The Fire This Time

I'm very happy that Tina Fey is hosting the season premiere of Saturday Night Live tomorrow tonight, but I'm even happier that the musical guest is Arcade Fire. Their new album Reflektor will be released in about a month, so I guess this is the first of their promotional appearances.

UPDATE: After SNL, NBC will broadcast a 30-minute Arcade Fire concert special. Adjust your DVRs accordingly.

There's a video for the single, also called "Reflektor."



The giant paper-mache heads are weird, but I found that opening it in a separate tab and listening to it without looking at the video helped me get into the song more. If you preorder the album directly through them, you get early access to concert ticket sales.

Also of note re: their SNL appearance: David Bowie sings background vocals on this song, and I'm totally speculating here, but he does live in New York so it's not out of the question that he'd show up for the live performance.

Retro Video Unit (9/20/13)

Today I'm going back to my college years for a song for which I never even realized there was a video. Yaz, known as Yazoo at home in England (there was a band in the US already using the name Yazoo at the time), was a synth-pop duo started by Vince Clarke, an original member of Depeche Mode who left early on to do his own thing.

He teamed up with vocalist Alison Moyet for a brief but influential period in the early 1980s; they only released two albums, Upstairs at Eric's and You and Me Both, before deciding to go their separate ways. Moyet pursued a solo career while Clarke formed the long-running duo Erasure with Andy Bell, a singer who sounded uncannily like Moyet.

This song, "Situation," is from the first album and is almost certainly the first song by them I heard. It's bouncy and upbeat, and would probably be good on a workout playlist.

It's Time You Knew

Maybe you heard earlier this week that AMC is splitting the final season of Mad Men and holding back the second half for a year, like they've done with Breaking Bad. That means viewers won't get to see the end of Mad Men until the spring of 2015.

You might also have expected me to have something to say about it here, as I have with many bits of Mad Men and other TV-related news. You also may have noticed that that sort of material hasn't been appearing in this space for a while. (Or you may not have noticed these things; that's okay too.)

Fact is, I've had a different outlet for my TV writing for about six months now. It's a Boston-based site called The Longfellow Bridge that started up in April, and I've been contributing there since the beginning. Those of you who know me personally know that I've been doing this, but if you only know me through what I write here, you wouldn't necessarily have any reason to make the connection.

I decided it's time to make my efforts known, and encourage you to visit The LFB, not just for my writing but for the efforts of everyone else who contributes there, in part because I feel a responsibility to promote the site in an effort to build its audience.

I do a weekly roundup of suggestions of things to watch that is posted every Monday, plus feature articles that include reviews, opinion and criticism, and stuff about the TV and media business as well. It's been a very satisfying experience and a new challenge for me, and I hope it will continue for some time.

And since I started out by bringing up this Mad Men development, here's what I had to say about it.

Orientation

I have a video for you today, but it's something a bit different.

The Mrs. started a new job this week with several days of mandatory orientation sessions. These included information about benefits, training specific to her field, and the obligatory information about sexual harassment.

On the very first day of orientation her group was shown this video, which aims to dramatize potential harassment situations using stuffed animals.



She found this quite funny, not because of the content (as someone who is making a career out of helping others, she would never make light of such a situation) but because of the way it's presented.

Spelling It Out

I am reasonably comfortable and conversant with technology, but part of that comes from making efforts to keep things as simple as possible. I've been using Apple computers for over 20 years, while my limited knowledge of how to do certain things in Windows has faded away. I've had TiVo DVRs for about eight years now, and part of the reason I stick with them is because they are so simple to use. (One time when I was visiting my mother she asked me a question about how to do something on her DVR; 45 minutes later I hadn't been able to figure it out, and never did.)

In the final half-season of Breaking Bad currently airing, there has been a lot of whispering. We had to turn up the volume really loud in several scenes, and then of course when the music comes up it blasts us out of our seats (plus our living room is directly under our upstairs neighbor's bedroom, and we try to be considerate about such things). At one point we were forced to turn off the air conditioner in order to hear the whispered dialogue.

So the Mrs. asked me if I knew how to turn on the closed-captioning. I thought I did, but couldn't find anything obvious on the remote. A couple of days later she started working her way through all the TiVo's on-screen menus; I was busy in the next room, but some time later she let out a yell of delight. She had figured out how to activate the CC function. It seems to have been there in the on-screen program info display all along, and we just hadn't ever noticed it.

I was under the impression that we could use it only while watching shows live, but it turned out that the CC data is embedded in the program recordings and can be viewed during later playback. The quality of the transcriptions seems to vary from show to show and even from episode to episode of the same show, but it's there.

As a bonus, being able to access the closed captioning makes it easier for us to enjoy British crime dramas like Luther and Broadchurch, which have a variety of accents with varying degrees of aural decipherability.

Retro Video Unit (9/6/13)

In the portion of the internet's attic where old music videos are stored, there are songs that I've always liked for which there are videos that I have never seen. That's the case with today's nugget, "Fade to Grey" by Visage.



I'll admit to knowing very little about the group itself, but I've been familiar with the song for more than 30 years. The video certainly has its share of oddness, but I think it makes quite an interesting cultural artifact from the early 1980s.

Retro Video Unit (8/23/13)

I'd imagine everyone has seen this one, but that's no reason not to post it. "Sledgehammer" was pretty impressive technically when it premiered in 1986, and it's still a good song. (Isn't it about time for tab-collar shirts to make another comeback?)

Retro Video Unit (8/9/13)

Some old songs have videos that I wasn't aware of, like this one from Toronto band Martha and the Muffins. Yes, it's "Echo Beach":

Retro Video Unit (7/26/13)

Sometimes I just remember old bands and songs out of nowhere, with no prompting or a coincidental hearing of a song on radio somewhere—that's how this one got here. The band is Our Daughter's Wedding, and the song is "Lawnchairs" from 1981. I had a friend in college who was particularly fond of this one...

Retro Video Unit (7/12/13)

I thought of this band for no particular reason. A lot of their videos were kind of boring, at least this one has some camera movement, and this is arguably the song that put them on the map anyway, several years before the John Hughes movie borrowed the title and featured a reworked, inferior version of this song on its soundtrack.

So, here's "Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs:

Retro Video Unit (6/28/13)

Sometimes a really good song got stuck with a mediocre video, like this one, "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17:

Retro Video Unit (6/14/13)

I've been looking at old Matthew Sweet videos for a while for this feature, and as good a song as "Girlfriend" is, I've decided to go with a different song, "Sick of Myself" from the 1995 album 100% Fun, because I think it's a near-perfect example of marrying bitter, self-loathing lyrics to a catchy melody. Sweet was by no means the first person to do that in a song, but he sure did it well. (And thanks to the blog Anthony Is Right for providing the idea.)



Also, those of us of a certain age will recognize and remember the "credits" that used to appear at the beginning and end of MTV videos like this one.

Retro Video Unit (5/31/13)

I've been trying to mix some memorable Boston bands into this feature, so this week we'll look at one that popped into my head recently: The Del Fuegos. Their single "Don't Run Wild" was very popular at the time of its release in 1985, and I saw the band play several times over the years.



The video is perhaps most memorable for the shots of the band playing on the Mass. Ave. bridge. The night shots are cool too; those appear to be in a parking lot on the waterfront, possibly on the Fan Pier?

The Reentry

Oh, hi there. Yeah, my brain took a few days off. I guess that's what long weekends are for, right? I got my stitches out this morning, but I'm still healing.

I'm also in the midst of rewatching the three seasons of Arrested Development that aired on Fox (since I haven't seen them since they were first shown), to get ready for the new episodes on Netflix.

I'll be back soon with more fun stuff.

Retro Video Unit (5/24/13)

With everything going on last week I forgot this again...

This is one of those obscure bands from the New Wave era that were really good and deserved to be more popular. They're called The Brains, they were from Atlanta, and the song is called "Money Changes Everything."



You may actually know this song, because Cyndi Lauper covered it on her 1983 album She's So Unusual, but this is the original. It's not much of a video, but it's slightly better than the ones people make with just a static picture of the band or the cover of their album.

I have a lot of bands like this filed away in my head. In many cases I have the music on vinyl. Once in a while songs like this show up on compilation albums. I found this one on an album called Gold: New Wave (but the cover says New Wave Gold) that has several other excellent obscure songs on it and is worth owning if you ever come across it.