Pop's New Low

I don't want to spend too much time blogging about crap pop songs, but incidental hearings of a recent single by Rhianna have started to drive me completely insane. The song is SOS and I have to raise a white flag of my own here.

To be fair, I am not in the target demographic for the gorgeous pop songstress, but I wish she and her handlers could have come up with something better than a tuneless dirge set to the tune of Soft Cell's Tainted Love.

The issue here is not sampling. That debate is long over and, frankly, I like too much hip hop to speak out against sampling. While I don't consider it the musical equivalent of being Elton John on the piano, I wouldn't want to have missed the work of De La Soul or Mos Def's "Miss Fat Booty" because of sampling snobbery.

But this isn't a clever sample and nothing remotely clever has been done with it. It's the latest song to take a song with a certain cachet and record a girl singing stupid lyrics over it. And these are just plain terrible. We hit a new low a few years ago when Jessica Simpson recorded "Jack and Diane" as "I Think I've in Love With You" and now Rhianna is here to knock the bar down a few more notches.

At least the writers of the original songs get a credit and get to watch the royalties roll in a big way for a song they recorded over 20 years ago. I'm sure they're not complaining. But I am! Ah well, at least I can change the station. And fend off these phonies with my iPod headphones. I just wanted to register my displeasure.


On the other hand, these gals is HOTT!

I'm Not Likeable

Sometimes you can just telling by the look on the guy's face.

Day After the All Star Game

I am an avid fantasy baseball dork. Man, it's killing me that there are no statistics rolling in this week. I guess I will just have to be content with staring at this image of Manny Ramirez.



"Every guy wants to be him And the ladies go crazy" - Moonshot, Manny (Pega Luna)

Return of the Mack

My love affair with the cinema began, as all the best love affairs do, as a form of forbidden fruit. Growing up, my family went to a church that was quite strict about what one could do for fun. The list started long and just kept growing whenever some holier-than-thou prick made a big enough fuss. This list included, but was not limited to:

• Dancing
• Drinking (even a little)
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Smoking
• Magic (any kind of magic)

Last, but not least, I was forbidden from attending the theatre. Not even Disney flicks because, in the words of our minister, "The money you spend on Bambi contributes to the making of other movies [aka Godless smut]" So unlike most people my age, I didn't see ET, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or any of these childhood-defining movies until after they came out on TV. I even had a Greedo action figure and I had no idea who he was, so I just lumped him in with my GI Joes. He was the ugly one.



The first movie I ever saw in the theatre (and without the permission of my parents) was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?



I still remember feeling a sort of guilty thrill that I was going to see a movie in the forbidden zone. Strange to look back on that now. I started going to movies non-stop for a few years. I even went to Drop Dead Fred because there was nothing else playing that I hadn't seen.



But sometime shortly after university, my love affair ended. I was jaded, it was expensive, and worst of all: people just won't shut up in the theatre. Everyone from teenage asshole guys to ladies who lunch (except instead of lunching they meet and chat all the way through a movie) always end up behind me flapping their gums, making fun of something on screen that they actually just don't get, and kicking my chair...ALWAYS KICKING MY CHAIR!

So I started seeing movies more and more at home...waiting first for the VHS and now for the DVD. I sort of miss the movies, but until I can afford to put a theatre in my home, I will mostly choose to watch from the couch.

But what's the point of all this? Oh yeah, I do go to the movies once in a while and, boy, am I glad I did last weekend. I went to see Superman Returns and it blew me away. I am going to resist the temptation to review the movie or wax poetic about the role that Superman plays in most of our imaginations. I mean, whether you are discussing the Joe Shuster/Jerry Siegel vision of Superman or Nietzsche's ubermensch, the ideal of a super man goes to a far deeper place in our collective conscience than the X-men and Spiderman could ever hope to delve.



But I digress and I promised myself I would not digress. I just want to tell anyone who might happen to read this that you really should see this movie in the theatre. You may not enjoy it as much as I did (I literally laughed, cried, and wanted to cheer at the end) but I doubt you will be disappointed. Dads, take your sons. Sons, take your Dads. Go and enjoy the magic of movies. And if someone behind you is talking or kicking your chair, give em one of these: