A Variety of Cool Stuff

What's up playas and playettes?

Been heavy on the sports stuff lately (especially the American football, as the kids like to call it), so I thought I'd mix things up with a cornucopia of other stuff that's either awesome, or laughably stupid in some way (new season of Jersey Shore anyone?) NFC/AFC Championship game picks forthcoming tomorrow before 3 p.m. kickoff of the first game (Green Bay Packers at Chicago Bears). EL Presidente won't leave you hanging, don't worry.

GOLDEN GLOBES

Word on the street is this guy pissed off some important people at the Golden Globes last weekend.

So much so, in fact, that he apparently won't be invited back to host.

Okay, so Ricky Gervais said some inflammatory stuff. He was on the anti-establishment tip. Not drinking the Kool Aid. It seems kind of obvious he wants to up his profile and continue to push boundaries as a comedian and general celebrity personality. It's hard to imagine this as anything other than a calculated career move. Whether it actually helps him or not remains to be seen, but if there's even a hint of truth to anything he said, I give him credit for setting his fazers on stun and calling people out. Hey if nothing else, it was entertaining.

As for the actual winners? Sometimes the folks who score the hardware are a decent indicator of what might happen at the Oscars, but that's not always the case. I agree with many of the choices, but like usual, you could make an argument for others who lost out but still gave great performances.

Highlights for me (and by highlights, I mean the selections I agree with most vehemently) include:

-- Christian Bale scoring Best Supporting Actor for "The Fighter." I could not believe it was a professional actor playing a character rather than a real guy off the streets of Lowell, Mass.

-- "Boardwalk Empire" winning Best TV Series Drama -- solid show, although I'm a little surprised Steve Buscemi won best lead actor in a drama series over both Jon Hamm (Mad Men) and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad). I mean, he's adequate in his role as Nucky Thompson, but I've never felt so inspired by him that I just had to start up a conversation about his performance.

-- Aaron Sorkin winning "Best Screenplay in a Motion Picture" for The Social Network -- great flick, and an essential story in our current age of social media addiction and up-to-the-minute updates about virtually everything.

-- Natalie Portman winning "Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama" for her performance in Black Swan. It's not easy to play a character who is both disengaged from most of those around her and also emotionally disturbed all at once, but she did it convincingly, and she had you rooting for her to come out on top even if she wasn't the most likable protagonist ever. If a bat-shit crazy Barbara Hershey was your mother in a cramped Manhattan apartment for several years, you'd be a kick in the ass away from a stint at Bellevue yourself.

It will be interesting to see what happens at The Oscars. Generally speaking, my favorite flicks from 2010 (or at least the ones that stand out most right now) are The Social Network, The Town (brilliant cops-and-robbers stuff, wonderfully done, very unique and entertaining), Black Swan (a total mind-hump), True Grit (fantastic Coen Brothers remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic western) and Winter's Bone, which unfortunately will likely get the least amount of attention at the Academy Awards.

It came out too long ago (last April), had a limited theaters release and admittedly features bleak, depressing subject matter. But it's a jarring story about how the other half lives with a watershed performance by a promising young actress named Jennifer Lawrence. You should check it out, but you should also do so only when planning a happy activity immediately afterward. I mean, there just aren't that many feel-good movies about poverty-level, meth-addicted people and a teenage kid looking after most of her family while drug-dealing, fugitive dad has put the house up for bond collateral. It's worth it to see this though, trust me. Would I ever steer you in the wrong direction? Certainly not intentionally!

KENNY POWERS

Probably my favorite comedy right now, on network TV, cable TV or damn near anywhere, is an absurd, uproarious tour de force known as Eastbound and Down, and it airs on HBO. There's a very good chance you know it, or also enjoy it, which is good because it is goddamn comedic gold, this much I promise you.

The series focuses on Kenny Powers, a washed-up major league pitcher who has been derailed by drugs and alcohol, and also untimely injury. Season one opens with Kenny needing to figure out what comes next in life after his career as a pro baseball player takes a nose-dive, so he ends up crashing with his brother's family in Shelby, North Carolina. That's enough for set-up, but practically everything that happens in this show is laugh-out-loud funny anyway.

What's best about it though? That's tough to say. The obviously idiotic situations that ensue are definitely part of it, but for me, it's got to be the atrociously vulgar yet hilarious dialogue and Powers' complete lack of cooth and decency. Somehow though, you love his character, vile though he sometimes is as a person. Danny McBride completely kills it as Kenny Powers.

The underrated ingredient that makes the show really enjoyable though? That would be a guy named Steve Little, who plays the incredibly nerdy and overconfident yet somewhat self-aware Stevie Janowski, a schlubby dude in Shelby who idolizes Kenny and begs on as his sidekick when Powers rolls into town in Season one.

There have been two seasons of EB&D so far, but it's an extremely manageable 14 total episodes at 30 minutes each. It's totally worth the commitment. You'll plow through them in no time. It's easy, guilt-free, feel-good viewing, and you'll always feel better about yourself when you watch what most of what these mopes go through. Isn't that the point of a good comedy? Anyway, you can catch it on HBO On Demand or through re-runs that they occasionally air. If you don't get HBO, Netflix it.

A SAD 'SITUATION'

Can we just have Jersey Shore taken off the air already? It's a joke at this point, right? Are these situations really real? Is the show not completely manufactured? Do Snooki and The Situation really have multi-million dollar book deals? It's times like these when I need to shoot myself. Not fatally, you know, but a non-lethal bullet would be a nice reminder that people who have NO business being well-paid OR famous are occasionally rewarded with both.

At this point, the only fun for me in a show like Jersey Shore is trying to figure out if these people are for real. Is this really who they are 24/7? Sadly, I think the answer is 'yes.' Nobody can act THAT well. I suppose there's something refreshing about that, right? They're just being themselves, take them or leave them. Nothing wrong with that, right? Certainly not. And if you want to waste hours of your life and basically just become dumber, you can watch them 'just be themselves' for hours on end on MTV!

But the show is somewhat of a trainwreck in the sense that you just can't turn the dial once you stumble upon it. There's no going back. You become transfixed. Don't fall into this trap. Sadly, my wife has a few times already, and I swear to all that is good and just in this world that neither of us is any better for it.

HIP HOP TIP DU JOUR

Since I fashioned my creative namesake after the one and only Notorious B.I.G. -- (moment of silence for his hip hop greatness) ... and .... there. Thank you. -- I'm going to try to begin making it a semi-regular occurrence in this space to drop some true blue hip hop knowledge on those that care to receive it, ya dig?

As an art form, hip hop is one of the more revolutionary and fascinating cultural movements of the past 40 years (the roots of what inspired it go back way farther than that). As is known by many of us who once cared for, and still do, great works in this art form, it's clear that the culture has changed in such a way that the life force and impact this music once had isn't the same these days. But it will never truly be dead. We will always have what made it what it was in the first place.

To that end, I'd like to share with ya'll a prime example of some dope sounds I've been grooving on lately. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9aG3xc9IZw

This, constituents, is a perfect example of what laid the groundwork, the foundation, for hip hop music to explode into the universally adored musical movement it has become. This is Grandmaster Flash, one of the original and truly transcendent hip hop figures ever, getting busy on the one's and two's as only he can, taking some dope old 70s sounds and chopping them up for sonic wonderment. Keep in mind all he had were his hands, some black wax circles and a couple basic turntables, as this was clearly back in the day.

Yes, it's not studio-polished, and yes the beat chops slightly out of rhythm here and there. But that's precisely what makes this so enigmatic. Considering what GMF did with what he had to work with, this is like somehow turning a packet of Hot Pockets into gourmet dining.

Hope you enjoy. This one is a 7-minute instrumental beatdown, but put it on in the background while you're doing your taxes, or wasting time on facebook, or looking up Snooki's latest arrest. Next time I'll break you off with something on the lyrical tip.

Peace.