Sure, Rachael Ray may have dressed for a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial in a scarf Arafat-esque enough to piss off Michelle Malkin and her fried-pastry fascists…
Dunkin’ Donuts was accused of promoting terrorism, thanks to the wardrobe choices of Rachael Ray, its celebrity spokesman, during an online advertisement. According to the bloggers, she had decided to embrace “hate couture” by wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf popular in the Arab world and preferred by Yasir Arafat and other Palestinian militants during their rise in the West Bank and Gaza.
But right wing, proven-wrong pundits such as Malkin are missing the real evil Ray has unleashed upon the world. As losanjealous.com pointed out a few months back, she’s really guilty of a far worse betrayal–sullying the reputation of South By Southwest in Austin (and rock and roll in general) by having her husband’s crappy bar band play on the same bill as The Raveonettes and The Stills at her hipster-tempting barbecue.
Update: Greg over at The Talent Show has a wonderful blog on the same subject.
Governor Paterson of New York announced May 23rd that Slick Rick is pardoned for shooting his cousin and another dude in 1990. He already served five years, and has been out of jail since 1997, but I guess better late than never:
“Mr. Walters has fully served the sentence imposed upon him for his convictions, had an exemplary disciplinary record while in prison and on parole, and has been living without incident in the community for more than 10 years,” said Governor Paterson. “In that time, he has volunteered at youth outreach programs to counsel youth against violence, and has become a symbol of rehabilitation for many young people. Given these demonstrated rehabilitative efforts, I urge federal immigration officials to once again grant Mr. Walters relief from deportation, so that he is not separated from his many family members who are United States citizens, including his two teenage children.”
Though the pardon didn’t prevent Rick from serving his time, it will hopefully keep him from being sent back to England. It’s kind of hard for me to believe that a guy who once told us to “treat her like a prostitute” is a symbol of rehabilitation, but I’m glad to hear that the only English rapper from the eighties who didn’t suck is going to be able to stay in his beloved Big Apple.
Okay, this isn’t exactly new, but I just saw the post on Pitchfork Media where the Sex Pistols played the Jay Leno show in October 2007 to promote “Anarchy in the UK” appearing on Guitar Hero III. It’s not really a good performance, but I do like that Ron Paul was the guest, and a fat John Lydon calls out to “Mr. Paul” and wiggles his bloated butt at him! Now that’s entertainment!
Later someone put a clip on YouTube of Ron Paul and his entourage watching the performance. Not quite as funny, but I think I can hear some people laughing and saying “anarchy!” in the background, which made me giggle.
Don’t forget to vote June 3rd. In L.A., where everyone’s willing to bulldoze their houses and buildings to make yuppie kennels (AKA “lofts”), rent control is the only power that tenants have to keep from being evicted and sustain their quality of living from one year to the next.
I was thrift store shopping in Joshua Tree, and ran into this album cover. Ooh, sweet Jesus…
She’s got a face and a form that makes me want to shake the paint off her walls! I know that she was a bigot in the seventies and eighties who fought against the rights of gay Americans, but what else could she so, full to the brim as she was with virile heterosexual feminine rrrrargh!?! With that pretty mouth, those determined nostrils, and that lily-white Bible clutched to her bosoms, she’s so good and clean, it makes me want to get down and dirty! I totally want her to kneel before my second coming.
To get myself in the mood, I’ll let Anita herself cool me down, then heat me up with a funky funky freak song from the era of disco and good times. The dude who put this tune on YouTube won’t let me embed it, but you can click here to get God’s mojo workin’.
On May 15th, the California Supreme Court overturned Proposition 22, the recently passed bill that declared, “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid.”The majority of justices said in no uncertain terms that anything less than full marriage rights, including civil unions, was an unconstitutional slight against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered couples:
“Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation,” George wrote for the majority. “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”
Unfortunately, the bigoted zeal from fundamentalists hell-bent on limiting marriage rights keeps burning as hot as the hell they think gay people will someday fry in.Christian-leaning organizations such as protectmarriage.com, which sponsored the Limit to Marriage amendment to the state constitution, have gathered up enough signatures to get it on the November 4th ballot, where only a slim majority is necessary to pass it into ineffable law and supersede the Supreme Court decision.
And if that’s not mean enough, they’ve even hinted that they’ll try to prevent gay marriages between now and the November vote.On June 15, the Court’s overturning of Proposition 22 will take effect, allowing gays to legally marry in California—unless there is a “stay” on the decision.And guess what the Limit to Marriage crowd has to say about that:
It is likely that legal representation for ProtectMarriage.com will seek a stay in order to allow the people to vote before same-sex “marriages” take place.
Most Californians see law in a similar manner to how the rest of the country does—we love to ban things but don’t necessarily like to strip away rights that are currently being enjoyed.The anti-gay agenda knows that if they can prevent gay couples from marrying between now and November, they’ll have a much better chance of getting people to cast their ballots against hypothetical marriages.Voting for invalidating thousands of existing, happy, loving same-sex marriages is something most of us would be hesitant to do, so the anti-gay coalition will stop at nothing to delay those marriages.Here’s hoping Ellen and Portia don’t let themselves get steamrolled on their way to the altar.
Update: The L.A. Weekly did a great report today on this story. They kicked my ass in the research department.
I’m a fan of Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter, in which he chronicles his prosecution of Charles Manson for the Tate/LaBianca murders in the early seventies. Though historical perspective and local L.A. hearsay tend to show how much Bugliosi and the police misunderstood about the case (MDA deal, anyone?), his account is still the Bible for all rebellious pre-teens who want to find out more about America’s favorite bogeyman.
Today, though, Bugliosi’s going after another mass murderer, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths–George W. Bush. In his new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, he suggests not only that Bush is a murderer, but that he should receive the same punishment for his crimes that he relished as Texas’s governor: capital punishment.
If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren’t speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem ludicrous.
I’m kind of fascinated by this story not because I think Bugliosi has any power to make this happen, but because he’s saying what I think a lot of us are thinking–Bush is an evil president, who has lied straight-faced to the American people, boldly coddled his friends and pardoned his accomplices, knowingly condemned innocents to torture and death, and threatened all nay-sayers with the stigma of being considered appeasers or traitors. Bush does deserve to be tried, and though I don’t believe in the death penalty for anyone, I think I’d definitely put him in line for the chair ahead of, say, a mentally retarded woman in Texas.
Ryan at losanjealous.com reports that Brian Wilson is putting out a studio release at Capitol Records on Sept 2 (and will be following up with some shows at the Hollywood Bowl).
This news is getting me all hot and bothered, not necessarily because Brian is being active again, but because I’m such a huge fan of the Beach Boys, and Smile in particular, and this means Capitol might finally do an official release of it.
Though I like the Wondermints and applaud them for helping Brian release Smile and tour it out a couple years back, the version they recorded with him was definitely “Brian Wilson’s Smile” and not Smile as it was originally intended to be heard. I mean, they had modern instrumentation, Of-Montreal-esque vocals, and synths instead of toy pianos. And nobody made them put the grand piano in a sandbox. And they had a woman singing Carl’s parts, for cryin’ out loud!
The Beach Boys were about more than just Wilson’s genius songwriting–they were also about the beauty of those blended voices, brotherly voices, the voices of children raised by a very violent hand to sing odd falsetto notes in such perfect harmony. The elderly Brian’s voice, though sometimes pitifully beautiful in its sadness, doesn’t match the acid Lutheranism that shows up in those sixties sessions. Even Mike Love’s gentle bass ba ba ba’s contributed so much to their sound. The Beach Boys were actually at the height of their harmonizing powers, which is why the implosion of Smile was such a tragedy at the time.
Luckily, most Beach Boys enthusiasts out there have heard bootleg Smile sessions, and know that pretty much every part of the final 2004 arrangements was originally recorded at some point or another with Mike, Carl, Denny, Al, and Brian on the mike back in 1967 or so. And because we’ve heard the bootlegs, we know that the masters are sitting in the Capitol vaults somewhere, just waiting to be unearthed, spliced, edited, tinkered with, and released in a super badassed amazing box set, with the final arrangement put together, plus bonus stuff, a historical booklet, liner notes with a Van Dyke Parks introduction, “stacks of vocals,” etc. I actually never thought I’d see this possibility come together so soon, and who knows, there may be some legal wrangling on Mike Love’s part to keep it from happening. But if Brian could re-release Pet Sounds, maybe his new alliance with Capitol means we’ll get Smile as well.
In the meantime, enjoy “Cool, Cool, Water,” which was pieced together from material written during the Smile era and finally released as a single in the early seventies:
Our one-time correspondent, Dan, has published his first review at losanjealous.com. It’s from a show at the Echoplex on Saturday night.
He talks a bunch about Earlimart, and one of their opening bands, Siggy. But when he refused to review a band called Voxhaul Broadcast, because he couldn’t remember any of their songs (they were all too much alike, so he just had nothing really to say about them), he got hated on in the comments by a bunch of their rather inarticulate friends, and even members of the band themselves:
eatmypenisdan : 5/21/08 at 12:39 am
At least your honest. So am i.Suck my dick
phil
voxhaul broadcast
To their credit, Voxhaul Broadcast is ever so slightly better on its recordings than it was live. In the studio, they have some of the bounce and energy of Television, Mink Deville, or Tuff Darts–you know, good New York bands from decades ago–with vocals that are just a tad too indie for my tastes. I’m sure these aren’t their influences, but for my tastes, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
But live, I agree with Dan, these guys were as bland as bologna. And their comments to his article seem to prove they’re also as dumb as dishwater!
BTW, “Phil” from the comment above is the guy with the Devendra hair below:
Cabaret is one of the best musicals ever made–and that’s saying a lot, even coming from me. The Seventies were notoriously tough on old Hollywood methods of movie-making (as Paint YourWagon can attest), and unsentimental realism became the hallmark of the day. So, how to make realism out of a genre that specifically calls for your characters to drop out of normal conversation and croon their dialogue? Set your film in Weimar-era Berlin, and have your lead sing in a cabaret that pokes fun at the joys and perils during the tide before the Nazi storm.
Of course, I know that the musical was a stage-play before it was a film, but Bob Fosse (as always) did a great job of adapting it to the tough, gritty world of Seventies cinema. Gritty, and yet still very camp–but whereas an earlier Fosse musical, Sweet Charity, was a campy look at a gritty sexual lifestyle (and even then toned down from its source material, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria), Cabaret goes further.
Some of the fun of the film comes with the tawdriness that seems silly yet sexually liberating on stage (“Two Ladies” comes to mind). Joel Grey as the “Master of Ceremonies” wears ambiguous make-up, appearing sometimes in drag as a put-on (think Bugs Bunny with a mop on his head). Yet his sinister leering and groping in quick jump-cuts behind the stage, sometimes interspersed with scenes of early Nazi street-thug violence, lets you know that all vice reaps its just reward, and everyone there will pay the piper very soon.
Perhaps the most diabolic part of the movie, though, comes not in the dank cabaret but in a bierhaus in a golden field, when an angelic cherub starts singing. Capturing the rise of Nazism better than most historical dramas, Fosse illuminates us when his Hitler Youth leads his call to arms, a chant about taking the future for a better tomorrow. It’s a real battle hymn of the reich, and when his sonorous angel voice is suddenly joined by an ever-growing chorus of voices young and old, some adamant, some proud, some angry, you know it’s the beginning of a terrible juggernaut of destruction.
It’s horrifying and grim, yet the movie motors it way back to the relationship between two people caught unaware and unable to change much of anything in the world around them–a nightclub dancer and an English Tutor. She’s promiscuous, he’s unsure of himself sexually, but when we find out Michael York’s character has shagged a Baron–well, that’s the gayest thing to ever hit cinema since The Boys In the Band. And yet it all falls apart into confusion, pregnancy,and regrets, it picks you up and reminds you that life is a game, and at it’s worst, sometimes you just gotta rail against the darkness and say “fuck it, I’ll be the grandest flop ever to wallow in obscurity!” Like at the end of The Seventh Seal, sometimes you just have to stand up to death, eyes wide, and bask in your aliveness.
Anyway, somewhere in the midst of all the Nazi imagery and decadent thirties Jazz and cross-dressing, the budding minds of glam rock got a huge kick out of this film. I mean, did you ever hear Lou Reed use a tuba before this movie came out? Tell me this song isn’t ripped right out of the Cabaret template:
Ryan at losanjealous.com 
