Alexis, Gabby and Tess of Pretty Wild/E!

If you don’t live in LA or New York or go to film festivals, you won’t get a chance to see Sofia Coppola’s newest movie, The Bling Ring, until June 21, which seems like an eternity. Whether the movie gets close to the genius of The Virgin Suicides or Lost in Translation, or falls completely flat on its perspective-lacking face like Marie Antoinette and Somewhere (full disclosure: I’ve never seen Somewhere and have absolutely no plans to), remains to be seen. The subject matter is potentially intriguing, but it also seems possible that celebrity-herself Sofia Coppola might have a sort of obnoxious take on the whole situation, completely villainizing the mid-level rich kid nobodies who rob useless items from the upper-level rich kid somebodies. For those of us who spent our teen years babysitting and lifeguarding to literally pay for our mistakes (I spent all the money I ever made in high school fixing other people’s cars that I had backed into) because our parents believed in logical consequences and didn’t have cash to throw around for things that weren’t vital to continued existence, Sofia Coppola’s ability to only empathize with her brethren, the super rich, can make her films offensively one-sided (see: the total lack of reference to or concern for the French Revolution in Marie Antoinette). Also, David Denby already wrote in The New Yorker: “…it lacks the edge or the insight that would make it great.” That said, THE BLING RING. What a terrible and wonderful name for a crime team! What stupid and entertaining bunch of criminals! What a glamourous and horrible group of victims!

In one way it is very lucky that there are a few days before we will all get to see the movie and make our separate judgements about it: this means you still have time to watch the entire season of Pretty Wild (2010) on Netflix Instant. Pretty Wild is the reality show that just happened to be filming about the family of one of the Bling Ring-ers, Alexis Neiers, when she was arrested for her crimes. The show played for one season on E! and was then canceled allegedly because pictures surfaced of Alexis and her adopted sister, Tess Taylor, smoking black tar heroin. Alexis, who is now 21 and has been sober now for awhile, has openly admitted that the entire time the show was filming she and Tess where doing many, many drugs, including oxy and cocaine. Tess, who’s 23, continues to battle her drug addiction.

Judging from The Bling Ring‘s trailer and the fact that she paid the family, Pretty Wild is part of Sofia Coppola’s source material for her film. However, it is also a strange and important cultural artifact, somehow the reality show that encompasses all reality shows. When Alexis’s mom, Andrea, home schools her daughters (the other daughter is 16-year-old Gabby, Alexis’s biological sister) based on principles from The Secret the movie, it is a show about a fanatical religious cult. The girls are models and when, at one point, Andrea (the mother remember) encourages Tess to soap herself up so Andrea can do “a photo shoot” in the bathroom of a naked Tess, it is an HBO show about prostitutes in Nevada or a documentary about child abuse (Tess is 20 but still). When Alexis and Tess go to Cabo, it is The Real World and during Alexis’s trial, it is a true crime show. When a bottle of Xanax is found (that and Adderall stand in for the much less legal drugs Tess and Alexis are also doing), it turns into Intervention. The family is simultaneously willfully stupid and strangely prescient. At one point the mom references Anna Nicole Smith and at another, Tess says about Gabby’s 16th birthday party: “She could be on Super Sweet 16!” and Alexis replies, “Like, it would be better than that though.” There were multiple times I thought the whole thing might be some sort of pastiche, and though the tone and editing of Pretty Wild scream Contemporary Reality, the story itself is a parable about the emptiness of American excess that rivals the documentary Queen of Versailles.

While Sofia Coppola’s movie will most certainly be art of some kind, Pretty Wild is also art, just less self-aware and more kitsch. And in some ways, maybe that’s a good thing.

Pretty Wild is on Netflix Instant now and The Bling Ring will be released nationwide on June 21. Watch! Tell me what you think!

The Barenaked Ladies and Ben Folds/The Last Summer On Earth

As you’ve probably heard, outside of San Francisco, it’s a magical season called “summer.” This is a time when the sun shines and girls wear dresses and everyone swims in lakes and rivers. Another sure sign of summer is the Outdoor Concert Extravaganza. Bonaroo, Coachella, Sasquatch. People gather in numbers to watch their favorite bands perform as they drink beer and eat expensive slices of pizza. This year, I submit that instead of a big festival, you head up to the Mountain Winery and relive the late 1990s and early 2000s with the Barenaked Ladies and Ben Folds. Why? Here’s why:

1. The crowd will be less obnoxious than your usual summer concert crowd.

The inherent nerdiness of both the Barenaked Ladies and Ben Folds, as well as the fact that their main radio heyday came about 10 years ago, leads me to believe that the crowd will be full of true fans, not Johnny-Come-Latelys screaming requests for “Brick” or “One Week.” The other thing this means no one will glare at you when you sing along at the top of your lungs to every song. Also, BNL is from Canada, so it stands to reason their audience is very polite.

2. Ben Folds by himself is just as awesome, if not more awesome, than Ben Folds with his Five.

Amazing covers, good stories and audience participation. See the evidence:

“Such Great Heights”:

3. The Mountain Winery is a classy joint.

You’re a grown-up now. Why not take your outside concert experience to the next level? Adult level. The level that has fancy dining options and merlot. No more eating old bananas and pot cookies in the dirt. This isn’t a muddy field or a parking lot. This is a winery. Growing up, it turns out, doesn’t have to be all bad.

4. The Barenaked Ladies are like, the nicest, most entertaining guys of all time.

See below for their friendship with Weird Al, the children playing in front of the stage and even more audience particpation.

The Barenaked Ladies and Ben Folds are playing for their tour, The Last Summer On Earth, at the Mountain Winery on Tuesday, June 25 and Wednesday, June 26. Get your tickets!

John Oliver/The Daily Show

If you’ve been watching The Daily Show, you know that Jon Stewart is about to take the summer off to direct a movie and another, much younger (36!?) John will take his place. It may seem scary to not have Jon Stewart on TV every night. Scary like you’re dad going on a loooong business trip. But don’t worry! Mommy’s new friend John Oliver is just as nice! He will play catch with you in the yard while you wait for daddy to come home. He will talk about our problems with that nice soothing accent for three months and by the end of it, we might even be sad to see him go. Don’t believe us? To the tape!

1. Talking About Immigration on Totally Biased

2. Investigating Gun Control on The Daily Show

3. Talking About California in the KQED Green Room

4. Describing America as a Drunk Girl for “The World in 2010″

So let’s all relax and accept John Oliver and let Jon Stewart have some alone time. It’s going to be a magical summer.

A year ago tomorrow, PBS Digital Studios released “Garden of Your Mind,” the Mister Rogers remix made by Melody Sheep that caused everyone everywhere to cry nostalgic tears for a week or more. The Mister Rogers remix spawned other remixes of shows millennials and their parents (us, guys, that’s us) felt nostalgic for. You’ve got the Reading Rainbow remix, the Julia Child remix and the Bob Ross remix. Today PBS Digital Studios released a new Mr. Rogers remix called “Sing Together.” I’m going to be honest, after three listens I don’t love it with the same obsessive feeling I had for the first remix. But there is something reassuring and calming about Mister Rogers’ voice that does make it perfect for a Melody Sheep remix, so while I would be excited if PBS Digital Studios tried something completely new, I also won’t complain if they decide to make a million more Mr. Rogers remixes. What do you think?

And for those of you that can’t get enough of these remixes, here they are, in one playlist all in a row, for you to listen to all day long:

Game of Thrones/HBO

Last week at a meeting, someone who has “read the Game of Thrones books” (a distinction between types of viewers that didn’t matter to the non-readers until last night), casually mentioned she was having a viewing party on Sunday. “This isn’t the last episode?” I said. She replied: “Oh no, it’s the ninth episode. Something big always happens during the ninth episode.”

I should have known that I wouldn’t want to be alone.

TV watching has become so individualized. We watch shows on our own devices, alone and in separate rooms, whenever we want. So that’s why when something goes down like last night’s blood bath of an episode of Game of Thrones, everyone has to figure out a way to quickly band together, which is what I’ve been trying to do with anyone I can find since the show ended last night and I stared into the music-less credits on my laptop in complete shock.

I’ve been texting my friends and relatives who watch, emailing people and accosting any potential viewers in the halls at work. My brother is heartbroken. The girl who had the party says we can process today. And one of my bosses expressed my feelings exactly when he said: “I mean, I’m a professional. I know it isn’t REAL. But still…”

Is this what it takes to bring us television watchers back together? To bring this thing that has become so personalized back to what it used to be, about sharing and community and watching together? The wholesale murder of three of our favorite characters? Maybe. I’m not sure. I haven’t even watched last night’s Mad Men yet, the show that is in an emotional arms race with Game of Thrones, and now I’m not sure ready…

If you’re feeling alone in your pain, just know we are all in this together. If you don’t believe me, watch this video of people reacting to last night’s final moments, filmed of course, by their cruel friends who had, you know, “read the books.”

Arrested Development/Netflix

Last week at this time, everyone on the internet was freaking out about Arrested Development. We over here at KQED Pop were freaking out about Arrested Development (when they tweeted us our heads almost exploded). It seemed magical that this thing we had all loved so long ago, in the early 2000s, in our youth– this thing that we had mourned for dead– could come back to life. It was like your lost dog returning after you had moved to a different state or finding your keys in the sand at the beach. These things don’t happen and when they do, you kinda believe in miracles. However, by Sunday afternoon, you could hear the sighs throughout the land. “It’s just not that funny,” people were saying to each other on the phone. “I haven’t laughed once,” read the text messages.

Yesterday at lunch a bunch of my coworkers brought it up. Out of the five of us who were watching the show, all of whom purported to be True Arrested Development Fans, only two of us had gotten past Episode Three. I realized right then and there that I had to do something. What follows is a message to all Arrested Development Fans who haven’t gotten past Episode Three of Season Four of Arrested Development:

Stop whining. Do you remember when the show first came out? You probably don’t. Everyone was confused because the title made it sound like it was about that band that sang “Mr. Wendal” and the camera work was weird, not to mention that when you just tuned in and hadn’t seen every other episode, you had no clue what was happening. You probably don’t remember because when the show first came out, nobody watched it.

It took three seasons for this show you’ve been calling your “favorite show of all time” since college to gain any momentum with viewers and then it wasn’t enough and the show got canceled. For seven years you’ve been using that cancellation as an example of what’s wrong with television and by extension, what’s wrong with the world. And now, in a truly unprecedented gift from the gods of entertainment and Netflix, the whole cast, the writers and the creator have been reunited FOR YOU, and they have created a fourth season that stays true to the tone, the spirit and the world of the show while acknowledging the passage of time and what that would mean for the characters lives. This is an amazing gift. And you’re going to stop watching because you didn’t LAUGH ENOUGH IN THE FIRST THREE EPISODES?

This is like if your mom got lost at sea and then seven years later returned to you unharmed but tired and you were like, “Um, she didn’t make me a grilled cheese sandwich right away so, whatever, I’m over it.”

Have iPhones and a non-George W. Bush president made us this lazy? Are we a group of such ungrateful jerks that we can’t give it a second while our television idols ramp up to the laughs and set up a bunch of great jokes while giving us the back story we most definitely want? IS THIS WHO WE’VE BECOME?

Friends, I want to implore you to keep watching Arrested Development Season Four. I just finished and I can tell you without a doubt that a) it is awesome and worthy of those years we pined for it and b) it isn’t over. If you all can stop turning on everything two seconds after you say you love it (see Anne Hathaway) and develop a little patience, I think we will live to see a future with another season of your favorite show of all time. Maybe even a movie. But this means you can’t give up now. You have to turn off the haterade and start watching. Tell your friends to watch. Show Netflix you love it and you don’t want to lose it again. Because you don’t.

We will never go back again to those salad days of 2003/4/5/6 so of course this iteration of the show is different. The whole world is different now than it was then. In some ways darker, in some way lighter and in all ways older. But the new Arrested Development is just as smart and tight and funny as the old and if we are lucky and supportive, we can do something even better than going back (because really, none of us want to be 23 again): we can grow up and watch our favorite show of all time grow up right along with us.

And also this: it does get a whole lot funnier. I promise.

So stop complaining and start watching. This is happening. Taste the happy Michael. Taste the happy.

The Office/NBC

Time is basically irrelevant without markers to let you know it’s passing. You go along, day to to day, doing jobs, eating dinner and then suddenly, BOOM! something happens to remind you that you are getting old and that someday, you are going to die.

So it is with tomorrow’s series finale of The Office, a show that has been on since my last semester of undergrad, April 2005–so in a way, my whole adult life. That’s nine seasons and eight years. In Lizzy-time, that’s five baby cousins born into my family who aren’t babies anymore. Three states, six bedrooms, two degrees, two surfboards, eight roommates, five bikes, one book, six jobs, one real-life boyfriend and three pairs of glasses.

“The American Version of The Office,” which those of us just returning from abroad trips in Britain in 2005 continued to call it for at least the first four seasons, never really reached the insanely painful heights of its British predecessor. The genius of Ricky Gervais in his original production of The Office on BBC 2 was that he was able to create characters just on the edge of believable, that made you so uncomfortable you almost had to turn away, precisely because you knew they could be real people. The America Office could never quite achieve that; its characters were always just a bit too silly. But after awhile, the show became its own thing. As apposed to sitcoms that defined previous eras, filled with leisure time and absurd apartments, it was about the daily grind, spending the majority of your hours with people you didn’t choose, in front of computers and trying to work the copy machine. The Pam and Jim romance kept us hopeful; the antics of the various bosses made us feel like our bosses weren’t so bad and also weren’t so good. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing, but The Office helped a whole generation of us Millennials romanticize normalcy and lowered expectations. And it helped goofy tall guys everywhere get some action.

Anyone who cares at all about TV will tell you that in the last few years, (last handful of years?), The Office has lost some of its original magic. New shows like Parks and Recreation took its mockumentary style and did it better, with more laughs and a more purpose. It’s characters, especially Dwight, became too ridiculous. Pam and Jim proved that no one wants to actually see the happily ever after. But in this final season, it has come back to being meaningful. Pam and Jim hit the rocks, like all married couples (I am told) and the characters final became aware of the fact that they were in a documentary, which feels strangely satisfying. Tomorrow, the whole story will get wrapped up. Maybe Pam and Jim will leave Dunder Mifflin. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it will be a little bittersweet but not so bad. Everything has its time and maybe tomorrow the people who will really be quitting the paper company will be us. Time marches on. And now it is time to find another job–something a little more interesting maybe?– and a new TV show to define the next stage of our lives.

I was one of those hordes of admirers. I read Gatsby in many English classes, throughout my many years of school. But when I was 17, I read it in an English class in South Africa, where I was an exchange student. While I have always had a penchant for fan fiction (I did a pretty reasonable rewrite of the end of Little Women when I was about 12, in which Laurie and Jo end up together AND EVERYTHING IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD), on the occasion of my second reading of Gatsby, during the turmoil of 8 months in one of the scariest, loneliest places I had ever been, I was moved to write a super dramatic love letter in place of an essay for class. I’ve saved the letter because a) I love The Great Gatsby and b) it’s interesting to see what I thought about love back before I’d ever been in love. Spoiler: pretty much the same way I do now. Double spoiler: I’m into nautical metaphors.

What follows is my letter from Gatsby to Daisy, written sometime in 1999 or 2000. Dear Baz Luhrmann: Do not let this precious 17-year-old down.

Daisy, my darling                                                                          February 14, 1922

Last night I stood out side in my yard staring intently at the green beacon across the bay that distinguishes your dock from the countless others that make up the East Egg shoreline. For a moment I felt a quiet calm, as the passengers of a dingy in tumoltues [sic] waters might feel when  the swinging arm of a lighthouse passes over their sodden vessel.

But as the glow rests only momentarily on the boat, so did the peace rest on me and suddenly I realized that a near-impassible reef lay between the dreary ship of my love and the warm, sparkeling [sic] bay of yours.

The terror then was almost unbearable and I began to wish that I had never heard that paltry word that has come to represent you, the parigon [sic] of magnificent human beings. But again I thought of the afor mentioned sailors in [the] tempest. Would it be fair for them to perish without knowing how close they were to the continuation of their lives? Or would it be better for them to die with the hopeful shine of the lighthouse reflected in their eyes? Daisy, I do not know. In my soul I wish the reef would vanish and the weatherworn men would find a warm drink and a soft bed in which to spend the night. I know, though, that this is not reality and that the impossibility of our situation only makes me more determined to aspire to that which I quite probably will never attain. And my life has at least been real because if your small yet immeasurable contribution. If it hurts to breath, at least I can feel pain. Thank you Daisy, for surviving childhood to make my life live. I love you.

Gatsby

Welcome to Tuesday, the day of the week that isn’t called Monday but is still basically a whole week away from Friday. There are two ways to look at the week stretching out before you: one, you can be sad, listless, overwhelmed by the never ending work and the mounting TPS report situation. Or two, you can think of it as almost four more days to practice your twerking skillz before the weekend!

What’s twerking, you say (okay, you didn’t say that but hypothetically, someone could have said it if they have been on an internet fast since like 2010 and don’t believe in watching hip hop videos)? Why, it’s the dance craze sweeping the nation faster than the “Macarena”! Basically, it involves shaking your hips and hindquarters in a vaguely or super, depending on your skill level, suggestive way. All the kids are doing it, though some of them are getting suspended for doing it because there is apparently still a group of people alive who haven’t seen any version of Footloose.

Now, without years of dance training and hours of daily practice and a unicorn onesie, you’re never going to reach the twerking heights of Dame Miley Cyrus. That said, you can probably get enough of an idea of how to do it from the video below that by Friday you can at least entertain your friends at parties. Remember, there is no wrong place or wrong outfit for twerking (see above, work function and clogs). All you need is strong thighs and a big heart. Happy Tuesday!