Brandon's Buzz

Lotsa great stuff in the pipeline this week, including the latest effort from a much-deserved Grammy winner who, regrettably, has never gotten her proper due from the record-buying public. I probably won’t be able to change that with one measly paragraph inside the Buzz’s record store report. But I can damn well try.

Head on over to your local Target store this week, as Bravo has teamed up with the retail giant to release exclusive DVD season sets of some of their most-watched series, including their insanely popular Real Housewives franchise, Flipping Out, Top Chef, and Kathy Griffin’s riotous My Life on the D-List. A was particularly agog about this promotion, because while on a transcontinental JetBlue flight some time back, he got sucked into watching a four-hour marathon of a Bravo program entitled Million Dollar Listing, which follows three egocentric, young, ridiculously telegenic real estate agents as they wheel and deal their way through the mega-intense shark tank that is the greater Los Angeles housing market. I am man enough to admit that I was enormously dubious when he first told me about this show, because as a man who openly detests television — and simplistic, slickly edited reality television, at that! — A is not at all within eighteen miles of Bravo’s target demographic, but having now watched four of the six episodes which comprise Listing‘s second season — the DVD set of which is available as part of the aforementioned Target promotion — I can attest that this is a fabulous, fascinating program. (And having just bought a house last year, I can testify that all the minutiae contained therein — the haggling, the negotiating, the whittling down of purchase price, the endless inspections — are not exaggerated in the slightest for the benefit of television.) If you’re at all curious about the madcap world of high-end real estate, this is definitely worth a look-see, and I wish to take this opportunity to publicly thank A (of all people!) for bringing it to my attention.

(more…)