Music: Drake Take Care Album Cover

Next month, Drake is set to release his sophomore set Take Care. We’ve already heard “Marvin’s Room,” “Headlines,” and “Club Paradise,” to name a few, and expectations are high for an album that most people hope is more So Far Gone than Thank Me Later. (Just for the record, I really liked Thank Me Later.)

Photo: Wild and Crazy

Sometimes, I do miss Miami.

Throwback Movie: Flesh Eating Mothers

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Co-written and directed by James Aviles Martin, this 1988 horror comedy follows the survival efforts of a group of people after the spread of a mutant venereal disease turns the entire township’s mothers into zombie-like cannbials. Terror + hilarity ensues.

What say you, Amazon?

It’s just another day in your typical Middle America town. The children diligently head off to school, fathers leave for the office and mothers spend their day working hard to make certain the family returns to a clean house and a warm dinner on the table. Today may begin like every other day in this town of good, solid values, but children become suspicious when their mothers begin developing some very peculiar appetites. “Flesh Eating Mothers” is a non-stop cult action/comedy that tells the story of a kid’s worst nightmare: becoming dinner! One by one, mothers are infected with an unusual virus that makes them develop bottomless appetites. When they run out of food they simply walk next door, not to borrow a cup of sugar, but to make a new recipe with the neighbors as the main ingredient. The children begin to realize that their mothers are preparing some of the strangest meals for dinner and react with mixed emotions. Should they run away or even worse, kill their own mothers to end the mayhem? Add a pinch of police corruption and a dash of a cover up in the coroner’s office and you have prepared a film deliciously destined to be a cult classic romp.

News: Rona Jaffe Foundation 2011 Writers’ Award Winners Announced

Last week, the Rona Jaffe Foundation announced the winners of its 2011 Writers’ Awards. Each of the six winning writers will receive a $25,000 prize. They are:

• Melanie Drane (Poetry)
• Apricot Irving (Non-fiction)
• Fowzia Karimi (Fiction)
• Namwali Serpell (Fiction)
• Merritt Tierce (Fiction)
• JoAnn Wypijewski (Non-fiction)

The Rona Jaffe Foundation gives its awards under a program that identifies and supports women writers of exceptional talent, focusing on writers in the early stages of their careers.

Throwback: Fugees – “Nappy Headz (Remix)”

Ah, The Fugees. Back when they were the Tranzlator Crew. Back when people called them a Digable Planets knock-off simply because it was a crew comprised of two guys and a gal.

We can be honest: Blunted on Reality wasn’t the joint. Heh. But there were some cool cuts on the album, including the sublime “Vocab” and the Salaam Remi-produced track posted above, which was what really got people to pay attention. That tranzlated (heh) into a fair bit of anticipation for their sophomore disc The Score, and, well, the rest is … you know.

Quote: “Anyone Can Become A Writer”

“Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”
—Harlan Ellison, Writer

Throwback Movie: Body Double

Body Double is writer/director Brian DePalma‘s homage to classic thrillers by the master, Alfred Hitchcock. The tributes to films like Vertigo, Rear Window, and Dial M for Murder are so prominent, some have suggested that Body Double itself is a quasi-remake of sorts.

Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t matter—Body Double is, ultimately, a great film, a violent, lurid piece of cinema that still holds up to this day. The trailer posted above is a classic, having won a Clio in 1984. It doesn’t show anything that actually happens in the movie, so here’s a plot summary for you, courtesy of The Database:

After unemployed actor Jake Scully finds his girlfriend in bed with another man he moves out and accepts an offer from fellow struggling actor Jake Bouchard to house-sit for a few weeks. Apart from getting to live in a swank and ultra-modern house he also get to watch a sexy neighbor, Gloria Revelle, who does a sexy dance in front of her window every night at exactly the same time. He becomes interested in the girl, infatuated even, following her around and eventually meeting her. She also has another admirer however and while watching her one night through his telescope, Jake sees her murdered by this other man. The police are skeptical about what he claims to have seen, but the case takes an even stranger twist when, while watching adult TV, he sees a porn star do the exact same dance he’d watched for all those nights. He soon realizes he’s been an unwitting accomplice in a complex plot.