While in the car with my mom, Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter” comes on my iPod:
Mom: Boy, does this take me back! Driving you or your [younger] brother around in high school!
Joshua: It’s old enough to have been me. It was released as a B-side in 1992.
M: {amazed:} A B-side?! What the hell was the A-side?!
J: “Jeremy”.
M: {ponders:} Oh, yeah, OK. I can see that.
How cool is it that my mom can have this conversation?
Movie buffs want to help me brainstorm? What songs have directors ruined for you by playing over a horrific event?
Usually it only hits me when talented directors do this; they create images seared into my mind that are evoked every subsequent time I hear the song.
Off the top of my head: “Love Hurts”, as a sheriff grieves over his step-daughter, shot by police; Johnny Mathis’s “Wonderful, Wonderful”, which accompanies deformed brothers as they beat a policeman and his wife to death in their home; “The Hokey Pokey”, played while a possessed doll tries to kill a girl’s mother; and (obviously) Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle”, which accompanies one of the most-disturbing torture scenes of the ’90s (again of a cop — what’s with the recurrent police theme in these scenes?)
Contributions?
I was taking to a friend while he was browsing a dating site. He read the bio of a woman that began “A feisty, smack-talking girl who….” So, naturally, I went off on one of my meandering jokes:
She only talks about smack? That would be weird:
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Do you like heroin?”
“Um … have you ever been to Disneyland?”
“I really like heroin.”
“So … who’s your favorite Disney princess?”
“The heroine?”
“Stop it!”
“No, that was a real response!”
”Zenith” is a viewer-sponsored, torrent-distributed video series released under a Creative Commons license. Their first episode has been published, and donors are being courted to finish the series — with some fascinating incentives for donating.
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