October 7, 2002
11:59am Monday

JAMES BROWN IS DEAD

I went to the Aron's Records parking lot sale in Hollywood on Saturday and found an old LA Style "James Brown Is Dead" CD I used to listen to a lot in college for a buck. 9 tracks of bass-thumping repetitive techno. Nice. I got a few other things, too, and no, one of them is not Spice Girls "Spice" in case you're wondering.

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I'm out of the Nicholl. The letter came Saturday. It was very polite, very supportive, very extremely overwhelmingly disappointing. I knew the odds were bad, but sometimes I couldn't help daydreaming the what if. I never do that, I always steel myself for disappointment -- think the worst and you can only be pleasantly surprised -- so I found myself pretty open-wound bummed. But it wasn't anything a $1.99 bottle of Charles Shaw Merlot couldn't fix.

Well. Maybe dulled is more the word.

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So in last week's Hollywood Reporter there was a full-page Dawson's Creek ad placed by rabid fans who've organized themselves under the titles "project soulmates" and "operation daisies."

I don't watch the show, which isn't to say I haven't seen pieces of it and heard snippets of pretentious dialogue over the years, and even though I'm not a Van Der Beek fan I'm totally absolutely looking forward to the chaos that will certainly be Rules of Attraction -- although I think not setting it in the mid-80s as it's written is a huge, huge mistake. I love it that Van Der Beek's character Sean Bateman is the fictional brother to American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. That kind of crossover's genius. I hate that they subbed out Bennington ("Camden", whatever) for the University of Redlands in California. The school itself was such its own character in the book and California looks like California, not Vermont. Oh, digression.

So Dawson and Joey were I guess supposed to screw in the season opener last week. Did they? I don't know, I tuned in post-coital if it happened. But the gist of this $4000 fan-placed ad is that Dawson and Joey must be together, stay together, love together, be soulmates together, forever, because that's how it's meant to be. The left side of the ad is text, and the right side holds four pictures of Dawson and Joey in various states of togetherness, with a 30-point text quote saying, "Despite the circumstances, they never stopped loving."

Smatters of text, for your enjoyment: "Since 1998, fans all around the world have been captivated by the concept of two best friends with a connection too strong to be limited by the boundaries of friendship. For almost five years, we have waited for Dawson and Joey to give in to a lifetime of feelings. Tonight, our wait is finally over but it seems it won't be quite the happy ending that we envisioned."

"We thought our moment had finally arrived but now we have heard that more obstacles are on the way for Dawson and Joey and that tonight might mark the end of their on-screen romance forever so we knew we had to speak up."

"If this ends up being the final year of the series, we will feel so cheated and will only be left with a bittersweet ache at all the lost potential. We are begging all of 'The Powers That Be' not to let this happen to Dawson and Joey. They deserve better and so do the fans."

I can't bring myself to go on. Katie Holmes says it best below -- I mean, Joey says it best, let's not get real life and television all confused here.

Can someone hop in there and give her a kleenex, please?