Those of us who stuck with Marc Maron during those brutal days long ago when he was getting fired from Air America three times have been hoping for something like this ever since. Yes, folks, the human version of Henri le Chat Noir (only without the French and the fur, though there will be cats) is coming to IFC in May.

Labels: Comedians, comedy, Marc Maron, pop culture, television

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched Sunday night's episode of Downton Abbey, wait to read the below until you do.

Really, Julian? I mean really? Seriously?

After I've spent nearly a half-season steeling myself for the moment when Matthew tires of Lord Grantham, who in Season 3 has turned into the biggest asshole in the countryside, hits him over the head with the candlestick in the library with the help of Colonel Mustard and is then murdered in prison by Bates' roommate, thereby freeing Dan Stevens to, I don't know, perhaps take over the role of Elder Price in The Book of Mormon, THIS is what you do? I mean we knew that Dan Stevens had tired of wearing a tuxedo all the time and was moving on after this season, so whether he is killed off or goes off to play a footman in a musical review, it will be anticlimactic anyway.

We'd even heard rumblings that Maggie Smith had had quite enough of the Dowager Countess, though Cousin Violet may be the best role Smith has had in her entire career, and while the costumes are unwieldy, how could anyone give up a role where you get lines like these:







But from what I hear, old Maggie can be a bit cranky, so I just figured that the Dowager Countess would be keeling over any minute.

But Sibyl? The lovely Sibyl, she of the harem pants and the sweet disposition and the adorable mini-baby-bump? Sibyl, the heart and soul of the Grantham family -- the only one of the three Grantham sisters that one might actually want to know in real life?

Julian, how could you? And in CHILDBIRTH no less? Is this what you think well-born ladies who marry below their class deserve? A gruesome death from eclampsia? At least the unfortunate Lavinia Swire got to expire prettily at the end of Series 2 in a mist from a partcularly generous spray bottle with nothing seemingly amiss but a lack of mascara.

I've put up with a lot of hooey from you. No suspension of disbelief is enough to compensate for Matthew's miraculous recovery from his manhood-ending war injury, or of O'Brien's nefarious architecting of miscarriage-by-soap, or Lavinia's father leaving all his money to Matthew because even though he treated old Reg's daughter so shabbily, he's a good chap who deserves to be left a fortune anyway. I've also put up with a lot of how you've treated your women characters, aside from the Great Dowager. Poor Edith. I mean, Edith hasn't always been the nicest person; after all, writing the Turkish Ambassador to regale him with the details of his son's demise from Mary the Ice Princess' obviously-not-icy nether quarters. But to have her jilted at the altar was just plain cruel. To leave the lovely Anna moping around for half a season, playing a kind of downstairs Debra Morgan? Can O'Brien really be that evil? And poor Daisy...can't you give the poor dumb girl a LITTLE happiness? At least you haven't killed off Mrs. Hughes...yet. Mary is a cold bitch, Edith is both pathetic and loathsome, Cora is shallow, and Mrs. Crawley is a right-wing caricature of a bleeding heart liberal.

But through it all, there was Sibyl. Beautiful, kind Sibyl, who was even nice to that awful Thomas, and who, give her fifty years or so, would have marched with him at a gay rights parade. Lovely Sibyl, who followed her heart and married the fiery Irish chauffeur, risking her father's wrath for love. And that's where you fell into loathsomeness, Julian. Because in making the wages of sin death as punishment for Sibyl's refusal to adhere to the mores of her class, you showed yourself to be not just classist, but sexist as hell.

I hope Edith takes up wearing trousers and smoking cigars -- just to piss you off. And don't you DARE start getting ideas that she should marry Branson. She's just gotten some meaning to her life, don't you go getting all Henry VIII on her ass.

Labels: Downton Abbey, pop culture, sexism, television

No one knows for certain in what year season 5 of Mad Men will be set, but I'm speculating it's going to be 1967, because it seems that the New York Times may have spoiled it today:

“Mad Men” returns to AMC for a fifth season on Sunday, and times have changed — again. African-Americans are now picketing on the street, chanting for fair employment and equal opportunity. It’s a tinderbox summer of riots and protests, and the reception from some who are working on Madison Avenue is less than supportive. Advertising may be a cool profession that draws talented, sophisticated people, but even some of them can be bigots.

The Watts riots were in 1965, but since Matthew Weiner tends to time-jump by about two years at a time, and since Kiernan Shipka, who plays Don Draper's daughter Sally (in whom I take a particular interest since Sally is approximately my age) is now twelve and usually plays a year or so older, I'm betting on the summer or fall of 1967 -- when riots took place in Detroit and Newark, NJ. place.

This newsreel, clearly scripted from the "Respect Police Authoritah" "ZOMG...Negroes!!" (sic) point of view, shows what the riots looked like for people like Don Draper:



In 1967 the U.S. had two worlds colliding in terms of race. At the same time as American cities were exploding from police brutality and institutionalized poverty, white Americans were inviting the first interracial buddy team into their living rooms as Robert Culp and Bill Cosby (who won three consecutive Emmys for his performance) starred in I Spy. People today know Cosby as Cliff Huxtable, the sweater-wearing dad from his eponymously-named show from the 1980s, but in I Spy, Cosby was kind of badass:



Now today Cosby would get the girl too, but this was still pretty groundbreaking stuff in 1967. A year later, Diahnn Carroll would play a black nurse with an impossibly angelic child, and then in 1971 Norman Lear would create All in the Family and in 1972, set the entire notion of the Black Person Who Didn't Make White People Uncomfortable on its ear by introducing proto-teabagger Archie Bunker to Sammy Davis Jr...



...which laid the groundwork for the urban Good Times:



But all that is in the future as we head into Season 5. I can't wait to see how Roger Sterling manages to keep his foot in his mouth in his dealings with race and how Don Draper deals with the emerging recognition that black peple buy products too.

Labels: Mad Men, pop culture

Peter Bergman 1939-2012


The Firesign Theatre, Live at the Improv, 1981


It's impossible to underestimate the impact that The Firesign Theatre had on my life. I first encountered them during a period when WBAI used to run old-time radio shows on weekend evenings, except one night they were playing something that SOUNDED like an old-time serial, but there was something different about it -- something deliriously, profoundly WEIRD. It was "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger", and it was the funniest thing I had ever heard.

Comedy in the late 1960's and early 1970's was starting to undergo a transformation from the Borscht-belt suit-and-a-cigarette model that had dominated for the last decade. Weird sketch comedy was nothing new; Ernie Kovacs had pioneered it in the 1950s. But Kovacs was a visual comic, whereas the long-form sketch comedy of the Firesign Theatre was something uniquely of its age, with its weird multiple layers and hallucinogenic undertones. You didn't have to take hallucinogens to appreciate it, but you did have to be weird, and appreciation for "Firesign" became a checkbox on the cred list for membership in the Weird Boomer Adolescent society. Because Firesign kids back then weren't all druggies, but we did all have a sense that we were put here by mistake, and the kind of multiple realities that the troupe dealt with so well gave us our own sense of cool. Because you have to be able to see the world differently to appreciate something as profoundly strange and subliminally disturbing as Everything You Know Is Wrong, with its Illuminati references and conspiracymongering that pre-dates Alex Jones by decades.

The Firesign theatre not only looked backwards for inspiration, but their future visions were often so cogent that to listen to them now it's as if they were foreseeing the future. Go listen to I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, which envisioned a computer age where people still can't find a job, and tell me that this stuff wasn't prescient.

Along with its somewhat less strange British counterpart, the Monty Python guys, The Firesign Theatre begat Saturday Night Live which begat any number of sketch comedy shows that we see today. Firesign begat the Church of the Subgenius (which no less a personage than Rachel Maddow has referenced on her show) and was so influential on the comedy of the late, great Air America radio show Morning Sedition that the show had its own version of Nick Danger called "Morning Sedition Radio Theatre". But nothing since has achieved the kind of highly disciplined and at the same time chaotic verbal viruosity that we saw from these twin pillars of literate sketch comedy.

I introduced Elayne to Firesign in the early 1980's, and with her customary focus, she want on to create a Firesign 'zine and become a kind of unofficial historian and keeper of the Firesign flame. Mr. Brilliant and I had Firesign in common when we met in 1983, and it was a sign that we both lived in the same strange kind of mindspace of what are now called Quirky Kids. And many years later, I ran across Melina, whose own grandfather was behind many of the radio serials that inspired Firesign's work. So there we are.

And this morning I found out that Peter Bergman, the voice of Lt. Bradshaw, Mudhead, and many other characters has left us from complications of leukemia at the age of 72. His final signoff from his solo venture, Radio Free Oz is in the video at the top of this post.

And another cultural icon of my childhood bites the dust. I guess I'd better get used to this.

UPDATE: Here's a lovely tribute from Richard Metzger, who quotes his friend Mike explaining what I think all Firesign freaks share:

I phrase things the way I do because of the Firesign Theatre. I look at the world the way I do because of them. There might not be anything that had a bigger formative influence on who I am today when I really think about it!”

If your automatic reflexive response to someone who asks you what you're doing is "The foxtrot. You can have the next dance", you know what he means. (And don't miss the video of actual car dealership ads the guys did in 1969 while you're there.)

More tributes from:

Skippy
Jesse Walker, at Reason, of all places
Mitchell J. Freedman
wruckusgroink at DKos
Andy Parx
Gordonskene at C&L
Tom Dupree

Labels: comedy, obituaries, pop culture

And it was Peter Tork who reached out to the Rachel Maddow show, not the other way around:



Peter Tork is 70. How old do YOU feel now?

Labels: obituaries, pop culture, Rachel Maddow

Sorry, but I just couldn't resist that headline.

Paula Deen's cooking show is not one I usually watch on Food Network. The few times I've seen parts of it, the food she was making was so nauseating I simply had to turn it off. As soon as the Crisco or the Cool Whip starts coming out, I'm done. It isn't that I'm only willing to use hand-rolled, hand-shaped macaroni and three types of reduced-fat artisanal cheese and truffle oil to make MY macaroni and cheese, but chemical-laden frankenfood just doesn't do it for me. That isn't to say that I won't eat anything that doesn't come from an organic garden in a pastoral landscape tended by golden-tressed earth mothers singing Big Yellow Taxi, but I do recognize the difficulties of being someone who has to be in a large building for eight-to-ten hours a day combined with a commute that can be an hour or more, and that unless you want to have dinner at eight PM and then go to bed an hour later, your weekday dinners are going to often consist of heating up something from Trader Joe's.

And then there's Paula Deen, who has made a fortune giving the people what they want -- dishes laden with butter and chocolate and sugar and shortening -- the kinds of food that perhaps were acceptable when everyone did hard physical labor on the farm all day but that are deadly in today's sedentary desk-job world. It's not surprising that people in the TV chef world such as Anthony Bourdain would get their high dudgeon on about the kind of crap Deen whips up on her cooking show. But let's not claim that haute cuisine chefs completely eschew the artery-clogging stuff either, not after the episode of Chopped I saw the other night in which the centerpiece of an appetizer was marrow bones.

Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer is drooling over a commercial that advertises something like "Two full pounds of ground beef, soaked in rich creamery butter. Topped with bacon, ham, cheese, and a fried egg"? Well, meet the "Lady's Brunch Burger."

The legitimate beef (so to speak) with Paula Deen is about the frankenfood more than even the fat content. Let's face it, folks -- anyone watching television who thinks that a cheeseburger topped with bacon and a fried egg and served on a glazed doughnut is a great idea has bigger problems than Paula Deen.

What's surprising is the schadenfreude coming from so-called progressives. At a time when discrimination on the basis of health risks is increasing, that a side of the political spectrum that's often (Dan Savage notwithstanding) associated with fighting discrimination based solely on girth. How can you attack the right for saying that women who get raped deserve it because they dressed provocatively and then say that Paula Deen deserves to be trashed because she ate a high-fat diet and developed Type 2 diabetes?

It seems to be at least somewhat about the diabetes drug endorsement deal she's received:

Deen knew she had diabetes for three years and still pushed doughnut burgers on her fans. Then she waited to tell people until she had an endorsement deal with a drug company. It’s hard to see that choice as anything but shabby. Deen could have spent three years talking about “moderation” without making any money off a pharmaceutical company. Like Bill Clinton, who slimmed down on a mostly vegan regimen, she had the potential as a Southerner and a food lover to teach her fans new strategies for eating and living — and she could have done it without shilling for the pharmaceutical industry. She looks like a calculated opportunist today — when, she could have, for those millions of fellow Americans with diabetes, been simply sweet.

First of all, how often do you hear Bill Clinton talk about veganism? Almost never. Bill Clinton doesn't travel the country talking about veganism, and nowhere in the mission statement of the Clinton Global Initiative does it talk about diabetes. It's something he did, and good for him. (It also helps that he can no doubt afford a spectacular vegan chef to prepare delicious vegan meals for him.) But the biggest problem with the paragraph above is its implication that there is no gray area at all between the Lady's Brunch Burger and a vegan diet, when in fact there's a great deal of gray area. To imply otherwise is enough to make your average overweight person just decide "The hell with it."

Amanda Marcotte, who blogs for a living and so doesn't have to sit in an office for eight-to-ten hours a day and then sit in traffic for an hour, joins the pile-on, though she makes some valid points about managing diseases after we have them rather than preventing them in the first place.

The problem is that there are no hard-and-fast rules about prevention. I come from two fat parents. Both have lost a bit of weight recently, but are still overweight by any objective standard. Both have health problems, one related to lifestyle (smoking), the other unrelated to lifestyle. Mom is 84 and Dad is 86. Neither one has diabetes, despite being overweight for as long as I can remember. I have a friend whose husband has high cholesterol, despite a diet of lean meats, fish, grains, and vegetables, and a two-mile run every morning. Sometimes smokers don't get lung cancer and nonsmokers do. Sometimes thin people get Type 2 diabetes and fat people don't. Christopher Hitchens smoked cigarettes and drank like a fish and died of esophageal cancer. Winston Churchill started each day with a cigar and a snifter of brandy and lived to be ninety. Julia Child was the queen of butter and was similarly bashed (NYT link) -- and lived to be ninety-two.

Look, I recognize that people who eat crap, and those, like Paula Deen, who glorify crap food make it more difficult for those of us who try to eat right to convince people that we don't sit around eating doughnuts and Chicken McNuggets (or Lady's Brunch Burgers, for that matter); that we eat egg white vegetable omelets with just a sprinkling of cheese (non-artisanal, alas) for breakfast and vegetable-laden soups with salad for lunch and a small bowl of chili for dinner -- and we're still fat. Tonight I am going to dinner with some colleagues who are in town from overseas. They love, love, love Cheesecake Factory. I hate, hate, hate chain restaurants like this because it's so difficult to find something to eat that isn't fried or covered with cheese. Yesterday I spent a full fifteen minutes perusing the menu in advance to try and find something I can eat that isn't huge, fried, covered with cheese, or drowning in dressing. This is what life is like every single fucking day for Your Humble Blogger, who is a 4'10" size sixteen anyway. And it doesn't involve doughnuts, fast food, or these days even chocolate, as I've mostly lost my taste for sweet stuff. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote the Salon article excerpted above, is battling Stage IV melanoma that started on her scalp. This happened despite wearing sunscreen all these years because who puts sunscreen on her scalp? So I suppose we should cut her a cetain amount of slack and not say she brought it on herself by spending too much time in the sun without a hat. Because even though lifestyle factors might bring on a serious disease, blaming sick people for their own plight after they're sick seems a little bit like blaming rape victims for being assaulted.

None of us is perfect, and there's no one in this country who hasn't deluded him/herself at one point or another that s/he is immortal and will never get sick and never die. Those of us who have seen parents live to what is old age by any measure are especially susceptible to this delusion. But you can do everything right and still get cancer. You can do everything right and get wiped out on the highway tomorrow. You can do everything wrong and outlive everyone you know. The universe is random like that. Of course it's better to eat a moderate portion of chicken sauteed with fresh organic vegetables over a bit of brown rice than it is to eat a Big Mac. I don't think even the most ardent red-stater would deny that.

Now, I'm not a Paula Deen fan, so I can't say for sure. But I can't imagine that she has been out there advocating eating two pounds of fried macaroni and cheese topped with butter at every meal, every day, for your entire life. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. But I suspect that Paula Deen is not that much different from most of us -- she never believed it would happen to her. So-called progressives who would never advocate discriminating against the 22-year-old who's paraplegic because he drank a six-pack and then drove his car into a tree because his disability is "lifestyle-related" have no business being selective about who they'll bash for having a life-threatening illness. Even if it did come from Velveeta and doughnuts.

Labels: double standards, Fast Food Nation, pop culture, weight

Gregorio Borgia/AP


I don't know what it is about shipwrecks that we find so compelling. Our age is one of air travel, not sea travel. When planes crash, we are horrified, but the horror seems somehow mundane. Yes, we were all appalled when Air France Flight 447 crashed, and when EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed, and TWA Flight 800 crashed. But for those of us who didn't know anyone on those doomed flights, life returned to normal in a matter of days, and we stopped thinking about it.

Somehow I don't think that's going to be the case with the wreck of the Costa Concordia. And that's where James Cameron comes in.

The only thing that would have made this better for Cameron would be if this wreck had occurred next March, because his billion dollar shipwreck epic, Titanic, has been re-engineered for 3-D and re-released next April, just in time for the 100the anniversary of the most famous shipwreck in history.

The Concordia was no Titanic. No one made claims that it was the most luxurious cruise ship in the world, that it was some kind of quantum leap forward in technology. It didn't usher in a new age and mark the end of one. On the plus side, it didn't hide its lower-income passengers in the bowels of the ship, dining on lamb stew and rough bread while the toffs feast on aspic and quail. Today, steerage-type travel is reserved for air passengers.

Looking at photos of the Concordia in happier days, it was your pretty standard small city-at-sea, with pools, a glitzy lobby, and ornate dining rooms. And yet, the ghosts of the great White Star and Cunard liners pervade the design of all of these monuments to ongepotchket. Giant ships are now about vacationing, rather than getting from one place to another, but no one boards one of these behemoths without standing on deck thinking of all those passengers who came before them, and no one arrives in New York Harbor at seven in the morning, with the sun gleaming down on the Statue of Liberty as she beckons, "Come on in, there's plenty of room here" without thinking of the teeming hordes of people, some of them our own relatives, who saw that very same view a hundred years ago (give or take a few) and were filled with hope. Despite the relentless pop music and the 24-hour soft-serve and the neon lights and the open seating, there's still a sense of glamour about being on one of these giant ships.

Perhaps that's why when something like this happen, we can't tear ourselves away from it. And of course the granddaddy of all shipwrecks, the one the memory of which pervades everything, is still that giant White Star liner that hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The Titanic itself, but more vividly, and even more oddly, Cameron's film, hover over the Concordia wreck like an accusatory finger, invoked consistently by the survivors of the Concordia wreck.

Jonathan Paturi, a chef on the Concordia:

Looking back to that traumatic Friday evening, I wonder how much like the Titanic disaster it was. Just like the Titanic, the Costa Concordia was a luxury liner. We were hosting 4,200 holiday makers. And just like the Titanic, we were serving dinner to our guests when disaster struck. Only, the Titanic struck an iceberg and we ran into a reef.

It was 9.30 p.m. Friday evening. Friday, the 13th, I’m now told. Five of my mates -- chefs, all from Hyderabad -- and I were cooking dinner for the passengers. Suddenly we felt the ship tilt over. Such moments do occur on a ship, so we thought it was one of them. Then the crew-only alarm went off: Delta X-Ray. It meant the ship was taking in water. Then another alarm was sounded: India Victor. It meant there was a fire in the ship and that passengers had to be moved to safety.

The ship began to list even more, and I saw food sliding down the counter. Yes, just like in the Titanic movie. Then there was a complete blackout. I fought down the panic rising within me. I called my cousin and told him about the situation. He told me to be brave. I told him, “I’ll call you if I’m alive.” Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt that I might never see my loved ones again.

Photos taken of the evacuation and of huddled passengers on shore add to the eerie parallel effect, as do the reactions of passengers:

“We were having dinner aboard when we heard a loud noise, like that of the keel dragged over something. There were scenes of panic, glasses falling to the floor.” -- passenger Luciano Castro

We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side.

“We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get onto the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.” -- passenger Mike van Dijk

"Have you seen 'Titanic'? That's exactly what it was," -- passenger Valeria Ananias (link)

Look hard enough, and you can find as many parallels as you want.

Of course there are differences. The class differences that made it perfectly acceptable for third-class passengers to have less access to lifeboats have largely been levelled, with inexpensive cabins now located on the same hallways as more expensive ones. And this time the villian role of Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line executive who hopped aboard a Titanic lifeboat in the midst of chaos is being played by Concordia captain himself, Francesco Schettino, who abandoned ship instead of standing nobly on the bridge as his ship sinks. The Concordia seems no have had no quasi-military men like Charles Lightoller, portrayed as brave and noble by Kenneth More in the 1956 film A Night to Remember and as a blithering idiot in Cameron's film. (Lightoller later recounted to family that a steering error by Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, similar to that which probably brought the Concordia aground, led to the Titanic's collision with the iceberg that took it to the bottom of the sea.) But the relentless comparisons to the wreck of the Titanic, despite the fortunately much smaller death toll, persist.

And all this just a little under three months before Titanic 3-D opens in theatres. You can't BUY that kind of publicity.

Labels: movies, pop culture

Gay guys nothing. I do this too:



The truly coffee-spitting moment is at 1:43. That's where I completely lost it. (Hint for the uninitiated.)

Labels: cat blogging, pop culture, Teh Funny

When you're alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go
Downton!
When you've got worries,
An Edwardian surrey
Seems to help, I know,
Downton!
Just listen to the music
of the wine glasses at dinner
Linger in the countryside
where Mary's still a sinner
How can you lose?
The lights are much softer there
You can forget all your troubles,
forget all your cares and go
Downton!
things'll be great when you're
Downton!
no finer place for sure
Downton!
Escape is waiting for you

(Apologies to Petula Clark and Tony Hatch for the above)

This afternoon at Casa la Brilliant may have belonged to the Giants (YAY!), but after 9 PM, when the football is over and Mr. Brilliant has turned in for the night, it's all going to be about sober-but-still-awesome clothes and fabulous hats and World War I and the denizens of Downton Abbey.

I remember when the original Forsyte Sage played on American TV for the first time, ushering in what would become Masterpiece Theatre. This was a sprawling, 26-episode, utterly faithful rendition of Jon Galsworthy's six novels. It had sex and intrigue and family strife lo unto succeeding generations. The Forsyte Saga was all about the upstairs and not at all about the downstairs. It had great costumes and British accents and rigid manners -- all the things we now take for granted about costume dramas. But in 1967, there had been nothing like it on American television:



Today this version has lost none of its power, though it does play a bit stagey. But at the time, Forsyte was so successful that it begat Upstairs Downstairs (from which co-creator Jean Marsh insists Downton Abbey was shamelessly stolen), Poldark, The First Churchills, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Brideshead Revisited, and the greatest costume drama of all time, I, Claudius. The best of the Masterpiece dramas have two things in common: richly-drawn characters, and superlative production values.

As we are wont to do in our navel-gazing society, there is much hue and cry over why the very same people who support the Occupy movement are already assembling their tea and scones to enjoy over the premiere of season 2 of a drama that's all about inheritance of a huge English mansion -- the family that owns it and the many people whose purpose in life is to serve them. And let's face it, the people who have been screaming about defunding NPR and cheering Mitt Romney's assertion that Sesame Street is going to have to start advertising Froot Loops, are hardly likely to be planted in front of their local public television station tonight, for all that they have the delusion that if things were only just like they were in the pre- (and this season, current) World War I era, with everyone knowing exactly where s/he stands in the scheme of things, life would be a lot better.

But those of us who ARE glued in front of PBS tonight at 9 Eastern Time know what the attraction is. It isn't that we want to be waited on by people who have no lives other than serving the wealthy. It isn't that we want to, as Lady Mary said in Season I, have no life but going to socials and charity functions and wait around to marry. It isn't that we want to, as Maggie Smith's deliciously haughty Dowager Countess said last season, have no opinions until we marry and then our husbands tell us what to think.

No, the attraction is something far less profound.

It's all about the clothes. And the hats:



After Titanic came out in 1997, there was a rash of interest in Edwardian clothing -- the lace-up boots, the tea dresses, and yes, the corsets. I myself bought one, and while it would be horrifically uncomfortable to wear all the time, there's something about a corset that makes you carry yourself differently -- taller, straighter, and with a rack you could read Shakespeare from. Even among those of us who refuse to take any vacation where we have to dress up, there's something appealing about watching people wear gorgeous dresses to dinner, and outfits with matching hats to garden parties. Even Boardwalk Empire, with it's Scorsesean gangsters and graphic violence, had some of the most fabulous costuming we've seen in popular culture in recent years.

There's something about wearing the clothing of a particular time that gives us a vague sense of what it was like to be there -- the constriction of corsets and hobble skirts. The pointed toes of lace-up boots. The feel of a summer breeze blowing through the straw of a hat festooned with the better part of an entire florist's inventory

The darted sheath dresses, suits, and fedoras of Mad Men have never quite caught on, perhaps because there are far too many of us alive who still remember them from the first time, or because there is nothing about the lives of ANY of the characters on that show with whom we'd want to change places even for a day, for all that we find them so compelling. Nor would we want to trade places with Lady Mary Crawley either, for that matter, despite her gorgeous dresses, because Michelle Dockery so expertly portrays the despair of a woman born just a few years too early for the changes that will come after Season 2 of Downton Abbey ends.

Yes, Downton Abbey may seem like just another Austen-esque thwarted romance story with a big house. But if you ask a fan to dig down deep and reveal what the appeal is, yes, it's about the house p0rn. But more than anything else it's about this:



and this:



So if you're inclined to shop for clothing inspired by this time period, Victorian Trading Company has some lovely garments and accessories.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dress for dinner. Consider this an open thread for All Things Downton.

Labels: Downton Abbey, pop culture, television

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.

Labels: music, pop culture, The Decline and Fall of America

No, I don't watch "X-Factor". But based on a short promo clip before the season started, I could see that Rachel Crow has a vocal gift you can't cultivate. I've been saying all along that this kid is no pop princess, she's a born blues singer. Turns out I was right...in more ways than one:



Unfortunately, they've already started ruining her. It's clear they put her on a diet, and there's only a flash of the little-kid grin we saw earlier. But holy crap, what a voice.

Labels: pop culture

Last time Southwest Airlines hit the news, it was because their maintenance sucks. Before that it was because Kevin Smith was deemed too overweight to fly on their airplanes. But who's Kevin Smith, anyway? Outside of snarky fanboys and fangirls, do most Americans know who he is?

Now they may have messed with the wrong pop culture figure. Because Southwest perhaps might have wanted to think twice about kicking a guy who penned an album that became the anthem of a generation off their planes for ridiculous reasons:

Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says he was asked to leave a plane he was travelling on in California for not pulling up his trousers.

The singer, 39, tweeted to say: "Just got kicked off a Southwest flight because my pants sagged too low!"

[snip]

Cindy Qiu, a local TV producer, was on the flight and described what happened on her company's website.

She says she heard Billie Joe Armstrong ask the flight attendant who'd demanded he pull up his trousers, "Don't you have better things to do than worry about that?"

Now, it's true that when one is on a plane, one is supposed to listen to the flight attendant for safety reasons. But kicking someone off a plane for wearing low-rise pants?

The band is back in the studio. I for one can't wait to see the song about Southwest Airlines. Perhaps Kevin Smith will appear in the video.

Labels: Green Day, pointless authoritarianism, pop culture, security theatre

When we first bought our house, a friend came over with her mother on the day we closed, took one look around, and said "You are going to be working on this house until the day you die."

After fifteen years and about $60,000 worth of siding, windows, roofing, gutters, a refinished basement, two water heaters, a furnace, and an upgraded electrical panel, I'm still ashamed to have a party. The longer you live in a house, the more daunting it becomes to have work done in it.

My next project (and I know my limitations so I don't end up on Renovation Realities), was going to be the downstairs bathroom. It's a 1950's cape cod house, so the bathroom is one of those tiny 5 x 7 functional-only bathrooms. I had a bath designer come out, and explained to her my vision of a step into yesteryear with gleaming white subway tile, a pan shower replacing the hulking seafoam-green tub with the massive rusting chip in it and the curved bottom that plots to kill me every time I step into it, and white hex tile with black accents. I knew the minute she walked in the door that her company would not try to get this job, because she came armed with a fat stack of glossy brochures from the kind of high-end cabinetry companies to which I'm sure the Real Housewives of New Jersey refer when remodeling their bathrooms every five years, sending the old fixtures to Green Demolitions.

Then Mr. Brilliant was laid off in January, and I started looking around said bathroom, and suddenly it seemed like a waste of $10,000-$15,000 to gut a bathroom with plaster walls and replace it with sheetrock. Yes, it's one of those 1950's tile bathrooms, but while most bathrooms of that era that are seafoam-green-and-black have the black tiles as accents, mine has black wall tile with the green accents. So I started to reconsider. We're hoping not to have to age in place, because the property taxes in New Jersey will kill us, assuming we're ever able to retire. So it may not pay to do the shower conversion right now. The tile is in good shape, and while the floor is a dull green that needs replacement and a new subfloor, and the holes in the ceiling that had to be punched so that a leaking pipe from the upstairs bathroom could be replaced have to be patched, but it occurred to me that perhaps this bathroom could be saved for the cost of a new vanity or sink, a few boxes of hex tile from Home Depot, a new mirror and a couple of well-placed shallow wall cabinets, a new light bar, and the labor to deal with the difficult stuff.




So I started looking around for photos that others had taken of their sow's ear bathrooms turned into silk purses. It isn't so much that I wanted to return it to its 1950's glory, though I did recently find on Freecycle a listing for an original seafoam green sink and toilet and thought about it for about five minutes until remembering that the seafoam green is the part of this bathroom I loathe most. But in these austere times, the days of the $20,000 Zen retreat seem to be over.

While looking for others who had scaled back their plans, I stumbled on Pam Kueber's very cool Retro Renovations site. Pam isn't just about learning to live with mid-20th-century tackiness, she's about reveling in it as some kind of Golden Age of Design. For someone like me, who is old enough to remember chrome-wrapped boomerang kitchen tables and who worships regularly at the altar of Gustav Stickley, it was difficult to wrap my mind around this concept. But Pam's enthusiasm, and that of her readers, is so infectious that I almost found myself starting to appreciate the design sensibility of my childhood.

Almost.

But who knew that there is, in this country, an entire subculture of people who, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to make their midcentury houses look like McMansions, have chosen instead to restore them to their original hideous glory, with pink bathrooms and ugly Don Draper sofas and pink kitchen appliances and tulip chairs.

If you watch This Old House, or read the magazine, there's always a bit of self-importance about restoring an old Queen Anne, or a Victorian, or especially a Craftsman house (which is my own particular favorite design aesthetic). Perhaps it's because these eras all pre-date anyone who's still alive today, which gives them a hushed museum quality to which that kind of reverence fits. But the mid-20th-century aesthetic, with its absurd turquoise kitchens and seafoam green bathrooms and bright orange sofas and kidney-shaped coffee tables, has a kind of gleeful tastelessness that after you read Pam Kueber's blog, makes you kind of understand it, even if you aren't quite ready to contact that guy getting rid of the seafoam green bathroom sink.

Today Pam Kueber has attained that revered condition of Blog Nirvana -- a LONG profile in the New York Times. Go check it out, and then check out Retro Renovations.

As for me, next time I go to get my hair done, I'm going to check out World of Tile on Route 22 in Springfield. Who knows, they might have the same seafoam green and black floor tile that I have now, and perhaps when it hasn't been trod on for fifty years it looks awesome.

Labels: home improvements, personal musings, pop culture

Somewhere in California, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are howling with laughter:


And that differs from these.....how?

Labels: Broadway, pop culture, religion, snark

Because anything that can make me laugh at a time when the idea of a sudden fatal heart attack is an appealing thought, deserves to be posted.

Labels: Game of Thrones, pop culture, satire

There's a very strange thing happening in pop culture these days, and it has to do with show tunes.

Show Tunes. The very phrase has been associated with, variously, little old ladies with blue hair, tourists from Kansas, and Teh Gay. And yet, we're now finding that there is a Vast Show Tune Underground, a club that surely meets in dark basements in bad parts of town, serving up bad liquor and requiring a password for enter. Its members are neither little old ladies with blue hair, nor tourists from Kansas, nor gay men. In fact, they are some of the most unlikely people you'd ever think would be aficionados of the Songbook of the American Theatre. For one thing, they're straight guys. For another, they're "guy-guys", with sophomoric, Apatowan senses of humor which lean towards jokes about getting high and jerking off, about farts and anal probes and the reality that "clitoris" is a funny-sounding word. And yeah, there's a fair amount of undercurrent of homophobia to what they do, which is why they are as rich as Croesus and is no doubt their way of overcompensating for the fact that these guys really, really love show tunes.

Seth MacFarlane, who created Family Guy, a show that uses any excuse to include a musical number (preferably a big production number), has often revealed in interviews his love of show tunes and the American songbook. The CD Family Guy Live in Vegas, a collaboration with composer Walter Murphy, gave a taste of what MacFarlane's amazing pipes can do. But MacFarlane takes his American songbook as seriously as Michael Feinstein does, and in September will release Music Is Better Than Words, a compilation of "hidden gems" from musicals of the 1940's and 1950's. But because Mac Farlane's Broadway sensiblity is so tied up in his own voice, and because he's busy producing three hit TV shows and doing live performances, a move to Broadway is unlikely. Still, given the demographic of his audience, a guy with the snark cred of Seth MacFarlane can do a great deal to open the eyes of the youth demographic to the emerging Broadway that is not just for bluehairs anymore.

The bluehairs are the reason for the hue and cry over the years about the impending Death of Broadway, about where the next generation of audiences is going to come from when everyone who could possibly stand to sit through Andrew Lloyd Webber bombasts has already seen them and started to die off. All the hoopla about Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, at least before it became a national joke, was about keeping the same young audiences in the theatre that made Avenue Q a hit and a Tony Award winner in 2003-2004 -- one with staying power that is still playing off-Broadway.

The plethora of jukebox musicals that dot the theatre district like Starbucks these days aren't going to do it. The songs in these shows, such as Jersey Boys, Million Dollar Quartet, and Baby It's You, have no resonance for younger audiences. They're for the neo-bluehairs that constitute the first wave of baby boomers. Perhaps this group has enough disposable income to keep Broadway going all by themselves, because there's yet another one coming: Natural Woman, based on the life and music of Carole King. It's all enough to make me rue the fact that Leader Of The Pack opened in 1984, before the jukebox musical became a cheap way to make money. Frank Rich hated it, but I actually SAW Leader Of The Pack and was rewarded by some great belting by Annie Golden and a rendition of "River Deep Mountain High" by the great Darlene Love that turned the Ambassador Theatre into the First Church of Awesome Gospel. "Leader" ran for only 120 performances, which should give the producers of Natural Woman pause, Jersey Boys notwithstanding. The jukebox musical set is starting to retire, and doesn't have a whole lot of money for Broadway. There's only so many ways you can slice that bologna before it starts to go bad. At some point you have to bring in new audiences.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that snark sells. Yes, musicals like South Pacific are classics, but among the high school drama club set from whence new audiences come, the standard bearer is the ubiquitous Guys and Dolls -- to this day the gold standard of marriage of wit and music. The wit is out there; the question was from whence the music would come.

And it's coming from some highly unlikely places.

Anyone who's followed Green Day over the years knows that even back in the Dookie days, it was clear that while Billie Joe Armstrong may have been a snotty punk pothead, he had a gift for ditties -- 3 minute pop songs filled with angst, rage, and yes, snark. We knew that Billie Joe was prolific, and we knew that his brand of 3-chord punk had those damnedly catchy pop hooks that left "Walking Contradiction" playing over and over in your head for three days. What we didn't know, is for all these years, what Billie Joe was writing was show tunes. What we learned when American Idiot hit Broadway was just how glorious some of those songs are when performed by people who can actually sing.

For example, here's "Whatshername" performed by Green Day:


...and by the original Broadway cast:



American Idiot on Broadway was a vibrant, exciting show with a great cast, hampered by a weak book, but it still played a respectable 422 performances, closing this year on April 24. And now we know that while Billie Joe Armstrong became a rock star writing songs about getting teenaged rage, there's something else brewing there -- a knowledge and feel for the conventions of theatre that in the aftermath of American Idiot have no doubt had him thinking he might at some point write something specifically for Broadway.

Sort of like what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done with The Book of Mormon. Back in February, I started receiving postcards for bargain preview seats for this show. I knew that these two guys combined with Bobby Lopez, who along with Jeff Marx wrote the hilarious, yet still tinkly songs for Avenue Q, would produce a winner. But Mr. Brilliant had been jettisoned from his employer a month before, and I couldn't justify spending even $49 a head for a show.

Of course now I'm kicking myself, now that Book has become a monster hit, and is expected to pick up a wheelbarrow of Tony Awards this weekend. Who would have thought that the same people who fifteen years ago created a cartoon that started with a foul-mouthed character getting anally probed by space aliens via an expanding satellite dish would become the Toast of Broadway? But even if you can't get tickets until sometime in 2016 (which is what seems to be the case; just try looking for tickets during the time period that Telecharge allow you to enter and if you want to really get sick, try looking for tickets at StubHub), you should run out and buy the original cats recording.

Here's composer Bobby Lopez on this week's Studio 360 on NPR (full interview link) playing the opening to "I Believe", which I've read will be the song performed on the awards show tonight. It wouldn't have been my choice, but this song is a small miracle -- it demonstrates the full goofiness of some of the Mormon precepts, and yet for one brief moment, it makes you believe them too.



Parker and Stone may be getting all the press, but for my money, it's Bobby Lopez, likely to be two-for-two by the end of this weekend, who is the unsung hero of this production -- a Frank Loesser for a new generation.

Labels: Broadway, I Welcome Our Snarky Comic Overlords, pop culture, religion

I heard a couple of nice British kids got married.

Labels: insanity, pop culture

But if you simply must pay attention to those two nice kids in England, there's no better way to do it than with Sarah's liveblogging over at Balloon Juice. Just be careful, though: coffee and keyboard simply do not mix, dahling.

Labels: bloggers, pop culture

Sorry about no good pearls of widsom from me this week, just crazy busy with work and too dispirited to come up with anything readable. So you might as well catch up on those who have been able to at least catch their breath. I have a day off tomorrow, only part of which will be spent working, so I'll try to catch up then.

Meanwhile, not all of this is from bloggers, but worth reading just the same.

Gaius Publius on the wholesale turning over of entire towns to corporations.

Gail Collins on Texas: Ground Zero for the Work Force of Tomorrow. (God help us. And by the way, why is Texas Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to secede, now looking for FEMA help when they hate the federal government? Fucking parasite.)

Mike Stark on Alaska Sen. Don Young actively participating in a rally supporting right wing militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was arrested on March 10, 2011 for plotting to kill state police and a federal judge, and for possession of illegal weapons.

Rick Ungar is keeping an eye on Scott Walker, who hasn't actually DENIED that he's planning the kind of "financial martial law" that's taking place in Michigan.

I knew what I was doing when I added Tom Degan to the blogroll. Enjoy his look at the late, great Ernie Kovacs.

And finally....Roger Ebert reviews At Last, Drugged, a.k.a. P0rn for Paul Ryan.

I'm going to try to pull some thoughts together about the senseless and pointless death of Restrepo director Tim Hetherington.

Labels: bloggers, pop culture, writing

It isn't so much that I want to write about the fact that the biggest pair of doofuses ever to appear on a cable TV show (and I'm including Snooki and JWoWW in that consideration too) think that you can get pap smears at Walgreen's. It's just that I can't pass up the opportunity to point out the latest example of right-wing idiocy when it also provides the opportunity to once again flog David Brooks for his "salad bar at Applebee's" observation about how Barack Obama can't relate to "the common man" as well as a pundit who deludes himself that he has a brain in his head.

And I think "Pap Smears at Applebee's" would be the greatest name for a rock band since the Fountains of Wayne were left orphaned by the closing of, well, The Fountains of Wayne.

If YOU decide to name your band "Pap Smears at Applebee's", please e-mail me a link to your YouTube video and I'll post it. But until then, here are the Fountains of Wayne:

Labels: assholes, irrelevant has-been pundits, music, pop culture