fourfour

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.)

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:

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!

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:  

Clearly, the best album

Here is the first thing you should know about Carol Channing's 2009 album of negro spirituals and assorted Lord-praising:

And here are 27 more things:

Sporadic reader

 

Above is an interview with Simon Doonan that I did a few weeks ago. I love him. In order to make this coherent as a piece (and not, you know, 45 minutes long, which was the duration of our chat), a lot of our back-and-forth couldn't be included. Things we talked about that weren't included were: Showgirls, his hanging out with Kitten Natividad, his bumping into Erica Gavin when she became a buyer for Barneys (using a pseudonym because she was ashamed of her days as a Russ Meyer girl!), Tyra (I expressed my dislike and he told me not to be jealous!) and that he is stopped on the street by girls praising his ability to make ANTM Cycle 2's Catie cry by telling her to go down to the docks, take in what the hookers are wearing and avoid it. A true classic stays with you for life.

What is included is mostly about his book, Gay Men Don't Get Fat, which is somewhat controversial (especially among people who haven't read it) as a result of its several sweeping generalizations. You don't have to look further than the title for one of those, but if you do, you'll find things like, "Straight conversation has no common denominators with gay conversation," and "We poofters strive to make life jolly and cute, like a chic cinematic anti-depressant." What a strange sensation it is to read about yourself and not relate whatsoever! It soon becomes clear, though, that Doonan's exaggerations are part of a device he uses to tell the truth; through his generalizations about how things are, he talks specifically about himself. (He totally knows that gay guys do get fat, hence the chapter on bears.)

In that respect, his book couldn't have been published at a better time, in this advent of shit-said shit, which also employs generalization as a medium. Conceptually, I think this is a very clever way to express your truth to an audience that will be talking back. Immediately, whenever a, "Shit Xes Say," video pops up, people look for themselves in it. Those videos' comments sections are full of, "OMG, I soooo relate!" or, "That is wrong, fail." By positing these personal observations so generally, one leaves his experiences and impressions open for debate, signaling an embrace of the fact that not everyone was going to agree with your argument, anyway. That's wisdom, whether the creators of this stuff know it or not. It's a way of making universal what is often a solitary medium that goes further to promote narcissism (we all know that the Internet is a breeding ground for that!). The effect is magical.

For that reason, I recommend listening to Doonan's opening words in the video above, because it is there that he gushes about the art of exaggeration. He's really charming, as is his book. Believe me, as someone who's stretched the definition of chunky with my actual waistline, I went into it thinking I would hate it, but it totally won me over.

Just a few more links to things I've done for work recently that were particularly satisfying:

An essay on the things I like about Downton Abbey

An Iron Lady review (Ridiculous movie!)

A War Horse review (Even more ridiculous!)

Another really good woman

 

Just when you thought you saw the best old lady of 2011, along comes the mother of Lidia's Italy's Lidia, who openly lusts after show guest Stanley Tucci and explains, "I'm an old lady, but I like young boys. What you wanna do?" A declaration and a proposition. Merry Christmas.

The best woman

 

Ugh, this week, right? For the sake of posting something, anything, here is Editta Sherman, who in my opinion, stole the show in Bill Cunningham, New York (not an easy thing to do from an also-amazing man who happens to be the subject of said documentary!). The self-aggrandizing that is so popular in our culture and that I tend to loathe in most people is endearing here. I guess when you've been around for 96 years, you've at last earned the right to toot your own horn. A legend and a fixture, indeed.

You should probably see this

For work, I devised an alternate Christmas viewing canon, full of weird shit like Tim & Eric's Awesome Show Great Job! Chrimbus Special, The Anna Nicole Show holiday special (Cousin Shelly for life!), The Monster's Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2. I love all of these and look forward to watching them every year. One new addition to my perennial favorites is George King's Ten Thousand Points of Light. It's 30 minutes of tacky Christmas insanity (which is the best kind of Christmas insanity, in my experience), as it documents the final years that this family in suburban Atlanta named the Townsends crammed lights and Christmas shit in every corner of their house and then let people walk through it.

It's shot on VHS and better for it, as the blurred picture gives it a home-move vibe and gives you the strange sensation of remembering something you never experienced (weirdly, when B. of STFU, Parents introduced this to me, I initially felt like I'd heard of it before, but in actuality had not).

Anyway, here's the trailer.

 

I highly suggest you get on this this now, but I plead my case further after the jump.

The diva chain

 

Not to incite a stan war or anything (HAHA, I WOULD LOVE THAT), but the practice of female singers being asked to comment on their peers (or taking it upon themselves to do so) is endlessly fascinating. (Is it sexist to play women off of each other? It it bitchy for women to take the bait? Is it sexist to think that they're bitchy?) So here are a bunch of clips of divas talking about divas. I gave myself an organizational rule when assembling this: The person speaking in each clip must have been talked about in the preceding clip.