The finale of Season 16 of Dancing With The Stars starts Monday night. I want to encourage you all to cheer and root and vote for Kellie Pickler.
Kellie is an alumnus of American Idol (she finished 6th in Season 5) but has been more successful than most AI winners. She was basically abandoned as a child and was raised by her grandparents. She is 26 years old from Albemarle North Carolina. She is also so sweet she will give you diabetes.
(Not to mention she is a close friend of Taylor Swift.)
Mad Bum and the SF Giants manhandled the Atlanta Braves this afternoon. The Klown is very pleased.
FYI: If you watch the movie Looper do not miss the first 10 minutes and turn on the captions cuz it’s one of those movies where they turn down the volume on the dialog and turn it up full blast for the violence.
George Jones, the country-music singer who overcame alcohol and drug addiction, bankruptcy and broken marriages to have more hit records than any other artist, has died. He was 81.
He died today at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, after being admitted with fever and irregular blood pressure, the Associated Press reported, citing Jones’s publicist, Kirt Webster.
Known for his bass-to-falsetto range and emotion-drenched vocal style, Jones appeared on the country charts 167 times. Fourteen singles, from “White Lightning” in 1959 to “I Always Get Lucky With You” in 1983, hit No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s chart. About 30 more made the top five, including “Why Baby Why,” his first national hit in 1955.
“George Jones is a national treasure and should be treated accordingly,” Keith Richards, guitarist for the Rolling Stones, told the Washington Post in a 2008 interview. He had “a unique style so often emulated, even inadvertently,” said Richards, who sang with him on a duets album released that year.
When Jones’s career started, he favored honky-tonk music, a traditional form of country. He turned toward country-pop in the early 1970s after marrying singer Tammy Wynette and collaborating with her producer, Billy Sherrill. After the marriage ended and he stopped working with Sherrill, he reverted to his early sound.
Jones’s fondness for liquor, and later cocaine, were part of his legend. Before he kicked those habits, he canceled so many concerts he became known as No-Show Jones. Another nickname, Possum, was given to him by Nashville disc jockeys because of his close set eyes and upturned nose.
Many people consider “He Stopped Loving Her Today” to be one of the greatest C&W songs ever written.
I grew up listening to a little bit of everything. I mean that literally – Ferlin Husky, Marty Robbins, The Carpenters, Ray Conniff, Gospel, The Beatles, Benny Goodman, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Sonny and Cher, John Phillip Sousa, you name it. These days I mostly listen to Country and Western.
But my true love is Rock and Roll. Heavy Metal. Guitar tracks that will knock you on your ass played by some of the greatest musicians who ever lived. Drum tracks that rock your world.
Music that will blow the cheap speakers right out of your Chevy.
We all knew it was true, but the Vast Vegan Conspiracy and their willing partners in the media were never open enough to investigate the situation honestly. Alcohol is good for you. In fact, it’s proof positive that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But now, at long last, the scientific community is coming around to see the light.
KANSAS CITY, Missouri – Forget water or Gatorade. The drink of choice to rehydrate after a workout is beer.
Researchers at Granada University in Spain found beer can help retain liquid better than water alone. The results were published in the British newspaper The Telegraph.
The study involved a group of students. They were asked to work out until their body temperature reached 104 degrees.
Researchers then gave beer to half of the students and water to the other half.
Not only did the beer rehydrate the test subjects better, but the alcohol apparently served as a minor pain reliever for the aches and stresses of working out. Of course, even the eggheads running this promising study failed to see the forest for the trees, missing the one obvious solution to the entire conundrum. If you just didn’t work out in the first place and stayed on the couch drinking beer, you would require neither hydration or pain relief. But we’ll clearly have to be patient and bring these people around one step at a time.
When Forbes released its annual list of Hollywood’s highest-paid women in October, it was no surprise that Oprah Winfrey passed everyone else by a mile. Her vast media empire, pulling in $165 million last year, swamped her nearest competitor, Britney Spears, whose earnings from music, TV and product endorsements totaled a distant second at $58 million. Spears’ career has made a spectacular recovery after what seemed like a squalid death spiral just a few short years ago — but she’s being given a run for her money by the new gals in town.
It’s staggering that 22-year-old Taylor Swift earned $57 million and Katy Perry $45 million. How is it possible that such monumental fortunes could be accumulated by performers whose songs have barely escaped the hackneyed teenybopper genre? But more important, what do the rise and triumph of Swift and Perry tell us about the current image of women in entertainment?
Despite the passage of time since second-wave feminism erupted in the late 1960s, we’ve somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s. It feels positively nightmarish to survivors like me of that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful and modest. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee formed the national template — that trinity of blond oppressors!
As if flashed forward by some terrifying time machine, there’s Taylor Swift, America’s latest sweetheart, beaming beatifically in all her winsome 1950s glory from the cover of Parade magazine in the Thanksgiving weekend newspapers. In TV interviews, Swift affects a “golly, gee whiz” persona of cultivated blandness and self-deprecation, which is completely at odds with her shrewd glam dress sense. Indeed, without her mannequin posturing at industry events, it’s doubtful that Swift could have attained her high profile.
Beyond that, Swift has a monotonous vocal style, pitched in a characterless keening soprano and tarted up with snarky spin that is evidently taken for hip by vast multitudes of impressionable young women worldwide. Her themes are mainly complaints about boyfriends, faceless louts who blur in her mind as well as ours. Swift’s meandering, snippy songs make 16-year-old Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry if I Want to)” seem like a towering masterpiece of social commentary, psychological drama and shapely concision.
Gee, what a horrible role model.
Still one week shy of her 23rd birthday, Taylor Swift is worth an estimated $165 million, none of which she inherited. She writes or co-writes all of her music, plays guitar, banjo and piano, has cranked out four top-selling studio albums as well as numerous number one hit singles and has won just about every possible award in music. Meanwhile she is unfailingly polite, attentive to her fans and is involved in numerous charitable causes.
Despite the fact that Taylor’s love-life is infamous for a number of bad relationships she has maintained a public image and persona that is sweet and wholesome. She has never been arrested for anything nor is she alleged to use drugs or alcohol. Taylor has stated that she believes it is her duty to be a positive role model for her fans.
As far as her music, it’s a matter of taste. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it.
But wait! There’s more:
Urban rappers’ notorious sexism seems to have made black female performers stronger and more defiant. But middle-class white girls, told that every career is open to them and encouraged to excel at athletics, are faced with slacker white boys nagged by the PC thought police into suppressing their masculinity — which gets diverted instead into video games and the flourishing genre of online pornography.
The emotional deficiencies in sanitized middle-class life have led to the blockbuster success of the five Twilight films as well as this year’s The Hunger Games. Their stars are nice white girls thrust into extreme situations and looking for strength. But the movies are set in abnormal environments of supernatural vampirism or dystopian survivalism. Romance is peculiarly intertwined with bloody atrocities and the yearning fabrication of foster families.
The insipid, bleached-out personas of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry cannot be blamed on some eternal law of “bubblegum” music. Connie Francis, with her powerhouse blend of country music and operatic Italian belting, was between 19 and 21 when she made her mammoth hits like “Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Stupid Cupid.” Movie ingenues once had far more sophistication and complexity than they do today: Leslie Caron was 20 at her debut in An American in Paris; Elizabeth Taylor was 19 in A Place in the Sun; Kim Novak was 22 in Picnic; Natalie Wood was 17 in Rebel Without a Cause.
Paradoxically, a key problem with the current youth cult, which is devouring both entertainment and fashion, is that aging women have become progressively invisible. If girls are helplessly stalled at the ingenue phase, it’s partly because women in their 40s and 50s are, via Botox, fillers and cosmetic surgery, still trying to look like they’re 20. Few roles are being written these days for character actresses — parts once regularly taken by Marie Dressler, Marjorie Main, Thelma Ritter or Maureen Stapleton. But Hollywood is overflowing with fascinating, charismatic and outrageously underutilized career actresses from Raquel Welch to Theresa Russell. The field for top roles is even sparser, populated by barely more than Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. Middle-class white girls will never escape the cookie-cutter tyranny of their airless ghettos until the entertainment industry looks into its soul and starts giving them powerful models of mature womanliness.
So what female artists does Paglia believe are good role models? Rihanna (who has apparently reconciled with her abuser, Chris Brown), Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce.
WTF?
I’ll let Molly Ivins have the last word:
There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “Poor dear, it’s probably PMS.”
Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, “What an asshole.”
Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, “Sheesh, what an asshole.”
If you like the sound of a pedal steel guitar, you’ll love this song.
I would like to ask everyone to leave a comment whenever you drop by, even if it’s just to say howdy. Don’t just lurk. We get a stat from WordPress that tells us how many visitors we get but not who they are. Plus it’s friendlier, and we want this to be a happy place.
BTW – If Taylor Swift ever meets Mister Right or Prince Charming and lives happily ever after, is her singing career over? She’s currently robbing the cradle with some 18 year old lead singer of a boy band.
Seriously, they suck. I stopped watching MTV at least 20 years ago. When they first started it was nothing but music videos. It was all rock music too. Then they added Pop, then Rap/Hip Hop.
Then they quit playing music altogether. Nowadays their shows have nothing to do with music. So I hear anyway. These days I watch CMT and GAC – they play country music and the girls are way prettier (I like girls that drink beer). Plus they don’t have to bleep out any words.
If you’re wondering where you heard this song before, it was featured in The L Word and a Dodge Journey commercial. Jill Barber is the singer. For more information visit http://www.jillbarber.com
