I might have to make the argument that the best thing to come out of the Internet, other than perhaps all the free goat porn, is the ability to watch loads of music videos again. Remember when MTV used to play music videos? Me neither,…
The 79th Annual Academy Awards aired Sunday night, and as usual it was longer than a typical Mormon church meeting. How long is a typical Mormon church meeting, you ask? Well, depending on whether or not your mother is the choir director, and your father…
The 2007 Golden Globes was one of the least annoying award shows I have ever sat through from beginning to end, but then, they already had a head start. The Globes have a fighting chance at being fun because they never include a cloying musical…
During the holiday season at my childhood home, my parents played Christmas music from the end of November through the new year, always the same albums in the same order on the record player that sat inside a ten-foot long black lacquer console underneath an…
Every Fall when the new television season is rolled out, I invariably become emotionally involved in those series which are yanked by their networks after only a few episodes. I have an uncanny ability to pick the losers, probably due to the fact that I…
A few weeks ago my husband and I attended a live show for the first time in several months, that of singer/songwriter Andrew Bird whose performance nearly knocked us out of our shoes, our shoes that were bought on sale because we spent the rest…
Katie Couric debuted as the anchor of CBS Evening News almost three weeks ago, and immediately critics decried her work as perky, bubbly, and too sweet for such a formidable position. The Washington Post even gave her suit a bad review, saying that it made…
I do not know how to sit down and write this without sounding like a grumpy 80-year-old woman who hasn’t done any cuddling in the last twenty years, so I’ll just go ahead and get it out of the way: MTV is total crap. I’m…
Usually when I sit down to watch television with my husband I have my fingers positioned on the TiVo remote, not only to fast forward through the commercials, but also to rewind the parts of a show I can’t hear because he is too busy…
Two years ago this month I checked myself into the psyche ward at a local hospital due to a debilitating bout of postpartum depression. My daughter was six months old, and I had been fighting feelings of hopelessness and anxiety since her birth. I had…
My older sister inherited completely different parts of our parents’ DNA than I did, and consequently we look nothing alike. She got my mother’s curves and body-type, womanly in every line and shape, whereas my appearance is much like my father’s in that my only…
Because I began my freshman year of college toward the beginning of the nineties, my music collection was filled with what you might expect for a white kid who, while living away from home for the first time, decided that she was the first person…
Growing up the youngest of three children I had my taste in everything from music to movies to clothing influenced by the field-testing my brother and sister had done before me. Both of them were larger than life to me, who I wanted to become…
When Britney gave birth she increased her circle of critics ten-fold, because now she has to answer to the harshest and meanest critics in the world: other mothers. UGH.
For my father’s 37th birthday my mother recorded me, then three years old, singing “You Light Up My Life” from beginning to end, word for word. That is the first song I have any memory of, and that cassette tape proves that my flair for…
In the Spring of 2002 my husband and I were standing in the lobby of the SPCA in Pasadena, CA when a woman walked in with the tiniest, furriest puppy on her shoulder. We were in the midst of trying to fill out an application…
During the pre-release press frenzy of Mission Impossible: III I watched an interview with the director, J.J. Abrams, wherein he said that he had wanted to set out not to make a movie about a spy but instead a movie about a man who was…
In April of 2001 I attended the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California, a few hours drive from where I was living in Los Angeles. Coachella is considered by some to be the greatest indie-rock festival in the country, and for me it was like…
I thought it would be an interesting first assignment to set my iPod to shuffle to see what I could say about the first ten songs that came up if only because the shuffle setting is the one function of any music player that I could do without.