28 January 2007 |
A new season of American Idol, a botox advisory, and missing American sports
It should go without saying that the missus and I have been watching the new season of American Idol with great interest, as the only such show we’ve ever missed was the first edition of the BBC’s ill-fated Fame Academy, and don’t imagine we don’t give ourselves a vigorous pummelling about it whenever the subject comes up.
At the recent NYC auditions, Simon, for whom the missus has become a devout apologist on the basis of his being a fellow animal-lover, and who doesn’t annoy me because I won’t give him the satisfaction, Randy (whose affectation of addressing women as “man” annoys me mightily), and Paula (living proof that persons with abnormally constricted crania can live glamorous, if not exactly productive, lives in 21st century America), were joined as celebrity guest judge by the noted songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, formerly Mrs. Bacharach. We hadn’t been so excited since Kenny Loggins performed similar duty last season, or the late (or maybe he just looks and sounds late) Clive Davis the year before that.
You’ve heard of people having so much botox that they lose the ability to smile or frown? Well, La Sager was the first person so full of the stuff as to impede the flow of blood to her brain. She sat there looking like some weird spawn of my late-70s girlfriend Marie and Elizabeth Taylor at around the time she began seeing a lot of Michael Jackson, except with inhumanly smooth skin, exuding all the vivacity of a dead house plant, or Bjorn from Abba the week he coached contestants on The X Factor. She seemed either afraid to speak — wrinkles, you know! — or unable.
It’s long amused us how the families of contestants on Idol’s British analog, The X Factor, pretty nearly wet themselves when they get put through to the second round. How can one be an adult in the UK without having noticed that celebrity is the cruellest thing one could wish on anyone on this comically overpriced little island? The exultant mums and dads think that little Gemma or Nicola is going beomce the new Kylie and buy them a holiday home in Marbella? Well, maybe. But the tabloid press will also dig up every most embarrassing secret anyone in the family’s managed to keep at any time since the last English victory in the World Cup. And the News of the World will pay a vindictive former boyfriend to recall in detail how little Gemma or Nicola wasn’t very good at fellatio. Even Nan (grandma to American readers) won’t be able to shuffle painfully down to the local Costcutters to buy milk for her bloody tea without an army of foul-smelling paparazzi nearly trampling her, trying to get shots of her with dark perspiration spots under her arms that Heat can publish above a laceratingly snide caption that’ll have Nan calculating whether she has enough of her medication left to end it all if she takes it all at once.
It amused me once, years ago, to suggest that Paula Abdul has the same relationship to singing talent that Sir Elton John has to heterosexuality; she’s been around a lot of it, but never inside. Perhaps one day I will again. Nor, Semites’ anti-Semitism being only slightly less distasteful than others’. will I recount how, when MTV sponsored a Name Paula’s Forthcoming Tour competition back in around 1991, when I was living in a sector of San Francisco in which no tour bus was ever glimpsed, I came up with The Talentless Little Jewish Fatso Tour.
For over 20 years now, Robyn Hitchcock’s song "My Wife and My Dead Wife" has given me pleasure every time I’ve remembered it, and it occurred to me over this past weekend that maybe I should write a novel about a guy whose wife and deceased earlier wife, who lives with them. I’m amused by the idea, for instance, of Living Wife regularly accusing Deceased Wife, a victim of breast cancer or (someone else’s) drunk driving, of playing the martyr card. Maybe I should lie down awhile until the urge passes, or until I remember that I’m agent-less.
At group therapy this morning, Young Chef confided that he intends to watch the upcoming Super Bowl with a group of “mates”. I was embarrassed and aghast to have to ask who was playing, and when. I used to so adore watching football (and, before that, before I came to find it screamingly boring, baseball), just as I enjoyed playing everything I could get my hands on; for someone almost devoid of physical coordination, I was quite the implacable young athlete throughout my childhood and teens, and was still playing basketball (to the inevitable chagrin of my teammates) at Hollywood and Fairfax High Schools at age 30. I have tried to Get Into what the world outside the USA knows as football – you know, soccer – and regularly watch the World Cup with the missus, even though I find it only marginally less stupefying than baseball.
What I don’t miss – what I extremely don’t miss – is the most recent generation of American sports reporters. They’re all called Casey, or some other frat-boy name, they all smack of Catholic school, and they’re all just fantastically snide, around eight parts Denis O’Leary to one part Chris Berman. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that most of them are failed standup comics. Nor would I be saddened to hear that they’d all been sterilised.
British music critics, whom I got spanked in Q magazine for ridiculing in my universally hated biography of The Pixies, whom I, individually, loathe, love to fling the epithet “cod” (that is, fake) at things. I’m forever reading how this or that artist has performed a cod reggae song, for instance. I think the idea is that you have to be Jamaican to play genuine reggae, the music having been invented in the Caribbean. And yet I vigorously suspect that these same critics – rotters, the lot of ‘em! – would be very loath indeed to describe a black musician playing Mozart as cod classical music.
Many of those Amazon customers who vilify my Pixies book wonder how one can speak ill of a group known to have influenced Nirvana. (Mr. Cobain is said to have said that The Pixies’ “Defamer” in particular inspired him to try to write his own version, and I will grant you that The Pixies are no less obvious an influence on Nirvana than The Shirelles were on The Beatles.) The easy answer is that I don’t think having influenced Nirvana is anything to be proud of. Couldn’t bear them, you see. Would almost prefer The Pixies!
So why did I write a book about them? For very much the same reason I wrote a book about myself, the authorised autobiography Nancy Rumsey helped me entitle I, Caramba. Someone offered me money.