"You have to say that now...."

CNN anchor gets visibly uncomfortable when Nathan Fielder suggests there are moments when she doesn't want to express criticism to Wolf Blitzer given his prominence at the network.

 "We like each other and we talk to each other," Blitzer insists. pic.twitter.com/K3d4l9YovI

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) May 29, 2025

The art guy who fakely took credit for the fakery of "Dumb Starbucks."

Consider Marc Horowitz, who's getting his name promoted in a item by Emily Greenhouse in The New Yorker, after he slapped his name on another man's attention-getting stunt. (Here's where we discussed the comic Nathan Fielder, the Canadian comedian whose project Dumb Starbucks really is.)

Horowitz's history of art-foolery made his claim credible:

In 2005, when he was working as a photo assistant at Crate & Barrel, he snuck his phone number into the home-furnishing chain’s national catalogue with the message “Dinner w/ Marc.” Thirty thousand people called, and he spent the next year crossing the country in a small R.V., eating dinner with some of them. The project, known as “The National Dinner Tour,” made the rounds on local news and late-night television. Five years later, he was selected, from over nine thousand applicants, as one of AOL’s twenty-five “innovators and visionaries.” The judges, who included the director of the Whitney, awarded Horowitz a grant of twenty-five thousand-dollars for his “socially oriented projects and playful enterprises.” Days after he received the prize, Horowitz launched “The Advice of Strangers,” in which he relinquished control of his life to the public for one month, making daily decisions based on the results of Internet polls.

And then there's the comic arrogance of claiming — or as The New Yorker puts it "believ[ing]" — "that the art actually began when he claimed Dumb Starbucks as his own." He took credit "as part of a lecture on appropriation and hijacking, for the Internet-studio-art class that he teaches at the University of Southern California." He boasts about "steer[ing] the global media discussion." He "blurred authorship and caused confusion within the media hysteria."

Greenhouse pushed Horowitz "to demonstrate the magnitude of his most recent hoax," which I take it means that she said something like: Why is what you did worthy of a New Yorker piece, considering that it was perfectly easy to make the claim and its falsity became apparent almost immediately?

Greenhouse presents his answer with insufficient skepticism: "it quickly became clear that, for him, duping wasn’t exactly the point: what mattered was the unravelling." Why believe him?! Greenhouse is too much of a facilitator here.

I'd say: When I pointed out that his hoax didn't fool anyone for long enough to matter, Horowitz instantly rolled out a new claim: that his whole point was the unraveling. And I'd press further: How can it be interesting to watch the unraveling of something that was never even much of a sweater in the first place?

"My project is about social-media appropriation," Horowitz said, appropriating the New Yorker's writer to spread his propaganda. She transcribes his little art-class mini-lecture: "In art, there is an entire history of appropriation: from Picasso to Duchamp to Rauschenberg to Warhol to Richard Prince to Jeff Koons to Christian Marclay."

But the question was about the magnitude of the appropriation. To drop all those names is to point to the appropriators who pulled off big, memorable appropriations, not to establish that you belong in that group.

And yet you got The New Yorker to boost your name. That's the relevant appropriation here.

"Many of you probably know me as a comedian... but this is a real business I plan to get rich from..."

"The owner of a parody coffee shop in Los Angeles called 'Dumb Starbucks' has been revealed to be Canadian television comedy personality Nathan Fielder."

"We are evaluating next steps and while we appreciate the humour, they cannot use our name, which is a protected trademark," a Starbucks spokesperson said in a statement.

Part of the comedy is this straightfaced assertion about law: "By adding the word dumb, we are legally allowed to use the coveted Starbucks name and logo, because we've fulfilled the minimum requirements to be considered a parody under U.S. law." That's transcribed from the video. What I like about this is that the comedian is making fun of law, and he's also perplexing Starbucks, which probably doesn't want the image of humorless and litigious. But I guess they have to protect their trademark. I predict quiet arrangements and Fielder closing down the place with no consequences. He's actually helping Starbucks, and I assume Starbucks wants whatever good can come of this, while squelching the bad.

By the way, in the video, doesn't the exterior shot of the place, showing the strip mall, look like where Saul Goodman had his law offices on "Breaking Bad"?