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.)

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...

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.

Sporadic reader

As before, a sampling of my recent day-job offerings:

Music

Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow review (In my opinion, this is the most overpraised album of the year)

Surkin USA review (Probably my favorite album of the year)

Switch & Andrea Martin "I Still Love You" single review (Probably my favorite track of the year)

Mary J. Blige My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) review (Definitely not my favorite album titled My Life)

Morgan Geist talks Storm Queen's "It Goes On"

Niki & the Dove "The Drummer" single review

A feature on disco revivalism (especially re: Escort)

2011 Christmas album roundup

Movies

Olivia Colman Tyrannosaur interview

The Immortals review

Rating the post-Henson, pre-The Muppets Muppets movies

I judged a child beauty pageant

Last month, I judgded a child beauty pageant that was taped for Toddlers & Tiaras. I covered this for work. You can watch video, see pictures and read my write-up here. I don't need to say that it was amazing, but it was amazing.

My narrative was actually several times the length of what's running in The Daily today, and with my editor's permission, I am posting the writer's cut below. Everything you ever wanted to know about attending 12 hours of a child beauty pageant and scoring children should be below. If it isn't, let me know because I'm sure I can tell you.

Weekly reader

My still-new day job (at The Daily) is taking up a lot of the brain space I've devoted to this blog, particularly because I can basically write about whatever I want within pop culture (which is what I've always done here). Since it's sometimes hard to track down stuff from The Daily, I'm going to start to post regular link roundups of some of my stuff. I usually tweet that stuff, but that's so ephemeral, too. The idea of self-promotion has always made me feel ill at ease, but the idea of coming off as less active makes me feel worse. The former wins out.

Here are some things I've written since starting a few weeks ago:

On music

Justin Bieber Under the Mistletoe album review
Bai Ling "Rehab" single review
Mary J. Blige featuring Drake "Mr. Wrong" single review
David Lynch Crazy Clown Time album review

On movies

Paranormal Activity 3 review

On TV

Horror TV essay (Walking Dead, American Horror Story, etc.)
Fairy tale TV essay (Once Upon a Time vs. Grimm)

On books

Chuck Palahniuk video Q&A (this is heavily condensed, which is unfortunate since we talked about Judy Blume, among things that were excised, but whatever -- editing me shorter is best left to others)

I'll do these about once a week. Hope they don't make you puke!