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.)

La Toya Jackson's fear of small cats

 

La Toya Jackson took to Stickam last night to say that shit she's been saying since the June release of her second memoir, Starting Over (much of that same shit, by the way, is in the book). It was pretty hilarious, since it was live and her mic kept going out. (You can watch the recording at the chat's page -- the video and sound are out of sync, which is kind of perfect.) When you could hear her, she did things like claim credit for MJ's love of crests and for coming up with the idea to name children "Paris" and "Prince" (not only Michael copied the idea, but so did Kathy Hilton, at least in the former case). One of my favorite quotes of the night was, "Jan is always saying something about something." JACKSON FAMILY SECRETS REVEALED. Put that in your 900 number.

My other favorite moment is above, when La Toya vaguely described her fear of small cats, and vaguely explained how that fear does not extend to large ones, like the tiger she's posing with in the picture she's describing. It makes no sense, but then again, if it did it just wouldn't be La Toya. I am in love with the fact that she is the most visible Jackson in pop culture! My her reign be eternal!

Starting Over again

This weekend, my review of La Toya Jackson's second memoir, Starting Over, ran in The Daily. I didn't write the headline, so at first I freaked out a little, since much of the book is about her trying to correct misconceptions about her mistakes of the past. But then I thought about it and it's ultimately true: she's not sorry. She voices regret and points a lot of fingers (only on rare occasions at herself), but the weird thing is that she is unapologetic. I don't think she should be (there's nothing wrong with Playboy!), but she acts like she should be? She's pulling a Linda Lovelace and it's weird. I really didn't like Linda Lovelace (her memoir is such a crock of shit!) and I don't want to not like La Toya!

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Starting Over for many of the same reasons that I loved her first book. La Toya Jackson is adorably clueless. There's no recognition, for example, that we have no reason to trust her after she basically admits to deceiving us in her first book (Jack Gordon, her dead scumbag of an ex-husband, was the guiding hand behind the salacious allegations against her family members, supposedly). Who's to say that in 20 years' time, she won't come out with another book that said that Jeffré Phillips and his overemphasized syllable didn't force her to fabricate much of Starting Over?

Anyway, all of the abuse stuff aside (which is awful and harrowing if not gratuitous, as it stretches on for about 150 pages), Starting Over is fun and funny! I recommend it! Just a few more points/lines that I couldn't fit into my review, but still think are worth another chuckle:

Under the bus: An expanded supercut

 

Probably won't do this every year a la "I'm not here to make friends," but to celebrate (or something) last night's Celebrity Apprentice finale, I cut together even more instances of people saying some variation of "thrown under the bus" than were included in last year's season-specific clip reel (which has gone down, actually). The one above spans all four Celebrity seasons of the show, so get ready for at least four times the annoyance!

I know it's not exactly politically correct to admit to watching this product of Trump, but like I said after the premiere: I couldn't help myself.

[Embed code is here, if you're after it.]

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:

A child's laughter

For no good reason, I made a montage of La Toya Jackson giggling. Think of it as an endurance test. If you can get through this, you can get through your work week, no sweat. Happy Monday.

Jackson family d'oh-nasty

 

For the amount of Jacksons that there are, The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty should have at least been a shit show, but its two-hour A&E premiere was really just a bunch of crap. If failing publicly has become the standard for reality TV, this was a failure to fail. It wasn't a trainwreck because they never left the station. As weird as the perpetually muttering Jacksons are, they're just as guarded, which means that the show is just a packaging of the ham-handed way the family has attempted to smooth out their lives and attempt to look normal for anyone who cares to watch. This results in something very boring. Of the four brothers profiled, only Jermaine sticks out because he seems particularly out of touch (he explains that because everyone knew Michael Jackson as superstar, no one can wrap their heads around him being a brother to Jermaine and the rest, as though the concept of siblings is unique to the Jackson family). Also, he seems to be wearing Michael Myers' mask, which makes him stick out, too. Jackie says Marlon's kidding all the time, but the greatest example of this we see is Marlon telling a waitress that Jackie wants his burger cooked in butter. Hilarious, right?

The elephant in the room is the renewed relevance of these four, thanks to Michael's death, though when confronted, Jermaine pretends that he gave birth to said elephant. "How are we cashing in on something we created?" he says, answering Entertainment Tonight's question with a question. His words come from the same place as his elephant: his ass. Here's how, Jermaine: for decades, no one cared about the shit you created until the person who actually built a long-term career from it died abruptly. Simple! Welcome back to TV.

If you care about the whereabouts of 3T, this may be the show for you. Me, I'd rather watch Joe's Blu-Ray. The biggest missed opportunity is the lack of the other Jacksons besides the Jackson 4. Katherine shows up in the first episode to scowl for a bit, and it's no surprise that Janet isn't involved, as she's the only one with a potentially salvageable career. Joseph is a fucking bastard, so you could imagine him not getting involved just on principle. But where, oh where is La Toya? You know that she would have done it if asked. La Toya will go to the opening of a disposable camera's freshness pouch.

And so, to illustrate exactly what we're missing, I've prepared a La Toya Jackson gif wall below, all grabbed from her 1994 Playboy centerfold video. That means there are boobs below (NSFW!), but I swear, this shit is worth getting fired for. As someone so awkward, prone to flailing and in possession of a voice that's like nails on a chalkboard, I think gifs might actually be La Toya's natural medium. Let this be a lesson to all of the Jacksons that they need to get their heads out of their asses/MJ's grave, and recognize their familial greatness that still walks this earth.

The ptosis with the leastest

Alternate punny post title:

 

"Imp interrupted." Or "Impterrupted", even. Or, hey, how 'bout, "The evil, dead"? God, a double elimination yields an embarrassment of riches. Or an embarrassment of bitches, even. Hey, there goes another one. I'm like Lionel Richie: I can't slow down.

Brother's keeper

Do you know how you tell if a Jackson’s lying? Their lips are moving! Or, in the case of La Toya Jackson, her pen was moving. Er, make that her ghostwriter's pen was moving. It zipped along to the deliriously tall tales that fill her 1991 memoir La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family. Now that the Jacksons are something to obsess about all over again (are you sick of them yet? I'm not!), La Toya is the deliciously trashy beach reading that comes along but once a summer. There's something morbidly telling about the fact that up until June 25, this shit went for pennies on eBay (my boyfriend bought it for me a few years ago for literally $0.01) and it now starts at almost $50 in Amazon's Marketplace. I'm not judging: it wasn't until this summer that I finally cracked the spine. And I'm so glad that I did.

La Toya's fascinated me for a while now. She's a three-legged dog in a family of champion racers. She is runty in sight, sound and intellect. She's so desperate for attention that, even today, all it takes is some charity advocacy to wind her into a frenzy (scroll down). That's pure camera-driven adrenalin right there. It's tragic, the lengths she's gone to and the ears she's damaged in search of even Jermaine-level success. The only thing sadder than watching her is not watching, since she's so needy for attention.

Desperate enough to be a telling reflection of its "author" (even if it's by way of fun-house mirror), La Toya is appropriately full of lies. It climaxes with a series of her own family's attempts to kidnap her after she finally left their Encino compound Hayvenhurst at around age 30. Reading this section, I was like, "Toy, no one likes you enough to put that much effort into being near you. Stop flattering yourself by way of creating a plot point!" There are pages on end devoted to exonerating her then-husband Jack Gordon, who was accused of bribing feds for the approval of some slot-like gambling machine. Reading page upon page of obviously planted defense, my eyes glazed over but not so much that they kept me from scrawling in the margin, "WHO FUCKING CARES?" I wanted to get back to the dirt about Jermaine's bitch-assness (he was so jealous, he pronounced Thriller a flop upon pre-release listens) and Janet's anti-Semitism and Michael's introspection inspired by (what else?) The Twilight Zone ("...He was sitting in front of the TV asking himself, 'Who am I? Am I really real?'") or La Toya's own delusions of grandeur ("['Wanna Be Startin' Something' is] not about Michael at all, it's about the friction between me and my sisters-in-law"). Who knows what in there is true? (Somehow I just can't picture Janet as a Jew-hater.) Who's gonna let it stop them from being entertained by the possibilities?

To La Toya's credit, she did blow the lid off of how severely fucked-up the Jackson clan is. I'm inclined to believe virtually everything she says about Joe Jackson's abuse (it definitely is a buzz-kill in the scheme of the book, but not enough to make the entire thing a downer -- all else is just too ridiculous). Last week, in going over my archived footage for this post, I found and posted a Phil Donahue Show clip from '89, in which he raves about how scandal- and drug-free all the Jacksons were and how Joseph and Katherine are to be praised. I know he's an asshole, but the fact that anyone could say that with a straight face is pretty amazing considering all that's transpired in the past two decades. And La Toya, for better or worse, wielded the lightning rod as though it were a baton in a parade.

And people were pissed! Check out this clip from a different Donahue appearance (from '91), in which the crowd is livid that she'd be telling her family's secrets. I mean, they are in so many words accusing her of opportunism, which: fair enough. I love that she is both belligerent and completely air-headed in response. Either response wouldn't have helped her cause, but the two together makes this thing full-on farce:

So yeah, the point is that she's kinda sad, really desperate, a little fun and totally hilarious. A sampling of my favorite quotes from her memoir is below. Watch out though: read them and you're gonna get rocked!

Do you remember the time? (I don't!)

I'm sifting through a bunch of old La Toya Jackson TV footage (for a reason that, like Janet's ex-husband's old group used to sing, time will reveal), and I came across this clip from a 1989 episode of The Phil Donahue Show that blew my mind. In it, Phil enthuses that the Jacksons:

• Haven't been rocked with scandal
• Aren't on drugs
• Have Joseph to thank for their good fortune

I cannot believe there was a time when these statements seemed more or less true. (It is post-Elephant Man bones, though, so the no-scandals thing isn't entirely true.) I cannot believe that there was a time when Joseph seemed like anything but a giant cockroach made out of leather and opportunism. This is some alternate-reality shit.