TOD: "Corre" by Jesse y Joy

i'm a pop music junkie. gimme a pretty voice, a catchy tune, a solid head-nodding beat + i'm hooked: the song is on nonstop repeat on my player. i admit it: my taste is completely commercial; i am the scorn of hipsters everywhere. 


today's track of the day has been on heavy rotation on the local bilingual spanish pop station (la kalle 101.3). i think it got big thanks to a telenovela (a spanish language soap opera); the music video alone provides everything you need for a satisfying soapy story arc. the song is performed in spanish, but you don't need to understand the lyrics to appreciate the melody + to get that it's a sad song (how is it that words are not necessary to understanding the emotions of a song? melody is so mindblowingly powerful). here's the mexican brother-sister duo, jesse y joy (i have no idea which is which), performing "Corre". 

for musical theatre nerds

warning: if the idea of people singing and dancing their life dramas out on stage makes you cringe, go on and skip this post entirely. make yourself a cup of tea or surf on over to another website. this post is dead to you.


Smash- NBC's adult version of Glee- is an hour-long weekly drama about creating an original musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe (meh). i can watch the show in 10 minutes because i fast forward through all the dialogue that consists of endless discussions of boring grown-up problems (divorce, affairs, parental approval, evil assistants, financing a broadway show). but the good news: after you carve away the talking parts, you're left with a collection of more-than-decent original songs written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (double t's in both his names!), who co-wrote the music for Hairspray. even if Smash ends up as another tv casualty, i suspect these new songs will start turning up in heavy rotation in musical theater auditions everywhere. here are the two most memorable ones so far: "Mr. + Mrs. Smith" and "Let Me Be Your Star".

OOJ: Squashhenge!

mozz forest

this is what we saw when my PR lifted the foil off of his fresh-from-the-oven lasagna. i love sculpture in unexpected places. cool, huh?

R.I.P. Whitney

i don't generally feel much connection to celebrities, so i was surprised by how sad i felt when i found out whitney houston passed away over the weekend. she was 48. whitney was my gateway drug to pop music. "Greatest Love of All" came out when I was 8 years old and just starting to discover radio. hers was the female voice i most wanted to emulate as i belted out tunes alongside to my fisher price plastic radio until someone yelled at me to stop. and it wasn't just me: so many divas who followed her echoed her style too. though i couldn't have said as much as a kid, whitney's voice gave me my first taste of the power music could have over me- to consume me, inspire me + sustain me.


here is one my fave whitney songs. the lyrics are typically cheesy romantic, but the melody is gorgeous + the vocal artistry is classic whitney. from the movie, The Preacher's Wife: "I Believe in You and Me".

sunday paper

nothing like reading the classifieds to make me grateful for the job i have. one posting impressed me w/its exhausting details:


"Jollisant Farms needs 5 temporary laborers to work from 03/12/2012 to 11/30/2012. Duties include: plant hay fields, cultivate, fertilize, + irrigate; cut + bale hay; load hay. Planting of hay starts March; cutting + baling starts May-Sept; loading + transporting to other ranches begins Oct-Dec. Work tools, supplies + equipment will be provided without cost to the worker."


and for a pick-me-up, i read the personal ads.


"HAVE PITY: SWF seeks SWM, 70+. I'm ugly, dumb, no personality, boring, can't dress, but I have beautiful blue eyes + red hair, great conversationalist. Give me a call."


"WHY NOT ME?: SHM, 61, bald, widower, honest, n/s, retired, likes walking."

more local art

here's the latest from the current exhibit at south broadway library gallery:

"Meta-Morph", Wesley Pulkka (Gesso, Ink, Matte Acrylic)

you might need to stare at this one for a minute to get it, but the title helps:

"I've Got a Question", David Mckean (Oil)

"High Lift Kundalini Cam", Wesley Pulkka (Gesso, Ink, Gloss Acrylic)

more facebook fiction

more excerpts from 420 Characters by Lou Beach. some of them read like the first paragraph in a longer story, but my favorite ones stand on their own as complete little stories- beginning, middle, end- like glazed munchkins. 


"Little Fluff knocks over the dish of milk. 'Naughty, naughty,' says Mother Kitty. 'You may not go out to play.' Little Fluff begins to cry. Mother Kitty wipes her tears and says: 'If you promise to be more careful in the future, you may join your friends outside.' Little Fluff promises and runs outside, where Mitsy and Binks are setting fire to some trash and smoking the marijuana cigarette."


"I rise at 3 a.m. to walk my bladder to the bathroom, then return to bed and wait for my face and pillow to come to an agreement. I lie on my right, my left, my stomach, my back, as if attempting an even tan, until I find the Goldilocks spot. The only sound is the hum of the planet, and the whistling and chirping of the little birds who live in my nostrils."