Michael Jackson's swansong: 'This is It' (2009)

Last night I got to see 'This is It', the film of rehearsals for Michael Jackson's abandoned O2 Arena stage spectacular. The film was interesting but went on for too long and lacked much of a narrative. Jackson came on as a kind of body-popping android / phantom of the opera figure who spoke in such a whimper that he frequently needed to be subtitled. At 50, he struck me as the kind of oldest adolescent on the block. 'This is It' was all about the show and not much about its creator. The film reminded me of how he sat so much at odds with the rest of his life, but how he used his perfectionism to transmute that angst - and various pop culture genres - into some fine music.The somber starting and somewhat contrived first interviews seemed odd, and general lack of audience was strange, but there...

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Literacy in the the hood!

Recently I heard that 50 Cent has made a come back, not just with a new album but with a "business bible" (self-help book) on how to make things happen by conquering your fear and embracing the dog-eat-dog world of the hood... It all makes sense now: drug dealing, like rap artistry, is about entrepreneurialism, and Fiddy is the new Ophra... Of course, as its title and co-author suggest, this is not entirely Curtis Jackson's baby - it is actually Robert Green's, with Fiddy as the fall guy. Green's famous The 48 Laws of Power has been reworked with a touch of bling by adding hip-hop to the mix. The result is an interracial buddy book about how to be a man in the shark infested world of the street or the boardroom - an existential treatise on self-fashioning that pursues masculinity as something...

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