The Oppenheimer Report - 2/14/11 Happy Valentine's Day!

I noticed in the entertainment section of the Buffalo News that there is a concert scheduled for May 28 featuring NKOTBSB. That is, The New Kids on the Block and the Back Street Boys, together. Like, could there be a more awesomer concert on the face of the earth??? I recently had the displeasure of catching a bit of this collaboration on some TV awards show, and as much as I disliked these boy bands the first time around, the dilution of their talent is exponential now that they are no longer boys/kids. I might have a slightly wider tolerance for different genres of music than the average listener, and I enjoy everything from classical to Rock to Balinese gamelan music. I even like some of the homogenized pop music that is pumped out in excess today. But those boy bands like Not-So-New Kids and the Backdoor Boys always irked me, and now that I see them resurfacing as men, doing the same bubble gum boy band stuff, I think their act is getting a little old. Literally. Even Menudo had the good sense to exchange their players once they reached a certain age! Puberty's a bitch man. Some of these guys, like Justin Timberlake and Ricky Martin, go on to re-invent themselves, and while I don’t particularly like their music, I respect their talent and their ability to grow. Fun fact: the now wildly famous actor/director/producer Mark Wahlberg was once the headliner for a 90s boy band called Marky Mark. One day he’s hawking underwear for Calvin Klein and the next he’s up for an Academy Award. But these middle-aged men singing boy band songs are ludicrous to me. Learning machine that I am, I googled “Boy Bands” and looked at some of the past representatives. According to one entry I read, The Monkees were considered to be the pioneers of Boy Band music, although technically I don’t think they qualify. According to the Wikipedia definition of a boy band - and I live and die by the information I glean from Wikipedia - in a genuine boy band, the players dance and they do not play their own instruments. Two strikes against the Monkees. They scampered about and acted zany, but I don’t ever recall seeing them actually dancing. And I think that most of them learned how to play their instruments, eventually. That Davy Jones was cute as a button, back in the 70s. These days, not so much.



Did you hear about the 1,250 Superbowl fans in Dallas who were unable to sit in their assigned seats because those seats were deemed unsafe? Oops. 400 were unable to be relocated, and I’ve got a hunch that the three times face value ticket refund that the NFL is offering will not satisfy them. Too bad, because as Superbowls go, I thought that this one was pretty good. Pittsburgh was outplayed, but they kept it interesting until the very end. Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 years old last Sunday. I watched a special on him the other day, examining his long life, and it was interesting to watch him dance around the Iran/Contra scandal. How he ever walked away from that one is beyond me. The Teflon President. What I found most interesting was the fact that today’s Republicans, desperate to sweep the Dubya years under the rug, have created a Reagan mythology that glosses over Reagan’s many shortcomings, making him out to be the Great White Hope. I don’t know much about history, except that a lot of it seems to become sanitized with time, but after Nixon, I gave up on my president-can-do-no-harm delusion. After his “Let them eat hummus” speech failed last week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down and handed the reins over to the military. This is what the people protesting in Tahrir Square wanted, but aren’t they just replacing one autocratic ruler with another one? I wouldn’t want to be a dictator right now; the peasants are getting restless. Tunisia, The Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, and I understand now Uganda is poised for an uprising. With the blinding light of the media shining down on them, how could anything go wrong?


Final note. In the “what-part-about-the-words-public-figure-don’t-you-get?” department, congressman Craig Lee of Amherst, N.Y. (I love it when Western New York makes the national news) abruptly resigned after a suggestive photo of him surfaced on Craigslist. Too cheap to pay for sex like the rest of your cronies? In all fairness, a shirtless photo of Lee flexing his muscles in the bathroom mirror is pretty low on my scandal scale, but the guy IS a married man, he WAS flirting on the internet, he broke the golden rule of American politics: don’t be stupid; don’t get caught, AND he lied about his age. I guess he resigned because he wanted to stop the bleeding, but it wasn’t as if he showed us his “winkie” or anything. He wasn’t caught soliciting oral sex from some other guy in an airport bathroom. Now that he has resigned, I wouldn’t be surprised if CNN hires him (like they did Elliot Spitzer). I heard a song performed by Chris Brown on SNL last Saturday night that was ten times more scandalous than that photo. I’m going to go listen to my Justin Bieber album to mollify my indignation. Oy, for the love of Allah, where has purity gone?

To the many people I love, Happy Valentines Day!

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED