fourfour

This isn't the time for pretty

The title of this post quotes Nigel, who simultaneously meant to compliment Isis' face and critique her lack of effort. If you ask me, though, it's a really good comment on this entire cycle (nay, show!) without qualification. It cold even be the tag line: "ANTM All-Stars: This isn't the time for pretty."

The worst song I heard this weekend

 

...But also, the best.

This is from the god-awful TV movie Rockin' with Judy Jetson, in which a song written by the prematurely greying daughter of George for a pop star who is not Jet Screamer, ends up getting mixed up with alien gibberish (just like what happened with Jet Screamer!). It becomes a huge hit and Judy gains tons of fans based on her counterfeit songwriting talents. This is maybe the most ridiculously optimistic view of the future that The Jetsons ever offered. More than flying cars!

I watched this, by the way, because I'm working on a Jetsons-based project that I'll post in a few days and then create a sense of Jetsons overload on this blog. Sorry. I thought this was too horrendous not to share.

Do model with food in your mouth

On this show, this is considered ideal:

Literally, a shot of someone showing you the half-chewed food in her mouth was deemed this week's best photo.

I love this show. SO MUCH!!!!

Another gay movie

When we talk about gay equality, sometimes we use phrases like, "Well, if it were straight people, then..." (you can replace "straight" with any other group supposedly less marginalized than gays, depending on the speaker's point of view). Well, if Andrew Haigh's Weekend were about straight people, then...it simply couldn't exist. There would be nothing to talk about -- over the course of their 48-hour, club-spun fling in England, Weekend's two principle characters, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) barely deviate from the subject of their homosexuality and how it relates to themselves and each other and the larger world. Peppered with male nudity and extended explicit sex scenes, this is as gay as it gets.

The message is simple: we can't yet reverse the gay/straight binary, because there's still so much to work through on our side. We're years away from something as matter-of-fact as a gay version of Before Sunrise, a film to which Weekend has been compared. Maybe it's a bit of self-obsession, but it's hard not to talk about being gay if you are gay, especially upon meeting (and hooking up with) a fellow gay guy. When the majority of the world still feels so behind, still thinks that rudeness (or worse) is a socially acceptable way to deal with a person who is different, you talk about it to cope, to reassure, to strengthen. Language is one of the few things we do have -- the belief that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on your humanity and rights confirms as much.

This film has a good grasp on what it is like to be gay in 2011, this bizarre moment of transition where you won't always get beat up for showing gay affection in public, but you could very well be confronted with disdain. By positioning two characters of the same sexuality that possess different ideas of what equality means and what makes for "radical" behavior, Haigh creates a meditation that asks as much as it proclaims. Glen is comfortable with his sexuality to an almost militant extent; Russell is uncomfortable to the point of being virtually closeted. Glen's is angry, Russell is wary. They don't always agree, but through events that took place in these characters' pasts and from what plays out on screen, they are both justified. This bizarre moment in time makes for really complicated interiors.

Weekend is quiet and intimate, and that makes sense because of how introverted communication has become. Yes, clubs are still frequented, but because of the Internet and Grindr, they are no longer a necessity (and in fact "non-scene" is sometimes worn as a badge of pride). We can get to the point of two people interacting a lot more quickly. For that, Weekend, a film about two people talking, feels perfectly of its time, in the way that Larry Kramer's Faggots and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance must have felt very much of their time in the late '70s.

T hose books feel largely under-read at this point, and that's for maybe for the same reason that Weekend could only exist at this moment. I don't expect Weekend to have much reach in the future, or even now for that matter -- despite it oozing with humanity, there is not much allegory to be had. It is what it is: two gay dudes talking about being gay and having gay sex. The best case scenario for this document of its time is that we'll return to it in a few years, see the internal conflict, the frustration, the still pervasive homophobia, and realize that it has since become obsolete.

So you bought yourself a Flowbee!

...but your (obviously used) set didn't come with the instructional tape and you're a bit confused by Flowbee (only the best people refer to it without an article, like it's a person)? This video re-edit I did should clear everything up!

 

Hapy all-one-length cutting!

America's Next Top Next Top Model

Another fall, another cycle of ANTM. But this time is different! Bringing me out of recap hiatus is the All-Stars angle of this cycle.

But it is a bittersweet return.

"Pillow Talk" with Winston

 

My boyfriend and I have often said that Jamillah's cheap, (I think) Canadian version of Sylvia's "Pillow Talk" is Winston's personal anthem because it's so weird and fluffy and coo-filled. I had no idea how right we were until I set this video to it: I started it where I wanted it, let it play and realized immediately that his kneading was more or less in sync with the song. The cat keeps a mean rhythm!

Come on, Irene

Amazing:

This comes from my hometown free newspaper, Ocean City Gazette. It is the most bonkers thing I've read this year...until Tyra Banks' young adult novel Modelland is released tomorrow. Maybe.

It's me again, and I'm back

What a weird time this is for me and my life. I've been pretty obsessed with all the happenings around me, and I can't help but wonder if that's my way of displacing self-obsession enough to be OK with it. I don't know the answer, but I do know that requesting it from the outside would be my most self-obsessed move yet.

Anyway, I regret not having posted here in a while, as this is my refuge and refuges deserve upkeep. Last month, I went on vacation and all of a sudden found myself with a pile of assignments. They were gratifying (especially my "Imagining a world without the Kardashians" piece for the Washington Post, as well as my column for MTV Hive), but time consuming. I never wanted fourfour to be at the bottom of my priorities list, but you can see how work you do for others has to take precedent over work you do for yourself (for one thing, I run no risk of not getting more work commissioned from myself).

I have more time now. I'm no longer with TVGuide.com. And that's that. I really look forward to using my time to focus on talking about exactly what I want to talk about. There are supercuts to be cut and old movies to be cut up (have you seen Whore, btw?). Also, there's an all-stars cycle of ANTM coming up that I will be covering in some capacity. I'm getting a little old to be spending 10 hours on a single recap, but then again, my process is my process for a reason. Everything is wide open, which is terrifying and exhilarating. It's kind of like being eaten by a shark, I guess.

Anyway, expect more posts here starting next week. In the meantime, here's a handful of things I observed in my time away: