Magic Jewball

Once upon a time, when I used to hold my transistor AM radio to my ear as I fell asleep at night, this was my favorite song. It sounded so good! It still does. It always will.

Edited to add the video. I remember seeing this on TV pre-MTV, I wish I could remember where. But it’s useful just to say that the joy you see in Michael’s face in the video is pretty much the same expression I have when I hear the song. I think this is the way I’ll remember him.

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8q5z_dont-stop-till-you-get-enough_music[/dailymotion]

OK, you know what? People on movie sets who tell you to move along because there’s nothing to see here are LIARS. L.I.A.R.S. I will now no longer believe them, even when I am prone to move along anyway. That’s what happened last week when I popped into Whole Foods to buy a Perfect Orange for the Failcake. I wanted something lovely and organic because the peel was going in too and I was willing to pay good money, which as you know, you’re totally going to when you go to Whole Foods.

But outside the Time Warner Center where the WF is housed, there was a giant crowd, even though it was like 9pm (I work and shop late) and huge lights, one of them in the shape of a tootsie roll, I kid you not, that was being raised and lowered from some sort of tractor-ish truck. If you have worked till 8:30 and are then going grocery shopping before going home to bake a cake, the last thing you want is to be caught in a crowd of tourists gawking at a movie set where apparently nothing is happening.

So I went down and got my orange and a few other things and came back up to leave and go home. As I was walking out, I did stop to look and try to see if at least there was someone famous so I could say I had seen someone famous. As if on cue, someone from behind the cordoned off area, many rows of crowd in front of me said authoritatively, “nothing to see here! No one famous!” Well that was a relief. Phew! Nothing to miss, and I went on home and made my cake. And then another cake the next day, but you knew that.

Then, the next day, I happened to be reading Gawker when I saw this picture and I knew knew knew that this was the set in front of the Time Warner Center, lit by a giant tubular light. Nobody famous! Why, this was the exactly the same famous person I blogged about in my first “I passed a movie set” post! Hugh Grant! That was from Music & Lyrics and actually, my block was cut out of that one, alas. This one is called Did You Hear About the Morgans? and has Sarah Jessica Parker (also pictured on Gawker) but I doubt I’ll be seeing it. They lied to me, sheesh.

***SPOILER ALERT***
By the way, I finally saw the Sex & the City movie and was relieved they rectified that whole “Samantha ends up with a man just like everybody else, completely going against her whole personality” plotline. Phew. But Stanford and Anthony was just not believable. Sorry!

Rollins Band – Liar

I seem to be getting lots of searches on one topic lately. The trouble with answering questions in this fashion is,

a. it does a disservice to my regular readers.
b. it will take a while to get indexed by Google and by then people will have moved on.

But I can’t help myself!

The Hebrew on Boy George’s shirt in early videos says, transliterated, “Tarbut Agudah,” which means Culture Club. But backwards, since in Hebrew the noun comes first. So it kind of says, “Club Culture,” but actually really means nothing. But it was a good try! I have been getting a lot of Boy George queries lately because he’s recently gone to jail for some kinky sex crime or something. I was too busy being fixated on how he’s let himself go to really read the article. Ouch! Could anyone have been more fastidious regarding his appearance than George? How the mighty have fallen! It also means he’ll probably never tour here again because he’s a felon and won’t be admitted. But I’ve already seen Culture Club play and once was enough, so I’m not disturbed personally.

And while we’re chatting, Googler, I should also reiterate that David Nalbandian is not Jewish. Those questions are once again becoming prevalent because he won the opening tournament of the year, the Medibank Open! Woo! The Australian Open is going on now but since only two of you are concerned about that (although I’m sure countless lurkers care very much), I’ll try not to go on and on about it.

But hey, my interaction with you could have been like this gem I unexpectedly found while I was searching out lyrics for that “That’s Not My Name” song by the Ting Tings. You see, I had to know if her name was really Jaleesa.

Meaningful, right?

Is it wrong that I keep ending Culture Club song titles with, “….in jail?” Do you really want to hurt me… in jail? I’ll tumble 4 ya….in jail. Boy Boy, I’m the boy…in jail.

Luckily, this one doesn’t work.
Culture Club – Church Of The Poison Mind

People think you run into celebrities all the time in NY, and I won’t lie to you, you do. It just depends on what your definition of “celebrity” is. Many years ago, many being “greater than ten,” I used to watch a cable access show each week that was on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, MNN being “home for wackadoos before websites were so easy to create.” And this woman was one freaky wackadoo. I mean, she had a lot of thoughts on her mind and she wanted to share them: about open-mindedness, about the power of myth, about loving oneself and others. If you are wondering what the fuck I was doing watching that sort of thing, I ask you to imagine all that said in the most hypnotic and soothing voice possible, like honey, at exactly the time you were trying to fall asleep at night. She was like a drug, a crazy, crazy dose of Ambien.

But then she disappeared off of MNN and ever since then I’ve been trying to find out where she went, albeit in a half-assed way. I’ve missed her long extemporaneous diatribes couched in the most earnest and sincere manner. “I’m a mystic!” she would say. “I am a healer.” And I miss the way she would go from tangent to tangent and never make it back to her original point. But that was OK because she never really had one or at least it wasn’t one that you or I could understand. All that mattered is that she lulled me into blissful sleep. She has a website but it hasn’t been updated in forever. I kind of gave up and turned to the real Ambien. Which you wouldn’t know from the time my posts tend to appear but whatever.

Anyway, I was at a local shop, a big shop, with an information desk, and I went to ask where the item I needed might be. And there she was, the MNN Wackadoo Lady. I felt like I was in a dream, the kind you have when you actually sleep at night. But she was real. Right in front of me. In the most mundane job in the universe. I did what I always do when I’m face-to-face with a famous person (yeah, yeah, she’s not Angelina Jolie, but she’s famous to me): I give them a little “I know who you are” eyebrow waggle and see if they return it with a “yep, I’m ____ !” look. She kind of did. And then I decided to just go for it and say, “Linda?” She was surprisingly unfazed that I knew who she was (I mean, did I mention? She’s not Angelina Jolie) but seemed pleased that I remembered her and that I told her I wished she were back on the air. She had a lot of reasons, “I lost my producer, these things take money, I lost my web designer, blah blah blah.”

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned her name it’s because I told her a lot of nice, uh, less than truthful things about herself, like that she had significant things to say and added meaning to people’s lives. I don’t want her to Google herself and find that the chick who said those things actually just thought she was a nutjob with a smooth, smooth voice. But of course, if you watched MNN at a certain point in time, you may know who I’m talking about. And the truth is, she did mean a lot to me. I searched for her for years! Sometimes you just have to go to the shop down the street and ask at the information desk.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey

You may have heard that recently, the Doc Martens shoe people got into trouble for producing ads which featured dead rock stars wearing Doc Martens. Dead rock stars with living, litigious relatives. I followed this story kind of tepidly (that is, it caught my brief attention via feed reader before I scrolled merrily along). But that all changed when I read this statement from Joey Ramone’s brother:

Obviously, we are in the same position as Courtney Love, as well as the Estates of the others depicted. We were never consulted about this ad. We were never asked for permission to use Joey’s image, or paid for the use of it. As Executor of my brother’s estate I never would have approved this ad as Joey never wore these shoes. And, not that my brother was terribly religious, but the fact that he was Jewish, and this ad is not exactly Kosher, makes it that much more inappropriate, inconsiderate and contemptible.

(via Gothamist)

Huh? Let’s parse this. Kosher in the strict sense means permissible according to Jewish law. The common form mostly relates to food, as you’d know if you were a regular reader of this blog or resided in the Kosher food nexus of New York City. Neither of these explanations seems to make sense. If you work on the basis that Mickey Leigh (Joey’s brother; the real kind, not the fake Ramone kind) meant Kosher in the sense of “correct” and “permissible” then it doesn’t really have much to do with Judaism and then his whole “but he’s Jewish so how could you do this to him?” argument kind of falls apart. If you stretch to understand his meaning as “OK by Jewish law,” I’m afraid that there’s nothing more verboten about stealing someone’s image by Jewish law than in the more secular, American kind, so that doesn’t work either. The food idea is completely off the chart.

Is it because Joey’s kind of dressed like an angel in the ad (you can see it yourself in the Gothamist link above)? We have angels in Judaism too. Or maybe Mickey thinks the figure is kind of Jesus-like? I’m not really seeing that either, especially because I’m told that Jesus wore sandals. Everything in the ad itself, aside from the shoes, could totally be from Judaism (heaven, light shining through hole in the clouds, etc.). So what’s he on about?

So basically, Joey Ramone was Jewish, everyone. And that means you can’t dress him like an angel in heaven and have him shill your shoes. Oh yeah, and he didn’t even wear Doc Martens, so there.

This is the only Ramones song I could ever stand.

The Ramones – We Want The Airwaves