General

American Apparel loves to brag that they use “real women” instead of models in their ad campaigns. Photographer Holly Norris and disabled model Jes Sachse called bullshit, and came up with something a little, um, realer:

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On his True/Slant blog, the always-fascinating cultural critic Mark Dery dissects the Downfall/Hitler YouTube phenomenon and the impact of its sudden copyright-induced theft from the online world.

The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them. In the world where mass culture has given way to microniche markets and the culture wars are dissolving the body politic into socially isolated demographic clusters, copyrighted narratives and trademarked characters–Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight–are the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society. Bruno Ganz gave Hitler life, but now he belongs to all of us, a psychopathic sock-puppet to be ventriloquized as needed.

Love it.

As always with Dery, be sure to read the whole piece.

Ariana Huffington is definitely a genius. An Ayn Randian genius perhaps, despite her liberal politics, but definitely a genius. First she built one of the largest news websites in the world without paying the majority of her writers a cent. Now she’s got kids paying to be interns — to the tune of $9,000 a pop.

We bust the Ariana’s chops, but, in fairness, the Intern fees were raised in an auction to support the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Yahoo! News has more:

Other winning bids this year: A week at Esquire went for $1,000, while internships at Black Enterprise and Niche Media brought in $550 and $500, respectively.

Perhaps to offset the appearance that only wealthy interns would get inside, each publication also created a slot that doesn’t cost anything, according to the RFK Center.

Insane tidbit of the day: Anna Wintour has kids paying $42,500 to intern at Vogue.

H/T Romenesko

Forty years after the first Earth Day and we can’t even get a consensus in our major media outlets that the planet might actually have catastrophic environmental problems worthy of attention. The L.A. Times says it’s time to panic, the Washington Post says forty years in, we’re losing. The New York Times apparently isn’t into dire prognostication and instead runs a photo essay on Jersey trash art. The Wall Street Journal says Earth Day is boring, and about that global warming thing? No problems here.

Rush Limbaugh says he plans to personally bulldoze two acres of rain forest, while setting the air conditioning on his five rental properties to a cool 65.

James Cameron says he didn’t make enough money on Avatar, so you can listen to him talk about the environment for $50 bucks at LA Live.

Perhaps the most sage generalized Earth Day thoughts come from the Detroit Free Press, which notes the real Earth Day is 365 days a year.

In honor of April Fools Day, HuffPo put out a list of the most enthralling literary hoaxes in history. We were pleasantly surprised to your humble Fishie’s LA Weekly story “Navahoax,” which outed “Navajo” memoirist Nasijj as a white, failed pornographer from Michigan, mentioned on the list.

Other hoaxes of note mentioned: JT LeRoy, Margaret B. Jones and Clifford Irving, who forged interviews and documents for a biography of notorious recluse Howard Hughes.

“Best Of” lists are always kind of silly and pointless. OC Weekly and “Ask a Mexican” writer Gustavo Arellano‘s recent list of the top 10 pieces of journalism EVER, is no exception. Seriously, any list of great journalism that contains two OC Weekly stories and only one Esquire piece is fucked. No Hunter S. Thompson, but a gonzo-esque piece by the Phoenix New Times? Come on.

That said, the only reason people write these lists is to get everyone worked up. And Arellano did makes some interesting choices. So we’ll play along and nitpick a little more.

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Last night, drunk off our ass at the Tam O’Shanter, we got a strange and melancholy text from a good friend.

“Alex Chilton died today. So lucky to have met him a million years ago. Gracious, weird and brilliant. A hero of mine. Sadness.”

This morning we woke up from our hangover and saw the news was true. The wildly underappreciated brains behind the band Big Star was dead of an apparent heart attack at 59.

Mark Ames at eXiledonline has by far the most interesting (and depressing) obit we’ve seen thus far:

Alex Chilton’s story always scared me more than the others–I’d figured he was already dead, for some reason–because in the romantic version of Alex Chilton’s life, he would have died decades ago, rather than drag it out the way 99.9 percent of us do.

Chilton was, for a couple of brief years in the early-mid 1970s, the purest, most dynamic talent in American pop music. But the hippies had no use for his talent, so Chilton was discarded for something more with the Zeitgeist, like Foghat or Yes. What’s so demoralizing about Chilton’s failed career is that there’s no villain to blame his wasted talent on. The early 70s were a bad time; the only humanoids to survive the hippie plague were the ones who went underground in New York to wait it out. Chilton was one of the few legendary fans of the Velvet Underground back in the dark hippie days, but Chilton wasn’t a New York hipster–he was a Tennessean– and back then, if you weren’t a hippie you’d better be a New York hipster, and if you weren’t either of those, you were nobody.

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If you’re about to hit South By Southwest, or any hectic conference, you could benefit from a little advance planning. Mediabistro has created a guide to help you get the most out of your attendance. First on the list is to SET SPECIFIC GOALS:

“It’s important to know what you want to gain from a conference,” says Melissa Fireman, a Washington, D.C.-based career counselor, and founder of Washington Career Services. “I know that sounds basic, but you have to be very specific about your goals. If networking is a goal, what specifically are you networking for?” Write down your goals, print out the schedule and attendee list ahead of time, and take the planning process seriously, Fireman says.

Check out the full guide here.

San Diego CityBeat’s annual Local Music Issue came out this week and yours truly has a feature up front — a profile of San Diego neo-new-wavers “Lights On.” The band has started making some national noise after their song “Wild at Heart” was featured on the HBO show “Hung” last year.

Have a read.

No character on “Mad Men” so embodies the Barbie mantra “We girls can do anything” like Peggy Olson. So why was a trophy wife and an oversexed secretary* the only female characters deemed worthy by Mattel of becoming Barbies?

*No offense, Joan. We continue to worship you as the patron saint of under-appreciated office workers in push-up bras everywhere. We are preparing the ritual sacrifice of a handsy intern as we write this.