Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
I got a buy-one-get-one free deal on two packs of uncured hot dogs last week. It was a path taken, even if I had to figure out how to get a symmetric number of buns.
We do know that the southern United States eats the bulk of all hot dogs each year – more than any other region of the country. Residents of New York City purchase more hot dogs at retail outlets (grocery stores, supermarkets, etc.) than any other city in the country – over $101 billion dollars worth. And travelers passing through Chicago's O'Hare International Airport consume more hot dogs there than LaGuardia in New York and Los Angeles International.
This Vice article was a pleasant essay to read, only because I did identify with Malcolm of the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, as well as Patty and Lauren of Square Pegs. much like my favorite episodes of Big Bang Theory are those with Leonard’s mom. I watch too much television, but sitcoms are a kind of cultural looting of genres and Malcolm was better because it was more cinematically constructed. The side note for Malcolm is that they weren’t able to produce a DVD of the series because the music clearances were too expensive, a tale of modern media production/distribution.
Almost every episode ofMalcolm in the Middleends with the sound of a door being slammed shut. It returns Malcolm's family – a combustive medley of troublemakers and misfits – back to the status quo. This is standard in sitcoms; everything returns to how it was. The difference is, inMalcolm in theMiddle, the status quo is bleak. Unlike the characters in, say,Friends,who live comfortably in midtown apartments with lives seemingly unbothered by work, Malcolm's family is poor. Every joke, plot and resolution revolves around this material fact.
The series differed significantly from the standard TV sitcom format/presentation commonplace at the time. Malcolm routinely broke the fourth wall by both narrating in voice-over and talking directly to the viewer on camera. The distinctive look and sound of the series relied heavily on elaborate post-production, including fast-cut editing, sound effects, musical inserts, the extensive use of locations, and the unusual camera styles, compositions and effects (e.g. overhead, tracking, hand-held and crane shots, and the frequent use of a wide-angle lens for both close-ups and ensemble scenes) that would be generally impractical or impossible to achieve in a standard studio-based video multi-camera sitcom production.[5][6] The show employed neither a laugh track (which became a popularity in other TV sitcoms) nor a live studio audience.[7][8][9] Emulating the style of hour-long dramas, this half-hour show was shot on film instead of on video.[10] en.wikipedia.org/…
I grew up thinkingMalcolm in the Middlewas a zany show about four quarrelsome brothers and their parents. Re-watching it now it's clear what the show is actually about: the idea that meritocracy is a sham, social institutions are corrupt and wage-labour is cruel. The parents, Hal and Lois, have a comically carnal relationship, which I didn't really understand when I was young. It's a way of protecting themselves from the vicissitudes of capitalism. All the characters are condemned, in one way or another, by the world that surrounds them.
While this might sound like heavy stuff for a primetime show on FOX, sitcoms have smuggled in radical ideas before. In fact, there's a reference to this on Malcolm, Dewey and Reece's bedroom wall: a poster of the sitcomDinosaurs, which ran in the early 1990s on ABC.Dinosaursis unlike any sitcom America has produced: an anti-capitalist, moralistic puppet show about a family of dinosaurs living on a swampland owned by the FruitCO corporation (a division of WeSaySo enterprises), run by a Trump-esque CEO. It offers a critique of exploitation, sexual harassment and political corruption,and concludes with the family becoming extinct due to a climate change-induced ice age.Dinosaurswas Malcolm's guiding spirit.
“I think that when people loot during a riot, they are solving a lot of the immediate problems that make their lives very, very hard,” the author of “In Defense of Looting” says, in a conversation with @IChotiner. https://t.co/NtD8ifZJYd
You know I have this thing for pre-electric contemporary music with brass band /polka band versions of contemporary music (with lots of jazz riffs/solos) and I discovered this group Lucky Chops which has had 55 different members (a lot more than Menudo) and had a great baritone sax player, Leo P who plays with the trio, Too Many Zooz and does a duo with Grace Kelly (the alto player).
When I was an undergrad, I really wanted to go the Berklee School of Music for Jazz training if I didn’t get into grad school (I probably wouldn’t have made the audition cut), so I have appreciated things like their big band that plays videogame music among other things.
My favorite group remains this Swiss band Quä Quäger Triengen (qqt), that does metal and punk tunes like Iron Maiden’s Fear Of The Dark, performed at Bahnhof Guuggete 2014.
Cast off the crutch that kills the pain
The red flag wavin' never meant the same
The kids of tomorrow don't need today
When they live in the sins of yesterday
Cast off the crutch that kills the pain
The red flag wavin' never meant the same
The kids of tomorrow don't need today
When they live in the sins of yesterday
Well, I've never seen us act like this
Our only hope is in minds of kids
And they'll show us a thing or two
Our only weapons are the guns of youth
It's only time before they tighten the noose
And then the hunt will be on for you
Jazz-wise, this BBC Proms concert is a more complete explication of Charles Mingus’s music featuring Leo P. at 26:47, 42:10, 56:50, 1:39:30, 1:42:46, 1:50:24.
I have to step away for a zoom meeting with another DK group at 9pm ET (hopefully my bandwidth can take all this multitasking) Zoom does have a 40 minute limit so I should be back by 940pm.
