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Well there’s a lyric I can honestly say I’ve never noticed, despite hearing the song in which it resides approximately 1 zillion times.
The song in question is the wonderfully titled “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.” Or, as we mortals know it, the one that samples B.B. King singing about being downhearted, baby.
It’s a song that sits comfortably in a ’90s niche — the phone booth was broken, at least, but what the hell’s a phone booth? — but I still love it. Often it makes me think of TGOTS and our post-college stint in Maine. But today it shot me to a later evening in Brookline, Mass., when I met up with a few of my less intimate work acquaintances for trivia night at an Irish pub.
When it came to work outings in the late ’90s and early ’00s, I mostly hung out with the same people and stumbled over the same ground. But occasionally I ventured out of my comfort zone to do fun things with other fun people.
And trivia night … how fun was that?! Answer: Wicked. I am a sucker for trivia, believing myself to be good at it (there was the time TGOTS and I considered auditioning for Jeopardy), even though I too often get stumped. That night, one of the questions asked for the title of this song. Our team got close, I think, but put a quarter in the guy’s hand instead of money.
I realized this morning that I have a weird enduring fondness for the concept of trivia nights, although in truth that was the first of only two times I’ve ever gone to one. The other was in Seattle; a co-worker and I awkwardly followed (stalked is such a loaded word) another co-worker to a tourist-y bar where he’d told us he was going, because she liiiiked him. When we arrived, he was surrounded by female friends, and after saying hi we were forced to slink off and sit at our own little table and pretend we were just coincidentally there for Love Of Trivia. I don’t think we even participated, just muttered the answers between ourselves and pretended to be writing things down when the emcee wandered our way.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that, to this day, when I see notices about trivia nights at various local pubs the real me gets excited. And then the imaginary, parallel me totally attends, and totally cleans up — and would totally know the full title of that song.
I’m wearing big earrings today and I can’t stop swinging them around.
Though they used to be a staple of my wardrobe, I haven’t worn earrings this long and dangly in a long time (too many years in the land of pearls and sweater sets rid me of the habit). I’m not completely sure they’re appropriate for work, but I’m completely sure I do not care. They are making me feel delightfully (albeit mildly) rebellious, and may just get me through another dreary work day.
You know what else pretends to be is delightfully (albeit mildly) rebellious? Liz Phair. Not so much (at all) with “Why Can’t I,” which is what I heard this morning, but some of the stuff off Exile in Guyville is kind of great. I wish I’d heard “Divorce Song” this morning instead. There’s a song that’ll make you walk like you’re ready to kick some ass.
Hey! Lookit that! Liz Phair — possibly a heretofore unreferenced name on ye olde Auto Tunes? Do I get ten points?
Apparently I cannot go to the dentist without writing about it in this blog.
After I went this morning, I started composing a blog entry in my head about how the usually fab music at this particular dentist’s office was strangely absent today. BECAUSE I KNOW YOU CARE A LOT.
Don’t know why there was no music on this sunny morning, but did enjoy having the chipper hygienist (as if there’s any other kind) and the handsome dentist tell me what a splendid job I’m doing taking care of my teeth. I told them each in turn that it’s because both my parents have had gum issues, but that’s partly a lie. I don’t really do anything extraordinary in terms of dental care, I’m just moderately responsible and very lucky (so far).
My “Well, I don’t want to have the troubles my parents have had” answer echoed in my brain after I left the dentist’s. Why is it, I asked myself, that I have any measure of conscientiousness at all about my teeth, because of my genes, but am unconscionably lax about other inherited tendencies — namely, those toward weight-related ailments? Why, when I know I might be predisposed for things like diabetes and heart disease, don’t I daily say to myself, “Well, I don’t want to have the troubles others in my family have had”?
Reader, I have no good answer for this. I mean, I have a million answers ranging from the incredibly simple to the psychologically complex, but I don’t know that any of them are “good.” And maybe they don’t even matter. Maybe all that matters is making a little effort, every day, to eat a little better, move a little more, and be moderately responsible. If I can start with that, maybe I can get some momentum going toward better health — and getting compliments on more than just my teeth (which, I must say, are really not that great).
Bah. I dunno. But I did just get back from a long lunchtime walk in the lovely sunshine, and have a nice salad waiting for my lunch.
I also now have “Mack the Knife” in my head. There are a million versions to choose from, but this clip is capital C CHARMING.
Pearl Bailey is my new best friend, I tell you what.
Was just driving back from lunch with a colleague and, irked by James Blunt, punched the scan button. No scan. Punched it again. Nothing.
“No scan!” thought I. “What will I do?”
But it got worse from there. I couldn’t Seek, either, so I turned the radio off and back on. Whereupon I discovered that I could no longer adjust the volume or change the station manually.
Quel horreur! All I can do with my radio is turn it off and on and get in one semi-staticky station that favors James Blunt.
Which is bad, blogwise and mental health-wise, and also potentially Seriously Bad as I seem to dimly recall that the radio going can be the first sign of alternator failure.
For now I’m going to ignore the whole situation, but … stay tuned. As it were.
Is it possible we have not written about the once-ubiquitous “All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun”? I don’t believe it, and after my Monday blogging debacle, I don’t trust my search skills.
But I do want to report that Sheryl’s ode to frivolity, which usually just makes me shudder and change the station, sparked a sunshine-y memory for me today. Specifically, when she sang about Santa Monica Boulevard, I suddenly remembered that TGOTS and I once ate lunch along that venerable route. Or somewhere very close by.
Truth be told, I think we were both cranky. The combination of hunger and having to navigate the mean streets of LA is not such a good one. But I dimly remember that after much driving around and debating over where to park/eat/whether to just get the hell out of there, we had a lovely, healthy lunch at an open-air restaurant in that beachside city.
Our visit there — part of our epic road trip of 2000 — also took us to Hollywood, and nearly saw us enjoying the wit and wisdom of Freddie Prinze Jr. courtesy of some hawked-on-the-street late-night-talk-show tickets, except as I recall I felt some obligation to go home to the family members (of mine) we were staying with, thus robbing TGOTS of her shot at rubbing elbows with the stars. Or with the other hoi polloi trying to rub elbows with the stars.
I’ve had several opportunities to visit LA over the years, because my brother has lived there for the last quarter-century (yikes). And most of my memories are similar to that one: half-experienced, half-glimpsed moments marred by confusion and crankiness. There was the time, for instance, when my mother and I were at my brother’s house for the aftershock of an earthquake — we were sharing a double bed and woke up petrified, despite having missed the big one that preceded that temblor. Or the time my sister, sister-in-law, and I decided to visit Rodeo Drive with my 18-month-old nephew, only to end up standing mutely on the sidewalk wondering what to do next. Or the time my fella and I struck out to visit Venice Beach, a venture oddly similar to the Santa Monica field trip in its logistical hairiness and eventual healing lunch.
In my experience, there’s little room for quick side trips and spontaneity in that city. The cars and the crowds intervene far too much. But maybe it’s just that I’ve done it all wrong. After all, Sheryl says it’s fun. And if you can’t trust Sheryl, who can you trust?
I just want to send a short note to Rihanna via our blog, which I am sure she checks regularly. To wit:
It was confusing enough when you joined Eminem to glorify/condemn domestic violence through the song “Love the Way You Lie.”
But then I heard you giddily sharing your love of S&M the other day — and I got concerned. Not for you (OK, a little bit for you), but for your fans.
What message does it send when a pop star who’s been involved in a prominent abuse case goes on to sing the praises of violence? Yes, I know S&M and domestic abuse are not interchangeable. But does a 12-year-old make that distinction when you sing, “Sticks and stones may break my bones/ But chains and whips excite me”?
I don’t expect you to devote the rest of your career to making anti-violence PSAs. And I don’t think it’s fair to heap criticism on you while Chris Brown earns free PR for smashing windows. I also forget, most of the time, that you are only 23 years old yourself, still impressionable, still unformed, still trying things on for size. But I know I’m not the only one struggling with the impact of this song — here’s one of the more coherent takes I’ve seen.
Rihanna, you are a powerful woman in a powerful position. If you want to exercise that power by sending out a global and ironic fuck-you to people who think you should be somehow changed or cowed by your very public unhappiness, I’m all for it. But I also wish you — and perhaps your People — would give a little more thought to your influence before the next single comes out.
WOW it had been a long time since I’d heard Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams.” Did this morning, though, didn’t I?
When that album came out I was in college, and I played it — somewhat surreptitiously — all the time. While MamaKitt and I had loved Billy Joel together in high school, by that point, somewhere in my sophomore year of college, I knew my affection for him was not especially cool … though I couldn’t deny it entirely. I loooved “River of Dreams,” with all its doowopping background, its breezy melody, its light poetry … all delightful.
The best thing was discovering that one of my buddies had a secret thing for Billy Joel as well. And that some of his other buddies — whom I admired from afar, and wanted to befriend myself — did too. We all ended up going to see the piano man in concert together, at a massive arena, and that was the second-best thing. But mostly what “River of Dreams” made me think of today was how that concert was the start of several friendships I cherish to this day — a fun field trip in a college career that didn’t have many (we were pretty isolated there in the corn fields) made even better by the discovery of shared tastes, interests, and senses of humor. Old Billy’s concert was where I really and truly fell in love with some of the best people in the world.
Now, don’t imagine it escapes me that this is the second post in a row that obsesses over friendships. I have been blessed with many fine ones throughout my life, and think about them a lot — even more so now, perhaps, that I am living a fairly solitary life, with plenty of agreeable acquaintances but few dear comrades. I’m okay with the solitary life — but it may lend itself to a bit too much dwelling on times and people of the past.
Dwelling isn’t great, but being grateful for the wonderful people who have been, and continue to be, part of my life is all right, I think. But God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man.
For a million ridiculous reasons and one really good one, I got teary over Queen this morning.
The one good one, of course, is that a song about a best friend who is also a lover made me so glad and grateful for my own, the one and only MamaKitt.
I’m not even going to apologize for the gooeyness of getting weepy at what is possibly Queen’s worst song, a song I don’t even like, a song that pales in comparison to all the other songs that legitimately remind me of MK, because here’s the thing: I know how lucky I am to have a person like her, and she means the world to me.*
(Ugh. “Means the world to me.” What a cheesy phrase. And yet … tis true.)
MK and I spoke on the phone at length yesterday, and talked about some semi-serious stuff (including the future of this blog), so she was on my mind. We don’t see each other much, our daily lives are now very different, but it’s an amazing thing to have the same dearest of friends for decades. This I know, and I’m everlastingly grateful.
And I promise not to let such a terrrrrrible song remind me of her ever again.
*Okay, I’ll apologize a little bit. Because that song is for crap, and totally unworthy of the strange and wonderful MK and our strange and wonderful friendship. It is beyond cornball to be moved by it. But so it goes.
I assume Bob Seger was including himself when he dissed “today’s music.” Or maybe he felt that he was treading some sacred middle ground between the classics of old and the poppy pap of the late ’70s.
What he probably did not think was that, ten years after his song was released, teenagers in small-town Maine would shriek and cheer every time it was played at a junior-high dance.
Why? Is all I want to ask. I was among the shriekers and cheerers, but mostly because my friends were so happy, and it was indeed a fun song to dance to, and of course it meant one more escape from slow-song-will-I-get-asked-to-dance-or-should-I-pretend-I-have-urgent-primping-to-do-in-the-bathroom limbo.
In retrospect I wonder if the song was so wildly popular because of the notorious scene from Risky Business, but that movie came out in 1983 … could it still have been causing giddiness in 1987 and 1988?
To be honest I was unaware of the movie at the time, and the song’s role in it. I didn’t see it until probably ten years later. And though I harbor no love for the Cruise, I do enjoy that scene and the many parodies it has inspired. That shit never gets old.
Bob Seger, on the other hand … he gets old. That song, too. It is dated and hoary and grunting and gross — but it still has the magic ability to transport me to a hot, dark gym full of happy people, to a time where we were celebrating not so much the music of old as the music of what was to come.
Dear The Corrs,
There was a time when you were first on the radio that I found you vaguely charming. You were all brunette and Irish and chipper, and for the first three or four listens your songs were kind of pretty and fun.
A hundred million plays later, they are less so.
I don’t know the real story on you, The Corrs, but the one I tell myself is that you were flashes in the pan who flared up then flamed out — yet at least two of your songs remain in heavy rotation. Too heavy.
It doesn’t help that one of these is “When the Stars Go Blue,” which is, let’s be honest The Corrs, really a Ryan Adams song — and not one of his best. I do love (some of) the Ryan Adams, so you would suffer in comparison — even with a Bono guest appearance — even if your version weren’t overprocessed and annoying where his is delicate and pleasing.
The Corrs, I think you have pretty voices, so I wonder if there are other songs in your oeuvre that I’d like better. For now, though, I’m stuck with the couple that pop radio sees fit to play again and again. That, and the new information that Tim McGraw also apparently recorded a version of “When the Stars Go Blue.” Huh.
xoxo TGOTS
(But — to quote the inimitable Levar Burton, don’t take my word for it:)
Ryan Adams:
The Corrs:
Tim McGraw:
