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MY PUBLISHED (ENTERTAINMENT) 'TURKEY OF THE YEAR,' 2007.....
- Nov 22, 2007 at 9:31 AM
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Arts and entertainment writers name their 'Turkeys of the Year'
12:00 AM CST on Thursday, November 22, 2007
It's time once again for the annual roundup of arts and entertainment turkeys – people, trends and things that we are most definitely not thankful for.
Our writers broiled, fried and smoked their unfavorites, and all but deboned them for your seasonal pleasure. They sharpened their knives so you don't have to. More, 6E
To many fans, she can still do no wrong. But for someone whose primary job should be cashing royalty checks, J.K. Rowling has at times seemed in need of a scroll of Please Stop Being Annoying.
She urged fans to not spoil the contents of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, then talked about it herself. She helped whip readers into a frenzy, then berated newspapers that wrote reviews before she was ready. And when all should have been said and done, she started revealing details about characters' private lives that she just hadn't been able to squeeze into the previous seven volumes.
Recently, she sued a small publisher over its plans to release a book version of a Potter Web site, one she had once praised. Could somebody lend her a cloak of invisibility for next year?
Michael Merschel
If it's a courtroom full of TV cameras and lawyers with O.J. Simpson sitting in the center, then this must be 1995. Nope, it's 12 years later. A few things have changed: the charges (armed robbery and kidnapping – among others – instead of murder), the venue (Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles), and O.J.'s put on a few pounds. But the big difference is that the world doesn't seem to be watching this time around.
Then again, the actual trial hasn't even started yet. This may be a turkey that doesn't get served until 2008.
Tom Maurstad
Normally, I've got nothing but love for underdogs who stay on their hustle and find success in the fickle music industry, but this year's incessant and unavoidable onslaught of cameo appearances by "rappa ternt sanga" T-Pain has become a bit much.
It's bad enough that he appropriated the late Roger Troutman's popular "talk box" trademark (a vocal technique that requires singing through an electronic device and creates a robotic-sounding tone) and applied it to every single one of his own marginal and tired tracks – think "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)," "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')" and "Bartender."
But T-Pain has also infiltrated other artists' songs with ferocious frequency, like a soulless, out-of-control music virus (a good name for it would be T-Strain). By creating empty odes to the sobriety-impaired and unnecessarily usurping the creations of others (Chris Brown, Kanye West and Fabolous, to name an unfortunate few), T-Strain has earned my vote as 2007's Turkey of the Year.
Lorrie Irby Jackson
What would the celebrity- scandal industry have done this year without Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan? There hasn't been a time in 2007 when one of them wasn't filling the tabloid media with further tales of her supersized discombobulation.
Whether it was each week's latest installment of everyone's favorite pop-cult serial, Britney Goes Bonkers – oops, she did it again, and again, and again – or Paris' jailhouse transformation from airhead heiress to airhead heiress who's going to save the world, or Lindsay's Lifestyle of the Rehabbed and Relapsed, these three women have been racing one another in a yearlong turkey trot – and the winner loses. Or is it the other way around?
Tom Maurstad
My nomination for classical-music turkeys goes to people who insist on applauding after every movement of a symphony or concerto, even when it's obvious that most people around them aren't doing so.
Yeah, that's what audiences did in Mozart's day. But 18th-century audiences in Paris also talked out loud during opera performances, came and went, ate and drank as they pleased.
For more than a century, it's been pretty much agreed that we should hold applause until all movements of a symphony or concerto have been played. It's no more a matter of snobbery than not blowing your nose on your host's linen napkin or not cutting in line at the grocery checkout. It's just good manners.
So check the program. If there are multiple movements, or several art songs grouped in a cycle, save the clapping for the end. Then, by all means, cut loose.
Scott Cantrell
I don't doubt that Hollywood writers are undercompensated for their hard work. I could even be convinced that big star salaries are keeping movie studios from making money (though I would need a little more convincing on that one).
But here's what a lot of people see in the current Writers Guild of America strike: An army of creative types getting doughnuts on the picket line from Jay Leno. An industry known for wretched excess crying poverty. Favorite TV shows drying up before your eyes.
It's hard for the average joe to get worked up or feel sympathy about any of it, much as it's tough to feel the pain of ballplayers unhappy with their current collective-bargaining agreement. Even if you believe in the cause, it's not easy to relate. None of it looks very good right now. Especially not the reruns.
Chris Vognar
Attention restaurant servers: It's time to officially cease the snootiness that nudges diners into ordering bottled water.
"Eat local" has been the mantra of environmentally minded food lovers for the last decade. This year's new credo? "Drink local," in reference to the backlash against bottled water and the championing of good ol' tap water.
In the last year, trendsetting restaurateurs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Mario Batali of Del Posto in New York decided to stop selling bottled water and install filtration and carbonation systems in their restaurants.
Of course, the vast majority of the nation's eateries aren't yet willing to make that step: The markups on bottled water make for an easy profit.
I'll concede that I've lived in cities where the tap water tastes terrible and can actually interfere with the enjoyment of a good meal. But Dallas isn't one of them. Serve me from the spigot here, please.
Bill Addison
Get the virtual carving knife ready, because digital rights management is about to be cooked in the music business. Early attempts by the major labels to keep CD and online music from being reproduced – discs that were unusable in older CD players, surreptitious and unsecure DRM cookies installed on PCs, substandard audio quality for non-DRM-encoded content – were almost Orwellian in scope. But so many roadblocks have popped up that all four major music companies are now finally abandoning DRM as a copyright-protection measure.
Even in 2002, when DRM was first widely used in music, this was the reality: Mass-reproduced artistic content will be shared between people; it doesn't matter if it's a song, video, dance move or printed artwork. It can't be stopped, and slow-reacting companies should never have attempted to halt it because, simply put, the free flow of music is the best marketing tool for that same music.
Even mighty Apple, which basically set the stage for major labels to adopt DRM by using a proprietary audio-compression format for the first iPods, is losing its grip and accepting fate. Not only do later-model iPods play most common digital formats now, but iTunes began to offer non-DRM-encoded versions of its offerings in reaction to Amazon MP3's non-DRM download store, which opened in October. Yep, even Steve Jobs is accepting that DRM was a fowl idea.
Mike Daniel
Bigger does not mean better where nightspots are concerned. But there's always an entrepreneur willing to post another small fortune on a club the size of an airline hangar. The combustible merger of overwrought ego and monument building proves irresistible despite the steep odds against success.
The challenge of filling those multithousands of square feet night after night to offset the costs of having those multithousands of square feet to fill creates a thicket of hazards. Chief among them is the prospect of an unfiltered and raucous clientele that draws the attention of the constabulary. Consider the downtown clubs Purgatory and Blue, which has been rehabilitated as Cirque.
Still, they keep coming. Next up is the 22,000-square-foot Sting Dallas off the Tollway, which opens in December.
Mr. Dallas
Plano now has three lovely, viable theater spaces, each just a block from the DART station in the historic downtown district. But doom seems to stalk every ambitious theater company that moves into one of them. Barely three years after moving into the snazzy new Courtyard Theater, Plano Repertory Theatre bit the dust in 2005. Then, after less than a full season, the esteemed Classical Acting Company closed its doors earlier this year. Scary.
Other groups have stepped forward to use the theaters, but it remains to be seen whether any will rise to the quality levels of their predecessors.
Lawson Taitte
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