"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Friday, December 09, 2011

I am SO glad I don't actually watch this show
Posted by Jill | 8:57 PM
I realize that if you're going to be part of the zeitgeist in America today, you have to watch all of these competition shows. The problem is, I'm over here still listening to the Allman Bros. Band and even Green day; and I also like Railroad Earth and Leftover Salmon and the Flecktones (four of the best damn musicians you will ever hear) and Hot Tuna (who are playing at the Beacon Theatre this weekend, and if you didn't get to see any of last winter's shows with Charlie Musselwhite and G.E. Smith, and you're in the New York area, GO!). I like swing. I like bluegrass until they start singing "I'm going to heaven and you're not because I love Jesus and you don't" through their noses. I love black gospel music because it feels like praise and joy and not like smugness and elitism the way white gospel does. I love Motown. I love 1920's jazz as rendered by Bix and Tram and Satchmo and Sidney Bechet. I love acoustic blues and electric blues and the blues shouting of Wynonie Harris. I love the music from Tin Pan Alley that collectors are thankfully digitizing from old 78s and Edison cylinders. My musical taste is far and wide and eclectic. And if it doesn't include hip-hop, well, I'm 56 years old and I guess that's just going to have to be my excuse.

What I don't care for is what I think of as current pop music -- the stuff purveyed on talent shows like American Idol and Simon Cowell's Fall 2011 entry which I keep thinking of as the Rollerball of talent shows, The X Factor. I would have had ZERO interest in this show were it not for a promo that ran during The Simpsons one night in which a girl who was just a kid was belting out "Mercy", sounding like the love child of Janis Joplin and Axl Rose. And I was utterly blown away. This must be what it must have been like for the people at Island Records hearing Amy Winehouse for the first time, long before she became a hot mess.

Of course I have my pride, so it's not like I was going to sit there for two hours a week watching a parade of cookie-cutter shrei-ing pop divas trying to be the next Mariah or Whitney or Britney or Beyonce or Rihanna -- those overproduced divas who to my aged ears are completely and utterly interchangeable. But as little Rachel Crow, the chubby Betty Boop-faced kid with the infectious grin, the heartwarming backstory, and the ferocious confidence, charmed her way through this weekly mess of American decadence, growing as a singer even while we watched, it was hard not to get sucked in.

And I'm so glad I didn't (well, not too much). Because for all that Rachel Crow has the heart and soul and voice of a long-downtrodden blues singer, I'm not sure I could have watched her be eliminated this week.

The entertainment industry is littered with kids who starred early and flamed out quickly. For every Leonardo DiCaprio there are twenty River Phoenixes and Corey Haims. For every Justin Timberlake there are twenty Britney Spearses. And the trainwreck that was Michael Jackson is in a league by himself. So it's probably a blessing in disguise to not score a $5 million record constract at thirteen, I don't care how centered and sane her family seems to be. But while Rachel Crow may be able to sing like Etta James, this image:



...drives home that this is still a very little girl. The talent is there. The opportunities will come. There's too much money to be made off this kid for them not to.

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Saturday, February 26, 2011

We're #1? In what, assholes per square mile? Willful ignorance?
Posted by Jill | 4:48 PM
26 troubling stats about the United States, from The Opinionated Liberal:

1. Has the seventh largest debt (as a percentage of GDP).

2. USA Ranking on Adult Literacy Scale: #9
(#1 Sweden and #2 Norway)- OECD

3. USA Ranking on Healthcare Quality Index: #37
(#1 France and #2 Italy)- World Health Organization 2003

4. USA Ranking of Student Reading Ability: #12
(#1 Finland and #2 South Korea)- OECD PISA 2003

5. USA Ranking of Student Problem Solving Ability: #26
(#1 South Korea and #2 Finland)- OECD PISA 2003

6. USA Ranking on Student Mathematics Ability: # 24
(#1 Hong Kong and #2 Finland)- OECD PISA 2003

7.USA Ranking of Student Science Ability: #19
(#1 Finland and #2 Japan)- OECD PISA 2003

8. USA Ranking on Women's Rights Scale: #17
(#1 Sweden and #2 Norway)- World Economic Forum Report

9. USA Position on Timeline of Gay Rights Progress: # 6 (1997)
(#1 Sweden 1987 and #2 Norway 1993)- Vexen

10. USA Ranking on Life Expectancy: #29
(#1 Japan and #2 Hong Kong)- UN Human Development Report 2005

11. USA Ranking on Journalistic Press Freedom Index: #32
(#1 Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands tied)- Reporters Without Borders
2005

12. USA Ranking on Political Corruption Index: #17
(#1 Iceland and #2 Finland)- Transparency International 2005

13. USA Ranking on Quality of Life Survey: #13
(#1 Ireland and #2 Switzerland)- The Economist Magazine ...Wikipedia "Celtic
Tiger" if you still have your doubts.

14. USA Ranking on Environmental Sustainability Index: #45
(#1 Finland and #2 Norway)- Yale University ESI 2005

15. USA Ranking on Overall Currency Strength: #3 (US Dollar)
(#1 UK pound sterling and #2 European Union euro)- FTSE 2006....the dollar is now
a liability, so many banks worldwide have planned to switch to euro

16. USA Ranking on Infant Mortality Rate: #32
(#1 Sweden and #2 Finland)- Save the Children Report 2006

17. USA Ranking on Human Development Index (GDP, education, etc.): #10
(#1 Norway and #2 Iceland)- UN Human Development Report 2005

(Source for numbers 2-17 here)

18. A national unemployment level of 9.6% (Google)

19. 10th largest per-capita GDP (CIA)

20. 110th in unemployment (CIA)

21. 34th overall in literacy (CIA, 2009)

22. 12% poverty rate (CIA)

23. #1 in oil consumption by almost 3-to-1 over #2 but only 3rd in oil production (CIA)

24. Largest external debt (CIA)

25. More military spending than the rest of the world combined (Source here)

26. Highest obesity rate in the world : 30.6% (source here)

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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Heroine of Normal-Sized People Everywhere
Posted by Jill | 7:35 PM

American Icon? THIS?
You gotta be shitting me.


I'm not exaggerating when I say that I'm hardly MTV's demographic. I'd argue that I wasn't MTV's demographic back when we were watching the videos for "Sledgehammer" and "Take On Me" and "Losing My Religion." But when you don't have kids, you think you can stay relevant. Later on you learn to use new words like n00b and say w00t! in text messages and talk about how someone gow pwn3d, in the hope that makes you still a cool, happening sorta old person.

But I draw the line at Jersey Shore.

In the Beginning

The Italian-American zeitgeist is nothing new. If "colorful Jews" dominated radio in the pre-television era, "colorful Italians" have dominated pop culture for the last thirty or so years. It all started with The Godfather, as the murderous Clemenza could be forgiven anything because of his immortal line, "Leave the gun...take the cannoli." Later in the 1970's, the gangsters of Francis Ford Coppola gave way to a younger group of Italian-Americans.

Mr. Brilliant used to joke about the whole Saturday Night Fever/disco thing by calling it "To be young, stupid, and have no future." John Travolta's Tony Manero was the proto-Situation; a heavy-featured Italian guy, inarticulate, boorish, oversexed, vain. At least Tony Manero could dance.

The cultural touchstone of the last decade was indisputably The Sopranos. The genius of David Chase's vision was how he was able to make people in the flyover states actually CARE about a large cast of extremely unappealing characters who exemplify the WORST of Italian-American cultural stereotypes. Is The Situation just the latest manifestatio of Michael Imperioli's Christopher Moltisanti? Is J-Woww the reincarnation of the poor, doomed Adriana, the original Guidette? And how the hell do I know who these people are, anyway?

Once you get past Jackie Mason, the Jewish stereotype has largely fallen by the wayside. Sure, there are comics like Marc Maron who still play to the "Jewy thing" to some degree, but Jews have become so assimilated into goyische life that we now have a generation of Kaitlyn Goldbergs and Ryan Liebowitzes. Why assimilation today means that every baby is Irish, I have no idea. But there's a certain rough Italian-American archetype that still captures the imagination. Everywhere. You can't fucking get away from it. And that is why, despite the fact that I have never seen the show, I know who Snooki is.

Pay Attention To Me!

Last Sunday she was the focus of a Mean Girl article in the New York Times style section, which referred to Nicole Polizzi as "a berserk windup toy" and alluded to some possible retardation:
...she doesn’t exhibit normal levels of self-control for a woman her age. Her father, referring to her antics on “Jersey Shore,” said, “It’s not an act she’s putting on,” and as if to prove that, he described a recent visit by Snooki to his office: “Instead of standing at the counter and saying, ‘Can I speak to my father?’ she walks in and goes, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ And people are looking at her. It’s not an act. It’s just the way she is.


Now, I've never seen Jersey Shore, but the minute I saw "4-foot 9 inch" in that article, I immediately started thinking about how, on a show full of tall, busty, sharp-featured girls who are the living embodiment of what Richard Price described in his 1974 debut novel The Wanderers:
She was about sixteen and had jet black hair piled high on her head. She had a nice figure, as much as he could see, and her face was Cunty Italian -- small dark features, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a lot of eye makeup.

...it's the ridiculously short chick with the kind of body that went out of style after WWII if it ever WAS in style, who's the breakout star of this show? As someone who only has maybe an inch and a half in height on young Snooki, I have to admit to a certain fascination with the way she's treated in the media, and even a certain soupçon of satisfaction that someone who is, as a former fellow vertically-challenged co-worker used to say, "a normal-sized person," is the one everyone's talking about.

From press accounts, she's dumb, loud, vulgar, childish, with an outsize personality, albeit largely a lousy one. But in a peculiar way I can relate to that. Because when you're less than five feet tall, you often have to be loud in order to have people recognize that you exist. It isn't so much that we want attention (well, most of us, anyway; Miss Polizzi seems to be an insatiable need machine), we just don't want to be jostled in the subway, bullied on the roads, and in general treated as if we don't even exist just because the tops of our heads are below the eye level of a good chunk of the American public. So we have to do something to let the world know that we're here, or else we find ourselves, as I did in our local pizzeria one night, trying to pick up a pizza with the counter so high they can't see you, while people behind me in line get waited on so I'm reduced to shouting, "Hey, am I fucking invisible or something?" This is not the sort of thing that sounds normal coming out of the mouth of a fortysomething (at the time) self-styled Jewish intellectual. But out of someone called "Snooki"? Pure gold.

I cringe at the idea that Jersey Shore is how not just the rest of the country, but the world, sees Americans. But for all her vulgarity, you've got to admire someone with a nickname that sounds like the dog down the street, doesn't give a rat's ass what you say about her height, her ridiculous hooters, her thighs. or her awful taste in clothes. And while I realize that all this is starting to make me sound alarmingly like Camille Paglia, I say to Snooki, go get 'em. Take their money and wear what you want and tell everyone who doesn't like it to go fuck themselves. Do it for all of us who get pushed around and called Little Napoleon and have to have 10" of fabric cut off everything we buy. Because we are not short, and we are not fireplugs, and we are not the Lollipop Guild. We are normal-size people. It's the rest of you out there with inseams longer than 26" who are the freaks.

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Monday, March 01, 2010

Hey, Evan Lysacek! You've just won an Olympic Gold Medal! What're you going to do now?
Posted by Jill | 10:24 PM
It's enough to make you long for the days of Disneyland. Unless they partner him with Niecy Nash, I say the hell with it.

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