{"id":607,"date":"2016-06-02T14:14:43","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T18:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/?p=607"},"modified":"2016-11-09T04:33:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T09:33:09","slug":"preview-quincy-jones-burning-the-light-tonight-on-hbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/2016\/06\/02\/preview-quincy-jones-burning-the-light-tonight-on-hbo\/","title":{"rendered":"Preview: Quincy Jones – Burning the Light Tonight on HBO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat do you do as a dying man when you\u2019re already following your dreams?\u201d That\u2019s the question we hear Quincy Jones ask at the opening of his first stand-up special, Burning the Light<\/em>, which premieres tonight on HBO at 10 PM<\/a>. It was a little less than a year ago, in July of 2015, that Jones was diagnosed with stage four mesothelioma. And if his prognosis at that time had been correct, he\u2019d only have weeks left to live. Instead, he\u2019s still out there doing stand-up, celebrating a career milestone. <\/p>\n

The sentimentality doesn\u2019t last long once Jones hits the stage. He raised a lot of money on Kickstarter to produce this special, based on the fact that he was dying. It\u2019s a lot of pressure, he says. \u201cI can\u2019t live longer than three years with this shit,\u201d he says. \u201cYou blow that far past your goal, they expect a great special and a casket.\u201d He riffs on being the \u201cMagic Johnson of cancer,\u201d living another five years and making everyone wonder if he\u2019s really sick and makes light of his food choices as a chemotherapy patient, comparing himself to a pregnant woman when he\u2019s craving flaming Cheet-ohs and egg nog.<\/p>\n

Jones doesn\u2019t dwell on cancer-related material, but it\u2019s sprinkled through the act. Most of the time, he is addressing more mundane, every day topics like dating, aging, and social media. Even when he sets up a bit with an outrageous statement, usually he backs out of it into much more pedestrian peccadillos. \u201cI figured out how to make genocide work,\u201d he says. The problem is we\u2019ve been doing it by race and religion, and not obnoxiousness. On his list? Pumpkin spice enthusiasts and people who say things like \u201cI prefer their earlier work.\u201d <\/p>\n

He bemoans the search for true love. \u201cLove is so hard that Nicholas Sparks is getting a divorce,\u201d he says. \u201cHe wrote the fucking Notebook, he can\u2019t hack it?\u201d Then he breaks down his chances by the numbers. Seven billion people in the world. Half are religious, and he isn\u2019t. Not all of them are straight, not all of them speak English, not all of them are in LA, which he figures brings him down to about one million. \u201cHere\u2019s the catch, I don\u2019t have a car,\u201d he says. \u201cSo one million\u2019s down to 12. But some of those women are on the bus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if he did find true love, there is another catch. \u201cI have to ask the girl, define \u2018long term\u2019 relationship,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

There are a couple of jabs at racial issues later in the special. He proposes that cops would be less willing to shoot black people if they all carried small dogs. \u201cThen PETA would step and be like, \u2018We have got to stop letting these cops kill these anim- these peop-\u201c He lets the punchline hang there a bit for the audience to digest. Jones details how black people have broken down barriers in sports, music, and even politics. The final frontier? They need a fair shot at being slave masters. <\/p>\n

He closes with a good bit, returning to the cancer theme. The material dealing with his illness is less than a quarter of the special, but I was still surprised it was even that prevalent. When I spoke with Jones for the Boston Globe in February<\/a>, I asked how often he joked about his cancer in his act. He said it depended on the room. A lot of good things had happened to him, a lot of media attention that helped him far outstrip his original Kickstater goal. But he was aware of the subtext of it. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, this is a constant reminder that I\u2019m sick,\u201d he said. \u201cOf all the good things that are happening and how great I feel when I\u2019m on that stage, it\u2019s still a constant reminder of my mortality. So it\u2019s always important for me to just keep things calm and in check.\u201d <\/p>\n

Jones had raised enough money to shoot his special when we originally spoke, but shortly after that he visited The Ellen DeGeneres Show and got the news HBO had picked up his special. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised to see a second special from him. It was already on his mind before he\u2019d even had firm plans for the first. I asked him then what he\u2019d do once he finished the first special. \u201cYou start working on a second hour,\u201d he said. \u201cYou start rebuilding, revising. I feel like you\u2019re never really truly satisfied. There\u2019s always room for improvement and growth.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u201cWhat do you do as a dying man when you\u2019re already following your dreams?\u201d That\u2019s the question we hear Quincy Jones ask at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[322,324,321,323],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedy","tag-ellen-degeneres","tag-hbo","tag-quincy-jones","tag-the-ellen-degeneres-show"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/quincyjonespreview.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7lGwW-9N","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickzaino.com\/departmentoftangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}