Monthly Archives: January 2009

I really, really want one of these.

I’m sorry but the attempts to frame this horrific family murder/suicide as an economic issue is simply ridiculous. It takes much more than tough external forces to cause people to commit such acts of atrocity – it takes a massively twisted fucking psyche:

It was described as one of the most grisly scenes Los Angeles police had ever encountered: the bodies of five small children and their parents, all shot to death, in two upstairs rooms of the family’s home.

But even more incomprehensible to some was the story that emerged after the bodies were found Tuesday: A father who, after he and his wife were fired from their jobs, killed all six family members before turning the gun on himself.

In a letter faxed to Los Angeles television station KABC before his suicide, Ervin Antonio Lupoe blamed his former employer for the deaths, detailing his grievance against Kaiser Permanente’s West Los Angeles Medical Center, where he and his wife Ana had worked as technicians.

I’m sure times were tough, and his lost job was the excuse, but you don’t go from loving your family to deciding they should die because you have some financial problems, I don’t care how serious they are. I guarantee there are thousands, if not millions, of Americans in a tougher spot than this douchebag, suck it up.

Also annoying is the media’s attempt to make this about the recession, as though mass murderers can be created in a matter of months because of hard economic conditions. These things tend to happen more in times of crises, but not because these psychotic individuals aren’t out there, but because these situations unearth them, giving them excuses for their terror.

Please don’t encourage the psychos CNN.

A friend showed me this kinda-funny Slate article about Billy Joel called The Worst Pop Singer Ever. It’s cheeky, cute. Here’s a bit:

I’m reluctant to pick on Billy Joel. He’s been subject to withering contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth the time. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so popular for so long? He’s still there. You can’t defend yourself with anti-B.J. shields around your brain. He still takes up the space, takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters, with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock.

Heh.

I’m no great Billy Joel-lover, though I’ll admit to having a few of his songs on my iPod, but here is what bugs me about the article. It contains zero insight on the musical merit of his songs; it is solely about the lyrics in his songs. Yeah, Billy’s songs are kinda douchey. Yeah, his lyrics aren’t always the best. But if you are going to devote an entire article, even if it is purposefully silly, on why an artist is good or bad, you have to criticize their art. The author, Ron Rosenbaum, even qualifies the critique by describing his attempts at finding “absolute standards” of art. Well, I would assume that almost everyone would consider the craft involved in ones art to be one of those “absolute standards”, but the author is obviously completely unqualified to judge Billy Joel’s art in a musical context.

Billy Joel is a pretty good musician. He’s definitely a good singer (or was) and wrote several well-crafted – if rather trite – songs. It’s good 80s pop, not much more. His lyrics can be pretentious, in the case of And So It Goes (although I kinda love it), or dreadful, in the case of Pressure. Usually they are ok. Obviously, the author finds BJ to be annoying. Alright. I can see that. But that is not a valid criticism in and of itself. Here are a couple examples of his justifications:

First let’s take “Piano Man.” You can hear Joel’s contempt, both for the losers at the bar he’s left behind in his stellar schlock stardom and for the “entertainer-loser” (the proto-B.J.) who plays for them. Even the self-contempt he imputes to the “piano man” rings false.

“Captain Jack”: Loser dresses up in poseur clothes and masturbates and shoots up heroin and is an all-around phony in the eyes of the songwriter who is so, so superior to him.

“The Entertainer”: Entertainers are phonies! Except exquisitely self-aware entertainers like B.J., who let you in on this secret.

K, got it, you don’t dig the lyrics. But that does not make you a music critic, anymore than it would make me an art critic be if I decided I didn’t like a painting because I thought it was ugly. It may be fair for me to form that opinion, but it doesn’t make me an authority. And I sure as hell would not be conceited enough to write an article for a major online publication decrying that work of art for being ugly, while being completely ignorant of the technique involved in creating it.

Seriously, they don’t put up with this shit in the art world, why do musicians find it acceptable that utter laymen are the primary commentators on their work?

This is how I felt this morning when I woke up to find my apartment void of my favorite caffeine-laden hot liquid.

Can they pledge to not make any more of these sappy freaking videos?

Yo, catch my sis Suzanne tonight at 9pm on the premiere episode of Fox’s new drama, Lie To Me, starring the legendary Tim Roth. She plays a newcaster. Awesome.

Make sure you watch it through to the end to catch the über-creepy picture. This is straight-up cult-speak. It still disgusts me that Obama picked this dude, partly because it is a giant “fuck you” to gays after Prop 8, but mainly because I think that most mega-churchs are cults. Warren sums up my fear of mega-churches in this speech explicitly. Every time I see a mega-pastor speaking to the thousands of people at a mega-church, I think of Hitler in Munich. Here, Rick Warren not only makes that comparison, he seems to make it favorably. WTF.

And did anyone think that Warren’s dismissal of “moderation” was a little ironic, considering who just hired him to speak at his inauguration?

I finally got around to watching my first Terrence Malick film last night, Badlands. Considering that I had read much about the film, and its director, I can’t say that I was really shocked by the film, but it kept me up all night thinking about it.

Here’s a relatively spoiler-free clip:

I thought it was a little funny that the two DVDs I have from Netflix currently are Badlands and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Well, I did until I was reading commentary on IMDB last night and found several posts explicitly comparing the two. Weird.

Next up is Malick’s follow-up to Badlands, Days of Heaven. I’m a methodical sumbitch.

In honor of the new Biggie movie coming out tomorrow – and presented in stark contrast to what looks to be a heart-warmingly revisionist biopic of one of my favorite rappers – I thought it would be nice post one of my favorite Biggie flows of all time.

Dead Wrong. This tune was Biggie’s foray into the extreme rap subgenre of horrorcore (although it was released posthumously). It’s one not liable to come up on the soundtrack for the movie, mainly because it’s one of the most violent and explicit lyrics ever recorded by a mainstream artist. I dig it for several reasons: 1. It is a great example of his expert rhyming skills – something you don’t really get on, say, Going Back to Cali as much; and 2. It highlights gangsta rap’s fantastical nature, to an extreme degree.

See, contrary to popular belief, gansta rappers don’t necessarily believe what they are writing/saying, they are in character. Christopher Wallace was the man and Notorious B.I.G was the fictional persona he created for himself. To many it may appear as if they must always wholeheartedly agree with said character for the mere fact that they are speaking it, but that is an incredibly simplistic way of viewing it. It would be similar to the absurdity of expecting every actor in a horror film to defend every one of their lines as if they themselves meant it.

When Ice-T wrote the controversial single Cop Killer and all of the politicians were up in arms, they simply could not fathom that Ice-T wasn’t advocating killing policeman, he was writing fiction. Yes, it was based on his frustration with the police, but that is how art works (unsurprisingly, Tipper Gore didn’t quite get this) – it is a personal expression, and sometimes a fantasy based on the root of that expression.

Biggie was a businessman, and in many ways cleaned up his act at times to achieve starhood, but he was also a raw talent, his heart was in the skill and craft of rhyming. Movies like Notorious will attempt to transform him into something ‘more’ – a symbol – but they neglect that, for the most part, art is not about the narrative, it is about the craft. I don’t care if Biggie slang crack or loved his Momma, that don’t mean shit to me. The tragedy of his death to me is that there will never be any new Biggie rhymes. That sucks. Luckily, his rhymes are rich enough that we can constantly find new appreciation in them, new ways of recontextualizing them. I’ve already done one Biggie remix, I’m sure I’ll produce more.

“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”
– Barack Obama in 1996

He needs to be confronted on this at his next press conference, straight up. I’ve always suspected that his civil-unions stance was purely political and this seems to prove it. What up Barry?