Crumpled Notes

I just hate TV sometimes. You know that time after prime time but before the late night talk shows? Yeah, the time when nothing interesting is on but reruns of various past and present primetime shows. Now, normally, I don’t go out of my way to watch TV this late, but when I need some brain clearing time after the kids go to bed, I flip on the tube and start looking for something – anything – to watch. I can keep flipping for a while looking for something on Bravo or TLC, but unfortunately most nights, I get stuck on CSI: Miami.

CSI: Miami. I just get mesmerized once it’s on. I WANT to know who killed the bastard who cheated on his psychotic, lying wife with the psychotic, lying neighbor. I want to see what kind of high tech devise they use to figure out who did what to whom like when the sniffer smelled out air freshener on the victim and on the murderer’s cloths and therefore the pretty forensic specialists were able to make the arrest. Man. I burned smelly candles every day for weeks after that episode, just in case…

But what really chaps my hide is why do I have to fixate on a show that pivots around David Caruso? Like I haven’t seen him pause dramatically, speak slowly and give thoughtful chin down glances enough in EVERY OTHER MOVIE OR TV SHOW HE’S BEEN IN. Why can’t I get stuck on some rerun of Law and Order or Everyone Loves Raymond? It’s always David Caruso and CSI:Miami.

And before you fire off a response stating how great CSI: Miami is and how I’m underestimating David Caruso’s acting ability, just remember The 40 Year Old Virgin… “Be David Caruso in ‘Jade.’” “Ok. I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

See. Always the same…

So as I’ve mentioned before, I listen to XM Radio. I even went into a little depth about how incredibly stratified the stations are. I can see how this could be a selling point for some people, but for me, it’s actully XM’s biggest problem. Yes, they do have a few stations that seem to be devoted to eclecticism (XM Cafe, HearMusic (the Starbucks channel)), but the problem for me there is that it’s eclecticism of Not The Kind Joye Likes.

When I’m listening to FM Radio, I tend to listen to “variety” stations like Bob or KGSR, stations that make a point of playing a wide variety of music–Bob’s tagline is “We’ll play anything!” and KGSR really does. So sometimes the very narrow stratification of channels on XM gets to me and I switch over to FM for a while. But then I start to feel guilty, since I’m paying to listen to XM; perhaps I actually should.

So I’ve got an idea for XM Radio: license the playlists from several of the top FM radio stations around the country. Entertainment Weekly did an article about FM radio a while back (FIND ARTICLE OR SIDEBAR), and they had a sidebar about the five or ten best radio stations in the country. KGSR was, of course, one of them. I would SO listen to XM’s version of KGSR or even Bob–even without the local content that gives KGSR some of it’s flavor and appeal, I’d love to just hear the playlist without all the flippin’ ads. Or Bob, for that matter.

I guess instead of writing about it here, I should just go find XM’s version of a suggestion box.

In the past six months or so, when my mother-in-law visits, I get totally pulled into whatever telenovela she’s watching at the time. For the uninitiated, telenovelas are Spanish speaking and the ultimate in soap opera experience. Our English speaking counterparts have nothing on the drama of the telenovela and even better, the telenovelas I’ve watched only run for a set number of episodes so you get to learn about brand new characters every few months or so. Frankly, I just think they blow soap operas like All My Children out of the water.

You see, my own mom is a soap opera junkie and so I’ve watched a few. But I never liked them so I teased her for years about watching the US soap opera scene. But now I know: if she spoke Spanish, she would give up those blazé stores of comas and drug addictions for the steamy story of Epólita on Alborada - the telenovela I’m currently watching with my mother-in-law. I mean, how can you resist a story that has the heroine married to a gay guy living in Panama while she’s living in Mexico with the man who fathered her child secretly. Yeah, well. You’ve really got to watch it to get it all in…

Another great thing about telenovelas is that I have a built in rationalization for watching. I tell people who ask why I watch them that telenovelas improve my Spanish comprehension. I mean, I already learned “Where is the bathroom?” and “My name is ____.” Now I can learn more important, and frankly more fun, phrases like “I slept with him but didn’t who he was because my evil mother-in-law tricked me into thinking he was my husband.” Something I’ve always wanted to learn to say.

Another beauty of the telenovela is that it allows me to spend time with my mother-in-law without having to talk about the kids or her son or my family or any of the other mundane family topics. Instead she catches me up on who loves who and who is whose father and who’s bad and who’s good and who is just dumb. I just love to hear her talk about it as if it’s a puzzle to be figured out. I ask questions. Have her translate when I need it. Laugh. A lot. I even love it when she admits she doesn’t understand what they’re talking about or when we had to look the title up in the Spanish dictionary because we knew alba was dawn but what the hell is alborada*?

So next time you’re looking to take your soap opera viewing up a notch or increase your Spanish comprehension or, even better, bond with your mother-in-law, may I suggest a good telenovela? It’s good for the soul. Or at least the vocabulary.

*According to the dictionaries on elmundo.es it means “tiempo de amanacer” or “time to wake up” or, my own poetic interpretation, “awakening.”

Want more info on Alborada? I’d suggest this WONDERFUL summary blog:
Pratie’s Place: Alborada - telenovela recap

or the official site, for those of you who speak Spanish:
Official Univision’s Alborada Site

So I listen to XM Radio a lot in the car. It’s got like a thousand stations and they are are all very precisely defined. For example there are something like 5 or 6 country stations that cover alt country, Top40 (Nashville) country, old country like Hank Williams, honky tonk/70’s (Willie & Waylon), another “today’s country,” folk and bluegrass. I guess that actually makes seven. I used country as an example because to use “rock” would’ve required listing out 13 channels, and that’s before including categories like “Hits,” “Urban” and so on.

So anyhow, I was getting tired of listening to my main 5 channels (Lucy, X Country, the Mix, The Loft and XM Cafe) and started browsing around (now that I have my cool new Roady XT, browsing around is easy, plus you can see what’s playing without actually changing to each station) to see what was good. I found a channel that was playing U2, and one of their songs I actually like, always good. I switched to it, and proceeded to listen to six or seven songs in a row that I really liked. I remembered the name of the channel (Top Tracks) and it’s channel number (46) for the future. Well, after listening to it several more times and finding that Top Tracks played more stuff I liked more often than many of the other channels I usually listen to, I added a button for it. All was well and good.

Then, one day at a stoplight, while rummaging in the glovebox, I found the little card XM Radio (the company) sends out to subscribers with a list of all the channels (there’s really 160) and 2-3 word descriptions of their content. I was curious how Top Tracks was described so I looked it up. Classic Rock. Oh my god, I must be Old now.

See, I’ve always kind of made fun of people (principally my husband) who listen to “Classic Rock” stations. And to be fair, the primary one here in Austin plays mostly old CCR and Zeppelin–you know, OLD stuff, not REGULAR stuff like U2, and Billy Joel, and Prince, for god’s sake. Though to be fair, when I went to the website for Top Tracks, it listed the following as what you might hear:

Aerosmith, “Dream On”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Def Leppard “Photograph”
Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water” (which, incidentally, my 8-year old daughter can play on the guitar)
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Free Bird”
ZZ Top “Tush”
Van Halen “Jump
Kansas “Carry on Wayward Son”

Most of that list is the kind of thing I’d make fun of Will (my husband) for listening to. “Get out of the past–geez, listen to something more current!” But once I thought about it, U2’s “The Joshua Tree” is nearly 20 years old. That’s 2 - 0.

I feel like the protagonist in that most annoying of songs (”1985,” by Bowling for Soup) who wondered “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?”