Link Banana

Here’s a dense bit. Two long celebrity profiles that aren’t interesting enough to mention seperately, but do merit a mention.

• This week’s New Yorker has a profile of George Clooney. In case you don’t have the patience, here’s what New York’s Vulture liked about it.
• The forthcoming New York Times Magazine has a profile of (MS)NBC’s Chris Matthews. In case you don’t have patience, here’s what New York’s Daily Intelligencer liked about it.

Hopefully you now understand what “New York” is doing in the title of this post.

I thought Joel Stein had mastered the George Clooney profile a few weeks ago. A.J. Jacobs may have just topped him.

You may Google yourself from time to time, but George Clooney doesn’t. How could he? It’s different for him. It’s overwhelming. Its infinite madness could disintegrate a man’s personality. “George Clooney” pops up on nearly 11 million sites on the Internet. Spend a day browsing these sites and you will find unfathomable rage and baffling adoration. You will find America with all its insane colors refracted through the prism of George Clooney.

But George Clooney is also a brave man, and today he has agreed to spend a couple of hours exploring what the Internet has to say about George Clooney. A sort of This Is Your Virtual Life. Today he will see things that shock him, scare him, and make him shake with laughter. He will see things so disturbing that he will walk out of the room horrified. Also, he will see his own nipples.

(via brijit)

I know I know. George Clooney isn’t really “The Last Movie Star.” But when I finally got around to looking at the Time cover story, I thought it was great and carefree in the way that Joel Stein seems to do better than anyone else.

Clooney hit traffic, his assistant called to say, on his way back from visiting his girlfriend in Las Vegas. He’s wearing faded jeans, black laced boots and a zip-up sweater, and he looks less like a movie star than a normal, un-Botoxed 46-year-old unmarried guy coming over for dinner, but he also looks like he’s excited to be here because wherever he is, George Clooney’s also there. He hasn’t brought any wine, and I worry that this guesting thing is just not going to work out. I offer him a glass of red, and he suggests that we sit on the couch, and soon we’re talking about real estate, and it’s fine, and next thing I know, he’s getting a tour of the house. A tour of the house? The man owns a mansion in L.A. and a 15-bedroom villa in Italy! Why don’t I just show the Oscar-winning actor the tape of me in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie? But he’s nailing this guest role: “I love old houses like this.” “You kept the original stuff.” “It’s nice to have a guest room.”

(via brijit)