Entries Tagged 'Media' ↓

I missile you much: GTA IV‘s Niko Bellic sends his regards

The worst job I ever had was working in the car loans department of the now defunct Chemical Bank, at the Huntington Quadrangle in Melville L.I. It was a small office of about ten to twelve mutually limited, small-minded people, held under the managerial thumb of a doughy, mouse-faced, unsmiling, bespectacled woman with yellow smoker’s fingertips and a bad perm.

Our task was taking in loan requests by fax or phone from GMAC finance dealers, processing them, and passing them up the chain for approval. What I remember most was how tense this office was, as this woman kept us under the grind to turn out precious loan apps. My solace was ducking into my ’75 Impala at lunch time, loudly playing Grandmixer DXT and Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album, and sleeping.

But pristinely nested on the other end of my employment karmic balance is the job I loved the most: The 2 1/2 years I spent, from 2004 – 2006, working in public affairs at Rockstar Games, maker of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of video games.

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I’m surprised Racialicious hasn’t picked this apart, yet: Six Flags’ “More Flags, More Fun!” campaign, and its English-gargling Asian pitchman.

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According to Forbes.com’s 2007 list of top TV personalities, in the year between June 2006 and June 2007, talk show host Oprah Winfrey earned over a quarter of a billion dollars, $260 million, precisely, or over $1 million a day.

Pauper.

In a report cited by The New York Times yesterday, Institutional Investor’s Alpha (IIA) magazine ranked the 50 top hedge fund earners of last year. (The incomes on this list are so outrageous that you need to have made at least $210 million to get on it. Were Oprah a fund manager, she’d have ranked 38th.)

At #1, John Paulson, right, 52, of Paulson & Company, utterly nuked his competition by taking home compensation of…hold your breath, people…$3.7 billion.

That’s not his net worth. That’s three billion, seven hundred million dollars in salary.

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I’m gonna get you, sucka: John McCain flashes those pearly whites

It’s such an obvious question that it seems bizarre few in the media have asked it:

Does John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?

And, outrageously, did he refer to his wife with the evil “C-word,” during an outburst?

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What a feeling: Carlton Draught’s “Kevin Kavendish” gets footloose

Here’s the safest bet you can possibly make in your life: When director Adrian Lyne released Flashdance, on April 15, 1983, dollars-to-donuts that neither he nor the movie’s distributor, Paramount, was counting on anyone talking about it a quarter of a century later.

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Bag lady: Victoria Beckham says “Aaah” for photog Juergen Teller

Interesting article from yesterday’s New York Times on the creative partnership between German photographer Juergen Teller and American designer Marc Jacobs. But even more startling are Teller’s images, which have prettied up W and other fashion bibles for a decade: Teller as artist Cindy Sherman’s twin, or, in an incredible story, as Charlotte Rampling’s hapless gigolo.

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“How can I bittorrent this sweet ride?”: Shawn Fanning ponders a VW

I was watching TV yesterday when, out of nowhere, a commercial popped on, featuring, of all people, Shawn Fanning, above, creator of the contraband late ’90s file-sharing service, Napster.

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The first time I saw the trailer for 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the images that threw me most for a loop were those of the panoramic space battle over planet Coruscant, pictured below.

With its massive, mile-long cruisers, acres of explosions and laser bolts, and the shimmering, metal world below, I found myself overwhelmed by the realization that digital tools in filmmaking had created new possibilities in the artform, not merely for effects, but for outright visual density.

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The sole issue more amazing than the blatancy of VOGUE’s having mined crude racist imagery for their April 2008 LeBron James/Giselle Bündchen cover has been the whiteout of surrounding media on the issue.

Here, in New York, neither The New York Times, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Sun, or The Village Voice have cracked a word on this subject, online or off. Newsday wrote something, before the direct pairing of the cover and H.R. Hopps’s 1917 Destroy This Mad Brute—Enlist poster, right, was widely known. As for television, local and network, zero.

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Former NYPD Blue star Garcelle Beauvais recently gave birth to healthy twin boys. She proudly appears with them on the cover of 57-year-old Black weekly, Jet, above.

According to Racialicious, however, the unusually light skin color of the Haitian-American actor’s offspring (her husband is white) seems to be annoying some people, to the site’s chagrin.

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