soul of the son

I first heard D.J. Rogers Jr.'s "Lonely Girl" in June 2002 while waiting for The Sum of All Fears to begin at a movie theater in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It was part of the piped-in music provided by United Artists Cinemas, and Rogers was identified as the "hot new artist" behind the song after it played. I was immediately struck by "Lonely Girl's" smooth hooks, and I still think it's one of the best songs of the past decade.

Unfortunately, the album that housed the song, Emosoul, the title of which seemed to piggyback off the "emo" subgenre of pop-rock that was popular at the time via groups like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World, was barely released at the end of '02. In fact I'm not sure if anything more than promotional copies were pressed by Rogers's label, Motown.

"Lonely Girl" should've been a hit. And because I liked it so much I ended up asking for a greatest-hits compilation by Rogers's dad, an R&B-gospel singer who was popular in the late '70s and early '80s, for Christmas in 2005. I wasn't disappointed: Golden Classics is well worth a listen.

the Alex Chilton-Michael Jackson connection

Last week as I read obituaries for singer Alex Chilton, who died on March 17 at the age of 59, reportedly from a heart attack, I realized he had a few things in common with Michael Jackson.

Chilton didn't end up becoming the biggest star in the world—he was a fairly obscure artist compared to Jackson—but he did have a #1 hit on the Billboard Top 40 at the age of 16 as the lead singer of the Box Tops. "The Letter," which hit the top of the charts in 1967, was the Box Tops' first single, just as "I Want You Back" was the Jackson 5's first single two years later, when frontman Michael Jackson was only 11 years old.

Listeners couldn't believe "The Letter" was sung by a tenth grader when they first heard it; Chilton's gruff vocals sounded like they were coming from a much older (and some would say blacker) set of pipes. Similarly, Jackson was noted for sounding mature beyond his years when he sang hits like "ABC" and "The Love You Save," and when he died last June many writers observed that he spent his childhood being the breadwinner of the family only to spend his adult years acting like a child.

One of the tributes to Chilton that I read on the Internet mentioned that he had covered Jackson's "Rock With You" in concert in recent years. In a video shot in Haiden, Austria, in August 2008, the month Jackson turned 50, Chilton introduces the 1979 smash hit by saying, "I honestly love this tune. Nobody else even realizes it's good yet, but I swear to God this is a great song. He didn't write it, but ... that's probably why it's great."

Okay, so Chilton wasn't a fan of Jackson's songwriting, but Rod Temperton, the Englishman who penned "Rock With You," deserves all the praise he gets. "Rock With You," like Chilton and Jackson, is an enduring classic.

a movie poster that could've spent less time explaining itself

Welcome back to my infrequent series (some would call it "abandoned" or "not substantial enough to even qualify as a series," but let's not nitpick) in which I play Monday-morning quarterback for movie-studio marketing departments and therefore justify my existence in this universe.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, adapted from the book series of the same name, opens today, and recently I've seen posters on the sides of buses that feature this tag line:

"IT'S NOT A DIARY, IT'S A MOVIE."

Of course it's not a diary! How stupid do you think I am, Hollywood? Nobody advertises their diaries in public. Duh!

But even if they do, they're called blogs. Or Facebook status updates. Or tweets. And they help justify our existence by letting everyone else in the universe know what we think of, you know, stuff, or how bored we are or how fat we think we are (which is the cue for the rest of the universe to say "OMG, you are so not fat!").

You could learn a lot from people like me, Hollywood. In fact, yesterday when I was trying on some new jeans that felt a little tight and I decided Levi's has really taken a nosedive in popularity, I thought, "This would so make a great movie!"

Trash can be just as inspiring as art.

Thomas Mars and Laurent Brancowitz of the French band Phoenix were asked about their influences by Melena Ryzik for the March 7 installment of The New York Times's Playlist feature. Here are two excerpts:

Ryzik: On your list you also put a painting, "Guacamole Airlines" by Ed Ruscha.

Mars: He's just the coolest artist alive. Whenever you hear him talk about art, his approach to it is very contemporary, it's very pop, and that's something we've always wanted to do. That's why I put Us Weekly in there [too]. Why you want to create music can be because you hear something beautiful, and you're thinking, I could be inspired by this. But sometimes you see something disgusting, and you think, O.K., I have to make something better than this.

Ryzik: How do you hold on to ["teenage abandon," as Brancowitz calls the recurring theme in Phoenix's music] as adults?

Brancowitz: It's not hard. I mean, it's not related to age—I say teenage because it's something you experience with the most force when you are young. You know this emotion you have when you see a movie that's so beautiful or you hear a piece of music that sounds perfect? It's this kind of anxiety and joy. So it's very easy, actually. You just have to see the right piece of art.

Everyone needs a theme song.

Plenty of songs are named after women, but men have needs too.



Thanks for finding this one, Sini!

Coming up with awesome book titles takes practice.

Sometime last year I saw this book cover on a friend's Facebook page:

In Hendersonville, North Carolina, two months ago, while visiting my parents for Christmas, I saw the book's title again, this time on a postcard at a local grocery store called the Fresh Market (possibly the best-smelling place on earth).

Luckily, it's not the only memorable title Lorraine Peterson, an author of books for young (Christian) adults, has come up with over the years:

Answer: He's paranoid about getting mugged, so He never carries cash, but He can light up your life with a lightning strike if you'd prefer.

Answer: Your hair is proof enough that you can't be trusted to do the right thing.

Answer (in the form of bitter, sarcastic rhetorical questions that reveal a little too much about the person writing them): Who ever said God loves forgetful teenagers? Who said God loves teenagers, period? I mean, look at your face—if God loved mankind, why would He create pimples?! And why would He let grown men go bald in their early 20s but still give them pimples in their mid-30s? That's just cruel!

Most accidents occur in the home.

Last night I opened one of my kitchen cabinets to put away some dishes, but I forgot to close the door.

I have a short attention span, but I've only found it to be a problem since I graduated from college 12 years ago. Still, that's a dozen years, and the rise of the Internet as a part of everyday life probably hasn't helped.

In case you're just tuning in, I'm blaming the Internet for my short attention span, and I'm blaming my short attention span for my decision to interrupt the activity in progress—putting away dishes—in order to dust my breakfast table.

At the time I was thinking, "I'd better do that before I forget." But in the process of not forgetting, I forgot to close the kitchen cabinet door. That's why, when a spine from the little cactus on my breakfast table (my only table, and it doubles as a desk) pricked my finger, I walked over to the sink to rinse it off.

That's when I ran right into the kitchen cabinet door.

I didn't turn around and bang my head into it. No, I walked directly into it. How did I not see it?

It reminded me of when I was six and was jumping into a pile of leaves with a friend at his dad's house after kindergarten one day. On my second or third jump I was running toward the pile of leaves when suddenly I fell backward onto the ground—I'd hit a metal bar that was right above my line of sight. That accident left me with some stitches and a scar above my left temple. And now that I'm bald, the scar is in plain sight on my forehead.

I don't think last night's accident will leave a scar, and the cleanup didn't require more than a Band-Aid or four, but I was left with a gash* on my right temple, and over the next few days I'm sure I'll get lots of reactions like "What did you do to your head?"

Well, clearly I got in a fight with one of my kitchen cabinets. Unfortunately, it won.

* The gash above John McClane's (Bruce Willis) right eyebrow in the featured promotional still from 2007's Live Free or Die Hard doesn't resemble mine at all in terms of point of impact. His postaccident facial expression, however, is a perfect match.

expressions of love

My girlfriend, Tamara, took her daughter on a trip to Los Angeles last weekend to look at colleges. She brought me back a "Music We Like" in-store booklet from Amoeba Records, which lists employees' favorite music and movies. I especially liked these two write-ups:

EvelynMarie
The Best of the Moments: Love on a Two-Way Street (Rhino): Wow! ["Sexy Mama"] goes beyond sexy. Harry [Ray, lead vocals] says, "This afternoon I know you liked me, by tonight you're gonna love me." He had me at his parents' conception! It is eight minutes long & good. My only wish was to have been in the studio at this recording. Be careful you might get pregnant just listening! Always practice safe listening!!



Rachel W.
Paper Moon soundtrack (El/Cherry Red): "Drink your Nehi and eat your Coney Island!" No surprise that my all-time favorite movie is also my all-time favorite soundtrack ... Leo Reisman, Dick Powell, Ozzie Nelson, Hoagy Carmichael and friends ease you into the joyful, alien land of Depression America where snappy patter wards off poverty and sickness, and you can wrap your troubles in dreams.



Also, last month my dad sent me the following xkcd comic strip by Randall Munroe:

antidefamation defamers

In Monday's Chicago Sun-Times the wildly popular, heavily spray-tanned MTV reality show Jersey Shore was called "nothing more but a 'Sopranos' for teenagers" by Robert Allegrini, the vice president of communications for Hilton Hotels in North and South America and "a major player in various Italian-American groups" that protest cultural stereotypes in movies and TV shows, according to the Sun-Times.

I haven't seen Jersey Shore, which reportedly follows the exploits of underachieving, fame-seeking twentysomethings who drink a lot, then argue and/or hook up with each other. (Sooo, pretty much like The Real World ever since that 2002 season set in Las Vegas?) But to compare it to The Sopranos, one of the richest, most entertaining TV series ever created, is an insult. In fact I'd say it's defamation—and anti-defamers who defame disgust me!

I'll cut Allegrini some slack, though, since he's employed by a company whose profits have allowed Paris Hilton to never have to worry about getting a "real" job. Underachieving fame seekers probably aren't his favorite kind of people.

Bruce Springsteen is haunted by the ghost of Tom Joad.

And why shouldn't he be? One year after the release of his last album, Working on a Dream, we're still in a recession. (Okay, fine—technically, the Great Recession may have ended a few months ago, but the job market is still pretty bleak here in Chicago.) Even the Boss's drummer in the E Street Band, Max Weinberg, got laid off from his job as Conan O'Brien's bandleader last week. It's rough out there, y'all.

Any-hoo, am I the only one who sees an apparition behind Bruce on the passenger side of that old car?

Great Moments in the History of Bad Proofreading

A playbill isn't just a desolate landscape filled with random names and credits and people thanking their pets for supporting their artistic dreams. It's also a minefield laced with bad proofreading and faulty logic! Here's a favorite of mine from the playbill of a community-theater musical I saw in 1995:

In her spare time she loves to write plays and hopes to one day write her own play.

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Tonight I was told that Norwegian free-jazz bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten is my doppelgänger.

My girlfriend and I were at the Dusty Groove America record store in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood when a man to my left looked up from the soundtracks section (alphabetized by composer, not by movie title—Dusty Groove don't mess around, y'all) and said, "Ingebrigt?"

I wasn't sure at first what he'd said. I didn't recognize any English in the question he'd posed.

He followed it up with "Håker Flaten?"

Again, confusion. I was wondering where the hidden camera was located.

"You're not Ingebrigt Håker Flaten?"

At that point I remembered the bassist's name from the five years I spent proofreading the music listings at the Chicago Reader. According to the gentleman at Dusty Groove, Håker Flaten doesn't live in Chicago anymore, so it's a good thing I'm still around for false sightings.

(This is my "actor" head shot. If I don't land the role of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten in The Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Story, I'll have to fire my agent. Of course, before I take that drastic step I'll have to find an agent, but why sweat the details?)

a poem I wrote when I was seven

In 1983 my dad, an English professor at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, let me sit in on a creative writing class he taught for grade school students that summer. I wasn't yet a second grader, but he let me sit in on the class.

Over the holidays I discovered one of the poems I wrote that summer. I was such a killjoy.

THE PEGASUS PAPERS, 1983

Selected works from the "Words! Words! Words!" class (grades 2-4), July 18-22.

FEAR

Running along

As fast as you can:

Nothing beside me,

You think in your head.

Don't worry, child,

Fear is right here.

Thinking for awhile ...

Sounds begin to talk,

Fear is with you

The rest of the way.

Music is worth talking about.

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form." —Plato (source and date unknown)

"Music is the healing force of the world / It's understood by every man, woman, boy, and girl" —Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, "I Love Music," 1975, as performed by the O'Jays

"Music is the naked cry of the human heart longing to be with God. Yo!" —Dion, at the 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert on October 29, 2009, at Madison Square Garden in New York City

the generation gap

Earlier tonight my dad was scrolling through his iPhone while my mom sat beside him on the couch and looked at her friends' Facebook postings on her laptop.

I sat opposite them and read newspaper clippings I've collected over the past few months.

true, but it's fiction

On December 18 of last year I discovered I was being laid off from my job at the Chicago Reader. On December 18 of this year I discovered that my first attempt at (very short) fiction was being published in the Reader's annual fiction issue. Despite the past year being difficult in many ways, I liked the timing of this news.

decaying masterpieces

If actor Tim DeKay wastes an entire weekend watching the fine programming on USA Network, does that qualify as "time decay"?

It's good that apartheid has ended, not so good that proofreading has gone the same route:

pretty bloody

An Associated Press story about Katey Sagal (Married ... With Children, Futurama, 8 Simple Rules) and her role on the FX series Sons of Anarchy was reprinted in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times. I have no idea when the word "not" got deleted from the following paragraph, but I like the result:

Season 2 of the FX drama "Sons of Anarchy" is primed to end with bloody payback. It's likely to be pretty.

in between

On the run from government assassins after a botched attempt on his life, and looking for a place to hide, CIA bookworm Joe Turner (Robert Redford) kidnaps a stranger, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), and forces her to drive him back to her place, in Sydney Pollack's 1975 film Three Days of the Condor.

Later, at Kathy's apartment, Joe uses a rare moment of quiet to look at the black-and-white photographs on her walls.

Joe: Lonely pictures.
Kathy: So?
Joe: You're funny. You take pictures of empty streets, and trees with no leaves on them.
Kathy: It's winter.
Joe: Not quite winter. They look like ... November. Not autumn, not winter. In between.

White Guys in Suits: 1989 vs. 2009

Alessandra Stanley wrote an article in the New York Times earlier this year about Jimmy Fallon taking over for Conan O'Brien on NBC's Late Night that month, and O'Brien getting set to take over for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in June, and Leno taking over for the majority of 10 PM drama series on the network in the fall, and how every other late-night network talk-show host is a white guy in a suit, and why isn't there any diversity?

On November 9, TBS debuted Lopez Tonight, hosted by Mexican-American comedian and former sitcom star George Lopez. (Sorry, ladies—you're still confined to hosting daytime talk shows.)

When The Arsenio Hall Show started its syndication run in January 1989, it garnered a lot of media attention, mainly because its host was the only minority hosting such a show at the time. But it also had much more of a party atmosphere than Johnny Carson and David Letterman's shows on NBC: Hall didn't sit behind a desk when interviewing his guests, he featured many R&B and hip-hop musical acts who weren't getting booked on the NBC shows, and he had a section of audience members he referred to as "the dog pound" because they responded "Woof, woof, woof!" when commanded to do so. (Sadly, Ivan Pavlov's late-night talk show never got off the ground in the late 1800s due to TV not having been invented yet.)

Yo! MTV Raps debuted a few months before Arsenio and helped bring hip-hop into the musical mainstream by exposing white suburban youth (including myself) to the relatively new genre. But 20 years ago MTV was a cable channel that was still expanding its own audience, whereas Arsenio was mostly syndicated on non-NBC network affiliates on "free TV," so its exposure of hip-hop to mainstream audiences helped rap expand even further, and possibly faster, into white America. And similar to The Cosby Show five years earlier, Arsenio didn't need a white sidekick in order for its host to cross over to white audiences. It was broadcasting without the stench of narrow-minded focus-group research or "niche audience" goals.

One problem, though—Hall wasn't funny. I loved Letterman's on-air persona and Late Night's conceptual humor (courtesy of writers like George Meyer, who's something of a legend among his fellow writers on The Simpsons, and Chris Elliott, who later cocreated and starred in his own conceptual-humor masterpiece, the early-'90s sitcom Get a Life) when I was growing up, and reruns of Carson's Comedy Classics prove that the late Tonight Show host's comic timing has stood the test of time, even if ABSCAM references haven't. Hall, on the other hand, laughed at everything he said, which made his jokes even less funny. On top of that, he was a lousy listener during interviews.

I remember Hall's cameo in Eddie Murphy's directorial debut, Harlem Nights (1989), being the only funny thing in that horrible film (Murphy hasn't directed a movie since), but unlike Murphy, Hall didn't have effortless charisma as a performer telling jokes to an audience. (He recently returned to movie acting with a role in the blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite.) His show was a party, but nothing more.

Similarly, I think any actress who's lost an award to Tina Fey since 2006 has every right to roll her eyes and gnash her teeth. (Jimmy Fallon and she continued the irritating trend of laughing at one's own jokes when they anchored Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment in the first half of this decade, though they preferred the self-satisfied smirk above all else.) To her credit, Fey has admitted she's more comfortable as a writer than as an actor, and I'm not saying she's the worst actress on TV by any means, but the fawning admiration this woman gets for her acting is ridiculous. Hollywood and all of my friends have been brainwashed, and it doesn't look like they'll come out of their trance anytime soon.

At least I can take comfort in Nancy Franklin's review of 30 Rock in the December 8, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, where she wrote, "Fey's Liz has become a bit looser over the show's forty episodes, and it may be that winning two Emmys in a row for Best Actress in a Comedy has freed Fey up as a performer; in which case, I'm all for giving out awards before people fully deserve them. (Yoo-hoo, Pulitzer Prize committee, over here!)" Likewise, Franklin can take comfort in knowing that I flattered her by unknowingly stealing that Pulitzer joke of hers last month over at Popdose.

In Fey's defense I'd assumed ever since 30 Rock began in '06 that as the creator and executive producer of the show she was responsible for all the low-cut tops her character, Liz Lemon, wears, even though Liz is a self-described awkward nerd, both socially and sexually. But if that's the case, wouldn't she cover up her breasts in the workplace? I don't think there's a subtle, multilayered joke I'm not getting here.


It turns out 30 Rock costar Alec Baldwin is responsible, at least according to Maureen Dowd's Vanity Fair article about Fey in the magazine's January 2009 issue. "There is Liz Lemon and there is Liz Lemon as portrayed by a leading actress in a TV show," Baldwin said. "It's not a documentary. Tina's a beautiful girl ... Tina always played the cute, nerdy girl. Tina on ['Weekend Update'], the glasses. There was not a big glamour quotient for her. Now there is." So Baldwin wants to exploit Fey even if it doesn't fit her character, which in turn makes the jokes less honest and the show less interesting. But I'm not an Emmy voter, so what do I know?

Getting back to actual late-night programming, instead of the fictional kind portrayed on 30 Rock, right before Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson in the spring of '92, Hall told Entertainment Weekly, "No one put the late-night silver spoon in my mouth. I earned every drop of mine. And I'm gonna treat him like we treated the kid on the high school basketball team who was the coach's son. He was there because he was anointed too. We tried to kick his ass, and that's what I'm going to do—kick Jay's ass."

Hall didn't seem to appreciate Leno telling the press they were "friends." Branford Marsalis didn't look like he wanted to spend any more time than was necessary with Leno when he was The Tonight Show's bandleader, and George Lopez called him "two-faced" in 2007. Then there are the stories about how David Letterman, a former friend, can't stand Leno now. (But he seems so nice. Is it a case of Leno not having any sincerity to back it up?)

Well, Hall didn't kick Leno's ass. In fact, two years after he laid down the gauntlet, his show was gone, due in part to CBS affiliates dropping his show for Late Show With David Letterman once it began airing on the network at 11:30 PM in the fall of '93. "Too much too soon" and a shift in the zeitgeist also factored into the decline of The Arsenio Hall Show's popularity.

I don't think Hall got much respect from fellow comedians in the early '90s the way Letterman and Carson did. Below is part of a Bill Hicks interview from a 1992 issue of The Nose magazine in which the revered stand-up comic tells interviewer Jack Boulware how he really feels about Hall.

(Hicks died in 1994, three months before Arsenio ended its run. Hall can be consoled by the fact that Hicks also had a beef with Leno, who he once considered a mentor of sorts, because he appeared in TV commercials for Doritos; in his stand-up act, Hicks pondered whether Dallas's Patrick Duffy or Blossom's Joey Lawrence would be the celebrity to push Leno over the edge and force him to shoot himself in the head on national television, regretting what his life had become.)

You really piss people off sometimes.

Well, it's funny, but I just have this weird theory. The best kind of comedy, to me, is when you make people laugh at things they've never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people's minds and exposing them to the light.

Man, I don't know—I always felt that's what the point of it all was. I don't think it makes you sympathetic to mass murderers so much as maybe ... I thought the whole point of it was to make you feel un-alone. Many thoughts I do have are not my own thoughts, you know what I mean? They're not secret thoughts.

In your act, why do you refer to Dick Clark as the Antichrist?

The only point of that whole thing is just about mediocrity and lowering the standards of the world.

Who else falls into that category?

(pause) Arsenio is the most dangerous one of all. Everyone is going on that show. It is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Jesus is gonna do that show when he comes back. (as Arsenio's announcer) "Tonight on Arsenio: Paula Abdul, Della Reese, and Jesus of Nazareth. Let's get busy!" (as Hall) "Jesus, tell me the truth now. Mary Magdalene—didja do her?" (as the audience) "Arf, arf, arf, arf." (as Hall again) "We'll be right back."

I can't believe it. I mean, Robert Duvall—I've never seen him do an interview, never seen him do a talk show. Comes out to promote what? Days of Thunder. I'm watchin' him with fuckin' Tom Cruise, and [he's] just, "Tom Cruise. I had to work with this man. Oooh. Well, let me tell you something, Arsenio—Tom Cruise is the young talent of today. Better make sure of it."

What the fuck is happening? Did they all get transfusions from Merv Griffin in the green room? This is fuckin' Duvall, man! De Niro did Arsenio! Do we have some sort of huge white guilt or something? Or do these people—did they all just drink Merv Griffin's blood in some alley? What the fuck is going on here? The guy is the child of fuckin' Merv Griffin and Little Richard, man.