It’s Possible That They Could Still Be Talking

When Ticketmaster announced it would publish a new magazine, LIVE, many people cynically speculated that the publication was a shameless publicity ploy to promote acts faithful to the Ticketmaster ticket-marketing vision.

While the first issue unsurprisingly did not make any mention of Pearl Jam, we still believe that such fears of corporate meddling are overblown.

To wit: At the magazine’s recent launch party at the El Rey theater, where hundreds of editorial and advertising people came to eat and schmooze, we found Ticketmaster President Fred Rosen on the theater’s stage alternating between pleading and irately demanding that the assembled throng pipe down so the congratulatory speechifying could commence.

“Can’t you just wait five minutes?” he asked, near exasperation. Editorial independence, we’re happy to report, is still alive and well and the conversational buzz continued unabated.

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Oh, to Be a Cat: We haven’t looked at our Chinese calendars nor do we intend to dust off our old Al Stewart LPs, but the Social Climes staff would like to be the first to declare 1996 to be the Year of the Cat. First, “Cats” breaks the record for the longest-running Broadway show. Now Disney, the company that gave us the mouse, has gone positively catty with the imminent release of the home video version of its animated film “The Aristocats.” To further compound this year’s feline feeling, former Stray Cat Brian Setzer was asked to rerecord one of the soundtrack songs. The title? “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat.”

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Your Eyes Don’t Deceive You: Karaoke fans, take note. In the video that plays with the Tom Jones song “Delilah,” you’ll notice a familiar-looking figure with slicked-back hair. That figure is none other than celebrity house guest Kato Kaelin. Kaelin’s representatives assure us that the video was created more than eight years ago, when Kaelin couldn’t afford to be too picky about acting assignments. The song, you may recall, concerns a man who loses control when he catches his woman cheating and contains the lyric, “I felt the knife in my hand and she was no more.”