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Quick Cuts
Jul. 29th, 2011 01:13 pmI'm forcing my way through the beginning of the sequence in which, amongst other things, Chess and his mother have the most awkward family reunion ever. It's...really bad so far, frankly. Which is why I'm not going to talk too much about that.
In other news, I discovered a really great artist I'd never heard of before: Dessa, whose album A Badly Broken Code is frankly amazing. She comes out of the spoken-word slam poetry circuit, apparently, but her stuff combines rap and straight-up vocals in a fresh, catchy, gloriously smart way--she's like a cross between Queen Latifah and Aimee Mann, name-checking Sylvia Plath and boasting about how "Chicago Manual of Style keeps the prose right crisp" (which it does, believe me). Like Nicky Minaj, she can sing her own hooks and seems to enjoy putting on characters, though I suppose it's also possible that the narratives in tracks like "Seamstress" and "The Chaconne" are legitimately drawn from personal experience; I personally don't care much if they are or aren't, since they work either way, though there's always that confessional tradition of female artistry to wrestle with.
On So You Think You Can Dance U.S. Season 8, meanwhile, Sonya Tayeh finally managed to do what nobody's tried to since Wade Robeson in Season 3, with his ill-fated "Foxes" routine: Choreograph a girl-on-girl pas de deux which was entirely built around the dancers in question's amazing strength, flexibility, movement and technique, rather than their sexuality or (trappings of) femininity. My personal feeling is that "Game On" will/should stand out as one of the best routines of the season, but I suppose we'll have to see. One way or the other, it's been a damn good year for chicks, with Melanie and Sasha leading the pack and Marko and Tadd (the first two Asians to place in the top six--Marko's from Guam, Tadd's Filipino) bringing up the rear. I frankly can't wait for the finale.
And here's where I'd like to go on and talk about Prince of Foxes, this demented Tyrone Power movie I bought that features Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia, but I really do have to keep on clocking some words, so I'll save that for later. It sort of rates an entry all on its own, since I'd "have" to talk about my obsession with the Borgias generally: The Neil Jordan miniseries, Kaori Yuki's Cantarella, Jean Plaidy's Portrait of Three Poisoners, etc. As well as that unfortunate (though understandable) propensity of WWII movies to make every tyrant-figure of history into a Hitler manque, which--really does not completely work, in Cesare's case. Though to give credit where credit isn't due, it's not like they exactly tried to get into the whole: "My Dad's the Pope!" thing, either.
Okay, back to the mines...
In other news, I discovered a really great artist I'd never heard of before: Dessa, whose album A Badly Broken Code is frankly amazing. She comes out of the spoken-word slam poetry circuit, apparently, but her stuff combines rap and straight-up vocals in a fresh, catchy, gloriously smart way--she's like a cross between Queen Latifah and Aimee Mann, name-checking Sylvia Plath and boasting about how "Chicago Manual of Style keeps the prose right crisp" (which it does, believe me). Like Nicky Minaj, she can sing her own hooks and seems to enjoy putting on characters, though I suppose it's also possible that the narratives in tracks like "Seamstress" and "The Chaconne" are legitimately drawn from personal experience; I personally don't care much if they are or aren't, since they work either way, though there's always that confessional tradition of female artistry to wrestle with.
On So You Think You Can Dance U.S. Season 8, meanwhile, Sonya Tayeh finally managed to do what nobody's tried to since Wade Robeson in Season 3, with his ill-fated "Foxes" routine: Choreograph a girl-on-girl pas de deux which was entirely built around the dancers in question's amazing strength, flexibility, movement and technique, rather than their sexuality or (trappings of) femininity. My personal feeling is that "Game On" will/should stand out as one of the best routines of the season, but I suppose we'll have to see. One way or the other, it's been a damn good year for chicks, with Melanie and Sasha leading the pack and Marko and Tadd (the first two Asians to place in the top six--Marko's from Guam, Tadd's Filipino) bringing up the rear. I frankly can't wait for the finale.
And here's where I'd like to go on and talk about Prince of Foxes, this demented Tyrone Power movie I bought that features Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia, but I really do have to keep on clocking some words, so I'll save that for later. It sort of rates an entry all on its own, since I'd "have" to talk about my obsession with the Borgias generally: The Neil Jordan miniseries, Kaori Yuki's Cantarella, Jean Plaidy's Portrait of Three Poisoners, etc. As well as that unfortunate (though understandable) propensity of WWII movies to make every tyrant-figure of history into a Hitler manque, which--really does not completely work, in Cesare's case. Though to give credit where credit isn't due, it's not like they exactly tried to get into the whole: "My Dad's the Pope!" thing, either.
Okay, back to the mines...
