25th Hour
We watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour Saturday night. Interesting plot, but it failed to build any suspense. I was left watching how Ed Norton lived the last day of his free life, without questioning whether he would go in or not. Only in the final scene, when his father tempts him into fleeing, is that question raised. Before that, all we want to know but don't is who turned him in?

Anna Paquin's role was strange. Besides showing what a goof Phil S. Hoffman was, what? Wasn't one sexy woman enough? C'mon Spike, I expect better from you.

More disruptive to the movie were two things: the homage to 9/11, which seemed corny and forced, and the two or three periods of racial angst, which were even more forced, not to mention taken straight from his older work.

The film, while certainly wrought with race, ethnicity, class, gender issues, did not seem to be calling them into question specifically. The plot involved a hip white man -- with Irish roots, to be sure -- and his dilemma of going to the slammer. Sure, his girlfriend was Puerto Rican and said identity was questioned and excused for turning him in, but that was the extent of such dialogue; it hardly engaged in the larger narratives of exclusion and racism.

So to me, his five-minute rant picking on every sub-category in New York was totally out of place.

Today is November 1.
It is time to pay rent.

I've been steadily working on my website; it should be up in the next week or so. Most of the information -- because there isn't much -- is set in place. I'm more concerned with design right now. I'm striving for uniformity as well as style and appeal. I expect this much from myself, though my first attempts are always sloppy and amateurish.

It's a tricky process, as is deciding what content is worth displaying. It's a bit like an identity filter: what should be disseminated to the public, what shouldn't. Moreover, how should it be presented (this is where style comes in).

Pages that exhaustively attempt to describe one's persona are tiresome and boring. As viewers, we don't want to know everything, only what's interesting, novel, relevant. So I'm going for brevity.

Images convey as much info about a person as the words that appear. This, too, is a touchy subject. I'm trying to find the right balance between being accountable and with integrity to who I am, who I know myself to be, as well as to present myself in a way that makes me appealing to the public.

Don't front. We all do it when we choose which clothes to buy, which shoes, which restaurants to eat at, which movies to see, which friends to make. Transparency is not very desirable; only the illusion of transparency is.

One.

Greetings
The question I pose today is merely to speculate why DJ Premier did not produce a track for Jay Z's The Black Album. The reports have varied from Jay rejecting all of the cuts Premo submitted, to Premo being too busy to submit anything.

With all of the hype surrounding Jay's "last" album, it is a bit disappointing that rap's most successful emcee and one of the best DJ's of all-time failed to collaborate.

Instead, Pharrell has included what sounds like a wack track. I hope the rest of the album has a street sound. I also don't doubt that Jay will be back for more.

Speaking of coming back for more, Fiona Apple is supposed to release an album early next year. Which means she beats D'Angelo once again. The two came out with albums within a year of each other in the mid-90s. Both of their sophomore efforts came out four or five years later.

D'Angelo has reported been working with George Clinton and Raphael Saadiq, and some reports say he has seven songs. But I'm not holding my breath.

One.