On the set of "Walk the Line," Joaquin Phoenix learned to explore his feelings.
On Monday night, everyone’s favorite brooding Hollywood leading man, Joaquin Phoenix (pronounced JOHN-quin, if you’re my mother), announced at some red carpet event that he plans to hang up his acting shoes—permanently—and pursue music full time. Wha?!? I mean, while my first reaction was something along the lines of, cool! Maybe he’ll grow a huge beard and long hair, and brood even more! upon further thought, I quickly realized that this is, in fact, a terrible idea.
Why, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Phoenix learned to play guitar while preparing to play the Man in Black himself, Mr. Johnny Cash, in 2005’s predictable, yet engaging, “Walk the Line.” Over the course of this process, Phoenix apparently realized that the guitar can serve as an excellent form of self-expression, and subsequently decided that he had a lot of “demons” inside himself that he just needed to set to music. So, back in May, Phoenix announced he was cutting an album of original material with Tim Burgess of UK band The Charlatans.
I’m not sure if you heard, but last night Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama bought a half hour of national air time to broadcast a bold “closing argument for the Everyman,” as the New York Times phrased it. In the days leading up to the event many derided the stunt as the Obama Infomercial. Clearly, they hadn’t been watching the same campaign over which the rest of the country swooned for nearly 700 days.
The Obama campaign for President will go down in American history as, to date, one of the most incredibly crafted and executed sojourns to the White House. It is the first national political campaign to take place fully in the age of Web 2.0, building on the past successes of Howard Dean and forging a new blueprint for Baracking the Vote in an age of Facebook blasts and You Tube gaffes. A half hour ad for Barack Obama during the fall prime time season on most of the major networks? That’s not an infomercial; that’s an event.
I’ll let other sites tackle whether the spot was effective, whether it was compelling, whether it was fresh. My vote isn’t up for negotiation 5 days before the election. But policy and substance have never been the most alluring tenets of Obama for President. It’s been style, flash, grandiosity and spectacle. His campaign’s premise seems to be: You can be President if you often appear Presidential. Much of that comes from character, eloquence, carriage and gait, understood. But even more comes from lights, camera, sound and action.
Traditionally in American politics, it is uncouth for a Presidential candidate to directly attack the Vice Presidential nominee of the opposing ticket. Though this election season is many things, traditional it is not.
Wednesday morning the Obama campaign revealed a new ad attacking John McCain’s knowledge on economic issues. Toward the end the ad includes an image of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin winking during her debate with Sen. Joe Biden. John McCain knows little about the economy, the ad says, and in 2007 he said he would choose a Vice President who could compensate for this deficiency. His choice? Winking Sarah Palin.
Not one to turn the other cheek, McCain today released his own ad attacking the “character” of Obama’s VP selection, Joe Biden. With less than a week until the election, it appears the McCain campaign has forgone the October surprise and brought out the big guns, the kind that can get you rung up on weapons charges in Atlanta.
McCain Attack: Does Joe Biden Pal Around With Rappers?
There’s a little rumble in the earth.It’s faint now, but it sounds like it’s getting closer.Wait, I can see it now.It’s a train, and it sounds like it’s chugging along to a beat.Damn!That’s a fresh beat choo-choo train!It says Pop Music on the front and it’s got Phil Collins’ face painted on the side.Is that M.I.A. on the train?!Oh snap!Is that Ezra from Vampire Weekend?And Bonde do Role and Santogold???Wait, stop!Pharrell is tied to the train tracks and he’s screaming!Oh no!I think I’m inside Pharrell’s worst nightmare!And it sounds like SHIMMERING, GLOBAL AFRO-POP.
Well I hope everyone packed their Pumas because we’re all going back to Africa like Marcus Garvey, except darker skinned and with a bigger smile.And it’s about time.
When I imagine a global pop sensation coming to reality, the formula I’d guess would be: entrentched producer with an ear for ‘authentic’ sounds meets up with ‘authentic’ musician with a pop proclivity.Authentic musician does his or her thing, and entrenched producer mashes it up with a dub beat and a rock sample.BOOM.Indie blogs rave, Fader Mag does a cover spread, mixtape drops, Rolling Stone loves it, YouTube views soar, Live Aid 2010 invites roll in, and a global pop sensation is born before the first LP is ever released.
Call it what you want, baby, but I still call it love.
Last night the recently reunited New Kids on the Block played Madison Square Garden in New York City. I personally did not attend; one New Kids show at Alpine Valley in 1989 was enough for me. My sister, however, bought tickets the moment they went on sale six months ago, snuck out of work and caught most of their set.
Most people will probably scoff, roll their eyes or ironically titter at the thought of NKOTB reuniting to tour the world. These guys, after all, are not only has beens, but also New Edition rip-offs, the Elvis to Bobby Brown’s Chuck Berry, who preceded the Boy Band craze of the ’90s. What New Kids on the Block and bands reuniting represent, however, is something more than music, something more emotionally powerful and far more compelling as a lucrative commercial tool. They represent the lure of Nostalgia.
Listening to NKOTB and seeing them perform live in concert isn’t about the now, it’s about the then. Feeling what you felt at the age of 12, lip-syncing the Right Stuff into a flashlight as your microphone, honing the dance, running shoulder to shoulder with a crowd in search of lawn seats at an open outdoor amphitheater. How were the New Kids last night? It doesn’t matter since everyone in the sold-out Garden saw what they wanted to see – a flashback to their adolescence when time and markets didn’t matter. There are no glasses rosier than the bifocals of nostalgia. NKOTB is your fat girlfriend, the one only you can love.
The holiday season begins in earnest in a few weeks, which means a cavalcade of unwelcome rituals: standing in line a lot; smelling your wet coat as the snow from outside melts on it; conversations about why the BCS sucks. If November and December were just about family, fun and Christ, we’d be totally down with the holiday season. Shit, even Hindus like to feel warm and fuzzy inside while a Nor’easter assaults the finish on our decks.
Here’s the problem with ritual, though – it breeds unorginality and cliche. Am I so jaded that I called Christmas cliche? No, what you do in the privacy of your home to celebrate whatever holiday you choose to observe (Happy Diwali, Hindus!) is personal and therefore out of the purview of judgment. Actually, that’s not completely true, but I’ll leave it to my boy Scalia to parse the nuance. What I’m saying is every year we have to deal with the Holiday season and by extension the Holiday Party. Holiday Parties, themselves, have enough packed into them to lace any week leading up to one with anxiety and concern. How much should I drink? Should I wear a tie? If I don’t what will I wrap around my head at 11:30?
Then you have the boys and girls who raise the stakes. Their holiday party needs a theme, and as we all know there are only 4 themes that exist for theme parties.
Remember when on the Glow in the Dark Tour, ‘Ye played the new beat he made and Jay came out and ripped the first verse of Jockin’ Jay-Z? Holy shit that was tight! But yo, something had to be done. Jay couldn’t even get his Icebergs on ’cause Noel Gallagher was on his nuts so bad.
Well, now it’s pitbulls that are getting jocked like Secretariat. Fresh off the success of their Olafur Eliasson A Milli remix, Southern Mothers are back to defend Pitbulls against GOP slander. With seven days until Obamageddon, we ask you, “What’s the difference between a Hockey Mom and a Pitbull?” Turns out a lot.
I’ma put it all out there: I’ve been a fan of Jason Robert Brown for some time now. From his bittersweet depiction of a marriage gone wrong in “The Last Five Years,” to his haunting, sprawling Southern epic “Parade,” even to his surprisingly soulful song cycle “Songs For a New World,” I’ve been down with the JRB from very early on in my ongoing love affair with the sultry vixen we call musical theater. His music is both traditional in its reverence for the history of musicals past, and progressive in that his melodies are fresh, unique, and original. Brown’s lyrics are, for the most part, quite nuanced, by musical theater standards, and his characters are all the more multi-faceted as a result. In short, JRB is the real deal, meng.
That said, I was understandably very excited when Mahotma and I attended a production of Brown’s new musical “13” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last night. I knew the musical was about a thirteen-year-old kid who moves from New York to Indiana when his parents split up, I knew that the kid’s Bar Mitzvah was going to be a central theme to the narrative (JRB, much like acclaimed author and bona fide MoJaMa hero Philip Roth, seems destined to weave his Judaism into every story he tells), and I even knew the New York Times gave it a pretty so-so review. Despite these warning signs, though, I was undeterred. Even when Mahotma and I showed up in our blazers and cardigan sweaters, very possibly the only non-teens or non-parents-of-teens in the building, I shuffled into our seats in the center of the orchestra section and was ready to be delighted. Bring on the show!
It’s Freaky Friday. McCain-Palin just launched a badass, harrowing new ad that looks like it was directed by Tony Scott, and the Asian markets plummeted last night meaning the Dow Jones is going to be going Down Jones today.
That’s okay, though, because it’s only se7en days until Palin-Phelps Costume Day, and Modern Jackass has what you need to start your Halloweek off right. It’s called Brian McKnight Shyamalan, the most soulful fright fest since Thriller, Candyman or Werewolf Bar Mitzvah. So settle in for 5 minutes of mayhem and get your ghoul on with the things that go bump & grind in the night. MoJaMa Presents:
This blog could use a shot of estrogen. So here I go, talking about Lady Issues.
There are some things that are hard to admit. Like sitting at home on a Friday night watching “The Ghost Whisperer” while drinking a vodka tonic made with clementine vodka and eating Carr’s cheese crackers. Like seeing the trailer for “Nights in Rodarthe” and planning on seeing it during its opening weekend. Like knowing way too much about Diane Lane and Josh Brolin’s varied marital disputes. Like having an abortion.
Ever had one? I’ve had two.
Flippant? Sure. But talk about abortion is generally confined to two manners of discourse: it is either above your pay grade or it is your exact area of moral expertise. When in reality, everyone should really just shut the fuck up. Especially John McCain and Sarah Palin.
No one ever actually talks about abortions because the people who talk about abortions don’t have them, and the people who have them don’t talk about abortions. Part of this is fear of social stigma and lunatics fire bombing their (my) homes. But I think it is largely because the choice to have an abortion is not a vote in an election, it is not a national policy referendum, it is an intensely personal decision that confirms and contradicts every single political cliche used to argue for or against it.
If I tell you my story, it is not meant to be representative. It is simply meant to be illustrative. And it is because I admire Sarah Palin’s decision to have a baby with Downs Syndrome, but I want her to stop shoving Trig’s face in mine. It isn’t my business, nor is the fact that I aborted two babies any of hers. My right to privacy is assaulted every day she denies that privacy to her own choices and family. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Sadman Hussein 
