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Thursday, March 23, 2006
DAVE BARRY IN DAYTON: He’s still kinda funny!
Humorist Dave Barry kicked off the 2006 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton Thursday evening by cluing in about 350 fellow scribblers on how to make people laugh — along with a bunch of other silly stuff.
• On where he got his sense of humor: “I had a very funny mother. She was what they called, in the 1950s, a housewife — but she was a dark, edgy housewife.�
• On UD: “You know, I’ve been to many universities, but I’ve never been to one that has parking. The real world really isn’t like college, because the real world has parking.�
• On grueling book tours: “Publishers send you on them because they believe that the book will be worth more if the author is dead.�
• On being at the beginning of a writing career: “As somebody who’s been on the bottom rung, and gotten past it, I have this to tell you: Neener, neener, neener!�
• On his first newspaper job: “It was a paper called the Daily Local News … no kidding … and if a guy in town grew a zucchini that looked like Marlon Brando, that was front-page news. Well, if you think about it, lots of zucchinis look like Marlon Brando.â€?
• On where to find humorous material: “Everybody who wants to be a humor writer should have kids.�
• Or: “Get a dog. The main point of all columns about dogs is that dogs are stupid.�
• Or: “Move to Miami. Miami is the funniest place in the United States…. The official motto of Florida is: ‘Florida. You can’t spell it without the Duh.’â€?
• On using his kids as column fodder: “I got a chance to drive the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, and I picked up my son in it at middle school…. Now, you may say, ‘Dave — you scarred your kid for life, just to get a column out of it.’ Yeah, but it was worth it.â€?
• On making the mistake of provoking Neil Diamond’s fans by making fun of their idol: “You think Salmon Rushdie got in trouble….â€?
• On giving up his syndicated column a year ago: “You know, people still come up to me in Miami, where I live, and say, ‘I love your column, and I read it every day.’ So maybe you don’t actually have to go to all the trouble.�
Boonshoft secrets…
You’ve probably been to the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery at some time, letting the kids run through Wild Ohio or opening all those cool drawers full of shells, bones, bugs, arrowheads and such. But you might not realize that what you see is only a fraction of what’s there.
Behind the gallery walls is a vast complex of secure, temperature-controlled storage rooms jam-packed with secrets galore — boxes, bags, shelves and cabinets full of items that have been amassed over decades.
A while ago, curators Lynn Simonelli and Bill Kennedy gave us a peek inside. Here’s what we found:
• Lots and lots of stuff: The collection has 1.5 million objects. Most have been donated.
• White gloves only, please: Volunteers enter the huge collection into the Boonshoft’s growing database. “We couldn’t do it without them,� Simonelli says.
• Native American items: Boonshoft storerooms are where the thousands of relics from Dayton’s SunWatch Indian village are kept, all of them bagged, tagged and carefully cateloged. The museum also has a lot of textiles and relics from Southwest and Plains tribes.
•  Most valuable: The collection’s most irreplaceable piece may be a beaded deerskin vest from the Crow people, made around 1860.
• A small armory: There are thousands of weapons, including a modern South Pacific blowgun; a Swedish crossbow from about 1520; bows, arrows, spears and knives from myriad native cultures.
• No longer flying: Hundreds of mounted birds are in storage, many dating back to the Victorian era. Included: samples of the now-extinct Passenger Pigeon and the possibly no-longer-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
• Strangest of all: That might be the bird’s nest made of steel shavings from pigeons who lived near a local factory, and used what they found.
• Quote: “We’re a trust for the entire community, preserving and protecting these things so that people can come in and see them,� Kennedy says.
• Just in case: “You never know when something you handle may turn out to be really important to somebody someday,� Simonelli says. “This may just seem like a blowgun from the 1990s, but 100 years from now somebody may say, ‘Hey, look at this!’�
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CRAZY RUSSIAN VAMPIRES!!!
All right, one of the strangest movies you’ll ever see is currently playing at the Neon Movies downtown…
It’s “Night Watch,” a Russian vampire movie that is the first of a trilogy and also has the honor of being the highest-grossing film in that country’s history (take THAT, Eisenstein!). It’s a bizarre, weirdly uneven but thoroughly engrossing movie that hodge-podges all kinds of vampire/undead pieces and parts of other movies and wrings them through an intriguing filter that is very closely tied into Russian history and consciousness….
Namely, this: The reason things don’t work well in Russia is because the country’s infrastructure is the battleground in which vampires do battle.
“Night Watch” pits two types of “Others” against each other … those who are with the Dark and those with the Light — an old idea that’s been done, of course, but this time with a twist. In order to keep the peace between these two types, there are basically watchers who keep everybody in line: Dark watchers who keep an eye out on Light others who misbehave, and vice-versa. The movie follows them as they do their work, which is sort of a mix of police work, mob enforcer butt-kicking, bar bouncing and private security enforcement, along with some guidance counselor thrown in.
And it’s a hard job that’s done on the fly with both sides angry at the middle — so that it’s a constant struggle that sometimes bleeds over into the real world of the living.
Thus, bad things can happen to society as a whole — and when they do, it’s the fault of the Others!
Now, considering that Russia is a deeply screwed up place that has a hard time just keeping the lights on, let alone flourish in a post-Communist world, this would be a reassuring message that would resonate pretty deeply, I’d think — much akin to the way Godzilla resonated in post-Hiroshima Japan, I’d bet.
The movie itself is fast, furious, tangled and waaaaay bizarre — violent, flashy, creepy and crazy, with the look and feel of an MTV video on steroids, or worse.
Is it good? Well, The New Yorker gave it a big thumbs up, and Entertainment Weekly gave it an F … which made me want to see it right away, given that odd split.
I liked it a lot. It was jumpy, thought-provoking and utterly unlie anything i’ve seen before — plus it had vampires! I’ll ALWAYS go see vampires.
Keep your garlic out, kiddies….
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Big celebrity nite in Dayton!
Tonite we’ve got a coupla stars amonst us…
Kenny Chesney brings his country kicks to the Nuthouse this evening…
and…
Funnyman Dave Barry opens UD’s Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop tonight with a keynote speech at the Marriott.
Anybody going either one?
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My new favorite CD of the year…
My wife gets tired of hearing me talk about music, i think… she’ll hear me come in all excited about something or somebody new that I’ve just heard, which I’ll usually refer to as “My new favorite CD,” and she often replies, “Yes, but you say that every time.”
She’s right, she’s right… BUT STILL, I see nothing wrong with falling for new music as often as you can… it keeps things fun and interesting. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Which leads me to my NEW new favorite CD of the moment — which, actually, may well turn out to be on my year-end list of faves, and here we’ve still got snow on the ground. Maybe it’ll be a good year!
It’s a band called HARD-Fi, with the disc “Stars of CCTV.”
HARD-Fi is a fiesty young band from the London suburbs who kicked around over there for three years before “Stars of CCTV” broke out and became a huge UK hit. Atlantic Records picked them up in the States, for which we thank them.
HARD-Fi’s sound strikes a perfect balance between freewheeling and tightly controlled, infusing every song with an urgent, shaky tension that’s utterly infectious. The band harkens back to great mid-’80s Brit bands like Style Council and New Order, but definitely rocks harder.
Listen closely and you’ll sense shadows of old Clash-style dub from the “Sandinista� era, polished to a glossy, echo-chamber sheen and respun through a hard-bitten, post-punk intensity that’ll make you want to jump up and dance.
OK, OK, I’m ranting, but it’s my blog and I”ll rant if i want to. Truth is, this is a terrific album, and worth every kudo. The UK spits new bands at us all the time, in a seeminginly inexhaustible torrent. This one’s actually up to the hype.
I give this sucker an A.
iPod picks: Cash Machine, their big UK single; Unnecessary Trouble; Hard to Beat.
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