Melinda’s been doing some warmups for Halloween, and while this isn’t specifically a monster song, it’s fricking spooky. Like spooky and also sexy, in the way that Phil Collins can somehow be sexy, especially when he’s grayscaled and soft-focused into a Michael Myers mask.
Also, like so many songs on this feature, it’s often inspired by what I happen to hear on the radio. I was driving during this particular song, and I’m not a terribly experienced driver; I tend to hold my hands tightly on the 2-and-10 positions most of the time. Except for when this came on, when I had to air drum. I had to. So do you. If you don’t believe me, hold your hands still while watching this, and try not to air drum at the 3:15 mark.
Try.
You can’t do it.
If you can, you’re clearly on Thorazine and stuck in one of those rooms in that hallway. Listen closely. Do you hear the doorknob jiggle? That’s Phil Collins. He’s looking for you.
P.S. This song also gets major bonus points for being the on the soundtrack to “Risky Business,” which will someday be covered as a Nomi’s Blue Book feature.
I got horrible news a few weeks ago, during the presidential debate. No, not that Obama had been replaced with a pod person, although I can see how you’d think that. Rather, an old friend, Jim, got in touch with me–the first time in 20 years–to tell me his cousin, Drew, had kidney cancer, and was in pretty bad shape. He wanted me and my sister to know. For a few summers in the early 90s we spent nearly every entertaining moment with Jim and Drew, and while I hadn’t heard from them in years, I was thoroughly upset.
Jim told me Drew’d love to get letters from Samantha and I, and I told him I’d write to him. And then the week happened, and I suddenly realized it was the next Friday, and I knew that after work I’d have to sit down and write to Drew.
Only I opened Facebook Saturday morning to find I was too late. The cancer they’d discovered four weeks earlier had finished its work, and Drew with it. He was 38, and newly married, and he was gone just like that.
We wrote to each other my senior year of high school. He was a freshman at PSU, so I kind of had a college boyfriend, even if it was of the no-touching long-distance kind. We talked on the phone a lot. He was magnificently hilarious, incredibly intelligent, and could be petulant and moody in the way that 18-year-old guys are–especially 18-year-old guys who are still shedding the last vestiges of high school dorkiness. But lord, was he funny.
At the time I was deep into my Broadway musical phase, and after an especially spirited discussion about How Broadway Sucks, I sent him a mix tape of my favorite show tunes. He was unimpressed, although he did like “One Night in Bangkok” and thought “Master of the House” would be well-performed by Muppets, a comparison I still hang onto this day. Accompanying the rest of his blistering rhetoric on the awfulness of West Side Story, Hair, and Les Miserables, though, came his own mix tape, compiled from years of poaching his older brother’s music collection, and, I suspect, a few John Hughes movies.
He called it “Unfathomably Good Music,” and I was blown away by it. I listened to it ALL the time, and made my sister a copy. It introduced me to the music of many bands of which I’d only heard, and several that were previously unknown to me. It traveled with me to college, to New York, to San Francisco, and back to Pittsburgh again. It lost its cover en route, but the tape is still listenable and intact.
So when I found out about Drew, I ran downstairs, into the last remaining box of cassette tapes, and unearthed “Unfathomably Good Music.” The tape lost its cover over the years, so I had to listen to it again to pull together the full playlist. As a result, I’m kind of a teary mess at the moment. But here you go, folks: the playlist of the first mix tape I ever received from a boy.
SIDE A
Ceremony by New Order
Into the Mystic by Van Morrison
Pictures of You by The Cure
Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode
So in Love by OMD
Motion of Love by Gene Loves Jezabel
Just Like Heaven by The Cure
Satellite by Echo and the Bunnymen
Chorus by Erasure
Put the Message in the Box by World Party
Learning to Fly by Tom Petty
SIDE B
No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley
Lips Like Sugar by Echo and the Bunnymen
Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo
Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order
Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Joy Division
Every Day Is Like Sunday by Morrissey
This Is How It Feels by Inspiral Carpets
One More Time by The Cure
See a Little Light by Bob Mould
The Perfect Girl by The Cure
I know what you’re thinking, San Francisco friends, and you’re wrong. I submit to you track 1 of Side B, “No Woman, No Cry,” aka, the anthem of freshmen who want to get laid by girls. Drew wasn’t gay. He just had really, really fabulous taste in music, in all senses of the word, and it’s because of this mix tape that I knew how to turn on The Cure when I really wanted to get my cry on. It’s because of Drew that I entered college with any kind of musical street cred.
Listening to these songs again, I felt nostalgic and sad, of course. I saw myself sitting on the floor of my bedroom, crying to “One More Time” after I’d called it quits with him. But the song that really killed me–the one that had me sobbing hardest–was this one. It’s the exact opposite of sad. It’s joy and beauty and heavenly boys spinning madly in a mirror-balled dance floor, and harmonizing with choirs of synthesizers. It’s life and fun and the exact opposite of cancer.
Drew started a blog to write about his experience with illness, and called it http://drewgoesthereandbackagain.wordpress.com. He only had time to write two entries, but he never thought for a minute he wouldn’t come back again. I thought he would’ve, too, or I wouldn’t have taken so much time to sit my ass down and send him a letter.
So fuck you, cancer. This is what I think of you. Take your bad cells and your short notice and stuff it in the back dumpster at The End-Up, because your kind is not welcome here. These boys are here to harmonize your ass back to hell.
We bought an awesome phases-of-the-moon calendar back in March, and it’s nice to track when the full moon’s going to be high in the sky. Even better, though, is that last night, apropos of seemingly nothing, my husband began singing, “It’s a NEW MOON ON MONDAY!”
I knew he wasn’t singing it because the song popped randomly into his head and he was forced to loop it until another song purged the earworm like a toothpick through stuck glitter glue; no, I knew he’d consulted the calendar.
So here we are, opening our week with the second-best video from a band that became famous solely because of its videos, although if you say that’s proof that their songs suck, I’ll stab you with this freshly sharpened eyeliner pencil. I always carry it, in case someone disses Duran Duran.
Of course, not realizing the import of the lunar calendar, I decided to work in our downtown office today, instead of at home, where I’d have the luxury of watching the video and pointing out the especially fantastic parts. But I’ll leave the deep examination to Melinda, and point out, from memory, why this is one of the best videos of Duran Duran, and also ever.
There are four versions. FOUR. They range in length from the one you saw on MTV to a 17-minute edition that can only be found through an Easter egg on their greatest hits DVD, after watching the video three times. This YouTube video is “extended,” but it’s only 6:08.
The extended edition features Simon LeBon in a dressing room with a hot French spy, and at one point, he says, “It looks like you’ve already got my back against the wall,” at which point, any viewer must squeal giddily, take control of the remote, and rewind. Yes, rewind. Don’t skip back or run it back or any of those crazy newfangled things discs do; you must find a way to rewind.
It features a semi-futuristic French revolution, I think. There are French-looking cobblestones and French-looking flags and soldiers on horseback, and also Simon LeBon.
There’s also something about this time, la luna, and lighting one’s torch and waving it for a new moon on Monday, which I think is some kind of insignia, or possibly a rallying cry for la revolucion, I’m not really sure, but it rhymes really well, and Simon LeBon sounds really sexy saying it.
At one point, late in the video, the soldiers on horseback–or it might just be palace guards on foot, I can’t remember and can’t watch it right now–chases the hot Frenchie spy down an alley, and she stops the charging horses (OK, maybe they ARE horses) by waving a giant flag and being very brave and revolutionary, totally like Tianamen Square, only without the grocery bag or actual fear of impending death. That act of bravery is not the important part, though. The important part–and the part that makes this video the most rewinded in the Handley house– is that Simon LeBon is watching her wave the flag from far away, and is totally charmed by it, and ducks his head and smiles and then sneaks another look at her because she’s so darn cute when she’s being all death-defying like that. Pick up remote. Rewind. Repeat. Feel funny in ways you don’t understand yet. Rewind. Repeat. Pause. Squeal.
Back to the salt mines. Or, as we like to say around here, back to feeding the capitalist pig dogs.
P.S. The first best Duran Duran video is View to a Kill, because it intersperses scenes from the James Bond movie seamlessly, and features the entire band in their natural habitats: Nick Rhodes as a fashion photographer, John Taylor shooting at Grace Jones, Roger Taylor as a gunner in the back of a van, Andy Taylor as an evil blind accordionist, and Simon LeBon as a terrible pun-teller.
A few weeks, ago, I paid tribute to The Bangles, and in the process, apparently kicked AM Gold in the teeth a little. Specifially, I suggested that Simon & Garfunkel don’t rock. I stand by that statement: they don’t. I listen to them frequently and find the songs beautiful and melancholy, but it’s not the kind of thing I crank up during a long stretch on the turnpike, or in the shower.
Melinda, whose favorite bands are The Scissor Sisters and everything on AM Gold, called me out on it. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make it up to her, and then yesterday, on my way back from Lowe’s, new space heater in the passenger’s seat (my home office has no heating vent, and I got tired of wearing gloves by the end of the day), 3WS, Pittsburgh’s home for oldies, kicked out with the most rocking tune ever to be played in a dentist’s office: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”
Here’s the funny thing about “Baker Street”: I’ve heard the song five thousand times, give or take a million, and I don’t think I ever knew the title. Or if I did, it was one of those things where I’d hear the title and think, “Oh, yeah, it’s ‘Baker Street.'” And then: “Oh, right, Gerry Rafferty.” And then I would forget the name and artist, because I would spend the next half hour trying to remember who had sex to the song in which movie.
And by George Michael’s yacht: someone did. Either that, or the saxophone conjures a false memory of having sex in an urban landscape, with a view of the wet pavement, silhouetted against louvered blinds. The sex partner is someone with whom you had an affair ten years ago, but he’s married and you’re engaged, and his marriage is failing and your fiance is in a coma, or drives a Camaro. Or else you’re a teacher and he’s a former student. Or you’re dating his best friend.
Which scenario was it? I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s right there, at the corner of waa-waa and do-do-doooo, but it keeps slipping away. Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy. Kim Basinger and Mickey O’Rourke. Somebody had sex to this song, damn it, and the internet’s no help at all.
In any case, I knew I’d feature it this week, although there’s no video, since it was released in 1978. Just this live TV clip. And thank the heavens for the mid-morning DJ, because she said the name of the song, which I repeated five times, and then made my daughter repeat, for good measure. So I’ll never again forget that the name of this song is “Baker Street.”
One thing, though. Listening to it on the radio again, I realized something truly astounding: did you know this song has lyrics?
Someday we’ll do a Tuesday Tribute to the hilarity that is Julie Brown (not Downtown Julie Brown, because she was the opposite of funny) but the Julie Brown who brought us “I’m a Blonde,” “Just Say Julie,” and a dozen other brilliant moments from when the M in MTV stood for music.
But not today, because it’s Friday and tomorrow is Homecoming, bitches. That’s right: I’m heading to my 15th college reunion. Like in 1-5, like in if I’d had a baby when I graduated from Bethany College, she’d be studying for PSATs and getting her learner’s permit. Fortunately, though, I postponed parenthood and the internet went viral, so here I am, sharing this gem with you.
What I really love about this particular YouTube clip is that it was recorded from “Just Say Julie”–and I think it might even have been the episode in which Julie has PMS and fires her entire crew, and spends the entire show eating Oreos and weeping. It’s also the episode in which she’s watching “Lost in Your Eyes,” and she says, “Debbie Gibson’s wearing a hat. I don’t have the CHEEKbones for a HAT!” a line which my sister and I still use when we have the opportunity to try on a fedora.
Of course, this song would never have been written today, because in the intervening years, too many kids actually HAVE gone Carrie on their classmates. So this tribute to psychopathic, gun-toting high school students, waging a massacre against their fellow partygoers, is really a swan song of a more innocent age. We miss you, Debbie.
UPDATE: This post inspired a new category: Nomi’s Decoder Ring! Also included in this category are these posts. As you were.
Been enjoying our new Bluray with Roku, which means the interface is much nicer with the Netflix streaming, and I’ve been discovering a lot of the goodness they’ve been secretly adding. (Coming to America? Check. Beverly Hills Cop? Check check. Raw? Check check check.)
So last night we’re watching Clue, because it’s Clue, and during the fabulous “No meaning yes” scene between Martin Mull and Tim Curry–and BTW, we watched Mr. Mom on Sunday night, so we had two nights in a row of Martin Mull and Christopher Lloyd–we all know that the incomparable Mrs. White slams her glass against the fireplace and screams “PLEASE!”
(I should add here that we recently bought an obscenely big television, so watching old movies is like watching new movies, because you can see so, so much more.)
Anyway, I’m anticipating Madeline Kahn being hilarious–which, honestly, is anticipating a leaf falling in September–when my husband says, “WHAT does the fireplace say?”
We ran it back. It says NOUVEAU RICHE OBLIGE. The fireplace is reminding the tacky nouveau riche homeowners that they should be giving away some of their millions, instead of investing it in carved fireplaces and secret passageways.
And you thought Communism was just a red herring.
P.S. No, this is not so much a tribute to Madeline Kahn as it is a tribute to the Cate Bangs, a set designer and owner of the most awesome name since Johnny Rocks, but since anything involving Madeline Kahn is ultimately a tribute to her, she gets the credit.
I returned from vacation this week to find that fall had fallen like Robert Downey Jr. down a K-hole. (Did they have K-holes in the 80s? No matter, he probably did it at some point.) So it’s no coincidence that all week I’ve been singing this spectacular song. No, the leaves aren’t brown yet, but the sky is most definitely a hazy shade of winter.
Unless it’s anything ever written and performed by Bob Dylan, I usually like original versions of songs better. “Hazy Shade of Winter” is an excellent example of a number that that started as a reasonably well-performed ditty by two of the greatest harmonizers in history; it rocks a little harder than most Simon & Garfunkel songs, but that’s like saying James Spader was slightly less douchey in “Pretty in Pink” than he was in “Less than Zero.” Enter The Bangles, who started off in the LA punk underground, but leaped into the 80s pop scene with all the energy of 99 luftballoons rising into the German sun. A few crocodiles and donuts later, and they had all the street cred of Justin Timberlake, pre-SNL.
Then they got hired to do a song for a soundtrack. “Less Than Zero,” for those that have forgotten, stars James Spader in the 80s with a twist (he’s a drug-dealing douchebag, instead of just a plain ol’ douchebag), Andrew McCarthy as a sensitive friend, Jami Gertz as the sensitive girlfriend, and Robert Downey Jr. as himself. The movie has cocaine and blowjobs for cocaine and sports cars and hot tubs, and it’s currently being used as a tutorial for speechwriters too young to know how fucking radical the Reagan years were.
But that’s aside from the fact that The Bangles took Simon and Garfunkel and turned that shit up to twelve. Rumor has it that Art Garfunkel’s hair straightened in response to the four-part harmony, driving guitar and pounding drums. No firm report on what happened to Paul Simon, but it’s said he disappeared into Africa for several years, wondering how four young lassies had managed to rock harder than the guy who actually was a rock.
Introducing a new feature here at SlumberPartyMovies: The Freshman Film Blue Book, where we take ourselves very, very seriously. Not too seriously, because seriously: We take these movies seriously, so there’s no “too” involved.
I’ve been mentally writing several chapters of my “Labyrinth” series for months–ever since we started the blog–but this weekend, we bought a 52″ plasma TV (that I may decide is too big; jury’s still out) and inaugurated it with watching “Labyrinth,” for no other reason than “Magic Dance” came up on my iPod, which immediately made my three-year-old insist we see the real thing in all its codpieced glory. She didn’t use the word codpiece, though.
I love a lot about the movie, for many reasons, but the biggest is that it’s fundamentally a coming-of-age story. And a coming-of-age story is nothing if not a loss of innocence: realizing that you’re not a kid anymore, that you have to grow up, and that that is both totally awesome, and massively sucky.
Sarah is dressed in princess garb when we first meet her–over her jeans, no less–reciting lines from a book to her dog, who’s named Merlin. She fancies herself an abused stepdaughter, and although it’s never said, her mother was clearly a princess: she was a beautiful stage actress, wildly famous, and died young and recently. Sarah worships the ideal of her dead mother, who spent her life pretending to be other people, and hates her new mother, who has a boring, bad haircut, and her new half-brother, who she’s doomed to babysit every night that she doesn’t have a date, which by the sound of it, is every night.
In a nutshell, she makes a wish to lose the brother, and instantly knows she’d rather have a baby brother, safe and secure at home, than live her fantasy of being an only child. She engages on a quest to find him, and at the end, we see her taking down her clippings of her mother, hiding away the toys of her childhood, deciding that it’s time to start moving on and growing up.
The second, third, and fortieth viewings of the movie reveal that her room is peppered with characters from the labyrinth, from Hoggle to the Fieries to the Escher steps. The Goblin King’s there, too, standing right next to her mirror, all purple and blond. Which, of course, has all led us to wonder: how much of this is in her head?
We’ve all thought it, of course: any movie that ends with how it began makes a person wonder if it’s all a dream. But the thing that finally tipped the scales, that finally made me decide to take up the keyboard and tackle this blue book, is the best number in the movie: “Within You.”
This is the big finale, where she faces him for the final puzzle. The song is fantastic: “I move the stars for no one” is probably on a t-shirt at Hot Topic, and if it isn’t, it should be. According to Google, it’s also a popular lower back tattoo.
One of the main themes that repelled and attracted me (OK, mostly attracted), and makes my husband squeamish about the whole thing, is the sexual tension between Jareth and Sarah. He’s like 40+. She’s 14. Gross. Except hot. Especially when you’re 11. So here’s where I go all Intro to Film class, and make a wild suggestion: if the whole thing’s a dream, and every character in a dream is, essentially, you, then Jareth’s part of her. And he’s the part of her that’s trying to keep her in her dream world. Being that she’s 14, sexual tension is pretty much a given.
All of her friends are trying to help her escape; Jareth doesn’t just want to keep Toby. He wants Sarah. He wants her to be his queen–specifically, he wants to rule her so he can be her slave. Which, on the face of it, is a big WTF–you rule me and you’re MY slave? But it makes sense, taken in the context of imagination. If you let your fantasies rule you, it seems as though you can do whatever you want. In fact, Jennifer Connolly herself grows up to marry a guy who solves spy secrets for a supersecret government agency… in his head. Lesson being: you can do whatever you want in your fantasies, but you’re not really living, because you’re obeying them as much as you think they obey you. After all, Sarah wished that her brother be taken away, and he was, and she realized, in that second, that wishes can bite. You can’t always get what you want, but when you do, you don’t always want what you get.
The big a-ha moment for me was the beautiful moment at 1:38, when Jareth sings, “I…. I… can’t live within you,” and makes the saddest, most disappointed face ever seen on a supervillain. He’s crushed. But he’s also resigned. He can’t have her. She’s beating him. The phrasing is what’s important: I can’t live within you. Major sexual undertones aside, he’s realizing that, when faced with adult responsibility and the high stakes of losing her baby brother, she’s rejecting living in her fantasy. Her fantasy can’t live within her anymore, and she finds that bitterly disappointing.
Moments later, she realizes the only way to get to her brother is to take a leap of faith. And she does. And then she faces down her fantasy with her best tool: the magic words her mother gave her. He has no power over her. She controls her fantasies, her imagination, and the game is up: she can be a grown-up. But she can also live in her imagination, as long as she doesn’t let it rule her.
Which is pretty much what I’ve been striving for my entire life. The reason I love stories set in a realistic setting, but with fantastical elements, is that there’s always a part of me that’s pretty sure I am a Muggle, and that there’s a school out there I don’t know about where some lucky kids get to do magic tricks. There’s a young woman who kicks ass against the forces of darkness so I can live in relative normality, sheltered from the vampires and the demons. And I will never, ever wish that the goblins will come and take Gillian away, no matter how fussy she is. Just in case.
P.S. When I saw this in a theater last year, the first five seconds of that last clip sent the audience into paroxysms of catcalling. Just yesterday, my daughter said, “He’s a princess! He’s so pretty! But he’s going to fall in his dress!”
Aren’t you lucky? I randomly heard this blaring from the PF Chang’s parking lot last weekend. (No, I wasn’t eating at PF Chang’s.) The whole video’s pretty spectacular, but really, the reason we love it is the last minute, featuring the greatest outburst in a theater, ever. I like to think that she spent the last month or so of their terrible relationship quiet as a mouse, just knowing that he had tickets to Debussy or some equally lame symphony, and that she knew his boss would be there, and that he spent $400 per ticket, and that he got a demotion on Monday.
slumber party movies 