Brendan Bernhard

The Television War

Brendan Bernhard
If the first 10 days of the war had been a tennis match, the score would have been 6-0, 6-1, 6-0. And yet, listening to much of the commentary about it on television and elsewhere, you’d have thought that every set had ended in a tiebreaker with the plucky Iraqi......

The Ultimate Reality Show

Brendan Bernhard
Photos by Ted Soqui Monday, 3/17, 5 p.m. President Bush gives Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of his own country: "Events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision." As he delivers his speech, Bush's body, obscured by the lectern, seems unnaturally still. His arms hang......
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Big-City Weirdness

Brendan Bernhard
Imagine a private-eye novel in which the case being investigated is imaginary, and the person looking into it borderline crazy, and you'll have a fair notion of Jim Knipfel's The Buzzing. Not that it's really a detective novel. The hero, Roscoe Baragon, is a reporter on the "kook" beat at......

Street Stupid

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Oliver Upton SACHA BARON COHEN, THE MIDDLE-CLASS wag behind Da Ali G Show, has a taste for a certain kind of deliberately moronic British humor. In the guise of Ali G, a pseudo gangsta rapper and fake television interviewer, he confuses anthrax with Tampax when talking to General......

Fetching the Paintings

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Elliott Shaffner HOW DO YOU GET 110 EXTREMELY VALUABLE artworks from Barcelona to Los Angeles without losing them, damaging them, or having them stolen from you at gunpoint in a sensational heist that will make headlines the world over and set young criminals dreaming? The first step, in......

Private Faces in Public Places

Brendan Bernhard
IT WAS THE TEETH, THE HORSEY ENGLISH CHOMPERS, that signaled the arrival of an alien culture in downtown Los Angeles. They belonged, respectively, to William Feaver, curator of the new Lucian Freud retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and David Dawson, Freud's assistant and occasional model, and they......
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That 70s Show

Brendan Bernhard
Illustration by Jordin Isip WITH MOVIES AND TELEVISION RELUCTANT to take on the subject of old age, and theater preferring to sign up young movie stars, it falls to the novel to tackle life's unglamorous end. It's a theme that, if only by virtue of its unpopularity, almost becomes subversive......

About Brent

Brendan Bernhard
THE OFFICE, THE NEW BRITISH IMPORT ON BBC America (Thursdays, 7:20 & 10:20 p.m.), must be one of the most depressing comedies in the history of television. As in the case of People Like Us, another British examination of the Incredibly Boring Job that aired on BBC America last year,......

Students Against Old Ladies

Brendan Bernhard
Photos courtesy BBC Worldwide FEODOR DOSTOYEVSKY’S CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is one of those novels that generally enters a reader’s bloodstream in late adolescence and is apt to linger there for decades afterward. Like Hamlet, it’s a great story about a violently unhappy student, and God knows there are always plenty......

American Asshole

Brendan Bernhard
I’m tempted to say that the creators of The It Factor (Bravo, Mondays, 9:30 p.m.) should be shot, but perhaps that would be a little harsh. How about just never allowing them near a television studio again? After all, there are plenty of other jobs in the world, many of......