I know I’m late to the game on this one, but I saw “Up in the Air” and it kind of found my heart, nudged it gently, threw a friendly arm around it, and then knifed it.
“Up in the Air” revolves around the idea that all things can be made more efficient, can be improved upon — the difficulty comes with confronting the realities of all that efficiency. That’s abstract. So, “Up in the Air” is about these people who try to organize and edit their lives into one simple circuit, but then have to deal with life’s lack of science. Still abstract. “Up in the Air” is a stomach punch of a movie. When everybody figures out they’ve been doing everything wrong, well, it’s too late.
So, originally Pitbull was not the headliner of Quake. Then he was. The moral at work here: Pitbull has to play a full set. What the hell is he going to play? The Anthem, I Know You Want Me, Go Girl — that’s three songs. What else? Will he cover “Gasolina”? Just throw a 4-4 stomp on the synthesizer and autotune something about sex and money while repeating something very basic, like the first few letters of the alphabet or “[simple action verb, like 'go' or 'shake']“?
We stumbled upon the finest thing Pitbull could do, however. It is a piece of pure, distilled magnificence.
Look how thrilled everybody is. People just love Gloria Estefan and, I don’t know, leather chaps over mom jeans. Pitbull can nix the latter of these things, but should Vanderbilt hear from the brass section tonight, I would actually tip the Music Group. True story. The rhythm, as Gloria’s bangs in that video know, is going to get you.
Check it: At Vanderbilt this fall, you can see Girl Talk, O.A.R., Asher Roth, and JAY-Z for $70, all on campus. We still have to see Pitbull, though, which feels mildly to moderately like we are creating a horcux and giving part of our collective soul away, but this is a minor concern.
Tonight, Life editor Avery Spofford will be backstage and checking in via Twiter, while back in Hustler land we collect up all the overflowing wisdom of Twitter and dispense it out like social media Pez on @HustlerNews. Solid City.
Resisting an unrelenting desire to photoshop fangs on a John Deere, I offer this: One of my friends GChatted me “is this really happening?” when awful Lois drove over that guy’s foot. The only other time somebody has said this to me, it involved a dozen English and Irish soccer players walking out of a Philadelphia bar to go drinking with her specifically.
Allow me to wager something at halftime here: When this series ends, the tragedy will be Joan, the triumph Peggy, and the rest a “Good Soldier“-like traipse through the depths of human interaction, led by Don Draper, the dark side of American ingenuity and reinvention (“This is your little brother. He’s only a baby. We don’t know who he is yet, nor who he’s going to be. And that is a wonderful thing.”).
How do you learn how to be the right kind of girl?
Sal knows coyness and rhythm and how to shimmy, and just like last week, the truth burns awfully bad when it’s singing in front of you in its pajamas. Poor, gay Sal and his little buttoned up pajamas, but mostly, poor Kitty. She throws on her sexiest green negligee, tosses out a fail of a pick up line (”I need tending”…bleach my ears, jeez), and she gets that sly, over the shoulder look, Diana Ross style and it’s like the gay atomic bomb has been dropped, so poor Kitty just sits on her bed, as glitter, the remains of her marriage, and “Seasons of Love” surround her. She’s June Morgan! Naturally, of course, Sal allows himself one honest moment of creative thrill — and honestly, the only four people on this show good at their jobs are Don, Sal, Peggy and Joan — and destroys all illusions in the process.
The Washington Post says more than half the colleges in the U.S. now are in the throes of H1N1’s torrid fury. Vanderbilt has broken the 80 person “sick with the flu” mile-marker and now needs a little cartoon pig in an apron and chef’s hat to provide hand sanitizer and inform us to keep on keepin’ on (eatin’ our barbeque). And so I sit quietly, hands folded, ankles crossed in Fate’s waiting room, because, well, if history teaches us anything, I will get the swine flu.
In the mean time, we’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
