Your minimum daily requirement of a hard slap to the face

From the @IDFSpokesperson Twitter feed.

So, you see, in reality, the bombs dropped on Gaza by the Israel Defense Force are just delicate kisses, mere angels' tears, on the foreheads of Palestinian children . . . .

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has quickly replaced Dick Cheney and John McCain as my preferred "STFU [fill in the blank with the unfeeling, aggressive, rigid, dissembling, hard-to-believe-they're-human political figure of your choosing]!!!" scream at my TV whenever I watch the news.

And I can assure you that is no small accomplishment.

Congratulations, Benny. You've just given birth to a million new jihadis. And a billion others like me, ineffectual bystanders, people who would never take up arms against anyone yet who feel for the people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestinians everywhere, but who can only blog about it, tweet about it, post articles about it on Facebook, and yell at their TVs.

Touch me

Cathy Dennis-Touch Me(All Night Long) by val6210

Not quite sure why, but I've been having some serious flashbacks to circa 1990 (1989? 1991?) in the form of this video by Cathy Dennis for "(Touch Me) All Night Long."

Perhaps it's because it's around the time I moved out of Washington, D.C., and started the "great adventure" that has become my adult life: A return to North Carolina, a relationship, graduate school, a new career, a move to Texas, alleged success in that career, and a move to Pennsylvania for a new job and then another job in Pittsburgh. And then another.

Suddenly 23 years have passed by. Then I was not only moving geographically but also chronologically, psychologically, from my late 20s into adulthood. Now I find myself . . . where exactly? Smack in the middle of middle age . . . or at the end of it? Oddly, I feel that a simple song and video from 1991 represents that transition, from youth to adulthood, from a certain innocence and carefree attitude to . . . this: A career that feels like it has stalled in a city that I don't get or enjoy, five+ hours away from the man I love, working like a water buffalo in a field I find somewhat uninspiring, not having a lot of fun at the moment, not sure how to have more, surrounded by a couple of people I like and respect, but many more than I don't.

I'm not sure how to get out of this space. Therapy helps, as has a prescription to Wellbutrin. And a terrific boyfriend, a supportive family, and one or two sympathetic friends and colleagues.

But I'm still here and don't know how to get out.

Mind you, I don't want to get out "permanently." I just want to move on the next phase of my life, but I want to do so in a way that offers more satisfaction and happiness, that shows progress. No frying pan to the fire for me, please. I've done that too often in life.

The thing is, to move ahead, I have to move into the unknown. I have to take some chances. That seemed fine to do in my 20s and my 30s, even into my 40s. But now, in my early 50s, there are only so many chances left to take. Or so it feels. Any bad chance taken could result in serious problems, grievous harm, both financially and personally. And there's only so much time left to fix mistakes like that. Or so it feels.

I feel all my indecision and dithering is causing life to pass me by. And funny thing is, I felt that the first time I saw Cathy Dennis's video for "(Touch Me) All Night Long." I was all of 29 then, in a bar I almost never went to on P Street in Dupont Circle, having a beer, trying to meet guys, and waiting for something to happen in my life. I was then dithering over leaving D.C. and trying to figure out the next direction to move into. When I saw that video, I realized at that moment that club music and youth culture had changed, but I had been too busy with work and life to notice. I once again was not having any fun.

So what's the lesson here? More drinking? More bars? More fun? (Definitely to the latter.) And perhaps taking some chances, walking into the fog, being uncomfortable for a while, but having the hope and perseverance that I'll come out on the other side, fairly unscathed and maybe even better for it.

Not unlike when I left Washington. I didn't know exactly where I was going. Actually, come to think of, I was heading toward San Francisco. I had been thinking about graduate school, but I wasn't sure whether it would be in history or librarianship. I didn't have a source of income, just a little money put aside and an offer to come home for a while and figure things out.

In the end, everything worked out fine, or at least the way it should. Nevertheless, I'm just not sure I have that kind of confidence, ignorance, or blind faith to go anywhere at the moment.

And yet I feel my happiness and satisfaction in life depends on my doing so.

Bonne fête nationale, mes amis!

Monsieur Gainsbourg chante sa version de "La Marseillaise," l'hymne national de la France.

Sort of.

Because I can, that's why

I can't tell you how long I've been looking for a video of this song, one of my favorites by Samantha Fox. A posting on the Facebook page of Annie for "I Wanna Have Some Fun," led to me sharing this static YouTube video of the album version of "Hurt Me! Hurt Me! (But the Pants Stay On)," a minor hit for "the Fox" in the early 1990s. I remarked that I'd never been able to find an official video for this song, having only searched YouTube, et voilà! A fellow Annie fan shared this video with me.

It pays to get out of YouTube every now and again. Otherwise I would have never found this video by Annie herself.


Annie - I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me [New] by elpolemico

Which probably remains one of my favorite pure pop tunes of the last decade.

You can snicker all you want, but I think Samantha Fox is a rather underrated pop performer from the 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, she sings a heckuva lot better than Paula Abdul ever did, had generally better production (at least in this case) than Kylie Minogue did at the time, had more sex appeal than early Whitney Houston, may she rest in peace, and certainly more presence than Britney Spears. Ever.

So what's the deal?

Hmmm, well, in a lot of her songs, she coos and baby-girl orgasms a little too much--but so does Britney in practically every record, and Samantha Fox simply does it better, with more feeling and lusty gusto.

It probably didn't help that she was everywhere, at least in the UK, at the time, and was better known for her busty portraits as a "page 3" glamour model in the British tabloids. Or that, according to Wikipedia (my source for all wisdom), she made some dodgy career decisions (shilling for a Leicestershire-based car company at the height of her popularity) or performed badly in some settings (such as the 1989 Brit Awards). Or that she has had a confusing, often contradictory personal life--from pin-up girl to born-again Christian to more-or-less out lesbian.

I think it's fair to say she was not seen as credible by many and grasping by others. But she did make some wonderful, pure-pleasure, pop records for a while, highly entertaining (at least to me), and later in life has seemed to try to give by through charitable works.

Samantha, I just hope you're happy and well. All these years later, you still make me wanna have some fun.

State of independence . . . or slothfulness . . . or obsession . . . take your pick

I celebrated my independence in America much like a sloth would (if a sloth were human and had a modicum of free will, access to modern pleasures, and has become obsessed with whatever he turns his mind to)--

• Reading--well, sort of; mostly articles on Islamic and American constitutional fundamentalism, which dovetail unsurprisingly well together. but I have a few books set aside to read this weekend, so we'll get there by and by . . .
• Watching TV--As noted previously in this blog, lately I am obsessed with the classic, gothic soap, Dark Shadows, these days. Perhaps because Coronation Street is inconsistently updated on HuluPlus and I lack the attention span to focus on subtitles on episodes of Engrenages. Maybe I'll make it to something long-form by Sunday. I have a yen to watch Plenty, a movie I missed when it first came around in 1985, mainly because it stars Tracey Ullman, who I also seem to be slightly obsessed with (in a pop cultural way) of late.
• Cooking--or at least planning to do so. I'm trying to find and perfect a Korean barbecue recipe that isn't loaded with sake, given that my current significant other (yes, there is one) doesn't drink and I don't do much myself.
• Game-playing--I'm also obsessed with the Sims 3 of late, specifically one family, the McDermotts. This was a pre-existing family in the Riverview neighborhood, which I've expanded and refocused, making them Irish immigrants (Liam, Siobhan, Ronan, Connor, Blaithin, and hopefully soon Maeve) to my pretend Midwestern community of Clemmons Landing, immigrants who grow vegetables, harvest honey, and raise chickens--as well as teach school, rock out, fool around, create potions, and try to improve their social skills with middling success. More than you ever needed to know about my private activities. Again, obsessed.
• Exercising--at least some cardio on Thursday night and a long walk yesterday through Frick Park on what had to be one of most pleasant, low-humidity July days I've ever experienced.

And today, a day after celebrating my independence low-key style, I have a major headache. Oh well. Two more days of slothfulness should cure that.


* * *

Some funny for your post-independence pleasure, the wisdom of The Onion to balance out all the bombast and banality with some most-welcome, much-needed chuckleheadedness.

"New Study Finds 85% of Americans Don't Know All the Dance Moves to the National Anthem"

"Little-Known Facts about the Founding Fathers"

* * *

And one last video from the "I Remember Donna" series:



This is from 2005, less than a year after I saw Donna Summer in concert at Wolftrap outside of Washington, D.C., about a year after moving back east. Sometimes I question why I moved back east, and sometimes I question my decision to leave the relative comfort of outer suburban Maryland and go north, middle-aged man, to the Central Pennsylvania. It was surely a work decision but also a life decision, adventure over the status quo. Both work- and adventure-wise, life has more or less played out well, although not always smoothly, excitingly, or as anticipated.

But we'll get to that. Not today but soon. Perhaps this weekend as a sloth will also allow me the chance to contemplate and communicate a bit more about my feeling and thinking at the moment. Less pop culture, more pop psychology.

It's worth the effort--as long as it doesn't get in the way of my Sims-playing and Dark Shadows-watching.

England 2 Colombia 0

CBC Music (which I follow on the Tweety) recently featured a best-and-worst-World-Cup-songs-ever roundup. I was entertained and pleased to see Ricky Martin finally get some credit for something musical--in this case, "Copa de la Vida," his World Cup hit from 1998. I'm going with the Spanish-language version, because (1) "cup of life" sounds goofy in English and (2) "Copa de la vida" was the first version I heard. Oye, it's a San Antonio thing.

No, for reals about Ricky Martin. I mean, "She Bangs" and "Livin' la vida loca" were ridiculous, but gah, I even miss '90s music these days, when there was a chance you might hear a song on the radio (at least in San Antonio) that didn't sound like it came out of a sterilized facility in an industrial park somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley.

*Heavy sigh.*

But I digress . . .

While I was pleased to see some musical love for a post-out Ricky, I was nonetheless slightly perturbed that CBC Music didn't include my all-time favorite World Cup song in its best-of list. And that would "England 2 Colombia 0" by the late, fantastic Kirsty MacColl.

OK, so it's not a true, official World Cup song. Regardless, it is far more entertaining, celebratory (of life, of survival), and poignant than anything J-Lo and Pitbull could manage in a thousand years of trying--which, plainly stated, still wouldn't be up to the output created by a hundred monkeys locked in a room with a drum machine and Autotune.

Sorry, just a little bitter this morning. Kirsty was taken from her family and from us much too soon. Her own output was sporadic due to record company problems throughout her career, but I had followed her from sometime in the '80s when I used to hear her songs on the radio in Washington. I also probably had some glancing knowledge that she was the creator of the pop classic, "They Don't Know," made famous in the U.S. by Tracey Ullman, during the second British Invasion, late '70s-early '80s edition. And who could forget a song title like, "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis"? Well, I probably did forget about it until recently. But it's a rockabilly charmer worth recalling now.

So I am sad that Kirsty is no longer gracing us with her wonderful, whimsical, poignant songs, but I am also happy that if she had to go so soon, she went out on a very high note with the Latin-inflected Tropical Brainstorm album.



Here's another one from the LP, "In These Shoes?," which may or may not be the first song I heard from this album and one that still makes me laugh and groove. I am pretty sure I bought this record when I was still living in San Antonio, although I don't remember how or when I heard about it. Nevertheless, I pull it out every now and again and give it a spin and regularly use tracks from it on mixtapes I make for friends.

And now, through the miracle of the Internet, I'm doing the same for you.