Columnist, Music Is My [BLANK],
Video Jockey, Friday Video-A-Go-Go!, and Time Capsule
Tell me about your column
Music Is My [BLANK] is a bi-weekly music lifestyle column. Ever since I've been about five, music has been my total and complete passion, so it’s colored every aspect of my life. In each column, I talk about music in connection to a particular aspect—Music Is My 3rd Grade Diary, Music Is My 7th Floor Study Carrel, etc.—and I hope that other music fans will have a few laughs in recognition of things they either remember or see in themselves.
I also do the weekly postings entitled The Time Capsule and Friday Video-A-Go-Go!. The Time Capsule appears every Monday morning and features a cool campy video clip from the pop culture vault. Friday Video-A-Go-Go! appears every Friday morning and functions, I hope, as a coffee-at-your-desk diversion to help start the last workday before the weekend.
Who or what are the biggest influences on your work and if you could pick one person to collaborate with dead or alive who would you pick?
At first, I didn't know how to answer the influence part of this question. While I'm sure my style is by no means original—after all, (a) it's a big world with lots of people, and (b) one need look no further than the current movie listings to see that nothing is really "new" anymore—I never consciously made a decision to write like this person or that person. I just wrote.
But then I thought about it some more, and I realized that I do have an influence—a HUGE influence—John Hughes. I've always tended to write about the smart, spunky, but perpetually thwarted girl in the midst of absurdist tragi-comedy. And while, these days, that's just me, it's my personality, I originally identified it and co-opted it from Hughes' Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink. In fact, oftentimes, when I'm writing, I find myself envisioning the scenes in Sixteen Candles where Molly Ringwald recoils in abject horror at her latest indignation, while, we, the viewers, are falling off the couch with laughter. And that feeling is what I aspire to when I write.
As for collaboration? Pshaw. "I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel."
What album had the most influence on your adolescence?
The Smiths' "The Queen Is Dead." As a bored, disaffected teenager growing up in a small town, I didn't get the people, and they didn't get me. But this band made me realize that there were others who felt the same way, and it was ok.
What were your favorite toys or games from your childhood?
Mego superhero action figures, Star Wars toys and action figures, the Sesame Street playset, Gilligan’s Floating Island (you could take it in the bathtub), the Donny & Marie TV Show playset, my Big Wheel, Atari, and, later, my transistor radio, Panasonic tape recorder, and Certron High Energy Gamma C-60 tapes.
My least favorite toy from childhood was the Trash Compactor Monster that came with the Star Wars Death Star playset. To this day, bring that out and you will see a 38-year-old woman run crying and screaming through the house to lock herself in the bathroom.
What is your pop culture guilty pleasure? (What movie, tv show, band, etc. do you love that you know is awful, but you love it anyway?)
Charlene’s song “I’ve Never Been To Me.” It’s literally The Song That Launched A Million Gag Reflexes and the sheer antithesis of everything that I believe in, but it is so incredibly cheesy, earnest, and BAD that I will scream it at the top of my lungs.
That’s truth, that’s irony.
If you could own one piece of artwork by any artist, who would you choose and why?
While I have several of Shag’s serigraphs, I’d love to have an actual oil painting. His art has very crisp, clean lines, and, at gallery shows, when you see the paintings up close, the lines are so incredibly smooth. You never really think about them in the serigraphs—there’s a bit of a computer illustration look to the art—but, when you see the actual paintings up close and realize that he actually got the lines that smooth and that perfect, it’s truly awe-inspiring.
One of my secret future goals in life is to someday commission him to do a painting depicting my boyfriend and I as swank 1960s British secret agents. That’d be way cool.
What are your favorite television shows that you feel ended too soon?
Square Pegs and Freaks and Geeks. As discussed prior, smart girls in the midst of adolescent tragi-comedy is my favorite genre, and these series were both amazing and entirely too short-lived.
Square Pegs, starring a very young Sarah Jessica Parker, aired for a few short months, starting in October of 1982. It followed the adventures of Patty and Lauren, two unpopular high school girls, as they tried to break into the popular clique. With a theme song by the Waitresses, an appearance by Devo (playing Muffy Tepperman’s bat mitvah), and uber-New Wave-r Johnny Slash, the show was this 10-year-old New Wave girl’s dream, and I totally lived for it.
Freaks and Geeks was another great show, similarly running for a few short months in 1999. Obviously, everyone here knows how Judd Apatow and half of his cast (including Seth Rogan, James Franco, and Jason Segel) went on to become hugely successful, but, to me, nothing they’ll ever do will top this show. It’s probably the closest anyone has ever come to capturing that John Hughes tragi-comedy (remember the sheer side-splitting mortification when Nick starting singing Styx’s “Lady” to Lindsay?), but it was also so incredibly sweet. One of television’s greatest losses was the untimely cancellation of this show. It was just that brilliant.
Who is your favorite super hero?
1960s Batman and Robin. Every day, my kindergarten boyfriend, Scotty, and I would ride our bikes to each others' houses and watch the show in syndication. Scotty had a totally rad black and orange dirt bike with the number "8" on it and cool squishy handlebar grips. Anyway, when the show ended, we'd enact it with Scotty as Batman and me as Catwoman. And our bikes as our respective Bat/Cat Mobiles. I also had the yellow Batman utility belt—it came with a plastic walkie-talkie and "Graplink." I cried for hours the day the Batman-logo belt buckle broke.
In addition to being in love with the show because it was Campy Fabulous, 1960s Batman and Robin were also probably my first-ever crushes. There was just something about those... suits. And, to this day, whenever I see either clips from the show or my 1970s Mego Batman and Robin action figures, I get really, really inexplicably happy.
If you were to have dinner with 5 people living or dead, who are they and what would you serve?
Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Boy George, Gore Vidal, and Marcel Marceau.
I chose Marcel Marceau mainly because I couldn’t come up with the “right” 5th person, and I figured (a) he wouldn’t throw off the vibe of the conversation, and (b) he’d add a surrealism that would add to the hilarity.
What would I serve? Fondue... because to paraphrase thee fabulous Mrs. Parker, "Ducking for [bread]. Change one letter and it's the story of my life."
What fictional character do you identify most with?
If you put Laura Holt from Remington Steele, Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Chandler Bing from Friends, Andie Walsh from Pretty In Pink, Amélie Poulain from Amélie, and Max Fischer from Rushmore in a blender, you would have me.
And, most likely, something that you would not want to drink.
What 5 movies could you watch again and again?
Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, Better Off Dead, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Fast Times At Ridgemont High.
Back in the day, a particular classmate and I could literally recite the dialogues to each of these movies by heart. One day, she asked, “How is it that I can remember the entire dialogue to Sixteen Candles, but I can’t remember what’s on a test?” Twenty-plus years later, I’m still asking myself the very same question.
What book or author do you regularly recommend?
Rob Sheffield's Love Is A Mixtape.
Making mixtapes is one of my absolute favorite hobbies, and I've made tons of them over the years. (See Music Is My Dirty Little Habit). Rob has, too, and he understands the true art of mixtape creation like only a fellow mixologist could. The book is an ode to mixtape making, and he uses various tapes created throughout his life to signpost the funny, pop culture-laced, and absolutely heartbreaking story about his life with his first wife. Shout-out to Rob and Renee... had I been in Charlottesville in the late '80s and early '90s, I am certain they would have been friends.
What are your favorite web sites?
Facebook, YouTube, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, NME.com, and, of course, Forces of Geek
What are you most looking forward to geeking out over in the coming year?
Moving to NYC. I’m totally psyched for the adventure of living somewhere new and exploring my new ‘hood. No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn!
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