Sweet Valley High Nostalgia: Drugs are bad and outcasts with funny glasses will grow up to be Cat Power

 

Lynne,the shy musical genius of Sweet Valley: the inspiration for this entire blog?

Sweet Valley High nostalgia is  is ubiquitous these days in the blog world. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sweet Valley High book series, the publisher is putting out a special “new” edition of the first and second in a series of over a hundred books: “Double Love” and “Secrets,” updating the lives of the ultimate 80’s Valley Girls (the series started in 1983 and ran its course all the way to 2003) to the 21st Century. (Props to great blogger Sarah Weinmanfor this bit on NY Mag blog).

For those not in the know (and if you are ages 22-32 and a female American you probablyare in the know), these books, the product of “Francine Pascal” and her various ghostwriters, documented the travails of a pair of size-six, blond identical twin sisters, Jessica and Elizabeth (respectively a trampy party girl and a hardworking and socially minded aspiring journalist), and their wealthy, primarily white, California-living sun-kissed friends (and occasionally a girl of color, such as Rosa, for whom a whole book is devoted to how she tries to cover up being a Mexican). My favorite character was Lila, who you might remember as being the poor little rich bitch who drove a Fiat (one of the few brunettes in power) and basically destroyed everyone in her path. Her male counterpart was the evil Bruce. Lila was hands-down the inspiration for Rachel Bilson’s character on The OC.

As an 8 year old (waaaaaaaaay too young to be reading this trash), these books were way more interesting than the vanilla Babysitter’s Club, for they feature lots of gossip-y and backstabbing behavior, vague descriptions of teenage sexual activity, a rock band with a girl drummer (yep, the Droids), serious motorcycle accidents, kidnapping, and even hard drugs! Better than 20/20 after TGIF nights, for sure.

Following a trail of SVU nostalgia, it was on Feministg.org where I found out about possibly the most amazing in-depth coverage of the Sweet Valley High series: The Dairy Burger  (named after favorite hangout of Jessica’s—except in one book, where she goes on an ill-advised diet), which reviews SVH books and other teen trash of the 80’s and 90’s. Not only do they do hilarious reviews of how truly terrible these books are (pointing out how lookist and consumerist they truly are, not to mention anorexia-inducing), but they also give in-depth plot summaries.

After a little bit of searching on Dairy Burger, I found a review of my favorite SVH book: OVER THE EDGE, one I’ve been trying to find for years now (I am thinking of going to EBay today, really). Over the Edgetells the tragic story of one of Bruce’s ex-girlfriends, Regina, also a friend of Elizabeth’s (i.e. one of the good girls). Regina, along with having been dumped, is also, sadly, deaf. Yes, deaf. So poor deaf Regina, both hard-of-hearing and out of luck-in-love, starts hanging out with badass kids, such as “Justin Belson, who is a troublemaker with bad grades, who also hangs out with Molly Hecht and some badass named Jan…She is invited to a party at Jan’s house, which will be WILD because Buzz the drug dealer will be there. And he doesn’t get his name from a bumblebee, if you know what I’m saying. Everyone warns Regina that he is bad news….”

Reginathen goes to the party and there is this intense scene where the crew of derelicts coerce poor deaf Regina to do coke. PEER PRESSURE! What happens? Regina has a rare heart condition and she dies from her very first rail. Deaf, brunette, dumped, and suffering a rare heart condition which means a bit of marching powder=swift death. Sucks. Don’t do blow! But especially don’t do blow if you already seem to have EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE GOING WRONG FOR YOU.

(It’s actually not bad advice now that I think about it)

And you thought the Jesse Spano “I’m so excited” Saved by the Bell episode was bad?

Eat, For This is My Body and Other Films to See ASAP!

Last night I went to see one of the films from MOMA’s New Directors/New Films series: Eat, For This is My Body the debut feature film from Haitian-American filmmaker Michalange Quay. Set in Haiti and the Loire Valley in France, it’s a non-linear, visual/sound poem of post-colonialism in Haiti, using the binaries of birth and life, black and white, male and female, eating and starving, etc as its narrative (rather than “plot”).

 Quite stunning.

Also if you’ve got a bf/gf or would be gf/bf and you want to get all cosy with while watching very, very good looking French youths (including the LOVELY Louis Garrel) sing romantic ditties, check out Christopher Honore’s Chansons d’amour (and then go home and get The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on dvd!)

And if you wanna see the real thing (not fashinista neo-New Wave, for much as I like some of Honore’s films, they can’t hold a candle to Godard), go to Film Forum to see the new print of Contempt.

Lastly, revisit the demented mind of Lynch’s youth as a Philly artist on Saturday night at IFC’s midnight showing of Eraserhead.

Dusty/Duffy…the Revival of White Girl Soul Music Still a Good Thing Post-Winehouse

 ”Mercy”: This chick Duffy, a Dusty Springfield for the 21st Century? Eh, perhaps not, but I’m digging this. Ok, maybe not that weird whisper rap thing. I’m just a sucker for a girl with a vintage haircut with a smoky voice  and song with the refrain, “yeah, yeah, yeah” in it? (Which is why I still like Amy Winehouse, despite the crack use and bad skin problem).

But, the actual Dusty? The British Burt Bacharach-singing chanteause, maybe-lesbian with a hard-as-nails disposition (what a sad life she did have!) and a voice like cough syrup smoothing over a chest cold…. oh man, Dusty Springfield was the shit.

Dusty singing “Everyday I have to cry.” This is from Ready Steady Go!, 1964

I used to think, many years back when I was too-cool-for-school, that my dad was crazy for listening to Dusty. And then I burned his copy of Dusty in Memphis and after one listening I just got it.

 This is soul. And really, really good production.

Trip Hop Resuscitated: the Shaky Return of Portishead

I used to listen to Portished’s Dummy and the self titled second album almost everyday at one point for an extended time (3-6 months at least) during the late 1990’s. Thanks to their mainstreaming (I think I first heard Dummy at a Banana Republic or something), I was introduced to electronic music made after 1992, at least electronic music that wasn’t on the soundtrack to The Saint (with Val Kilmer? Remember?). 

I unabashadely miss trip hop and the genre’s derivatives, which I Portishead falls into (purists would argue they are kind of trip hop-lite). As done best by Massive Attack and Coldcut, trip hop was not quite blippy enough to be IDM, too detached and rock-phobic to be called shoe-gaze, and far too pretty to  hold a candle to drum n’bass’s intensity (a genre which was trip hop’s sister-in-sampling). And it was the great easy listening hope of high-minded Public Enemy, Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine fans alike, and uh, well, people who watched a lot of Twin Peaks. It was also very coffee shop friendly. And it’s GREAT make-out music (ten years later, I still claim, hands down, that Massive Attack’s Mezzanine is the best get-frisky album of all time).

I am listening to the new Portishead album Third right now, which has leaked on the Internet and is officially released in US on April 29th. I’m not sure what I think (I’m trying to remember the the 90’s and all I can think of is Tank Girl and Juliana Hatfield ) but I will say it features tracks that are both far more spirited AND stripped down than the prior two albums.

Beth Gibbons still sounds Enya-esque, but against machine gunfire drilling. Hence “Machine Gun,” the first single.

Dub Easter Electro Egg Mix

Sans la grippe, avec beaucoup de travail, c’est à toi une musique. Bonne Paqcues!

Future: Cut Copy Or, rather, Fewcha! Let’s just go into a minute why Australians rule? Nick Cave. Kylie Minogue. Cut Copy. Koalas. Murial’s Wedding. Ok, I won’t post about Cut Copy anymore.

My Spine is a Bassline:  Shriekback

New Young Pony Club: Hiding on the Staircase This is such a good song. Stupid name for a band and when I first saw these guys two years ago, I wasn’t that impressed but now they impress me. This sounds so vintage I can’t believe it wasn’t made in 1983.

Cocaine in my Brain: Dillinger

Vivien Goldman: Laundrette: This was actually made around 1983. I think I may have actually lived this song, though, in 2004. Goldman is a professor at NYU now. (She was also in the Flying Lizards).

My Favorite Mutiny: The Coup

Yppah: What’s the Matter?

Digitalism: Idealism This song is so very 1994 Big Beat (Orbital, Prodigy) and I fucking love it. I kinda wanna watch Hackers right now actually

Crazy Women? Uh, Crazy Men!

I rarely read Details. However researching their book coverage on the website today, I found an article I could not help but sharing:

Why Can’t You Resist This Woman?

Crazy girls! Hot ones! Why so irresistible?

Well, while Details has their hall of fame of crazy women on here, I’ve made my own for crazy sexy menfolk.

HOT MAN GONE MAD HALL OF FAME

Syd Barrett

 

Leonard Cohen

 

Nietzche (man was caught getting all huggy with horses at the end of his life for bloody sake!)

Brian Jones

 

Brian Wilson

 

Gary Oldman in every movie

Christian Slater ONLY in Heathers

 

My favorite Crazy, Daniel Johnson

She’s Lost Control–Joy Division (because boys can be suicidal too!)

“What we need is Awareness!”: Obama on Race in ‘illadelphia

Today Mr. Obama made me tear a little. Not sure if it’s the Dayquil in my blood, or that he’s going all MLK/Bobby K-style-idealistic again, now in my home city of Philly or that he has got his speech writers pulling Faulkner quotes out, but man I was moved: 

“…race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

I give you–cough, ack, ugh–fuck the flu, anyhow, I give you Public Image Limited (PiL)! Johnny Lydon when he started getting into Guy Debord. Good stuff. 

Public Image Limited–Rise 

“Williamsburg Hipsters” Take to Farms and Hooking Says NYTimes

 

How many times can the Sunday edition of The New York Times cover the travails of the “Williamsburg hipster” in one single issue? Between the hipsters who became farmers from the Style section (literally titled “Leaving Behind the Trucker Hat”)  to the article about the double lives of real prostitutes–one a zaftig Dom with piercings and another straight from an Adrian Tomine comic–the NYT boner for those who live off the L line just got a little bigger.

Skip the trucker article and skip right to “The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls” from this Sunday’s Metro section. It’s riveting stuff–hip young thing hookers who also do things like design websites and sell real estate! (Hello tax deductions!) For example, “Ms. O’Donnell, 25, is a Williamsburg hipster with entrancing blue eyes who carries an NPR tote bag and might offer up a few pleasantries on the Whole Foods checkout line before turning back to her Junot Diaz novel” and is later described as having “russett bangs and the coquettish nerdiness.” I can’t wait til next week’s article about Joanna Angel’s favorite novelists!

 

“Coquettish nerdiness”  and the new happy hooker?

However, to give The Times their due, they do have the effervescently scathing Maureen Dowd, who this week comments on the carefree behavior (“like Rachael Ray sprinkling paprika on goulash”) of our president even as the economy continues to meltdown:

“Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy. Yet the more terrified Americans get, the more bizarrely carefree he seems. The former oilman reacted with cocky ignorance a couple of weeks ago when a reporter informed him that gas was barreling toward $4 a gallon”

Oh Mo!

Some vaguely topical music: 

Sex Dwarf-Soft Cell (from the absolutely brilliant album Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, one which 21st-century electro owes its soul to)

Self Obsessed and Sexee–Sonic Youth 

 

 

I like Australians who like Daft Punk (i.e. Cut Copy)

CUT COPY

Studio B

Saturday night. Fuckin’ go yo!

And yes, sadly, I think Goth week is over. I have nothing Goth left to give you!

Here’s what I am listening to get ready for another jaunt to Studio B:

Editions of You-Roxy Music

1983-Miss Kitten

So Cinematic-Pora Pora!**because nobody tears shit up like Nanna

Amparanoia: Proganado: War is Not the Solution (remix)

Chicago this summer: Spiritualized!

Spiritualized headline Pitchfork Fest (and release new album in May). Oh yeah, and Public Enemy is playing too.

Duuuuuuuude! Way to bring me back to laying on the floor my first year of college listening to “Shine a Light”! Between them and the Verve touring again, it’s like 1990’s heroin-friendly shoe-gaze all over again. (Please note I am not endorsing heroin in any way. Heroin is bad.)

Holy Psychedelia!

Holy Flava Flav!

Pitchfork fest may be worth braving Chicago heat, sun and American Apparelites this summer.

And to continue Goth Week, here’s Julianne Moore looking damn goth-y at a TSE party. Shot by Getty’s most wonderful photographer. “She’s like an albino!” says anonymous source. Well, if you look at her hand color and compare to Leigh’s leg…OMG, Moore has out-paled a Misshape! Not an easy feat.

Yeah, that’s Leigh Lezark. Again. Does she do anything having to do with music….?