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Intellectual House o' Pancakes Webdiary

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2007-05-23 - 11:07 a.m.

I've been watching the WKRP discs for a little over a week now, and have had time to digest the show, and reevaluate it...

When this first came on the air, the thing that made it so refreshing, obviously, was that it referenced music--all the cool bands I was reading about in Creem were showing up on posters and incidental music on the show... In a pre-MTV world, it was exciting to have my internal obsessions reflected back at me in the mainstream media.

So it's a little less fun without the actual music, but that's not a deal-breaker. Cuz the show was always really about the characters and their goofy and endearing quirks, and the way the actors played off each other.

It bears a lot of old-skool sitcom traits: there is almost always some kind of moral lesson, it gets maudlin and uncomfortably serious (which I loved as a melodramatic pre-teen, but as an adult...eep!).

All in all, though, it stands up well as a sentimental revisiting and gets a "B+" as an entertaining entity unto itself.

And that Gary Sandy--man, could his pants be any tighter?


This James Blackshaw's minimalist, reverb-y music has haunted my every waking hour since I first heard it yesterday. That's at least 12 hours of haunting! That's gotta be some kind of haunting record.


However, I am also semi-haunted by the Durutti Column lately, if only because I've realized how wildly inaccurate my imaginary opinion of them has been. I always sorta lumped DC in with New Order and Joy Division and the like, when really Vini Reilly is just a fabulously gifted and melodic ambient guitarist.

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