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.)

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!

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!

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...

Some kid!

 

There was an episode of Made that premiered last week that, as far as I can tell, got ZERO play despite it being UTTERLY AMAZING. It featured the kinda awkward, kinda sickly awesome high school student Jason, who has some kind of degenerative disease that will soon paralyze him (I missed the first three minutes, but the only reference to what is ailing him that I could tell came when he said he was hypermobile, although that just means double-jointed, so WHAT?). He wanted to be a rocker to get "chicks," but then once the cameras did that job for him, he kind of lost interest but still had to stick it out for his hunky Made coach Eoin Harrington (who's "like pie"). For some reason this episode isn't even online, nor is it airing again in the near future (as per a cursory survey of upcoming episodes on my cable box). So here's seven of Jason's best minutes, which are as cringey and hilarious as teenagehood itself.

Toddlers and Tiaras: The aftermath

Reality TV has the reputation of dehumanizing people, but my brief experience on it was to the contrary. In the fall, I judged a Universal Royalty pageant that was filmed for Toddlers and Tiaras (read 5,000 words of my thoughts about that here). The episode finally aired this week (I was interviewed for the show, and you can see a reel of my screen time here). Watching the early portion of the episode, which chronicled the preparation for the pageant (as every first half of a Toddlers and Tiaras episode does), was eye-opening, primarily because it was incredible to see the children that I judged actually look like children.

Isys doesn't wear glasses onstage (a lesson from the early part of the episode: her mother doesn't know "how she sees" but is convinced that she does). If she did wear them, though, I would have certainly given her a 10+ on facial beauty. That would have been a bold and endearing choice. Glasses on kids! That is heartbreaking and adorable.

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.

Maybe my favorite thing of the year

 

I saw this during Everything is Festival at Cinefamily this summer and fell in love -- it's a highlights reel of a video sex advice column Heidi Fleiss and Victoria Sellers did years ago for Laugh.com. Their flippancy and tendency to give guidance that amounts to, "Get a hooker!" reminds me of...another duo of online advice dispensers that are not to be trusted. Mmmmm...who could I be talking about? (But really, seeing this was, in a warped, fun-house way, like looking in a mirror for the first time after having living life oblivious to the existence of mirrors.) Fleiss has never been more endearing and Sellers alternately hilarious and really sad (especially when she talks about her black outs)! (Also, the language is totally NSFW, if that's even a thing, and this does involve a life-life latex vagina being poked at, so BEWARE.)

Also, Cinefamily is doing this live streaming telethon starting Saturday at noon and its lineup is insane. It's a good cause, as they are an unending source of the weird shit that makes pop culture fun. Also, I love them. Please give.

Proselytizing in 2011

I was on the boardwalk at Coney Island this weekend and something in the distance caught my eye. "It's a puppet show!" I said (fine: squealed) to my boyfriend. And then, upon approaching, "...and I think it's religious!!!!" It was:

 

I think this is a wonderful metaphor (or working example, even) of evangelism's burden in 2011. No one cares and the wind's blowing too hard to pay attention, anyway.

Though it was an obvious highlight, this was not the most surreal thing I experienced on Coney Island. The Coney Island beach is pretty gross (it's more dirt than sand), but a nice thing about it is that people walk by all day selling things. This makeshift dim sum set-up is very convenient if you want ice cold water or a Corona in a paper cup or a $1 blow-up beach ball. As part of this series of nomadic peddlers, an overweight, older man with a gray ponytail that was down to his ass approached our group and held up a seashell with a pot leaf laminated inside of it. "Would anyone like to buy an ashtray?" he asked. His intonation was somewhere between music and a child-beauty pageant announcer (really, he sounded like Mr. Tim in Living Dolls when he announces that Reed Hale's hobbies include "playing in the dirt and watching Unsolved Mysteries"). Of course we were like, "No." "It's made with a realllll leaf," sang-song the man, lingering. We ignored him and he slinked off. I realized that he was probably speaking in code: his Lynchian tone and behavior were either his way of signaling that he was selling marijuana or that he would be back to murder us later. We're all still alive, so I'm going with the former!

And thennnnnn, when we had left the beach and were standing on the boardwalk, waiting for people to finish using the bathroom, two guys approached our group of eight or so and asked, "What's a douchebag?" Someone started to explain exactly what it was, but the pair interrupted and clarified: they wanted to know whether "douchebag" was more frequently used to describe men or women. The more laid-back of the two was gently trying to convince his friend that "douchebag" was typically used for cocky, boorish guys. His more excitable friend (who had what I think was a Dominican accent) was insistent that you call women "douchebags" because "douchebag is the equivalent of scumbag" (literally, that is a quote). I calmly explained that, no, the laid-back guy was right and that men are typically called douchebags. Someone else in our group said that you could call anyone anything but typically the connotation is that men are douchebags. The excitable guy began pointing at each person in our group in an impromptu poll that got him nowhere except more insistent that he was right. Then a giant pitbull with a football in his mouth walked up and distracted them. We slipped away and I got ice cream.

The literary-level irony of this is that both of these guys were total douchebags! (I can only imagine the conversation that led to this debate – it almost certainly stemmed from shit-talking a stranger, probably a woman.) They didn't know it, but they were in the middle of an existential crisis.

Anyway, the larger point is that if you go to Coney Island, you should talk to people because everyone is fucking insane.

Dancin' on Air

A few weekends ago, a Philadelphia station aired a four-episode marathon of Dancin' on Air, a teen-oriented dance show that aired from 1981-1987 (it was Dance Party USA's predecessor and then sister show). Before and after commercials during this string of very special reruns, they'd cut to various dancers who kept this show going back in the day. One of them said that this was "the reality show of the '80s." That claim sat alongside ones of them still being recognized, 30 years later, in supermarkets, so I was ready to dismiss it along with those. But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. Many of the ideals present on Dancin' on Air have become reality show dogma. Already strange-looking people have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves look stranger. No discernible talent is necessary to participate. There's a palpable struggle for camera time that is rewarded by outlandishness. In its polite and simple way, Dancin' on Air predicted our cultural adoration of extreme human behavior.

It was also run really weirdly, although I'm not complaining: pop curios (like Taffy's Italo "I Love My Radio") were featured alongside smash hits. Also, concepts the cut-in dance above certainly introduced layers missing from your standard kids-dancing-in-a-room programming. And who doesn't want to know what turns underage children off?