KARE 11, a TV station in the Twin Cities, has issued an ad campaign in — what else? — Norwegian. At the end, he even says, “Ya, you betcha.” They’re promoting their new weatherman. And let me tell you, weather(man) or not — this kid is a little hunk of cute.
With a name like Sven Sundgaard, he sounds like he owns a coffee shop in Lake Wobegon. What choice is there? It begs for a little Scandinavian navel-gazing.
I once counted myself as one of the proud few who did not fall for mind-numbing reality TV crap. American Idol — Love Kelly Clarkson. What red-blooded American homosexual man doesn’t? But Who Wants to be a Superhero? If this is the evolution being televised, please spare me.
However…
The clouds part and a fiery chariot descents to earth to bring us … Project Runway.
I. Love. Project Runway. As far this particular reality show goes, I have dismounted my high horse. It takes a subject that makes no sense to me whatsoever — fashion — and makes into a backdrop for some really good human drama. These people live together. They are made to run around like chimpanzees trying to work out how to reach the bananas.
I simultaneously love and hate the contrivances and twists that are engineered to create drama for those poor contestants. The third season may be the best so far, but I’m worried about Seasons 5 and 6 and 7. Already they’ve been made to design for each others’ mothers and sisters (with the result that one was reduced to tears). They’ve designed for dogs. They’ve used recyclable trash as fabric. What will they make those designers do in a few years? Create underwear for each other? Design dresses for the male contestants to model? Use human waste as dyes and pigments?
Tonight, in a move both brilliant and cynical, they brought back two of the designers who had previously been removed. I nearly shit myself when I saw Vincent again. I hate Vincent. (No, Eric… You hate how Vincent behaves.) I guess it makes sense: They have some talent; maybe it was bum luck that got them removed. And they got booted off anyway, along with the pageant queen Kayne, much to my dismay.
I am now Project Runway‘s bitch. Yeah, daddy. Do it.
A good friend recently reminded me of a minor source of embarrassment for me. He posted a clip to my MySpace profile from a kids’ show from the ’80s (and, I was surprised to learn, ’90s) called Kids Incorporated.
It’s a rendition of “Over and Over” by Madonna. As it’s her birthday, I thought appropriate to re-post it here:
As I recall, every episode of that show was book-ended with musical numbers. How much you want to bet that “Over and Over” was the last scene of this particular one, and the girl singing it (Renee, I now know, following some Google research) had had some sort of crisis earlier in the show where she felt like a failure but her friends convinced her to keep trying until she succeeded? Those closing numbers were always thematically relevant and oh-so cathartic.
Some quick Googling reveals that the clip is from Season 2, episode 5: “The Big Lie,” in which, according to www.kidsincorporated.us (turn down the volume before clicking!) “Renee’s rumor about Riley blows up into a big lie.”
Riley was the soda jerk, I am ashamed to remember, at the place where the little supa-stars performed. In fact, the place was called The Place, because the first A in “Palace” had burned out on the marquee. (Oh, no. It’s all coming back to me.)
So, not exactly as I thought, but evidently poor Renee had to talk herself out of the doldrums with an obscure Madonna B-side following her brush with Sunday afternoon immorality.
I’m embarrassed to remember how many episodes of that show I watched as a kid. Every Sunday. I’d stand my friends up in order to sit in front of the tube with this silly tripe. Even then I was kind of annoyed by the awful, watered-down, cleaned-up shadows of pop songs I actually liked. But it was infectious. And the show did give us Martika, so who can complain, right?
Incidentally, that show also gave us:
• Eric Balfour (Six Feet Under)
• Stacy Ferguson (Black Eyed Peas)
• Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five)
• Mario López (Saved by the Bell)
• Scott Wolf (Party of Five)
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| Teenage dreamboat Ryan Lambert. The chicks on either side of him formed a girl group in the ’90s called Wild Orchid. The one on the right is the hot blonde from Black Eyed Peas [Kids Inc Photo Home Page] |
I had such a crush on the dark-haired white kid, Ryan. He was so cool, with his spiked hair and turned-up collar. I wanted to BE him. He was also in The Monster Squad, in which he was also heart-stoppingly cool. Remember him? I guess he’s the lead singer of a San Francisco band now called elephone. They just put out an album this summer. He’s not nearly as cute as he used to be.
The episodes where he sang were always my favorite. Back then I guess I thought it was envy. In retrospect, I can see it was young puppy-lust. Good lord. I was 9, 10, 11 and 12 during the years he was on that show. How did it take me so long to come out of the closet?
Eating is bizarre.
Earlier today I couldn’t take my eyes off a guy with a Baskin Robbins sundae sitting across from me on the bus. Over and over I watched him cut his pink plastic spoon through the whipped cream into the stubborn hard-pack chocolate ice cream below, hack out a small nugget (testing the limits of the flimsy spoon) and carry it to his mouth. He’d close his lips around the spoon, pull it out and start again. Maybe the next time a tendril of strawberry would hang over the edge of the spoon, and he’d have to open wider or give it a bit more action with the tongue. As the sundae melted, the whole process got messier. But he attacked that sundae with determination and rhythm, pausing for breath and to check the street signs — rarely, because he was transfixed by the ice cream.
Here was a grown, fit man, eating a sundae. Totally ordinary. But, briefly, utterly captivating. It wasn’t sexy or funny like food can sometimes be. It was just a guy eating ice cream. But it struck me how silly the whole thing was — this process of carrying food to our stomachs — junk food especially — only to have it passed through, digested and dropped back out again hours later. The whole fact of eating seemed to me in that moment to be just a weird waste of time.
Why chew? Why break it up into small pieces? Why put it in a cup or bowl? On a plate? With matching utensils and napkins? Why cook and prepare it? Why transport it great distances? I wonder why we don’t simply take the raw ingredients and put them directly into our bodies. Why this activity called eating?
I guess, it’s because we absolutely need to fill our minutes with sensation.
People so often invest so much attention in what they are eating. How often have I watched someone stare at a bagel with cream cheese, lift it to her wide-open mouth, clamp down, smear her cheeks with goo, chew madly while wiping her face, then stare at the bagel again? Or blow across the rim of a polystyrene cup, gazing into space as the waves of coffee lap the far edge? What are we looking at?
Maybe we’re watching the steam rise. Maybe we’re looking at the shapes our teeth make or the layers of colors in a sandwich. Maybe we’re looking at the ice cream melt against the spoon or the saliva freeze to the stainless steel. Maybe we’re watching the butter glisten in a bowl of peas or the oil dribble from a slice of pizza. Maybe we’re looking at the holes in the bread or wondering about what grows from a sesame seed.
Who knows. But whatever we’re doing, it seems to me to be an extremely introverted and self-indulgent practice.
Eating is a function of the body no more glamorous than sleeping, crying, sweating, farting, burping, bleeding. Truth be told, chewing is only a few steps away from shitting.
There’s a scene in My So-Called Life, in which Angela says in one of her voice-over monologues, “I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her. I mean, if you start to think about, like, chewing, what it really is, how people just do it, like, in public.”
She seems not to complete the thought, but even then I knew exactly what she meant.
And she’s right: We — sensible, boring people, that is — don’t have sex in public. We don’t pee in public. Eating is kind of gross. It’s kind of personal. What in the world are we doing with a sundae on a bus?
I won’t call it hypocrisy. I’ll be generous and call it a paradox.
It almost qualifies as irony. But we English majors know better.
What I’m talking about is Madonna’s insistence that she not only monitors the TV intake of her kids (good idea in my opinion), but she also neither watches TV nor reads newspapers nor magazines herself. Ever.
She, our like great nation’s source of illumination, George W. Bush, is intentionally media deprived. She says sometimes she listens to the BBC with husband Guy. She hears about the news of the world from conversations with friends.
Madonna, the queen of mass media, star of magazine cover and MTV, chooses to disregard the news. Sure, she ignores press about herself. This is just and good and fair. Besides, how tedious, boring and infuriating, right? But she also ignores news about the world? She does TRL. She does The View. She does Good Housekeeping. She does Ladies’ friggin Home Journal. She depends on the media. She is the media.
Yet, she holds herself above the very media her career depends on.
Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Madge. But does this seem weird to anyone else?
When I first learned that Doug Savant and Marcia Cross would both be among the cast of Desperate Housewives, I assumed the show would be another trashy incarnation of Melrose Place. But I listened to my obsessed friends who insisted that it was special; it was different; it was like nothing else; it was Good. So we rented Season One and got ourselves hooked. We waited with Six Feet Under, too, and we ended up adoring that show, so I figured maybe the same thing would happen with D.H.
OK, so it’s a good show. We love Lynette. We hate Susan. Bla bla bla.
Then, oddly, at the end of Season One, the reason for the show’s existence was eliminated: The mystery of Mary Alice’s death was revealed. Yes, certain other intrigues were introduced — something to keep the show in a second season, like the new neighbors with the creepy guy in the basement, and the aftermath of Mrs. Huber’s murder — but the main engine of the show was shut down.
I began to worry again.
Sure enough, to keep things moving, the second season has been filled with nothing but a series of contrivances, each more far-fetched than the one before. And now that we’ve reached the end of Season Two, we find ourselves with Bree escaping from the loony bin, Susan living in a trailer, and Zack shutting off granddad’s life support to force-inherit his fortune and a rather large house, and abandoning his dad in prison. Tom has a long-lost daughter, whose crazy mother is moving into the neighborhood. Gabrielle’s maid is having her baby. Mike gets run down by Susan’s dentist! And Andrew is wandering the back highways of … Illinois? (Where are they, anyway?) … after Bree drops him off at an abandonned gas station in nowheresville.
And, incidentally, who cares if Andrew is gay? His assholeness trumps any interest I might have in his love life — though I was enjoying the scenes of his boyfriend mowing the Solis’ lawn. Nor do I have much use for his totally non-credible hatred of his mother. What did she do to him, again? Uhh… hospital corners on his bed? Whiter-than-white underwear? Potpourri? Surely he’s not upset that she gave him a hard time about his sexuality. I mean, she didn’t kick him out — until he seduced her sex-addicted AA sponsor/boyfriend. After he falsely sued her for child abuse to become an emancipated minor and abscond with his trust fund to buy … a car? A car? No, Andrew isn’t even soap-opera interesting. He’s just petulant and boring.
One of the best characters of Season One, Mrs. Huber’s weird sister Felicia, is reduced in Season Two to the minor role of Zack’s grandfather’s nurse, playing some manipulative role in Zack’s future — and with a terrible new haircut!
When TiVo screwed up and failed to record the last half hour of the two-hour season finale, we were barely bothered. Most of the details I missed, I got on the ABC Web site. As it settles safely into Melrose Place Land, will anyone care about this show anymore?
I thought for sure Felicity Huffman and Heath Ledger were going to win last night. My only Oscar predictions that came true were that Jake Gyllenhaal would not win Best Supporting Actor and that Brokeback Mountain would win either Best Picture or Best Director but not both.
It was supposed to be a great year for the Gay Film, right? No one can deny that the nominations of Huffman, Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ang Lee and Brokeback Mountain are important. It’s excellent company. But as selfish filmgoers, we want wins, of course.
I didn’t see Walk the Line, so I don’t know anything about Reese Witherspoon’s performance. She gave a great acceptance speech. And I loved her in Legally Blonde. So, OK… Give her the Oscar. (That’s a joke, btw.) Sorry, Felicity. Go home and polish your Emmy. But take heart: A lot of Desperate Housewives watchers — from cities without art-house theaters — probably would never have known you played a transsexual if not for the Oscar broadcast.
I didn’t see Capote, but Hoffman is amazing in everything he does, so it’s entirely possible that he deserved the Best Actor win as much as Ledger. I’m similarly disappointed, but it’s still a gay role — albeit I think a more “standard,” less provocative, less interesting and safer gay role. So… chalk one up, I guess, eh?
And even though I didn’t expect Brokeback to get Best Picture after Ang Lee won Best Director, I still can’t believe that Crash won! OK, the “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp” win was kinda cool — even though a second Oscar loss for Dolly Parton tears at the fabric of my gay soul. But Best Picture? Considering what it was up against? I can’t fathom how they pulled that one off. Crash was a good movie. I like the questions it raised. But it was obvious, too full of coincidence, and a little overbearing.
It’s almost like the Academy wanted to throw a bone to all the nominated films — no film goes home empty-handed! And as a result, the wins don’t seem quite so golden.
Maybe it’s not such a surprise that the gay-themed work didn’t sweep. There are other good movies in the world. But what the hell is this quotation in an Associated Press article from an Exodus International goon supposed to mean?
First of all, I object to his inclusion in the article as a balance to GLAAD. They are not equal and opposite. Maybe if there were a group that was out there to turn straights into gays, this Chambers would have something to say worth listening to. But to set someone who wants to convert gay people into straight people against someone who merely wants to make sure gays are treated fairly in the media is idiocy.
Besides that, though, “America sent a message”? What a dumbass. America doesn’t vote for the Oscars. America went to the movies in hordes and droves and ate these movies up. And what kind of message does he suppose “America” sent with the gay nominations in the first place? Oh yeah … Clearly a lack of interest.
I read another article that cited the show’s “gay cowboy” montage as being in poor taste, which also bothered me.
If the insinuation of being gay were an insult, i.e., a bad thing, of course it would be bad taste. The trouble is, it’s not. The comment stands in sharp contrast to the opening sequence where John Stewart wakes up in bed with a grinning George Clooney, which was hilarious. It’s OK to insinuate a same-sex attraction in John Stewart but not in John Wayne? When it’s clearly a joke? What is this double standard? Again, the cowboy — honestly, a minuscule piece of American identity — is held up as some gold standard of masculinity. The writer shows that he clearly didn’t get the joke — or the significance of Brokeback Mountain.
Unless these “real men” can roll with the joke, until they can realize that their masculinity, their lifestyle and their image (certainly their marriage) are not being threatened, I will not believe that they are real men at all.
Brokeback or “the gays” didn’t need to sweep last night. But it would have been nice. It would have been fun. Truly, I don’t like it when one movie wins everything. It seems myopic, lazy, unimaginative. And the Oscars don’t need to score points for the Gay Rights movement. And even if they did, I’m not sure it would really be speaking to the core of middle-American thought. Far more important, I think, is the work that was done to bring these roles and these films closer to the mainstream. Far more important is the nomination, the attention and the discussion.
And, of course, the image of John Stewart waking up in bed next to George Clooney.
... but enough about me 