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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

It is honestly hard to muster excitement about the final four American Idol contestants. Many have called this the most lackluster season, one that given us mostly stiff and uninspiring contestants, and we’re inclined to agree. This wasn’t the season of an unusual talent, like Adam Lambert last year, an artist who transformed some song choices like David Cook (remember what he did with Mariah Carey or “Eleanor Rigby”?,  or even the crowd pleasing charm of a Carrie Underwood.  No one this season has generated much originality, or at least these streaks of brilliance haven’t been sustained. Remember when (now-departed) Andrew Garcia did Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”? Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, Singapore! I have spent some time here in the last few years and I was just there recently on a business trip. What can be said about this amazing but sometimes unsettling authoritarian city-state? Where the main activities that concern most Singaporeans seems to be a heavy dose of extravagant shopping (you really must see the incredibly designed Ion Orchard shopping center, a feat of art and design with swirling escalators going up and down several floors) and bodacious eating. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week saw the much-hyped premiere of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC. It did pretty well in the ratings (well, who watches TV on Friday nights anyways?) and it was all over the media outlets, from Larry King Live to the Oprah Winfrey Show. The preternaturally boyish celebrity chef from England, with executive producer (and also boyish) Ryan Seacrest in tow, were busy telling the nation that it was facing a crisis in how poorly its children were eating in public schools all over America. Read the rest of this entry »

I was trying to figure out why this family of four had brought in some throws and pillows to my local AMC movie theatre yesterday. The kids were in tow, too, and they seemed just as eager as their parents to go see…..”Cop Out”? “Tooth Fairy”? It couldn’t be. When I looked closer at the displays, it turns out they (and quite a few others) were queueing up for AMC Theatre’s annual tribute to this year’s Academy Award Best Picture nominees. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this was an interesting and effective way of demonstrating just how huge the Internet is.  Scroll down and get a glimpse of some of these numbers.

This montage was put together by the folks at Online Education, who proudly feature the stuff they don’t teach you in college.

So you thought that the cuddly teddy bear holding the little red heart box of chocolates really nailed it today didn’t you? You thought you scored with your special Valentine, right? Well, talk about thinking totally outside the box: a company called DNA 11 offers you a gift that is so intensely personal, so unique and yet rather unusual that it will never be forgotten.

DNA 11 offers you a chance to provide your own DNA sample, which they will then process and place on an artistic screen, either in mini-portrait form or on a canvas that you could use as artwork. Now, we’re not talking that kind of DNA sample. Read the rest of this entry »