Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Notes on Pop Culture/Politics: 'Grey's' Mixed Notes, Ferraro's Passing Ignored, Paging Mr. Darcy



Grey's Mixed Notes

So, about that Grey's Anatomy major music extravaganza . . . it received largely mixed reviews, like the mixed review I gave it the morning after it aired.

The scene above -- in which Callie was supposedly imagining all the Grey's couples gettin' flirty and sexy -- is an example of how this episode, which started out very powerfully (so much so that I was teary-eyed), went horribly awry. While Callie and her unborn baby were in life threatening situations and Meredith was severely depressed about her inability to have her own baby, she would NOT be singing gloriously about "running on sunshine" with a crazy-big smile on her face while kissing Derek I'm sorry. This scene was preposterous.

However my review wasn't all negative:

"Sara Ramirez, who plays Callie, sang the hell out of this episode. She has a lovely voice. She energetically emoted. She underplayed it when the song called for quiet grace. And that opening scene where Callie was having an out-of-body experience and singing as she was brought to Seattle Grace and wheeled into the OR for the first time, that was mighty powerful.

Chyler Leigh (Lexie) and Chandra Wilson (Bailey) also sang exceptionally well throughout."

Otherwise . . . too. Much. Singing.

Media Coverage: Ferraro vs Taylor

Following on the heels of last week’s post about the disparity of the media coverage allotted to the deaths of screen icon Elizabeth Taylor and political trailblazer Geraldine Ferraro, I wrote a column which contains some hard numbers to back up my assertion that Taylor received loads more news coverage than did the first woman vice presidential nominee for a major political party, someone who the likes of Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright said was a role model for them.


The most dispiriting part of the piece was this quote that I found from a National Journal writer who, after comparing the  media attention these two women received after their deaths, surmised, “. . . [A]s the media space afforded Elizabeth Taylor’s and Ferraro’s obituaries attested . . . society still values female sex symbols more than female leaders.”

Paging Mr. Darcy

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I've never read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I know, shocking, isn't it?

But seeing as though I've been on a classics binge lately -- A Tale of Two Cities and Jane Eyre -- I started Pride and Prejudice over the weekend and am bringing with me high hopes that this classic will deeply impress me. I hope I won't be disappointed.

In the meantime, as far as my pet project of reading the entire, seven-book Harry Potter series aloud to my youngest son, I've started writing about the Harry Potter Reading Out Loud Project on my lifestyle/parenting blog. Thus far, between myself and my husband, we've read 2,750 pages to our now-9-year-old son and just concluded Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

To keep tabs on our reading progress, I made a special blog page where I list on what page we left off and what was going on when we closed the book. We've just started the beginning of the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and are still on the part where the U.K. Prime Minister is having a disturbing conversation with the Minister of Magic.

Image credit: Amazon.com.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mmm, I love "Pride and Prejudice." Almost as much as I love "North & South" and "Jane Eyre." It really wrote the book on romances, and it's fun to see how it's influenced all that came after it. If you want a fun compare-and-contrast, read Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones" after you finish "P&P." The former is based on the latter, and the modernized parallels are fun to spot if you've read Austen's classic. You should also dig into the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth; it's truly excellent and very romantic. :)