Idols of our youth...

So I'm flipping through channels last night on cable and I found Dolly Parton and Melissa Etheridge doing a special together on CMT Crossroads. Now, I'm a huge fan of Melissa's early work and had I had a chance I'd probably have recorded the entire thing onto my tapes of MLE sightings for completeness. Heck, I even like many of Dolly Parton's songs since my parents are 100% country listeners and that is what I grew up with.

With that said, the one or two songs I watched and the interview segment between them bothered me. I lived 25 years in Texas, but now that I'm no longer surrounded by people saying "ya'll" constantly, it bugged me when the interviewer said it about a half dozen times in 30 seconds. Dolly's frightening plastic overly-made-up appearance was disturbing. Heck, even Melissa was wearing way too much make-up. It was just all so goddamn Country!

Of course it didn't help that I only caught them doing one of MLE's songs and it was one of the newer ones that I'm not so enamored with...

And when did Melissa Ethereidge become the kind of performer to appear with Dolly on CMT and the Oprah show anyhow!?! The truth is that Melissa is pretty damn mainstream, and always worked really hard to remain 'acceptable' by neutral pronoun usage. I guess I should just be happy that the Republicans weren't trying to burn the lesbian, but it was all just so wrong somehow.

So I'm listening to her first album to try to remember what it is I love about her music in the first place... This is also why I really like Melissa Ferrick so much because she has the raw edge that MLE has lost somewhere along the way due to years of success, age, and probably better overall mental health.

More observations...

I decided to go home to eat lunch today, and while there I ended up watching part of an episode of the 80s version of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. As a kid, I adored shows like this... Yet watching them now I see what cheesy crap they were. Ah the early 80s when futuristic meant LED-segment displays and metallic synthetic fibers. The acting of the random guest stars is so bad it makes the main actors look good. Erin Grey is sexy as hell in that skin-tight blue jumpsuit with high-heels, but what the hell is up with the glitter lipstick? And they have a total of maybe 45 seconds of special effects shots all created for the pilot and used over and over and over again...

I will say my favorite thing about that edition of the show--besides Erin Grey's pin-up girl pulp-fiction outfits, and I must admit a certain weakness for the intro theme--are the AI rulers of the Earth, or more accurately their form-factor. What a brilliant idea to work around the problems inherent in giving over control of your society to machines: don't give them any way to move or manipulate the world directly and instead force them to talk people into things. What's more, they are so small that if one of them gets too uppity, you can always drop-kick them into a thousand pieces.

I wonder if the company doing the Battlestar Galatica remake for the Sci-Fi channel might consider updating Buck as well?