So What'd I Miss?
Nothing, it would seem. The Grammys went on without me, apparently, and after reading Salon's blow by blowing blow coverage of the proceedings, I'm thanking my lucky stars that I was spared seeing it.
Three-and-a-half hours and they only presented 12 actual awards. That's an award every 17.5 minutes. Which means there were way too many commercials and badly lip-synched performances sandwiched in between. On the plus side, though, Outkast got the props they so richly deserved, as did Lucinda Williams (Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, though? If you say so ...) and Spike Jonze/Fatboy Slim/Chris Walken. So I missed my boy Jon Stewart, but whaddyagonnado? I got to rock out to kaitO and The Faint instead.
The Grammys are usually a big industry lovefest (shmoozefest? suckupfest? selfcongratulationfest?), but this year I imagine the tone was different. Record sales are abysmally low, thanks not just to digital music swapping, but also to the industry's complete tone-deafness to actual good music. See, they used to just be able to trot a Train or an O-Town or a Hoobastank and most people just sucked it up. But now that you can try before you buy (which is how I suspect most people use file-swapping services — like the 21st Century immediate-gratification version of taping an album off a friend), you can buy only stuff you like and not get stuck with an album on which the only decent song is the single.
And with the hated Don Henley leading the revolt among artists for better contracts and points and deals, etc., music industry heavies must just be locking themselves in their corner offices and panicking. They're seeing their once-mighty empire assailed from both the artist and consumer sides, and neither contingent seems likely to give up the fight. Neither musicians nor consumers want to be fucked over by the music industry anymore, and it seems like there are some pretty substantial chinks in its armor. So we'll see.
Maybe the Grammys 2003 will take on a decidedly different tone. Or maybe Linkin Park, Lenny Kravitz, and Usher could all go home without awards next year. That would be a marked improvement right there.
I'm posting my Noise Pop 10-related adventures over at musicrag.com, so if you wanna know how Day 1 of my six-day musical pilgrimage went, click here. Day 2 reviews should be up later today. Rock on. ßßß
Go Back to Rock School!
It can only get better from here, I hope.
Last night was not the auspicious Noise Pop beginning that I had hoped for. There was some noise, and plenty of pop, but somehow the ratios weren't quite right. I'm planning on doing actual reviews of each show — a Noise Pop tour diary, if you will — on musicrag, but until then, here are some capsule reviews of the bands last night:
Aveo: Radiohead as a power trio from Seattle. Pretty good.
The Velvet Teen: Radiohead as a power trio from Santa Rosa. Also pretty good.
Dismemberment Plan: Oh no please God make it stop! I thought frat funk died in like '91.
Death Cab for Cutie: Great songs but boring live. More noise, less pop.
Tonight we'll be attempting to double up on shows: Hit the Bottom of the Hill early to catch Track Star, then back to Bimbo's to peep The Faint. Very exciting.
This means, however, that I will be spared the decision about whether or not to endure the interminable torture known as the Grammy Awards in order to catch a glimpse of my beloved Jon Stewart. Ya see, if I were smart, I'd take the ReplayTV thing that's been sitting in a box in my living room since before Christmas, hook it up, set it to record the Grammys tonight, and fast forward to the Jon Stewart and Outkast parts. But since I'm not smart, I won't have to decide. Ignorance, she is bliss, no? ßßß
Sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof.*
A mind is a terrible thing.
Take mine, for instance — please. But seriously. The same overactive imagination that serves me so well when writing or reading or devising elaborate scenarios of revenge against my enemies also attempts to sabotage me at every opportunity. When confronted with the unknown, it can take the most mundane event — the first meeting of a new tech writing course, say — and build it up into some monolithic, terrifiying prospect.
Of course the class went swimmingly, and I am well on my way to becoming teacher's pet and incurring the ire of all my fellow students. I'd hate me too, but I'm not going there for them, so screw 'em.
My brain is so devious that it can even make me dread good things, things to which I have been looking forward for months. Like Noise Pop, which starts tonight. I bought a badge for this thing ages ago, and even then I was wondering how I was going to get to all these shows. In addition to the typical buyer's remorse, I wrestled with questions like, Will I be able to go to enough shows to make the badge purchase worthwhile? What if two bands I want to see are playing at the same time at different venues? Will I have to take some time off work?
The last question has been answered for me, as there is no work to take time off from. One problem solved. And all the other questions will get answered, too, whether or not I work myself up into a frenzy about them. So the smart play would be to just kick back and let it all happen, right? Right. But my brain. It's evil.
So that's what today's headline/quotation is about. A little reminder to myself. "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." I'm not sure exactly what it's saying, but I've always taken it to mean that the thing I'm worrying about is gonna be bad enough when it actually happens, so there's really no point in worrying about it now. Which while extremely pessimistic is still a good reminder.
So tonight is Death Cab for Cutie and Dismemberment Plan at Bimbo's, one of the best bills of the festival. Maybe I'll propose a truce with my brain today. Perhaps it can give me one day of peace and quiet, free from incessant chatter about what I should (or shouldn't) be doing instead of what I am doing. Maybe the mind could take an entire day off from concocting elaborate scenarios of failure and disappointment.
I just want to relax and enjoy my Death and Dismemberment. Is that so wrong? ßßß
Happy Birthday, Johnny!
The Man in Black turns 70 tomorrow, and since tomorrow's blawg will be about all things Noise Pop, I thought I'd send him my birthday wishes a day early.
Jesus, so where do you start? The guy's already been bestowed with every industry accolade it's possible to bestow. He's in every Hall of Fame there is — Nashville Songwriter's, Country, and Rock 'n' Roll.
The guy's biography reads like a blueprint for the perfect Behind the Music episode: son of Baptist sharecroppers records with Sam Phillips and becomes megastar, develops chemical dependency, gets busted, meets June Carter, gets Saved, gets sober, becomes an activist, develops Parkinsons, gets hooked on painkillers, and in between made some of the best country music ever. When country went pop he didn't try to make it as a "hat act"; he stayed black and put out "American Recordings," one of the only relevant country releases of the '90s.
And that's all well and good, but the reason I love Johnny Cash is simple: He wrecks me. I can't hardly hear his rich baritone voice without getting choked up, and I can't hear "Folsom Prison Blues" from "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison" without crying like a baby. There's a point on that recording when he sings the line "When I hear that whistle blowin' I hang my head and cry," and this huge cheer goes up from the crowd, and tears just start streaming down my face. Never fails. I'm such a pussy.
Last week Fresh Air replayed an interview that the inimitable Terry Gross did with Johnny where they play part of that song, and I practically had to pull the car over. Anyway, happy birthday, Johnny. Many happy returns. Thanks for keeping it real. We love you. ßßß
The Theory of Problematic Relativity
So it turns out all my fears about last night were warranted. It was pretty much a disaster.
It started out promisingly enough. Got to the venue just in time for load-in, and parked in the only available spot near the club, which happened to be at the far end of a bus stop. Walked in, found Ryan (guitarist) to help me carry stuff in, and walked back to the car. On the way I told him what a shitty day I'd been having, but that it was all gonna be OK once we exploded on stage. Total elapsed time since parking: maybe three minutes.
But that's all it took for one of San Francisco's evil minions, a ticket warlock, to start writing me a $250 ticket. Two. Hundred. Fifty. Dollars. Oh, I'll be fighting that, don't you worry. Plenty of mitigating factors to pick from. Besides, I'm unemployed — what the hell else have I got to do? But so OK, bad day just got way, way worse. We're not getting paid for the gig (it was kinda like a charity thing on the part of the booking guy), so not only am I not making any money, this gig is costing me.
But I go and mingle and meet the guys from the other bands and make nice. Everyone was supercool, and that helped, and now I'm just counting the minutes 'til I can really cut loose on stage. I get tuned and psyched up, the appointed hour arrives, and we hit the stage.
Ever since I first played in front of people (at a high-school talent show when I was 13 or so), it's been my drug of choice. Something else takes over and things like parking tickets and unemployment and the trials of everyday life just fall away. Sadly, so does most of my motor control and coordination, so it was not a complete surprise when, in my transcendent performance state, midway through the first song I stepped on my taut guitar cable and ripped the input jack out of the front of my amplifier, rendering it useless.
Oh, fuck.
A minute into the set and we're fucked. This is classic. I sheepishly step up to the mic and plead for someone to lend me a bass amp, and luckily someone does. A few excruciatingly long minutes later I'm back in business and we continue the set. No one threw rotten fruit or put hexes on us for being a wimpy indie pop/punk band on a metal bill. Actually, maybe they did — a hex would explain both the broken amp and the drummer stopping inexplicably in the middle of one of our songs and coming back in just as inexplicably a few measures later. Still, though, far from the high point of my performance career.
But these are some pretty high-quality problems to have. I mean, at no point yesterday did I have to think about where I was going to sleep that night or how I was going to eat. If the referee decides not to reduce the fine on my ticket, I'll still be able to pay the $250 (although it just might kill me to do it). And I got to share the stage with some of my favorite bands.
It's funny, but I sang these lines in one of our songs last night: "Here in the whirlwind, there's no perspective/Just self-pity and invective," and it didn't occur to me until just now that that's where I was hanging out last night. Perspective is everything.
I wonder how many more of these lessons there are to learn. I don't know how many more I can handle. ßßß
Surgery, Shows, and Stuff
No entry yesterday, as I spent most of the day tending to my dear, dear wife after a surgical procedure. She had a ganglion cyst removed from her wrist and is recovering fabulously. And she got to have all kinds of good drugs, of which I am really, really jealous. Anyway.
Tonight is The Hills Have Eyes big coming-out party (no, not that kind of coming out). We're opening what should be a huge sold-out show at Great American Music Hall. And I am freaking out.
I really don't know why, either. I've played big shows at this very same venue. (Last time I played Great American I ended up at unconscious at S.F. General; remind me to tell you that story sometime.) Hell, I've played to 20,000 people at one of those KROQ things. This should be a piece of cake, and it probably will be, but I'm still all wigged out.
See, we're a li'l wimpy indie-pop band and the rest of the bill are like insane satanic math-metal car-crash bands. And we're really not ready for a high-profile gig like this. But we're doing it anyway. Trial by fire. It's not likely to kill me, so it just might make me stronger, no? Yes.
So if you're in or around the Tenderloin tonight, hanging out at Mitchell Brothers, maybe, come check out the show. We go on promptly at 8, and play all the way until 8:25. Blink and you'll miss us. Rock on. ßßß
Because You Can Never Have Too Many Award Shows. Oh, Wait. Yes You Can.
I've consumed the following entertainment products over the long weekend, and created awards for each. The envelope, please.
Best Gothic French (by Way of Hong Kong) Supernatural Kung-Fu Movie Ever: Brotherhood of the Wolf. Lived up to and surpassed the hype. Unlike your average "action movie," the incredible Hong-Kong-style fight sequences exploded within a rich, sweeping storyline full of complex, conflicted characters. But oh, those fight scenes. Wachowski Brothers, look out. Christophe Gans has got your number.
Best "Family" Movie I Expected to Be Terrible but Was Actually Damn Good: Spy Kids. How do you make a kids' movie worthy of your audience? Well, start by giving them a little credit. Assume they don't want to hear the same old bathroom humor and hackneyed plot devices. Don't patronize them. Throw in some sincere feminist sentiments. And a lot of ass-kicking. Robert Rodriguez succeeds on just about every level in Spy Kids. Entertaining, action-packed, warm, and funny. Can't wait for the sequel.
Worst Movie That Should Have at Least Been Watchable: Kiss of the Dragon. With Jet-Li and Bridget Fonda in it, and with Luc Besson as producer and cowriter, I should have been able to sit through it, right? Wrong. Incoherent plot, trite characters, and wack action sequences prevented me from doing so. Avoid this movie at all costs.
Best Loud/Quiet Acoustic/Electric Screamo Poptronica Album of the Year: Aereogramme, A Story in White
Feliz Dia de los Presidentes!
My condolences to those of you who are at work, but when you're unemployed, every day is President's Day! Or something.
Now that I'm no longer being paid to write this thing (I used to bang out blawg first thing when I got to work), I find I'm much less obliged to do it. Now that doesn't mean I'm gonna quit or anything, just that it's not as big a part of the routine. There are other important tasks at hand, like going to the gym, doing the dishes, finding a new job, and deciding where to have brunch.
And there's also just less stuff to write about. Strangely, it seems I'm spending less time out in the world, not more, now that I'm jobless. I mean, I still do stuff — work out, go shopping, go to rehearsal — but there are no public transit horror stories, no tales of dot-com absurdity and woe, and a general lack of job-releated angst to mediate through writing. I don't know. Things are good, mostly, and maybe a mostly good life doesn't provide the best blog fodder.
Thanks to everyone who's submitted band names for the Untitled Hard Rock Band Project. There were some damn good submissions, some real clunkers, and lots of comedy. I promise to keep my word: Every last entry will be presented to the band, and hopefully we'll be able to agree on something. Anything. And I'll post the results here. So thanks again. ßßß
Your Assistance Is Required.
The other band I'm in, whose working titles have been variously Wish, The Untitled Former San Geronimo Project, and At the Rival Cave In Schools, really really really needs a real name. We're getting ready to go into the studio next month to record some demos, and we kinda need to know who to tell the guy he's working with. Besides, I'm getting sick of telling people I'm in a band with no name. It feels tentative and transient, and this band is anything but.
This may be the single best band I've ever played in. No, scratch that: This is the single best band I've ever played in. The other musicians are talented and seasoned and and focused like I am. Going to rehearsal is like going to a job I really love. It's long and gruelling sometimes, and is deadly serious business, but I love every minute of it. We're all there for one reason: to make these songs the absolute best they can be. No egos, no nonsense. How novel.
So please help us, won't you? Do you have a great band name to donate to a worthy cause? Honestly, all suggestions will be entertained. We're desperate here. There will be no monetary reward of any kind, but rest assured that when the inevitable "Where did you guys get your name from?" question arises in interviews, you will get a shout-out. So enter early and often. Direct all submissions to ian@blawg.com. Thank you in advance for you support. ßßß
My Next Five Job Prospects (Now That I Am Officially Laid Off)
Click here for the first batch.
I'm the King of the World!
David Foster Wallace, you are my bitch.
I finally finished Infinite Jest. All 981 pages of regular text and 96 pages of errata and endnotes in that hideously small 6-pt. font. It took me a while — a couple of months, actually — and I had to get laid off to do it, but I did it. I vanquished you. I finished your opus.
Now will someone please tell me what the fuck happened???
Sarcasm aside, though, Infinite Jest is easily the most compelling, ambitious, and well-written thing I've read in ages. Well worth the slog. Definitely.
One of the characters in I.J. is a recovering addict, in particular a synthetic narcotics addict. A lot of his story is told in flashback, so there are plenty of junkie-type anecdotes to tickle the funny bone. In particular, this character is a devotee of downs and Haffenreffer (which DFW mistakenly [I think] refers to as Hefenreffer [sic] beer¹), which I can tell you from experience is a combo unparalleled in its ability to blot out anything resembling reality. Good times.
Even at 14 and 15, getting Heffenreffer was not a problem. Getting pills, though, was another story. In high school I managed to befriend a kid whose parents were both OB-GYNs, but he was notoriously stingy with his stashes. I did rip him off for his PDR, though, so I could try and not kill myself with the various combinations of pills and booze I'd regularly ingest.
The most creative and, looking back, the most just downright perverse, prescription-drug-acquisition scheme we had was one of my own invention.
Why Do Mondays Still Suck, Even When You're Unemployed?
To any- and everyone who has emailed me in the last week or so and not received response, please accept my apologies. It's not because I don't like you; rather, it's because I'm an idiot.
James Sullivan, staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, totally ripped me off in this article. It bears a remarkable resemblance to this blawg entry. He didn't use my trademarked Professional Celebrity term — that woulda been a dead giveaway — but I'm still pretty pissed off. He gets a paycheck and sweet byline on a (relatively) respectable newspaper, and I get, well, nothing. The adualtion of hundreds, maybe. Or at least tens.
Day 10 of unemployment calls for a trip to the gym, delivering the coup de grâce to Infinite Jest (a measly 30 pages to go), looking for work, mixing some rehearsal tapes, and other odds and ends.
Disemployment Diversions
OK, that was fun. But what the hell do I do now?
I've had to go to great lengths to entertain myself during this fallow period. Making up new words and trying to work them into conversations is one such activity. Here are a few of my favorite creations:
OK, I guess that's all I got. There's a new picture over there, featuring me in my unemployment uniform. Yep, I've worn nothing else but those Gap jeans, warm-up jacket, and my trusty Asics Gel Trabuco IIIs for going on two weeks now. Only the underthings have been changed to protect the innocent. ßßß Will Cook for Food
Through no fault of my own, I am an embarrassingly good cook. Yes, circumstances have conspired to make me a whiz in the kitchen.
They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but it's not gender-specific. I see the way women look at me when I tell them I can cook. I see them look askance at their no-cooking husbands or boyfriends. If you want to impress a woman, skip the flashy car and drinks at the latest hotspot. Fix her a nice risotto. It's just as effective, and a hell of a lot cheaper. ßßß Note to Self
Hey, jackass! If you plan on going to sleep, like, ever, don't drink a huge cup of coffee and a Dr. Pepper during band practice! It's not rocket science, retard: stimulants keep you awake. Well, at any rate, they keep you awake when you want to go to sleep, and put you to sleep when you need them to keep you awake.
Checklist for the Next 6 to 10 Weeks
What follows is a list of things I hope to accomplish during this strange and wonderful period of unemployment. I figger if I write stuff down here, maybe I'll be compelled to actually follow through on some of it. At least I can't misplace this list.
My Two Cents on This Two-Trillion-Dollar Budget
My head hurts. I'm going back to bed. ßßß "You're young, you got your health; what do you want with a job?"*
And so I begin my first full week of unemployment by ... going to work?
The two The Hills Have Eyes gigs this weekend were a study in contrasts. Friday was a complete fucking disaster (shitty club in Santa Rosa; awful nü metal and "punk" bands on the bill; time slot got pushed from 10 to 11:30, thereby guaranteeing that any kids who would've dug our set would be long gone by the time we went on; and I almost got into a brawl with the club owner), while Saturday's Groundhog Day gig was super cool.
The Hills Have Eyes Northern California Tour 2002
If you are within the sound of my voice, I beseech you to come check out The Hills Have Eyes this weekend. We're playing somewhere in Santa Rosa tonight (Don't know where, exactly, but Santa Rosa can't be that big. Just drive around until you hear the rock.) and tomorrow in Oakland at the Stork Club. Six bucks, four bands, on 02/02/02. Love that symmetry.
The Best Bad Movie Ever
Two words for you, dear blawg.com reader: Glitter. That's right. I said Glitter. Best unintentional comedy in recent memory, I tell you. I'm still kind of in shock at just how bad this film was. I mean, it had Mariah Carey in the lead role, so I was expecting a high level of badness, but even that notion couldn't prepare me for the maleficence I was to witness.
Don't miss last month's brilliant insight.
Like many enterprising youths, in the wintertime we'd go door to door and offer our snow-shoveling services. Only we'd go to the next town and do ours cut-rate, because we weren't in it for the money, necessarily. Nope, we'd undercut the other snow-shovelers by 50 percent and be extra-nice to the old folks so we'd for sure get invited in for cocoa.
Once inside, one of us (OK, me) would ask to use the bathroom. Then I'd rifle through the medicine cabinet, stuffing my parka pockets with anything that looked remotely interesting. We'd collect our five bucks or whatever, smile and wave and go. Then back to the PDR to figure out what the hell we had.
Truth be told, though, it usually didn't matter what the book said. I'd take whatever it was and wash it down with whatever was around. Pretty scary when I think about it now. Lived to tell the tale and all, I guess, didn't kill me, made me stronger, etc. Good thing that I, like all of us, was invincible when I was 15. ßßß
11 february 02
See, until the middle of last week or so, I was still using the old job's VPN and downloading all my email to their MS Exchange server. So my address book and all my email were consolidated in one convenient location. Which is great, until the now-defunct company shut off my VPN access. Now I'm totally screwed. Two years worth of email communication and address info lost in the ether. Oh well.
But if you've emailed me recently and not gotten a response, please try again. Maybe I'm less stupid now. We'll see.
Are we having fun yet? ßßß08 february 02
I hit the wall sometime yesterday. I think it was a combination of seasonal affective disorder, cabin fever, bad weather, and general malaise, but I started going stir crazy. I've spent the better part of the last two weeks going to the gym, writing my weblog, looking for jobs, and staring dumbly at my computer screen. In fact, it's exactly like when I was working. Only now I'm not getting paid for it.
Entry Word: habeñoia
Function: noun
The irrational fear of rubbing your eyes (or worse) after cooking with habeñero chiles, the world's spiciest peppers.
Entry Word: preact
Function: verb
To react to a situation that hasn't yet happened. See also Mariah Carey in Glitter.
Entry Word: emotocol
Function: noun
The protocol governing the use of emoticons in instant messenger conversations. <Dude, you can't just keep replying with a smiley face to everything I say. That's a clear breach of emotocol.>
07 february 02
Circumstance the first: Moms is an amazing cook. One of my theories re. cooking is that if your Mom (or Dad) can't cook, it's very likely that you can't (or won't) cook. The rationale is simple: If you don't know what good food tastes like, you won't be able to cook it. It's like you have no frame of reference for what constitutes good food.
But the Moms could cook. Typical white-people food, Joy of Cooking-style, lots of dairy and meat, etc., but hella good. So I grew up knowing and appreciating the good grub.
Circumstance the second: I did a junior-year-abroad stint in England, specifically at the University of Sussex. I was used to the typical cafteria meal plan deal of the American university, but Sussex had no such equivalent. No cafeteria, no restaurant, no nothing. They had a tiny market on campus that stocked wilted vegetables and lots of eggs.
I remember the info packet saying the dorms were "self-catering"; in Britspeak, apparently, that means "you will fend for yourself or you will starve." So began my entrée into cooking.
Of course, I was godawful at first. My culinary creations were completely inedible, but I ate them all the same. And I attacked cooking the way I approach everything in my life — with pigheaded determination. I was going to learn how to cook if it killed me. It nearly did.
Circumstance the third: Being vegetarian, then vegan. Being veg*n and not being able to cook is like being diabetic and being needle-phobic: just a bad combo. You're doomed to a life of peanut butter and jelly, ramen, and expensive frozen dinners from Amy's, Nancy's, and other women.
You can't just sear a chicken breast, bake a potato, and toss a salad. You've got to get creative. You realize that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily operate on the meat/starch/vegetable program. You start exploring Asian, African, South American, and Caribbean cuisines. And supplement your diet heavily with Boca Burgers, of course.
06 february 02
This whole insomnia thing is relatively new to me, so it's still kind of a shock when it happens. But it's not necessarilty a bad thing to have happen once in a while. After all, sleep-deprivation is just another way to alter your perceptions. Which, considering I don't do a lot of perception-altering, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Of course, as of this writing, I'm riding the crest of a wave of giddiness. Ask me how I'm doing in a few hours, when I'm weeping for absolutely no reason, and you might get an entirely other response.
Off to the dentist. Then to the grocery store. Whipping up a mess of Jamaican peas and rice fer dinner. Good times. Then practice. Then sleep. Precious sleep. Zzzzzz ... ßßß05 february 02
04 february 02
Yes, as strange as it sounds, I am am going back to work today. Sort of. Basically, a good friend of mine needed help with his company's website, and called me up. Made me an offer I couldn't refuse, as it were. So I went in on Friday and worked a coupla hours, and I'm going back today, hopefully to finish up. Funny how work has a way of finding me no matter how hard I try to evade it.
Ahh, well. I think I could get used to the consultant's life. Wake up late, roll out to the job site, work for a couple of hours, take the afternoon off, charge exorbitant sums of money, plus bill all expenses back to the client. What's not to like??
We didn't play that great on Saturday — the sound was lousy, and we couldn't really hear ourselves sing — but the vibe was really fucking cool, and nothing at all like the night before. I had lotsa trepidation about our newer stuff, which is slower, poppier, and emo-er than the stuff we'd been playing. Plus I'm singing a mess more songs now, which is totally new and scary. But it was received really well.
We've got one more practice gig next Saturday before our big San Francisco debut, opening for Dillinger Escape Plan and Botch. We go on first, so make sure to show up early. See you there. ßßß01 february 02
So I go into it armed with the knowledge that the plot will be preposterous and the acting pathetic, but I guess I kinda thought that there would be a plausible storyline. 20th Century Fox wouldn't greenlight a movie that was just a mishmash of random, self-serving, bathetic vignettes, would they? Well, apparently they would.
What can we say about Mariah herself? The woman has no detectable charisma, stage presence, rhythm, or talent of any kind. Depending on the camera angle, she looked by turns like a chimp or a sea monkey (with apologies to chimps and sea monkeys everywhere). And the boob job? Jesus Christ, those things are, like, in different area codes from one another. If I was Tommy Mottola I'd have that plastic surgeon whacked. Or at least demand my money back.
And don't even get me started on Ms. Carey's acting. Tracy pointed out that she has a bad habit of "preacting"; that is to say, reacting to things that haven't happened yet. Reaching out for a glass of champagne that hasn't yet been offered, throwing off an arm that hasn't been put around her, and answering a question before it's finished being asked. Hysterical.
Director Vondie Curtis Hall, who also wrote and directed Gridlock'd, which I quite liked, managed, in "Glitter," to make a movie in which not a single character was sympathetic. No one to root for. Which is weird in a gigantic star-vehicle puff piece, 'cuz that's kinda the point, ain't it? Well, this movie pretty much failed on every level. A train wreck from which I could not avert the eyes. If there were any justice in the world (We both know damn well there isn't, but humor me for a moment.), no one even tangentially associated with this movie would ever, ever work again, in this town or any other. ßßß
