Supercool event this Saturday!

Come out and celebrate the return of the sun, good art and sustainable living.

Riverside Theatre, The Living Word Project, MAPP International, Mighty4 and Samurai Graphix and Cultural Animators Series EARTH (H)OURS present:

Life is Living

A public outdoor installation to catalyze deeper thought and community action around the value of life and our relationship to our planet.

Featuring:
The Estria Invitational Living Word Graffiti Battle
The Mighty 4 B Boy Battle hosted by Paulskeee

Performances by:
Kurtis Blow’s Hip Hop Choir
Brave New Voices Green Team
Grace Kelly Jazz Quartet

Nothing else like this.
Beautiful People.
Beautiful Day.

Join Us.

Susan Boyle is this year’s Paul Potts.

Potts, a Carphone Warehouse salesman and 2007 Britain’s Got Talent contestant, rocked audiences with his rendition of “Nessun Dorma.” He went on to win the competition and was subsequently signed to Sony Records, where his debut album sold over 2 million copies.

Boyle seems poised to do the same.

The 2009 Britain’s Got Talent contestant has been all over the American news since bringing an auditorium of cynics to its feet with her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. And now her YouTube video is on its way to being the most watched clip of all time.

When Boyle walked out on stage, the audience laughter was audible. The eye rolling exaggerated. Clearly she was going to be the joke. A 47 year-old woman who dreamed of being a professional singer. Absolutely ridiculous.

And then she sang.

If you are alive and if you have a heart, her voice will bring a tear to your eye. Or at the very least leave a lump in your throat. Still, most of the media coverage has focused on the fact that Boyle doesn’t look like a singer.

For a woman to be reduced to her looks and solely her looks is not new territory, but the implied connection between physical beauty and talent is. The Guardian columnist Tanya Gold raises the question, “Is Susan Boyle ugly? Or are we?”

The moments before Boyle sang are filled with cruelty. Like a high school lunchroom, except everyone involved is way too grown. And like any good teen movie, the same kids that openly ridiculed our heroine are the ones who applaud her in the end.

Entertainment Weekly contributor Lisa Schwarzbaum explains, “In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging — the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts — the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace. She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective from time to time.”

Boyle said she hoped to be as a successful Elaine Page. Now a duet with her idol is in the works, and the show isn’t even over yet.

When Simon Cowell, asked Susan why she hadn’t yet achieved her dream of being a professional singer she replied, “No one’s ever given me the chance.” Here’s hoping every Susan gets her chance to shine.

I had every intention of blogging about He’s Just Not That Into You, but it will have to wait.

Thanks to the relentless media onslaught, all week I was drawn into discussion about Chris Brown, Rihanna and the alleged abuse that took place on Grammy Night. There was no escaping it. It was like when I found myself disproportionately affected by Heath Ledger’s death. I didn’t want to talk about it as much as I did, but there it was continuously dropping into otherwise polite conversation.

Enter this Jay Smooth video featuring Elizabeth Mendez Berry. This is actually the conversation I want to have. It’s the conversation I wish more people were having.

Note: For an update on the stats quoted in the video, please visit http://www.illdoctrine.com/.

In general, I avoid the biopic because mid-movie I will inevitably start thinking about which scenes actually happened and which ones were manufactured to move the silver screen version of things along. Occasionally, I see a What’s Love Got to Do With It, where the acting is so good it actually doesn’t matter which parts of the story are true.

Fall 1993. Howard University Homecoming. In the dorm room of a friend of my friend C. I first heard Biggie Smalls’ “Party and Bullshit.”

Who. Is. That?

None of us knew then that B.I.G. would become Notorious, but I did leave DC with a tape of “P&B” on repeat.

So with early nineties nostalgia all over it, I facebooked my old-school, college crew (yes, Carman 7!) and planned a field trip to a Saturday night showing of Notorious.

If you were in New York in the nineties, listening to Hot 97 and reading your monthly subscription to Vibe, then not much new information is presented in the film. Still I left the theater with the following:

1. Empathy for Lil’ Kim. (*insert much larger discussion here*).
2. The realization that I am now seven years older than Biggie was at the time of his death.
3. A renewed love of the underdog.

The makers of Notorious want you to know that Biggie was changing. In the third act (of the film and his life), he wants to be a better man and a better father. He wants to rhyme about more than guns and girls. He never gets the chance. He was twenty-five years old when he died. What were you doing when you were twenty-five?

My old roommate used to say, “Watch it like a movie.” In regard, to her own life. If your life was a movie, who would play you? What would be the plot? Biggest obstacle? How do you want it to end?

Yes, this is what I do in my spare time.

Last week’s Gossip Girl found a drunken Chuck Bass, ambling along the edge of the roof of a very tall building. One misstep and he’d be splat! on the pavement like the bottle of Jack that slipped from his hand moments earlier.

But Gossip Girl is a television series. And Chuck (and Blair) are the reasons I tune in. So the threat of his death was a false one. As any avid GG fan can tell you they aren’t going to kill Chuck Bass.

Certainly not after his next-level performance in the “O Brother, Where Bart Thou” episode. In fact, if I had an award for Outstanding Emotional Range in a one-hour episode, Ed Westwick would get it. Again and again.

In that same episode, Blair finally says those three words (“eight letters”) to Chuck. “I love you.” She is hoping to move him, which is to say she is hoping Chuck will stay. He leaves.

A week later on the roof, it’s Blair’s impassioned plea that pulls Chuck back from the ledge. Turns out, her words hold as much power as any gravitational force.

Newton’s first law of motion states, “An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

In other words, objects tend to keep doing whatever it is they are doing unless acted upon by an outside force. Movement begets movement.

In the opening interlude of Mos Def’s 1999 classic “Black on Both Sides” he says,

“…people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s getting ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is going?)
I tell ‘em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
[…]
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant living in the hillside
coming down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is going where we going”

The same can be said of the next four years.

We talk about our democracy like it’s some entity unrelated to every individual citizen. But it’s actually us.

What you do and say matters at least as much as Blair Waldorf’s words and actions. Maybe even more so, since you are not a fictional character.

Jay Smooth covered this in much greater detail, so I won’t rehash. Point is there is movement now. Where do you want to go?

P.S.
A little theme music for your journey.

An unexpected consequence of ambient intimacy– actual divorce.

I can’t wait for the Adrian Lyne film.

When I told her I was having dinner with my ex, I could hear her eyes rolling over the phone. “Nobody wants to see that movie again,” she said.

She was right.

It’s a disaster film.

Like Cloverfield on crack.

We all know how it ends.

But some movies are worth watching over and over again, no?

I never get tired of the last lift in Dirty Dancing and Purple Rain Prince humping the piano during “Darling Nikki” is pure movie gold.

Conversely, John Waters’ original Hairspray should never have been touched by the likes of Zac Efron (who was recently tapped to play the Kevin Bacon role in a remake of Footloose). And The Hulk (any of the Hulk movies as far as I’m concerned) deserves to be body slammed by Lou Ferrigno in green body paint.

Of course, on rare occasions, it is possible for a remake to outshine the original (see: Luther Vandross’ version of Burt Bacharach’s “A House is Not A Home,” The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), et al.). But this is not the norm.

Needless to say, I was shocked and dismayed upon discovering that Hollywood has gotten it’s grubby little hands on The Last Dragon. The eighties cult classic — Bruce Leroy! Sho-nuff!! The Glow!!!

Enough is enough, people. Step away from my movie.

Taimak is perfection. And as much as I love me some Samuel L. Jackson, there’s no way he makes a bigger and/or badder mofo than the late great Julius Carry.

Sometimes what defines a classic is the fact that it can’t be replicated.

As J predicted, the aftermath of my dinner was death, destruction and decimated wasteland.

My advice moving forward: Make a new movie.

and Bernie Mac.

“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.” -Unknown.