Joshua Malbin

For one of my early Valentine’s Days in Los Angeles, my now-ex and I went to Campanile, one of Los Angeles’s best and fanciest restaurants, located in a vaulted home where Charlie Chaplin’s production company once resided. The waiter was efficient but exhausted, and towards the end of his shift, as we struggled down the rest of our second-cheapest-bottle, he saw sympathy in us and unloaded a little.

“Valentine’s Day,” he said, passing us a secret of the trade. “A lot of amateurs come out to eat.”

We weren’t any different, of course — kicking it up one notch in honor of Mandatory Romance — but we appreciated that we were young and somehow assured enough to attract his confidence.

The following year found us exhausted and filthy on the night of February 14th. I’d been sanding the floors in our apartment, and she had been late at work, preparing a gallery show. Unshowered and dusty in our workshirts, we headed out to Palermo, a neighborhood red-check Italian default, and plopped ourselves down at the first available table.

And then we looked around, and saw that Palermo was like every other restaurant on Valentine’s Day, a place where people go one step further than usual. It was mostly teenagers, dressed up better than the restaurant’s usual casual-dining customers in blowy suits and shiny, short dresses, sporting single red roses or buying them from a girl on the floor. A good number of working-class adults were there, not as spiffy as the teens but wearing the ease of having found a babysitter and made it out to the first restaurant in a long time.

We felt a bit out of place in our stains and flannels, but no one was there to notice us. It was a fine dinner, with amateurs everywhere.

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We live in a Golden Age of sports revisionism movies. 2008 brought Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, a tender hymn to washouts, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, the athlete as sex worker, a body for sale. 2009 brought Wrestler writer Robert Siegel’s Big Fan (which the former Onion writer–who claims responsibility for the ‘Area Man’ trope–wrote and directed), which finds the serious fan on a perpetual seesaw of striving and emasculation. Some spoilers after the jump.

(continue reading…)

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This is just getting stupid.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of The Daily News, is considering a bid for the Senate seat now held by Kirsten E. Gillibrand, according to two people told of the discussions.

The Times thinks he’d run as a Republican, which I guess he won’t do if Pataki steps in. I don’t know which scenario makes me feel ickier.

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When it comes to his shadow run for Senate, Harold Ford is a New Yorker through and through. When it comes to paying taxes, though, he’s still a Tennessean — he’s never filed a New York return.

Ford claims to have moved to New York three years ago, and says paying “New York taxes” makes him a New Yorker. But his spokeswoman confirms to Gawker that he’s never filed a New York tax return — meaning that he’s never paid New York’s income tax, despite keeping an office and a residence in New York City as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch since 2007…

Ford presumably decided that his real home was Tennessee, which conveniently has no income tax. Which means that, despite the fact that New York law requires part-time and nonresidents to pay income tax on money they earn in the state, Ford has shielded his entire Merrill Lynch salary from New York’s tax collectors for the past three years.

Even before this latest carpetbaggery revelation, the guy was averaging over 18 points behind Gillibrand in primary polling. Apart from his being buddies with Mike Bloomberg, is there any reason to take him remotely seriously as a candidate? Who pulls this kind of easily discovered stupid crap and thinks he can win? WTF?

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Same as it ever was in the nation’s leading newspaper: lunacy and bullshit given the same weight as the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence. Because who can say who’s right? Certainly not John M. Broder, who covers the climate beat as his full-time job.

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Yesterday I headed over to Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV blogger, to check out his predictably entertaining recap of Chuck from the night before…and there was already a bit of a kerfuffle kicking up in the comments section. By yesterday afternoon, the argument was almost 300 vituperative comments long and so heated that Sepinwall felt obliged to do an interview with the Chuck head writers, which in turn led to another 150 or so angry comments.

The source of all the anguish? Chuck kissed a girl other than Sarah, and Sarah got a back rub from Clark Kent.

Look, I remember hanging out on the Television Without Pity boards and complaining at great length about the last 1.5 seasons of Gilmore Girls, and I’ve ranted myself about the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, so I’m not one to deny fans the right to get upset at their favorite TV shows.

Here, though, I think we have a clear case of shippers gone berserk. No, this week’s episode of Chuck was not particularly good, but the season up until now has continued last year’s strong run. (We got Buy More Fight Club and Captain Awesome on a mission. That’s pretty good right there.) It reminds me of all the people on the TWoP boards who weren’t so much upset that the new showrunner in Gilmore Girls season 7 turned Lorelei into a simpering, inarticulate freak as they were that she married Chris instead of Luke. But as long as the characters remain reasonably true to themselves and the writers are telling good story, who the hell cares how they’re paired up?

The sad thing is that Chuck is such a marginally rated show that even the defection of a small, crazy segment of its audience could doom its chances for a fourth season.

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Buh-bye, Hiram.

But if Paterson does have to resign (unlikely), and his brand-new lieutenant gov steps up, what does that mean for the now evenly split Senate? Prolly deadlock again. Horrors! They might not get anything accomplished!

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The Los Angeles Times has given good consideration the prospects of taxing soda to pay for rising healthcare costs. An op-ed in October made the case for such a tax, and a front-page story last Sunday detailed the proposal’s murder by the beverage industry.

A few weeks after hearing testimony that a penny-an-ounce tax on soda could reduce consumption by 23%, Rep. Linda Sanchez proposed the tax to colleagues on the House Ways and Means committee to a favorable reception. Beverage industry lobbyists went to work, raising questions about the science and, significantly, bringing minority groups that they had long supported out in opposition to the tax, saying that it would affect minority consumers disproportionately. (It would cost minority consumers more, but these are people with higher rates of diabetes — Sanchez herself was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes).

As dog ever bites man, lobbying scares Democrats:

By the time the Democratic caucus held its next closed-door meeting in early summer, the atmosphere had changed, Sanchez said — an assessment shared by Pascrell and some committee staffers.

Democratic Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer who represents Atlanta, the corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola, argued that the soda tax could lead to taxes on other foods, raising prices for hard-pressed consumers during a severe recession. If you begin taxing one sugar product, where do you draw the line?, he asked.

Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), who represents a rural district where dairy farming is widespread, said he became concerned about the fairness of targeting one industry. Kind had heard from local Pepsi and Coke distributors, and he and other members also received letters from the National Milk Producers Assn. concerned that the proposed tax could apply to chocolate milk.

“We went from having real interest in this idea to it just falling off the table,” Sanchez said. “It was my perception that opposition increased as members began hearing from local businesses” that were part of the beverage industry coalition.

Michelle Obama debuted today her Healthy Food Campaign. The most regulation proposed inside it would grant principals the ability to ban unhealthy foods in schools, which is good, but altogether too localized. A soda tax would have discouraged consumption of a product and would reigned in the externalization of its costs.

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This Ezra Klein interview with Lamar Alexander is stunning for one simple reason: Alexander says that while he co-sponsored more sweeping health care reform than that currently before the Senate (the Wyden-Bennett proposal that had been floating around for a few years), he wouldn’t have voted for it.

He sponsored legislation he wouldn’t have voted for. Negotiate with that.

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She may not have been lucky in love on the “Jersey Shore,” but Snooki has found herself a man – and he’s just her type.

“He is just like my typical guido juicehead with like a good personality,” Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi told RadarOnline. …
He is freaking banging.”

Can somebody maybe write a zombie movie called “Juiceheads?” I would probably watch it.

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