Category Archives: Entertainment

King of Kulture

Posted on June 25, 2006 | Leave a comment

Aaron Spelling is dead at 83, after a stroke.  You’ve seen his name on television credits and film credits as a producer.  Don’t fib.  You damn well know you have.  Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Beverly Hill 90210, Starsky and Hutch, The Mod Squad.  You have so watched at least one of those shows.  Don’t lie to me.  

There are four people on the planet who haven’t seen a television show by Aaron Spelling.  Two of them live in a teepee up past Eganville.  One is in an asylum on Guam.  The last one is a Gujuara Indian who was chained to a rock in the bay for forty years. 

Nothing Aaron Spelling created in television was intellectual.  You won’t see a retrospective of his oevre at the American Film Institute.  He won’t be nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, or the Museum of Film.  Even the French thought Spelling was uncouth and they think Jerry Lewis is talented enough to deserve a Legion d’Honneur. 

His shows were translated into hundreds of languages.  At this moment someone is watching Krystle call Alexis something unpleasant in Urdu, while another person watches Link and Pete try to find the drugs dubbed into Azerbaijani.  Unfortunately, those broadcasts are also going out into the Universe, so Po931X and his family on the Planet Coozebane IV are watching Captain Steubing or Mister Roarke welcome Lenny and Squiggy in their walk-on role.  I despair of our planet some days.  

Aaron Spelling may not have been highbrow, even by Republican standards, but he did create a lot of popular television and pop culture.  Nobody could ever say they were challenged by the plot twists of Fantasy Island or even Starsky and Hutch.  It was formulaic, three acts plus prologue and epilogue or cliff hanger.   

It was schlock, but it was immensely popular.  Sure, it was mindless pap, but it was well done mindless pap.  We’ve all slumped on the sofa after a vicious day and lost our minds in the eighth re-run of a Charlie’s Angels.  

Some weird stuff got injected into our culture from Aaron Spelling. The Mod Squad was one of the first dramas with an African American (back then they were black) in a full-jam Afro as an equal on the team.  Starsky and Hutch popularized pimp-chic with Huggy Bear and made the car (a 1976 Ford Torino) a hero before Knight Rider.  Jiggle shows, of which Charlie’s Angels was the first, made nipples acceptable on prime time.  Linda Evans as Krystle got the word ‘Bitch” over the banned bar.  Beverly Hills 90210 covered it all from incest to sex with fish.   

The actors who were made, or remade, by Aaron Spelling are almost too long to list.  Paul Michael Glazer, David Soul, Peggy Lipton, Michael Cole, Clarence Williams III, Tige Andrews, Herve Villichaize, Ricardo Montalban, Gavin McLeod, Linda Evans, William Devane, Shannen Doherty, Luke Perry, Farrah Faucett-Majors, David Doyle, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, Shelly Hack, Tanya Roberts, Bernie Kopell, Ted McGinley, Fred Grandy, Ted Lange, Lauren Tewes, Jill Whelan, John Forsyth, Joan Collins, Pamela Sue Martin, Emma Samms, Lloyd Bochner. Stephanie Powers, Robert Wagner and just about every B, C and D-list actor who ever walked up from the seaplane dock on Fantasy Island or across the gangplank on The Love Boat.  Hit the IMDB (imdb.com) and search up his name for the filmography.  It is huge.   

Even scarier, I was able to spit out that list of actors without referring to IMDB.  For some demented reason I retained that data.  I need a lobotomy, I think.  

Culturally, what does this mean to the Greater Good of Mankind?  Sweet FA and I don’t mean Football Association.  It was recreational, escapist and I make no apologies for having seen any of it.  

Spelling did know, somehow, deep in his bones, what would entertain us.  He was probably the last of that kind of mogul and storyteller.   

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Posted in Entertainment

Even More Snow

Posted on March 11, 2003 | Leave a comment

The last few weeks have been filled with snow.  Every three or four days we get a dump of snow, enough to pull out the technology and blow it away.  Between my two neighbours, John and Bob, we really don’t have any place to put the stuff. 

Bob and I share a driveway, so we take all the snow from his side and my side and toss it over to my side of the equation.  Then we toss it up and over into a traditional snow bank that many of you know as a child.  Except my front lawn is only 7 feet wide and there is a big tree in the middle of it.  So, we toss the snow into John’s driveway, clean John’s driveway out and toss all the snow up and over onto John’s lawn.  Three driveways and walkways full of snow, all wind up on John’s lawn.

Then the snowplough comes by.  John, by being on the corner, gets some mono-browed Human Amoeba with a huge grader to fill the end of his driveway with six feet of ploughed, hard-packed road snow in the name of clearing the streets.  So, we dig that out and toss it up onto the pile.  Oh and we clean out the end of my driveway and Bob’s too.

Considering that the snow technology (the snow blower) is an overpowered 8 hp monster, this hasn’t been an issue in many previous years.  This year, it is an issue. We can’t actually toss the snow high enough to clear the existing snow banks and get the damn stuff to hell out of our way.  And you can’t throw it back in the street either, as that is ‘against the law’.

We now have three, very tall, as in six feet high, piles of hard packed snow.  In my childhood in the Pleistocene Era we had a few winters that created these huge snow piles.  Being industrious juvenile delinquents, we decided to create snow forts, by burrowing down into these piles and clearing out domed rooms. 

One winter we were able to tunnel from one end of the driveway to the other in the snow banks, creating two hidden snow forts in the heart of the snow banks with an invisible tunnel connecting the two.  We did this, essentially, because we were idiots and had watched “The Great Escape” on TV one too many times.

With all this snow, I’m looking longingly at these huge snow piles and thinking to myself.  Unfortunately I am a technically grown man and it would be unseemly.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to construct one last huge, hidden warren of snow tunnels and forts through all the snow banks.  File this under keeping the inner child alive.

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Posted in Entertainment, Health and wellness, Social Constructs

Jacko The Wacko

Posted on February 8, 2003 | Leave a comment

I did the unseemly thing last night.  I watched Dateline on NBC replay the Martin Bashir interview with Michael Jackson. 

Just so you know, Martin Bashir is the ink-stained wretch who did the interview the Diana Princess of Wales just about a year before her death.  He works for Granada TV in the UK and is essentially, the heir to the Sir David Frost legacy of solid, investigative, journalistic interviews.  He’s good and he’s honest and he’s truthful.  Martin Bashir’s credentials are solid.

Mr. Jackson, on the other gloved hand, is a celebrity, self-proclaimed King of Pop, Protector of Children, and Role Model for The World.

It was fun watching someone commit career suicide for two hours.  It wasn’t Martin Bashir who fell on his sword.  Jacko basically shot himself in prime time, then bled all over the place.  The usual celebrity fibs were in place and that is an accepted practice today that we will let slide.

The real dangerous part of the whole show was that Jacko let his mouth run.  He came across, to my opinion, as an unwell person.  In his defense, he’s been a ‘celebrity’ since he was about six years old, had some less than ideal family experiences and lives in a celebrity/fame/fortune bubble of security, PR and fears that we can’t always know or understand.

But Holy Mother of Pearl, if he was anyone other than Jacko, he’d be under what is called, a Lieutenant Governor’s Warrant:  Meaning locked up in the Penatanguishine Psychiatric Hospital “until the pleasure of the Lieutenant Governor is known”  Essentially, forever, as an incurable mental patient, dangerous to society.

Face aside (and I am willing to cut him some slack with the pigment stuff and the broken nose that was repaired) his words and ideas are those of someone who has lost touch with reality and has enough money to do whatever the hell he wants.  This wealth gives him the label of ‘eccentric’. 

If you or I devoted out lives to creating an amusement park in the back yard, having sleepovers with children and talking about the innocence of children being the basis for World Peace, then the label we would get is ‘insane’.

All that was really missing was Jacko admitting that there is a special radio station telling him to Love Children For World Peace and Elvis saying he’s glad Jacko ‘ain’t shankin’ his lil’ girl no more’. 

Had Jacko admitted to the Special Radio Station, then the powers that be would be almost certainly required to come by with the big net and the happy truck.  But, wisely, he stayed just this side of the line thanks to the layers of hangers-on, legal eagles and image stylists who drink from the same water fountain as Jacko.

Will Jacko ever do another “Thriller” or “Bad”?  Probably not, he’s seeing the effects of time on his talents and moves.  Which is sad, as both the aforementioned albums were very good, but the knees give out and the pipes give up over time, even with the best of the best.

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Posted in Entertainment, News and politics