Soundtrack to the Motion Picture

Friends Only Soundtrack

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I post in waxes & wanes. Some entries stay public but the nittier & grittier won't: personal stuff, dumb stuff, woolgathering, handwringing, Photo Whoring, navel-gazing, and long concentrated written stretches of nothing.

Traditionally this space has semi-regular content and a kick-ass friends page. If you do come in there's a semblance of some there there.

"The goal is to get there
Without fear in high speed
We dance through the darkness
We won't stop 'til we're stopped."

- "Wrecked Metal," from the album The Jade Motel

I'm shocked, positively SHOCKED that the best slices of pop manna continue to be served by Swedish chick bands. And with this stellar ditty comes an endemically and organically cute video replete with diary doodles in the margins of living breathing picture postcards.

DON'T listen to flabby reviews blurbing this band as a Swedish Pipettes. That's insulting the British, the Swedish, and the Wall of Sound aesthetic.

If you squint your ears a little you can tease out the soulmate sounds of early English Beat, Smiths, warm ripples of third-wave chick ska, and even Siouxsie Sioux's kid sister on vocals!

Those Dancing Days release their debut album, "In Our Space Hero Suits," this month.

I'm 100% incapable of rooting against Britney Spears.
In fact, she's never NOT been on my Crush List™.

So maybe it isn't actually Britney Spears I should cheer on. Maybe it's her think-tank gumbo of pop producers, PR minions, style stylists, astrologists, baristas, feng shui artists, and music video directors.

Regardless, this trio of pics from the set of the video for her single "Womanizer" doesn't bring me back into the fold, since I never, ever left. (The white striped accent in the toe of her shoe in Photo #1 of the triptych ALONE had be at hello).

Here's hoping she has a sprig of the Travolta mojo working for her as she ramps up the new album. (The career comeback-after-comeback-after-comeback part, not the hairplugs or Scientology parts).

James Gunn's new web series PG Porn launches today. The first episode stars Aria Giovanni and Nathan Fillion.

All the crappy production values, plot, dialogue, Nathan Fillion, and porn stars without all that having sex that usually gets in the way!

This two-and-a-half minute ditty gets way more right than Chuck Palahniuk's "porn" novel Snuff!

This project being aired online thanks to a federally funded grant Spike.com.

Link to news here.

How on EARTH am I to wait until March 2009 for this?

[I wrote this three years ago and ALWAYS associate it with Labor Day. It's exactly how I feel about them. Which is bittersweet and quivery]:

Friday night of a 3-day weekend. 11PM.

I stopped at a gas station within spitting distance of Exit 68 in Tolland, CT. It’s a good halfway point for the trip to my mother’s house in NH, which in turn is a good halfway point for the remainder of the trip to Maine.

Gas and convenience. Impulse buy: the last four (4) packs of Topps “Wacky Packages Series 2” trading cards at the counter. When I was buying them in 2nd grade they were 35 cents for 13 cards; now they are a $1.50 for 8. Of course I make more money now (27th grade) than I did when I was eight.

I wanted coffee to get me through Worcester & Leominster & the NH backroads (crawling with local law) as ungroggily as possible. And the convenience store – on a Friday night on the holiday weekend, with coffee as an unalienable right to every consumer – was OUT of coffee. Every flavor, every denomination, every hot thermal carafe on the counter was empty. More was brewing, but the counter guy just started it and I wanted it NOW. This stop was more of a pit stop at the Indy 500 – I wanted to jet while the motor was still warm. There was a Travel Authority Rest Stop Oasis up the road with a Dunkin Donuts, but my Inner Driver didn’t want to stop twice (having already appeased the Road Trip Gods with my Wacky Packs purchase).

You know your Inner Driver – NEVER STOP for a map or directions, or to pull over if you’re sleepy, or need to pee, or to be static for too long anywhere, not while you can see and still hear all those cars rushing past you on the shouting-distance highway. The ones that are winning while you're standing still on the sidelines. It’d be a shame if all those cars you passed overtook you again. If they beat you. So says your Inner Driver. Ten additional minutes for fast-drip Qwik-Mart coffee would be Unacceptable™.

Coffee options in the immediate vicinity: package store next door = closed. Subway sandwich shop = closed. Corner coffee shop = closed. Other gas station across the street = closed.

Electric Blue = open. They serve coffee. At least they did 5 years ago, last time I remember going inside.

Electric Blue is a strip club.

It's been there well before I was a college student. You never see one of these joints in construction; they've always been open and always been where you see them, in any town. I’ve been to Electric Blue for bachelor parties and a handful of cliché-ridden alpha guys’ nights out (wings & happy hour at Hooters, then either Kahoots which is closer to Hartford or the ‘Blue). Tolland, Connecticut is near UConn so when school’s in session there’s a lot of girls dancing part-time in between course schedules, and the handsy frat boys that love them.

It looked exactly like it did the last time I was there. You see the ATM just inside the door before your eyes can adjust to the space. Dark and generically seedy sports bar-looking, only much more cavernous like a VFW Hall. A DJ cranking classic rock & cheesy dance pop and pouring on that baritone gravy as emcee - "NOW TAKING THE STAGE GIVE IT UP FOR" announcements and the like. Four girls danced on the main stage, a dozen others flitted around & worked the patrons on a drink-by-drink, case-by-case basis. If you’ve been in a place like this (and at this point even if you haven’t) you know what everyone here looked & sounded & acted like.

I sat at the bar. If you travel deeper and sit stageside you’re expected to dispense money with regularity like an ATM. Red Sox lowlights (they lost) flickered on televisions. Tonight’s special: the quarter-operated pool table was free all night.

They didn’t have coffee, either. Not anymore. Not much call for it. No upside to selling it in a strip club, I guess.

I paid for a Diet Coke with a twenty. You know you’re at a strip club when you get 18 crisp, thong-ready singles for change.

I nursed my soda. Watched. Listened. Politely refused three offers for shoulder rubs (10 bucks for one song right where you sat) or for a private dance (20 bucks for one song behind the velvet curtain).

Twenty minutes later and after her stage set, Brooke sat down. She was friendly, which is a stripper's default setting. But she also said more than two sentences to me without immediately soliciting me up for a drink or a massage or a dance. Most dancers hard sell, and it’s usually an aggressive buyers’ market so they move on if customers aren't immediately opening their wallets or making it rain twenties. Neither of us were playing to those types, which surprised us both. She also didn’t seem too jaded. She didn’t have what Captain Quint describes in “Jaws” as “lifeless eyes, a doll's eyes.”

I told her I was passing through on the way to New Hampshire, that I still had to get up there tonight. She kept sticking around, kept talking to me. We talked Hartford and how it's exactly halfway between every other more interesting city in New England.

She just moved here from Washington (the state). She liked it okay, did pretty well because she was a brunette and, like, there's always more blondes and the regulars always love new girls so she did pretty well. She liked that she lived in the suburbs and not actual Hartford but still had a kinda city if she wanted to, like, go to a city.

She said she just came back from Puerto Rico with her roommate, another dancer who wasn’t working tonight, they had a blast and so want to go back. She hadn’t been to New York City yet but wanted to. Law and Order SVU is one of her all-time favorite shows ever. She didn’t have plans for this Memorial Day weekend other than (maybe) seeing Revenge of the Sith and probably just hanging out. She didn’t work Saturday or Sunday.

She said she liked it okay here, the staff was okay, the other girls were mostly cool. It’s slower in summer because UConn’s out of school. Private dances here are pretty lame – not the actual dances but because there was a separate jukebox back there for the music and dancers had to pay for the songs on it themselves.

She asked if I wanted a dance. The curtain hung ten feet from where we sat.

The keys to any service industry: make you think they really like you, for you, and not simply because you’re paying. This is fact. But what if, for once, to misquote Sally Field's Oscar-winning speech for Places In the Heart, they really, really did like you? For you?

I gave her some singles and she picked some songs. She gave me three songs even though she only owed one. The song I remember is "Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen. That track is more pop than rock; all neon sounding, and is the reverse commute of a prototypical Van Halen album cut.

Her hands. Fingertips light on the back of my neck like they would have been if we were kissing and we were together and this wasn't a business transaction in a drafty alcove too close to the front door of a strip club, where the bouncer was loud with the patrons.

Her hands slowly and tenderly tousled my hair. Oe or two times her fingers interlocked with my own hands resting passively on my knees (per the "no-touch" rules). Her brown eyes were lit from within with sparks, pools of turkish coffee. Her eyes were unembarrassed and genuine as they looked into mine. Her smile was unforced.

We didn't fill the space with nervous talk. The songs took forever to play and we were frozen in amber. I felt like I was in junior high again and that this was my first slow dance with my very first girlfriend.

The songs finished. The DJ's set outside the curtained alcove thumped back into our collective consciousness. She parted from me slowly, like the finishing move on an expensive spa massage.

I stood up and got on my jacket. She lingered. She told me she wasn't working Saturday or Sunday but would be here Monday. She said this making eye contact so I could read between the lines. Then she asked if I would be passing through on the way back, maybe. I would be but said I didn’t know. Then maybe I’ll see you again, or the next time you visit your family, she said. Maybe, I said. Then I left.

I got back on the road. All those cars I was hellbent on passing were long gone. Everyone was already where they needed to be, far far up the highway.

I smelled like her perfume. Brooke was her name. And she really, really liked me.

I drove the rest of the way home in the dark with the windows open and the cold air keeping me awake. I needed cold night spring air. I needed to feel windswept.

"This year and last have been age of the notebooks and journals - the promissory notes of the artist, as in international lending operations. Notebooks -- Trollope, Wharton, Delacroix, Melville. The Hasty Age (big business and Hollywood influence): we buy the prospectus because we have no time for the finished work."

Dawn Powell wrote that SIXTY years ago.

Despite her dismay, she would have been comfortable in this day and age of lifestreaming, microblogging, and general oversharing. Her blog would rock, even if semi-contradictory for her to keep it. (Her diaries are extensive so there's precedent and more legitimacy than, say, a Diablo Cody, who as an Oscar-winning screenwriter and blogger was a middling stripper).

I also think Shakespeare and Dickens and Hitchcock would have embraced these new technologies and formats.

Dawn DOES have a Twitter page, so there's that.

Speaking of The Hasty Age, I'm really only ever on Plurk now. And I used to piggyback my posts here via various delivery systems, but they led to all that garbled Matrix-y looking stuff so I killed it.

I will say that working freelance in Production is tailor-made for the 140-characters-at-a-time insights.