if you weren't a child in the 80's, i'm sorry. it was awesome.
John and I have been talking about great TV shows from our childhood and I want to share some awesomeness. First, we have the Sesame Street crayon factory. Possibly my favorite Sesame Street segment. The visuals are awesome. The fact that it's an actual Crayola factory is awesome. But the music is just spectacular.
Awesome, yes? Okay, next, there's the nines song from "Square One." My favorite thing about "Square One" was Mathnet, but the nine song is the thing that I think was the most useful to me. It's like it's describing some sort of weird mathematical magic. To this day, when I multiply something by nine (not that it happens often, but still), I picture this cowboy.
Next on my list of 80's children's programming is the opening to "3-2-1 Contact." I remember that I loved this show, but I remember very little about the show itself. This theme song is so cool though! It has the upbeat, inspirational tone of the old EPCOT music I love so much. (If you don't remember me talking about this before, check out this post from February, when I was praying Obama would get the nomination, in which I compare his speeches to lyrics of songs from EPCOT.)
I would love to have found something from "Jellybean Junction," but I couldn't. In fact, the internets are telling me that that isn't even the show I watched, based on timeframes and stuff, but that is the show John and I both specifically remember.
Last, in a departure from the public television theme I have going here so far, is a commercial for Astronaut Barbie. Amy had this doll. And she was really one of the coolest Barbies ever. Listen close to these lyrics.
"We girls can do anything, like Barbie." Classic! Rather than shattering the glass ceiling, Sarah Palin seems to have made it so that our political discourse is now roughly on par with 80's advertising aimed at children. Bravo! I'd just like to point out that the Barbie commercial is the only thing here that I didn't remember. Hopefully, in 20 years (or less), no one will remember Palin either.
The show John has been working on premiered last night on ABC Family. It's called Slacker Cats. It's an irreverent adult cartoon, sort of like "The Simpsons" or "Family Guy," only it's about talking cats and their owners (who, yes, can hear the cats talking). John's younger sister, Misty, is in town, and the three of us went to a party for the premier last night at Guy's North, upstairs from Jerry's Deli, close by in Studio City. The episode that aired last night wasn't done by the studio John works for--their first episode won't air until September. The party was full of people from other studios. The director was there, as were voice actors Nicole Sullivan and Kiersten Warren. It was a lot of fun. Make sure to check out the show. I'll post the date of the episode John worked on...as soon as I remember to ask him when it is. Meanwhile, he's been working overtime for two weeks now, helping the studio meet a deadline for their next episode.
"i'm not crying. it's just been raining...on my face."
Last June, John and I were lucky enough to go see the amazing Flight of the Conchords. They now have a show on HBO. And it's pretty awesome. The songs have all been slightly altered from the versions that I'm used to, making some funnier and some less funny, but still good.
The most recent episode might be my favorite so far. Here's part of the reason why:
I've just gotten home from seeing Transformers. It was no where near as bad as I expected. It was a long, silly live-action cartoon of pretty ladies and big robots. Not exactly my cup of tea, but you have to understand that in the 1980's, as now, I was a girl. Until about five minutes before the previews started tonight, I thought Optimus Prime was a bad guy. Needless to say, I didn't watch the Transformers cartoon, and this is a little embarassing.
Changing the subject for a moment, Mr. Lee, do you remember that you ate at the Baja Fresh at Sunset and Vine during the opening weekend of Episode III? Well, I was there, too. My husband and I were there with our friends (Chris, Jennifer, and Greg), having a quick bite to eat before mingling with the Boba Fett and Chewy in the lobby of Arclight. You were there in your trendy clothes and weird Earl facial hair. And I was so excited to see you. Do you remember? Of course, I know you don't remember me, but do you at least remember owning a cool plaid shirt?
Mr. Lee, I first saw you in Dogma, because I didn't see Kevin Smith's movies in order. In college, I came to know you as Banky and Brodie, both of whom I found (and try to still find) adorable. I must tell you now, with love, that Brodie would be ashamed of you now.
Now, I'm not saying this to be hateful, I'm saying this as a sort of warning. You see, next month, a live-action movie of Underdog will be coming to theaters. And you are the voice of Underdog. Mr. Lee, surely you see that this was in bad form. I'm willing to cut you some slack, because you're much older than me and, in fact, new episodes of the original cartoon were still being made when you were a child. I'm sure you grew up on it. I'm sure it could've even been exciting for you to be his voice, in whatever dumb format Disney felt compelled (by what ridiculous force, only you and your ridiculous movie folk know) to create. But, I'm afraid I can only give you so much slack.
Before going into the theater this evening, my husband and I saw a huge, cardboard version of the movie poster for Alvin and the Chipmunks. Have you lost your mind?! How much money did they give you? Your face was over 3 feet tall, towering over the ugliest CG rodents I could've ever imagined!
I swear to you, if I find out that you are somehow involved in a live-action My Little Pony movie, I'll track you down and beat you with a Rainbow Brite doll.
I so love Stephen Colbert. He's on my tv now and, even though he isn't what I was planning on talking about, seeing his smiling face makes me unable to talk about anything else. He's just so darn cute.
Okay, enough ooeygooey Colbert love. The city is on fire. Literally. The zoo closed early. You know how I love the zoo. The pictures are all over the internet and they're terrifying. The Los Feliz area has been evacuated and most of the area doesn't have electricity. John and I went and oogled it this evening.
In lesser news (much lesser),I finished The God of Animals Sunday night. I loved so much of it, I hate to give it anything less than a glowing recommendation...but... I don't know. I enjoyed reading it and the characters were great...but... I don't know. I think it's worth reading. I'm glad I read it. That's enough, right?
In case there was ever any doubt that I am the master of unimportant, useless, minute details, take this case in point:
Honestly, I was in the middle of watching The Tudors and there was Anne Boleyn...wearing Ugly Betty's necklace. Aside from being taken completely out of the moment, I was a little disturbed that I even noticed the necklace at all, let alone that I could tell, with pin-point accuracy where I'd seen it before.
Have I mentioned how much I hate Sunday nights? I probably have. I've probably droned on and on about how much I hate Sunday nights. And that every Sunday afternoon at around 4, my happy, it's-the-weekend attitude crumbles into a pathetic, I've-got-work-tomorrow stupor. (My job isn't even that bad. It's just been stressing me out lately because the sixty thousand ladies who work there all seem to have these crazy scheduling demands that I have to attend to, juggling Ms. Lucky-pants's vacation with Ms. So-in-shape's pilates-or-some-such-thing class, and still remember to do little things...like buy register tape and go to the bank.) And tonight is Sunday night and, boy, does it ever feel like it.
The really sucky part (watch as my verbal skills turn to mush, under "Sunday night fog" and I actually use words like "sucky") is that I used to really like Sunday nights. Because, back when I worked at my previous job at Indie Bookstore #1, I had Mondays and Tuesdays off. Sunday nights were the beginning of happyfuntime. I'd get home from work and John would order a pizza and we'd watch ABC. Here's where that fell apart: 1) I got a new job with a totally different schedule, and 2) ABC Sundays sort of suck now.
Last season, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition slowly turned into "Designers Behaving Badly," in which the so-called Design Team ran around acting like idiots and the actual designs of the rooms in the house get approximately one camera pan each...as the family jumps and screams. And the family should be jumping and screaming. Not the designers, who happen to be playing street hockey with the Mighty Ducks. Listen guys, this is not the kind of behavior that made Britney and Kevin name a kid after one of you! Notice, will you, that their second baby is not named after any of you! Everyone knows that Britney, really, is your target audience and you lost her. And you've lost me.
That's not even going into the Desperate Housewives debacle. Yes, it's true I watch "Desperate Housewives." It was my guilty pleasure. That's sort of the point of the show, actually. But I have issues with the fact that Bree got engaged and married before her daughter even made an appearence in this season. Wait a second. Didn't last season end with Bree hugging Danielle whose murderous boyfriend had just been shot in their house? Yes. Yes, it did. And six months have passed ten minutes into the first episode of the season, so wham-bang all the previous storylines are over! Except, of course, for Mike's coma, which I find strangely boring. Please, please, please, get better and back to being like the first season.
The final blow to Sunday night, obviously, is that Grey's Anatomy has been moved to Thursday. That's okay, really, because the writing is still adorable and it's addictive and I love it. Seriously. I love the "Mc" jokes and the drama and the pretty doctors and the fact that I can't watch it without crying. I'm a big, mushy girlfest. How much does it suck that Sunday mornings still feel a little better than they should because I still feel vaguely like McDreamy is waiting for me on the other end of the day? A LOT! That's how much it sucks!
John and I used up a Target gift card we got for Christmas and bought a new TV for our bedroom tonight. The one we had before, a TV/VCR combo, was one my mom bought for me when I started college. I used it in my dorm. That little TV told me about the results of the infamous 2000 election, the results of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when Sarah Hughes got the gold and Michelle Kwan ended up with bronze. And a bunch of other things that didn't make me cry.
Now there's been another election and we're at the end of another Olympics. The VCR is broken on the old one and when I turn it on, it tries to autostart a tape that isn't there, because there's nothing in it, and when it can't, it shuts itself off. It might be easier to fix if there weren't a TV on top of it. Anyway, the new one is a fancy-pants flat screen and is a little bigger, too. We also got a VCR/DVD thing. Because I still want to watch VHS tapes. Replacing all my old tapes with DVDs would just be too expensive. Plus, I can tape stuff. I'm hanging on to old technology, I know. But. Sometimes it's just not time to let go.
I've been really wrapped up in the Olympics. It's like a roller coaster. I love it.
I got sooo excited tonight about [drum roll] my cable company. That's right. Charter rocks. I will be watching all of the 2006 Torino Winter OlympicsON DEMAND. I will be able to rewind the Olympics! Like God!
Also. Heather is awesome. She deserves prizes. Go vote for her poem. You'll feel better about yourself.
Firstly, I should totally be asleep right now. And I am sort of tired.
I've got HGTV playing in the background. It does little to inspire. It really just makes me think about how little money I have. How little money I make, more like.
I'm in one of those moods. Don't really want to sleep. One of my moods. Jeez. How pretentious is that?
And just then, when I think I sound pretentious and hoity-toity stupid, I hear Kenneth Brown say he wants to paint a room Spanish Moss, he says, the great color, he says, from Louisiana, he says. I am not hoity-toity stupid, after all. Using the phrase "Spanish Moss" to describe a color is way worse than anything I could ever do.
Who is Kenneth Brown, anyway?
So, we watched Broken Flowers tonight. It's a very smart film. (Notice, I did not call it a "movie." Not sure if that distinction was instinctive or premeditated.) In fact, I want to watch it again. Right now. I'm not going to though.
Because, as I've said, I should be asleep right now.
It went public today (which is now yesterday) that the store where I work is going under/out. My boss keeps using the phrase "selling out." He means it literally: he's selling out stock. I wonder how many people think he has somehow sacrificed his principles in this process.
You know, besides me.
Interior designers have their own language. And most of them seem to have the same ambiguous accent.
Last night I watched the Golden Girls Reunion on Lifetime. I knew already that my mom and my sister had watched it, in their own time zone, which is two hours ahead of mine, at an earlier scheduled time, which meant they watched it three hours before I did. I had an algebra class flashback trying to figure out the difference of time in between them eating cheesecake at my sister's house and me sitting in my PJs listening to my husband make flustered noises about Battlefield Vietnam, which he was playing online with headphones so I could hear the TV. (Apparently, when you play online, people can shoot you, even if you're on their side, so they can fly the helicopter. Barbarians.) I wanted some cheesecake, too. And, of course, Dorothy was the one to get married and move away. And it doesn't matter how much I tell myself that I'm sick of that show, I'm just not. I could watch it every day if our apartment was bigger. I laugh out loud every time I watch it.
This morning, on my way to work, I heard part of this story on KCRW. Really, I only heard the beginning. But there they were, this father and son, just talking. About war. About these horrible things. Like being on the phone with your son and having to hang up because he says there's shooting going on behind him and for you not to tell your wife, his mother. And you listen. And yet, it wasn't depressing. Frederick Busch and his son, Ben, had this lovely way of speaking of and to each other that just made me miss my own dad, who has been known to call me out of the blue to tell me about something he heard on public radio that I would have liked. He rarely remembers who anyone was, what show he was listening to, and sometimes he can't tell me what it was about. Just that he thought of me. I never want any more than that anyway. A couple of times he's remembered and given me books he's either heard reviewed or heard the author talk about. And they've been good. Because NPR has good taste and my father knows mine. So, I missed my dad a lot today. But this interview was great because of the way this elloquent marine described his own insights into his father, a novelist, listening to his son over the phone being, basically, shot at, and knowing what this novelist father would imagine was happening because (and this is the line that made me stop breathing) "fiction is the focus of his life." I love when phrases like that pop out of conversation or off a page and fly around in front of me, like something beautiful I wasn't expecting. Like butterflies. And I do stop breathing for a second.
But I've been breathing again for hours and hours now. I'm listening to the Garden State soundtrack and am about to start reading Shopgirl, which I'm about halfway through, while I wait for John to come home from his dismal temp job. Cross your fingers. We need something to happen.
Have you ordered your 2006 lauraslens.com calendar yet? There are always good things waiting on the pages of another year.
I watched the Emmys tonight. Because I love Ellen. And the prolonged tribute to Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings made me cry. Like a baby. Even though two out of three are still alive, none of them are on the news anymore. And even though I shouldn't really care, I do. They were there, in my dorm room, when I heard about the tragic things going on in our country while I was in college. Like when I went to sleep thinking Al Gore was going to be president, then woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the TV and cried myself back to sleep. Like when my sister called me on a Tuesday morning four years ago and said, "Laura, you need to turn on your TV. Something bad is happening in New York." And then later, when John and I were in our weird transitional period in LA, living in my grandparents empty house, and Bush won again.
Would it be too unbearably cliched if I said something about how my parents weren't there, but when the whole world seemed to be crashing down (that is, I discovered Politics) it was nice to see a friendly face?
Probably. So. Anyway.
Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria both lost, which disappointed me.
I finished Bee Season. I liked it a lot, but the ending was nothing at all what I expected. In fact, the whole second half of the book is very different from the first half.
"magnolia in exile" may be the funniest thing I've ever thought. ever.
We're watching King of the Hill, the third episode out of eight showing tonight on FX's "King-sized Friday," which I'm totally devoted to. Except that this happens to be my least favorite episode (the one where Bobby gets a ventriloquist dummy and inadvertently freaks out Dale...and me...because it's just a creepy-looking doll).
I finished Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi) Wednesday night. Yestday at work I told Anna that I'd read it (she was the reason I wanted it anyway, because she said it was so good) and she said she had just started reading Persepolis 2 on Wednesday. She finished it on her break, brought it to work for me to borrow, and I read the whole thing last night. I read super-crazy-slow, but graphic novels go pretty fast. Even so, I was still pretty surprised to finish two books in a week. I literally could not stop reading them.
That Sarah Vowell book I've been reading keeps, sort of, getting less and less enjoyable. It's weird. I mean, sometimes I really like it. And I just like her style, in general. But the last story I read, about her and her sister traveling down the Trail of Tears to better understand the history of their people, just didn't sit well with me. The idea is great...but she just didn't carry it out very well. There's this one part where she's at a historical landmark near the Tennessee Aquarium and she starts getting angry because the happy kids going to see the pretty fish aren't being told about the landmark by their teacher. And while I do, to a certain degree, see her point, there's something about the way she wrote it that makes it sound like the kids should be made to feel guilty for something that happened before their grandparents were even born. She compares the Trail of Tears to the Holocaust on more than one occasion, which I think is relatively acurate...but I wonder if she begrudges little German kids and wants them to go around feeling guilty on every school fieldtrip they get to take. She even goes to the Hermitage and confronts some poor tour guide. (Andrew Jackson was largely responsible for the Trail of Tears.)
This all makes some sort of sense. I know that. But it's her attitude. Too willing to blame people who really aren't related to the issues.
Later she talks about Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas, a battleground where about 800 Cherokee soldiers fought for the Confederacy. Sarah Vowell has this to say:
I'm making myself sick trying to reconcile the fact that oppressed Indians could live with owning slaves, to die for slavery's cause.
We all know, without question, that slavery is, was, and will always be, horrible. But to act as though that's the only thing the Civil War was about...well...that's just ignorant.
I'm sick of feeling like I'm supposed to be ashamed because I'm Southern. I'm not. At all. Nor am I going to defend the Confederacy. It's just that...I don't deal in absolutes.
I remember going to Shiloh as a kid. Actually, all I remember was part of the film we watched in the visitor center...the nearby creek turned red with blood. The water ran red. That's straight out of Exodus. A plague on Egypt! 150 miles from Nashville! I was terrified.
In my annoyance, I was suddenly filled with the desire to read about the history of the South. To sort of know the truth in a very symbolic, but real way. I would write a book about it. Me living in California, finding my way home metaphorically. Here are some possible titles (mainly, I'm joking):
The Battle of Burbank A Year Without Rain (Except for a Couple Weeks in December) Magnolia in Exile
We're watching Huff with the fancy-pants "on demand" feature that somehow managed to come bundled in with our cable plan. Which means that I'm more than a little distracted as I write this. I've always had a thing for Hank Azaria, but the show would still be awesome even if he wasn't in it.
I'm going through some sort of weird phase. All anxious and...like I need a good, long stretch.
I blame school.
For (how many?) years, I went along getting a good dose of work, then break, then different work, then break again. And. As stupid as this sounds, I can pretty much break up my life since graduation into semesters...all of which correspond with a major U.S. city: Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles. Only, this latest semester has lasted since September. And what is the second week of January if it isn't the beginning of a new semester?
I'll tell you what it is...
It's freaky.
There's something about my life lately that's eerily similar to swimming. Well, swimming like I do it...which basically amounts to flailing around in the water and not moving forward (nor backward) one damn inch. My sister once told me she'd never seen anyone swim so hard and not move.
When did this website turn into a diary? Was it ever anything else?
So. No more Hallmark. I now work in a bookstore. And I've decided that if I were in the X-men, I'd be a shapechanger. Like Rebecca Romijn. Only overweight and, you know, not blue and naked.
I watched the American Music Awards tonight. What a bizarre waste of time. John Mayer's guitar mic was turned up louder than the one he was using to sing...so it looked like he was just strumming away and mouthing the words. The audio seemed basically off for most of the performances. I missed Gwen Stefani altogether. Still not sure how that happened. Probably just as well though. Saw Josh Groban though.
I think my least favorite celebrity is Jessica Simpson. And, frankly, the very fact that I've formulated the thought of who my least favorite celebrity is...frightens me.
I'm glad I'm working in a book store now... Intelligence by osmosis. And so on.
John is at work, so I have the TV on to keep me company. We only get about four stations in English...so I'm watching "The A-Team." I vaguely remember watching it when I was a kid...but only vaguely. Wasn't it supposed to be funny? So far, they've had to go back to Viet Nam to find some guy's kid, who, incidentally, is being played by Tia Carrere.
Jason sent me an audio clip of the protesting going on in Nashville after he saw Michael Moore speak. As I listened to it, the A-team re-entered Viet Nam for the first time. Think: slow montage, fades in and out, depressed men in color, scared men with guns in sepia tone...and from my computer, screams and anger.
It's strange how I can be grateful for being too young to have experienced the world during the Viet Nam War...and at the same time wish I could have.
On our way home from New York, John and I listened to this show, in which the point was made that our "founding Fathers" lived in the Age of Reason and that we're now living in the Age of Propaganda. Could there be something more depressing?
