Tim Brough's Black Leather Bookshelf

Too Close for Comfort
2 Out Of 5 Stars

Let's not mince words here. Kris Kristofferson's voice is shot. 'Closer To The Bone" still exhibits his ace songwriting chops and Don Was produced it as stripped down as possible, but you can't escape the fact that Kris' voice has lost its range, enunciation and - sadly - the gruff, whiskey soaked potency of his golden years. I'd love to hear someone pluck the better songs (the title track, "Let The Walls Come Down," "Love Don't Live Here Anymore") and cover them with the melody intact from how they were intended. The songwriting is what keeps "Closer to The Bone" from dipping below two stars.

However, not every elder statesman gets to do what Johnny Cash managed to do (or even Glen Campbell). This album just makes me more sad than anything else, because the man who wrote "Me and Bobby McGee" and sang "Sunday Morning Coming Down" should be left with his legend intact. "Closer to The Bone" diminishes a major, historic talent. Were this anyone but Kris Kristofferson, I have a feeling the ecstatic 5 star reviews on Amazon wouldn't be so glowing.



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The first major disappointment in the Glee Cast CD series, for some reason they decided that "Rocky Horror" needed to be sanitized. For some reason, the suits at Columbia and/or Fox didn't like the word "Transsexual" in "Sweet Transvestite," so now Frankenfurter comes from "sensational Transylvania." Huh? And instead of playing it close to the vest, the normally stellar Amber Riley over-sings it, painfully.

Then, in "Toucha Touch Me," Jayma Mays is apparently to prim to be allowed to sing the phrase "heavy petting," so that lyric gets altered. For a show that is all about the pratfalls and pitfalls of high school, that expression is too much? Please.

At least the autotune is gone. They also had the good sense to not try and match Tim Curry's Frankenfurter performance. On the flipside of the coin, Chris Colfer totally nails Riff in "Time Warp," saving this EP from total disaster. I am hoping that maybe Glee's broadcast of the Rocky Horror episode will perhaps lead to a revival of interest in the original show, but this sanitized version is a dud.

NYT Morning Headline:
Move to End 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Stalls in Senate

Because it seems that, according to Rebublicans, the only thing more of a threat to our nation than Islamic Jihadi Terrorists are openly gay US servicemen.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and they feel fine
2 out of 5 Stars


2012 is a movie where all the heroes escape by the thinnest of plots...margins. It's the old fashioned disaster movie where a handful of actors dodge impossible odds and impending doom that always seems to be just a wee bit slower than the plane/car/small dog racing in front of the collapsing ground/raging fireball/crushing metal machinery. It's B-Movie dumb with 21'st century technology. It will kill off 2 and a half hours of your afternoon and few brain cells in the process.

Director Roland Emmerich obviously learned a lesson from the wretchedly awful 10,000 BC (I joked that the BC then stood for Bad Cinema), where wafer thin plots better have a lot of things going ka-boom if the audience is going to plop down ticket money. This time, at almost every turn, you get a gloriously apocalyptic slice o'disaster. Be it the raining of molten fireballs on Jellystone park or the collapse of California into the Pacific, the effects are incredible. 2012 is the best disaster porn since "Titanic," and you don't have to wade through all those stuffy period dresses. Or, for that matter, the emotional baggage of millions of people dying before your very eyes.

Really, if you had just watched a city of millions get washed off the globe, would you react with giggles and jokes? Because no-one here seems to be all that disturbed that major chunks of the populous have been wiped out. Hardly anyone seems to be capable of shedding tears, save for the President's daughter and the scientific superbrain. With the exception of John Cusak and Woody Harrelson, all the actors here are interchangeable, mere props set against the gloriously delicious mayhem that does keep you on the edge of your seat throughout 2012.

So ignore the implausibility of it all and the sarcastic 2012 political subtext (only politicians and the wealthy will be worth having around post-apocalypse), and thrill to the destruction of the White House by battleship bearing tsunami. It's lights, camera, faultline!

I am sitting here, stunned. Michael jackson, a mere year older than me, died this afternoon. While I would not count myself as a fanatic, I was always in awe at the man's immense talents. When I was a kid, one of my first 45's was "ABC." When I graduated from college, the first Top 40 stations I worked for was one of those "Hot Hits" stations that would repeat the top ten in about a three hour period. WQBQ started in 1982, and the Top Ten included "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," with the recurrents including "The Girl Is Mine" and others. It was likely that you'd hear 2 or more Michael Jackson songs an hour. Yet the public seemed to not tire of them, and "Thriller" remains one of the largest selling albums in history. I still have the CD in my collection, an album that has been in my music probably two or three times. And when I worked as a club DJ in Dover, Delaware, the albums "Thriller" and  "Bad" still made people dance.

While his public antics, trials and health issues had long overshadowed his recorded work, I can't begin to estimate what Michael Jackson did to influence music and pop culture. I can still vividly remember watching an elementry school band slog their way through the usual marching band stuff and pop oldies that every young kid has to play, but then the band leader made an announcement that the kids had a special song that they wanted to play. A steady drumbeat began and dozens of little feet began to ecstatically tap and play "Billie Jean." Despite the somewhat studious nature of their playing prior to this, you could see their faces light up as they leaned into their instruments and put all their hearts into playing this, the coolest of songs for these kids to be playing. For these elementary school kids, Jackson was their gateway into loving music.

Michael Jackson may have been overwhlmed by the court cases and the plastic surgeries, but for me it is those kids in the school band that will be my measure of what Jackson accomplished. It will be the night I watched him doing the moonwalk on TV for the first time. It will be the fans who rallied to the Sunset Blvd Tower Records to see the "HisStory" statue when the box set was released. And even if he spoonfed and obligated newspapers to call him "The King Of Pop," he managed to make himself into the stuff of his dreams.

Had hers been the only celebrety passing today, Farrah Fawcett would still have been newsworthy, But add Michael Jackson's sudden death, and Farrah was almost overshadowed. Yet it is hard for me not to notice, because as a gay man not yet out of his teens, the infamous "Farrah" poster was one of only two women to be pinned on my teenaged wall. (The other was Linda Rondstat.) And while news reports had been making us aware that her battle with cancer was on the brink of taking her from us, the announcement of her passing still felt like a tug at the heart. I always have an issue with people who discribe a battle with Cancer as "Couragous," as cancer is an illness and not a challenge you choose. You would never consider describing anyone with cancer as "cowardly." Her fight with her Cancer was one she took on with dignity and determination. She looked at what she was doing as an opportunity to show women what dealing with cancer was, realistically. It was honest, it was heartbreaking. What she did in 1976 was charm us as a glamourius Charlie's Angel. What she did in 2009 was win us with her warmth and honesty, even if her 'glamour' had long passed, but her charm never went away.