding that it ‘screams King Kong.” Considering Vogue’s influential history, he said, covers are not something that the magazine does in a rush.

“‘So when you have a cover that reminds people of King Kong and brings those stereotypes to the front, Black man wanting white woman, it’s not innocent,’ he said.”

—“Vogue cover starring LeBron James is called racially insensitive by some,” Megan Scott, The Associated Press

“Lying,” photographer Annie Leibovitz’s late lover, Susan Sontag, famously said in an essay, “is an elementary means of self-defense.”

Perhaps knowing this is why both Leibovitz, right, creator of VOGUE’s controversial April 2008 cover photo, above right, and Anna Wintour, VOGUE editor-in-chief, below, both 58, have remained absolutely mute since accusations began to fly, over a week ago, that their coy image—featuring Cleveland Cavaliers point forward LeBron James, 23, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen, 27—was a less-than-subtle piece of racist indoctrination.

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I met Wilford Brimley once, on the set of Hard Target, John Woo’s first U.S. production. I had no idea he was a master of club music remixes, as these YouTubes, here, here, here, and especially here, of his Liberty Medical commercials clearly demonstrate.

Exactly one week ago, I ran a photo of the current LeBron James/Gisele Bündchen VOGUE cover, right, and noted, upon seeing it, “my first raw thought was that James looked bestial. They look like King Kong and Fay Wray.” (This, in the context of my reporting on a recent study that found many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes.)

I then asked, “Is it just me? Am I just imagining this?”

Apparently not. According to this Associated Press piece (thanks, Ray Winbush) titled, “Vogue cover starring LeBron James is called racially insensitive by some”:

the image is stirring up controversy, with some commentators decrying the photo as perpetuating racial stereotypes. James strikes what some see as a gorilla-like pose, baring his teeth, with one hand dribbling a ball and the other around Bundchen’s tiny waist.

It’s an image some have likened to “King Kong” and Fay Wray.

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For weeks, I’ve been trying to get the word out on an underreported paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley: According to these researchers, many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against Black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

Those findings, researched over a six-year period, were printed February 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is Black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. “This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done,” she said. “This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the Black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time.”

When colleague Ray Winbush forwarded me the LeBron James/Gisele Bündchen VOGUE cover, above, my first raw thought was that James looked bestial. They look like King Kong and Fay Wray. Is it just me? Am I just imagining this?

It was getting ugly there, for a second, with the, “you’d make a good vice-president” stuff, and dusty Geraldine Ferraro talkin’ that talk!

But since Hillary Clinton has said she’s sorry “to Black voters,” we can take up right were we left off: Pointing out what this race is really about on a certain level, thanks to the clip.

In truth, it’s more twistedness from political mashup theorist Michael Stevens, right, the brain behind CamPain 2008. Some of the piece looks creepy, e.g., the smooch itself, and Chelsea’s wink at the end. But favorite details abound: Hillary’s “thought balloons,” clearly taken from the audiobook of her autobio, Living History; Wolf Blitzer’s discomfort; the close-ups of approving Hollywood tag-alongs.

In fact, since you’ve been good, also gander at Mike’s other amazing spectacles: a happy-go-lucky rip on the thankfully dead campaign of Rudy Giluiani; Hillary killing crowds with her passion for change; a John Edwards promo that should stop any still-remaining “Obama running mate” chatter; John McCain’s vain attempt to connect with younger voters; and what comes off to me as a Jack Nicholson-styled endorsement of Ron Paul by R. Kelly, if you can get your head halfway around that. Collect the whole set.

Please: Would someone just shoot me?

According to this article in Animation Magazine, Tyler Perry is in discussions to do—help me—a Madea cartoon series:

Perry’s yet untitled project will follow his character Madea on her comedic trials and tribulations, and will teach “children about family values, in a way that only Madea could!” “After receiving thousands of letters from parents telling me how much their kids love Madea and realizing that a lot of the plays were not kid friendly,” says Perry, “I wanted to do something more appropriate and this seems to be it. A ‘Madea’ animation looks like the best way.”

Actually, the really best way would be for people to stop watching movies and plays with Madea in them, no?

Above: A finalist in the “Unintentionally Hilarious New York Times Headlines” category, awarded by MEDIA ASSASSIN, for a Wednesday piece about, of all things, small children…and television.

But, O.K. Let’s say they missed the last 300-plus years of slang. Didn’t anyone at the Times copy desk ever see the “Johnson! Pecker!” sequence, below, from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me?

To say I have a love-hate relationship with Vanity Fair would be sort of putting it baldly, and imprecisely. It’s more of a respect-recoil connection that we share.

What do I respect, and from what do I recoil?

Well, I don’t want to rush this, so what I’ll do is take each aspect one at a time, over the course of today and tomorrow, saving the best for last.

What makes me recoil from Vanity Fair is that the magazine, based on both its content and writing staff, seems to tightly embrace a dated form of racial near-sightedness. I call it anachronistic achromatism. It’s a magazine, Sly Stone be damned, about white people, for white people, and, especially, by white people. This is the norm in American media, but VF makes a deference to whiteness that seems, on this small, brown, post-9/11 planet, not just brazenly out-of-touch, but, even more, recklessly hopeful.

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“Yes We Can” is the Barack Obama-affirming musical short by Black Eyed Peas front man and producer “Will.i.am” Adams Jr. It’s peopled by minor celebrities, and Scarlett Johansson, sing-songing an insignificant melody to text and footage from Obama’s January 8, 2008 New Hampshire primary victory speech. As I post this, it’s been viewed 5,460,140 times at its main YouTube location.

Make that 5,460,140.5 times: I only got halfway through it before I just couldn’t take any more.

Pourquoi? I think it’s more than the film’s bloated, black & white solemnity and manufactured earnestness, both, perhaps, best signified by an otherwise throwaway gesture at the 0:06 mark: Will.I.Am “offhandedly” “fixing” a lapel pin that appears to be just fine. (These despicable qualities are also on display in the newer, “We Are The Ones” video, as is another starlet, Jessica Alba.) Indeed, to really put one’s hand on what the problem is, one has to briefly go back to the recorded origins of the Black Eyed Peas in the 1990s.

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