“Yo Tom, I’ma let you finish, but you’re not a star and don’t belong on this show!”

Last night Twitter and Facebook seemed to be flooded with updates about Tom DeLay’s appearance on Dancing With The Stars. I have never willingly watched that show, the only instance having occurred while visiting a family friend who watches it. Televised celebrity competitions have always had a tinge of sadness for me, and dancing more so. Dancing seems to bring out large amounts of insecurity in the male population, and to do so in someone “labeled” as a star, many of whom belong to an industry that breeds insecurity just seems excessively cruel.

In all honesty, I don’t watch much TV aside from the occasional Daily Show/Colbert Report episode or Discovery/History/Animal Planet documentary. Once in a while I’ll flip on CNN and see what Anderson Cooper has to say. And then of course there are the Showtime and HBO shows that I download, ahem, legally after the fact (True Blood, Weeds, Californication, Entourage and Dexter in case you were wondering). And then of course there’s my new favorite show, Glee. See? Not much at all. Definitely not enough to warrant getting a TiVo. But I digress.

Sometimes I think I that maybe I should watch more TV. I felt sort of left out not having seen ol’ Tommy boy getting jiggy with it on national television. I had a similar sense of longing when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards. As a general rule I don’t watch MTV as I no longer consider myself to part of their demographic, so I didn’t feel left out with the watching of the event. I just sort of wish I could have seen West’s drunken antics in real time. Seeing pop culture happen live lends a certain authenticity to any commentary that follows, an authenticity that is lacking when one watches it on CNN or YouTube the next day. I still remember watching Ol’ Dirty Bastard interrupt the Grammy Awards to complain about how the Wu-Tang Clan lost to Puff Daddy for Best Rap Album and to apparently state that “Wu-Tang is for the children.” And I remember watching Tim Commerford of Rage Against the Machine sitting on the scaffold above the stage, shaking the set at the VMAs to protest having lost to Limp Bizkit for Best Rock Video. I remember watching the NASCAR race where Dale Earnhardt died. I remember seeing Zinedine Zidane headbutt Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final. I remember OJ running away from the police in what had to the world’s slowest and most unexciting car chase ever.

Those moments stand out because I saw them as they happened. There’s a frame of reference accompanying them that goes way beyond hearing about it from someone or watching it on your computer. I feel as if I’m not engaging the world enough by missing out on the things that get people talking. And as a writer who aspires to be published or paid one day in the forseeable future, that’s unacceptable to me. A writer obtains material by engaging the world and I’m going to engage the world, damn it.

Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from having seen Tom DeLay on Dancing With The Stars. It sounds like it may have been rather painful to watch. I feel sorry for all of you who did. Disregard everything I just wrote.

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Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart… (too soon?)

Farrah Fawcett died today after being defeated by anal cancer. It was a sad end to a struggle for life that had only been recently brought to our attentions. She was a sex symbol to millions, myself included. I am too young to have experienced her advent, but when I became conscious of her as a post-pubescent teen in the 90s, she had just posed for Playboy and I could appreciate her beauty. She had that 1970s hotness that I find so appealing and makes me think I would have truly enjoyed spending the last 10 years of my life in that decade. I was sad to hear of her death.

And then Michael Jackson was rushed to the hospital, having suffered from cardiac arrest. I’ve never seen so many people in the social networking community post on the same thing. TMZ was reporting that he had died, but no one in the traditional news media takes TMZ seriously, so everyone on Twitter and Facebook was waiting with baited breath for a reputable news organization to confirm that he had died. It was almost comical in a way. And then the LA Times confirmed it.

Michael Jackson is dead. The King of Pop has passed away at 50 years of age.

Talk about stealing Farrah Fawcett’s thunder.

I let it sink in for a moment and let the gravity of the situation take hold of me. Except nothing happened. I felt no shock and no sadness. I was then as I am now, completely indifferent. At first I thought it was because of the economic situation. Or because of all the turmoil in Iran. Or because I’m waiting for Obama to enact health care reform. But no, it wasn’t any of those things. And then I realized what it was.

Michael Jackson has been dead to me for years, just as he has been to all of you. Sure, everyone will pretend to be sad and remember moments in their lives that had Michael Jackson music playing in the background so they can take part in the shared global mourning that is going on right now. But all those moments were more than 15 years ago. And it doesn’t change the fact that he hasn’t made any music that any of us could shake our asses to in years (the last song I remember was Scream). Or that if we all look at our music collections (if we haven’t packed them away or gotten rid of them) most of us won’t find a single Michael Jackson CD or cassette. He may as well have died back then.

You see, Michael Jackson, while being the King of Pop that was so loved for ABC, Thriller, Bad and We Are the World, had become wholly irrelevant in the last 10 years. The child molestation charges, the mutation into a white stand-in for Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, the bizarre antics, Neverland Ranch – all these things plagued the image of the man we’re all pretending to mourn today. Think of the last thing you said about Michael Jackson before today. It probably wasn’t anything nice and it probably had something to do with one of the things I just listed.

If I feel anything for him, I feel bad. I’m guessing he suffered a lot because of these things and while we’re all responsible for our own actions, I’m sure the derogatory slant in the media coverage had a lot to do with it as well. This is the same media that is now celebrating his life by showing snippets of his early career. I feel somewhat sickened by the two-faced nature of it. I’m glad that he’s free of all this now. Media outlets around the world will put on a circus in the coming weeks to celebrate the man they vilified for so long and act as if his passing was a huge ripple in time. If he had died 15 years ago, it may have been. Aside from his family, he has not been a part of any of our lives in any meaningful way for a long time and to act any differently is insincere. I do understand the need for a proper tribute to a man who so heavily influenced the world of music, but I don’t know, it just feels forced.

Don’t get me wrong; I have my own Michael Jackson memories. Thriller, the song and the video, was the first piece of media that truly scared the living bejeezus out of me as a child. Before Freddy Krueger haunted my dreams, it was Michael Jackson in Thriller. That was some scary shit, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I remember trying to Moonwalk. I remember watching Captain EO at Disneyland. I remember the Pepsi commercial with the zip line. I remember singing Man in the Mirror and Bad because I was oh so Bad. But I came to terms with all these memories long ago when the man who was responsible for them completely disappeared.

So, Michael Jackson, rest in peace. But I feel no sadness for your loss because you were lost to us long ago. I loved your music and will honor your memory by continuing to listen to it. But I’ve been doing so for years. I don’t really know what else to say, except for “thanks for the memories.”

And if Thriller was any indication, we know you’ll be back soon.

Let a Black man spend some money

People who are blaming the national debt on President Obama can be described as nothing but ridiculous. It was his predecessor, Former President Bush, who created the debt, spending trillions invading a country we had no business being in, while letting the country slide further and further into recession. After doing so and making no attempt to fix it, he simply handed the torch off to his successor with nothing more than a pat on the back and a “good luck.”

If your house falls into ruin because you had your financial priorities in other frivolous places, the solution to fixing it lies not in cutting spending completely and lamenting the cost of fixing your house. You have to spend money on it in order to fix it. When Bush was pouring money down the drain on Iraq, no one said anything. I guess that sort of spending was fine in the eyes of the people complaining now. But now that Obama is spending money trying to fix American companies and institutions, everyone is up in arms over what they call “out of control spending.”

Are they for real?

Desperate times call for desperate measures?

A friend posted a video from Rachel Maddow on Facebook, in which she mocked the conservative movement’s rally for a Tax Day Tea Party. I’m all for mocking conservatives because they tend to do all sorts of things that make mocking them easy. However, not being one to simply point and laugh, I became curious to know what all this Tea Party hullabaloo was about. Maddow was right about the GOP currently being in political exile, so up until now, any mention of a Tea Party was essentially the equivalent of the buzzing of a fly. I didn’t find much useful information on the actual Tea Party website. But on her show the following night, Maddow, also not being one to simply point and laugh, looked into some of the motivators behind the Tea Party and came up with this.

I like having my balls licked as much as the next guy, but it seems as if it’s nothing more than irrelevant conservatives throwing another tantrum over Obama winning the presidency. At the same time they are misguidedly trying to associate themselves with the motives of the country’s forefathers and the Boston Tea Party. And ironically, to do so they use sexual terminology that starkly contrasts with the Puritanical image they like to play up. Things really are changing for the conservative base.

That reminds me: I have to file my taxes.

A Missed Chance

Luck By Chance is in a word, boring. In another word, it feels disjointed. Overall I think the word that should describe it is disappointing. I can’t say that I was excited to watch it because it was Farhan Akhtar’s second film, following hot on the heels of the well liked Rock On!, because I have yet to see Rock On! However I was excited for it when I first saw the trailer for it. I have a soft spot in my heart for Hindi films that have an indie air about them, even if it’s just in the dressing as it is with Luck By Chance. The trailer portrays the movie as a gritty tale of an actor trying to make it in Bollywood. It didn’t display quite the grit of, say Fashion, but it looked promising.

The film follows Vikram Jai Singh, a recent graduate of an acting school in India. Vikram seems to show the only bit of promise in the entire class, and is wished well as he and the others are set loose in the shark infested body of water that is the Mumbai film industry. In his search for success he meets Sona Mishra, a young woman who is also trying to make it as an actress. She keeps taking bit parts with hopes that the producer for whom she keeps working will eventually follow through on his promise to make her a star in his next film. The two find comfort in each other, supporting each other through their struggles, and of course, as is the case between two members of the opposite sex who spend a lot of time with each other, quickly become romantically involved. All this changes when Sona is told by the producer that he can’t do anything for her, and in the process passes Vikram’s picture along to him for reference. Vikram’s luck begins to change for the better as the famous Zafar Khan, played tolerably by Hrithik Roshan, pulls out of the next film by RR productions. None of the big names will agree to replace him, so the producers begin the search for a new face. Through a series of chance encounters, Vikram is chosen to be the new face in Dil Ki Aag. It all soon goes to his head, as people continually dote on him and his co-star quickly falls for him. You can fill in the rest for yourself. Or perhaps you can’t, but even so you’d probably create an ending more interesting than what was written in the script.

The story never seems to properly grip the audience. As the movie reached the intermission, I found that I didn’t really care if the in film producers chose Vikram for a screen test for their film. The character is completely unsympathetic and never does one single thing to make one care about him or what happens to him. I never cheered for him once, from when his friend drunkenly tells him that he’ll never make it in the industry to when his picture was in consideration for the leading role. After he receives his big break, when asked by his co-star if he has a girlfriend, his answer of “no” elicits nothing more than a yawn.

The other characters follow suit, just seeming to exist rather than being defined through their actions in the story. This isn’t to say the film is all bad. It’s two strongest points are Neena, played by the ever lovely Dimple Kapadia, who unfortunately never reaches the level of menace that I think she is meant to convey, and the cameo by Shah Rukh Khan. The King of Bollywood plays himself, providing some important words of wisdom to the now successful Vikram, as well as to anyone on a similar path.

The film ironically parodies its own production, showing what happens when successful industry heads engage in nepotism. It is the directorial debut of Zoya Akhtar, daughter of famous lyricist Javed Akhtar and brother of star Farhan Akhtar, and it shows. She never fully assumes command of the ship and therefore the story and actors meander aimlessly and carelessly. The biggest display of this comes at the end, when the film inexplicably closes up with a focus on one of the supporting characters, who up until that point was never featured as prominently as in the film’s final moments. In movies about film making, actors are frequently comically featured as not having read the script. In this case it appears that the screenwriter herself had not read the script.

Luck By Chance is 156 minutes of wasted potential. It could have been so much better by taking a few guiding hands from outside the Akhtar circle(a point interestingly touched upon by Karan Johar in his cameo), and with its refusal to do so sums up the problem that plagues the bulk of Bollywood. It would be a miracle of chance if you manage to sit through the entire film.