And a good Wednesday to you.

Ah Wednesday's. Named after the mythical Welsh god Woden. From what I can deduce, he was into humping. Which is why they named this day after him. Who the balls knows.

So...
as you can imagine, on the eve of the first elimination of the American
Idol's 8th season, I felt compelled to m'blog. I've been offering
musings on Idol for nigh on 4 seasons now via my blog, so it just
didn't seem right to abandon that tradition the way 60% of this
season's female contestants have abandoned their children (for, at
most, a span of 12 weeks... any way...)

Which brings me to my
first point... what is with the gaggle of young mothers this season?
And not just in the finals - the ratio in the finals is actually quite
on point with the number the dozen or so that were in the semi-finals,
and furthermore, the hundreds in the preliminaries... okay... maybe that's an exaggeration... but still!

Anyballs... this is what I make out of last night/this season so far...

In order of appearance.

Lil Rounds...
Don't think I need to tell you that I love her on sheer principle. I'm
kind of predisposed to love sassy, quirkily-named, animated black
chicks who are both generously voiced and generously buttock'd. That
would be one Lil Rounds to a tee. She'll fill this season's
requiste-black- diva-who-sails-to-the-second-runner-up-position quite
nicely... although she's not as vocally blessed as others who've filled
that role before her (think: Kimberley Locke, Vonzell Solomon, Melinda
Doolittle), she's got delivery, poise and moxie to more than make up
for it. Expect her to stick around for a while... well, until precisely
the Top 3, as I just said.

Scott McIntyre...
is blind and don't you forget it, asshole. This season has well
established itself as THE season of the backstory and Scott is its
poster boy - his intro clip package literally ran for a milisecond
before he said "I've been blind since birth...". His vocals are
middling at best... reminiscent of a young Christopher Cross
(some dead fucking sexy stuff here, people...) BUT HE'S BLIND, SO YOU
HAVE TO VOTE FOR HIM!!! Methinks this going to be one bumpy ride we're
in for with him... think Sanjaya, but with an actual physical disability.

If Danny Gokey
wasn't a.) a dead wife pity-monger b.) a Jesus freak and c.) actually
named "Danny Gokey", I think I'd like him. He's got a great voice - a
perfectly palatable growl reminiscent of a young Michael Bolton
(which I actually mean as a compliment... I do enjoy the Bolton from
time to time...) and an unassuming charisma about him. Unfortunately
items a.), b.) and c.) still stand. So no fucking dice. Meh. Pending a
Chris Sligh-esque flameout in the next couple of weeks, expect him to
go far.

Michael Sarver... would last a lot longer if he succumbed to stereotype and went country. Instead he's just another Color-Me-Badd-esque
R&B-warbling wigger about 15 years too late. He probably delivered
the best performance he could have hoped for last night, and should
stave off elimination for one week and one week only... but m'afraid
he's back to the oil rigs after that. Which is apparently the most
dangerous job ever, or something.

Jasmine Murray... has the face that Li'l Kim had initially envisioned at the onset of her plastic surgery. I'm convinced of it. And her mother is the hottest tranny I've ever laid eyes upon. She's got about all the potential in the world - a potentially great voice, a potentially great look, a potentially great performance style - but it's all undercooked at this point. And considering the fact that she wasn't actually voted IN to the competition in the first place, things are looking pretty grim for her tonight...

Kris Allen... is fine, if you like that sort of thing. I think he's terribly nondescript and doesn't even give me half
a boner. He rode the heartthrob wave into the finals (snatching that
position away from much better-singing, boner-inducing candidates... Ricky Braddy, natch) on an exceptionally impressive vocal showing, and I guess he's now trying to carve out his niche as some sort of Jason Mraz tribute act... something, I fear, might just work to his advantage. Blah!

Allison Iraheta...
(or "Allison Mojito", as I've called her for the past couple of weeks
completely unaware of what her actual last name was, just knowing it
was something Latin) is the hottest bitch alive. FOR REAL - she's only
16? NUTS. Her voice is RIDICULOUS (think present-day, lived-in Pink),
she works the stage masterfully and is wonderfully unguarded (in
response to Simon telling her she needs to lighten up: "It's not like I
cut myself or anything!")... AMAZING. I both hope and expect she goes
far...

Anoop Desai... is set to benefit off America's Slumdog-mania about a million times more than any of those child actors who were actually IN
the movie will... I can tell you THAT for free... Seriously. Does
American Idol seriously need an everyman every season? Could we not do
without the nerdy kid who can kind of carry a tune and "oh, good for
him! GO AMERICAN DREAM!" for ONE season? No. I guess we can't. Expect
this to go south... and FAST!
Jorge Nunez...
will be in for at LEAST three more weeks based solely on the votes he
gets from the members of his extended family who were gathered around
his television for his intro-clip package. He's got a good voice...
reminiscent of a young Marc Anthony (and I'm not just "meh... who's a
Spanish singer?"-generalizing when I say that!)... but is increasingly
uneasy to watch and look at... I'd bet on him making a Bottom 3 visit
tonight...

Megan Corkrey...
has the most solid reason for becoming a teenage mother I've ever
heard: she couldn't get into her high school musical. Or something like
that, BASICALLY. But yeah - perhaps showing her dissolve into tears
explaining her separation anxiety during her intro package wasn't the
greatest case to be made about why you should vote for her, but I guess
we'll see... She's quirky. Bjork-meets-Hilary Duff. She looks like Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls.
She's definitely going to be the pretty girl who's in the Bottom Three
for 4 consecutive weeks before she's ultimately sent packing...

Adam Lambert... is a good old fashioned over-bronzed power bottom and I say more power to him! I do kind of feel like he's a bit of a Chris Kattan-character,
and I'm far from feelin' the fuck out of his voice, but ever since
those photos of him tonguing another dude came out, I'm all aboard his
train. And the judges seem to be championing him, too. So that's a good
thing. I'm super hoping that he actually does something brashly faggy
and provacative and makes a statement...

Matt Giraud... is really nothing spectacular. Don't be fooled. He's worked very hard at affecting himself with all the trappings of a Robin Thicke-esque
neo-soul man, but as the all-over-the-place-ness of his performance
demonstrated, he lacks the musicality. Expect the cracks to start
showing as the weeks trapse on...

Alexis Grace... is maybe better than I thought she was. That was downright Pat Benetar-ian
last night! Good on her! The judges apparently spend all their boner
juice, because they were nonplussed - which was bullshit. She did quite
a nice little job on it. Another front runner!

I'm going to call the bottom three as being Jasmine, Jorge and Megan,
although I'm sure I'm wrong about it. There are 13 of them. It's kind
of a crapshoot at this point. I'd like to think that with all the
overlap of ghastly R&B-singing white dudes, at least one of them
bottoms out...

Beyond that, apparently there's some sort of
twist happening - I'm 99% certain that the judges will throw down some
sort of sing-off and decide who stays and who goes. Which will be
SCANDALOUS.

Meh.

Later,

--- Aj

Salutations.

How's your winter been? Notice that broad stroke?
How I can ask you how an entire season of your life has been? And why?
Because I've been so shamefully M.I.A. (missing in action, that is...
not birthing a little Sri Lankan heir to my rap throne a mere 3 days
after appearing at the Grammy's, mind you...)

I'm very sorry
about that. I've made several attempts to post in the past couple of
weeks, and they always start out the same way... me explaining where
I've been - in truth, just working... - and it's never remotely funny
and then POOF - time to leave before I've even started to wax
engagingly regarding Jessica Simpson's
overblown weight gain. But fuck it. I'm just going to go balls deep
without any lube or preparatory taint massage, so bite ya pillows,
y'all...

So yeah... Last night... OSCARS.

A snail paced
marathon that I'll simply never tire of. Last night's seemed
exceptionally snail paced, but was not without its charms.

I've
got to say: I felt the fuck out of that thing that they did with the
five past winners welcoming this year's recipient into the club. My
first impression was that the multiple introductions and the
wedding-esque speeches would get a little long and a little
nauseatingly precious, but nope. Felt the fuck out of it, did I. I'm
someone who loves that sort of stuff, though - over-appreciation sort
of stuff. Almost like delivering an obituary early... remarking overly
fondly about living people... I do it a lot to my friends when I'm
drunk, so yeah. That was very up my alley. That was one wheel whose
reinvention went off without a hitch...

Some things that I most absolutely did NOT feel the fuck out of:

I thought the In Memoriam was handled disgracefully.

I'll
admit it: I love the In Memoriam. I look forward to it. First off, I
loves me a montage. Secondly, I love trivia. Thirdly, I love a
popularity contest. Alternately, I'm not entirely impartial to moody,
swelling strings. The In Memoriam montage has all these things... AND
MORE! I was quite comfortable with the classic paradigm of having a
full screen, hastily spliced-together montage flashing clips and
pictures of those we lost this year to intermittent applause breaks and
the requisite dimming of the lights to close. Whomever's idea it was to
have Queen Latifah serenade us
with a frumpy jazz standard while skirting the camera back and forth,
short and wide so the names and faces were respectively unrecognizable
and [Heath] illeg[er]ible needs a swift kick in the box. It was an
arrogant attempt to put a personal stamp on something that hardly
needed fixing in the first place... and totally undermined the people
it was supposed to be pay tribute to in the first place. Not to mention
the GROTESQUE oversight of Estelle Getty and Anita Page.

After substantial rumination, I've concluded that the musical is most definitely not back. Even if it was enjoying a modest upswing at the moment, it was a dealt a massive setback last night in the form of that deplorable salute to the movie musical care of host Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Vanessa "Pizza Beav" Hudgens, glorified chorus members Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper of Mamma Mia, and of course, Beyonce.
Because no one can embarrass themselves in a musical number at the
Oscars quite like Beyonce... or have you forgotten about this:



Now
I don't speak French, but have heard from those who do, that it's
almost insulting. Also, did anyone else notice that part when she
busted into "At Last"? What did that have to do with movie musicals?
Was that a deleted number from "Meet Me In St. Louis" or some shit?
Nope? Nope. Methinks it was a boldfaced jab at Etta James - yet another manoeuvre in my second favourite May-December cat fight of late (my favourite, of course, being the Faye Dunaway v. Hilary Duff bout currently in progress... LOVESIT!!!) ...

Aaanyballs
- other highlights came c/o that mischievous French tightropist (that's
right... take THAT Beyonce and your smoke 'n mirrors... you was
upstaged by a fucking street mime who could balance an Oscar on his
chin and make a coin disappear up his sleeve... awesome...), Tina Fey's mere presence (and holy BALLS how gorgeous did she look?), and, of course, the completely unnecessary panning to Angelina Jolie
during a visibly flustered Jennifer Aniston's award presentation for
animated features. That was actually amazing. I live for that shit. At
one point, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie were quite actually steps apart from each other. AMAZING.

The statues followed a pretty predictable course... Penny Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Viola Davis WILL rise again!)... Heathcliff Ledger for The Dark Knight (Why was there 0.0 mention of Michelle Williams? She's KIND of the mother of his child/most underrated member of Destiny's Child)... Kate Winslet for The Reader (which they kinda HAD to give her at this point)... the only surprise was Sean Penn for Milk
- not that he didn't deserve it, because holy fuckfuckfuck he sooo
did... I wept at that movie. WEPT - but because the old boys club that
is the Academy is notoriously stingy about lionizing gays.

Well
I guess a lot of those old dudes died between Brokeback and Milk,
because Milk totally won a bunch of important shit! ... And generated
the two most heartbreakingly memorable moments of the telecast... Sean
Penn's hilarious and poignant acceptance speech - in which he addressed
the Academy as "commie, homo-loving songs of guns" [half-facetiously,
maybe], made light of his not-always-so-agreeable nature, and sternly
urged for equal rights for all. And with that, a very unlikely gay icon
was made. Like for real - busted, serious, "Jude Law Is One Of Our
Finest Actors"-saying Sean Penn. Pretty crazy stuff.

The
highlight of the night for me, and, I assume, every other gay dude on
the planet (excluding that bunch that were on last week's episode of The Tyra Banks Show, topic: I Hate Being Gay... ohhhhhh brother...) when Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black won best original screenplay.

I was really hoping for a soap-box moment, and boy-oh-boy did I get one. His speech, below:



Class
frickin' act, I tells ya. Not to mention, the boy has a standing
invitation to sit, full weight, on my face at any space and/or place in
time. Yes, that invitation honours the possibility of time travel.

Anyballs... that was that with that.

What's is what with what, however?

That's
right. Another one. All new girls!!! I'd strongly urge you to click the
above image and see it in all it's high-ish resolution glory.

Back tomorrow. Let's talk about this Rihanna/Chris Brown 'Domestic Disturbiance' stuff.

Deal!

--- Aj

Haaaappy New Year!

I don't know who did it or how I even came across it, but it's a mash-up of Karen Carpenter singing "The Christmas Song" and something that the Roots did... if this song could take a human form, it would look like your mild-mannered, Christmas-sweater-wearing, Nanaimo-bar-baking Aunt Judith stoned out of her mind on some demented Barbadosian weed. It's just fucking genius.

Download/Listen to it HERE!!!

The next offering comes from one of the breakout starts of 2008 - Lady GaGa.

Ohhh Lady GaGa. Substantial props for assuming a stage name that starts with "Lady" - it's very regal... further props for bringing back the zany super-hero aesthetic to pop music... and, final props for merging your signature Betty-Boop-on-meth-voice coupled with your thinly veiled crass sexual metaphors with the Christmas Spirit. Thank God for Lady GaGa and her Christmas single, "Christmas Tree" - although I'm sure, I heartily assume it's just another metaphor for a big, sturdy cock. With lyrics like "Light me up, put me on top, let's fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la", anyone who listens to this is sure to be filled with Christmas Spirit. Or hot, piping spunk. One of the two.

Download/Listen to it HERE!!!

The penultimate offering comes from a sultry-voiced dance music queen named Kirstine W., who you probably wouldn't know unless you're a gay remix enthusiast, which I just so happen to totally be, so...

She recently released an album entitled "Mr. Christmas", featuring dance-i-fied versions of several Christmas songs, including (but not limited to) "Oh Holy Night", "Mary, Did You Know" and "Favourite Things"... but there's one song she did that jumped right out of me, a cover of "Hard Candy Christmas" from the musical The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. The song - about carrying on in the face of hard times... specifically, loss, be it financial or personal - has specific resonance this year, what with the horrific financial climate.

It also has significance for me, because The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas was the first musical my parents took me to see (odd choice, I know, but it just happened to be what the Brockville Operatic Society was doing at the time...) It was bizarre... I remember it vividly... Oddly enough, my French Teacher - Madame Darroch - was in it, playing a whore, who said the line "shit" after being left out of an orgy of football players. This blew my mind... ANYBALLS - I remember crying my fucking eyes out at the end when the whores were evacuated from the whorehouse singing "Hard Candy Christmas".

Anyballs... GOOD SONG... Download/Listen to it HERE!!!

But... the ultimate offering - I'm talkin' the aural equivalent of gold, mer and mothafuckin' frankincense up in herre - that I can give you this season has to be a track off of outsider-musician (and close personal friend of mine) Heidi Brander's sophomore Christmas album, "Pair Noel"...

Background: Last Christmastime, Heidi surprised all of us in my friendship circle with a full-length Christmas album she recorded. It was amazing. I made her a myspace page. She's really taken off.

This year's follow-up was a collection of yule tide duets - "Pair Noel". We had a listening party last night, and it was absolutely bonkers. Well worth listening to each and every song. But I'm not made of time, so I'll post the duet that I did with her... in the style of Whitney Houston featuring Bobbi Kristina from her Christmas album "One Wish", here's Heidi featuring me raping and murdering "The Li'l Drummer Boy"...

Download/Listen to it HERE!!!

And I strongly urge you to visit Heidi's myspace page to hear more...

Anyballs - that's it for me. This snow better stop at some point.

Back on Monday with a countdown!!!

Have a good one,

--- Aj

It's been a while since I've gabba gabba hey'd, hasn't it?

So, hi...

How was your weekend? Mine sucked toad ballsacks. I was in Hamilton slinging 'funny' all weekend to a crowd of - if I could borrow a page from Liz Lemon - "whittling, jug blowing IHOP monkeys" who couldn't have cared less. I didn't know this about Hamilton - but it's a mountain town. As in it's on a mountain. A snow-capped one, to boot. Well, no. But there were substantial thermal differences, that's for sure. Anyballs - this is boring... moving on:

A few things...

1.) The most hilarious thing I've read in a while...

Some amazingly kooky lady named Eileen Bernstein who teaches social studies at a public school in the outer boroughs of New York was teaching her class of 12-year-olds about slavery. She decides to, well, get creative in this history lesson by taking two black girls in the class, BINDING THEM TOGETHER, then making them crawl under a desk to replicate how conditions were on a slave boat... Holy fuck... that is out of control... and SO something that would have happened in my hometown of Brockville.

I remember learning about slavery - we didn't have any black kids for the teacher to force into any such creative anachronism (we didn't even have anyone who looked remotely swarthy, for that matter...), but make no mistake about it - if we did, the teacher totally would have done something like that and thought that it would have been a really instrumental learning experience. Instead, we just read the Barbara Smucker novel "Underground To Canada" - a touching story of a young slave named June Lilly (versioned to Ju'Lilly, for short), "followin' the drinkin' gourd" (the big dipper in slavetalk) on the underground railroad to Canada and, ultimately, freedom.

Because in Canada, as my teacher put it at the time, if you owned slaves, "it would have been like wearing a New Kids On The Block T-Shirt"... this was around 1993, so yes, that reference had a lot of weight behind it.

2.) The most hilarious thing I've heard in a while...

C/o urban dictionary.com - The Kimmy Gibbler: When you refuse to leave after you have a one night stand, even when they ask you nicely.

The sentence they provide as an example: "Last night I met some whore at the bar....we came back to my place and she gave me the Kimmy Gibbler....she fucked the hell out of me and then refused to go home when I asked her nicely."

Ugh - I have been Kimmy Gibbler-d so many times I can't handle it. I can't tell you how nice it is to finally have a name for when that happens.

3.) The most hilarious thing I've seen in a while...

The purported cover work for Whitney Houston's long-awaited comeback album...

Yeah. No.

Devastatingly, this is not it. It's some sort of fan-generated photoshopping.

You don't know desperate every fibre of my being was that this was actually it, because this would have been fucking amazing.

I'll bet the actual album cover will be her sitting there looking Dionne Warwick-esque in a cream turtle neck surrounded by Laura Ashley-isms, as opposed to this little nugget that makes the last Pussycat Dolls album cover look like it was shot by Anne Geddes...

In other Whitney Houston news - reports that her and Bobby B were on the verge of reconciliation were met by a resounding "Hell To The No!" by Whitney's press rep. Or at least they should have been.

The most hilarious thing ever ever ever EVER ever...

TOMORROW NIGHT!!!

AHHHH! Can you even fucking handle it?!?!? I certainly can't.

And...

One more thing...

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the passing of a Toronto comedian and friend of mine, Troy Dixon.

He died in a car crash Saturday night - from what I've pieced together, he was travelling in the dead of snow squall country somewhere around Guelph driving back from a gig when he hit a patch of black ice and crashed. Game over. Very sad.

He was just about the nicest guy ever, a TERRIFIC comedian and, as you can tell from the photo, a searingly hot piece (Troy was well-aware that he had a standing invitation to, at any time, sit, full-weight, on my face).

His death is sad for so many reasons... Of course, it's heart-breaking to his family and close friends and anyone connected with him in any way, as we've lost a human life - but it's particularly sad and terrifying because of the way it happened... a fluke patch of black ice while driving home from a gig - something that could have happened to ANY of us... I was on the road all weekend - this easily could have happened to me.

To me, the saddest thing about this is that Troy was just on his way up... he was just getting good and all of a sudden, this happens. It really makes you question this whole concept of "destiny" what the point of all this is. Well no - the point of all this is that we are all so temporary and fragile and it can be over any second, so for fuck sake's, if ever you needed reason to tell anyone that you loved you love them, let this be it.

Anyballs... Rest in peace, Troy.

That's about it...

--- Aj

Wow wow wow wow wow...

So yeah, apparently, there was some sort of political to-do in the United States earlier this week.
Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States of America Tuesday evening, and it was a huge fucking deal.

I did not anticipate it being as big of a deal as it was at all. I can remember watching the 2004 election results, and it was the bust to bust all busts. Quite literally. I was up until 2 AM and the tone was both grim AND uneventful. It was weird. And then, by morning, we knew nothing. Of course it turned out that Bush would still be all up in our business for four more quite inglorious years - with exit polls explaining that the top issue was 'protection of values' (i.e. "Gays marrying? Not on my watch!") trumping four more years of Bushs' misguidance.

Anyballs. I was expecting it to be another toss-up this year - and that no one would know anything until morning. This is why I opted out of any sort of social gatherings... I thought it would just be a bust and I'd be under slept and disappointed in the morning. How very, very wrong I was.

I was watching CNN - not NBC - so I was in the company of yer Wolf Blizter's, yer Candy Crowley's, yer Soledad O'Brien's and of course, yer Andy Cooper's. I had read earlier that day that the first polls closing would be McCain states, so it's going to look like McCain is leading off the bat, but he's not. All I can remember all night was Obama in a menacing lead at every point.

I can then remember when Ohio was called - apparently that was the kicker. This was confirmed by Dana Bash, who - beside being the terrifying hybrid of Janice from The Muppets and Felicity "Bree" Huffman in Transamerica...

FOR REALS! WHAT - IS - WRONG -WITH - HER - FACE?!?!

Anyballs - Dana Bash said at that moment, heart's sank at the McCain party, where she and her busted tranny muppet face were. Apparently - they didn't even announce it to the crowd... that's how heart-sinking it was.

Still, I wasn't sold. This is going to take HOURS I thought to myself. I kept the TV on. There were a bunch of fat asshole talking head politic-ista's yammering around in circles about what this would mean for the country... yadda yadda yadda...

At approximately 11:05 (mere minutes after the Western polls closed), Andy Cooper and Soledad O'Brien were making some inane CNN smalltalk about Iowa when SHAZAM - without an ounce of ceremony, the banner changes to read "Barack Obama Elected President" and we cut to crowds cheering for nigh on 10 minutes.

And I absolutely lost my shit.

And had no idea why.

But I did - lost it. My shit. Completely.

The more I think about it, I think it was a cry of relief. Certainly a release of adrenaline, because this was so built up in everyone's subconscious, but relief. The nightmare is over. For once - and I quite literally mean once, in recent history - the American people used common sense and did not subscribe to unsubstantiated phobias... well, at least enough of them didn't...

That's the thing, though. I went into this appropriately cynical. With the expectation that the Obama situation was too good to be true, and in the end, the US would blow it and opt for more of the same. I cried out of relief and astonishment that "Holy fuck... this IS a reality now". The good guy finally fucking won.

Even if this is a complete crap shoot and he fucks things up immeasurably/can't repair enough of Bushs' damage - I'll always have the memory of that relief and that hope. I think it was a moment the world NEEDED to have. At this moment in time, and for so many reasons beyond the immediate ones.

I also cried out of relativity to the plight of the African American population and what this meant to them - of course I now feel a little less sympathetic considering their involvement in passing California's ghoulish Proposition 8, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Anyballs - you know what it was like?! Quite literally - it reminded me of American Idol, Season 3 when Fantasia Barrino beat Diana DeGarmo. I'M ENTIRELY SERIOUS... don't remember it? Here...

..

Fantasia - the exponentially more talented yet controversial choice - beating remarkably similar pageant queen Diana. It was like a modern-day fairy-tale, much like Tuesday night...

I know, I know - any excuse to talk about Fantasia. Deal. With. It.

So yeah... soon after came McCain's concession speech. Flanked by the ever-vacant Cindy and the y'know, just, Sarah & Todd Palin, he came off certainly classier than he had during his campaign. It was a very dignified moment, save for the drunk yokels in the crowd who booed every time McCain's brought up Obama. Sidebar: When the cut to Palin, she actually looked disappointed and surprised to have lost. Like in the way a spoiled 9-year-old looks disappointed and surprised when they don't get a pet Unicorn for their birthday. Either scenario is equally implausible.

Cut to Obama's victory speech in Chicago - I was especially moved by the image of America's new First Family. It also hit me that as excited as I am about Obama being the next president, I think I'm more excited about Michelle Obama being the next first lady. WORK!

Then came Obama's speech. I lost my shit again - NUTS! I can tell you the exact moment it occurred... when he said: "It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled..." - that just hit me like a ton of joy-bricks. For the first time, the President of the United States of America recognizing the minority group and biological predisposition of which I belong as part of his constituency. Not disregarding it as some unspeakable, perverse 'lifestyle choice' like past presidents - but recognizing it, saying it. That honestly meant the world. And that's kind of sad, really. How low that bar of expectation is. But yeah... baby steps...

Anyballs - this trumps 9/11 as the definitive moment of my generation. Why? Because for the first time, my generation - the millenials - has its first significant moment that we can take responsibility for, the first item of history that we produced. And that, along with freshly tracked crow's feet I've discovered (Editor's note: ACK!), makes me feel really fucking old.

And that's the sense that I've made out of this.

Congrats to you, America!

Smell ya later,

--- Aj

And a good Wednesday to you.

Last night I braved the snow - YES, SNOW. WHAT THE FUCK?!?! - to venture out to the cinema to take in "The Secret Life of Bees".

I'd tell you more about it, but it's a secret.

No. It wasn't so great. I enjoyed it, because I enjoy things that feature black ladies, but me-don't-thinks anybody's gonna be winning any Oscars from it.

It featured quite serviceable performances by Jennifer Hudson (who, yes, as it turns out, can act after all... suck it, Sex & The City: The Movie and the doubts that arose thereafter) and apparent cellist Alicia Keys - who, by the by, played the bitchy sister. Make no mistake about that.

Queen Latifah looked the portrait of a 1960's bee-keeping bull dyke (I know - is there any other kind?). Latifah is fast cornering the market on wise, elder authoritative black ladies... kinda like a female Morgan Freeman.

Dakota Fanning was her usual intense, precocious self. I don't care how normal an adolescence she's seeming to have, that bitch is always going to be the ringleader from Village of the Damned to me.

The real revelation of the evening (if there was one) was Sophie Okonedo as borderline retarded sister, Mae. I actually put her right up there with Sean Penn in "I Am Sam", Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man" and Rosie O'Donnell in "Riding The Bus With My Sister" in terms of commendable cinematic portrayals of specially abled folk. Look at me being so PC. Ooh La La!

It must have kind of sucked for Sophie Okonedo, though. She's this fucking RADA-trained tragedian and she's playing opposite people whose acting credits include "Charlotte's Web", American Idol, "The Nanny Diaries" and of course, "Living Single".

I will say this about Jennifer Hudson, though: Just like the saying goes that "nobody gets beaten to death like Hilary Swank", no one can go from desperate to sassy like Jennifer Hudson. I'm very happy to know that she's finding her niche.

In other news:

Have you seen this yet? Y'should.

..

Wow.

I can only hope that she pulls out that condescending, passive-aggressive, "talking-to-8-year-olds" tone out of her pocket when she tries to finagle the nukes away from Kim Jong Ill.

ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!?! The extent to which this bitch knows not what she says is getting out of control at this point!

I often joke that "I don't mean to play logistic police right now, but..." - I can't tell you how much I believe there truly SHOULD be some sort of private 'logic' brigade or something that can intervene when things just don't fucking make a stitch of sense - LIKE THE POSSIBILITY THAT THIS DUMB BITCH MIGHT BE RUNNING THE FREE WORLD IN A MATTER OF MONTHS!!!

Blerg.

Anyballs...

Until tomorrow!

--- Aj

Hey friends... Friends of friends...

How've you been keeping? I trust well.

I've been busy. Good-busy.

Last Tuesday, of course, marked a particularly Sapphic edition of Bitch Salad - a Gi-normous thank you to all who came out for that ('GI-normous' both as in superlatively huge AND vaGInally...)

It wasn't as lesbo-centric in terms of an audience turnout as I thought - which was just as well, as my lesbo-centric material was scant at best. But yeah - suu-h-uuper-fun. I totally put more germs in my head insofar as doing theme shows WITHIN the already themed show that Bitch Salad is. I.E. an all musical edition... or an all-'urban' edition... or... uhh... an all-puppeteer edition... yeah... probably not... whatevs...

So the excitement continued when last Wednesday saw me attend the opening of Mivish Productions' restaging of the beloved classic "The Sound of Music" - something I was waiting for with baited breath, considering my overly enthusiastic interest in the CBC reality show, "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?" this past summer.

In three words: Feel Good Time.

I don't know if you're a fan of the movie at all, or fuck, even SAW the movie - as a shockingly high number of people I've spoken to haven't (read: One person. I can't believe anyone has NOT seen the movie?!?! I thought some sort of accrued knowledge of the Family Von Trapp was more requisite in someone's childhood than the assfucking Bible... meh)... - but this thing definitely lived up to it.

The solution to "How [Exactly] [You Do] Solve a Problem Like Maria?", underdog Elicia MacKenzie, definitely worked it out. She still isn't nor shall she ever be runner up/predicted winner Janna Polzin (who, incidentally, alternates in the part Wednesday evenings and Sunday matinees), but she's definitely believable in the part of flibbertigibbet songbird nanny/mistress, Maria Rainer-Von Trapp.

Other highlights include Noella Huet's "Mother Abbess"... although her acting ranges from barely passable to passable, she can sing like a motherfucker. Like a motherfucker, let me tell ya. Upon hearing her fuck the shit out of the last phrase in the first-act closer "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", you'll be hard pressed to find yourself sitting on a dry seat. It's devastating.

And, of course, the bitch who plays Gretl is mayhaps the fiercest bitch who's e'er lived. She literally needs to blink and the audience full blown ovates. It's nuts. I was ACTUALLY star struck by her at the after party. I kept almost approaching her, only to come to my senses and be like "Dude... she still poops her pants... we can't hang out."

Some differences from the movie:

In the live version, the staple "My Favourite Things" is NOT sung to the children in bed to distract them from the thunder storm, but instead by the Mother Abbess to Maria in an uncharacteristically secular move. Good heavens!

What Maria does, in fact, sing to the children to lift their spirits during the thunderstorm, is instead "The Lonely Goatherd" - a song famously done in a marionette orgy in the film. This was incredibly disappointing, as I was hoping with all my might that there'd be a chorus of people pretending to be marionettes. BUT NO. Instead, it's just Maria yodelling to the kids as they scream their heads off. I thought, "Fuck... could there not be a little bit of reimagining here? Like maybe a mash-up of "The Lonely Goatherd" and Gwen Stefani's "Wind It Up"? Like have Gretl come out like "This is the key that makes us wind up..." But no. Anyballs...

Another thing that is noticeably different in the stage production is the part of the Baroness - she's not the skanky, jealous tranny that people have come to know and love from the film... but instead a quite noble and feminine character who simply can't have a meeting of the minds with the Captain... BORING! I WANTED TRANNY BARONESS!!! Instead of being played by a Kathleen Turner-type, as she should have been, she was played by a Gwenyth Paltrow-type, if that gives you any idea.

Anyballs - the party afterwards was fine. Cramped as fuck, as it was held in the actual theatre, because - as I'm told - every banquet hall in the city has been booked due to some mystery conference of sorts. There was a considerable food shortage, and it was all Austrain-themed.

During the show, at one point Elicia/Maria rewards herself for a job well done making clothes out of curtains or something, by sneaking a pastry, but is then busted by the Baroness. I then remarked to my co-horts that if Elicia/Maria needs to do that 8 shows a week, she's going to end up like Jenna Maroney in the episode of "30 Rock" when she comes back from summer hiatus performing in "Mystic Pizza: The Musical" on Broadway, only to have gained 50 pounds from having to eat 3 pieces of pizza on stage per show... I couldn't find a clip of it, but because the more 30 Rock you can mention, the better, DO enjoy Jenna performing her Number 1 smash hit (on the Israeli pop charts), "Muffin Top":

..

Anyballs - this whole Mystic Pizza: The Musical thing was worth mentioning, because afterwards, upon discovering that the scant food selection was all of Austrian persuasion (Cabbage Rolls, Schnizel, Pickeled motherfucking Herring...), my compatriot Heidi remarked that "now [she] really does wish this was Mystic Pizza: The Musical". Ha. Because then various pizza-things would have been served. Meh - it was funny at the time.

So yes...

Go see "The Sound of Music". And by all means join me in having "The Lonely Goatherd" in my head for the rest of days.

I'm going to see "The Secret Life of Bees" tonight. Jennifer Hudson is in it. I expect sass by the barrell full.

Smell ya later,

--- Aj