Jordan Chandler Hoax Spreading to Traditional Media

I was on an internet message board Sunday and someone published an excerpt and link to a Wordpress blog story claiming that Jordan Chandler, the kid who took Michael Jackson to the cleaners in a 1993 out-of-court settlement - was now recanting his story in the wake of Jackson's death.

The Wordpress article has since been taken down, but the site it used as a reference, Fresh News on trashselector.com (well-named). This appears to be the story's originating source.

Under the influence of a controversial father (Jordan Chandler) told his son to tell that Jackson had touched his penis.Jordan Chandler then told a psychiatrist and later police that he and Jackson had engaged in acts of kissing, masturbation and oral sex, as well as giving a detailed description of what he alleged were the singer’s genitals.

” Now for the first time i can’t bare to lie anymore. Michael Jackson didn’t do anything to me, all was my father lies to escape from being poor.”

Trash Selector further sends people to a Michael Jackson tribute site.

The story was all over Twitter and other internet sites, where a few people were good enough and wise enough to follow its tracks and tell others they were being had.

That was Sunday. Last night I opened up this morning's prep service I use for on air, and there was the story in all its unquestioning glory. I wrote to the support department immediately notifying them of the hoax; it was taken down about an hour ago.

Meanwhile, back at Trash Selector people are asking questions. The site's owner appears to be a deranged Michael Jackson fan with a hard time distinguishing real time for role play, there's the pity of it.

I want to say that this information it’s for sure (I mess up with the names because i was crying), I don’t really care if you believe it or not, I made a promise to an old friend to tell the truth when Michael will die and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not searching for attention i have enough of it. This is for you Mikey i will always love you…

Yikes. Brain Suck

It's bad, isn't it? Between Twitter and my new habit of kayaking, there've been, what? some five posts since mid-May, I think. One of the two is definitely having a negative impact on creative output - I just hope it's Twitter, because I really like this.

Transformers 2 Out Today

Last week I said something on the air about the pre-promotion of Revenge of the Fallen and what a bad sign it was, speaking for the film's quality as art, that it was all revolving around how hawt Megan Fox is, and what an outrageous family Shia LaBeouf is from.

Now, Michael Bay is slamming the marketing department, too. BBC picked up on it:

In a memo sent to Paramount Pictures last month and leaked to gossip site TMZ, the director called the film's US print campaign an "abject failure".

"You talk so glowingly about Transformers being the movie of the summer, but unfortunately this has not got to the public," he wrote.

"I have been waiting and waiting for the anticipation of an 'event movie' to make it into the 'public zeitgeist'," Bay wrote in the e-mail to Paramount executives on 4 May.

In the end, it maybe won't matter all that much unless it's really, really, really bad. The average guy I talk to admits right up front, they only care that they're going to get a movie with Giant Robots Smashing Things. But I've got a feeling that their girlfriends are going to want something a little more if it's to hold up past the first weekend.

UPDATE: I just spoke to Brian, the web guy. He saw a preview and said it was awful. I told him about the 'big robots smashing things' theory. He said, "they aren't smashing enough things, then." He also mentioned that one robot turns into a "hot chick. I don't want robots turning into hot chicks. That's not right."

Could Brian be the exception?

UPDATE 2 Roger Ebert's spoken his piece and it's the most mercilous skewering I've seen him give anything since his first viewing of The Brown Bunny. Go take a look.

Naomi's Girl Crush

When I read about Naomi Wolf's Bazaar homage to Angelina Jolie, purported to explain why American women want to be and screw Mrs. Smith's alter ego, my first suspicion was that it's an article pitched and driven by Jolie's publicist(s), timed to tamp down and/or prop her up amidst all the "Brangelina split" rumors floating around.

Yes, she is conventionally beautiful: Bosomy and wasp-waisted, with that curtain of hair and those crazy pillowy lips, she is an obvious male sex fantasy. But more suggestively, polls show that her appeal and magnetism play at least as powerfully in the fantasy life of females.

Women admire Angelina Jolie, but that would hardly stop the presses. Polls also show that if women — not just lesbian and bisexual women but straight women — had to choose a female lover, they would want to sleep with Angelina Jolie. In other words, women both identify with her and desire her.

There's something more than a simply physical response. Her persona hits an unprecedented level of global resonance — and makes women want to be with her and be her at the same time — because she has created a life narrative that is not just personal. Rather, it is archetypal. And the archetype is one that really, for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation.

After reading the gushing essay, it resembles nothing so much as when Camilla Paglia was kicking off her decade-long fascination with Madonna,

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny -- all at the same time.

only, what if all those pieces were written more like Peggy Noonan's glazey-eyed love-fests over another Madonna era figure: Ronald Reagan.

Clare Boothe Luce famously said that each President is remembered for a sentence: "He freed the slaves"; "He made the Louisiana Purchase." You have to figure out your sentence, she used to tell John Kennedy, who would nod thoughtfully and then grouse when she left. Ronald Reagan knew, going in, the sentence he wanted, and he got it. He guided the American victory in the cold war. Under his leadership, a conflict that had absorbed a half-century of Western blood and treasure was ended — and the good guys finally won.

Enough of that; Wolf glosses over and assumes women and everyone else, for that matter, is too stupid to fully understand that everything about Jolie's image, especially of the last five years, is just that: image. We know it and we're okay with it, most of us. We don't want to be her, we want what she has: a terrifically-well paying, globe-trotting career, a sexiest-man-alive husband, a family, and nannies to manage it all.

But no, most of us don't want to be her in spite of the fascination, and this is why:

In case you haven't heard, in an upcoming edition of Archie Comics, Archie Andrews is going to propose, finally, to one of the two women he's been stringing along for decades, and Veronica is the IT girl. Speculation is already high that 1: Archie will have a change of heart before he gets down the aisle, and 2: if he doesn't, Betty's much better off without him, anyway. I gotta agree.