Month: January 2012

Till I Waltz Again With You is not a waltz

Rather than a waltz, it is a slow AABA shuffle.

Went to the doctor’s on Wednesday to deal with this chronic head cold/sore throat thing which is now a chest cold. She sent me to a place to get a chest X-ray to determine whether I have bronchitis or pneumonia; as it turns out, I have neither. So I’ve been home for a couple of days, taking an antibiotic, using an inhaler, and consuming some cough medicine which is a “controlled substance.” Did you know a physician in New York state can electronically submit most prescriptions, but that “controlled substance” Rx has to be hand-delivered?

This means I have some time to read blogs, but absolutely no energy to write anything.

Fortunately, Arthur came up with a birth meme:

1) Find the #1 single the week you were born.
2) Find it on YouTube.
3) Post without shame.

“If you want to do the meme, my suggestion is to Google ‘number one pop songs month year’, changing the month and year to when you were born; that’s easier than searching for the specific week because pop charts may end on different dates.”

Well, the winner for my week was Teresa Brewer’s Till I Waltz Again With You, which, as Wikipedia notes, “Rather than a waltz, it is a slow AABA shuffle.” It was actually #1 for five weeks, preceded by Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes by Perry Como and succeeded by The Doggie in the Window by Patti Page.

Here is the song, and here is her 1962 rerecording.

DISCOVER card rediscovered me

I felt – dare I say it? – VALUED by a credit card company.

Late last year, I got a call from the DISCOVER card people. I was asked if I wanted to get a 25th-anniversary card. OK, sure, whatever, and didn’t think about it.

Then a few days later, the special monogrammed card arrived and I had to call the toll-free number to get it authorized. Instead of the automated service, though, I was transferred to a customer service rep, who thanked me for having a DISCOVER card for a quarter-century. She noted that, in the early days, not a lot of businesses were accepting the card, so lots of people weren’t carrying it. I noted that Sears, where I did a lot of my shopping in the day, was one of them, which was a prime motivation. We had a nice 10-15 minute chat.

I mean, I know she was working off a script, but it was a really good script, and she used it quite well. She signed me up for whatever cashback plan I was eligible for that quarter, which quickly paid off when I shopped online for Christmas.

I felt – dare I say it? – VALUED by a credit card company. Given the number of cards I’ve had and canceled in the interim, because of the ridiculous interest and/or fees, I’m surprised that I’ve had ANY card that long. I guess they didn’t do anything to tick me off. And I guess, in my own ungenerous way, that’s high praise.

The Year, Sort Of, In Review

Incidentally, the name of the charts of music generally associated with African-Americans has changed several times, from rhythm & blues (or R&B) to soul to black, back to R&B to R&B/hip-hop.

 

For the past several years, I have gone to the random number generator and taken a random line from a random post each month. It is not exactly representative of the year, but it does hit on some significant points.

January: I mean, I look at the synopses [of Night Gallery] and say, “Oh, yeah, right.” [Answering Gordon’s question]
February: The week before my mother died, I had nothing on any credit cards, save for any recurring expenditures, such as the newspaper. [That soon changed.]
March: Someone told me a long time ago that the number of keys one has related to how important they were. [ABC Wednesday]
April: This specific song [Help] my daughter knows all the lyrics to, without either encouragement or prompting from me. [My Beatles countdown]
May: I specifically remember him [my friend Steve] going on and on about this great singer/guitarist named Bonnie Raitt, who I had never heard of, but who he had seen perform in the area; her debut album would come out later that year. [This was my first 40 years ago entry]
June: Somehow, it seems as though he [my father] became a bit more real to her [my daughter]. [My Father’s Day post]
July: Maverick was on either Saturday or Sunday afternoon. [100 TV memories]
August: Incidentally, the name of the charts of music generally associated with African-Americans has changed several times, from rhythm & blues (or R&B) to soul to black, back to R&B to R&B/hip-hop.
September: It’s not a belief system; it’s not an “either, or,” it’s a fact, Jack. [Part of Amy’s question to me re: global warming.]
October: He [Glen Campbell] shared the fact that the favorite of his songs was Wichita Lineman, as he noted his favorite lyrics.
November: Media being as diffused as it is, a Real Housewife of Schenectady might be well known in certain circles but totally invisible by lots of others. [Re: the late Andy Rooney]
December: One [boycotted product] was for a drink mix from Pillsbury called Funny Face, targeted to compete with Kool Aid. [My more-or-less weekly question]

Y is for Yankovic, “Weird Al” Yankovic

He got his parody tapes to radio personality Dr. Demento when Al was still a teenager and his career slowly took off.

 

I was flipping through the channels on a Saturday morning – unusual, that – when I came across a BIOGRAPHY Channel piece on “Weird Al” Yankovic, which I was oddly compelled to watch. Then I came across this Bat Segundo interview, a very interesting listen.

Most novelty acts last a year or three. So how is it that Weird Al has managed to mine the music parody gig for nearly three decades? Not only that, he is more successful than ever, up for two Grammy awards in February 2012 and having a 2011 Top 10 album. Yankovic’s success comes in part from his effective use of music video to further parody popular culture, the song’s original artist, and the original music videos themselves, scene-for-scene in some cases. There’s a whole YouTube channel of Weird Al songs out there, so it’s difficult to narrow the list.

As a kid starting on the accordion, the instrument of non-relative Frank Yankovic, Al learned to play an unusual version of rock and roll. He got his parody tapes to radio personality, Dr. Demento, when Al was still a teenager and his career slowly took off.

Al usually has three basic types of songs on his albums, of which I have a half dozen: those that parody a particular song with new lyrics, generally with the express permission of the original artist; original songs, often in the style of a given group; and the polka medley, where a bunch of songs are strung together.

For instance, compare Al’s Eat It with Beat It by Michael Jackson. Or Al’s Smells Like Nirvana with Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Many of the same sets and/or actors are used in both the original videos and Al’s renditions.

Just a handful of the parodies:
Ricky, a riff on the TV show I Love Lucy, taking the tune from Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey
Amish Paradise which came, via Coolio’s Gangsta Paradise, from Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise
Gump, about the movie character Forrest Gump, based on the Presidents of the United States’ Lump
Polkas on 45, the first of the polka medleys
The Saga Begins, a Star Wars riff using Don McLean’s American Pie
And something I can really relate to:
I Lost On Jeopardy, based on Jeopardy by Greg Kihn, who’s in the last shot of Al’s video.

A 2011 non-parody tune contains an important message: Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me

As Wikipedia and the BIOGRAPHY special noted, Al tends to work clean. There are videos purporting to be Weird Al’s, usually “songs that are racist, sexually explicit, or otherwise offensive,” which often misspell his last name as Yankovich. So make sure you’re getting the real Weird Al Yankovic. This Funny or Die video isn’t really Al, but Al does appear in it in a small role.

From Correlated.org, a meaningless factoid: In general, 59 percent of people like Weird Al Yankovic. But among those whose primary home computer is not a laptop, 74 percent like Weird Al.
Based on a survey of 245 people whose primary home computer is not a laptop and 544 people in general.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

MOVIE REVIEW: Mary Poppins

The highlight for me was the dancing of the chimney sweeps to Step In Time; incredible!

 

The day after Christmas, the Palace Theatre, a once-and-again-classic Albany movie theater from the 1930s with a fascinating past, was showing the 1964 movie Mary Poppins at 3 p.m., preceded by activities for children. We pretty much missed the activities, such as posing with a young woman dressed as Ms. Poppins, because I was still moving slowly from whatever bug was paining me.

My wife decided that we should go up to the balcony, which I thought was an intriguing idea; it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a film from there. At some point, Ms. Poppins took the stage and announced the winners of a couple of drawings. Then there was a 10-minute drive-in movie theater intermission countdown that looked EXACTLY like this, only the full 600 minutes long. Then we got a short, Pecos Pest, a Tom and Jerry cartoon about the mouse’s guitar-playing Uncle Pecos terrorizing the feline.

Then our feature began. This was DEFINITELY a film, as opposed to some digital version. For one thing, there were three or four pops/skips, a couple of which unfortunately appeared during songs early on. For another, the second reel was much more orange-tinted than the prior or subsequent part of the film. Rather than annoyed, I found it oddly charming.

Speaking of odd, this was the first I had actually seen the movie. Oh, I’d viewed various segments over time. And I had read book adaptations to the Daughter. But I was unaware of the subplot involving women’s suffrage that Mrs. Banks (Glynis Johns, who I remember from a short-lived CBS fall 1963 sitcom called Glynis) was involved with. The guy with the cannon on a neighboring roof? New to me. But I must have seen the end of the film on TV, for I clearly recall the anagrammed name of the old banker changing to the actor who actually played him.

Julie Andrews was wonderful in this, of course, though Mary Poppins is sterner than I would have suspected. The songs by the Sherman brothers were infectious, especially, for the Daughter, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The first song A British Bank, though, reminded me greatly of the With a Little Bit of Luck from My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe from about a decade earlier.

But the highlight for me was the dancing of the chimney sweeps to Step In Time; incredible! Indeed, my admiration for Dick van Dyke, already quite high, increased greatly.

One last bit: the tickets cost $5 each for The Wife and me, $3 for the Daughter, purchased at the box office. But, had we bought them online, it would have cost $23 more!

A good time.

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