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"You will find a way out" - Headset featuring Lady Dragon and Sach, Grasping Claw [xlr8r incite #25]

Ryo Ishibashi enters The Grudge about a third of the way in. Adorned in a green trenchcoat, a scowl and a furrowed brow, he called up images of The Wolf in Pulp Fiction and Mr. White and the many other roles as detectives and cops that Harvey Keitel has played in his 4 decades on film. Ishibashi's Detective Nakagawa is measured, even tempered, wise...and tortured. He knows the history of this house and the evil that lies there but he still seeks the truth possibly to avenge the dead and missing detectives that have been lost investigating this place but mostly to soothe his own demons of guilt and inaction that hide just under his steely demeanor.

I gotta get to Japan sometime in this lifetime.

The Grudge isn't the best horror film. I'm struggling to even write that because after watching the film in the Cinerama dome with the producers, the writer, the director and just about everyone who worked on it and seeing how proud of their baby they are, I don't want to criticize. Really, despite my problems with it, they should be so very proud. It is masterful in it's creation of atmosphere. The score and the sound envelops you in creep. From the moment we sat down, we were jumping in our seats. Nervous laughter leapt out of me at regular intervals. The MVP nearly broke off my arm as she hung on for dear life, hiding her face in her hoody and constantly whispering in my ear, "I have a headache", as I anxiously chuckled and tried to slow down my racing heart. The film just loses steam as we move to the final act. The frights aren't as frightening and the resolution isn't as compelling or horrifying as one would want. The most interesting story is Bill Pullman's and his stalker but we don't get nearly enough of that. I'm also not convinced Sarah Michelle Gellar can command a film. She works this not very believable cutesy voice throughout and it bugs...but maybe that's just my residual Buffy memories at play. Jason Behr does what Jason Behr does: makes slow inquisitive statements, showcases his muscular frame and new moptop do, and watches the ladies swoon.

I can't hate on the guy, either. He came to the after party and was very pleasant. I kept my desire to talk about Roswell and how my old crush on Majandra Delfino has turned into a crush on Emilie de Ravin now that she's adorably pregnant on Lost in check. Besides, there was open bar and Doughboys Red Velvet Cake and ghost stories to tell with Hov, MVP, and completely gorgeous women with dorky boyfriends.

Apparently The Grudge is doing very well this weekend with the estimates at about 15 mil for last night alone. Good on ya. It's the week before Halloween, kids, go get your scary movie on.

Oh, and book a ticket to Japan. Just don't watch video tapes while you're there, mmmkay?

Scary movies, y'all!

"1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9/What I use in the battle for the mind/I hit it hard/Like it supposed/Pullin no blows to the nose" - Public Enemy, Shut 'Em Down [buy the album]

It started earlier this year. In the brief few weeks when Air America radio was available in Los Angeles and you could hear Chuck D's tired and frustrated voice over the airwaves during Unfiltered.

It continued when Chuck D took over TRIO over the summer for a weekend and hit with PE concert films, some of his favorite films, and the documentary on The N Word.

Then Flava Flav came on the scene with The Surreal Life and a return to prominence and interest by his very odd but highly watchable relationship with Brigitte Nielsen.

It came to a head yesterday as De La Soul's outstanding The Grind Date features Flav doing his hype man routine ("Come on Down!") on a track and a Chuck D sample earlier in the album met with the Soundtrack of Friday Night Lights is replete with classic PE tracks from 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (and a Welcome to the Terrordome cue cheat) followed with me finally watching VH-1's 30 Years of Hip Hop special and getting PE history in the third installment.

Public Enemy is back, once again, bass in your face!

With our current political climate, though, I shouldn't be shocked. With 4 white male millionaires battling each for the top political office and never broaching the subject of race except for subtle jabs at the third world in debates we need someone with a megaphone shining a light at what's really going on for the poor, downtrodden, and predominantly brown segments of our country.

Our political landscape is such that anger isn't allowed. Howard Dean gets smacked in the court of public opinion for being angry and animated. George Bush chomping at the bit to get out his misguided points is seen as problematic.

Bah! Give me some fire, some animation, some heart, some feeling, some meaning.

Party for your right to fight. Strike fear in the hearts of those seeking to deny or limit your voice.

Become Public Enemy No. 1.

Come on Down!

Bring the Noise!

"Time moves faster when you're loaded." - Phoenix, Summer Days [buy the album]

The editors at The Fader Magazine editorialize this month:

In recent months we've grown more convinced than ever that there's a new music listener in America: you. We see you out there, someone who thinks about hip-hop but doesn't need to wear baggy pants all the time, someone who's into garage rock when it's real and not a major label Next Big Thing fabrication, someone who wants to know more about dancehall patois and production but doesn't need the weirdo homophobia, someone who wants to know what in the hell is going on with music in London right now beyond Dizzee Rascal...You can collect records without being a geek. You can check blogs without living out your fantasies online (well, most of them). You can go to a show without going home with someone in the band. Right now, it's just about the music and you have to have it. Right. Now. All. The. Time.

Yes. Exactly that.

"I've tried to keep from feeling all the things I'm feeling" - George Duke, I Love You More [buy the album]

I'd never seen Say Anything before the wee hours of today. I know. Shut up, I know! I'm probably one of the very select few whose formative years were in the eighties who hasn't seen the film. And I mean, like never seen it. I know the still image of John Cusack holding his boom box over his head in his trenchcoat and tennis shoes but that's it. Every single moment of this film was fresh to me. I didn't even realize it was a Cameron Crowe movie until the credits rolled.

The only reason I'm watching it now is because a friend said to me, "You're like the modern-day Lloyd Dobler" and I was struck by that. I understood it was a compliment. I've heard the Lloyd Dobler reference since high school. Not bandied at me necessarily but as that "guy". Well, Lili Taylor's character says he's not a guy, he's a man but I get it.

All of Lloyd Dobler's friends are girls. Lloyd has a reputation for being the great guy even though he's a little off. He just wants people to be happy, to choose to be happy. And, he just wants the girl. That girl. The perfect girl.

Now, whether or not Ione Skye is that girl is up for debate. She's smart and sort of interesting but her mouth is distracting. It's like her jaw is slightly disconnected from the rest of her face, leaving her in this kind of eternal pout and suggests that she's some kind of weird mouth-breather. But, okay, Lloyd is all about her and won't suffer those who might doubt her charms. He won't even suffer his own doubts when she returns to him. He only wants to love her. To see his value reflected in her appreciation of him.

But here's the thing - to Diane Cort he seems disposable. While he's willing to leave everything in his life to follow her, she is unwilling to do that for him. In fact, she only realizes his worth when she needs him, needs someone to cling to as her perfect world crumbles around her. When he showed her his heart, she gave him a pen. When she shows him her needs, he tries to give her the world.

When he's driving around town talking into his tape recorder pitying his predicament, I get everything he's saying. "I'll be a pushover no longer" he's saying with all the bluster he can muster but he knows it's not true. In the end, he will sacrifice more of himself in order to make her happy because his own joy is intertwined in others, her in particular, feeling good around him. Because of him.

He needs that validation. It's the only thing that matters.

I can relate.

"Awww yeah, all right, so tight, forever" - Bing Ji Ling, Forever [music-for-robots]

52 Books in 52 Weeks is something that should have probably made it to the 101 in 1001 but didn't. Ever since I was a wee one, I have loved to read but for much of this year I hadn't been motivated to pick up a book. I don't know why but I suspect there's an addiction to electronic forms of entertainment at play. Over the past few weeks though, I've made a commitment to reading.

3 Sundays in a row, I have found myself with the tv off, the iTunes shuffling, and my nose in a book. Those first two Sundays ended with reviews written here. This past Sunday found me with Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet and some heady thoughts about my book selection process.

Nick Hornby writes an occasional column for Believer Magazine called Stuff I've Been Reading. In it, he talks about the books he's been reading but also the selection process and the journey for new knowledge that each book brings him. I had first read the column in the Summer of 2003 and thought about it a couple times that fall while reading Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both novels referenced number squares and mathematical "magic" and I thought that I should know more about the subject but didn't follow through with the thought choosing instead to get lost in XBox and television on DVD.

But now I'm back to the concept. Where You're At had me hungry for more hip hop knowledge so I sought Unbelievable. At the same time, I had blown through Birth of a Nation which tickled my interest in good fiction immersed in dark skinned worlds so I sought out Walter Mosley's latest.

Little Scarlet is as hard-boiled as any of the previous Easy Rawlins books but is set against a landscape that, for the first time, is changing for Easy and the people that populate his Los Angeles. Starting mere hours after the Watts Riots, Easy spends the entire story exploring the emotions that the riots have stirred in him while dealing with a brand new Los Angeles and the murder of a black woman quite possibly by a white man.

From here, I'm first going to take another crack at Fearless Jones, a Walter Mosley novel that I couldn't connect with the first time I tried to read it but the mention and appearance of it's main characters in Little Scarlet has me wanting the complete story. Then, it's onto Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (which I suspect I will be visiting a public library for as it doesn't seem to be readily available in stores) and finally a different fictional take on the Riots and their aftermath with Southland.

I'm sure these other books will take me in new directions as well. I want my reading to weave together into a cohesive narrative and I don't know why I've only rarely done this in the earlier parts of my nerdy bookworm life.

Little Scarlet, especially for Angelenos, is highly recommended.

"Leave your things behind cuz it's all going off without you." - Frou Frou, Let Go [buy the album]

I wasn't the only one who saw Garden State this weekend. Outside of those completely standard movie cheesy wrap-up conversations in the last act of the film, I adored it. I'm now back to crushing heavily on Natalie Portman. Or at least wanting very much to interact with someone that's as witty, wry and alive as her characters--Princess Amidala excluded--always are.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to discuss the AMC Movie Network.

I haven't been to the AMC Promenade 16 in nearly 2 years. Despite the fact that it's walking distance from my apartment, I had the year long movie pass from Loews in 2003 and I've been spending more and more time at the Arclight and the Pacific Sherman Oaks Galleria since then because the Arclight is the best theatre on the planet and the Galleria is convenient for many of my friends. The AMCs (in both Woodland Hills and Century City), however, used to be my go to movieplexes. I was in love with the movie watcher card and the comfortable seats and the generally good movie experience. But somehow it had lost favor to these more regal establishments.

The Pacific Sherman Oaks Galleria is still relatively new and unknown by the masses. I never feel crowded or overwhelmed there and the clientele, once you get past all the creepy Oaks 'tweeners in varying versions of the short skirt, ugg boots (slowly becoming sandals) and double tank top uniform, is generally high quality. No obnoxious kids talking all through my movies there. And the Arclight is the Arclight. No further explanation needed.

But where AMC has these places beat is the pre-show entertainment. That AMC Network stuff is pretty excellent. Kind of like a TV Guide channel for the movies, I appreciate getting the commercials well before the movie starts rather than when my beloved trailers are beginning. The special bit on Shark Tale wasn't lame and in general it just was high quality and unobtrusive. Especially for a person like myself who often likes to go see movies alone (particularly indie flicks...the kind I want to take some time to process a bit before discussing) and is there early, a good pre-show matters.

So bully for you AMC Network. Bully for you.

"This is what I want y'all to do. I want y'all to grab all y'all Dutch Masters and all y'all White Owls, and y'all Phillies, get you a fat sack, a pint of Hennessy and lay back..." - The Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls is the Wickedest [buy the album]

"Ms. Wallace?" Voletta Wallace dropped the phone. She didn't need to hear anything else.

Here I am reading about this hardcore cat and Cheo Hodari Coker has me crying like I'm some punk. This shit would not have played on Fulton Ave. with the hustlers, the stick-up kids, and Christopher Wallace. Crying does not help real street niggas get that paper.

But the tears came, anyway. The same way they came for Lil' Cease and D-Dot and Don Pooh and all those that had gotten to experience all that was this 6'4" inch dark as night but nice on the mic kid named Biggie Smalls. That's how I felt by the time Coker is getting to explaining his last night on earth, like I had known this man. B.I.G. is absolutely my favorite MC. I simply don't think anybody tells a story better than he does on wax. I don't think there was before him and definitely not since been anyone who was as adept at manipulating rhymes, making it the most impeccable art - Layered, thoughtful and clever. Both timely and timeless, something very very few hip hop heads are ever able to do. But that person on wax has always been more personae than truth, a lot of character and charisma but not Chris. Coker's book, Unbelievable: The Life, Death and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G. through classic and new interviews with and about the boy who would become the King of New York, helped me find him.

Lynne had mentioned on my post about Freestyle that some of my writing style there had reminded her of how Coker wrote in this book. I'm flattered by the comparison because while I'm able to turn what I saw on-screen into an okay story, Coker's writing is much more visceral. He's there, in the thick of it. I can practically smell the stench of those trees Biggie and his crew seemed to be always smoking. My shoulders constrict with tension every time that real thug street shit creeps back into B.I.G.'s life. I'm laughing heartily and regularly at the dark absurdity of situations in his life (much of which would end up in the outrageously hardcore humor of his best lines and freestyles). My heart breaks every time Voletta Wallace seeks to protect her son from the inevitable. It's a tale not unworthy of a Scorsese or Coppola film.

It's also a pretty complete document on the rise of Puff Daddy, the hip hop landscape in the early nineties, and the descent and demise of 2Pac. There is a lot of repetition of phrases, information and moments as Coker relies heavily on the same major interviews and quotes to tell different stories throughout the book. It's at times distracting but doesn't detract from the overall strength of the book.

Not only was Coker a journalist during Biggie's rise to the top of the rap game, he was also his friend. This book is like a love letter to him especially because it ripples with honesty. Coker doesn't shy away from Christopher's infidelity, his crimes, or the speculation surrounding him and 2Pac. He puts it all out there, only once, at the very end of the book, taking the time to address the reader directly and explain what he believes about that night in Las Vegas, that night in LA and the 2002 LA Times piece by Chuck Phillips that so pissed me off 2 years ago.

I'm late to the table on this one but if you haven't checked for Unbelievable in the year it's been out, check for it now. Otherwise, you just can't really know why Biggie Smalls is the illest.

And why I'll always love Big Poppa.

"No, she don't know why she got all dolled up for a suicide " - The Decemberists, I Don't Mind [buy the album]

And I just told Jessica today that while I was trying to find new ways to keep this site interesting to me, I wasn't going to post about Britney Spears just to bump my stats up.

Heh. Sadly, these are too good to pass up.

Mrs. Federline (Courtesy of Stereogum)

The Definition of Federline (courtesy Broken Language):
federline (fed ur lein) intr.v.
1) to come up
2) to effect, in any fashion or manner, a "Vanilla Ice"
3) to create the circumstance for future palimony payments
4) did I mention "to COME THE FUCK UP"?

When you've got the supposedly hottest girl in pop wearing your name I think you've come up.

I wanna be like Kev. K to tha E V.

Cuz he got 99 problems but a Brit ain't one.

"Big girl, big trucks, big whips, Whip up/Black see for you only got my back, shut your lips up!" - Erykah Badu featuring Queen Latifah, Bahamadia, & Angie Stone, Love of My Life Worldwide [buy the album]

I ran across a banner ad for The Cookout (tagline: This summer, get your grill on!) that noted a special guest appearance by The Queen La. This is now her second special guest appearance in an african american archetype movie. It leads me to wonder what's coming to the magic johnson theatres near you next year...

Church! - This fall, Jesus is jiggy! (with special guest appearances by Queen Latifah and Kirk Franklin)

The Swap Meet!- This spring, come get your cheap ish! (With special guest appearace by Queen Latifah as the security guard)

Jail! - We got more brothas than college! Opening Christmas Day.

Damn, somewhere this went horribly wrong.

Related:
The Family Reunion! (with possibly the most obnoxious sounds on a movie promo site ever)
The Wedding!
The Funeral!
Big Momma 1, 2, and soon to be 3

"And you don't know me yet." - Big Daddy Kane, 'Nuff Respect [buy the album]

Michael Franti is on Def Poetry Jam alternating between the deliberate cadences of spoken word, the rhythmic flows of rap and the staccato delivery of reggae in this approximation of a coffee shop or a small theatre, a beat poet's hangout. He's talking about the roots of revolution and subversion and sticking it to the corporations that seek to keep revolution down. This imagery and message is being given to me on Home Box Office, a fully owned subsidiary of Time Warner, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. They are more than happy to sell us the sounds and visuals of revolution once a week for 28 minutes. Hell, we can afford cable and the pay service, HBO, we aren't revolting against anything. But Michael Franti's sentiment is genuine and so I'm left wondering...

Is this hip hop?

Ruby Dee, who, like Lena Horne is gonna be fly until she dies, is up next and she's doing a poem about Tupac Shakur. Now, I just revealed on here that I'm not a fan of 'Pac and this old lady is taking me to school. She goes through his mythos, his conflict, and his tragedy and I feel shamed. My "conscious" rap lovin' ass is much more comfortable in the hands of the lyrical literati like Mos Def and Talib Kweli and The Native Tongues or in the party and bullshit rhymes of the Kings of New York (Biggie and Jigga) or their west coast compatriots (Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg) than the risk in 'Pac's more inspired work and so I'm left wondering...

Am I hip hop?

These are the questions that Patrick Neate seeks to answer for himself in Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet. It's been so long since I've read about hip hop from a more academic perspective, I devoured his work. Neate, a UK based writer, teacher, and DJ is a little older than me, a lot more involved in the culture, and, like me, looking back on his connection to what has become the most popular and accessible form of pop culture in the world, travelling the globe to do it. The premise is that he's trying to find out where hip hop is but, really, he's trying to find out where he's at and while reading the book I found myself asking a lot of questions about who I am, how I got here and what my relationship with hip hop is.

The globetrotting is vastly interesting. Living in this giant megaphone known as America, our pop culture goes out to the rest of the world with very little of that foreign pop being brought back to us and I'm hit completely unawares with what's going on in hip hop in South Africa and Brazil and Italy and France. It is completely mind boggling to consider how significant this artform is to the marginal on a global scale.

There's some tedium in the way Neate goes about getting to his point. He spends maybe a little too much time on the history and sociology of each area which, while fascinating, brings the large scale cultural questions about hip hop to a bit of a halt. His conversations with the local heads are the true gems in the book and I was constantly hungry for more of those interactions, thoughts, and outlooks.

What I found so on point about the book, though, was how present, how now a lot of the topics he gets into are. Maybe it's my constant blog monitoring but I was regularly reminded of posts I'd read recently.