Mariah & Me
I know I'm supposed to hate Mariah Carey. A lot. But I can't help it. I really like her, almost as much as I'm supposed to hate her. I'm much more fond of the post-Tommy Mottolla Mariah, of course. Ever since she broke up with him, she's been way more interesting. She's doing songs with Da Brat, Jay-Z, and Ludacris. She's shaking her booty all around. David LaChapelle is directing her new video, making her look all candy-coated and campy (which matches the sample from Cameo's "Candy" featured in the song). And I know that it's wrong to like and enjoy that kind of objectification, even if it is self-inflicted. I don't care. She's not doing anything she doesn't want to do, and I think it's safe to assume that she had a fair amount of creative control over the video shoot. More importantly, Mariah looks really happy. In her interviews, she seems much more relaxed and free than she used to do, and her music has improved steadily over the last five years. I don't necessarily think that in 25 years' time, it will be cool to like her, in the way that it's cool now to like formerly hopelessly un-hip and square-seeming artists like Dionne Warwick (after all, Mariah is no Burt Bacharach in the lyrics department), but she is savvy, and she's full of joy, and that's enough for me. Who knows? Maybe one day she'll become a hermit and disappear altogether from the superstar life, and then resurface years later in a tiny cameo in a John Waters movie. And that will be her new, cred-tastic, beginning. In the meantime, bring on the Glitter!
Thursday, June 14, 2001 05:17 p.m.

Ye-Ye Girls: An Introduction
Just when I think I know something at all about music, I find a resource like this. Tor Mitdskog has written a lucid, engaging, and earlust-inducing introduction to French Pop since the 1960s. He begins, of course, with Serge Gainsbourg, and then moves on to profile four of France's most famous Ye-Ye Girls, who were kind of the Britney Spearses & Christina Aguileras of their generation, but much, much cooler. Imagine if Bob Dylan wrote lyrics for Dream, and if Daniel Lanois produced Mandy Moore, and if Jessica Simpson were a lyricist on a par with, say, Aimee Mann. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that's what these girls were like. And they were hugely popular, selling gazillions of records. And they were sex symbols, too. The Ye-Ye Girls website is pretty encyclopedic, so don't stop after you've read Tor's intro to the glory of French Pop. I hope they update soon - it's been 8 months since they posted a review. Via London Lee's fantastic Pop Linx.
Thursday, June 14, 2001 05:15 p.m.

Telephone Affair

My telephone number has been troublesome since I got it in September. It seems to have been recycled several times as both a residential and fax number. I've been on the shrieking, squawky business end of more wee hours would-be faxes than I can count. I've patiently explained that, no, Phyllis, Jimmy, Ahmed, pick a name, aren't to be found at this number. I often leave my phone unplugged for days at a time.

All of this wrong wrong wrong number foolishness seemed to drop off a month or so ago, and I was happy with my normal, plugged-in phone. Now, however, it seems that my answering machine is carrying on a love affair with some other telephonic device. I come home to find 2, 6, sometimes 9 very long messages on my answering machine, all of them consisting entirely of longish, high-pitched, rather lonesome-sounding beeps. It sounds like maybe another sad little fax machine is trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) with another fax machine. Now, you'd think that most fax machine operators would figure out that my number is clearly not the one they should be sending to, but maybe the operator on the other side (or the machine itself) has developed a little crush on my answering machine. How else to explain the eight wordless, beepy messages waiting for me after I was out of the house for 90 minutes this morning?

It could be, of course, that the fax machine operator on the other end is irretrievably stupid. But I prefer the idea of a romance between machines. It reminds me of 1000 Robots. Of course, this means I'll have to start enforcing a curfew on my nubile little phone. No calls after 11 PM, and no million calls in a row. She's grounded right now for this morning's escapades. So Mom, if you're reading this, and you want to talk to me today, e-mail me instead. Honey's disconnected the phone.
Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:11 p.m.

Butterfly House
This awesome house, built by students at the Rural Studio of Auburn University's architecture school, cost just $30,000, and is completely handicapped-accessible. Local residents have dubbed it The Butterfly House because of the sharp angles of the roof. There's a great profile of the Harrises, and how they've made the Butterfly House their own in the four years they've lived there in the current issue of Nest Magazine. Meanwhile, my rockin' Dad found me a link to this great interview with Rural Studio guru Sam Mockbee from a recent issue of Architectural Record.

Mockbee is devoted to designing and building affordable, practical, and beautiful housing for the poorest residents of rural Alabama, a mission which no doubt played a part in his recent MacArthur Genius Grant. Great quote from the interview: "One idea is to also ask something of the premier architects in America, the Frank Gehrys, the I.M. Peis, the Richard Meiers, and Michael Rotondis. I'd like to ask each to design a cottage for a family that's living down here in a cardboard shack. I'd take their sketch and get four intern architects to build the house. Masons Bend, Alabama, would become like Seaside, Florida, but I'd be doing this for the poorest one percent of Americans." (Thanks, Dad!)
Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:17 a.m.

I Hate Them.
They are a bunch of arrogant, swaggering, non-injured, 3-pointer hitting punkasses. I hope they all get stress fractures and sprains in the same limb and lose all their peripheral vision and foul out. All of them. Feh.
Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:11 a.m.

Mondegreens
A great moment in my personal librarianship history: in the course of my evening duties as desk/reference girl at my faculty library tonight, I had occasion to point someone in the direction of Kathleen's page of mondegreens (the real word for those misheard lyrics we're all so fond of). So now you all benefit from one patron's curiosity. Yay, fun reference questions!
Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:05 a.m.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

Neither do we have any entries. Well, that's not entirely accurate. We have a number of entries, sitting in a Word document, all ready to go. However, we have spent the last 90 minutes doing some e-mail housekeeping, because our chickmail account is going to be de-activated by June 30, because all of chickmail is going down that day, never to be heard from again. So we are changing all our e-mail contact information at our various UBB hangouts and compiling addresses of all of our usual correspondents to notify them of our chickmail eviction. And we are referring to ourselves in the first person plural because we are ravenous and feeling halfway between silly and pompous. It's best to stay out of our way when we're feeling this way. Regular transmission will be resume tomorrow. Now we are going in search of a small snack and clean pajamas.
Monday, June 11, 2001 11:28 p.m.