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How they lost

I have discovered what I humbly consider to be the most perfect use of the gif wall medium possible: The reaction shots of Oscar losers. As they are broadcast, you simply cannot take them all in since they're spread out on the screen in tiny boxes, and last but seconds. They're just flickers of emotion. I think that placing them side by side on infinite loops works best to fully read the reactions of disappointment, bitchiness, feigned cheer and actual cheer. As much as losing an Oscar (or winning even) is kind of an emotional Rorschach for the nominated actors, reading their expressions is a Rorschach for the viewers. Except for the really bitchy ones. Those we can all agree on.

Below are so so many examples of fallen dreams. Each row is all of the (present) members of one year's given category (I'm only using actors and actresses here). On far right, I've included the reaction of the winners just for good measure. Have fun laughing at their pain!

Love is deaf

I almost admire Rihanna's audacity. She is a willful woman in a world still fearful of them. She knew exactly the kind of backlash that collaborating again with Chris Brown would inspire and she did it anyway, taunting the world via Twitter last week in advance of last night's release of the remix of Talk That Talk's "Birthday Cake." (One tweet repurposed the lyrics of "Hard" from her superior, post-abuse album Rated R: "They can say whatever, Ima do whatever... No pain is forever <-----YUP! YOU KNOW THIS.") Rihanna has been unfairly accused of having no on-record personality, but the statement (and all of the psychological implications) made in one remix is bolder than that which your average contemporary pop star makes over the course of a single album.

So willful is Rihanna that she not only rejected better judgement and her record company (allegedly), but her own words, as spoken in her 2009 interview with Diane Sawyer, which aired around the time of Rated R's release:

"My selfish decision for love could result into some young girl getting killed. I could not be easy with that part. I couldn't be held responsible for telling them, 'Go back.' Even if Chris never hit me again, who's to say that their boyfriend won't? Who's to say that they won't kill these girls? And these are young girls...I just didn't realize how much of an impact I had on these girls' lives until that happened. It was a wake-up call. It was a wake-up call for me big time, especially when I took myself out to the situation and I'll say that to any young girl who's going through domestic violence: Don't react off of love. Eff love. Come out of the situation and look at it third person and for what it really is. And then make your decision, because love is so blind."

So is she regressing or making a cynical bid for attention (the second best currency in a rapidly crumbing industry)? Is she back in love, blinded all over again, the product of the effect on which she wisely opined two and a half years ago? None of this was any of our business, by the way, until she made it that way with such a public act of reapproval. As irresponsible as it would be for her to privately hook back up with Brown, there'd be little left to do but sigh over her not understanding the extent of the career she's chosen, that her words from 2009 were indeed true and that when you are a celebrity, at least part of your life is no longer your own. That's the trade-off for mass adulation and wealth. You don't have to be an explicit role model, but like it or not, you are an example.

The convenient thing about this "Birthday Cake" remix (and the infinitely duller "Turn Up the Music" remix, his song on which she now appears, in a one-two punch of releases) is that we need not examine a set of messy, complicated personal lives to critique the Rihanna/Chris Brown reunion: This time it's musical. It once was, too: Brown guested on a terrible remix of Rihanna's "Umbrella" before the pair confirmed their relationship. That one's long forgotten, as it deserves to be (it was dropped from playlists after the abuse reports, but it always seemed like a doomed, shrimpy attempt at eclipsing something that was iconic on first play).

The "Birthday Cake" remix will not evaporate so quickly. Like its Coldstone namesake, it will stick to the ass of pop culture. That's too bad because it is a terrible, terrible song. Brown, who's an embarrassment to the soul tradition, adds nothing as usual. His limited range and whiny tone help expose the song's ultimate bankruptcy -- what ran on Talk That Talk at a brisk minute and a half has been stretched to over three and a half minutes and you feel every extra second. Brown merely reiterates what Rihanna says verbatim. (Her in the first verse: "It's not even my birthday, but he wanna lick the icing off / I know you want it in the worst way, can't wait to blow my candles out"; Him in the second: "It's not even her birthday, but I wanna lick the icing off / Give it to her in the worst way, can't wait to blow the candles out.") His third person pronouns in reference to her help us look at this situation for what it really is: Chemistry-free. (When he does refer to her in the second person, it's to say, "Girl, I want to fuck you right now / Been a long time I been missing your body." So yeah, that's no better.)

An irritating clack of a song that finds its hook in a monotone, "Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake! Cake!," the "Birthday Cake" remix is a miserable experience. It's a shame because the original was something special: Not a song or an interlude, but a statement. It's a statement in which a woman sings, "I'mma make you my bitch," and it sounds plausible, not just wishful or compensatory to someone who already expressed what he thought of her humanity all over her face. The original features a hard cut right after Rihanna sings the words, "I wanna fuck you right now." She's so serious, so in control of her sexuality that she can't even be bothered to end her own song. It's real a shame that she somewhere lost belief in the power of leaving things unfinished.

Old-lady love/hate

On Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center screened 1970's awful-enough-to-subvert-its-own-camp Myra Breckinridge. (I have a very complicated relationship with this movie: when I watch it, my emotional state is a perpetually motive vacillation from love to hate.) The showing was preceded by a live chat between Simon Doonan and Myra herself, Raquel Welch. She was such a bitch. Simon opened with an anecdote about watching Raquel on a motorcycle during the '60s, biting the air and introducing the notion of sexuality to him. It took him five minutes to get that out because Welch repeatedly denied that it was she on that motorcycle. She claimed it was Ann-Margret. I'm more inclined to trust Doonan on this one (he's the pop culture encyclopedia!), but fine: If he was wrong, he was wrong. She was unduly condescending about this, though, at one point talking about how captivating our hallucinations can be. She seemed to mean it as witty banter, but it was just cutting. I couldn't help but wonder if the entitlement that comes from being a fawned-over legend for decades and decades obliterates the nuance necessary to pull off pleasant nastiness.

Welch also bristled when Doonan compared Myra Breckinridge to Showgirls, finally saying, "I don't do nudity," as if that were what he was implying in the first place, and as if Showgirls isn't at least 10 times more entertaining than the movie Welch claims to dislike but regularly shows up to discuss (she has a solo commentary on the Myra DVD – it's entertaining, and far be it from me to begrudge anyone profiting off her bomb, but she makes a lot of time to protest too much). Much of her Myra discourse involves trashing her dusted-off co-star Mae West, who by all reports was terribly unkind to Welch, refusing to appear alongside her on screen and dictating Welch's wardrobe. Well, Welch gets the last laugh by virtue of having outlived West, so HA! (I guess?)

Granted, I admire a good bitch. The utter lack of political correctness Welch exhibits by speaking ill of the dead (pirouetting on a grave, even!) is breathtaking. That said, what she doesn't seem to get is that West is by far the best thing about Myra – West's Old Hollywoodness is one of the few things about the film that actually flatters Gore Vidal's pillaged source material, and she's weird enough to be a standalone freak show. The peak of her performance is a completely needless musical number, a medley of "You Gotta Taste All the Fruit" and "Hard To Handle." You haven't lived until you've seen West bring her trademark snarl to an Otis Redding standard. She feels herself up better than anyone else could possibly hope to.

 

Happy Valentine's Day!

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...