Crue: 'MTV ... bogged down in its own way'

Motley Crue announced this week that they are pulling out of their seemingly stalled deal with MTV to make a film of the band's 2001 memoir, "The Dirt."

"MTV has become bogged down in its own way," said bass player Nikki Sixx. "It's a channel that used to be hip and has now actually become unhip."

OK, first things first: Motley Crue is back? Man, those headbangers will not die. They'll probably survive the next Ice Age. The only remnant of humanity will be Tommy Lee chasing a bunch of penguins across an ice floe, clacking his drum sticks.

But being dismissed as "unhip" by a relic of the hair-band wars, a group fresh off an appearance on "Larry King Live"? That stings.

But wait. If a passe band like Motley Crue judges you unhip, doesn't that very act nudge you back towards hipness? It's like one of those old brain teasers: Epimenides says all Cretans are liars. But Epimenides is a Cretan.

Did MTV just get dissed into favor? It's hard to tell these days. The culture is jumping unpredictably in five-minute increments.

• Switching jerseys. For further proof that the pop world is spinning too quickly to follow, you had only to watch "The Daytime Emmys" on ABC.

Right at the top, host Cameron Mathison explained that each of the soaps had its own table, as he stopped at the "All My Children" enclave to greet Ricky Paull Goldin and Beth Ehlers.

Whoa, Goldin and Ehlers? Don't you mean the "Guiding Light" table? No, apparently while I wasn't looking (maybe during the previous commercial) the actors jumped ship.

Oh, well, if Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen can win an NBA title in that sickening Celtics green, anything can happen.

• Why doesn't he blink? ABC Family has a fun new summer series, "The Middleman" (Mondays, 8 p.m. EDT), a wry sci-fi cross between "Men in Black" and "Ghost Busters." But it's oddly cast, particularly Matt Keeslar as the hero.

I can't look at him without thinking of Chip (Jay Underwood), the teen android from those '80s Disney TV movies, "Not Quite Human." Keeslar not only looks like the boy robot; he acts like him, too.

- Quick cures. Ever notice how drug commercials deluge us and then vanish? (Well, except for erectile dysfunction ads. They're always with us.)

Last year, it was all Restless Leg Syndrome. Now you can't turn on a TV without seeing a fibromyalgia treatment commercial. Do diseases go in and out of fashion?

- Diesel honey. I always thought Kobe Bryant was the luckiest high schooler in history when Brandy Norwood showed up as his prom date at Lower Merion High School in the Philadelphia suburbs.

But it turns out Whit Wright has it all over Kobe. As seen this week on MTV's "Once Upon a Prom," Wright was the guy chosen over his classmates at Hillcrest High School in Tuscaloosa Ala., to take teen country star Taylor Swift to his formal.

I never thought a girl could emerge from a bus looking like a vision, but Swift pulled it off.

David Hiltbrand

The Philadelphia Inquirer