It’s a small thrill to occasionally “discover” a musical artist or group that you haven’t heard before, something that sounds creative and fresh. Not the latest Top 10 artist either, or the pablum that radio stations spit out ad nauseam 50 times a day on their computers. Read the rest of this entry »
For her upcoming CD, “Someone to Watch Over Me”, to be released November 1, 50-year-old Scottish superstar singer Susan Boyle has once again plumbed a classic song that is another unlikely choice. You remember SuBo from a couple of years back, when you and probably the entire globe stopped everything to watch the formerly dowdy dowager electrify a panel of judges on “Britain’s Got Talent” (among them, Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan) with a show-stopping version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables”. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night at the Tesla auto plant in Fremont, CA, onlookers marveled at the new Tesla Model S luxury sedan, which finally made its debut after a long wait. Technically speaking, the unveiling of the new luxurious sedan was for the approximately 2,000 customers who have put down deposits of $5000, but these were prototypes, not their actual cars. Seeking to create even more buzz, if not bowl over these customers who showed up for the gala event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, dressed to the nines in a tuxedo, asked the crowd to spread the word about this beauty, which won’t be ready for delivery until 2013. Read the rest of this entry »
5 WAYS TO MAKE ABC’s “THE CHEW” TOLERABLE
The loud trainwreck that is “The Chew”, which premiered this past Monday on ABC not only as yet another food-theme show but also as replacement for “All My Children” the 40+ year legendary soap that ABC killed earlier this year, has not been the smashing success that the network had hoped. Or is it early to tell? Read the rest of this entry »
Yikes! It’s Labor Day weekend! School’s already started in some parts of the country. Is the summer over? Didn’t school used to start in September? What’s the rush? Does this mean the lazy days of what has been a steamy summer in many parts –well, do we have to pack it in for the fall already? I want to still remember what I did this summer, which for one, was to come up with this year’s SMASHgods list of the most memorable, the most disposable, the most played —sometimes you wanted to poke your eyes out—songs of Summer ’11.
Let’s review some of the guidelines here. Summer songs are memorable not just because they are played on endless loops by absent djs on radio stations, or downloaded frantically on iTunes. They also have to minimally represent summer in some way –something frothy, something accessible, something that can withstand all those replays. What was the song of this summer? In the past we have awarded this dubious title to the likes of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and BEP’s “I’ve Got a Feeling” –iconic titles for sure and certainly reminders of the last two summers. Read the rest of this entry »
You really don’t want to be around Obama nowadays. He will kick your ass. And he’ll be smooth about it. Let’s look at the last 72 hours or so of his schedule and take a look at what finesse and general bad-assness he has displayed.
On Friday, instead of just tucking in and watching the Royal Wedding and hat parade like the rest of us, he flew with his family to Alabama to comfort those who were devastated by horrendous tornadoes. He even went to Miami’s Dade College and gave a commencement address! Read the rest of this entry »
We are knee-deep in the film awards season, it seems. Last week’s brouhaha about Ricky Gervais tossing out some jokes that offended some Hollywood types as the host of the Golden Globe Awards almost overshadowed the fact that real awards were hand ed out. (We think Ricky rocked, and it’s high time someone of his courage decided to take the hot air out of the event. Like Angelina cared about her worthless nomination, or aboutcharges of payola with her rotten “Tourist” movie, as she leaned back into Brad Pitt’s arms.) Read the rest of this entry »
So, you’ve all been shopping, haven’t you? Of course you have! We’ve seen you schlepping those shopping bags up and down the escalators at the malls. We’ve seen you stand in long lines at Macy’s just to get gift boxes –that’s the 6th floor at “Gift Wrap”. Just from a cursory glance it really does seem like there are a lot more people out there spending money, so there must be some kind of economic recovery going on. Yes, the economists declared the recession to be over in June 2009, but unemployment has slowed things down, or at least the perception that the economy is still tanking. We don’t think so. We have proof. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is my birthday. 9/11/10. Ah, so you noticed? I get that from time to time. The double-take, the slight pause, the occasional “So what’s it like?” question which, I suppose, is more rhetorical until I actually try to come up with an answer. Because in fact I don’t really have any answer. Because I don’t think I have fully internalized my feelings about this. Because maybe I try to not let things get to me. But I am going to try to explain how I feel today, the 9th anniversary of the day that, according to many people, I am supposed to suddenly feel differently about this day, my birthday that I used to celebrate as if it were any other day. Read the rest of this entry »
My nephew and I have a long-distance postcard relationship. For a couple of years now he and I manage to see each other rarely but instead send each other postcard dispatches in which I will describe a cool attraction I visited and he will get excited about a local dish or delicacy from a vacation spot around the US. I travel a lot internationally so I have sent him postcards from places like Singapore and Paris, and even more obscure places like rural Massachusetts (the homemade pasta e fagiule soup at Il Forno in Fitchburg = to die for) and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This latter spot was memorable because in the middle of 98-degree summer heat, a woman who was missing a front tooth was selling Siberian Husky pups outside on her pick-up truck bed. $400 in cash and that precious pup could have come home with me in a bag on my flight back to SFO –ah, the things I regret in my travels. Read the rest of this entry »
At my niece’s 17th birthday party last weekend we brought the laptop and played a familiar game. We either went on to iTunes or Youtube and did a little “Name That Tune”: play a few seconds of a pop song and we’d all try to guess the title. Another nephew has some kind of app on his Verizon phone that allows him to access songs and lyrics. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s get real: the Miss Universe pageant is a mostly bloated, hoary affair, now resurrected by Donald Trump and his lackeys and it’s essentially a travelogue and two-hour commercial-filled tribute to Las Vegas, which is where this tired blimp has now parked itself recently. The show, telecast by NBC last Monday night, even lost 10% of the late summer audience from last year, so maybe this thing really is on its last legs. Read the rest of this entry »
George Steinbrenner, who died the other day following a massive heart attack at the age of 80, was a larger-than-life figure. As owner of the New York Yankees for 37 years, he presided over 7 World Series titles and 11 pennants -no small feat for anyone in baseball, especially someone who took on such an obsessively managerial role in virtually every aspect of the game, from the merry-go-round hiring and firing of managers to on-field calls that really weren’t the purview of a team owner. Read the rest of this entry »
Get out! 7-11 is here. Not the date, silly -the store. Oh yeah, well it’s 7-11 the date too, we guess. Don’t you know what happens every year on this magical date? Thousands of people flock to their local 7-11 stores and celebrate the anniversary of the store chain by filling up on free small Slurpees. Tomorrow is 7-11’s 83rd birthday. That’s right -more than eight decades serving up local fare that’s literally a block away, and serving customers all over the world.
We all grew up with this chain, and we definitely grew up with the Slurpees -my favorites were the Cherry Red and of course, the old standby, the Coke flavored one. Pull back that knob and fill up those cups, but don’t get brain freeze like Bart Simpson did when he went into the Quik-e-Mart, which is “The Simpsons”’s homage to this most venerable of institutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Summer has officially begun and with the toastin’ and roastin’ temps and it’s time we crown a new Summer of 2010 pop song champion. It’s the 3rd annual SMASHgods competition, and I have to tell you, with pop radio stations blaring everywhere across this country, everyone is in the mood of enjoy a totally energetic song right now, whether it be cruising down Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood (KISS-FM, 102.7 with Ryan Seacrest), or the Upper East Side (Z-100 in Manhattan) or up north in SF, where I have managed to find no discernible difference between Wild 94.9, Energy 92.7 and Movin’ 99.7. Read the rest of this entry »
Full disclosure: I was a pretty hardcore Jamiroquai fan back in the day. In the early 90s I was in Paris and inside the Virgin Megastore I heard a pretty amazing album, “Emergency on Planet Earth” on the headphones. Its eclectic mix of jazzy beats and funk on what was a paean to the horrors that we have caused to our environment made them noticeable to world audiences who also noticed the lanky lead singer, Jay Kay, the one that appeared in a furry buffalo hat.
They seemed to be very popular in Europe before they caught on here; in fact, the “Return of the Space Cowboy” US club tour in 1995 was played to small audience–they even performed at a tiny dive bar in the Rockridge district of Oakland, CA (which is now a lonely laundromat). Read the rest of this entry »
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