Sunday, November 21, 2021

"Look What The Black Cat Dragged In!"


Don't think I even have time tonight for the promised (Or is that threatened?) Narnia mash-up. I have all the pictures but as I learned last night I'm not capable of just putting them up and walking away. I have to editorialise and in the end it takes as long as writing a proper post, so that's kind of missing the point.

Luckily I have the old fall-back to fall back on. Music videos! Got a couple and a couple of reasons for using them, too. Always good to have a reason.

The first is something I wanted to crowbar into yesterday's post but couldn't find a delicate way to do it. Delicate crowbarring. Now, there's a concept to conjure with. Conjuring with crowbars, even better. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, the video. It's Nine Stories by Hazel English. Pretty obvious why I wanted to get it in somehow. Better now than never.


It's a slice of sweet indie pop with a bubbling beat and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded through a sock. Several socks. Probably thermal. I don't want to come over like one of those fathers in a 1960s teensploitation movie but I really can't understand the words. 

Of course, by "understand" I mean "make out". I can understand what they mean, now I read them at Genius.com. They're pretty simple to understand or they seem to be. I know lyrics are seldom as surfaced as they appear but it's what I'm going with for now. 

The only conection with the book that gives the song its title would appear to be the first few lines

"You lent me Nine Stories
While you starred in mine
We talked about J.D
In your car.
.."

It's enough. I mean, I didn't even talk about him.

The other video is "3 Small Words", a candypop slammer from the soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats, done live by Letters To Cleo, whose singer, Kay Handley, was the voice of Josie in the movie (Something which takes more digging to authenticate than it should.) and the always entertaining Charly Bliss, who are currently supporting LTC on tour, a billing order that surprised me. 

The result is one of the most mood-lifting spectacles I've seen for quite a while.

Seriously, if that doesn't at least make you remember what it felt like to be happy, you may want to check your pulse. I had that much energy once, you know and some of it was even my own.

Other than the sheer, innocent, exuberant joy of it, the reason (Remember, I said I had one.) for wanting to put it up is because Riverdale is back in my thoughts and back on Netflix. Last time I mentioned the show (I'd link but I can't find the post. Maybe I only thought-wrote it.) we'd just gotten to the end of Season Five and everything had gone totally telenovella. 

I wasn't sure there was going to be another season but not only is there, it's now! It's also short. Five episodes. Actually, that's just half a season. Then it goes on hiatus for a few months to return in March next year.

That would be good enough but there's more. So much more. Remember how peeved I was over the way longish-running shows seem to get cancelled these days with no view to giving the fans either the catharsis they need or the satisfaction they deserve? One of those shows was The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which ended (BIG spoiler...) with Sabrina dead and gone to heaven. It was kinda cool but kinda fucking annoying at the same time.

When it happened, I wondered why, since TCAOS and Riverdale both take place in the same 'verse and have the same showrunner, some sort of deal couldn't have been worked out to integrate the two. Well guess what!

Oh, you guessed. I kinda teed that one up a little, didn't I? The picture at the top of the post may have been a clue, too.


Season Six of Riverdale, which is "in-canon and within the continuity" features the return of everyone's favorite teenage witch. Just like in the trailer (I could give you a couple of thousand words on that trailer, by the way. Maybe just on Cheryl.) Sabrina doesn't turn up until the end but I'm hoping she'll be sticking around for the second half of the season, when it finally gets here.

That just leaves me with the familiar quandry: whether to watch the weekly episodes as they drop or to hold my nerve and watch them all in quick succession at the end. I've tried it both ways this year. I waited for The Expanse (Also soon to return.) but I watched each episode of Stargirl as it came. 

My preference is to watch one episode a day. I wish someone would try that for a cadence once in a while. Or maybe they have and it's something I don't watch

I don't watch everything. Just the good ones.

2 comments:

  1. This is the second thing I've seen named after Nine Stories (after Lisa Loeb's backing band) which is extremely irritating to me because ... "Nine Stories" isn't even a title! It's declaration of medium at best! It's like naming your band "350 Pages" or "On a CD"!
    Which I suppose someone probably has.

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    1. The band I was in in college was called The Romantic Novels, if that helps...

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