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March 2006
MORE MADE LOUD TO PLAY LOUD
WHOA!! you people must have COMPLETE HEARING LOSS.
lotsa good tunes listed below… keep ‘em coming!
SEE SHARON STONE GET NEKKID
The reviews are starting to slither in on “Basic Instinct 2,” which opens today. So far, the main message of them all seems to be: “Hey, a woman doesn’t have to put on weight between age 34 and 48! Who knew?”
Really, now! Can anybody remember a time when a major movie was completely made and marketed around the single concept of getting a middle-aged actress to take off her clothes for a second or two of film time? From what I’ve read, the thriller isn’t that thrilling, the dialogue is dreadful, the acting is so-so (the word “arch” has shown up in at least two reviews I’ve read, which means movie writers have discovered a new word to share; good for them!) and Ms. Stone gets all nekkid and such for a brief moment or two.
This all may or may not be true, mind you — it’s just Friday morning, and I haven’t gotten to the theater yet. What intrigues me most of all about all this, tho, is the cultural ballyhoo that’s at work here, which is that movie marketeers seem hot on the idea that they can pitch a bad sequel 14 years after the original movie (which is memorable mostly, of course, for a single surprise crotch shot by Stone, but otherwise pretty forgettable) simply by advertising that Sharon is “still sexy” into her mid-40s.
That says a lot about how we regard women, sex, sexual allure, the aging process and the usual fate of Hollywood actresses, who are usually put out to pasture (unfairly) after they hit the age of 32 or so. Good for Stone, I guess, tho somehow I bet that while she’s happy to be back in the, um, spotlight, she’s also a bit weirded out by this whole thing.
Wait … I do remember something like this. Way back to “Victor/Victoria,” an other pretty bad flick that was sold chiefly, if not entirely, around the promise that the otherwise wholesome Julie Andrews would drop her top. It got a lot of press back around, oh, 1980 or so. I hear she did, but I’ve never made it that far into the movie to make sure, which tells you a bit about the movei.
Great to see that things have come so far so quickly… Don’t ya love progress?
Oh, incidentally — my weekend is busy, but when “BI2” hits DVD in a few months? I’m ON that sucka.
MADE LOUD TO PLAY LOUD!
we had some commentary running earlier today on apple’s (silly) attempts to control the volume on new ipods so that they don’t get blamed for hearing loss in their customers, and several of ya’ll out there in bloggerland have noted that there are certain songs that MUST be played loudly…
and of course your humble scribe agrees.
here’s my list to get started:
• “More Human Than Human,” White Zombie
• ”Gimme Back My Bullets,” Lynyrd Skynyrd
• ”Hung Up,” Madonna (or “Get Into the Groove”)
• ”Jenny Was a Friend of Mine,” the Killers
• ”Call Me,” Blondie
• “Love-itis,” J Geils Band
• “Police on my Back,” the Clash
• ”Without Me,” Eminem
• “Pretty Vacant,” the Sex Pistols
• ”Baba O’Reilly,” the Who
Um, that’s a good start, i think…
comments? thots? suggestions? CAN YOU HEAR ME???????
Just turn it down, stupid
OK, sometimes the answer is simply a little bit of common sense.
Elsewhere on today’s home page, boys and goilz, you’ll find a business story that says Apple is trying to act all socially aware about the hearing damage that can come from playing the volume too loud on its iPods. In addition to issuing warnings with new models that warns about hearing loss if played too loud, they’re also … this is swell! … issuing software that will let people (um, presumably parents) prevent the iPods from being played too loud.
Are you done laughing yet?
As one of our editors pointed out when she heard this story yesterday, that’s pretty funny considering most parents can’t even run their VCRs (remember those?) without their kids’ help … can you imagine one of the oldsters trying to pre-set Muffy’s iPod? Ho-ho-ho.
And even if they could, how long before the Muffster can download something else off some corner of Myspace.com that will over-ride the setting? I’d say that’ll happen in about two weeks.
Face it: Kids are smart. They KNOW it’s a bad thing to play music too loud that shoots right into their eardrums, but they JUST DO NOT CARE. They’re immortal and they know better than you, and besides … it’s fun and it pisses their parents off. So there you go.
Apple knows this, of course, but is naturally worried that lawyers will get involved in here somewhere (those darn nosey adults at work, again) and start messing up a good thing with lawsuits that claim Apple is the next Big Tobacco, once they realize that their obesity class-actions against McD’s aren’t going to go anywhere…. Apple has DESTROYED THE EARS OF OUR (OBESE) YOUTH! I can hear it now.
Like I said at the outset, all that’s needed here is a bit of common sense. Kids will eventually figure it out, or not, based on their own Darwinian intuition and the realization that soon, if they aren’t careful, they won’t be able to hear their cell phones go off with the cool new ringtone download of Gwen Stefani’s newest jingle, um, single. When their ears ring louder than their phones, they’ll finally act like … well, I was going to say “grownups,” but never mind that.
The passing of a friend of the arts
Painters and sculptors in and around Dayton are sad today because of the death of a lovely lady who has long been a friend and helper for many years.
Barb Cline, the office manager and administrator for the last dozen years or so at the Dayton Visual Arts Center, passed away suddenly on Saturday.
She’s mourned not just by her family, but also by many artists and friends of DVAC who knew her as the hard-working, cheerful center around which Dayton’s main arts support group and artists cooperative functioned. She served under three DVAC directors, the most recent of them being Jane Black, with whom she worked to help move the organization’s offices and galleries from Fourth and Ludlow streets downtown to the new space on Jefferson Street. It was a big move for DVAC and the clients it serves, and Barb was one of the key people in making it happen.
She was smart, efficient, friendly and deeply knowledgeable of the working of DVAC, and also of the styles, needs and personalities, quirks and all, of the many artists she helped and served. For many years in my time as the DDN’s arts editor, she was right across the street from our offices, and she was always quick with a greeting and a smile.
Wednesday night, the guestbook at Routsong Funeral Home in Oakwood was a true who’s-who of the local fine-arts community. Barb’s services are at 10 a.m. Thursday there.
DVAC is at a crossroads in its fairly short but very lively history. The recent move has pushed it up in terms of impact, exposure and importance not just in the local arts scene, but in the future of downtown overall. Bringing and keeping artists and arts fans downtown is vital. Barb Cline was one of the people who, by doing her job very well and remembering that helping people is the highest, most wonderful thing one can do with one’s life, helped promote that vital mission. Lots and lots of people will miss her a great deal.
‘Blue Velvet’ for little kids
The latest pop gem to cross our desks? You won’t believe it.
It’s “Dev2.0” by the, um, group of the same name….
There are bad ideas, and there are really, really horrible ideas that not only should have been killed as soon as possible, they never should have been aired to begin with. Such is the case with this abominable “children’s� album that’s been hacked up by Disney, on which an adorable quintet of pre-adolescent moppets (Nathan! Michael! Kane! Nicole! Jackie!) chirp their way through the songs of Devo.
Yes, Devo.
The troubling aspect to all this is not that they reduce the band’s already reductionist sound to an even purer concentration of pop drivel — Devo probably deserved that, anyway, and was always pretty busy laughing at us for buying their records. It’s that beneath its quirky sheen Devo was actually up to something pretty dark and deviant — they were sorta the rock version of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” which was the main part of their appeal.
So it’s more than a little disturbing, even in this era of the sexualization of adolescents, to hear the kiddies singing “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Big Mess,” “Peek A Boo” and “Jerkin’ Back ‘N Forth,” all of which are really about things they don’t seem to be about, if you know what I mean.
“Whip It,” on the other hand, has always been known to be the first mainstream pop song about the glories of out-of-control sadomasochism — which Disney has now apparently declared to be appropriate fodder for our children. Breath deeply now.
The upside? At least they didn’t include “Mongoloid.”
Grade: F
Smarter than your average blogger
OK, kiddies, this morning I want to re-highlight a posting that was left by our good 10-4 buddy Mark on an entry I made a few days ago about the “pirate radio” station that got busted by the FCC in Miami. As his post shows, most of you out there should actually HAVE MY JOB…
It’s worth a read for its generally smart and sassy take on the state of radio. Take it awaaaaay, Mark:
“Based on my knowledge of RF (which is much above your average Joe), the only way for a pirate radio station to interfere with air traffic control would be due to a poorly configured or faulty transmitter. FM radio is in the 88-108 MHz range, while Airtraffic frequencies fall into the 108-123 range. A little bleed from crappy broadcasting equipment using the upper end of the FM range could definitely interfere with some low priority NAV stuff – in other words, that particular pirate was a jackass for operating that close to the airport and not knowing what he was doing. This might sound strange, but a pirate needs to use some common sense or the hammer will (and should) fall.
“In regards to Mike’s comments about the FCC, I would agree that the FCC started out as a noble effort by the federal government. Without them, stations would have been pumping out millions of watts of power and your radio would pick up a wide selection of unpleasant interference.
“But these days, the FCC acts more as a tool of big media conglomerates than as an advocate of the people. A vast majority of their policies are geared toward allowing media monopolies to gather more and more bandwidth in more and more markets. The day the Telecommunications act of 1996 went into place was a black, black day for freedom of speech in this country. The effects are evident everywhere, from the demise of WOXY, to the rise of the evil empire known as Clear Channel.
“I personally can’t wait until the Internet becomes truly portable. Imagine being able to tune into customized broadcasts and podcasts from thousands (heck, millions!) of different IP addresses wherever you are. At that point, Clear Channel will become irrelevant (and broke) instead of dangerous. Long live the revolution!
“However, in the short run, we can get the ball rolling. What most people don’t know is that the FCC enacted a policy in 2000 allowing for what is know as LPFM (Low Power FM radio). It is now legal to operate an FM broadcast station at a maximum of 100 Watts at an elevation of approx 100 feet, as long as it’s at least three bands from an existing licensed station. Translation: you can legally broadcast “pirate radioâ€? at a range of about 3.5 miles if you stay far enough from the frequencies the big boys use. “Radio Free Daytonâ€? anyone?”
madhavok@gmail.com
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sexy scarlett?? VOTE NOW!!
ahem… FHM mag has rated Scarlett Johansson No. 1 in the “100 Sexiest Women in the World,” in its current issue.
i mean, she’s cute and all… but … really???
please post your alternative votes NOW
no more gangstas in vegas?
Interesting… today’s Wall Street Journal has a p1 story about how police and gambling officials in Las Vegas have pretty much declared war on hardcore and gangster rappers. the city is cancelling shows, including those of high-profile guys like Snoop Dogg, in the wake of several shootings and homicides that are believed to be related to rappers in the city.
the rappers claim they’re being discriminated against, and that their kind of music is being singled out unfairly.
the cops and authorities claim that bouncing the music from clubs and stages is a legitimate crime-prevention measure.
what do you think?
Kayaking downtown? How cool would that be?
Now, I don’t want ya’ll thinking that just cuz I like to write about arts and books and movies and TV and music and dance and culture and the symphony and rap and all that frooferall that I just sit around on my keester thinking deep thoughts all the time and such.
Actually, I’m really the outdoorsy type!
No, really. Thanks to my son’s Scouting career, nearing its conclusion as he has recently entered young adulthood, I’ve been spending inordinate amounts of my leisure time in the woods, on trails, along rivers and on various bodies of water for about the last 10 years or so, and enjoying just about every smokey, buggy, rainy moment of it.
Which leads us to this morning’s topic: The current plan by Five Rivers MetroParks and the Miami Conservancy District to build a recreatinonal water park along a stretch of the Great Miami River downtown that could be used for canoeing, kayaking, tubing and stuff like that.
My thots on this are as follows:
This is a great idea.
The Great Miami isn’t much of a river anyway, especially the way it’s been dammed since the 1920s to keep it from killing us all… so why not make more of it?
Kayaking and canoeing are great fun — and if you don’t think this will attract lots of Scout troops, church youth groups, college students, weekend river rats and outdoor types downtown every warm afternoon of the year, you just haven’t thought about it very much yet.
Start thinking about it, then: MetroParks has, and those guys get my vote as being the smartest, best local governmental agency around with a can-do attitude that gets things done that directly impact the quality of life in our town. Hats off to them.
Downtown needs all the help it can get, let’s face it. The big boom in retail and entertainment business that was expected to follow each of the big-addition amenities of the last 6 years or so — Fifth Third Field and the Schuster Center — have not materialized and don’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. There are some great places downtown (Oregon, the Neon, the Convention Center, some late-nite dance clubs, the public library), but they’re few and far between, generally disconnected from one another and each serve their own niche. The kayaking waterpark would do something that hasn’t happened yet — potentially draw a steady stream of folks from the burbs during the daytime, rather than just at night, and in a mixture that includes families. Perfect.
Got any thots on all this? There’s a hearing to discuss the park, which could cost about $4.4 million according to today’s DDN, at 7 PM this Thursday at Wegerzyn Gardens MetroPark up on Siebenthaler Avenue.
Meanwhile, what do you think of all this?
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Cool 1980s movies!
Our very snarky GO! magazine columnist, the amazing Alan Smithee, ran a list last Friday his fave movies from the 1980s, making the point that it was a much better flick decade than some folks might remember.
Here was his list of favorites: Midnight Run, Die Hard, Best Seller, School Daze and Local Hero. Aliens, Altered States, Back to the Future, The Beastmaster, The Big Chill, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Blade Runner, Blue Velvet, Brazil, The Breakfast Club, Caddyshack and Coal Miner’s Daughter. Dangerous Liaisons, Darkman, Das Boot, The Dead, Diner, Do the Right Thing, The Elephant Man, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Excalibur, Fanny and Alexander, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Fatal Attraction, Field of Dreams and Full Metal Jacket. Also Glory, The Great Santini, Henry V, Hoosiers, The Killing Fields, The King of Comedy, Places in the Heart, Platoon, Predator, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ran, Red Dawn, Reds, Risky Business, Scarface, The Shining, Something Wild, Tender Mercies, This Is Spinal Tap, The Terminator, Tremors, The Untouchables, The Verdict, Videodrome, WarGames, Witness and Working Girl…
That’s a VERY good list… But some friends and I were talking about it over the weekend and came up with a bunch of others he left out that are just as good:
The Princess Bride; Breaker Morant; Gallipolli; sex, lies and videotape; The Year of Living Dangerously; The Stuntman; My Favorite Year; Broadcast News; Lost Boys; The Fabulous Baker Boys; An Officer and A Gentleman; The Right Stuff…
I’m pretty sure those all fit that decade… and I know I liked them all a lot.
Anybody got any others?
HollyDaytonWood? Um… not so fast
Elsewhere on today’s DDN.com you’ll find a good story by staff writer Jo Smith about how some travel, tourism and city official types in Dayton have got their hopes up about attracting film production companies to our area, as a way to boost the local economy.
My advice: Don’t hold your breath.
Well, OK … that’s a bit hasty. The truth is that there already have been some movies made in this area, most notably 2002’s “Blue Car,” a much-praised indie that premiered at Sundance and starred David Straitharn. Cincy has had some success with Hollywood, mostly standing in as other cities, and a recent news report mentioned that “Spider-man 3” will be partly shot in downtown Cleveland, with the Terminal Tower standing in for NYC, thanks to computer enhancement in post-production.
I’ve been to Cleveland, and I’ve been to New York… And lemme just say that Cleveland is no New York, CGI or not.
But that example marks the sort of thing the Buckeye State can offer: lower production costs, willing and welcoming city officials and lots of cheap extras who think it’s cool that a movie is coming to town. Trust me on this … in New York, the average resident is mostly annoyed that “Law and Order” is shutting down the parking meters on their street next Tuesday for yet another shoot. In Cleveland, they’ll roll out the red carpet.
But still, there’s one main reason why you won’t, despite all this fluster, see too much large-scale shooting in our area, or even our state: The film industry, like most other businesses, is VERY conservative, VERY set in its ways, and VERY closed to new ideas and new ways of doing business. All you have to do remind yourself of any of these things is go see a movie.
The industry is very much based and focused in LA and New York. Breaking it out of that mindset enough times to have much impact in cities like ours (which is just one of many places what would love to see more movies shot there, btw; they’re probably having that conversation in Wichita, too).
NYC and LA is where the infrastructure exists already. CGI technology makes it even easier not to leave those cities for shooting than ever; the location shot at it once used to exist has changed dramatically in the last few years.
Few writers will start setting scripts in the Midwest just because we want them to … and even if they do, you can film in Oklahoma City and make it look like Dayton — just as Ed Radtke’s “The Dream Catcher” turned Dayton into OKC a few years ago, and quite effectively.
Still, maybe there is a chance. Moviemakers seem to be growing tired of Toronto, which has been the stand-in city for many films in recent years and where costs have started going up. Chicago, the favorite in the 1980s (ever notice how many movies from that decade are set there? dozens…) also seems to have fallen a bit from favor.
Who knows? We might catch on. Certainly, we like it here, and we do our best to make a good impression on visitors. Maybe some director had a good time at UD Arena recently when he was there for an NCAA basketball game (OK, a stretch, but still…) or enough producers will see “David Chappelle’s Block Party” and realize what a fun time he had here, and decide to take a little scouting trip our way…
Cuz we oughta be in pictures! Our moms all think so.
A very fine evening with George Benson
The George Bensons came to town Sunday night.
There are two George Bensons, if you think about it: One is a smooth soul crooner who knows just how to pitch a song to the ladies, and isn’t ashamed to toss a sexy little swivel of the hips into the tune for good measure.
The other one is a peppy jazz guitarist with a bouyant, hollow-bodied style that would be hard to mistake for anyone else — full of slow, silvery lines and a tightly controlled choppiness that seems to place an entire beat between notes.
Both Bensons get full and free rein during one of their concerts, as a nearly full house of well-dressed, mostly middle-aged and enthusiastic fans learned at the Schuster Center. The guitar side let it flow on the fabulous “Breezin’,” one of the greatest drivin’-with-the-top-down tunes ever written, and “Gimme the Night,” a sensuous street glide. This Benson even tossed in a cute mid-show instrumental of “Danny Boy” that was a delightful surprise.
The crooner came on strong with “Turn Your Love Around,” “Let Me Love You One More Time” and a host of other favorites, all well delivered in a 63-year-old voice that remains strong, if a bit tired-sounding on just the fourth show of this tour. Still, the energy is there.
Benson’s two halves came together perfectly near the end of the one hour, 45-minute show, on his big hit “This Masquerade.” It blends his velvety baritone with his supple playing on the one song that, as he observed, he wouldn’t have been allowed to leave without playing.
Fortunately, he made it out alive — after sending his fans home satisfied and very, very happy. A common feeling, by the way, at a concert with the Bensons.
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Too soon to kill Tony Soprano? Maybe not…
Fans of “The Sopranos” may be wondering, correctly so, just how long their favorite anti-hero will be staying on life support.
When last we saw Tony S., last Sunday, he was strapped onto a ventilator, drugged up with antibiotics, comatose with a hole in his big belly, struggling to survive the gunshot he got from his increasingly crazy Uncle Junior.
Meanwhile, we see that without him, his mob family also may be on life support. Expect tonight’s episode (9 PM, HBO) to start looking at the ways in which the organization becomes frayed and undone without Tony’s bullying presence to keep things going. Who will take charge in his absence? Silvio, the consigliere? Christopher, who’s actually Tony’s closest family member who’s aligned with the business?
Or somebody else that we don’t know yet? Don’t forget that New York boss Johnny Sack is sitting in prison but still controlling his organization through Phil, his captain … that the two of them want to see Tony come down, and hard. Don’t be surprised to see them start shaking things up from the edges, looking for chances to take advantage of the disarray in Tony’s house.
Don’t be surprised to see the Feds try the same thing. They badly need a new mole inside, and my guess is they’ll come after Christopher. Speaking of turncoats, don’t forget that Paulie Walnuts has been talking to New York behind Tony’s back for years. Now that T. is flat on his back, that angle is likely to get weird, too.
And who knows? Don’t count Carmela out when it comes time to start exerting control and exercising power in the vacuum. She has her ways…
Anyhow, the power play has begun. Back to my original question: is it too soon in the season for Tony to actually be killed off? I don’t think so. Nothing would surprise me on this show, and it’s very interesting that they threw this surprise into the dramatic mix so early on, shifting the action from Tony and his problems to the entire family and its problems. That changes the entire show and makes it even more complex as it goes into the home stretch.
Besides, I’ve always thot that like “The Godfather,” this show will turn out to be mostly a story of family succession, and how the dynasty evolves and moves past Tony. If I’m right, and I think I am, then he’s got to check out much sooner than the last episode of the last season. He needs to buy the farm now.
You heard it here first.
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An Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop report…
UD was buzzing this weekend with the sound of anxious, happy, pumped-up writers, more than 350 of whom were attending the fourth Erma Bombeck Humor Writers’ Workshop on the campus.
Writing tips galore, advice on dealing with editors (scum) and agents (REAL scum), suggestions for how to get published, and the like — along with lots of good, honest encouragement to sit down and get started on writing.
Writers workshops are many, but UD’s is one of the best around … attended mostly by people from outside the Dayton area, I met folks this weekend from Canada, California, New York and Oregon who attended.
It’s all the memory of UD grad and former Dayton Newspapers columnist Erma Bombeck, who was one of the best and best-loved columnists ever and whose memory is very much alive in these sessions. She’s frequently invoked by attendees and speakers alike, and a new half-hour documentary about her and her work was unveiled Friday night to great acclaim. It will show in May on PBS stations.
Another high-quality workshop in our region is the annual Antioch Writers’ Workshop, which happens every summer in Yellow Springs and also draws from around the nation. It, too, has a good rep and we’re lucky to have these in our midst. Hats off to Tim Bete at UD, the coordiator and organizer of the Bombeck workshop — he and his crew do a fabulous job. Kudos.
By way of full disclosure, yours truly was on a panel Friday about how to break into newspaper writing as a freelancer (told you that editors were scum). It was a lot of bracing fun.
See ya’ll in two years at the next workshop, I hope. Dayton should be proud to have this session and to have recognized and cherished the memory of one of our greatest citizens.
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A REALLY HATEFUL SONG
In keeping with our list from today of Songs We Hate, how about “Havin’ My Baby” ? It’s gotta be up there.
MORE SONGS WE HATE
You’ll note a bunch of contributions to our list, down below…
Add to mine, now that I was prompted on it, America’s “Horse With No Name.” As Dave Barry also noted Thursday, “If you’re in the desert with nothing else to do, go ahead and name the horse!”
Amen.
Agreed also with the post below putting “Kokomo” by the Beach Boyz on the list… To mine you can add a lot of their stuff.
I’ll also add Neil Diamond to my personal list of dislikes, for most of his stuff.
Any votes for “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee?
Just checkin’…
SONGS WE HATE
Dave Barry made very funny reference in his Thursday nite speech at UD to a column he wrote about 10 years ago on the subject of songs he REALLY hated — “MacArthur Park” and “Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love in My Tummy” were on it, apparently — and noted that he got about 20,000 pieces of mail on it.
In fact, he says, people still send him and talk to him about songs they hate.
Soooooooo… I’ve got lots of songs I hate.
Don McLean’s “American Pie” is No. 2 on my anti-hit parade, snugglebunnied right alongside John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which I maintain to this day is the STOOPIDEST song ever made by an otherwise fine major artist. Third worst would be “Jack and Diane” by John Then-Cougar Mellencamp. Dreadful. It makes “Pink Houses” sound like a work of art.
But that’s just me.
What do you hate? Let’s have us some fun….
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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The greatest movie performance ever!
So, yesterday we were talking about the big PREMIERE magazine list of 100 best performances of all time, and in all the fun we never mentioned the one they voted to be Numero Uno…
And that would be Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.”
agree? disagree?
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No longer Steely, but still Dan
Hmmmm… What to put in GO! mag (that’s something we run in the newsprint edition, kiddies… you should try it!) this Friday???
hey! How about this? The new CD from …
Donald Fagen, “Morph the Cat”
Donald Fagen was doing his best to blur the lines between rock and jazz even back when he was the brainier, quirkier half of Steely Dan, and in some strange way it’s comforting to find that he’s still at it.
Or more precisely, what he’s still up to is being Donald Fagen — one of rock’s most recognizable and dependable brand names, even if the guy goes more than 10 years between albums. His last was in 1993 (the little-heard “Kamakiriadâ€?) and the last before than in 1981 (the very-much-heard and -enjoyed “The Nightflyâ€?), with a Steely Dan reclamation project or two thrown in there somewhere.
“Morph the Cat” finds Fagen still full of wry humor, bittersweet semi-romance, sideways views on life, odd street-scene observations, dark big-city fantasias and a cast of characters who would be lost anywhere else but in one of his songs. Meanwhile, he’s kept the sound the same: One of rock’s most distinctive vocal talents out in front of an exceedingly smart jazz combo that really would prefer to rock — if only he’d let ‘em. Fagen, as always, is far too tightly wound and in control to let that happen.
Grade: A- iPod picks: The title tune and Bright Nightgown.
NEWS FLASH: Aerosmith singer endures lip transplant
NEWS FLASH: Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler underwent immediate lip-transplant surgery today in a new operation that is a first-of-its kind procedure, sources said.
Tyler, longtime singer for the rock band, decided his lips were no longer helpful to his career and decided he wanted a pair that were more in line with his and group’s changing music and aging fan base.
“Mr. Tyler, after careful consideration, has determined that his lips, designed during the hard-rock era of the 1970s, when Aerosmith was emerging and establishing itself, are no longer contemporary in function or design. He has therefore decided to make appropriate changes.”
“Yeah, he talked a lot about them getting in the way now,” friend and lead guitarist Joe Perry said. “I mean, back during the whole androgynous thing back in those days, when all the singers were trying to look like Mick Jagger, a pair of lips like that were a real asset. But now, I mean, who does that anymore?
“We’re doing more bluesy stuff now, in fact our last record as all blues — and he was finding that the lips just kept gettin’ in the way, you know,” Perry said, puffing on a Marlboro Light. “We think it’s a good thing for the band.”
“You know, he first talked about the lip transplant back in the late 1980s when the band was in really bad shape for the first time,” drummer Brad Whitford said. “We thought the lips might be a good way to restart the whole thing. But then we hit that 1990s return and decided not to mess with a good thing, so now he’s been stuck with them for a while. I think everybody needs to change. It’s cool. I’ll kind miss the loose little buggers, though.”
The band had no comment on reports that Tyler was changing to a pair of “Boltons.”
Surgeons described the six-hour procedure as “routine but actually fairly amusing,” and said they played an old LP copy of “Toys in the Attic” during the operation, just to keep things going.
Mr. Tyler is expected to have a monthlong recovery. Through a publicist he issued the following statement: “Mmmfphg. Mmmpfffphrrafguhmmmph. Hmph.”
And who could forget…
… these other actors who are on PREMIERE’s list of 100 Greatest Performances of All Time?
No. 84: Anjelica Huston in “The Grifters.” Great movie that most folks haven’t seen… worth a check.
No. 82: George C. Scott as “Patton.” The greatest war movie of all time, too.
No. 55: Sidney Poitier in “In the Heat the Night.” They still call him Mr. Tibbs, you know.
No. 27: Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.” You’ll never think of butter the same way again…
No. 19: Paul Newman in “The Verdict.” An underappreciated classic from the early 1980s.
Who’s your favorite actor or actress?
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Bogie’s always cool
We’re back reviewing the PREMIERE mag April issue’s list of 100 top screen performances, and of course Humphrey Bogart shows up several times.
No. 24: “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” it’s good, sure, but so good it belongs on this list? not certain of that…
No. 50: As Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon.” Oh, yeah. That’s a good one, for sure. Plus it defined his career and set the mold for all future hard-boiled detectives, in film and on TV. Heck, in most books after that, too. Hammett had to be proud.
Stop back later, there’s more!
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MORE GREAT PERFORMANCES!
OK, class, today we’re doing the PREMIERE magazine list of the “100 Greatest Performances of All Time” in movies, and to continue our conversation, here’s what they list:
No. 31: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in “Ray.” Yeah, that’s a good one. But what’s harder for an actor, I wonder: Totally recreating a character from history that people already know, and doing it dead-on, or creating a whole new persona that exists only in that performance? I know which one Oscar prefers, but i’m guessing the latter is harder…
Speaking of which, No. 33: Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie.” Agreed, that’s a classic. And a cute movie, to boot. Haven’t seen it in a while, but always enjoy it and Hoffman is perfect in the part. Let’s not forget Bill Murray, tho. He steals his fair share of scenes.
Tune in all day and we’ll have more!
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Great performance No. 87!
PREMIERE gives this slot to none other than John Wayne, for his role as Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers.”
not only is that the Duke’s greatest part, but it may well be the greatest Western of all time … other than “The Wild Bunch,” of course, which wins the title mostly as the movie that put Westerns in their grave for nearly all time, except for the occasional boot sticking out of the dirt every once in a while…
Wayne’s Edwards is a man both hateful and tender, a tough role to pull off as he goes in search of a niece who’s been kidnapped by the Indians … when he finds her, he decides she needs killin’. Why? Well, watch the movie, silly! I wouldn’t want to spoil this one; it’s’ one of Ronnie’s faves.
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The greatest performance of all time!
Some time ago, I told myself that I was tired of magazine lists, and even wrote a column in the DDN talking about how much I disliked them and tried to avoid them.
I’ve given up on that, and even realize that nowadays they’re so dang ubiquitous that I’ve even found myself using lists in conversation (which is no doubt irritating to anybody I”m talking with, but hey, it’s a habit now…) and in fact help put them more and more into the paper. So, what heck, why not go with the flow?
To wit, PREMIERE magazine (a great movie mag, if you don’t know it) has put out the latest in its frequent lists on big film topics — and April’s edition is about “The 100 Greatest Performances of All Time.”
It’s a very chewy list, and I figure we can have some fun with it today since it’ll distract us from all that nasty snow, right?
Sooooo…. Just to get us started, here are a few of their faves. And guess what? I’ll tell you what I think as we go along! We’ll get to No. 1 sometime today, so hang around.
No. 100: They kick the whole thing off in reverse with Malcolm McDowell’s performance as the bad boy in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” What’d they like? His ability to make us sympathize with the evil thug-boy… I dunno about you, but I never actually did sympathize with him, not one bit. In fact, I hated him so completely that in my mind, that’s why it’s a great performance that should be on the list. I wanted him dead, in fact, and kept hoping that was the way the movie was going. Alas…. BTW, some day do yourself a favor and read the book, by Anthony Burgess. Imcomparable.
No. 46: Tom Hanks in “Cast Away.” I’m glad this is on the list, and glad it’s so high. This is a one of those modern classics that snuck up on us all … a movie that didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but which has become a true, widespread fave and one that my whole family will stop on whenever we catch it on TV, no matter what else we’re doing. Hanks is, of course, perfect in this. Would we have wanted to watch any other current actor in that role, all by himself, for that long? I say Wilson got snubbed, tho. He’s not even on the list.
A note on “Cast Away,” tho: I know LOTS of people who say they hated or didn’t understand the ending, in which Hanks has just met the Texas artist to whom he delivers the package, and then is standing at the lonely crossroads… For me, tho, it’s one of the Great Movie Endings of All Time. After spending years with no possibilities, alone, he now faces an entire world of choices — still alone, but this time in a different way. Plus being on land, so far from the water? Perfect.
No. 43: James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause.” I guess I’m OK with it on here, but I assumed Dean would be in the top 10 and I would’ve been bored by that. I think he was incredibly over-rated, and mostly enjoys the rep he has cuz he died at just the right time to have an iconic mantle placed on his shoulders. He could have been about No. 86, as far as I’m concerned…
TUNE IN LATER TODAY! we’ll have more fun.
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Ads, ads, everywhere!
Just when you thot you’d had enough of advertising … and who hasn’t? … along comes a report by AP that advertising companies are — SURPRISE!!! — digitally adding their products into TV shows in a new form of product placement.
Now, this should not be a huge shockeroo — but in fact, just what we deserve for having bought so quickly into Tivo and DVR technology that lets us skip thru all those commercials.
Surely, you didnt’ think they would let that go by without response, did you? Do be fair, no advertising means no TV, so it’s obvious they had do something.
It’s already fairly predictable that ad companies will start editing their commercials so that some portion of the message sticks with you when you speed thru them — like, every fifth frame or so, the one that halts briefly on screen as you FF thru the ad, will be the frames that contain the essential information. Heck, they’re probly doing it already and we just don’t know it…
The digital additions of products is just a new wrinkle on good, old-fashioned sluttiness — we’ve always known if a TV show only uses a certain kind of car, or if a star drinks a certain kind of drink. Plus, from watching sporting events over the last few years, wtih all the digital placement of brand names all over baseball stadium sidewalls and the like, we aren’t all that stunned by this.
BUT … and you heard it here first … I can predict the next great wave of this stuff: Writing the product and a conversation directly into the script.
Think about it. Now, on TV if a guy walks into a bar the bartender says, “What’ll ya have?” and the guy says, “Beer,” and he gives him a beer and the guy leaves money on the bar and doesn’t ask for change. In the new world order, it will go like this:
Bartender: What’ll ya have?
Guy: “Um, got a Sam Adams?”
Bartender: “No, but I’ve got Sam Light. It’s just as good, and half the calories.”
Guy: “Same taste, really?”
Bartender: “Sure. Try one, and it’s on the house if you don’t agree.”
Guy, after tasting it: “Boy, you’re right. That’s great. I’ll have another. Hey, by the way, I’m a private detective. You seen the guy in this picture?”
Anyway, you can see it coming, can’t you? It’s only a matter of time….
BTW, Sam Adams DID NOT pay for this blog entry. But if they want to send me a case of something tasty, it’s all good!
“Rock” is a meaningless word nowadays
In response to an earlier blog from last week about Miles Davis’ new place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, here’s a thoughtful response from reader Monica Ice:
Yes, this has been a big problem in the music industry. “Rock” has come to mean nothing, as you stated. The real deal here, though, isn’t what the industry insiders think; it always comes back to the fans. In the way that radio decided its customers were the advertisers, not the listeners, and ruined themselves by it, the music industry has done the same thing. EVERYONE knows they’re a bunch of egomaniacs who refuse to acknowledge the new net-based paradigm of marketing. In layman terms, they’re out-of-touch dinosaurs who want to force the world to stay the way it was. They are NOT losing money because of downloading: “piracy” accounted for only 4% of their losses and when the original Napster was at its height, CD sales were the HIGHEST they’ve ever been. File-trading sold more product by exposing more bands and more music to more people. As the music execs of old scream inaccurate figures and lawsuits, they forget the customers they’re screwing over are the people they should be in bed with. Back to my point, these are the same execs who decide who wins Rock nom’s and who gets Grammies, etc. They all push for their own people who make them look good (the ones who couldn’t stomach the hypocracy already left) whether they’re “rock” musicians or not. They are the dying breed. Physical media sales are no longer needed. Do you buy new computer programs on CD-ROMs in boxes or download them from a website after purchase? Same with music, movies, games, video, etc. (I know you know this.) The people running the rock hall and the old music industry are obsolete. With the web crowds, it doesn’t matter who get inducted because it doesn’t mean anything. The rich guys can afford to build anything they want, but that doesn’t mean the audience is there. I’m just old enough to know what music used to be and what it can be. It still can; we just need to rewrite the distribution/industry to meet the new market demands - internet and iPod. Flashy dinosaurs are only important if people care.
Yo! Pirate radio lives!!!
Arrrr, mateys … arrrrrrrr
This is pretty funny in one of those odd, news-of-the-didn’t-expect-read-that sorts of ways… the AP reports yesterday that the FAA has been chasing down a “pirate radio station” in Miami that apparently has been interfering with plane-to-tower traffic at Miami International Airport. They were picking up a little too much hip-hop when they wanted to be talking about takeoff…
So the feds track it down to an antenna at a nearby warehouse that’s wired to some computers and a CD player, with no DJ to be found.
Too bad… i’m imagining some baggy-pants kid in a doorag who’s delighted by the idea of spreading the music he loves directly out to his friends in the neighborhood on his very own radio station. And I’m also imagining the nutty thrill he must have felt doing it, too.
That’s why I like this story — first of all, because nobody got hurt (and face it, nobody was likely to, despite all the hair-on-fire craziness associated with flying and airports in general these days, of which we all grow a bit tired…). And second of all because I got a smile from the very idea of “pirate radio.”
We all know that radio sucks these days, and has for a long time. It went slick corporate and stoopid a long time ago. “Local” radio programming is beamed in from far-away cities; commercials rule the airwaves; DJs are hired for their blandness, not their personality; the exact same songs play at the exact same moment hour to hour, from city to city in a kind of dull, monotonuous Clear Channel lockstep that has driven many of us away.
Satellite radio tries to recapture some of the weird, fizzy charm that radio had in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and in some cases it does a pretty good job. But it costs, and lots of us aren’t willing to go there yet.
NPR does its best to be and feel different from the corporate blah-blah-blah, but it plays to middle-age white folks almost exclusively, knowing that’s where its donations mostly come from. The average NPR DJ truly believes, or seems to, that Celtic music is edgy… Um.
College stations are usually cool, but lack strong signals. Internet radio is the place to be these days (long live WOXY.com! more on that later) but it’s still in its infancy and portability is an issue for most of us. It may be the future, but these stations often aren’t different from their broadcast brethren.
So the image of the kid with his tiny little pirate band in Miami makes me smile. I love the idea of somebody deciding to seize a little bit of the airwaves for himself; it’s a small bit of personal anarchy and rebellion of the sort that you really don’t hear much about anymore. And if I had the time and a bit of similar chutzpah, we all might able some day to tune into WRON, which would be realllllllllly cool, kiddies…. Just trust me on that.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Tony’s got a bullet…
… and it’s lodged smack dab in the middle of his big fat mobster belly …
“The Sopranos” is on at 9, just in time for a little bball break, and when last we saw our favorite Mafiosa he was lying on the floor of Uncle Junior’s house, trying to dial 911 and bleeding from a gutshot that came like a surprise bolt outta the blue from crazy Uncle Jun’s own shaky hand…
Now, since we already know that James Gandolfini has signed on to play Tony until the very end of the series, next year, and since we also know he just renegotiated his contract for, like, $1.5M an episode, he’s probably not gonna kick the bucket tonite.
But can anybody out there say, “dream sequence” ….?
Nobody does ‘em like “the Sopranos” for actually revealing the troubled inner state of a character, and offhand I’d say we’re in for a DOOZY tonite.
Please do not call between 9 and 10 pm.
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What’s Dayton’s best band?
You know, following from last evening’s entry about the good time had with The Rejects, it seems more than proper to ask:
What is Dayton’s best band? Let’s open it up. Tell us what you think.
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What’s wrong with covers bands????
I’d heard of The Rejects, one of the Dayton area’s most frequently appearing cover bands, but I confess that until tonite I had never had the chance to hear or see them.
Not bad!!! They played someplace I attended this evening and were A LOT of fun. In fact, that strikes me as the main diff between cover bands and bands that play original stuff… There is an unspoken but clearly understood tier system in the aesthetics of rock bands that says cover bands are on a lesser plane than originals bands… but in fact, it’s entirely possible (if not likely) that you will have a lot more fun with a band like The Rejects than you will in a club with a group that is trying to be artistic…
What’s that all about? How did this come out to be this way? Isn’t a band a band? Isn’t fun good? Isn’t it all just rock and roll at the end of the day and not all that important one way or the other? Isn’t it just music?
With the Rejects, it will be a darn good time either way. By way of full disclosure, they found a way to pull yours truly up to the mike and arm me with a kazoo as one of several guys (all wedding guests) for a version, if you wanna call it that, of “Wild Thing.” I got to sing (sorta) before a live audience and it was cool.
It’s all just music, kiddies. Enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it.
And if you’re reading: What’s your favorite band in Dayton???
tell, tell
Dayton Art Institute: Pandering or pensive?
Ahhhh, now there’s a good question for us to chew on just a bit. On yesterday’s post about the continued high attendance at the Dayton Art Institute’s “Diana: A Celebration: exhibition, a commentator left the following post:
“High attendance numbers are wonderful for the museum, however it’s unfortunate that the DAI must pander to such pedestrian pursuits with these exhibitions. Would the community not be better served if the museum actually showed art that could challenge the viewers- as opposed to satifying purely voyueristic interests?”
Well, he makes a good point and raises an interesting line of conversation. It’s true that art museums, along with other fine-arts organizations, have gotten more on a bottom-line business model in the last 20 years that forces them to raise more of their own money in an atmosphere of reduced philanthrophy and other such support.
And that has put museums, including the DAI, into a kind of blockbuster mentality that is not unlike what you get from Hollywood, in which they’re always seeking out the next big show that will draw a big audience, raise their membership and gate numbers and also bring in much-needed cash. And when I say much-needed, I really mean it. The DAI is not rich, and its officials make no bones or secret about badly needing the money that they earn from their large exhibitions.
At the same time, they are very conscious of the dilemma our Blog Poster makes up above … balancing the need to make money with showing art that raises people’s awareness of the culture, enlightens them and makes them smarter — the original museum mission.
The DAI believes, and I think Alex Nyerges, its CEO, would argue, that they have matched that balance in the last two shows by bringing in a show about ancient Egypt, which was instructive and illuminating (and seen by more than 30K local school kids on field trips, btw), and then undergirding the bottom line with a show that is more contemporary and flashy — Diana’s dresses.
Are Diana’s things art? No, not in one sense — though a female DDN co-worker told me to get off my artistic high horse on that point by thinking of this way: “If they were 300-year-old dresses, you wouldn’t question them being in the art museum at all.” And she had a good point.
Could the Diana show have played just as well at the Convention Center, or at Hara Arena? Well, sure, I guess. But don’t forget that the DAI also hopes that while all these people visit the museum for the first time to see Diana’s stuff, they will also take a moment to tour the rest of the museum and soak up some culture from the permanent collection — and doubtless, many of them will.
So, what do ya’ll think? Pandering or pensive? How’s the museum doing? Well or not so well? Thoughful or knee-jerk? Art or kitsch?
Lemme know…
To all those ‘AI’ fans… I’m sorry!!!
OK, elsewhere in our DDN.com blog directory you will find, if you but look, the Reality Bytes blog that charts the ups/downs, comings/goings, doings/undoings of this strange thing we call reality TV…
And you will also note, if you scroll down just a bit, that our own Kelle Fraser has taken yours truly to task for being a bit too, um, spiteful for my attempted skewering of “American Idol,” a show for which I have considerable, not to say extreme, distaste….
But she has properly chided me for being a bit toooo mean, and I must confess that upon reflection, she is correct. I was too mean. I should have been able to make my point without meanness…. Alas, such is the nature of the medium of the blog that one may spout off without due consideration before punching the “return” button, thus inadvertantly infuriating people to whom you had hoped to win over to your point of view…
Which of course was not my point. So, I say: My honest and humble apologies, for my tone and dismissive attitude.
But not for my opinion. I still don’t like the show. If you do, that’s fine.
See you in the blogosphere!!!!
Cool Dayton Art Institute news
The newest local artist to add her work to the permanant collection at the Dayton Art Institute will be Leesa Haapapuro, whose mixed-media sculpture “For Diana” has been donated to the museum by a private collector.
The piece in question is a nearly life-size work that features a woman looming out of the frame of the work and leaning toward the viewer — one of a series of striking works that Haapapuro made back in the early 1990s. She showed a lot of them at the now defunct Kitty’s restaurant downtown.
The work is about six feet square and needs some conservation — but should show up soon in the DAI’s contemporary galleries.
Speaking of the DAI, the museum reports that attendance at “Diana: A Celebration� is running at the same rate or higher as the recent “Quest for Immorality� show of ancient Egyptian art, which set a record for the museum at about 123,000 visitors. If it breaks Egypt’s numbers, we’ll say told-ya-so.
The Diana show drew almost 5,000 visitors last weekend. The museum has extended hours till 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays. For ticket and other information, visit www.daytonartinstitute.org. And stay tuned here for further updates.
The Dub Pub floor show
OH! I left out the best part about this morning’s Green capers at the Dublin Pub downtown… that would be the tall blonde woman who was: A) wobbling drunk on very high heels, by 6 AM; B) barely dressed, in that her jeans were sooooooooooooo low that … well, let’s just say EVERYBODY at the Dublin Pub learned a lot about the young lady’s personal tanning routine; and C) the talk of the entire bar. She kept wandering about looking for a place that wasn’t too noisy to use her cell phone (good luck), and was dutifully followed around by a very polite and tired-looking staffer who kept trying to keep her moving and not hurting herself.
See what you can see that early in the morning? Why, even the birdies weren’t chirping yet.
She was last seen being escorted to a safe ride home, I believe, but not before she managed to drop her phone on Fifth Street.
I HATE it when that happens….
EARLY MORNING ST. PATTY’S BAR REPORT
Begorrah and the happy wearin’ o’ the green to ya, lads and lassies!
OK, enough of that. I’m pleased to report that the crowd is currently SRO at the Dublin Pub, where the doors opened at 5:30 a.m. and they started serving breakfast right away.
Myself and several green-wearin’ mateys were there at 6, before the sun was up, and we already had a hard time finding a place to sit. The crowd was boisterous and fun, the black-and-tans were flyin’ to the tables and many plates of scrambled eggs and hashbrowns were making the rounds. Yummy.
WDTN’s wacky Jim Bucher was there doing the live TV shots as folks were coming in and out, and there was a talented young crew of Irish dancers up on the stage area. The staff was still abuzz from the performance by Green, um, Blue Oyster Cult on Thursday night … obviously, not much sleep for them…
Anyway, the morning was a cheerful blast. They’re tasteful enough not to dye the beer any strange colors at the Dub Pub, tho that’s likely to happen someplace around town by now.
Wayne Ave. is partly closed down right in front of the bar to make room for the big tent, which was getting a good Irish folk band going as we left, and a few tables were filling up. It was chilly out there (snow on St. Patty’s Day!! Egad!!!) but that will only last until the bodies start spilling out from the main bar area…
Which is probably happening by now…
And really, boss… I just had a couple cups of coffee!!!!
To any and all of you Irish, half-Irish, fake-Irish, wannabe-Irish, people who think you might have an Irish great-grandmother or something, follks who know somebody Irish or those of you who once heard about Ireland on the Discovery Channel…. HAVE A GREAT (AND SAFE) DAY!!!
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I ain’t feelin bad…
.. in case you’re wondering, AND I KNOW YOU ARE OR YOU WOULD NOT BE READING THIS, about anything I have said about “American Idol,” “Crash,” “The Unit,” Blue Oyster Cult, Kid Rock or any other goldang thing I’ve opionined about in the last few days.
Just in case you were wondering. Not even Blue Oyster Cult. Really. Not even them.
And I am NOT an ignorant slut!
Well, maybe.
But I DO still fear the reaper…
Yo, kiddies… just when you thot that green was the color of St. Patrick’s Day, along come those good old wacky folks at the Dublin Pub downtown (who should know, btw), and they announce that it’s actually NOT green but blue…
as in, the Blue Oyster Cult, which arrives in the big tent at the Pub this evening (THURSDAY the 16th) for the pre-Patty’s day kickoff, an annual event over there.
the bar brings a rock band every year, usually of the classic rock variety. i confess a certain affection for this one, as I still occasionally dust off my copy of “Agents of Fortune” (the LP, natch), which i bought in high school and which went thru more than a few bouts of weirdness over the years …
weirdness, of course, being in perfect keeping with the Cult, which back in the day was one of the most inventive hard-rock guitar bands. they combined lush production, odd sonic effects, velvety harmonies and a strange, trancy list of song subjects — death, time, disappearance, monsters and the like — into a following that was, well, a Cult of sorts.
for a while, too, you couldn’t beat the two guitar combo of Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. These guys were soooo cool they even got Patti Smith to sit in with them, and back then there was very little overlap between their sounds and attitudes.
anyway, have a fun and foolish time if you go. tent flap opens at 6, music at 7:30, and the pub is at Wayne and Fifth, as if you didn’t already know.
Drive safely!
HATING ‘AMERICAN IDOL’
All right, I’ve stayed quiet on this until now (hard for me, I know, but I’ve really been working on it, trust me….), but from the way ‘American Idol’ is sprawling like a bad fungus all over the rest of this website, I feel I owe it to many of you to say the following:
Not all of us out here in the heartland are lovin’ AI. In fact, some of us dislike it sooooo much that we will go to nearly any length to avoid it.
That means avoid watching it, reading about it or even hearing it mentioned.
It’s a terrible show. It’s a terrible concept. It’s terrible entertainment. Period.
Why? you ask, as you sit there with your popcorn, munching away as one poor sot after another gets shot out of the saddle by a trio of talentless-hack judges who couldn’t cut it themselves in entertainment careers before they got their current lucky break?
Well, the answer is contained in the question. I don’t like the show, simply, because it’s just plain, downright mean. In fact, it encourages and institutionalizes meanness.
AI pretends to be about the exaltation of bringing up a talented person who deserves it — but it really isn’t about that, not at all. They’ve got you all fooled. It’s really about crushing the spirits of a whole lot more people who hope they have talent and find out instead that the only brass ring for them is to be humiliated on national TV. And crushing spirits is apparently sooooo much more fun to watch!
Face it: The show is designed to make people who should not ever be singers think they can sing, gets their friends and neighbors and family to all make them think they can, then sets them up to be cruelly pilloried and mocked for our collective amusement.
It’s only fun if you’re one of those people who thinks that low-rent carnival freak-shows from the 1930s used to be fun, with their cages and straw-filled booths full of Lobster People, Bearded Ladies and Legless Wonders. Um, no, thank you — there’s a reason we don’t have those shows anymore. It’s because they were undignified, mean and beneath us as civilized people.
So is AI. Have you noticed the initials are the same as “artificial intelligence” ? Good reason for that.
The show is mean, mean, mean. Worse, it’s contemptible. My advice: Watch something else. Better yet, read a book or play a game with your kids. Whatever you do, leave me out of the whole bilious, hateful mess.
Nicolette + Bolton = Egad!
um, elsewhere on this homepage you will find an item that says Nicolette Sheridan from “desperate screenwriters” is engaged to Michael Bolton…
so, if witchy marries schmaltzy and they reproduce, does that equal … um … waltzy?
just a thot
Anybody doing the Big Read this year?
I don’t get the sense that many people are all that into this year’s Big Read…
It’s “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Anybody reading it? Talking about it?
Anybody care?
Suggestions and reactions taken here…
Live Kid Rock rocks
yo! here’s our CD du jour (um, that’s french):
THE BAND” Kid Rock & the Twisted Brown Trucker Band
THE ALBUM: “‘Live’ Trucker”
WHAT I THINK: Here’s a terrific juxtaposition: Kid Rock has stolen the graphic look and feel of fellow Detroiter Bob Seger’s famous mid-’70s live disc for his own concert documentary — and except for the look of the cover and the fact that both guys are from Motown, that’s about where the comparison ends.
YIKES! This is a disc that earns is Parental Advisory sticker with pride, as Kid Rock spins out his raunchy, raucous tales of pimps, drinking, bar fights, hangovers, pickup trucks, broken hearts and troublemaking — the hatted one is in full NC-17 Urban Redneck mode here, having captured performances from Cobo and other Motown venues from the last few years.
THE VERY NUTTY KID: At this point, what he has to offer is pretty well known, and he’s probably bound to always be a mid-tier star. But then, he clearly doesn’t care, and is happy to take what comes his way. What Kid Rock is very, very good at is recapturing something that has long since disappeared since Seger’s day — plain old unadorned hard rock that isn’t angry, vicious, angst-ridden or mean. Kid Rock is none of those, and in that regard this disc does manage to harken quite successfully back to the era from which he draws most his creative energy, even while adding a hefty does of profanity and heavy rapping to it. We’re talking the 1970s, of course — the brief heyday of the live rock album.
REMEMBER THE DAY: Back in those days, careers were made or broken on the strength of the double live disc, from Frampton to Kiss to J. Geils to, well, Bob Seger. Kid Rock has his finger firmly on that historic pulse and at the same time seems more committed to pleasing his fans than to swaggering for swagger’s sake. ‘Live’ Trucker captures that commitment perfectly, too — something that doesn’t happen all that often anymore.
AND THIS: A final thought: I hadn’t thought I’d missed much by missing Kid Rock’s recent Hara show until I spun this CD. Now I wish I’d been there, if only for the sheer, horrifying hick-druggy-party spectacle of it all. Exhale.
WHAT I GRADE: As art: D; as rock: B+; as a live album: A+.
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Why not have jazz in the Rock Hall?
A few days ago, there was a small bit of buzz that emerged in PunditLand as to the seeming appropropriateness of inducting Miles Davis into the latest class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Nobody takes issue, of course, with the famed trumpeter’s talent or impact on music, of course. It’s just the guy was 95 percent a jazz musician (he did take a few very small forays into rock/fusion in the 1970s, but they hardly matter against his entire body of work in deciding what to call him, genre-wise).
Somehow, it just seemed a bit odd to see him in the same group as this year’s other inductees, which included Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blondie and the Sex Pistols (YAY! Finally!!!). Again, not to question whether they were worthy, either — but it seemed to raise the question: Jazz in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Why not start enshrining football players in Cooperstown?
Actually, I don’t have too much problem with it — mostly because of the way in which the word “rock” has become so darn flexible over the years that it has come to mean “just about all forms of contemporary popular music since 1954.” Think about it: the term itself is practically meaninginless anymore. Techno, disco, southern rock, metal, funk, prog rock, reggae, reggaeton, R&B, country-rock, alternative rock, grunge, soul, singer/songwriter music, vocal groups — they’re all in the Rock Hall already, in a variety of personalities from the Staples to the Stones (big diff there, btw).
Eminem is basically as much a rock star nowadays as Madonna, in the general sense of how the term gets tossed about, and neither of them does anything close to the original style and substance of what we once called “rock and roll.”
In fact, practically nobody even makes plain old original rock and roll anymore — the Sex Pistols were probably the very last band who did, if the term is meant to describe vox-bass-guitars-drums, three chords, simple solos, steady 2/4 or 4/4 beat and a quartet. And they broke up in 1978.
So why not include a jazz guy, if he had a rock star’s attitude and was cool to listen to? Look at it this way — it’s entirely possible that putting Miles Davis in there might actually have raised the actual degree of talent and difficulty for the average Rock Hall inductee 5,000 percent. Because if there’s one big diff between what he did and all his new compadres did, it’s that jazz is supposed to be too hard for most people to play, while rock and roll — if it’s good — should be so damn simple that three kids who don’t know how to play their instruments can crank it up in their parents’ garage.
Speaking of the Pistols….
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“The Unit,” a show designed by committee
CBS has unveiled a new show that it hopes will be another in its long list of current hits — “The Unit,” which is on at 9pm Tuesdays.
It combines several familiar elements in its tale of a counter-terrorist, super-secret military squad that goes behind the lines to scotch the bad guys. There’s the stop-action, bleached-out photography during the war sequences that we remember from “Saving Private Ryan.” There is the back-at-home storyline with the wives of the men in the unit, which has a bit of a soap-opera tone to it and resembles a middle-class “Desperate Housewives,” minus the comedy. Plus, who knows if the women know what their husbands really do for a living? There’s the government-lawyers-trying-stop-the-soldiers-from-doing-their-jobs stuff that gives it an interrogation-room “JAG” feeling, too… Add in the end-of-show coda told over the strains of a bittersweet contemporary pop song by a David Gray soundalike, a trick stolen from “Grey’s Anatomy” and other younger-audience shows…
so, JAG + Desperate + Ryan + True Lies + Grey’s + God Bless the USA = “The Unit.”
Design by committee, spawn hit. Or at least, we’ll see…. Oddly, one of the exec producers is David Mamet. Never thot I’d see that on a TV credit for a show like this.
Anybody watch it? What’d you think?
Tennn-hut!
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The most interesting new CD I’ve heard
…in quite a while…
Sometimes, you run across a disc, song or artist that is just so improbably, implausibly different and weird that you can’t wait to tell somebody else about it.
Put Matisyahu squarely in that camp. One of the coolest CDs that has crossed our desk lately is “Youth,” the second disc by the guy who mysteriously, marvelously blends orthodox Judaism with reggae, rock and hip-hop and spins it into something that is uniquely, exclusively his very own sound.
His real name is Matthew Miller, hailing from Pennsylvania and New York — and, actually, the idea of what he does only seems implausible until you give it a listen, when you realize that reggae, after all, is religious music.
Matisyahu just subbed in a different religion, and it works just fine. Even given that the CD is pretty uneven at times, this is one we strongly recommend, if only for the sheer this artist brings to knowing he’s doing something you’ve never heard before — which is in itself its own strong selling point.
What grade? Let’s say a B+
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rockin’ with the naughty Veronicas…
Here’s a pre-glimpse of the CDs we’re reviewing in GO! this Friday:
rock The Veronicas “The Secret Life of…” They’re young, trashy, fun, trashy, silly, poppy, trashy, peppy, trashy — and they actually kick up a fiesty little rock ‘n’ roll ruckus on their debut disc. The Veronicas are a pair of 20-year-old Aussie twins, Jess and Lisa Origliasso, who are already getting some mileage from the kickoff single “4ever.” It’s the sort of Joan Jett-meets-Avril Lavigne froth in which they’re not just looking for the sort of trouble that was once considered unseemly for young ladies their age, but in which they also seem to combine the very naughty possibilities presented by two of a kind — if you get our drift. And if you don’t, the Veronicas will go out of their way to make sure you do. Did I mention trashy? Grade: C+ iPod picks: “4ever,” “Everything I’m Not”
Thanks to the DAI docents
Here’s a big “thank you” to the docents’ corps at the Dayton Art Institute, who honored yours truly on Monday morning by inviting me to come give a few remarks about how and why we do what we does at the DDN Arts Desk. (Don’t ask me, ask them…)
They’re a lively, curious and interesting bunch, about 100 of them — many in their second and even third decades of docent work. They’re the ladies and gentlemen who take your kids around the museum on field trips, who explain the artwork to gallery visitors and generally make the DAI feel homey and inviting.
Thanks to Howard Boose and Ruth Ann Peck for the invitation, and to all the docents for their warm greetings, good questions and, most of all, their good work.
Tallyho!
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THE TRUTH ABOUT BIKINI WAXING!!!
HA! gotcha. for that, you have to check out our “Chick Chat” blog, elsewhere at ddn.com.
happy bloggin!
(yes, this was a shameless attempt to boost traffic.)
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A wild new show…
dang! almost forgot in all my “sopranos” frenzy the other nite to toss in a hey-hoorah-boy-howdy for the new HBO series that followed on its heels Sunday… “Big Love.”
it’s about a polygamous (look it up) Morman family in Salt Lake City — one hubbie, three wifeys and seven kids. their houses are side-by-side with a common backyard, and he shuffles dutifully from one bedroom to the next in a skedded rotation.
Bill Paxson plays the guy, with Jeanne Tripplehorn as the older “Boss Lady” wife, and they’re terrific — as is the show. The inaugural episode finds the clan dealing with opening a new business, very tight family finances, a small touch (sorry) of impotence, aging relatives and the worry that Bill’s mom might be poisoning his father.
You know, regular soap stuff… But what makes “Big Love” really interesting is the overarching theme of life within the subculture of the Mormon church. Tho the church officially denounces polygamy, the show claims that from 20,000 to 40,000 people supposedly live in a multi-wife arrangement. The show is likely to become controversial for its depiction of the church — especially in its personification of the church elder who arrives at odd times of the night with a henchman to shake Paxson down for the church’s 15 percent of his profits, and marries a teenager when he’s in his 60s — or rather, takes her as a wife and seems to have pretty much brainwashed her. Played by Harry Dean Stanton, he’s the character to watch.
So far, so good — HBO seems to have come up with another winner, and the latest in its long string of very cool, very watchable, very worth your time series.
Do not call my house Sunday night, please.
The stoopidest movie of all time…
Over the weekend, on a serious boredom lark, I picked up a copy of a Japanese horror movie called “Pulse,” which has enjoyed a bit of a cult rep that it’s extremely chilly and scary … one of the main hits in the new wave of that country’s scarefest crop, which includes the “Ring” movies, the original “Grudge,” etc…
Basically, these flicks involve good looking, fairly clueless young people who don’t talk very much and a lot of ghosts that just sorta stand around or emerge from TV sets or computer screens.
The twist in “Pulse,” if you want to call it that, is that all this nonsense leads up to some weird deal in which the ghosts in the machine (um, already an old joke in these movies) apparently take over the world and crowd all the rest of us.
Actually, “nonsense” gives too much dignity and wit to a picture that really was the ABSOLUTELY STUPIDEST MOVIE I HAVE EVER EVER SEEN (and not at all scary), and that even includes “Beach Blanket Bingo.” Which, come to think of it, was also scarier, on a number of disturbing levels.
Two hours I will want back on my deathbed, except that i was smart enough to FF thru a lot of it near the end…
Stay away. Far away.
Why I really like Marion’s
I was sad to hear the news Monday morning about the passing of Marion Glass, the founder of Dayton’s top pizza chain, as I’m sure many other folks around the area were, as well. But his was not one of those obituaries that left the reader with a lot of what-if type questions; Mr. Glass’s final story provides us, rather, with many, many thank-goodness moments.
Those come as we reflect upon the many good times we’ve had in his restaurants. Marion’s Piazzas have been so successful over the years because they’ve found and worked several niches over the years, and worked them very well.
Foremost, they’re great family places. Which of us parents hasn’t spent uncountable hours in a local Marion’s after a kids’ soccer game, watching trophies get passed out; or at birthday party for little ones; or after a Brownie or Cub Scout event, to mark a big event? Marion’s has always made it easy on parents, coaches and den leaders to get in with lots of kids, feed ‘em well and have a good time doing it, without leaving a Chuck E. Cheese type cloying unpleasantness; a trip to Marion’s was always fun.
Next, it’s worth noting that the restaurants do have a certain charm, with their high ceilings, brick and courtyard-type feel. You knew what you were gonna get, and how it was gonna feel. You still do. It’s a simple, pleasant, consistent atmosphere that isn’t garish or trendy. It’s just Marion’s. It’s a piazza. Look it up.
The pizza? The pizza’s not bad, either — when myself and our two other DDN Leadbelly Boys visited a few years ago to rate the best pie in town, we placed Marion’s near the middle of the pack. And it was the one we caught the most heat for from readers, too. People love the thin-crust, straightforward pie. We thot the sauce was a bit unsexy, but face it — they came up with a winner here, in terms of cooking up something that most folks love. Maybe it’s the bite-size pieces? My family has always enjoyed the crumbled sausage best — they were among those who got on me for our rating of Marion’s. Hey, Leadbelly life ain’t easy.
But what do I like best of all about Marion’s?
That’s easy. It’s all those bizarre old black and white photographs on the walls. Do you ever look at them? They were shot at the after-parties for the Kenley Players and other local theater groups that Mr. Glass hosted for years, as a way to draw attention to his restaurants. It worked, too. You’ll see him, his family and friends all mingling happily with a cavalcade of stars, semi-stars and wannabe-stars from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, all of whom worked the community theater circuit or came to town in traveling shows. The 1980s saw lots of this stuff when John Kenley was bringing show after show to smaller Ohio cities like Akron and Dayton — it’s a time most of us have forgotten, but it was lots of fun back in the day, and the exuberance and delight on the faces in these strange, faded photos bring it back to mind. It’s nostalgia of a very weird sort — especially when you see actors like Pam Dawber and Tony Danza and others, and have to think to yourself what happened to them later, what TV show you know them from, or even who they were at the time, some are so obscure.
But they were all welcome at Marion’s — same as the coaches and Cub leaders.
R.I.P., Mr. Glass. And thanks for lots of good times. We owe you.
TONY’s BEEN SHOT!!!!!!!!
Yo, there was NO WAY to see that coming on the premiere of “The Sopranos.” We’re left with Tony getting shot in the gut by Uncle Junior, who’s turned out to be nutty as a fruitcake, when all along we thot he was probably kidding around…
Carmela has no idea, but she and Tony were just starting to get back together… While she’s having fun with her girlfriend, Tony’s bleedin’ away on Junior’s kitchen floor…
Yikes! More troubles with New York, too, as Johnny Sack’s stand-in captain is letting his goons run loose and beat the heck out of Hesh and his son-in-law; that’s a big future blowup just waiting to happen, even with the $50K settlement Tony worked out…
And you think you can get outta the life? Our new friend who wanted to retire and move to Florida, leaving all this mobbed-up stuff behind him, thot he could just put the oath behind him. “Whattaya think you are, a hockey player?” Tony asked, as he pretty much turned down the guy’s request. Memo to David Chase: We dont’ think you should be able to get out, either. You got us here, and you think we’re gonna settle for this being the last season?
Instead, we’ll just be swingin’ gruesome from the rafters, like our erstwhile disappointed retiree…
Seeya next Sunday, kiddies.
Meanwhile, “Big Love” is getting started. Let’s go see what HBO does with another Great American Subculture….
Caio
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A cool new club to check out
There’s a cool new club in town worth checking out.
Friday nite marked the opening of The 88 Club, the newest arrival in downtown nightlife and the latest attempt to do something that will last in the space that over the years has housed a succession of good, but eventually unsuccessful, restaurants (Kitty’s, Thomato’s, Mediterra).
Right on Main Street in the Citfed building across the street from the Schuster and right next door to Uno’s, you’ll find this new spot. It’s a piano bar (get it? 88 piano keys? the 88 club?) decked out in cool blues, moody lighting and spare modernist decor. Friday night several piano players took their turn at the grand, which is located on a small dias in the middle of the room for maximum hearing pleasure.
They were pretty good, too — and frankly, created a quiet, sophisticated atmosphere unlike most other Dayton-area watering holes. The place was at its swankiest and most fun when the piano playing was going on; actually, the recorded classic rock stuff they were playing during the down times between piano sets wasn’t as much fun. They’re still working out some details, I guess, and that’s OK.
But the drinks were heavy and the service was first-rate and right-there-quick. A couple of pool tables are available and the mixture of people seemed to be arts types, downtown after-workers, jazzbos and an assortment of the curious who heard there was a new place to check out.
Some friends and I were amongst them, and was glad I did. I’ll be back, too. Downtown’s a lot of fun already, but I think it just got a bit better.
Let’s play Sopranos trivia!!!
Hooray! In honor of this evening’s return of the greatest TV drama of all time, let’s play a little ‘Sopranos” trivia, how ‘bout? Don’t wanna? Then fuggedaboudit.
I’ll post the answers tomorrow.
• True or false: Carmela had at least two affairs before breaking up with Tony.
• True or false: While fooling around the house in Season 2, Junior gets his hand stuck in the toilet.
• WHO SAID “It’s all a big nothing … what makes you think you’re so special?”
• True or false: After Livia dies in Season 3, Janice moves into her house.
• Tony likes to: A) barbeque; B) collect stamps; C) hunt bears; D) play Scrabble.
• True or False: Big Pussy disappears at the end of Season 3.
• In Season 4, how does it cross Furio’s mind to kill Tony? (Clue: It’s pretty gruesome).
• When a mob guy tells another to “Come heavy,” what’s it mean?
• True or False: In Season 3, Tony makes Ralph a captain.
• What is Hesh’s real name?
• WHO SAID “What animal would smoke marijuana at his own confirmation?” BONUS: To whom was it said?
We’re up for 13 weeks of big fat fun. If you wanna take a few guesses at these or post some clues and chatter, feel free! I’m just sittin’ around waiting for the show.
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Mmmmmm… Deer are TASTY
you may already have noticed elsewhere on this site the story about the guy who took his crossbow up to Oakwood the other day and shot a deer, hoping to use the meat to feed his family. he says he didn’t know that Oakwood was already debating an ordinance that would allow selective hunting in the city limits as an effort to cut down on the number of four-legged flower-munchers who are apparently taking over the area’s touchiest suburb.
several thoughts come to mind (none of which are particularly arts/entertainment related, but it’s Saturday morning, rainy, and i’m bored, so what the heck):
isn’t the most important thing that the poor shooter guy needs help feeding his family? why not figure out how to help him do that?
this is one of those rare cases in which the words “ordinance” and “ordnance” are easily confused in the same story. check your dictionary, fans!
um, there really are too many deer. but they’re so cute!
my wife brought home the soundtrack from “Bambi” the other day, which she got from the public library. really! i find that to be an extraordinary coincidence. i love the part where all the little woodland creatures come out in the spring and get all … what’s the word? … “twitterpated” ? yes, that’s it.
it’s difficult to twitterpate if you have a crossbow arrow sticking out of your neck, i bet.
in our newsroom, every time one of the oakwood deer-hunting stories comes up on a news budget, folks start making Bambi jokes. i bet that happens at your house, too, doesn’t it?
what happened to the dead deer? did it go into the Oakwood PD evidence locker or something? “yeah, just put it in there next to that six-pack we got off that kid on Spirea th’other night.”
ever seen a crossbow up close? yeeeegads. it’s an ugly thing.
it should be pointed out the shooter guy did try to do the right thing by finding a metroparks worker when he realized he’d wounded, but not killed, the deer.
once oakwood figures this whole problem out, can somebody in kettering come up with a new city law that will help me do something about all those dang irritating foul-smelling bugs that look like ladybugs but really aren’t, that come out every spring? they’re almost here again, and i HATE those things.
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!!!!
The other day, a co-worker stopped by my desk with a question. “So, what is it with the Arctic Monkeys? Should I believe all the hype?�
My answer was “Not really,� but I should probably back up and offer some explanation for anybody who’s wandered in by mistake.
We weren’t talking chilled primates here. The Arctic Monkeys are the hottest new rock band from Britain, a place that churns up hot new rock bands faster and more often than anyplace on the planet. Every so often it also tries to toss one of them across the pond, as they like to say, to see if it can catch on in the larger U.S. market.
Arctic Monkeys have a new album out, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not. You may have seen the stories that ran about the band when it broke in the UK — selling more than 300,000 albums in a week, one of the biggest album openings in history. That got the hype machine working in uber-mojo over here, where all rock writers who could still find their way from the bar to a laptop started downloading songs and writing about how fabulous the Monkeys were.
By the time the album came out in the United States a couple of weeks ago, the advance buzz was monumental. Reviews of the actual album, though, were a mixed.
Hence, my friend — who, by the way, does a good job at staying on top of new music — posed her question. So, back to my answer: Not really.
Arctic Monkeys sound a lot like plenty of other slightly grungy, punky English bands — a bit faster and more raw than some, and they do sound like they’re having fun. If you remember the Jam, from back in the 1980s, and can imagine those guys with a dance beat, you have the idea.
Either way, Americans weren’t that impressed. The album sold only about 10 percent as many copies in its first week here as in the UK. Which seems to raise the question: How does this hype thing work? Several thoughts come to mind.
• Hype loves a vacuum: Very few new releases come out in January and February, and so good music stories are few. The Arctic Monkeys picked the right time.
• Hype loves the Brits: American writers are always looking for the next big thing and keep thinking it will come from England. Sure, there have been big British Invasions (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, the Who, etc.) and large movements (metal, punk, etc.) from there, but in fact most Big British Bands that get megahyped in America don’t actually do that well here. Terence Trent D’Arby? Robbie Williams? Nuff said.
• Hype is self-sustaining: Once one person starts going nuts about something, other people jump on board because they think it’s cool. Safety in numbers, you know.
• Hype is stupid: Really, at the end of the day it all adds up to not much. Of course true hits emerge, but have you ever noticed that they tend to pop up on their own, by surprise, and don’t really emerge from the Legions of the Hyped? This fact drives scribes and pundits crazy, by the way.
Perhaps those nutty Arctic Monkeys actually have it right, and said it all in that album title: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. Bingo. We should at least remember them for getting that part right, when we’ve forgotten everything else.
A fine dancer who’s moving on, alas
In Sunday’s upcoming DDN (the print edition, for all you cybernutz), our esteemed Dance and Theater writer, Terry Morris, profiles Anna Kirker, who has spent 11 years with the Dayton Ballet and says this may well be her final season here.
Terry profiles her in the context of the Ballet’s next production, Carmen, which starts next weekend. She danced in Memphis and Cincy before coming to Dayton, where Terry observes she has always been a “fluid, elegant dancer.”
Agreed. She’s always been a standout in the Ballet productions I’ve attended, and we’ll miss her talent and skill on the boards.
Find out more about her in Sunday’s Arts & Entertainment section!
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It’s almost ‘Sopranos’ tiime….
Sunday nights are about to become fun again, boys and goilz…
We were OK for a while when “Rome” was on, as the wifey and I would snuggle up on the couch for our regular weekly appointment for intrigue, backstabbing, bloodlust, lethal politics, gladitorial combat and crucifixion … I tellya, it was almost better than a day at the office!
But alas, all wonderful things must end, and of course on HBO all wonderful things end in just 13 weeks. Dammit.
And then we were back to a diet of the usual network junk food: In this case, “Grey’s Anatomy,” which still seems like ER with cuter younger people, and “Desperate Screenwriters,” which is only somewhat as amusing as it likes to think it is. Both good-ish…. but not HBO.
Yay! Tony, Carmela, Christophuh, Paulie and the boys in the mob are back this Sunday night at 9 for Season 6, the long-awaited continuation.
When last we saw Tony, he was running from the Feds and had just avoided (or so it seemed) a massive gang war with New York… Will he get back with his wife? Will somebody else die? Will the FBI get him this year? What will happen, DEAR HEAVENS WHAT OH WHAT WILL HAPPEN?!?!?!?!?!?
Who cares? No matter what David Chase has in store for us this year, it’s GUARANTEED to be fun fun fun … of the thinking-viewer’s sort. If you don’t get HBO yet, call today. BTW, they did not pay for this testimonial.
Talk to ya later.
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Colbert: Best line of the day
this from tonite’s “Colbert Report” … “Iraq is poised on a civil war… Bad news for Iraqis, great news for Ken Burns….”
YEAH it is…
i love that guy… he’s such a nut!!!
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Rap love vs. rap hate, Pt 2:
Here’s why I pose this question: the other day I was in a business meeting in which I accidentally made a comment about hip-hop that I meant as a fairly casual comment — and without realizing it, I opened a GIANT can of worms between two co-workers who are on very opposite sides of something that I hadn’t even realized was a big deal anymore: Whether they like rap and hip-hop or not.
The one (white, middle-aged) hates it and started to say so pretty loudly in a way that clearly referred back to previous disagreements with friends and co-workers to which I hadn’t been party. The other (black, twentysomething) rolled her eyes at all this and was coming at this from the viewpoint of a suffering rap fan who had to listen to this nonsense yet again….
This struck me as interesting because I’d experienced two times in the last week when I realized that I was around or with people who didn’t like or listen to rap very much but who were suddenly subjected to a lot of it. One was Oscar night, when all of TV-viewing America got a taste of Three 6 Mafia doing the music from “Hustle & Flow.” The first time rap happened on the Oscars show, and I heard plenty of folks the next day wondering what the hell it was all about, and not liking it.
A few days previously, I had been to the Dave Chappelle show at the Nuthouse, which was more a rap show than a comedy show.
Now, I liked it … a lot. But I know plenty of fans of Dave didn’t realize they were gonna get a full dose blast in the face of Mos Def, Dead Prez and others, esp at such volume.
I like rap a lot, along with about every other kind of music you can imagine, from country to jazz to opera to reggaeton to … well, you get the idea. So I don’t think so much about people not liking somehting that I generally consider to be just more music. This week, the strong antipathy many people have toward this sort struck me initially as alien, but then as pretty common and just outside my notice…
SOOOOOOOO, what’s the deal, readers?
Rap: Love it or hate it?
You may notice from a posting below by frequent commentator Dirk Sniggler that he’s kicking me for having posted a positive review of the new album by Juvenile, a rapper from New Orleans whose music definitely takes on a gangster tone and attitude. Dirk suggests in his remarks that hardcore rap is, um, an illegitimate art form.
Before I weigh in more completely, anybody want to offer a few thots?
Rap: Love it or hate it? Like it or dislike it?
Let the conversation begin.
cool rock with the subways!
ooooh, here is one i REALLY like
The Subways “Young for Eternity”
Love that title! Would that it were true … fortunately, the Subways are here to make you feel as though it just might happen, at least for the next 30 minutes or so. And isn’t that, at its heart, really what rock ‘n’ roll is all about?
This young UK trio thinks so, and they rock out accordingly — pounding out cool, high-energy punk-pop that doesn’t sound anything like the pop-punk you’ll get from the States. The Subways blend everybody from Roxy Music to the Jam to the Velvets to the Kinks to the Pistols, with a bit of sighing girly-girl in there and a lot of punchy raw stuff kicked in on the side. Dang! How to say it any better? This is a smashing good disc. It’s fun, fun, fun — and yes, it made me feel young again.
Grade: A-
iPod picks: Rock & Roll Queen, Oh Yeah, City, Mary. But really, it’s all good-good-good.
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Thuggin’ out with Juvenile
Cool new rap disc from Juvenile, “Reality Check.”
The guy who may well be the Big Easy’s best rapper rolls back strong, mean and almost sensible on his third disc, weighing in on all the crazy-awful stuff that’s happened in his hometown since that big wind blew in off the Gulf.
Which turns out, in Juvenile’s neighborhood, to be pretty much the same clubs-guns-booty stuff that was going on before. “This album is dedicated to Sister Soulja and the victims of Hurricane Katrina,� the inscription reads inside the CD liner notes, laid over a picture of the Superdome that’s printed in green — the color of the money that Juvenile would argue didn’t get spent in any of the right places in the wake of the storm. Not subtle? Nope, not by a Mississippi mile — but Juvenile walks a fine line between scattergun rage and a cyncical, what-did-you-expect attitude toward the storm’s collateral damage.
Anyway, he’s too busy making money the wrong way to worry too much about social-service delivery, even on a rainy day.
This isn’t a theme disc, not by any means. Juvenile acknowledges all that recent history (briefly) and then gets back to the gangsta bump-n-grind he’s good at. Whether he’s grabbing somebody else’s girlfriend or setting up a bad-sounding drug deal, he clubs his way uptown and back, making the most of his gruff, growly voice and a clean set of beats that somehow seems to bring Deetroit down to the Deep South.
Thug that.
What the hell? Let’s give it a B+ iPod picks: What’s Happenin’, Who’s Ya Daddy
Walkin’ on with “Walk the Line”
finally caught up with “walk the line,” which my cash-lovin’ son saw on its first day (skipped skul for it, in fact), but which i waited to see on DVD.
i liked it quite a lot, tho to Jon Stewart’s point that it was essentially “Ray with white people,” there is something to that … namely, when will hollywood quit feeding us these contemporary biopics and dig back toward something a bit more learned?
this is not a knock on cash or the movie, mind you; i’m a fan of the former and admired the latter. but i wish moviemakers would look back a little further into history than people who lived and died within the last few years. would anybody make “anne of a thousand days” or “beckett” anymore? it was not that long ago that hollywood did a darn good job of making history seem to come alive and matter for a mass audience that actually responded to what it was seeing; plenty of the movies we regard as classics today had strong historical basis. there are plenty of examples.
seems those have gone by the wayside lately for more pop-culture-based figures who have recently been in the headlines, like ray and johnny. and it’s ok to give us them, but how about trying to teach us something, too? say what you will about the considerable merits of both those films, but they mostly must rehashed recent history most of us already at least a vague sense of already.
then again, culture today seems more and more about reinforcing what we know and think, rather than challenging us to think something new and different… just more of the dumbification of our society. too bad.
R.I.P: Gordon Parks
Very sad indeed to see the passing of one the very true, and perhaps last, Renaissance Men of our age. Parks was an amazing multi-talent.
Can anyone think of a performer, entertainer or artist in his league of being so diverse and interdisciplinary? Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan come to mind, but I still don’t think they are quite in Parks’ realm.
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YO! The Sopranos is almost back.
Oh, this is a VERY GOOD THING.
After nearly two (!!!!!!) years away, “The Sopranos” is back for its sixth (!!!) season, and most likely its last full season; there will be a half-season someplace down the road that wraps it all up, but this is the last big splash, according to Mob Boss David Chase.
But really… can something as large, sprawling and epic as this show really ever be said to be “wrapped up” in a meaningful way? I don’t think so.
To my mind, it’s not just the best show on TV — it’s been among the very best art created in the United States in the last decade. All this week, we’ll be be blabbing about why.
In the meantime, tell me what YOU think! Or else fuggedaboudit.
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More Worst Best Pictures!
You’ll note down below that a couple of our very excellent commentators (hereafter referred to by the very respectful designation VECs, or “Very Excellent Commentators” … ain’t that clever?) have homed in on “American Beauty” and “Shakespeare in Love” as movies that were not at all worth the Best Picture wins they won back in the ’90s.
Hmmmm. Well, I happen to really still like “Shakespeare in Love.” I know it was up against “Saving Pvt Ryan” in that year, but that was a VERY VERY complicated year. While Spielberg’s movie is today acknowledged as a modern classic — and I would say, deservedly so — when it came out it was pretty controversial, and the jury was not at all unanimous on it.
Lots of people didn’t take it seriously because of who made it; Spielberg, while undeniably talented, is not at ALL universally revered… which may come as a shock to some of you, but it’s true. I, for one, get easily hacked off at him mostly because he has a tendency to ruin his own serious moments with cutesy stuff … such as, in this case, the framing device of the old man at the cemetery, who KILLED the moment for me on that movie. And not just me.
Also, the violence was very much a hot topic then. Hard to imagine now, but it was. Also, folks weren’t ready to accept Spielberg as a serious director of serious topics as much as they are now; he had done “Schindler’s List,” but at the time it seemed more an aberration than a trend from a guy who was still rememebered for “Hook.”
Um, you remember “Hook,” right? OK, then, shut up.
I actually still like “Shakespeare in Love.” Well acted, smartly written, tightly plotted, very close to capturing the mood of its day, a daring take on the history and mystery surrounding the Bard, and at its heart a great Love Story… Ahhhhhhh, sigh. I liked it then, still do. So there. Best Picture? Well, maybe not. I rewatch “Ryan” more… but it was good and not a horrible choice. I don’t think. And I’m just sayin.
Oh yes!!! “American Beauty” !! Two things: 1. Bathtub scene. 2. The lovely floating plastic bag. 3. Bathtub scene. 4. Kevin Spacey.
OK, that’s three things (the bathtub is just one, repeated). You know what I”m sayin … it was an ACTUAL BY GOD NO KIDDIN MAINSTREAM ARTHOUSE FILM!!!!! And the first one since “Sex Lies and Videotape.” So it probably should have won. I liked it at the time, and I didn’t think I should have not done so till recently.
soooooooooooo….. Keep ‘em comin, folks!!!
Well, then, let’s talk about ‘Gladiator,’ too!
Um, it seems like we opened up a nasty (but fun; and of course, nasty and fun can be, well, extra-fun) little Pandora’s (remember her?) Box yesterday when we opened up the conversation on what ya’ll thot was the WORST BEST PICTURE OF ALL TIME. Amongst the entries in the comments you’ll find posted below (thanks to one and all… keep ‘em coming… lots more bad stuff out there to pillory) is mention of “Gladiator,” which I, too, disliked at the time that it came out.
However, like “Titanic” (another posting from yesterday; scroll down a bit further), I found that while I didn’t much care for “Gladiator” the first time around, I have grown fond of it since then.
What bugged me before? I didn’t like the hyper fast editing of the fight scenes, finding it very distracting and hard to follow. Joaquin Phoenix seemed to froofy for his part, and I wasn’t yet used to Russell Crowe’s bluster and swagger. There were also some odd plot gaps that I found bothersome at the time.
My family all loved the movie, tho, and so it’s gotten played a lot on DVD at our house over the years… I slowly found myself on repeated partial viewings liking it more than I did at first, and feeling OK about it. Overall, I think it may be a much better film than I thot …. tho whether it was the Best Picture, I still can’t say.
I do wonder this, tho: Is my eventual turnabout on a film like “Gladiator” more about me, or about movies? In other words, is that my tastes have changed, which of course they will, or that movies — esp action movies — have deteriorated even further since “Gladiator” so that now its flaws seem relatively minor? Um…..
Lemme know what you think. Movies today: Better or Worse, just in the last few years? And what has happened to the Thoughtful Action Picture? Always a rare breed, has it gone totally extinct????
Lord Spencer: What a gentleman!
You’ve already heard that Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer and the younger brother of Princess Diana, made his way to our fair city on Monday so that he might help promote the exhibition of his sister’s dresses and personal items at the Dayton Art Institute … and I’m here to tell ya, he’s a very cool guy.
OK, so maybe it isn’t proper to refer to a bonafide member of the British aristocracy as “cool,” tho one got the sense from meeting him that he wouldn’t mind. Lord Spencer spent all day meeting with Girl Scouts, DAI docents, VIPs, donors, media and other folks to get the word out about the show at the DAI, which celebrates the accomplishments and style of his late sister.
So, at the end of a long day like that you might expect him to be a bit flagged out by the end of it. Not true at all. He squeezed in a private party in a side dining room at the museum and was as gracious, charming and, well, cool as one could ever hope for.
Spencer is dapper, handsome and very tall — at least 6-3, trim and very composed. He goes out of his way to work the entire room, moving from one group of folks to another, realizing they’re all there to see him but aren’t sure what to say — so he takes the initiative and makes the first move, introducing himself and making polite, witty conversation. He truly gives the impression of being very much involved in what he’s hearing and being told, and is interested in what his guests have to say. He’s the picture-perfect gentlemen.
He’s also in an odd position. He knows, of course, that his connection to his sister is the reason for most people’s interest in him, but he graciously acknowledges that fact and moves past it, making a connection from her to his own role in perpetuating her life story and legacy — which is indeed significant. He has turned it into an important and vital thing in its own right. And meeting him is quite impressive.
The local Girl Scouts who had met and talked with him just before the meet-and-greet I attended were all filling the DAI parking lot as my wife and I entered the building. And let’s just say the parking lot was full of many delighted screams and squeals. Properly so. When I mentioned that to Lord Spencer, he just gave a small smile.
Let’s talk about ‘Titanic,’ if we must
Elsewhere on the blog today you’ll note Susan has commented that she’s still mad about ‘Titanic’ getting Best Picture back in 1997 … something that I, too, was mad about at the time. When that very big movie came out, I was not at all a fan… my main problemo with it was James Cameron’s seeming need to dress up such a dramatic event in its own right with a gummy love story that was fictional,a dn not at all necessary…
I confess, tho, that in recent years I’ve grown to rather like “Titanic.” I can’t say why, really… maybe I’m just older and sappy stuff bothers me less. But it really does seem to earn all four of its stars now in a way that it did not at the time… It may be, also, that since then few Big Blockbuster Event Movies have come out that had as much heart as that one did, even tho it was tough to recognize at the time it came out…
Dunno… What do ya’ll think? Titanic success, or Titanic failure?
What’s the worst Best Picture ever?
OK, I’ve said enuff about ‘Crash.’ But what’s your favorite Worst Best Picture?
Premiere magazine recently weighed in and suggested these: “Cimarron,” “Cavalcade,” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Oliver!,” “Chicago,” “The Great Ziegfeld,” “All the King’s Men” and “American Beauty.”
I’d put a couple more on there that didn’t make their list. I don’t think “Rocky” holds up all that well anymore, at least not as the Best Picture in any given years. Same with “Forrest Gump.” Both are sweet and well-intentioned melodramas, but really…
Actually, my list is LONG … but what’s on yours????
Tell! Tell!
JON STEWART: THE BEST HOST EVER?
All right, now that we’re all back at work and talking Oscars, let’s get past the whole ‘Crash’ thing for a second and talk about the show itself….
I thot it was good!!! Jon Stewart was a smashingly fine host. His timing was good, he struck the proper balance between snarky and sweet (not an easy thing to do, btw), and he seemed to be both respectful of the event and also a bit cynical about it without trashing the whole thing…
He never got dumb, like Letterman, or surreal, like Steve Martin. He got it more than Whoopi G., and wasn’t as cutting as Chris Rock. Billy Crystal was a good host, but he had his run in the proper time…
Stewart’s crew provided a lot of “Daily Show” humor with the made-up ads promoting certain categories and candidates … those were hilarious. And the whole show in general seemed tighter, faster, better designed and run and more streamlined. I found myself laughing a lot ….
Which actually made up for the Best Picture winner!!!
Let’s begin our BRING BACK JON in ‘06 campaign now!
‘Crash’ is still a mediocre movie.
OK, so it won. So did “Dances With Wolves” and “Oliver!”, but that doesn’t make them good movies.
“Crash” has a noble message about the pervasive power of racism in our lives, there is no doubt about that.
My problem with it is that it’s simply not a good movie. Too many coincidences. Too much melodrama. Too many sudden hand-wringing epiphanies. Too many lousy lines — in fact, I hadn’t remembered until the Oscar ceremony tribute that replayed a scene from “Driving Miss Daisy” that Sandra Bullock’s big line, and the biggest line in “Crash,” is stolen right out of the former movie.
Oh, yeah — don’t even get me started on the fact that a lot of the movie is just downright racist. Of course, you get a hotheaded Arab guy. A black heroin addict. Street thugs who talk like college professors. A simpering, fragile upper-class white woman. Every character plays according to stereotype — in fact, the movie depends on it.
Mediocre movie-making wrapped up all glittery in a package that was designed to go over big with guilty-feeling, rich, white Academy voters. Plain and simple. And too darn bad that they fell for it.
What’s that thing on Charlize Theron’s shoulder?
IT’S AS BIG AS HER HEAD!!!! OMIGOD!!!!! SOMEBODY HELP THAT POOR WOMAN!!!!!!!
Wither Reese?
OK, really … a few years ago, did ANYBODY on the face of the earth think Reese Witherspoon would ever win an Oscar for Best Actress? I mean, really, did you?
And her dress wasn’t even pink!!!
Well, rap has now crossed the Oscar barrier… 36 Mafia turned in a nicely sizzlin’ performance on “It’s Hard Out There For a Pimp,” the theme song from “Hustle & Flow,” which moments later went on to win the Best Song category.
And deservedly so, especially compared to the piffle from “Crash” that was nominated, and the fact that while we love Dolly Parton, her song from “TransAmerica” didn’t really leap out at us.
The hip-hop did, tho. And the first performance of a rap song at an Academy Awards ceremony made us wonder: “Why’d this take so long to happen?” Maybe the Academy wouldn’t be watching ratings fall on the show every year if they were a bit more in touch with what’s out there… Just a thought.
Or, as Jon Stewart said, “I think it just got easier in here for a pimp.”
A well-earned HOORAH for Robert Altman!
Pretty hard to argue with the Honorary Oscar they gave up for Robert Altman, especially during the rundown of all his great movies.
“I kinda always thought this sort of award meant it was all over,” Altman said upon accepting. After all he’s got “Prairie Home Companion” coming out this summer, and it’s a promising latest addition to an amazing run. As Altman, said, he feels as tho he’s just made “one long film.”
In a way, that’s true… One knows when you’re with Altman, whether it’s “Gosford Park” or “M.A.S.H.” The masterful pacing, the way actors seem to drive the bus (but really don’t), the subtle shocks and surprises, the mad and crazy ensembles, the Big Themes that emerge regardless of premise or project…. Altman’s the man. Very cool that the Academy noted it.
Altman noted that he got a heart transplant 10 years ago, that of a young woman donor — he said that he “fears you may have given me this 40 years too soon, because I’ve got 50 years left, and I plan on using them all.” OK with us.
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Jon Stewart’s best jokes of the nite!
• On “The Chronicles of Narnia” beating out “Cinderella Man” on makeup: “I’m really surprised… I mean, can you imagine how hard it was to make Russell Crowe look like he’d been in a fight?”
• On the size of the actor’s ensemble in a certain Best Picture nominee: “OK, maybe this will be easier — jsut raise your hand if you weren’t in ‘Crash.’”
• On how video piracy is affecting the box office: “If you’re engaged in piracy, I have one thing to say to you: You’re taking money away from the people in this audience. Look at them! Some of these women could barely afford enough dress fabric to cover their breasts!”
• On Hollywood’s political leanings: “This is the best place to see all your favorite stars without having to contribute to a Democratic Party fundraiser. Seriously, though, I’m happy for all of you (actors). This is the first time many of you have ever voted for a winner.”
• ”I have to report some tragic news: Bjork couldn’t make it tonight … she was trying on her Oscar dress when Dick Cheney shot her.”
• On introducing Terrence Howard, star of “Hustle & Flow”: “Um, for some of you in the audience, let’s see… pimp… it’s kind of like an agent, but with a better hat.”
• “Good Night and Good Luck” wasn’t just Edward R. Murrow’s nightly sign-off line, but it’s also how Mr. Clooney ends all his dates.”
• On “Capote”: “It was a truly groundbreaking film. It showed that all gay people are not just tough gay cowboys in the west — that some of them are actually effete New York intellectuals.”
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‘Crash’ will win tonight
Prediction: ‘Crash’ will win Best Picture.
It’s tailor-made to be the swoony, love-in vote that will help all the Academy voters tell themselves that Hollywood isn’t racist (which it is), so that all these rich white stars, producers and directors can pat themselves on the back like they’ve done something noble, and then scoot off to get drunk at post-ceremony parties in which the tables are bussed by poor, probably minority, workers who will have worry the next day if they accidentally try to drive through the stars’ gated communities on the way home from work.
Meanwhile, the next day movies will be be just as dumb and racist as they were the day before, with no sign of changing.
Yessirree, it’s gonna quite a sloppy little lovefest. I’ll bet $5.
