Thursday, December 11, 2003 BOYS in the BUBBLE -- It's a turn-around jump shot It's everybody jump start It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts Medicine is magical and magical is art The Boy in the Bubble And the baby with the baboon heart Paul Simon - The Boy in the Bubble - GRACELAND 1986 - Warner Bros -- The cover of GQ's November issue features a blank portrait of actor Adrien Brody, with the caption: "Adrien Brody and 30 other Legends, Rogues and Heroes" The special dual cover, seperately featuring actors Adrien Brody and Colin Farrell heralds the conclusion of GQ's eighth annual "Men of the Year" awards held in Manhattan on Oct 22nd last. "There are roughly 3,144,648,887 men roaming the earth, and only twenty-six of them have what it takes to be Men of The Year." Thus concludes GQ's magazine staff its annual survey of visionary, physical, radical, cranky, comical and iconic candidates able to meet GQ's staff's overbearing adjectives. GQ broke with an engrained tradition by having its editors choose this year's hopefuls all by themselves. Why? GQ Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson explains: "Because editors are overstimulated heavily opinionated people who love to spend days dissecting hot-button issues like "Who-s the Christian Rap-Metal bassist of The Year?" So- are the GQ editors justified in their decision to omit their supposedly indifferent, blase, and vote-weary readers for this year's round up? Photographer Martin Schoeller summons the dilemma, commenting on the contrasts between the two hugely different candidates featured on the November GQ cover: "Colin drank and smoked cigarette after cigarette while Adrien occupied himself petting his chihuahua." GQ's audience is no match to the editors' insider's knowledge of their selected candidates. This year's choice echoes their biased view for the "Men of the Year" awards: SURVIVOR: Aron Ralston FUNNYMAN: Dave Chappelle ROOKIE: Amare Stoudemire COACH: Jon Gruden SHOWMAN: Justin Timberlake TV PROVOCATEUR: Roger Ailes DESIGN TEAM: Dean & Dan Catten of DSQUARED TV ACTOR: William Petersen LEADING MAN: Colin Farrell ACTOR: Adrien Brody SWASHBUCKLER Johnny Depp BALLER: Tim Duncan MOST EXCITING ATHLETE: Michael Vick FREE RADICAL: Viggo Mortensen CRANK: Larry David COMIC ICON Bill Murray VOICE OF REASON Jon Stewart PHENOM: 50 Cent DEFENDER: Simeon Rice DESIGNERS: Dolce & Gabbana VISIONARY: Peter Jackson ROCK ICON: Dave Grohl MOST STYLISH: Ashton Kutcher ACTION HERO: The Rock What else does this issue of GQ, a hefty 382 pages, ad-infested, men's lifestyle catalog offer to their readers? From its vast editorial content I traced a gamut of signatures- -- "Somewhere another man your age is buying a silly red sportscar" Ad for LG 60" wide plasma HDTV monitor -- Safety Dance "According to the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, 25,557 people went to the emergency room with chain-saw-related injuries in 2002. Here are the locations and frequencies of some of the various injuries. Head and face - 2,079 injuries Upper body, arms, and hands - 12,293 injuries Legs and feet - 10,542 injuries Other Areas - 67 injuries -Kevin Sintumuang- -- "Television has always been telling me to lose weight. Keep fit, and be in shape. Finally, television takes its own advice." Ad for Philips Cineos TV -- Is Bush back? "You get tired of having a girl look like she's 12" "Like the Brazilian rain forest in the 80s, the bush started disappearing about five years ago. Magazine articles heralded the age of the Brazilian wax. Sex and the City dedicated an episode to the characters' female topiary. Even Gwyneth Paltrow revealed that she like a little landscaping. Soon regular girls, girls we met in bars and at office functions, were going at their panty lines as if they were bonsai trees. Bushes everywhere were reduced to landing strips or tortilla chips or Hitler mustaches. One salon would even adorn women's jewels with..jewels. And still they shrank. It wasn't uncommon for a woman to go completely bare. Bush seemed dead. And we weren't complaining. Suddenly, our girl friends of five years looked like porn stars. It felt pretty good too- no scratching or tugging or itching when unmentionables met unmentionables." -George Curley- -- Is Canada Cooler Than Us? "It's not just Hollywood producers who are abandoning the homeland for the north. In the first six months of this year, more than twice as many American citizens fled for refugee status in Canada than in all of 2001. And over the same period, more Americans fled as refugees to Canada than Iraqis or Afghans." -Simon Houpt- -- Bentley Born Again "For all its sportiness, this is a big car with a wide stance, as I discovered on several occasions, once when I was trying to enter the walled Welsh castle town of Caernarvon through a medieval portal. The GT is equipped with front and side sensors that begin beeping when the precious bodywork comes within a foot of an obstacle, a feature I found annoying in parking situations but that in this case possibly saved me from getting wedged between the castle walls." -Jay MacInerney- -- The Killer Inside Him Michael Connelly's short list of the greatest mystery novels ever* The Long Goodbye By Raymond Chandler "The mystery as an art form. It showed the possibilities of the detective novel." The Underground Man By Ross MacDonald "The past comes up out of the ground to grab the present by the throat." The Choirboys By Joseph Wambaugh "The ultimate cop novel." Red Dragon By Thomas Harris "Probably the most influential crime novel in the past twenty-five years." Hell to Pay By George P.Pelecanos "Mystery with a message, which is what we all aspire to write." -Steve Friedman- -- Sympathy For The Bizkit "You've heard about Fred and Britney. They met early this year while Durst was helping her make some songs for her upcoming album. They did a couple of songs, but the rest is in dispute. Spears says nothing happened. Durst says it was love. "Dude, I fucking fell for this girl," he says softly. "I really thought, Wow, I am going to be with someone who's in the same business, someone who's going to understand my life. I really felt that this was going to be something major." -Jason Gay- -- Lord of the Drug Ring "Calderoni had thrived while working for the federales, a law team that combines all the virtues of the FBI and the Mafia. I once attended a wedding where drug dealers and federales drank, did drugs, fucked and celebrated together for five days. During the party, one federale major and a colleague left for a few hours, murdered two peasants who were smuggling drugs without paying them off, took the load of dope and sold it." -Charles Bowden- -- "You can't buy your way into heaven. Paradise, however, is another story" Ad for Jeep Wrangler X -- Look Who's Listening Jason Adler spends his days listening to other's people phone calls. Sitting at his desk, he eavesdrops for hours on end. Contract negotiations, work gossip, family quarrels, gynecological-exam results-an endless parade of other people's triumphs, disasters, peccadilloes and braggadoccio pour through his headset. "It disgusts me," says Jason, whose name isn't really Jason Adler, because speaking publicly about what he does is guaranteed professional suivide. "I've heard things I don't want to hear. I wish I could go back to being the person I was before I started doing this." Jason Adler is not a private investigator, nor does he work for the FBI or for Homeland Security. In fact, Jason Adler is an assistant to a Hollywood producer." -Robert Moritz- -- A Perfect Proposal Although everyone has different ideas about what makes a proposal perfect, a Korbel survey revealed that proposal traditions, such as asking the intended's family for permission and proposing on bended knee, are still important to both men and women. However, the survey also revealed that women feel that the way the question is asked during a marriage proposal makes a world of difference, while men are most likely to focus on finding the perfect location. Ad for BlueNile-Korbel -- Party at the Moontower! Ten Years after Dazed and Confused Parker Posey: "I got in the first day, and all the women were like, Have you met Matthew McConaughey? Oh, my God! I saw a Polaroid of him, and I was like, Holy shit. Everyone watch out." -Brian Raftery- -- The Big Bad Wolfowitz? "Or the fact that Greenspan had been a student of Wolfowitz's father at Cornell. Or that, when Cheney ran the Pentagon and Wolfowitz was his undersecretary for policy, Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And now that Powell is the secretary of state, Rich Armitage is his deputy, and when Armitage worked in Reagan's pentagon, Colin Powell was the national security adviser and Paul Wolfowitz was at State. The list of names has stayed about the same for twenty years, merely rotating and shuffling with time." -Wil S. Hylton -- Paradise is Burning "Not long ago, during a panel discussion at a hotel guarded with machine guns, a panel of Muslim scholars was asked for opinions on how Indonesia should respond to the White House's war on terror. "When the U.S. experienced the WTC attack, they said, "We are under attack," one replied. "Why can't we shout the same thing?" -Marc Herman- -- Eddie Izzard "He polishes his craft in rough English pubs where the drunks shout C U N T ! at every pause, so he learns not to pause-an ambition quite attainable for a man whose brain moves about sixty times faster than his mouth. He embarks on every performance with a sketchy idea where he's going, and then, to a degree that would make most performers wet themselves, he wings it. To keep his humor in what he calls "the molten phase," he's forever composing new comedy out of thin air, using his audience as both muse, and instant critic." -Elizabeth Gilbert- -- GQ USA - Men of the Year Issue - November 2003 -- posted by Walter at 12/11/2003