cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
SONGWRITING
There’s this sadness about [Katy Perry’s hit song “Teenage Dream”], where you feel young listening to it, but you feel impermanence at the same time. When I put that song on, I’m as moved as I am by anything by David Bowie, by Fleetwood Mac, by Neil Young. It lets you feel something you didn’t know you needed to feel. There’s something holy about it.
–Lorde, interviewed by Jonah Weiner in the New York Times Magazine
TIME
[With “Pee Wee’s] Playhouse,’’ [Paul] Reubens revitalized Saturday-morning programming, a wasteland of cheap animated series that served mostly as glorified toy commercials, by discovering an aesthetic wormhole connecting late-night comedy and early-morning children’s programming. The sensibility of stoned 20-somethings at midnight, he realized — marked by an unreasonable love of repetition, absurdity, narrative disjuncture and jokes that either last way too long or flit by in a short-attention-span-accommodating blink — had significant overlap with that of little kids in pajamas, laughing themselves silly over breakfast cereal. ‘‘Those are the times of the day when there aren’t rules,’’ Reubens said of morning and night, standing as they do in idiosyncratic opposition to the more conventional prerogatives of the prime-time dial. ‘‘Rules are for the other times.’’
— Jonah Weiner, “Laughing Last,” New York Times Magazine
photo by Jeffrey Henson Scales
another eye opens 