Mood Music XIII

The other day, Feministing had a post on an example of one of my favorite musical things (I don't know quite what to call it - subset? subgenre? sub-subgenre?) - male artists covering songs by girl groups.  The analysis of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" gave an interesting read on the role of tone and arrangement in communicating the song's message - the Grizzly Bear cover is hauntingly sad in a way that the Crystals original simply is not. 

I thought I'd share a couple of my favorites of these covers - 

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - I love this arrangement of the song.  Also, in my opinion, Valli's vocal comes across way needier than those of the Shirelle's version, or Carole King's from Tapestry, which I kind of love.

"Remember Walking in the Sand" by Aerosmith - To me, this emphasizes the kind of not-always-obvious influence that girl group music had on musical acts that followed in the later years of rock and roll.  In Walk This Way, Steven Tyler rhapsodizes somewhat at length about his crush on the Shangri-Las' Mary Weiss, who gets honored by this gloriously heavy cover.

If I knew more about looking at music from an academic standpoint, I would totally write about girl group music.  It's easy to write the songs off as fluffy, but many of the men who are credited as rock's greatest singers and songwriters cite them as influences and idolize their singers.  Heck, Please Please Me has three girl group covers.  At the very least, there's the potential for a probing analysis of the gender issues at hand, as is evidenced by Feministing's look at just the one song.

On a semi-related note, they should totally do a Carole King week on American Idol (including her songs written with Gerry Goffin). Between the pop fabulosity of the early songs and the singer-songwriter-y goodness of her seventies work, it would be awesome.

TV Thoughts

I have actively chosen to watch One Tree Hill instead of Heroes, which is just the latest indicator of this TV season's general suckitude.  Generally speaking, I usually give shows I like a lot of leeway when they have dips in quality, but this season I've basically given up on multiple shows mid-season, with only vague intentions of ever catching up. Brothers and Sisters is more or less spinning its wheels, and I have my doubts about the writers using the departure of Balthazar Getty in a dynamic, story-propelling way.  Ugly Betty seems to have regained some of its momentum, but the "Betty gets condemned by her family for having a job and a life of her own" storyline earlier this season was really kind of gross.  The fourth-season finale storyline of the tumor trial resurrected my faith in Grey's Anatomy, which was then squandered by the Denny hallucinations, which started to actively erode the goodwill Shonda Rhimes and co. built up with the stellar second season.  Heroes is just...boring.  

There just seems to be a giant gulf in quality between the really good shows and those that are...less so.  It certainly doesn't help that interesting shows like the cancelled Pushing Daisies or the low-rated, seemingly not long for this world Kings get astonishingly few viewers.  Cable's got most of the good stuff these days, but the narrative control that comes with shorter seasons is offset by months and months between each season.  This past season of Big Love, which concluded last night, was an amazingly multifaceted study of womanhood.  All I could do when it ended was hope that the time it takes for Season Four to come to the screen will be less than a year. (The same goes for Mad Men) ER's run up to its series finale has been history-honoring and heartrending, but that's only because the show is ending.  Similarly, Lost will leave its own void in the schedule when it ends next year.  I want to write about the Battlestar Galactica finale after I've had a chance to watch it again (unlike some critics, my read on it was positive), but again, it's another departure of a quality show. I don't know, I guess I'm just feeling pessimistic about my favorite medium.

On a lighter note (kind of), I've been catching up via DVD with the thoroughly excellent Veronica Mars.  The first season of that show is an unbelievable example of the mystery genre executed nearly flawlessly.  The penultimate episode of that season, "A Trip to the Dentist" is one of my favorite episodes of TV ever, if not the favorite:

Ignore the hateful fishstick commercial.  "A Trip to the Dentist" is show continuity firing on all cylinders, taking the universe constructed around Veronica throughout the season and bringing it all together.  The characters who reappear in the episode all come from their own great one-off Mysteries of the Week, but their place in Veronica's past and present in this episode grounds them in the world of Neptune High in this mind-blowing sort of way.  Additionally, I was a die-hard member of the small minority of the show's fans who preferred Duncan to Logan, and the scene where Veronica confronts Duncan remains amazing, even after I've seen this episode who knows how many times (it's also probably Teddy Dunn's best scene in his entire run on the show) Add to that the final creepy-video-room clue to the Lilly Kane mystery, and this episode just becomes legendary.  As good as "Leave It to Beaver," the finale that follows with the epic Aaron Echolls reveal, is, it pales in comparison to "A Trip to the Dentist."

This ended up much longer than I thought it would.  I'm trying to get back into writing semi-regularly - Spring Break caused an unfortunate complication since my computer and the wireless router at home don't get along with one another.  I've got plans, though. April, I think, will be good.

Quoted V

"Is that the devil?"

-Tina Fey, on Robert Pattinson, in a shot of them sitting behind Mickey Rourke at the Oscars

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, March 4

Random Film/Music Observation

This song came up on my shuffle this morning as I was waking up:

A fun wake-up, to be sure. However, it's kind of depressing to me that it seems quaint that only fifteen years ago, there was the perceived need to shield kids from the word "farted." Fart humor has become so prevalent these days that this joke seems unbelievably subtle.

Mood Music XII

Over the weekend, I was watching American Graffiti - a film with a seriously excellent soundtrack, which reminded me how bitchin this song is:

Right now I'm watching some concert special of the reunited Police on PBS (stalling instead of washing my dishes or reading for class) and trying to restrain myself from buying a greatest hits compilation - I'm really, really trying to curtail the impulse shopping. Even Sting sounded a little jumbled singing "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic," which just reinforces my feeling that it is not a good song for people to sing on American Idol. (I mean, seriously. Who thinks to themselves, "I must impress America with my vocal talents! But what song should I use to ensure my survival in this vote-based competition? I know! "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic!") Just because it's a good song doesn't mean that it will serve you in that capacity. Which is a long winded way of saying, I haven't heard this one yet, but I'm hoping to:

That one time a couple of years ago when the Idol weekly theme was something like "Gwen Stefani's favorite songs, and also some that she sang" and it was a seemingly random mix of No Doubt, the Police and, like, Cyndi Lauper songs, the one that stood out as well-chosen was whoever sang "Every Breath You Take." (Phil, the bald one who was in the military, whose last name I can't remember and can't be bothered to Google) The "ohhhh, can't you seeeeeee" actually does work as a vocal showcase.

Commercials

It's a little ridiculous, but the line "I'd get it myself, but I don't have thumbs!" cracks me up every time I see this.

On February

All in all, I think I did a pretty fair job. Out of twenty-eight days, I missed posting on two calendar days, but ultimately ended up with more than twenty-eight posts for the month. I think for the future, I'll try to stay consistent, but won't beat myself up about missing a day. I have high hopes for the pop-culture ramblings yet to come.

No. 100

This is my hundredth post. I guess I'm ready for syndication now. I started writing here about three years ago, but it's only recently that it's really worked as an outlet for thinking and writing, as a sort of supplement to all the academic reading and writing I've been doing. I hope the new rate of writing means that number 200 will come within the next six months - I'd like to write more, think more critically, and work on developing my voice. As always, it's a work in progress.

Idle Thoughts

I'm watching The Black List on HBO, and I just wanted to observe that someone should totally make a movie about Suzanne DePasse. Documentary, fiction, whatever - it's something that's sort of occurred to me before, but watching her speak for just a few minutes really brought it home.  She ends up being somewhat of a bit player in the TV biopics about Motown groups like the Jackson 5, but she just seems so ballsy and awesome, and she started out young and gained so much power in a field where Black women don't often have much. Just sending that thought out into the universe.

edited to add: Jezebel posted clips from the show, including Ms. DePasse.

Stalling

I really really have to read this book by tomorrow, and it is just not happening. I read the first ten or so pages on Monday morning, and it was so mind-blowingly dull that I haven't been able to bring myself to open it again. Seriously - I got back from class this morning around 11:30 and have done NOTHING productive since then. I: made coffee, which ended farcically when I dropped the cap from my half and half and saw it roll under the fridge - attempts at retrieval with the handle of my Swiffer were unsuccessful, so now I need a new carton of half and half on top of everything else; watched the second season of Extras, today's and yesterday's As the World Turns and The Amazing Race from Sunday; wrote notes to send to my friends through the physical mail; messed around with an iTunes playlist that I'm thinking of making into a mix for the car; surfed around the Internet for hours; ate some mini bagels and dried pineapple, leftover pasta and cookies I made over the weekend (in addition to my daily allotment from the 5-lb bag of Haribo Twin Cherries I crazily bought off of Amazon - I need to cool it with the shopping, I have bought so much shit that I seriously don't need over the last month. For real, the upside of not being romantically interested in anyone is that I'm not crazy all the time, but the downside is that the craziness gets replaced by boredom, and somehow my solution to boredom has become shopping. Like, there's a recession on. Not to mention that I'm convinced that all this sugar is making me pre-diabetic. What the fuck is wrong with me?); drank some wine while gazing intermittently into my fridge and trying to think up a dinner, ultimately settling on more leftover pasta; watched The Biggest Loser, Obama's speech, the rerun of The Office that came on after Obama's speech, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; contemplated hunting and killing this crazy-ass giant centipede thing that I keep seeing crawling on the walls - I have these stark white walls because I never got my act together enough to hang the stuff I have on my walls, which really puts bugs into sharp relief when they start circuiting the apartment - right now, it's either in the bathroom or the bedroom somewhere, and I really want to just locate and smite it because otherwise I will have no inner peace - most of the time I like it here, but sometimes I hate living in the middle of the fucking woods. 

That all seems like a terribly sad thirteen hours laid out like that.

So now I need to wash my dishes and find/beat the life out of that bug and try to read a little of this book before I go to sleep and try again tomorrow. I don't know - every time I look at it, the mental block grows stronger. I have to read it. I have to. I'm supposed to present a summary and questions to my class, and I can't even fathom the ridiculousness that would ensue if this class were to proceed without guideposts.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will tackle you, book with the cover that makes you look self-published and shady. I will soldier on through your 200 pages, present in class, and return to my apartment, collapse, watch Lost, probably eat McDonalds because when I'm driving home from this class at 8:30, the siren song of the drive-through is usually too powerful for me to resist, plan my weekend, and generally get my life in order.

One of my professors keeps recommending keeping a journal, and I'm pretty sure she means about our academic work, but sometimes a self-involved rant like this is really cathartic. 

Disappointing

The news that Defamer is being folded into Gawker was really a letdown.  For quite a while, Defamer has been one of my first-surfed links of the day - their broader focus on the entertainment industry has never been quite as insider-y as Gawker's coverage of New York. I understand the financial constraints that are making these kinds of changes necessary for Gawker as a media conglomerate; it just seems like they're dismissing entities with fan bases that are devoted, even if they're small. I'll stick around for the blind items, but if the writing's not there, there's not much of a draw, day-to-day.

Random TV Observation

Watching Zeljko Ivanek on Heroes just makes me miss Ray Fiske on Damages. So many shows have turned into major disappointments this season. 

Oscar Thoughts

7:33 - E!s "Glamastrator," where they pause pictures of actresses in their gowns and virtually write on them Madden-style, is insanely ridiculous

7:34 - OK, Seacrest gets points for asking Ron Howard about the Arrested Development movie

7:40 - E! keeps showing Jessica Biel, which makes me hope against hope that Justin Timberlake will somehow be a part of the sure-to-be batshit crazy "tribute to middling musicals of 2008" involving Amanda Seyfried, Dominic Cooper, Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron

8:01 - Switched to ABC's pre-show. Tim Gunn and Robin Roberts are probably going to make the E! staff seem unbelievably simple

8:11 - Mickey Rourke is BREAKING MY HEART talking about his dog

8:15 - I was wrong - the essence of red carpet banter is vacuousness, regardless of who's delivering it

8:25 - Ooh, Michael Giacchino is doing the music for the show. I wonder if he'll get to do one of his Abrams-y "something mad creepy is going to happen right....NOW!" cues

8:34 - I know I wished for Hugh Jackman to sing, but I meant, like, a real song.

8:44 - I am rare among viewers in loving the montages and the acknowledgements of Oscar history, but I fail to see how this "past winners honor the nominees" deal is going to result in anything but a ceremony that ends at 1:00

9:03 - Jennifer Aniston presenting! Can she make it in front of Brad and Angelina without having a nervous collapse? The readership of People magazine waits with bated breath!

9:05 - The animation montage just made me realize that I completely forgot about the terrible-looking Horton Hears a Who movie. Also, those off-brand movies about animals in space.

9:14 - I'm becoming progressively more and more committed to catching a rerun of Big Love. Even with their "Don't Miss This One! Really! We Mean It!" ads, HBO was fighting a losing battle there, programming-wise.

9:25 - Okay, Rob Pattinson and Amanda Seyfried. Not bad, not bad.

9:26 - TWIIIILIIIIIIGHT!!!

9:39 - Ah, Biel was the tech awards hostess. I'm still holding out for JT, though.

9:41 - The Soloist looks mad cheesy, but I've loved Joe Wright's films so far. I'm torn. The delay on that film getting to the screen doesn't inspire confidence, either.

9:47 - As a Freaks and Geeks fan, it is thrilling to me to see James Franco and Seth Rogen presenting an Oscar together. 

9:53 - CRACKED-OUT MUSICAL NUMBER!!! BEYONCE!!! YESSSS!!!

9:56 - The phrase "hot mess" should be retired from thus forth, because there's never going to be anything else that will embody it more than this insane musical medley. "The musical is back!" Jackman just proclaimed. The subtext - "and then we killed it again!"

10:03 - This "past winners" mode of award distribution seems like something that someone would describe after having a near-death experience - being greeted by your forbears, welcoming you to the great beyond. On a related note - Joel Grey!

10:19 - I'm having doubts about them getting all the sound awards (plus editing and visual effects) AND the Big Four AND the tribute to Jerry Lewis done in the space of an hour. Even with these super-short commercial breaks. Especially if Rahman and Co. are doing performances of the Slumdog songs.

10:37 - No wonder these shows are dropping ratings year by year. On a fundamental level, there's very little you can do to dress up the part of the Oscars that is deeply dull for anyone outside the industry (and probably a few inside, too)

10:40 - Does In the Motherhood have an interracial couple? That would be kind of revolutionary for network TV.

10:52 - Okay, maybe not revolutionary, but different from a vast percentage of TV couples. And different in being involved from the get-go rather than over the course of the show. It's music time right now. I'm not gonna lie, I'm bored.

10:53 - Either Alicia Keys is tall, or Zac Efron is short. They look about the same height, which I wouldn't have thought would be the case. Maybe Vanessa Hudgens is tiny, though.

11:00 - The dancers with the Slumdog songs make me miss bygone days of undergrad watching South Asian cultural shows with my friends. Also - no MIA! Her baby was like, "you can do either the Grammys OR the Oscars, Mom."

11:04 - Maybe I was wrong about the timing. The question is - is the extended past winners presentation only for the actors, or for directors, too? Spielberg's there - maybe...

11:09 - I know he does Top Chef, so maybe I'm being nitpicky, but something seems wildly insincere about Tom Colicchio shilling for Diet Coke. Maybe it's because Mark Bittman is so wildly opposed to artificial sweeteners in How to Cook Everything. Maybe it's because Diet Coke, which is, like, entirely chemicals, is almost the opposite of real food, except you can ingest it. I don't know.

11:15 - Even the In Memoriam segment wasn't terribly well-executed. Instead of allowing the clips to go full-screen, the camera swooped schizophrenically around the stage, often rendering the names and occupations of the featured people illegible. Fail.

11:19 - Reese Witherspoon is presenting Best Director - does this mean she's not going to be part of the "Best Actress nominees - THIS IS YOUR FUTURE!"?

11:48 - Ah, Spielberg does Best Picture. Another montage?

11:53 - And Slumdog Millionaire wins. Eh. I haven't seen them all, so I don't have an informed opinion. I'm not surprised. But I liked Milk more.

Hmmm...

I'd like to semi-live blog, if I can figure it out. Probably not, though. We'll see. Maybe it will just be my own shady insertion of timestamps, instead of any technological means.

Oscars!

I'm excited about the Oscars tomorrow - I love awards shows of all media genres, and even when the Oscars are boring, or in one of those stretches where they're handing out lots of technical awards, they are still super-glam. Hugh Jackman was a fab Tony host, and he should be a welcome change from the more traditional comedian-host. I have two wishes for the Oscar ceremony. One is probable, one less so.

1) Hugh Jackman sings.

Dancing, it seems, is already in order:

Singing seems likely. I certainly hope so - he's got a great voice.

SOMEONE GIVE THAT MAN A SCREEN MUSICAL!

2) Dev Patel and Robert Pattinson present an award together. This is mainly shallow - I'd kind of like to see if the confluence of my two major pop culture obsessions of the last six months would make my head explode after I squeal with glee. Adorable-osity, British accents - MAKE IT HAPPEN, OSCARS!