Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.
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This week, various editions of Vogue magazine published a lengthy piece on the failed romance of James Dean and Pier Angeli, born Anna Maria Pierangeli. The original Italian article by journalist Giacomo Aricò, published on Wednesday, and the truncated English adaptation published on Friday contain a number of misrepresentations and errors that came from the telephone game of repetition and PR that passes for “celebrity” coverage in our media. But the broader purpose of the piece, as the author writes in Italian, is to deny that Dean was either homosexual or bisexual, a remarkable claim for a major magazine in 2024. Let’s take a look at some of the ways the Vogue pieces went wrong.
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever Matt Singer | Putnam | Oct. 2023 | 352 pages | ISBN: 9780593540152 | $29 Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert spent so long reviewing movies on television that, when Siskel died in 1999, I could not remember a time when I hadn’t watched them. They started their first review program six years before I was born (I’m 42), and as far back as I can remember, I can still picture my parents tuning in to hear about the newest movies—movies that, for the most part, they would only see on rented VHS tapes, months later. I tended to prefer Ebert to Siskel, not for any dramatic reason except that my local paper carried Ebert’s print reviews but not Siskel’s, so I felt like I understood his thinking more. Even when I was a teenager, Siskel & Ebert was still appointment viewing, and I recall setting extra time on the VCR to record the show when the local ABC affiliate’s sports coverage pushed it to odd hours of afternoon or overnight and we weren’t sure exactly when it would start.
Note: This essay is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter. This past weekend, Tom DeLonge, the punk rocker and UFO media entrepreneur, released his first feature film, Monsters of California, direct to streaming. DeLonge served as both director and co-writer of the film, which follows a teenage boy and his friends as they investigate conspiracies about aliens and the paranormal around San Diego only for the hero to achieve New Age enlightenment through realizing his place in the cosmos. Indifferently acted and roughly written, the movie is an amateurish production all the way around, the New Age equivalent of those Christian “movies” that badly approximate a Hollywood production. Like those evangelical films, Monsters also has a spiritual message, that all is consciousness, we are but specks a pantheistic tapestry, and that “advanced” aliens are our teachers and guides toward enlightenment.
Note: This article is cross-posted from my Substack because Twitter is limiting links to Substack. I think you'll find the historical content interesting. Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known. All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.
Last this week, we learned that Donald Spoto, the celebrity biographer, died at the age of 81. Spoto produced many well-regarded biographies, including Rebel, about James Dean. I found that book particularly useful in writing my own manuscript for my James Dean book. Spoto was kind enough to read an early draft of my book before his death and offered both useful critical notes and a blurb as endorsement: “His new book The Rebel and the Fear is sure to evoke spirited debate, not least when he addresses the lure and lore still attached to that hapless young actor, James Dean (1931-1955).” Spoto will be missed.
This year wasn’t quite as bad as 2021, so I can’t be too upset at a year that, if nothing else, did not get appreciably worse. On the other hand, nothing really improved either. Between inflation and further work cuts in my failing industry, it’s been hard. When a prominent astrologer said this year would be the best of my life, I wasn’t sure whether that was a promise or a threat. It’s a good thing astrology is bunk, or else I would be painfully depressed to think this was the best things will ever get.
In a more general sense, this was a year devoted mostly to UFOs, which dominated the paranoid paranormal discourse for the first ten months, until Atlantis made a late run for the crown. Here, then, is the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog posts and newsletter. Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount James F. Hopgood | Luminare Press | 2022 | 282 pages | 979-8886790108 | $18.95 Note: This review is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter, The current issue of Mojo, a music magazine, features an illustration of James Dean driving toward the reader in the Porsche Spyder in which he died. The singer Weyes Blood sits beside him as he speeds away from a flying saucer, its tractor beam chasing them toward Dean’s inevitable death. The striking image illustrates a line from Blood’s new song “Grapevine,” but the unusual portrait also suggests a longing to follow Dean into death, as though his demise were an act of transcendence, an event of cosmic importance. It’s not the kind of image you find associated with most celebrities. You don’t see much fan art of political junkies depicting themselves riding through Dealey Plaza alongside JFK, nor are there many beatific images of Marilyn Monroe as a psychopomp guiding fans to heaven.
This week, Rep. André Carson announced that his subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee would hold a hearing next week on the Pentagon’s lack of transparency on UFOs. It is the first UFO hearing in Congress since 1966. Naturally, the New York Times brought back its biased reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, both with conflicts of interest, to cover the story. Both reporters are longtime members of the UFO community. Blumenthal has openly spoken of his “transcendent” belief in the paranormal power of UFOs, and Kean spent much of the last year working for Bob Bigelow, a key figure in the government UFO story. She was also the longtime romantic partner of the late Budd Hopkins, an alien abduction researcher funded by Bigelow.
As part of the research for the new book I am crafting out of parts of the one that didn’t garner much interest, I have been researching government persecution of queer people in the postwar era. In so doing, I came across a rather dramatic fact that led me down a statistical rabbit-hole as I hunted the source of a seemingly dramatic fact that turned out not be what it seemed.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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