This weekend, on Saturday (July 28th),  from 10AM til 1PM, is your chance to be a star when the world-famous Apollo Theater of Harlem, NY will make its once a year visit to California in search of "amateur" talent for upcoming Showtime At The Apollo shows back in New York City at the historic 125th Street venue.  This year the producers of the show will only visit five American cities outside of New York in search of talent so this is a great opportunity to try out if you are an aspiring entertainer: be it singer, rapper, spoken-word artist, comedian, dancer, musician (any instrument), etc.  And on Saturday their only West Coast tryouts will be held at the Oakland Convention Center located 1001 Broadway in downtown Oakland.  

Note if you plan on attending the tryouts (for which there is no charge and is based on a first come, first served basis) I suggest you get in line earlier than the scheduled 10AM door opening time. The first 300 in line will be admitted to audition. But even though the cut off time is 1PM the actual tryouts inside the auditorium will last long past that - until 6PM or possibly even later - so pack a sandwich and bring lots of water, and sunscreen (you might be in line outside for hours). And another tip is to get lots of rest the night before so you are at your best.

 A couple of months ago I attended one of the two-a-year tryout sessions held in New York and wrote about it for the New York Press and what amazed me most was the level of quality talent who showed up to audition.  I enjoyed the tryouts even more than the actual Amateur Night at the Apollo (held every Wednesday for the past 73 years) and am looking forward to attending the Oakland session for which I am scheduled to write a report for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Scattered … That’s where I am these days. Completely to the wind all over the west coast.

If I’m not in the middle of packing up some 250 boxes of household items, records, and books, and moving from an island in the Puget Sound back to my native LA, I ‘m sitting in a van doing a small tour back up the coast to the northwest. (Of course, first I welcomed the movers to LA, found a change of clothes, found some musical gear, bid a big hello to all my newly-arrived-to-LA crap, then said goodbye to my wife and son and hit the 5 freeway north in a van with six other band members. It’s hardly a coincidence my life is so scattered. “Can I discharge myself now, please, sir?”

Side note (about the 250, maybe even 300 boxes):  there wasn’t really a  problem with our last house, the rooms were great, yard was huge, but  the very large basement looked kind of sad and a little desperate until I filled it with crap … oh how the basement purred once it was full. So 1,100 miles and a semi-truck filled with 11,000 pounds of personal possessions later …

Truthfully, yet not exactly, the biggest excuse for not writing this week about my nearly, yet not necessarily, favorite subject (7 inch 45’s--I had promised something for the good people at Amoeba at least a week ago):  cable was finally installed in our new house and just in time for the Tour de France.

For me, July is inevitably about my birthday, BBQ’ed sausages on the 4th (just meat--none of this mango/pesto/tofu stuff, save those ingredients for a smoothie) and bicycle racing in France. My money for the 2007 Tour was on Alexandre Vinokourov. He would have been my choice to win the Tour last year but his old team, Astana-Würth, was ripped to shreds after five of its riders were implicated in the “Operación Puerto” doping case and scandal, leaving Vinokourov with only three teammates and for the most part a team without a pot to piss in (pun intended). Last year Vinokourov was never accused or implicated in the doping scandal, however as of this morning all that has changed. On Tuesday Alexandre Vinokourov tested positive for a banned blood transfusion after winning last Saturday’s time trial, prompting him and his team Astana to pull out of the Tour de France. I’m broken hearted once again. “So it ain’t so Vino.”

I finally got around to watching the most recent 北野 武, Takeshi  Kitano  dvd the other night; 2005's  Takeshis' ...


It  concerns  an established actor, Beat Takeshi, and his crossing paths with a struggling actor, Takeshi Kitano. A significant number of the cast play dual roles which I was embarrassingly  slow to comprehend, given the fairly confusing abstractions within film.  As Beat Takeshi,  Kitano plays himself as boorish  and self-important and satirizes his own artistic conventions to comic effect.  In his film-within-a-film,  he plays a  bandaged yakuza character. Annoyed by cicadas at his Okinawan hideaway, his character "unexpectedly" shoots his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself.

The second half of the film grows even less conventional.  Sometimes it just seemed strange for the sake of being strange.  It moved toward abstraction like David Lynch's last few films have, as if to bait the deluded fans into comparing their own narrative reconstructions.  I started to lose a bit of interest at that point since that kind of "artistic innovation" became pretty cliché before my parents ever met.


One ingredient I quickly realized was possibly detracting from my enjoyment was the absence of longtime musical collaborator Joe Hishaishi (or, Hisaishi Joe, Mamoru Fujisawa's Nipponized version of "Quincy Jones"), whose moody, jazz  & Japanese -influenced scores have always contributed to the tone of Kitano's previous films so complimentarily. I guess Takeshi Kitano and Joe Hisaishi got into it on the set of  the amazing "Dolls" a few years back and lamentably ended their artistic arrangement. Apparently, Kitano saw Hisaishi walking in the rain with Hayao Miyazaki.
 

Not to be confused with the East Bay based Hieroglyphics producer of the same name, Domino the SoCal rapper with the Southern drawl that betrayed his real roots, who arrived  on the rap world in late 1993, was the pop-rap artist who scored hits with "Ghetto Jam" and "Sweet Potato Pie"  signed to Outburst but picked up by RAL (Rush Associated Labels) And who, despite his LBC claimed roots and his Snoop Dogg affiliations, sported a delivery that was less gangsta and leaned more towards the pop/RnB spectrum of hip-hop music:  a catchy sing-song style I guess you could call it.  Not too long after he arrived in December 1993 he scored his fiirst hit "Ghetto Jam" which garnered Gold status after six straight weeks atop the Billboard maxi-single charts. It was followed up soonafter with an even bigger hit - "Sweet Potato Pie"  (see video above). The album's groove-laden production came care of AMG and Battlecat and would prove to be Domino's only real hit. His delayed sophomore follow-up album, 1996's "Physical Funk,"  and subsequent releases including 1997's "Dominology"  and 2001's "D-Freaked It' all fell short of the mark.

So I was just talking about how excited I was that "The State" would be coming out soon on DVD a couple of blogs ago. If you forgot, you can look at it here. I finally got to tag my own blog! So I mentioned that the entire cast of The State was in David Wain's new movie "The Ten." My friend just happened to let me know about the special screening last night at the Lumiere.  I, of course, ran over there after work to meet some of my great special friends to go see it. The movie comes out August 3rd, so I was especially excited to see it early. I had already watched the trailer a bunch of times. And I am obviously a huge fan of the creator of the movie and not only the cast of "The State", but almost everyone else in the film.

 
I will just start by saying that the movie is unbelievably awesome. I really don't want to give too much away. So just watch the preview at the bottom of this entry and check out the website. It is better than any comedy you have probably seen in a while. Please go see this movie instead of the horrible movie that is "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry." Just like the world of sitcoms, they really don't make comedies like this anymore. The movie is basically broken into ten parts, with each part about a particular commandment from the bible. The cast pops up in multiple connected stories all put together by Paul Rudd, who narrarates in between each section. It is sort of like 10 skits from "The State" or "Kids in the Hall." But even better. In addition to Paul Rudd and the entire cast of "The State", the cast includes Jessica Alba, Gretchen Mol, Adam Brody, Liev Schreiber, Justin Theroux, Oliver Platt, and Winona Ryder.