February 2007 Archives
Idolator kick-off party high points: "My Boo" came up on the iPod. Overheard 42 different conversations wherein The New Yorker was invoked ceremoniously. I wasn't even officially invited - I went as Chris Ryan's plus one. Perhaps I should become snarkier. Chris and Andy and I stood around, drank box wine and talked about Young Jeezy, Young Chris and the actual Gabe. I met some new people from New York magazine. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Before we entered the finale party for the "white rapper show," T told me, "Last time I was at this club I saw a guy carrying two long knives get kicked out." It would be a prophetic statement: alphamaleness was in full effect - an ancient underground mc condescendingly addressed me as "honey" after lecturing my cohort on the plight of women - I felt like punching someone in the face. I have not been in a fistfight since 1994, but hey, why not enter adulthood with a bang.
Otherwise, the shit was beautiful. Ego Trip is still running the smartest/funniest game in hip-hop. Episode was hilarious, the right dude won. Some contestants performed: G-Child is from another planet, Persia has decent stage presence, John Brown and the Ghetto Revival bit Dipset flows until everyone fell asleep (except for the dudes in the front shouting "hallelujah holla back" - the King of the Suburbs IS THEIR NAS). MC Serch freestyled greatness (one about the exit sign/fire code). Gigantic shout out to Mary for yelling "Fuck your myspace page." Why am I writing this like liner notes? It is early and I must leave for work in five minutes. Where was Eric Lott? Did anyone else notice the "White Rapper Show" theme song was executed in the style of Al Jolson, and think that was genius?
I look forward to watching more white rappers humiliate and/or redeem themselves in future seasons.
minor Grey's Anatomy spoiler alert
I would like for the writers of Grey's Anatomy to work on a script while they are sober. You know Shonda Rimes (creator) isn't writing these Days-of-our-Lives-exorcisms ('90s reference), because she's too busy creating the new Addison spin off (costarring ripped-ass Taye Diggs, yea) and writing a pilot for what will hopefully be a Murphy Brown-like series about female journalists - WORD IF ONE of tHEM IS AN ARTS CRITIC WITH AN ADVERB FOR A FIRST NAME. So it would be nice if her Grey's script-author fill-ins (the bartender from the emerald city pub?) would step back, breathe, and stop trying to slaughter the ratings haus. If it is scientifically implausible, why let the wench live!! We don't watch this show for that annoying narcissist Meredith and her trophy boyf, anyway. We watch it for the complex career ambitions and underdeveloped emotional intimacies of our idols Cristina Yang, Nurse Miranda, and Addison [Maiden Name].
"Flipping back and forth between 30 Rock and Grey's" is about to become "30 Rock on lock," lest I ever miss another Tracy Morgan / video games sequence again.
Tracy Morgan, shirtless and pointing his hands to the sky ala Superman at Nas' birthday party, is totally my screen saver.
I can tell you personal shit like that because exhibitionism is that new-new. Or so New York magazine reported last week - which means exhibitionism is that old-new, and total privacy is what's hot in the streets.
I just changed my screen saver. I'm not telling you what it is.
I have made three entries on VIBE Confidential lately since our normal VC blogger-lady is out of town. None of them are all that confidential, but I tried to put some of my regular electric flavor in there for you to enjoy, or not enjoy. GO COMMENT!
Gossip blogging. Because I don't get to write snarky shit about pedicures enough.
Can we talk for a couple seconds about "I BE DRILLIN THESE CHICKS LIKE MAJOR PAYNE," the R.Kelly half-verse ("Make it Rain (Remix)") that has dominated all my conversations this weekend? first off, Major Payne came out like 12 years ago - yet it was on Starz or some shit a couple nights ago, which leads me to believe that R. was just kicking back with the cable remote when he came up with that choice little metaphor. Secondly, his whole shit now is simply flagrant, to borrow a term from my friend Toshi - ok he was flagrant before, but now it's like what little self-awareness he had floated away with the happy people. (Yet he still possesses more self-awareness than the brain genius who employed him for the Daddy's Little Girls soundtrack). Chris Ryan, a true brain genius not a fake one, described lil Robz as "post-misogyny." I like how we are now using "post" as a prefix to describe people whose absurdity and lack of conscience has traversed into the heretofore unexplainable by regular people.
(The word "post" can also say a lot about who is using it, like when someone - uncredited - flippantly described Beyonce as "post-race" in the conde nast fashion mag, Fashion Rocks. I think in that case the writer was perhaps "pre"-beatdown.Who am I kidding, whoever wrote that is probably a Rockefeller debutante and will stay running the world. As for Beyonce: dear heart, I hope you are flush in $40,000 swedish chairs until the glorious H-town Jesus takes you home.)
Something else I would like to point out. Bridge to Terabithia is great, even though the female lead's capital-a, doe-eyed ACTING annoyed heavily (B disagreed; called her "endearing"). I had not read the book since I was wee, and forgot it was so sad, and also that there was so much Christianity in it. Yet and still, I wept. I threw popcorn. I wept some more all the way up Henry Street. But then it was cool cause when we got back, my man, he threw some Jodeci on the turntables and I forgot all my troubles. When pressed, he even *scratched*. AND THAT IS A KIND OF PUN!!
For her first entry, Shauna B. spent 36 hours with 8Ball and MJG and got this. Two words: Blog. Roll.
1. if Sting is joined by R. Kelly on "Roxanne"
2. if all their visuals are directed by the person who makes Sting's "crystal fantasy" genre of videos
I feel like myspace, facebook all that social networking shit is p-l-a-y-e-d now that I can login to mybarackobama.com. It's cool - you don't have to try too hard to impress people with your exhaustive "interests" list, because you're already impressing people with your political gumption, simply by being there.
Added bonus - hooking up with the liberal and righteous via political networking sites is what's hot in '07.
I feel like Barack Obama is the Bill Clinton of 2008: he's a young hot smart and inventive dude who's going to mobilize/reenergize a base that has been disenfranchised, disgusted and depressed for eight of the longest years in my lifetime. I remember attending rallies for Clinton in '92, not yet old enough to vote but wishing I was, because I could feel the energy and hope crackling in the air as he delivered a speech envisioning a better country. (And this was in an airport hangar belonging to the FE Warren Air Force Base in crimson-ass Wyoming... can't imagine what it was like in Dem states.) I'm a crowd-responder, yes, I fare best at parties where everyone's dancing, but with Obama, it feels like that again. Like I can almost remember what a country with a decent leader is like. A drop on the tongue during a drought.
Frankly, I vote for any man who rides out to Staple Singers, but read that speech and tell me if you don't weep.
Addendum: I think the Staple Singers outro was exclusive to the broadcast I heard ... still, the announcement video on his website totally outros to McFadden & Whitehead. I get down to them too.
Believe me when I say one of the most exciting things I have ever seen occurred today: an orange butterfly, perched on a leaf, unfurling its long black coil of a tongue and prodding into the red tube base of a flower, the butterfly's body bucking as it sipped from the fronds, then rolling the tongue back up into a perfect O and fluttering away. New Yorkers, do NOT sleep on the butterfly conservatory at the Natural History Museum, where B and I sojourned today as extention of our mutual obsession with Walking with Cavemen (hosted by Alec Baldwin, aka Man of the Year). Fortuitously, and completely by coincidence, this was also the grand opening of a new wing - the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, with all the Neanderthal backstories and light-up human migration patterns on plexiglass maps our hearts could possibly desire. We paid homage to Lucy, bowed down to Turkana Boy and were interested to discover people living in the Basque region of Spain are considered the oldest living ancestors of the first homo sapiens emerging from Europe (who got there by migrating from Africa, the original home turf of all mankind). Natural science - CAN YOU REALLY FEEL ME
Believe me when I say one of the most exciting things I have ever seen occurred today: an orange butterfly, perched on a leaf, unfurling its long black coil of a tongue and prodding into the red tube base of a flower, the butterfly's body bucking as it sipped from the fronds, then rolling the tongue back up into a perfect O and fluttering away. New Yorkers, do NOT sleep on the butterfly conservatory at the Natural History Museum, where B and I sojourned today as extention of our mutual obsession with Walking with Cavemen (hosted by Alec Baldwin, aka Man of the Year). Fortuitously, and completely by coincidence, this was also the grand opening of a new wing - the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, with all the Neanderthal backstories and light-up human migration patterns on plexiglass maps our hearts could possibly desire. We paid homage to Lucy, bowed down to Turkana Boy and were interested to discover people living in the Basque region of Spain are considered the oldest living ancestors of the first homo sapiens emerging from Europe (who got there by migrating from Africa, the original home turf of all mankind). Natural science - CAN YOU REALLY FEEL ME
Lacrate just sent me this video, of his Lily Allen's "Smile remix." it's b'more club or b'more club influenced, lacrate calls it "gutter music"
all I know is, I love a dance contest.
Also, I just want to say that Alec Baldwin is the man of the year for '06 AND '07. If you haven't checked out his appearance as host for BBC documentary Walking with Cavemen, shot in the late '90s, do it to it. It is self-aware and it is GENIUS.
Last night's comeback episode was like the Michael Bey take on a story that was once subtle and compelling - gunfire, lost love, and as B pointed out, "everybody was crying." Previews for next week: explosions. Can we get the original writers back on the show? Why do so many good, unique shows become so self-conscious about their own franchises once they reach a modicum of popularity? (See: tonight's Grey's Anatomy, featuring "SOMETHING THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" - which has been their tagline for the last ten episodes.)
I hope Ugly Betty never sells out.
PS Did anyone else love America Ferrera's speech at the Golden Globes, but would have loved it more if she had mentioned the immigration themes in the show? It's not her job, I know, but still... maybe if Ignacio "the imprisoned psycho in Born in East LA" Suarez had won, he would have illuminated his character's plight. At any rate, hope they keep with the immigration/HMO/single-parent themes and don't get too distracted by the fashion chicas up at Mode.
Ugly Betty is in the new Teen Vogue as a fashion statement, f. Marc Jacobs. Duh.
Oh shit: check right now for the funniest muhfucka on the whole wide interweb. Talkin bout my man.
Oh, who are you again? Who am I? I am internetting over there and my brain is smooshed. All apologies, except where apologies would be extraneous. The sorry only counts when you back it up with action. Moving on.
So The Messengers: Not unscary. Directed by the Pang Brothers, who B says are known for their horror-mastery, and who are often lumped in the "Americans loving Japanese horror film" category by erroneous reviewers, despite the fact that the Pang Brothers are from China. Many pretty shots, sometimes bad acting, and the second boyfriend from Sex in the City, as supporting character. (Adrian.) We are horror film geeks and it ranked above The Descent, below The Exorcist, to give ballpark. Previews: Ghost Rider looks terrific. But I'm biased: Nic Cage is my favorite actor to watch act (vaseline teeth of Charlton Heston descent; never-wavering puzzled squint; Nic Cage as NIC CAGE).
More intriguing: the last day of Ron Mueck sculpture exhibit at Brooklyn Art Museum -- also first Saturday and Black History Month: the lines wove beneath the glass panel roof like ants in a greenhouse. The Egypt room was virtually empty, though. When I die, please bury me in a sarcophagus, wrapped thick in cartonnage, and paint my face above it. Paint my face on wood cut from the sycamore of Matarria. Give me bigger eyes than I have. Make me look innocent. Wrap me in a garland of blue lotus and water lilies.
In 1999, Ron Mueck made a lifelike sculpture of his dead dad and titled it "Dead Dad," a hobbit-size depiction of his nude father in rigor mortis, his body sunken and grey, his nakedness less stark than the expression on his face: one of vulnerability and suddenness. It strikes only empathy. All of them did. The boy kneeling and peering into a mirror, the man and woman half-nude and spooning, the tiny baby hanging from the wall in a colicky crucifixion stance.
They are never to scale: he sculpts them either very small, or very large, as with the room-sized rendering of his despondent wife looking upwards from beneath her duvet. I thought her expression was that of a woman immobilized by depression (maybe post-partum, in keeping with his baby theme): she looks up, pupils dilated, her hair dull and plastered to her forehead as though she hasn't recently showered, her hand draped against herself as if to imply need, but also a reluctance to accept help. The classic grey stare of those frozen in their sorrow. And while I found all his sculptures to be incredibly sad, their vulnerability and aloneness a common thread between them -- all captured in various states of solitude -- those were also the things that made them great, and loveable. It's one thing to become a master sculptor, to spend painstaking months plugging in little head hairs and painting placenta marks onto your giant newborn baby sculpture. It's quite another to accurately capture the discomfort and miraculousness of being born in that baby's expression. Mueck deeply understands the most common emotions and how they manifest on the human face.
I feel like I should tell you, because I haven't been able to update for awhile and don't know when I will again, that my favorite song right now is Mims' "This is Why I'm Hot." Reason: self-explanatory. It is the perfect manifestation of the YouTube age: instant celebrity, merit unrequired.
It's also an important representation of post-Dipsettian logic: I'm Hot, Because I'm Hot.
(I'm Hot, Therefore I'm Hot? Put that in your capsule review and smoke it.)
