Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.
It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.
Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.
The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.
But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one.
Somtimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won’t get to take stock of until its too late.
I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles – it was like being a glamrock roadie for God.
Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.
Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.
It’s kind of amazing how popular ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in ‘Veep.’ She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play ‘Veep’ would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn’t one.
Most of an award-show host’s job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it’s the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel’s ‘Hero Dog Awards.’
On ‘Idol,’ Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.
Our amour fou with ‘The Sopranos’ is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We’ll never see a show like this again.
It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers’ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers’ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.
Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.
Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she’d retired the day after she recorded ‘I Feel Love’ in 1977.
Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they’ve got.