Got to give it up for Today's Winner; her scrawny head and shoulders tower above her peers.I haven’t seen her in much since I tried to watch that bizarre and terrible FX network show about the gypsies squatting in the McMansions.Also, with Conan O’Brien so much in the news this month, I’m afraid I have to admit that her entire career is largely eclipsed in my subconscious by a silly musical bit Conan did about six or seven years ago, a sort of Sing-A-Long-with-Mitch-type number which had as its closing lines,
Greg Hildebrandt, New York, New York, cinematographer
Jeremy Schonfeld, birthplace unspecified, American singer-songwriter
J. Kent Edens, Johnson City, Tennessee, editor
Lee Grossman, Hastings, Minnesota, Twins fan
Maria Luisa Mendonça, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, actress
Sam Nicolary, San Raphael, California, cipher
Sylvia Kollek, Klosterbrück, Poland, German “Idol” judge
Tripp Weathers, Shelby, North Carolina, member of Wilmington, North Carolina scene
Vasil Siskov, Skopje, Yugoslavia, actor
I became fascinated with the birthplace of Sylvia Kollek.Throughout my labors on this page to date, I’ve been fastidious about listing countries of origin according to how geopolitics hung together in the year of everybody's birth.Thus the USSR, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, for instance, have all made appearances as birthplaces over the course of this month.Fraulein Kollek, a music producer best known as a former jurist on “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, has a listed birthplace of “Klosterbrück, Upper Silesia, Germany”.From there it becomes rather complicated.
Upper Silesia was an administrative jurisdiction of the Prussian Empire.It lies deep within the boundaries of present-day Poland, incorporating also a bit of the Czech borderlands.Klosterbrück appears to be a tiny suburb of Opole, Poland.Even though it’s totally Poland, there’s a decent sized population in the hinterlands of that city that consider themselves entirely German.(This article doubles as a useful summary, and another example of the kind of thing Wikipedia can do very well..)
So for giving me cause to contemplate the odd circumstance of a minority German community isolated in the midst of modern southern Poland, Sylvia Kollek, du bist den heutigen Gewinner.
Dmitri Malikov, birthplace unspecified, Russian musician
Eric Packham, Starke, Florida, extra
Felipe Cordero, birthplace unspecified, Costa Rican production manager
Heather Graham, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, actress
James H. Dargie, North Adams, Massachusetts, CGI animator
Janice Kawaye, Los Angeles, California, voiceover talent
John Walton, Budapest, Hungary, porn star
Paula Larrain, Valparasio, Chile, Danish journalist
Robert Collins, Concord, Massachusetts, sidekick
Robert Jolley, Pocatello, Idaho, cameraman/grandnephew of Ansel Adams
Tony Travis, Cleveland, Ohio, writer/director
Here was how I first envisioned this post going:
BULLETIN
Attention, Unmarried Men Of America….Attention, Unmarried Men Of America….
Today is movie star Heather Graham’s 40th birthday!!!!!
She’s single, fellas, SINGLE I tell you….
Somebody, anybody, please, it’s a longshot, yes, but, c’mon, I myself am extremely happily spoken for, but ONE of you has got to step up to the plate here!
***
But the more I thought about it, I came to the following conclusion:
To really get at what’s fascinating to me about Heather Graham and her singlehood, I have to delve into available internet speculation about the real-life persons she has been linked to over the years.And I’m going to do that in just a second, but first, I feel compelled to point out that she does deserve more credit than she generally gets as an actress.Lots of equally gorgeous women have had far less substantial careers.She’s good in all the better-known pictures she’s done.Even a kind of throwaway cable TV special like Say It Isn’t So works better than it ought to, due in no small part to Graham’s feisty sticktoitiveness.
Today’s Winner may never get married, and why would she?Why would anyone care?I mean, yes, her job is to be a bodacious big-screen beauty, as opposed to a great, serious actress.Time and again in the movies she’s embodied a ripe and juicy but ultimately elusive object of desire.(I’m looking at you in particular, Special Agent Dale Cooper.)As a red-blooded male, I’ve basically been programmed over the years to think of her largely in terms of her hypothetical romantic attainability.
I’m not the only one.All you have to do is type the letters H and E into a Google Image search, and already “heather graham” will spring to fifth on the dropdown list of all searchable entities beginning with those two letters.She’s ahead of “heaven”, “hell”, and all human beings, including “heidi klum” and “heath ledger”.Among all possible search terms beginning with those two letters, she trails only “heart”, “hello kitty”, “herpes”, and “hello”.
But the way you have to look at this, I’ve concluded, is that judging from all the people that the internets claim she has bonked, this woman is a female Warren Beatty.This is trickier than it might at first seem.I think that she’s just been playing the field, avidly, all these years, and intends to go down in history as a kind of Doña Juana de Los Angeles, the envy of all those women who might have wished to sleep with the broadest possible range of men imaginable.It’s a backdoor feminist triumph, really, pun only reluctantly intended.
Christian Steel, birthplace unspecified, porn star
Gregor Törzs, Hamburg, West Germany, actor/cinematographer
Jeremy “Beaker” Rabb, Princeton, New Jersey, actor
Kelsey Shaw McNeal, state of California, photographer
Lisa Correia, Worcester, Massachusetts, producer
Magdalena Warzecha, Bialystok, Poland, actress
Raul Guterres, São Luís, Brazil, short filmmaker/producer
The nod today, in a bit of a tepid field, goes to Magdalena Warzecha, solely due to the fact that she had once a major role in a film directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1995’s Wielki tydzien (Holy Week).Seems like an interesting picture.It’s a shame and a surprise that the years 1984-1998 are completely absent from such a heavy-hitting director’s Netflix filmography.
Amy Hargreaves, Rockville Centre, New York, actress
Brian Smith, Honolulu, Hawaii, writer
Cindy Cheung, state of California, actress
Corky Pigeon, Fresno, California, child actor: not, as I had hoped, an actual pigeon
Eric Milota, County of Los Angeles, California, child actor
Fabian Harloff, Hamburg, West Germany, TV actor
Fernando Vega, birthplace unspecified, Argentine sound man
Gerrick Winston, Chicago, Illinois, actor
Heather Nauert, Rockford, Illinois, Fox News anchorwoman
Ho Lim, birthplace unspecified, Korean actor
Jon Douglas Rainey, state of New Jersey, demonstrative burglar
Joseph Hampton, Urbana, Illinois, production assistant
Kevin Isola, Fort Irwin, California, actor
Can’t help awarding today’s prize to Amy Hargreaves, for being the only person in the entire Internet Movie Database who was born in the same place and in the same year as I was.To confirm that there was indeed only one person who met those specifications, I had to examine the entire all-time list of IMDb-ers that Rockville Centre has produced.Here it is.
Norman Barasch, 18 February 1922, TV writer
Benjamin De Mott, 2 June 1924 (died 28 September 2005), writer/professor
Doris Kearns Goodwin, 4 January 1943, historian
Joey Heatherton, 14 September 1944, actress/singer/dancer/what have you
Maralyn Hershey, 24 January 1949, police inspector/”Survivor” contestant
David James Carroll, 30 July 1950 (died 11 March 1992), Broadway actor
Alan Howard, 21 March 1951, child actor
Gary Marangi, 29 July 1952, NFL quarterback
Mark Hamlet, 5 February 1954, hand double to the stars
Jack Koenig, 14 May 1959, actor
Thomas R. Rodinella, 24 November 1959, editor/writer/director/producer/professor
Joe Fay, 17 January 1960, extra
Ken O’Brien, 27 November 1960, NFL quarterback
Chris McNamee, 5 January 1961, extra
Mark Allen Shepherd, 7 January 1961, painter/Morn of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”
Karen Velez, 27 January 1961, Playboy playmate
John Salvatore, 3 November 1961, extra
John Louis Fischer, 16 August 1963, extra
Billy Donovan and Tammy Parks, 30 May 1965, NCAA champion basketball coach and porn star, respectively
David S. Barron, 10 April 1966, cameraman
Matt Reeves, 27 April 1966, writer/director
John Vogt, 15 September 1966, production designer
Robert Kato DeStefan, 6 March 1967, costume and makeup man
Brian Cashman, 3 July 1967, New York Yankees general manger
Matthew Hastings, 21 October 1967, writer/director
Amy Rilling, 16 April 1976, ersatz restaurant hostess
Rory Albanese, 29 May 1977, “Daily Show” producer
Chris Bythewood, 1 October 1978, production assistant
June Diane Raphael, birthdate unspecified, comedian/actress
Colin McShane, 16 August 1980, singer-songwriter
Kenneth R. Frank, 14 November 1980, writer
Joe Pontillo, 9 December 1982, short filmmaker
Alison Whitney, birthdate unspecified, actress
Karen Ann Ryan, 19 January 1984, production assistant
Noelle Arzillo, 21 January 1984, actress
Brendan van Meter, 13 July 1984, balloon light technician
Rich Drezen, 4 February 1985, animator
Diana Rice, 24 October 1987, child actress
Ryan Balton, 13 September 1989, one-eyed jib assistant
Mitchell Ryan Rodriguez, 11 November 1992, child actor
Rather than anoint an all-time champion from this illustrious bunch, I’ll simply take a moment to single out a few names that for one reason or another belong to persons who have earned my respect.
First and foremost I respect the name of the one person on this list that I know, Colin McShane.For several years we worked in the same building, and I always found him to be an eminently good-humored human being.Also, he earned his lone credit on the IMDb as a voice in a video game, which is badass.
I respect Joey Heatherton for becoming wildly famous in the sixties, becoming a tabloid punchline in the seventies and eighties, posing for Playboy in the nineties, and then sufficiently disappearing from view that most people would be surprised to learn she was even still living, let alone only 65 years old.She was a TMZ/Perez Hilton-darling-type before any of those mechanisms were dreamt of.I respect her now for the low profile she’s been keeping in her older age, and I hope she’s not a total mess.
I respect Doris Kearns Goodwin for her keen good nature on talk shows; once in a while she is able to lend valuable perspective to current events.I wish more historians were given the chance that she has had to expound at length, connecting current events to the long arc of our common heritage.
One of Goodwin’s most appealing venues has been “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”; I respect Rory Albanese for being a longtime producer at that program, though the fact that he’s only still in his early thirties does rim my glass with a wee lime rind of envy.
I respect Brian Cashman, for getting in young, when Steinbrenner’s mind was taking its last licks; also for surviving the precarious pre- and early-A-Rod period in the middle of the last decade, when he almost lost his job.At the rate things are going, he might still be running the show in another twenty years.
I kind of respect Alison Whitney and June Diane Raphael for not disclosing their dates of birth to the world at large.Studying the contexts of their careers to date, however, I am confident I have placed them somewhere close to chronological correctness above.
I respect Benjamin DeMott, whose writings in Harper’s Magazine I have enjoyed through the years.I have no respect, however, for the blithe dismissiveness the late Mr. DeMott suffers at the hands of the owner/operator of this web address.
I respect Billy Donovan for having the hairstyle of an early nineties police detective.Also, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he has a son named Hasbrouck, which is bizarre but which I kind of hope catches on.
I have mixed feelings about Rockville Centre itself.
Alberto Pernet, Buenos Aires, Argentina, short filmmaker
David Perry, Rambouillet, France, porn star
Katreniah L. Washington, Harrisonburg, Virginia, secretary
Kirk Franklin, Fort Worth, Texas, singer-songwriter/impresario
Kristine Maitland, Toronto, Ontario, researcher
Louanne, Fort Worth, Texas, actress/“Gong Show” contestant
Markus Baldwin, Wichita, Kansas, actor/writer
Petteri Jussila (died 27 July 2004), birthplace unspecified, Finnish businessman
Rob Hornbuckle, Melbourne, Australia, sound recordist
Tracy Middendorf, Miami Beach, Florida, actress
I sought comment on the subject of Today’s Winner from a friend of mine who has superior expertise in the area of contemporary gospel R&B.All he had to say was:
“Like Andre Crouch’s coke & LSD addiction before him, Kirk’s struggle with internet porn only makes his gospel music that much more ‘hallelujah anyhow’ [italics his].”
OK fine, I admit, when I was reading up on Franklin’s (mostly) charmed career, I kept waiting for the scandal to erupt.And sure enough, yes, in 2006 he did have to seek professional resurrection from The High Priestess of American Virtues in order to reboot his reputation.
But on the subject of anguish and redemption, I will choose here instead to highlight Franklin’s most recent contribution to the national conversation.And god bless the gospel community for being unashamed to indulge in the second greatest* lost art of secular mass communion, the All-Star Charity Recording.
*…the greatest lost art of secular mass communion being the non-sports-related New York Citytickertape parade (this last link specially dedicated to my Pacific Rim readership).
Chris Mills, Los Angeles, California, NBA basketball player
Giselle Fraga, Vitória, Brazil, TV actress
Jeff Keegan, Medford, Massachusetts, computer programmer
Julie Sergeant, London, England, actress
Marisa Johnston, birthplace unspecified, American producer
Richard Grieve, birthplace unspecified, British soap opera actor
Seiji Chihara, Kyoto, Japan, actor
Stephen Chbosky, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, writer
Tomás Jofresa, Barcelona, Spain, basketball player
I know that I could be accused of laziness for this next winner, but who, actually reading this, would dream of accusing me of laziness?Nobody, that’s who.I could just as easily accuse all the people born on January 25, 1970, of laziness in the advancement of their careers, which I won’t do, not even in the case of Chris Mills: after all, he was a pivotal asset in the New York Knickerbockers’ 1999 Latrell Sprewell acquisition.
Today’s Winner, then, will be Seiji Chihara, simply because his name is so much fun to type on a keyboard.Go ahead.Try it yourself.
Alan Embree, The Dalles, Oregon, left handed relief pitcher
Daniel Tognetti, Buenos Aires, Argentina, reporter
John Stagnari, Englewood, New Jersey, extra
Juliano, Chicago, Illinois, raw food evangelist
Julie Blutstein, Miami, Florida, production assistant
Kym Shirkani, Los Angeles, California, actress
Mark Wohlers, Holyoke, Massachusetts, relief pitcher
Michelle Ihnot, state of New York, set dresser
Oleg Ovsiannikov, Moscow, Russia, ice dancer
Ray Felipe, Chicago, Illinois, script researcher
Rick Youck, Calgary, Alberta, best boy
Robb Badlam, Ogdensburg, New York, producer
Robyn Good, birthplace unspecified, Australian rigger
I yield to no one in my love and veneration of the Internet Movie Database.Still, there are some aspects of it that are just plain goofy.
Take the STARmeter, for instance.Just below the date and place of birth of every name you can access, there’s a strange hucksteresque ranking, an enticement to arcane and esoteric enlightenment.
“Up 678% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.”
That’s the tag associated with Today’s Winner, Julie Blutstein.She was a PA on four productions in her early twenties, most famously the Brad Pitt beard-a-thon Kalifornia (1993).I’m reasonably sure that nothing anyone could have done in or upon the cyberspace, the twittsterverse, the information superhighway, or the virtual reality could realistically account for a 678% surge in anyone’s popularity, least of all poor idle turning-forty-today Julie Blutstein.And yet, there it is.The internet says so.
I don’t know.I love algorithms as much as the next guy.But only when they are applied for an actual purpose. This whole notion of “popularity” as “currency” is just galling and confusing to me whenever I encounter it.Why can’t Julie Blutstein enjoy this, the seventeenth year and counting of her quiet retirement from production assistantship, undisturbed, without some dumb robot STARmeter making spurious claims that anyone in the universe other than me is the least bit interested in her career at this point?
And no, I'm not going to sign up for IMDbPro to find out. I'm an amateur, and I intend to keep it that way.
Andrew Scott, birthplace unspecified, American TV producer
Brian Gaskill, Honolulu, Hawaii, soap opera actor
George Loving Jackson, Los Angeles, California, actor
Jamie Rama, Detroit, Michigan, illustrator
Kellie Hudson, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, acting teacher
Today’s gang, for me, is kind of an eight-way tie for “meh”-th.
In cases like this, you need to look for tiebreakers.If we go with Most Compellingly Unashamed Mini Biography Of An Unimportant Person, two strong contenders emerge.
Our runner-up, Kellie Hudson, has a lot to recommend her.In her self-authored profile, we learn that she is a) a divorced mother of two children with unfortunate names; b) that she took her own last name, Hudson, from a beloved acting teacher whose own last name is no longer Hudson; c) that “After high school graduation, she auditioned and was accepted into the prestigious ‘The American Acadmey of Dramatic Arts’ [sic]”; d) that the anniversary of her ill-fated marriage is April Fools Day; e) that she deems her employment as an assistant director's nanny upon arrival in Hollywood as worthy of mention; f) that she was Miley Cyrus’s acting teacher when Cyrus won the role of Hannah Montana.
Hard to top, I concede.I’ll quote what I know about Today’s Winner in full:
“George Loving Jackson was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Raised by a single mother of two, George has experienced more things in this life than the average person living. George was shot five times January 6, 1991 by an jealous ex-girlfriend which he survived. George was homeless for five months living in his car going from house to house in an out of hotels trying survive in LA. He started working for the LA Dodgers in 1985 vending soda, ice cream, pizza, peanuts, for dodger stadium, which he loved doing for 10 baseball seasons. He stopped working there in 1997 to pursue a career in the entertainment business. George was always a singer/rapper in the streets of LA, but when he started in entertainment, he stepped on to the comedy circuit to make a name for himself, which he has done. George has touched many parts of the entertainment industry, acting, casting, producing, managing, publicity, and even promoting club venues.”
So you can see, it’s close, but I’m giving the edge to Mr. Loving Jackson, strictly for one reason.Though I assume that he too was the one who submitted his own life story, he signed the above summation “Danny Pakowski”.I don’t know why, that just strikes me as a deeply awesome alter ego for a man named George Loving Jackson.
Carrie Nellesen, state of California, student film actress
Darin Ferriola, Fairlawn, New Jersey, writer/director
Eric Porvaznik, Erie, Pennsylvania, documentarian/cousin of Stan Musial
Greg Pitts, Sarasota, Florida, actor
Harvey Lowery, Los Angeles, California, makeup man
Ken Leung, New York, New York, actor
Luke Geissbuhler, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, cinematographer
Marian Van de Wal, Vianen, The Netherlands, singer
Marina Foïs, Boulogne-Billacourt, France, actress
Michael Gay (died 24 December 2007), birthplace unspecified, American film editor
Michela Rossi, Bologna, Italy, production manager
Sarah Lambert, birthplace unspecified, American actress/documentarian
Tom Katt, Atlanta, Georgia, porn star
Shit happens when you party naked.Just as Howard Stern has his rule that anybody who was in any way associated with the making of The Godfather has an open invitation to appear on his show, I feel compelled to praise and acknowledge anyone who had a hand in Bad Santa.Observing that assistant editor Michael Gay (who also worked with Terry Zwigoff on the neither-underrated-nor-all-that-awful Art School Confidential) met his end on a Christmas Eve, leaving hardly any trace on the internet (or at least the upper echelons of a cursory Google search), one can’t help but extend the speculation that the production may have been cursed.John Ritter, gone.Bernie Mac, gone.Little people have big health problems, so look out Tony Cox.Billy Bob Thornton’s music career, and his wildly vain assertions about it, I feel certain will ultimately be explained by some sort of “House, M.D.”-style good-sense-impinging brain tumor; I just hope that it’s discovered while he’s still living, so he can recant on-air to that blameless Canadian radio fellow.
All of the above is a total digression, however, when it comes to Today’s Winner.Luke Geissbuhler has manned the camera on two of the more satisfying documentaries of the past five years, Helvetica (concerning typeface design) and Objectified (concerning design in general). The director, Gary Hustwit, opens up fairly dry academic subjects in ingenious yet straightforward ways.The effect is like an excellent New Yorker article extended and blown up to three dimensions in full color.
Since Hustwit has no date of birth listed on the IMDb, I’ll honor him here along with his cinematographer.As a tribute, here are ten subjects randomly plucked from my thoughts that I’d love to see the Hustwit, Geissbuhler and company tackle in the years to come:
Reno Wilson, birthplace unspecified, American actor
Rosa Mariscal, Madrid, Spain, actress
Stefan Gödicke, birthplace unspecified, Swedish actor
Terry Kirby, Hampton, Virgina, NFL football player
Tim Swine, Venice, California, porn star
Tuuli Matinsalo, Tornio, Finland, gymnast
Val Riazanov, Crimea, Soviet Union, fitness instructor
Skeet Ulrich may yet have his second act.An off-brand Johnny Depp in his mid-1990s heyday, he never actually blossomed into the star he was tapped to be.But he will always hold a heartthrob’s place in the bosoms of little girls born between about 1978 and 1982.That’s an accomplishment.And he’s kept himself out of D-list reality show hell, even though I’m sure wads of that type of cash have been brandished in his direction.He’s an excellent illustration of the principle that not succeeding to a high degree is very different from failing.He deserves consideration for the prize of today’s winner.
Branka Katic is an actress I pull for.Like a Balkan Kathleen Turner, she appeared on the American entertainment scene as a fully-formed Young Older Woman, though not surprisingly she had a number of Serbian-language features back home in her twenties.I’d be curious to know what the big break that got her over here was.Her storyline on “Big Love” was a little forced at times, I thought, but that’s hardly the actress’s fault.She, too, has a long career playing accented fading sexpots to look forward to, and I look forward to it with her.On any other day, she too would be a natural choice for today’s winner.
But I cannot overlook the extraordinary contribution to the cultural landscape furnished by Kerri Kenney-Silver.Borderline beautiful, but with an giraffelike peculiarity, she’s a natural at playing just plain weird.Of all the great work everybody on “Reno 911” has ever done, no one has delved deeper into depths of shame, loneliness, sexual deprivation and depravity, and hideously incompetent policing than Deputy Trudy Wiegal.She engendered the bony awkwardness of every woman in law enforcement’s ill-at-easeness in tough-guy drag.Even if she never inhabits another character in a meaningful way, Kerri Kenney-Silver is a shoo-in for Today’s Winner.
Also, every four years at least, Inauguration Day seems like a pretty cool birthday to have.
