Jazzanine

Within every new decade, pop culture looks back 20 years. As we get closer to 2010, ‘80s nostalgia has reached its apotheosis. Look around. Lady Gaga is channeling not just Madonna, but the theatricality of Grace Jones with the spirit and hooks of Debbie Harry from Blondie. Atlanta’s Janelle Monae fashioned a robot persona to explain her music and stagecraft, a blend of techno, soul, and rock that seems like a foward-looking black spin on Talking Heads and David Bowie, who in the ‘80s was coming out of the elegant iciness of the Thin White Duke. Edgy artist Santigold wears the day-glo colors and polka dots of ‘80s fashion with the door knocker earrings and asymmetrical hairstyles of early hip-hop circa Salt N Pepa, while her 2007 tune “Lights Out” is new age proto-punk surf pop, like the Go-Gos on acid. Rihanna and Keri Hilson are rocking asymmetrical ‘dos right out of the ‘80s fashion playbook, while Dorothy Hamill wedge cuts and shredded T-shirt, straight-legged jeans and wide belts ...

I am sitting in front of my TV, watching Michael Jackson’s golden coffin, bedecked with crimson flowers, as it is loaded into the hearse at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, just a few miles down the road from where I sit. It’s hitting me anew that this talented, conflicted entertainer will no longer be walking the earth in his velveteen loafers and military style jackets. I am both weary of the barrage of news coverage – Jackson doctors being investigated! Debbie Rowe decides not to attend public memorial! Battle over children to heat up! Estate wrested from Katherine Jackson! – and wholly riveted. The Staples Center memorial is getting underway half an hour later than anticipated. The golden-ticketed chosen gathering downtown are of all ages, all races, some dressed as for a funeral, others as for a concert. Roland Martin on CNN is saying that you can go to any club in America, and anyone young or old, white or black -- even the toughest gangbanger -- cannot stand still in the face of “You ...

Oh, Michael. What a sad way to go. When I heard the news I was shocked, but not surprised. There’s something about your untimely passing that I understand. Over the past month, as I reported on your upcoming series of 50 shows in London next month, I told people around me: “Michael will never perform a single date of that engagement.” It was evident to me that you were not well. If you weren’t physically ill, I thought, you were ill inside. You wouldn’t withstand the pressure, the expectations of the madding crowd. I knew it wasn’t to be, but I never imagined your death. I simply thought that the Michael Jackson who speaks in a whisper and wears surgical masks and told the world that the most loving thing you could do was to share a bed with a child – the Michael Jackson who had crooned a tender “Ben” to a rat -- I knew that that Michael Jackson was being consumed in the conflagration of the world’s desire, a desire to both love you and see you utterly destroyed. There would be nothi...

Greetings, it has been more than a year since my last confessional. In December 2007, soon after posting up the sad novel excerpt posted below, I began a two-year MFA creative writing program at Antioch University L.A. Challenging, and obviously much needed in terms of my own craft. Still, the current state of the economy means that the publishing world is not what it once was, and my two-year graduate education may boil down to an expensive self-improvement project, like elocution lessons. I hold out the hope that with Obama now in the White House and placing a renewed emphasis on higher education, I might be a little ahead of the curve, and a warm and cozy teaching post awaits me at some fab university when the stampede to academia really gets going. I'm optimistic that I will get over the humps of my final manuscript and a teaching seminar to graduate this December. A propos of nothing, I was just on the street in West LA and saw a crowd of red-bereted dudes: black pants, army b...