Jessica Dube Loves Scott Moir

I no longer have the flu, but like almost everybody I know, I've persisted with a kind of half-assed, coldish, allergyesque, malaise-y kind of feeling, despite experiencing some really really really really nice weather, and an overall general delightedness that spring has sprung. I wonder what's causing it:

When I know it’s (way past) time to crawl into the web

and find out what Scott and Tessa are up to.

Every time I trek back into the figure-skating regions of the internet, I wonder if maybe something like this went down while I was away:

While occupied elsewhere I could easily miss it, given how much real news is happening these days (Bruce Jenner!). But it always turns out not to worry, it's still Groundhog Day in Scott and Tessa Territory. Both on track to pass their thirtieth birthdays still lying their asses off with the avid participation (actual help isn’t really required) of the many eager beavers in Canada's media demi-cartel. I bet Virtue Moir didn’t anticipate, back in 2008, that it would become the norm for the mainstream North American media to peddle bullshit it knows flatout is bullshit, and doesn't care. We're not talking see no evil, hear no evil. Not failure to verify. Straight up. Tessa and Scott's mid-00s hoaxing antics matured in time to intersect seamlessly with the current Zeitgeist, which is essentially all bullshit, all the time.

Tessa used to want to be different, Tessa and Scott used to say they wanted to do their own thing, but in this regard they’re just lemmings.

Scott, never change:

“Now that that pressure is gone, we can both
focus on our LOVE … for skating and how much we
love to skate ... TOGETHER”

 

Actually, he could change a little. I wonder if he still gets a kick out of himself still using the same material from 2009.



I of course read this:

Dating

More fun clippings for mommy and daddy's scrapbook. Kirk Penton has the byline.

The rest of Team Jones discusses how they’re dealing with the heightened public attention the curling team has done nothing but energetically cultivate since they stepped off the podium. It's how you do. Bust a hernia jockeying for the spotlight, then smile gamely and interview: "Oh my gracious - attention! Let us demonstrate what good sports we are about it!" 

I don’t think you even have to be really having any kind of authentic celebrity experience, because we all know that if your publicist tells a "journalist" you're getting attention, the media will say you are without having the first clue if you are or aren’t. What is the media going to do – verify? They’re too busy using celebrities to create celebrity for themselves.

************

I was really interested to read in Vanity Fair that NBC's news division was run by a woman who came up the Peggy Olson way (began as a secretary), accumulating an extensive management background but with a complete gap where news experience would belong. She has plentiful soap opera background, and for that matter, why does one actually need a news background, when the way you manage a news division is to commission a bunch of focus groups to find out what they think of the on-air personalities. Then you do what you want, because focus group research only exists to back-up something you’ve already decided upon. The article describes how communication among the different honchos up and down NBC's hierarchy was less than clear cut and aboveboard, and how Brian Williams did what he wanted and reported how he wanted because he was a network celebrity. His supervisors at NBC - once they remembered that's what they were - didn't really care that he'd lied. Turns out Williams' career-stalling blunder was crafting his weirdo apology himself, and delivering it on air without alerting anyone in advance. No no. You're supposed to hole up in your apartment with NBC's crack marketing wizards, shades drawn, for three days until you produce something that makes the lies slide by like butter. Williams went rogue when it mattered most.* Sheesh. Don't ad lib your own explanation for why you lied your face off, fool! Let the pros write it, that's why we pay them.







Speaking generally, I'm left with the understanding that most of the media professionals who ever gave even half a care about distinctions among and between news/entertainment/marketing are dead, or living dinosaurs, and those who work in the industry today don’t know the difference or think about it. Verifying has slid off the radar. I think if NBC is like that, then Jesus, TSN must be even sillier, ditto every television studio in Canada. And once you don't even know what a distinction is, you can not notice the distinction between marketing and lying.

*********************
As I said in the previous post, I've been reading about the seamier, more sordid, Big Lying and Faking, routine cover up, grotesqueries commonplace in Old Hollywood (which intersected with Old Politics and Old Law Enforcement and Old Mob). We've got murder, racketeering, all the dramatic stuff, but for me, the grotesque part happens where the politics of movie marketing really did extend to the most intimate and private aspects of people's lives.

What I find is that, in some cases, while some of the totally manufactured show biz relationships might have been the spawn of a studio publicity department and somebody's agent, sometimes the fake couple actually went ahead and did the deed. For example, on the orders of their studio (so the story goes), actor Keenan Wynn divorced his wife so his wife could marry Van Johnson, who was a huge star at the time, and gay. Van Johnson didn’t want to marry somebody the studio picked out, and Wynn was his best friend, so here, have my wife. Somewhere along the line, Van Johnson and Keenan’s ex had a kid, despite the gayness, and despite the fact that she only divorced her other husband to further the careers of both guys. I feel there's got to be story points missing here that didn't make it to wikipedia.

Then there’s Rock Hudson, who briefly wed his agent’s secretary cause HE was a mega star and also gay.

The Newlyweds

Some private detective, or the P.I.'s estate (or similar) released recordings containing a conversation between Hudson and his wife, where she seems to be complaining that he needs to go to gay-to-straight conversion school, and where she expresses dissatisfaction with their sex life. Their SEX life? Hudson lets his wife know she's not the only disappointed party in his intimate circle  - he shares some TMI with her about why he’s not marathon man with dudes. Check it out, but who knew. I thought the whole point of a beard or phony relationship was not having sex with the other party to the deal, but apparently some of these arrangements were fluid, no double meaning intended.

Scott Moir has evolved (one way of putting it) so much since he was an endearingly earnest, candid youngster full of ideals and high standards, so who knows what he’s doing. When he shams, Cara, mom, and other buffers are recruited always, seemingly so as to observe some sort of subliminal, subtextual propriety - "We're chaperoning. There's no actual funny business going on!" But we are living in an era of double and triple layer of bullshit and who can out-manipulate who, Scott and Tessa right in the thick of it waving the Maple Leaf, so who knows what's really going on with that.

_____________________
*This article made Brian Williams come across like a very very special snowflake indeed.