Walker, Texas TV Trope
About three summers ago I started going to the gym during “peak hours” because I thought it would help streamline my workouts. As in, make me do them for only 30 minutes and not meander on the T-mill for 2 hours so I could watch back-to-back episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger on USA. Walker, in the tradition of such shows as Murder, She Wrote, Father Dowling’s Mysteries and Diagnosis: Murder is all about clown horn storytelling. In addition, Walker heavily relies such tropes as Sitcom Memory Syndrome – having and forgetting experiences in twenty-two minute intervals – Keeping it real “Native” while reaping the benefits of white privilege and All my friends are wrongly accused of murder.
It also perfected the My black friend is a guy who happens to be black, so there trope in a way I actually found reasonably enjoyable, as the character Trivette is well integrated – pun intended – in a limitedly tokenizing way paving the way for such black best friends as Hardison on Leverage and Gus on Psyche. Trivette is also positioned as a “neutral” black male rather than “neutered”, which is a welcomed change. It reminds me of the nuanced, though decidedly un-ham handed way, the creators of Magnum, PI broadened the portrayal of life for returning Vietnam Vets, which mostly consisted of framing them as MONSTERS or VICTIMS.
But back to Walker, I did find the embarrassing misappropriation of Marital Arts culture co-existing with the Wild West theme without commentary pretty intriguing – albeit mostly executed in a piss poor fashion and wholly problematic.
I’m doing it again. Deconstructing the elements of media I consume and enjoy. And really, nobody should give up this many Social Attention Units™ in service of Walker, Texas Ranger, but eh, what can you do?
Anyhoo.
Going to the gym at peak hours meant my sequin cardigan over Bowie Aladdin Sane glitter tees attracted a bit of attention. Now in my defense, this wasn’t some Romy/Michelle situation complete with high heel sneakers and a woefully limited understanding of the proper use of exercise equipment. This was my little way of making the gym more enjoyable since it’s unrealistic to walk outside for 9 month out of the year where I live.
During this time in between “Getting Jiggy Wit It” and Sir Duke-ing, I observed many intriguing behaviors of various species of gym patron.
I observed men wandering past rows of stretchie pant clad heinies looking for a heinie he wanted to make “mine-y” and saddling up next to the owner of said heinie in hopes that cranking up the T-mill to “11″ while nearly going into cardiac arrest was enough to make a positive impression.
I noticed many of our more “fabulous” and “good to mama” folk cluster fucking around the machines which provided them the best access to any program featuring Tyra Banks or Heidi Klum.
The Weight Watchers brainwashed populace demonstrated a preference for Noah’s Ark-ing in pairs of competitive sets of “friends” wearing matching passive aggressive smirks of superiority and shiny new Easy Spirit walking sneakers.
POCs tended to avoid any machine which brought them into contact with POCS acting a fool on Reality TV or being paraded past reporters in handcuffs. And by POCs, I mean me. I also avoided machines with views of Oprah, Queen Latifah or Flava Flav/New York. The Oprah thing was an act of conscious effort, though I will say I was tired of folks getting into my car and immediately reaching under the seat in hopes of finding the deed to a McMansion or a shoebox filled with negotiable Bearer Bonds.
The “Am I hot or not?” crowd of any gender seemed really fascinated by their own reflection in the floor to ceiling mirrors covering every wall in the building.
I also noted – with some amused detachment – if I was sandwiched between two folks on a T-mill, didn’t matter if they were bigger or small than me, they tended to keep a watchful eye on my speed/incline and adjust theirs accordingly.
For the first two weeks of my new gym time, I couldn’t pitch a pedometer without hitting someone who assumed it was my first time touching the equipment and offering to teach me how to us it. Now, I had seen this ploy used in service of a pick up, but it was usually a fellow patron and not an employee.
Another thing my new time brought me was observing the sheer numbers of folks who work out for an hour and immediately hit the human TOASTER OVENS. This annoyed me so much that I campaigned to get “perk” removed from my own Cadillac plan – I was born a lovely shade of burnt sienna and am not a fan of melanomas – and replaced with the ability to have my designated guests work out without requiring my presence.
My experience with hook ups was severely hampered by my refusal to make eye contact with the volume of wildly inappropriate suitors who attempted to engage me in anything approximating conversation.
Save one.
I was going through my I can’t date you, so I’ll amass a collection of guys who look just like you phase, which mercifully ended when I met my current partner. So when my Yvonne Ellman disco song approximation blipped on my radar I began to embody and display all the mating behaviors I previously found so beneath me.
But in my own ridiculously corny way.
We’re talking carrying interesting and provocative magazine titles, curating and wearing a collection of fabulous Bowie shirts and of course, cranking up the T-mill to “11″ and risking cardiac arrest.
It worked! Oh snap. Did it work.
The day Mr. Approximation surveyed the rows of hard working heinies and selected the T-mill next to mine was pure pop bliss. I played music which made me feel and therefore act fun loving and approachable. Neither quality exists in me naturally. I worked on my running stride ensuring it afforded me a bit of jigglevision but didn’t result in black eyes. Playa, I marinated myself in so much Angel by Thierry Mugler that regular scent wearers could rub against me to get their daily ration.
I would later say of my performance:
“What in the name of Maria Conchita Alonso was I thinking?”
So it was quite moment of delicious Schadenfreuden for my “higher self” when my crush went crash and I had to crawl back into the dead of night to work out. Back to my Walker and newly discovered Brolin lovefest Pensacola: Wings of Gold. Then again no more high colonics to my self regard (Vonnegut) or soul crushing reversals of fortune either.
It always seems as though I end up watching a Streisand film while I’m doing my nails. Whether it’s coincidence, inspiration or the preponderance of Streisand flicks on instant view, I don’t know.
Babs flick: The Main Event
Nail Polish: Rescue Beauty Lounge – Film Noir
Ryan O’Neal joins Babs for this surprisingly funny flick fueled by the power of belligerent sexual tension and the promise of a kick ass song over the end credits. The premise involves Hillary (Babs), a fabulous perfume maker, going broke with the help of a shady business manager who bones out with all her cheddar. After settling her debts she’s left with one asset – a washed up prize fighter’s (O’Neal) contract. But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch when your prize fighter looks like Ryan O’Neal at the tail end of his 70s hotness. He doesn’t actually fight. He’s merely paid to be a fighter and throw a few matches – for taxes purposes – but actually runs a failing driving school out of a building shaped like a giant boxing glove. In fact he has a bit of a fear of getting hit. Determined to recoup her losses, Hillary decides she will kind of manage him to ensure he actually wins fights to pay off his debt. Of course they “hate” each other and have one of those push me/pull me relationships that is the stuff of romcom tropery.
Along for the journey are Whitman Mayo, who co-stars as Kid Natural’s (yeah that’s O’Neal’s character) manager/co-conspirator, a post Andy Warhol/pre-New York Undercover Patti D’Arbanville and Barney Miller’s annoying boss Inspector Luger James Gregory. Ernie Hudson has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him scene at the beginning, but I was removing my old polish during the exposition so I only heard his voice and couldn’t tell you if the performance was memorable.
Hillary seems to be the forerunner to Carrie Bradshaw, particularly her penchant for zingers and deliciously inappropriate footwear. Strappy sandals and sequins in boxing ring? Seriously? Actually the costuming is pretty fly. Lots of shiny monochromatic and skimpy outfits. And the nails! I liked her pale manicure much better than the social worker plum color she wore at the beginning of the film.
The dialog is quite snappy and I messed up my own manicure trying to go back and review a scene. Despite pushing nearly two hours the film moves along nicely. And unless you don’t have a lot of exposure to rom-com it’s fairly obvious where this train is headed and the ride is fairly enjoyable.
O’Neal and Babs have surprisingly effective chemistry so much so that you almost don’t notice how embarrassingly awful the “boxing” is. You can see better faux fighting on Jerry Springer. But since this isn’t really a boxing film I’m inclined to let that slide. In addition, neither actor is doing anything you haven’t seen them do before. With O’Neal, it’s like Oliver Barrett IV decided to move to LA and disappoint his father in a milder climate. And Babs, well, she plays Babs mostly and that’s perfectly fine with me.
But that song. I tell what. The theme song is discolicious. There is nothing better than a slow, melodic intro that bursts into a high octane booty shaker. Though this is more of a wannabe Fosse jazz hands thing. Definitely lots of big finish fake outs peppered throughout the song. I dare you not to toss your head back and throw your hands in the air while attempting the high notes.
Jazz hands to the sky, baby!
And of course shadowboxing. I’m pretty sure similar to the music from Rocky it’s a federal offense not to shadowbox while belting this out in front of a mirror or a bar full of drunken New Englanders.
You can't win. You can't get even and you can't get out of the game.
As a Pop Culturalist, I’ve never found it my job to critique media I do not consume, nor do I give much credence to those who do. It’s really easy to pick apart even the legitimate shortcomings of media you don’t like, but it’s hardly productive. Okay, so you found all the problematic content of something you already do not like! Good for fucking you. Now here’s a barrel of fish to shoot!
You ain’t never heard me in my life critique on the following:
LOTR
Joss Whedon’s universe
WOW
D&D
Howard Stern
lolcats
Twilight
Harry Potter
The Office
Reality TV
McSweeney’s
BECAUSE I DO NOT LIKE THESE THINGS. And state as much up front. Me no like!
Besides, what would be the point? To prove I know how to pick on an easy target? There ain’t no black people in LOTR. Booyah. I’m done. Okay, I can go out for a soda or something. Joss Whedon’s world is like Tori Amos’s world, which is like Jesus’s world. Possibly great but the followers appear to be large pains in the ass when proselytizing about their savior. Playa, JW’s are less aggressive. Done with that one. The rest are probably self explanatory if you’ve read this blog with any degree of closeness.
And that took – what – like a paragraph. Should I waste more of my time analyzing all the ways in which I believe these things to suck with supportive evidence of their suckery? As I say all the time, I don’t know how many hours your day comes with, but mine only has 24 and I intend to use them wisely.
Critiquing what you consumes means never having to say, “Omg, I can’t believe Le Tigre would do that!!!” Cause if you’re critiquing what you actually care about, well then you don’t find yourself so god damned shocked by what was in front of your face all the time. And granted, it’s a lot more difficult to question the merits of things you cherish, but it’s work that has to happen. Ain’t no two ways about it. The alternative is merely ensuring it’s always someone’s else’s heroes, interests or passions that are problematic and not say – yours.
*FIXED SPELLING OF JOSS SO FOLKS WILL ACTUALLY HAVE TO ENGAGE WITH THE MESSAGE. AND NOT TRY TO SHOEHORN TELLING ME HOW AMAZING HE WHILE PLAYING 3RD GRADE TEACHER. 
Sir Michael Caine
I gathered up a bunch of friends – okay so I ‘ounded the hell out of them – to start a pop culture blog. I’ve longed for someone to see my Rupert Holmes and raise me Robbie Dupree and now I have it in the form of some kick ass bloggers.
The new blog is called I Fry Mine in Butter – a Vonnegut reference – and it’s all about delicious, cheeky pop culture goodness. The kind of stuff you get here, but a lot more playful, though still quite snarky. In any event – main or otherwise – I’m not going anywhere. I am the Michael Caine of blogging.
Anyway check out the rest of IFMiB crew:
Raymond J
Miss Tasha
Ms. Jacks
Gudbuytjane
Drop by, pull up a comfy chair and show us mad love!
Vonnegut - he's up in heaven now+.
I start each day with a devotion. I grab book next to my bed – or let’s be honest, couch, I don’t like sleeping my bed during the winter – and pick up where I left off. I usually read for about an hour and then scrawl in my journal for another forty five minutes. Then I do the Hokey Pokey and turn myself around. This week I’m rereading Timequake, which technically I haven’t read in nearly ten years, though I listen to the audiobook whenever I’m trapped in the car and out of range of the nearest craptastic public radio station.
Timequake came into my life when I kind of meandering, both artistically and personally. I had just moved back east and felt a total failure moving in with my mom. Though looking back I realize that was a pretty fucking brave thing to do. To say to yourself, “Hey, you tried it your way and since there are no more Marcia Muller ‘Sharon McCone’ mysteries to read, you better come on home.” And it was in fact La Mommie who would periodically come into my room – with its ice cream shoppe stripped walls – carrying the novel and giving the daily highlights and reflections on its prose.
From my previous post Don’t Disturb This Groove:
Don’t get me started on how many times Tony (The Sopranos) had gotten himself in trouble or how many shiny suits the gang had gone through before I decided to do more than just booty dance to the theme and have my mother and other people just describe episodes and spoilers to me. I did the same thing with SFU. A friend used to watch the shows and then call me immediately afterwards (with notes scrawled during the eps) and go through scene by scene for me. In many cases I loved this more than the actual episodes. Particularly when my mom gave me the lowdown on each and every season six: part one ep of The Sopranos. I love how she editorialized and would say things like, “You know with his history of emotional issues and inappropriate boundaries…” well I wouldn’t know, but I would be fascinated just the same.
With Timequake she used Vonnegut’s prose to both reignite my activist/political passions as well as my artistic/creative passions. And it worked. So without further ado, here are my top favorite things he said.
1. “In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.”
(Ch. 32, p. 128)
Buried in the middle of the novel with the more disastrous events taking center stage, this little gem almost gets overlooked. But it resonated with me and it’s sort of my person motto. It strengthens resolve when I’m feeling discouraged and makes me freaking laugh. It’s accurate too. There’s always time to panic. Why rush it?
2. “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
(Ch. 50, p. 196)
The premise involves a timequake – a disruption in the fabric of time and space – sending us all back ten years but no wiser or better equipped to deal with life as a rerun. We can’t change ANYTHING or do anything we didn’t do when it was original material. (Vonnegut) When we’re popped out the other side we suffer from something Vonnegut calls PTA or “Post-Timequake Apathy”. This quote is what Kilgore Trout broadcasts from a TV station in hopes of shaking folks awake. It’s applicable in a variety of situations and fun to say!
3. I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Ch. 42, p. 161)
This quote shook up my short fiction, which always felt hampered by the literary constructs, which seem to require that people grow, change or learn something. I never really believed it and it severely limited my ability to enjoy a lot of short fiction. In many stories it felt like the characters tap danced off the page or had the equiv of a laugh-freeze frame-flute note-end credits moment often observed on 70s and 80s cheeky dramas. Murder, She Wrote is totally guilty of this. Once I gave myself permission to let my characters do what they will my craft really developed.
4. “Sure the Bible might be the greatest story ever told, but the most popular story is about a couple who has a good time fornicating, but then stops for one reason or another while it is still a novelty. “
There are dozens of lulz to be had in this novel, and this is one of my favorites. It’s a delicious recognition of the truths nobody tells you as a writer. It pretty much sums up some of the most beloved novels in existence.
5. “I FRY MINE IN BUTTER.”
I love me a good non sequitur and this is one of the best. It’s all about being inappropriate and being caught. In the novel, Vonnegut tells a story of two women chatting during a performance of an orchestra so they have to keep talking louder and louder to out pace the music, which is doing the same. You can guess how this ends. I often say this when a person is caught being inappropriate though not problematic or offensive way. I fry mine in butter.
“TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
I’ll let Vonnegut do his thing:
She was a widow, and he stripped himself naked while she went to fetch some of her husband’s clothes. But before he could put them on, the police were hammering on the front door with their billy clubs. So the fugitive hid on top of a rafter. When the woman let in the police, though, his oversize testicles hung down in full view.
Trout paused again.
The police asked the woman where the guy was. The woman said she didn’t know what guy they were talking about,” said Trout. “One of the cops saw the testicles hanging down from a rafter and asked what they were. She said they were Chinese temple bells. He believed her. He said he ‘d always wanted to hear Chinese temple bells. “He gave them a whack with his billy club, but there was no sound. So he hit them again, a lot harder, a whole lot harder. Do you know what the guy on the rafter shrieked?” Trout asked me. I said I didn’t. “He shrieked, ‘TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
+ It is rumored – though Vonnegut claimed this himself – at Isaac Asimov’s funeral Vonnegut said, “He’s up in heaven now.” which if you know anything about either makes this quite humorous. Vonnegut also hoped folks would say the same of him.
My current beast of burden bag
Ahhh, the beast of burden bag. I have always loved me a big ass MEEMAW hand bag. Scratch that – I’ve always loved me a big ass purse of any style. My clutches approximate the dimensions of catalog envelopes and my everyday bags often cause strangers and loved ones to ask if I’m on my way to country for a weekend at cozy, under-siege-by-Laura-Ashley Bed & Breakfast.
what I'm currently carting around in my bag
I’ll be the first to admit I take my bag inspiration from walkers of the evening streets. And when I use the adjective “hooker” it is with great reverence. Not because I have anything meaningful to contribute to the discourse centering around agency as it relates to sex work or seek to misappropriate an experience of those warriors of the fur chubby. I just think many elements of their style – namely their accessories – service the needs of my lifestyle. Oh yes, that was very much intended.
Now, I know our ladies of the eve are much more Y2K and business casual these days, so really my inspiration is more 70s in nature and was chiefly framed by endless viewings of TV cop shows. It’s doubtful fur chubbies have been raged with any conviction or irony free since – oh – about 1978. But the big ass MacGyver bag is timeless.
My first Bueno - circa 2002 - Big Blue
Seriously, you can’t keep me away from any bag that is shiny, pairs well with seasoned citizen cruisewear or is roomy enough for a family of five. And I’m not one of those people who has a big Olsen bag and holds up checkout lines trying to find stuff and in the process pulls out items ranging from a tube of KY to a spatula with gum wrappers and lint stuck to it. Oh no. I’m one of those bag-inside-a-bag people. I have no idea why I have to cart around all that stuff; I only know I wouldn’t know what to do with a modest sized handbag. Thankfully, since we’re all going green, I can always pretend I’m carrying around a suitcase so I won’t kill more planet by carting off my bargains in a store bag. I’ll save my obsession with reusable TJMaxx/HomeGoods $.99 shopping bags for another day.
Buenolicious collection.
When I walk into TJMaxx – or any store selling bags – I head straight for the luggage/computer tote section. If there’s anything worth spending my five cents on – cause you know I’m allergic to full priced items – it’ll be in that section. TJ/Marshall’s/AJ Wright never let me down. They always have something fun and usually ridiculous and almost always made by a company called Bueno. I tell you what, Bueno might not know how to do websites, but they certainly have mastered the art of liberating cash from my wallet in fifteen dollar increments.
Dolly Parton.
Robin Jacks is one of the co-founders of The Southern Girls Convention, a long time friend, co-conspirator and personal hero.
Snarky’s Machine has asked me to write this guest post based on a conversation we had many years ago, probably at a feminist conference somewhere in the South, about the implications of class on our respective senses of fashion. I can barely remember recognizing then that our conversation was specifically about class, even though looking back I can see that it was. I was, at that time, constantly pissed off about the then-trend of radical activists wearing doo rags and hankies on their heads everywhere they went, even if they weren’t doing any actual physical work.
I remembered spending so much of my childhood watching my mom scrub the kitchen floor on her hands and knees with a handkerchief tied over her head, protecting her hair from the dirt my father would track in after working his ass off outdoors all day, from the fur of the five hound dogs who roamed our rural Mississippi property. In the few photographs of my mother that have stuck around from those times, she’s almost always wearing a doo rag. Although there were then and still are plenty of icky appropriative fashion trends in supposedly progressive communities to be concerned about, that one has always stuck with me. The way people wore doo rags then was offensive not just to my sensibilities, but to my person. It was offensive, tasteless ‘working class chic’. It was all form, no function. It was, for Chrissakes, about my mama.
Growing up isolated in 1980’s rural Mississippi left me with few options for tangible fashion icons. I couldn’t dress exactly the way I wanted to; the rural South tends to be repressive that way, both financially and culturally. There was the very occasional trip to the feed store so my daddy could buy my sister and me a cowgirl hat or a pair of boots, and sometimes we’d go to the department store in Memphis and get something fancy, but mostly I was stuck wearing cheap warm-up suits. Back then I spent most of my fashion-centric energy internalizing rather than externalizing, making mental notes for the future.
I watched Hee Haw with my dad on Saturday evenings and noted that the Hee Haw Honeys dressed real nice-like; I hated their corny jokes, but I loved the Honeys’ flouncy square-dancing skirts and plaited-yet-bouffanttastic hair. They were equally wholesome and naughty; I liked that, even though I didn’t quite get what that meant. Dolly Parton was, of course, a key icon to so many little country girls in the 80’s who wanted more than the hand they were dealt. Her voice, body, and personality were big, so much bigger than the shack in the hills where she had come from. I watched my VHS copy of 9 to 5 that I’d taped off of a showing on TV over and over again, memorizing how she walked in heels and wondering how in the heck she got her hair to stay high and curled like that. I spent chunks of time every weekend combing my hair backwards, making it bigger and messier until it ended up being an incorrigibly tangled wad of hair that my mother would have to take apart with baby shampoo and a comb. (To this day, I don’t think she knows how my hair got so tangled all the time.)
My grandmother grew up in small-town Mississippi, in the Delta during and after the Depression. Her father was an oft-unemployed, non-functioning alcoholic, and caring for him at night when he stumbled in shit-faced usually fell on her shoulders. Despite all of this, she was a teenage superstar in her community. She loves to gloss over the bad parts and show me newspaper clippings from when she was voted “Miss Greenville High” and “Most Attractive” during her senior year in high school, rather than “Most Beautiful”; “Most Attractive”, she likes to remind me in her rolling Delta accent, was the one “who was glamorous AND had the personality.”
Her family was dirt poor – her not-quite-right father would walk through the streets of town literally throwing money in the gutters – but my grandmother made a little bit of money for herself by playing the piano on a local radio program, fighting with her father at home at night after she returned home. Their biggest battle royale came after she saw a lady in a magazine wearing a pair of, in her words, “VERY high heeled shoes.” No one else in town dared to wear them, but my grandmother saved her money and bought one of the few pairs that the town shoe store had for sale. She wore them around for the rest of the day, practicing her strut and prancing around downtown Greenville. She was punished severely for it when her father got home; he’d heard about it from everyone who had seen her walking around that afternoon, and as a result she never wore those shoes again. I was never clear if the heels were taken from her, or if she’d made the decision to get rid of them herself. The moral of her story, as she tells it, is that “nice girls don’t wear things like that.”
She would sit across the kitchen table from me with her scrapbook open, telling me that story for the thousandth time, tracing her cigarette ash around and around in her ashtray, making the cherry of her cigarette into a perfect point while muttering, “I really shouldn’t have done that.” But as much as she wants me to take her story as a cautionary tale, I love to think of my grandmother that way- the Most Attractive Girl Of Greenville, Mississippi, saving her pennies to buy an expensive pair of heels that she’d only get to wear once, sashaying down Main Street like she owned it, devising ways to get the hell out of that town and away from her life.
Elinor Burkett - Girl, interrupting.
Burkett told Salon:
What happened was the director and I had a bad difference over the direction of the film that resulted in a lawsuit that has settled amicably out of court. But there have been all these events around the Oscars, and I wasn’t invited to any of them. And he’s not speaking to me. So we weren’t even able to discuss ahead of the time who would be the one person allowed to speak if we won. And then, as I’m sure you saw, when we won, he raced up there to accept the award. And his mother took her cane and blocked me. So I couldn’t get up there very fast.
Did she really just call out his mama? The woman is 87 years old! Even if everything Burkett stated was true – I don’t know much about the case – how does it justify bum rushing the stage, an utter Soy Bombination to what would otherwise have been a triumphant moment for the filmmaker? I can see why Williams wasn’t speaking Burkett. You can’t reason with assclowery.
It’s interesting how this is being framed. Did anyone contact Kanye immediately after his Soy Bombing to get his side of the story? Was he provided a steaming cup of benefit of the doubt? Did he call out Swift’s mom? I don’t think so. I seem to recall an immediate and decisive condemnation of his antics. There were many valid criticisms, to be sure, but a lot of it veered away from the events of the evening and started looking a lot like racism at times.
I suspect Burkett’s obnoxious behavior will be framed in a less hostile manner and she’ll be mentioned in the same breath as the 1974 streaker, as though her behavior was nothing more than an odd Oscar moment. When in reality the attempt to silence a black filmmaker during his speech was all about some seriously unchecked hostility. She doesn’t deserve a forum to air her grievances. Instead she should be using any forum afforded her to apologize to Williams and his mama.
Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman - American or otherwise - to win a Best Directing Oscar
History was made during last night’s Oscar Telecast and that was just the murky depths of fail explored by its woefully inept hosts. Alec and Steve were misfiring like a Saturday Night Special, though in a SNS’s defense, those guns usually cause far less carnage.
Liveblogging with the ladies of Shapely Prose provided suitable innoculation from some the evening’s truly dreadful moments.
Of all the clips from Precious showcasing Gabby’s preternatural talent, the only one suitable for airing involved Precious jacking fried chicken? Seriously? Oh someone should be getting fired for that.
Academy Award winning screenwriter, Geoffrey Fletcher.
Geoffrey Fletcher – the first Black person to win a writing Oscar – had the best speech of the night (in my opinion):
I don’t know what to say. This is for everybody who works on a dream every day. Precious boys and girls everywhere. All the cast and crew, anyone who’s kept believing in me. My two brothers, supported me in every way. My role models, my heroes, Buddy and Todd. My mother, Bettye, angel of my world. My father, Alphonse, who spent so much time with us and taught us everything. I’m sorry I’m drawing a blank right now, but I thank everyone.
emphasis is mine.
As a person who worked on a dream daily, I was moved and inspired. Thank you, Geoffrey Fletcher. Thank you for being understated, truly humbled and a class act all the way. You wanna adapt my novel Bright Neon Love?
Let’s not waste bandwidth talking about the apotheosis of awful perpetrated by So You Think You Can Dance? producers who took ten minutes of my life I’ll be begging for on my deathbed when I’m 982 years old, for a sequence I named So You Think You Can Stink Up The Oscars.
Like adverbs and certain spices, Interpretative dance should be used judiciously.
Once again, The Dude was taking ‘er easy for all us sinners with his smoove and gracious win. And if my livestream hadn’t crapped out, I might have been able to see it.
Mo’Nique was spectacular and if it weren’t for her size and race, I’m sure she’d be considered a “tough broad” in manner of Midler or Babs, rather than “mannish” or “uppity” or “hostile”. How dare she let the work speak for itself.
Speaking of Babs. I tell you what, I knew it was going to be Lee or Kat when Babs strolled onto the stage wearing what appeared to be scraps of various costumes left over from The Main Event. I ain’t mad, though. You can wear a garbage bag when you’ve got James Brolin at home keeping the sheets warm.
Trust me, that’s legwork I wished I could do.
It was incredibly exciting to see K-Big rock the mic two times, though I could have done without the Muzak version of “I Am Woman”.
And Tom, even with a long broadcast, it’s still nice to quickly rattle off the noms before harshing J-Cam’s mellow.
Hey folks, I will be joining the divas of Shapely Prose to liveblog the Oscars tonight, starting at 6 EST.
You can find all the action here
