Me: Thanks so much for sitting down with me.

Jane: It’s my pleasure, jobs, justice and particularly climate change are the defining issues of our times, and with what little time I have left, I want to do all I can to bring attention to them.

Me: Of course, of course. Nice hat, by the way—I think it says, “Let’s Change The World Now!” At any rate, you said, “with what little time I have left,” how old are you?

Jane: I am 77 years-old, and fortunately I’m in good health and have lots of energy, so I’m very hopeful that I can keep using my celebrity to bring attention to these causes before it’s too late.

Me: My mother is 77 years-old and she doesn’t look anything like you. Practically a different species.

Jane: I’m sure your mother is a very, very lovely woman, although looking at you I’d think she was much older than 77. But anyway, I’m from Hollywood and I’ve had so much work done I’m practically a cyborg.

Me: Ha!! A sex-cyborg! That’s funny! I’d love to see a Jane Fonda sex-cyborg. I hope the Japanese invent one after you’re dead. But back to the interview. You can imagine how confusing it was for me growing up to have you on one hand, a hot star I wanted to have sex with, and my mother on the other hand– and both being the same age! Very mixed-up– still am, I guess!!

Jane: Well, I hope you got some help for that. That’s one of the good things about Canada, it has universal health care so that people with mental illnesses such as yourself, can be treated.

Me: I loved you in Barbarella. When you made that film, did you have any idea how many strip clubs in North America were going to name themselves Barbarella’s? There must be hundreds, probably thousands.

Jane: The sex industry is a very complicated one, but what is clear is that women should have the right to do what they want with their bodies, be it free choice, stripping or prostitution. We need to enact laws to protect and empower women so that they’re in control of their bodies and lives, treated fairly and in a safe environment.

Me: Okay, good point. This one is a three-parter: Is acting a form of prostitution? Does Hollywood treat women fairly? Do you have sex with all of your leading men, or women, such as the case may be?

Jane: Yes, I think that acting is a form of prostitution, and…

Me: I have never in all of my years been to a prostitute. Never had to pay for it.

Jane: As I was saying, Hollywood has a long, long way to go before men and women are treated equally, particularly older women. Once you hit a certain age, the roles just vanish and you become invisible!

Me: Which is why you’re at a rally in Canada instead of, saying, selling aerobics videos

or starring as a lawyer or sexy, mean matriarch in some movie. I get it. They say that women in Hollywood have a best before date, a point where they become unfuckable. Do you think you became unfuckable, and if so, at what point in your career? Maybe Stanley and Iris or Monster-in-Law?

Jane: (Gets up and leaves)

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

Westminster Dog Show just happen in New York City.

Big deal in canine world.

Westminster is for dogs what Academy Awards is for two-leggers. Everybody hate show and think stupid, but all like to sit around and make fun anyway!

Good times.

These Heidi thoughts on some of dogs at Westminster:

Mearle

Mearle very stupid dog. Tell by eyes and moron flop to ears. Not much upstairs for Mearle. No way could catch squirrel and probably no understand beg. Think Mearle maybe hit by car and that why so dumb. Probably looking at ceiling fan.

Lucy

Lucy big slut. Tongue out like trying to be all seductive while throwing innocent, come hither look. So fake! Slut Lucy just want treat, she no love you!! Lucy not even that good-looking. Heidi think maybe 6 out of 10, and collar she wear show she trying WAY too hard. Heidi hate Lucy. Whore dog who sex with cats.

Gracie

Oh, look at St. Gracie! She so holy her likeness should be on a cushion! What miracle you do today, Gracie? Gracie pee! ? Oh Gracie, surely you agent of God! Ha! Gracie saint of snobbery! She think she better than everybody, but she just a pretentious faker! Hope she get head caught in wall and everybody in world forget about her. Stupid dog, bad dog!!

Selah

Selah look nice, I guess. Friendly, like probably share toy.

Bug

Bug think he all macho and handsome Alpha stud. Heidi agree. Bug have perfect coat, Heidi just lose herself in rich, yet symmetrical tapestry of colour! And Bug eyes?! Dreamy. Such a strong and muscular dog! What Heidi would give to have Bug’s tongue lick her coat! Oh, Bug can be Heidi’s best in show all night long! Bug can pull Heidi’s sleigh any day of week! Golly, Heidi having spell, feel hot and need to run in circle a bit!

Eisous

This is completely retarded dog. Almost feel sorry for it. Very serious mental illness. Heidi don’t even understand name. Eisous? WTF? Heidi stay away from that dog, cross street to avoid it. Might be possessed or addicted to bad drug and Drano. Has self-harmer written all over it, probably bites off own fur. Show business very dangerous, many pitfalls and temptations for celebrities!

August 15, 2014

Dear J-Law:

It’s me, Michael Murray again, just writing you a quick note to wish you a most excellent and happy birthday! It must feel incredible to be just turning 24, having already won an Academy Award and been nominated for a few others, all the while being utterly adored by absolutely everybody on the planet, including the Chinese, who are known to be cautious with their affection.

Chinese people never seem to like me. I don’t know why but I’m starting to think it might be because I’m really good at ping-pong and that they’re just a really insecure people. Any thoughts?

I would like to play ping-pong with you- we’d be a great match! ( I am gifted at puns)

At any rate, I have to say, I’d really like to feel incredible like you must feel all the time. It must be pretty cool, that feeling. Sometimes I feel depressed. Like right now, as I think about the insecure Chinese and how they hate me, I’m also realizing that I’m old enough to be your father! Funny, that, because it really feels like there’s great chemistry between us. If we starred in a movie together I think we’d become the next great couple.

Jennichael.

Do you know what helps depression? Touching. If you were to touch me I would feel less depressed. It’s a medical fact. It’s called Touch Therapy.

There’s also Sensual Touch Therapy for the people who really care.

It was a real shame about Robin Williams, don’t you think?

Anyway, I don’t want to be a drag on your big day, my depression isn’t that bad! I only get down because I’m sensitive and feel life more than most people! I just wanted to give you a big shout-out and wish you an incredible birthday full of much happiness, health, joy and success, and to let you know that Touch Therapy really works. It does, it saves lives. You are beautiful, staggeringly beautiful, and I bet you have cool, soft hands that smell like poems.

I would love to hang with you if you’re in Toronto for the Film Festival next month!

Michael Murray

PS: Bradley Cooper (pretentious name) is much older than you. Did you sleep with him when you made Silver Lining Playbook? I have seen that movie 24 times, once for every year you’ve been alive.

Kind of like Academy Award Winner—only in a way that brings absolutely no positive connotations.

Back in 1988, when he won the Olympic gold medal in Seoul, Korea and shattered the world record for the 100 Metre, he was an absolute hero. I was a student in Montreal at the time and my friends and I were so euphoric, so energized by his victory that we sprinted down St. Laurent screaming for joy. It was a completely spontaneous act. We simply could not prevent ourselves from running, as every elated cell in our bodies was commanding us to do this.

Of course, you had to be willfully blind to not realize Johnson was on steroids. Even his nickname, “Big Ben,” implicitly hinted at his usage, and his eyes were jaundiced and yellow– a clear indication his liver was over-taxed from the drugs. He looked like a bull, and his mood was always remote and defensive, happier (if that could ever be a word associated with him) in the shadows than in the spotlight.

Carl Lewis, the great American athlete and his Arch Enemy, was everything that Johnson was not. Lithe, maniacally outgoing and resembling Grace Jones, Lewis loved the spotlight and seemed to effortlessly excel at every sport he touched. He sang, sold sweatshirts and played at being a kind of corporation, a latter day Muhammad Ali (only absent the charisma), if you will, and he was everything we hated about America, and then to have somebody as quiet and unloved as Johnson, not just defeat him but crush him, seemed a titanic victory for underdogs all over the world, and it was this that sent us shouting down the street.

IN YOUR FACE, USA!!

Of course, a couple of days later it was revealed that Johnson was doping. He was stripped of his medal and ever since has been known as “disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson.” Post fall, he has been in trouble for pointing a starter’s pistol– from his Porsche– at another motorist while on the highway, was hired by Gaddafi as a football coach for his son (resulting in the son being suspended from the league for drug use), raced a horse and a stock car, headed a failed clothing line called Catch Me, chased a Romani gang who robbed him of his wallet in Rome and failed to catch them, and endorsed a sport’s drink called Cheetah Power Surge, the commercials of which player off the fact Johnson was a cheater.

It’s been this nearly-forgotten way for almost thirty years, and it must get kind of exhausting, but every once in awhile Johnson raises his head from the shadows, most recently emerging for a photo-op to lend his support to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s unceasing and exhaustless bid for re-election. Disgrace, one would presume, and not her better angel redemption, being what brought the two men together under the Big, Confused Tent that is Ford Nation. *1

*1 It’s as if Marvel Comics was creating a super-group of villains in the Ford camp, all readying for some great apocalyptic battle to take place in a future issue.

Like Andy Kaufman before him, Ford has the ability to create and live in the Venn Diagram overlap between the fiction circle and reality circle. Ford seems happy there, with the rest of us staring on in bewilderment, uncertain if what we’re witnessing is self-aware performance art or the Frankenstein id of some moron bully unleashed upon the world. Currently, Ford’s in the midst of what might be his masterpiece, his descent (with brother Doug and brother Randy) into Hollywood where he was rumoured to be attending the Oscar’s and is to appear on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Monday night.

Last night, while the Academy Awards were taking place, Ford was at the Kimmel party blogging fashion commentary on what the stars were wearing:

Pharrel

Look how small Pharrel is! I tell you, he never would have made the high school football team and if he dared to show up at school in that sissy outfit, we would have beat the crap out of him. I love that Robin Thicke video he’s in, though. Crazy hot.

Jennifer Lawrence

She’s a pretty girl, this one, but I have to say I’d have preferred if she passed on the Dior gown and wore that naked blue get-up she had on in the X-Men. You know what I loved about the name of that character, Mystique? Name of a stripper, and as she was always nude, it was perfect! Mystique was way hotter than any of the chicks from Avatar! Anyway, even with clothes on JLaw definitely deserves an Oscar for best boner!

Jared Leto

Okay, this guy played a sort-of-girl in a movie, so that’s why he has the long, Jesus hair, but that red bow tie? Trying WAY too hard. Why not a simple NFL tie, say a good working class team like the Cleveland Browns? That way he could make a statement, “Yeah, I might have long hair and play a rainbow in a movie, but I still like football!” and could still be an action hero or a guy who steals cars in his next movie. It’s weird what actors will do. You couldn’t pay me enough money to play a woman, even though I have tremendous respect for them and really value them as people and hope that they come out to vote and support Ford Nation on October 27^th!

Glenn Close

Has the appearance of a retired tennis player, somebody who would make you take off your ball cap when you went in her house. A real buzz kill. Looks like she’s going to a funeral, but she might be holding a flask in her left hand so maybe she’s still cool.

Lupita Nyong’o

She’s a string bean, but look at those arms! Really toned. I bet she’d make a great wide receiver or defensive back. She probably runs just as fast as hell. I’m glad that slave movie did well. Many of my voters come from slave people.  Looks like she’s wearing Prada to me.

The future in which the Spike Jonze directed movie is set is suggested rather than primary visual architecture. It’s familiar but slightly dislocating, men wear High-Waisted pants, such as you might see in the Civil War, the technology is just a little smaller and swifter, and the city in which the film takes place drifts back and forth between a smoggy LA and a smoggy Shanghai.

Saturated in lyrical oranges and ambers, a dreamy, narcotic ambience presides, as if one of remembrance rather than projection, if that makes any sense. Even in the heavy, coarse fabrics of the clothes people wear, or in the forest imagery existing as backdrop in an elevator, you can feel a yearning for something authentic amidst the increasingly spacious and abstract world of technology.

Joaquin Phoenix, sporting the melancholy moustache of another, somehow European era, falls in love with an operating system played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. He’s probably in every scene in the movie and he’s simply terrific. Gentle, nuanced and empathetic, his performance is the very opposite of the kind of grand scale acting we’ve come to expect from the likes of Christian Bale, and this dose of humble realism is immensely appealing.

The entire movie was appealing, actually, and it felt like relaxing into the lives of friends who were easy to be around. It was intimate but not needy, and it evoked our shared feelings of falling in love, of tumbling into one another and living in those times when everything is golden and funny and precious and even the colour of your partner’s sweater spoke to a greater truth. This was accomplished deftly, in small, perfect ways, and in spite of it being an abstracted, artificial relationship, it was still the most familiar and convincing depiction of love that I’d seen in years, including, of course, the awkward, tender and melancholic drift apart.

Sweet, charming and a little bit sad, it was a fun film to be a part of and it stayed with us, remaining a companionable presence, like an absent friend, as we shared drinks across the street—each one of our minds drifting off to a different point in time, and then happily returning to our present company.

The home-viewing options, although imperfect, are vast, and nothing could be easier than staying at home and watching Netflix at 8:00 or whatever other time might make my life simpler. Of course, Netflix is actually pretty lame, but in my life convenience now trumps quality, so instead of watching a movie I actually want to see like 12 Years a Slave, I end up binge-watching a TV show like New Girl. Such is the world that we, or at least, I, live in.

At any rate, Rachelle and I reached deep and mustered together enough will to go and see American Hustle at the theatre. This movie, directed by the successful but widely-despised-by-actors, David O. Russell, has been receiving all sorts of praise and is already a favourite to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

I liked the movie fine but was far from swept away. It’s a professionally crafted Hollywood film that features some big actors doing big acting in appealing wardrobe. Everybody is good, especially Amy Adams’ cleavage and Christian Bale’s hairpiece, but it’s one of those movies that actually looks better than it is.

The truth, I think, is that the movie was kind of incoherent, like a series of improvisations by talented actors that had later been stitched together by a director. It was as if Russell wasn’t thinking about how character and story fit together, but how each, individual scene would come across on it’s own. All the primary components of a film were showcased, without a film actually being composed from them, if that makes any sense.

Still, it was a pleasing enough experience, and in that regard it reminded me of Argo. Watching it, you felt like you were getting your money’s worth, that middlebrow Hollywood was functioning exactly as middlebrow Hollywood was supposed to function. The idea in Hollywood is to give the audience what they’re looking for, not to startle or elevate them, and movies like Argo and American Hustle are perfect examples of this—well made products where performance, the visible effort of performance, will always trump content. Regardless, the movie didn’t ask too much of us, and it didn’t give us too much either, but it was attractive and distracting, and on a cold, winter’s evening, well, that’s exactly what we want.

Monica Lewinsky 40:

Dear Monica:

I just want to say that it’s amazing and impressive that you’ve lived this long. I think everybody in the media was sure you’d die in a self-loathing pit of drugs, despair and faded memories, but no! You took up knitting! That is completely awesome, and I wish more borderline celebrity types would do this. MC Hammer? He should be knitting. Anyway, I just wanted to wish you a most excellent and happy 40^th and continued success in living an anonymous and not disastrously adjusted life! You’re doing great!

Lynda Carter 62

Dear Lynda:

You probably know what you meant to me when I was a boy growing up, so I won’t get into that here. But sweet Jesus, you were hot. My friend Ian used to hump the TV when your show Wonder Woman came on. Can you imagine that? I tell you, young boys will put their dicks on anything. Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have written that to you, it’s kind of gross, I guess. But I don’t know, maybe it makes you feel kind of proud, too? You are getting old, after all. I don’t mind admitting that women, even Wonder Women (LOL) have always confused me. Anyway, you’re beautiful on the inside and out, and all of us are very proud of you for being a spokesperson for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I’m on a gluten-free diet, myself. Happy birthday!!

Kevin Spacey 53

Dear Kevin:

I have to say, and you’re now old enough to hear it, you’re a VERY over-rated actor. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a happy birthday, you should, but you just need to stop hamming it up so much.

Elisabeth Moss 31

Dear Elisabeth:

I just want you to know that I think that Peggy Olson, your character on Mad Men, is made of steel. She takes no shit!! I mean, it’s a man’s world where she works, but Peggy stands up for herself, changes with the times and learns how to dress! It’s awesome. How does it feel to have your own doll? Pretty cool, I bet. I’d like to have my own action figure. He’d be playing table tennis. Do you know Jennifer Lawrence? Happy birthday!

Selena Gomez 21

Dear Selena:

You know what’s weird? It’s weird that on your birthday I was riding my bicycle by a fancy hotel in Toronto that was being swarmed by gitchy teen girls in really short shorts all waiting to see Justin Bieber, the guy you dumped. What a bunch of losers! Like you, I’m not a Belieber, and you know what? I’m old enough to be your father but still find you really sexy! Funny, eh? Happy birthday, Selena, may your 20s be wild, unpredictable and very experimental!