me’s blog

Kathy Griffin kicked ass Wednesday night at the gorgeous Lyric Opera House in downtown Baltimore.  We got stuck in traffic on the way there and didn’t arrive until 8:10, but fortunately she didn’t go on until about 5 minutes after we were in our seats, so all was well.  In her opening segment she asked if anyone had just driven from DC up to Baltimore for the show that night like she just had.  She commiserated through our hoots and hollers, saying "Yeah what’s up with all the fucking traffic?"

I won’t retell all of her stories here, because a) this blog would go on for-EVER; b) I could never do them justice; and c) they will probably all end up in one of her tv specials anyway.  I will say that a significant amount of time was devoted to her recent encounters with "too stupid to vote" Paris Hilton, highlighted by brilliantly nuanced imitations of her freaky retarded baby voice and her "half-horse/half-tarantula" likeness.  She also discussed a run-in she had with Dr. Phil, whom she repeatedly addressed merely as "Phil" in an apparently successful attempt to ruffle his feathers.  Hee.  Other targets included Oprah and her boyfriend Gayle, Aaron Carter and his methed-up complexion, Paula Abdul and her onscreen oxycontin passouts, and Larry King and his seemingly shapeshifting head.  And of course, Miss Ryan Seacrest.

The show ended with yet another in a long line of hilariously infamous tales from Kathy’s apperances on The View.  This was from the first day immediately following the big Rosie vs. Elisabeth blow-up, and Kathy was scheduled to sit in as a guest co-host.  Apparently one of that day’s "Hot Topics" involved the age-old (heh) issue of menopause.  Here’s what Kathy said:

Those women on The View looooooooove talking about menopause.  Menopause menopause menopause…. So we were talking about how once you hit menopause, your vagina dries up.  Little Elisabeth - bless her heart - didn’t believe us, so I told her, "It’s true!  I’ll admit it, I’m not afraid of a little K.Y."

And you know what Barbara said?

"I pwefer Astwo-Gwide."

I’d like to take this opportunity to point both of my faithful readers to the glorious return of one of my favorite online features, the Chart Flashback column on Entertainment Weekly’s website.  Every few weeks or so, EW blogger and music aficionado Whitney Pastorek lovingly takes Billboard’s top 10 singles of that particular week from some random year over the past few decades, revisiting each song with highly entertaining combs of varying fine-toothedness.  [Thanks to YouTube, she is also able to provide the often dubious videos for each song in her column.]  Sometimes she offers her opinions on how well a song and/or its video has held up over time.  Frequently she’ll throw in personal anecdotes or memories she has attached to a song.  And every once in a while, she’ll just sum up a song in one word and give it a grade.  For this particular edition of her column she has chosen to evaluate the top 10 singles of this week from 1989.  This is exciting to me for a few reasons.

First of all, 1989 was my favorite year in pop music.  It was sort of a random transition year from the hair-sprayed ubercheese-that-knew-it-was-cheese of the 1980’s to the hair-gelled ubercheese-that-thought-it-was-cool of the early 1990’s.  As you’ll see in her column, crap acts like Milli Vanilli and New Kids On The Block (sorry Amy!) cross paths with more streetwise acts like Bobby Brown and Neneh Cherry.  Throw in some veterans like Natalie Cole, Bette Midler, and Donna Summer, and you’ve nearly rounded out quite a wacky top 10.  I LOVE THAT SHIT!  Today?  A top 10 like that would NEVER happen.  Sad.

Also, for a period of time in middle school and high school I was kind of obsessed with the top 40, even going so far as to create my own weekly lists and countdowns.  (If I hadn’t done so before, I have now completely outed myself as a dork.  But a music dork, which isn’t quite so bad, right?  Lovable, even?)  Along with this obsession came a fascination with the charts in Billboard magazine.  I ended up getting a subscription for a few years while I was in high school, but this week, with this particular top 10, is the first issue of Billboard I ever purchased.

The reason I remember the top 10 from this particular issue is because it was the week that "Cry" by a Welsh band called Waterfront peaked at #10.  Nobody - Whitney included - remembers this one-hit wonder, but it spent so much time at the top of my own weekly countdowns that it ended up becoming my overall #1 song of 1989, and I was thrilled that it managed to graze Billboard’s top 10.  Perhaps even more significantly, "Cry" was the very first cassette single (remember the "cassingle"?) that I ever purchased.  These watershed acquisitions of my first cassingle and my first issue of Billboard came within mere minutes of each other.  We were on a 7th grade end-of-the-year trip somewhere downtown and we went to Union Station for lunch.  Pretty exciting, with its food court and its train schedules and its SAM GOODY!  It was there that I bought the cassingle for "Cry" (as well as the cassingle for "Let The River Run" by Carly Simon).  Shortly thereafter I wandered into one of the train station’s comprehensive magazine stores and picked up my first ever copy of Billboard.  I think I spent all of my lunch money on these purchases.  No Sbarro’s for me, thankyouverymuch!  Despite the now obvious red flags which somehow evaded this 11 year-old audiophile’s wide-eyed gaze, my heart grew ten sizes that day.

So without further delay, I invite you to take a trip back in time.  Get a Gumby-do like Bobby, prepare to dine with the Fine Young Cannibals, and check out Billboard’s Top 10 Singles for the week ending June 24, 1989.

Maybe you’ll thank me in 8 more years.

Last night I was talking to a fella I’ve been hanging out with lately.  He had not yet read my most recent blog installment, so he asked me what I thought of Cirque Du Soleil.  I gave him the Readers’ Digest version of my review, and my conclusion that this particular show of theirs seemed to have some specific stylistic problems.  His response?  "Don’t worry.  We’ll see a better show of theirs sooner or later." 

In my head the needle scratched loudly across the record.

Having heard almost these exact same words almost exactly eight years ago, I had to chuckle to stop myself from pulling his cute little face off to reveal a Brandon 2.0 underneath.  Grrr!

[If you don't get it, just read the end of my previous post.]

As I sat in my seat at the Verizon Center last night watching a performance of "Delerium" by Cirque Du Soleil, I was mesmerized by the incredible stuff going on before my eyes.  Surrealistically dreamlike images colorfully wafted across the stage.  Driving, organic live music rhythmically churned through my gut.  A bevy of freakishly skilled (and sculpted - wowza!) acrobats did things I’d never even imagined people could do with their bodies.  There were many moments that made me miss the developmental cabaret theater style in which I loved to participate while studying drama at Duke.  We would throw the unique talents and passions of the diverse cast members into a mixing bowl along with multilingual songs and texts that held meaning to us, stir it all up, and cook up something strangely stageworthy whose undeniable power came from the palpable emotional connection between the artists and the art.  Those shows were jaw-droppingly entertaining and heart-skippingly moving.

But while I definitely found myself enchanted by the aspects of "Delerium" which I mentioned above, I can’t honestly say that the show moved me.  Perhaps some of this is due to the near-nosebleeds where we were sitting, but quite frankly, I just kept thinking how underwhelming a lot of it was.  And I’m not sure I should’ve been underwhelmed by most of it.  The projections which danced across the scrim in front of the stage were frequently stunning, but then two seconds later I’d be reminded of some run-of-the-mill desktop screensaver I’d seen.  The dancing was good even when there was no mind-boggling contortionist on stage to twist my imagination, but good dancing can be seen on a handful of primetime reality shows with a mere flick of the remote. 

And then there was the singing.  To someone who has been on a few cruises in his life, the jarringly out-of-place singing in last night’s show felt a bit too cruise-shippy.  Aside from many of the admittedly catchy and well-sung songs being far too lyrically linear and downright "American" for a show that would’ve benefitted from a total surrender to Eurasian surrealism, the stupid cameras tended to focus on the downright unremarkable sight of the singers.  This resulted in gigantic images of ho-hum vocalists on the screens abutting the stage, while the marvelous acrobats remained relatively microscopic to the naked eye.  Call me crazy, but I would’ve preferred the magnifying glass to be transfixed upon the four silver-Speedoed hotties who essentially defied gravity for five minutes, not the forgettable face of the mic-holding singer who just kinda stood there, um, singing.  At least for this show, unlike many a cruise ship revue, the singing was in-key.

So am I just jaded?  Or was it our seats?  Our was it this particular show?  Whatever the reason(s) may be, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, with a name like Cirque Du Soleil, the show should’ve been a little bit more - wait for it - Punky.

I’ve actually been waiting for eight years to see Cirque Du Soleil, so perhaps the expectations were impossible to meet.  I first heard of them around this time of year back in 1999, a mere day or two before I was unceremoniously dumped by Brandon, the one person I’ve ever really called a boyfriend.  [For more on him, click here.]  He and I were in Orlando laying the groundwork what was (not) going to be an eventual move to Miami together.  While hanging out in Downtown Disney or whatever that little area is called, we stumbled upon an actual Cirque Du Soleil theater there where various shows of theirs are performed year-round.  I’d never heard of them before, so I went into the Cirque store and saw some images and postcards and stuff, and I was immediately intrigued by what I saw.  We tried to buy tickets, but of course they were sold out for the foreseeable future.  Brandon told me not to worry, we’d see a show of theirs sooner or later. 

Now it’s eight years later, and I can finally cross it off the list.  If for that alone, the show was amazing.

[NOT EVEN SIX DEGREES:  Brandon also happens to be the name of the dog of Punky Brewster, a character played by Soleil Moon Frye, whose first name is the same as the Cirque, which I first discovered with Brandon....  Quelle trippy, dudes!]

Dear Sir Paul McCartney,

First of all, hello.  Or shall I say, cheers!  Okay, enough with the pleasantries.  I know your time is precious, so let’s get right to the point, shall we?

On Sunday afternoon I went with my mom, my dad, and my sister to see "Shrek The Third" for Fathers Day.  The movie was a cute enough sequel to the other two films, but I have to tell you, something has been bugging me ever since.  I’m hoping you can help set my mind at ease.

Early in the movie when the Frog King dies, the opening section of your classic tune "Live And Let Die" is played.  Now, I too am a songwriter, so I understand the somewhat fluid relationship one should be willing to have with traditional grammar when fitting words to music.  That being said, there is one line in your song that drives me crazy every time I hear it.  My sister has recently inspired me to follow through when I mentally note an intention to write a letter airing some grievance of mine, so you Sir are the fortunate guinea pig of my first such experiment.  I sure hope you’re reading my blog.

I want you to be assured that I’ve been thorough in my research before bringing this to your attention.  I’ve even done numerous lyric searches on Google just to be sure that I’m hearing it correctly.  Apparently, and unfortunately, I am.  And it seems I’m not the first person to notice this glaring atrocity.  Perhaps, however, I am the first to bring it to your attention.  Though I kind of doubt that too.  The lyric in question goes like this:

"But if this ever-changing world in which we live in makes you give in and cry…"

Um, what?  "In which we live in"???  With all due respect, Sir, you gotta be bloody kidding me!  Maybe you were absent that day in elementary school (which I believe you wacky Brits coincidentally call grammar school), but I am rather certain I learned not to blatantly repeat prepositions like that in, I don’t know, second grade?  Sir Paul, baby, tell me how much harder it would have been to turn the phrase thusly:

"But if this ever-changing world in which we’re livin’ makes you give in and cry…"

Phonetically, this sounds EXACTLY the same as your whack-ass construction, especially when your British accent is taken into account.  Is that why you thought you could get away with it?  Because any crime against grammar sounds correct  - proper, even - with an English accent?  That’s a load of bollocks!  Even Judi Dench couldn’t get away with a phrase like yours.  I doubt she’d even deign to try.

Besides, is the meaning of my proposed alteration really THAT much different than yours?  It still ends up in the present tense, and all of the rest of the words around the phrase remain the same.  I can simply think of no syntactical or contextual motivation for your extra "in".  What purpose does it serve?  Is it intended to add some extra oomph to just how "in" this world we live?  Like, we’re "inside" this world?  That makes little sense to me.  Maybe the disconnect is happening because the world in which I’m living is different from the one in which you lived in the 60’s.  See what I did there?  I used your construction, but I used the second "in" to start a new prepositional phrase.  That’s how we roll in the colonies.

I have no doubt that you will promptly take whatever steps are necessary to right this seemingly singular wrong on your otherwise pristine record.  I suppose it might not bother me quite so much if I hadn’t been raised by a mother who used to teach English, but we are who we are.  I cannot change that, nor would I want to if I could.  For like you, I too believe in living and letting live - as long as said living is done with decent, inoffensive grammar.

I look forward to searching online for your lyrics again soon and finding them all fixed.

Have a chim-chimeree weekend, your Sirness your Knightity your Highness Paul!

Blimey,

Matt

P.S. - I’m loving the new season of "Footballers’ Wive$"!  You people sure do make good telly.  That Amber is an absolute crumpet!

I just finished watching the most recent episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life On The D-List.  For those of you out of the know, this is a usually harmless and frequently hilarious reality show which chronicles comedienne Kathy Griffin’s struggles to pull herself out of obscurity and turn herself into a household name.  Last week she sold out a gig at Carnegie Hall, so her efforts definitely seem to be paying off.  Soon the title of the show may need to change.

On tonight’s episode the laughter stopped for a little while as Kathy confronted the death of her father, a spunky 90 year-old wise-cracker who has appeared on the show numerous times with Kathy’s equally spunky mom as a sort of comic relief - from the comedy.  And wouldn’t you know it, I actually found myself bawling.  During a comedienne’s reality show.  WTF.

Death sucks.  Saying goodbye sucks.  Stuff like that always fucks me and my tearducts up, and I will forever hold E.T. responsible for that.  No, not the nightly tabloid tv show with that permaperky Mary Hart who creepily never ages.  Though she and that show do make me sad for a host of other reasons…  But I’m actually referring to the so-called "kids’ movie" E.T., the one which I distinctly recall hurling me into some kind of primal breakdown half of my life ago when it was re-released in theaters in 1992 for its ten year anniversary.  I’m talking a wailing, keening tantrum complete with projectile mucus here.  I truly believe that movie scarred me for life, and that however young I was when I first saw it - five, perhaps? - was waaaaay too young.  I’m not sure I’m old enough even NOW to be subjected to such a traumatic film.  To this day whenever I say goodbye to someone, or whenever I see someone say goodbye to someone on tv or in a movie and I know they’ll never see the person again, I lose my shit.  Not literally.   That would be weird.  But I do tend to cry in those situations.  A lot.

So I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised that Kathy Griffin made me cry tonight.  What perhaps came as a bit more of a surprise was that not five minutes later she had me laughing hysterically again.  I’m pretty sure she knew that’s what her feisty old dad would have wanted, as he watched her show upstairs on God’s giant flatscreen.  Way to go, Kathy!  See you next week in Baltimore!

The lesson?  It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s definitely a nice reminder.  Sure sucky stuff happens sometimes, but it always feels better after I let myself have a good cry.  And if things get entirely too serious, I can always HIT OUISER!  For as Dolly Parton so eloquently states in Steel Magnolias, "Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion."

Who am I to disagree with Dolly?

And by thong, I mean flip-flop.

I need to vent.  Or, more specifically, my feet need to vent.  While sitting here at work innocently passing the seemingly interminable 8-hour Monday at my desk, I heard a truly disturbing sound approaching from the other end of the hallway, getting louder and louder like a killer beast from some summer blockbuster horror movie:

fffwip fffwop fffwip fffwop fffwip fffwop fffwip fffwop FFFWIP FFFWOP

Yes, the insanity-inducing annual plague of the Flip-Flopped Workplace Women has once again descended upon DC, and I for one am not going to take it.  Well, not silently anyways.  Like those stupid-ass locust doofuses that come clumsily careening into our lives, our gutters, and our hair every 17 years, so too does the Business Casual Dress Code Double Standard - the BCDCDS - come smacking me upside the head every year around this time.  Why, oh why, are women allowed to wear flip flops, tank tops, and shorts (call ‘em what you want ladies, but you know they’re shorts) all summer long, while we men have to wear long pants, socks, actual shoes, and at the very least, short sleeves?  It’s damn hot outside today, and I for one would love to be able to go fffwip-fffwopping down the hallway with toes, legs, and arms a-flappin’ in the breeze. 

Buuuuuuuut no.  Because I work in an office and was born with one appendage that women are rumored to envy, my other appendages are forced to live a life of quiet seclusion, never seeing the light of a summer weekday until after 5:30’s metaphorical whistle blows.  And maybe I’m crazy, or perhaps just gay, but I for one do not want to be having women’s feet aurally flaunted in my face all day long.  It’s like that obnoxious woman with the tiny head from those Room Store commercials who takes her shoes off and puts her bare feet all up on the furniture.  That’s not smart advertising.  That’s just nasty.

This weekend my sister was talking about how she needs to get better at following through when she makes a mental note to write a letter about some injustice she perceives or encounters.  Even though she’s probably at work right now wearing dressed-up flip-flops (or - and God how I hate this word - "strappy" sandals), perhaps I should take inspiration from her and write a letter.  To her boss.  Mental note.

I did dip my toe in the water, so to speak, by venting briefly about this to two male friends online today, both office professionals, hoping to elicit a smidge of sympathy.  They impressively managed to stifle their inner monologues (which were undoubtedly chanting "nanny nanny boo boo") as they both promptly informed me that they were currently wearing flip flops.  At work.

They’re such women.  And they know who they are.

So is this just my own personal cause, or is anyone else out there a victim of this sick and twisted societal inequity?  Would you sign my hypothetical petition, given the unlikelihood that I’ll ever take action on my mental note?  Would you stand with me, besandaled, as we all join hands and march upon Washington, united as one, demanding equal rights for workplace feet everywhere?  One small fffwip-fffwoppy step for man, one giant fffwip-fffwoppy step for mankind!

Or should I just put on a parka, ski pants, leg warmers, and some wading boots and cover my ears with my hands until September?

For my faithful readers with sick senses of humor (as this entry’s title may have already indicated), proceed without haste to www.haveaslogan.com.  Keep clicking on the smiling man for some hilariously absurd (and often disturbingly thought-provoking) noun/slogan combinations.

Endless good fun for a slow workday.

Feel free to post your favorite results in the comments section below.