The Saddest Thing

This is the most upsetting thing I've seen in many a moon. It's super uncool that this video not only exist on YouTube, but that it's an over the top advertisement for a fast food chain that insists on opening in poor neighborhoods, while paying the employees that also live in the neighborhood a low wage. Watch and vomit.

Shame.

Lady Day's Blues

“I don’t think I sing the same way twice. … Anything I do sing is apart of my life” Billie Holiday

I’ve been thinking about the life of a singer once they’ve put their mark on a song. Once that music becomes apart of a record, a cd, a tape, an 8-track. What it does to us as listeners, as students of music, as admirers of their voices. What’s that noise, that timbre in their voice, or horn that transports us? What is it about the singers of the past that touches us today? Why can’t that sound be duplicated today, by the best voices of our generation? How does the human soul: its joy, heartache, torture and torment make its way up and out of a person so powerfully to the point where in 2011, a voice like Billie Holiday on a scratchy record can make you want to cry?

I guess the easiest answer is that there are no easy answers to any of those questions. I equate it with trying to understand why I can’t watch movies like Rosewood or see images of people I never knew, but knowing the simple reason of why they were killed swinging from a tree while others glance up gleefully, pointing, proud. That not more that 75 years ago the color I live with is the same of those that hung and burn on a tree in the South. The same color that was denied the education that so many of us enjoy today. The similar tone of many more that have been and are currently incarcerated because of a justice system that hates me and others of similar hue. It can’t be explained. I call it “soul wounds”. Wounds that have been passed down, without words; stories or otherwise, that are felt and connects Blacks as a people whether we like it or not.

All this to say, as I washed dishes today, Billie sung sweetly in my ear, letting me know that a love of hers is gone now, never to return. And I felt her, behind me. Neck twisted in emotion, finger raised as if to reach an elusive note. All right here in my kitchen on this quiet January night. Thank you Lady Day I love you too.

Listen - Billie Holiday "Solitude"

Listening to Ken Burns Jazz: Billie Holiday, Kind of Blue: Miles Davis.

Location: My kitchen

Kicking Angelina Jolie’s ass for sport

“It’s about time nothing happened in film!” – For Your Consideration

So. I’m sitting here on my day off watching admittedly one of my favorite actors: Ms. Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Good movie I can see how they hooked up. There’s the usual steam, knowing looks and behind the scenes blah, blah, blah. I still like that movie. I like a lot of action movies. Call it a holdover of something dear old dad taught me; as his days at home were spent sitting in front of the TV watching Rambo or Over the Top (classic!).

However, what was troubling to me was one particular scene in the movie that played out all wrong. The scene is of the Pitt and Jolie characters: John and Jane Smith fighting to the death after they fight out the other is a spy. From my perspective, John really won the fight or at least wore Jane down. In the end he could not pull the trigger and neither could she and we were treated to some “hot” Jolie-Pitt action. But, with a not so close look at the scene, one comes to the conclusion of a man beating his wife to the point of the house being destroyed. I think the filmmakers knew that this was the case with a viewing of the dailes. A very well choreographed scene, indeed. But in the end it was a scene where the good looking stud mercenary beat his wife’s ass. (Watch clip)

One part of the scene had Jolie out of frame being kicked repeatedly by Pitt’s character. The solution to mask this obvious abuse was to add a fun track: “Express Yourself” by

Charles Wright. (Listen) Really? As soon as the scene ended, I asked myself what would this look like if I had watched this on mute. So I did, and it was fucked up. So fucked up.

Now, I must say that Jane Smith did get her licks in, but it just wasn’t the same. Her character’s intensity did not match the murderous energy that John Smith had in wanting to kill his wife of six years. But maybe it was Jolie’s acting, maybe she isn’t as intense as Pitt. But the filmmakers could have seen this as a possible reading of domestic violence and not of two evenly matched assassins fighting for their lives. But instead writer, director, editor, studio, and whoever else was in charge of this hot mess took the lazy Hollywood way out in inserting a song of doing you despite what may be said about you, cranked it up to 11 and hoped that the audience didn’t notice. Just another example of Hollywood thinking the audience is dumber than they are. At least Jolie got a good line in “Who’s your daddy, now”?