|
| < 2/1 2/2 2/3 2/4 2/5 2/6 2/7 2/8 2/9 2/10 >
|
(e) points out that mash-ups are in fact bootlegs according to my definition, in that they're neither officially sanctioned nor distributed. What's more, it's the current lingo, as evidenced by compilations such as The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever... and others. I accept that. What bothers me is the "bootleg equals mash-up equals bootleg" conceit, which I'm perceiving as an attempt to redefine the word rather than simply expand it. I'm mean, I'll accept that mash-ups are bootlegs (if they're using copyrighted material) but not that all bootlegs are mash-ups. Jeez, I have the weirdest conservative streaks, don't I? I swear, if my DNA had anything to do with it, I would have been a total High Fidelity guy. I'm glad I (mostly) dodged that bullet.
10:36am I would have switched out Nashville Skyline and Street Legal with, say, New Morning and Time Out of Mind, but otherwise, want.
| ||
 | ||
The final El Rio incarnation of Wicked Messenger was last night. The audience was light (I'm told the pay cable dyke show was heavy competition, since queers evidently can't program VCRs), but everyone who did show up had a lot of fun, and that's what matters.
12:42pm Lingufascist time again: I'm all for the expansion of language, both formal and vernacular. That I refer to myself as "queer" means I don't have a problem with reappropriation. But with all due respect to Bootie (how much respect would that be, exactly?), this annoys me greatly:
[A bootleg and a mash-up] are pretty much all the same. Also known as "bastard pop," a bootleg is a song that's "mashed-up." This usually means the vocal track of one song is mixed into the instrumentation of another song.Um, no. They really, really aren't "pretty much the same." I do get the joke: the name of the club is Bootie, which shares the same first syllable. n a musical context, though, a bootleg is a live track or studio outtake released unofficially, by fans and/or capitalists. It is not fuckin' Madonna's voice dubbed over the Sex Pistols. And it isn't likely to be anytime soon. So stop calling it that.
4:20pm Danielle, who has always said I resemble Johnny Depp (which I don't see at all), insists I should do Captain Jack Sparrow for the Drag King Contest this year. Well, that I should be him, anyway. She's made it clear that she would be the one doing the, um, doing. Whether that's a threat or a promise depends on your point of view.
8:47pm The Grammys. The fucking Grammys were last night. Now I really don't feel bad about the low turnout, not between that and the pay cable dyke show.
| ||
| ||
So I've been invited to perform at a Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Ignoring the obvious logistical issues in getting to Georgia, I declined, primarily since they're under the impression that I do slam poetry. Nope. I don't consider myself a poet to begin with, and having participated in one slam (and scoring a mere 25.0) does not a slam poet make me. Oh well. The official Twilight Zone: The Plays page is up. And my name is even spelled correctly. I swear, it feels like I've heard "Don't put that in your blog!" more over the last thirty-six hours than I have in the years I've been doing it. (It'll be five this Thursday, in fact.) And Maddy's probably right—I should stop being all semantic and objecting to the use of the word "blog." It was called an online diary back in the day, and I still refer to it as such. Besides, blogs generally have an interactive element, which this page doesn't. Pick pick.
| ||
| ||
II was told last night, with great conviction, that I'm a dead ringer for an actress on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit by the name of Stephanie March. Especially when she's wearing her glasses. I'm not sure I buy it, but I'll take it all the same.
| ||
| ||
I'm really not surprised. Sooner or later, Bush was bound to compare the "war on terrorism" to World War II. Blatantly, I mean. Pearl Harbor comparisons were tossed around a lot after The Great Overshadowing, but they never seemed to stick, and aside from the flurry of non-voting flag-wavers, it ultimately didn't have the same impact. They were two very different events, just like Bush's war and World War II are very different things and don't have much in common at all. The things is, I've never really bought into the "greatest generation" hype (my maternal grandfather was in the war, and he was as human and flawed as anyone else), and my feelings about war are more Howard Zinn than Steven Spielberg, yet even I find the comparison offensive. And the fact that it took so long for Bush to get around to saying this, it's almost as if—naah, this being an election year couldn't have anything to do with it. Wartime presidents are historically very popular and are that much more likely to be re-elected, but I doubt Karl Rove knows that. Gotta be a coincidence. For Bush's sake, I hope he doesn't repeat his father's mistake and compare himself to Truman. For everyone else's sake, I hope he does. By the way, there's no way in hell John Kerry can be president. Not with a face like that. Ain't gonna happen.
12:02pm I lie. There, I confessed. I'm a liar. I don't do it very often, but even if I only ever lied once, that still makes me a liar. It's like losing my virginity—that would be that. And let's just say I'm not a virgin. It isn't pathological, however. If I say something happened to me, it did. People who make stuff up in an attempt to make their lives seem less boring irritate me severely. To an extent, it's one of the reasons I can never go into deep stealth, since it would inevitably require rewriting my past. I was never a teenage girl, and I'm not going to claim otherwise. All of which is an overly complicated way of saying I don't like to lie. The Boss keeps asking me to, and it makes me very uncomfortable. Most recently, he lost a recent issue of an industry magazine, and he asked me to call them and say it never arrived. Ugh. It makes me feel so...I don't know. "Dirty" isn't the right word, but it's all I can think of. The irony of how casually he steals from other companies (which is what it boils down to) while being terrified of getting gouged is not lost on me.
6:40pm we're all children of michelle in the long run...
| ||
| ||
I've bitched before about reviewers of the movie Bubba Ho-Tep being able to suspend their disbelief and accepting an elderly Elvis battling an Egyptian mummy, but scoffing at the concept of Ossie Davis playing John Kennedy, referring to his character as "elderly black man who thinks he's JFK." The movie (like the short story it's based on) is intentionally vague on the actual identities of both characters, implying strongly that they're both deluded. But, no, the white geek populace can't accept that, so as far as they're concerned, Bruce Campbell is Elvis Presley, battling a mummy. The other guy is just some crazy old black man. At long last, Stomp Tokyo gets it right:
In a bit of casting that is not quite so obvious, Jack Kennedy is played by Ossie Davis. When we saw Bruce Campbell speak about this movie a while ago, he described the character by saying that he was black man who claimed he was JFK, that his death was faked by the CIA, his skin was dyed black, and part of his brain removed and placed in a jar in Washington D.C. "And the thing is," Bruce said, "He's right." The movie leaves this particular story open to interpretation, but in a movie that features a soul-devouring mummy from ancient Egypt, such things are hardly beyond the realm of possibility.Thank you, guys. And fuck Film Threat. Did they suck this much as a print magazine and I just didn't realize it at the time? Don't tell me, I don't wanna know.
2:57pm As long as I'm on about disposable pop culture, the whole Super Bowl (god, that feels like it should be one word, "Superbowl") brouhaha reminds me yet again why I loathe the mainstream media so much. The teevee networks, organized sports, the music industry, the whole freakshow. Just...ugh. Fuck all of it. Perhaps Michael Powell in particular: I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show of the Super Bowl. Like millions of americans, my family and I were gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, the celebration was tainted by a classless, crass, deplorable stunt. I have instructed the commission to open an immediate investigation into the broadcast. It will be thorough and swift.Oh, man. "A celebration?" What the fuck? Okay, I'm biased by my dislike of organized sports, but a celebration of what? And, dude, it's the friggin' Super Bowl. Of course it's aiming for the lowest common denominator and hitting the ground beneath. It's never been about being classy. Never has, never will. The Mickey Knox interview in Natural Born Killers is oat halftime for a reason. For Pete's sake, the commercials get as much press as the game itself. It's all about the filthy lucre, kids, and there's nothing crasser than that. But it sure is giving him an opportunity to sound tough, moral and decisive, huh? Besides, raising a stink about the horrors of Janet Jackson's exposed breast (I'm not going to go into the racial implications, since Powell, a black man, did not) is a swell way to distract the public while he deregulates the media into the hands of an increasingly small number of corporations. (And I'll bet the average citizen cares even less about those vaporware WMDs right about now.) However thorough and swift the immediate investigation may be, whatever fines or penalties are imposed, they know he's still their best friend.
| ||
| ||
Maddy and I have been bellying up to the Aileen Wuornos media trough like the good little piggies we are. In addition to seeing Monst0r when it opened, on Friday night we rented Nick Broomfield's '92 documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and on Saturday we went to see his followup Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Whee. (I'm still not sure how I feel about him as a documentary filmmaker, though he did direct my favorite Spalding Gray monologue movie, Monst0r in a Box. Sorry, Demme-ites and Soderberghians. As far as I'm concerned, he's the only one who got it right.) It's been fascinating to see so many different points of view on her, considering that she's practically a folk hero to some of my friends. (Sadly, Danielle probably doesn't have their correspondence anymore.) I especially love that she requested Natalie Merchant's "Carnival" to be played at her funeral. It's safe to say she'd gone quite mad by the end of her life, but she wasn't entirely blind, either. Continuing what I hope to be a tradition of seeing political documentaries on the day of The Big Game (last year it was Bowling for Columbine), we saw Errol Morris's The Fog of War, about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. We cheated and went to the UA Stonestown Twin rather than the Embarcadero. The Twin is a crappier theater, but it's also a ten minute drive as opposed to a muni trip all the way downtown. It also meant there were commercials before the movie, during which I meandered around the lobby. Ain't gonna watch commercials in a movie theater. No. Fuck you. That said, I'm still not sure if it was ironic that the first commercial was for the Army. In the evening was a Twilight Zone director's meeting at Spanganga. As a result we got to K'vetch late, well after the open mic list had filled up, though a rather ill Lynnee was kind enough to plug the next Wicked Messenger for me. Speaking of which, Heather and Jim have officially invited me to move the show into their performance space. Anders is gearing up to move out of state, they don't serve alcohol and can't have any loud bands. So it'll be different. But it has a new home, and that's a good thing.
3:05pm There's a school of thought which believes that secondhand smoke, or at least its danger, is a myth. Sometimes I really hope they're right.
| ||
| ||
Though Lynnee tried his best, Tribe 8 will not be recorporealized in time for next Sunday's Wicked Messenger. Lipstick Conspiracy has stepped in as the band, which is very cool of them. The fly0r has been changed to reflect these things. Please, please, respect the umlaut.
| ||
| ||