Good Morning Starshine

I once saw, in the days of print media when such things were much more impressive, this song topping some humorist’s list of the most terrible songs ever recorded. To be specific, this was in the nineties, the humorist was Dave Barry, and he dedicated several columns to exploring what the called “the issue of song badness”. In those days when most people still read their humor columns on paper, a column that someone had taken the trouble to type and publish still had some semblance of credibility, even if the author was Dave Barry. Personally, I loved Barry’s column and agreed with most of his opinions on song badness. But it was a little shocking to find a song that I’d always adored considered one of the all-time worst. With a little thought though, I had to admit, Good Morning Starshine is pretty retarded. Lyrically and musically it not only fails to reach the wit and thoughtfulness of James Rado and Jerome Ragni’s other work, but doesn’t even reach the high standards required by some of the lesser Muppets. But such objective critical question aside, it still somehow never fails to make me happy. Perhaps because Hair is such a great movie that anything associated with it is bathed in reflected affection, or because its own shameless silliness is inherently charming in and of itself, but Good Morning Starshine might be the best bad song we all love to sing along to.

1,001

Speaking of great albums…I’ve stumbled upon this thing called 1,001 [Things] to [Experience] Before You Die. Things in this case being albums to hear. (Other titles include books to read and movies to watch.) So, of course, I was curious. I downloaded not the whole schmeer but a random chunk of it, comprising a period between 1978 and 1982. And I’ve been torturing myself with it ever since. Right now I’m on number 435 on the list, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music (I started at 401.) I’ve learned a few things, for sure. First, AC/DC is just as intolerable to me as ever, but now I can boldly say that I’m not just basing that judgement on the intolerability of one single but a whole album’s worth of intolerability. Obviously, the records I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones by artists I was already all into, like Springsteen’s Darkness On the Edge of Town; This Year’s Model by Elvis Costello; Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo; and The Cars’ eponymous debut. This being the punk era, there’s a lot of punk/post punk on the list. The punks, from The Adverts to X-Ray Spex, all sound boringly the same. There’s also the realization that the reason I can’t get on board with Van Halen or Willie Nelson isn’t because of the music, which on its own merits isn’t all that bad, but just because I feel no attraction towards their respective personalities. There are interesting questions that arise. It does make sense that if you have to listen to an album of pure disco, you might as well make it Chic or Sister Sledge. But who decided that Willie Colon and Ruben Blades‘ Siembra is the only salsa album I have to ever hear before I die? The biggest surprise so far is how much I enjoyed Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous, the fun in which is how much it reminds me of Spinal Tap. So, that’s my ongoing experiment in listening to supposedly great albums by people I otherwise wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.

Billie Jean

Guess who died a year ago today. Yeah. That makes it the first time in over two decades that admitting you like Billie Jean is not a humiliating embarrassment. Funny how that works. Michael Jackson had to die and stay dead for a while before everyone could just admit that his whole life was a gigantic trainwreck which anyone with a little decency should have averted their eyes from,  but nobody did, because it was ghoulishly entertaining, and as a direct result a poor fucked up kid got the life sucked out of him in front of  a schadenfruede-happy world. The moral lesson is, among other things, sometimes having unlimited material resources does more harm than good. It’s no revelation that Jackson had a traumatic childhood. If only he’d had some incentive to try and fit the mold and become a productive member of society – i.e. someone with a regular job, a boss to answer to, a circle of non-sycophant acquaintances, etc –  perhaps he would’ve sucked it up, gone into therapy, and dealt with it like normal people do. Instead of having the freedom to disappear so completely into a world of his own making that he was naive enough to think it was ok for a middle aged man to have sleepovers with other people’s children. Just saying. Anyhow, it is now officially safe to stop treating your Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits cd like it was porno and bring it out from wherever you’ve been hiding it all these years.

Cold War

Ever wonder why concept albums went out of style? This is why. When the likes of Styx decided their music needed more big ideas, suddenly big ideas didn’t seem so cool anymore. In 1983 Styx made Kilroy Was Here, their idea of a rock opera, with a heavy concept intersecting themes of fascism, dystopia, personal freedom, and robots. There was a big tour, in which the performance was prefaced with the showing of a thirty-minute film detailing the aforementioned heavy conceptry. The album did give the world the ridiculous and ridiculously good single Mr Roboto. Thoroughly silly as it may all seem, the band seemed to take the project quite seriously, which of course only made them look sillier. I heard they actually got boo’ed and heckled when they brought it to Texas. From watching this video, they do appear to be playing with straight faced conviction (Tommy Shaw looks like Napoleon Dynamite). They’re awfully close to Spinal Tap territory, unwittingly driving the nail into the coffin of the rock opera. That said, I absolutely love Styx. They are so silly and cheesy and uncool and so good. Styx kicks Rush’s ass every time!

Alejandro

I need to come out of the closet about something. I’ve been keeping a lid on it for a long time and I just need to let it out. I hope you can still respect me. Here goes… I really like Lady Gaga!

She makes music that should be awful by any standards; loud, dumb, electronic, crudely sexual, etc. And yet, it’s it is not awful. It is awesome. I’m not sure how seriously I can take her claims that the brainlessness of her songs is all an ironic pose. Maybe it’s an ironic post-modernist re-conception of mindless dance music. Maybe it’s just really good mindless dance music. Either way, she’s some kind of genius. Her songs are so additively catchy that I actually feel happy when Bad Romance comes on the radio for the eighth time in one day. She’s also got a great voice. What I really admire is that she’s transformed herself from averagely nice looking girl to superhuman ‘fame monster’. Gaga really grasps the importance of image. She uses fashion to create performance art, with herself as the canvas. That alone qualifies her as a genuine badass rock star.

Born in the USA

This is something of a guilty pleasure for me. I’m somewhat divided in my feelings for Bruce Springsteen. On one hand I enjoy his music. On the other hand, I’m really turned off by the whole “Working Class Hero” cultishness that surrounds him. I realy, really feel embarassed to be caught listening to this little number. It’s so misconstrued as a flag-waving anthem for bandanna-loving jackasses from Joisey. If you actually wake up from your beer coma and listen to the lyrics you’ll find the attitude to be a little south of  ”America, fuck yeah!” There is a thoughtful message there that life in America can be fucking tough. That’s a big part of the song’s appeal to me, besides the sinfully catchy chorus. I hope that’s the appeal for a lot of other people as well.

I finally read Twilight…

…Just to see what all the fuss is about.

To my shame, I am now on the second book, New Moon. And, yes I plan to slog through all of them. But only because I want to get to the part where they finally have sex.

The sad fact is, Stephanie Meyer is a terrible writer. Her prose is bland and excruciatingly repetitive. How many times in one book do we need to be reminded that Edward is ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect’? He is a vampire. Vampires are beautiful and perfect. We get it.

But, because Meyer isn’t aiming very high, she squarely hits her target.  Despite her shortcomings, Meyer understands how a girl’s heart works. She understands the intensity of first love, the confusing, maddening emotions, the insecurity and hesitation, the excitement, the thought consuming obsessing, the mood swings, the fear, the dizzy happiness, and the blase, sarcastic front required to hide all those.  The book is unapolgetic wish-fullfillment, designed to appeal to the universal (excruciatingly repetitive) female fantasy of being the chosen one. Who doesn’t want to be singled out by the most extraordinary, beautiful and perfect male in the vicinity, who also happens to be a perfect gentleman and superhuman being? Besides all that, Meyer has also found a way to take the act of courtship and make it fresh. In the great (non-excruciatingly repetitive) romantic novels of Austin and the Brontes, courtship was all-important. Lovers had the full weight of society to keep them apart. Every gesture, every touch, every moment together was momentous. Nowadays, at least in the eyes of pop culture, young lovers have nothing to stop them freely experimenting, embarking on ‘starter marriages’, and wantonly hooking up. Meyer’s strength is the realization that most girls’ experience is closer, at least emotionally, to the old standards than the new oversexed media image. So Meyer has concocted a love story in which hand-holding is meaningful, the first kiss is an epic milestone, and desire is appropriately fraught with fear and hesitation. And it’s unapologetically, deliciously romantic. What’s that old saying? There are no bad books, only badly written ones.

Yeah and I watched the movie also. I was a little disappointed, I expected something better from Catherine Hardwicke, who’d directed the scary and electrifying Thirteen. But it wasn’t as bad as I could have feared, but even fluffier and less substantial than the books. In the book most of the dramatic tension is in Bella’s head. We listen to her excruciatingly repetitive thoughts as she obsesses and broods. The internal monologue is compelling enough to disguise the fact that not very much actually happens until the very end. The movie dutifully hits the highlights with choice bits of dialogue, and all the most important scenes. However without the benefit of an excruciatingly repetitive narrative voice, these events don’t add up to very much. It’s a video reenactement of the book, nothing more. If Kristen Stewart was less limited in the acting ability department some of the emotional impact of the book would have survived, but her thespian arsenal consists mostly of blinking a lot. It’s not entirely her fault, since whoever wrote the adaptation was so concerned with finding all the scenes in which things actually happen, that they forgot to give Bella time to do what she does so much in the book , which is sit and think. Perhaps a more emotionally transparent actress, given some good close-up time could have made the movie a little less shallow. It’s lucky that Edward, being an enigmatic vampire, is supposed to be a bit of a blank slate, so Robert Pattinson with his sanpaku eyes can glower romanically and call it a day.

So, to my shame, I did enjoy the book, and didn’t hate the movie. The whole franchise is brain-candy for little girls, but hightly effective at that. Oh did I mention the excruciatingly repetitive prose? It’s exruciatingly repetitive!

I know some of you people (and you know who you are) are eagerly awaiting my verdict on the most important question of all. The answer is yes. Pattinson is hot. Maybe someday he’ll make a good movie.

I’m such a sellout…

…I’m reading Twilight. I just want to see what all the fuss is about. I like vampires. I want to like something popular – just to prove the rule. And guess what – so far I’m liking it.

Am I Sexy?

This song is by 90s techno band Lords of Acid, whom I know nothing about. Sorry.

I secretly like rave music, techno, electronica etc, but I don’t know much about it. Since music that’s built on beats and samples tends to sound pretty anonymous there doesn’t seem to be any point in finding out who all the bands are. Anyway I found this track on some promotional compilation cd – the best of acid house or some such. Maybe soon I’ll get to go to a real rave, not one in somebody’s basement.

welcome to tv land

For a long time I’ve been hearing about these things called ‘shows’ and ‘series’ that ‘broadcast’ on ‘television’. I decided to find out what those things are. Apparently, a show is broadcast on its parent channel at a specific time on a specific day, and its viewship is somehow measured for ‘ratings’. I noticed that a so-called half-hour show is only 20 minutes long, while an hour-long show clocks in at about 40 minutes. It turns out that that extra time is filled with things called ‘commercials’, which are supposed to make you want to buy stuff but which actually make you want to kill yourself. To me, an e-person, this systems looks as ungainly as a dodo. Why would someone tune it at a particular time every week to catch an episode when they know that a) the episode will be rebroadcast ad nauseaum throughout the following millenium, b) if they wait a couple of weeks they can stream it online with 90% less commercial interruption, and c) if they wait a few month they can buy or rent it on DVD with no commercials at all? I don’t get it.

What I do get is being able to watch just about any show on Hulu for free. I just took in the new season of ‘South Park’ and now I’m tackling ‘Lost’ Season 1. That show makes no sense, but it’s pretty addictive. And it has Dom Monaghan, and we uphold our vows to support LOTR veterans in all that they do. Seriously, Dom is the best thing on that show, for real.