Still here

No, I haven’t abandoned this blogging thing, at least not yet. It’s just that, with no internet access at home, I tend to do my blogging during down time at work, and for the last several weeks there just hasn’t been any. However, my boss is out for the afternoon, and I’ve spent the better part of the last 2 days at the mind-numbing, eye-blearying task of weeding duplicate names out of a huge database, so I’m taking a break.

So anyway, this past Saturday, July 9th, was the 50th anniversary of “Rock Around the Clock” hitting Number 1 on the US pop chart, thus initiating the so-called “Rock Era.” Which it seems we’re not really in anymore...if anything we’re in the “Hip-hop/R&B Era,” I guess. But even though rock ‘n’ roll will likely never be the dominant force in pop culture it once was, I think the dire predictions about its future that I sometimes hear are ridiculous. “Hey hey, my my, rock and roll can never die,” sang Mr. Young (paraphrasing Danny and the Juniors), and if you can’t believe Neil Young, who can you believe? Plenty of people like rock and hip-hop and R&B and lots of other kinds of music (I’m one of them), and I think they all have vibrant futures ahead of them. That said, no music has ever captured my soul like rock ‘n’ roll music...it will always be the music that changed my life, that made me alive at all. So I wanted to take a brief moment to recognize the song that, it some sense at least, started it all. And hey, have you heard “Rock Around the Clock” lately? Because it’s still a kick-ass tune.

Speaking of kick-ass tunes, the Song-I-Can’t-Get-Out-of-My-Head this week is by Canuck quintet the Weekend and is called “Into the Morning.” It’s an awesome little punk-pop anthem of teenage love, and I mean “punk-pop” in the best sense of the word: it combines wistful pop earnestness and self-aware punk cynicism in just the right combination. Provided your connection can handle it, you must dig on the video. I watch it like 5 times a day. It also doesn’t hurt that the singer is way hot. She actually reminds me quite a bit of the object of my first major crush, a girl named Lisa Spadaro who went to my mom’s dance school. Man. I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world, with her raven-black hair and chocolate-brown eyes and dazzling smile. I wonder where she is now?

Oh hey…funny thing: I used to have this running fantasy in which Lisa and I were spies, going on secret missions to glamorous European locales and getting ourselves into desperate situations where it appeared we were going to die, and so of course I had to reveal my feelings about her, and then we would make out. That’s a funny thing because I was introduced to the Weekend thanks to “Into the Morning” being used in the spy-spoof movie D.E.B.S, which I watched last Sunday. Mary-Jane, in her blog, mentioned seeing My Summer of Love (which I haven’t seen but am looking forward to) and called it “a lesbian teen flick in which nobody dies.” I’m pleased to say the same about D.E.B.S, and also to tell you that it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s hardly great cinema, but it’s charming and funny with the added plus of having a sweet lesbian romance. Sara Foster, who plays the latently lezzie spygirl who falls for her out ‘n’ proud archnemesis, actually reminds me a bit of Amber Benson (high praise indeed), though her beauty is more commonplace. But she does cute things with her mouth like Amber.