I did not attend the Gay Pride Parade this year, but then, I never do. I have nothing against it -- in fact, I've really come to appreciate obnoxious expressions of gayness in my old age (thank you, RuPaul's Drag Race!). It's just that I had to have brunch for my boyfriend's birthday, and I hate parades and it was hot and...and...and, in the words of Florrie Fisher when she began an entirely unsolicited story that she decided against telling midway through, it's not important!
But what I did do on Sunday was watch the entire episode of The Joan Rivers Show devoted to Paris Is Burning on YouTube. Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Willi Ninja and Freddie Pendavis (whose name Joan pronounces like "Pen-dovah," much to Freddie's amusement) and PIB director Jennie Livingston all sit on Joan's coach (and in millions of living rooms when this aired in 1991) and talk about being gay and drag balls and slang (Joan is legitimately perplexed by the term "24/7!"). It's all gayer than just about anything you'd see on daytime TV today, 19 years later. It's a beautiful thing, but not more beautiful than Pepper LaBeija's outfit, which looks like Big Bird crossed with an entire stage production of The Wiz crossed with fierce.
Above is my favorite segment (the final one), in which a mini drag ball is staged and women from the audience are called down to strut their stuff. Women pretending to be men pretending to be women are generally so much more off in their aim than men pretending to be women. That extra layer makes all the difference. Below, I've embedded the rest of the episode (it's annoying to dig through that YouTube account to find it so I got you). [via CNTRL+W33D]
Update: Ugh! What is going on in my life? My secondary YouTube account was deleted over clips I posted MONTHS ago (I'll be reupping stuff over the long weekend) and then this shit goes private? Lame. But I'm used to lameness, so I saved all the flv files. You can download the five parts of this episode below. Nobody gonna breaka my stride.
I think Chris Brown's tears at the 2010 BET Awards were sincere. I think that when you are an entitledbrat who can't for the life of you figure out why no one wants to listen to the supremely shitty music of a pop star-beater ("It’s nothing else that I can do. I’m doing everything that I need to do," is how he put it), it must feel really good to receive the attention you were before you beat that pop star. I think this was a perfect storm of acceptance from his peers and the self-actualization message of "Man in the Mirror" that led to Chris Brown's onstage breakdown. (From where I sat, it was hilarious at first, shocking to watch unfold, and unsurprising in retrospect.) It may have been the most sincere thing he's done ever, but at least since beating Rihanna. It was also incredibly unprofessional. He had a job to do -- salute Michael Jackson -- and instead, he shifted the focus to himself. This is why you don't invite Chris Brown to perform a tribute. When he beat Rihanna/his career to oblivion, he showed that he has a hard time controlling his emotions. Well, look how much things haven't changed! He couldn't even sing a line of a song that he was assigned! The general tone toward him seems to be one of forgiveness and I wonder why. He only furthered his reputation as a volatile wreck. The very act of crying is what makes everything better? Absurd and ridiculous. Let's remind ourselves of this next time we have a murderer or rapist or BP exec whining in front of cameras, OK? Or don't. Whatever. Be as emotionally irresponsible as you want. It's apparently the thing to do now.
I've seen Diane Horner's Country Hip Hop Dancingmentionedbriefly on the Internet, but I don't think anyone's done its wackness justice. And if there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I'm all about justice. Anyway, I think you'll agree that the highlight reel I put together is, in a word, jammin'. It is the hip-hop.
I'd probably be ashamed of being white right now if I weren't busy laughing so hard. Buffoonish appropriation: it's a trope that never gets old!
Oh, and I thought you'd like some gifs of the hip-hop dancers, so they're below for you:
It does seem overly sentimental to take time out to recognize the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, but I guess that's where we are as a culture. I'm not carrying grief per se, but I am somewhat reminiscent of the few months after MJ's death, when he was once again the biggest pop star in the world. It was a trip back through time for more than one reason -- those months reminded us of how things were before the long tail, before tastes
compartmentalized to the point of solitude, before iPods were all the
companion you'd ever need in the city. I like the long tail and
compartmentalization and I love my iPod, but I forgot how much I missed
communal listening on a grand scale.
The video above was uploaded the day after Michael's death. In virtually any other context, I would get pissed and leave a subway car that hosted a scene like this. In virtually any other context, this wouldn't have happened. Maybe a common emotional focus is what's needed to turn something from cheesy to charming. Maybe June 25 should become the official day of MJ Remembrance and Resulting Corniness. I wouldn't really mind that. It would be refreshing for a moment.
K. Michelle will never be as messy as she is right now. The young R&B wailer is a self-proclaimed "walkin' talkin' weapon" from Tennessee who interrupts her mixtape What's the 901? to call out her baby daddy for not paying for their son's day camp. Before that, she admits to keeping their son from him, and in the same song she confesses that she's been sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend in the NBA (so Basketball Wives of her!). She devotes a whole song, "Fakin' It," to faking orgasms ("He ask me if I like it / I say yeah ‘cause he tryin’ / I only do it ‘cause I love him / Man, I be lyin’"). At times she fancies herself as a vigilante targeting those who've been violent toward her. Her worldview is lopsided by her eye-for-an-eye philosophy, even when it comes to unfaithful lovers -- she beats them at their game before it's even a game ("Call me goldilocks, ‘cause someone’s been in your bed"). She is cut from the same ragged cloth as Keyshia Cole (though she sounds mostly like Shareefa with a larger range and a more precise pitch). Obviously per the What's the 411? reference of her mixtape's title (which also opens with a "Leave a Message" track), she recognizes herself as an heir to Mary J. Blige's drama-sharing legacy. But just in case you don't get that she falls on the rugged end of the R&B spectrum, she's got you: “I’m not Jazmine Sullivan, bustin’ all your windows out / I’m from Memphis, Tennakee, I’mma bust you in your mouth."
Where Mary and Keyshia peddled commiseration implicitly at first, K. Michelle enters the game like it's not a game at all, but group therapy: "Life ain’t been easy for me, and I’m sure that life ain’t been easy for you, either," she tells us on a spoken interlude at the end of 901. She explains that she drinks, curses, wilds out and sometimes wants to hit people -- "everyday emotions of everyday people" she calls this. And even though her singing voice sometimes heaves like her soul is throwing up (I mean that as a compliment), this isn't just a purging session -- she's an advocate for abused women as she mentions her own suffered abuse in no fewer than five of 901's songs. She urges women to leave abusive situations and speak out on them. She isn't just reflecting, she's providing a model through her music and the willingness for someone to take such a stand from the jump bespeaks an uncommon courageousness in the say-nothing field of R&B (much as I love it, the form is about selling the cliche -- something K. Michelle's simultaneously raw and controlled voice allows her to do exceedingly well when she wants to, by the way).
"This might be too real for the radio," she mourns on the "Song Cry"-esque, string-laden "Where They Do That At?" Indeed, message music left urban radio in the '90s. Undoubtedly, K. Michelle will be shaped into something a little less real by her record company, Jive as she readies her proper debut, Pain Medicine (R. Kelly, whom she opened for on his most recent tour, is executive producing it and their "Echo" Remix duet on 901 already shows sings of a sex-kitten makeover). It's only a matter of time before K. Michelle's world is gentrified. I wonder if, like Mary and Keyshia, she will be ironed out and prone to boring by her third album. (I'm not saying that Mary and Keyshia are no longer capable of making music that's great, but I doubt that either of them could produce an entire album that is great or without polite sappiness, at this point.) These flowers-through-the-asphalt divas are such a weird phenomenon to wrap our heads around. Emotionally investing in their music means rooting for them to improve their quality of life. But then when they do, what use are they? We hate it when our friends in our head become super-famous.
K. Michelle probably only has a limited amount of time to make something as deliciously cranky as "Bitch Outta Me" (it's the scrappy cousin of Teedra Moses' "You Better Tell Her"). She probably won't be calling out Bossip for criticizing her openness about her abuse for much longer. And soon she'll be clear on the fact that saying, "Y’all takin’ my pain and my life and y’all considering it entertainment," is hypocritical -- obviously, even if it's her story to tell, by including her pain in her music, considering it entertainment is exactly what she's doing. Time is running out before K. Michelle's edges are sanded down, before her fascinating contradictions are erased. Get on her while she still sounds human.
I've thought a lot about how I should feel about the clip above from the 1994 TV movie Starting Again. In typical TV-movie fashion, it goes in like a lamb (soft music, and slow pacing), which only makes its roaring end come off as more ridiculous. It includes one of my favorite tropes in pop culture -- a crazy old lady acting crazy. So what's the problem? It's a scene from a film based the true story of the 1987 suicide of Joan Rivers' husband, Edgar Rosenberg. That's Joan playing herself, and in the recently released documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, she talks about how therapeutic making this TV movie was.
Out of context, this bit is as funny as any flare-up of '80s melodrama. In fact, the only thing holding it back from being hysterical is how much it resembles so much of unintentional TV movie comedy. Looking at it within context is trickier, because you must decide which context to acknowledge. Yes, this based on a true grieving (a tragedy, by the way, that wasn't just sad but also frustrating and infuriating). But it's also a depiction of monetized grieving. After all, she didn't pay for this therapy -- NBC paid her. I understand that converting life into product always has been what Joan Rivers does. I also understand that if you live in public, you mourn in public. However, the compassion that drives me to keep this sacred doesn't seem to be present in her -- why do I feel like the burden of respect for Joan Rivers' dead husband is on me?
Like tears streaming down reconstructed cheeks, Joan Rivers herself is a
bizarre mix of integrity and artifice. A Piece of Work (a fascinating film, start to finish -- really, run, don't walk) is so
involving just as a puzzle to untangle the two, and part of the reason I point this clip out is because it summarizes that effect so well. Joan seems to be driven
mostly for the sake of art -- she refuses to slow down her work and when
it slows down anyway (as a result of a lack of demand), she's affected
to the point of wallowing. You get the sense that as someone who lives
amongst gilded walls, she doesn't have to work at the rate that she does, even despite
all the people she supports (downgrading her lifestyle a step or two
would still find her living in luxury that most of us couldn't even conceive), and especially at her age, especially after all these years.
Is she living for the adulation? And if so, why is she so willing to
humiliate herself for a job? ("I'll knock out my teeth!" she says at one
point, begging a manager to get her a dentures endorsement. She, of
course, also mentions the option of hawking adult diapers.) We hear from people all
around her that she'll turn down nothing, which makes her
straight-talking persona harder to swallow. You don't get the sense
that she's always aligning herself with product she believes in. But if
you don't believe me, whatever -- go ahead and get yourself some Right to Bare Legs. Be my guest. She says it's
great.
There's such a weird mixture of feeling and insensitivity within Joan
Rivers. I know comedians are still people (and complicated ones at that), but I'm not sure I buy humor as an excuse for inconsistency. The oft-cited emotional high point of A Piece of Work comes when Joan tells a Hellen Keller joke onstage and is met with heckling from someone who identifies himself as the father of a deaf son. "Oh, you stupid ass, let me tell you what comedy is about," she says. "Oh, please. You are so stupid. Comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything, and deal with things, you idiot.” Joan rounds out her lecture with a qualification that her mother was deaf (asserting that kind of ownership undermines the everything-for-everybody populism within her proclamation, unfortunately) and later when a fan brings up the incident backstage, Joan's response isn't one of righteousness but sympathy. "He has a deaf son," she says with a shrug to the woman who cannot believe that he had the nerve to interrupt Joan's set. Again, the matter of context arises. One person's tragedy, when held up to the right light, is another's
comedy, and vice versa. We're all just trying to deal with things, right? So if I chuckle at one person's reenacted pain because of the broadness of it all, I'm probably not a bad person. No worse, at least, than Joan Rivers.
(Just a heads-up that there are a few butts in the clip above. I'm sure that reveal will make some people less likely to check it out and some much more likely.)
I've long been obsessed with the overwhelmingly gay subtext of Nightmare On Elm Street 2. Well, in the recent four-hour documentary on the horror franchise, Never Sleep Again, it's revealed that this, in fact, is pretty much just text -- the movie's writer David Chaskin confirms that all the gay stuff is intentional (although the most hilarious thing in the clip above is that virtually everyone else who worked on the film had NO IDEA how gay this thing was coming off, which is really pretty gay of them). I love the entire documentary (it's so detailed that it includes a segment on the fact that three Just the Ten of UsLubbock Babes popped up in different Elm Street flicks), but this is my favorite part. I find it really satisfying to finally have confirmation on something I've known forever -- Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is the Clay Aiken or Ricky Martin of cinema.
I can't believe with what Aubrey Drake Graham gets away with. For a second, look past his background. Look past the fact that you don't see a lot of half-Jewish Canadian people in hip-hop and never Degrassi: The Next Generation alumni, at that. I want you to even ignore his his grumbled-about ambivalence toward fame, which is the thematic center of his proper full-length debut, Thank Me Later. (By the way, Drake's alternating celebration and loathing of the bizarre societal ideal that thrusts real human beings into a luxurious, paranoid world, in which they can't even trust themselves and thus hire teams to just tell them how to be, is as nuanced of a statement as you'll find in contemporary pop music, complainers be damned.) Forget the baggage and just listen to what an anomaly he is. He raps like he's repressing a squeak, his voice frequently flirting with shrillness (that's made even clearer when he contrives a more booming delivery -- on the braggy single "Over," he goes for butch but just sounds hoarse). Later's uniformly gorgeous production is often muted and filtered ("somnambulant" is how Sean Fennessey describes it in his excellent review). This leaves Drake's relatively high voice as the main source of treble in his own universe. Drake also takes part in a practice that is essentially a requirement for female rappers (Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, Eve, Queen Latifah, Lil' Kim, Lauryn Hill) but rare amongst male ones -- he sings. And it's not just Autotuned warbling like Wayne's or Kanye's, it's not the sing-songy duo-tone of Kid Cudi, it's not the melodic chanting of 50 Cent -- Drake, in fact, doesn't just sing, he croons. This seems bold in a genre that seems to equate singing your own hooks with sucking your own dick -- it's economical, yes, but you still end up with a dick in your mouth.
In a world that idealizes hardness, Drake has a bag-of-cotton aesthetic: soft on top of soft. (New York magazine goes as far as to mock his very moniker for belonging "on eighties soft-rock radio.") He largely rhymes (and croons!) about his feelings, and at times is exponentially introspective ("I'm looking forward to the memories of right now," he admits). He openly talks about remorse over not calling his grandmother, and seems uncannily in tune with women's psyches ("You say you droppin’ 10 lbs., preparing for summer / And you don’t do it for the men, men never notice/ You just do it for yourself, you the fuckin’ coldest"). I'm not saying he's gay, but I am saying that, "I love Nicki Minaj / I told her I’d admit it / I hope one day we get married just to say we fuckin’ did it,” is totally something a gay dude would say. And again, like the female rappers he resembles more than his male predecessors, he seems keenly aware that soft must be balanced with hard somehow (at least sometimes) -- in the one Later track that pretty much everyone agrees is amazing, the baby-making duet with The-Dream, "Put It Down," Drake tempers his otherwise drag-queeny command with a real man's curse: "Put those fuckin’ heels on and work it, girl."
Based on the uniformity of sound and what comes out of Drake's mouth on Later ("singlemindedness" is how Zach Baron puts it), this isn't some dudey dude having an emo moment a la Kanye. This is Drake. His otherness is his essence. Masculinity traditionally has been defined by big, bold lines ("A man does this and not that..."), and Drake's musical m.o. is to push boundaries, balance and blend (Fennessey's assessment that Later is the sound of Drake
making "this odd
little album about figuring out who he is" is key). It's ballsy to sound this neutered in hip-hop.
The Spanish-language horror film [REC]² is now available to watch On Demand and via Amazon. You should get it if you like pretentious nonsense. I really didn't like the first one, and I liked this one far less. I explain why with spoilers below.
My boyfriend spotted this commercial for Cibao Meat Products during Fox 5's broadcast of New York's Puerto Rican Day Parade. There is so much meat handling in it that it could easily run during New York's Gay Pride Parade in a few weeks (do they air that on TV?).
Obviously, this is my favorite commercial of all time (sorry Lysol commercial from the '80s, in which the girl complained about her dining room smelling like "fish and roses" -- you have been replaced). My Top 5 favorite things in this commercial are below...
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