Word: gagged
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When movie stars cut albums, they can't help but trigger a gag reflex. Everyone is suspicious of people who write songs between close-ups and mudbaths. Thousands of upstanding citizens spend the best years of their lives trying to take a garage band bigtime and never score a record deal, goes the knee-jerk response, so how can already rich and universally-adored actors feel they have the right to regard music as their sideline? Valid as that complaint may be, a survey of three upcoming records by movie stars reveals that every once in a while celebrity dabblers...
...half. "Acme Novelty Library" #15 (September) will be Chris Ware's return to the form since the triumphant hardcover collection, "Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth." Lauded even by the mainstream press for his intricate design and sardonic wit, this new issue will be over-sized and full of "gag" pages, rather than part of a continuing story...
...Gallup poll favored having female priests. Still, Rome has not budged on the issue. In 1994 Pope John Paul II emphatically restated the ban in a pastoral letter, and the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared his decision "infallible" and "not...open to debate." The gag order, even more than the edict, drove church liberals to distraction...
...Like the shift from network radio to the rise of independent stations, Top 40 happened quickly, between 1955 and '57. It soon became so codified that by 1959 a comedy duo, Arbogast and Ross, could produce a canny satire of the format, complete with frothing DJs, helicopter traffic reports, gag commercials aimed at teens who feel excluded because they don't have zits ("Pimple-On! Adds blotches and blemishes to the clearest of skin!") and, amid all the aural clutter, an occasional song. It would last about four seconds before the DJ ramped up his rant...
...trademark, a cameo in each of his films, shows the director's admiration of a good joke. His role as a casual passerby - as a man reading a newspaper or a passenger on a train - recurs 32 times in one room of the exhibition. The deliberateness of the gag is at its height in the 1944 film Lifeboat: an ad for a weight-loss program printed on the back of a survivor's newspaper features the portly director and his famous gut - in before and after poses...