fourfour

Under the bus, over the moon

Despite Donald Trump's stated politics of bigotry, I am not boycotting this season of Celebrity Apprentice. Now, I think that doing so is a noble cause. I applaud those who can resist this explosion of destitution and facial reconstruction, but I cannot. It would take eternal damnation itself to tear me away from a weekly dose of La Toya Jackson in a high-pressure environment. Sorry. I am gay and in support of equality, but I am also human. Besides, if Trump doesn't support gays, he does support a gay sensibility -- this show, more than ever, is nonstop camp, from Lisa Rinna's lips to Marlee Matlin's ears.

(On one quickly glossed-over part of the premiere, Marlee was seen motioning to her ears, seemingly to remind Star Jones that she is, in fact, deaf. I don't know how much more over-the-top you can get than one of the most famous deaf women in all of pop culture being forced to gesticulate wildly to signal her own deafness.)

Dionne Warwick is a living copy of AARP The Magazine, all determined and exhaustible. Her speaking voice could be described as "stereotypical Catwoman." Richard Hatch is a curly mustache short of a cartoon villain. Gary Busey is an untouched pile of isms books sitting in Urban Outfitters. He has no idea how he got there.

The show is also visually arresting. This season of Celebrity Apprentice collects for broadcast the biggest number of strange-looking people I've seen since I Love Money 2.

Come, let's look:

In case you missed them (and you probably did)

 

This week, The Village Voice released the results of its annual critics' poll, Pazz & Jop. If that alone isn't enough for you to get your pop-nerd on (or alternately, run screaming), allow me to point you to the individual ballots, where you can click on a critic's name, find what he or she voted for, click that and find out what other critics shared love for. Exciting stuff, right? Shut up, you know you're riveted.

I did just this for my own choices and found that five out of the 20 albums and singles I voted for, were voted for by me alone. There's, of course, plenty of stuff that was among my favorite of 2010 that was among everyone else's favorites (Kanye, Erykah, The-Dream, Drake, Rihanna, etc.), but 25 percent feels like a lot to be holding it down solo for. I have all these pop singers' mouths to feed! I think what it means re: the quality of my taste is not for me to decide (although really, who else is going to care enough to decide anything re: my taste?!), but I can assure you that I'm not going out of my way to be obscure. I just really liked this shit! And in the interest of my belief that taste is more about why than what, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a few words on my lost children (that I didn't birth or adopt or assist at all in the creation of, but that I love just the same).

The most glaring omission from everyone else's ballots, I thought, was Magnetic Man & Katy B's "Perfect Stranger." The studio version is merely a nice lite drum and bass track with an acrobatic vocal from my one and only true love of 2010 (and the voice of the future), Katy B (I put "Katy On a Mission" at No. 1 for the year and everything!). It was via the Radio 1 performance with a full orchestra that this song became classic for me (even though Katy doesn't even attempt the high Euro-house vocal that she did in the studio setting). Acoustic and electronic, melodramatic and earnest, otherworldly and assembled right in front of us, this thing is full of fascinating contradictions, as unique and beautiful as the person Katy's rhapsodizing.

And that wasn't the only dnb track on my list!

My love is too critical to have thrown back on my face

Tyler Perry's love is too inconsistent to have thrown back in his face. He has reconfigured Ntozoke Shange's "choreopoem" For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf into two acts' worth of soap opera and one of poetry recitation that by then sounds like hyper-descriptive, vaguely artful babbling. (Imagine a two-hour musical with no music for the first hour and 15 minutes and then only music for the last 45, except instead of music, it's all verse.) The effect is so stilted, it's like watching people on stilts walk on stilts. It's amazing, particularly when they all fall at every turn. So much of the script is so bad, it's virtually impossible to comment on the performances (but it is, of course, always nice to see Clair Huxtable).

Tyler Perry's love is too female-centric to have thrown back in his face. The one admirable thing about his For Colored Girls structure is that since each of his eight principle characters must hit emotional peaks that lead them to babble the aforementioned verse, the final act reads like a series of rolling climaxes. And multiple climaxes feel appropriate for a women's picture. That his characters' words turn artful under times of deep emotional duress (Loretta Divine's character realizes the man she's tried so hard to hold onto will never be hers; Thandie Newton's is forced to confront the err of her slutty ways [or whatever!]; Janet Jackson's gets HIV from her DL bf) feels like a hat tip to virtually every black woman writer who's made major contributions to literature (whether it was personal, societal or a combination of the two, black women writers have been through some shit). Most of For Colored Girls' female characters are oppressed by men, most of the male characters are huge disappointments (raping, cheating, flaking and throwing their babies out of windows-ing their way through life). To have sisterhood is to possess the secret of joy (or maybe instead of joy: just a lack of awfulness). Lesbians do not figure into Perry's story because, among reasons, a relationship without a predatory male around would be far too Utopian for this. Among other reasons:

Tyler Perry's love is too homophobic to have thrown back in his face. Because, well, you know.

Tyler Perry's love is too stereotypical to have thrown back in his face. (Borderline despicable vilification of gay men via a lazy depiction of down-low culture despite increasingly publicized evidence that black women are much more likely to contract HIV from straight men aside...) His characters exist to typify. It is initially exciting that so many different representations of black women are in one movie (high-powered execs! the cowering women who assist them! public servants! artists! religious kooks! back-alley abortionists who are Amy Winehouse! sluts who are proud! sluts who are sluts no more! sluts who dream! sluts who dare! Madeas!)...until you realize that you'd have to stack these cardboard cut-outs on top of each other to get the depth of one or two, at most, well-honed characters in a good movie. Perry's liberal use of irony is supposed to do some shading, but instead is so obvious (The power bitch has trust issues at home! Mommy's little girl is about to become a mommy herself! The social worker who spends her days worrying about others' children can't have any of her own!) that it only confirms Perry's cloddish grasp on every device he touches (see also his infantile attempts at foreshadowing that include a rape gaze predicting rape and a persistent cough predicting AIDS). It is never not amazing that this guy has been making movies for years now and didn't just recently stumble on set and hypnotize everyone into letting him direct.

Tyler Perry's love is too joyless to have thrown back in his face. Ultimately, this movie is one big mess of misery, and because each and every one of his black female characters is hurting so deeply, Perry seems to suggest that being a black woman is a miserable experience (but if you hug your sisters on a rooftop, you can at least fool people into thinking that you're getting a happy ending with all your unresolved problems and AIDS). I don't buy the 24/7 gloom always for everybody. This is not to denigrate others' struggles or suggest that they shouldn't be explored (as I mentioned before, that very process has given birth to wonderful literature, including this film's source material) -- I want only to suggest victimhood can be a part-time job. "I couldn't stand being sorry and colored at the same time. It's so redundant in the modern world," notes Loretta Devine's character. Indeed, colored girls in all senses of the phrase deserve better, and they deserve better than this movie. We all do, for that matter.

Every hand knows everything

If you want a tangible example of the self-investment that often accompanies activism, look to Ke$ha and the way she is selling her new single, "We R Who We R." What sounds like just another one of her vomit anthems actually was written after the recent epidemic of gay-teen suicides, at least, according to her. Ignoring the logistical hurdle of turning around an album's first single in a matter of weeks, "We R Who We R" is a callous response to teen desperation, if it is in fact one at all (and I think we all know that it isn't). You hear about suicides and you think, "We'll be forever young," really? Is she saying that the ultimate in "going hard" is going so hard that you die? I know that young people sometimes equate maudlin with cool, but I seriously doubt that it is those dead gay kids are the ones who are making the hipsters she sings about fall in love. Seriously, what is this woman talking about? Actually I know the answer to that: nothing as usual. Except this time she's pretending like it's something.

Ke$ha has no business talking about queer people. She doesn't seem to know the difference between drag queens and transgender people (whom she refers to as "trannies"). In her It Gets Better video, she assures those subjugated because of their sexuality and/or gender identity, "However you are choosing to live is beautiful" [emphasis mine]. In the interest of fairness, I'm willing to concede that perhaps she has no other choice than to be ignorant (some brains just don't function as well as others). However, no matter where it's coming from, the fact is that she is combating ignorance with ignorance. She makes me long for the days when, "I am not a role model," was sufficient. I'll take apathy over exploiting the cause du jour for the sake of marketing any day. That is some cancerous shit right there. 

Not that such exploitation is new to pop culture. Obviously, this is how the game works: scratching someone else's back works best when you can position your own to be scratched at the same time. (See also: Mariah Carey "gives" a needy kid a new house on Extreme Home Makeover...just in time to plug her new Christmas album.) The best gift a celebrity can give herself is one that appears to be given to others.

Not everyone is a pop star, but everyone has a shot of at least going viral, thanks to YouTube. For this reason, the numerical and discursive success of Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign comes as no surprise. How attractive it is to join the fight merely by discussing what is inevitably any red-blooded, plugged-in young person's favorite subject: himself! Even more, how easy it is to flip on a webcam and talk! People don't need an excuse to wax personal, but they'll take one (especially if it's in the interest of PR) and so, that's just what they've done: they're sharing their stories in droves for this display of solidarity that amounts to mass commiseration, but often feels like a big bunch of whining. One one extreme are those who come eerily close to fetishizing their bullied pasts (I can't imagine such catharsis helping anyone more than themselves) and on the other are people whose privileged positions have themselves so far up their own asses that of course they believe it gets better. (Like, really Hillary Clinton? What the fuck do you know about healing after being called a faggot? Live my life and tell me that it doesn't get moderately less worse at best.) Over and over, I get the sense that with one tossed stone, people are killing two birds (but no gay teenagers).

This is not to condemn the idea of It Gets Better. Dan Savage seems to understand the medium of YouTube well and as a result has devised a campaign for maximum involvement. However, understanding the other side of the medium at least a little, I doubt that a YouTube video is going to change anyone's mind or life (experience has me wary of the Internet's tendency to foster overstatement, and so I find fawning YouTube comments that proclaim, "You saved me!" to be suspect). I think that when you're young, the last thing you want to do is listen to old people telling you about yourself (or worse: tell you about themselves!), no matter how cool of a rap session they're attempting. And given the medium's insatiable hunger for newness, I worry about what happens when the meme is dead. Does it go the way of, "Is that your final answer?" Does Keyboard Cat play it off? On a larger scale, are gay people the new crack babies?

That said, anything is worth a shot and maybe if individual videos amount to little more than the weight of a blog post (like, say, this one!), perhaps collectively there is something of value there. The need to treat gay people as people is an increasing part of our global discourse and maybe the more we talk, the more others will speak up in situations where it actually matters. Maybe there is something to be said for the subliminal effects of all this chatter. Maybe all these personal accounts basically converge into a simple chant, just like at a rally. I don't think that talking about yourself on YouTube is an act of bravery, but I'm not counting out the possibility of it inspiring one.

We are increasingly public creatures, "public space" is an increasingly loose concept and perhaps It Gets Better's approach reflects all that. Connectivity has made it impossible for your left hand not to know what your right hand is doing, and the ideal of anonymous outreach is less and less realistic. And let's not forget why we tend to get involved with anything in the first place: people are motivated by pleasure. We have an innate need to feel better about ourselves, no matter how good we have it. One shortcut to achieving that is through subjugating others. I can't help but wonder if It Gets Better is yet another shortcut, just on a slightly higher road.

Introducing: Hot Guys on Judge Judy

I started a new Tumblr. It's called Hot Guys on Judge Judy. I feel like the more you have to explain a novelty Tumblr, the less conceptually sound it is, so I'll leave it at that. Hot guys. Judge Judy. Let's get to ramming.

If you're as insane as I am and somehow have screen-grabbing means that doesn't involve taking a picture of your TV with a digital camera and feel so inclined to contribute, you can send submissions to [email protected].

I'm really exited to give this to the world. Finally, a Tumblr for people who like to masturbate to Judge Judy! (A companion Tumblr for people who like to masturbate to Judge Judy for different reasons that will consist only of Judy Sheindlin gifs is on the horizon for '11.)

My pride

I did not attend the Gay Pride Parade this year, but then, I never do. I have nothing against it -- in fact, I've really come to appreciate obnoxious expressions of gayness in my old age (thank you, RuPaul's Drag Race!). It's just that I had to have brunch for my boyfriend's birthday, and I hate parades and it was hot and...and...and, in the words of Florrie Fisher when she began an entirely unsolicited story that she decided against telling midway through, it's not important! 

But what I did do on Sunday was watch the entire episode of The Joan Rivers Show devoted to Paris Is Burning on YouTube. Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Willi Ninja and Freddie Pendavis (whose name Joan pronounces like "Pen-dovah," much to Freddie's amusement) and PIB director Jennie Livingston all sit on Joan's coach (and in millions of living rooms when this aired in 1991) and talk about being gay and drag balls and slang (Joan is legitimately perplexed by the term "24/7!"). It's all gayer than just about anything you'd see on daytime TV today, 19 years later. It's a beautiful thing, but not more beautiful than Pepper LaBeija's outfit, which looks like Big Bird crossed with an entire stage production of The Wiz crossed with fierce.

Above is my favorite segment (the final one), in which a mini drag ball is staged and women from the audience are called down to strut their stuff. Women pretending to be men pretending to be women are generally so much more off in their aim than men pretending to be women. That extra layer makes all the difference. Below, I've embedded the rest of the episode (it's annoying to dig through that YouTube account to find it so I got you). [via CNTRL+W33D]

Update: Ugh! What is going on in my life? My secondary YouTube account was deleted over clips I posted MONTHS ago (I'll be reupping stuff over the long weekend) and then this shit goes private? Lame. But I'm used to lameness, so I saved all the flv files. You can download the five parts of this episode below. Nobody gonna breaka my stride.

Download Part 1

Download Part 2

Download Part 3

Download Part 4

Download Part 5

Yep, Nightmare On Elm Street 2 is gay

(Download)

(Just a heads-up that there are a few butts in the clip above. I'm sure that reveal will make some people less likely to check it out and some much more likely.)

I've long been obsessed with the overwhelmingly gay subtext of Nightmare On Elm Street 2. Well, in the recent four-hour documentary on the horror franchise, Never Sleep Again, it's revealed that this, in fact, is pretty much just text -- the movie's writer David Chaskin confirms that all the gay stuff is intentional (although the most hilarious thing in the clip above is that virtually everyone else who worked on the film had NO IDEA how gay this thing was coming off, which is really pretty gay of them). I love the entire documentary (it's so detailed that it includes a segment on the fact that three Just the Ten of Us Lubbock Babes popped up in different Elm Street flicks), but this is my favorite part. I find it really satisfying to finally have confirmation on something I've known forever -- Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is the Clay Aiken or Ricky Martin of cinema.

fourfour = 5

I started fourfour on May 31, 2005, and I figure that the fifth anniversary of this blog is an occasion that calls for a look back. Surveying 1,116 posts that have appeared on a single blog over the course of five years is setting yourself up for looking at a whole lot of nothing, but regardless of how foolhardy my time investment has been, clearly this space has mattered to me. I'm grateful that in the rare cases that I feel like I have something that should really get out there, it almost always does. I'm grateful that I can make some money (a modest freelance wage, really) saying exactly what I think needs to be said on my terms. I'm grateful for the work/interview/interpersonal opportunities my work here has presented to me. I'm grateful that people seem to care about what I have to say, for however temporarily (I've heard, "I used to read your blog..." enough times to make me feel like I'm being oversensitive by finding those words offensive). I've always said that I like to have something to show for my time (I'm very material in that respect) and so the most I'll concede after looking at five year's worth of work is that it's been a whole lot of something.

Let it never be said that I don't know how to throw myself a party. The verdict on this blog's best offerings is probably none of my business -- I wouldn't even know how to call that if I had to. However, for the sake of retrospect, I can share with you what the most satisfying posts of the past five years were from the perspective of the person who created them and received feedback on them. My Top 20 is below.

Haven't I done enough already?

In lieu of a post today, I'm going to direct you to my behind-the-scenes write-up of last night's RuPaul's Drag Race 2 reunion. It took hours and hours (the length attests to it), and so it's taken a lot of my brain space recently. My time on the set was seriously one of the highlights of my career (if not life) so far. I didn't really get that show at first, but now that I do appreciate it for the blank canvas that tells its contestants, "Entertain!" and then rewards them for doing so, I am completely smitten. Santino called it "the most significant show on television," and at this point, I'm thinking I might agree.

Martha Wash side-eye

This week's episode of RuPaul's Drag Race reminded me of the tiniest of tiny anecdotes I have about Martha Wash. She was on a panel at this conference on Sylvester at NYU in 2005 organized by Jason King. I brought some records for her to sign, assuming that she'd have time to do so after the talk was over (she did). One of them was "Give It to You," which I always liked probably mostly because of the video (I didn't realize that those guys are probably all gay back when it was in regular rotation on BET...and at the same time, I totally did). The other was "Everybody Everybody," one of the many tracks she sung for Black Box in one of the many instances of the early '90s that her vocals went uncredited. As far as I know, she'd never go on to reconcile with Black Box, unlike C & C Music Factory, whom she recorded for again after they'd fucked her over so hard. Questionable career decisions considered, I figured Black Box was somewhat taboo and thus having her sign one of their records was somewhat valuable. I presented it to her and she signed it...

 

...but not before giving me a complete and utter side-eye that let me know she at least did not appreciate the humor in signing her name next to Catherine Quinol, the woman who mimed her vocals in Black Box's videos, the ventriloquist dummy she never wanted. Her hesitation looked a lot like this:

 

That's her on this week's Drag Race in a modified version of a gif from my wall this week. I get the feeling she's had to do that a lot in her career.

Anyway, she's always struck me as an underdog, someone to root for. It's always been so insane to me that both C & C Music Factory and Black Box thought they could get away with using her voice and not crediting it because she was already established and her voice is so singular! It's like not crediting the color blue in a painting of the sky. I told her when she hesitated before signing "Everybody Everybody" that doing so might be a cathartic reclaiming of voice. She went, "Harumph!" as literally as I've ever heard anyone sound before. Unfortunately, I don't have a gif to further clarify that one.