The new My Chemical Romance record (streaming here) is the aural equivalent of a Michael Bay movie. It makes me feel like I’m Gangbang Girl #58 and I’ve got twelve cocks in each ear. Stop it. Sam’s Town is a better if you approach it as a Queen rip-off instead of as a Springsteen rip-off. *
I’m feeling better – better than that cat, at least. I’ve found a couple sources of strength.
The first is myNetworkTV. There were apparently two television “networks”called “The WB” and “UPN” – Buffy was on one, or both, or something – and they pooled together all their quality programs, cancelled them, and threw the rest on to something called “The WC,” or The Water Closet Network. This left a vast programming void. Rather than air another three hours of infomercials/night, many stations that pulled the short straw in the WC deal signed on to News Corp’s myNetwork (I love how the little possessive cowers before an imposing “N”). What is yourNetwork? It’s an entire channel devoted to turning models into model-slash-actors. Remember, charity begins at home.
myN (not to be confused with gyN, a very different pay-cable channel) has two whole programs. Based on Spanish-language soap operas, both Desire (about a restaurant that’s “serving up affairs and deceit”) and Fashion House (which “exposes the cutthroat world of a family fashion empire”) air ALL THE FUCKING TIME. They’re never not running – it’s like Beastmaster on TBS circa 1995 – and you can’t tell one from the other. It’s like visual wallpaper. Totally uninspired, badly written, horribly acted wallpaper.
I beg you – beg you – to go to the myNetwork site and watch the “‘Blonde’ Brawl” wherein Fashion House matriarchs Morgan Fairchild (frighteningly well-preserved) and Bo Derek (thaaaa’s right) face off over... oh, I dunno, something. Derek falls asleep about a half-minute in, there’s a brilliant bit of HEAVY SYMBOLISM and a some fantastic art direction (I bet Bo pushed for the Buddha). There’s cake, of course. The brilliance of myNetwork is that while the scenes are written with the hyperhysteria of the telenovelas from which they’re adapted, the actors in them are (no matter what their color) so white, so uninspired, so bland. It’s like eating a tub of Country Crock with a spoon.
The other thing I’m totally digging is this ditty:
Big, dark, twangy. It’s like a back-alley spaghetti western. Or something. It makes me want to bang on overturned aluminum garbage cans. Do they still make aluminum garbage cans? They’d better. This song don’t know plastic nothin’.
Just imagine how great it’d be if the guy oooooing actually ooooooed in tune.
The Toronto band is composed of, according to their myspace page, not ten, but two, and not Kens, but a Dan and Dean. I’m still digesting the rest of the album (their site has no further info, their disc is self-released but I don’t see any links to buy it) – which moseys from Black Heart Procession-type atmospherics to standard-issue Montreal howls to wan indieshit to the odd bit to headbanging carnival stomp – but it’s not a bad little first record. “Alternate Biker” should have you walking bowlegged, kicking up imaginary spurs.tags: ten kens cute overload my chemical romance the killers mynetwork my network fashion house
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