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Oh yeah, I'm writing for Gawker now

And I'm doing my thing with a freedom that no full-time job has offered unti this point. This blog has long been a refuge for work that doesn't fit in at work, but as of my first week, there's little of that. It's a beautiful thing to get paid for expressing all that is inside of me (I'm loving my job so far), but it also leaves me with the question of what to do with this blog. If I'm saying it all during the day, what else is there to say? (Winston pictures probably.)

I'll figure it out. But until then, if you want to check out what would be here (like a Hunger Games review, an essay on why I'll never recap a show again, a video re-edit of this motivational speaker/meathead, etc.), you can read my stuff on Gawker.

I wanna feel soft and pretty

Funky Town Grooves recently issued expanded and remastered editions of La Toya Jackson's third and fourth albums, Heart Don't Lie and Imagination. They are really something, to say the least. I reviewed them for MTV Hive. Since the noises that come out of this woman's mouth are often unbelievable, I thought it necessary to collect her best screeches, interjections and declarations in a soundboard. It's below. Turn your speakers down (off, even!) and have fun. (I highly suggest at least listening to the very last file, the last minute of the slow jam "Love Talk." You'll thank me.)

Still mourning

Oprah Winfrey's interview with Bobbi Kristina Brown, broadcast last night on OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter, was the antithesis of O's 2009, revealing sit-down with Brown's mother, Whitney Houston. Bobbi Kris's was conducted while standing, perhaps to feel more casual. The ultimate effect was one of discomfort, though, with a jittery Bobbi Kristina playing with her hair throughout the interview. Perhaps this was one subject where Winfrey's magic -- relaxing her interviewee better than truth serum and a magic lasso combined -- just wasn't going to happen. Broadcast exactly a month after Houston's death, Brown was still shaken, and who could blame her?

You can't push a kid in mourning, and one can only imagine the extent of the behind-the-scenes demands put on Winfrey in exchange for Bobbi Kristina's participation. Almost everything, it seemed, was off limits. Topics like Bobbi Kris's back-to-back hospitilizations (on the days of and after her mother's death), her supposed suicidal tendencies, her documented drug use and the reportedly imminent rehab stint weren't broached. Instead, we learned that Bobbi Kristina still hears her mother's voice and considers light flickerings in her house the work of her mother's ghost. She stated an agenda speaking publicly for the first since her mother's death: to let the world know what an amazing spirit her mother was. This didn't exactly accomplish that or much of anything (at least not Bobbi Kris's segment). I don't think it was "too soon" to try to talk to Bobbi Kristina, as some people have charged (as if such a concept exists in our day and age!), but I do think that she's not together enough to have any perspective. That's fine. Save it for the memoir, girl.

Bobbi Kristina revealed an interest in singing and acting, as we already knew. "I gotta carry on her legacy," is how she explained it. Where talent and career path are concerned, that is astronomical ambition. But in a way, Bobbi Kris is already carrying out her mother's legacy. She's struggling publicly, like her mother, and also like her mother, she has a legion of strangers behind her and rooting for her. I don't know what's in store for Bobbi Kristina's celebrity, but if she turns out happy and safe and lives a long, full life, she will have succeeded. Here's hoping.

Bobbi Kristina said she couldn't yet listen to her mother's music. That's in contrast to how the rest of the nation (and many parts of the world, I presume) mourned Whitney Houston's death. Post February 11, her sales skyrocketed, "I Will Always Love You" reentered the Top 5 on the Hot 100 and for a few weeks, the woman's voice was once again inescapable. When I interviewed TLC's Chilli a few years ago, I asked her if it was comforting to her and T-Boz that the rest of the world was grieving along with them over the death of their friend and bandmate Left Eye, as so many people were touched by the work they did with her. She told me that on the contrary, it made things more difficult becuase there was no option to grieve privately. Wherever they went, they were reminded of their loss and implicitly asked to discuss it by seemingly well-meaning people. For someone who found herself in an atypical existence through no pursuit of her own, things have to be even stranger and more complicated for Bobbi Kristina. Just getting through that Winfrey interview and saying the little that she did while remaining standing the entire time seems like an accomplishment.

The stuff with Whitney's brother, Gary, and his wife, Pat (also her manager and best friend) wasn't much more enlightening. Who knows if Pat was telling the truth when she said that at what would turn out ot be the end of her life, Whitney's drug days were over, as far as she knew, and that she was on an upswing. Pat seemed sincere, and certainly at other points in the interview, her candor was apparent (especially regarding her concerns over Whitney's involvement with Ray J as well as her confirmation that Whitney and Stacy Francis indeed had words at Kelly Price's Grammy party). But she also could have been attempting to spruce up Whitney's legacy by presenting a rosy picture. Maybe at this point, no one can the truth, or at least the whole truth.

I remain thirsty for it, though. It's very strange to be so moved by the death of someone I didn't know. I had a dream on Friday night that I was watching a just-taped interview with Whitney. She was happy and laughing and sharp and acting irreverent, like the rock star that she was. I felt such relief and I didn't know why. I then realized that my brain was contradicting the reality of the past month. The disappointment was worth the momentary flash of joyful deceit (in this case, the ride really was worth the fall). Whitney left behind so many of those moments, too. They're terrific places of refuge.

John Carter is so bad

It is unconscionable in 2012 for a movie to portray a white dude who infiltrates a non-white native culture and then turns out to be better at being a native than even the natives are. We've seen it for years, we saw it in Avatar and now we see this straight up white supremacy in John Carter. The title character, a former captain of the Confederate fucking Army, is ported over to Mars, where he encounters a race of four-armed green monster warriors. Because of his bone density (bone density!), he is innately superior, able to leap in massive bounds and thus can defeat legions of not-so-nice four-armed green dudes who confront him in orgiastic pilings-on. He is a super hero and his white skin is all the cape that he needs.

I am not familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs' beloved Barsoom books, so I cannot say whether John Carter does them justice. If they promote the idea of the white man's innate heroism and superiority, however, they are some bullshit and they deserve this piss-poor Disney film adaptation, if not worse. I can say for certain that transplanting this universe from print to film is not without immediate unintentional humor: Barsoom (the Martian word for "Mars" here) sounds way too much like "bazoom" when it is said out loud. I kept thinking about that awful woman Henrietta in Showgirls whose tits popped properly only with Nomi's assistance.

There's a lot of really stupid vocabulary specific to John Carter. There is a Martian city-state called Helium, and when another race (made up mostly of white people) kept talking about "saving Helium" at the beginning of the film, I thought they were discussing the element and could not figure out why it was so crucial. Maybe one of them really, really liked balloons, I thought. Like, liked them-liked them. Maybe they were planning a birthday party. That would have been more fun than John Carter's central demand of its audience to parse out dialogue over perpetually swelling music in some of the worst sound mixing I've ever experienced. But then, when I realized that the people were just babbling nonsense words anyway, I figured I wasn't missing anything.

Soon after arriving on Mars, John is given some elixir that allows him to understand the Green Martians' language. Mostly, it just cures the movie of subtitles, since the white people who already live on Mars only speak in English, even before the elixir is administered. Nothing in their speech is altered by John's taking of the elixir and they can freely communicate with the Green Martians, as well. I can't even figure out where the logic is there (other than allowing us the satisfaction of watching savages assimilate to our ears on their own fucking planet). The Green Martians are still capable of speaking in Martian or Barsoomic or whatever it's called, however, as we hear in prayers and various other mutterings throughout. So the elxir is more a Band-aid than a cure, I guess.

Also on the linguistic tip, when John Carter meets Dejah Thoris, the human object of his affection who kind of looks like Hoopz rendered as a Disney princess, we find out that there are still plenty of vocabulary differences. Planet names, for example, differ on Earth and Mars, although Dejah refers to everything as the "solar system" so somehow the stars aligned for that phraseology to be universal.

I know that many of these are minor points and that science fiction demands a suspension of disbelief. I don't know that John Carter is at terms with its own logic. Right up front we're told that Mars is not the airless or dead planet that we think it is, "but it is dying." So we're almost right, I guess? Great excuse for a story, righting our half-wrongs with racism.

I also don't really know what this movie is about. Opposing forces, I guess? Going from Point A to Point B through the desert on a Tauntaun knock-off with no name? Sword play in a time of aircraft technology that exceeds what we currently have on Earth by thousands of years? A cave of gold? A script whose first uttered word is "Mars!" that then goes on to deliver bon mots like, "Where on Earth am I?" and "I claim the right to challenge!" and "War is  shameful thing!" and "We are strong because we despise weakness"?

This movie is a pile of shit. I liked John's flat-faced dog side-kick because he reminded me of Winston, and I look forward to cutting together a supercut of all of the instances of people saying "John Carter" throughout this movie because they say it so much. It stops making sense and, like most of what comes out of people's mouths in this movie, is merely just noise.

I also reviewed Silent House for this week. Surprise, surprise, I also hated that, much to my dismay. I would love a good horror movie right about now, and I love to love Elizabeth Olsen. Ugh. I wish a good movie would come out. Right now, my favorite movie of the year so far is The Vow. Fucking The Vow!

Probably my only ANTM post of the cycle

As I've been saying for a while now (recapping be damned), I'm over America's Next Top Model. In confirmation, I thought last night's Cycle 18 premiere was fucking dreadful. I wrote about it for work, and a tweet I sent out with a link to that piece turned into an extremely unpleasant interaction:

I know people like that person from her past appearances on reality TV (I'm not much familiar with much beyond her name and occupation), but I think on ANTM, she is on some sub-Twiggy level shit. So dull. Here's the commentary on her that appeared in my review:

The biggest alteration arrives late in the premiere, when it is announced that fashion PR and reality TV vet Kelly Cutrone has replaced André Leon Talley on the judges’ panel. While Talley brought cloaks, his own vocabulary (“Dreckitude!”) and a sense of absurd performance (“I feel like I’m in a cinematic moment of something wonderful!”), Cutrone’s sole flash of color comes when she pronounces “aristocracy” as “UH-ris-to-crasy.” She is virtually lifeless, delivering flat line after flat line in a chat forum that demands animation (“It’s an unfortunate picture,” “The clothes are wearing her, she’s not wearing the clothes”). At one point, she describes her PR work by saying, “It’s my job to make them think they want things they don’t need.” If she’s trying to convince us that she’s what Top Model needs, she’s doing a terrible job.

A bit later, I recieved this reply:

There are many lessons to learn from this: