http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU
"Freedom of choice is what you've got.
Freedom from choice is what you want."
This is the tune I'd like to dedicate to America in 2013:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGINIsLnqU "Freedom of choice is what you've got. Freedom from choice is what you want."
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Here is my Christmas gift for all of my faithful readers (and anyone else who may wander by): possibly the most random Sesame Street sketch ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pruiFbPSkls This is from the show's first season, when they were pretty much throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick. My girlfriend and I found this on YouTube last week and we just thought it was so odd that it was hilarious. (I'm still cracking up watching it now.) I don't know if it would count as Dadaism or not. Lefty the Salesman doesn't even attempt to sell Ernie the R (he usually tried to sell Ernie some random thing like a letter, number or sign), he just produces it. Then Ernie pulls out the P, and the game is on. Maybe they had previously arranged this battle earlier. Maybe Lefty hoped to sell him the R, but when Ernie produced the P he knew he was outdone, so he was just trying to save face. I don't see how that could happen, though, because an R actually has that extra leg on it so it has more features than the P, making it the winner. Maybe Lefty should've had the extra leg available so he could've sold it to Ernie. Maybe I should just go eat my Christmas dinner and quit making up ridiculous backstories... The best thing I can say about Brian Jay Jones' 2013 biography of Jim Henson is that I learned a lot from it. The worst I can say is that it's far from definitive and doesn't deserve the glowing reviews of it I've seen posted on the Internet.
As an author, I can appreciate that every writer approaches their subject in a different way. The best biographies of creative people I've read, such as Philip Norman's John Lennon: The Life or David Michaelis' portrait of Charles Schulz Schulz and Peanuts tell you about the individual, what influenced their work, and what its appeal was to the masses so if you knew nothing about the person, you would understand their place in the pop cultural pantheon. Too often Jones assumes you are familiar with the material he discusses, and he can't be bothered to describe the humorous premise of the classic "Mahna Mahna" sketch or the insane appeal of Gonzo. His description of Fraggle Rock barely mentions the witty Uncle "Traveling" Matt segments that illustrated the show's theme of understanding between different cultures by showing how Matt, a Fraggle, misunderstood the world of the "silly creatures," aka humans, by humorously misinterpreting our everyday practices. Even worse are the factual omissions. Jones got much of his information through personal interviews of living Henson associates and family members and "unpublished" interviews from the deceased, but this lifelong Muppets freak couldn't believe how much he left out. The most shocking omission is the failure to credit Jeff Moss, the writer of the biggest Muppets Top 40 hit "Rubber Duckie," Sesame Street favorite "People in Your Neighborhood," and the soundtrack to the film The Muppets Take Manhattan. (Jones does manage to credit almost every other composer of every other Muppet project, though.) He mentions that Life magazine devoted one page to Street's debut but fails to mention the the publication's main competitor Look gave it an even more in-depth multi-page spread. He mention that The Muppet Show's makers unsuccessfully attempted to reunite The Beatles, but ignores that John Lennon was one of the Muppets' biggest fans, even referencing Cookie Monster in one of his songs. In his discussion of Muppet/celebrity collaborations that led up to The Muppet Show he neglects the long-lost 1974 Emmy-nominated TV special Out To Lunch that teamed the Mupppets with the likes of Elliott Gould, Barbara Eden and the adult cast of The Electric Company, nor does he think it worthwhile to include the Street cast's big screen debut in 1985's Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird. He even misses the in-joke of two Fraggles being named after stage/film terminology; another, Mokey, that was named after one of Henson's childhood friends and a third character, Marjorie the Trash Heap, that was originally rejected by the makers of Sesame Street before being resuscitated for the show. Jones also has no feel for the coincidental connections that make history fun. He mentions that a pre-fame Tim Burton worked as a puppeteering extra on The Muppet Movie but doesn't note that one of Henson daughter Lisa's first assignments as an executive at Warner Brothers was overseeing his film Batman. He also dutifully notes every vacation Henson took with his kids but misses that Frank Oz's first non-Muppet directorial project Little Shop of Horrors employed Henson offspring Brian and Heather in on- and off-screen roles. The author can't even finish the story right, neglecting to mention that Henson's abandoned screenplay Tale of Sand was recently turned into a graphic novel. I'm probably giving this book a higher grade than it deserves, but I did learn a lot from it. However, it's far from definitive due to Jones' information omissions. For the ultimate Henson biography, I highly recommend Christopher Finch's 1993 book Jim Henson:The Works. At least that includes Henson's quirky and often heartwarming hand-designed Christmas cards. Grade: a very grudging Statler and Waldorf-esque B+ I never thought much of Supertramp as a kid, except for identifying with the existential angst of "The Logical Song." Then one day, a radio station played "It's Raining Again" as a "lost classic" and I enjoyed its cuteness and, after hearing "Rudy" on one of those cheapo A&M Records Classics compilation cassettes picked up at a local thrift store, decided to give the band a second shake. Which led to my purchase of Retrospectacle - The Supertramp Anthology, a 2005 2-CD compilation of the band's material.
Supertramp was considered "art-rock" which means at their worst - namely the first 5 tracks culled from their unsuccessful first 2 albums - they sound like bad 10cc or a poor man's Steely Dan. It also means that the instrumental intros such as the one on the live version of "You Started Laughing" can last as long as the vocal part of the song. But once you get past the band's most annoying hit, the screechingly shrill "Dreamer," there's some really good stuff here. Supertramp's one of those rare performers whose album tracks were better than their hits, and the songs selected from the albums Crime of the Century, Crisis? What Crisis? and Even in the Quietest Moments are the highlights of the whole set. "Rudy" is a multi-movement masterwork, and "Two of Us" and "Even in the Quietest Moments" are delighfully depressing, with "Even" being one of the most accurate aural depictions of dysphoric thoughts that I've ever heard. Also, unlike other groups, the material recorded after their hit-making heyday stands up to the successes of their past. The 9-minute live version of "Another Man's Woman" from 1999 maintains interest throughout, "Free as a Bird" actually sports a gospel influence, and 2003's Sam Cooke-esque "Over You" probably would've made the Top 40 if it had been released 20 years earlier. The only reason this isn't getting a higher grade is that many of the band's hits still annoy me no matter what. "Bloody Well Right" and "Goodbye Stranger" force me to switch the station when they come on the radio, and the success of "Cannonball" and the Andrew Gold-copying (and why copy Andrew Gold?) "My Kind of Lady" puzzles me. However, this compilation is a great place to get an idea of the full range of the band's talents outside of their hits. Grade: B Here's some of the album's best songs (that aren't "The Logical Song," because I assume you know that one already): "It's Raining Again," the band's lost #11 hit from 1982: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZUE4_PtOk0 "Free as a Bird": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eXxanfQdD0 "Over You": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aedZBw1QcwU I don't believe in celebrity death conspiracies. I don't believe Elvis Presley is still alive somewhere in Arkansas pumping gas at some backwoods filling station, and I don't think Jim Morrison is carousing around Paris. (And if he did fake his death, all of his substance abuse has probably killed him by now, anyway.) Having said that, my girlfriend and I were behind a guy in line at Office Depot yesterday who looked exactly like John Lennon. And I don't mean Beatles-era Lennon, he looked exactly how he looked when he died, with maybe 10 more years on him. Like this, with more facial lines: Just imagine ("Imagine there's a Lennon, I wonder if you can...") a faded gray hoodie instead of that shirt in the picture. He was wearing jeans exactly like these, and even had Lennon's granny glasses. He was wearing hightop sneakers, which I could probably picture Lennon wearing if he was still around. I live in Texas, and it was even more freaky is that he didn't have a Texas accent, or any noticable accent whatsoever. It was very hard not to stare, but I did visually track him out to the parking lot, where he got into a yellow compact car only slightly larger than a VW Bug that was covered with bumper stickers on its rear. I didn't dare walk up to the car, but if I had seen any sort of peace-related message on it, I probably would've died.
As the world remembers Nelson Mandela today, I'm going to shine the light on the 1985 Artists United Against Apartheid single "Sun City," released in 1985. '85 was the year rock went charitable, from the "We are the World" song and Live Aid concerts benefiting starving Ethiopians to the inaugural Farm Aid concert to help American agrarians. Stevie Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band had a different idea, and wanted to create a song protesting South Africa's Sun City resort/casino, a place of luxury for whites that was plopped down in the midst of African-American poverty. Many artists including Queen, The Kinks, and Linda Ronstadt had defied United Nations sanctions against performing there, and Van Zandt wrote a song protesting their actions and, as was the trend of the time, enlisted a group of celebrities to perform it. The resulting catchy and potent tune just scraped into the American Top 40 at #38 in December 1985, although it did make it up to #25 on the separate singles chart that was based on sales alone. (The main "Hot 100" singles chart is based on a combination of sales and radio airplay.) Van Zandt reflected on this performance in an interview with Hollywood Reporter published Monday:
"MTV and BET both really did play it quite often," he said. "I went and met with both of them and really pleaded the case, and everybody sort of got on board. But you're right - it was too black for white radio and too white for black radio, sort of ironically exposing our own apartheid!" Here's the video so you can check it out for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aopKk56jM-I Soloists you'll recognize: Run-DMC, Pat Benatar, Bruce Springsteen, George Clinton. Look quick for: Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Peter Wolf of J. Geils Band, Ringo Starr and his son Zak, Motley Crue. 1985 period piece: That's actress Daryl Hannah with Jackson Browne. They were one of the hottest celebrity couples at the time, and she decided that she wanted to be a singer, too. Hannah also sang backup on Browne's duet with Clarence Clemons "You're a Friend of Mine" that was in the Top 40 at the same time as "Sun City." Additional historical note: The most recognizable face here for any youngsters who haven't watched The Sopranos is Bono, who wasn't even a big star in the States yet. U2 had only one Top 40 hit at this point, the MLK-memorializing "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and were becoming more known in the US after the band's Live Aid performance. Coolness Factor: Joey Ramone got to sing the most provocative lyric (the anti-Reagan one), and Oates got to sing almost as much as Hall! Just found this CD cover while Cyber Monday shopping on amazon.com: If Brahms was alive today, would he be on Duck Dynasty?
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Walburgh's BlogMostly retro, mainly music, but generally whatever's on my mind. Archives
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