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The Best Of What We Saw

I'm not big on "year end" countdown lists; I think it's the confluence of slow news days, convenient scheduling and boredom that forces us into year end reckonings, best of lists, and video montages of mostly not all that interesting stuff. Ask me my favorite film at any given moment, and it's probably what I just watched. My favorite song, the one I just heard. I don't keep obsessive lists, and I don't like the Oscars because they verify what was good in the previous year (a common misperception, I think, that explains why so many people get mad when the Oscars don't reward what they think deserves rewarding); The Oscars are interesting - to me - because they are so uniquely American (in rewarding both high and low art), because they use what it problably the best system for choosing, and because in spite of us and themselves, they do often get it more right than wrong.

Since I don't want to do what they do - or what everyone else does - I've decided to make up my own. In no particular order, and as best I can recall, here's some stuff I watched that I liked. And why. In case you want to seek them out for yourself. Not that I can tell you what to do. But I thought you might find it interesting. I did.

1. Supernatural, Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD. For years, I've meant to get into watching what I first called "Buff, the Ghost Slayers" when it premiered 5 years ago on the WB. Combining soap stud Jensen Ackles and then teen-dream (Gilmore Girls) star Jared Padelecki as ghost hunting brothers seemed at least amusing... but since I don't care for a lot of scary movies, I generally avoided actually doing it. All that changed as I got more into using Netflix (i have now maxed out my DVD queue there with some 500 items), and their "send it back and get a new one" system.  As it turns out, Supernatural is more than the sum of its parts: like Buffy, it uses the horror and fantasy elements as a jumping off point for deeper reflection the nature of family, what we know and what we can't know, and what it means to live on the edge of darkness. Jared and Jensen, too, have turned out to be actors of surprising depth, and both have turned their characters into layered, complex performances of considerable substance. Add in some truly inventive writing, and a strong production style, and it's more involving than I ever expected. Next up... season 3.
2. The Man Who Came To Dinner. Netflix has been a good way to catch up on "classic" films of the thirties and forties that are my real grounding as a film watcher and critic. This comedy classic is highly regarded and for years I meant to watch it (I DVR'ed it twice both in New York and Boston from airings on Turner Classic Movies)... but never quite followed through. I finally did and... wow. Easily one of the funniest, and slyest comedies I've seen (from the forties, or ever), The Man Who Came To Dinner has the simplest, smartest premise: a New York based writer is invited to a lecture in a small Midwestern town, slips on the steps of the house of his local host and hostess... and stays for weeks to recuperate from his injuries, upending their lives... and his. Based on the play by Moss Hart and George Kaufman, the film doesn't condescend to small town values or dismiss big city sophistication... but makes a smart, sophisticated case for basic decency over all else. Full of great performances - this is a great film to see the work of Monty Wooley and Jimmy Dyrante just for starters - The Man Who Came To Dinner is a great reminder of why Bette Davis was both a great star and a great actress; she fits comfortably into the ensemble, and turns in some effective, natural work which is rare for the period.
3. Precious. Enough said.
4. Tetro. A world where Precious and Tetro were battling it out for Best Picture... would be true justice.
5. Heroes, Season 1 on DVD. A friend from work lent me his copy and I loved it; but that was last year and it wasn't until this summer when I broke down and got it for myself. What's best is that Season 1 stands, by itself, as one of the best executed story arcs perhaps ever created. It's been down hill since... but Heroes will stand the test of time for just these 22 episodes.
6. Julie and Julia.
7. Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon. Jack Wrangler was one of the first gay pornstars, partly because of timing and partly because he connected with audiences so strongly. But his story is very unique: a child of Hollywood (he grew up in Beverly Hills), he tripped over his stardom, and was, like many outlaw success stories, not to be penned in by society's rules or expectations. After a long career in porn, Wrangler met and married singer Margaret Whiting, became a playwright, and moved into a more mainstream life. This documentary, which features fairly extensive footage from his career (without actual sex), interviews with a wide array of friends, family and fans, and a lot of Wrangler explaining himself, is one of the most fascinating documentaries I've seen. Wrangler is definitely an advocate for the road not taken, and for following your path wherever it may lead... which isn't the worst lesson from the seventies. Being gay will add a dimension to watching it... but it's not essential.
8. Star Trek. The best summer blockbuster I saw, and which always makes me think of my cousin.
9. The Women. My mom gave me what is probably my favorite film of all time on DVD for Christmas. Turns out... it's still a kick.
10. The Wizard of Oz. Even if I disagree with the overall message of it.

Post script: A reminder that I can be one with James Wolcott - I made a similar point about Public Enemies, and I actually went and watched Manhattan Melodrama (and I agree about Miami Vice, too)

Dedicated to a Decade Gone By

jinb

Be A Catholic!

If Nine is a disaster - and it surely is one, the very definition of "ill-conceived" - it is a fascinating, multilayered disaster, wrong in so many ways, and on so many levels, that figuring out just where it goes wrong is almost diverting enough to compel a full viewing. If you love musicals, if you love cinematic self referencing and deconstruction... you just might love watching Nine assemble all the elements in the most surely messed-up way possible. This doesn't just happen - you have to work at it.

Dating back to Broadway's darkest days - that period in the early eighties when almost no new shows were produced, and those that were had serious flaws - Nine (1982) was, I realized, emblematic of one of Broadway's real struggles: a dearth of male performers strong enough to carry the lead role in a musical, while a generation of multiple talented actresses were more than able to hold up their end. Nine is an odd show, top heavy with showy female roles, none large enough - or mostly fleshed out enough - to be a really satisfying lead, centered around a cipher-like, barely there male.

You could make a similar case for other shows of that period - Chicago and A Chorus Line leap to mind as similarly constructed, Dreamgirls sidesteps the issue by essentially being an ensemble effort - which may explain the odd period of musical film adaptation we're in: the problems these shows bring to the table are in their bones, their very structures... and thus are very hard to undo.

Still, it's hard to ignore that the central problem in Nine is its male role and its male lead: Daniel Day-Lewis is utterly miscast in a difficult role as Guido, the self centered, successful, melodramatic film director struggling to put together his next film. The role is thankless, yet essential: if we as an audience can't sympathize or identify with Guido's travails, the show lacks an emotional center... and Day-Lewis provides exactly that vacuum at the center of these proceedings. It's a hammy, unsubtle (everything screams ACTING in him) performance with almost no feel for what musical theater requires. That's especially true of what's supposed to pass for dancing from Day-Lewis, which mostly tends towards a vertical version of the Horizontal Samba.

It doesn't help that Guido - surely one of the most rampantly heterosexual characters ever created for a musical - has troubles all centered around the women in his life, or that his conception of them isn't much beyond the Catholic trilogy: Virgin, Madonna, Whore. Nearly every woman in this exercise is, at some point, lashed into some sort of lacy contraption, breasts pushed forward and skyward, working stockings and garters to the same smutty point. I can't begin to describe how cruelly unfortunate this is to a dignified, decent actress like Judi Dench, or how much this robs Penelope Cruz of her usual ability to be natural and subtly sexy. Cruz's number (A Call From The Vatican) is especially tawdry, though it gets topped, in sheer (and I do mean see through) excess by Fergie's "Be Italian!"

The Cruz-Dench-Fergie triumvirate of numbers (Dench's is Folies Bergere) are the first three, and their excesses and failings tend to underline another problem with Nine: as a musical it suffers from a weak, rough score. Maury Yeston is neither Kander, nor Ebb, and Nine tends to reveal his weaknesses: musically underdeveloped, full of clunky lyrics, there are perhaps two fully fleshed out songs in Nine, and a lot of not-quite songs that seem incomplete. Nine has always been at the mercy of its female performers - if they're strong enough to put the material over... then it kind of works. If they can't, things kind of grind to a halt. Cruz can't. Dench does her level best, but the material fails her. Fergie performs the hell out of her song... but there's just not much there.

Blessed with two fairly poignant numbers, Marion Cotillard probably fares best, in no small measure because she possesses the astonishing gift of being able to act while singing. That's rare enough, but Cotillard, who seems at first to be a pale image of her usual screen presence, reveals her character, Luisa, by degrees, each slightly more wrenching than the last. I'm not sure many actresses could make as much out of "My Husband Makes Movies" as she does, or turn her final number "Take It All" into a confrontational striptease where watching her bare all is your problem, not hers.

Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, floats through the proceedings so fluidly that when she finally opens her mouth and performs, it is almost amazing to fine her so assured, but she shows pretty firmly that Moulin Rouge was no fluke, and more than anyone she finds an emotional center to the material (and perhaps as pointedly, is about the only performer to really connect with Day-Lewis).

The real revelation, though, is Kate Hudson, whose number, Cinema Italiano is about the best thing here. Less a musical number than Vogue photo shoot done as a music video, Hudson is about as breezy and relaxed as I've ever seen her, and for once - even in a role that her mother could have done twenty years ago - she manages to escape the shadow of Goldie Hawn that seems to surround a good bit of her work.

It's in these ligter, breezier, glitzier moments - when Hudson shimmies in her white and silver go-go getup, or when Kidman and Day-Lewis do a pure movie star run in a convertible from a pack of paparazzi - that Nine seems to almost find itself. Unfortunately, Rob Marshall seems to have no idea how to do this over the whole film, and, sadly, he seems haunted by ghosts of Chicago. There's too much Cell Block Tango in Fergie's "Be Italian", too much Queen Latifah and Richard Gere in "Folies Bergere". Marshall seems to want to prove that Nine is serious, thinking person's musical stuff... and it's not. It's a fairly obvious tale of self centered hedonist being brought up short by reality and forced to abandon fantasy, and the film gets weighed down in portentousness. Perhaps Fellini himself could have managed this balancing act (though that's not my impression of 8 1/2), but Nine needs more sizzle and less sozzle; Hollywood rarely can look at itself with a clear eye, never mind looking clearly at the racy, hepped up feel of mod sixties Italia. To the extent anyone's made a womanizing musical director monster into a sympathetic character... it's Bob Fosse. And All That Jazz is world's away from anything being attempted in Nine.

In the end, the real failure of Nine is seeing women through the prism of naughty Catholic schoolboy fantasy - beyond the offensive, obvious sexism, there's the endless sense that there's little more to say to all of what''s here than "oh, grow up" (Which, by the way, pretty much sums up Sophia Loren's final speech as the ghost of his mother). In a show so dominated by the work of women, trying to salvage Nine would have to, at base, abandon the framework of the child-man at its center. But without him... why bother? That's the question that hangs over Nine, and probably always has... the failure of the film is not even realizing that the question is there, but that's hard to see when you're spending so much time on your knees.

Is Terror A Luxury Problem?

Driving into Manhattan tonight, I heard the news (over and over - oy, the traffic) that a second man was arrested in Detroit on the same flight as the "Christmas Day Non-Bomber"... which means, I suppose, that we'll dealing with more "War On Terra!" all next week, surely the slowest news week of the year.

I don't want to make too light of the threat - and frankly, a bomb sewn into the crotch of your scanties really writes itself - but there was something, well, synthetic about all the coverage today, that caught me in an unexpected way. And suddenly I realized... "Terrorism" - especially plane-based terrorism - is largely an upper class, luxury problem.

What clued me into the realization was Sunday morning comments from both Candy Crowley (subbing for John King) on CNN and David Brooks (apparently doing his worst George Will replacing) on ABC; both talked of the event in terms of the heightened airport security which was bound to come... and then sounded cynically dismissive of the lines and inconvenience involved for, well... people like them.

You know... upper middle class, college educated professionals whose jobs cause them to travel fairly regularly, both domestic and foreign.

Maybe I really am onto something, after all.

Throughout the post 9/11 age, we've had these odd dualities in the discussion: the need for increased security on planes seems obvious... yet most regular travelers look at it in terms of inconvenience. We talk of being a nation extremely vulnerable... yet at the same time, We Are America and We Can Win, and there's a tension between what we think we need to do, and what we can't really do to feel entirely safe.

Those dualities, though, have everything to do with class; when much of the threat we currently deal with has to do with people traveling, by plane, to the US from international destinations, the real vulnerability, on the plane, is largely confined to the upper middle class people who travel that way. Outside of the upper middle class (and remember, a vast majority of Americans do not travel outside the country to begin with, and lack passports), the threat of blowing up on a plane for many is highly remote.

And to the extent that we have "home grown" threats, those too have to do with class. I was a little surprised, though it's logical if you think about it, to hear today that most of the "Muslim extremist" terrorists are not poor Arabs; they come, often from an educated, better off group of young men, who get good educations, struggle to find work in their fields, and find consolation in becoming more true in devotion to their faith. Osama Bin Laden comes from a billionaire Saudi family; his second in command is an Egyptian doctor. Mohamed Atta, the lead organizer of 9/11 (killed in the World Trade crash) was a college educated professional who spoke four languages. The Christmas day bomber? A wealthy Nigerian mechanical engineer, son of a prominent doctor. You could go on - even Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood does tend to fit that bill.

As I said, none of this minimizes the very real threat; but as with our other major issues of the day, we can't really address what we can't even see. Part of the illusion we perpetuate about terrorism is that it's coming from poor, uneducated (or miseducated, via madrasas) young Arabs... but that's not really the story. The kind of creativity, not to mention funding needed to plan and execute terrorism on such a dramatic scale - and in expression of such resentments - involves a fairly sophisticated, cosmopolitan background, and an exposure to a fairly broad range of cultures and classes.

Nor is that reality especially new - Marxism, Leninism, the French riots of 1968, our own student unrest in the sixties - combine itinerant youth, bourgeois upbringing and a sense of injustice... and you are, at least, getting warm. Sure it will help to expand economic opportunities for poor people in Arab states; but the real reflection, in terrorism, is in the way oil oligarchies tamp down opportunities for an educated middle class. And, perhaps, that's not as far from the kind of economic condition any number of young, educated people are starting to face across Europe... and in America.

Perhaps, too, all of this class consciousness helps to explain the jingoistic, shrill rhetoric on the right when it comes to terrorism; somewhere, in their anticommunist leanings and their opposition to student protests to Vietnam, is the kind of populist line for demonizing the other, and a response that stresses a hard, visceral lashing out.

More than ever, though, such reliance on hard hitting response can't be the whole answer; undermining the appeal of Muslim extremism lies as much, or more, in identifying its central futility. Terrorism and extremism can't win because ultimately there's not enough positive in the alternative. But for a generation of student radicals - who now represent, in many ways, the eldest members of the liberal elite class - that's hard to face when they have yet to fully come to terms with their own failed rad ideas. And suddenly, all that noise about Bill Ayers... might have a point, after all.

In the meantime, I suspect, listening to well off white professionals moan about shoe removal, and shampoo in plastic bags may well have short shelf life. You want to know why terrorism is such a problem... the problem is on your plane, not in the slums. As usual.

Christmas Off The Grid

So... anything happen while I was out? :)

I've spent the last 48 hours or so "off the grid" - certainly off the 'net - and it was a nice reminder that real life can be, well, nice and real. I didn't check a blog, or my e-mail (aiee) or my website... to discover that there was a billing problem (due to my change in bank accounts from a ways back).

That's all fixed, and I have been keeping up with general events, so it's probably time to get back to it.

But before I do...

Christmas this year was an adventure. The 36 hours or so leading up to the celebration were full of setbacks and frustration, including a real nightmare at one of my Starbucks stores (I lost the store key - then found it! A Christmas miracle! - and opening was delayed for about an hour), and a horrific trip up 95 to Norwalk Connecticut for the Swedish delicacies we share at Christmas, which nearly ended in disaster (but I got there 20 minutes before the place closed). Then on the 24th we put up a tree and made a full holiday feast... and by the evening we were fully exhausted.

And I worked on Christmas Day. And the next day, the Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe turned 8.

It's not all bad - it was the Christmas Eve I love with family, good food, great music and gift giving - but it was a lesson in planning ahead: more time in advance would have saved a lot of last minute heartache. And so, what had been planned as a day or so offline turned into the better part of a week off the grid. I feel bad... but I don't necessarily think it could have happened any other way. And life is too short for regrets.

The frustration is, of course, that just as I start to make some real progress getting blog noticed and finding the right audience... I vanish just at a crucial moment... only to reappear and rebuild all over again. But that's life, I suppose, when you try to do things outside the usual path, make your own way, try as you can to stay off the grid. In the moments I had to think about this year and all that's happened and the life I have right now... it's the freedom and the independence I have, such as it is, that still makes it all worthwhile... along with the connections to friends and family.

But next year... maybe I can have all that... and a few more days off.

PS - Just to offer a small correction to my piece on my boss having a little faith in me... she read the piece (which was nice to hear in itself) and insists she did not tell me, or the other manager, that everything would be fine and I could handle anything that came up. I stand corrected. Sort of. :)

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Sorry for the moment of relative silence. Christmas duties call - have to buy a lot of festive swedish items for our smorgasbord, and will probably be out of pocket almost all day. Dare I suggest... an open thread? I'd love to hear from the people who come here to visit (i know you're out there), but don't necessarily leave a comment. Talk about Christmas, or about healthcare.. or whatever moves you. See you later. Now, I am off to see Red. :)

Have A Little Faith In Me... But Just A Little.

Sitting here, looking at the maybe two inches of snow today, it's easy for Northern Westchester to feel a bit gypped. We were promise a blizzard; we got nuthin'. Give the two feet of snow to people who know what to do with it... that's my feeling.

Because of blizzard fears - and yes, a little bit of snow and slippery last evening on the roads - I got a shorter shift than I expected at another Starbucks, not my own, the one in our area with the drive thru window. Starbucks has become big on drive through windows... but most of Westchester is without them, and because of that, few of us are well trained on drive through process.

This came up last night, because I told my boss, when she volunteered me to cover the shift in this other store, I pointed out that I had wasn't good on drive through. "That's fine," she said, "no big deal," and promised me that the other workers would be familiar, even though they came from other stores.

So last night, I wound up working with the Manager of said other store (who is close friends with my boss), who said, jokingly "you know, when I told K____ that I was worried about you not having drive through experience, she said don't worry, you'd be fine." At which point I told her about how my boss had promised me others with drive through experience. We both laughed - partly because the nice girl from the other store who was also covering a shift had no idea about drive through either... and breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn't come down to us, the inexperienced.

I was struck, though, by the faith my boss has in me - that she can throw me into almost any situation and expect me to work through it, and conveys that faith to others. It's what we want, isn't it? At least it's what I want: to inspire the kind of confidence in my abilities and strengths to overcome obstacles.

Up to a point. I've learned a lot, the past couple of years, about over promising, and failing to deliver. "I can handle it" has, in my gaining ofage and wisdom, been replaced by "I can handle a lot of it... but not all of it." I find myself getting a little more honest, a little less rash in promising to exceed every expectation, surpass every goal. I can do some things... I cannot do everything. Believe me, it's been a struggle just to get that far.

A day like yesterday can cause you to lose faith... in weather people and their inability to predict, or even your own faith in your own abilities, like say, driving in snow. I'm coming to believe that faith and trust in others should be tempered by keeping expectations realistic: nobody's perfect, you can't know everything... people will make mistakes.

It's nice to be trusted, to give the impression of confidence and the ability to handle everything life throws your way... but I suspect I've become good - too good - at faking it. Have a little faith in me... but only a little. Otherwise, I might let you down. And I'd hate to do that.

Deal, Or Done Deal?

As much as I let pessimism take hold - there's a surprise - and predicted disaster trying to muster an agreement, I suppose I should admit defeat. My larger point stands, I think: the roiling across the blogs in the past few weeks (to say nothing of the past few months, or all year) misses an obvious point - that nothing really mattered outside of the political dealing by a few people in the back room.

This is no way to conduct an American government, or create good policy, at least, not to me. Whether one likes the bill or not - and I'd like the bill more if its ardent supporters toned down the "niftiest, most historical achievement since sliced bread" lingo - is largely irrelevant. This is what we're getting, and well, we're stuck with it, apparently.

Brace yourself.

If it works properly - open question there - there are obviously some positive results: no more insurance denials for preexisting conditions, apparently no caps on coverage (we'll see), subsidies for many people to purchase coverage, and insurance exchanges to provide that coverage in a clear, comprehensible form (again... we'll see). And though supporters trumpet new "cost controls" in the legislation, there's not much, and what's there is debatable in effectiveness: Medicare will get to test "alternative" payment methods and regulations, hospitals required to disclose pricing, best practices research meant to drive cost controls... it might amount something, but probably not too much.(.. and you don't need to go much further than to ask "how do those 'innovations' actually get filtered into the system" to realize there's no mechanism for it.)

I'm still concerned, mainly, with two things: the poorly thought out "expansion" of Medicaid, which will be problematic - not to mention that giveaway to Ben Nelson where the feds will pay all the Medicaid costs of Nebraska... and no other state (I'll be curious to see how that plays out in the rest of the process) - and the question of whether the subsidy methodology will actually give enough people enough funds to actually afford new policies.

And what about the new abortion compromise? I'm appalled naturally, and I think it should derail the bill... but as I said, this isn't about what I want, what you want, or what most of us want. It's "Let's Make A Deal" where Congress is the group in the funny costumes up front and we're the rest of the studio audience watching the amusing shenanigans. It all works, if we promise not to think too much. Or have opinions. Especially ones that don't fit neatly into simplistic, either/or debates. Pick Door #1! Republicans are awful!

While there's clearly a path, now, to melding the House and Senate versions and getting a final bill to the President, I have to admit, I remain pessimistic and skeptical. It matters that so many people found this process appalling, that so many people have found the legislative process mind-numbing and deal making of the worst sort, and that a substantial plurality - if not a majority - of ordinary people don't like what they've seen of this bill. If it doesn't matter enough to stop the bill at some point between now and final passage, passage of the bill may well be the haunting incident that follows us through to next November's elections; I suspect for many, this isn't what we signed up for, and this is where the free-floating rage and incoherent tea partying could begin to turn into a focused, actual movement for specific goals.

As someone who cares, deeply about healthcare policy, and who's worked pretty hard to learn the details of our American approach to healthcare... I'm sure I'm supposed to have a simple "yay" or "nay" thought on this bill. I don't; I really haven't all along. There's some good points and some really bad points to this bill, as there have been all along. I think the bad outweighs the good... but does that matter? I think it's a bad bill for any number of reasons, I think the process of creating it has been dreadful to the point that it should make Democrats extremely embarrassed to be the creators of it... and yet, I have to admit... we have to do something. Doing nothing, really, isn't an option. Or more to the point, it's an option that makes everything far, far worse for most people.

I'd feel better about all of this if the proponents and supporters and cheerleaders were more sober, more reflective, less bombastic. I'd feel better if this deal smacked less of a steamroller for political gain over other goals and more about thoughtful policy compromises that can be revisited, thoughtfully again, at some later point. I'd feel a lot better if I thought poor people would really be doing better as a result of this bill's passage. And I'd feel better if I didn't know, deep down, that this bill changes very little, does nothing about large problems that have to be faced, and doesn't even represent the "start" to reforming our healthcare systems that its supporters contend. The bill we're getting makes it likely more people will have some sort of health insurance. Health insurance, as everyone should get by now... is not healthcare. Those who don't... will get that, soon enough.

In the dark of a cold, snowy winter's night... things can look pretty gloomy.  And perhaps, Obama and his backers have a point: we won't know what's good in this bill until we're doing things differently. Perhaps. But my sense is... this is not how doing the right thing feels, or looks, or acts. This is how desperation feels, how illusory gains look, and how people with few real principles act. It's a done deal... and that's a good thing, right? Door #1! Briefcase #13! I'm sure I'll get the hang of this someday...

Huh...maybe it can be done after all...sorry Eric...for Betty

jinb

Saturday Singalong: Dancing To The Dishes

Who says chores have to be a punishment?

I had a Swiss friend, a dancer, who told me once that his solution for vaccuuming - which he hated - was to run around the house with the vaccuum cleaner, naked except for a pair of high heel shoes, playing disco music (yes, I had an image of that scene in Working Girl where Melanie Griffith does much the same thing). Made sense to me.

Fully dressed, snas high heels, I was doing the dishes the other evening, and realized the silence was killing me. So I got out the iPod and put on my favorite mix of songs. I got through about 6 songs in the Bs. And then I thought... you should add this to the singalong.

• Janet Jackson, Because of Love. It's amazing to realize how much material Jackson managed to produce with Jam and Lewis at the height of her career (and let's be honest... that moment has passed). Because of Love is really something of a throwaway single on janet, but it shows how she managed to master the kind of strength Diana Ross has as a vocalist - the voice may be thin and best in high, breathy range... but if you showcase it right. Exuberant and lively, Because of Love exudes a cheerful, sexy playfulness. Hard to resist. I don't even try.
• Pet Shop Boys, Bet She's Not Your Girlfriend. True fans of PSB know that there's more to the story than hits like West End Girls; the Boys were big proponents of sharing their extra output as B-sides, hidden singles and the like. And so there's this delicious secret for true fans of knowing about stuff like Miserabilism and I Get Excited that others have no idea about. Bet She's Not Your Girlfriend is from the nineties, and is probably aimed at George Michael, among other British pop stars who were trying to keep their gay lives out of the tabloids. The real power of the song is that it's a damn fine dance single, and was a pretty big underground dance hit.
• Kylie Minogue, Better The Devil You Know. I mentioned this before, but there is a reason it's in my Top 25. It never fails me. Never.
• Big Fun, Blame It On The Boogie. Another hit from the Stock Aitken Waterman era, a remake of the Jacksons single from the seventies. Big Fun was a high singing trio of boys from London, modestly successful here, mostly on gay dance floors. The original had a certain sense of menace (see below), while this version is pretty darn sunny and cheerful (and smooths out much of the original's adventurousness), still "that dirty rhythm moves me" is hard to dispute.
• Michael Jackson, Blood on the Dance Floor (TM's Switchblade Edit). My friend will harass me for this one, but for me, this is one of Jackson's better later singles, especially this expansive rethinking/remix by Tony Moran, which uses Moran's usual tricks (a strumming acoustic guitar, beefed up background singers, and a better propulsive rhythm track) to improve the song's bitter elements. Moran transforms Jackson's moody paranoia into a striking, angry house jam... which, like the remix of Scream, is how I'd prefer to remember him.
• Jesse McCartney featuring T-Pain, Body Language. McCartney has managed to transcend his boy-ish band origins (he started out pretty similar to Aaron Carter), mostly by embracing a new form blue eyed soul, probably best described as blue-eyed hip-hop. Like Usher or Jay Shawn, McCartney adds street cred to his vocals by throwing in hot rap collaborators (Ludacris on How Do You Sleep, T-Pain here), and he's gifted with one of the best tenors going in pop music right now. Add in inventive lyrics ("Parlez-vous Francais? Konichiwa, come and move it my way") and a slow percolating rhythm track and it's pretty damned hard to resist.