This Is Not News

OK, here’s one of those stories that you just knew Dave and I couldn’t let pass by.

A Chicago producer who made a fortune selling CD compilations from radio’s Golden Age has decided to take on the highest of high profile subjects for his next collection: The Bible.

As reported in London’s Guardian a few days ago, the planned set will devote 70 discs to the Old testament and 20 to the New. Production began in July and already features some casting decisions that are…shall we say, creative?

Case in point, the role of God. Look up at the headline again and it’ll come to you. Yup, it’s Terence Stamp. Cross General Zod with Jor-El and evidently you get God. And I ask you, who can argue with that?

The one-hundred-plus member cast also includes Luke Perry as Judas, Marisa Tomei as Mary Magdalene, and Michael York as the narrator.

Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ is a co-producer on this project, titled the Word of Promise. Caviezel is also reprising his role as Jesus. Apparently when the role is that big, fears of typecasting become irrelevant.

Word is that creator (small c) and producer Carl Amari still hasn’t found his Satan but more than one person involved in the project has cast their vote for Simon Cowell.

Also no word as to whether the audio epic will be available on iTunes.

Better late than never, I always say. I saw this article about Disney teaming with a wedding dress designer to create princess-themed wedding dresses for grown-up brides about a week ago but I haven’t had a chance to comment on it until now. (In the interest of full disclosure, as I write this, my five-year old daughter’s heart-shaped Disney Princess plate is sitting on my desk. I believe she used it to snack on some carrots while she was playing games on my PC earlier.)

Having purchased at least one Disney Princess dress-up costume for my own daughter, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this headline. Is there truly a market for women to wrap themselves in bright yellow tulle (Belle, for those out there in non-Princess homes) or bright pink organza (Sleeping Beauty) on their wedding days? And if so, could Seven Dwarf-themed bridesmaid dresses be far behind?

Never fear, says designer Kirstie Kelley, these gowns will not simply be adult-sized versions of the character dresses already available on DisneyShopping.com. Rather these gowns will “attempt to channel the personality of each princess in terms suitable for a real-life, modern woman.”

Yeah, I didn’t quite get that part either.

Kelly goes on to explain key differences between the Disney Princesses to illustrate (hah!) this point.

A mood and fashion sensibility was assigned to each princess-themed gown: Cinderella is for the classic glamour bride; Sleeping Beauty is about pretty romance; Snow White is sweet elegance; Ariel is sultry allure; Belle is stylish sophistication; and Jasmine is bohemian chic.

“It actually touches on every type of wedding,” explained Kelly, who also has her own bridal couture label. “For the destination wedding there’s Ariel or Jasmine, but if you’re having 500 people in a ballroom, you’re definitely the Cinderella gown.”

Um…okay. That clears that up.

I’m really not sure how I feel about this. I fear that weddings in society have already moved so far into the fantasy realm, especially for women, that many have trouble understanding the difference between “getting married” and “having a wedding”. In fact, much of the wedding industry is built around this “princess for day” sense of entitlement that translates into brides spending thousands of dollars on horse-drawn carriages and swans.

As Susan Jane Gilman wrote in her hysterical and insightful book, Kiss My Tiara:

At age five, I perceived marriage as a dress, a party, and a spotlight. Unfortunately, there’s a whole industry dedicated to perptuating this idrea for females until we’re oh, fifty…. Many woman [have] grown up beleiinvg that their wedding will be “their day” – the most improtant day of their life. The problem was, their wedding day was not just “their day”, but their only day…the one time they were allowed to run the whole damn show, demand exactly what they wanted and be the center of attention.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about the creeping influence of the Disney Princesses in the lives of little girls. With few exceptions, the stories of the princess characters bear little resemblance to realties of love, relationships, romance, and work that they will encounter as they outgrow those brightly colored dress-up gowns. After spending your formative years being fed one ideal of life and love, it’s not hard to imagine that girls are more than a little shaken when they enounter the reality.

Am I reading too much into this? It’s certainly possible, but the fact that the word “princess” comes up hundreds of times during the planning of the average American wedding, makes me think that maybe I’m not. Wth or without Disney-themed dresses, Gilman hits the nail on the head about the wedding industry.

Of course, I can’t simply blame Disney for planting the princess idea into every little girl’s head, and I can’t even claim that I’m immune. I got married in a pale pouffy dress with something that looked suspiciously like a tiara pinned to my head. I can’t deny it. There were witnesses. Of course the best man at this blessed event was named Jennifer but that’s a story for another time.

I suppose it’s all about balance. As Disney becomes more effective at inserting their Princess brand into more and more related products and services, parents of young girls need to be more proactive about supplementing that princess image with other examples of the roles woman play and can still play in society. I realize that it’s hard to compete with pink organza and a marketing budget roughly equal to the GDP of China but we should at least try.

That’s all I have to say on this for now save this last comment: Is anyone else out there as disturbed by the idea of as “Ariel is sultry allure” as I am?

One of the big stories in the ongoing downsizing of the Philadelphia Inquirer is the reassignment of columnist Gail Shister, who carved out a beat focusing heavily on local broadcast, network and cable news operations. The leaner, meaner Inquirer apparently felt that this was not something they could spare a writer to do, so they reassigned Shister as a general features reporter whose pieces would appear as needed throughout the paper. This move has generally been panned as a sign of poor decision-making on the Inquirer’s part and something of a mark of disrespect to Shister. On the other hand, on Sunday she had a story on Katie Couric and CBS on the front page of the A&E section that was rather in-depth (a little shorter on specifics than I might have liked) and longer than anything that would have appeared in her column space. If that kind of reporting actually became a hallmark of the Inquirer and Shister’s news assignment, I might consider it a step up.

Does anyone happen to know why so few soundtrack songs are available as single tracks from services like Rhapsody and iTunes? There are quite a few tracks that my favorite artists have contributed to various soundtracks over the years and I haven’t quite been willing to pay the full album price for one sing. (Matthew Sweet had a great track on the Can’t Hardly Wait track called “Farther Down” that I’ve been looking for for years, ever since I gave up Napster.) As it is I gotta hope that the artist puts together a greatest-hits or b-sides compilation to try and track it down.

Ah well. Probably not an awful thing that I’m saving a few bucks this way. iTunes is already a vacuum.

So I finally got my 2nd-generation 8 GB black iPod Nano the other day. As is true of so many other areas of my life, I am ridiculously spoiled. I remember my first MP3 player, and how deliriously happy I was to have 32 MB of memory to carry an hour’s worth of songs with me on the bus. Now I have over 1100 tracks in a device that’s slightly smaller. And let me tell you, I’m gonna let Shuffle Play work through all of those tracks if it kills me.

In the meantime, now that I am an Apple hardware owner, I have begun to peruse sites like www.cultofmac.com in order to learn what other wonders Apple will have in store for us in the future. Then again, Fake Steve Jobs’ blog is probably more fun.

I had seen the reports that Disney is going to add an African-American character to its Princess lineup. My initial reaction, as the father of a five-year-old girl, was, “Well, that’s more merchandise for me to buy.” As some of the plot details have come out, other commentators have pointed out that perhaps Disney hasn’t quite thought through some of the connotations of The Frog Princess. Here’s Larry Wilmore commenting on The Daily Show – the clip is worth a view.

I have finally saved up enough cash to order my own new iPod Nano, and as I eagerly await its arrival, I’ve been putting together some playlists within iTunes. Now, one of the reasons I want to upgrade to a Nano is that I want to be able to store the 1200 songs I have in my library on one device, rather than the 64 or so that fit on my current Rio Chiba. So I imagine I’ll spend a lot of my time listening to the entire library on shuffle (as I’m doing right now), or listening to specific albums, or perhaps all songs by a particular artist. But there may be times that I am in specific moods, and I figure it wouldn’t be bad to have playlists ready to go for those occasions. Now, almost as long as I’ve been making musical compilations, I’ve referred to at least one of them by the name Daves Rich Pageant. It’s a riff on the R.E.M. album Lifes Rich Pageant which a friend once coined for me, and once I like something I tend to stick with it. Right now I’m using the Daves Rich Pageant tag for a general Best of the Best compilation – my favorite song from my favorite artists. (I try to limit myself to one song per artist per compilation. These rules are somewhat random, especially now in the iPod age. Once upon a time they helped me make sure every mix tape had some diversity on it.) The heck of it is, my memory must be shot. Because when I later put together two themed collections, I kept sticking songs there that I had already put on the latest version of DRP. What can I say? I guess I have a lot of ties in the favorite-song category, and I don’t always remember which one I picked.

The themes I’ve picked so far are Sonic Caffeine, for when I just want to hear a bunch of up-tempo songs that’ll get my enthusiasm and energy level going, and Sunrise Walk. Since I never really am awake at sunrise to take walks, I’m going more for a certain vibe. When I used to be really nocturnal, I sometimes stayed up until after dawn. And when I would walk outside, watching the sun come up and the world stir awake, I would feel a strange mix of exultation and calm. It’s a certain feeling of reflection, taking stock of the situation and feeling hope for what’s to come. There are certain songs that fit that mood, and I’m curious to see how it feels when I listen to them all in a row the next time I’m walking to class.

iTunes’ smart playlists already let me organize my library by year of release, but I’m still wondering if I should put together a list of songs from, say, high school or college. That might be a bit too backward-looking even for me. We shall see. In the meantime I’m gonna need to think of some more themes.

Went out with Pattie tonight to the Helium Comedy Club in Philadelphia, a small, pleasant club that’s doing the best job I can remember of bringing comedy headliners into Philly. We had front row seats to see Jake Johannsen, who did a great routine filled mostly with new material. Indeed, a lot of the material seems different from the CD I bought after the show, which was recorded in 2005. So feel free to head over to the website, see a show, and buy some CDs.

When I bought the CD after the show, I mentioned to Jake that I get the occasional e-mail from someone who’s looking for a copy of Jake’s HBO special, This’ll Take About an Hour. He got a look on his face that suggested I am not the first person to bring this up, and he said that he’s been trying to get the rights to put the show out on DVD. He seemed pretty hopeful that this would happen soon, so keep checking his site.

I also happened to catch Jake when he appeared on Comcast SportsNet’s Daily News Live on Friday. I was more than a little surprised to see him, since Jake’s not exactly what I call a sports-centric comic. The host, Michael Barkann, and Daily News writer Sam Donnellon seemed at least a bit familair with Jake’s work and did a good job chatting him up – and I admit I was a little bit amused to see how retired bits from his act worked their way into his answers. Hey, it’s good material – you dn’t want that stuff to go to waste. 🙂

Fading to Black is a blog that covers the ongoing decline of the newspaper industry in North America and the possible consequences of that decline for journalism. It’s an interesting read, and has the added benefit for me of being a window into how Canada is dealing with these issues. The blog highlighted my earlier post about ending my subscription to the Inquirer. I appreciate the link, and as I set out to return the favor, it occurs to me that I really do not miss the paper. I do check out philly.com almost every day – that’s how I spotted the article about brain scans I highlighted yesterday – but I don’t find myself spending much time there, and I certainly haven’t seen an avalanche of solid news stories that would make me want to pick the paper up again. Indeed, it seems a big focus for the Inquirer has been getting more commentators for its Sunday section, and like I said before, that’s exactly the wrong direction to go in if you want to get me to pony up again.

Got a new chair. Still getting used to it, so no deep thoughts tonight.

In the meantime, here’s a YouTube clip of Neil Finn playing the song “Silent House,” which he cowrote with the Dixie Chicks. The song is apparently on the upcoming Finn/Crowded House album. There’s a compare and contrast for you.