Clueless Emma

Toby Keith and Trace Adkins in PNW--Countryfantabulistic!

Thanks to Moose's great tickets, I got waay up close to Toby and Trace--Moose even got a Toby knuckle bump! I was so excited, I forgot to take pictures and when I did, I forgot to quit jumping--hence the rather crooked, blurry images. I certainly got my "tall hawt country man fix" for at least a little while. The Oregonian does a good job of reviewing it, so I shall just offer my glorious memories:.

 

Ever Wish Life Had an Undo Button?

Carrie Underwood - Undo It (Official Music Video)Carrie Underwood

For the Detective

Dedication to Moose April 20, 2009

Shuttin' Detroit Down

Tribute to B. Hussein Obama

I'll Bring it down

Praise God!

Braving protests and controversy, Italian pop star Giuseppe Povia has performed his new song about conversion from the homosexual lifestyle at Italy's prestigious Sanremo Festival.

Cruel teens or info tweak by liberal victim-seekers?

  A common reaction among students to Chris Brown's alleged attack on Rihanna goes something like this: "Ha! She probably did something to provoke it."

Woo-hoo! Halloween time 2008!

Tonight howls in the first 2008 halloween parties! Why tonight? I dunno, but I'm not fussin'! I've got big plans for the 31st--we're gonna check out the Zac Brown band at Duke's and then Saturday we're at the coliseum to see Dave Ramsey live.

But tonight I get to try out my hero costume and make sure it's the best I can make it--just for the record, I had this idea waaayy before SNL did! 

Update: pictures!

  SARAH PALIN AND HER TARGET MOOSE 

Society of porn

That [hyper-sexualized] education involves seeing thousands of explicit sexual images by the time a person reaches his teenage years. Experts say that exposure can make real-life sex a letdown for men driven by porn-style fantasies. In porn culture, women are overwhelmingly viewed as sexually rapacious or as victims of verbal, physical or sexual violence. And young girls, not knowing any different, may play straight into the watered-down mainstream versions of those roles. Today, terms like slut and whore are commonplace among teens. And whether it's porn or a combination of influences, anonymous, no-strings-attached-style casual sex, now commonly called "hookup" culture, has come to be one of the defining characteristics of a whole generation of teens. (That culture is the subject of a number of publications, including this year's "Hooking Up," by sociologist Kathleen Bogle.)

It's the porn ideal of sex as commodity in a competitive market—and to see rapper Nelly swipe a credit card through a young girl's backside in a music video only reaffirms that notion. It's artificiality as a replacement for authenticity, the Miley Cyrus-type plasticity that's become the mainstream, prepubescent sexual ideal. (Not only has Cyrus been photographed wrapped in a sheet looking like she just had sex—she claims she was manipulated by the photographer—but revealing photos of her, taken by herself and friends, have also emerged online.) "Both boys and girls are really confused about what's appropriate," says Brown. Helping kids make that distinction may be an increasingly uphill battle.

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The lifestyle of porn is addictive. Our babies are being perverted and we're allowing it in our homes through the TV and the internet. Guard their hearts. 

Tracy Lawrence and Chris Cagle at Oregon State Fair 08!

Hot, hot, hot!

Great seats. great show, great talent, and great time! 2 and a half hours of smokin' singin' and down home country music.

I'm tellin' ya, it just doesn't get much better 'n this.

Chris opened the show--sexy, talented, a bit short, but wow, what a sweetheart, signing a baby's blanket and a girl's shirt right in them middle of the show. He was personable and spoke intimately to the crowd as if we were all his buddies.

Tracy closed the show with flawless vocals and lots of audience participation. I saw him at the Oregon State Fair a few years ago when he traveled with Mark Chesnutt and somebody else I can't remember right now, and he's just gotten bigger and better.


Did I say how much I LOVE fair concerts?!

Gary Allan--Oregon State Fair 08

I have always liked GA's ballads, but who knew he was such a bad boy rocker! Wow! Arms covered with tats, band swiggin' whiskey from a bottle passed back and forth...maybe a bit over the top with encore covers of classic rock hits, but great entertainment and I tend to be one of the few that doesn't love a lot of the classics.  The concert lasted over 2 hours, which is phenomenal for a fair venue! $30 was a bargain--this is why I LOVE fair season--all the best names in country music for very little investment, AND fun on the midway!

HERE is one of his latest hits, Learning How to Bend, which truly can stand as my anthem this year.

ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, DOUG?

Michelle Branch

Oui-Haw! France turns even line dancing into a socialist event!

In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs.

Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.

The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state's obsessive desire to organise all public activity. “France is the only country in Europe apart from Greece where sport is controlled through the state,” he said. “Line dancing is now considered a sport, so it is being controlled, too.”

Yikes. Yuck. Caca.

Clueless Emma Does Vegas!

My camera refuses to flash these days, but the flash wasn't needed at the Tim McGraw concert at Mandalay Bay--there were plenty of sparks flyin'!

Halfway to Hazard was the warmup band--more heavy rock than country, but good. Jason Aldean then opened for Tim--he's got a couple big hits and did well, but seemed to take an awful long time jazzing the crowd--one wonders if he was told to stall.

 

 

JASON!

 

 

 

TIM!

Pop Goes Christianity: The deep contradictions of Christian popular culture

...At this point in history, American evangelicals resemble the Israelites at various dangerous moments in the Old Testament: They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin. In politics, and in business, they've mostly gone ahead and joined the existing networks. With pop culture, they've instead created their own enormous "parallel universe," as Daniel Radosh calls it in his rich exploration of the realm, Rapture Ready! A Christian can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.

The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he's likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who's not a Christian at all, and doesn't even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?

In the '80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the '90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America's crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth.

Most non-Christians are aware that there is something called Christian rock. We've all had the slightly unsettling experience of pausing the car radio on a pleasant, unfamiliar ballad until we realized … Ahhh. That's not her boyfriend she's mooning over! But few of us have any idea of how truly extensive this so-called subculture is. Reading Radosh's book is like coming across another planet hidden somewhere on Earth where everything is just exactly like it is here except blue or made out of plastic. Every American pop phenomenon has its Christian equivalent, no matter how improbable. And Radosh seems to have experienced them all.

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt ("Friends don't let friends go to hell"). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk'd, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for [ _____]. There's a Christian planetarium, telling you the true age of the universe, and my personal favorite—Christian professional wrestling, where, by the last round, "Outlaw" Todd Zane sees the beauty of salvation.

At some point, Radosh asks the obvious question: Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith?

For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

Straightforward, if somewhat crude, merchandizing so far. But there is also another level of questions, which the creators of Christian culture have a much harder time answering: What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product?

When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad. That's true when you create a sanitized version of bands like Nirvana or artists like Jay-Z, too: You shoehorn a message that's essentially about obeying authority into a genre that's rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp.

...The entertainers in Radosh's book complain about watchdog groups that count the number of times a song mentions Jesus or about the lockstep political agenda a Christian audience expects. They complain about promoting an "adolescent theology" of Christian rock, as one calls it, where they "just can't get over how darned cool it was that Jesus sacrificed himself."

In his interview with Radosh, Powell pulled out an imitation of a 1982 New Wave pop song with the lyrics; "You'll have to excuse us/ We're in love with Jesus." This, he explained, was the equivalent of a black-velvet painting of Elvis. Only it's more offensive, because it's asking the listener to base his whole life around an insipid message and terrible quality music.

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."

Striking a balance between reverence and hip relevance can be a near-impossible feat. Christian comedians, for example, border on subversive, especially when making fun of themselves. In one episode of Prank 3:16, the pranksters fake the Rapture and throw their victim into a panic because she's afraid she's been left behind. With true comedic flair, they're flirting with opposition and doubt, and even cruelty. But "the Christian is supposed to be secure in the loving hand of the almighty God," one of them tells Radosh. So, even if they don't sanitize, they're afraid to step over into the brutal, dirty truth comedy thrives on.

The new generation of Christians is likely to be a different kind of audience. Raised on iPods and downloadable music, they find it difficult truly to commit to the idea of a separate Christian pop culture. They might watch Jon Stewart or Pulp Fiction and also listen to the Christian band Jars of Clay, assuming the next album is any good. They are much more critical consumers and excellent spotters of schlock. The creators of Christian pop culture may just adapt and ease up on the Jesus-per-minute count, and artistic quality might show some improvement.

But in my experience, where young souls are at stake, Christian creators tend to balk. It's always been a stretch to defend Christian pop culture as the path to eternal salvation. Now, they may have to face up to the fact that it's more like an eternal oxymoron.

Hanna Rosin is the author of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission To Save the Nation and a contributing editor at the Atlantic. She can be reached at hanna..

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2190482/

POETS AND PIRATES TOUR 08 SAILS INTO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST!

 Yeeeeee-Haw!  I'm still floating on Kenny Chesney Cloud 9 after a colossal country cavalcade!

 

Leann Rimes is gorgeous in her flouncy eggshell dress (she looked dressed for a business interview with her jacket on, but turned instantly sexy with it off). We all know she can belt and croon better than any other female artist. Hot, hot, hot!

Kenny is simply awesome. Vocally, there is no one better on stage. I know there are commentaries out there claiming he can’t, but lemme tell ya, the boy can SING. Disarmingly cute—yah, he's a little guy, but HUGE in personality--I was way too far away for my satisfaction, but always felt he was singin' to me, too. (Okay, so he was singing only to me, if you must know. Allow me my fantasy). Blue muscle shirt, black felt hat, flashy white teeth, and kickin’ guns, Kenny entertained and courted his fans for a good 2 hours +.

The Clark County Amphitheater was packed to the hilt, spilling out fans along the hill, across the grass. Cowboy hats, muscle shirts, beer, the salt of the earth—the only way it could have been better would have been out in the open, warm sky right next to the stage,   with a hot date doting on me…that said, the rain did stop for the duration of the concert, we had covered seats rather than the wet ground (with beer holders, no less!) and my little sister was with me—the next best thing to a hot, doting date! 

Last night, in my quest for countrification, I learned a few minor things that I shall pass along in the spirit of country music education:

1) Make sure chicken strips are cooked before eating them.

2) If the concert shirt seems too small, it is.

3) The aisle is great for dancing in the aisles and getting out to the restroom 2,782 times during the show after enjoying a Corona or two, but be aware that the heftiest drinkers will sit in the middle of your row, needing to leave for the restroom 5,782 times during the show.

4) Those heeled boots make a cowgirl’s legs and backside look lovely, but 4 hours standing on sloping concrete can make even the most ardent cowboy (wannabe) boot-lover long for Uggs.

             5) Always add an hour to the real start time of a concert.

6) Opening act who?

7) It is well worth the extra $25 for VIP parking. The walk to the venue isn’t bad, but the hour in line to leave is not a lot of fun at

midnight.

8) Free shirts from Axe are about as impressive as Axe commercials.

9)  Always a good idea to take little sister to country concert--when she wins an Emerson Drive CD, who better to give it to but big sister?


10) Where was Kid Rock and Uncle Kracker?

11) Don't sit on your camera.

12) If you order a Mexican palm leaf cowboy hat like on Kenny's album covers to wear to his concert, make sure you measure the circumference of your head to get the right size. I went with my military hat size, which turned out too small, which seems strange when the website says the hats run big...so has my clueless brain grown?

Try as I might, I could not get that hat to fit, so I just wore my faded black straw. Ah, well. He wore black, too.

  13) Never, never, never assume the camera batteries are still good. I could only snap a few pics before mine quit on me. Pretty basic stuff, right? At least I remembered the tickets this time...

CLASSIC ROCK FANS VOTE CONSERVATIVELY. YA KNOW WHY? CUZ THEY ARE GROWN UP NOW.

If you are male and a Led Zeppelin fan, chances are you may be leaning toward voting Republican in the U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of rock radio fans released on Wednesday.                                                                         

The Jacobs Media's Media/Technology Web Poll IV of more than 27,000 respondents cited stronger than expected interest in the November 2008 election among fans of rock, classic rock, and alternative radio stations.

It also found that John McCain, the Republican candidate for U.S. president, was the top pick for the Oval Office for men and classic rock partisans -- those people who tune in to stations playing music from the "original classic rock era" of 1964 to 1975, comprised of bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd.

Jacobs Media said the survey, conducted among 69 U.S. rock-formatted stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles and Knoxville to Buffalo, found 84 percent of the respondents planned to vote in the November election.

JO DEE MESSINA

DOLLY PREACHES TO FEMINAZIS EVERYWHERE--LISTEN UP, CINDY SHEEHAN! PAY ATTENTION, GLORIA STEINEM! TAKE NOTES, PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS OF WOMENS STUDIES! APPLY TO YOUR LIFE, WHINING, NEGATIVE, ANGRY, UNAPPRECIATIVE, NAGGING WIVES!

YOU'LL THINK OF ME

AS MY FRIEND, RANDY, SAYS

MY NEW PERSONAL THEME SONG

FOR ALL THE WOMEN FEELING LIKE I DO ABOUT MYSELF THESE DAYS, HERE'S A LITTLE MESSAGE FROM TRACE ADKINS. WE CAN PRETEND, ANYWAY ;)

WATCH HERE