Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

ok, I have this morbid fascination with American Idol. I admit it. Sure, I know that it's Ted Mack Amateur Hour on steroids, and it's on Fox and all of that, but I love it.

My cultural consultant got me hooked on it. She is my cultural consultant by virtue of being a twelve-year-old girl. She opens up all sorts of new worlds for this old and jaundiced writer. I tune in to the TV shows she watches and the movies she sees and the music that she downloads.

I know that bennie is going unload on me for this, but I love this show with all it's kitch. Oh yes, it's melodramatic and cornball and just plain bad sometimes, but it also is a saga, an epic of hope and striving and joy and heartbreak. The protracted drama of who stays or goes is at once touching and brutal.

Does anybody else want to admit watching it?

What are your decadent lusts?

no

it is cheap, tacky, prefabricated, andm did i say cheap?



but when my daughter was younger, i sang along with the spice girls in the car with her, so i understand the motivation



at times like that, we can stop for a second, and look at things through the eyes of young girls...that is a gift, and especially valuable when it facilitates a connection

all to say, support those you love...until they grow up, that is, at which time they will defintiely NOT want you 'getting the jiggy with it'




but enjoy it while you got it, clay

The Americon Idol show is hyped up and staged.

BUT.... there are a LOT of talented kids on that show. VERY talented. There are girls and guys with excellent voices and who are already, at such a young age, capable, passionate, performers who can mesmerize an audience. I love watching and listening to the performers on the show. (Even though I don't like making art a competitive sport and I'm not too hip on the staged hype.)

What's so decadent about it?

What's so morbid about it?

I can understand being fascinated by it. What's wrong with that? Now, if you lust for the show, that might be a little odd, but hey, who am I to say? I lust for shrimp cocktail and yogurt. *shrug*

My lust and morbidity also exist on the tube in the form of The Gilmour Girls...AAAAAAK!!!!

fessin' up.......o.k. never did watch this show back in the 90's
called Seinfeld, I have to admit it's a riot and CJ loves it and I do occasionally find myself watchin' it with her....my other decadence to be real honest is the Antiques Road Show, for some reason I dig it, probably more of that ebay addiction surfacing.......

There's a british duo called The Big Strong Boys (they have counterparts called the Big Strong Girls), and they simply show up at a house and paint, and remove, and drill and create pleasant from a room or two that are mundane.

i used to be delighted when i'd catch these hands-on tv shows.

for awhile, i was equally fascinated by the gay dudes renovating straight guys

or the British women who take poorly dressed folks and teach them how to shop (watch them shopping via camera and then dash into the store to re-teach the implementation of fashion sense)

now, i don't give a flying fuck about tv. Nothing moves me - except for documentaries about einstein and his first wife melina, ram dass, brain discoveries.

Give me a perfectly quiet house without endless interruption from interesting people and i get morbidly fascinated by documentaries.

Yeah there was a show just like American Idiot...ah I mean thou shalt not watch American Idol!!!! It was called the Gong Show!!!!

WIREMAN I watched "Seinfeld" when it was first on and I still watch in reruns!!!! It's the only good TV show that's worth watching these days!!!!
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Mercedes Actros

It's kinda like religion round here, yeah it's alright dave.......

Cult around my neck of the woods!!!!
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Gulf War Syndrome Forum

I can't watch American Idol. I get far too embarassed for the participants......let's face it, someone has to. Gawd! I squirm in my seat for them.....don't they know, really, don't they know?

And Seinfeld is the best! I use "Serenity now!!!!" internally all the time, it's gotten me through many a moment, many a moment.

And Boston Legal is really good but none of you all will watch it with me.....that's okay that's okay

I'm thinking of turning cable off for the summer, I wonder if I'll have the strength, the willpower to take that kind of a first step.

well, at least nobody is watching Court TV or Fear Factor (gag me with a maggot)

Exactly!!!!
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Honda NSR250R

My decadent lust: ranting.

Proceed rant:

Talentless, gormless
Soulless, cunts!

Notice how all the winners look alike? As if their mothers all fucked the same guy.

Glorified, McDonald's workers who sing karaoke on the weekends.

What ever happened to working for your dream?

They all deserve to be given hip replacements, sans anaesthetic.
The very fact that these morons enter these competitions means that they think they have talent. None of them have talent. Being a good singer isn't a talent. Being a good singer is just like having a good speaking voice. It isn't talent; it's the luck of the draw, my friend.

Talent is being able to sing and mean it. Billie Holiday had talent; these cunts can just hold a tune. And even that only applies to some of them.

feed the machine
feed the machine

These "pop idol" winners all look the same, sound the same. They are all as similar and sanitised as the products they'll go on to sell in that lucrative world of soul selling.

Eat Pepsi
Drink KFC
Mmm Mmmm finger licking good.

Cunts!

And re them all crying when they are told the truth: fuck off! Crying because they lost a competition?

I write reviews for an underground music website. The bands I write about, okay, many, well, most, suck, but there are some who are really talented and they can't get a break because Mr. I'm gonna make you a star, sitting in his big glass tower in the centre of town is only looking for pretty, vacuous wretches who wouldn't mind a supplementary career as a fucking sales person for Nokia or Adidas.

These are the people who deserve it; the people who work at it, playing shitty venues with moisture dripping from the ceiling and moss growing in the corners (the best kind of venues in my opinion).

Put one of those polished ornaments on a stage in 13th Note or Nice N Sleazys in Glasgow and see how long they'd fucking last. They'd go back to the Glasgow fucking Hilton that night with the business end of a beer bottle embedded in their peachy little faces.

And who the fuck is the panel? A rude, obnoxious, odd shaped, business man and two has beens? What the fuck do they know?

I think the fat black guy eats the ones who lose.
The hispanic/latino woman fucks the boys who win
And the rude, obnoxious, odd shaped business man makes a mint either way.

a saga, an epic of hope and striving and joy and heartbreak

Epic? The more shows there are, the more money they make.
Hope and striving? A hope to be famous isn't a valid hope. It isn't a passion to sing that drives these horrible innocents, it's a will to be famous. Famous for what? Just famous! As for striving: when is entering a competition a valid alternative to actually developing ones craft, getting life experience by singing in the types of venue mentioned above and finding a soul?

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe I just take music too seriously. But the more of these useless wastes of space there are loitering on the airwaves the harder it is for young kids (because let's face it, kids are fucking stupid) to find decent music; the kind of music that puts fire in their bellies and upsets their parents. The kind of music that lets them know that the mainstream isn't the only water out there, that there are little fjords, creeks and babbling brooks of great alternative music.

Again, maybe I'm missing the point. One man's entertainment is another man's itchy trigger finger.

I can accept these fuckers in the world. But, if anyone of them ever refers to themselves as "artists" or their bubble gum, machine made, corporation approved music as "art," well then, my itchy trigger finger will be getting scratched.
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Of course you are right in most of what you say, bennie. I've been in the music business since before you ware born or hatched or discovered under a rock or however you arrived in this cacophonous world. I know what it's like to be a yeoman musician and play for 75 or 100 dollars a night in clubs that I normally wouldn't walk in to piss on the floor.

several years ago I was the emcee and stage manager at a place in Dallas called The Doonbuggy. It was called that because the building was once a factory where they made doonbuggies. The place was huge (36,000 sq. ft.). You could play a football game in it or have two stages and six mosh pits going at once. We ran three or four bands per night through there. They were all very young. Some sucked and some were great with kids who knew more than I'll ever know about music and also had the dexterity of youth. I loved the gig. It gave me a chance to do comedy and poetry and also play with some of the bands.

Sure the American Idol kids are amateurs and couldn't probably make it in the rough and tumble world of minor league night club professional music, and yes, the whole object of the exercise is to manufacture a "STAR" for commercial purposes, but on the other hand, there is not one of these scrub-faced kids that won't be a better performer at the end of the competition than when they started.

But even if they had an American Idol for Geriatrics, I would never in a million years subject myself to a cattle call like that.