“From here on in, content here on the Tumult Magazine [dot] com website is going to look more and more like the following post from Tumult’s design correspondent George Gunnar Nelson. It’s a short post, made to entertain immediately, perhaps inspire commerce, and be thought provoking without going too in-depth. We’re currently producing and saving the in-depth content for the magazine’s relaunch, to happen in the near future. Be on the lookout.”

And now, Proper Form, a little observation on design by George Gunnar Nelson

This chair, called the “Do Hit Chair,”designed by Marijn van der Poll and produced by the fine folks at Droog, appeals to us as it looks like it would have been Donald Judd’s worst nightmare.

George Gunnar Nelson hates most things, which means he has good taste.

He was the best part of that movie that we all pretend that we didn’t like. He was the best part of Burn After Reading. His J. Jonah Jameson is the only consistently watchable aspect of the Spider-Man franchise.

Here’s the catch: we have no interest in seeing J.K. Simmons trying to carry a movie for ninety minutes. None. In fact, we have little interest in watching most of our favorite actors carrying movies.

Consider: the ingénue parts in movies, the stuff movie stars are made of, are always, ten-times-out-of-ten, the least interesting aspect of the movie. So. When you take a character actor and make him the star, you’ve taken the most interesting person in your film and decided to make him or her boring.

Remember how awesome Don Cheadle was in Devil In a Blue Dress? Now where is he? Doing his damnedest to make Traitor and movies like it good, and admirably failing. It’s not his fault. He should never have been in that position in the first place.

Remember the first time you remember seeing Jack Black, as a disgruntled record store employee in High Fidelity? Wouldn’t you rather have had Jack Black continue to steal the show his whole career instead of making “The Face That Jack Black Makes” in one failed comedy after another? We certainly would have, because we sat through Envy.  (Also: can you believe that the same guy who made Rain Man made Envy? Well. He did.)

Again. Let us be clear. We in no way mean to suggest that actors like J.K. Simmons and Don Cheadle and Jack Black are unqualified to be the central focus of a film. They are overqualified.

Try to consider the movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There’s a moment in that movie that has legendary character actor John Turturro climbing up the side of a pyramid. While he’s doing that, he’s providing expository information. It’s something, seriously, about having to activate some device contained within the pyramid before some evil robots use it to harness the power of the sun and destroy the earth. Turturro dutifully delivers his lines – in soliloquy – in a real, if futile, effort to give the audience some kind of clue as to what the hell is going on with the plot.

No “movie star” would have been able to even attempt such a feat. If they were, then the movie’s star, Shia LaBeouf, would have, and Turturro would never have had to. As it stands, John Turturro deserves an Oscar for his role in the Transformers sequel based on effort.

There exist some cases in which character actors are able to take the lead in a movie. Geoffery Wright – amazing as James Bond’s American colleague Felix Leiter and Bill Murray’s buddy in Broken Flowers – was awesome in the otherwise-completely-inaccurate Basquiat. Jonah Hill, the funniest part of 40 Year Old Virgin and Funny People, carried Superbad marvelously. Don Cheadle, for his part, was great as broadcasting legend Petey Greene in Talk To Me. It could be concluded, then, that putting character actors in starring roles works as long as the movie itself concentrates on protagonists with strong personalities.

TUMULT Magazine proposes that the whole payment system in Hollywood be reconnoitered in such a way as to pay character actors way more money than the people who are supposed to be the stars. Because those starring roles could seriously go to anyone and no one would ever notice. Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill could have just as easily been Reese Witherspoon and Patrick Dempsey in Sweet Home Alabama. But you can’t replace Rhys Ifans in the former, just like you can’t take Mary Lynn Rajskub out of the latter. Meanwhile, Reese Witherspoon, Julia Roberts, and Hugh Grant are super-paid. (Patrick Dempsey, for his part, is still spending Loverboy money, so he’s kind of an outlier.)

This is Gordon Delgetti’s first piece for Tumult Magazine.

* QD3’s new documentary The Carter showcases the life of a strange, secluded savant in rap megastar Lil Wayne. Watching the movie, one quickly can’t escape the degree to which the studio,  that which more than anything defines Wayne’s professional life, never seems far away.

All Wayne ever seems to do is record songs in a studio. It is an amorphous, omnipresent factor in Wayne’s life. It could be located in his hotel room, in his condo, on his tour bus, or in a dedicated recording facility. It is always around him. While recording songs all the time, Wayne consumes massive quantities of promethazine cough syrup and smokes lots and lots of weed. In between, he gets tattoos.

And that, folks, it pretty much all Lil Wayne, international celebrity and multimillionaire, does with his day. That the studio appears to be the only constant in Lil Wayne’s life – at least according to The Carter – is a telling thing. In Wayne’s World, which is, really, whatever physical and mental space Lil Wayne is occupying at any given moment, The Law of Averages is forever fighting a war against the Law of Diminishing Returns. Listening to Lil Wayne’s output over the last few years illustrates this.

Being constantly surrounded by a recording environment allows Wayne to incessantly experiment with his sound. He goes for months at a stretch only recording Auto-Tuned verses. For a while there he was using a bizarre Jamaican accent on his feature verses. Sometimes he wants to make rock music. Other times, like in the case of “I Feel Like Dying,” this inclination to experiment pays off. At certain other points, though, it seems like Wayne completely ignores the idea that his mastery of spitting sixteen blue-flame bars at a time affords him the luxury of his own experimentation. Usually, at these moments, Wayne comes out with a verse, like on the star-studded posse cut “Swagga Like Us” that reminds the world at large that his claiming the title of “Best Rapper Alive” is not at all unfounded.

* Lil Wayne, at some point in the film, dismisses jazz music, or at least the possibility of ever making any of it. During this moment, the camera is close up on Wayne, and he slightly resembles a young Miles Davis.

* It’s rare that a film so completely captures so compelling a portrait of loneliness. No one who doesn’t work directly for or with Lil Wayne ever seems to be around him at any point in the film. Occasionally, Wayne will exit a vehicle flanked by a few women, but it always appears as though they’re headed to a photo shoot when this happens. His own childhood friend and manager, Cortez Bryant, limits the time he spends with Wayne, owing to the fact that he can’t stand to look at him when he’s all fucked up on cough syrup. (Which, again, is like all the time.) No one seems to know him all that well. Even Baby, also known as Birdman, the guy who gave Lil Wayne his start and remains at the head of his label, appears to sort of just let Wayne do his thing.

There’s a scene in The Carter involving a Rolls-Royce with a bow on it parked nearby just a few days after the album Tha Carter III surprised everyone and went platinum during the first week of its release. Wayne assumes that it’s a present for him. There is some confusion, but, in the end, he’s right. It’s almost as if Wayne’s at the center of a custody battle between Record Sales and Cough Syrup. Each of them supply their own rewards for Wayne, but neither offers much in terms of actual human contact.

* The Carter is not completely exploitative. It offers occasional peeks at Lil Wayne’s fierce native intelligence. His intellect is especially pronounced when Wayne feels cornered by reporters and cameras, or when he suspects that he’s spent entirely too much time in front of a video camera while extravagantly intoxicated. There’s an especially engaging point during which Wayne explains, in his way, why repetition is “the father of learning.” (This phrase is used on Tha Carter III in the lyrics of the song “Shoot Me Down.”)

* It’s tough to watch The Carter and not be put in the mind of Robert Frank’s documentary Cocksucker Blues, about the Rolling Stones. Both movies showcase an abundance of drug use and debauchery, and both movies were “disowned” by their respective subjects. In the case of Cocksucker Blues, the movie was officially blocked from release by the Rolling Stones, and, in order to legally watch the film, Robert Frank has to be physically present. Lil Wayne was not so successful, in that The Carter has received a nationwide DVD release after a strong showing at Sundance.

The lesson here may be that the Rolling Stones have the best lawyers in the business, something Lil Wayne might pay special attention to as he is (a) expected to receive a one-year jail sentence in February of next year, and (b) he’s currently being sued by the Rolling Stones.

* There’s a moment in The Carter where some dude is apprehended trying to sneak backstage at a Lil Wayne concert and is summarily dismissed.  “You don’t do shit for Lil Wayne,” they tell him. Soon after, the camera pans over to reveal upcoming rapper Drake, also hanging out backstage. How come nobody talked to Drake?

Wordrick Word gives credit where credit is due. “The photo at the beginning of this article is from the Life Magazine online archives.”

Here is some footage from “The Rumble in The Jungle,” the 1974 boxing match between then-champion George Foreman and Muhammad Ali :

This was some of the most watched sports footage ever at the time that it happened live. Everybody knew how big of a deal it was going to be, even before it happened.

Someone at Hart-Davis sensed that such an event – so big, so important, so violent and masculine – would be a perfect vehicle for Norman Mailer’s particular talents. So they paid him a million dollars to write a book about it. And it’s good that they did. The Fight is among the best interpretations of boxing ever written. But the existence of The Fight is part of a larger question about media and reporting: Is the insight into and the interpretation of a given thing as valuable as the thing itself? Is it possible that the insight and the interpretation is actually more valuable?

The Fight is either an excellent or piss-poor book to serve as a jumping-off point for this discussion. Consider that you can, if you are so inclined, watch The Rumble in the Jungle and have access to Mailer’s insight into it by watching Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary When We Were Kings.

(If you want to compare to the text of The Fight, pay special attention to 1:45 – 2:05.)

What we have in When We Were Kings is a variety of source materials synthesized in such a way as to present a new product.

Now.

Here is a wholly decent and insightful “blog post” by our favorite internet writer Bethlehem Shoals, one of the masterminds behind the Freedarko empire[3].

Somewhere between this and When We Were Kings is a forecast of this new kind of media that’s heading your way.

Jonathan Livingston Spacehelmet dutifully checks his voicemail even though he knew you were going to call.

[2] We’re calling it the “egalitarian multimedia collage,” but we’re not sure that that’s going to stick, since we’re not famous.

[3] By the way, their book, Freedarko Presents the Macrophenomenal Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game is TUMULT Magazine required reading.

There’s been a good deal of endorsement of an ugly habit, the smoking of cigarettes, on our little website here. This seems, on its face, irresponsible of us. Especially when our primary argument is that smoking looks cool. (It does.)

There are actually a lot of reasons why a person would continue smoking, beyond the simple but absolutely real physical addiction aspect of the whole thing. One of them has to do with the way that smokers are treated these days. Not quite like second-class citizens, but something like second-class citizens. Think about this: smokers can’t come inside as long as they’re smoking. A lot of times you can’t smoke in your own home if you live in, say, an apartment building with central air, particularly if you live on the ground floor. In response, there seems to be a sort of tendency to dig in one’s heels, and to interpret being outcast as a new and more overt way in which the habit is sort of romantic.

Also there’s this other thing, which is a little weirder, and a little bit, maybe, misguided. It might seem like, to a smoker, that the same people who got him started smoking in the first place are the people who, now, want him to quit. Either way, the advertisers get all the money. The madman who came up with Joe Camel is probably the same guy who came up with the Truth campaign. Smokers everywhere are left feeling like a former American president, who – presciently? – said: “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … you can’t get fooled again.”

A third thing is that, if you’re willing to reach with us, smokers don’t get Alzheimer’s disease. TUMULT hero Cecil Adams of the Straight Dope quotes a 1991 article in the International Journal of Epidemiology: “A statistically significant inverse association between smoking and Alzheimer’s disease was observed at all levels of analysis, with a trend towards decreasing risk with increasing consumption.” It seems counter-intuitive, but there it is.

TUMULT Magazine is looking to be a source of information for sane people in the twenty-first century. We feel compelled, then, to quote the counter-argument from the same Straight Dope column: “At least one scientist thinks smokers are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s mainly because they die of smoking-related diseases first.”

Also, we should really be telling people that they don’t need to smoke in order to look cool. (You really don’t.) Or, better yet, that they need to not smoke in order to look cool. And we would happily make that argument if it wasn’t so obviously a lie. According to Wordrick Word, who writes for our “Bad News, Rap Dudes” column, the closest anyone ever got to looking really cool while not smoking was Hub, the former bass player from the (pre-Late Night) Roots, who always had a chew stick in his mouth while he played – which, it turns out, has some hygienic properties that we hadn’t considered till we read the Wikipedia page on them for this article. So we’ve settled on “How to Quit Smoking By Continuing To Smoke,” or “Quitting, Kind Of.”

It works like this: the idea is to eventually quit smoking, while at the same time recognizing how much it sucks to quit smoking. So the answer is simply to not quit, while at the same time quitting. It is not only a Zen-like approach, but also based on the idea that it’s not the not smoking that gives smokers anxiety about quitting, but the simple, needling, powerfully terrifying notion of never having another cigarette.

The logic behind “Quitting, Kind Of” is that smoking less has got to be better for you than smoking more. (Right?) So the plan is to continually decrease nicotine intake until, eventually, the need to smoke cigarettes goes away entirely. Here’s our four-part plan.

Step One: Realizing how insanely expensive it is to smoke cigarettes. The other day Marlboro Lights at the store down the street were something like seven dollars and some change. A pack-a-day smoker, then, spends over fifty dollars a week, which is ridiculous. In a little under two months, with the money you’d save if you’d quit, you could buy a thirty-two-inch LCD HDTV.

Step Two: Setting some kind of arbitrary goal. Like deciding, at the beginning of your day, to smoke half the cigarettes you’d usually smoke. In 2001, Esquire magazine published a short piece that suggested that the person who purchases a pack of cigarettes buys twenty moments that they can enjoy. If you were to impose a limit of ten cigarettes instead of twenty, then the moments themselves become more valuable – and, we presume, enjoyable – due to their increased scarcity.

Step Three: Doing some of the things that smoking typically prevents you from doing. When’s the last time you went on a run, Smoker?

Step Four: Recognizing the futility of the whole operation. No one ever tells anyone on a diet that they’ll never eat another piece of birthday cake. There’s no reason to think that you’ll never have another cigarette. So, when you feel like it, have one. Just try to feel like it less often.

Ok. Good luck.

As editor-in-chief at Tumult Magazine, Trevor Forever is pretty lax about enforcing anti-smoking regulations around the office.

Click here for part one of this piece. – ed.

Jonathan Livingston Spacehelmet can either perceive 20% of the future 80% of the time, or 80% of the future 20% of the time. Whichever he feels like.

That said, if IMDB’s cast listing for Sylvester Stallone’s 2010 film The Expendables is a true listing of the actual cast, then The Expendables could be the best action movie ever made.

The world sleeps on Sly, and not without good reason. But Stallone brings an indisputable fact with him in his back pocket to any movie project he’s involved with: He wrote Rocky.  Also, he directed Rocky III, the best of the Rocky sequels. (That he also directed the abysmal Rocky Balboa kind of bolsters our overall point about this, which is this: When it happens, it’s probably a fluke, but Sylvester Stallone is nonetheless capable of making a decent movie.)

But here’s the thing. The main reason for The Expendables‘ potential success is not Sylvester Stallone. It’s Bruce Willis. Now, we haven’t exactly made a secret of our appreciation for Bruce Willis, but maybe we have been sort of subliminal about it. Suffice to say that at TUMULT, we consider Bruce Willis to be the gold standard of action movie stars.

So, too, it seems, does Sylvester Stallone. Stallone appears to have cast three people in his upcoming movie: himself, Jet Li, and Bruce Willis. By our count, Bruce Willis appears in The Expendables in six different forms.

First, there is the man himself, playing a character called Mr. Church.

Then there’s Mickey Rourke, who, until The Wrestler came out, spent the better part of two decades playing the poor man’s Bruce Willis. In The Expendables, Rourke is set to play someone named “Tool.” Which is. Well.

Jason Statham is in this movie. At his best — Snatch, Transporter 2 — Jason Statham is exceptionally adept at being the British Bruce Willis. At his worst — Crank: High Voltage — Jason Statham is like Bruce Willis with a constant “Yakety Sax” accompaniment.

Terry Crews, who might be the funniest man on the planet, could be in The Expendables for comic relief. The sexier proposition is that Crews will get to utter some dry, sarcastic, reluctant-hero one-liners, while at the same time saving the day. The Expendables could take Terry Crews from a secret comedy weapon and turn him into a Bruce Willis-caliber action star in his own right.

UFC Hall of Famer Randy Couture is also on the bill. He’s a big balding badass, much like Willis. While he has little acting experience, he does have the advantage of seeming like, in competition at least, the kind of wry, principled warrior that Bruce Willis has been playing for years.

Professional wrestling’s Steve “Stone Cold Steve Austin” Austin rounds out The Expendables‘ cast of Bruce Willises. He, too, is a big balding badass. He’s also made a living by portraying a wry, principled warrior in the vein of Randy Couture. In this sense, Austin is something like Bruce Willis twice removed.

The only thing missing from The Expendables is a young gunner. A “New(ce) Willis,” as it were. But, again. Things in Hollywood are constantly changing, and we wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone like that showed up.

UPDATE:

Wait a second. It looks like Stallone took his six Willises and made Rambo’s 11.

We’re counting it.

Trevor Forever is editor-in-chief at TUMULT Magazine.

What we’re getting at:

HOLY SHIT THE NEW JULIAN CASABLANCAS SINGLE IS GOOD AS HELL.

Also, has it been long enough for us to be able to tell you that we never stopped listening to The Strokes without you thinking that we’re assholes? Because we didn’t.

Let’s talk about it. We understand why it became unfashionable to like them for a while there, because we understand the nature of cultural backlash, even if we sort of hate it. They were sort of everywhere for a while there at the beginning of the decade. And their existence begat like twenty also-ran bands with similar names. (Being in The Vines must have been like being in Stone Temple Pilots or Silverchair but without all the hits.) And that because they were the first of a few bands to be hailed as rock’s new saviors after the release of one excellent EP, they were far too famous to be critical darlings. And so they were far too famous to occupy that sweet spot that bands like Morphine get to occupy, where everyone always likes you forever.

The Strokes’ first album was so aggressively good that the more destructive factions of popular culture – who were robbed of the chance to be among the first to like The Strokes and would therefore be damned if they were going miss the chance to be among the first to hate them – were forced to pick the band apart using their biography as a jumping off point.

Let’s look at some popular, if unfounded, reasons people hate The Strokes.

‘They grew up rich! They’re just a bunch of rich posturing hipsters playing at being in a rock n’ roll band!’

Remember this? Well. It was true, but it was never really a problem until it started to remind the rich posturing hipsters that had championed The Strokes early on that they – the fans themselves – were also a bunch of rich posturing hipsters who had never had to work for anything. The Strokes came a little too close to ruining the illusion of a lifestyle built on simulacra. It was like The Strokes were a Country Bear Jamboree playing to a bunch of people trying desperately to forget that they lived on Main Street, USA. (Incidentally, this mentality might inadvertently be responsible for rap music’s enduring popularity around the TUMULT offices. No one’s ever mad at a rapper for getting money. Being rich is the whole point of being a rapper.)

‘If I see one more blazer-and-tee-shirt combo on a skinny guy with a moptop I’ll puke.’

Again. Last we checked, dudes the world over woke up this morning and dressed up like The Strokes circa 2002. We’re curious as to how this is the band’s fault. But we suspect that it’s tied into the above thing about them being rich. People don’t like to see their reflections too clearly.

‘They’ve never been able to live up to the promise of their first album.’

This is patently untrue. Anyone who ever heard Room on Fire without listening to it through a backlash filter knows that Room on Fire is, in fact, a better album than Is This It?, their debut. On their sophomore LP, The Strokes became a more fully formed version of The Strokes from their first record. Room on Fire isn’t the record where they spend the whole time singing about how hard it is on the road and how hard it is coming up with new songs. They made a record that suggested that, in the face of becoming the biggest band on the planet, they had only become stronger. It was only on that third joint that things began to get a little uneven. But, come on. First Impressions of the Earth not only contains some jams – “Ask Me Anything” might be their best song – but it’s also the sound of a band fighting to stay interested in playing music for a group of people that had rejected them. They seemed forced to explore new and uncomfortable sonic territory so as to not quite so perfectly capture the experience of the folks that had been their original fans.

No one ever said you had to like The Strokes. You might never have liked them. That’s fine.

But cultural backlash, even when it’s deserved, is an ugly thing. When it isn’t, though, it reveals more uncomfortable shit about the audience than it does the artist. We’ll put it like this: If familiarity breeds contempt, then The Strokes bred a great deal of contempt by being too familiar in the sense that the people who hated The Strokes really hated themselves. Which is sad.

What isn’t sad is driving around bumping “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” or watching that video for “Someday” where The Strokes play the Feud with Guided By Voices – ! – and Slash – !! – is playing pinball while The Strokes are lamping around some dive bar.

Hopefully, in a few weeks none of this will matter anymore when Phrazes For the Young, Julian’s solo record, comes out and shuts everyone, including us, up.

Bagithi Baba has been thanked in the liner notes of several albums, all of which are now long out of print.

For starters, he’s called his new album The Blueprint 3, which not only openly invites comparisons to the original Blueprint, one of the few perfect rap records ever, but it also acknowledges the existence of The Blueprint 2, which had been previously disavowed up to this point[1].

The first Blueprint was a no-shit blueprint for success in the music industry. It outlined, with its song sequence and lyrical content, a method by which an artist could be extremely successful from a commercial standpoint while maintaining all of his credibility.

Despite its slept-on good parts, The Blueprint 2 did not do this.

The Blueprint 3, then, is a return to form, but not in the sense that it’s laid out like the first Blueprint album, because it’s not. What it is is a game plan for staying relevant in a young man’s rap game into one’s 40’s[2].

Some highlights: the first track, “What We Talkin’ About” could never, in its final form, match the ferocity and focus that Jay had in the Youtube clips of the verses that surfaced before the album came out. That said, the synths on the song, and the fact alone that Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun provides guest vocals makes for a pleasantly weird enough backdrop for Jay’s “checking in with” his listeners. More than that, and throughout the album, Jay-Z addresses his dissenters in a way that suggests that he read and paid close attention to Marc Lynch’s examination of hegemony as it applies to Jay-Z. In talking about beefs with Jim Jones and the Game by way of not “talkin’ about Jimmy” and not “talkin’ about Game,” Jay-Z appears to be exercising and advanced understanding of a concept that has eluded middle managers, captains of industry, and presidents: Any form of political capital is only valuable for exactly as long as it is not spent.

Part of the Jay-Z lore has always been the idea that he doesn’t write anything down. Never has this been more impressive than it is on the third verse of “Thank You.”  “Thank You” also features Jay at his funniest.

On “A Star is Born,” Mr. Carter runs through a brief history of recent rap luminaries, if only to underscore the fact that he’s the only rapper from his generation that has remained important.

“Young Forever” is like the movie Almost Famous. The sample is obvious and schmaltzy. The lyrics to the song are sentimental and, um, schmaltzy. And yet, somehow, the song transcends all that in its speaking directly to your schmaltz receptors. Watch Almost Famous again and try not to like it. Then listen to “Young Forever.”

Those are the exceptional outliers.The songs on Blueprint 3 that lay out the master plan, however, are many. “D.O.A.,” “Run this Town,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Off That,” and “Already Home” are not formulaic, but they do stay completely on-message[3]. These are the songs you’ve been hearing and will continue to hear on the radio, because they are good pop records that bounce but that are not soft.

There is a lot more to discuss here. In fact, it’s impossible to discuss rap music as a genre at all without discussing Jay-Z, even in his absence. Fortunately, Jay as delivered an album in The Blueprint 3 that merits such discussion, as it is the proper successor to The Black Album.

This is Wordrick Word’s first article for TUMULT.

[2] Lesson One: continue to be a better rapper than everyone else.

[3] Lesson Two: If you’re in your 40’s and you want to stay relevant, the best course of action is to make songs that people will enjoy listening to.