Pop Culture
August 07, 2004
Watching Watching the Friedmans
Recently, I saw Watching the Friedmans. Immediately after that, I put on The Mating Game, a "60s" romantic comedy (it was from 59 actually) with Tony Randall and Debbie Reynolds. To me, these movies and movie experiences side by side offer a perfect case for asking whether the point of life is to be happy and if so what choices one might make. Why the hell did I submit myself to the ugliness of Watching the Friedmans? I felt dirty and sad afterwards. Watching The Mating Game I was between amused and laughing out loud. Tell me, why would one choose the former over the latter? Life is hard enough, filled with enough ugliness. I don't need to add to it by looking inside the minds of sick people that the world would be better off without. Give me farce....Full entry: Watching Watching the Friedmans
January 21, 2004
William Asher connections
William Asher was one of the directors on I Love Lucy; the character's name was Lucy Esmeralda MacGillicuddy Ricardo. Asher went on to produce/direct Bewitched, starring his wife, Elizabeth Montgomery, as Samantha. In Bewitched, the bumbling nanny's name is Esmeralda, played by Alice Ghostley. Ghostley played Mrs. Murdock in the movie Grease (DVD/VHS). Eve Arden, who played Principal McGee in Grease, guest starred on Bewitched as Nurse Kelton in the episode where Tabitha is born. Arden also had a cameo on I Love Lucy in 1955. Besides rehashes, spin-offs and specials related to Bewitched and its cast (inc. the series' Tabitha and The Paul Lynde Show), Asher also directed episodes of Gidgit, Alice and The Dukes of Hazzard. But despite the importance of Lucy and the lasting power of Bewitched, Asher's most significant project in the canon of pop culture...Full entry: William Asher connections
January 01, 2004
Review of XeRo by LARuocco
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XeRo: Turn-of-the-Millenia (Zero)By La Ruocco
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La Ruocco's Xero is epistemological profanity at its cleverest. A chaotic but perfect world to explore. For the lover of art that makes you think and laugh, Xero is, as Robert Bork once said, an 'intellectual feast.'
Full entry: Review of XeRo by LARuocco
November 25, 2003
Joe Millionaire 2
Well, Joe Millionaire is back, and so is my tracking chart. This ahh-shucks wholesome-as-apple-pie cowboy (with the emphasis on boy) and I don’t see much eye to eye as far as women or anything else. I don't know. He thinks cursing and being dominant makes a girl "like a guy". To me, the kind of girl who doesn't curse, have a little attitude, and carry on a smart conversation would be the non-starter. Well, he can go for the model-thin shy “tall drinks of water”, and I’ll be favoring the smart beautiful ones. Joe Millionaire 2 tracking chart–through the finale 10/21/03 - updated 10/27, 11/2, 11/3, 11/10, 11/17,11/25 By Philip F. Rose www.experiential.net Well, Joe Millionaire is back, and so is my tracking chart. This ahh-shucks wholesome-as-apple-pie cowboy (with the emphasis on boy) and I don’t see much eye to...Full entry: Joe Millionaire 2
November 10, 2003
The 2003 Fall TV season (in ONLY 6,000 words)
(Orig. September 21, 2003; updated 10/28/03 to reflect Fox schedule changes and add a few notes and changes of opinion) (updated again 11/10 to reflect additional schedule changes and cancellations) Last year’s annual fall TV season preview ran 9,000+ words. It’s about two-thirds that this time. (I’ve also dropped the endnotes. I thought they were fun, but it’s hard to do them well on the web so they ended up just being an obstacle.) I’m focusing more on what I like, and not covering what I don’t unless its badness is interesting. In fact I’m also going to watch fewer shows this year. There are two reasons for this. For one, I plan to be more selective in what I add and I’ve dropped quite a few. And for the other, though there are a number of shows that are...Full entry: The 2003 Fall TV season (in ONLY 6,000 words)
August 31, 2003
The Ultimate Trip Hop Mix
Trip hop is one of my favorite forms of music. At its best, a beautiful, maybe even ethereal, female voice floats over gritty electronic music, making one of the most perfect tensions in music. While trip hop has pretty much faded away, in its heyday I was doing the music programming for the downtempo electronic station at digital radio company Clickradio, a station I had created. The mix was probably 50 percent trip hop, along with some ambient, acid jazz, exotica and doses of alt-folk, singer/songwriter and alternative hip hop. But this playlist is pure trip hop (well, by my standards.) It's a mix of 40 tracks that represent a cross-section of the best the trip hop genre had to offer -- drawing from the dub, DJ and soul styles. Several of the tracks admittedly lack the feature that is...Full entry: The Ultimate Trip Hop Mix
August 19, 2003
Essential songs #1 (v4) – singer/songwriters
This is obviously my opinion, but it’s from a whole lot of experience. I have a bias towards female singers and female sentiments, but there are a few men mixed in here. Take a look. I’m also not strict about the definition of singer/songwriter. I remember when I was in radio the music nerds would debate over whether Elton John was a singer/songwriter since he wrote the music but not the lyrics. I don’t care. Here, Alison Krauss, who does write songs, is singing a cover, two singers who don’t write are covering Sting, who is a singer/songwriter but I like these versions better. There was also a debate over whether a performer who used a group name rather than an individual name for their work could be called a singer/songwriter, since the name is a singer’s name. Again,...Full entry: Essential songs #1 (v4) – singer/songwriters
March 21, 2003
The 2002 Fall TV season (in 9,000 words, with footnotes (or endnotes))
(This is a merging of the original two articles and an update that made up my look at the 2002 Fall TV Season (9/23/02, 10/28/02 and 3/21/03.) One, in September, came before most shows had aired. It was more a preview, sharing what I expected, good or bad, based on a show's premise and the people involved. The second, in October, offered reviews of those and the ones that started late. As I combine them and post this to the web in 2003, I'm adding some comments but not attempting to update them all. Many stand as reviews of the shows at that point. Hope you find some of this interesting or useful. Feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested, as long as you include attribution or, better, point them to the site....Full entry: The 2002 Fall TV season (in 9,000 words, with footnotes (or endnotes))
June 08, 2001
On Warrior Dreams by James William Gibson
Warrior Dreams explains how the gun culture relates to the absense of a clear delineation between good and evil in this post-modern era. It also challenges the common belief that we lost in Vietnam because we didn't fully commit -- which Gibson proposes is a convenient lie to justify modern militarism. I've always been an anti-gun-control Original Intenter, though my steadfastness has been getting thin. This book has given me more to think about. It is with that compound caveat that I offer the following few comments challenging some points it makes. I do this not to be contrary, but because I think that the book paints an overly negative picture, one that was not justified at the time it was written, but especially is not now. I realize I can do this with hindsight that Gibson did not...Full entry: On Warrior Dreams by James William Gibson
