Drood, · where's · my · car?

I’m going to come right out and say it: Cat Deeley is the best host on television. What do you mean, who? Cat! Cat Deeley! She stepped in the second season as the host of So You Think You Can Dance to replace the walking turd that was Lauren Sanchez, and the show (already fantastic as a showcase for raw talent) has been all the better for it since.

Tall, blond, lanky, and sporting a cheeky English accent, she manages to look glamorous in whatever she wears—even a dress seemingly made from pink Reeses Peanut Butter Cups wrappers. More importantly, and unlike many presenters out there, the woman reeks with sincerity. When one of the show’s couples have danced their asses off, she’s the first one on stage applauding crazily, beaming and enthusiastic for them.

Many hosts barely manage to cope with the mechanics of their show. When Ryan Seacrest is revealing weekly voting results on American Idol and pulls one of his confusing “Blake, the audience has spoken, and they feel the opposite of not not disliking you. You may sit down,” stunts, he comes off as some kind of smug dick. Cat, when she’s asked to do the same sort of tension-inducing ploys, sighs and shakes her head in frustration as if to say, Oh, bugger, those naughty producers have gotten me again, too! She’s every contestant’s big sister, offering hugs and condolences when they leave, and gushing with enthusiasm when they’ve done well. On a recent episode, when one of the female contestants had a wardrobe malfunction and limped through the last part of her dance with a pinky toe hanging out of her ballroom slipper (ouch!), Cat actually flung herself onto the floor the moment the routine was over and personally stuffed the wayward digit back into the slipper, without making it seem like she was grandstanding for attention.

I want to see Cat working on The View. I want to see Cat with her own talk show; she couldn’t be any worse than most of them out there. I want to see Cat hosting Survivor. No, The Amazing Race. No, throwing herself into Heidi Klum’s place on Project Runway and coming off as the sanest person on the show. I want more Cat. Lots of Cat. Cat-a-mundo.

Cat for President!

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For the two and a half of you that were interested, I finally have up my best shots from my visit to Toronto two weeks ago. Enjoy!

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Back in 2002 when I originally wrote the young adult adventure novel, The Horns of Cassaforte, long before it was ever bought by the nice people at Flux and retitled The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I’d originally envisioned the book as the first in a series. I had a clear vision of the next two books, too. The Pirates of Cassaforte would follow, and start with sea battle, a shipwreck, and a rather genteel boy making an uneasy alliance with a nearly-feral girl against pirates targeting the city-state of Cassaforte. The third book, Pilgrims of Cassaforte, was to be all about the younger brother of Risa Divetri, heroine of The Glass Maker's Daughter: a school pilgrimage to a shrine in the countryside, and a political kidnapping.

And at the time, I had to make a decision—was I going to write sequels for a book that I hadn’t sold, or was I going to move on to something else? I was unpublished in 2002, and it seemed to make more sense to move on to a different project that might sell, so I started a novel called Kin (which I never finished, since I sold the idea to You Are So Cursed! while I was writing it. Kin did get reworked and overhauled and completely transformed into the world of Bedlam, Bath, & Beyond, however, so no creative idea is really ever wasted).

Last month, however, my nice editor at Flux asked my agent if I might please provide him with some proposals for two sequels to The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Did I have anything in mind? Boy! Did I!

I’ve spent the last three weeks writing up synopses of the two sequels I originally wanted to write, way back when. And let me tell you, having to sketch out the plot of a book before I put a single world to paper is an ass-backwards way to write.

( Thoughts on plotting. )

Could those of you with Facebook accounts out there (you know who you are, throwing sheep at me and whatnot), become fans of J. D. Warren? My pseudonym would greatly appreciate it.

Hey kids! Guess what? Well, I was watching the news—I know, you’re thinking, “Hey, Vance, what’s up with watching the news? Isn’t it all like, talk about Barack (yawn!) Obama and high prices and stuff?” And you are totally, one hundred percent right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe it was because I was flipping around and trying to get to some other station, one that had like, house flipping techniques or dancing celebrities, and I kind of phased out for a minute. You know how that happens.

Anyway! It’s a good thing that it did happen, because if it hadn’t, I would totally have missed out on some information. I mean, really important, life-changing stuff! Okay, okay, don’t get upset. I’m going to tell you, because I know you don't watch the news, either.

Apparently . . . and it was on the local news, so it has to be true . . . you know how you go outside and you put on your shoes? Yes, I know it’s summer and you don’t put on your shoes in the summer because only Yankees do that, but pretend. Well! On the news, they had a guy just do that, with the shoes and all, and then he came back in the studio, and they. . . .

No, don’t get ahead of me here. They didn’t cook an egg on the soles. Though that would’ve been cool, right? No! They took a swab and rubbed it all over the shoes and then took it to like, a fancy scientist in a white lab coat and everything who did one of those scientifical investigations and guess what he found?

Germs. Oh my god. I almost puked. Germs! On the shoes! Apparently the sidewalks and dirt aren’t as squeaky clean as we all thought! In fact, they’re seething with things like dog poo and grunge and tiny insectizoids and bacteria, and they somehow get on your shoes! YOUR SHOES! Oh-ho-ho, you might think they're like total fashion accessories, but they're really stealth weapons of death that you wear on your feet!

Well, thank god for the local news, because you know those yummy little appetizers Rachel Ray makes on her shows? I would never have thought about how it’s not safe to serve them to your guests from the bottoms of your Converse. And I’ve been doing all that yoga, too. Now I know just to like, take them off at the door. Like the Japanese do! (I mean the shoes. Not the appetizers.)

Like I said, thank god for the local news! Because if I hadn’t seen that life-changing segment, well, gosh. I might have just gone on thinking the local news programs are put together by total dipshits, like I usually do.

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We haven’t had much luck with thunderstorms, lately.

First there was the incident week before last, in which we were sitting in our den watching a movie and feeling grateful that a bad storm had completely bypassed us, when we heard what I can describe only as one of the worst sounds in the world, as if an asteroid had made impact a few houses over. The television screen went a sickly shade of yellow-green, and went out with a terrible pop; the lights above flickered. We both jumped to our feet and raced to turn off any appliances in the vicinity, right as the lights went out for good. I went outside to see what was happening and saw an electrical fire in a neighbor’s yard, so the Mont and I had the good fortune of running over to their house, banging on their door, and waking them from a deep sleep to inform them that an electrical wire had snapped and was sizzling fatally not thirty feet from where we stood.

We were without power for an entire day after that (and we made the strange discovery that apparently everyone in our neighborhood is fast asleep by 9:30), but it was nowhere near as traumatic or embarrassing as what happened Sunday evening.

Sunday had been a lovely day of beautiful weather and relaxation. At ten in the evening we were in the den once more when, in the middle of a thunderstorm that sounded as if it were several miles away, I witnessed a terrible crackle of light out the back door. The lights flickered a tiny bit, and before I could process anything, a man’s loud, deep voice began yelling, accompanied by the loudest siren I ever have heard, “FIRE! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY! FIRE! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!”

When we bought our house, I should explain, it came with an alarm installed—one of those fancy systems that’s supposed to detect whenever a window or door is open and immediately notifies the police, or sniffs out smoke and calls the fire department, or allows you to enter a panic code and notify the neighborhood that your sanctity has been invaded. We disarmed and turned off the system the moment we took the keys, knowing that we were both too incompetent ever to operate it. For ten years it lay dormant and silent until that lightning strike. And we couldn’t figure out how to shut the damned thing off.

The siren and man’s voice kept blaring from loudspeakers in the attic and the basement at top volume. It was so damned loud that I couldn’t think. The cats were scared to death—Fred and Sarah disappeared, while Chloe wandered around yelling at us to shut it off. The Mont had the presence of mind to run and get the owner’s manual that we’d never touched, while I put on my shoes and went out in the rain to make sure that the house wasn’t really on fire. Then I tried to calm the Mont down while he stabbed his pointy finger at the suddenly alive alarm keypad, trying to turn it off. It became evident, after a very long fifteen minutes of ear-splitting terror, that his frustration was entirely justified. Not only was the alarm manual written in the worst kind of technical jabber ever put to paper, but with the sirens blaring so loudly in our ears, my blood pressure was so elevated that my eyes couldn’t even focus enough to read it.

Our next-door neighbor showed up about then, with a hearty, “Hey! What’s goin’ on, guys?” He and the Mont disappeared into the basement to take a look at the alarm panel, and then I heard voices outside. When I stepped out of the side door, I found the entire damned neighborhood in our driveway. The alarm had brought people from as far as the next block down, and the next street over. All of them wanted to know a) if there was a fire, and b) if there wasn’t, when was the damned alarm going to be shut off?

I tried to mollify them for another ten minutes while the siren continued to scream its warnings to the surrounding square mile. Finally, and much to the relief of my shattered nerves, the Mont and the neighbor managed to do something that made the noise go away. They emerged victorious to clapping and cheering, and finally the neighbors drifted away. We retired inside to try to calm down. Until the fire department arrived, five minutes later.

Although we had electrical power, whatever happened in the back of the house fried several electronic devices inside, including our cable modem and the Wii and the A/V receiver we use in our entertainment center.

I tell you, it’s making me paranoid about leaving the house when it rains.

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Thank god for eighties nostalgia. Why else would we be lucky enough to get a new CD from that most ubiquitous of eighties bands, ABC?

ABC was always one of my favorite groups, in part because of lead singer Martin Fry's dapper presence and silky-smooth voice, but mostly because of a progressive aesthetic that often left the band on the cutting edge of pop. They were the most swooningly romantic of the new romantics on The Lexicon of Love,, dropped a heap of guitar-rock on Beauty Stab when their compatriots were still swimming in synthesizers, employed sampling and beatbox work in How to Be A Zillionaire!, reinvented themselves for Alphabet City, then plunged into house and early techno music for Up and Abracadabra.

Traffic is a good return to form for Fry. He sounds as silky-smooth as ever, and his choruses are filled with gratifying hooks that grab on and don't let go. Stylistically he's all over the place, from the Beauty Stab-ish "Sixteen Seconds to Choose" to the funky "One Way Traffic". My current earworm, however, is "The Very First Time", which manages to sound like classic ABC without seeming in the least out of date. The piano chords and swooping strings that open the piece are almost straight out of Chic (suggesting that Fry was listening carefully when Bernard Edwards worked on Alphabet City), but the chorus is pure ABC—debonair, romantic, and bittersweet.

(I don't know what's going on in this YouTube video, though. Apparently someone took the track and overlaid it with random video from hip movies from the nineteen-sixties. But it's good enough to listen to.)

Cyndi Lauper looks great (I believe that's the phrase one is supposed to use when referring to pop stars of a certain age) in her new "Into the Nightlife" video. Yet I cant help but feel that the dialogue behind the creation of this particular piece went something like this:

CYNDI: Fucking Madonna! Who does that bitch think she is?

PRODUCER: Don't worry, Cyn. We'll chap her ass with the next release.

CYNDI: Damned right we will. But how? I know! The gays still love me. We'll get them! This next single will be gay, gay, gay!

PRODUCER: It's pretty gay already, Cyndi.

CYNDI: Gay it up some more! It's not gay enough! Turn the gay up to eleven! What do the gays love? Circuit dance music clichés. And porn! Get a gay porn star to dance (but mercifully not sing) in the damned video!

PRODUCER: Isn't that kind of like, you know. Pandering?

CYNDI: More gay! MORE GAY!

(And yet I still can't get the darned song out of my head.)

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Crate & Peril, my sequel to Bedlam, Bath, & Beyond, is available for pre-order from either Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Treat yourself!

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So it was a year ago this week that I was laid off from my full-time administrative university position. The day it happened I left my office early in the afternoon, went home feeling like I’d been beaned with a two-by-four, laid around all afternoon worrying about the future, and then got back to work finishing up the last couple of chapters of Bedlam, Bath, & Beyond because it was due shortly after. That was my first act as a full-time writer. Save for the following Saturday when I snuck back when no one was there in order to clear out my personal possessions, I never returned to my office again.

It’s been an interesting year. There have been some good things about working for myself. No commuting means not having to pay high prices for gas; it can sometimes be six to eight weeks between fill-ups for me. Working at home means I can wear pajamas during the day, and not have to leave the house in the dead of winter, when even breathing the air outside is painful. I can set my own working hours and schedule. I don’t have to attend deadly-dull staff meetings, not ever.

In general, my life is more relaxed than when I was working full-time and then coming home and writing novels. I have actual leisure time, when I’m not on a deadline. I’ve pumped out more proposals this last year than I could have on my previous schedule. I don’t feel as if I’m working three hundred and sixty-five days a year, eighteen hours a day.

The drawbacks are there too, though. I’m poor, for one thing. The loss of a steady bi-weekly paycheck was a severe blow to my income, and I no longer have disposable income for vacations, entertainment, or even tiny things I used to take for granted, like stopping off at a 7-Eleven on the way home from somewhere to pick up a soft drink. Whenever I get a gift card from someone for a birthday or holiday, I’m so grateful I want to cry. There was one day so comically bad—it involved the Roto-Rooter guy coming to the house to investigate why the toilets were backing up and the laundry tub overflowing with sewage, only to discover a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of tree roots blocking the main drain, and then the mail arrived in the middle of the mess with a notice from the IRS that I’d calculated my taxes incorrectly and owed them money—that I couldn’t stop weeping.

And despite the fact that I’m generally more relaxed and less stressed out, I worry more. When I go through my seasonal bouts of insomnia, they’re made worse by the fact that I lie in bed fretting about my finances and my future. I’m constantly feeling guilty about not bringing the same amount of money into the house that I used to, and worried that the Mont will eventually resent me for it.

I privately freak out all the time when I go out to a mall or the supermarket, worried that I’ll run into one of the people I used to know from work, and what they’ll say and how I’ll respond. For months and months after I was laid off, I felt a lot of anger at the people running my old department (or, as the few work friends I had used to comment when I was working there, the people who were running it into the ground). For the most part that’s gone, replaced by an inert but not particularly active grudge that probably won’t vanish for a few years more. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had the epiphany that if I did run into someone I used to work with, since not a single soul from the office checked to see how I was after I’d been laid off, I wasn’t at all obligated to provide them updates on my life a year down the road. It was a tiny realization, but it lifted a weight from my shoulders whenever I stepped into public.

It’s been a year, though, and I haven’t gone bankrupt, or died or shame, or completely lost myself to depression or anxiety. Much as I mourn the loss of income, in one way I’m quite glad that I was pushed out of a comfortable position into uncertainty—it’s because no matter how much I would have thought about it or even yearned for it, god knows I would never have made that jump on my own initiative.

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A musical mashup is, at its most basic, an extended feat of digital sampling in which the music from one pop song is layered with the vocals of another. Simple, right? It’s a democratic form in that anyone with a computer and the proper software can do it

Like any other art form, though, it requires a degree of skill and talent to make a good one. Because while the vast majority of mashups out there I’ve heard will make me quirk an eyebrow and then quickly forget I’ve ever heard them, a good mashup will produce an instant electric tingle on my skin—a really good mashup manages to take two utterly familiar elements and make them suddenly novel. Familiar and yet alien at the same time.

My response to that kind of thing is galvanic. I love the way that the elements of Blondie’s “Rapture” and The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, for example, combine in Go Home Productions’ “Rapture Riders.” In it, Jim Morrison and Debbie Harry seem to be having a conversation back and forth, commenting on each other’s songs in a way they never could have in their alternate heydays. Or in my new favorite, Go Home Productions’ more recent “Finally Did You No Wrong,” Ce Ce Peniston wails her hit over a Sex Pistols track in a way that makes you wish that it had been an out-and-out rocker back when it was originally released.

One of the releases that kept me happy all during the month of March, when my writing mania was at its peak, was a twenty-track release of mashups with a simple concept: to mashup an entire Scissors Sisters CD. Da-Tah: The Scissor Sisters Mashup Album uses the music from one of my favorite CDs of the past couple of years, Ta-Dah, and realigns it with vocals taken from all over the place. It really shouldn’t work, but oh, how it does. Beck’s “Loser” set atop “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’”? Yes, indeed! “Kiss You Off” mashed up with The Clash’s “London Calling?” Please sir, may I have some more?

The mashups on Da-Tah are uniformly good, but many are simply outstanding—mixing Scissor Sisters’ “The Other Side” with The Chemical Brothers’ “The Salmon Dance” really shouldn’t work, but it’s absolutely compelling. Mixing “Ooh” with DJ David Guetta’s “Just A Little More Love” almost makes me wish that the bastard combination had been the original of each. And mashing “I Can’t Decide” with Li’l Mama’s novelty rap “Lipstick” is so inspired that it still electrifies me when I listen to it.

Mashups probably aren’t for everyone. Purists will certainly hate them. Anyone whose sense of humor and musical adventure is piqued by unexpected delights and canny juxtapositions, however, will get a kick out of Da-Tah.

And it's available for download here.

There are some reality-TV competition shows on which I’ve given up (The Apprentice, I’m looking at you), and some in which I never really was interested and therefore never watch (hi there, The Biggest Loser and Beauty and the Geek!). Yet there are some that continue to provide a lot of entertainment. Yes, you, Survivor. (A special P.S. to Cirie: you are awesome.)

And then there’s Top Chef. I like Top Chef. “You do?” its detractors cry. “Why? It’s a cooking show. You can’t taste the food!” Yeah, okay, point taken. I don’t really see any of Project Runway’s fans being able to try on the clothing after each episode, and no one crabs about that. But in the same way that those fans know what silk feels like, what colors are appealing, and how the dress looks when it’s completed, I’m pretty sure that with Top Chef I can remember how beef tastes, how an onion complements it, and how flavors might combine in a completed dish prepared right before my eyes, okay?

So I like Top Chef, although this season is grating on my nerves a little more than others. Until now, Top Chef has stuck to a specific casting strategy that’s worked. They threw together a handful of earnest but anonymous faces, one obvious winner (who wins), a bitter rival (who remains bitter), and some tool whose social skills are so lacking that the other contestants are always screaming at him. Like a bouillabaisse, it’s a classic.

This year, although they’ve still cast an obvious winner (who I bet wins) and several anonymous faces, they’ve upped the number of tools. Aw, who’m I kidding. Everyone in that show is a tool this year. I hate Spike, with a pathetic and ragged fringe of hair around his face that looks worse than a beard on one of those magnetic Wooly Willy toys, and I especially hate his never-ending series of douchebag hats. Yeah, Spike. Douchebag hats. I said it. Just because you found free abandoned headwear trampled down in the urine of some truck stop men’s room doesn’t mean you have to wear it on national TV, okay? I hate his compadre in bro-ness, Andrew, with his beady little eyes, his squealed Whaaaaats? and his constant bad-boy swearing. Dude, you're a cook. Sticking out your tongue while making devil-fingers and saying shit doesn’t make you a rock star.

What I think irritates me most this year is that all the contestants have adopted the same mantra. “My personal philosophy is that I believe in fresh food, prepared simply,” one of them will say. Then the camera will move on to someone else. “I think food should be fresh and prepared simply,” the next will say. Later on there will be an interview with the proto-winner, who dismisses the others and says, “You know what I believe in? Fresh food. Prepared simply.” Then he’ll go on to make a plate of three jellied quail’s eggs with a vanilla-wasabi sauce accompanied by a faux caviar of tapioca pearls served atop hand-dried strips of walrus bacon seasoned with Persian sea salt, the whole dish infused with an applewood-Japanese artichoke vapor and an espresso foam.

Simple, my ass. I think that whole pretense was blown in the water last week when the chefs were asked to prepare a meal for a family of four using no more than ten dollars. Chef Andrew, bro of the earth and man of the people, recoiled as if he’d been asked to unzip and provide one of his own mountain oysters for the meal.

Um, yes, I do like Top Chef. Why do you ask?

Whenever I’m in a comfy mood and want to re-read a favorite book, one of the authors I’ll immediately think of is Betty MacDonald. These days, I suspect that MacDonald is best remembered for her four children’s books centering around the eerily omniscient Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Delightful as these are, it’s her four memoirs that had a formative effect on my own writing choices and style.

MacDonald made a literary splash with her 1945 debut memoir, The Egg & I, an account of her misadventures as a young bride whisked away from city life to the wilds of Washington state by a husband who wanted to make a life in egg farming. It’s an early iteration of the Green Acres trope, featuring a chest-slapping husband thriving on farm livin’, while surrounded by nutty locals. MacDonald is never quite Lisa Douglas—she’s too down-to-earth and self-effacing to swank around her farmhouse in mink and whine about missing her shopping. There’s a charming fish-out-of-water appeal to her story, though, and it’s no surprise that it was adapted into a movie with Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert (and then spun off into a ten-film series featuring the book and movie’s most outrageous characters, Ma and Pa Kettle).

The success of The Egg & I, its film adaptation, and especially the completely fictional (and utterly low-brow) Ma and Pa Kettle movies somewhat overshadows MacDonald’s later memoirs, but they’re all lovely reads. Anybody Can Do Anything is an account of MacDonald’s post-farm divorce and attempts to find employment during the Great Depression, while The Plague and I details her battle with tuberculosis. Onions in the Stew, her final memoir before her death in 1958, is probably my favorite. It’s a loving and humorous look at her home on Vashon Island in Washington State, at coping with adolescence, and at learning to enjoy the little things in life that lend it flavor.

Why do I list MacDonald as one of my biggest influences? Her humor writing isn’t wildly raucous. She’s rarely farcical. Yet she always writes with the viewpoint of someone who’s looking for the little ironies of life, the gleaming nuggets that make tromping through the mud worth it—and she’s a deft hand at establishing her characters swiftly. She’s aware that usually she’s the voice of reason in a whirlwind of nuttiness, but she’s never superior about it. Instead, she’s grateful for the experiences and memories they provide.

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. . . and I'll show you mine.

Mario Kart Wii: 4811-7429-5987

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: 1719-2870-7212

Fred’s most beloved toy is a purple mouse. When we first gave it to her, it was a scrap of synthetic stuffing held together by a very light terrycloth-like fabric, sporting two red ears and black beads for eyes. The other cats had ignored it since we gave it to them some years ago, but Fred loved it. She would carry it around with her in her mouth from room to room, keeping it nearby for company. When I worked, she’d bring it to my lap for me to toss, so she could chase after it and trot it back so I could throw it again, over and over for hours on end. At bedtime, she wanted nothing more than a pre-sleep round of fetch with the purple mouse; we’d often wake up in the mornings to find the purple mouse between us on the bed.

Fred could amuse herself endlessly with the purple mouse. If she got tired of fetching, she’d mix it up a little and drop it in front of an open door, then position herself on its other side so she could spy on and swat at it from underneath the door’s opening. She’d hide it, then pretend not to be able to find it, only to make me search beneath the sofas and bookcases so that she could trot up behind me while I was on my hands and knees with a flashlight with the purple mouse in her mouth, laugh at me, and run away. Once, just to puzzle her, I put the purple mouse on the very top of the bathroom door, far out of reach. She spent long minutes staring at it, judging how to get up there. I’d forgotten about it an hour later when I left the office for the bathroom, but she hadn’t; the minute I passed through the door, she leapt from the counter to my shoulders, made a painful leap from my shoulders to the top of the door, grabbed the mouse in her mouth, jumped back down to my shoulders, and ran away triumphant.

Purple Mouse is much worse for wear, these days. It was ripped open long ago. The cardboard insert giving it its long and narrow shape has disappeared, along with half of the stuffing. I tried last week to bind it up with twine to keep it from disintegrating any more, but it’s useless. The twine disappeared almost immediately. The purple mouse is more like a purple pebble. I’m unwilling to throw it away, though, because she loves the thing so damned much.

And I can’t really find a substitute. She’ll play with other cat toys for a while, but they’re no purple mouse. The only thing that comes close is a wrapper from a Tootsie Roll Pop. Those she’ll chase and carry around in her mouth for hours. They provide endless amusement for her in a way no toy save the purple mouse ever has. The problem with the Tootsie Roll Pop wrappers is that I don’t know what happens to them when she’s done. They disappear, never to be seen again. I’m worried that one day I’ll open a closet and thousands upon thousands of them will cascade out with Fred surfing on top of them, like Mary Tyler Moore in that infamous episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

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"Let Me Know," a retro-disco number set over R&B chord progressions from the early nineteen-eighties, plagued me most during the month of February, I confess. I'm still catching up.

In the video, Murphy enters a diner, proceeds to turn it into her own discotheque, and then settles into her seat like a wildly-spinning toy top suddenly tumbling to a stop. It's a stunner.

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I can't get the chorus of "Without You," from The Feeling's new release, Join With Us, out of my head. I simply cannot get it out of my head. I woke up this morning whistling the damned thing.

To a certain extent, that's fine. I love The Feeling's retro-seventies approach to songwriting, and I'm very fond of Join With Us. It's chock-a-block with crunchy chord progressions and hook-laden cuts that are just as good as those on Twelve Stops & Home, one of my favorite releases of the last couple of years. There are far, far worse songs to lodge themselves firmly in one's head.

The video I'm kind of iffy about, however; Dan Gillespie Sells looks as if someone stunned him with a two-by-four right before both of the camera's two long, languid zooms that form the video's entirety. Given that the song's nominally about his reaction to last year's Virginia Tech shootings, however, it might be an entirely appropriate emotion.

(Thank you though, Dan, for removing the sleazy pencil-line mustache you sport in the CD's first single, "I Thought It Was Over." I really dislike that look on you.)

Whenever the Mont plays piano for our music teacher friend Marian’s elementary or middle school kids, they privately play a game with the approximate unspoken title of Guess Which Of Marian’s Students Will Someday Be A Future Full-Fledged Card-Carrying Homosexual American Citizen? I’d heard them comparing notes over dinners out in the past, carrying on conversations that sounded like:

HIM: That little short kid with the dark hair who wore the blue T-shirt. . . .
HER: Oh, you think so? Yeah, I could see it. But he’d be the closeted type.
HIM: And that one with the curls. . . .
HER: Justin? No way!
HIM: No, not Justin. The one with the blond curls.
HER: Oh, Adam? Well duh! Totally! And let me tell you, his mother is going to freak out when he comes popping out of the closet.

I’d totally forgotten about the GWOMSWSBAFF-FC-CHAC game until a couple of weeks ago, when Marian asked me to play a rehearsal and concert for her fifth-grade choir that the Mont couldn’t cover. I went to the elementary school early in the morning and was there when the kids filed in silently and arranged themselves in neat rows. Marian ran them through some vocal warm-ups, and then gave them a quick physical activity to do to rid them of their excess energy before beginning. While they were running around and shaking out their limbs, Marian sat down next to me on the piano bench. “So?” she asked.

“So what?” I wanted to know.

“So!” she said, impatient with my obliviousness. “Which ones?”

“Which ones what?” I was baffled.

“Which ones are going to be fam-i-ly?” she growled, sotto voce.

It was then that I remembered the game. “Ohhhh,” I said, finally understanding. I looked around the room at the graceless homunculi loping around. “Marian, they’re eleven,” I pointed out.

“Trust me,” she said, standing up to take control of the classroom once again. “You can tell. You watch. I’ll ask you later.”

Throughout the rest of the morning I studied the class when I wasn’t playing the piano, knowing that I was going to be grilled later on. Sure enough, the moment that the students began to file back to their homerooms, Marian shot over. “Well?” she asked.

I sighed. “How about the little girl who was over on the left?” I asked weakly, pointing to the approximate area where she’d stood. Marian shook her head. “She had on a white sweater? The one with the really, really short hair?” The girl in question had sported little more than a fine buzzed down on her head that made her look as if she were a nascent political protestor. If she wasn’t being raised by lesbian parents, there was at least a highly-militant mother somewhere in the background.

“Oh sweetie.” Marian looked at me with pity in her eyes, then patted my leg with barely-suppressed condescension. “That’s our cancer survivor.”

I had another opportunity to play for Marian yesterday. The same choir was putting on a performance with choirs from the system’s other schools, and my task was simply to play “A Pirate’s Life for Me” no less than seventeen times for the dress rehearsal. (I still can’t get it out of my head, yo, ho, ho.) Marian was organizing the entire thing, so she really didn’t have much time for me, but at one point in the proceedings after I’d swashbuckled my way across the keyboard and the kids were taking a break, she came out into the audience. She sat down next to me and asked, “Any more guesses?”

“Marian!” I scolded in a whisper. “These children are barely self-conscious yet. They’re bundles of impulse and reaction, still testing the world around them with hypotheses they can hardly express. That anything—anything—can be predicted about their futures and their potential is a fallacy in and of itself!”

She said nothing, but merely raised an eyebrow.

“All right.” I sighed deeply, and then pointed at a blond boy with pouty lips squirming in his seat, two rows in front of me. “The one who remembered my name, bumped my knuckles with his, thanked me politely three times for playing for you guys, and then a couple of minutes ago yelled out Hey look! We can do all of Britney’s dance routine from the Video Music Awards! and performed it with those two girls as his backup dancers? Total future ‘mo.”

Marian patted me on the back. “Now you’re getting it.”

--

Last year, the Mont and I went to see Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a comedic biography of a fictional rock star. It’s a parody of the broadest kind, mocking everyone from Johnny Cash and Jim Morrison to Ray Charles and the Beatles, and managing along the way to trample on every biopic convention out there. Everyone in the audience laughed along with its assortment of jokes, from the meta to the corny, and left the theater with smiles on their faces. On the way out, I asked the Mont what he’d thought.

“Why did you want to see that, exactly?” he asked.

“You didn’t like it?” He shook his head at my question. “But you laughed all through it!” I pointed out, quite rightly.

He shrugged. “It was silly.”

He was right. It was a silly movie. Yet I don’t think silliness is a reason to dismiss something, or to pretend not to enjoy it.

I was reminded of Walk Hard over the weekend when I went with thirdreel and his partner Stee to see a local production of the stage show, Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical. I’ve already gone on record as saying the show is one of my all-time favorites—it’s a fast-paced, one-act dramatization of the X-rated film from the nineteen-seventies, only with all the actual copulation replaced with musical or dance numbers. I’d already seen the local production once and laughed so hard that I was anxious to see it a second time; it might not be a good show, but it certainly is entertaining. I particularly liked the inspired decision to cast one of the Teen Services girls with an enormous guy in drag, who took his part of Donna (who works at the li-berry) so seriously that he came off as sweet and touching rather than outrageous and drag-queen-y. (Or maybe he managed to seem all of those things at the same time.)

Anyway. On my other side were a couple of guys who, like the rest of us, spent most of the evening howling their way through the scenes. The fellow next to me seemed to be enjoying the show, but his friend would, after each laugh, sigh and shake his head, as if disappointed with himself. “What’s the matter?” said the guy next to me, eventually. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s just so silly,” said his companion, almost in apology. Then, caught by one of the show's punchlines, he laughed aloud again.

It all makes me think there’s a wide gulf between those of us who admit to liking silly things, and those who can’t. Those of us in the former party don’t view the word silly as anything derogatory. Silly art and movies and theater is happy to make people laugh; it’s kids playing in a sandbox with no goal save each other’s amusement. It’s joyous. It’s celebratory. It’s an embrace of the now and the here and the simple pleasures of smiling and chuckling. Silly has a place in this world.

The other strange breed of people might not stop laughing at a musical number involving dancing candle dildo puppets, but they seem to be ashamed of themselves after. They want to be serious. They want to make sure their laughter is aroused by something worthwhile, and not merely of the giddy moment. It seems as if it would be a lot of be a lot of work to pick and choose what sources of entertainment are acceptably funny, as opposed to merely silly. Plus it overlooks the fact that even the most profound of artists can enjoy a silly romp from time to time.

Mostly, though, I pity the people who refuse to give in to silliness. It’s as if their inner grumpy grandmother storms out onto the back porch to yell, “Will you kids stop making all that racket!” when the laughter gets too loud.

(For the record, I have to say that the Mont is not immune to silliness. During a scatalogical scene in a Rowan Atkinson film he once went into hysterics so loud and so hard that everyone in the crowded theater stared at him and the management nearly threatened to stop the film unless he stopped.)

--

This one is really from a month ago, but I'm still listening. The video for "Funplex" isn't the best—there are times that Cindy Wilson looks frightened of doing anything more vigorous than whipping her head around and gesturing vaguely with her right arm, as if she's directing traffic or avoiding an inadvertent hip fracture. (Kate Pierson is still one hot mama.) But the latest from the B-52s is a return to form, and features a couplet that perhaps rivals Shakespeare at his most evocative:

I'm your daytime waitress at the Taco Tiki Hut.
I'm your daytime waitress—here's your stupid 7-Up!

Now that's poetry.

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