fourfour

Always love

Because my adoration for Whitney Houston is well documented, people have been offering their condolences to me, which is a little weird (it's not like I knew her better than anyone!) but entirely nice. I'm OK! Sad, for sure, but it's easy to find tangents of perfection, beauty and hilarity to distract yourself with when reminsicing about Whitney Houston. Here was someone so gorgeous, her warts were attractive.

To think of anyone's life as a cautionary tale is condescending (true acceptance includes flaws) and selective. Unless you are model-pretty with the best voice on the planet and have been rewarded for both with international celebrity, Whitney's complicated story doesn't apply to you. The best we could ever do was admire it from afar, the worst we could do is reduce it to a one-sentence moral. What can you learn from Whitney's addiction that Nancy Regan didn't teach you almost 30 years ago?

I was really looking forward to watching Whitney turn into a crazy old lady. The fun she already was predicted the fun she would have been! I was also looking forward to her comeback, which for the last decade, flirted with the horizon. Selfishly, I feel cheated out of some great chapters, but the early ones are rich enough to provide a lot of solace.

I've been pondering the thematic line in Whitney's "Didn't We Almost Have It All": "The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend." It seems like it should apply here, and it almost does. Jon Caramanica said it really well (with eerie prophecy) days before those pictures of Whitney looking disheveled outside of Kelly Price's party surfaced: "To be Whitney now, you had to be Whitney then." A life is over, and Whitney wore it so publicly that we now know exactly what we are missing. Nothing is "worth" someone's death, but I feel so fortunate to have shared some of Whitney's life.

I wrote a more formal tribute for work. During my research scramble, I rewatched a lot of her 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was just so wonderful and comprehensive that it's about as close to a memoir as we got from Whitney. The part of the interview that affected me the most during my review was the discussion on the death of Michael Jackson, which affected Whitney so greatly that she teared up during her recollection. Watching this in light of her death, I felt a weird unity with this distant star and so much farther away.

 

Millie Jackson is amazing

 

I'm a little late to this one, but I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on my favorite person on TV this week, soul singer Millie Jackson. Her life story took up an hour of TV One's Unsung (basically my favorite show on TV now – did you see last week's Full Force episode?!?). And what a story it was! She got her break by shit-talking some woman that was onstage at a concert she attended. She described her marriage to a bass player like this: "He was a decent cat, but he thought we were going to be Ike and Tina, and the record company didn't sign Ike, it only signed Tina." She gave Roxanne Shanté these words of advice: "You'll be successful a lot longer for the nasty things that come out of your mouth than the nasty things you put in it." She made fun of her own music, lamented her inability to pawn gold records and showed that at age 67, she's still quite flexible (you can see that in the video above).

My favorite thing about her crazy-old-lady-ness is that she's in complete control of it – she knows exactly how funny she is. There's no guilt or irony involved in appreciating this woman. A brilliant singer and storyteller (her Caught Up album, which contains her signature song, "If Lovin' You Is Wrong (I Don't Want To Be Right)" splits its time between the point of view of a woman cheating with a married man and the point of view of his wife – Millie plays both roles), she is the definition of unsung and I really hope that her series-stealing appearance boosts her visibility. I would love to see more of Millie. This senior citizen would be a breath of fresh air to pop culture. Reality show, please.

Some gifs of her wild stage shows and a few still shots are below the jump:  

Anything goes with Anna Nicole

 

Anna Nicole Smith died five years ago on this day, and rarely one goes by that I don't think about how much I miss her. I wrote a tribute to her for work that heavily references her infamous appearance at the 2004 American Music Awards:

 

You can read my piece here. Below the jump, some other recent writing...

Shit the Internet says about the Internet: A blog post

Lana Del Ray is a singer/Internet lightning rod, a prematurely experienced internet lightning rod, a lightning rod. (However, "Video Games" was the perfect lightning rod, a viral sensation.) [Emphasis mine.] Lana Del Rey is a starlet to music bloggers, a YouTube sensation turned Billboard chart-topper, Enya for the Twitter set, a comment-section-stoking singer, an internet sensation, an Internet sensation, an Internet phenomenon, an Internet singing sensation, a singer of songs that are very popular on the Internet, a person who makes music that is much discussed online, a tabula rasa, a punching bag, a reflection of our collective nightmares about American cynicism and disingenuousness. The divisive Internet sensation was, well, divisive: bloggers are obsessed with her. She is the new singer music bloggers love to hate, the Internet's most hated singer, a sacrificial lamb, 2k11's #1 human meme and 2012's buzziest artist you need to know, in one. Lana Del Rey is an important search term to refer viewers to a website.

"Video Games" hit the 1 million mark on YouTube. It attracted almost a million and a half page views. Two million views. Viewed 2,644,000 times. Nine million. 13 million. It currently has a staggering 20 million views on YouTube. No, more than twenty-one million views on YouTube since it was posted, last August.

What went down from 1 to 21 million views generally is agreed upon, sometimes in different words.

I just want my pants back

 

This is how we do on the other side of the BQE.

A week with RuPaul

(Via Georges LeBar)

I spent (roughly) the last week of 2011 with RuPaul at his place in the "Birds" section of the Hollywood Hills. He was a generous host, and not just with his time (he was inclined to pay for everything, and also gracious and unwilling to engage in one of those considerate play fights when I wouldn't allow him to). As a result, I wrote a profile for work, "The Tao of Ru." Of course, there were several things that couldn't make it into the article and so below is a brief list of outtakes...

Some kid!

 

There was an episode of Made that premiered last week that, as far as I can tell, got ZERO play despite it being UTTERLY AMAZING. It featured the kinda awkward, kinda sickly awesome high school student Jason, who has some kind of degenerative disease that will soon paralyze him (I missed the first three minutes, but the only reference to what is ailing him that I could tell came when he said he was hypermobile, although that just means double-jointed, so WHAT?). He wanted to be a rocker to get "chicks," but then once the cameras did that job for him, he kind of lost interest but still had to stick it out for his hunky Made coach Eoin Harrington (who's "like pie"). For some reason this episode isn't even online, nor is it airing again in the near future (as per a cursory survey of upcoming episodes on my cable box). So here's seven of Jason's best minutes, which are as cringey and hilarious as teenagehood itself.

This is the dumbest

 

This post should open with me saying, "I've seen some stupid as-seen-on-TV inventions in my day," and then list all the ones that now fall short of what I'm about to talk about, except my GoJo is so tight on my head it's affecting my recall. Literally a band to fasten your phone to your head so that you can walk around with your phone fastened to your head, this commercial is full of second-hand embarrassment while peddling third-. I feel like if this guy ever discovered speaker phone, he'd know the jig was up.

This was playing on a screen above a treadmill I was on this weekend. I glanced up from my iPad, saw it on mute, and figured it was a joke...until it went on for another minute and a half. I was hoping it was just a Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie flashback.

And by the way, you can strap a laptop on your head with the GoJo:

He's trolling, right? He's just trying to start a meme of things the GoJo will attach to your head, right? Someone want to get the ball rolling and make this a happy man?

Clearly, the best album

Here is the first thing you should know about Carol Channing's 2009 album of negro spirituals and assorted Lord-praising:

And here are 27 more things:

Toddlers and Tiaras: The aftermath

Reality TV has the reputation of dehumanizing people, but my brief experience on it was to the contrary. In the fall, I judged a Universal Royalty pageant that was filmed for Toddlers and Tiaras (read 5,000 words of my thoughts about that here). The episode finally aired this week (I was interviewed for the show, and you can see a reel of my screen time here). Watching the early portion of the episode, which chronicled the preparation for the pageant (as every first half of a Toddlers and Tiaras episode does), was eye-opening, primarily because it was incredible to see the children that I judged actually look like children.

Isys doesn't wear glasses onstage (a lesson from the early part of the episode: her mother doesn't know "how she sees" but is convinced that she does). If she did wear them, though, I would have certainly given her a 10+ on facial beauty. That would have been a bold and endearing choice. Glasses on kids! That is heartbreaking and adorable.

Down with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

 

I cut this up from the VHS source Not Just Fun and Games. In it a Canadian Christian panel eviscerates all that was harming pop culture in the '90s like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and their damn teething biscuits, which I'm pretty sure didn't actually exist), The Simpsons, Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer. You know, everyone who ended up bringing down the civilization that I miss as I type this from a burning ember that used to be a computer.

Enjoy. I know I do. Hell is great!

Sporadic reader

 

Above is an interview with Simon Doonan that I did a few weeks ago. I love him. In order to make this coherent as a piece (and not, you know, 45 minutes long, which was the duration of our chat), a lot of our back-and-forth couldn't be included. Things we talked about that weren't included were: Showgirls, his hanging out with Kitten Natividad, his bumping into Erica Gavin when she became a buyer for Barneys (using a pseudonym because she was ashamed of her days as a Russ Meyer girl!), Tyra (I expressed my dislike and he told me not to be jealous!) and that he is stopped on the street by girls praising his ability to make ANTM Cycle 2's Catie cry by telling her to go down to the docks, take in what the hookers are wearing and avoid it. A true classic stays with you for life.

What is included is mostly about his book, Gay Men Don't Get Fat, which is somewhat controversial (especially among people who haven't read it) as a result of its several sweeping generalizations. You don't have to look further than the title for one of those, but if you do, you'll find things like, "Straight conversation has no common denominators with gay conversation," and "We poofters strive to make life jolly and cute, like a chic cinematic anti-depressant." What a strange sensation it is to read about yourself and not relate whatsoever! It soon becomes clear, though, that Doonan's exaggerations are part of a device he uses to tell the truth; through his generalizations about how things are, he talks specifically about himself. (He totally knows that gay guys do get fat, hence the chapter on bears.)

In that respect, his book couldn't have been published at a better time, in this advent of shit-said shit, which also employs generalization as a medium. Conceptually, I think this is a very clever way to express your truth to an audience that will be talking back. Immediately, whenever a, "Shit Xes Say," video pops up, people look for themselves in it. Those videos' comments sections are full of, "OMG, I soooo relate!" or, "That is wrong, fail." By positing these personal observations so generally, one leaves his experiences and impressions open for debate, signaling an embrace of the fact that not everyone was going to agree with your argument, anyway. That's wisdom, whether the creators of this stuff know it or not. It's a way of making universal what is often a solitary medium that goes further to promote narcissism (we all know that the Internet is a breeding ground for that!). The effect is magical.

For that reason, I recommend listening to Doonan's opening words in the video above, because it is there that he gushes about the art of exaggeration. He's really charming, as is his book. Believe me, as someone who's stretched the definition of chunky with my actual waistline, I went into it thinking I would hate it, but it totally won me over.

Just a few more links to things I've done for work recently that were particularly satisfying:

An essay on the things I like about Downton Abbey

An Iron Lady review (Ridiculous movie!)

A War Horse review (Even more ridiculous!)

Shit gay guys say to their cats

 

I really admired Franchesca Ramsey's entry into the shit-said meme,"Shit White Girls Say...to Black Girls," because instead of just rattling off stereotypical hypotheticals like videos that preceded it, this clearly came from actual shit that was said to her and thus works as social commentary (also, she just kills it on the delivery). And so, I have made a video that has less to say than probably any other video within the meme. Just trying to maintain a balance!

A supposedly rewarding thing I'll never do again

In the middle of 2011, I spent a week doing what is posted below: An edit test for a publication that sought me out but then didn't hire me. From what I was told, I didn't get the job because they couldn't afford me (that I never discussed salary makes me wonder if they were just letting me down easy -- regardless, I never got confirmation that this edit test was so much as glanced at). I'm not bitter (or...not any more bitter than usual), but putting about a week's worth of after-work activities on hold to prove myself when I had proven enough of myself in the first place to be asked to do so and furthermore have spent the past six and a half years proving my abilities (I'm not trying to say, "Google me," but Google me) was a total waste of time. And if I have a New Year's resolution that can be said aloud it's: Waste less time. Perhaps pulling this out of a void and actually doing something with it (even if that something is tossing it into the world without so much as rereading it -- I can't, but maybe you will want to ) is making up for lost time. Maybe it's a waste of even more time. At the very least, you may want to scroll to the bottom for the Basketball Wives video I did. But I understand if you don't, and furthermore won't hire me. I'm used to it.

(Keep in mind that these 4,000 words followed what was requested: Three short pieces and two long ones. There was some additional programming-type short form stuff that I'm not including because it would just be tedious to read, but know that it was time-consuming, too.)

(Also, I did this because I really wanted the job. I understand that rejection is a risk that comes with applying, but all the understanding in the world won't get me that time back.)

Here's to exorcism...

2011 odds and ends (music)

For work this week, Zach Baron and I had a little back-and-forth to sum up the year in music. You can read it here. Zach is a tremendous writer and thinker and a positive motivating force within my writing life. I really think that he makes me better.

Anyway, on a solo and, by my logic, worsened tip, I have a few stray points and elaborations about all this (and also a rant about Facebook) left to share, and so they are below: