December 2006 Archives
According to The Fader:
Top Six Ghetto Pass Applicants of 2006
6. Gwen Stefani*
5. Nelly Furtado
4. Wilmer Valderamma
3. Fergie
2. Bow Wow*
1. JR Rotem
*Continuation of a multi-year process, a la Justin Timberlake
Um, how is wasted grinding and Jaeger shots at corny bridge-and-tunnel clubs in Midtown an application for a ghetto pass? I mean really?
Otherwise, great list, darlings. Divine. Just don't fuck wit ma juvie, si?
I spent Xmas in Waterbury, CT, with three generations of Irish Catholics -- old Dems of the Kennedy persuasion -- learning all the local bon mots about Waterbury's long history of corruption: all the mayors spend time in the clink eventually, the high school auditorium was built in the same year as the Rose Bowl (and for the same price), Lamont's campaign manager's election-losing commentary, "the great thing about this city is you still vote even after you're dead."
And Waterbury is where the great and recently passed James Brown was set to kick off his latest world tour this Wednesday, in the restored Palace Theater. RIP James Brown, the godfather of soul, the soul of the movement, the magical motion, the greatest performer that ever lived.
I can't believe the Silver Spoon closed and these people are taking its spot. What does "Shoot Hoops Not Guns" even mean?!
NY mag's Chris Smith blogs on the Times' lapse in reportage regarding Atlantic Yards, the hematoma of a development that's being plopped in the middle of Brooklyn (not long from the spot of yours truly) and are Frank O. Ugly to boot:
"Individual Times reporters have written significant stories along the way. But the Times, collectively, has never demonstrated the will or interest to examine Atlantic Yards in anything close to the proportion demanded by one of the biggest real-estate schemes in the history of the city. Maybe it's because Ratner is the Times' partner in building the paper's new Eighth Avenue headquarters. Maybe it's because Times editors think Atlantic Yards is an objectively good idea. Maybe it's because the Times, along with the rest of the city's mainstream media, does a lousy job of covering anything outside our midtown backyard. Whatever the reasons, the effect has been an abdication of the Times' civic and journalistic responsibility.
Alan Hevesi's driver shenanigans cost the citizenry $200,000 (which he's repaying) and affected the lives of no one; Atlantic Yards is floating $1.6 billion in state-backed debt, and Brooklyn's 2.5 million residents will feel the project's impact every day. "
Friends,
Shareefa, whose album Point of No Return ruled late autumn for me (she especially slays "No One Said"), tells Concrete Loop that she watches The Wire (SPOILER!!! ALERT!!! Do not read if you have not seen the last episode of season 4!!!!!)
Love,
NERD NERD
Portland artist damali ayo has released a how-to pamphlet on eliminating racism as part of her "now art projects" (which also includes the terrific idea of handing out Black History Flash Cards at Halloween). She compiled the pamphlet by asking 2000 people for their thoughts -- it resulted in a really practical, simple step-by-step guide broken into two parts, one for white people and one for people of color. Very awesome, read now.
"Yeah, I'd definitely say that any asshole, who, armed with a bootleg copy of a show, posts a clip of a major character being killed on YouTube or headlines a website posting with "XXname hereXX R.I.P." has pretty much defined himself before the world as a hopeless, useless premature ejaculator."
I totally forgot to put Nelly Furtado's "Do It" on my best singles of 2006 list. Let this be an addendum: Nelly Furtado's "Do It," which sounds like taking a job as a lip gloss salesgirl inside a pinball machine, is on my best singles of 2006 list, with her reggaetony track "No Hay Igual" being my second-favorite song from that album. FYI
Hit them up. Joschi is like the best German ex-ballet dancer / body sculpting yoga teacher ever.
= Hipster mating call
In case you are sitting flank w/me at the nerdfest: In my original write-up for "The Clipse" (#7 Hell Hath No Fury) for Pitchfork's "Top 50 albums of 2007" feature, I had originally called Pharrell's beats "gruesome and impersonal as a speculum," however the "speculum" part was edited out. Still, I keep returning to the idea of Pharrell's beats on Hell Hath as analogous to a speculum, which is the metal gynocological instrument meant to crank open your vaginal cavity so your ob-gyn can get a look-see at the ole cervix, before taking a cotton swab, or "pap smear," to ensure your overall cervical health.
Like Pharrell's beats for Hell Hath No Fury, speculums are penetrating, cold, necessarily invasive, utterly asexual, go down a little easier if you're lubed in some way -- and, of course, somewhat gruesome and impersonal. If you have never experienced one, it is probably because you are too young, a male, or do not have health insurance, in which case I recommend hollering at Planned Parenthood because they are sliding scale.
Some models also resemble a duck or a pelican.
quack, quack
"Speculum-like" is also an accurate way to look at how The Clipse approach women on Hell Hath: with a certain clinicism and manner of distance.
Shopping, on the other hand -- whoa. Peep toe pumps, holler.
At the first holiday party me and B hit, at some point between "breakbeats," rum & Tings (believe THAT) and fake-cheeze soy crisps (yum), me and Dave T broke down the fearsome geographies of our rural youths, reminiscing on the places we visited when we wanted to scare the shit out of ourselves. His were in the wooded Carolinas and sounded vaguely Blair Witch Project, as they involved disappearing slaughtered deer and like, a lodge. But that's his story to tell. My story is that I had two. The first was a cemetery, of course, 15 minutes outside of Cheyenne, WY where I grew up, which was supposedly built in the 19th Century atop a "Plains Indians Burial Ground." Western Expansion remains a prominent theme in Cheyenne, moreso in other places I've been in the west (but then I've never had the pleasure of visiting Montana). "Indians" tend to motif and mascot all schools, hotels and whatever-whatever, and yet Native Americans are scarce outside the rez on Ft Washakie, about a 12 hour drive NE of Cheyenne (the 2003 census says there were 6460 native americans living in Wyoming at the time, in a total state population of around 500,000 – and Cheyenne has been a city of cowboys, Mexicans and military since the turn of the last century). The idea of "Native American Burial Ground," as a sacred and vengeful place (i.e. Pet Sematary), is a fear partly predicated on guilt and reciprocation, because it presumes the knowledge, and cognizance, of a great injustice -- the desecration of a people, one so profound that even the resting ground of its dead is summarily annexed. Also, I bet some people perpetuated the curse idea in order to stop the conquistadors from fucking up sacred ground.
Surely there's an essay about this somewhere. I can't think of any parallels where a cultural fear has manifested itself in pop culture in the same way -- all the typical horror tropes that come to mind are built on good old fashioned protestant moral-building, i.e. "screwing teenagers always get axed first."
So in high school we'd drive up there to scare ourselves. Even without the "indian burial ground" concept. flat plains are inherently eerie, Wyoming nights are terribly dark, its lack of populace is isolating. The people who do live there will exercise the second amendment.
The other fearsome /fear-building place of my youth: abandoned nuclear missile silos in a crater in the country, unguarded enough that we Boones-thirsty teenagers threw parties there. They were large concrete structures with rotund steel girders pointing 45 degrees into the sky, which had clearly once cradled huge missiles, ready to pop off at Reagan's first Xanax stupor. These were the years Doug Coupland was bonerizing the radioactive flash of the final countdown (in the Clinton administration no less, finally free to work out his cold war anxiety). Me and my friends ate up all Coupland’s anomic Gen-X books, but like, our teen apocalypse fears felt a little more, how you say, tactile.
Because when your hometown displays lifesize replicas of "peacekeeper" nuclear-missiles as proudly as it displays its statue-homage to "first woman governor" Esther Hobart Morris, nuclear fear is not so far-flung. ERRRY DAY I LIVED IT. During the Cold War, before I was even a tween, my bully of a cousin (now Mormon) tortured me by saying, "You know Julianne, if the Russians attack, Cheyenne will be the first place to go." In retrospect, he was probably wrong, although one arrogance of the US military is that it likes to floss. And considering the prominent monument to our phallic stockpile that still flanks the entrance of FE Warren Airforce Base, they might well have faxed Gorbachev with the exact coordinates.
Also PS. Special to Dick Cheney, '90s style: EET FUK
Party-hopping: After the rum 'n' Tings, delicioso to the max, B and I stood on the corner of Lenox in the cold, waiting for a cabbie that would take us from up in Harlem down to Carroll Gardens for holiday party #2. A man in a gypsy cab recognized our frozen desperation and was willing to negotiate a price. $40 and 40 minutes later, we were sipping wine from glasses with stems, missing the Knicks fight, discussing our moms.
When Mark Ronson DJ'd TomKat's wedding, did he drop "It's Goin Down"?
0 YES
0 NO
0 MAYBE
Me and Brendan aka Teddy Riley fans #1 and #1A watched it this morning and nearly died from snort-laughing at its dead-on impression of Color Me Badd. Word to Timberlake for not taking himself too seriously.
It's in the summer at the Empire Skate -- "the birthplace of roller disco." I go with Nick for Chioma's birthday party. The rink is lit exclusively by neon palm trees. It's adult night, so the DJ is cursing, getting progressively drunker, and shouting the "25 and overs" everytime he drops a record that came out before 2002. We are the only amateurs on the rink. But where some people have routines and crews, I'm killin em with my razzle dazzle. When that fails, I get em with determination. Neither of us falls not even once. The night's all Biggie and "Roll Bounce" and '80s house and it's Brooklyn in summer, the best time and place to be I think in the world, ever -- redeemed and free, we are sweating from humidity and work (my ass will feel it a day from now) but everytime we round the corner to the left to the left, the wind whips through our hair. We are ponies in syncopation.
Then the DJ stops the music.
"I know this next song's not a roller jam," he disclaims, "but THIS IS MY FAVORITE HIP-HOP SONG OF THE YEAR."
The alarm-like, not-Jon synths of the froggish Yung Joc's "It's Goin Down" bang thru the system. That song is deceptively simple, but it's got like four different counterrhythms going, in disguise as synth changes or "Ay"s -- I have a theory that if you recomposed every element to "It's Goin Down" on marimba it would become a complicated percussion piece for Xenakis heads and regular readers of [UK music magazine] The Wire. I have not tested this theory.
But more importantly, have you ever tried to rollerskate and do the snap dance at once? So many ppl hated on snap this year, complaining about everything from its topical simplicity to its thinnish lyrical acumen, and while I understood where the complaints were coming from, I thought they often missed the point. (Course, some of those complaints were sour grapes -- i mean, rappers are worse than bloggers and/or 8th grade girls when it comes to gossiping and back-stabbing (not to summarily shit on 8th grade girls but, having been one once, I am drawing from experience). The most gossipy rappers are over 30.))
Anyway, snap music was most-hated of all Southern music and while it certainly didn't blow my mind-slash-change my life-slash-invigorate my behind and/or brain in the same way other Atlantans did this year (Polow da Donnnn), I enjoyed snap's life purpose as canny party-music with little to prove but the weekend. And also, if you think I'm gonna be mad at any song that namechecks the MALL, you are sorely mistaken. (Mall as communal public space, that is, not just Mall as "where i cop my bed bath and beyond." That said, meet me at Atlantic Center, it's goin down.)
As the DJ, possibly drunk, gushed on Yung Joc, we whipped around the corners, with the flow of roller-rink traffic. If you are not a roller-skating pro like T.I. or Jessica Simpson, the best way to dance on skates is to bounce. The bass thrum came up through the wheels and snap's pure visceral impact hit me, feet first. That song has motivational qualities beyond the tired "we run this." Sure Yung Joc is no Ciara when it comes to life coaching but I wouldn't refuse an invitation to his pool party, you know? That night, I felt like I experienced that song the way I was meant to -- sweating, stunting, rolling by a neon palm tree and trying not to fly into Nick, and trying not to flip into long trails of everyday-practicing, hands-holding dancers who were snaking round the corners like caterpillars. Just flexing my calves and hoping my face didn't hit the floor.
Can we get this guy for president one time? Thanks.
Congratulations to my friends at Not Straight Outta Compton, the Alligator Lounge's premiere gay hip-hop party, for making Art Basel Miami a little less "white linen/black AmEx." And also for making the MIAMI HERALD BUSINESS SECTION (last three paragraphs)
Speaking of AmEx and friends and Friends of NSOC, Janicza has a website with all her films on it... I highly recommend the "Hannah Dances" trilogy and the "Coco" and "Cousins" documentaries.
Someone on the girlgroup yahoogroup of ladies music writer-nerds sent this excellent article on the boys club that is the high-level music industry. "To be fair, there are plenty of men signing female artists not prancing around in high heels. But it's hard to imagine this comment about Spears coming from a female: During an A&R panel at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, in March, a male talent exec joked after seeing a wholesome photo of a young Spears with a puppy that "she was the all-American girl you just wanted to defile."
[barfing noise]
also you know the dude who said that was totally the type of LA A&R chode who's douched in dippity-do and brushed linen. BARF O RAMA TOWNE
Word to Jada Pinkett for giving her alma mater a million bucks in the name of Tupac. This is a good time to mention that season four of HBO's THE WIRE just ended on Sunday, and if you watched it and you're not motivated to withhold your Iraq tariff and donate the money to your local school district (or Boys & Girls Club), then... read this
Everyone who called me from Art Basel Miami this week was wasted whilst doing so. "We drank 19 Smirnoff Mangotinis and we DIDNT HAVE TO PAY FOR ONE!!! IT'S AWESOME DOWN HERE!" and so on. I can only assume Bey-Z, too, were wasted when they dropped forty G's on a chair that looks like my grammy knitted it
For no other reason than I would like to start re-rocking jean vests and oversized overalls. That and, you know, CLASSIC BRANDY! (That and, I am crazy deadline woman! So watch me rock this YouTube! What!)
Beyonce and Jennifer Hudson beef to the wind, Eddie Murphy is killing the Dreamgirls soundtrack. Highlights: "Fake Your Way to the Top," "I Meant You No Harm," "Axel F."
Chris Ryan reminds us that E-dot is kinna a d-bag for dropping Scary Spice at the slightest inkling of a missed period.
ME: John, what is a 'bro-job'?
JOHN WATERS: "A bro job is two straight boys having sex. You know, like, 'Hey, bro.' They don't want to say they're gay so they call it 'bro job,' which I think's hilarious. It could also be a gay guy blowin' a straight guy. [in fake shady voice] Hey want a bro job? 'This means we're straight.' It's a good one. It's Friends with Benefits. Means the same thing."
On deadline, can't talk. But La Consuela "Connie 4LIFE" Wohn sent this too-good-to-be-true story about rapping birds that I thought you should read.
It is a travesty that I have not yet linked to/ pointed out the blog of one of my favorite writers ever, Jason King. He is also a stellar person. READ IT NOW. Also: TEVIN CAMPBELL IS THIRTY?!
Also Lala is straight preggers and interviewing 50 and Em on TRL, which we are watching now (MTV is the promised land: cable television in every cube). Chris Ryan: "LALA! I love her maternity wear! She looks like my third grade teacher!"
So the DJs /or DJ sound system/ at my gym is all blenders-and-mash, all the time: i.e. Mary J Blige vs. Stevie Nicks soundclash into, like, ACDC and/or Smitty. Everytime I am at my gym, Kris Kross "Jump" is played at least once, sometimes twice. It is a good song to work out to. Drives you on the elliptical trainer nahmean.
Tonight was a night of special synergy, however, when someone's standard T-Mobile ring (you know, "din din din DIN DUN") went off in their locker in exact rhythmic sync to Tribe "Scenario" and I had to pause to make sure it was not part of the mix.
The beauty of the prefab ringtone: recognize.
The Wire's Tristan Wilds (Michael) on what he imagines he'll be doing in 10 years: "I am gonna own a Prada in New York." For a young dude, our manses has fine taste.
Quick: Which longtime American film director recently told me in an interview, "The Low Christmas album is so the opposite of arousing!"
HINT: This man also described the Chipmunks christmas album as "erotic."
Take a guess!
because I owe him money and I get all his nerd-jokes, but "Gabe Said 'Were into Movements'" is killing me right now. I.E., More thoughts on Jay-Z's grown and sexiness and Kingdom Come:
Please tell me if anyone else is this regularly funny.
You would think this guy is totally my long-lost nephew, but in fact his song is clearly going to be the Wyoming prom-theme-fave-turned-decade-long-torture a la "Achy Breaky Heart." I fear for my family.
Just a suggestion: if you are going to be cooking large quantities of an explosive drug, it's probably a good idea not to do it across the street from one of the most important and heavily secured buildings in the entire United States.
But then, the guy was a citicorp executive, and perhaps felt entitled.
