Salon.com > Mark Guarino

Can Victoria Jackson return from the fringe?

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Victoria Jackson's career was nonexistent. So when the daffy blonde comedian who sang and strummed her ukulele through six silly seasons on "Saturday Night Live" decided to embrace her religious roots and become one of the zaniest and most incendiary Tea Party celebrities, well, she didn't have a lot of other opportunities.

"I didn't have anything to lose," she says, from her home in the Miami area.

On "SNL" from 1986-92, Jackson starred with Jon Lovitz, Al Franken, Chris Rock, Nora Dunn, Phil Hartman and Julia Sweeney, and was a quirky yet beloved member of one of the 38-year-old show's most enduring casts. But recently she's had more in common with Dennis Miller: In 2007, Jackson had a political awakening and "realized" then–presidential candidate Barack Obama was a communist. Radical Islam, she came to believe, was infiltrating and infecting America.

Suddenly the sketch comic best known for turning cartwheels on the Weekend Update desk was making headlines of her own by blasting gay marriage, Muslims and Occupy Wall Street on conservative talk-radio shows and creating goofy sound bites and song parodies that found a home on Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, yes, Miller's shows.

Rap’s killer new rhymes

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:10:00 +0000

Chief Keef, the biggest new star in Chicago hip-hop, releases his major-label debut, "Finally Rich," from Interscope on Tuesday, and the attention he’s received since early last year — over 20 millions views of his music on YouTube, major features on tastemaker sites like Pitchfork, an appearance this past summer at Lollapalooza and the endorsement of heavy hitters like Rick Ross and 50 Cent — suggests a positioning for household name status by this time next year.

Jettisoning to the national stage on a reported $3 million contract would be a dream come true for any other 17-year-old from Englewood, Chicago’s most impoverished neighborhood on the South Side, but for Keef, whose real name is Keith Cozart, the path to fame is complicated: Ordered to live in his grandmother’s house under house arrest earlier this year for pointing a firearm at a Chicago police officer, he is facing court charges for violating probation and is under investigation for his possible link to the shooting death of a fellow rapper on Chicago’s emerging “Drill music” scene.

Is Taylor Swift being taken too seriously?

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0000

Pop stars tasked to deliver adolescent angst have rarely been so subdued as Taylor Swift. She is 22 and last month sold 1.2 million copies of her new album in its first seven days of release, an occurrence as rare in the faltering music business as a comet in the night sky.

That Swift defies the current economic model of selling music is not a surprise since she is a star made for this post-recession era of staycations, “Downton Abbey” and Prius sports wagons. Like any pop singer, she mirrors her time, and lucky for her, she didn’t emerge during the economic prosperity of the post-9/11 era when McMansions lined Heartland cornfields, weapons of terror were to be found in the desert and Arnold Schwarzenegger stumped for Hummer. As is known to any market research analyst, we aren’t rewinding to those halcyon days and our current “new normal” means downsized sales expectations in almost every market sector, especially cars, real estate, tourism. Which means the raised metric for pop longevity is demure thoughtfulness, not tacky opulence.

Fear the almighty wrath: Five natural disasters “caused” by gays

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Look at what the gays have done now.

Hurricane Sandy is just the latest weather calamity being blamed on gay people. Who is doing the finger-pointing? This time, it's self-appointed biblical scholar John McTernan of Defend and Proclaim the Faith ministries in Pennsylvania, who made the connection between gays and Sandy, writing this week the hurricane is “a huge bucket of vomit in America’s face during the election,” forcing us to choose between “a pro-homosexual Mormon along with a pro-abortion/homosexual, Muslim Brotherhood promoter, Hard Left Fascist.”

Here are five other natural disasters mankind suffers because of the gay agenda:

1. Hurricane Katrina, August 2005. The grand dame of gay gales! This storm resulted in flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and 1,833 deaths, causing untold damage and the public shaming of President George W. Bush and his administration. In 2006, Megachurch Pastor John Haggee of San Antonio, Texas, said “God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin.” What Pastor Haggee doesn’t know is that New Orleans has a gay pride parade every weekend! God should have wiped this town out long ago starting when that French ninny Napoleon Bonaparte was marching about in his culottes and passing out copies of “Madame Bovary.”

Stephen Colbert is Middle-earth-bound

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:18:00 +0000

Not since the time Bob Dylan showed up in an episode of “Dharma & Greg” will a star cameo be as bewildering as when Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert appears in the second and possibly third installments of “The Hobbit” trilogy directed by Peter Jackson.

Colbert, a reported J.R.R. Tolkien fan, will not be in the first chapter, which opens Dec. 15, but Hollywood Reporter says he’s a lock for a role.

Which one? Here are five possibilities:

1. Beorn. This weird, old recluse shepherds an army of animal servants and assists Bilbo and the dwarves' escape from a goblin horde. He’s also a shape-shifter who happens to become a bear in key moments of the story. A Colbert? A prime choice if Colbert wants to skip the rubber makeup and flowery robes and just stick to the pinstripes.

2. Elrond. An Elfin leader who is described in the novel as “strong as a warrior, as wise as a wizard, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer.” Colbert’s venerability as a dwarf king is well known to the many little people in his life, but what makes this role certain is his keen wizardly ways — like when he produces exact change at a toll booth, or the time he knew to bring a sweater for a nature hike in October.

“Glengarry Glen Ross” revival shows us how low we’ve sunk

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Maybe it’s the carpet-bombing cursing or maybe it’s the blunt poetry of the Chicago streets, but David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer winner “Glengarry Glen Ross” is always reliable for striking the doctrinaire dramaturges and other gatekeepers of the Broadway stage as a noble beast of a play for how it swings the double-edged sword between a game of grotesque verbal handball and a finely hewn critique of human greed.

You know the drill: A storefront real-estate office in Chicago gets jacked of it prime leads, setting in motion a buzzard’s den of penny-ante salesmen who argue, whine and eventually knife each other in the back to survive, just like they do in the cubicle farms that grow the worst in human relations.

This harsh allegory of modern-day capitalism is not for the frail. New York Magazine critic John Simon famously freaked out on the play, calling it “reprehensible, immoral” because Mamet “enjoys his characters too much, that he revels in their brazen, agile crookedness.”