A Good Looking Man vs. A Good Man

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The man on the left is Boris Kodjoe, an actor best known for his role in the television adaptation of the film Soul Food. The man on the right is William Conrad, an actor known for playing the original Matt Dillon in the radio version of Gunsmoke and for such television roles as Cannon and Jake and The Fatman. I use these two people for this piece because women all seem to be looking for a good man, but really they are looking for a good looking man; or are they?

Craigslist, which is never a good idea to search for someone, is filled with ads that use vague “pay attention to me” methods such as the dismissal of good looks as being a requirement and the need to have a picture sent before any correspondence can take place. I don’t really object to all of this because this is how people date. We are visual creatures and we are excited when, in the game of dating, we can not only find a good soul to live our lives with but someone who is pleasing to the eye. Dismissing the need to nitpick someone’s looks is unrealistic – you know someone is considering your sex appeal the second they see your picture.

I believe women want a good man, but they are not willing to put up with the possibility that the man they find that is good may not be good looking. I think what gets many women in trouble, and men as well, is the fact that the looks become the first thing that we consider before the character. Really beyond looks, we always in dating search another for something to get around the really hard part; knowing the soul of the person we wish to be with.

I suppose, as George Clooney said in Up In The Air, it is much easier to stick to the surface (actually he said “Stereotyping Is Easier” which is about the same thing). Figuring out someone, especially in during the course of a date, is like trying to find a needle in a very thick haystack; you may find the needle, but you would have wasted too much time and miss out on a number of good other candidates. Still, can the endless amount of divorces, break-ups and domestic violence cases be because we don’t know who we are dating? or that we don’t know enough?

One thing is for certain; I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone does.

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Nicki Minaj vs. Keith Sweat: Who Could Annoy You Faster?

Keith Sweat is an R&B crooner who has been around forever it seems. Nicki Minaj, who is signed to Lil’Wayne’s Young Money label, is an up and coming rapper who in terms of popularity could take over Lil’Kim’s mantle as a modern day hip-hop female heavyweight. Personally both of them can annoy me easily with their voices.

“Your Love”, a new single from her soon-to-be-released debut album is perhaps the first song I’ve heard from her that didn’t appear to be from a mixtape or feature another artist. It’s meant to be a smooth kind of song and even brows the background music from Anne Lennox’s rendition of “No More I Love You’s”. The nasally voice of Minaj however just makes this hard to listen to, or take Minaj seriously as a temptress.

Before Minaj fans call me a hater, there is a reason that I put this title to this blog. In my day, you could have done much worse than Minaj with Keith Sweat. He has talent and has put out some classics, but the man’s voice can get on your nerves.

“Nobody” which came from the 90s era of Keith’s time on the charts struck me as being a good song with a good beat. Like Minaj however, that damn voice made me laugh a few times. It’s almost like he stuck a talkbox down his throat to make his voice sound as if T-Pain was fighting with his real vocal chords.

Keith Sweat and Nicki Minaj both have nasal sounds in their music, but the former doesn’t bother me as much as the latter. Still these two, who I guess are very talented, don’t strike me as re-listenable R&B/Rap singers I could take seriously. As I stated earlier however, worse has come out in my time when Keith was around.

Where is Keith Sweat anyway?

Download: Nicki Minaj — Your Love

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Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , | View Comments

Inspector Morse: A Great Classic Of British Television

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I never did watch Inspector Morse during it’s original run (1987-1993) and I didn’t get into the specials that came afterwards. Thanks to the power of Netflix and Amazon On Demand, I went back over the 33 episodes starring John Thaw as Chief Inspector Morse and Kevin Whately as Detective Sergeant Robert Lewis. They are a treasure to watch, even the stories that aren’t the most beloved of the series carry an interest with me.

The show never was a preachy show like Law and Order and it wasn’t the “fight first, ask questions later” style of NYPD Blue. It presented a case which often dealt with high society from the perspective of a man who talks and walks as part of the upper-class, but is very much an outsider. He is a detective and deals in murders and other heinous crimes, but solves the cases with the interest of an art lover.

Most of the cases are resolved as with all crime shows, but little threads and deeper questions go unanswered at times. American television would probably cancel a show like this after two episodes mostly because there is a resistance to making television that doesn’t have all the answers. Sure shows that leave answers lingering have been successful (Lost, The X-Files) but only when it’s clear the answer will come later in another episode. The only continuous thread is that Lewis is with Morse to learn how to be a Chief Inspector in the future.

Ghost In The Machine, which is the first episode of Series 3, is a complicated one involving a well-to-do eccentric who engages in weird erotic art paintings and is killed suddenly in what appears to be a suicide. Things begin to get out of the control when it turns out that the wife was having an affair with the gardener and had a particularly remote relationship with her. Shame, honor and respect play a big part in this episode. The wife, played by Patricia Hodge, is a creepy character. Even when Morse finally confronts her about with what he knows about how her husband died, nothing she express in the way of tears comes out as sincere.

If you want a good introduction into the show and the Morse/Lewis partnership, I’d start with this episode. It’s not your typical crime show, which in my book is a good reason to see it.

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Doing The Dozens

bully

This is gonna make me sound conservative.

I dislike video games like this that promote bullying and mass destruction as something cool. It’s never alright terrorize others. Whether it’s with a bomb or with your fist, beating someone down is still beating someone down. Life however is never that simple when it comes to what is intolerable and what isn’t.

The Dozens, which basically is a bunch of people cracking insensitive jokes at someone else, is one form of bullying. Folks who find life to be torture find ways to make every day worth getting up for by taking a fault, or several if you will, and spinning it into a joke that is designed to be playful but really is meant to be vicious. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it, but sometimes it’s just not necessary.

I would love to be a bit more social in my life than I am now. The more you showcase yourself and who you are beneath the surface, the more you risk being “treated” so to speak. I feel more and more these days that the less I speak, the more likely I am to save myself the trouble of being hurt.

Call that a wussy move.

We need to treat each other better. Cornball? Yes. Necessary? Yeah.

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Nights In Chicago Are Endless In Summer, But Hardly Pretty

endless

In 1988. Richard Marx released a song that 22 years after it’s original release is still tinged with the sound of summer. The title tells it all – Endless Summer Nights. In Chicago, anthems of this type give you the false impression that a summer night is breezy and somehow separate from the harsh realities of life. Sadly as Chicago Breaking News will let you know, the Chi is hardly a place for that kind of summer night.

At 10:28pm today, an 18-year-old was shot in the neck at Parkway Gardens on the South Side.

At 5:19pm today, a 50-year-old man from Lawndale was shot and killed.

On July 16 (Friday), a shooting rampage started across the city that left 18 shot which ended early Saturday morning. Two of those 18 died.

You can find headlines like this all day long in every city. The sensitive point that I have towards the reporting of violence in this city isn’t that it’s reported. Blood and guts sell newspapers and ratings. My issue is that no one has really taken a hard look at what could be the cause of all this violence.

We keep saying things such as lack of education, lack of a stable family and my personal favorite, the lack of families attending church that causes these kinds of situations.

Could it be simply that these the young children of Chicago don’t really any place to have fun? I’m not just saying this for people who live on the south side where this is more than evident, I’m saying this for everyone in Chicago. The lack of places to go and relax from the stressful ordeals of life often mean that people end up succumbing to more violent extremes.

One of my mother’s favorite movies is a film directed by Spike Lee’s brother Malcolm called Roll Bounce which centers a group of black kids in the 1970’s from the south side of Chicago who are forced to stake on the north side after their skating rink closes down. Think of it as Saturday Night Fever with an all-black cast. Although the plot is borrowed and the soundtrack is made up of familiar 1970’s dance hits, the film is unique if you look at today’s world and perhaps even today’s Chicago.

I believe that kids back in the day of my parents time actually attempted to have some fun that didn’t involve violence all the time. I believe that once people started taking away those places for kids to have a good time, the generations after who had no options to go anywhere ended up trying to find activities in the street. I believe this is what’s leading to the headlines you see on the Chicago Breaking News site.

We need to create the kind of ideal summers that Richard Marx created with Endless Summer Nights, we need to return the fun to Chicago and make it so that the violence will not be the highlight of our city. Of course this will only happen, no maybe’s, if we get off our butts and do something about it. It has to be done.

How many more children have to die? How many more people have to die?

You tell me.

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Murder On The Orient Express (2010): A Review

(Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_movie_poster

Murder On The Orient Express is considered the best-loved of Agatha Christie’s catalog of mysteries. This one, originally published in 1934 and featuring Christie’s famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, is centered around a lavish train called The Orient Express which becomes the scene of a murder. The victim is a wealthy businessman with a dark past which includes a connection to a kidnapping several years earlier. Considering the victim’s killer would have left tracks in the snow (the train entered a snowstorm and got stuck), the only possibly explanation is that the killer is still on the train. Full of passengers, Poirot is now faced with the challenge of not only finding the suspect but figuring how the victim was killed.

In a Christie tale it is often par for the course to make just about everyone who is a suspect the likely killer. Everyone has something that can make them appear the most likely person to commit a murder. The reader is meant to at this point become completely confused and read each page carefully to get the clues. The small screen and the sliver screen have seen her stories, and the style that comes with them, brought to life many times over the years with some varying degrees of success.

Murder On The Orient Express has been made for television twice (once in 2001 and another in 2010) and made into a feature film once (in 1974). The most successful and critically loved of the adaptations was the 1974 version with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot and an all star cast of suspects. It should have been the 2010 version with David Suchet as Poirot, but it didn’t come off as successful as the 1974 movie.

Agatha Christie stories tend to be translated as being fairly breezy stories that while very deep, are not necessarily made to be heavy-handed. This was the trick the 1974 film managed to pull off well. In the 2010 film, it appears that Poirot is more irritable
than in earlier years and is now seemingly more of a sad relic of a man than a bright detective.

I was able to deal with it for awhile, but I wanted him to lighten up. I also do not believe that Poirot should have been turned into a moralist. The berating he usually gives never puts into question how to morals of society measure up to the morals of the man (or woman) who committed the crime. In this case at the story’s end, he judges the suspects based on how society would see them and not really berate them for their crimes.

I’m rather disappointed that this approach was taken. It’s watchable, but it’s not the best take on the classic Christie story.q

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Posted in Television | Tagged , , , , | View Comments

Busy

I love all my subscribers who stand by me and my writings.

My real life however has been busy.

Pray for me.

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I Don’t Have Anything To Say…

Life has become just that complicated.

So much could be said in this entry that surrounds what goes on in my real life, but i’ve found far too many people try to use that to make disparaging comments (and videos).

It shouldn’t be this hard to express yourself online.

Right now it is.

I shall return to this blog when I can and when I feel emotionally ready.

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Posted in Personal | View Comments

I Love Mario

That is all.


Warp Whistle
Uploaded by MatthewDominick. – Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

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Deborah Cox Equals Fire!

I’ve known about Deborah Cox since her “Nobody Supposed To Be Here” video. I think she has a voice, but I never thought she was ever promoted right. That seems to happen to singers like Tamia and Chante Moore; great singers, but not too many songs to utilize their talent.

The dance genre of music seems to help alot of singers gain some extra exposure. This case can be connected to Deborah given the numerous amount of remixes I’ve seen come from her song catalog. My personal favorite of these remixes is one for “Absolutely Not” from her 2001 Morning After album and for “Up and Down” which is also from that album.

 

I’m sure another album is around the corner for Mrs. Cox. Since she’s had alot of success with her dance mixes, she could simply do a whole album of dance songs. That’s just me inserting my ideas to the interwebs — pay me no mind.

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