Iron Man came out in France last Wednesday and I caught it on Friday afternoon with the missus. It was a good one, more on that in a minute. On Monday, Marvel Studios announced: Iron Man 2 for April 2010; Thor for June 2010; The First Avenger: Captain America in May 2011; and The Avengers two months later, July 2011. I think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first time I personally realized that Hollywood CGI had caught up to the superhero stories I’d loved as a kid enough to really make them convincing. So about Iron Man (featured in his specialized “Hulkbuster” armor above): y’know how New York City itself is a character in Manhattan or Sex and the City? For comic geeks like me, I imagine that the Marvel Comics universe was like its own Iron Man supporting character. Like when Robert Downey Jr. flies out of the earth’s atmosphere to break the altitude record set by the SR-71 Blackbird, only comics heads know that particular plane belongs to the X-Men. Or the Roxxon billboard in the background of the battle scene: Roxxon is the nefarious Exxon-like energy company that commits all kinds of crimes in the Marvel universe. Even the joke (revealed at the end, though I didn’t think it would be) with the agent from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, and how he eventually acronyms it down to S.H.I.E.L.D. Comics nerds know all about that espionage organization and artist Jim Steranko’s out-of-this-world work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. from the 70s. As far as easter egg inside jokes go, the Ghostface (a.k.a. Toney Starks) video playing in the background of an Iron Man party scene was pretty funny too. Anyway, glad there’s a sequel lined up. Director Jon Favreau obviously knows the material and his audience. Now will someone line up Frank Miller to direct a Daredevil relaunch?
Back when MTV aired videos (sometimes to death), “Cannonball” by the Breeders got so much play circa 1993 that I couldn’t help but hate it. Until it inevitably grew on me, that is. Judge for yourself: it’s below, you’ll remember it. Still, I think it’s more likely Kurt Cobain endorsing the alt-rock foursome in an interview somewhere that led me to Last Splash, hands down one of the strongest rock albums of the 1990s from start to finish. Never saw them live despite hours and hours of listening pleasure over the years, not to mention the Amps side-project. I was blessed to catch the group perform recently after a looong hiatus at Le Cigale a few weeks ago, supporting a solid comeback album, Mountain Battles.
I was the only only black person in the entire crowd (which made my neck itch, to paraphrase Lenny Kravitz) but it was worth it. Moshing broke out in front of me once they opened, all the French girls chanting along in broken English. The Breeders, if you know nothing about them, are kind of a girl group. Kim Deal (formerly of the Pixies, whom I’ve never heard, I won’t front) is the only member whose been there since the beginning; her twin sister/lead guitarist Kelley had jokes for the crowd in-between great solos; Jose Melendes on drums and Mando Lopez on guitar round things out.
Thing is, the Breeders are only doing Europe and Australia for the time being, so I lucked out. If you gave a fuck about Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Antichrist Superstar and “The Dope Show,” “Creep” (Radiohead), “Plush” (Stone Temple Pilots) and such in the 90s, then you’re already creaming in your shorts. Cop Mountain Battles, it’s worth it. I came home from Le Cigale and stuck the album’s opener “Overglazed” on my MySpace page right away. Here’s a by-no-means-complete set list to the show:
“Bang On”
“Divine Hammer”
“No Aloha”
“Pacer”
“We’re Gonna Rise” (unfuckwitable)
“New Year”
“Cannonball”
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” (yeah, that one)
“Iris”
“I Just Wanna Get Along”
“Saints”
“Overglazed”
“German Studies”
“Here No More”
“Hellbound”
(And psyche: the video’s not “Cannonball,” it’s “Overglazed.” Couldn’t resist.)
Weeks ago I got an invitation in the mail from the Ambassador of the United States, to attend a commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Getting on the American-expatriate radar here doesn’t happen overnight and so this was my very first invite to the Ambassador’s Residence at the American Embassy in the 8th arrondissement, about two buildings down from the Palais de l’Elysées (the French White House). Not exactly my crowd, but then I’m 37, maybe my crowd is changing. How many things like this did Jimmy Baldwin go to in his day? So I went.
I walked in late for “Champ de Sons,” a one-man show put on for the event by Emile Abossolo-M’bo, an excellent actor/comedian of Cameroonese origin. I say “excellent” judging from the crowd reaction and all the faces M’bo pulled and the different voices he pulled off, but his performance was in French only, so I only understood 10% of the gist.
I showed up alone, only to discover that I’ve met more people in Paris over the years than I realized. So who was there (the true arbiter of any event)? Claude Grunitzky sat next to me during M’bo’s show, in town for TraceTV’s recent forum on blacks in the French media. (Claude founded the urban culture bible Trace under the original True magazine name back in 1995. We met when I studied abroad in London then, writing for True.) Hors d’oeuvres and free drinks were served afterwards and the lawn was opened up to everyone, about 300 of us in all. Author Jake Lamar, a former Time writer and Bronx native who’s been living here for over a decade, was in the house. Two years ago Jake brought me over to the apartment of sixtysomething Morehouse grad Tannie Stovall, who hosts a get-together for black men only every Friday at his place. (Director Melvin Van Peebles has been known to float through.) I hadn’t seen him since then, but Tannie was there too. And sexy Trace staffer Sandra Etienne had a drink in hand.
Cameroonese guitarist Franck Biyong recognized me from MySpace believe it or not and handed me Haïti Market, a CD from his band Massak; expect a real analysis soon on this furthermucker. This is truly a 21st century expat event, because Jennifer Bullock, a cultural affairs officer at the US Embassy, recognized me from Facebook. (Maybe this happens all over America these days, but it’d never happened to me in France.) I somehow met student Serge Noukoue and his Howard study-abroad buddy Shamira Muhammad, and Serge introduced me to Ricki Stevenson, who’s been running Black Paris Tours here since 1998. Overall, it was a good old-fashioned clusterfuck like I’m used to in Sex and the City-fied Manhattan, but Parisian style. Free wine on George Bush’s dime!
Juggling, juggling, juggling projects. Fiiiinally bought Final Draft software today so I can get cracking on my first screenplay this summer. I’ve got two stories in mind already, adaptations of short stories I’ve published before in anthologies. But I haven’t forgotten about my comic book project, The Masters; far from it. To the right you’ll find more fine artwork by the guy who’s (most likely) drawing this miniseries or graphic novel, Mshindo Kuumba I. To recap, The Masters are folks like you and me who’ve achieved a certain level of spiritual mastery that in turn enhances them with superpowered abilities. My monthly progress for April involved a simple roundup of potential publishers for the book. Following personal advice from Sin City creator Frank Miller, I don’t plan to offer The Masters to comic powerhouses Marvel or DC. Instead, my list of potentials looks more like this, in no particular order:
In college I went about training myself to become a music journalist without realizing that’s what I was doing. I’d grown up in the 80s reading dad’s Rolling Stone magazines (and Black Beat, Right On!, Word Up, Spin, Billboard, etc.). Whenever Prince would tell a journalist that he loved Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, I’d haul my 14-year-old ass to Crazy Eddie searching for whatever it was. Writers used so many Beatles/Rolling Stones/Bob Dylan comparisons that eventually I decided to give myself a strict education in these furthermuckers. I spent the summer of 1989 on a Beatles trip, and devoted my 19-year-old summer of 90 to the Stones.
The Beatles summer was a lot more interesting, but that’s a story for another time. My summer of Stones involved reading the biography Jagger by Carey Schofield, watching the Gimme Shelter documentary and discovering Exile on Main St. (recorded on an infamous vacation in the south of France), Hot Rocks 1964-1971, Some Girls (for “Miss You,” which I always liked) and Let It Bleed. I think Steel Wheels came out that year, and I went down early in the morning to the Times Square train station where the Stones would be announcing the album’s release to the world. It was maaad crowded and I broke out without seeing nary a grey hair on Mick, Keith, Ron or Charlie’s head.
I had (have) young parents, and so Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed were actually on vinyl at the crib growing up, but they never got any burn, not that I remember. Whatever Stones I knew was from the oldies station in the car. Despite my summertime 1990, I still haven’t listened completely to classics like Sticky Fingers or Beggars Banquet (though “Parachute Woman” is two minutes and 23 seconds of their finest moments); the albums are in my iPod from somebody, tracks get shuffled in sometimes.
Does “Brown Sugar” offend me? This a Black Rock Coalition question, like were John Lennon and Yoko Ono a little free with it recording “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” I personally think that the Rolling Stones created something unique in trying their best to copy black blues styles. I gotta admit that I’ve heard Nirvana’s “In the Pines” more than the Leadbelly version it came from, and I’ve listened to Exile‘s “Ventilator Blues” more than any Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf song. And “I Just Want to See His Face” is one of the greatest songs of all time to put on a repeat-ad-infinitum loop after finishing a fat blunt. It’s complicated. When you’re a race man, you sound like a race traitor saying “you gotta lay down some of that baggage to enjoy to overall art of shit sometimes,” but that doesn’t make it any less true.
I wasn’t aware how much of a race-man I’ve been my whole life till I moved to France, where the blending of black and white is a lot less self-conscious. Case in point: I like the Rolling Stones – I’m not their biggest fan or anything, but fuck it, I can name at least 15 great songs by them – and yet a slew of racial touchstones went through my head last week watching Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light concert film of the Stones. Stuff like
Oh… isn’t it interesting that Mick Jagger doesn’t sing that line anymore from “Some Girls” about how “black girls just want to get fucked all night”? The song is in the film, but I guess that lyric is politically incorrect circa 2008.
And yet on “Far Away Eyes,” he still jokes about the “preacher on the colored radio station” without being embarrassed.
Is anyone aware that his first child Karis Jagger (born in 1970) was born from the African-American model Marsha Hunt? Like, nobody ever talks about Karis, and whatever became of her? Mick Jagger has a black daughter; no one ever says a word.
And for all the talk about the fan who got killed at the Stones concert at Altamont Speedway back in 1969, it seems to me that most people don’t realize Meredith Hunter was an 18-year-old brother on a date with a white chick at the front row of that Stones show, and was stabbed to death by Hells Angels security for precisely this reason.
Blues guitarist Buddy Guy mops the fucking floor with Keith Richards and Ron Wood during the Muddy Waters cover “Champagne & Reefer.” Mops the fucking floor.
Is it fair that the Rolling Stones are British multimillionaires through imitating African-American blues guys who died broke pretty much in near anonymity?
Why is black Rolling Stones bass player Darryl Jones never allowed in as an “official” member, despite touring with the group and playing on their records now for 15 years?
I sat around watching the Superbowl (of all things) with some family the year after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, when the Stones did the halftime show. To them the performance was hilarious, because these guys are grandpas, and anyway, there was never that much respect for them. I could swear Miles Davis said something somewhere about how black folks just laugh at Jagger when he shimmies and shakes talking about the Harlem Shuffle; in the black community, the Stones are kind of a joke.
More on this in part 2. (Serendipity alert: me and Mick Jagger both have sons named Lucas; me and Keith Richards have the same birthday…)
There’ll be a proper post once I get a good night’s sleep. In the meantime in-between time, some random notes. Bugged out to learn that Sofia Coppola got stuck for her purse at Le Bon Marché, the Bloomingdale’s-like department store on the Left Bank; not feeling the new Janet Jackson record Discipline, her third clunker in a row; equally disappointed in the new Lenny Kravitz, It Is Time for a Love Revolution, though I liked the ‘net-savvy campaign; watched Disappearing Acts for the umpteenth time this week for black romance movie pointers (better than – gasp – Love Jones?); don’t know if you’ve heard, but the French really and truly call the head of their government President Bling-Bling; and am I a sucker for turning off my set when reality TV got out of control instead of pitching my own show to MTV/VH1/whoever and selling out?
Months ago I was shopping at Le Grand Épicerie (a chi-chi gourmet supermarket in the 7th arrondissement) – they sell American groceries like Planters Mixed Nuts for twice the price – and I got stopped cold by a display for Bling wine. Yes, hiphop had infiltrated the most chic of Parisian bistros, or rather, some cold-hard-cash American capitalist slapped the Hot Boys’ contribution to the English language on a bottle of crushed grapes to suck in… who, exactly? Who would buy a wine called Bling? (Or, as it turned out, not a wine at all – oops – but Bling H2O bottled water; same difference.)
Today I turn the rest of this furthermucker over to guest blogger Dinkinish O’Connor. When Lil Jon announced his Little Jonathan Winery last week, I got all snob indignant. Living in France where wine is so vitally central to the whole social culture, I wondered who these urban-targeted wines (see the K’orus wine commercial waaay below, they’re French actually) are supposed to appeal to. If I was single and trying to impress a date, I would go the extra length for some expensive, imported something-or-other from a vintage year; I certainly wouldn’t cop shit from Lil Jon. Anyway, I let Dinki take it over. Apart from being the ex-girlfriend who turned me onto Coldplay, she also writes Wino Confidential for Miami.com and helps run Purple Reign, a company she cofounded to throw fabulous wine-centric, Oprahesque events nationwide.
Dinki: I like to use music as an analogy to explain wine and so I ask you to consider this comparison: Beyoncé vs. Aretha. They’re both dynamic singers, but Beyoncé is younger, and so I don’t expect her to have the depth of complexity that Aretha has in her music. Older wines, particularly from older regions, are more complex. They go through a longer maceration process than young wines and, at times, ferment and age in French or Hungarian oak or steel tanks. Some of their vines are born and reared in limestone and tended on stony, misty slopes. I’m not saying that younger wines can’t have the same background; I’m saying, don’t expect them to have the same depth.
Do I expect Lil Jon’s 2008 Merlot to speak to me the way a 2003 Pomerol would? Of course not. It doesn’t mean that Lil Jon’s wine isn’t going to be fun and delicious and perfect for a BBQ. Not all wines are made to be cellared, know what I mean?
Among my favorite one-night-stand wines are 2004 La Garrigue Côte du Rhône, 2005 Perrin (another Côte du Rhône) and 2006 Casillero del Diablo Carménère. On the domestic side, 2005 Gnarly Head Old Vine Zinfandel and 2006 Smoking Loon Viognier. These are all amazing values. The Carménère in particular unravels into a wine with smoky, ganja-like characteristics.
MML: Whassup with Yellow Tail? I notice the (black) folks drinking Yellow Tail over the past few years like we discovered some Romanée Conti. (I don’t know wine. I googled “expensive French wine” and got Romanée Conti.)
Dinki: Back in the day (2003), you’d find bottles of Yellow Tail Shiraz at every black house party in Brooklyn and Harlem. I, too, was smitten by the wine’s ripe black cherry and Welch’s Grape-juicy profile. But wine snobs called it syrupy and flabby (haha). I was fortunate enough to meet a wine boutique owner who opened up my palate to other wines in the same $6-$10 price range that offered a little bit more than a fat, juicy ass: Primitivos, for example, an entry-level, Zinfandel-style wine from Italy. The difference? A little more depth and personality, dark fruit flavors unfolding in a body of sweet spices like cinnamon and nutmeg.
But, don’t get it twisted. I haven’t had Yellow Tail in a while, but the label does show up on critics’ top picks for wines under $15. Quality can increase or decrease over time, especially if you’re producing 85,000 cases of wine. It’s always best to taste it yourself and become your own critic.
Spoke to Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson last Thursday via cellphone, and asked him all about Rising Down, the next record from the almighty Roots crew. And but so before we got into that, I made sure to bleed dry all info on the Edith Funker project first. (For the one person out there who’s never seen the trailblazing All in the Family sitcom from the 70s (when sitcoms were sitcoms), the matriarch of the family was named Edith Bunker). I didn’t get much, but here’s what I got:
The name Edith Funker comes, obviously, from Edith Bunker (like Gnarls Barkley/Charles Barkley), but it was coined by actress Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy and Peggy Lipton. The group was originally named Funk Sway. (As in feng shui.)
The Roots’ live shows are booked all the way up till November, so an Edith Funker album coming in the fourth quarter is unlikely/ impossible.
Erykah Badu has been talking to Starbucks about the possibility of a couple of things, one of which might could be releasing an Edith Funker album.
The band performed just last month at the SXSW festival in Austin, and according to Ahmir, that live show could stand as an album as far as he’s concerned.
Iron Man came out in France last Wednesday and I caught it on Friday afternoon with the missus. It was a good one, more on that in a minute. On Monday, Marvel Studios announced: Iron Man 2 for April 2010; Thor for June 2010; The First Avenger: Captain America in May 2011; and The Avengers two months later, July 2011. I think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first time I personally realized that Hollywood CGI had caught up to the superhero stories I’d loved as a kid enough to really make them convincing. So about Iron Man (featured in his specialized “Hulkbuster” armor above): y’know how New York City itself is a character in Manhattan or Sex and the City? For comic geeks like me, I imagine that the Marvel Comics universe was like its own Iron Man supporting character. Like when Robert Downey Jr. flies out of the earth’s atmosphere to break the altitude record set by the SR-71 Blackbird, only comics heads know that particular plane belongs to the X-Men. Or the Roxxon billboard in the background of the battle scene: Roxxon is the nefarious Exxon-like energy company that commits all kinds of crimes in the Marvel universe. Even the joke (revealed at the end, though I didn’t think it would be) with the agent from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, and how he eventually acronyms it down to S.H.I.E.L.D. Comics nerds know all about that espionage organization and artist Jim Steranko’s out-of-this-world work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. from the 70s. As far as easter egg inside jokes go, the Ghostface (a.k.a. Toney Starks) video playing in the background of an Iron Man party scene was pretty funny too. Anyway, glad there’s a sequel lined up. Director Jon Favreau obviously knows the material and his audience. Now will someone line up Frank Miller to direct a Daredevil relaunch?
