theCLog

As the Baltimore Ravens scored to time the game at versus Minnesota Vikings with 3 minutes 37 seconds left in the fourth quarter, a tune — familiar and fierce — began to rise above the cheers and whistles … until, before long, the entire stadium was engulfed in a hearty rendition of legendary rock band Journey’s signature song, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” From Broadway to cable to sports, the nearly 30-year-old hit just keeps on swinging.

The 1981 power balled is a soaring, hard rockin’ anthem for those who refuse to let a little thing like doubt keep them from what they want. The song reached No. 8 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

That was back then. Now, the tune has taken on a life of its own due to repeated appearances on some of TV’s hottest shows.

In 2008, it was the 72nd most downloaded song in the iTunes store and is its “most downloaded song not released in the 21st century” of all time. Arguably, the most recognizable and most referenced song in popular culture right now, but it received a jolt of new life by the finale of HBO’s addictive series The Sopranos in 2007. In fact, sales of the song on iTunes rose 482 percent over following days. It has shown up on Family Guy, Scrubs, and MTV’s Laguna Beach.

Earlier this year, contestants from American Idol sang “Don’t Stop Believin’” as a group at the beginning of the results show, and if you caught them when they rolled through Time Warner Cable Arena in August, the song was used as the closing group song for the Season 8 tour. It was ranked as the 11th greatest song on VH-1’s Greatest Songs of the 80’s countdown. Most recently, the cast from one of my favorite new shows Glee performed a cover of the song.

So, what is it about the song that seems to transcend generations and genres? Sure, much of its resiliency is due to its own purely musical kick-ass nature. But it’s one of those rare creations with a message that speaks to a feeling to which most anyone can relate. “Don’t Stop Believin’” brings us to a place we have all been at least once — a point where with a dream in our hearts, we throw caution to the wind and, even when the odds seemed stacked against us, we soldier on and … well, at the risk of stringing together any more motivational clichés, it’s a damn good song from the lyrics to the instrumentation to frontman Steve Perry’s powerful delivery and is, thankfully, not at all like much of the unintelligible and incomprehensible “music” in heavy rotation on the radio today.

If you are currently living under a rock and have no idea what this song is, the band is perpetually in tour mode, albeit without the golden-piped Perry.

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Major Inversions, by Gordon Highland, CreateSpace, 276 pages

Drew Ballard is perhaps the least likely protagonist ever.  For one, he’s not all that likable, being a drug-dealing and abusing rent-a-cop with musical talent – he plays in a hair metal tribute act, The Down Boys,  a jazz fusion act called, Feu Jeune, and works as the jingle writer of choice for the Wilmington area.  He’s also a slacker despite his workload, with no real goals beside the next gig.  The only thing he wants to do with women is of the carnal desire.  He really shouldn’t be the center of such an engaging and intriguing novel.

Consider the opening line: “My earliest memory is shitting in the bathtub.”  Such an inauspicious line  births the main theme of the novel, that of creation.  The music, such as the wonderful chorus of jingle’s sprinkled through the novel (Grooves in the sand, innocence lost / A period in waiting, anxiety the cost), is the most obvious creation Drew gives us access to.  The whole of the novel, too, is Drew’s creation, his own story and how he wants to tell it.  He talks to the reader, admitting things are omitted or simply not as they really happened, though there is one reader in particular he is addressing.

The metafictional aspects of the novel are engaging, giving readers a layer to come back too once  finishing. It brings more and more to the forefront that you didn’t quite get through the initial reading.  With the format of a thriller, Highland undermines expectations, – pulling out the rug on subplots – but each thread he weaves is all in service to a great story.  This is one of those novels that will completely exceed your initial impressions, throwing you for a loop as the twists start.  Though he subtly foreshadows the ending near the beginning, you won’t see it coming.  Everything is important in this novel, as pointless as it may seem.  From his dealing and security guard day job to the music he creates and the people he meets – everything is working to the ultimate payoff.  To tell you too much would ruin a surprising read, and I want nothing to do with such sins.

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Say it isn’t so. A legendary childhood TV fave of mine recently met its demise. After 26 years — nearly my whole life — of convincing kids that reading is cool (and I have the library to prove it), the scholastic staple Reading Rainbow was pulled off the air two Fridays ago.

Sooo … no weekday morning before school Electric Company. No Schoolhouse Rock interspersed with Saturday morning cartoons. Now, no hypnotically cheerful LeVar Burton. No wonder some kids don’t think learning is fun. Poor children of the future. Just how will they learn anything? Internet, schminternet. It’s creepy out there. But Reading Rainbow — now that was a wholesome, good ol’ fashioned learning machine.

The program earned more than two-dozen Emmy awards and was the third-longest running children’s show in PBS history behind Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. According to NPR, John Grant, who is responsible for content at WNED Buffalo, RR’s home station, said no one, including the station, PBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, would put up the several hundred thousand dollars that would have renewed the show’s broadcast rights.

NPR reports that changes in educational initiatives are to blame as well. That is, whereas RR “operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books”, research is now directed at the basic tools of reading such as phonics, spelling, and reading fundamentals. Blah, blah, blah … I get it.

OK, so maybe I don’t remember the title of any book that was ever on that show. However, I do remember being excited about the wonderful world of imagination and how all you had to do to get lost in a different daydream everyday was turn a page. I don’t think I even realized I was learning, expanding my thought processes, developing my creative juices. And how could anyone forget that theme song — Butterfly in the sky/I can go twice as high/take a look/it’s in a book . . . I would go on, but I think I feel a tear forming.

So I was a book nerd. But RR got me where I am today. You see, RR made me love reading. Reading made me a better writer. Being a better writer got me A’s in English. A’s in English got me everywhere. The rest is history.

Thank goodness for companies who are salvaging the life of this wonderful program by selling it on DVD. At least this way, future generations will benefit from the educational value that this program, cleverly cloaked in 30-minute increments of fun, fancy and fantasy, had to offer.

And they won’t have to take my word for it.

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Bank of America is still the biggest bank in America, for those who are counting.

A ranking released Wednesday by Virginia-based research firm SNL Financial shows that Charlotte-based BofA (NYSE:BAC) has total assets of $2.25 trillion and deposits of $971 billion.

And, Wells Fargo wants to give the U.S. their TARP money back ASAP.

Chief Executive John Stumpf says the San Francisco bank plans to repay “shortly” a government investment made in the bank during last fall’s financial crisis.

Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) accepted $25 billion in taxpayer funds from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was designed to thaw the credit markets and boost the economy. So far, 10 banks have repaid the TARP money they received.

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While working on another movie-related blog post, I found myself just wasting time taking online quizzes and reading fairly useless compendiums of others’ opinions. Here are two I figured I’d share:

The New York Times’ Film Studies Quiz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/26/education/edlife/20090726_Edlife_Quiz.html?ref=edlife) — This is one Internet quiz that’s actually pretty tough, and co-authored by a professor at my program. I’d like to explain away my god-awful score on the quiz by saying I never took a course with him, but that doesn’t really excuse someone who’s getting a Master’s in this stuff. Surprisingly, I did best on the Westerns section. If only there had been an homage to MGM musicals …

John Carpenter's The Thing, included in Empire's list of great horror movies.

Empire’s Salute to Horror Through the Ages (http://www.empireonline.com/features/horror-through-the-decades/default.asp) – A fellow MA student posted this to their Facebook page. Obviously, it’s just one person’s (or one magazine’s), like, opinion, man, about the standout themes and films from the past 50 years of horror, and it’s a shame the magazine didn’t give movies pre-1950 their due, but this still provided a few minutes of good distraction and food for thought.

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Is there no one left in Hollywood with an original thought in their head? Be on the lookout for an unfortunate influx of classic movie remakes coming soon to a theater near you for your viewing displeasure. It was bad enough that some film studio outfit sullied the legacy of one of my favorites, Dirty Dancing, with that dreadful Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights a few years back, but now I hear they are at it again, and an actual remake of the film is now in the works. Sigh … please, please let’s leave Baby in the corner where we left her 22 years ago.

No doubt the popularity of reality shows such as Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance is contributing to this lapse of judgment by these studio execs. But if they think this remake will have them swiveling their hips to the sounds of blockbuster cash rolling in like it did for the original flick starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey back in 1987, or that it could possibly take hold and never let go of a generation of blossoming adolescents in remotely the same way … well, let’s just say they will most certainly NOT be having the time of their lives. (more…)

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For those who are devotees of film, or in this case, film acting, or deeper still, minimalist acting 101, check out Brother John, a 1971 film starring Sidney Poitier as John Kane.

Kane returns to a sleepy, racist Alabama town due to the death of his sister after being gone for a long time. Kane’s stoic yet enigmatic presence upsets and offsets the status quo of the town. John is branded a “troublemaker” just because of who he is. Coincidentally, at the same time, the local African-American townspeople are up in arms and protesting the unfair working practices at the local plant. (more…)

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Microsoft swapped out a black man’s head for a white man’s head because they felt the people of Poland would not be able to relate to a black person in a business meeting. I know that there aren’t a lot of Blacks in Poland, but that isn’t giving Polish people a lot of credit. They cite racism in Poland as the cause. Really. Perhaps it’s racism in the people making the creative decisions that is the cause? I suspect there’s no causal link between advertisers who dare to determine what people can and cannot imagine, and racism against blacks that is a mainstay in Poland. I guess the Microsoft folks never thought that this ad with a black person in it could send a message of equality. Instead they cater to the familiar — racism in advertising and society.

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