It’s a cynical world, and there isn’t much to do about it. I grab rare glimpses of virtue whenever I can, but I’m seldom overwhelmed with opportunities. A couple weeks ago, however, we all caught sight of incredible bravery, strength of character and guts, and I couldn’t let the event pass without taking note.

But before I go into that, I need to clarify what I believe Hollywood’s standard definition of an actress is: a body. If the body can recite lines of dialogue somewhat convincingly, so much the better.

As an actress moves into the field of celebrity, how she looks becomes even more important to the grist mill. Is she getting fatter? Is she sickly thin? Is her hair short, long, thick, thinning? None of this really relates to her acting ability, but all of it seems to be preeminent on the minds of the Tinseltown machinery. I haven’t seen Angelina Jolie’s turn in last year’s A Mighty Heart. Maybe she’s really great in it. I don’t know. But I know that her biggest roles, from the animated Beowulf to the Tomb Raider flicks and this summer’s Wanted, have relied very heavily on her looks. That’s just Hollywood and, in all honesty, it’s always been that way. Above and beyond possessing talent, an actress has to look good, and so the maintenance of the body becomes almost an all-consuming task.

Cut to the shocking announcement. Christina Applegate, only in her 30s, was diagnosed with breast cancer. We came to know her almost 20 years ago as the ditzy, slutty Kelly Bundy on Fox’s Married … With Children. She was, to be blunt about it, the eye candy of the show, but she also had sharp comic timing. She wouldn’t get enough credit for it until a couple decades later, when she held her own with the big silly boys in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), and even though the premise of her role was, again, the hot object of affection, she handled it beautifully as the nemesis of Will Ferrell’s egomaniacal newscaster.

Her most recent role, in ABC’s dramedy Samantha Who?, has allowed her to work all of these aspects, showing range, an adeptness at wordplay, and the occasional bit of slapstick here and there. She had proven again and again she was more than a body, but for many, she would always be Kelly Bundy.

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For all my pretensions, all my attempts to present myself as a literate, knowledgeable, and discerning fellow, I’m really a lowest-common-denominator guy at heart. I don’t often allow that to come through. I know that a fart joke is just about the basest, most tasteless thing in the world, especially during Holy Communion, but it can also be the most freakin’ funny thing in the world, especially during Holy Communion, especially if it’s insinuated that it was the monsignor who stepped on the duck.

I’ll tell you about it someday.

That may explain my fascination with the Kids’ WB! animated series Freakazoid!, produced by Steven Spielberg back in the rip-roaring mid-’90s. Warner Bros. Television Animation had been through a resurgence of sorts, propped up by the success of the moody, atmospheric, and terrifically written Batman: The Animated Series. They suddenly had the rest of the entertainment world paying attention, so much so that Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment came to call. From there, a succession of fondly remembered series tumbled out: Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain. The word came down that Spielberg’s next series should be a superhero show, so Bruce Timm, an integral part of the Batman show, started spitballing ideas, working up a premise and designing characters. The result was a show far more earnest than Spielberg planned, so he sent back the message to crank up the humor. He should have been more careful with his direction.

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Have you read the entertainment news today? Oh boy. A particularly dreadful tune is set to break some major records for sales, this week’s new movies arriving under a mantle of critical kudos have been trounced at the box office by The Dark Knight, a four-week winner no less, and the spate of mind-numbing reality TV shows, once considered dead in the water by pundits, are not only thriving but multiplying for the 2008/2009 season. It is, as the critics have feared, the grim realization that they have zero effect on the zeitgeist. But then again, we always knew that.

The few critics that actually heard Darn Floor Big Bite, the 1987 release by the band Daniel Amos, were flabbergasted. They praised the textured, atmospheric guitar work as a revelation in contrast to the band’s keyboard-driven previous releases, Vox Humana and Fearful Symmetry. They were keen on the balancing act singer/writer Terry Scott Taylor had struck lyrically, still as literate and mature as before but not as heavy-handed. In a time where guitar groups were hair metal, and regular groups were messing with their synths, Daniel Amos (known at that point as Da to avoid the whole “Which one is Daniel” question. Answer: none) looked to the underground and came up with an angular, nervy winner.

And now you get to say, “Well it can’t be that great, because I’ve never heard of it,” which has been the bane of Da’s musical existence from the start. The band started, of all things, as a thoroughly Christian country act, morphing into a Beatle-esque rock outfit, then fully embracing the original new wave ethic that was coming from CBGB darlings like Talking Heads and Television.

Problematically, they were the antithesis of most bands from the Christian subset. Their Beatles and Beach Boys influences came at a time when outside forces were totally verboten. Their four Alarma Chronicles albums (Alarma, Doppelganger, Vox Humana and Fearful Symmetry) plumbed the sounds of punk, garage, darkwave synth-rock and Krautrock, none of which sat well with the established Christian organizations, record labels and bookstores. They were alternately branded for “consorting,” being too secularly intellectual and just plain too weird. Oddly, the secular music outlets rather much felt the same way in vice-versa terms.

Perhaps the most damning charge thrown at them was that they dared to criticize the Church as equally as they looked toward the scriptures. It has been one of the major drawbacks for people in accepting Christian rock as rock music with the specified worldview that discernment with worldly ways was fine, but when it came to investigating the hypocrisies within the institutions, well, it just wasn’t done. Da, however, dared to go to that thorny place. (more…)

Porcupine Tree has been, for well on a decade now, a cult favorite trying to simply be a favorite, but there has been a problem in making that happen. That problem is the box lead member Steven Wilson refuses to be put in. The band started as a home studio project, a solo affair that leaned heavily on psychedelia, hence the trippy group name. The project would soon be fleshed out into a full group comprising Wilson, bassist Colin Edwin, drummer Chris Maitland (to be followed later on by Gavin Harrison), and former Japan synth player Richard Barbieri. With the expanded group ethic, Wilson found the proper tools to stretch out in progressive rock, pop, and even the current metal sound. That metal sound has, unfairly, caused some to blanch at the group’s Tool-like complexity and weight, which are mixed with Wilson’s harmonious, classic rock vocals.

And so it goes that radio programmers who need clear-cut lines of demarcation don’t know where to stick Porcupine Tree. For the most part it’s a cop-out, especially with their two most pop-centric releases, Stupid Dream (1999) and Lightbulb Sun (2000). While some songs do go off into eight-minutes-or-more fantasia, the majority on both releases are solid examples of pop songcraft, little marvels of production and eminently worthy of obsession. Amsterdam label Tonefloat knows very well about such obsession — they’ve been releasing Wilson’s music on high-quality vinyl for years, not just the recent Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) but also his ambient forays as Bass Communion and his duo with vocalist Tim Bowness called No-Man. It’s a treat for fans of the band to finally have a vinyl version of Lightbulb Sun in their sweaty mitts. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, though.

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The Police make me thankful The Beatles never had a full-fledged reunion.

It was a strange Sunday evening in the wilds of Holmdel, New Jersey. The PNC Arts Center usually allows patrons onto the property two hours before show time at 6:00 PM, and so I found myself on the Garden State Parkway with Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth CD on the stereo and thoughts of scoring a sensible parking space bouncing in my brain. Little did I know that, as a courtesy to the weekenders, the venue let people in at 4:00. They dumped me out into the adjacent woods to park! This did not bode well.

I’ll freely admit I was more excited to see Costello and the Impostors and was not disappointed. Mixing older fan favorites like “Pump It Up,” “Every Day I Write The Book,” and the requisite “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding” with newer songs like “45″ from When I Was Cruel and “American Gangster Time” from the current and very worthwhile Momofuku album, Costello covered the necessary bases. Performing them with the gusto and spastic fire of a man half his age was wonderful to see, especially after hearing all the rumors that things would be toned down for those tender Jerseyan sensibilities. And just to give the set an extra dash of coolness, Sting came out to duet on “Allison.”

Now, had the evening ended there, I wouldn’t have walked away from this performance completely baffled. It would have been my shortest concert experience, but we all would have felt like we wanted to be in the same room with each other, band included. We’re all aware of the behind-the-scenes tensions purportedly happening in Camp Police. We’re also aware that even back in the early days, Sting commanded the majority of the attention, a position that could quickly irritate, and while hearsay shouldn’t color one’s impressions so early in the game, it was evident when Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland took the stage that they were plainly irritated.

The PNC Arts Center is a weird venue to start with. It is essentially a large, round coffee table where you and the stage are placed beneath. It is both an indoor and outdoor theater and, at the same time, neither. So there is a tendency to rig the electronics and the mix to accommodate all seats, including the uncovered lawn seats to the far back. The upshot is that the mix tends to be louder than it truly needs, causing all the music to come at you as a bass-heavy muddle. It can be compensated for. A few years back, Megadeth played the main Gigantour stage and the sonics were perfectly fine. An hour earlier, Dream Theater was on and the sound was that of a seal being clubbed (miked from the inside of the seal, no less). The Police, by contrast, were much louder than either of those bands, louder than any other show I’ve seen there this year, and easily the most sonically murky. (more…)

It was quite a thing to hear.

The big U.S. auto manufacturers, finding their sales affiliates smarting over the loss of business for the once-profitable mammoth, 4X4 luxury monsters in deference to smaller, fuel-friendly models and higher prices at the pumps, started testing the waters to see what would happen if… they sold those divisions? Maybe they might just close the Hummer and Escalade plants down, seeing as how the time for them had come and gone. A part of me, the part that never could afford one of these stupid counties on wheels and was gleeful in spite, cheered the announcement. Sure, it wasn’t a concrete plan of action — merely a “f’rinstance” — but the merest mention of the possibility was enough. At least, it momentarily was.

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I said something that sent a jolt of disbelief through the ranks of Popdose. I have been known to take my opinions to the far side, but this one threatened to betray an ignorance I didn’t know I harbored. Let me spell it out and see if I’m as far off base as some have claimed me to be:

Madonna will not be remembered for her music as much as her controversies. In fact, the latter is likely to shadow the former so much that her output as an artist will become an afterthought. And while Mariah Carey’s vocal acrobatics have become the standard pop style (thereby irreparably screwing everything up), Maddy’s antics have become the standard conduct by which all young up-and-comers must match or else not be noticed at all.

Your first salient question would be, “Dunphy, do you even like Madonna’s music?” Honestly, it’s not that I dislike her music at all. No, I’m not a fan and no, I don’t own any of her albums, but I can say unequivocally that she’s made three truly great songs in her career, a lot that I like in passing, and some that are total crap for the sake of spiking the media. The three great songs are, in no particular order, “Live To Tell,” “Oh Father,” and “Frozen.” All three indicated to me that she could radically depart from her patterns and deliver. There is nothing on her latest, Hard Candy, that comes close to the style and sentiment of the aforementioned tunes, even though that album is being hailed as a return to form.

Ideally, that’s what we should be talking about, right? That album? The music? Sure, Maddy’s a PR animal and seeks attention the way sharks seek chum, but she’s a singer and that ought to be the first thing that comes to mind, no? (more…)

In a recent smackdown bitch slap Chartburn discussion that will be published tomorrow, we had cause to discuss the merits of “She’s a Beauty” by the Tubes. I won’t disclose the consensus, because we’d rather all of you read the post and not rely on my Dose-opedia version. Suffice it to say that I suddenly had an urge to revisit the band’s work. I avoided the earlier and — some would rightly say — weirder stuff like “White Punks on Dope,” and aside from a solitary spin of my vinyl version of The Completion Backward Principle (1981), I didn’t swim too far into the dangerous waters where the deadly David Fosters lurk (even though that’s where all their best material is floating).

First up was the Todd Rundgren-produced Love Bomb, a recording that is wildly uneven, even for a band that prided itself on unevenness. (”Wild Women of Wongo”? “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman”? Issues, anyone?) There wasn’t much to say about the album. I liked the tune “Piece by Piece,” but you could get that on the Tubes’ 1992 best-of compilation, so memory lane tends to be awfully unkind to ol’ Love Bomb.

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No, it wasn’t a nightmare. I was surrounded by jive-ass talking cartoon animals, and so were you.

The dictum of great animation is that it gives us something a straightforward film cannot. It can show us visions that would be impossible in reality, if not just ridiculous looking. Animation affords an instant degree of suspension of reality, that magical bit of stuff that allows us to empathize with photos projected in succession. It’s an unwritten pact between the maker of those images and the person who spent $10+ for the ticket — take me out of reality for an hour and a half. For many years that pact has been, if not broken, arguably fudged and cheated. It’s the only way I can explain 2005’s Madagascar, 2006’s The Wild and Over the Hedge, this summer’s Kung Fu Panda, and even the upcoming CG-tweaked horror of Beverly Hills Chihuahua. It’s as if the studios all gave up writing and just agreed to make animals yammer and yap for a couple decades.

Pixar, the little CG studio that could, wasn’t immune either. In their defense they were able to work the worlds of insects (1998’s A Bug’s Life), fish (2003’s Finding Nemo), and culinary rats (2007’s Ratatouille) with a lot more finesse and intelligence than their competitors, in both the visual sense and the sheer commitment to story. Fortunately I didn’t get railroaded by hippos, rhinos, roaches, cats, dogs, and amoeba spouting the latest catchphrase in pop culture, rapping, or other such unforgivable acts, and I didn’t have bovine herds congratulating one of their own with “You go, cow girl!” Pixar always seemed intent to keep the fauna among themselves. Regardless, there were still talking animals.

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Okay, who hasn’t thought America’s favorite family has jumped the shark by now? Even with the success of last year’s movie (which I found quite funny) still fresh in the audience’s mind, the actual show has become something not so much unfunny as it is unfriendly.

Allow me to back up here. This assertion has been going on for a decade now, ever since a particularly harsh mean streak started to creep up on good old dullard Homer Simpson. His callous nature and general ignorance to all but his own personal needs cataloged deaths, a desire to get a friend back off the wagon ’cause he needed a drinking buddy, framing his wife for a DUI to save his own ass, and many a faux pas resulting in the viewing public crowning the character “Jerk-Ass Homer.” If there was an upside, it was that the rest of the characters seemed to be coping, uh, in character. The other saving grace was that, often, the show was still funny and still, dare I say it, human. As if to acknowledge that the audience’s statement was heard loud and clear, the term “Jerk-Ass Homer” started working itself into the scripts.

But now, in its millionth season on the air, all the characters are becoming jerk-ass. Homer dreams of suffocating his father, abandoning his kids, and shacking up with a rack of meat in a motel room. Marge also dreams of escape while attempting to live vicariously through her kids. Those kids, Bart and Lisa, are exhibiting less of a sibling rivalry and more of an ingrained hate for each other, and where the show once balanced the absurdities of real, mundane life with the occasional flashes of cartoonishness, now it is, inside and out, a cartoon.

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