Years ago, a photo Forrest Black and I shot of Malcolm Jamal-Warner was almost published by Vibe. At the time, Malcolm Jamal-Warner was starring on Malcolm & Eddie with Eddie Griffin, but still best known for whatever it was he did on The Cosby Show. (I can’t speculate because I’ve never seen The Cosby Show, although I have seen a Chris Rock spoof of it.) I admit that I was interested in shooting him mostly because he was a charismatic guy with the world’s largest diamond tongue ring, at a time when tongue rings were still, ya know, radical. Vibe expressed interest and held onto the print for months. I was really excited to appear in such a large circulation music and lifestyle magazine then, but, alas, they eventually passed and sent my stuff back. No idea why to this day.

But now I know Vibe will never be on my list of credits because effective today, the magazine has ceased to exist. Staffers were in the middle of work on a Michael Jackson tribute issue when they received a memo, from CEO Steve Aaron, telling them they could basically go home. Vibe was hit hard by a combination of lack of access to venture capital and the huge decline in advertising, especially in Vibe’s bread and butter automotive and fashion categories, due to either recession belt-tightening or companies plain going out of business. I’m not a huge fan of venture capital because I feel it puts the banking people in control over creative, while allowing companies to spend vast sums on overpriced parties and coders and real estate in a way which can make otherwise viable businesses unable to compete in an environment where the venture capital-funded businesses will soon also go under due to irrational business plans. Nonetheless, I’m not thrilled that the taxpayers bailed out the banks but not really the automotive industry and this means companies like Vibe have to be shuttered.

I would think the Vibe web site would be an asset with some value, and the closing memo says digital did well for them, simply not well enough to counterbalance the rest in this economy, only apparently it is not for sale, so it may have too many liens from venture capital folks on it or something along those lines. At any rate, the issue of Vibe on the stands now, with Eminem on the cover, will be its last and the web site will stop updating immediately and be closed in the next month. I love magazines and it saddens me to see this rash of magazines folding.

When I heard Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg was hosting the MTV Movie Awards, I thought for a split second about whether they would be worth seeing. Hot Rod was an unwatchable mess of a movie, but Andy Samberg brought us Dick in a Box, Natalie Portman Rap, I’m On A Boat, and more awesomeness. My brother went one year and reported it was unutterably dull, but staying home and TiVo can assist with that. But I only really thought about even TiVoing it for a split second. I suspect Eminem, who walked out of the proceedings, wishes he had not even TiVoed it as well.

I wondered what remotely cool or remotely music-related movies even came out last year, besides Twilight? From all reports, the only notable events of the MTV Movie Awards evening were the premiere screening of the Twilight New Moon Trailer (which we’ll have for you here in a moment) and that grody Sacha Baron Cohen creep being dropped on Eminem. Basically Sacha Baron Cohen put on this white outfit which riffs unoriginally on the already satirical White Gold heavy metal milk commercials and shows his ass (which ranks lower than Fred Durst’s ass on the List of Asses Nobody Wants to See) and MTV flew him over the audience on a wire and dropped him in Eminem’s lap, crotch up. If multiplatinum rapper and movie star Eminem, who has the best gothic video on MTV right now, ups the MTV Movie Awards star quotient by gracing them with his presence, how disrespectful and unappreciative is it to stick an unappealing stranger’s tiny groin in his face?

If you don’t know who Sacha Baron Cohen is, count yourself fortunate, but he is basically this disingenuous pseudo-comedian who never owns his own stupid presentation. Sacha Baron Cohen always pretends that he is just playing a character, but most of his characters are exaggerations of someone trying pathetically hard to be cool. The ego protection Sacha Baron Cohen is engaging in there is so obvious, just in case someone notices that he is not cool at all, that I find him painful to watch under the best of circumstances.

I guess one could argue that Eminem plays spoof characters in some of his videos, but I feel that is deeply different because one has a sense that sometimes Eminem is clowning around and sometimes he is being raw and real. And nobody would greenlight flying Eminem over the MTV Movie Awards audience and dropping him in Bret Michaels’ lap, crotch up.

It is now the morning after and Twilight unsurprisingly swept the MTV Movie Awards with standard award show fare like Best Movie and MTV special awards like Best Fight Scene. So Robert Pattinson who played vampire leading man Edward Cullen, Kristen Stewart who played viewpoint character Bella Swan, and Cam Gigandet who played bad boy vampire James all spent a lot of time clutching boxes of gold popcorn on stage. Apparently the other music-related movie worthy of MTV consideration was High School Musical 3: Senior Year which starred Zac Efron. Zac Efron is nice-looking enough and I saw him host SNL and so I can’t say whether High School Musical 3: Senior Year was robbed when Zac Efron lost in the Best Kiss category he was nominated in which was won by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from Twilight. I’m not sure what Zac Efron did win, as even the clips from the MTV Movie Awards show this year are kinda unwatchable and IMDB shows no 2009 wins, but, when he was called to the stage by Sacha Baron Cohen, who was apparently a presenter, poor Zac Efron, being put on the spot, looked like he wanted no part of it and was considering following Eminem out of the building. Edit: MTV reports that, although most viewers missed it in the hubbub, Zac Efron won for Best Male Performance (as opposed to Robert Pattinson’s win for Best Breakthrough Performance Male Winner.)

I’m going to get on posting that Twilight New Moon trailer now, but, seriously, I think Eminem should get a Get Out of Jail Free card for pistol-whipping Sacha Baron Cohen any time he feels like it. Ideally without warning and in the (tiny) crotch area.

Some pundits are suggesting today that Eminem was not really annoyed and just acted angry as part of the gag. If Eminem was not actually disgusted, then he deserves an Oscar or at least an MTV Movie Award for his convincing performance.

So apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, best-selling author Tucker Max challenged Nick Denton’s huge blogging empire’s flagship Gawker to a $10,000 bet over the likely domestic gross of his upcoming movie and Gawker declared Jihad on Tucker Max over everything. Not in that order.

Full disclosure: I have drunk beer with Tucker Max and I’ve shaken hands with one of the Rudius Media bloggers. I have partied in Vegas with large portions of the Gawker staff, enjoyed Gawker’s hospitality in Austin, and shaken hands with Nick Denton. I think it is fair to say that I don’t have a horse in this race because I genuinely like and enjoy the work of people in both camps.

Now, Fleshbot is the main Gawker blog I read with any regularity, although, given that I quoted ValleyWag earlier today, obviously it is not the only one I read. So I don’t know how I missed the Gawker flagship’s 20 entries this month about how much they loathe Tucker Max. I worried that I might be being too rough on Joshua Todd and Buckcherry earlier this week, but, damn, compared to Gawker, I am sweetness and light and the personification of all that is gentle.

I wrote a thing a while back where I praised Tucker Max’s writing and general brilliance, but I mentioned that he was coy in his stories about use of cocaine. Tucker Max is very sensitive to people having misimpressions of him and he explained to me that it was important to him that he was about hanging out with beer and hot chicks and not about hookers and blow and that he felt beer and hot chicks were more fun. I’ve never been big on choosing just one scene, if more than one has something to offer, and there was probably more blow than beer in the room we were standing in, so I told him I’d have to contemplate that. I then printed a retraction of my implication that he might do drugs. And Tucker was still stressed out that I might not have been clear enough.

At the time, I thought he was being more sensitive than he needed to be, but, having read through some of the Gawker articles where everything the guy does is put under such a microscope, it makes more sense to me now. Wikipedia, which almost never takes any responsibility for how badly someone is being falsely maligned or lauded, actually locked the Tucker Max entry about a week ago. If Wikipedia actually makes any effort to control the rampant wikiality of an entry, then you know it is serious. Either that or Tucker Max has superpowers. In addition to pointing out that editing Tucker Max’s Wikipedia entry must be a full time job, on their site, Gawker assassinated everything about Tucker Max from his writing to disgruntled former employees to what swag he gave away at his movie’s wrap party to how cutesy he is with his dog to entries friends of his have written about him during arguments and since removed from the web.

As a big fan of Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I don’t get what it is about him that drives some people into a complete frenzy of hate and disgust. Folks who are allergic to him generally complain about frat boy something or other and refer to his work as fratire, but Tucker Max says he has never belonged to a fraternity and I believe him.

I’m not excited about I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell being made into a movie. I recently watched the Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors flick on TiVo and it was painful, even mostly fast forwarding. The problem with bringing memoir to the big screen is that the aspect of high quality memoir which is most interesting is the memoirist’s perspective. I have read almost all of Augusten Burroughs‘ books and enjoyed them, but the Running with Scissors movie was wretchedly unwatchable. And Running with Scissors had Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Evan Rachel Wood in it.

Tucker Max quotes Eminem’s lyrics “I love being hated, it’s great, let’s me know that I made it” when talking about the Gawker month-long hatefest. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a sociopath. The line between self-actualized individual and sociopath is soooooooo thin. But I think being vilified bothers both Tucker Max and Eminem, especially being vilified inaccurately. People always like to laugh about the idea of someone getting upset over something on the internet, but we live in a digital age and everyone needs to get their heads around the fact that what happens on the internet is real life now. You can step away from the keyboard, but something that tens of thousands of people read is still going to have an impact.

Sometimes you just have to live your life on your own terms and deal with the fallout. In this case, Tucker Max says that his film needs to do about $20 million gross to definitely be in the black. He has invited Gawker to wager what they feel will be the movie’s earnings and they win if it comes in beneath their bet and Tucker wins if it does better than they gamble. I’d say that a 20 entry media blitz on Gawker might be worth a few grand, but Hamilton Nolan and the rest of the Gawker crew write too well for a hostile deconstruction from them to equal good publicity. I’m very curious to see if Gawker will accept Tucker Max’s wager, all proceeds to be donated to charity of course. After that, I’ll be very interested next spring, when I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is released, to see who wins the bet. I hope I haven’t offended any of the involved parties, but, if I have, I’m okay with dealing with the fallout.

When I was a little kid, my compatriots would frequently use the expression “I don’t care”, but I was always careful to say “I care, but not enough to change my behavior.” Everybody likes a smartass, right?

Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to problem number two. I dislike it when companies use a fake female spokesperson and have her pretend to run the company or some such, just so they can get some feminist points or chick support. I dislike it the same way I do when large corporations will back some supposedly indie project and send out phony press releases about what a bootstrap operation said project is. Basically, I think that a certain strata of American culture has figured out how to co-opt their own opposition. So Juno looks like a hip little film, with a spunky portrayal of how intelligent teenage girls approach the world. As played by Ellen Page, even in the trailers, the title character Juno looks like the sort of girl any teenage girl would want to be. Only the storyline of Juno has a teenage girl getting pregnant, deciding not to get an abortion, and giving her baby up for closed adoption to a woman in the middle of a divorce. This is pro-life without even the benefit of family values. Are the baby boomers really that scared that social security is going to go bust if younger generations don’t start breeding immediately?

I’m pro-choice, but I’ve never had an abortion. I realize that there is some powerful biology there and you don’t necessarily 100% know what you would do, until you are dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. So I’m not saying it is wrong for a teenage girl to bring her baby to term and then give it up via the out-dated closed adoption method where she can never meet her offspring, even if the child wants to meet her. I do, however, know that every single woman I know, who has had an abortion and saw Juno, came out of the movie feeling terrible about having had an abortion. So, if the film was not intended as pro-life propaganda being disseminated from within the castle walls of hipsterdom, then it was a poorly done movie, because that was surely the impact it had on its audience. If it was intended to cause more unplanned pregnancies to be brought to term, then good job, guys.

Witness the recent much-publicized pregnancy pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the fourfold increase in pregnancies at Gloucester High was the result of something which could be described with so sinister a term as “pact”, the fact remains that teen pregnancy appears to be on the rise in some surprising places. My mother mentioned this teen pregnancy story to me when it first broke and my first thought was that this was another example of co-option of cool to promote a counterintuitive agenda. Sometimes certain cultural patterns look obvious to me, but I’m not sure if others will share my view. Well, turns out high schools are now referring to this as “The Juno Effect” and this apparently annoys actor Jason Bateman, who played the prospective adoptive father.

You can be damn sure that, if kids were stealing cars after playing Grand Theft Auto, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started killing themselves after listening to Ozzy Osbourne, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started swearing after listening to Eminem, connections would be drawn. So, now that the shoe is on the other ideological foot, connections can damn well be drawn here too. Juno causes teen pregnancy. The film only cost $6.5 million to make and has grossed over $100 million, so maybe they can use some of those profits to help out all the unwed mothers they have inspired.