I know I’ve used this photo before, but dang it, it’s one of
my very favorites, just for the uber-glamorous half-assedness of it. John and
Simon can’t be bothered to put down their cigarettes, John looks on the verge
of tears, Roger is hiding behind his sparkler, and Nick, the magical pixie, is busy
setting his hair on fire. At least Andy and Simon seem to be having a good
time.
Duran Duran’s Paper
Gods album is out today, so the guys have been doing a slew of promotional
stuff. There’s a good, long interview in The Guardian in which everyone is in
fine form. Here's my favorite bit, in regard to filming the Sri Lanka videos (“Hungry Like the Wolf”, “Save a Prayer”, “Lonely In Your Nightmare”):
John: Then Andy
fell off a tree into a lagoon and got poisoned. We heard about that for a long
time afterwards. That was one of Andy’s favourite resentments: “Oh, that
fuckin’ island …”
Nick: I don’t
know, I never used to listen to him.
Yep, we know, Nick. Andy wrote a 320-page book about
how you never used to listed to him.
I’ll be seeing them in concert next week and next month. Heady stuff! This will
effectively triple the number of Duran Duran concerts I’ve attended.
I’ve done a staggering amount of blog work this week—Miami Vice on Monday, The A-Team on Tuesday, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. yesterday—so this
is going to be very short. I just want to quickly draw your attention over to
the side panel on the lower right of this page, that “Popular Posts” bit. See
it? (If you’re reading this on a mobile device, probably not.) Anyway, that’s a
running tally of my top ten most-viewed posts, based on total page views per
week. 99.99% of the time, the top post is my four-year-old Strange Sick Sad Career of Thomas Gibson essay, which, for some unfathomable reason, continues
to be a monstrous juggernaut in terms of page views. It’s usually followed
closely by my Criminal Minds: Top Ten Episodes post, which is almost five years old at this point. I have no idea
why, but those two posts account for an ungodly percentage of my total site
traffic. It’s the weirdest thing. While they’re perfectly good posts (I say
modestly), at this point they’re both very old and outdated and not terribly
representative of this site’s usual contents. It’s a rare event when any new
post is able to dislodge those two posts, however briefly, to gain the top
spot.
This week, my Miami
Vice post managed to knock them both down to seize the number-one position
on this list, thanks to a little vital signal boosting from that episode’s guest
star, Lou Diamond Phillips:
Thanks, LDP. I owe you one.
Because my obsessive little brain is fixated on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. these days, here’s
a swell fan-made video devoted to the inimitable Illya Kuryakin, which manages to capture the bright,
bubbly, kooky, hilarious feel of the show:
To end this on a Duran note, here are the boys in 1981,
performing “Friends of Mine” (complete with lip-sync errors and a slapped-together
video—stop sneaking peeks at the camera, Nick, we can see you) on the BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Darn good
song, they all look great, and while there’s not enough substance to the video to warrant a
Duranalysis, it’s still fun to watch.
Until next week.
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