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And back to Africa she goes!

It turns out that Brooke's comment, Crashy or not, was a curse. Ooga booga, y'all. Oh well, Nnow nnothinng's inn Nnnenna's way on her quest to become America's Next Top AFRICAN Chemist. She's gonna achieve it, too, worldly as she is.

But for real: THANK YOU TYRA! Thank you for this! Thanks for keeping Jade around because the vocabulary she has in her pinky is more colorful than anything Nnenna has in her larynx (dropped g's, failed r's and all). Thank you for keeping Furonda around because her face is much more...interesting than Nnenna's one of perpetual gloating.

Thanks for clearing the path for a Top 2 featuring Joanie and Danielle. And thanks for shaking things up, for being unpredictable (however predictable being unpredictable has become). Even though, y'know, I knew Nnenna wouldn't win, whatever, I'll still act shocked and play along. You did a good thing, Tyra Banks. Mama's proud.

A fool before, a fool forever

The video embedded below is sort of a sequel to my Liza on Larry clips reel. This time around, Paula Abdul is the star, which makes sense -- Paula is cut from the same cloth as someone like Liza or Judy Garland or Whitney (when she's together enough to appear in public). These are all women on the verge whose visibility correlates (or correlated) strongly to their messiness. I realize that guffawing at Paula's seal claps, interpretive dancing and meltdowns on American Idol is a cliché, or at least, a national pastime. It's also extremely rewarding.

The following reel was assembled from Paula's stint shilling jewelry on QVC last week. She recorded two hour-long "shows" -- despite the first one airing at 1:00 a.m., Paula seemed rather composed. Maybe she ran out of happy (or sad) pills for the day. The second, which ran the following night at the more sensible hour of 9:00 was an improvement, which is to say that's she was at least slightly messier. It was this one that I mined solely for the reel. I have to note that it's really fucking bizarre that Paula Abdul spent two straight hours talking on live television last week and didn't start blubbering or slip into a coma or laugh at her imaginary friend or shoo the hummingbirds that she saw hovering around her head. Not once! Could it be that she's getting it together? Could it be that she's finally found the right pill cocktail to even her out? Probably not, but I find it pretty fucking astounding that she has even hours of composure.

Regardless, that second hour did provide its share of insanity (mostly in the form of momentary fits and giggles) that I've torn out and put back together. Yes, this is extremely manipulated and yes, I'm ripping things from their context to make them funnier. But whatever, I'm not the one who made her proclaim, "Right on! Bling's good. Bling is very good. Very, very good." That shit is Wall Street for the hip-hop generation.

She's havin' fun, everybody!

(Note: Bonus Paula madness here.)

(Note 2: fud·dle - v. tr. 1. To put into a state of confusion; befuddle. See Synonyms at confuse. 2. To make drunk; intoxicate. -- I'm not including this to be condescending; I'm including it because I had to look it up after Paula said it. I was glad that I did.)

Winvisible

You read that right: Winvisible. Cats and puns. You love them separately, you love them more together. Cats and puns. Does it get any hipper?

Tyra mail!

I know y'all are looking at your monitors sideways, all, "Ramps are on slants. Are they taking us to a skate park?" Or, "Slants? Asymmetrical haircuts? Are we getting new makeovers?" The answer to both is: no! But I am giving you a reading assignment.

Every once in a while, someone gets all high-brow on the low-brow and attempts to intellectualize ANTM -- there was a humorous piece that ran in BUST last year and a far less humorous, less insightful one that ran (I think) in The New Yorker at the start of the fourth cycle. Neither of those could have predicted brilliance that is my buddy Ed Gonzalez's take on it over at Slant. Creating coherence out of a show that, to a lesser eye, would appear to be campy nonsense, Ed points his gaze where so few have glared. He makes a case for Tyra's drama baiting, illustrates the show's potentially positive subversion of the American standard of beauty and gracefully proves exactly why "Go back to Africa!" was a fucked up thing for Brooke to say ("Nnenna isn't from Africa but from Texas (where she was born), and no one has told Jade to go back to Philadelphia just yet," he writes).

Earlier this year, Ed became my No. 1, can't-miss film critic, the guy whose opinion I regularly disagree with but nonetheless am addicted to (Roger Ebert filled this role until he made me feel bad about myself). I realize that as a friend, my praise carries little weight (I'm not saying all this because I'm mentioned in the review, swear!). But as a fan, it really means something when I say that this time, Ed has outdone himself.

(It's here in case you somehow missed the link above.)

What I got

Five things that joined my world this weekend:

• Cross Crunch!

I wasn't kidding! Can you tell how much I love it? See how my embrace echoes that of one of the models on the box who undoubtedly doesn't use product he's posing with anyway? Thas love, thas love. Thas white-boy love. But for real, notice how the box has a white sticker slapped on the middle? My address and all relevant postal information are on that sticker because Cross Crunches are shipped in that very box, one that advertises exactly what's inside! I wasn't around during the first delivery attempt of this wonderful machine that I can't wait to not use, and so I had to retrieve it from the post office. Now the woman at the post office with a hairy upper lip (which one?) knows that I have body-image issues and that I'm the kind of schmuck who buys plastic exercise equipment off television. Thank you, Cross Crunch!

• A headache

Hard Candy's responsible for this one. It is quite possibly the most obnoxiously obvious message movie I've ever seen, although I feel bad for even calling it that. Message movies don't deserve such abuse. Instead of taking the issue of stautory rape and doing something bold or even different (like, for example, exploring whether the notion that someone can be sexually mature yet "underage" is a useful social construct or just a fanciful, futile attempt at protecting innocence), director David Slade and writer Brian Nelson deliver a cartoonish and P.C. P.S.A. that's about an hour and forty-two-and-a-half minutes too long. Anime-eyed Ellen Page (whose prominent features are enhanced above, just for the fun of it) rants and raves about dirty 32-year-old men with the finesse of a women's studies major at Stereotype U (she doesn't say, "The children! What about the children?!?!?!" but she does say, "The pedophiles!!!"). Also, newsflash: murder is bad! If I want to be screamed at in only the most predictable terms about the most obvious of subjects, I'll hang out in Union Square or the parking lot of an Ani DiFranco concert, thank you very much. Seriously: shove it in a thesis. Or, even better: shove it up your illegal ass. Something I read favorably compared this movie to Miike's Audition, and my memory's failing me, but whomever said that deserves to be numbed with ice and castrated or dismembered with a wire meat cutter. Or both. Another thing I can't remember is the last time I endured a piece of indietrash that enraged me this much. Oh wait.

• A timeless memento of Mario Lavandeira's celebrity

You've probably seen the video from which that audio clip is ripped. If not, it's here. But maybe you're better off just listening -- that way you don't have to look at him and still get the gist of his charm. Awwwww -- look at me looking out for you. I'm bringing the fame born in Perez Hilton's head to your ears. Aren't I generous?

• NKRU's "Seis Nueve"

Such pretty vinyl, such ugly music. When I was a freshman in high school, I thought this song was really daring, what being about mutual oral sex and all. They even play around with Spanish, translating "sixty-nine" as "seis nueve," not the less rhythmically sound but grammatically correct "sesenta y nueve" -- audacity all around! I still admire the couplet that goes, "I got it goin' on like popcorn / And when you see me, give me a pound and move on," since popcorn is pretty fucking awesome, but that's about all I like in this plodding and blurry new jack crap. I mean, it sounds like NKRU (which, as you can see above stands for Naughty Kreations R Unified, or as I'd put it: GO BACK TO MERRY-GO-ROUND) are barfing up the chorus. Girls, if you don't like it, don't do it! Ellen Page would like to speak with you. I hadn't heard "Seis Nueve" in about 10 years before I found the 12" this weekend. I'm glad to say that it no longer has the effect on me that it once did. I've grown so much...

...or maybe not at all, as the final thing I got this weekend was:

• A hickey

I'm sporting this shit proudly, though. Trashy is in this spring and from now on. Don't be jealous. Go out and get your own.

Pouty 5000

It's all upstream from now on for America's Next Top Trout.

Nothin', baby, could compare to her lovely face...

...but she did have a helluva rack, didn't she?

Friends in Decatur

Da Backwudz are gay-friendly. That's insane. They are openly, unexpectedly so as 1) rappers 2) Southern rappers (machismo is as important as 808 beats to the Southern-rap template), and 3) rappers who are seemingly proud of their anti-cosmopolitan status above all else (I mean, check the name!). But still, wade through the swamp of the Decatur, Georgia-based duo's subject matter found on their just-released debut Wood Work. You'll hear about rappers Sho-Nuff and Big Marc's Chevrolets, Cadillacs, chronic sacs, chrome flats, oxtails, collard greens, fried chicken, rice and beans, crooked women, pole sliders, baby mamas, pacifiers, microphones, MPs and super-hot 16s. And then you'll hit track 12, the maudlin "Feelin' Lonely".

The track follows the downward trajectories of three young subjects. Between (unrelated) tales of drug overdose and HIV is that of Rick, a popular high-school student, valedictorian and captain of the football team, who's outed, persecuted and ends up killing himself. Yes, we've heard it before. This is no feat of storytelling -- Da Backwudz are merely snapping an archetype into a cliché. What's impressive here has to do with context. Wood Work is Da Backwudz's debut, so it's not even like they're repenting for previous homophobia a la Common. Without being asked and without saying "fag," Da Backwudz paint the picture of a queer who's not even queeny, but, in fact, "a regular jock." The group is so sensitive (the interlude that comes before "Feelin' Lonely," featuring an inspirational call from one of their moms tips you off to this sensitivity) that they make sure there's no question as to who's at fault in the story -- Rick or his homophobic peers. Da Backwudz spell it out in the last line of the verse: "The same classmates wept at his eulogy." Rick loses his life, everyone else loses, period.

All this from a group that's unafraid to invoke the name of God or to put a religious angle on hardships. In Da Backwudz's extended bio on MTV.com, member Big Marc comments directly on "Feelin' Lonely, saying: "We talk about some stuff that's going on and makes you be like, 'Man, the devil is busy.' It makes you sit back and think about what we're saying." Whoa. Bashing as the work of the devil? There's an idea! How nouveau-Christian of them.

That's the good news. The bad news is that "Feelin' Lonely" is kinda wack. The production reminiscent of Eminem's ugly "Stan," the chorus attempts to recall the Roots' "You Got Me," and the song itself, as a series of heavy-handed, cautionary tales, recalls Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Wildside." But this isn't to hate or discourage. Maybe those kind of broad strokes are needed, considering the flagrantly idiotic and immature nature of homophobia ("You're different! Ha ha!"). At this point, it's probably too much to ask anyone to make a conscious effort to reversing Fiddy's "gay isn't cool" philosophy. Maybe a 16-bar after-school special is the best jump-off we could ask for.

Or maybe it's all just savvy PR, the chance for the attention of a demo that hip-hop almost uniformly ignored (I didn't go into Wood Work with the knowledge that Da Backwudz were 'mo bros, but I wouldn't be writing about it if they weren't, either). Certainly, it's to the group's benefit to net as many fans as possible, and that seems to be the sonic ideal anyway, as something like "The World Could Be Yours" erases hip-hop's Mason-Dixon line, by laying the South's snappy percussion under a Kanye-esque speedy, yanked soul sample. Forget their name, there's nothing too country about Da Backwudz, or too Southern for that matter (sonically, the album is somewhere between the melodic post-crunk of T.I.'s King and the kaleidoscopic brassiness of OutKast). The all-things-to-all-people mindset also means that their bleeding hearts are no match for their throbbing pulses: Sho-Nuff bemoans the abandonment of education for "sex, drugs, money and booze," even though "I'll Do," "Smoke N Ride" and "Makin' Money, Counting Hundreds" celebrate the first three would-be evils, respectively.

But ultimately, you get the feeling that Da Backwudz are just good guys. I mean, they're comfortable enough with their collective masculinity to spit atop "You Gonna Luv Me," their first single, which sampled a show tune (and not just any show tune, but Jennifer Holiday's diva-zilla turn from Dreamgirls, "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going"). "Not in my backyard?" Hardly. Da Backwudz provide a safe place.

He didn't eat the placenta

Earlier, stories like this and this and this popped up, claiming that Tom Cruise planned on eating his baby's placenta upon its birth (which also happened earlier, as you know). Um, didn't anyone watch Friday's interview on Primetime Live? I watched 10 minutes of it and I knew this story wasn't true. How? Because he full-on refuted it way before these stories broke.

Look:

"They're gonna take this and they're gonna think he really ate the placenta."

Good job everyone. Way to make America's favorite batty boy seem lucid. Prescient, even.

(Note: If YouTube is being a bitch or if you just want this clip for ever and ever, here's an avi.)

Belly boy

Winston has a message for all who have been asking why there haven't been any posts on him in a while:

It makes him want to scream. It's hard for him to be interesting when he spends 23 hours a day like this:

Imagine the difficulty of my task, then, in having to package and share that. For real, I have two self-imposed rules here: be honest and don't post if you have nothing to say. Sorry if that means increasingly long lags between cat posts -- I have to keep the gratuitous cuteness factor in check as much as I can.

That said, here's what Winston's been up to:

Les' be out

Usually in this space, I post a picture of the week's eliminated contestant looking particularly stupid. Call it schadenfierceness -- it's my way of twisting the knife of elimination, of saying, "That's what you get for entering a televised modeling competition, fool!" However, I couldn't find any dopey shots of Leslie. Is it that she's so ravishing that she can't take a bad screencap? Or, is she just that bland? I'm thinking it's a mixture of the two, in which case, I shout, "I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!!! Why didn't you play up the bisexuality your MySpace professes?!?!?!?"

Oh wait. Well, she did give Jay a look when he asked how she dances with guys.

And she did go topless while in the hottub with at least one other girl.

And there was the whole in-bed-with-Brooke thing.

And um, uh...

Hmmm. Yeah, I don't know then. Just bland I guess. The ghost of Alfred Kinsey weeps...