Michael Abernethy - The Homegrown Snob

Did you know that there’s now porn showing 24 hours a day on basic cable?

This “epiphany” occured to me while HGTV was playing in the background. Whilst stirring my beans (no, that’s not a euphemism) some show like “Househunters” or “Designed to Sell” or “Property Virgins” or any of the other gazillion shows they have about first-time buyers and sellers blared mindlessly into my living room.

And that’s when it hit me.

These last few days have been horrors for the market, the Dow and the Nasdaq and the Ohcrap plummeting to new depths in the wake of AIG and Lehman Bros. and about every other firm crying like babies and packing up to go home. America is hemorrhaging money and the security of its people — partly because of the normal ebb and flow of the market, but mostly because of the lack of oversight and regulation enforcement.

Home foreclosures are up up up, as is inflation, making working wages in the midst of a fuel crunch go down down down. (It’s all sunny here in Snobland, can’t you tell?)

And I realized, as “Ryan” a first-time homebuyer in Anywheresville, U.S.A., closed on that charming cottage and 2-acre lot, that what was playing in my living room was nothing short of pornography.

We once again find ourselves at a juncture in America’s history where owning property is a luxury (or at least it seems like that to those who don’t have it). Watching these folks re-do their kitchens with marble and stainless steel, or re-paint their bedroom and add all sorts of pricey and useless nicknacks, is torture in a way.

It’s observing a fantasy: something unattainable in the real world. And isn’t that what pornography is all about? The fantasy of sex whenever you want it, without consequences, pure id. Totally unlike reality.

So it is with HGTV: property flipping without consequences.

Everytime HGTV dresses a window, it’s akin to Jenna Jameson dropping her top. Redesigned family room w/ widescreen TV: Implants. New tile shower and extra-modern plumbing fixtures: Money shot.

Just who are these 25-year-olds who can afford a home right now? What is their occupation (and why was I not smart enough to pursue it)?

It makes me feel guilty for such coveting. Here I am in my (actually very nice) duplex where I can’t “re-do”, or “demo” or “update.” So I sit back with most of the rest of the HGTV viewers and judge them on their decisions.

I wouldn’t have used that color.

I would have chosen a different layout.

I would have gone for the house with the bigger, fenced-in backyard.

And then there’s the question of who’s being exploited. Is it the viewer, entranced by this vision? Or is it the homebuyer, chosen for his or her naivete?

Sure, it’s a socially acceptible, G-rated sort of exploitation. But it’s still exploitation.

Yup. Legos of Madonna and Amy Winehouse are on their way. We won’t get to buy them.

Apparently, I’m the only one in the world who doesn’t know about this already, but I thought — since I was shocked by the news — that I ought to document this, er, momentous occasion.

That Madonna Lego is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. At least the Amy Winehouse one just looks like she’s gonna beat you up for some crack cash.

Turns out, there’s a ton of famous Legos — and not just Star Wars characters.

A quick google and I had my hands on a list and pictures of famous or historical figures immortalized in boxy, choking-hazard plastic.

Observe:

Gandhi

Donald Trump

Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin

King Henry VIII & Anne Boleyn

And, um, Jack the Ripper.

So, comparing the twisted minds who do this to my own, I’m not nearly as sick as I thought.

After about a week of lagging web activity, I am going to jump back into the game with this roundup of celebrity mug shots compiled by the Baltimore Sun.

Some of the biggest names ever to grace the red carpet of a holding cell, including:

Nick Nolte!

Andy Dick!

Paris Hilton!

Cedric Benson! (two shots!)

Gary Dourdan!

Ritchie Sambora!

Dawn (420) Wells!

Heidi Fleiss!

Mickey Rourke!

DMX (two shots!)

And all your other favorites!

91 snaps of celebs being bad! Collect them all!!!

 Woo and w00t!!! and jolly good.

Following last year’s questionable Mercury Prize recipients, the UK jury redeemed itself this year by choosing (totally respectable) dark horse Elbow for their album The Seldom Seen Kid.

It’s fitting, since the album is arguably their best and they’re finally getting some US airplay and attention for their single, “Grounds for Divorce.” (That’s the song you’re hearing in the commercials for the Coen Bros.’ new flick, “Burn After Reading.”)

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The Mercury Prize is equivalent to our Grammy for album of the year, but lists artists solely of UK origin. There are 12 nominees named each year.

In the competition for 2008 were fellow under-rated band British Sea Power’s Do You Like Rock Music?, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Robert Plant and Allison Krauss’ Raising Sand, The Last Shadow Puppets and some other lesser-known artists (also less-deserving of attention).

Given all this, and frontman Guy Garvey’s statement that this is “the best thing that’s ever happened to us,” let’s rewind on the tiny UK outfit.

They first got some attention in 2001 with Asleep in the Back, a middling but sometimes brilliant debut (check “Newborn” and “Scattered Black and Whites”) that brought comparisons to Radiohead (what UK band doesn’t get this?), Peter Gabriel (better) and Robert Wyatt (interesting).

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Turns out, they didn’t hit their stride until 2004’s lovely Cast of Thousands. It’s one of my favorite records this decade, full of humble songs and odd rhythms and contrasts. The album barely rose above a whisper but, by the end of “Grace Under Pressure” and the Glastonbury crowd they recorded singing along, went places in the heart and head most bands never do (the closest comparisons are Talk Talk or maybe Catherine Wheel). “Buttons and Zips” is leery and lusty; “Snooks (Progress Report)” is catchy and quiet and odd; “Switching Off” is just plain beautiful.

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2005’s Leaders of the Free World was more political and less interesting for it. It sounded a little impulsive and unfinished, despite a few great songs.

With Seldom Seen Kid, we get a little of everything. “Starlings” is Elbow’s orchestral soft-loud formula at its best. “Weather to Fly” is one of the prettiest things they’ve ever done. ”Audience with the Pope” is slinky and sinuous and memorable.

Then there’s ”Grounds for Divorce,” as close to rock as Elbow gets. It’s also hilarious (opening line: “I’ve been working on a coctail called ‘Grounds for Divorce’”) and eery (”there’s a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall”).

You can practically hear the kids screaming it in pubs from here.

None of this will probably matter on this side of the Atlantic. Elbow are among a host of bands ‘too British’ to translate to US success.

No matter. They’re still a great band, deserving of your time and attention.

Congratulations, Elbow!

After last night’s premiere of “True Blood” we might finally have another reason to subscribe to HBO.

It’s been a while.

“The Sopranos” called it quits more than a year ago. “Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under” followed their titular directions. “Sex and the City” (which wasn’t ever great but ceased to be entertaining in its third season) leapt to the big screen. “The Wire” is no more. And “Entourage” is just limping along.

Recent attempts at profundity — “Carnivale” and “John from Cincinnati” — stalled in messy pretention.

It’s about time the premium cable channel offer something to keep viewers coming back for more.

The premiere was fairly smart, well-paced, unpredictable, graphically sexy and even creepy at times. On its surface, it’s little more than a soap opera with adult themes. But the pilot left the series and characters open for change.

“True Blood” will either devolve into a parody of sex and violence or move to the heights of social allegory. Given the choice, I hope the filmmakers would aspire to the latter but I’d be just fine if it stayed where it is: smack dab in the middle of both of those.

The acting so far is good. Nothing spectacular, but it’s nice to see Anna Paquin getting steady work and possibly room to stretch. My editor, Brent Lancaster, would probably complain about the Southern dialects, which are all over the place. Some are pretty good, others — mostly from the minor characters — are terrible.

What “True Blood” did best was twist the vampire genre conventions just enough to keep us interested.

The short version: Vampires have announced themselves as a permanent presence in humanity and are fighting for legal rights and against predjudice. “Vampire sex” has become the trendy taboo – much like Viagra  and threesomes these days — prompting increased fascination and co-mingling between humans and vampires.

Lead character “Sookie” is a psychic who’s trying to hide her gift and whose brain is oddly quiet around vampire love interest “Bill.”

Eh. Fine.

Let’s get back to the sex and violence, that’s what I say.

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Spoilers ahead!

The biggest surprise is that there wasn’t a single on-screen vampire attack. There were only two sets of fangs seen during the whole thing, once in the hilarious intro when a redneck vampire threatens the clerk and patrons at a convenience store, the other during a taped vampire sex scene.

The biggest menace so far is a drug dealing couple who attempt to drain Bill’s blood to sell on the black market. Sookie saves him but the episode ends with her getting her head kicked in when they return to her bar after hours.

The previews of next week’s episode show Bill saving her by giving her the choice to drink his blood and become a vampire.

Pretty easy to guess where this will go, right?

Safe again.

If it stays on course, it could be a light, entertaining diversion, which is about all that I’m willing to take from a vampire story. 

So, here’s to a good season and — after a long wait — a reason to tune in Sundays at 9 p.m. again.

This was just posted on YouTube yesterday, the trailer for the movie I’m most anticipating this fall.

That’d be “Milk,” the Gus Van Sant bio-pic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in U.S. history, starring Sean Penn.

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If you don’t know Milk’s story, he’s often referred to as “the Martin Luther King Jr. of the gay rights movement.” That’s over-stating it a bit, but the tremendous strides he made and the movement he helped launch before his death are still being felt on a national level.

He fought for and won anti-discrimination laws for gays and lesbians in California at an unprecedented level. He helped defeat Anita Bryant and kept militant right wingers from using their religious and moral arguments to squelch basic freedoms.

Milk ran for the position of supervisor several times before he was elected to the city’s board in 1977. He served only a year before he was murdered, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by Dan White — an ex-cop and ex-councilmember who’d resigned his position but decided he wanted it back. When it became apparent Moscone and Milk weren’t going to vote to allow him back on the board of supervisors, he snuck into city hall through a basement window armed with a gun and shot them both in the head at point-blank range.

White denied premeditation, though he was carrying 10 rounds and had to reload after killing Moscone to walk down the hall and assassinate Milk.

He was tried and found guilty - not of murder but of voluntary manslaughter based partially on the defense that he’d been eating too much junk food and that it had caused him to become temporarily insane. It’s now known as the “Twinkie defense.”

White was sentenced to seven years, eight months in prison. He was paroled in less than five.

White had the decency to kill himself in 1985.

The night of Milk’s murder, thousands gathered for a candlelight vigil at city hall. That’s captured in the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary, “The Times of Harvey Milk,” and overdubbed with an eerily prescient statement from Milk himself.

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

Here’s the intro to that documentary.

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I only have a few real heroes. Harvey Milk is certainly one of them. I hope the movie does right by him and doesn’t over-sentimentalize him.

In this age of the internet, the worry is that creepy strangers are scouring the Web for our secrets and keeping files on us make us part of the next night’s 6 o’clock news.

We ought to worry more about the people we know.

Or have known.

No, this isn’t some scary warning about the statistics that show that most violent crimes are committed by those closest to us. This is cautionary tale of the past coming back to haunt us — or at least Friend-Request us.

To start with, I will never go to a high school reunion.

There are many reasons for this. Most of them revolve around the fact that I’m still so relieved to be away from most of those people. Sorry East Gaston Class of 1999. There’s the truth.

I wonder what the hell we could have in common now or in the future, especially since I didn’t find much in common with them when we were shoulder-to-shoulder. I didn’t particularly dislike most of them, either. But now that I’ve been away, I wouldn’t go back by choice.

Beyond that, I’ve kept in touch with most of the people I wanted to. Thanks to the Internet — instant messenger, Myspace (eh), Facebook (better) and e-mail — I know where they are, who they’re married to or dating, what they do. I know if they have children and what they look like.

Sure, there are a few who’ve fallen through the cracks (most of them were in the Thespian Society with me) but I’m lucky to still be tremendously close to my closest friends in high school. Some of those poor souls even read this blog.

But as much of a blessing as social networking sites like Facebook are, they are also a minefield of interpersonal disaster.

Ex-girlfriends. Friends’ ex-girlfriends. Co-workers. Former co-workers you thought you were rid of. The creepy dude that you hear breathing loudly one bookcase away from you when you’re in the library.

ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE ON THE INTERNET, WAITING TO MAKE LIFE DIFFICULT FOR YOU!

Take this morning. It began innocently: checking my account for new messages and friend requests over my morning bowl of oatmeal, a few laughs, a few deleted items.

But then I read the name by the friend request. I saw the face. I began to wonder.

This person sure wasn’t interested in being my friend when we were in class together. In fact, I remember them being rather cruel to me and others. So why should they be now? And why me?

Are they suddenly thousands of miles away and cut off from the familiar at a new job in a new city? Or do they just want to add another digit to their pile of friends? I suspect the latter.

But what happens if I deny their request? Will this person simply shrug and move on to the next sap they emotionally destroyed in K-12, or will I look like the jerk now? Should I be honest and delete their name from my queue, effectively erasing them from my life forever? Or should I be nice and accomodating and just add them? It would be almost harmless. I wouldn’t actually have to be their friend. And I’d hate for them to look like the bigger person.

I didn’t ask for this emotional turmoil when I signed up to you, Facebook! All I wanted was my niche in another new piece of the Web and possibly a way to keep tabs on college friends. As time has gone on, you’ve now coerced me into adding book lists and music videos to my page. Now you want me to add some application that lets me put illustrated farting, dancing pigs in tu-tus on it, too?

Well, OK.

But I have to draw the line somewhere and I draw it at social ruin.

I’ve already been through high school once, Facebook. I’ve already signed the yearbooks and gotten my diploma with my name misspelled on it. I’ve already been humiliated and narrowly escaped you transforming me into a sheep. What lessons have I learned if I start now?

But there they are, in the picture with the dog on the beach and smiling face and what appears to be a girlfriend clinging onto them. Maybe they’ve changed and I’ll never know. Maybe I should be more forgiving and hold less of a grudge? Maybe I should just chalk it up to growing up?

And what if I’m stranded on the highway and they are the only ones to stop and help, except that they remember I didn’t approve their friend request?

Yep.

Just like in real life, on the internet fear wins out over reason.

Thank the Lord for remastered reissues.

U2 sure ought to.

The best thing about remastering U2’s catalogue (besides an upcoming pristine-sounding, deluxe version of Achtung Baby) is that it’s made me realize how good Boy and October are and also that War is as overcooked and overthought as I remember.

And there it is: the story of U2, told and foretold 20 years before we knew it was so.

In Boy we got the majestic, unhinged birthing sound of a band being birthed in stabs of guitar. October saw those four refining their sound, pushing obscure barriers for more texture. War was where Bono’s ego congealed with his moral conviction, where every word (even when sung as hauntingly as “New Year’s Day”) is delivered with Voice-of-the-Generation bravado.

Those threads — directness, obscurity, brazenness, earnestness  — have been battling and twining through the band’s work ever since. Besides a brief vacation from The Message in the early 1990s, when they chose to wrap emotionally tangled songs in ironic imagery and sounds, the group has played it straight.

Probably unintentionally, we also get to revisit the first three years of the 1980s, when U2 weren’t the biggest band in the world. Neither were they the best band in the world at that time. During several periods of time (1987-88, 1991, 2001) they have been. But in 1980 to 1983? Not even close.

What you’ll hear is the band stealing and borrowing from some of the best music of the post-punk and new wave eras: Bowie’s Berlin period, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, The Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Simple Minds. Especially Simple Minds.

Back in the beginning, pretty much everyone liked Boy. Well, this was before they became mainstream so it was really the critics who liked it.

Just as well: Boy is as good as your remember. The Edge’s guitars are all over the place. Bono’s vocals aren’t completely in-your-face yet.

“I Will Follow,” “Out of Control” and “Stories for Boys” are all terrific. Just about everything else there is, too.

Historians tend to skip the band’s 1982 sophomore album in the wake of the band’s huge success. It was generally deemed a slump with no huge hits and a shaky musical direction.

It’s not as excitingly naive as Boy or as robust as War but October is where U2 found its direction. At least, that’s what I’m going to argue.

Boy was all about big sound; a sprawling, cacophonous impact. October reigned that in, in favor of moodier textures and Bono’s first stab at grandiose religious statement, they stumbled a bit.

It’s interesting to look back now at the album whose reputation among U2’s albums is only slightly less maligned than 1997’s similarly misunderstood Pop. Everything U2 did through The Joshua Tree is predicated there.

All they really needed was the right producer. I’ve gotta say, Steve Lillywhite has done some good work but he doesn’t serve U2 that well. Just listen to 2004’s anemic How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

By the time they’d hopped in the studio for War, Bono’d found the socio-political direction he’d been searching for in Ireland’s strife. Many critics cite the 1983 album as one of their favorite U2 albums. I can’t.

“New Year’s Day” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” are smashingly brilliant. So much so that most of the other tracks can’t keep up with them. I’ve tried and tried to like War. I just don’t.

They fell too hard into a sparser, early-80s arrangement there, with keyboards that didn’t work as well as the Edge’s layers of guitars. It did give them their first peaks at American success, though, and most certainly paved the way for their ongoing chart smashing reign as one of rock’s greatest bands.

Thank goodness for remasters, though, and the chance to re-digest and grow along with U2 all over again.

And, yeah, Achtung Baby is going to be THE BOMB.

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   Hi, everybody! Look what hit the record bins today:

   The Verve’s Forth.

   What’s that you say? You’re American?

   Oh, yeah, sorry. I forgot that you don’t care.

   It sure is a pretty cover, though, don’t you think?

   Yeah, me too. I mean, that cover’s almost enough to make me run out and snatch it up right now, not having heard a note of it.

   Totally! That’s not a good or responsible thing to do at all, especially as low as my bank balance is.

   Hahaha! You’re right! It would be hilarious if I spent my last $15 on this Verve album with the pretty cover and not-so-cleverly punned title rather than spending it on cheap canned vegetables and $10 of gas to get me through the rest of the week.

   Oh, American, you’re the funniest person I know.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, blogger extraordinaire, I came across these clips of the Muppets performing classical music.

Again and again, I’m reminded that the world can’t be such a bad place when the Muppets live in it.

Watch and be relieved.

“Habanera”

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“Ode to Joy”

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It’s Strauss, but they say “Bach”

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 On the mash-up side, I never knew Miss Piggy was so perverted! [ audio NSFW - set to Peaches' "F*** the Pain Away"]

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And why not an old classic while we’re at it?

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