Writing about TV, I see a lot of pilot episodes. They’re not the best way to judge a new show, but they’re all we’ve got. Just two years ago, I watched the pilots for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock; I thought the Aaron Sorkin drama was sharp and witty, while the Tina Fey sitcom was charming but a bit of a mess. I still don’t think I was wrong, but 30 Rock did something unusual: it just kept improving week after week as the ensemble came to life and the writing kicked into high gear, to the point where it’s now one of my favorite shows on TV and I eagerly await the beginning of its third season this Thursday. (Studio 60 pulled off an even rarer feat, getting worse every week it was on the air: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show decline so steadily.)

In late 2006, halfway through the first season of 30 Rock, I did a long sitdown interview with Tina Fey. It was actually done in two sessions, first during breaks on location at a Manhattan nightclub where Fey was filming the scene that includes her drunkenly performing a Janis Ian song, and then at Silvercup Studios in Queens (also, at that time, home to The Sopranos–cast members of 30 Rock reported seeing Sopranos actors using the studio’s bathrooms while covered in stage blood). During our conversations, Fey was polite, focused, and on the clock: as head writer, executive producer, and star of the show, her schedule was stuffed way past the breaking point, and as soon as we were done, she was supposed to be three other places simultaneously. (I can only imagine how crazy this fall has been for her with her new sideline as America’s leading political impressionist.) Read my interview for Fey dishing on Saturday Night Live hosts, lying about her jeans, and revealing her willingness to make out with Bill Clinton.

posted 27 October 2008 in Archives, Articles. 2 comments

This one was taken about two months ago, at the Orange County Fair:

posted 24 October 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

I’m actually on the road today, so video #76 will have to wait until next week. But to tide you over, I thought I’d share a few stats about the 1988 charts. There was quite a bit of turnover: 32 different songs hit #1 on the Billboard charts. (The most ever was 35, a mark achieved in both 1974 and 1975.) That would change abruptly after Billboard started incorporating real-world data from SoundScan (for sales) and BDS (for airplay) in late 1991: there were only 12 #1 singles in 1992, 10 in 1993, and 9 in 1994. Things perked up into the teens for a while, but then hit an all-time low in 2002, when just seven different tracks reached the top.

At any rate, back to 1988: most chart-toppers stayed there for one or two weeks. The exceptions were George Michael’s “One More Try” and Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (three weeks each), and Steve Winwood’s “Roll With It” (four weeks); I’m sure we’ll be seeing them all in the higher reaches of MTV’s countdown.

And what was going on in the alternate universe of the country charts? There was a new #1 single in Nashville almost every week: 48 total at year’s end. (This wasn’t an exceptional year; in 1984 and 1985, there were fifty-one different #1 country singles. Things slowed down a bit after Billboard started using the BDS data, but the country charts still moved much faster than their pop counterparts: 25 to 32 singles would routinely reach the top each year through the 90s.)

So what country songs managed to stay on top for more than one week in 1988? I’m glad you asked. Four held on for a full fortnight: Kathy Mattea’s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” Randy Travis’s “I Told You So,” Ricky Van Shelton’s “I’ll Leave This World Loving You,” and Keith Whitley’s “When You Say Nothing at All.”

posted 23 October 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

Interviewing comics can be tricky: some fall back on canned schtick, while others are self-consciously dour offstage. But I’ve interviewed Chris Rock three times in the last five years and he’s never disappointed. Rock’s not a rat-a-tat joke machine; he’s always seemed more interested in answering my questions thoughtfully. He just says incredibly funny things along the way.

Since we’re roughly halfway between Rock’s recent Kill the Messenger HBO special (solid, but not helped by the odd decision to edit shows from three different continents together) and his upcoming voiceover work in Madagascar 2 (already a hit with the two-year-old in my house, based just on the posters), this seemed like as good a time as any to put my interviews with him up in the archives. The first one is from 2003 and was pegged to his hosting the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s full of then-topical references, but remarkably little has changed in the world in the past five years. (Johnny Cash died, Beyonce and Jay-Z got married, Rock hosted the 2005 Oscars–I’m sure you can figure out the rest.)

The article also had a sidebar where Rock discussed some of the songs being nominated for awards, which I will share with you here:

50 Cent, “In Da Club”
It captures the club right now. It’s like “Teen Spirit.” Every song’s got a key line that makes it a hit. Here, it’s “I’m into having sex / I ain’t into making love.” Okay, now you got a hit. You take that line out of the song, you got an okay record.

Justin Timberlake, “Cry Me a River”
It’s the kind of song a man doesn’t want to admit he likes, but it’s a great Timbaland track. There’s something about a falsetto, man, that captures people. I always liked N’Sync more than Backstreet, because they embraced being a boy band instead of trying to be tough.

The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army”
Love this song, love this album, love the last album. I love anybody with a uniform–it makes your life so easy when you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to wear. Albert Einstein wore the same brown suit everyday. He didn’t want to waste his brainpower on clothes.

Missy Elliott, “Work It”
Missy is one of the only rappers who seems to be having fun. I love her whole album, it’s like a hip-hop Cyndi Lauper record or something. If a hard record had that many good cuts on it, it’d probably get more notice. Plus we’re used to her making good records–every year, she makes the best record of the year.

posted 22 October 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

I’ve been listening to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” for over twenty years now. (Thankfully, not continuously.) Only recently did I realize an odd quality of the song: the chorus doesn’t appear until the very end. Technically, that means it’s not a chorus at all, right?

posted 21 October 2008 in Tasty Bits. 10 comments

I haven’t written many articles that have gotten a more intense response than this 2004 profile of Macaulay Culkin. Which surprised me at first, but makes sense upon further reflection–Culkin was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, not that long ago, and then he pretty much vanished off the radar.

Not much has changed since its publication: Culkin has made just one movie since 2004 (last year’s little-seen dark comedy Sex and Breakfast) and is still together with actress Mila Kunis. Doing press for Max Payne last week, Kunis said in the LA Times that she and Culkin spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft together. Yeah, I know all too well how that can chew up the hours. (Apparently, Culkin has a level 70 Paladin character.)

I’ve just added my article to the archives. The piece includes Culkin talking about his drug experiences and dishing on how Mandy Moore came to enjoy cursing. He also muses on his strange life and the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq invasion: “We haven’t even found those weapons, and I don’t appreciate being lied to that way. They can’t even be bothered to plant the evidence.”

posted 20 October 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

On Monday evening, we were driving back home from San Diego when a huge cloud of smoke blotted out the sun, bringing on dusk several hours too early. The smoke was coming from a wildfire on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base. It burned up more than six square miles; firefighters appear to have the blaze under control now. This picture was taken from a rest area on I-5.

posted 17 October 2008 in Photos. 1 comment

We see the “Big Bang ’89” promo for the third time, with close-ups on explosions and spinning clocks building up excitement for the fact that 1989 will start in only a few hours, a transition that can be enjoyed in the company of Robert Plant, Poison, Winger, Cameo, Hall and Oates, the Escape Club, Bobby Brown, Vixen, Sam Kinison, and Sandra Bernhard. It’s a little jarring to see both Plant and Bret Michaels looking unhaggard. (By the way, I saw the first ten minutes of Rock of Love: Charm School this week before screaming “What am I doing with my life?” and fleeing the room. But I did have the small epiphany that at this point, Sharon Osbourne is more famous than Bret Michaels.) The background music for most of the ad is the riff from Brown’s “My Prerogative,” which sounds really good.

A repeat of a Coca-Cola ad: the parents go out for the evening, admonishing “no parties,” but return to find a bacchanal in full swing, fueled by caffeinated beverages: their daughters have thrown them a surprise anniversary party. This is actually a “Coca-Cola Classic” ad; the New Coke debacle was in 1985, and I was a little surprised to realize the “Classic” brand was still around in 1988. I just went online trying to figure out when they dropped “Classic” and deemed it to be regular Coke again. (1992, it turns out, when the new formula became Coke II–much later than I expected. I haven’t seen a Coke II in a long time, but apparently it was never officially discontinued and is still popular in Samoa.) I also discovered other Coke variations: you can currently buy a Coca-Cola Orange in England, and for a brief time, New Zealanders could enjoy a Coca-Cola Raspberry.

Another Rain Man spot (this one, not this one), where a montage of clips receive a soundtrack of “Iko Iko” and a voiceover. “Newsweek magazine calls Rain Man the best acting of Tom Cruise’s career.” (Apparently, they weren’t paying attention to his marriage to Mimi Rogers.) “People magazine says it’s the acting triumph of the year by Dustin Hoffman. And Rex Reed of At the Movies calls it one of the most entrancing films of the year. Dustin Hoffman. Tom Cruise. Rain Man. Rated R. Now playing at a theater near you.”

The WWF’s Royal Rumble ad plays again. “Don’t get shut out, order now,” says the announcer, as if there were a finite number of pay-per-view packages to go around.

Ad from the local cable provider: “Season’s Greetings from the Staff at UA-Columbia.” Much like before; a different set of employees sit at their desks and wave for the camera.

We finish our commercial break with an MTV promo. Gray screen, with a small white S and a large black cross. We hear an operatic soprano. Bang, bang, bang: we hear aggressive channel-flipping, and the soundtrack keeps changing along with the symbols: a dollar sign, a smiley face, a skull, the anarchy sign, the square root of 3. Then a title card reading “ONE SIGN / UN SIGNE / UNA SENA” plus kanji or hanzi that I assume translate as the same thing (but that I hope actually mean “Screw you, Coke-swilling Westerners”). “ONE TIME” follows (with translations), and then “ONE VISION” (etc.), capped off by the MTV logo. It’s supposed to be well-intentioned tolerant pap, I think, but it feels like a declaration of war: the whole world belongs to MTV.

posted 16 October 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

Apparently Dennis Hopper is starring in the new TV adaptation of Crash, which holds no interest for me, since it’s an adaptation of the bad Paul Haggis movie from 2004. (An adaptation of the Cronenberg/Ballard movie from 1996 might be equally awkward, but at least it would be unlike anything else on TV.) But the recent advertisements reminded me that in one of the cooler phone conversations I’ve ever had, I got to talk to Hopper about his photography. (He advised aspiring film directors to try telling a story through storyboarded photos first.) Rolling Stone printed about half of the following in their 2002 “Cool Issue” (issue 893, 4/11/02):

Before he was a film director, Dennis Hopper was a photographer. And before he was a photographer, he would walk down the streets of New York City, framing images with his hands. You probably know Hopper for his wild-eyed acting, from the biker in Easy Rider to the bomber in Speed, but he’s always had a secret life as an excellent visual artist. Not just “excellent for an actor”: he makes perceptive, lovely images. Did you think that camera around his neck in Apocalypse Now was just a prop? Decades from now, he may be better remembered as an artist than as a performer.

People are finally starting to notice: a retrospective of his artwork is touring this year from Amsterdam to Vienna to Moscow. An eight-minute video he made about a Dutch homeless girl will be shown in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. And he has a new book of old photographs, 1712 North Crescent Heights (Greybull Press), documenting his life from 1962 to 1968, when he and his then-wife Brooke Hayward presided over an LA coterie of actors and artists. (It’s edited by their daughter Marin, who got Dad’s permission to look through his contact sheets, in search of forgotten happy times.) See Tina Turner trying to get her mouth around an enormous Coke bottle! Teri Garr on the beach! Jane Fonda practicing archery! But even without the celebrity quotient, Hopper’s photographs would beautifully evoke a vision of the ’60s as a playground: innocents in the garden of California.

Hopper’s impressive Pop Art collection can be seen in the background of many of the photos: originals by luminaries such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Oldenburg. These days, he says, he relies on phone conversations with Julian Schnabel and Damien Hirst to keep him up-to-date with what’s going on in the art world. (Although he does live in a house designed by Frank Gehry.) “And I doodle,” he says. “I can’t paint, just because I haven’t gotten my studio set up. But I just took some incredible photos in South Africa.”

Asked if his approach to art has changed in the last four decades, Hopper says, “I was in Amsterdam for a month, working on my retrospective, and I saw a lot of Flemish painting while I was there. That changed how I looked at light.” He laughs. “But everything else is pretty much the same.”

Most of that Pop Art collection, by the way, was lost in a fire. Used copies of 1712 North Crescent Heights now go for $150 and up, but you can see a very fast flickering slide show (freezable if you click on it) of some of the pictures here.

posted 15 October 2008 in Articles. 2 comments

I love Foreigner the way I love my microwave oven. The oven’s clunky and utlilitarian, and I don’t even use it that often. But when I nuke a bag of popcorn, or fill my eyes with that double vision, it makes me happy beyond all reason.

Alas, this song isn’t one of the GE Spacemaker II’s better efforts. It’s an over-synthed ballad that’s clearly trying to follow up on the band’s last big over-synthed ballad, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” But while that one came out on the other side of the children’s choir with an improbable majesty, this one is just goopy and overwrought. (And so, of course, it hit #1 in the adult-contemporary format.)

By the time this track was released, singer Lou Gramm was busy launching his solo career (which apparently was meant to coexist with the band, but that never really works, does it?). His single “Midnight Blue” had the punch of classic Foreigner; it hit #5 in 1987 and is one of two ’87 videos that I bitterly regret came just a little too early for this countdown. (The other one, of course, is Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again.”)

Anyway, Foreigner don’t appear anywhere in this video. (Given the way they looked like an accounting firm in the “I Want to Know What Love Is” clip, it may have been a smart move for them to return to their classic “faceless” image.) What we get instead is a total clip job: lots of short footage taken from nature films and old Hollywood movies.

The video starts with stock animated footage of planet Earth from space (and a misspelling of the single’s name–MTV renders the title as “I Don’t Wanna” rather than “I Don’t Want to,” a sign of how little attention anyone was paying at this point). Then a volcano erupts, a raindrop falls, cells squirm around, a mushroom grows through the miracle of time-lapse photography, and a frog expands its throat in dramatic fashion. Lions and gorillas lead to a clip from an old Hollywood movie, apparently set on a riverboat, where the leading lady drops her handkerchief to entice a man.

If this video came out today, it would have its own Wikipedia page where fans would identify every single animal and starlet. Knowing some references but not others, I feel very pre-Google.

Peacock footage, then back to the riverboat, where our leading lady gets her handkerchief back. Popeye and Olive Oyl vanish into the tunnel of love. Joe DiMaggio kisses Marilyn Monroe. Giraffes rub their necks together. An actor lugs around an actress like she’s a bag of laundry. A WWII sailor kisses a girl. An ox (I think) licks the ear of its young. B&W movie kiss. Fred Astaire in a hotel room, spinning around with a chair and mooning over a photo of a girl.

As we roll into the chorus, an actor who might be Ronald Reagan looks jealous as a girl gets kissed in front of him. Betty Boop gets a ring from a man with a villainous mustache. A beauty queen admires her own ring. The young Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Philip wave to the crowds on their wedding day. A couple at their wedding reception spin around the dancefloor on rollerskates. None of this seems to be bolstering any emotion in the song.

A new sequence: a fertilized ova, a human fetus in the womb (with lovely golden lighting–why can’t all sonograms look like this?), a squalling infant, and then a monkey mother holding a simian baby. Movie clip: octuplets and a shocked father fainting (I’m going to guess this comes from Miracle at Morgan’s Creek).

The sun rises. A cell splits in two. The raindrop falls again, and the frog does its freaky throat thing again. Two iceskaters spin around on the ice. Some guy kisses Myrna Loy’s neck. An ostrich flaps its wings. A black-and-white movie star carries his girl through a swank apartment. Penguins hang out on the ice while two orca whales surface behind them. Elizabeth Taylor kisses Eddie Fisher for the cameras; he’s wearing a yarmulke. A cartoon wooden soldier has his heart spring out of his chest. More actress-carrying: this time, she gets deposited onto a bed. Two herons hop about. Animation of a “1 Karat Ring,” which has an actual carrot.

Communion (presumably at a wedding ceremony, given the other clips), a straw-hatted boy stealing a peck on the cheek from a farm girl, a bride and groom walking on a tightrope, balancing with large poles. More movie kisses: in soft focus, on a train platform, on a front porch, in color, with John Wayne, with billowing smoke.

A bird sits on the back of a walking calf. Spencer Tracy picks up a kicking infant. A lioness licks her cubs. One last black-and-white kiss, and then we finish with the same shot of Earth we started with.

You hardly ever see this type of video anymore. It’s not just that it seems lazy and uninvolved, a memo to fans saying “Hey, we couldn’t be bothered to make a video, so our record company just slapped something together for us.” It’s too expensive now: with the amount you’d have to spend these days to clear the rights for all these old movie clips, you’d be better off just hiring some hipster animator.

“I Don’t Want to Live Without You” hit #5 on the Billboard singles charts–Foreigner’s last single to hit the top 40. (They had sixteen of them–just one more than Pat Benatar.) You can watch the video here.

posted 14 October 2008 in 1988. 5 comments