By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET Having taken on the challenge of writing a new political comedy song every week, as well as writing songs regularly for children’s music publishers, I am regularly confronted with the question of from whence comes the kernel of inspiration. Or in less high-falutin’ terms, “oh crap, what am I gonna write this week?” But that’s sort of the point of these regular challenges, seeing how we respond to the regularity. (Such as “Julie and Julia,” how a home-chef blogged about cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering French Cooking,” and how it transformed her marriage and made her a media star, or those articles that pop up occasionally in women’s magazines about couples who decide to try having sex every day for a year, only none of them end up getting played by Amy Adams. But I digress . . . )
There are those who say inspiration flows from a higher power, like in the movie “Amadeus” where Salieri envies Mozart, whom he thinks is basically taking dictation from a divine source. And others say there’s no such thing as pure inspiration, it’s mostly persistence and hard work. Most famous writers will advise their audiences to write what they know, and to write regularly. (When I was in middle school, our class got to attend a lecture by Ray Bradbury, who met with us afterwards, and he detailed his writing method, he got up every day, put his rear end in his chair, and made himself write 10 pages. Sometimes the words flowed effortlessly and became the germ of a new novel, and sometimes he took several hours to write 10 pages of “I hate writing.”)
So when it comes to political comedy songs, of course I start with perusing current events, but usually I still have to do the plant-the-tush-and-force-myself. Sometimes a meme or topic is trending too strongly to ignore, like the 2012 election’s “Binders Full of Women” or the recent flap about Paula Deen (so I at least have a subject matter). But every now and then, a line or a tune will simply pop into my head – not that I claim to be Mozartian with some sort of direct line to divine inspiration, but I do sometimes wonder where that comes from. And this started when I was a kid – in 6th grade, I accompanied Amy Wood and Lori D’Itri in the school talent show, singing the recent hit song “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” (Yeah, it was that long ago. Altho I skipped a grade so I was only 10. So I’m not that old.) Anyway, the sheet music listed other titles available from the publisher, including a title that cracked us all up, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” We thought that was really weird, and all of a sudden a tune and a lyric popped into my head:
(sung to a jaunty ragtime tune)
“I left my heart in San Francisco,
I left my lungs in Waikiki,
I left my legs in old New Mexico,
And now there’s nothing left of me!” That was the moment I decided to become a songwriter. (And someday it will make a terrific anecdote for a t.v. interview . . . )
I don’t have those moments very often, when a whole section of a song just materializes, but it’s wonderful when it happens. And this week, after reading a slew of articles about the combination of failed attempts at reasonable gun legislation, and the recent spate of state restrictions on abortion, the title and first few lines of this week’s song popped into my head. I imagine the combination of these two sensitive issues will prompt some pretty vehement responses (although so far, the angriest youTube comments I’ve gotten have also been the worst in terms of spelling and grammar, which makes them a little less ominous . . . )
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET  I’ve noted several times on these pages that while Alannis Morissette is one of my favorite songwriters (“You Oughtta Know” is one of the best breakup songs ever penned), her song “Ironic” is in my opinion the worst song of all time.
Perhaps I am holding Alannis to a higher standard, but the main trouble with “Ironic” is that she doesn’t understand the definition of the word “ironic.”
Nothing that she terms “ironic” during the course of the song “Ironic” is “ironic.” Rain on your wedding day is disappointing, it sucks, but it isn’t ironic. A black fly in your chardonnay is gross, but not ironic. And so on…
Fortunately, Rachael Hurwitz has come along to correct the record.
And while the vocal quality and production value don’t match up to the original version, her grammar is excellent. And the video is pretty funny: (h/t Jill Smith Muth)
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
“If you can’t succeed….. at least fail spectacularly.”
That’s advice I’ve taken to heart and is exemplified recently in the new movie Sharknado.
You read that right. It’s a scary movie about the nightmarish scenario of what would happen if you combined sharks and tornadoes.
It is so bad it’s good. Or at least entertaining.
It’s the best sci-fi adventure film since SNL’s Laser Cats.
Only longer. And without Andy Samberg.
But you won’t want to miss this gem. An overnight cult classic.
 Here’s the clip!
Warning: Weak dialogue and preposterous premise may offend the artistic sensibilities of young discriminating viewers.
Others will find it hilarious.
And we are reminded that if you can’t make a good film, then at least make one so cheesy and lousy that everyone will be talking about it.
And watching it!
And you creators will cheerfully allow us to laugh at them….all the way to their bank.
By Nancy Slotnick, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET  Paper towels are my guilty pleasure. Is that pathetic or what? But I’m totally serious. Especially the Viva ones, that are so soft and absorb everything. I never have to touch a sponge. My husband wipes up turkey grease with a Crate and Barrel hand towel and it kills me. Why? I wish it didn’t. I’m trying to train myself not to care. Shalom Bayit is the term for letting sh*t go for the sake of peace in the family. It’s more than that. It’s letting go of thinking that the way I do everything is the right way. Realizing that there are many ways to skin a cat. And that some of us would never dare skin a cat. But my husband would if we were hungry enough. I respect that. He does love cats too.
So I have to pull it together when he puts the Tupperware on the bottom shelf of the dishwasher. I stole that line from Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, btw. I was encouraged to know that I’m not the only one who worries about crap like that! But a little scared to think that I’m about as sexy as Liz Lemon sometimes. I used to be sexy though. And I think I still can be on a good day. In further tribute to Tina Fey, I don’t own Mom Jeans. But I’m not quite Nancy [MILF] on Weeds. That’s probably good news for my son, as well as for the paper towel industry, but it might not be so good for me.
Read the rest of…
Nancy Slotnick: You Sexy Think
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jul 15, 2013 at 4:00 PM ET
Here’s Louie C.K. on climate change and racism in America.
Hilarious and right on point.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jul 15, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  My early days as a sports agent (wanna be)
“Look, as long as I’m representing Muhammad, we aren’t fighting in Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium.
It’s either Freedom Hall or somewhere in Manilla in…wherever that is.
And I don’t want to hear that Don King’s name one more time. The guy is nuts and has lame hair and will never be able to compete with my doo no matter how hard he tries to copy me! I’m the original crazy-haired boxing promoter!
We clear fellas?”
===
 This picture may have been the pivotal conversation I had with Colonel Sanders when I was 3 to persuade him to sell KFC.
“Look, Colonel, if you sell controlling interest to Jack Massey and my dad, it’ll be like you can be a kid again.
You’ll have all the money you want to buy toys and candy and we can dress up like cowboys, Indians, superheroes, colonels and what not and play in the back yard all day and mom will make cookies and lemonade for us.
No more of these long boring business meetings and endless phone calls about earnings. It’ll be awesome!”
Or it may have been the conversation about me wanting another piece of birthday cake.
I just can’t remember.
===
Got game?! Kinda…. ; )
The apex of my athletics career….
At Freedom Hall performing at halftime basketball game in front of over 10,000 people as a member of the Bellarmine Junior Pros half-time entertainment.
We were good.
And Ken Fleming, future Metro Council member, was nearby. We won the Regional title for, well, not sure what they called us—half-time performers with basketballs, I guess.
===
 This one is for Jeff Hoover.
Your fro beat mine. I give you that…. But you gotta admit, I gave you a run for your money!
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jul 12, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Parental Genius!!
I wonder if young people will ever figure out what we adults did to them on Facebook?
Early on we hand-wrung, threatened, even took down our children’s Facebook pages to protect them from stalkers, bullying and time-wasting.
But nothing worked.
Finally, in a brilliant stroke of parenting genius, we switched to a final and dramatic strategy.
We decided —without our children suspecting—to take over Facebook by using it ourselves until our children no longer believed Facebook was cool.
After just a few years into this brilliant and bold move it is working beyond parent’s wildest dreams.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jul 11, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET How to stay relevant even when you’re not.
Oh come on. You’ve wondered this too. It’s like trying to avoid excessive amounts of cellulite on our personality or wrinkles on our reputation. And, yes, it matters.
I saw this news release on my feed this morning:
Forbes listing of the “Most Powerful Celebrities” in the world.
I had no interest to read the article. We all have a pretty good idea of who the “most powerful celebrities” are.
Obviously, Oprah tops the list. And it’s fair to assume Lady Gaga, Madonna and Justin Bieber are all in the mix near the top.
OK. Yawn.
But what about a list of “The Least Powerful Celebrities” in the world?
That would pique my interest. Maybe it’s age; maybe practicality or maybe fear. But increasingly I’m more interested with the secrets of maintaining my status as my skills and energy levels decline.
I would be interested to know how some celebrities have found ways to succeed at remaining celebrities while being on the brink of irrelevancy and without any apparent influence.
I know that doesn’t sound like the most exciting late night infomercial pitch.
Or does it?
Think about it….
“Have you spent your career trying to establish yourself in some area and finally broken through? But now see age and agism start you on the downhill course toward obscurity and professional oblivion? What can you learn from Cuba Gooding, Vanilla Ice, Kato Kalin and Nik Wallenda? The surprising answer is “More than you might think.” What are their secrets to staying in the public mind despite nearly half the public believing they “may have died” several years ago? What is it that they do to differentiate themselves from those who have already transitioned to merely “former celebrities” with no power? How do they successfully get invited to appear on QVC and Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice show while their less savvy borderline celebrity peers phase out of the public mind?
Now that is a pitch that I’d be interested in hearing more about. And be willing to buy the book, CDs and DVD set.
Operators are standing by.
By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Jul 9, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET Like most people from my generation (late-baby-boomers or early whatever-is-in-between-that-and-Gen-X?), I was taught to respect my elders, my teachers, or anyone in a position of authority, even if I disagreed with them. This apparently outdated training gave us very good manners and some real difficulty in calling our parents’ friends by their first names even when we were parents ourselves. It also meant that we behaved respectfully toward bosses or elected officials even if we couldn’t stand them or their politics, so that up until recently, political discourse always at least had the veneer of politeness.
These days, of course, it’s easy to point to the collapse of civility everywhere from Congress to preschool. (And yes, there’s a joke in there somewhere about how I just insulted preschoolers.) Some of this informality is welcome – for example, since between my husband, my kids and myself we have three different last names at my house, it’s just easier to go by my first name; and I certainly don’t long for those days when my mother put on a girdle, stockings, a dress, heels, and even gloves to go to the grocery store. But as many writers on this site have pointed out, not holding back our opinions is part of why there’s such partisan gridlock in government. Can’t we manage to be polite and courteous even to people with whom we disagree? (And how many of you had the equivalently old-fashioned education to notice that correct grammar?)
I like to pride myself on that ability to rise above petty differences. It’s worked with my ex-husband, to the point where we can sit together at our kids’ events, and only my closest friends know all the mean-spirited little digs I was tempted to throw out there but didn’t. It’s worked with my friends who have different political views – yes, some of my best friends are Republicans. (Of course I live in the San Francisco area, so Republicans here tend to have liberal social views along with being more fiscally conservative; on the other hand, one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons showed one woman describing her latest date to a friend, “He says he’s a social liberal and a fiscal conservative – which just means he sleeps around and he’s cheap.” But I digress . . . )
However, sometimes it’s just too hard to stay polite and respectful, particularly when someone says or does something too egregious to ignore. (Or in kids’ parlance, “He started it!”) And this can be true even for Supreme Court justices. I had my first taste of head-scratching behavior by one of these lofty figures when I spent a semester in college as a DC intern. (This was back when being an intern had nothing to do with jokes about Presidential infidelity.) Our group got to meet with Potter Stewart, who had just made headlines with his statement that while he couldn’t define pornography, he knew it when he saw it. Not only did he reiterate that view to us, he elaborated by explaining he’d had to view quite a bit of the material in question to come up with his conclusion. Somehow, the idea of a fairly elderly man in a black robe rationalizing his porn consumption knocked the Supreme Court off the pedestal in my mind – I realized they were just people like anyone else, extremely influential, and presumably more intelligent than most of us, but not necessarily. (Not to mention the fact that a Supreme Court justice discussing pornography with sophomoric college juniors was already pretty surreal, as well as giving us all bad cases of supressed snickers.)
So speaking of ludicrous statements by Supreme Court justices, I had planned to resist the temptation to write about Antonin Scalia’s ranting opinions, dissents, and other tirades in recent months, but the combination of his “argle-bargle” comment and his son now claiming that homosexuality simply doesn’t exist was just impossible to ignore – and impossible for me to remain civil and completely respectful. (Although I will give the man credit – he makes the nation’s highest court both colorful and great material for comedians!)
“The Scalia Song”:
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jul 5, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Idiom-speak can leave you tongue-tied.
It’s depressing when things that are supposed to “wax and wane” end up merely “waning and waning” And then waning once more —and in a big way, as waning goes—when you least expect it and when you really, really needed a major league waxing period to begin.
At some point waning (without waxing) is just a trend that you have to accept and just deal with …it for what it is and stop telling yourself it will stop soon and start waxing. It may not. It may never wax again.
In fact, it may wane and ebb!
And that is some serious stuff when that starts to happen. And you better be ready.
You can’t be standing idly by wearing rose-colored glasses telling yourself a flowing or waxing period is just around the corner when it’s obvious to everyone else around you there is only more waning and more ebbing ahead. Maybe a lot more.
And that your “glass,” so to speak, is definitely half empty and not half full. And really more like only a third full (or, I should say, two-thirds empty).
Don’t be the last one in the room to realize you are waning and ebbing and already–and maybe permanently —half empty, glass-wise.
Put it this way: When that happens, and you see a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s best to run the other way. And to leave all those pesky idioms, maxims and metaphors behind.
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