I’M FROM ROLLING STONE: If you’re really lucky, you can interview We Are Scientists for the Web site. |
“Some people cast shadows,” wrote Donald Trump in a 2005 letter to the New York Times Book Review, “and other people choose to live in those shadows. To each his own.” The Donald was engaged, at the time, in giving an epistolary slagging to an unauthorized biographer of his called Mark Singer (“I’ve read John Updike, I’ve read Orhan Pamuk, I’ve read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I’ll read one of his books . . . ”), but his words as usual had a broader and more solemn application. We are all in Trump’s shadow, and we cannot choose. His towers, his fame, his large-waisted silhouette. The umbrageous spread of Trump lies across the culture like an eclipse. And now here’s Season 6 of The Apprentice (NBC Sundays, 8 pm), set in Los Angeles, city of screaming contrasts, in homage to which Trump and producer Mark Burnett have devised a new domestic twist: the winning team live in a mansion, gamboling in its pool, while the losers have to doss down in tents.
The great mystery of The Apprentice is why I watch it. The varnished realtors, event planners, and Wall Street carnivores who compete each season for a spot in the Trump organization (“the dream job of a lifetime!”), the thick-necks and the taut-calved businesswomen, are always terrible people. And Trump himself, braying clichés from beneath his fried hair, is a loud flatline on the charm meter. But somehow those boardroom showdowns do raise the pulse; it’s bloodsport, when the suits turn on one another. This week it was prissy Martin, caressing his cufflinks, against ape-like go-getter Frank. Sly, fluent Martin had been working Frank for hours before they met in the boardroom. “I can handle the psychology,” he sleekly assured us. “Frank’s on the defensive. I think in the back of his head he’s in a dark place.” But Frank, whose face has that slight bulge or glare of corporate psychosis, was too vulgarly insane for Martin’s stratagems. “I’m here for you, sir!”, Frank bellowed at Trump, as if he’d eat someone alive if Donald said the word, just gnaw their arms off. “You see the fire in me!” (Martin got fired.)
Hey — who wants to work for Rolling Stone? Who wants to stomp around the country like Hunter S. Thompson shouting “Ye gods!” through a light crackle of small-arms fire and expiring brain cells? Who wants to penetrate the aristocracies of freakdom like dapper Tom Wolfe, using the exclamation point — ptoing! ptoing! — as a champion fencer uses his sword? Never mind that RS in 2007 is one of the most lavishly cynical mags on the rack, a loyal organ of the celebrity-industrial complex: step up, hot shot! And if you’re really lucky, like Colin the intern on MTV’s new I’m from Rolling Stone (Sundays, 10 pm), your editor will send you to Toronto to interview We Are Scientists for the Web site.
I’m from Rolling Stone, if it achieves nothing else, may disabuse the viewership of certain notions regarding bands. Bands are wankers. Look at those barbed nerds in We Are Scientists and how they treat poor Colin at his virgin interview. Cloudily, after much flapping of the notepad, he manages to ask whether they’ve been writing any new material on the road — or are they, uh, too focused on touring for that? “We are neither focused on touring nor capable of producing anything,” quacks a Scientist complacently. What a wanker. Colin is one of six trainee journalists battling for a “Contributing Editor” credit on the RS masthead; the others include Tika, a black lesbian, Peter, a proto-alcoholic Australian rowing jock, and Krystal, who wrote a piece about her home-town music scene featuring the phrase “cherub-faced scenester.” “I think the writing’s there,” she said brightly, reviewing her work. “I think it’s great. I really enjoyed reading it.” “Very strong, very strong,” murmured her organic and untrimmed boyfriend. RS editor Joe Levy didn’t agree: he found Krystal’s piece “overly wordy.” What a wanker!
All these reality premieres are exhausting: too many competitors, smirking and jostling. Weed ’em out, weed ’em out! Season 3 of Beauty and the Geek (CW, Wednesdays, 8 pm) kicked off with a spottily entertaining two-hour marathon. Simple, Darwinian premise: eight young men who have spent their lives gazing through the chain-link fence of geekdom meet eight young women favored by Nature with breasts, smiles, etc. They pair up and compete in challenges, the ultimate aim being a world-defying geek/beauty love match, a hippogriff of brains and bod. The beautiful and the unbeautiful, as we all know, are separate species, and the key moment came when the two groups were introduced: the girls gasped as the geeks descended the stair en masse with their long socks and squashed haircuts. (“It was like a huge car accident,” shuddered Megan the Playboy model.) And the geeks were candidly stunned by flesh. “I was almost blinded!” marveled the genius Piao, his gummy, snuffling grin now apparently permanent. “They were just so shiny!” It could all go badly wrong: by the end of Episode 1 the velvety Andrea had begun to bully her pet ectomorph, an MIT-type called Matt.
Next week I intend to discuss the premiere episode of Playboy TV’s Naked Happy Girls, which (to quote the press release) “follows erotic photojournalist Andrew Einhorn as he traverses New York City, meeting real-life women and convincing them to pose nude for him.” What a . . . but no — let’s wait and see.
