THEME FOR GREAT CITIES

When Bad Spelling/Grammar Happens to Good Singles

2013-05-19T05:05:00.000-03:00

Could it possibly get any worse than this?

What if will.i.am and Justin Bieber's "#thatPOWER" and Mariah Carey's "#Beautiful" kick off a new bad habit in pop: hashtag hits? Isn't it bad enough that they're already continuing another one: The hashtag hits are the latest in pop's long tradition of bastardizing English with its song titles.

As usual the end results are mixed, with only Carey's single coming close to warranting its hashtag hype. The shameless bit of built-in marketing doesn't ruin the fact that it's Carey's best single in five years (since 2008, when she barely dented Billboard's Hot 100 with "I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time"). Here are some other cases where poor orthography didn't spoil the song. (Interesting orthographical pop fact: Though few might question the grammar in the title of Tina Turner's 1984 career-redefining hit, which is now so entrenched in our vernacular, if an English teacher were to pose the question in real life, it would be "What does love have to do with it?")

"Ain't That a Shame" Fats Domino/Pat Boone/Cheap Trick Have you ever heard the one about Pat Boone and how he tried to alter the title of Fats Domino's 1955 release (which ultimately reached No. 10 on the Hot 100) to "Isn't That a Shame" because he didn't want bad grammar to alienate his squeaky clean (read: white) pop constituency, which sent it to No. 1 anyway? In the end, he left well enough alone -- sometimes "isn't" just doesn't have the same ring as a well-placed "ain't" -- paving the way for the continued pop-staple status of latter. And that ain't no shame.

"Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)" Sheena Easton Would she have had an easier time tracking down her elusive lover if she had used a telephone instead?

"Kool Thing" Sonic Youth For some reason that completely escapes me now, a friend and I recently devoted several minutes of conversation time to naming our favorite Sonic Youth song. Yes, how '90s of us. I almost went with Sonic Youth's 1990 first major label single as the best of Sonic Youth, but then I remembered "Bull in the Heather."

"Hungah" Karyn White The 1994 single that ended White's short run as a crossover pop star holds up better than I thought it would at the time.

"Grapevyne" Brownstone I wonder what the late Marvin Gaye would have done if he had heard it through the grapevyne instead.

"Da Funk" Daft Punk Considering that the French duo's 1996 breakthrough single was an instrumental, it easily could have been called "The Funk" without missing a red-hot beat. At least they didn't call it "Da Phunk." No good ever comes of "Phunk" for "funk," as The Black Eyed Peas have proven over (with 2003's Elephunk) and over (with "Don't Phunk with My Heart" two years later).

"Giv Me Luv" Alcatraz It's gotta be "luv" for "love" (as Robin S. had sung three years earlier, on her 1993 single "Luv 4 Luv"), so come here, and giv it to me.

"Sexx Laws" Beck I don't know how to explain it, but Beck's 1999 single probably wouldn't have sounded the same with just one "x."

"Dirrty" Christina Aguilera featuring Redman A much better use of an extra "r" than Nelly's "Hot in Herre," but unfortunately, pop fans thought differently. While Nelly's dreadful 2002 anthem topped Billboard's Hot 100, Aguilera's valiant effort topped out at No. 48. At least the UK, once again exhibiting superior taste in pop, sent it to No. 1.(Fun fact: With her next single, Aguilera took her own "Beautiful" into the Top 3, which I suspect is right where Carey's is headed.)

"U + Ur Hand" Pink When my iPod shuffle landed on Pink's 2006 Top 10 hit yesterday morning, I found myself wondering wondering why "Ur" for "Your" never caught on quite like "U" for "You." (Fun fact No. 1: Did you know that the official styling of Alecia Moore's stage name is P!nk, another twist in proper orthography. Fun fact No. 2: A pink-coiffed Gwen Stefani once told me that she worried about the long-term prospects for a singer named after her then-hair color, meaning P!nk, who was on her first album at the time. Look who's the one still regularly cranking out No. 1 hits more than a decade later!)

"I Would Die 4 U"/"Take Me With U"/"anotherloverholeinyohead"/"U Got the Look"/"I Wish U Heaven"/"Gett Off" Prince and "Nothing Compares 2 U" Sinead O'Connor (written by Prince) The King of Misspelled Pop certainly had a way with words -- and symbols -- until I started losing interest some time around Diamonds and Pearls. Few pop stars could temporarily change their moniker to an unpronounceable symbol and return to normalcy (I've always loved that "Prince" isn't a delusion of grandeur -- or royalty -- but his actual birth name) with his reputation more or less intact. Let's hope he's not eyeing this hashtag trend and getting any bad ideas.

"Anotherloverholeinyohead"

10 Random Thoughts I Had While Listening to the Top 30 on This Week's Billboard Hot 100

2013-05-17T19:36:00.000-03:00

No. 6: "Come and Get It" Selena Gomez As big a star as she is (with or without Justin Bieber as her arm candy), I'm surprised that it's taken Gomez this long to finally score herself a Top 10 hit. I've heard far worse (like her 2011 single "Love You Like a Love Song," which spent forever on the Hot 100 without ever rising above No. 22), but I wish it didn't sound so much like a cold leftover from the recording sessions for Rihanna's first album.

No. 11: "Heart Attack" Demi Lovato I still secretly wish Lovato's second No. 10 hit (and third Top 10 overall) were a cover of Olivia Newton-John's 1982 No. 3 single of the same name.

No. 12: "The Way" Ariana Grande featuring Mac Miller The pure-pop sound is pure 2000 (and Miller's sweater in the video so The Cosby Show, circa 1984), and there's no evidence here that Grande, a Broadway and Nickelodeon star making her Hot 100 debut, is a better or worse singer than the Top 20's other two kiddie actresses-turned-pop stars, but it's the only one of their current singles that I actually wanted to hear twice. That said, I'll also say this: The callow, regressive pop sound of the genre's new princesses (Gomez, Lovato and now Grande) has me praying for the swift return of some of the old ones. Come back, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, all is forgiven!

No. 15 "Get Lucky" Daft Punk featuring Pharell Williams Not only does disco not suck, but it never really went out of style. Daft Punk's first U.S. hit single may be a highlight in the Top 30, but I miss the French duo's Gallic electronic edge, which, to be fair, never got them higher than No. 66 on the Hot 100 (with "One More Time" in 2000).

No. 16 "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light 'Em Up)" Fall Out Boy I was never a Fall Out Boy fan when they were huge in the mid aughts (the band's song titles were always more interesting than the actual songs, which hasn't changed), and I'd forgotten all about the guys before they recently resurfaced following a five-year hiatus. As comebacks go, this one is fairly whatever, but I'm glad the single's a hit if for no other reason than that Pete Wentz can now glare at his ex Ashlee Simpson (where has she been?) and say, "Take that!"

No. 20: "#thatPOWER" will.i.am featuring Justin Bieber Here he goes again. More state-of-the-art overproduction and the biggest collaborators that money and superstardom can buy in search of an actual song. I respect will.i.am's skill as a producer, but must everything about him be so damn pretentious, from the ridiculous spelling of his name to the hashtag in front of the title of his latest single to the complicated styling of the title itself? Is he trying to hide the fact that behind the beats, there's actually #zer0SUBSTANCE?

No. 23: "Highway Don't Care" Tim McGraw With Taylor Swift The man who inspired the title of her 2006 debut single brings out the best in Swift. Infinitely more listenable than "22," two notches down.

No. 24: "#Beautiful" Mariah Carey Ugh, another hashtag. I know they're very 2013, but shameless marketing ploys should have no place in the title of a single that probably would have hit No. 1 anyway. Still, I adore this track's modern Motown vibe, and it's, well, beautiful (sans hashtag) to see Carey back in the upper echelons of the Hot 100 where she belongs. But a part of me wonders why it had to be a trip for two. It's a bit -- well, maybe a lot -- ageist of me, but there's something off about seeing a 44-year-old mother of twins parading about in next to nothing next to a 27-year-old guy with a flat-ironed coif when she's got a 32-year-old husband at home.

No. 26: "Next to Me" Emeli Sandé About a year after my friend Trudi sent me the video of this, the third single by UK sensation Sandé, it's finally a hit in the U.S. Though it's always nice to welcome genuine talent into the Top 30, with Sandé, I appreciate her talent more than I actually enjoy her songs. In that sense, she's the British Alicia Keys.

No. 30 "Here's to Never Growing Up" Avril Lavigne I know Lavigne fancies herself a true artist (because she writes her own material, and compared to pop's princesses, she's kind of rock & roll), but at 28, she really needs to start changing her tune. To be forever young at heart is an understandable ambition, but "Complicated" was 11 years ago, and she's pushing 30 now. Is she still spelling "Sk8er Boi" with a numeral and an "i"? Guess what? Time to grow up -- at least in song. Leave the sentiments of being 22 to someone who actually is, like Taylor Swift.

Gays Against Gay Marriage: Why They've Got It All Wrong

2013-05-16T08:05:00.000-03:00

At some point, possibly within the next lifetime, if not in mine, people will probably look back at the gay-marriage debate and ask, " What were they thinking?" That gays were once legally barred from calling their civil unions "marriage" will seem as unfathomable as the idea of women not being able to vote or a world without Facebook.

In the meantime, the debate continues, with some unexpected players popping up on both sides. President Barack Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama have been openly endorsing it at least since last year's National Democratic Convention. And notice how many straight rappers now publicly support gay marriage, from Jay-Z to Eminem to 50 Cent to Snoop Dogg to T.I. to Macklemore, who along with his DJ/producer partner Ryan Lewis, recorded "Same Love," a No. 1 Australian hit, in favor of it.

As the United States inches closer to nationwide enlightenment and legalization of gay marriage -- on May 14, Minnesota became the 12th state to go there (13th, if you count Washington D.C.) -- some dissenters refuse to let their increasingly outdated opposition go. Shockingly, a significant number of them are the very people who would benefit from it, though those gay detractors beg to differ. I saw several attempting to explain themselves once on an episode of Rick Lake's talk show, and some prominent ones I've never heard of shared their points of view in the 2010 book Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage.

I know the title was supposed to be ironic. They don't actually think they are "against" equality, but really, by associating themselves with a movement that's long been a platform for homophobia and intolerance, they are. That's the point of this post/rant.

The first time I ever heard the anti-gay marriage argument coming from a gay person, it went a little something like this: In making gay marriage the gay cause, it sends the message that marriage should be the end game for any self-respecting gay person, creating a new generation of gay youth who grow up obsessing over it, thinking it's the only way to true human bliss. Opposing it is for their (gay youth's) own greater good. While the idea of hundreds, thousands (millions?) of gay bridezillas-in-training gives me a headache, it's a pretty weak reason to deny gay people access to the same deluded upbringing as straight people.

I, for one, don't want what I can and cannot do to be dictated by the psychological effect it may or may not have on young people I don't even know. By that same argument, should women's rights groups start lobbying against straight marriage because too many young girls grow up dreaming about their perfect fairytale wedding? I no more get that mindset than I do the institution of marriage in general, but it's not for me to get.

Someone I know once made the argument that gay people can enjoy more or less all the rights and benefits of married people -- all that's missing is the word "marriage." That's it exactly. If "civil unions" offer the same rights and benefits as "marriage," then why not just call them "marriages." Suggesting that they shouldn't be -- whether for reasons that revolve around tradition, history or religion -- is tantamount to suggesting that gay relationships are somehow less valid than straight ones. It's the principle that counts, and principles count.

It's like the episode of Frasier in which Frasier and Niles kept trying to upgrade their membership in an exclusive club. Every time they advanced one level, they'd hear about a higher one and desperately want in. Although at some point, the benefits between levels became fairly commensurate, only they were offered in different sections, Frasier and Niles wanted to go higher. Weren't they just as good as the people beyond the wall? They deemed the other side higher because they were restricted from it, and ultimately ended up in an alley next to a garbage bin.

I'm not saying that the state of holy matrimony is a bunch of trash (though, in general, I don't think that much more highly of it), but that's how gay people feel about the "marriage" that is still denied to them in 38 states and in countries around the world. It might be little more than a title at this point, but denying them that title suggests that they aren't worthy of it, and like Frasier and Niles, they are left stranded -- segregated -- on the other side. Why aren't all of these anti-gay marriage gay lobbyists carping about the damage that's doing to the collective psyche of young gay people? It's basically telling them that their relationships are inferior to straight people's, not worthy of equal recognition in the eyes of the law.

Where have I heard something similar before? In the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown Vs. Board of Education in which the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, tried to make the argument that it was okay to segregate black students from white students in learning facilities that were separate but equal. That "separate but equal" spin didn't fly with black people then -- nor with the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently inequal" -- and it shouldn't fly with any gay person with any intellectual capacity.

I've also heard the argument that the nature and dynamics of straight relationships and gay relationships are different (duh!), and the straight institution of marriage simply doesn't fit into gay culture. Now let's consider this for a second. For decades, gay people have been saying to homophobic straight people, "What happens in our bedroom is none of your business!" So is what happens in those bedrooms, in those relationships, the concern of gay-marriage opponents, whether straight or gay? If you don't want your relationship to be defined by "straight" ideals, don't let it. But stay out of mine. In the end, it feels like politicking for the sake of politicking, with no discernible goal beyond distancing gay romance from straight romance, which feels like stepping backward instead of forward.

More and more people around the world are realizing that regardless of where you stand on marriage or on gay people, there just isn't any rational reason to continue denying gay people the same institution of marriage, along with the same title, that straight people enjoy. As Eminem once wisely said, "I think everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want."

Well, perhaps not completely miserable, for there are great benefits to marriage, which is the only reason why some straight people choose to enter into it. I might actually be able to get behind a general anti-marriage movement on the grounds that "marriage" discriminates against single people, who aren't afforded the same financial and immigration breaks as married people. It's an outdated institution whose symbolic significance has been cheapened by the sheer number of people who casually enter and exit it. But it feels unfair and wrong to single out gay marriage as the greater of two evils.

Those who are content with their "civil unions" and/or have no interest in walking down the aisle are free not to. I, for one, have no interest in ever being a groom, but that doesn't mean I won't dance at my best friend's wedding and maybe even catch the bouquet. If gay people are going to demand the right to privacy when it comes to what goes on in their bedrooms, they need to extend the same courtesy to what goes on in other people's relationships and how people choose to legally define them. In this case, hypocrisy and bigotry may be separate vices, but their end results are equally intolerable.

Thoughts on Horror Fiction: Can Words Scare the Crap Out of Me?

2013-05-15T10:25:00.001-03:00

I've got to hand it to Stephen King. I've never read one of his books, and bits and pieces of Carrie, The Shining and Dolores Claiborne and all of Stand By Me and Misery aside, I've skipped the film and TV adaptations of his work, possibly because being scared has never been my idea of a blast, even when it's someone else whose life and limbs are in danger.

Although I've had such minimal exposure to the best of King, I now have a newfound appreciation for what he does best. It started with an offhand comment by my friend Marcus, who, at my request, had just read the synopsis for my book. He enjoyed it (much to my relief), which, he pointed out, was not necessarily a given beforehand because he tends to like to read, in his words, "physics and horror" only.

My first thought was that there can't possibly be anything scarier than reading a book about physics. Even more so than chemistry, my second-worst subject in school, physics always went straight over my head. I couldn't imagine reading a book about it for fun, much less understanding it, but I'm glad that Marcus does. The knowledge gleaned from his leisure scientific reading -- like, I imagine, all that arcane stuff about the properties of AC adapters that stopped me from having to buy a new one for my laptop yesterday -- occasionally comes in handy in my everyday life.

But horror? The horror! I knew that scary books existed, but I'd never before really stopped to think about it as a literary genre, particularly from a writer's point of view. What a frightening undertaking that must be! I've spent the last year trying to master the art of writing narrative non-fiction, foreign territory for a journalist trained in news and feature writing. That was difficult enough, but I can't even begin to imagine how tough it must be to scare the shit out of someone with only words at your disposal. What would Wes Craven do?!

I recall a scene from The Golden Girls in which Rose was trying to frighten the girls in her Sunshine Cadet troop by telling them a spooky story during a camp out. The girls were thoroughly unterrified. It was possibly because the camp out was actually a camp in, taking place in the middle of the Golden Girls living room, but I always thought it had more to do with this: In order to be scared by something in a story, you had to see it -- or not see it, since onscreen, what's implied is often far scarier than what actually happens -- to be afraid of it.

I've always considered horror to be primarily a visual medium, one that's never really appealed to me in movie form -- and with the exception of Curve's "Horror Head," Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash" and David Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), but not Michael Jackson's "Thriller," a song whose appeal I never really understood, not in music form either.

It's not because I'm a film snob or anything (though I admit that I am). It might not be my thing, but I have complete respect for the horror genre. Still, I can live without ever having to spend another 90 minutes to two hours watching a screen through my fingers, terrified of sudden slashing movements and things that go bump in the still of the night.

I'm such a wimp when it comes to fright flicks. I once had to call my friend Dave and tell him to come over while I was in the middle of watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which isn't even a horror movie, because I was certain things wouldn't end well for Diane Keaton. I couldn't bear to see what Richard Gere or Tom Berenger or some other scary monster (and super creep) might do to her while I was sitting alone in my New York City apartment on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I was a grown man in my 30s at the time, so imagine how traumatic it must have been for me to be 7 years old and watching The Omen for the first time in 1976 on HBO. To this day, it still qualifies as the scariest thing I've ever seen onscreen.

It might be the reason why the only true horror movie I can recall ever going to see in the theater was A Nightmare on Elm Street (directed by the aforementioned Wes Craven), which I went to see eight years later with a group of work friends from the Publix Supermarket at Mill Creek Mall in Kissimmee, Florida. Mostly I went for the honor of sitting in the dark next to a colleague I had a crush on named Barbara. She's the only reason why I got to see Johnny Depp in his first screen role.

But now that I think about it, would The Omen (and the less horrorfying Damien: Omen II two years later) have had the effect it had on me if I'd skipped the movie and just read the book, which was written after The Omen was filmed but before its June 1976 release? Sure the Biblical Book of Revelation was always good for jolt when I was forced to read any of it in church as a kid, but its words would have been far less scary had I not bought them at the time as the future of the world. I'm not sure that The Omen would have given me terrifying nightmares well into my teens had I just read about Damien's antics instead of seeing them played out in full color onscreen.

I'll probably never know. I have no intention of ever reading the book, or any other book that's intended to frighten me into a state of extreme entertainment. If you're looking for me, I'll be over here where it's safe, re-reading The Great Gatsby before diving into the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

Why "Nashville" and "Smash" Have Me Wondering About My Psychic Powers

2013-05-13T15:59:00.002-03:00

Two recent episodes of two of the major-network TV shows that I watch religiously (the just-renewed Nashville and the just-canceled Smash) got me thinking: Either television has become way too predictable in its old age, or in mine, I spend so much time watching it (usually on my laptop) that it no longer has the capacity to catch me off guard.

(Regarding Smash's cancellation and Nashville's renewal, both of which were announced on May 10, is there only room in prime-time for one musical featuring original songs and dueling divas, one sugar and spice, dark-haired, and in love with a recovering something, the other troubled and bitchy, blonde, and constantly at odds with an overbearing mother? Make that two. It just dawned on me that I almost could be writing about Rachel and Quinn on Glee, too, if the high school musical had fewer covers, and we included Rachel portrayer Lea Michele's real-life relationship with rehabbing Cory Monteith.)

I generally know what's coming up on my beloved daytime soap operas because I never let a weekend go by without scouring the various soap websites in search of spoilers for the coming week's episodes. With prime-time TV, however, I'm generally spoiler free. When the "unexpected" happens, I should be just as surprised as the characters. Unfortunately for the part of me who likes to be shocked by an unforeseen turn of fictional events, they've been rare lately, with two recent sequences in particular making me wonder if my psychic/predictive properties are really all in my head.

One of them involved two hot guys on a couch on the May 1 episode of Nashville. For me, it wasn't wishful thinking, bad acting or amateurish writing that screamed where the scene was headed. Well, maybe it was a little of the former, but both Sam Palladio (as Gunnar) and Chris Carmack (as Will) played the beats expertly, and the writing on Nashville is as high caliber as its original music. Speaking from personal experience, I can say the build up to the attempted kiss, in both the acting and the writing, perfectly captured the awkwardness of the pre-plunge sofa moment, even when the two couch potatoes/players involved are out and proud. That it felt so familiar may have been part of the reason why I was so certain what would happen next. (If you haven't seen it, or want to see it again, click here.)

But I went into the scene with my suspicions already in place because of what had begun to transpire in the previous episode. From the moment Gunnar and Will took that joyride across the railroad tracks, rocking the dynamic of their bromance, I knew it wasn't going to end well. It's not that I would immediately expect a reckless driver/daredevil to be a closet case. It's just that it became clear that Will wasn't what he seemed to be. The last time that happened with a TV Will (young Mr. Horton, on Days of Our Lives), he lost his girl and eventually ended up with a guy. There was no place for Gunnar and Will's increasingly intimate friendship to go but under the bus.

Which, for all we know, may have been what did in Kyle at the end of the April 27 episode of Smash -- a bus. That episode, incidentally, was the first of the entire series, which will air for the final time on May 26, to feature an original song I actually wanted to hear twice: "Don't Let Me Know," performed by Katharine McPhee and Jeremy Jordan.

More likely, it was a car that sped into Kyle since anyone who's ridden a New York City bus knows they rarely move fast enough to do that kind of damage. From the minute poor Kyle started singing Jeff Buckley's "The Last Goodbye," I knew the song would be his. Even if the camera hadn't kept panning to his feet signaling something momentous to come, I would have made the death connection because Andy Mientus's first big Smash number happened to be a song by a singer-songwriter who died tragically and too young.

It's too bad Mientus had to go just as his character was being given a personality beyond being Jimmy's keeper. In the previous episode, he'd suddenly morphed from saint into sinner, and in his post-mortem episode, he ironically got more screen time than he had during his entire time on the show, doling out words of wisdom like the stereotypical wise gay BFF. Who knew he and Julia (Debra Messing) had become such close confidantes off-screen?

The writers didn't have to go out of their way to make Kyle sympathetic again after the brief character assassination that found him cheating with Tom. I, for one, still liked him, and found him to be a far more engaging character than the insufferable Jimmy, which is no offense to Jeremy Jordan, who is a fine actor and singer, though not wholly convincing as a tortured straight twentysomething male.

Unfortunately, to make us -- and every character on the show -- feel sorry for Jimmy and crowd into his corner, they had to give him something truly worth pounding his fists over while railing at the unjustness of it all. Exit Kyle.

I prefer the way Nashville handled the fallout from its own gayish plot twist to the Saint Kyle flashbacks on Smash. I like that Gunnar, though clearly spooked by Will's amorous advances, hasn't been a homophobic asshole about it. Though some of his actions lately have put the ass in front of hole, he's generally a pretty decent guy. As for Will, his morning-after behavior -- a mix of shame and denial -- felt completely real. He did exactly what I probably would have done if I had found myself walking in his cowboy boots. (When in doubt or just plain ol' embarrassed, blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol!)

Now here's a bit of definite wishful thinking: I'd love for Nashville to pursue a Gunnar/Scarlett/Will triangle, with Gunnar, not Scarlett, as the grand prize. I'd buy Will as bisexual, and Gunnar and Scarlett could certainly use more interesting relationship drama than the his career vs. her career stuff that broke up her and Avery. What if Gunnar's response was so ambiguous, never quite crossing over into full-on jerk mode, partly because he's a decent guy and partly because he's not so sure how he feels about Will?

It would be daring, it would be sexy, and it would convince me that I do indeed have the power to predict the future on TV.

I Hate When People Say That!: 25 Things I Hope I Never Hear Again

2013-05-11T10:26:00.000-03:00

Either I'm becoming a grumpy old man, or I'm regressing to peevish, petulant boyhood, but people really need to start watching what they say around me. In true sourpuss spirit, I've decided to make my latest list a list of what not to say or ask the next time you see me. (Don't stop me if you think you've heard some of these before. If it's not worth saying once, it's worth saying not to say it twice.)

1. "Where do you see yourself in 5/10/15/20 years?" As David Chappelle might say, "Who am I, Negrodamus?"

2. "African-American" Wrong on so many levels! It suggests that all black people are American, that African = black, and that "black" is somehow a dirty word. My mother was born in Antigua (when it was a British commonwealth), and my dad was born on the French side of Saint Martin, and I was born in the U.S. Virgin Islands. What does that make them -- and me? That's right, we're all black.

3. "He/She/It/They was/is/were amazing!" If everything is amazing, then is anything truly amazing?

4. "Have a safe flight." As if frequent and infrequent fliers have any control over what happens up in the air. "I hope you have a nice flight" would be preferable -- and it doesn't imply the possibility of a fiery crash landing, which nobody needs to be thinking about right before take off.

5. "It is what it is." So banal, so obvious, it immediately trivializes whatever you were discussing. It's a wonder that anyone ever thought to say it, or that everyone thought to repeat it as if it were the most brilliant closing statement one could possibly make.

6. "So what do you do all day?" As if spending at least a third of every weekday doing a job you hate is the only way to live.

7. "I could care less." Not because it's kind of a rude thing to say but because I couldn't care less.

8. "Don't take it personal." "Personal" is an adjective; "personally" is an adverb. I don't take it personally when people get it wrong (and way too many people do), but they really ought to make it their personal mission to say it right.

Wrong!

Wrong!

Right!

9. "Feel better"/"Get well soon." If I had any control over it, do you really think I'd be lying in this godforsaken sick bed.

10. "I'm not on Facebook." It's not so much that they aren't on Facebook as it is the way some people say it, as if Facebook is Satan and not giving into its temptation immediately elevates you to the status of super, superior human.

11. "So when am I going to see you? If you have to ask, one or both of you doesn't really want to. People with a burning desire to see each other just make it happen.

12. "Let's do something soon." Even more annoyingly non-committal than No. 11 and as thinly veiled a near-kiss off as "Take care" and "Keep in touch."

13. "Diez centavos?" Damn Buenos Aires and it's continuing shortage of moneda -- though it has resulted in a few discounts of up to 2 pesos! If cashiers are going to have to grovel for change, why not just make all prices even peso amounts?

14. "Hablas muy bien el español." It's not that it's not a nice thing to say, or that I ever really get tired of hearing/reading it, but people like that nice cashier at my local panaderia (Why are they -- and my Pilates teachers -- always nicer to me than anyone else providing a service in Buenos Aires?) say it at my own risk. It's pretty much guarantees that I'm going to screw up my next sentence.

15. "[Anything] to the [anything]" -- as in "Hell to the no." What does that even mean?

16. "Black don't crack." Why does this sound kind of dirty to me?

17. "Is it true what they say about black men?" The bane of my social existence for the last nearly seven years living abroad. If I answered yes, how cocky would that sound -- pun intended?

18. "Top or bottom?" ("Activo o pasivo?")/ "What are you looking for?" ("Que buscas?") Same shit, different country. I'd say it's time for those horny guys on Grindr and Manhunt to come up with some new material. An unimaginative fling-turned-friend once defended the former as vital information because if you aren't going to do that in bed then what are you going to do, which would explain why he wasn't very good there.

19. "Fun" for sex. Speaking of online malapropisms... Sex is fun, but come on, we're all adults here. Do we really need a euphemism for sex?

20. "That's so American." As if the United States is the only country where the citizenry is given to cultural vices.

21. "Where (are) you at?" As grammatical fuck-ups go, I'm not particularly bothered when people end sentences with prepositions unless it's "at" the end. And don't even thinking about dropping those helping verbs! They're there to help us not sound like illiterate caveman.

22. "This album is about where I'm at now." For any music journalist in danger of overdosing on trite creative commentary, it's a true occupational hazard -- and quite possibly the most it's-so-obvious-why-even-bother-saying-it thing that someone can say this side of No. 5. At least its "at" is where it should be.

23. "[Insert name of dearly departed celebrity here] lost his/her battle with cancer." Another occupational hazard -- in the Obituary section. A friend/colleague/breast cancer survivor once enlightened me on how incredibly insensitive this is. Anyone who bravely battles a disease as insidious as cancer, whether alive or not on the other side, is no loser.

24. "Supper" and "cocktails" A completely irrational pet peeve, yes, but both words have always made me cringe. I'd much rather have "dinner" and "drinks," thank you.

25. "I love Taylor Swift." Atzin, whose taste in music I've long respected above most others, scared the hell out of me on Thursday night when he became my first friend ever to declare anything more than indifference to Swift. I might never be the same again. Several weeks ago, I heard "22," her latest single, playing on the TV while I wasn't looking. It was the first time I'd ever heard the song, and until I looked up and could see what I'd been listening and cringing to, I could have sworn it was a Saturday Night Live parody of bad confessional singing.

Is Your Boyfriend the Biggest Loser Behind Your Back?

2013-05-10T14:32:00.000-03:00

"Tengo novia pero vos me gustas mas."

If I wasn't sure that my mystery texter wasn't talking to me earlier during breakfast when a one-word message arrived from the same number declaring, simply, "Linda," now I was. Unless I've been cross dressing in my sleep, taking the feminine-specific adjective for "pretty," and possibly flirting with random people who have girlfriends, this was clearly a case of mistaken identity.

Or was it? I met my ex-boyfriend two and a half years ago on a wild Thursday night in Melbourne when he was out with his girlfriend at the time. Was I turning boys again -- if it was indeed a guy? And more importantly, did the girlfriend know?

The person refused to reveal who was texting, only that it was "alguien a quien le gustas." If nothing else, I was talking to someone with a lot of confidence, which might have been sexy if it weren't for the fact that he (or she) was being so duplicitous with his (or her) girlfriend.

As I started dreaming up storylines for the love triangle -- Was I supposed to be a good friend of the girlfriend? Had I already crossed the line? Had I previously been completely oblivious to the fact that this person was into me? Was I getting between a lesbian couple? -- I wondered if I should play the role that had been assigned to me, or if I should reveal my true identity. I opted for the latter approach.

"Querrias enviarme a mi eses mensajes? Soy Jeremy, un chico!"

That's when more true colors started to come out. The mystery texter called me a "puta" (in this context, more or less the Spanish equivalent of "faggot"), as if the fact that he (It had to be a he, right?) had sent me an amorous SMS automatically made me one, and chided me for having the nerve to like boys and "tomar la leche." In his warped world view, on the list of abhorrent human behavior, being gay (which, apparently to him, also meant that you must drink semen like it's water) trumped hitting on other women behind your girlfriend's back.

I decided to let him have the final word. His scale of morality was obviously tilted to the wrong side, and his girlfriend was about to be the biggest loser. It wasn't any of my business, but I still felt so badly for her. It wasn't so much that her boyfriend was primed to cheat (guys do that all the time) but that he liked the other woman more -- and he was homophobic, his most offensive crime.

On the bright side, she wasn't the biggest loser at all. He was.

The Truth About Money (Yet More Words of Wisdom from Luke Spencer)

2013-05-09T08:26:00.000-03:00

"Money can't buy it," Annie Lennox once sang (on the best track on Diva, her 1992 debut solo album). To be fair, according to Annie, neither can sex, drugs or you. (Keep reading after the video.)

In 1964, 28 years earlier, The Beatles had taken the limited purchasing power of funds a bit further: "Money can't buy me love," the Fab Four insisted on their fourth No. 1 hit in the U.S and according to Rolling Stone magazine at one point, the 289th greatest song of all time.

"For the love of money," The O'Jays insisted on another Top 10 single nine years later, people will do just about anything despicable. "Don't let money change you," the trio warned -- no, pleaded -- in conclusion.

Show me the money? On second thought... For something so highly desirable, money has such a rotten reputation. Money talks, but too bad it can't defend itself. "Money can't buy happiness." "Money is the root of all evil." "The love of money is the root of all evil." So go the old cliches and Biblical aphorisms (the latter one, from 1 Timothy 6:10). For something that so many people spend their lives striving to accumulate, money sure gets the raw deal. It's a good thing it doesn't grow on trees.

If nothing else, money has inspired a lot of excellent music over the years, from different songs named "Money" by The Babys, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson and countless other acts who've borrowed the title (and probably the actual stuff as well), to Psychedelic Furs' "All That Money Wants," one of my all-time favorite money songs.

Money may not always make the world go 'round, but let's not underestimate the value of cash (liquid and otherwise). Leave it to General Hospital's Luke Spencer, possibly the wisest flawed character ever to walk the streets of a fictional soap town and definitely the only one who has saved the world, to size up money and put it firmly in its place, which he did nicely and eloquently on the May 8 episode.

"It's been my experience that money may not eliminate misery, but it certainly makes it easier to bear."

Having never had an unlimited abundance of money but being all too familiar with misery, I can't speak from personal experience, but I'd bet what money I do have that old Luke Spencer is right.

Jeanne Cooper, 1928-2013: The Dimming of Another Bright Light from My Youth

2013-05-08T21:10:00.001-03:00

In one of the current storylines on The Young and the Restless, Katherine Chancellor -- the daytime soap's matriarch and second-longest-running character (after Jill Foster Abbott Fenmore), played by Jeanne Cooper, its longest-running star -- was given a clean bill of health after undergoing surgery to remove a benign brain tumor.

Sadly, real life wouldn't mirror reel art. On May 8, Cooper passed away at age 84 in a Los Angeles-area hospital. She had recently been admitted twice, with her son, actor Corbin Bernsen, providing her fans with regular updates on her health through Twitter. Though anyone who was paying attention knew that it was coming -- "She's in the final stages," Bernsen acknowledged in a May 3 tweet -- there's no way you can ever really prepare for the loss of a national treasure.

She's the second one we've had to say goodbye to in less than two weeks, the second childhood icon that I always closely associated with my mother. The first was George Jones, who passed away on April 26 (on her birthday last Thursday, mom told me that she had been planning on going to Jones's Atlanta concert on April 25, until it was cancelled due to his illness), now Cooper.

One of my earliest memories after my family moved from the Virgin Islands to Florida in 1973 was spending a half hour every weekday afternoon watching the dramatic antics of the Fosters, the Brookses and, of course, Mrs. Chancellor, as I always called her, on The Young and the Restless. (The show wasn't expanded to its current hour-long format until 1980, seven years after Cooper joined, eight months into the show's run.)

I'm not sure what it was that drew me to Mrs. Chancellor. She was hard and steely, hardly your typical grandma, but there was a warmth lurking underneath the severe exterior, which I think must have emanated from the actress herself. Until a couple of years ago when another actress with the same first name, different spelling (Genie Francis) brought me back into the Y&R viewing fold, I'd only watched sporadically since the early '80s. Still, I was well aware of Katherine's many storyline arcs (her alcoholism, her feud with Jill, her breast cancer, her strokes, her alter-ego Marge, her long-lost son, Cooper's real-life face lift worked into the show) and Cooper's contributions to the soap genre, which among actresses, are perhaps second only to All My Children's Susan Lucci's.

She was my very first diva and the subject of my first blog post in 2008, after she won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Daytime Drama Series. "I bet you thought I had died," she joked at the beginning of her speech, and I laughed right along with her, thinking she might outlive us all. On the verge of turning 80, she looked even better than she had in the '70s.

Cooper had recently published her autobiography, Not Young, Still Restless, and watching her and listening to her as she worked the publicity circuit, still sharp and as endearingly blunt and fiesty as her alter-ego, I was certain she had at least a second volume left in her. Sadly, that one will remain unwritten.

Jeanne Cooper's final Y&R scene (which aired last week) before her death.

What the New York Times Totally Flubbed in Its Review of Prospect Park's "All My Children" and "One Life to Live"

2013-05-08T15:53:00.000-03:00

When Chelsea Handler takes her digs at daytime soap operas on her late-night E! talk show, I chuckle politely and call it satire. Although it's not the most original comic concept (and out of context, pretty much any TV show can be made to look like a complete joke), ha ha ha anyway.

But when a publication like the New York Times, one with the reputation of being "the paper of record," jumps on that bandwagon and starts taking predictable swings at such an easy target, offering no fresh insight or depth of analysis, it's just lazy criticism. So let me set the paper of record straight regarding Neil Genzlinger's review of Prospect Park's online versions of All My Children and One Life to Live that ran on May 4. (The revived daytime soaps premiered on April 29.) It was full of the kind of specious reasoning and uninformed points of view that gives reviews and the people who write them bad names.

A few of its most egregious declarations:

"At least, that's how it looked to this potential viewer, one of the vast millions who never watched the original shows because they had jobs." (People who watched AMC and OLTL on ABC didn't have jobs? How condescending, to them and to working girls past and present, like Carol Burnett, Aretha Franklin, Julia Roberts, Chandra Wilson, Sherri Shepherd and Elizabeth Taylor, all self-proclaimed soap fans, as well as to the frequently and gainfully employed Oscar nominee James Franco, who personally requested a role on General Hospital.)

"Unless you're into camp, why put in the time it would take to decipher these shows when there are much, much better ones beckoning?" (The soaps-are-campy argument is a creaky one, and you could easily sub the word "camp" for "country" and make the same argument against Nashville, or "hospital drama" when similarly slamming Grey's Anatomy, or "historical period pieces" to dismiss Downton Abbey and The Borgias. Doesn't loving any show and sticking with it require an affinity for its premise or some specific quality it possesses?)

"The acting ranges from mediocre to outright bad, especially on All My Chidlren. Any scene involving a couple over the age of 50 has the treacly gloss of a Viagra commercial. Any young characters are played by actors far too old for the roles." (Oh sure, Daytime Emmy winner Debbi Morgan, who has been acting in prime time and in film since the '70s, is "mediocre to outright bad," and those twenty-to-thirtysomething Glee kids sure do look like actual high schoolers.)

I support the right of informed TV critics who watch without prejudice to carp about anything on the air. It's a matter of taste, and the daytime soap is pretty much an acquired one. Many of us who obsess over them learned to love them as tykes, watching them at our mother's (or grandmother's) feet. Without my long history of daytime-soap viewing, I'm not sure I would care about them today. But I don't think that's groundbreaking news. I'm certain many longtime viewers feel the same way.

I'm accustomed to being ridiculed for my unhip taste in television, so I can handle Genzlinger's condescending attitude toward my stories and by association, their viewers. But to spend the bulk of his review criticizing the shows for being too insider seems unfair and not a little disingenuous. Revenge has been on the air for only two seasons, and anyone tuning in for the first time with last Sunday's episode would be utterly confused. Why does everyone have an ex to grind with someone, and what the hell is "the Falcon"? Is arcane content, as Genzlinger suggests, really more acceptable when it requires only a few seasons worth of catching up (on DVD) as opposed to a few decades (on YouTube or any of those soap sites dedicated to such things)?

I've been watching Revenge religiously from the beginning, and I'm still a little confused, so newbies must be positively perplexed. That's how it goes with serialized storytelling. If you want to know what's going on, either you do your homework before joining in, or you just watch patiently and attentively and try to catch up.

It would have made absolutely no sense for Prospect Park to have pretended that the characters on AMC and OLTL had no back story -- including the"older gentleman" on AMC and "the woman he's apparently known for a long time," the iconic Adam Chandler (played by multiple-Daytime Emmy winner David Canary) and the nearly equally legendary Brooke English (portrayed by fellow Emmy honoree Julia Barr) to those who have been paying attention for the 30-plus years they've been around. Should the show have pretended they were just born yesterday? Or should they have explained the nature of their relationship and their long, twisted history in the opening scene?

Serialized dramas are always beginning in the middle of the action and then back tracking to explain things. Such was the case with Lost, and Desperate Housewives after it skipped ahead five years. Revenge did it in its first season, too, by beginning with a murder and then going back in time to retell the incidents of the previous summer.

It's been nearly two years since the final ABC episode of AMC aired, and the show lost most of its cast, so it would have been tricky to replay the final finale moments from five years earlier (on AMC's time scale) and what happened immediately afterwards. It would not have been such a bad approach (after all, GH has done a pretty decent job with its recent Dante/Lulu flashbacks featuring the new actress playing Lulu), but I suspect that suspense is part of the plan. The show wants to make sure you're dying to know what the hell happened after what happened five years ago (J.R., or whoever, pulling the trigger at Adam and Brooke's party), even if it means banging you over the head with references to it.

I can't say much about AMC overall as I am outside of the U.S. (and therefore can't access the shows on Hulu and can only download from Argentina's iTunes store) and was only able to watch the first new episode on YouTube, but OLTL pretty much explained everything within the first week. A new viewer who was paying attention and wasn't just out to write a negative review certainly would have understood why everyone hated the character Genzlinger referred to as "some surly guy with a scar on his cheek" (Todd Manning, also legendary) by the end of the first week's four new episodes. The Friday re-cap show, which I suspect eventually will be jettisoned, filled in more blanks.

Perhaps Prospect Park undermined itself by spinning the online versions more as reboots than as continuations, the latter of which is pretty much what they are. Most of the new actors are playing aged characters from the ABC versions, so I don't understand why the New York Times reviewer -- who admittedly doesn't know much about daytime soaps and must hate the genre to deem the campy, self-conscious acting and convoluted storylines of a prime-time serial like Revenge "much, much better" -- seems to think they should be starting from the beginning, lest new viewers be confused. What is this, the Bible?

Also, it's easier to create the illusion of higher quality when you have the big budget to do so. How would most of the acting on Revenge hold up if it were transferred to the far cheaper sets of OLTL's Llanview? I think a large part of why the storylines in prime time -- which are often no less ridiculous than those in daytime -- seem more plausible and the bad acting doesn't appear to be quite as dreadful is that prime time's glossier trappings can distract us from holes in story. This is as much an issue for any of the remaining four daytime soaps on network TV as it is for the new AMC and OLTL.

As for the Times' evaluation of soap viewership, it's so 1999 to suggest that at any time this century the audience has been locked in to having to watch them during the daytime hours in which they air. That argument may have been true in the pre-TiVo age, but it's completely irrelevant today.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not taking issue with the Times review because I think the shows are perfect. I don't. The pacing is off on OLTL, and I worry that the scenes we're getting are more episodic vignettes than the seeds of engrossing long-term umbrella story. I also agree that the Victor Lord Jr.-is-alive reveal fell a little flat, but remember Victoria Grayson's resurrection from the dead on Revenge? That wasn't treated with much less of a shrug. One of the defining characteristics of daytime drama is that for all of the overacting the stars are accused of doing, often the characters respond to the outlandish out-of-the-real-world hands they're dealt (returns from the dead, frequent life-in-jeopardy moments, the supernatural) with much less OMFG! shock than the average person would in real life. We'd be in therapy for decades. A week later, our soap superhumans are back to life as usual.

I would defend anyone's right to criticize daytime soaps. I don't think supporting the genre means we all have to sing the praises of the shows all the time. But as a veteran magazine editor, I'm appalled that the Times would run a review of the online versions of AMC and OLTL written by a writer who obviously knows nothing about daytime drama, can't identify Adam Chandler and Todd Manning by name, and has never even bothered to watch any of either show's previous episodes. (If the goal of the Times was to offer an unbiased critique of soaps by a newcomer to the genre, the task should have been assigned to an unbiased writer who didn't already consider the shows beneath him.) It's a lot like letting a jazz music critic who's never heard a David Bowie song and secretly considers rock & roll to be crass review Bowie's current album.

No decent editor with any respect for rock & roll (and Bowie) would ever do that. By now, hasn't daytime drama, a genre that's been around in some form for more than eight decades, earned the same level of respect? I wouldn't be surprised if Chelsea Handler, bless her critical heart, never misses an episode of the shows she loves to hate on. Criticism is always smarter -- and funnier -- when it's informed.

One Thing You Should Never Do in the Middle of Sex

2013-05-07T07:12:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I received a tear-stained message from Tobias, an acquaintance in Melbourne whom I'd never pegged as someone with a flair for melodrama. He'd barely batted a brown eye that one time I insulted his intelligence by telling him he had none, then turned on my heel and flounced off. My drunken outburst, though (and yes, I'm going to blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol), was nothing compared to what had recently gone down on the other side of the world.

"just called my ex and he picked up while he was having sex so im abit pisssseedddddddd"

That'll teach him to be careful whom he drunk dials.

When I tried to conjure a visual of a hot Australian guy in the throes of passion pausing to answer the phone, it was superimposed with a flashback to what was possibly the most disturbing scene in the entire six-year run of Sex and the City. (Yes, even more so than anything involving Carrie and the Russian!) In it, my girl Miranda called her own ex Skippy, who was in the middle of doing it with the girl to whom he'd just introduced Miranda after they bumped into each other on the street.

A brief conversation followed, after which Skippy promptly dumped his bedmate while still inside of her. On the scale of shitty human behavior during sex, this might trump what Adam did to Natalia on the penultimate Season 2 episode of Girls. I'm not sure which is more appalling: that Skippy didn't have the decency to wait until after afterglow, or that he'd taken Miranda's call at all. Was the sex with the rebound girl really so whatever that he couldn't bear to ignore the ringing phone? Shouldn't couples turn those damn things off before foreplay anyway?

I just don't get it. What is this human obsession with taking every single phone call? Are people that afraid of missing something important if they let voice mail do its job -- even in the wee hours of the morning, when any news is most likely bad news? And if you must look to see who's calling, wouldn't caller i.d. rule out any pressing medical emergencies?

I can handle answering the phone and reading text messages during a date -- well, actually I can't -- but if I were on the side of the bed of Skippy's girlfriend or the guy with Tobias's ex, I'd definitely get out of it. If I'm not good enough to distract you from the ringing phone, you can get off under someone else.

Though the guy under (or over or beside) Tobias's ex had a lot more to be angry about, I could understand Tobias's ire, too. Talk about throwing "I've moved on" in somebody's face. It's safe to assume that the ex knew exactly who was calling, thanks to that aforementioned modern wonder known as caller i.d., and it's even safer to surmise that it's precisely why he answered the phone. And maybe I'm being a bit too conspiracy theorist here, but those grunts and moans he no doubt played up after picking up -- or did he tell Tobias what he was doing, which would actually prove my point even more? -- were no doubt for the benefit of the guy he probably used to call the love of his life.

I felt cheap just thinking about it. Suddenly the actions of my own ex, who once emailed me after seven months of silence just to let me know he was seeing someone new, didn't seem so bad, after all. But I still think he's kind of a jerk for disturbing my peace. When he called me three times in the middle of the night a few weeks later (and no, I wasn't alone), I certainly didn't answer the phone.

I wonder if he was the guy with Tobias's ex. Unlikely, yes, but how poetically just would that be? I can't think of two insensitive guys who deserve each other more.

Alison Moyet's "the minutes": A Track-by-Track Review

2013-05-06T00:31:00.001-03:00

The world of pop is always a better place when there's new music from Alison Moyet about to enter it. It arrives today in the UK (6 May) in the form of the minutes, which is scheduled to wash up on U.S. shores on June 11. Here are my not-so-random thoughts on the album's 11 tracks.

"Horizon Flame" Ambient and futuristic, which are two words one might not have previously associated with Alison Moyet. A post-space age love song (not to be confused with "Yesterday's Flame," Track 1 on 2002's Hometime), the opening number on Moyet's eighth solo studio album and first since 2007's The Turn clearly signals a change in musical direction after the stately chamber pop of its predecessor, which was initially conceived, in part, as the musical accompaniment for a stage play. "Horizon Flame," with its hint of a dance beat, an instrumental bridge that sounds like it might turn into the introduction of Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money," and slightly processed vocals that seem to riding in on the wind, is more suited to future cinema. I can imagine it playing over the opening scene of a James Bond film 50 years from now, as Daniel Craig's third successor emerges from a ring of fire, dressed to thrill and still licensed to kill.

"Changeling" One step forward, then one step back, but in the case of "Changeling," that's hardly regression. Track 2 starts to deliver on Moyet's pre-release promise of a return to the electronic form of her early '80s work with Yazoo, but it has more musical elasticity (at times the synthesizers sound almost plucked) and bite than anything she ever did with Vince Clarke. This is what Upstairs at Eric might have sounded like if Clarke had been influenced as much by guys with guitars as he was by Kraftwerk.

"When I Was Your Girl" The album's first single is a standard Moyet ballad in which she covers familiar musical and emotional ground (welcome back to her torch zone). The backing vocals on the chorus are pure '80s power ballad (very Robert John "Mutt" Lange-produced Def Leppard), as is the musical interlude, and even the title sounds like it could have appeared on a previous Moyet album. Lacking any real aural connection to the tracks that precede it, "Girl" begins to suggest an album unburdened by any unifying musical theme.

"Apple Kisses" As industrial and Middle Eastern influences mingle in the background, Moyet plays sexual temptress, and it's a surprisingly good fit. Rihanna doesn't have a thing to worry about -- Moyet is too classy to try to win over a rude boy by acting like his female equivalent -- but it's nice to hear her putting aside her usual vocal reserve and letting her inner sex kitten out for a purr.

"Right as Rain" Moyet at the mid-'90s disco. In these mid-album tracks, 51-year-old Moyet sounds like a vintage diva experiencing a mid-life sexual reawakening. In 1995-96 this would have given Everything But the Girl's "Missing" a run for its under-the-strobelight following. Moyet sounds so comfortable with the beat that it's a wonder she hasn't spent more of her solo career riding one. But it's a short dance: At 3:07, just as you've begun to work yourself into a full sweaty frenzy, it's over, leaving you wanting at least a full minute more, which, in a pop world of short attention spans is saying a lot (all of it good).

"Remind Yourself" A variation on the ambient electro musical theme of "Horizon Flame." For all the pre-release hype that the minutes would be a return to Moyet's techno roots, most of it so far sounds more like her later solo work. Not that she's repeating herself on "Remind Yourself." It's neither groundbreaking nor resolutely of the moment, but there's a newfound tension and spark in the way her voice floats above and cuts through the electronic din, rendering the song somewhat revolutionary in the context of Moyet's previous body of work. Producer Guy Sigsworth has somehow managed to make the multi-layered musical backdrop sound spacious and airy instead of fussy and cluttered, and Moyet, always the vocal equivalent of a great, unattainable beauty (unlike her duo-to-solo British peers Annie Lennox and Tracey Thorn, her accent is more apparent in her phrasing, giving her delivery an aura of posh), sounds warmer and more accessible than ever, like she's singing -- no, cooing -- right into your ear.

"Love Reign Supreme" Up to now, this is the track that most sounds like it could be an '80s collaboration with Vince Clark (if Moyet had been the lead singer of Depeche Mode, Clarke's previous band, and not Yazoo) but with far more sunshine and light.

"A Place to Stay" The most pointed difference between Guy Sigsworth and Moyet's previous collaborators is in Sigsworth's harder, more aggressive approach on the minutes. Think his work with Alanis Morissette on 2008's Flowers of Entanglement, not his softer-edged production for Madonna, Britney Spears, Robyn and Bjork. Basically another torch song that goes industrial on the chorus, "A Place to Stay" might be one of the minutes' lesser tracks, but it's ongoing proof that synthetic pop need not sacrifice soul for sound.

"Filigree" I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the most Yazoo-inspired song on the minutes is also its best. Part of what pushes it to the top is its slow-burning drama, which reminds me of "Softly Over" and "Mr. Blue," the bare-bones You and Me Both Yazoo tracks that cemented my early obsession with Moyet. (It's the minutes' equivalent of "Coloured Bedspread," the best cut on Annie Lennox's last album, 2007's Songs of Mass Destruction, which also happened to be her solo offering that sounded most like her work with Dave Stewart in Eurythmics). Its crowning achievement, though, is mostly the result of spartan acoustic-electro production (for much of the song, little more than a tentative beat and delicate bleeps), which enhances Moyet's vocal -- a haunting blend of fragile and unbreakable -- by getting out of its way.

"All Signs of Life" Where do you go after the perfection of "Filigree"? For half of "All Signs of Life" (the best half) to a similarly stripped-down place, where mood trumps sound. But when the eerie, ambient verses turn into another pounding chorus, it tempts me to back track to the previous one.

"Rung by the Tide" More tender-to-tough and back and forth, but less jarringly so. It's a nice album coda with a title that, like the opening track's, references the elements. My only complaint is that there's a little too much instrumental and not quite enough Moyet, which is the reason we came here in the first place. Such a great singer always deserves the final word.

Shockers! Sane Words of Semi-Wisdom from Amanda Bynes on Twitter

2013-05-05T08:14:00.000-03:00

@AmandaBynes is usually a tweeting disaster, but she's a savvy one. While calling @Drake and @JennyMcCarthy "ugly" isn't going to help her case in Hollywood, it probably did win her some new "followers" because everybody loves a good celebrity smackdown. Beyond the bile, though, there are actually some sweet observations about life and love. Like many 27 year olds, she has a weakness for cliches ("Be careful what you wish for") and platitudes ("win from within," "Love isn't real if it's not forever"), but if you scroll patiently through Bynes's tweets, original ideas eventually emerge.

They're so easy to overlook because she tends to give far more space to negativity, whether it's in the form of rants against magazine editors, including those at my professional alma mater Us Weekly, and the paparazzi (for the Top 2 offenses: covering her "erratic behavior" and running bad photos of her) and @PerezHilton (for simply existing).

If she's just looking for attention, it's working. While I enjoyed her work in Hairspray and Easy A, I was never particularly interested in Bynes or thought much about her one way or the other until she started driving really badly and getting arrested. Now that she's taken to going off on Twitter, I'm a little bit hooked. I never follow celebrities, and I starting following her because I could use the daily entertainment.

10 Sort of Smart and Totally Sane Things Amanda Bynes Has Said on Twitter

The reason I'm suing everyone I'm suing: defamation (of character) n. the act of making untrue statements about another which damages his/her reputation. If the defamatory statement is printed or broadcast over the media it is libel and, if only oral, it is slander.

@joeyislame don't hurt yourself babe! You're beautiful! Ily!

Don't worry about thoughts, it doesn't matter how it feels, all that matters is how it looks..

I don't care what you think, I care what you say.

When I like you the only one who can make me not like you is you.

When you're beside me I'm beside myself

When you're in love, only one persons opinion of you matters.

If you don't get jealous it's because you don't care

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women like to be a man’s last romance.

What you think about is what you are ❤

11 One-Hit Wonders Who Are Far Less Deserving of the Dishonor Than Two-Hit Wonder PSY

2013-05-04T20:41:00.000-03:00

One of the most unexpected developments of the year in pop so far must be the fact that PSY won't go down in history as a one-hit wonder. No performer of a recent viral hit this side of Baauer's "Harlem Shake" seemed as destined to never again scale the heights of Billboard's Hot 100 as the man behind the abominable "Gangnam Style" (the song and the dance).

Then something shocking happened on his way to the cut-out bin: PSY scored another hit. Alas, "Gentleman," the slightly superior follow-up to "Gangnam Style" that sounds like it might morph into "Harlem Shake" at any second, could manage only one brief week in the Top 10, at No. 6, before plummeting to No. 26. So long, Psy! (We hope!)

Whether or not he ever manages to pull off another chart coup, PSY is already more successful than these 11 far-more-deserving-of-more-than-one-hit wonders. (For the purpose of this post, I'm defining a one-hit wonder as any act that hit the U.S. Top 10 with its first Top 40 single at least five years ago -- which would disqualify recent candidates like Foster the People and Gotye -- and never again made it into the Top 40.)

Gregory Abbott "Shake You Down" (No. 1, 1986) A decade before logging his lone hit, he was the 12-years-younger husband of Freda Payne, the singer of the 1970 No. 3 hit "Band of Gold," who, unlike her ex, managed to eke out two more Top 40 singles (including the 1971 No. 12 Vietnam-protest hit "Bring the Boys Home.")

Amii Stewart "Knock on Wood" (No. 1, 1979) I've always thought that the singer of my all-time favorite disco hit (and one of my Top 10 favorite covers) deserved at least one more claim to fame.

Amy Winehouse "Rehab" (No. 9, 2007) Speaking of talented women named Amy, it's hard to believe that with all the great classic tracks on Winehouse's breakout opus, 2006's Back to Black, not one of them managed to climb higher than No. 77 -- the peak position of "You Know I'm No Good" -- on the Hot 100. At least her fellow countrymen, once again exhibiting far better music taste than the Yankees, were smart enough to send four more of them into the UK Top 40.

Jane Child "Don't Wanna Fall in Love" (No. 2, 1990) If you haven't heard any of this Canadian's other work -- the rest of 1989's Jane Child, 1993's Here Not There, and 2002's Surge -- you are truly missing out on some incredible music. (Read more about it here.)

Love and Rockets "So Alive" (No. 3, 1989) Of all the British acts to land only one Top 10/Top 40 single in the '80s, the trio that sneaked theirs in at the end of the decade was perhaps the most deserving of so many more. (Read more about it here.)

Tweet "Oops (Oh My)" (No. 7, 2002) The late '90s and early '00s introduced a number of female R&B singers who soared only once -- Nicole, Sunshine Anderson, Truth Hurts -- but anyone who has heard Tweet's "Party 2nite" (which was turned into a Top 5 UK hit in 2006 by Booty Luv, whose cover was as dreadful as its moniker) knows why she's the one who should have taken flight again.

Take That "Back for Good" (No. 7, 1995) Even more inexplicable than the lack of solo success in the U.S. for Take That member Robbie Williams is how one of the most successful boy bands in UK history, with 19 Top 10 singles there, managed to place only one of them on Billboard's Hot 100.

Faith No More "Epic" (No. 9, 1989) The 25-year-old who guessed my age to be between 35 and 40 the other night totally redeemed himself when he showed me some of the songs on his iPod, and I spotted FNM's shoulda-been-huge 1992 single "Midlife Crisis," a No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart that hit No. 10 in the UK but failed to dent the Hot 100.

James Blunt "You're Beautiful (No. 1, 2006) Despite Blunt's talent, I can't say I didn't see it coming -- or rather, not coming, if we're talking about hit status for his failed (in the U.S.) follow-ups to "You're Beautiful." Sensitive male singer-songwriters haven't been pop's thing in decades, and indeed, three No. 1s later, Canadian Daniel Powter became another future one-hit wonder, never again charting after "Bad Day." Two (good) days ago, though, my iPod shuffle landed on "1973" (Blunt's 2007 single that peaked, interestingly, at No. 73 on the Hot 100) and convinced me not to count out Blunt just yet.

Joan Osborne "One of Us" (No. 4, 1995) Though I hated her only charting hit (which is why I'm posting the infinitely more deserving "Right Hand Man," which flopped two singles later), I still consider Osborne to be one of the best things to come out of the mid-'90s Lilith Fair/Women in Confession Pop-Rock movement.

Sinead O'Connor "Nothing Compares 2 U" (No. 1, 1990) Here's another instance of a singer-songwriter's only hit (with a song she didn't write) not even grazing the surface of her talent, which is why I'm posting O'Connor's non-charting (except in her native Ireland, where it reached No. 48) 2005 single "Marcus Garvey" instead.

A Pre-Birthday Burning Question (and Answer): How Old Do I Really Look Now?

2013-05-03T09:22:00.001-03:00

A few years ago, I took an online test designed to determine how old you are on the inside. After answering a series of health-related questions (Do you smoke? What do you eat? How often do you drink/exercise/have sex? Do certain chronic illnesses, like diabetes and hypertension, run in your family?), you were given your medical age.

Naturally, as with your cosmetic age, the further below your chronological age, the better. I turned out to be a robust 34, which was slightly disappointing (damn that genetic hypertension and diabetes, the latter of which I've thankfully avoided thus far), because I was on the cusp of 40 at the time, and I was used to being told I looked at least a decade younger. But it certainly beat the results of my friend, who was four years younger than me chronologically and a year older than me medically.

I probably should have gone out and celebrated adding about five years to my life. And it wasn't as if I'd been told that I looked 34. Let's face it: Whether we want to admit it or not, most of us are slaves to our vanity. When it comes to age and guessing games, it's what's on the outside that counts most, and who doesn't love being told they look a lot younger than they are?

Up to now, I've been pretty lucky. People usually count backwards when they guess my age. Two years ago, I met a 19 year old in an Auckland club who placed me around 26. Normally, I give credit to Kiehl's Facial Fuel, but that night it was all about booze and great lighting.With enough whiskey and the right dimmer, it's so much easier to pass for twentysomething. When I met up with the 19 year old the next afternoon to see The Hangover Part II, I wasn't about to ask him how old I looked now!

I hope his guess-timate still would have been more flattering than the one I got last night in my living room, where I had neither the benefit of whiskey nor good lighting. I was sitting across from a 25-year-old university student, thinking he looked more like 30, which was actually a good thing (though I'm sure he would have disagreed had I told him what I was really thinking when he asked). When you're over 40, the numerical difference between 25 and 30 is negligible, but 30 is so much hotter.

Switching mental subjects, I started talking about my plans for my birthday next week (May 7), which, of course, brought us right back to the age thing.

"Cuantos años vas a cumplir?"

"44." I couldn't tell a lie.

He looked as surprised as I was hoping he would. I was also hoping that whatever came next would start with a 2, but apparently, that 10-peso bill I'd been given by the cashier at the panaderia yesterday morning, the one with words in Spanish scribbled on it that promised me good luck for the rest of the day, had gotten it all wrong.

"Pareces mas como 35 a 40."

What? That old? Nobody had ever told me I look 40 before. My first thought was that I should probably turn off another light. My second was that what he knew about my life -- that I had been a journalist for many years in New York City, and I've been living abroad forever -- must have informed the age-range he would have assigned to me. My third was that he'd actually remembered that I was already over 40 when he met me two years ago, so he was aiming for a little realism in what he perceived as flattery. My fourth: Well, if I had to guess my own age, I probably wouldn't go a year under 40. At least he'd gone five.

In the end, I decided to accentuate the positive. Looking nine to four years younger than my soon-to-be new age is a lot better than some of the dreadful alternatives (like not being around to welcome it). And for the first time since my next birthday started creeping up on me, I actually felt relieved to be turning one year older. To look four years younger than my age is certainly better than three.

Do I Discriminate Against Blind People?

2013-05-02T08:41:00.001-03:00

I recently awoke from another one of my oddball dreams. It was the latest in a series of head-scratchers, the follow-up to an unconscious nocturnal mini-drama in which I was plopped right into the middle of a fake General Hospital storyline. (See, I am a card-carrying nerd!)

In the dream in question, though, I was not in Port Charles but once again living in the apartment complex in Melbourne that I called home for the first three and a half months of this year, only it had doubled in size from two to four stories. I was waiting at home for the arrival of someone with whom I was going to do unspecified business.

Knock, knock, knock.

I went to the door, expecting to greet a typical Aussie lady who'd have pen and paper in hand, ready to take notes. When I opened it, a giant dog as big as a small horse rushed in, followed by a timid-looking woman holding a telescoping cane. She was blind?!

My mind immediately began to race, running around as aimlessly and clumsily as that dog. I'd had no idea that the woman I'd previously only spoken to on the phone was blind, and she hadn't told me. Though her visual impairment made me somewhat uncomfortable (possibly because, as in real life, I couldn't stop wondering, What if that were me?), I told myself that I didn't have a problem doing business with her. It was the dog that concerned me. He was acting more like a bull in a china shop, running from corner to corner, knocking over everything in his path and chomping anything he could sink his teeth into.

The dog had to go. It's not just that the building had a policy against pets (one that I was pretty certain the management would have overlooked, though I'm not sure where Australia stands on political correctness), but he was completely invading my personal space and making a mess of it.

What was a neat freak to do? Should I castigate my visitor, the human one, for her lack of full disclosure? Was she even required to disclose anything? Though I don't know what business she was to conduct for me, I knew in the dream that it didn't necessarily require her to possess her sense of sight. But I was uncomfortable in the presence of this blind woman and her dog, and not just because the dog was destroying my apartment. In a way, that was the least of my concerns in that moment.

I felt like Blanche in the episode of The Golden Girls in which Blanche gave her number to a guy who asked her out in a bar and didn't realize he was blind until he showed up at her apartment for their first date. (She had a similar situation with a guy in a wheelchair in the public library once -- that girl's powers of observation were truly shot!) I can't say that the same thing might not have happened to me. I've had few interactions with blind people in real life, which might explain why I was so ill at ease. In fact, the only one I can remember having was the time last year that I sat next to a chatty guy on a nine-hour flight from Bangkok to Melbourne, and I didn't even realize he was blind until I saw him walking through the terminal carrying a telescoping cane after we'd landed.

I've often wondered how I would feel about dating a blind person. Unlike Blanche, I'd be less worried about wondering what he saw in me if he couldn't see me and be more concerned about the limitations it would put on our activities. But then if he looked like Justin Kirk, who played the hot blind guy in the film version of Love! Valour! Compassion!, it probably wouldn't matter.

But this wasn't Love! Valour! Compassion!. It was a dream that was quickly turning into a nightmare. I felt like a gay guy on Grindr standing in front of someone who looked a lot better in his photos. I wasn't sure how far the blind woman had traveled to get to me, but I was certain it had taken a considerable effort. I couldn't treat her like a Grindr pick-up and casually send her on her way.

When I woke up before the denouement, I was disappointed because I really wanted to see what happened next? Would I pretend that it was perfectly normal to have a mad dog on the loose in my apartment and excuse the woman for not controlling him because she was blind and had other things to worry about? Would I tell her that the building doesn't allow pets, and her friend would have to wait outside? Or would I come up with some brilliant excuse to excuse myself from requiring her services?

I'll never know what I ended up doing, and I'm still not sure what I'd do if I were in the same situation during regular waking hours. And the worst part of it is that I can't help but hope I never have to find out.

Wil Wheaton on Nerdism: Is It Really a Social Movement?

2013-05-01T07:10:00.000-03:00

A friend of mine just tagged me in a Facebook post in which he shared a video of the actor Wil Wheaton speaking at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo on April 27. A mother in the audience made an unusual request. She asked Wheaton to send a message to her newborn daughter explaining why it's great to be a nerd.

While watching the video, two thoughts entered my head: 1) Is being a nerd hereditary? I would assume that the new mom is one, or she probably would have had "cooler" things to do last weekend, but does she just assume that like mother like daughter? Will she allow nerdism to blossom naturally in her little girl if it was meant to be, or will she make it a part of her manifest destiny? 2) That Wil Wheaton sure gives great off-the-cuff speech! The words just roll off his tongue, and he doesn't stumble over them. Was he fed that question beforehand and given time to perfect his response?

Interestingly, I probably wouldn't have known who Wil Wheaton is if I didn't spend way too many half hours watching the same 20 or so episodes of The Big Bang Theory. (Stand By Me was a lifetime ago!) Now I'm dying to see more of this smart, engaging guy. I love his positive spin on nerdism. The way he sees it, being a nerd is mostly about passion, though generally for things that the general population might consider too arcane or too unhip to obsess over.

In that regard, I plead guilty. I've been a card-carrying nerd all of my life. I was never really into comic books (though I did read the X-Men and Fantastic Four series to feel closer to my big brother Jeff, who loved them but couldn't be further from a nerd) or science fiction, always preferring tonier literary fare (biographies! classics! Oscar Wilde!) and cinema as character study (see, nerdy right there!). I was the kind of kid who learned all the names of the then-39 U.S. Presidents at age 7 and, when I wasn't reciting them to my classmates, spent the next several years devouring as much information as I could about them. To this day, I'd rather spend New Year's Eve watching a documentary on YouTube about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President, than dance the night of December 31 away at DJ Station in Bangkok. (Yes, a true story. Oh, what a night -- late December, 2012!)

I've never seen an episode of Game of Thrones (though I do have one in the to-watch queue on my laptop), and I couldn't care less about Star Wars, Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, but I'm still hopelessly devoted to daytime soaps, Greek mythology, the Oscars (even more so now than as a kid), trivia, lists, and the underdog. (Not to mention, Underdog, a youthful obsession whom I rediscovered in 2011 while watching the Cartoon Network in Bangkok.) As Wheaton said, though, it's not what you love, it's how you love it, and how I love my "stories," my fun facts and my history documentaries.

I may no longer dress the part (after finding me on Facebook a few years ago, a friend I've known since grade school marveled at my physical transformation because, she sheepishly said, "you always dressed a little nerdy"), and I hope I don't look it (at the time, I hated being compared to the gay black kid in the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, though in hindsight, I get where everyone was coming from), but on the inside, I remain 100 percent pure geek.

The part of Wheaton's monologue that I'm not so sure about is the social aspect of being a nerd. Does one really have to travel thousands of miles and seek out like-minded people in order to be truly nerdy? I may spend way too many hours perusing the message boards on the soap blog Daytime Confidential, but I wouldn't necessarily want to meet most of the people who post there in person, especially if they are as bitchy in person as some of them are are in writing. (There's a fine line between snarky, a hallmark of being a nerd, and bitchy, which used to be the specialty of people who harassed nerds.)

The furthest I've ever gone out of my way to be in the company of other "story" addicts was when I traveled from Manhattan to Long Island to attend a benefit featuring the stars of All My Children and One Life to Live. I had a great time, but I couldn't wait to go home and dive into the latest issue of Soap Opera Digest, my subscription to which was one of the hardest things for me to give up when I moved from New York City to Buenos Aires.

I've always been more of a loner nerd, preferring to do my obsessing in the comfort and privacy of my own home, as a party of one. In some ways, that makes me even more of a nerd, as it implies a certain misfit isolation, which I always thought was at the core of nerdism. For me, it's not an alternative form of conformity and group think, but the ultimate manifestation of individuality.

25 Things I'm Dying to Know About Social/Dating/Sexual Etiquette

2013-04-30T16:49:00.000-03:00

No, I'm not particularly interested in being Mr. Manners, but I wouldn't mind being a nicer, more polite person (losing none of my slightly testy edge, of course). To that end, today I've got some burning questions on my mind.

1. Is it okay to drop by without calling first?

2. Once on the inside, is it a gross invasion of someone else's personal space to enter it and... a) light up a cigarette without permission, b) change the music or the television channel, c) open the refrigerator, drawers or closet doors without asking, d) lie or sit on a nicely made bed without an invitation?

3. Is it rude to tell someone that he/she has bad breath?

4. Is it okay to ask "What's your name again?" the morning after, or should you just hope he includes his name when he writes down his phone number on the way out?

5. If you can't be with the one you love, should you really love the one you're with? Is that fair to either one of you, especially if the one you're with has issues with being a consolation prize?

6. If the one you're with calls out someone else's name, do you have every right to kick him out of bed?

7. Is it okay for an ex to send you the email equivalent of longing glances while he's dating someone new?

8. How do you nicely tell a romantic suitor to get lost? (Or that you can't date him because he has bad breath?)

9. Is it "nicer" to just stop responding to his texts/IMs (a non-response I'd prefer to get over those dreaded words: "I'm just not that into you"), or is that a total cop out, and far ruder? Do we owe it to everyone, even the guy we've only been out with once, to tell them how we feel, whether by text, email, phone call or in person?

10. Is it acceptable to answer the phone, read a text message, or respond to one during a date?

11. It is fine to ignore a "hi," "hello" or "hola" instant message until later, or forever? Does the person sending it really have anything significant to say?

12. Is it wrong to end a cyber exchange without typing "Goodbye" or some other concluding equivalent to indicate that it was nice chatting, and the conversation is now over?

13. If you instigate an email or text message conversation -- say, after a first date -- do you have to respond to the other person's response, or are you locked in as a "good guy" for writing first?

14. Isn't deleting people on Facebook so 2009?

15. What does "xxoo" really mean? Unlike "I love you," is it okay if I don't write it back?

16. Is it wrong for a white guy to refer to the black mother of his child as his "baby mama" (as nu-Matthew Buchanan did to nu-Destiny Evans in the April 29 premiere webisode of the One Life to Live reboot)?

17. When mad man John Hamm complains about people discussing the size of his, um, package, is it just false modesty, or does he have a point?

18. Does the next person who dares to ask me "Is it true what they say about black men?" deserve the full eye-roll treatment?

19. Who gets to claim the armrest in coach on airplanes?

20. Is it wrong to make a stutterer keep talking on national TV? (Shame on The Voice [Australia]'s Seal and American Idol's Ryan Seacrest?)

21. If lunch or dinner was your idea, are you stuck with the bill?

22. To the left, to the left, or to the right on the sidewalk? Does it follow the country's road rules?

23. Do pedestrians still have the right of way at intersections, and should people on bicycles yield to runners on the jogging track?

24. When people declare that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results as if that really is the definition of insanity, is it okay to inform them that no, actually, it isn't, that it's just an overused Albert Einstein quote that's not nearly as clever as what he said about the infinite universe and human stupidity?

25. Speaking of human stupidity, is it okay to call people out on isolated instances of it, or is calling what someone has said or done stupid tantamount to calling them the same?

10 Great Songs That I First Heard While Watching TV

2013-04-29T14:00:00.005-03:00

Remember the "Fire and Ice"-to-"Ice Ice Baby" Age (1981-1990), when MTV was the visual forum most likely to launch a pop hit? Those days are long long gone, the network's increasingly non-musical programming in the '90s and, more recently, the rise and rise of YouTube have seen to that.

For a while, movies filled the hit-making void left by the de-emphasis of the M in MTV, but film soundtracks are no longer nearly as bankable as they were in the '70s, '80s and '90, when the ones to Saturday Night Fever, Dirty Dancing and The Bodyguard were among the biggest hit albums of their respective decades. In fact, a No. 1 single hasn't won the Best Original Song Oscar since Eminem's "Lose Yourself" 10 years ago, and had the Academy's most recent anointee, Adele's "Skyfall," come out circa 1984, I have no doubt that it would have spent more than just a lone week in the Top 10 of Billboard's Hot 100.

Perhaps Adele's Bond theme would have fared better there had she performed it on Saturday Night Live, the TV show that sent her on her crash-collision course with megastardom after she appeared on it in 2008, six years after television started to really matter again in the creation of pop stars and pop hits. We can probably blame American Idol for upsetting the balance of pop power and shifting it back to TV for the first time since MTV ruled the '80s. In the years after its 2002 debut, Idol has been perhaps the most dependable launching pad for pop and country stars/hits, of which Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood have been the biggest, and it also re-ignited Jennifer Lopez's pop career after she performed her comeback-hit-to-be "On the Floor" on the show in 2011.

Across the Atlantic, Britain's Got Talent turned its biggest loser Susan Boyle (who came in second in 2009) into a household name and a multi-platinum recording artist. Now Olly Murs, another 2009 runner-up (on Britain's The X Factor), is boldly going where Girls Aloud and Cheryl Cole (the massive-in-the-UK British girl group discovered on Popstars: The Rivals in 2002 and its biggest member) have yet to go, up Billboard's Hot 100, where he's gone as high as No. 29 with "Troublemaker."

Then, of course, there's Glee, the now-waning one-time pop phenomenon that spawned platinum soundtrack albums and turned "Don't Stop Believin," Journey's 1981 No. 9 single, into a hit all over again in 2009, via the Glee cover, which peaked at No. 4 in the U.S., No. 2 in the UK, and No. 5 in Australia. My 24-year-old Aussie ex once told me that he'd never even heard Journey's original -- which became a UK hit for the first time in 2010, reaching No. 6 -- until Glee.

Though it's been the most prominent non-reality TV hit maker in recently years, Glee hasn't been the only one. Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" owes its Top 5 status in the U.S. to its prominent placement in the 2006 season finale of Grey's Anatomy. Two years later, M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes neatly underscored the changing of the pop guard from film to television after being featured in the trailer for the film Pineapple Express but not in the movie itself. Shortly after hitting TV airwaves through the trailer, the song began its ascent to No. 4 on the Hot 100.

Over in the world of commercials, where a Mitsubishi Eclipse ad helped make Dirty Vegas's "Days Go By" a Top 20 hit 10 years ago, consumer goods and Seth Rogen/James Franco stoner comedies aren't the only things being sold. Last year, Alex Clare ensured that he'd no longer be best known as Amy Winehouse's ex after his 2011 flop single "Too Close" was resuscitated after appearing in an Internet Explorer 9 ad, climbing all the way to No. 7 on the Hot 100.

Now it's Icona Pop's turn. Their 2012 single "I Love It" began a steady upward chart trajectory after being featured on the January 27 episode of Girls, where I first heard it. I've since enjoyed it on dance floors from Melbourne, Australia, where it was a No. 3 hit last year, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. It now sits at No. 13, and will likely become 2013's second Top 10 hit by a Swedish act (following Swedish House Mafia, whose "Don't You Worry Child" recently reached No. 6) in a matter of weeks. (Sadly, mainstream U.S.A. continues to sleep on Robyn, Sweden's second-best export after ABBA, and has been ever since she was briefly a break-out pop success with back-to-back Top 10 hits in 1997.)

Even when it's not making hits, TV continues to be a dependable taste maker, introducing me to a number of great songs, some of which have taken up permanent residence on my iPod's Most Played playlist. "Turn up the radio," Madonna sang on a 2012 single. Turn up the TV (or whatever you use to watch your favorite shows) is more like it. Here are 10 of the best songs I may never have heard without it.

1. DB Boulevard "Point of View" (Sex and the City, August 11, 2002)

2. Chip Jenkins "All for Love" (Men In Trees, 2006-2008, Argentina's Warner Channel ads)

3. Bryn Christopher "The Quest" (Grey's Anatomy, May 22, 2008)

4. Temper Trap "Soldier On" (90210, November 10, 2009)

5. Pink "Glitter in the Air" (52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards, January 31, 2010)

6. Boy & Bear "Mexican Mavis" (90210, April 25, 2011)

7. Regina Spektor "All the Rowboats" (Ringer, March 13, 2012)

8. Massive Attack featuring Hope Sandoval "Paradise Circus" (Revenge, November 4, 2012)

9. Lenny Williams "Cause I Love You" (performed by Vincent Powell on American Idol, February 28, 2013)

10. Tame Impala "Elephant" (Girls, March 17, 2013)

George Jones, 1931-2013: He Stopped Loving Her Today

2013-04-26T17:22:00.002-03:00

To fully understand the greatness of George Jones, you must first grasp the profound effect he had on his fellow artists -- his country antecedents, his peers and his Nashville descendants. No other singer in the history of country music was as inspirational as Jones, who died on April 26 in Nashville at age 81.

I arrived at his altar relatively late, at age 10, when he was cresting Billboard's country singles chart with his signature song, "He Stopped Loving Her Today," a No. 1 comeback hit in 1980 that was my mother's favorite song at the time. I've been a devout worshipper ever since. To know him, to know his voice and his music, was to love him forever. His ex-wife and sometime duet partner, the late Tammy Wynette, to whom he was turbulently married from 1969 to 1975, pretty much said so much when I interviewed her and Jones together in 1995 while they were promoting their reunion album One.

Despite their troubled marriage, marred by the alcoholism that nearly sent Jones to an early grave, Wynette was clearly still in awe of her ex. I was astonished by the easy rapport between them, the way they still finished each other's sentences, after all those years apart. To know him was to never stop loving him or his music, and he gave love right back -- and not only through his songs. I was convinced then and now that George never really stopped loving Tammy. (Watch the video below until the end for evidence.)

The second time I witnessed the George Jones Effect on a fellow superstar, he wasn't even in the room, just in the building. It was one year later, 1996, and there I was starstruck and smitten, sitting across from Anne Murray in the bar at the RIHGA Royal Hotel (now the London Hotel) in New York City, and all she could talk about was Jones, who someone told us was staying in the same hotel. It was a significant moment -- Murray's first No. 1 country single was her 1974 cover of Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" (retitled "He Thinks I Still Care"), itself a 1962 chart-topper -- and if I didn't get it before, from the way my mother adored him, from the way Wynette still clearly did, I got it then.

George Jones was not only a legend, he was a legend who inspired others to greatness (including Patty Loveless, on whose "You Don't Seem to Miss Me," featured in Wednesday's blog post, Jones provided memorable harmony), and that becomes a legend most.

Seven George Jones Hits That Defined My Youth

1. "Still Doin' Time" (No. 1, 1981) My favorite Jones single. The steel guitar motiff that begins and ends it remains one of my Top 5 moments in the history of recorded country music. So simple and so simply devastating.

2. Two Story House (No. 2, 1980) Not necessarily my favorite of his duets with Tammy Wynette (in retrospect, that honor would go to "Near You," No. 1 in 1976), but that "Oh, what splendor!" exemplifies his vocal greatness. Oh, what splendor!

3. "I Always Get Lucky With You" (No. 1, 1983) Jones's final country chart-topper. If you're gonna go out, you might as well go out at the top of your game, still kicking ass, effortlessly.

4. "I'm Not Ready Yet" (No. 2, 1980) How do you follow a great, unforgettable hit like "He Stopped Loving Her Today"? With another equally great, unforgettable one, of course.

5. "Yesterday's Wine" (No. 1, 1982) A chart-topping duet with Merle Haggard, a song whose greatness I recently rediscovered while running around Lumpini Park in Bangkok. Been there, tasted and offered that.

6. "Same Ole Me" (No. 5, 1982) Featuring The Oak Ridge Boys, the best backing vocal group of the early '80s, who also could be heard delivering their harmonic magic on 1980's Top 10 "Broken Trust" by Brenda Lee, who, incidentally, duetted with Jones on 1984's Top 15 "Hallelujah, I Love You So."

7. "Her Name Is" (No. 3, 1976) The first George Jones song I can remember loving, way back before I even knew George Jones was singing it.

6 Things I'd Forgotten I Love About Buenos Aires

2013-04-25T08:04:00.000-03:00

It's not exactly La Grande Jatte, but I love Plaza San Martin anyway.

I'll never forget about all the great friends I have in Buenos Aires, the delicious ensalada de fruta, the tree-saving bidets (How did I go so long without them?), or those ridiculously cheap Pilates classes -- which are included in the 380 pesos (or roughly US$45 at the black-market exchange rate) I just paid for a one-month membership at my old gym. But the joy of six other great things about BA had almost slipped my mind.

1. The scenic running routes There are so many of them in Palermo that the Buenos Aires barrio rivals the entire city of Melbourne as an ultimate jogger's paradise. The heat and humidity isn't so disagreeable here that one must do his or her running around town at the crack of dawn, as I was forced to do in Bangkok last year, but if you choose to sleep in, it's your loss. Buenos Aires is loveliest in the half hours just before and after sunrise, which I'd also forgotten until I woke up on Tuesday at 6am for my first BA run in more than two years. The low-rise layer of fog floating over the lake in the center of Plaza Holanda as an orange glow started to peek over the brightening black-and-blue horizon almost stopped me dead in my jogging tracks. Going around Holanda's 1.5-kilometer running path was a breeze with such a lovely view to distract me from the pain in my feet.

2. Its R-E-S-P-E-C-T for retro pop stars As far as I know, BA hasn't hosted the Queen of Soul lately -- or ever. But Liza Minelli has made it here several times, including one trip in 2007 for a Liza-inspired cabaret show, in which my first Pilates teacher moonlighted as a dancer. ("She was amazing," he said, predictably, the morning after meeting her at the after-party.) And during Tuesday's early morning run, I passed a sign announcing the BA arrival of another golden oldie: Peter Cetera is coming to town -- again! How could I have forgotten about all the random vintage music acts who used to come around here, ones you might not even expect to have much of a South American following, like Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Boy George and the former lead singer of Chicago, who played Luna Park in 2010 and will hit Teatro Gran Rex on April 30. Hmm... I wonder if someone can convince Bobby Womack to swing by BA before his Melbourne gig on May 21, the day I fly back into Sydney.

3. The soundtrack No, not tango, which was never really my thing. If you aren't willing to shell out the pesos required to see your favorite vintage middle-of-the-roader live, there are always unexpected pleasures for free courtesy of pop radio in BA. I can still remember walking through the supermarket while singing along to random non-hits like Tracey Thorn's "It's All True" and Keane's "The Lovers Are Losing" playing on the loudspeaker, which would probably never happen anywhere else. And who needs reading material during lunch when you've got a radio playlist that includes Keane's "Is It Any Wonder?" followed by Santana featuring Michelle Branch's "The Game of Love" to keep you entertained?

4. French fries I don't know what they do to make them taste so good here, but they don't even need ketchup. In the U.S., they were always too skinny or too soggy, and in Melbourne too dry or too cold -- except at Burger Edge, where the burgers are just an excuse to get to the fries. It's that way all over BA: People rave about the prime Argentine beef, but for me, the meat has always been pretty much just a side dish (una guarnicion) to the fries, not the other way around.

5. Spanish I'm a timid perfectionist, so speaking Spanish was never really my forte. As with English, I was always a greater communicator when writing it. But one really has no choice when dealing with customer service personnel in person or on the phone. Getting my point across and understanding theirs always gave me a certain sense of accomplishment second only to completing a writing assignment (in English or in Spanish) or a particularly grueling workout. I imagine it must be something like how Ikea addicts feel after they've assembled a shiny new white shelf.

6. Siestas It's so good to pass out in bed in the middle of the afternoon and not be wracked by guilt, for according to Argentine custom, that's right where you should be. So please, close the blinds on your way out. Zzzz...

10 '90s Hits That Sound Even Better Today

2013-04-24T09:08:00.000-03:00

Since we were on the subject yesterday, why let a great decade go now? So here's yet another '90s list and possibly my most random one ever.

1. "No Scrubs" TLC (1994) My favorite girl group of the '90s (followed by En Vogue, SWV, Brownstone, Total, Zhane and Xscape, with Destiny's Child bringing up the rear by the end of the decade) was always more consistent than its fellow '90s sisters with voices, who were, for the most part, better on the singles scene than they were in long-term relationships. In other words, their hits were a lot better than their hit albums, which wasn't the case with TLC, whose entire Fanmail opus (1999) was an R&B highlight of the '90s that still sounds current today. Unfortunately, the type of guy TLC was singing about on the third of its four No. 1 singles hasn't gone out of style either. (Honorable mention: TLC's first No. 1, 1994's "Creep," was nearly as good, but despite the implication of its title, which used the word as a verb and not as a noun, it wasn't another guy-basher.)

2. "Mockingbirds" Grant Lee Buffalo (1994) My two favorite Grant Lee Buffalo moments of the '90s: 1) Seeing the band live in 1994 upstairs from the Hammerstein Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on a triple bill with Saint Etienne and American Music Club. 2) Going to the apartment of a guy I met in Copenhagen in 2002 and having him try to seduce me to the strains of "Mockingbirds," an obscure GLB "hit" that reached No. 36 in 1994 on Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart. Like Grant Lee Phillips' simmering, then soaring, "Mockingbirds" vocal, great taste in music is as sexy today as it was back then!

3. "Sex and Candy" Marcy Playground (1997) Speaking of sex(y)... A true one-hit wonder ("Sex and Candy," a No. 8 hit, was the band's only single to chart on Billboard's Hot 100) and a one-hit-album wonder, too. (Though I never put the two together at the time, now it sounds to me like a slightly peppier distant relation to "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," as in Crash Test Dummies' own lone U.S. hit, from 1993.) After its platinum parent album -- MP's eponymous 1997 debut -- not one of the group's five studio follow-ups between 1999 and 2012 charted in the U.S., Canada, or the UK. Not one. To quote the title of an '80s TV show that's as long forgotten as the still-active Marcy's Playground, that's incredible!

4. "Twisterella" Ride (1992) A No. 36 hit on the UK singles chart that also reached No. 12 on Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks list, "Twisterella" today remains better than sex, to quote the description that a colleague back then applied to its still-in-heavy-rotation-on-my-iPod parent album (and one of the best-titled ones of the decade) Going Blank Again.

5. "Too Funky" George Michael (1992) When people think of George Michael in the '90s, this is probably the last of his solo Top 10 hits (No. 10 on the Hot 100) that comes to mind, possibly because it came not from one of his three studio albums that decade but from the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Dance. Alas, I never realized my early '90s fantasy of sashaying down a catwalk while this song was playing, certain that George Michael only had eyes for me.

6. "Ain't Nobody Like You" Miki Howard (1992) I was so certain that Howard's second No. 1 R&B hit (and her highest charting Hot 100 single, peaking at No. 68) would finally change the course of her crossover fortunes. (Of her six Top 10 R&B singles between 1986 and 1990, only 1989's "Love Under New Management" managed to graze the Hot 100.) How wrong could I be? Howard would hit the R&B chart only three more times through 1996, never rising above No. 43.

7. "Mary Jane's Last Dance" Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1993) Someone in Bangkok or Melbourne recently brought up Petty's penultimate Top 20 hit (No. 14), and all I could think was where the hell is Kim Basinger anyway?

8. "Bones" Radiohead (1994) Ok, so it wasn't a "hit." It wasn't even a single. But no discussion of '90s music would be complete without at least a mention of Radiohead, my magnificent mid-decade obsession, and The Bends, one of my Top 10 favorite albums of the '90s, so highly regarded mostly for its Three B's: "The Bends," "Bones," and "Black Star." At some point in the last 19 years, one B ("Bones") replaced another ("Black Star") as the album's song most likely to get me to press repeat over and over on my iPod.

9. "You Don't Seem to Miss Me" Patty Loveless (1997) Loveless's Top 20 country hit really hit home the day I returned home after a business trip to Chicago and was greeted with the most lukewarm reception ever. Although the guy I was dating at the time said all the right things over the phone, I sensed that he wasn't really so thrilled that I was once again in the same area code. "What? Tuesday night? You don't want to see me today?" It was Sunday, and I was feeling as loveless as Loveless and even more so when he later revealed that his reluctance to see me that night, or the next, was due to the fact that his ex was back in town for the weekend and not leaving until the following evening. My instincts about loveless guys haven't failed me since.

10. "Fools Gold" The Stone Roses (1989) There are three things I love about Revolver Upstairs in Melbourne: 1) The excellent company (thank you, Dov!), 2) The great Thai food, half-price on Thursdays, so nearly as cheap as it would be in Bangkok, 3) The soundtrack, which is usually chock full of '90s gems. When The Stone Roses greatest hit (an end-of'-'89 release that hit No. 8 during the first of three chart stints in the UK, but didn't impact in the U.S. until the beginning of 1990) came on during my most recent dinner there, I nearly spit up an extra-spicy mouthful. Along with Happy Monday's "Bob's Yer Uncle" (a 1990 single from Pill 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches that was equally unexpectedly heard last year during a first date at Sukhumvit's Bar 23 in Bangkok), "Fools Gold" was the best thing to come out of the UK's late-'80s/early '90s Madchester musical movement. I'm still a total, utter fool for its luster.

The Essential Black Crowes (Or, Why Kree Harrison Is My Favorite Would-Be "American Idol")

2013-04-23T08:52:00.000-03:00

About two months ago, my iPod shuffle landed on The Black Crowes' "A Conspiracy" as I was running around the Tan in Melbourne, and I had one of my increasingly semi-regular '90s moments. They were, after all, some of the best years of my life so far.

As flashbacks of Bill and Hillary Clinton filled my head, I remembered that Atlanta's Robinson brothers and company were my second-favorite rock & roll group of the decade (and the genre's top squawkers, high above Sheryl Crow and Counting Crows), and promptly spent the next 24 hours or so listening to no one else. (R.E.M., fellow Georgians and my favorite '90s rock band, is the only other one whose entire '90s discography I bought and loved, despite the occasionally harsh reviews.)

I meant to say something about them at the time, but I must have been distracted by another golden memory that popped up on my iPod. Now I've been sidetracked again -- thankfully, from my constant whining about the sorry state of Buenos Aires these days -- this time in the Crowes' favor. It happened last night when I finally got around to watching last week's American Idol performances by my two favorite remaining contestants, Candice Glover and Kree Harrison.

The latter's rendition of the Crowes' "She Talks to Angels," the band's 1990 fourth single (released the year she was born, which also happened to be the year before I graduated from college), rocked me gently and literally moved me to tears. I'd forgotten how that opening line -- "She never mentions the word 'addiction' in certain company" -- used to kill me every single time when I was around Kree's age. Interestingly, "Angels" was one of only two Top 40 Crowes singles (the other being a cover of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"), making the quintessentially American band more successful on the UK singles chart, where it logged four Top 40 hits with four other songs.

In its heyday, The Black Crowes was often criticized for being derivative (too Faces!), but at a time when rock & roll was all about grunge and alternative, proudly wearing your middle-of-the-musical-road badge was a lot more rebellious than dressing down in flannel. There were no forays into experimentalism just for the sake of it. You always knew what you were getting with a Crowes album: tightly written and tightly played old-time rock & soul sung by the most technically proficient '90s frontman this side of Soundgarden's Chris Cornell.

Kate Hudson has made three very smart moves in her life, and the one that wasn't hooking up with Cameron Crowe (no relation -- for Almost Famous, the 2000 film that brought the actress her first and probably last Oscar nomination) and Muse's Matthew Bellamy (for her second son, Bingham, almost 2) was hooking up with The Black Crowes' frontman Chris Robinson, father of her first son, Ryder, 9. In my rock & roll fantasy where Robinson is the perfect soul man, I'm certain that letting him go might have been the dumbest thing she's done -- yes, folks, dumber than Bride Wars!

But this isn't about her, it's about him and his band, and I guess Kree Harrison, too, who I've got to give credit and perhaps a slight Idol edge over Candice Glover (Kree's cover of Faith Hill's "Stronger" has been my favorite Idol moment of the season thus far), for reminding me and, hopefully, others of the national treasure we've been taking for granted. Now for five Crowes gems that I couldn't do without.

(Blogger's note: The Crowes' YouTube presence is dominated by live performances while there are relatively few studio tracks and high-quality video clips, so for your optimal listening pleasure, you should check out the albums containing these key Crowe moments.)

5. "Remedy" (from The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, 1992) When I was younger and more likely to pull them off, I wanted a pair of trousers just like the ones Chris Robinson was rocking in the video.

4. "Midnight from the Inside Out" (from Lions, 2001) Was I the only one who thought it strange that the Crowes' hardest rocking effort to date at the dawn of the new millennium was produced by the same guy (Don Was) who'd previously helped make Bonnie Raitt Grammy-bait (with Nick of Time), The B-52's Top 40 darlings (with Cosmic Thing) and Was (Not Was) a two-hit wonder (with "Spy in the House of Love" and "Walk the Dinosaur)?

3. "Under a Mountain" (from Three Snakes and One Charm, 1996) I don't believe I've ever been under a mountain, but I have been on a slow train coming around one (in the Pyrenees, in 1993). The instrumental introduction to the first track on the Crowes' fourth album has always sounded kind of like how that slow-train experience felt three years earlier.

2. "A Conspiracy" (from Amorica, 1994) The one that kicked of my recent Crowes fixation, from the group's third album and it's final one to be certified (merely gold, for shipments of 500,000 copies), which would make the Crowes, despite its multi-platinum start, one of the most woefully underrated bands of the second half of the '90s.

1. "No Speak No Slave" (from The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, 1992) Or better yet, tracks 5 to 9 on the best Crowes album and the first one that I bought on CD. (I was still slumming with cassettes when I purchased Shake Your Money Maker, The Black Crowes' 1990 debut, at Spec's Music and Video, where I was working at the time.) It might be my favorite five-song sequence on any album in the '90s, and its penultimate part remains the most essential Crowes song on my iPod.

Being Boring: Is Working 9 to 5 the Only Good Reason to Get Out of Bed?

2013-04-21T19:19:00.000-03:00

I recently found myself sitting across a dinner table in Melbourne from one of the most frustrating people I’ve ever known, once again having to explain/justify my life to him.

As usual, he was having trouble with the idea of being a “freelance” anything, free of any obligation to go into an office for at least eight hours a day five days a week – something I haven’t done since the summer of 2006, shortly before I gave up the traditional 40-hour work week (which, in my case, had always been more like 60), and the regular paycheck that goes with it, and left New York City for Buenos Aires.

“So what do you do all day?” he asked, after a nine-months-pregnant pause. I took offense, and not just because I’ve never been busier in my life. (These near-daily blog posts don’t write themselves, nor do any of the hundreds of freelance articles I've done since 2008, when I started writing regularly again after a two-year hiatus.) There was more than a hint of judgment in the way he asked his loaded question (note the emphasis on the second "do"), one he seemed to ask every time he saw me.

The last time I’d seen him, some eight months earlier when he was on holiday in Bangkok, he’d actually had the audacity to question my finances ("So how do you make money?" he'd inquired, as have many before him -- as if they all have every right to know), and I was pretty sure he was getting ready to go there again. When I tried to stop him before he started, his reaction was like an explosion in a tightly sealed bottle. He spoke slowly and deliberately, looking off to the side as if he was addressing an unseen jury. His voice was at volume 5, but his righteous indignation was unmistakable. On a scale from 1 to 10, it was hovering around 20. He was really milking playing the misunderstood victim.

He insisted that he couldn’t care less how I made my living and called me on getting defensive every time the conversation took a predictable turn into the realm of my unconventional (by Western corporate standards) lifestyle. I asked him why I had to answer the same questions every single time I saw him. I may have switched cities several times since we’d met, but I hadn’t changed careers. I'm a writer. What does he think I do all day?

“I was just trying to make conversation,” he responded, unconvincingly.

He later admitted that it wasn’t as simple as him trying to keep the conversation going. I’d already dismissed that excuse in my head as the lamest justification ever for asking a stupid question. It’s not as if we had ever run out of things to talk about in the three years that I'd known him, and we were comfortable enough together not to have to frantically fill every single moment of silence with idle chatter. As I suspected, there was more to this obnoxious interview.

He simply didn’t know how I do it, live life without structure that's imposed on it by someone else. Though he didn’t love his job, he had no idea what he’d do without one. For reasons that had nothing to do with supporting himself financially, it was his lifeline. It may not have always kept him busy or particularly interested (judging from his Facebook status updates, which were as boring to read as they must have been to live), but it kept him social. Without it, he might have been forced to spend large chunks of the day alone, and how was he supposed to do that? He was the kind of person who claimed to be excited about going on a solo vacation until a few days into it, when he could no longer stand being alone with his thoughts.

I know a lot of people who are like that, and I don't think there is anything wrong with them. It's just not me. The fear of being alone is a common aspect of the human condition, but it’s something with which I have no personal history. When I say I’m a loner, I actually mean it. I’m neither self-involved nor narcissistic (unless those who have described me as a good listener and a compassionate and sympathetic friend were lying, or mistaken), but if I were about to be stranded on a desert island, and I could only have one person along for company, I’d probably choose myself.

I can understand the confusion of someone whose brain has a limited capacity for imagination or creativity, but there must be a better way to ask how I do it (like, for instance, “How do you do it?”) than to ask, “What do you do all day?” That’s a question you pose to a burnout slacker or a destitute fool without the resources to keep himself busy in any meaningful or meaningless way. I'm pretty sure that even a care-free and career-free person like Paris Hilton finds ways to occupy herself during regular business hours. Surely she's not counting flowers on the wall all day.

But that's not me either. This so-called friend knew that I'm a writer. He’d “liked” enough of my blog posts on Facebook and commented on them, too. He also knew that I’d spent the better part of the previous year working on my first book. Did he think all of that just magically happened without any effort on my part?

Does anyone wonder what David Bowie or Kate Bush or Sade Adu or Shania Twain do all day while they're taking a decade between albums? We assume they are living life, enjoying it, being creative. Does being a writer not qualify as a full-time creative undertaking whether you’re punching the clock or not, if you happen to not be famous?

In "trying to make conversation," he made me wonder if he hadn’t been paying attention during any our previous ones. He also revealed a number of negatives about himself. I’d never considered him to be a person of remarkable depth, but for the first time, I was certain he was someone who was bored with life. Why else would he need a 9-to-5 job, especially one that didn't reflect any of his personal interests (if he even had any), to fill the hours of his day? Why would he think of the hours of his day as something needing to be filled?

I wondered about the new love of his life that he’d found online a few months earlier. What did they see in each other? Were they both just looking for someone to fill the empty space beside them and those hours of the day which weren't already being filled by their jobs? Of all the things he’d said about his new boyfriend, the ones that stuck out most were that they had the same first name, and that they new boyfriend worked out twice a day.

Ah, so that’s what he does all day!

I probably should have felt more of that compassion I'm known for instead of such annoyance. It must be tough spending your life depending on the presence of other people to keep you not only occupied but content, too. The guy sitting across from me had never spoken of any interests or passions, so as far as I knew, he didn't have any. Perhaps that was why he was so dependent on his job and a boyfriend who worked out twice to day to help him ward off loneliness. Perhaps if he had interests, passions, he wouldn’t have to “make conversation.” It would just happen. He certainly wouldn't wonder what I do all day.

I didn’t say any of this, of course. I didn’t want to offend him any more than I already had. Plus I really wasn’t interested in “making conversation.” I was too busy thinking about all the things I’d do the next day, alone, things that had nothing to do with going into an office or answering stupid questions posed by people who didn't care enough to remember the answer a few months later.

Burning Questions: The Back in Buenos Aires Edition

2013-04-20T18:50:00.000-03:00

1. Is my The Big Bang Theory theory true? Have only about 20 episodes of the CBS sitcom actually aired over the course of its six seasons on the air? As was often the case with Nine in Melbourne, it always seems to be on all night long on the Warner Channel in Buenos Aires, but the same few episodes must be on a continuous loop on the networks in both cities.

Every episode I heard playing in the background as I went about my business my first three nights in town, I had already watched during the Qantas flight from Sydney to Santiago and the LAN flight from Santiago to Buenos Aires. They were the same ones that always seemed to be on Nine in Australia. I love the show, and the priggish musings of Sheldon Cooper never get old, but I'm kind of over laughing at the same ones over and over.

2. Has my Palermo Hollywood apartment actually shrunk in two years? It was never a grand palace -- only about 40 square meters, balcony included, on a good day -- but when I returned to the scene of so many crimes today for the first time since March of 2011, I felt the same way I did when I returned to Osceola High School in Kissimmee, Florida, in 1997 for the first time in nearly 10 years. Had I gotten bigger, or had everything I'd left behind gotten smaller?

And although it was spotless, and the blinds were pulled all the way back, letting tons of sunshine in, why did it seem so grim and dark? Was this really home for four years and three months? If I had any doubts about selling it, they were all pushed out of my mind the minute I saw the still-banged-up front door, a souvenir from the last home invasion, which was exactly one week short of one year ago.

3. When I lived in Buenos Aires, did I live on bread and cheese and sweets alone? Those empanadas are as yummy as I remembered them being, and the pizza -- basically cheese slapped onto bread without tomato sauce -- is still so not pizza, but it's so easy to fall into a pattern of eating facturas, sandwiches de miga (left), empanadas and pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner if you don't want to go to the trouble of cooking or eating out in proper restaurants. Disco and Carrefour just don't have the microwavable frozen-food selection of Woolies and Cole's in Melbourne, and I'm trying to resist the temptation of Subway and Burger King on Avenida Santa Fe, a few blocks away from my rental apartment.

Tonight I'm having dinner with my friends Cara and Mariem, and it will be more of the same: Piola, a Palermo Hollywood pizzeria, which Cara describes thusly: "like a fancy Romarios, haha, but I swear it's real pizza, not a thick slab of bread with a big hunk of cheese in it!" Sounds yummy, but there goes my figure -- again! Pilates to the rescue? Even if the price of classes has doubled, it still will be a lot cheaper than in Melbourne.

4. Should I be thankful that the Argentine government is sort of inept? Some would add "corrupt," particularly the citizens who were marching down the streets of BA in protest of the government's policies my second night back in town. Since President Christina Kirchner's administration set the "official" exchange rate at around AR$5=US$1 and banned the use of dollars in trading, a black market for U.S. dollars has emerged where you can sell your physical cash for AR$8-$9 per greenback. (According to my friend Erin, that's the "legitimate" exchange rate, where it would be if it weren't manipulated by a desperate administration.)

What a sweet deal! If you've got the dollars, and you don't mind flouting the law -- and in BA, everyone does it, so why shouldn't you? -- BA, despite the ridiculous inflation, can actually be a far cheaper place than it was two years ago. No, I'm not in love again, but I'm happy to spend the next month in a totally loveless marriage with BA, if its going to be that easy on my bank account.

5. Are Argentina guys actually more sensitive than I remember? Today when I was going through the things I'd left behind in my BA apartment, I came across El Principito, a book that Alejandro, a guy I dated for a few weeks around the halfway mark of my time in BA, once gave to me as a gift. (Ironically enough, right after a pizza date with Cara and Mariem.) On the inside cover, he wrote the following: "Porque me encanta que te allas cruzado en mi vida. Y espero conocerte a vos, y al nino que llevas dentro... Alejandro 02/09" Wow, that's sexier than the Lady Gaga song, and with the exception of the birthday dinner that Jayden cooked for me two birthdays ago, possibly the nicest move any guy has made on me since I left the United States. If I must run into any more old flames while I'm here, I sort of hope one of them is him.