My new phone came yesterday. Did I mention that it's red and purty? I spent six hours playing with it. Yes way.
One thing I "wasted" a lot of time on was making ringtones and wallpapers in Virgin Mobile's Studio V. I'd like to present my signature piece, "Cowbell Funk." It has two cowbell tracks. I'm sure I don't have to trot out an overplayed meme to illustrate the significance of this.
(And yes, I flinch when the singer is called "Eric" when Eric Bloom wasn't the vocalist for that song. It's one of those meaningless things I choose to have an emotional reaction to instead of, say, worrying about the environmental impact of accidentally leaving the water on while brushing my teeth. But if you've ever seen me brush my teeth, you know it's not pretty, and the more water the better. Suffice to say I probably over-butter the toothbrush. Then, yesterday, I was brushing and had a coughing fit in the middle of it all. Talk about getting your Emergency Windex Procedures in place for next time.)
Speaking of overplayed and years-plural old, I'm worried that someone out there hasn't seen "Taco Time." So, here:
So yes, I played with the phone (again, RED), but only called myself about six times. (No, it wasn't on vibrate.) I just like having an Oingo Boingo ringtone. (Yes, that song again.) And I took a couple of photos with the crappy camera. Now you know that I am really just a neckless head lolling on a sofa cushion:
This, er, effect was achieved with the following materials:
- a sofa that reclines
- a sofa that is moderately deep
- a subject that is reclining in a moderately deep sofa
- a subject seated next to a half-draped window
- the standard assy "blogger's aerial" angle of shooting yourself from overhead, because no chins are better than one (plus one plus one plus...)
Me: "Look, it's a picture of me." (Like Mike wasn't on the other end of the sofa the whole time.) Mike (innocently): "Why's the angle all funny like that?" Me: (No words, I just flash my gang signs. I use two hands. But only one finger on each.) Mike: "How come I don't get the special angle when you take pictures of me?"
Men.
I also like the way the poorly rendered light is just Nature's Little Obliterating Airbrush on my wrinkles.
It took awhile of poring over my mp3s to think of the right ringtone. (I picked several, but then I couldn't find them as readily available ringtones. I probably just don't know where to look. Remember, the last time I had a phone that didn't go BRRRP BRRRP, people were still embedding midis into their Geocities sites. And no, I couldn't be bothered to make my own. Mike made all of his ringtones, thus using up our geek rations. )
Looking at my playlist and emotionally weighing the songs for ringtone-worthiness inspired this post. Because two of my favourite blogging subjects are "this makes me think of that" and "go look at someone else's creativity," I thought I'd reminisce about some songs.
Well, just one song, because it's late/early.
That's Animotion, singing what I call their "other song": I Engineer.
I realize it's a little heartless to say that. Sometimes Mike and I have huge "who can be more incredulous?" contests where one of us claims a band was a one-hit wonder, or that they weren't, and every time we have the stats of our own country's pop/rock charts to back us up.
For example, he says Nik Kershaw has two songs. Two! Not in my country, laddie. You get this, and that's it. Take your two-songed Kershaw notions to Canada, where they're used to all that duality. I'm not saying there aren't people here who know other Kershaw songs, or that he only had one good song - not at all. I'm a big fan of this one, after all. (Note: not the official video.) But he did only have one "hit" (#46) in the US.
While "I Engineer" was #2 in Germany, it never went anywhere here. "Obsession" steamrolled over pop station programming in 1985, and sure, I loved it the first 60 times I heard it. But I've never wanted to hear it since. I'll turn up a Billy Ocean song before we go back to even the best line of that tune. ("And now my goodness... has turned to badness...)
But when I head "I Engineer," I bought the album. (Which still has its sad little sticker announcing the "I Engineer" track. Like it wasn't destined to hit #76 and slink away.) I don't remember anything else on the LP, but I still like this song. The sound is a little slick for my current tastes, but anything before 1986 can be forgiven.
Related memory: the summer of 2005, I was at fat camp in La Jolla, California. "Obsession" was still big. One of the girls there told everyone that the male singer was her cousin. However, well-read Rolling Stone/etc. reader that I was, I said, "Oh, Bill Wadhams!" And I could tell she had no clue who I meant. Busted?
I'd gloat, except then karma would demand that I reveal how a fellow camper (HI LEANN) and I told several Duran Duran-related whoppers to one of our younger campmates. I did actually call said campmate five or six years later and, in the course of catching up, unflinchingly own up to our (squirm) lies, but that doesn't change that, at the time, I'm afraid we got rather carried away. (Sorry again, Diana.)
It's just, once you've established the character of being the secret half-American lovechild of Andy Taylor (we had to pick the one we didn't, you know, want to...) who is carrying on a secret (and tumultuous) affair with Simon le Bon, and who just happened to end up at the same fat camp as her best friend (although they didn't seem to know each other a few weeks ago), and said best friend is also having a secret (and just as tumultuous) Duran Duran affair, but with John Taylor (because apparently they were very into 15-year-old chubbies), well, it's almost rude to just abandon these creations, right?
At fat camp I had a roommate from Phoenix named Kristy. She was a skate punk with a rich 70-something-year-old Dad that she never saw. She claimed to sometimes ride around with a girl named Debbie who "maybe killed someone." (I began to feel like I had perhaps overstated my interest in punk rock when filling out the roomie matchmaker forms before camp.)
Weeks before Leann and I confessed to being new wave heiresses in disguise, Kristy told me that she'd boinked Brian Setzer. I was skeptical at the time. Strangely, she looked a bit like Brian Setzer. As did the guy I liked in 8th grade. And then my high school buddy Joel ended up playing rockabilly. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!
Well, nothing, Other than I start typing one thing and other things come out, including memories I'd forgotten. Like, how Kristy, who was just too punk for "newros" (New Romantics) like Duran Duran, took me aside and asked to be included in the Duran Duran Live Action FanFic/gullibility test as a love interest for Nick Rhodes. But, Leann and I didn't really have time to retcon, what with pretending to take calls from Andy (on a pay phone - times were tough in the olden days!) writing all of the fake love notes from Simon, which our counselor noticed and thought were love notes from her fiance and we'd somehow gotten them, so she wanted to see them... and this is when the woman in the French maid outfit ran across the stage. And unseen speakers played the Benny Hill theme song.
I can't quite let the Brian Setzer thing go yet, because another memory came to me. I haven't thought of this in 20 years. So, after fat camp, a new Brian Setzer video came out. I didn't like and still don't like the song - sorry. My loyalty towards BS ended with the Stray Cats, mostly because I cannot love everything. I could repartition and defrag my heart drive to make room for some rockabilly sentiment, but then I'd have to overwrite something else. Like, the part of me that I think may someday like Rush. It hasn't happened yet, but it could. Many people have assured me of this.
So, the video came out, and I happened to see it, because when I was 16 I didn't miss any videos. I didn't like many of them (MTV was about to begin its transition away from music, and music was... I still don't know what happened to music), but I watched them. And when I watched this one, I thought, "Wow, that girl at 3:08 looks a lot like Kristy. Same plaid shirt and everything."
I don't think it is Kristy, who probably never even met Setzer, but - okay - maybe she did meet Debbie, but I don't think Debbie killed anybody. Debbie probably was her own kind of liar. We were all engineering something back then.
("I Engineer" was written by hitmaker Holly Knight. You know, the person who wrote "Pleasure and Pain," "Love is a Battlefield," "There's the Girl," "The Warrior," the theme to Angel, and - GASP - John Waite's "Change." In 1986, I was sure her own band was going to be the next big Top 40 thing. I could not have foreseen Whitney Houston.)
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