All of the lights
After the Mountain Goats extravaganza on Friday, Marisa and I spent Saturday in Philadelphia with Bayard and Alex. We hit the Philadelphia Book Festival, which as a science-fiction-friendly and science-fact-averse English major I'm surprised to report was sort of upstaged by the Philadelphia Science Festival. Maybe some people dropped out due to the train, but the book fest booths were more like the outskirts of the Brooklyn Book Fest (with the self-published authors and the like), while the science booths had a theremin, and also a free Q&A with Mary Roach, who is more writer than scientist, but makes a lot of weird science stuff interesting and appealing. I've only read her stuff from Stiff, but she was discussing her newer book Packing for Mars, which sounds pretty awesome. There were copies of Stiff on sale at the gift shop in the Mutter Museum, also known as the museum of medical oddities mostly in jars! It was awesome! Why didn't anyone tell me to go there before?
Later that evening, I lost at Trivial Pursuit but dominated in the more specialized and less impressive field of Simpsons Scene It. Another thing about hanging out in Philly for the weekend is that we drove a bunch of places and listened to some Top 40 radio, which I don't get the chance to do very often. In fact, I don't think of myself as particularly up on Top 40 songs but then I remembered that Top 40 stations really play more like a Top 11 and I was able to fill in some gaps pretty quickly. Because nobody asked for it, here are some songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and what I think of them:
"E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West (#1)
You all know I love "Teenage Dream" but this is no good. The Kanye rap sounds phoned in even for him, the lyrics are as semi-nonsensical as any Katy Perry track, and the vocal is hammering and robotic in a bad way. Despite its chart position, we didn't actually hear this on the radio; Marisa couldn't properly describe it to Bayard so we found it online when we got home. He played us another Katy Perry single I hadn't heard, "Peacock," which might be even stupider. It made me appreciate "Teenage Dream" all the more while driving home the helpful reminder that no, Katy Perry isn't even really very good at radio songs, despite trying to make nothing but radio songs.
"S&M" by Rihanna (#2)
We heard both the Rihanna version and the one with Britneybot vocals programmed in. I don't really like Rihanna. I kind of want to, because I read a profile of her in Rolling Stone and she sounds pretty silly, and I do like the hook she sings on that Eminem song. But her own vocals tend to sound flat. I just don't buy her as having a great voice or charisma or anything. Absent that, you're left thinking about the weird implications of a battered woman singing about how she likes it rough.
"Fuck You" by Cee-Lo (#4)
Has this song taken this long to chart? I had read that it hadn't actually really broken through as a traditional single so much as a popular online attraction so it wasn't actually translating into much money for Cee-Lo, but I see that it's in the top ten, and we definitely caught it on the radio at least once. Obviously this song is awesome, but I'm almost puzzled as to how and why it did eventually chart, since the version of it that is actually awesome can't be played on the radio. I guess it's not the first song to become a hit because it reminds people of another song; it just happens this time that the other song is almost the same one (something something Nickelback rimshot!).
"Born This Way" by Lady Gaga (#5)
Marisa was talking about how her cousins' kids love Lady Gaga, and I get that, because her songs are incredibly easy for a child to learn and remember. I'm sorry, I have yet to hear a decent Lady Gaga song. "Bad Romance" comes close but that part where she babbles using her own name puts me off because she sounds like a goddamn pokemon. "Born This Way," okay, yeah, it's a nice message, and I don't even care that it sounds just like "Express Yourself" because I'm not a huge Madonna disciple either, but her songs just sound like shitty dance records to me, except with ten times the chorus. A lot of rote songs use verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus types of structures; Gaga's all sound like verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus. And that "don't be a drag, just be a queen" stuff, I don't know, again, nice message, but it sounds faintly condescending or at least on-the-nose to me. Maybe because Lady Gaga isn't a very interesting songwriter!
"Till the World Ends" by Britney Spears (#8)
Okay, this is probably the best Britney song I've heard since "Toxic" while, please understand, not being anywhere near as good as "Toxic." I dig that there's a wordless chorus and that the song takes most of its running time to get to an actual sung chorus, especially after the mega-chorus Lady Gaga assault. But Marisa is right that Britney doesn't seem remotely conscious of actually making music anymore, even by her perfunctory standards; she doesn't so much perform anymore as sign off on Britney-endorsed songs and albums that bear her likeness, or merge her likeness with Ke$ha's, who co-wrote this totally okay dance-type song. But more importantly, how in fuck do I not have "Toxic" on my computer? Where did it go? No wonder I haven't heard it in three years.
"Blow" by Ke$ha (#11)
Generally I can deal with Ke$ha but this is not one of her best in terms of not sounding exactly like every song she's ever made, the premise of which is: wow awesome there are a lot of people in this horrible club.
That was pretty much it. We caught some "What the Hell" (#28), which I still love and am saddened to find didn't ever break the Billboard Top 10. We heard several songs that might've been the several (boring) Bruno Mars songs currently charting (#20, #21, #34). We didn't get "Firework" which I think is probably the second-best Katy Perry song? By default? I still haven't heard an actual Nicki Minaj song but she is the reason that "Monster" is the most-listened Kanye track on my ipod right now. I don't feel like we got much rap; I don't know if that's just not how the Top 40 rolls in Philly or if we were just flipping around too much. I couldn't listen to this stuff all the time but driving through the city on a Friday night or a rainy Saturday, it feels right.
It was kind of weird that this weekend we saw the Mountain Goats and Mary Roach yet somehow did both of these things without Cristin, but at least we went to Scream 4 with her and Katie when we got back to Brooklyn. I'm a fan of the Scream series, but even as a fan, I consider them somewhat disposable: I'm not sure if I've seen any of them a second time straight through (although if I had more time this week I would've checked to see if any enterprising cable channels were rerunning them). What I remember about them, apart from a few key set pieces and performances across the trilogy, is the degree to which they played as audience movies -- some of the best experiences I've had with horror movies and big crowds, in fact, with tons of laughs and shrieks on the opening weekends of the then-hotly anticipated sequels. So even a slightly diminished Scream 4, even late on a Sunday afternoon rather than a Friday night at 9PM, is a pretty fun movie, playing with the audience with its jumps and winks. But the filmmaking isn't quite as solid this time around; the mix of three surviving characters and a ton of new characters is choppy and uneven. I could almost buy that this was almost intentional as misdirection, but even if that was the aim, it doesn't really work, and the movie doesn't fly by the way its predecessors did. Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette are all back, but they often seem to be dividing up the movie, rather than co-starring in it; same goes for many of the new characters, even if Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, and Alison Brie all have good moments. As mentioned in my column (where you can also find a review of the tepid Rio, by the way) and in my L Mag colleague's review of the movie, part of the problem may be that part fours aren't exactly rife with horror-movie rules to point out and subvert; instead the movie kinda-sorta takes aim at new (or newly revived) horror subgenres since the trilogy ended in 2000; kinda-sorta gets meta about reboots and remakes (which this one isn't); and kinda-sorta bats around a bunch of movie "rules" that aren't of much consequence. Some of this stuff is fun! But it's messy and overstuffed compared with (what I remember about) the earlier movies (even Scream 3, which apparently a lot of people hate? It's definitely not as scary but it's pretty damn funny). Scream 4 is supposedly the first part of a new trilogy (if this weekend's tepid box office doesn't scotch it), but it feels more like the two-hour pilot for Scream: The Series.
I've also been checking out some also-ran types of indie movies like happythankyoumoreplease (review) and Henry's Crime (review). Neither are very good, neither are terrible, but only happythankyoumoreplease gave me insight into what it must be like to watch How I Met Your Mother and kind of hate the Ted Mosby character.
Later that evening, I lost at Trivial Pursuit but dominated in the more specialized and less impressive field of Simpsons Scene It. Another thing about hanging out in Philly for the weekend is that we drove a bunch of places and listened to some Top 40 radio, which I don't get the chance to do very often. In fact, I don't think of myself as particularly up on Top 40 songs but then I remembered that Top 40 stations really play more like a Top 11 and I was able to fill in some gaps pretty quickly. Because nobody asked for it, here are some songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and what I think of them:
"E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West (#1)
You all know I love "Teenage Dream" but this is no good. The Kanye rap sounds phoned in even for him, the lyrics are as semi-nonsensical as any Katy Perry track, and the vocal is hammering and robotic in a bad way. Despite its chart position, we didn't actually hear this on the radio; Marisa couldn't properly describe it to Bayard so we found it online when we got home. He played us another Katy Perry single I hadn't heard, "Peacock," which might be even stupider. It made me appreciate "Teenage Dream" all the more while driving home the helpful reminder that no, Katy Perry isn't even really very good at radio songs, despite trying to make nothing but radio songs.
"S&M" by Rihanna (#2)
We heard both the Rihanna version and the one with Britneybot vocals programmed in. I don't really like Rihanna. I kind of want to, because I read a profile of her in Rolling Stone and she sounds pretty silly, and I do like the hook she sings on that Eminem song. But her own vocals tend to sound flat. I just don't buy her as having a great voice or charisma or anything. Absent that, you're left thinking about the weird implications of a battered woman singing about how she likes it rough.
"Fuck You" by Cee-Lo (#4)
Has this song taken this long to chart? I had read that it hadn't actually really broken through as a traditional single so much as a popular online attraction so it wasn't actually translating into much money for Cee-Lo, but I see that it's in the top ten, and we definitely caught it on the radio at least once. Obviously this song is awesome, but I'm almost puzzled as to how and why it did eventually chart, since the version of it that is actually awesome can't be played on the radio. I guess it's not the first song to become a hit because it reminds people of another song; it just happens this time that the other song is almost the same one (something something Nickelback rimshot!).
"Born This Way" by Lady Gaga (#5)
Marisa was talking about how her cousins' kids love Lady Gaga, and I get that, because her songs are incredibly easy for a child to learn and remember. I'm sorry, I have yet to hear a decent Lady Gaga song. "Bad Romance" comes close but that part where she babbles using her own name puts me off because she sounds like a goddamn pokemon. "Born This Way," okay, yeah, it's a nice message, and I don't even care that it sounds just like "Express Yourself" because I'm not a huge Madonna disciple either, but her songs just sound like shitty dance records to me, except with ten times the chorus. A lot of rote songs use verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus types of structures; Gaga's all sound like verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus. And that "don't be a drag, just be a queen" stuff, I don't know, again, nice message, but it sounds faintly condescending or at least on-the-nose to me. Maybe because Lady Gaga isn't a very interesting songwriter!
"Till the World Ends" by Britney Spears (#8)
Okay, this is probably the best Britney song I've heard since "Toxic" while, please understand, not being anywhere near as good as "Toxic." I dig that there's a wordless chorus and that the song takes most of its running time to get to an actual sung chorus, especially after the mega-chorus Lady Gaga assault. But Marisa is right that Britney doesn't seem remotely conscious of actually making music anymore, even by her perfunctory standards; she doesn't so much perform anymore as sign off on Britney-endorsed songs and albums that bear her likeness, or merge her likeness with Ke$ha's, who co-wrote this totally okay dance-type song. But more importantly, how in fuck do I not have "Toxic" on my computer? Where did it go? No wonder I haven't heard it in three years.
"Blow" by Ke$ha (#11)
Generally I can deal with Ke$ha but this is not one of her best in terms of not sounding exactly like every song she's ever made, the premise of which is: wow awesome there are a lot of people in this horrible club.
That was pretty much it. We caught some "What the Hell" (#28), which I still love and am saddened to find didn't ever break the Billboard Top 10. We heard several songs that might've been the several (boring) Bruno Mars songs currently charting (#20, #21, #34). We didn't get "Firework" which I think is probably the second-best Katy Perry song? By default? I still haven't heard an actual Nicki Minaj song but she is the reason that "Monster" is the most-listened Kanye track on my ipod right now. I don't feel like we got much rap; I don't know if that's just not how the Top 40 rolls in Philly or if we were just flipping around too much. I couldn't listen to this stuff all the time but driving through the city on a Friday night or a rainy Saturday, it feels right.
It was kind of weird that this weekend we saw the Mountain Goats and Mary Roach yet somehow did both of these things without Cristin, but at least we went to Scream 4 with her and Katie when we got back to Brooklyn. I'm a fan of the Scream series, but even as a fan, I consider them somewhat disposable: I'm not sure if I've seen any of them a second time straight through (although if I had more time this week I would've checked to see if any enterprising cable channels were rerunning them). What I remember about them, apart from a few key set pieces and performances across the trilogy, is the degree to which they played as audience movies -- some of the best experiences I've had with horror movies and big crowds, in fact, with tons of laughs and shrieks on the opening weekends of the then-hotly anticipated sequels. So even a slightly diminished Scream 4, even late on a Sunday afternoon rather than a Friday night at 9PM, is a pretty fun movie, playing with the audience with its jumps and winks. But the filmmaking isn't quite as solid this time around; the mix of three surviving characters and a ton of new characters is choppy and uneven. I could almost buy that this was almost intentional as misdirection, but even if that was the aim, it doesn't really work, and the movie doesn't fly by the way its predecessors did. Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette are all back, but they often seem to be dividing up the movie, rather than co-starring in it; same goes for many of the new characters, even if Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, and Alison Brie all have good moments. As mentioned in my column (where you can also find a review of the tepid Rio, by the way) and in my L Mag colleague's review of the movie, part of the problem may be that part fours aren't exactly rife with horror-movie rules to point out and subvert; instead the movie kinda-sorta takes aim at new (or newly revived) horror subgenres since the trilogy ended in 2000; kinda-sorta gets meta about reboots and remakes (which this one isn't); and kinda-sorta bats around a bunch of movie "rules" that aren't of much consequence. Some of this stuff is fun! But it's messy and overstuffed compared with (what I remember about) the earlier movies (even Scream 3, which apparently a lot of people hate? It's definitely not as scary but it's pretty damn funny). Scream 4 is supposedly the first part of a new trilogy (if this weekend's tepid box office doesn't scotch it), but it feels more like the two-hour pilot for Scream: The Series.
I've also been checking out some also-ran types of indie movies like happythankyoumoreplease (review) and Henry's Crime (review). Neither are very good, neither are terrible, but only happythankyoumoreplease gave me insight into what it must be like to watch How I Met Your Mother and kind of hate the Ted Mosby character.