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(from John Cusack's Blog... I love that man!)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
WELCOME TO CAMP MOGUL
by Paul Krassner
My irreverent friend, Khan Manka, Chairman & CEO of Manka Brothers Studios, had broken his ankle and was afraid he wouldn't be able to attend the 26th annual gathering of the nation's most powerful executives and their trophy wives in Sun Valley, Idaho. I really wanted to spy on this summer camp for billionaires, so I suggested that Manka get a wheelchair, then I could serve as his official wheelchair pusher, and he immediately went for the idea.
This by-now traditional five-day extravaganza for 300 guests has been hosted by Wall Street investment banker Herbert Allen, President and CEO of Allen & Company. There were moguls all over the campground, overflowing with the country's most influential leaders in business, entertainment and media. I could feel myself developing a severe case of imposter syndrome.
Saturday was Talent Night, and it was absolutely hysterical. Part-time Sun Valley resident Tom Hanks served as the emcee. Warren Buffet was the opening act, with a medley of Jimmy Buffet songs, all sung out of tune. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos skillfully juggled five Kindels (wireless electronic books). Edgar Bronfman from Warner Music--dressed like the character Tevya in *Fiddler on the Roof*--sang with zest, "If I Were a Rich Man." Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang--who had turned down an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo earlier this year--sang a duet with the ex-CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, harmonizing on a song from *Annie Get Your Gun,* "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better." Meg Whitman of eBay did a striptease, auctioning off each item of clothing, one at a time, and over 3-million dollars was raised for an unnamed charity.
There had been a lot of drinking in the evening, and it was obviously too much booze that loosened up Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch's tongue. He was shouting at the moon: "Who says there are 27 million slaves around the fucking world? How would anybody know? Do they have census takers or what? Where can I get one? You tell me! I'll decide!"
Also, a screaming match broke out between the co-founders of Google, Sergei Brin and Eric Schmidt, over the infamous cover of the *New Yorker,* which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as the new President and First Lady, as a terrorist couple doing the fist-bump gesture in the Oval Office. Sergei thought it was a brilliant satirical illustration, but Eric thought it was racist and irresponsible.
Last year, the surprise guest was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. This year, it was Steven Beschloss, the editor of a new magazine which will be launched this fall and be delivered to 100,000 U.S. households with an average net worth of $25-million. There were piles of preview copies scattered about.
While Beschloss was holding court in an outdoor area, annoying mosquitoes kept buzzing around the crowd. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, yelled at him, "I gues we'll never hear *your* readers whining about a mental recession. And those of your subscribers who are in the sub-prime mortgage industry--these mosquitoes are *their* fault, because, along with all the home foreclosures they're responsible for, the stagnant water in abandoned pools turns into new breeding grounds for mosquitoes."
Others drowned him out by singing the mogul version of good old-fashioned camp songs, such as "This Land Is *My* Land, This Land Is *My* Land" and "KumBuyYahoo." I couldn't help but notice that billionaire activist Carl Icahn snapped his fingers as if having an epiphany; a week later he ended up on Yahoo's board of directors.
Khan Manka explained that the bigwigs at these events have so-called "informal" meetings which always take place where a pair of individuals can have their discussions alone without any interruption--on the golf course, hiking along an isolated trail, fly-fishing at Silver Creek--but Manka had been privy to only one specific example that he could share.
"Back in 1995," he told me, "Disney honcho Michael Eisner met with Robert Iger, who was then the head of ABC. And exactly one month later, these two giant companies merged into one media megamonster. Coincidence? I don't think so. Their deal had been sealed when Eisner and Iger exchanged friendship bracelets that they had worked on at Camp Mogul."
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Originally posted on ArthurBlog on Yahoo.com
Bio Warfare by the US against the US
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
send this around!
Rob Gonsalves
"Martin Blank goes to war."
The adventures of the Bush administration have, it seems, driven John Cusack a little crazy, just as they drove Richard Kelly far enough around the bend to make his much-maligned epic "Southland Tales." Perhaps these men have found a workable response, if not the only one, to current events: broad satire sprinkled heavily with glitzy disgust.
War, Inc., written by Cusack along with Jeremy Pikser (Bulworth) and the postmodernist novelist Mark Leyner, doesn't even pretend to buy into American warfare in the Middle East as remotely ennobling or democracy-inspiring. Tonally, this farce is all over the place, getting easy laughs from official doublespeak about new prosthetic limbs ("Just another breathtaking example of how American know-how alleviates the suffering it creates") and then choking our laughter off. The business of war is serious even when it's funny, and vice versa.
War, Inc. could almost be a default sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank, 1997's witty, jet-black comedy about hit-man Martin Blank and his struggle to regain his humanity at his ten-year class reunion. Here, Cusack is Brand Hauser, a government assassin tasked to whack an oil baron who wants to run a pipeline through (fictional) Turaqistan and drink some of America's milkshake. Brand is given a cover story: he'll be organizing the arrival and media opportunities of rising Turaqi pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff, sullying her squeaky-clean persona impressively). Plaguing Brand's existence are this movie's Minnie Driver, leftist reporter Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), who wants the full story on what Brand is doing in Turaqistan, and this movie's Joan Cusack, hard-bitten assistant Marsha Dillon (played by ... Joan Cusack), who wants Brand to ice the target already so they can all go home.
Add in an appearance by Dan Aykroyd as the amiably venal vice-president and a Joe Strummer-esque score by David Robbins (brother of Cusack's buddy Tim) and you really do have Martin Blank Goes to War, but as a die-hard fan of GPB, I didn't care. Cusack's morose intelligence holds everything together, and he has an agreeably combative rapport with Tomei and a gentler one with Duff, whose Yonica symbolizes how we're trying to "democratize" the Middle East by Britneyizing and corporatizing it. The movie takes some cues from satires old (Dr. Strangelove) and more recent (Wag the Dog, especially in its barbs at the press for being so easily gulled by the government's magic show), but its tempo and emphasis are all its own. Joshua Seftel, a documentarian making his narrative feature debut, channels Kubrick as well as Terry Gilliam in his cool fish-eyed-lens assessment of Turaqistan's chaotic chessboard. By the time we see a tank with a goldenpalace.com banner on its tail, it's no longer clear where monetary fantasia ends and war-torn reality begins.
War, Inc. is looser than GPB, and makes time for several extended scenes of various characters just sitting around getting to know each other, a welcome respite from what always threatens to become a cartoon. In a dazzlingly brutal dust-up between Brand and some local thugs, Cusack shows he hasn't lost any of his kickboxing flair, nor his way of looking soulfully stricken when caught in the bloody act by a loved one. In these movies, Cusack is America, abashed by his talent for and background in violence, and eager to escape it — here, Brand constantly chugs hot sauce to burn himself out of awareness (he says he's trained his tear ducts not to flow when he downs the stuff). People are always consuming in the movie — Yonica has her Popeye's Chicken (a front for Brand's shadowy liaison), a soldier chomps on freeze-dried coffee to amp himself up for crowd control.
Critics will probably rush to smear "War, Inc." as a rehash or irrelevant or even un-American, but it's a good deal smarter and more satisfying than that — a punk-rock Strangelove riff on a mission very much unaccomplished.
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