In the interview, he discusses his new film Milk, a biopic about 1970's gay rights activist Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn). Franco plays Milk's longtime partner Scott Smith, and, if his interview with Out is any indication, he's just a straight guy who is surprisingly relaxed about his sexuality. There's none of the caginess of a closeted man, and none of the "it was fine. It was just work" rigidness of a straight actor desperately trying to feel comfortable about kissing a dude. Instead, he's just frank (heh) and honest, expressing an interest in (or at least a knowledge of) "queer cinema." He'll also be playing gay poet Allen Ginsberg in the upcoming movie Howl. All of which makes us like him!

I mean, other than this queasy-making gay rapist rumor, Franco otherwise comes across as refreshingly "enlightened"—a dashing, talented young man with an active interest in furthering his education and a sober, respectably artistic approach to supposedly difficult issues of a hetero playing a homo. From the Out interview, with Milk screenwriter Lance Black:

James: At one point during rehearsals, the idea was thrown out that Sean and I would go to the apartment that we eventually shot in and spend a night or two there just to, like — I don’t know what — feel comfortable with each other? That idea was kind of thrown out but ended up not happening because of scheduling. I approached the relationship part as I would approach any relationship. When I’m working with another actor or actress that I’m supposed to have a relationship with, I’ll look for things in the person I like. My other hero on the film was Sean, so it wasn’t too hard to look up to him — or whatever that is.

Lance: You fell in love with Sean? Is that what you’re saying?

James: Basically, I’ve been in love with him since even before Fast Times.

So, I guess, the mystery deepens. Franco may be hiding some dark and closeted secrets. Or, you know, maybe there's no mystery at all and grim rumors are just grim rumors and Franco is just a straight actor possessed of a progressive and exploratory spirit and I'm kind of an ass for harping on this gay stuff, because why should straight actors feel chased away from gay roles, you know? (Plus, why does Out keep putting straight actors on their cover as if to dangle some tantalizing, forbidden fruit?) Anyway, here are more photos from the issue for you to ogle:

Another person I ended up I.M-ing daily was one of Gawker's most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and into into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. She wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in a high-profile ways—her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship's ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia's naked attention-whoring—"Attention is my drug," she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how much she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her—even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.

If this and the second excerpt are any indication, it's an odd piece for the cover of the magazine. On account of how it looks like one woman's personal journey through notoriety, and not the Grand Socio-Cultural Statement On The Way We Blog Now that some of us were wary of. But also it's not an odd piece for the cover of the magazine, because look at alll the attention it's getting! The Times is just like Jullia Allison! As are we all!

New York Times Magazine Exposes Readers to Blogger [NYO]
Photo: Julia Allison, natch.

This recent Financial Times piece about West Virginia voters quotes a "lifelong Democrat":

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.

Mr. Simpson, that does not even make sense. You think a secret radical Muslim would marry an atheist? Even if it was purely to piss off Christians? Sleeper agent jihadists are not known for their tolerance of Enlightenment principles!

Seriously, West Virginia, we are going to give you back to Virginia unless you can demonstrate that you can handle statehood again. And no one wants that.

• Time Out Chicago apparently managed to convince some that their new publisher was Donald Trump.
• Hipster Book Club was pretty funny today. Our favorite post, primarily because of its use of the word "limned," is this book review by "Juniko Katutani."
• Daily Candy demonstrated an alarming sense of self-awareness today with posts, like this one offering celebrity skin flakes, that were more or less indistinguishable from their normal fare.
• The UK papers went over-the-top, with the Telegraph and the Mirror collaborating with the BBC on a "flying penguins" story that was just an ad for the BBC.

• The economy is collapsing. The markets surged on the news that Eliot Spitzer contributed rather too much to the black market economy, but then things miserably continued on their unmerry way. Bear Stearns just collapsed, pathetically, and now the feds are bailing out the banks. Not usually a good sign! Plus the housing market thing, and the plummeting dollar, and all sorts of other stuff we can't for the life of us understand.
• The politics! Man, the politics. Have you seen these politics? They're a mess! A crazy and angry old man toured Iraq, where he wants us to remain for 100 years, and he's mixing up Sunnis and Shiites, still, on the week of the fifth anniversary of our massive fuck-up there. And everyone is too exhausted to be outraged about it anymore! Barack Obama talked about the war this week, but it didn't receive anywhere near as much attention as when he talked about how the blacks and whites still can't get along. The speech was a total inspiring downer, basically. The response to it was pure downer. Even though most people liked it! But his poll numbers are suddenly not looking so hot against the confused old man. He was tortured, so you gotta like him!
• "An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet."
• Oh, and media. Media's always bad news, right? If we're hearing media news, it's layoffs and revenue shortfalls. Not even awesome old man Sam Zell can reverse Tribune's downward spiral. Also, the internet! If the internet ad boom busts (which it will, Nick Denton keeps insisting), we're fucked. PageSix.com folded this week. After three months! Rupert Murdoch didn't give it a chance—he's not too excited about this internet thing, apparently. He should know! He bought MySpace!
• Stuff White People Like!
• That shit in China? Ugh.
• denton: first time I've really contemplated the horrors of recession
  denton: last autumn it seemed, intellectually, a possibility
  denton: now I'm starting to hear stuff from friends
  denton: paintings taking longer to sell
  denton: (from a dealer friend of mine)
  denton: buyers disappear
  denton: pagesix.com going under
  denton: layoffs where a friend's wife works
• Choire Sicha is terribly lonely.
• It's Easter, the holiday where we celebrate the brutal murder of an innocent man by a tyrannical government. They humiliated him first, see, and also when all the Gawker sites were down the other day (yesterday, right?) we made the mistake of reading the amazing Errol Morris/Philip Gourevitch piece in the New Yorker about the woman who took the photos at Abu Ghraib. It involves a mummified kitten head! We wish we didn't like Errol Morris, then we would have an excuse to skip his Important Movie on the subject.
• A fucking baby moved in across the hall. This is Bed-Stuy! Not Park Slope! The baby is apparently as miserable about the state of the world as the rest of us, and considerably more vocal.

We will say this for "Stuff White People Like"—if it was a list, it might be quite funny. "Expensive sandwiches" is a funny phrase. But, christ, the execution? The writing? We make no bones about the literary or even humorous merit of our daily output, but please compare "Stuff White People Like" entry #14, Having Black Friends, to that once-controversial piece of ancient internet satire Black People Love Us, a site that identifies its targets with more care and pierces them with more skill.

"Stuff White People Like" is a retrofitted Sinbad routine. It's the internet equivalent of Michael Scott re-telling a Chris Rock joke. In The New Republic, the man who attemped to popularize the terrible let-us-never-speak-of-it-again term "grups" not only leveled these criticisms but also pointed out why "white people" love "Stuff White People Like." Three reasons: "it's funny 'cause it's true", "it's funny because I'm superior to those white people", and "white people dance like this."

In The Root (an online magazine this white person likes), Gary Dauphin puts it succinctly: "Usually, even jokey talk about whiteness has a whiff of danger to it, but SWPL is likely the safest, most affable racial satire ever, a loving high-five between friends passing as critique." (He also points out that white people like stealing and repurposing elements of black identity.)

And, yes, those are the intellectual criticisms. But didn't we mention that we're also sick of the hand-wringing? The side-choosing? It's just a stupid occasionally entertaining blog! But then the author—who is apparently Canadian, and thus an authority on what white people like, even though he has friends of varying ethnicites—received $300k to turn it into a book and so now we're probably going to have to hear even more debates about What It All Means whenever this book is actually published, unless of course by then President Barack Obama has led us all into the glorious post-racial fruitopia of tomorrow.

Long story short, too-clever-by-half liberal arts school graduates like blogging, regardless of race. And the rest of the nation, white, black, or otherwise, doesn't give a shit.

Q I was dating a guy for a long time and we both kept blogs. I used my blog to talk about the things that I did or that I was feeling, and although I talked about our relationship, I never talked about our sex life. I was just trying to be emotionally naked and self-revealing and let the world learn a little bit about me. My boyfriend talked mostly about the Bears and his work, but then he crossed the line and alluded to the difficulties of giving me an orgasm in a few of his posts. Even though it is mostly just our friends who read the site, some of their friends read it, too. Now they know that I have a hard time having an orgasm. That is my personal issue and I did not want it broadcast to our friends. We had other problems, too, and as a result of everything we broke up. I am hurt that he did this to me and even more hurt now that he is seeing someone else and has posted pictures of her and posts about dates that they have gone on. I feel like he is using his blog against me, which only makes me use my blog against him. I am frustrated by this whole thing and that other guys may not want to date me now because they can find out from the blog that it was "so much work" to try and make me come.

A STOP IT SHUT UP JESUS CHRIST.

Update: Ms. Allison asserts, convincingly, that this is "retarded," and adds, "if I wanted to talk about my issues, I would put my name on them. THAT, at least, is more than clear." So this is probably Lodwick's doing.

In & Out [TO Chicago]

[Via Swampland]

Call Julia! [TONY]

CORY NYC: V gallos herre
COBRASNAKE NETFLIX NEW YORK: Nice
COBRASNAKE NETFLIX NEW YORK: I think I'm gonna come
CORY NYC: Hurry
CORY NYC: Srsly

There are men, too, most notably Andrew McCarthy as a suitor for Victory, who states with a cocked head and a wry smirk "They say all men are asses and all women are crazy." Oh. Oh okay. The whole thing is even more dreadful than you'd think and exactly as awful as ABC's doppelgänger series Cashmere Mafia. Really, the only two likable bits are the sort-of sexy wooing of Nico by a younger man and the reasonably pleasant Brooke Shields. Can these women "have it all"? I suppose you'll need to tune in to find out, though I don't recommend it. If you are strangely compelled to watch, I suggest you get blindingly drunk on something beforehand (not cosmos). It's really the only way I could stomach another round of watching these dopey neurotics teeter off, in heels too high, into oblivion. Here's a clip of the ladies shopping and gabbing and learning. Welcome to the Jungle. You're gonna diiiiieee.

The phone number is not actually Ms. Allison's, but goes to some sort of hotline set up for members of the public to call and attempt to insert themselves into the tumblrd farce of her heavily-mediated take on Modern Romance. Or just harass her, we suppose, but she really probably gets enough of that.

Good on new Time Out EIC Michael Friedson for taking a chance on a relative unknown like Ms. Allison, especially after that New York profile didn't pan out. (Adam Moss declared our heroine to be a bit "too overexposed.") Please go buy like 10 copies! And marvel at how lucky it is for Ms. Allison that Mr. Friedson decided on The Singles Issue and not The Doomed Co-Dependent Relationship With Two Insufferable Media Whores Issue. That would've been embarrassing. Especially after three solid weeks now of Julia's "dating" column consisting of thinly-veiled bitching about her ex, noted prick Jakob Lodwick. That's that fun Sex and the City lifestyle so many validation-desperate little girls across our great nation dream of.

juliaallison.tumblr.com

It is a movie about hubris, both that of the C.E.O., played by Josh Hartnett, and the United States in the weeks before Sept. 11. There is one shot in which Mr. Hartnett wakes up woozy from a chemically enhanced night at the then-newly opened Bungalow 8, then is shown on the street against the backdrop of the World Trade Center. August has many of the little touches of the era right. There is a cameo by Jason Calacaniss, the Silicon Alley magazine founder, who seemed to be everywhere in those days. The employees at the doomed company compulsively check a Web site with an unprintable name that covers imploding start-ups, their impending layoffs and their large burn rates.

It's Fucked Company the Movie! Bungalow 8! Jason Calacanis! And ominous portent! The Times can't spell Calacanis' name right! Mid-2001 is back! Maybe Giuliani will be President! We're totally founding Dodgeball, see you suckers later.

The bad taste started early in the QUICK RESPONSE AIM chats that lit up the New York gossip elite's MacBooks yesterday afternoon. Balk prayed his scoop would hold up. It did! Jessica Coen—tumblring again!—also reposted the harried chatting frenzy. Former Gawker Media Managing Editor Lockhart Steele made the first recorded "Joker crying on the inside" joke at 5 p.m..

Our own inbox last night was full of depressingly unfunny "stalker" sightings. HEATH LEDGER SPOTTED NOT LOOKING SO GREAT ON BROOME STREET—now that's comedy! Because he was dead, you see. And famous. When it bends... (Denton removed an earlier Gawker post referencing those sightings because, he argues, sometimes even being condemnatory of bad taste can be in fairly bad taste. Just like this post you're reading right now!)

The undisputed masters of terrible taste are, of course, the lunatics at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church. They're the ones who picket the funerals of dead soldiers and run the website about how God doesn't like Carson Kressley. Naturally, they'll be picketing Heath's funeral, because he kissed a boy once, in a moving picture. Per Radar, their announcement:

Oh, the funny videos are already up on YouTube—have you seen the one that couples the video of the body being carried out of the apartment with audio of paparazzi shouting Ledger's name and asking him questions? Classic stuff!

(Given more time and a different venue we'd defend the ancient and venerable practice of gallows humor, especially when faced with the inexplicable surreality of unexpected tragedies, but honestly—"I can't quit you" jokes? Jesus.)

Crowe would like to dispel the ideas that his Vanity Criticism enterprise is a) a po-mo art prank joke, b) making fun of the kids or c) A Sad Commentary On The State of Our Culture and the Vanity of the Rich but it really does seem to be all of those things, and more.

Or as he puts it: "The idea that it is actually getting to the crux of what their work is about is ludicrous and if that was what I was selling then the world would have a right to be angry. I think that a lot of people won't get it - they will think that it's a metaphor for how much money there is at the moment."

Here is an excerpt from his essay on the painting reproduced above:

It is tempting to interpret Isabel Rosen's work, particularly that from her recent blue period, exclusively as abstract art, but this would be wrong. In fact it would be rude. Certainly a painting like Important Items in the Sky, 2007, (right) shares a surface similarity with Miró's later abstract works. But while Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry, Rosen adapts from the world around her, using ready made materials from her every day life. In the work we see a My Little Pony, and realize immediately that Rosen shares Plato's understanding of the ideal society. In this sense Rosen has more in common with Picasso than with Miró, but it must be emphasized that neither Picasso nor Miró possessed Rosen's sparkling pallet, or had a range of stickers anywhere near what we see here.

So there you have it, absolutely no kid-mocking or art pranking or metaphoring for all the money burning a hole in our culture.

Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service
Is this a Matisse? Er, no, it's Mattie's [Times of London]

Also:

Tuesday, December 4
I had a quick coffee at Balthazar, because I live a block away, with another person that's helping me out with another restaurant. I finally made it to Equinox on Crosby and Prince and got a yogurt and granola with fresh fruit at 'wichcraft at Equinox.

Then I didn't eat again till dinner that night. I went to Marlow & Sons and had roast chicken and a lot of Blue Point oysters — I think we had twelve. Then I came back to my restaurant where it was a really busy Tuesday night. At midnight I cooked scallops for the guys in the kitchen, showing them a new way. So I ended up eating six dayboat diver scallops. I'm always in the kitchen cooking, whether it's for me or one of the little line cooks ... we'll try to make Mexican or something.

Anthony Martignetti Plots a New Restaurant Over Croissants at Pastis

Great! One more reason to not want to write about this! It's just much more comfortable leave this story to Daniel Radosh and anti-Eichenwald crusader Debbie Nathan.

Did Eichenwald's editors know how much his memory had deteriorated? The New York Times' own stories on the story don't seem to indicate that anyone was too sympathetic to his "I forgot" defense before these revelations.

But yeah, now Eichenwald's credibility and reporting methods are at the heart of the cases against two child pornographers currently on trial—so we all get to take sides between a reporter who can only remember what he documents at the moment he's doing it and people who may or may not have had sex with children. Ugh.

Former 'Times' Reporter Reveals Secret [NPR]