I’M FROM ROLLING STONE: If you’re really lucky, you can interview We Are Scientists for the Web site. |
“Some people cast shadows,” wrote Donald Trump in a 2005 letter to the New York Times Book Review, “and other people choose to live in those shadows. To each his own.” The Donald was engaged, at the time, in giving an epistolary slagging to an unauthorized biographer of his called Mark Singer (“I’ve read John Updike, I’ve read Orhan Pamuk, I’ve read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I’ll read one of his books . . . ”), but his words as usual had a broader and more solemn application. We are all in Trump’s shadow, and we cannot choose. His towers, his fame, his large-waisted silhouette. The umbrageous spread of Trump lies across the culture like an eclipse. And now here’s Season 6 of The Apprentice (NBC Sundays, 8 pm), set in Los Angeles, city of screaming contrasts, in homage to which Trump and producer Mark Burnett have devised a new domestic twist: the winning team live in a mansion, gamboling in its pool, while the losers have to doss down in tents.
The great mystery of The Apprentice is why I watch it. The varnished realtors, event planners, and Wall Street carnivores who compete each season for a spot in the Trump organization (“the dream job of a lifetime!”), the thick-necks and the taut-calved businesswomen, are always terrible people. And Trump himself, braying clichés from beneath his fried hair, is a loud flatline on the charm meter. But somehow those boardroom showdowns do raise the pulse; it’s bloodsport, when the suits turn on one another. This week it was prissy Martin, caressing his cufflinks, against ape-like go-getter Frank. Sly, fluent Martin had been working Frank for hours before they met in the boardroom. “I can handle the psychology,” he sleekly assured us. “Frank’s on the defensive. I think in the back of his head he’s in a dark place.” But Frank, whose face has that slight bulge or glare of corporate psychosis, was too vulgarly insane for Martin’s stratagems. “I’m here for you, sir!”, Frank bellowed at Trump, as if he’d eat someone alive if Donald said the word, just gnaw their arms off. “You see the fire in me!” (Martin got fired.)
Hey — who wants to work for Rolling Stone? Who wants to stomp around the country like Hunter S. Thompson shouting “Ye gods!” through a light crackle of small-arms fire and expiring brain cells? Who wants to penetrate the aristocracies of freakdom like dapper Tom Wolfe, using the exclamation point — ptoing! ptoing! — as a champion fencer uses his sword? Never mind that RS in 2007 is one of the most lavishly cynical mags on the rack, a loyal organ of the celebrity-industrial complex: step up, hot shot! And if you’re really lucky, like Colin the intern on MTV’s new I’m from Rolling Stone (Sundays, 10 pm), your editor will send you to Toronto to interview We Are Scientists for the Web site.
