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Ellis & Barnes: Serious Mothers!

Sunday, February 07, 2010

You've Been Struck By...

The Smooth Criminal Swan Kick is illegal in five countries.

Have you seen This Is It yet? It's pretty amazing. No, really.

Like practically everyone, I could rhapsodize about Michael Jackson for days, but it might still be draining for anyone to want to listen. After the sudden death of the man, it was a whole few months of hearing: "I grew up listening to him...", "I used to listen to him as a kid...", "When I was a kid, I used to dance to Michael in my room...", and other similar statements from people stamping their childhood with their own personal history of Michael. So they should. In the eighth grade, we were all Clash fans, but at parties, we'd make an exception for MJ. He got the party started! Here's my personal history: I used to videotape all of his videos and I learned all of the dances. Every single one, and I still know them.

Seeing This Is It seven months after his death was jarring and sad, but magnificent. There's (of course) his music, but I will never tire of watching him dance, especially when he's just riffing on his feet, mucking around in rehearsals in front of his lucky pick of eleven dancers. From 500, to 200, to 11. Watching the A Chorus Line-like dancer selection process gave me chills; I hung up the tutu (and the sparkly thong with six inch spike heels) a long time ago, but there's a dancer in me that will never quit, and that will always want to go back in time and do better. Tonight, the dancer in me felt the tears of those selected by Michael himself. As their names were read, young, coltish blank slates with insane talent, they all at once were able to make us feel like we were picked too. If you watched this as a cynic, your heart would grow three sizes.

I was really trying to pinpoint what it is that I really love about Michael Jackson's dancing, and it came down to that if you saw him walking down the street, he looks like he could blow away in a light breeze (Fred Astaire), but when he's getting down and dirty with heavier percussion and licks, he adds weight to his moves, almost like a football player who can dance (Gene Kelly.) Then he turns everything out on a dime (Rudolph Nureyev), and then turns it all in and keeps it low and secret (Bob Fosse.) Michael had no 'training', but trained hard by observation. He turned his body into a sponge and then created his own moves, each move topping the one before last, until one evening while performing on the 1983 special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, he unleashes The Moonwalk on all of us like a sparkly Land Kraken. "Did he just...?", "What just happened...is he...?", "Wait, he's going forwards, but he's going backwards?". Yell straight into my eyes that when you first saw that, it didn't blow your mind. Tell me that you didn't try it yourself, on every surface in your home with every pair of shoes that you owned.

I don't care if he did it, or if he didn't do it. I don't care if he bought the Elephant Man's bones and turned it into a marimba for his monkey to play with. All I care about right now is that he's gone and I hope they hang that doctor out to dry. If I live long enough to where my mind can't tell a bag of grapes from Michael Jackson, at least I'll know one thing: I will still remember the Beat It dance.

It's for this, Michael, that I give you a long overdue thank you.

J.





Monday, February 01, 2010

We Probably Should Have Heard The Giant Squid Out First...

...before slaughtering them by the hundreds.

In another example of "look before you leap" or as I like to call it "we can't have anything nice can we?" hundreds upon hundreds of Giant Squid have shown up on the California coast line this past weekend and well...

I heard "giant squid" and I got very excited. Giant Squid are almost like dinosaurs! They are rarely seen...so much so that they pull top ratings on Discovery Channel. The child in me is jumping up and down and wondering if I have enough money to fly to the West Coast to join my brothers and sisters, hand in hand, and witness this awesome spectacle of nature.

Sadly, the child in me is instead horrified, standing in the bloody spray back from the slaughter that my brothers and sisters have brought down upon the Giant Squid.


"...say anglers in Orange County have caught (meaning killed) about 400 of the big squid since Friday night."

400 giant squid...killed...in 3 days.

Pardon me, and it may be all the science fiction and horror films I have watched, but if there are so many GIANT squid coming to shore...so many that "400 killed" sounds like it isn't making a dent...shouldn't we maybe wait to hear the squid out before knocking old people down just to kill one first.

Hundreds of giant squid suddenly showing up on the California coast seems to me like a sign of some sort, don't you think? Locusts? Blood moon? Hundreds of giant squid?

This is how I imagine it is going down. Some where, deep, deep, in the ocean...possibly near the home of giant squids, the earth's crust ruptures and human eating ocean zombies pop out and start making their way to California to eat humans. The King of the giant squid pays no heed, but his empathetic daughter cries to him, "oh father, I am in love with a human man named Frank. Can't you put aside your suspicion and bigotry towards man and help them? The story that man's violence and greed forced us into hiding centuries ago is just that, a story. You'll see. They are peaceful like we are." The giant squid king agrees. All the giant squid come to warn us and we kill them right away.

I think it is summed up best by this California fisherman in this article:


“Most of the fish we catch are better to eat, but they don’t give you much of a fight,” Woodbury said.
These squid, on the other hand, do not  stop struggling even after getting hooked and tossed into the boat.
"They’re trying to crawl around and blow ink all over everybody,” he said. (HA HA HA HA HA! HIGH FIVES!)
The squid make for a messier prize, but that is part of the fun," he said. "When they’re lifted out of the water … they become a giant squirt gun,” Woodbury said. (HA HA! CHEST BUMP!)
“Chances are you’re gonna take a faceful or a chestful of water – and probably ink – when you pull them out … everybody laughs.” (HA HA FART HA HA)
Well, when the human eating ocean zombies start eating our brains, I guess everybody will laugh.

(<----- not Frank)

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