At the Good-Beer-Is-Not-Cheap Café...

... quaff some brew...



... down at the end of Lonely Street.

"The rather scathing portrayal of Muslim society no doubt will stir controversy, especially in a frothy summer entertainment..."

"... but there's something bracing about the film's saucy political incorrectness. Or is it politically correct? 'SATC 2' is at once proudly feminist and blatantly anti-Muslim, which means that it might confound liberal viewers."

Oh! Poor liberals! Beset on all sides. Even "Sex and the City" has turned on them.

Indicative of the film's contradictory stance is a scene in which the ladies perform a karaoke version of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" in an Abu Dhabi nightclub. An equally outrageous moment comes when the interlopers are rescued by a bunch of Muslim women who strip off their black robes to reveal the stylish Western outfits they are concealing beneath their discreet garb."

Ha. Check out the trailer:

How Jerry Weintraub solved the problem of 5,000 unsold tickets to an Elvis concert.

And the one thing Elvis could not tolerate was playing to an empty seat.



(Via Deadline Hollywood.)

Elvis and Adam Lambert.

Oh, there was so much potential for extravagant self-indulgence. But in the end, they were pretty much on the same level. And 2 must go this week. So everyone's at risk, and no one can be saved. Angsty!

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa says: "What I couldn't believe was that nobody, not even Randy, commented on Siobhan's 'sexy Elvis' Halloween costume."

Ha ha ha. Stray thought: When are they going to have Lou Reed night?

The Kiss. El Kiss.

Elkis. Elvis.

So Ayla Brown, the erstwhile "American Idol" contestant, is the daughter of the Senate candidate Scott Brown.

Interesting. Well, that is one good-looking family. (Did you see that Scott Brown won some "America's Sexiest Man" contest in 1982 — and posed (modestly) naked in Cosmopolitan?)

Ayla was on the show back in the days when I did a lot of "American Idol" blogging, so let's see what I said about her. It was 2006, the year Taylor Hicks won and Katherine McPhee was the top female.

February 7, 2006:

There was the beautiful basketballer Ayla Brown, who belted robotically but made it on athletic attitude. Simon said the brilliant words that could stand as a critique of the whole show: "There's something empty about it all."

February 21, 2006:

Ayla Brown, the beautiful basketballer. She motivates herself by thinking about how Simon called her "robotic" and "empty." She's singing some cheesy song in a horribly cheesy style. Oh, it's something like "Reflection." It's harsh and abominable. She puts that pop-groan into it, but I'm not embarrassed for her, because she's so pretty and so tall. When she's done, she says, "I just feel so complete," as if she'd just had sex with herself. Appalling! But will the judges complain? Again with the praise. Is there no relenting? Simon calls her a "hard worker" with "a limit." But he credits her with "some emotion." Disgusting overpraise!

March 7, 2006:

Ayla Brown is just atrocious but the judges are very kind to her, perhaps because she looks fabulous -- really tall! -- and was adorable in the film clip talking about how when she was a kid she believed her dad was Elvis Presley. They don't want her to go.

March 9, 2006:

[M]y two picks to leave -- in the female category -- are in fact leaving. Ayla fights not to completely burst out crying. Oh, don't feel sorry for her. She's beautiful, tall, a basketball player, and a straight-A student. She'll be fine.

Ha ha. Well, they are a lovely family, and they seem to know how to leverage their loveliness. Does Scott Brown deserve to be Senator? I don't know enough about him to say, but I certainly suspect that his extreme handsomeness is a good part of the reason why people are responding to him so enthusiastically.

Celebrate Elvis.

If he had lived, he would be 75 today.

Jobs, best to worst, ranked by "environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress."

Actuary is #1, so... shouldn't there be more factors? Like something about how interesting it is... especially to do over the long haul? Is whatever gets categorized as "physical demands and stress" always necessarily bad? Shouldn't there also be deductions for lethargy and ennui?

Last place, #200, is roustabout. Yeah, but Elvis Presley never made a movie called "Actuary!"

"I am debilitated because I cannot move. My life is my bed, my spot in the dining room where I read the newspaper, and from there I do not move."

"I am to blame for the condition that I am in. I deserve it; I sought it out. I picked up this damn cigarette."

Among the last words of Sandro, the Argentine Elvis, dead now, at 64,

Still life with Wonder Woman.

(In a shop window in Knoxville.)

The ghost of Michael Jackson.

Here's the video everyone's talking about:



Elvis-y, no?

For added eeriness, there is a Michael Jackson song "Ghost." Video here.

ADDED: Presumably, Neverland will become a tourist attraction, and Michael Jackson's ghost will be part of the allure.

"He dubbed himself the King of Pop, which was a pretty daring act."

"Previously in our culture, the King of Jazz was Paul Whiteman and the King of Swing Benny Goodman and the King of Rock and Roll was Elvis Presley, all white men. This, in a way, radically redefined the black performer’s relation to music, made Jackson an auteur. In this way, Jackson may have paved the way for Obama in the sense of black man as auteur and self-mythmaker."

Says Professor Gerald L. Early of Washington University.

I'm keeping track of efforts at scholarly analysis of Michael Jackson.

And I'm also keeping track of the way Barack Obama horns in on everything (with the new tag "Obama is everywhere").

Michael Jackson "wasn’t eating, he wasn’t sleeping and, when he did sleep, he had nightmares that he was going to be murdered."

"He was deeply worried that he was going to disappoint his fans. He even said something that made me briefly think he was suicidal. He said he thought he’d die before doing the London concerts. He said he was worried that he was going to end up like Elvis. He was always comparing himself to Elvis, but there was something in his tone that made me think that he wanted to die, he was tired of life. He gave up. His voice and dance moves weren’t there any more. I think maybe he wanted to die rather than embarrass himself on stage."

Much more at the link.

"Most popular baby names + Medicare advice + awful Elvis impersonation = EPIC FAIL."

Yeesh. The worst.

"Elvis the ecstatic/ Elvis the plastic/ Elvis the elastic with a spastic dance that could explain the energy of America.”

Bono's poem about Elvis, aired on British radio:

A warning about the poem’s language preceded the airing, as a series of offensive words including “nigger” and “spastic” were employed.

Here in America — where we have Elvis energy, apparently — those 2 words are on completely different levels of offensiveness, but I guess that's the way they talk in Britain, where, presumably, "spastic" is not a word to be used casually.

***

Bonus: "Saturday Night Live" transcript. ("Oh no, its Chaz 'The Spaz' Knerlman!... Why don't you shut up, Spazalopolis!")

Ah, now it's coming back to me. Remember back in 2006, when Tiger Woods got into trouble for casually saying "spaz" in Britain? Language Log had a great post titled "A Brief History of Spaz":

[T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with Bill Murray as Todd DiLamuca and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner. On two shows that year (Apr. 22 and Nov. 4), host Steve Martin joined in, playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz" as he was known to Todd and Lisa.... A year after the SNL sketches in 1979, Bill Murray starred in the summer-camp comedy Meatballs, which featured a stereotypically nerdy character played by Jack Blum called "Spaz."

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

***

Don't you love the energy of America?