ReCOWmendations -- January 2023

A favorite show ends after 3 seasons, a must-see documentary for music fans, a reader-supported magazine that I can't get enough of, and a podcast from Australia that makes me giddy

Welcome to a new month of ReCOWmendations!

Also, happy new year!

For those new to the Earworm and Song Loops world, the COW of reCOWmendations stands for Community of Wormheads. AKA: You! I do love a good combination bad pun and acronym….

I know it’s not my first post of 2023, but there’s no statute of limitations on saying HNY. Well, there is. One month. Once February hits, Gregorian calendar-supporting humans are no longer allowed to give the new year greeting. Wishing happiness for the start of the year after 31 days is kind of like being the person who shows up at midnight to the party that was strictly announced as beginning at 8pm. Of course this example goes only for Gen-X and older (maybe some millennials) as we struggle to stay up past 11pm.

I would assume 20-somethings start parties at midnight, or at least that’s what I hear on TikTok. But maybe they all follow the Roman calendar.

But I digress….

I know most of us don’t lack for options for media that we can be entertained and inspired by. But I do love sharing the things I discover that make me incredibly happy, so maybe one of them will peak your interest and add more happiness into your life.

Here are four reCOWmendations from four different types of media.

I have written ad nauseum here in these newsletters about my love for 1970s - early ‘80s hard rock and heavy metal. So it should not come as a surprise that I was a big Ronnie James Dio fan. Blessed with one of the most powerful voices in rock history, RJD has been the lead singer for such iconic bands as Rainbow and Black Sabbath, and then as the leader of Dio, headlining stadiums around the world throughout the ‘70s and early 80s.

This week I watched an excellent Showtime documentary on Ronnie’s long and winding life, from a young doo-wop and R&B singer in the early 1960s to heavy metal icon a decade later. Dio: Dreamers Never Die follows Ronnie from a small child growing up in upstate New York to his battle with stomach cancer from 2008-2010.

Dozens of rock and roll legends are interviewed in the film and all of them, to a one, talk about what a stand-up guy Ronnie was. He was a rock star who stayed married to the same person (Wendy Dio, who is featured prominently in the film) his whole life. That shouldn’t be a rarity, but it is.

If you have Showtime and you like rock docs, this is a great one. I personally appreciated the inclusion of a few silly re-enactments, in particular, one of a stoner kid listening to a Dio album, playing air guitar on a bong. I saw that and thought: how did they sneak a camera in my bedroom when I was in high school?

The 3rd and final season of Dead to Me (Netflix) was released in late 2022 after a more than two year delay due to Covid.

I was a big fan of both seasons 1 and 2 of the show, finding the high-wire mix of melodrama and silly humor expertly presented by creator and show-runner Liz Feldman, and stars Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini.

How often do you get to see 40-something women friendships on TV? I can’t think of any. Maybe Frankie and Grace, with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin starring as women in their 70s. And Broad City featured 20-something best friends Alana and Abby as loving, supportive non-competitive best friends — a relationship I hadn’t seen before on screen.

More recently, Pen15 captured young “teenage” girl friendships; albeit performed by two 30-something women. Other than those three, I can’t think of anything. It’s sadly pretty rare.

Season three of Dead To Me was a pitch-perfect denouement for the show, ending on its own terms and maintaining to the end its unique blend of drama, smart-ass humor, soap-opera plot-twists and genuine pathos.

For those who don’t know, Christina Applegate was diagnosed with MS several months before the filming of the 3rd season was due to begin. To allow for Applegate’s limited mobility and strength, they rewrote the entire season so that she could continue to act while dealing with a progressive disease.

It’s a testament to the writers, the team of producers and show staff — not to mention Applegate and Cardellini who are as good if not better than in seasons 1 and 2 — that it all plays out so effortlessly.

You would never know that Christina was struggling to walk or stand while watching the show. If she doesn’t win an Emmy in 2023, it’ll be a fucking shame. (I cursed in honor of the “fuck”-heavy potty-mouthed Jen Harding. Applegate said that she treated each curse word like an essential note in a piece of music. A spice in a perfectly cooked dish.)

I want her to win an Emmy (and for that matter Linda Cardellini too) not as a pity vote, but for how emotionally true and human her portrayal of Jen was — for all three great seasons, but especially this last one.

As my book reading has dropped precipitously the past decade and even more so the past year (thanks to you, Substack! You time-suck motherf&**@r!), magazine reading has thankfully not gone the way of the dodo-bird for me.

I once had multiple magazine subscriptions, but two of them have turned to shit —Entertainment Weekly (now Monthly) and New York Magazine. EW was general pop-culture garbage reading and NYM was more like pseudo-culture snobbery with an excellent, well-researched article every couple of months.

One magazine I gladly renew each year is The Sun. The Sun is independent, reader-supported, advertisement-free and has been for almost 50 years. Each issue, based loosely around a theme — the environment, technology, drugs, etc. — contains interviews, personal essays, short fiction, poetry and a section that takes up the last pages called “Readers Write.”

The upcoming themes are posted a few months in advance and readers are invited to send in short (300-500 words) personal stories based on them. These rich nuggets of wisdom and struggle are heartbreaking and inspiring. And so are all the stories in every issue.

Especially during these wet, cold and gray winters, knowing that each month a new Sun will arrive, brightens even the darkest day.

If you become a subscriber — which I highly, highly recommend — you will have access to the entire online archive of issues.

Screw EW (or EM) and New York Magazine (and while I’m at it, I’ll razz the New Yorker too!). The Sun is a breath of fresh air in a sea of stinky corporate garbage.

That’s about as high-on-my-horse as I usually get.

I listen to a fair number of podcasts. About half of them are music-related. I’ve written extensively about one of my favorite interview podcasts a few months ago (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, check it out here), but it’s been a while since I’ve waxed rhapsodic about another podcast.

Australia seems to host a lot of excellent, well-researched, in-depth music-themed radio shows/podcasts. One that I’ve been following for a couple years now (and has been around for more than a decade) is Take 5, hosted by Zan Rowe.

Take 5 is a music podcast where the people you love, share five songs they love. Each guest has a different theme, and the memories attached to their most beloved songs flip them to fan mode, often giving a rare insight into their creative heart.

The above is what it says on the ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation) website, describing this beloved show. Double J is, I think, the music subsidiary of ABC and whoever is programming that channel is on fire. I just wrote about their covers-centric YouTube show “Like a Version” for my Medium channel (you can read that piece here and also by going to the Medium Articles tab at the top of my substack web page).

Zan Rowe really gets her guests to open up and talk about their childhoods, their love of music and what songs influenced them to get into the arts themselves. She doesn’t only interview musicians, but that’s about 80 percent of the guest list.

The episode above, with Joe Talbot of The Idles, is a recent favorite.

Well, just now, while checking for typos, I decided to look into who Zan Rowe is, and discovered that Take 5 is now a TV show! I have no idea where to watch it, but there are 5 episodes filmed and you can see a sample in the clip above! It looks really good and at least the YouTube channel has several 3 minute sample excerpts.

So those are January’s reCOWmendations! What do you think? Anything you are especially keen on checking out? What reCOWmendations do you have to share?

I’m always looking for more cool creative forms of artistic expression to toss in my ever-growing basket.

So leave a comment here and if you are too shy to leave a note, email me at ambidextwords@gmail.com and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter in general. I’d love to hear from you.

Steve