The dishwasher’s humming, dim down the lights
Set up coffee to brew in the morning
Most of us headed to sleep for the night
Swaying drunk sitting up loudly snoring

Sticky shot glasses, leaving goo circles
After the rest of the meal has been cleared
My munchies persist! Break out the cheese curls!
Laughing because you have crumbs in your beard

This time of night, everyone’s in the sauce
Playing poker, bluff, and ante money
Hearing late night talk shows start their applause
Even when they’re not really that funny

Post-meal Intoxicated Debacle
Drink lots of water and take some Advil

Accuracy of Results vs Voting Method

Graph by: dunno source via Graph Jam Builder

This darn hip-hop company called PPF House promises dope music and — okay, so they deliver on it. But how can they be a “House” if they’re a company? Hmm??? Isn’t that misleading? They could be a firm, an organization, a board, an agency, a posse — but they can’t be a house. That’s silly. That’s like me saying my hat is a shed, or my hands are bread. You can’t eat ‘em — so they’re obviously not bread. Just like you can’t live in a record company. I’ve heard of a woman living in a shoe, but this takes the cake.

Liars! War criminals!

Anyway. Check the new and free single, “Applause,” from two of this company’s finest rappers: LEO37 + Sunclef.

Download "Applause" for free

By Cassie Turner

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Published: Sunday, November 1, 2009

Updated: Sunday, November 1, 2009

Emre Kelly

Audience members rose to their feet and exploded with applause when UCF junior Michael Newman accepted the title of Mr. UCF 2010, beating out nine other contestants in the annual scholarship pageant.

Students watched as 10 students dressed as zombies took the stage in the Pegasus Ballroom in the Student Union  on Friday as they danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Newman, who won the judges’  favor and the audience popular vote, took home over $2,000 in scholarship awards courtesy of Student Government Association and the UCF Alumni Association. He said his main objective as Mr. UCF this year would be to spread awareness.

“I carry the world on my backpack,” Newman said as he performed a poem he found online called The Renditions of a Homeless Man for the talent competition. Newman dressed in layers of jackets and carried a sign that read: “Hungry any spare change helps please.”

“Students a lot of times feel disconnected from the community around us. Two miles down the road there are people that are homeless,” Newman said. “There are a lot of people that stay within the circle at UCF because they don’t really understand or realize what’s going on around us.”

Newman said during his interview that he wants to bridge that gap between the community, students and faculty, which he believes is part of the UCF Creed.

Newman is currently an ambassador on the President’s Leadership Council, the community service chair of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity and a member of the Student Sustainability Alliance. 

The pageant winner was not the only student heavily involved in campus and community activities vying for a shot at the Mr. UCF title. Spectacular Knight and Campus Activities Board Director Samantha Nemeroff said 15 students auditioned for the event, but only ten competed in the pageant.

“They represented UCF in a great way,” Nemeroff said. “They are all very involved in the school and the community. Their talents were impressive, too.”

Jonathan Parker sang the bluesy Porgy & Bess classic “Summertime.” Matthew Miller, clad in a glitter jacket and rhinestone glove, moonwalked to a version of “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson. Marcus Williams dressed in a red and white checkerboard shirt, and performed a hip-hop line dancing routine to a music mix. James Jarman broke out the red vinyl records and turntables, scratched and spun a house and Latin mix. 

Tyson Nales, Mr. UCF 2009, and Dasha Gonzalez, Miss UCF 2010,  hosted the pageant with a panel of five judges. The bulk of the contestants’ scores came from the talent competition followed by their audition interview, formal wear, beachwear and a final on-stage question.

The scholarship pageant began in 1989 and benefits both students and the community. Sidney Porter, Sunshine Princess and Lake Highland student, donated a midback ponytail of hair to Locks of Love and the audience favorite vote raised $920 for Children’s Miracle Network.

SGA provided scholarship awards of $400 to the third runner-up, Warren Jackson, $650 to second runner-up, James Jarman, and $1,000 to first runner-up, Marcus Williams.

Additionally, Jonathan Parker won $500 in awards for nonfinalist best interview and top ad sales. David Cohn won $350 for nonfinalist best talent and David Yu won Mr. Congeniality and $150.

The pageant is open to all full-time male undergraduate and graduate students who hold a minimum 2.5 GPA.

Nemeroff said she can relax for a week before she begins planning for the Miss UCF pageant, with 25 girls set to compete for the title on Feb. 6, 2010. 

UCFnews: Michael Newman crowned Mr. UCF: http://bit.ly/1×2pjS http://bit.ly/1WvEkf

Review essay

It’s an annual bonanza of tasty cinematic goodness: the London Film Festival (LFF) is winding down. Since this is probably my last autumn in the Big Smoke/Londonium, I went all out and got tickets for everything that struck my fancy. It wasn’t until my  fourth film screening that I realized there was a theme: motherhood.

Disclaimer: I’m not a mother and don’t intend to be. I generally resent it when podcasts and blogs I like get all hipster-parent-ocentric. Hell, I was mad when Lisa Bonet got up the McDuff and quit A Different World.  But, clearly, I must’ve been subconsciously looking for something. No, not a soul. For a different portrayal of motherhood. Something beyond a traditional natalist script of the perfection of motherhood, i.e. Katie Roiphe’s Double X article about her baby being like gak.

What’s mama-ing looking like in the 21st century? I’ll start with the titles that were mostly good, in their own way, but limited in saying anything new about motherhood, pressures (real or imagined) placed on mothers, and their expectations of children.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

I’m cheating a bit with this one. It wasn’t part of the LFF, but it should’ve been. Maybe it wasn’t because…drum roll…it won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year. And, yet, I suspect it won’t have a very wide release Stateside, so if Netflix has it, do it/queue it.

This quiet, tense film focuses on Mia, a 15-year-old living on an Essex council estate with her mum and sister. Grim. Read on. Mia dreams of becoming a street dancer and she practices her moves, gleaned from hip hop music videos, in an  abandoned and  trashed vacant flat. It’s just Mia, some wacked out speakers, a CD player, and a 40 of cider. Fame, it is not.  The film ostensibly hits its  core dilemma when Mia’s mum, with a pathological love of boob tubes, brings home a new, hot boyfriend, Connor. Is he making moves on Mia, as well, or is he being affectionate as a father would?

No spoilers here, but what I will note is that Mia’s mum, Joanne, is a two-dimensional portrait of Britain’s Young Mum Problem broadly drawn. She’s a vision in trampitude with very little inner-life. She’s mostly outer-life and a caricature of “the culture of poverty”: unemployed, hard drinking, braless, unconcerned with having sex with the bedroom door open, yells at her kids, is killing them with second-hand smoke and just a generally shite mum. We do see some vague notion of love for her kids at the end of the film, but it’s as if the filmmaker oh-so-reluctantly decided Joanne might be a teensy bit human.

While the reviews for this film were mostly concerned with the young girl/possibly paedophilic boyfriend plot, I was once again enthralled by British filmmakers’ fetishization of blackness. Or perhaps it’s British culture’s fetishization of African-American blackness. British filmmakers love to depict blackness without black people. Mia practices her dance gyrations to an Ashanti video (she is, indeed, on a boat!). When Connor catches Mia in the act he says, “You dance like a black.” Not a black person. Not with black style, but like something less than human. I don’t doubt the frequency of such grammatical construction but, while I’m not a linguist, I read it as an articulation of white superiority.

Similarly, Mia’s mum Joanne falls way outside the bounds of “decent” white British womanhood. Race comes crashing into class to equate poor British white women with the Reagan’s American vision of a black welfare queen or Ricki Lake’s hoochie. Notably, the music that Joanne and her friends dance to when the pile into her council flat is dancehall with accompanying windin’ da body. Black culture is clearly a proxy for degeneracy. An affinity for blackness will only keep Mia and her mother rooted in a culture of poverty, not a cycle with institutional roots—an assumption that certain people are born to be poor, are born to never achieve.

All that makes it sound like I didn’t like Fish Tank, but in fact, I thought it was captivating in the cinematography, the rich performances that Arnold elicited from her performers, a funny and poignant script, and some clever jibes at modern-day Britain’s tabloid-induced hysteria over paedophilia and missing children.

The Absence (Mama Keïta, 2009): I had a hard time with this one. Maybe I was supposed to. In Keïta’s film, Adama returns home to Senegal thinking that his grandmother is deathly ill. She, in fact, is not, but Adama’s sister, Aïcha, so desparately wanted her brother to come home from France that she faked the message. We’re also led to believe that it’s Adama’s fifteen year absence that has resulted in Aïcha turning to prostitution. Adama cannot, of course, understand this since he sends plenty of money back to Senegal for his female relatives’ survival.

Again, without spoiling the film, once he learns of Aïcha and her disrespect for his reputation, Adama whips himself into a veritable frenzy of battering Aïcha. He must, however, later try and save her when she turns her own anger on the wrong, vengeful john.

I left this film feeling ambivalent. Was it my Western black feminism that had me reading the film as short-sighted and misogynist in its manichean dealings with the women involved? The saintly but naive grandmother, the beautiful dead mother, and the dirty-whore sister? It seemed like an excuse to make a Tarantino-esque film in Senegal. While I commend the effort to depict the struggles that people face with emigration, the people they leave behind, and the people left behind, a more nuanced approach might have made Adama less of a douchebag and Aïcha able to articulate her needs (literally—in this film she’s both speech- and hearing-impaired) so that her family would listen. The people in the audience who liked the film were so glad to have a representation of Africa that wasn’t destitution or despots that it struck me as a bit of Stockholm syndrome: grateful for any new representation. I’d give it a close, but not-quite-made-it.

London River (Rachid Buchareb, 2009): I generally enjoy Brenda Blethyn’s performances. I think she’s a British national treasure right up there with Peggy Mitchell and the Queen Vic. Alas, when I mentioned Blethyn’s performance to a friend and that she was simply a miserable punching bag, he quipped, “She’s the nation’s punching bag. When is she not?” True dat.

In this London River, Blethyn plays, Elizabeth, the mother of a daughter who has gone missing during the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings that killed 52 people plus the four suicide bombers—all of Muslims of British-descent. This is important because the film plays with assumptions about nation, race, religion, and appearance. Elizabeth is thrown into the chaos of relatives searching for missing persons as she travels from her home on the isle of Guernsey to London. There she must grapple with a multicultural city that won’t easily tell her what happened to her daughter or where she might be. Everyone she encounters in this modern-day London—an Islamic landlord, a French Muslim detective, a black female constable—is Other to her. In her provincial mind, the people she meets are all evidence of London “crawling with Muslims,” as she cries to her brother down the phone.

Blethyn really rocks this role because you can see her coming to pieces when she encounters the father of the young African man her daughter was apparently living with, in love with, and…wait for it…taking ARABIC classes with! With this evidence she fears her red-haired, pale-skinned girl-child has been radicalized, Elizabeth is rude, hostile, and insensitive to the one person she’s in contact with who would most intensely know her pain: Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté), the young man’s father. Also a devout Muslim and a forester, we’re encouraged to see this elderly, dreadlocked man as a natural innocent, despite not having seen his son since he was six years old (more at the end of this post about fathers in these films).

The film maintains suspense as we follow both parents’ attempts to find their children.  With archival news footage of 7/7, London River perhaps too realistically conjours the horror of the time and the agony of not knowing. And, yet, everytime Elizabeth exhibited her racism and privilege, when others in the audience laughed at her, I just wanted to strike her. Neither reaction’s acceptable, but those were the limited options. Empathizing with her plight as a mother was difficult because it was too familiar and expected. Of course a woman who spends her days gardening on Guernsey in Wellies and sitting peaceably on rocky cliffs and making tea is going to be scared witless at the prospect of her only child living amongst the people constructed as boogey men by the BNP.

Ultimately, I think the film did do a good job of contrasting her religious rituals (Sunday church) with Ousmane’s. While she tossed and turned and mumbled to herself about her failings as a parent, Ousmane both sought help at the mosque and quietly hoped for the best, trusting that Allah’s will would be done. Being a non-believer myself, I could still appreciate the juxtaposition. As Western as Elizabeth was she couldn’t very well navigate the Western world as it evolved. The film did, alas, strike a Driving Miss Daisy Around Londontown note at times: sage, African man inserted to assuage the pain of mostly undeserving, self-indulgent white person.

Precious Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)

I’d have to place Lee Daniels’ film on the border in terms of representations of motherhood, generally, and black motherhood, in particular. I’ve been holding my breath since it was announced that Daniels would dare approach Sapphire’s amazing book. Besides, I’m still mad about the Daniels-produced Monster’s Ball, so I wasn’t trying to like this film. Grudges aside, he had a dream, went after it, got it financed, and pulled some incredible performances from Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, and Gabby Sidibe. As an aside, Gabby needs publicity lessons. Walking on stage, saying, “Hi. Bye.” won’t cut it on Oscar night. There will be Oscar nominations, if not awards. Hollywood likes to give Oscars to our worst portrayals of black womanhood. Yea…Academy.

Mo’Nique pulled out all the stops as Precious’ delusional, force feeding, battering, sexually abusing mother, Mary. “Monster” is the word that’s emerging most frequently in the press on the film. And, indeed, her behavior and the rationales she give for allowing her man to abuse her baby are monstrous. But somewhere between Mary’s devestating insecurities that would make her want to keep her man—any man—at all costs and Mariah Carey’s turn as a social worker ultimately out of her depth, the film raises some compelling questions about motherhood. There’s a lot of handwringing over stereotypes, but as many media scholars have been saying for a while now, isn’t it time we push our critiques beyond good versus bad representations?

Hopefully, viewers will be encouraged to look a bit deeper into what society pushes women to think will happen if they become mothers. What is our investment in writing certain women (poor women, women of color, lesbian women) off as “bad mothers”? We seriously need to question the notion of a maternal instinct. Some socialist feminists have been trying to do this for years, if not decades. What are the perils that women and children face if they believe saintly notions of mother-on-pedestal and children at her feet? One of the best interrogations of motherly expectations is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Just because many women can biologically  have babies doesn’t mean that there’s anything natural about how we expect people to raise those babies.

The last two films I want to note blew the others right out of the got’damn water! Sky high. Totally rocked in their filmmaking and complexity in depicting mothers.

Applause (Martin Pieter Zandvliet, 2009): Paprika Steen. I’ll say it again: Paprika Steen. This is the moment I love: when I stumble upon an actor, a band, a TV show that’s been going for a while and I have a whole catalog to devour after falling completely in love with a performance. So, don’t stop by unless you’re up for The Paprika Steen Film Festival.

The film: Thea is a mother just out of rehab. She’s a recovering alcoholic, as well as an actress still at the top of her game. She struggles with her ex-husband Christian to see her two sons and make up for lost time. I know it sounds kinda True Movies/Lifetime, but the depth that Steen brings to Thea’s desperation is palpable. She’s blunt, self-depracating, but wholly believable when she expresses a need for her children. To be in their lives is clearly a selfish act. Her motivation isn’t wholly that she wants to prove herself to be a good mother, but to stay sober.

It’s a dynamic take on motherhood because it’s honest. Having children is, more often than not, framed as a selfless act, Never has so much self-lessness been trumpted and used to pull rank on the child-free: “When will you stop being so selfish and have kids?” This logic has always sounded ass-backwards to me. Just because  you can no longer go to the cinema when you want to or get shitfaced on a Saturday night doesn’t make you bloody Mother Teresa. It means you’ve made a choice about a lifestyle change. I can think of nothing more selfish than the need to have replicas of yourself watching Noddy or asking, “Can we go now?” Applause reveals a certain truth about motherhood: it’s entirely selfish and if one’s not honest about that need, who’s interests are really served? Thea’s final scenes with her children are revelatory to her and the audience as she twigs what she must do in order to fit comfortably in the role of mother.

Mother (Bong Joon-Ho, 2009)

Bong Joon-Ho reeled me in with his 2006 South Korean monster flick, The Host. He upended conventions by showing the monster very quickly and using that sighting to scare the beejesus outta me for the rest of the film. In this follow-up, Kim Hye-ja plays “Mother.” She appears to be much like Brenda Blethyn’s Elizabeth: an almost obsessive mother in her willingness to do anything for her child’s safety and happiness. In this case, Mother is determined to prove that her slow-witted son, Do-joon, isn’t responsible for the murder of a local girl. The frenzy with which Hye-ja plays the role always hints at something even more manic just beneath the surface.

I can’t say too much more about the film for fear of giving anything away, but the film made me think about the ways in which motherhood marginalizes women, particularly older women. The notion of an empty nest syndrome becomes even more terrifying if one is led to believe that one’s value only rests in being a mother and wife, perhaps a grandmother. What’s a mother to do when her raison d’etre is threatened? If you like mystery-thrillers with a societal statement to boot, see this. One Korean film site likened Joon-Ho’s work to Almodovar and I’d say that description’s not far off. As we’d say on Yelp: I’m a fan.

Word to your papa…

Fathers didn’t generally fare well, but given that so many of the mothers depicted were flawed what makes you think they’d make good partner choices? There was the absent father (Fish Tank, London River), the dead father (London River, Precious, The Absence, Mother), and the abusive father (Precious). Of these men, it wasn’t a far leap to think that the underlying message was that if the men were around these women wouldn’t be inclined to drink, be sexually promiscuous, have Islamophobic panic attacks, or become abusive themselves. Of all the films, Applause has a present father who is central to the mother’s relationship with her children. As a testament to the strength of the script and the fine acting, we didn’t get a cardboard cutout of a bad man wanting to keep a mother from her kids. Nor was he a good man dealing with an utter wackjob. Of all the dad’s, present or unaccounted for, he made the most sense and made me want to see more of fatherhood depicted as more than an after-thought.

* I play on the “MILF” concept reservedly. It’s rather creepy that patriarchy finds ways to sexualize women at any age and in any station of life: “milfs,” “cougars.” Not that women of all ages don’t want to be wanted, but isn’t it telling that as soon as women reclaim their sexuality (e.g. women in the 40s, 50s, and 60s), some jackanape comes along and undermines it with a new “demographic” term?

Political speeches weren’t always about vocal audience reaction and applause. Now, however, one of the main ways that we show our appreciation and approval is with applause. Speeches are written with deliberate pauses to give the audience the opportunity to applaud partway along.

President Obama can hardly finish a sentence without the crowd breaking into applause. He can’t even blow his nose in public without being applauded for it. In fact, we often measure the success of a speaker by the round of applause that they receive at the end of their speech. The media jumps on it because it is such a tangible indicator of how the audience feels.

Applause is visible in other areas of life as well. When there’s turbulence in the air and the pilot of a plane manages to land it safely, the passengers will show their gratitude with applause. For long-anticipated movies, the hype that surrounds the film often leads to applause at the end of it (though this usually pertains only to opening-night showings at a movie theatre). Applause at the end of a stage theatre production is always expected, so to show even more appreciation, people do a standing ovation for the actors bowing on stage. Even this, however, has become increasingly more common, because of our habit of applauding over minute events.

One of the problems with applause is that it is used so frequently. The meaning of it has changed. It is expected; it is almost mandatory. In our society, if there is no applause, then something has gone seriously wrong with the rhetorician’s speech or performance. Sometimes, for example if an actor on stage forgets their lines, the audience sympathizes so much with the humiliation that the actor must be feeling that they applaud even louder to compensate. Thus it loses its “rewarding” aspect.

Applause is loud and easy to do. All it takes is the simple act of pressing one’s hands together with some measure of force and speed (though even a considerable amount of force and speed are not necessary, especially if there is a very large crowd of people). It’s a way for the audience to give back to the performer: applause signals agreements and support. It is interesting, then, to consider why we applaud when the performer clearly cannot see or hear us, such as in the movie theatre. In this case, we are not applauding for the performer. Instead, we are either applauding to assert our own position so that others can see what we think of the performance, or we applaud to show that we are a part of the appreciative group, when everyone around us is applauding.

It is rare that we will be in a group of people with everyone else applauding and we are not. The pressure causes us to start clapping, too. If we don’t clap, everyone wonders why we are not appreciating the same thing that they are. Because of this, applause is also an automatic response of our society. It is a way to identify with the group so that we are not separated from our peers. Applauding, and a lack of applause, are both measures of our values and identities as individuals and as a group.

Giant Snow Slug on Etsy front page treasury

What a piece of translucent loveliness in cool blues and zing reds. I’m all warm inside about my new Snow Slug being featured in this divine Etsy front page treasury! The Curator of this Treasury is the very talented duo behind Adatine – check out this Etsy store’s fabulous natural children’s wear and accessories for grown-ups.

Japan’s Suntory Ltd. announced Tuesday it would start selling the world’s first genetically-modified blue rose next month, 20 years after researching for a unique colored rose.

The blue rose has long been referred to by horticulturalists as the “Holy Grail” of the plant breeding world.

It succeeded in developing blue roses in 2004 when Suntory, together with Australian biotech company Florigene, implanted into roses the gene that leads to the synthesis of the blue pigment Delphinidin in petunias.

Genetically, roses do not contain natural blue pigmentation to allow a true blue rose to be bred by conventional methods.

Named Applause, the new variety is “recommended as a luxurious gift for special occasions such as wedding anniversaries and birthdays”, the company said.

The new variety is expected to be priced between 2,000 and 3,000 yen (22 and 33 dollars) per stem, about 10 times more expensive than normal roses in Japan. There are no current plans to sell the unique flower overseas.

congratulations
on yet another disappointment

my apologies
in close proximity
enclosed in simile
in prose and levity

hold your applause
for yet another lost cause

empty words plastic
spoken like the oldest trick
a voice like weary silk
that hits you like a brick

congratulations
on yet another disappointment

We camped out on the roof.  It was cold, but the stars were circling around our heads like crowns.  I was a king, and she a queen, and all the talking of the surf sounded like applause.  And when the sun rose over the other roofs, we saw the whole world.  The sunshine touching the waves.

The wind had blown terribly all night.  The shingles had peeled back.  Inside the attic all the things we tried to save from water rising and seeping in.

I said a prayer for the unlucky ones.  The man alone, exhausted, in a heap.  The woman he loves floating by or out of sight.  And from the dead, I asked for help.  I almost dreaded being rescued.  But rescue comes for everyone, whether he is happy to see the line or not.

We received the nicest, heartfelt letter from a wedding client on Monday. What a great way to start the week!

Dear Britta,

Melissa

I’ve envisioned myself on a stage alone, singing up a storm to an enraptured audience, since I was a senior in high school.  Again, it was that damned Nancy in Oliver! who put the idea in my head.  I saw myself in drag, no less, got up in a whorey red dress and wig, with plenty of fake these and those, belting out “As Long As He Needs Me”.  I used to love to listen to that song, and the other ones that the character sings in the musical, and imagine how I might do them…cutting loose in the rowdy, rollicking manner of the old English music-hall, fun at last…instead of the drab, unsmiling, inhibited and miserable teenager I was.

As I grew older, the drag idea stayed with me…a couple of my friends commented at one time that I would be great at it.  “You’ve got the hips, anyway,”  said Fred, the actor who played Dracula to my Renfield in 2003.  And even now, I wouldn’t be opposed to doing drag…but only within the proscenium arch.  I am not the least bit interested or impressed by improvisational comedy–never have been–and so the notion of going around in public done up in some outrageous costume, flaunting my feminine side through some even more outrageous feminine persona, holds no attraction at all.  I would, however, love to play a character in drag within the context of a show…and among my top choices of characters that would allow me to do this is the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (a favorite fantasy since childhood)…

Margaret Hamilton as WWW

and Miss Hannigan in Annie…

Dorothy Loudon as Miss Hannigan in the original Broadway production of ANNIE

It could happen, I know…because it has happened.  I read online about an actor (not actress) who has played the WWW seven times onstage, and he’s not the only one.  And I’ve found at least one production through googling Annie images where Hannigan was, um, non-traditionally cast.

Aside from these exploits, I do have a very real and serious desire to sing and to entertain an audience without the security blanket of a surrounding cast and script.  I mentioned not having much use for improv, and so the idea of doing a one-man show is about “as fer as I can go” in that direction.  I’ve spent years thinking about the format this show/concert could take, and the content I would choose for it.

The video above is of Adam Pascal singing one of my all-time favorite songs, “Maybe This Time”, from Cabaret.  His look, with the ratty jeans and T-shirt and such, is about what I would adopt for the evening.  I would be content with a single accompanist behind me, because getting a group of musicians together is, I would guess, probably just as much of a pain in the ass as getting a group of actors together to do a community show.  Besides, I don’t know too many musicians, and I’ve never felt accepted by that crowd, anyway.  It may have something to do with the fact that I don’t play an instrument, but that’s just a thought.

I think, in the end, I’ve got the urge to pursue this crazy endeavor because I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with singing, and other singers.  When I was in choir in high school, I didn’t like it much.  I found it boring and tedious and annoying, what with the lack of focus around me and the constant bitchery of the “ahdvahnced singahs” who took not only chorus, but Varsity Chorale and Show Choir as well.  In retrospect, our choir wasn’t that great, really…and the elevated singing classes were no better.  They thought they were, though, and that’s what kept me down.  I was told by many people that I had an excellent singing voice, but it was a baritone voice.  All the best male songs and musical parts are written for tenors, and that’s just the way it is.  On the other side, altos have the same problem with sopranos.  Sopranos+tenors=bitches in my musical math book.  But I digress.  The point is, after watching the handful of tenors in our chorus groups getting all the accolades and attention and the best parts in the musicals (I’m still mad as hell that I got the role of Doc–read, “got screwed”–in West Side Story my senior year), I backed off and no longer thought of myself as a singer.

In college, I took some voice lessons, and that built up my confidence a little, but I still didn’t feel I had what it took to pursue a lead in any of the musicals done by the drama department.  As always, they were in a higher register than was comfortable for me, and as I cannot even fake my way as a dancer, I was, once again, shafted. 

But the dream never died; that of getting up there and just standing and belting my heart out.  And so I began to think to myself…fuck the musicals.  Why not just go out there alone and sing what I want to sing?

A little hobby of mine in recent years was to record tapes of different songs I would love to do in a concert format, in the order I would do them, and listen to them, miming my way through them and developing a performance style and movement for each one.  I’ve graduated now to making a master list of songs that I add to frequently.  These songs are obviously not your mainstream Top Forty hits; they’re all show songs (read “fag songs”) with the exception of a few.  Would you believe, that in addition to “Maybe This Time”, “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Anything Goes”, I’ve always wanted to have a crack at Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way”, or that English group’s anthem, “Let It Be”?

Well, who knows?  I’ve made a friend within the past year who is a really good pianist, and I’ve already asked him, should the occasion ever arise, if he would be open to working with me on some selections.  Beyond that, the steps involved would be to narrow down my song choices to a reasonable evening’s worth of material, and to think up some halfway witty patter for in-between the numbers.  A venue would present itself when the time was right, I feel.  If I really want it, it’ll come along.  And I do want it.

As my grandfather says, I’m young yet.

Anytime you interview for a job where they tell you they use different applause to encourage their clients – and one of those applause’s is “We Will Rock You” by Queen – that is a job you want to have. And I do.

Staring at the crowd

From inside the squared circle

Milking the applause.

Image by libraryman via Flickr

"…universal truths by which all customer service can be measured. This can’t be the case."
Frankly – that’s just plain wrong. There ARE universal truths about customer service and if the ICS audit seeks them out then it will be a step forward.
For example, I can’t for the life of me see how great customer service can be delivered by staff who hate or even just aren’t enjoying their jobs. So, if the ICS seeks to measure staff engagement this is a great precursor to ensuring client delight. Note – delight! If the objective is to deliver customer satisfaction, you’re wasting your time – and believe me you will attain your goal of delivering a mediocre service if you are a local garage or a global bank.
Firstly, hats off to any firm for going through the audit process. It means they want to improve and are seeking to benchmark their performance – THIS IS A KEY STEP! Without a benchmark you have no idea where you are on the journey. As I am not a journalist, I am not genetically prone to see the world through a more than half empty glass. I take a less cynical view and as 95% of firms don’t do anything serious to improve customer service applause to those that do.
As a consumer it’s a shame more companies don’t try harder to delight, as every day I am subjected to mind-blowingly crap customer service experiences. Only yesterday I called the Orange call centre and in the end lost the will to live after 20 minutes on hold – a great example of denial of service. What did I want to do? I wanted to edit the account name. No reason to force me to do this with a person – I should have been able to do this via the account portal but you can’t because it can’t, nor can I email them my request because this isn’t an option. Result – spectacular Orange failure to understand its customers and the service they really want.
Here we are in 2009 and ten-years since it first re-wrote the rulebook, Amazon is still a guiding light on how to deliver online customer service. Others still can’t see the light or can’t find the will to follow.

WordPress Tags: Customer Service,customer engagement,client satisfaction,benchmark,performance,applause,consumer,Orange

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When the International Olympic Committee voted against Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics this morning — after the President and First Lady flew to Copenhagen to push for it in person — the Weekly Standard newsroom burst into applause.

Cheers…

Source:
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/weekly-standard-newsroom-erupts-into-cheers-at-news-of-olympics.php

This is out of the English Der Spiegel in Germany, complete with video.  They’re in the final weeks of a relatively boring, sanitzed campaign there – it’s hard not to be boring coming from four years of Seinfeld government – and apparently some local wags have decided upon a relatively, shall we say, unique campaign.  Flash mobs are dispatched – a singularly inappropriate word, I know – to speeches by the Chancellor (and Chancellor-candidate for the CDU/CSU) Angela Merkel.  At the end of every sentence – every single one – the mobbers shout “Yeah!” in the manner of an American tent revival.

Behold:

At one point Merkel apparently chided the crowd for simply saying “Yeah!” to

Presumably, this is not what they'd intended to cheer.

everything, so the crowd immediately started shouting whatever word Merkel’s last sentence ended with, regardless of relevance.  The article cites cheers of, “Growth!” “Five!” and – yikes – “Back door!”  I’ll bet her speechwriters will learn a valuable lesson about ending sentences.  Or perhaps they’ll work with it?  Can you end sentences in a preposition in German?  I’d delight in the spectacle of 20,000 people shouting “With!  Of!  For!”

Most of the people interviewed for it confessed that it was basically for fun.  However assholes like me can’t help but search for political subtext in it.  (And to be fair there are reasons things come across as ironically funny.)  Spiegel suggested, via a blogger, that the “protests” (?) were “all about reclaiming public space for debate.”  Another confessed a desire to find “a subtle [Huh?] way of presenting the other members of the crowd with a big question mark.”

Personally, I see it as no small reaction to the scripted, anemic character of modern political events.  Anyone who has ever watched the excruciating display of a presidential speech, with every other phrase interrupted by polite semi-spastic applause from an acceptably docile audience (and despite exceptions this is no more true of anyone than of Obama) can appreciate the desire to break loose from this stultifying spectacle.  In this sense the crowd’s repetition of whatever word Merkel concludes with is rather trenchant, wrecking the careful rhetorical balancing act that has turned every political statement into an act of Byzantine diplomacy, endlessly-dissected by a political lumpenproletariat that would make Marx blush.

In the event, I would be pleased to see this trend spread.  Perhaps I could even recommend a theme song for the Yeahppie movement.

Peter Fallows is 18 today.

I was listening to my new Green Day album this morning and in the chorus of one of the songs Billie Joe went all high-pitched and falsetto on me. Why? Why do male singers these days feel it necessary to prove their squeaky credentials?

On thinking about this, I realised that this is a fast growing problem in today’s music industry – they’re all doing it. Just have a listen to U2: I’ll go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight. Why Bono, why? Some people are clearly falsetto masters. You, sir, are not.

Of course a lot of this sudden prevalence of squeakiness can be laid squarely at the feet of the depressingly high-pitched James Blunt. That man can squeak. I do wonder how he managed to survive his army career whilst singing like that – he must have had the sh*t kicked out of him on a regular basis. It’s the playground equivalent of being the kid called Mary Christmas and having a bowel problem which requires wearing a nappy to school.

Slightly off topic, but my fiancée is a very good singer and a couple of years back we went to a local entertainment venue so she could compete in a singing competition. She didn’t want to enter by herself so I was forced into entering as well. Now anyone who has read my previous entries knows that my singing voice is not the finest in the land, and in an orgy of bad planning I actually chose to sing a James Blunt song. No, I don’t know why either.

Now if I’m being honest, as much as I protested and moaned, I quite enjoyed it – the bright lights; the microphone; being the centre of attention; that slightly bored clapping that we Brits do so well. To be fair, I was expecting a massive uproar of tumultuous applause, calls for an encore, fighting off the signature hunters… what I got actually was more reminiscent of a Lib Dem party conference – even from the stage I could actually hear the occasional snigger. Just call me Mr Clegg.

But Mr Blunt will insist on falsetto-ing as much as humanly (certainly not humanely) possible. But lady singers don’t do the equivalent do they? You don’t hear Beyonce on her new single doing a Barry White impression, do you? You don’t get Shakira rumbling the floor with her booming bass voice in the chorus. No. The ladies sing high, the men should sing low.

Of course this problem does have it roots in medieval history – well the BeeGees anyway. Three men in tight clothing singing like they’ve just been kicked in the nuts. I naively thought that this had died a death alongside the seventies, but sadly these things always come back to haunt us. Like flares. Or neon leg-warmers. Of course some retro revival stuff is pretty cool – converse shoes for a start, but most of it is pretty awful if we’re being honest.

So what to do about all these high-pitched singers? We could just wait for this squeaky fad to die a natural death, but I’m quite impatient. I’m all in favour of the playground approach mentioned earlier to be honest. It’s quick and easy, it doesn’t cost much to give Bono a Chinese burn, and the combination of sore wrists and humiliation should make them think twice before squeaking in future.

Who’s with me then? You pin James Blunt down, and I’ll fart on his head.

weekendalcoholic