Kevin & Bean vs. Mark & Brian

I grew up in Orange County.  I listened to KROQ in middle & high school, through college when I was home on breaks, and thus have been a fan of Kevin & Bean, their morning DJs, for a long time now.  I appreciated their wry & often immature sense of humor and they were two of the small number of acceptable voices of authority on the alternative/rock station that was supposed to be the station we kids listened to when we had the car to ourselves, since it was "too noisy" for our parents.  They had a female sidekick (now Lisa May), interns to bag on & blame for mishaps, and some other guys that hung around (remember Jimmy the Sports Guy, a.k.a. now fancy-pants Jimmy Kimmel who has his own late-night show??  Currently they have Psycho Mike, among others, who apparently went to my spouse's high school) to keep things going.

Throughout and directly after college I lived in the Bay Area, so I wasn't able to follow them for a while.  When I moved back down here 5 years ago and started listening to KROQ again, I slowly began to realize that Kevin & Bean had grown older just as I had.  The more I listened to them, the more forced their own laughter became.  And their attempts to relate to current events in music & alt/rock culture seemed less & less genuine.

So, I began listening more and more to KLOS.  The newer alt-rock on KROQ was sounding more pop-y to me and as a fan of the oldies, I'd always had an appreciation for classic rock, which is their metier.

(Aside: My unconditional love for K-EARTH, the local oldies station, became quite conditional when I realized they'd added 70s & 80s pop songs to their playlist.  I mean, c'mon, is it really right for a radio station to play doo-wop back-to-back with new wave?  You cannot play Rod Stewart's "D'ya Think I'm Sexy?" right after The Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody". No, no.  Not in my book.  I'm all for variety, but when I listen to a specific radio station, I don't want the same variety I can get with my iTunes on shuffle mode. I want the Four Seasons, Beach Boys, Sam Cooke, and Elvis Presley.  I do NOT want Billy Idol, 80's Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, or Belinda Carlisle.)    

KLOS also has two male morning DJs, named Mark & Brian.  They also have their female sidekick, currently Kelli.  They have their interns and other peripheral cast members with unique personality traits, hobbies, or cultural differences to make fun of.  I remember seeing billboards & TV ads for them when I was younger, but back then KLOS was considered an old-fogey's station to me, so I never tuned in. But as I began tuning in to Mark & Brian, I was more comfortble with their sincerity in accepting their age and the age of their target audience.  That, and I guess I'm now an old fogey!

With Kevin & Bean, I'm mainly turned off at the idea that they are now 25-30 years older than the listeners their station is supposed to be targeting - to me that just seems anachronistic to a fault.  That's like if my 63-year old father tried to convince my 4-year old niece why Curious George is way cooler than Clifford the Big Red Dog.  My dad doesn't know! He shouldn't care! He has no frame of reference to make such a claim or purport his opinion on the situation.  That's how I feel when I hear Kevin & Bean try to profess their views on young Hollywood starlets, the Twilight phenomenon, and over-tweeting.  Mark and Brian do also talk about mostly the same stuff but from the perspective of a more paternal figure - they accept, own & rock the fact that they've had their day in the sun.  They have the proper amount of annoyance and distance from the fact that their kids' phones constantly chime at the dinner table.  Kevin & Bean are like the mom trying to stay hip and be best friends with her daughter's friends.  Mark & Brian are like your curmudgeonly uncle making fart jokes.

Further evidence that Kevin & Bean are losing their touch, is that they now have to bring in Adam Carolla once a week to keep things kicking.  Don't get me wrong, I love Adam Carolla - I think he's hilarious - the man has brought me to tears on several occasions with his infamous rants.  My point is that Adam Carolla is a TV/radio personality in his own right - most definitely more famous on a national (dare I say, international) stage than Kevin & Bean.  He has his own daily PodCast now, and was (up until last year) the host of his own nationally syndicated morning show having taken over Howard Stern when he left "regular" radio for satellite radio back in '06.  Now, if one show's hosts need to rely on another show's host for variety and laughs, doesn't that tell you something?

I dunno.  KROQ will always be a preset in my car radio, and I'll switch over to them every so often in the mornings on my drive to work just to see what antics Kevin & Bean are up to - but it still makes me a little sad just listening to them, feeling like they're those house guests who have overstayed their welcome, listening with empathic embarrassment that they don't realize they're simply too old to be doing what they're doing.  Or at least they sound like they are.  Perhaps I'm being ageist.  All I know is I will release a small sigh of relief when I hear KROQ has new morning DJs. 

Julie & Julia was OK

My significant other, in honor of Valentine's Day, rented an uber-chick flick, Julie & Julia.  After a belly-busting veggie thali dinner in Little India (which until tonight I hadn't realized existed at all), we came home, assumed our usual positions on the sofa, and watched the movie. 

It was OK.

Meryl Streep does a really good impersonation of Julia Child, but I would hardly call her performance as an actor in the movie Oscar-worthy.  Amy Adams was good.  Stanley Tucci was good.  Everyone in the movie was good!  The writing was ok, the costumes - eh, the art direction & production design - ok, the editing - eh, the directing - ok...  I just didn't feel as uplifted at the end of the movie as I think the director (Nora Ephron) had intended. 

(Disclaimer: I never read Julie Powell's blog, I never read the book, and I went into watching the movie expecting a lot - having heard so much buzz from the media, my friends/family, and being a fan of cooking/eating/cookbooks myself.)

I really wanted to love this movie - I wanted to be inspired and hope-filled and all warm & gushy inside after the credits began rolling.  Instead, I felt a bit deflated and melancholy. I also had a bit of heartburn... but that's another post.   I'm willing to accept that 75% of the reason I was so let down was because I had such high hopes - but even if I had gone in expecting nothing, I'm pretty sure I still would have been a little disappointed.  Maybe it's because I just finished watching it a couple hours ago, but I feel like I'm not properly expressing exactly how & why I didn't like the movie as much as I wanted to.  This is all I have to say for now... if I can think of something better, I'll come back & edit it.

Pockets

My father-in-law has a preference when driving on long road trips - staying in the pockets. Pockets are those gaps between large groups of cars that naturally form on freeways when traffic isn't too bad and people are actually able to go at the speed they want. The faster drivers inevitably clump together, the slower ones get left behind, and if you're lucky and aware of your surroundings, you can sneak into a pocket between the two groups and have some elbow room and not have to worry as much about your blind spots or tailgaters. Lately, I find myself on the road a lot - not that I have to drive for a living. But I do live in Southern California. I drive about 40 miles, each way, to & from work, and my family and friends are fairly spread out from Orange County to Pasadena to Santa Monica. So I'm on the highways a lot - the 405, 5, 22, 110, 710, and 10 - fully immersed in the fumes and frustration that fill our SoCal roads. Sometimes I battle, sometimes I cruise, and when I'm lucky - I find pockets.

The fact that my father-in-law likes pockets tells you a lot about him. He's generally a quiet man, easily lost in thought. Don't get me wrong, the man has his opinions, and he's certainly not shy. But he's definitely someone who thinks long and hard before he speaks. At parties, people chat about everything and nothing around him, and he drifts about from small circles of people to large raucous crowds - putting in his two cents here and there, but mostly listening and thinking. Sometimes he escapes to the kitchen (if the party's at his home) to make sure the pile of dirty dishes and glasses doesn't get too high, to check on his basset hound, and sometimes he'll just go on a walkabout.

I had never heard the word "walkabout" until the first time I met my father-in-law. That first meeting was at a restaurant with a large group of people, and after most had finished eating the main course and were waiting for dessert and coffee and talking amongst themselves, he just vanished. He had quietly slipped outside and was walking about. Later I found out that he's infamous for his walkabouts - his friends and family often tease him and refer to them. They'll ask him what he does on his walkabouts, but he never really replies. He may shrug and mutter something about walking around, stretching his legs, and so on - but he never gives a "real" response.

I like to imagine that the man just values Silence. He is the father or stepfather of 6 children, he has 6 sons- and daughters-in-law, 8 grandchildren, 2 sisters, a sister- and brother-in-law, and hundreds of friends and extended family between him and my mother-in-law. How valuable, then, are the rare conversation-free, TV & radio-free, bark-free, phone-free and work-free moments? How comforting, then, is a blanket of fresh air, the darkness of night, the stillness of early morning, and relative quiet of a room with doors shut to a boisterous gathering in the next room?

Now my life isn't nearly as busy and full as his. It's just my significant other and me, a cat, no kids... We live at the bend of a quiet dead end street, in a duplex out of earshot of any schools or parks. I work in a small office on a quiet street. We don't eat out very much or party hard or go to clubs. Our lights are usually out by 10. But I do definitely find myself constantly bombarded by sound - looping music at the mall, people talking on their cellphones at the dry cleaners, people on their hands-free in line at the grocery store, 35 large screen TVs with surround sound at a sports bar, the booming bass from the car next to me at a stoplight, sirens late at night... And sometimes, especially at night, when I find myself on the road, and traffic is moving at the right pace, I turn off the radio and seek out a pocket. I find one, settle in, and just enjoy the black emptiness around me, threatened only with the twinkle of headlights far behind me in my rearview mirror and the warm red glow of tail lights in the distance ahead of me.