INTERACT

COMMENTS

It’s officially Spring, although New York doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. We’ve been busily putting together our May/June music issue and licking our chops thinking about the annual Coachella blow-out at the end of April. Meanwhile, your Senior Editor has had his heart crushed, incinerated, and otherwise shat upon by Zooey Deschanel. Indirectly, of course…but still. It hurts.

Ms. Deschanel has enjoyed her status as the archetypal “thinking man’s indie babe” for years now; no one, save Chloe Sevigny, has had as much cool cred staying power (and Zooey never had to blow Vincent Gallo on camera). Girls tend to hate Deschanel, mainly because their boyfriends are in love with her. She’s pale and doe-eyed and is beautiful almost all of the time, even when Terry Richardson shoots her looking like a blow-up sex doll for the cover of Dazed & Confused. And she doesn’t just act, ya hear? Her collaborative album with M Ward—billed as She and Him—was just released.

What you might not know is that Anthem has been courting Ms. Deschanel for the past two years and pretty much offering her candy-coated rainbows and endless hugs if she’d consider gracing our cover. We even, in a fit of what-else-do-we-do hubris, offered to take her along on a press trip to Tahiti in April—all to no avail.

And then comes She and Him’s Merge debut, and a different set of publicists making the email rounds to drill up coverage for their clients. We were a bit reluctant at this point to pursue the duo—M Ward is cool and all, but he’d already turned down having his picture taken by our own Jason Lee in the past, and he’s just not as cerebrally fuckable as Zooey. We considered shooting Zooey solo for the cover, maybe holding a little Polaroid memento to signify M Ward, instead of having M Ward’s own intrusive maleness mucking things up. Again—no luck. Then we saw the Deschanel (with M) on the cover of down-market music rag Under the Radar, and the whole interior spread was basically one long Vice magazine Don’t, which—let me tell you—is a pretty big feat when you’re working with that much raw beauty. Anyway. This isn’t a story about hot, pale, doe-eyed indie starlets. It’s a story about how much we can hate (some) music publicists. A lot.

We floated the idea of a collaborative project with Zooey and M Ward. Considering that we’d be giving them a magazine cover a good two months after their record dropped—we were shooting for our music issue, which hits stands in May—our reasoning was that “something special” was in order. Any time we can avoid floating yet another wank-job fluff feature into the pop culture ether, we take it. Unfortunately our request—which was basically along the lines of, “Maybe Zooey can draw a portrait of M Ward on a cocktail napkin while they’re in Austin, and then M can write a haiku about how much he desperately wants to make babies with Zooey but he can’t because she’s just not that into him, not like that”—was denied. Ditto our request to shadow the couple while they were down at SXSW. Ditto pretty much everything—except the chance to sit down with the both of them at a rented house in Texas, with an hour to complete a cover story interview and photo shoot.

If you’re not in the magazine industry—and statistically speaking, you’re probably not—shit like this might not have you reaching for a proverbial revolver. But if you read magazines—quite probable, that one—then here’s a little behind-the-scenes, “how the sausage is made” shocker. While the music business as a whole is imploding, music publicists (some of ‘em, at least) are busy turning PR into more of an assembly-line farce than it already was. Rather than working together, magazines and the publicists that pitch them find themselves in opposite trenches, pretending to play nice while digging in for a long, prolonged war. And you know who’s the real loser in this whole bloody mess? You. The non-industry magazine-reading person who’s probably wondering what the big deal is about all this. We’re sad to be living in an age where “publicity” means expecting that every glossy magazine in the world will run the same light, toothless feature on an artist; a feature that’s cobbled together after spending forty-five highly controlled minutes with that artist, most likely in a hotel suite with a publicist looming in the next room like a really uptight librarian who hasn’t had sex in a decade.

In any case, you won’t be finding Zooey Deschanel (or the infinitely less crushable M Ward) on the cover of our May issue. You won’t find Ms. Deschanel anywhere inside the issue, either. You won’t find her in Tahiti with us in April. You will find her in a probably-terrible M. Night Shamalaya movie out this summer—what’s with the weird ‘M’ fetish this chick has? You also won’t find her in our heart. We’re hanging up this particular brainy indie fixation and moving on. Tonight I watched 8 Women, and let me tell you, there’s plenty of obsession-ready hotness in that movie alone. IMDB that sucker.

Speaking of movies—we’ve been gleefully watching a really, really bad one make its slow transition through the Hollywood birth canal these past few months. The crapulent film in question is called Run Fat Boy Run, and it stars (and is co-written by) the previously laudable Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead). It was directed by David Schwimmer, a former star of a totally unknown sitcom called Friends. We’re probably butchering the plot here—it’s been a while since the last screening, and we tried our best to forget it all—but the movie is essentially about a loser (Pegg) who tries to win back his ex-wife by training to run in a marathon. That marathon is sponsored by Nike, as is most of the film, including a truly vomit-inducing “dream sequence” which needs to be seen to be believed. (It’d only have been better if a bunch of nu-rave Swoosh creatures had bounded across the screen, chanting ‘Just Do It’ while a Technicolor stream of Air Jordans shot out of their butts).

Poor Run Fat Boy Run seems like it was intended for release back in 1997, but a nervous distributor keeps holding it up, probably because critics were leaving advance screenings muttering things like “I want to kill the people responsible for that with my bare hands, without feeling any remorse whatsoever” or, “I feel like I’ve been raped.” After all this preamble, and literally months worth of “coming soon” press releases, this big ol’ turd is finally plopping into theaters on March 28th. We almost want to spend $11 to see it—if only to catch what last-minute surgeries were inflicted in the editing room to make it plausible. (Anthem’s “director’s super cut” would whittle it down to its 4 minute essence, and even that might start to drag).

Enough bitching and whining for one column. On a happy note, the other night we spent a few hours getting pleasantly sauced on the 52nd second floor of 7 World Trade Center. (We’d almost forgotten they’d rebuilt it too.) The occasion had something to do with the Smart Car, which as far as we can gather gets retardedly good gas mileage and is manufactured by a conglomerate that involves Mercedes-Benz in some capacity. We ate bacon-wrapped shrimp and chugged elderberry vodka cocktails while nodding sagely in the direction of the Smart Car itself, which looks like a very squished, somewhat dangerous Honda Civic. Read more about the project here—and don’t ever accuse us of not working hard for you.