Nicholas David (Mrozinski)

Minnesota native son (Saint Paul! Eagan!) has made it to the final three on The Voice. Like the other two finalists, he has been gigging around, recording his own music, playing in bands.  They aren't amateurs.
 If you want to hear a genuine Minnesota accent, listen to his dad in this little bio clip. Pure.


 You can find his original music at his website,

He's pretty scruffy in his audition with "Stand By Me," but Cee Lo picks him for his team. Wise choice, Cee Lo, because he has become a fan favorite.

Jennifer Hudson ("Holy Buckets!") worked with him on this Bill Withers song, "Lean on Me" (one of my favorite songs ever).

He gave his own flavor to this up-tempo Barry White song.

 "The Power of Love" gets the soul treatment.

The other two finalists are good.  I don't much care for Cassadee, but the rocker dude Terry McDermott has a great voice, of the power tenor rocker type, and sings with conviction. He has covered songs by The Who, Journey, Boston, and even the Kansas classic, "Carry On, My Wayward Son." (aka "The Supernatural song") Does that mean that the Supernatural fandom will vote for him en masse?  If so, watch out.

K-pop idol G-Dragon

Get your cray on

Great little introduction to K-Pop over on Boing Boing for those of us who have found Gangnam Style stuck in our heads for the last month. The dark underbelly of these pop star factories is a talent recruitment system that sounds terribly exploitative.

traces of Japanese sixties pop culture

From about 1963-1968, my family lived in Japan where my father, then a doctor in the U.S. Army, was stationed at Camp Zama.
Some sounds and melodies are imprinted from those years.
"Sakura sakura" (played with many variations on the koto by Yoshie Sakai) is a tune everyone knows.


We lived in a house in the Sagamihara Housing Area. There were lots of trees, and the post was small enough that we could walk the few blocks to school. I went to first-fifth grades there.
Although we were in Japan, we lived in the Army. Think "Leave it to Beaver," airlifted and dropped into the Japanese countryside. Sagamihara was a small town then; now it has been absorbed into greater Tokyo. Officers (doctors were automatically officers) had bigger and nicer houses than the enlisted men. We kids and wives were "dependents" and our entire social life was contained by the post. Those families who chose not to live in Army housing were said to be living "on the economy." I thought "the economy" was the land outside the fence around our housing area.

There was a commissary where we did our shopping, a pool where we spent most of the summer, a library, a movie theater, a "snack bar" with a juke box and hamburgers, an Officer's Club where we could eat steak. Even though we had relatively little contact with Japanese people or culture, we did watched Japanese TV in black and white: samurai movies, army movies, monster movies, variety shows, cartoons, sumo wrestling. Since it was all in Japanese, we made up the stories to go with the images. For a while, we had a confused idea that any dueling samurai was "a victor."

One program I that I loved was a cartoon called "Obake no Q" about a ghost named Q-Taro who was afraid of dogs. The theme song has been stuck in my head for decades (there were later versions, but this is the original). I can't believe I managed to find it on YouTube!


This song ("Ue o Muite Aruko"), sung by Kyu Sakamoto, was a huge cross-over hit (meaning Americans actually heard of it). We had the record.

I also remember seeing some of the early Group Sounds bands on TV shows. I was especially impressed by The Spiders.

Buh-bye! Sarah Palin

OK, after my earnest sentimental post about democracy (all those 4th of July fireworks!) here is my razz on the other political news of the week: "Sarah Palin's Iquitarod" (joke first told on @pourmecoffee's Twitter and then turned into Huffpo headline by Geoffrey Dunn).

Well, we won't have Sarah Palin to kick around any more. At least not while she is in elected office. I wish this meant we wouldn't be hearing from her or about her at all, but I fear she will continue to puzzle us with her amazing feats of syntax, and provide the pundits with fodder for punditry. LOL, even the otherwise horrid the Fox media critic Liz Trotta who laughed about Obama getting assassinated ("Osama..Obama... well both would be really good") goes off on her! Hmmmm.


But, for now, I say "Play her off, keyboard cat."

Girs/Boys just want to have fun? or "the deeper meaning" of it all?

Today I participated in a PhD prelim exam in which one of the topics was the way that the literary establishment (critics, writers themselves, publishers) thinks about quality and the way fans think about quality. The goal of the discussion was not to decide who was right, but to talk about how we are and are not aware of how these dynamics interact.

I think it's safe to say that fandom is about pleasure and fun. At times the pleasure is in the deeper thinking, and at times it's just about itself. Fresca feeds my reawakened Trekkie jones by revealing the existence of the blog "Look At His Butt" (that would be William Shatner's butt!), a compendium of all things Star Trek, hosted by bloggers LT and JK, who "talk Trek" on their podcasts (their inaugural podcast from 2005 is here). I think it's safe to say that this is a site that celebrates fun, but also engages in conversation about the funness of the fun.

Then there's the testiness of the critics who are worried that popular tastes are dumbing us down. TaNahesi Coates responds to a great essay by Alyssa Rosenberg called "The Fanboys of Summer" about the summer blockbuster sci-fi/comic hero movies. His essay "The Deeper Meaning of Star Trek/Wolverine/Terminator" contrasts what the critics think to what the fans want. What is it that we want from so-called "genre" books or movies? Whatever it was when we were teenagers, it might be different for us now as older adults.

Bob Fosse-->Beyonce--->your bedroom--->Obama

Beyonce's hit song "Single Ladies" has some dancing that was inspired by Bob Fosse's choreography . She acknowledges the influence of this dance he did for Gwen Verdon (here's the original bit--see the influence?). There are a now gazillion imitations that have been posted to YouTube, and the SNL sketch with Justin Timberlake as one of Beyonce's backup dancers is pretty funny. Everyone wants to channel his or her inner Beyonce, and one of the most famous viral videos is of Shane Mercado dancing in his bedroom in a rather skimpy outfit. Here's an interview with him, and his recreation of the video on the Bonnie Hunt show, and another where he shows a couple of local broadcasters the moves!
Alphacat has turned the song into an Obama inauguration song:

One of those unexpected TV moments

Last night we watched an episode of Bones that was surprisingly moving. I say surprisingly because the show is usually a combination fairly campy and light-weight humor. (And we are still peeved about the off-the-wall way they ditched Zack, one of our favorite characters, last season).
The episode was called "The He in the She". The body of a well-loved pastor, a woman, found in the Chesapeake Bay. Forensic evidence reveals that this woman had undergone a sex-change operation and had previously been a man. As the story unfolds, the hyper-rational Bones and her partner Booth have several conversations about both religion and gender. But the most moving moments come when it is discovered that in her previous life as Patrick, Patricia had been a bible-thumping evangelical TV pastor who had swindled credulous followers, and that his son, who had been raised to follow in his footsteps, had suffered a crisis of faith, and was now seeking redemption through self-sacrifice. In the end, of course, the murderer is discovered, but along the way the show provides some surprisingly compassionate and unsensational discussion of sex-reassignment surgery, the plight of transgendered individuals who are in the closet, the reactions of their family members to their decisions to change, and the ways that people can find the strength to seek forgiveness and re-connect with a community. My daughter and I thought it was a relatively well-written episode of a show (writer is the show's creator Hart Hanson) that is not always very deep, and the song they played at the end struck a deep chord in both of us: Antony and The Johnsons
"River of Sorrow"

Comedians pwn pundits

Digby summarizes the talking-heads reactions to the VP debate and bailoutnews: a mash-up of bad sports metaphors. So I'll turn to the comedians for some more pointed commentary.
Letterman is succinct.

Jon Stewart AND his writing team are on fire:

Lisa Nova! doesn't have the high production values of SNL, but she does have a great script.

and Queen Latifah, Tina Fey, and Jason Sudeikis don't leave Biden out of the mix.

SYTYCD on MadTV: President's Edition

While waiting impatiently for SNL to break out the Tina Fey/Sarah Palin bit, I caught MadTV's send-up of SYTYCD.
Brilliant!

The Obamas and the McCains compete for our "jidges" and get the Nigel perviness, the Mary Murphy scream, and the Mia Michaels cat-who-licked-the-cream vibe. The Cat Deely dress is perfect.

Reactions to the RNC

Now that the elephants are leaving St Paul, the experts weigh in! For the adult conversation, click on GritTV over on the right.

For buffered responses, we turn to YouTubia, the great leveler, because Tina Fey won't be on SNL until Saturday.

First, a sample of the pundits ON the air:
Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow review the nomination on Sept 1.

Tom Brokaw and Chuck Todd on MSNBC.

CNN has Donna Brazile, Roland Martin, Toobin and more.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow sums it up in five seconds at 3:20.
(Who is Rachel? Air America host who will now have a show on MSNBC).

Then the pundits when they think they're OFF the air: in first place this morning for views at YouTube: Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy, two conservative commentators, are caught saying what they REALLY think of McCain's VP choice: "It's over."

But enough of the pundits. What else is out there? Warning: the following contain satire, profanity and all-around bad taste.

McMoney

LisaNova imagines the conversation between McCain and Palin when he offered her the nomination!

Kevin Nalts does a Tootsie take on Palin in response.

Check out SarahPalinvlog #1!

Headzup! is a daily political cartoon you can view on your cell phone
Here's the McCain rap song (as part of the Headzup playlist).

They gave away a T-shirt for every time McCain said "my friends" in his speech last night: ten.

Famous people have opinions, too: P. Diddy's put up his own vlog about the Palin pick, and there are now a gazillion responses. I am fond of Michael Buckley of "What the Buck?".

After the P. Diddy parody, check out this hilarious song, a parody of I kissed a girl, rewritten as I picked a girl.

The Ballad of Sarah Palin #1 (to the Davy Crockett theme song)

The Ballad of Sarah Palin #2 (with a banjo!)

And here's an interview with Jon Stewart, who is now a more respected source of news than other TV newscasters. With the McCain campaign sounding identical to SNL, we can understand why.

Star Trek TOS parodies: gender and race on the Starship Enterprise

Fresca has watched all of Star Trek ("The Original Series" or TOS as I see it is called!), and wrote this fascinating post about the whole genre of K/S slash fiction. This reminded me of a very long graduate student conversation in a cheap restaurant on Telegraph avenue about why women wrote these fantasies. I've been talking to some graduate students lately about Carlos Monsiváis, Roger Bartra, and the mixed feelings that some academics have about popular culture. Monsiváis is both a fan and a cheerful analyst while others either don't experience the pleasures of pop culture or feel they must hide it.

In Fresca's honor, I post this Carol Burnett parody of Star Trek, in which something odd happens to the crew:


And this version by In Living Color, with Jim Carrey as Captain Kirk, is more daring than anything on TV these days:


And here is "The Really Last Voyage"


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