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Writer and editor Home > Blogs > Brain Droppings > Archives > 2007 > February
February 2007
Oscar hangover blues…
Oh, I’m sooo glad “The English Patient” got best picture. I was rooting for it!
Where’d I put my aspirin?
Watching the Oscars tonite?
I admit, I always enjoy Oscar night. Everybody likes to poke fun at it, and pretend that the awards aren’t important, or that the show is too long, or that they haven’t seen any of the movies (um, ok, obviously SOMEbody has seen them), and everybody likes to pick on Joan Rivers and her dingy daughter.
But hey … it’s better than “American Idol,” right?
A few thots before the show:
… Ellen Degeneres is the perfect host. She’s right combination of charm, smarts, good cheer, mild naughtiness and comic timing, and she knows how seriously to take the whole thing. If she gets tired of the gig, I say bring back Jon Stewart.
… Save us some time and just mail Helen Mirren her Best Actress now. She was terrific in “Prime Suspect.” No, wait a sec…
… If “Little Miss Sunshine” wins, we have some things to discuss. Was it a good movie? Sure. Was it sweet and uplifting? Well, yeah. But was it the best picture of the year? Um… I think we’re starting to notice something I refer to as “The ‘Sideways’ Effect” … in which reasonably decent adult movies that are pretty darn good (but that’s all) seem much much greater than they really are because they seem to stand out amidst all the infantile dreck that makes up about 75-80 percent of the rest of Hollywood’s output. We should confuse these for the Best Picture of the Year, however.
… The two best movies I saw all year didn’t get a nod. The first, and the one that actually stood half a chance of getting nominated, was “United 93.” It’s breathtaking. Almost perfect, and truly one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. The other one was “Casino Royale,” which was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a while. And anybody who could make a great movie out the flaccid Bond franchise deserves some kind of award. Wouldn’t the Oscars be more fun if a flick like that could actually get considered?
… It’d be OK w/ me if they simply did away with the best animated feature award. In these CGI days, who really cares?
… And as you’re listening to all those limp best-song nominees, just remember one thing: It’s hard out there for a pimp. In Hollywood, those are truly words to live by.
Seeya on the red carpet, ya’ll.
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What are you doing this weekend?
There’s a ton of stuff to do around here, as usual. We’re getting on our tuxes for the Artemis Gala Saturday night, and there’s more than one Oscar party in town on Sunday…
What are you doing with yourself this weekend? Got someplace/something to recommend?
Tell, tell, tell… Maybe we’ll seeya there.
FAB NEW BRIT ROCK
Here’s the coolest new rock CD that’s crossed my desk in the last few weeks:
The Cinematics’ “A Strange Education.”
Some bands are perfectly named, their monikers seeming to perfectly reflect the mood, attitude and feeling of the music.
Put the Cinematics in that category; these young Scottish post-post-post-punks do indeed write with dramatic flair and dark-tinged scenic imagery, spinning bleak, wintery tales of lovesick romanticism with a New-Wavey energy that reminds one not every song back in the ‘80s stunk.
We expect to hear more from this exceptionally talented quartet.
Grade: A-
iPod picks: Race to the City, Strange Education
“Hotel Rwanda” comes to Dayton
Paul Rusesabagina is one of those people who is world famous even though very few people know his actual name. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, of course, but because its multisyllabic African spelling is hard on American tongues and memories, much as we try to work with it.
Most people, I think, know Rusesabagina as the “Hotel Rwanda man.”
He seems happy and proud to be known that way. Actually, he seems relieved just to be alive, and considers it his mission in life to spread the word about the events that made him famous.
If you’ve seen the movie with Don Cheadle which was based on those events, you know the basic story: How, in 1994, Rusesabagina kept 1,268 Tutsi people safe in the hotel he managed while roving gangs of bloodthirsty militiamen roamed outside and even within the walls of the place, and how he put them off with words, diplomacy, tact and a lot of free beer until they went away and decided not to kill the people that day.
For a harrowing stretch of several months, using all his contacts, connections and luck, Rusesabagina held the wolves off and saved his immediate family and all those people while the horrible Tutsi-Hutu civil war in Rwanda turned into a full-blown genocide and nearly destroyed the country.
Rusesabagina’s lecture at the University of Dayton Tuesday night, to a standing-room-only, overflow crowd, was not what many may have expected. He did not get angry, or denounce the killers, or rail against the United States and the world community of stronger nations than Rwanda that stood by and did nothing while his poor country slashed its own wrists and bled itself to death. If he had, most in the symptathetic audience would likely have understood.
Rather, he gave a calm, detailed recitation of the facts as he saw them. “Let us go back in history,” he said, laying out the politics of the war and how it sucked in him and his family and friends.
It was not, as many Americans might think, a genocide based on race or ethnicity. As Rusesabagina put it, “there is no Tutsi language, no Hutu language; they speak the same langauge. No Tutsi culture, no Hutu culture. They are neighbors.”
It was class warfare. The minority Tutsis had, generations before, been the masters and the 85-percent majority Hutus the slaves … an arrangement reinforced by German and Belgian colonizers, who only made things worse. When Rwanda became independent in the 1950s, old rages and resentments went back and forth across town lines and national borders, one battle and refugee camp at a time, until the entire situation boiled over in 1994 with guns, machetes and neighbor literally turning upon neighbor.
The Tutsis were being slaughtered, and Rusesabagina, like everyone else, had friends in both tribes. When the 1,200 gathered at his hotel, the situation pressed suddenly upon him and he simply reacted with his wits and wisdom as the soldiers came to the door. One thing led to another as he talked them into leaving by convincing them to consider the humanity of the people they had come to kill. When they tried to dehumanize their targets as “cockroaches,” Rusesabagina found a way to remind the killers that they were talking about real people … babies, parents, old men.
When that failed, he called generals, colonels and police chiefs he knew in town, begging for help and protection one incident at a time.
Finally, the storm passed enough that the people in the hotel could be evacuated. Rusesabagina and his family found later that many of their relatives had been murdered elsewhere in the country, and recalled how he and his wife cried like babies when they found the dead. It was one of many heartbreaking moments in his hourlong talk.
Rusesabagina, who took his family to Brussels, where he still lives, claims he did nothing special — but we all know that isn’t true. His strength and courage stands out in a world in which most people go meekly along with the crowd … either to be killed, when the soldiers come, or to stand by and watch it happen, hoping the angel of death will pass on by, and that this time your number won’t be called. It’s a story as old as history and human nature, and the presence of a different sort of angel like Rusesabagina is enough to humble any of us fortunate enough to stand in his shadow for a little while.
People asked after the talk what they can do about Darfur, where Rusesabagina has visited, and where much the same sort of genocide rages on in Africa today. He advocated that people should put pressure on Congress, and said it would be the US, and not the UN, which would do something to stop the violence, if anything were to be done at all.
But in the end, Rusesabagina is one man who affected the people he saw immediately around him. He is not and does not claim to be a world-diplomacy expert. And much as we go to a lecture hoping that this great man might have the answers to the latest horror in the world that holds our attention but fails to engage our disinterested leaders, he does not. He’s just one man.
His message, though, was that we are many. And that as he used words as weapons, so can we. If we choose to.
Britney the Baldie
All right, kiddies… Let’s all fess up… the only strange thing about Britney’s shaved head is that we all feel compelled to go through the motions of pretending that we find it strange that Britney would shave her head in the first place.
Let’s think this through, shall we? What is Britney Spears’ job? To be famous, of course.
How does one stay famous? Why, by getting people to talk about you, of course.
How does one get others to talk about them? Why, by getting onto the cover of People magazine, naturally.
How does one get on the cover of People magazine?
Well, that’s a bit trickier these days, especially with all the competition. I mean, there’s the lovesick astronaut saga still percolating out there. There’s the whole Anna Nicole Smith trainwreck, which will have a good shot at the cover again. And then there are the Oscars…
Looks like the kid’s just being good at her job. Dontcha think?
A one-word movie review
My 19-year-old son, a man of few words, saw “The Last King of Scotland” last nite at the Neon.
I asked him this morning how it was.
“Rough,” he said.
Hmmmm. A movie about Idi Amin… says about all I need to know.
Maybe we could use a few more one-word reviews. It would save time and energy that we could expend on more useful things, right?
Let’s try it…
“The Queen” … Understated.
“Little Miss Sunshine” … Whimsical.
“Borat” … Flatulent.
Hey, this is fun. Try it!
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Save us from cultural comic-bookification, please…
There are people who are movie stars for no apparent or explainable reason, and Ben Affleck has always struck me as one of those. Why’s he so famous? Matt Damon did most of the heavy lifting on that writing Oscar they shared, I bet, and Affleck makes mostly crummy movies. There was the whole J-Lo thing, and good for him. But should you be able to build a career on that?
So my interest was piqued when I read the glowing reviews he got for “Hollywoodland,” a movie from earlier this year in which, sure enough, Affleck demonstrates quite clearly that I’d been a bit harsh. He can indeed fill a complicated role, and do so quite nicely.
He plays George Reeves, the grade-B actor who rocketed to fame playing Superman on TV in the 1950s. Reeves died of a gunshot wound to the head after several years on the tube, and Hollywoodland turns questions around his death — suicide? murder? — into intriguing melodrama with a brisk film-noir flair. It’s a good flick.
Reeves, we learn, never wanted to be Superman. He wanted to be a serious film actor in an era when TV was still in its toddlerhood and wasn’t considered important or even remotely artistic. He needed the job but hoped to get back into movies — and in fact landed a bit part in an important film in its day, 1953’s “From Here to Eternity.”
During the screening for “Eternity,” the audience breaks out in giggles when Reeves comes on. They think it’s funny to see Superman trying to act. He’s just a guy in tights, right? Who can take him seriously?
The camera dwells on Affleck’s face, his countenance falling as he keeps up a brave front. It’s heartbreaking and the beginning of the end for him. Affleck handles it brilliantly, and the scene was singled out in many of the reviews he got.
“Hollywoodland,” however, did only marginally well at the box office, and I wonder if the reason why might also be the moment in which Affleck shines so well. What I mean is this: For a contemporary audience to understand Reeves’ torment, we have to be able to understand why the audience laughed.
Today, heroes in tights are all the rage. The comic-bookification of popular culture has gotten to the bizarre point in which fine actors fight and claw to get prized roles in blockbusters fashioned after stories we enjoyed as adolescents.
Halle Berry wins an Oscar and then plays Catwoman. Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr., a serious actor’s actor, graces the cover of Esquire this month talking about his next big role — as Iron Man.
Oscar winner Nicolas Cage is playing “Ghost Rider” — truly one of the most minor characters in Marvel’s vast stable, suggesting that our craving for comic-book movies has reached a point of insatiability where we’re filming fourth-rate characters most of us forgot existed, once we grew up and got this thing called a driver’s license.
Even weirder is to contrast DC’s superstars, Superman and Batman. Consider that two years ago Christian Bale took exactly the opposite route as Reeves. He realized that he was about to be stuck forever in overly serious, indie roles that paid little — and so he actively sought out the chance to play Batman.
I’m not the first to wonder how we got to this strange place, or to fret about where this all fits into the general infantilization of our society. But thinking back to “Hollywoodland,” I wonder whether those people in the darkened theater, cruel as they were to poor George Reeves, might not have been onto something that we could use a little of today.
Another American Idol CD…
Pop disc of the day:
Katharine McPhee’s debut disc, “KATHARINE McPHEE”
It may come as a shock to some of you to learn that there are still, even in these “American Idol”-drenched days, those of us who do not keep track of the show and its results. Even worse, we approach any music produced by those results with a certain mixture of disdain, dread and apprehension. Sorry, but it’s true.
But it’s also true that for every Clay there seems to be a Fantasia, or something like that, and so it would be unfair and untrue to argue that one should ignore Katharine McPhee’s self-titled debut album.
Turns out, in fact, that the woman who came in behind Taylor Hicks (who?) has put together a crisp and clever blend of pop and R&B that’s downright listenable and for the most part quite pleasant.
McPhee’s an appealing package, and has been wisely spiffed her image into something both sultry and girl-next-door, with the songs it takes to back it up. She sings a lot about heartbreak, as heartbreakingly good-looking singers all seem to do, but brings the right amount of sob to the tunes to suggest ambivalence; “Over It” works because you get the idea she protesteth too much. Smart girl.
She’s snappiest on the quick-paced numbers, such as the very spunky “Not Ur Girl” and “Open Toes,” a shout-out to the fact that a gal just can’t have too many cute shoes (while obliviously accepting the wildly mistaken premise that guys actually pay attention to what’s on a woman’s feet).
McPhee, as Idol watchers know, has a convincingly broad range, and she maneuvers the hills and curves quite skillfully. Her voice is better than most of the other pop-tart competitors out there, but also restrains herself from the sort of hammy, Whitneyesque hyper-singing that gave us the awfulness of American Idol in the first place.
See? I told you she was smart.
Grade: B
iPod picks: Not Ur Girl, Ove It Dangerous, Love Story
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Snowbound? What’re you gonna watch?
OK, presumably many of you are house-bound and landlocked cuz of the snow…
So this is a GREAT time to catch up on a lot of bad TV!
What’s on that you’re enjoying? Tell tell tell …
Brilliant new Brit rock
Good rock album:
Bloc Party “A Weekend in the City”
It’s been a long time since punk as once played in the broken-bottle streets of London has reared its head — but its spirit lives on in the form of Bloc Party, one of Britain’s brainiest young bands.
You won’t hear the Pistols, Jam or Clash in their music, mind you, which is more complex and softer-sounding. Frontman Kele Okereke’s quavery tenor brings a flighty tension to Bloc Party’s songs that move them a dazzling distance from the heavy-hitting, three-chord punk of old.
Rather, it’s in their lyrics that the connection is made. “A Weekend in the City,” Bloc Party’s second major-label disc (after 2005’s brilliant “Silent Alarm”), is a young urbanite’s hymn of despair deeply reminiscent of the discontentment shot through the punk classics of 30 years ago, albeit with a more poetic, contemporary bent.
London itself is the main character in this urgent, 11-song melodrama, its clubs, bars, sidewalks, bedrooms and balconies providing the backdrops for disaffected young adults who try to connect but fall away, who seek meaning in their lives but run into cold, hard walls often of their own making.
“I have decided … at twenty-five that something must change,” Okereke wails, worried and clenched-angry about his failure to find solace in sex, fearful of his dependence on alcohol, afraid that a terrorist’s bomb may be on the next bus that comes by — in short, he’s losing it over nearly everything.
As it veers nimbly from explosive drumbeats to gentle, watery guitar lines, Bloc Party’s music hint that life may eventually hold something better, but it’s far from certain — and certainty is what these characters crave. For most of this weirdly entrancing album, one is left with the only partial compensation that desperation has rarely sounded this good.
Grade: B
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And a final Grammy thot…
Is it just me, or does every song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers sound exactly every other song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
Just wondering…
DixChicks and the Grammys: Can you say political?
All right, let me say first that I thought “Taking the Long Way” was a good album. I even gave it an A when I reviewed it last year.
I also thought it was reasonably courageous, at least as far as these things go. I mean, the Chicks took an unpopular political stance, stuck to their guns in the face of the potential loss of much of their fan base, and then dealt with fallout head-on. “Taking the Long Way” doesn’t make any apologies for anything that transpired during the ashamed-of-Bush period; if anything, it restated in no uncertain terms that the Chicks would have done it all over again.
Fair enough, and actually kinda refreshing in these days of overweening, preening celebrity mea-culpas that really mean nothing. Made us like the DixChix even better.
But really: Five Awards, including the top Grammy of the year? Come on, now.
If you have to wonder why people seem to care less and less about the Grammys, I would offer Sunday night’s results as Exhibit A.
“Taking the Long Way” wasn’t the best album of the year. Not by a mile. Not even close. It was very good, but it wasn’t the best thing out there. Justin Timberlake’s was better, and far more of a revelation in terms of what we got, relative to what we thought he was capable of. St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley was one of the most original things anybody’s put into the mainstream in years.
Let’s face it: The Chicks’ win was political, pure and simple. They won because the Grammys wanted to prove their left-wing cred and toss it in the face of the country music establishment that had dissed the band in the last few years. This was pure Blue State-Red State, left vs. right — and very little about the music.
Too bad, too, because the Grammys have a hard enough time being taken seriously by anybody who actually pays attention to what’s being recorded and released out there.
Helen Mirren is fab
Today’s New York Times Sunday magazine is worth a read … it’s the fourth edition of the Oscar preview they do, a special foto gallery of movie stars who had standout performances in the previous year.
No surprise to anybody that Helen Mirren, bedecked in a dramatic black dress that sharply contrasts her crown of silver hair, graces … and I mean graces … the cover.
Of course you’ve heard all the buzz about her work in “The Queen,” and even in a year of many good performances by women actors, her turn as Elizabeth II has all the even money on her to win Best Actress.
I haven’t seen all the other contenders, but I did see “The Queen,” Stephen Frears’ fine look at the week between Princess Diana’s death and funeral, and the royal family’s response, or lack thereof, to it. The story revolves around that lack thereof, in fact… Remember back to that week, when millions of people were arriving in London to mourn the “people’s princess,” and Buckingham Palace made no public statement of sadness or remorse?
I had forgotten this, but people started to viciously turn against Elizabeth and the monarchy, accusing her in the press and in dropping polls of heartlessness and meanness. There was talk for a while that the monarchy could actually fall.
While that turned out to be hyperbole at a sad moment, the new PM, Tony Blair, released wisely that the mood of the people on this was not to be trifled with, that the elderly queen was badly misreading it. The movie is about the interactions between them as he convinces her to make a public pronouncement about Diana.
It doesn’t sound like the stuff of drama, but trust me … it is, and it works because of the wonderful performances. Michael Sheen is great as Blair, balancing concern for country with a growing awareness of his own popularity and power. He comes to respect the queen more than he had before.
Mirren plays out the queen’s slow realization that she has lost touch with the times and her emotions. She inhabits the role so totally that you forget you’re watching somebody who isn’t Queen Elizabeth. It’s an amazing job, very fun to watch.
Mirren, it should be noted, had a great year on TV, too. She was great as the first Queen Elizabeth in HBO’s four-hour series on her life and loves. That may have been a harder role, too. She nails it.
And on PBS, she continued her fine work as the aging, alcoholic detective on “Prime Suspect,” which is the greatest cop show on the tube, period.
What, you thought that honor belonged to “CSI”? Oh, you poor thing.
That’s another blog entry, another time.
Ice cold “Queen”
ok, let’s just give Helen Mirren a best-actress oscar right NOW.
who’s seen “The Queen” ?
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Ice cold “Queen”
ok, let’s just give Helen Mirren a best-actress oscar right NOW.
who’s seen “The Queen” ?
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Lost in translation? Not with DCDC
Elvis Costello once famously said that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” a witty way to point out the difficulties artists face when they try to convert something that works well in one medium into another. Things get muddled or mangled in translation.
It’s not that you can’t leap from one medium to the next; it’s just that you have to know what you’re doing. It should come as no surprise to anybody who’s familiar with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company that they knew what they were doing.
The always-dependable troupe took on an ambitious and interesting challenge this season to highlight great American artists: It wanted to reinterpret the work of the painter Jacob Lawrence into dance.
Lawrence was one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance — a dazzling painter whose career ran more than 60 years. His keen eye caught the moods and details of black American life and history; his hand rendered them in a frenetic, vibrant style that made him one of the great American painters of the 20th century.
DCDC employed its own artistic director, Kevin Ward, and three top national choreographers — Donald Byrd, Reggie Wilson and Rennie Harris — to each bring their own vision to bear, world-premiering the four suites last weekend at the Victoria Theatre.
Each choreographer came to the challenge differently, choosing wisely to avoid literal interpretations of Lawrence’s paintings and style, but drawing inspiration from his vision and moving past it as quickly as possible.
Byrd’s piece,”J Lawrence Paint (Harriet Tubman Remix),” drew most obviously from Lawrence’s thematic interest in black history. This large ensemble piece touched on slavery, escape, emancipation, lynching, salvation and more, compressing 100 years into 20 glorious minutes of movement and music. It was breathtaking and one of the best things DCDC has done.
Ward’s “Continuing Education” went smaller and more personal, teaming two pairs of dancers who acted as each others’ mirror images on a compelling voyage of self-discovery.
Wilson’s lively piece was the one that looked most obviously like a Lawrence painting, attiring the dancers in brightly colored costumes that immediately recalled the Jazz Age during which Lawrence flourished. But the choreography quickly morphed into something he might never have imagined, blending jazz, African music, hip-hop and R&B into something brilliantly new through dance. The effect was to begin with Lawrence’s time-specific imagery and slingshot it dramatically into present day and beyond.
Harris’ “Jacobs Ladder” used white costumes to drain the color from Lawrence’s paintings, replacing it with wild, fabulous hip-hop-influenced ballet moves that truly captured the energy of his attitude and work. By the end of it all, one did indeed have a sense of paintings sprung vividly to life — but DCDC also managed to accomplished so much more.
The audience ate it up; Jacob Lawrence would have been proud; and Elvis Costello would have been darn impressed.
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2 new Harry Connick Jr. CDs!
It’s not often that an artist releases two albums nearly simultaneously, and there’s a good reason for it — namely, that you end up automatically competing with yourself in the marketplace, which is a bit self-defeating.
There’s another reason to think twice about, though: That much product invites critical comparisons that may work against you. For instance, are there two discs because the singer couldn’t decide which was his/her best material? Do they offer contradictory statements about where the artist’s creative head is at right now? Is it just too much?
Harry Connick Jr. is the one playing this game at the moment, and in the end it’s a bit of a mystery as to why he released his suite of New Orleans songs on two different CDs, though one gets a whiff of contractual complexity.
The more mainstream one, “Oh My Nola,” is out on Columbia, his usual label. The more unconventional one, “Chanson du Vieux Carre,” is out on the jazzier, more indie-minded Marsalis Music/Rounder.
The latter is pure big-band jazz recorded with a very fine and very big band indeed: 16 players in addition to Connick, who arranged, conducted and plays piano.
It’s a fun album, mixing traditional tunes by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Hoagy Carmichael with newer tunes of his own that fall in pretty closely with the oldies. There are few vocals, none of them Harry’s, and the music is stompin’ and upbeat enough that not even his fairly clumsy keyboard work can bring it down.
“Oh My Nola” is more what Connick’s fans might be looking for. It’s a fairly amusing romp, dedicated to the sounds and feeling of his hometown New Orleans, and he serves it up the way a French Quarter barkeep knows how to mix up one of those brain-melting fruity drinks.
Seriously, Connick’s an old hand at this stuff by now. He plays the shiny-haired barroom partyboy as well as he does the suave, sleepy-eyed seducer, and he’s good at both personas. One gets the impression that he prefers the former, but knows his mostly female fans demand the latter.
Still, one wishes as always with Connick that he would at least give the appearance of working a little harder at either one. I mean, if the guy wants to release two CDs of nearly all cover tunes, he can — but were any of us really looking forward to another version of “Hello, Dolly”? Or, put another way — do you really want one of those fruity drinks when you could just a good bourbon straight up?
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Did anybody see DCDC last weekend?
One of the best shows ever by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company…
It was cold outside but hot hot hot inside the Vic… anybody out there go? Lookin’ for some reax…
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Pity the poor astronaut
Since it’s February, love must not be just in the air, but in the news….
First, there’s that marvelous story about the young, prehistoric couple found cuddled together in a grave near Mantua, Italy, home of “Romeo and Juliet,” a splendid archaeological find that was just made for modern-day headline writers…. Neat story indeed.
ut surely, one of the most fascinating stories of recent weeks is that of the love-struck astronaut who, according to police, felt she had to do something about a romantic rival and was willing to drive across the country and throw her life away to do it.
This would have been a bizarre and compellingly twisted-seeming story anyway, at least on the order of the tale of the runaway bride. But the fact that this one contains not just one but two astronauts, another air force captain and a plotline right out of “Law and Order: SVU” (um, “SUV?” … wonder what she was driving….?) makes it all the more juicy and strange.
Let’s step back at bit, though, and mull it over. At the heart of the whole sordid mess is a very real human tragedy that is in its own way downright Shakespearean in its details and emotional wallop — and truly compelling, most of all, because the story apparently has over-the-top jealousy and a badly broken heart at its center.
That’s what makes the story so resonant, I think. Lots of the coverage has asked: How could somebody as straight-arrow as an astronaut act this way? But that seems to miss the main point. Sure … being an astronaut is certainly a high-stakes, high-pressure, high-risk job that requires a lot of on-the-ball calm and professionalism, but does that mean that the people who perform it are immune from the frailties that make them, after all, people? I don’t think so.
Please note that I’m in no way whatsoever condoning violence, or meaning to make light of the crime that police say that Capt. Nowak was intending to commit. But it is odd to me that we seem bewildered as a culture by stories that run counter to the stereotypical ways in which we like to pigeonhole people — and thereby process what we perceive as the reality around us. In our easy-think world, lawyers act one way, short-order cooks act another. Astronauts have hard, technical jobs, we think … ergo, they must be hard, technical people who don’t have feelings, or at least who don’t react to their feelings the way the rest of us do. When we find one who does, we brand her as more beastly or weird than somebody else whose similar behavior might not even register with us if they had a job that seemed more prone to human responses to domestic unpleasantness.
Capt. Nowak isn’t the first person we’ve heard of who may have reacted badly because she was driven temporarily nuts by lovesickness, betrayal, jealousy, emotional hurt or extreme romantic sadness … if indeed that’s how this turns out; at the moment, we’re all surmising based on what police have said. But say that’s the case … doesn’t she deserve for everybody to also sit back and realize that the self-control that it takes to do a job like hers might also be more brittle and fragile than it seems, and could also be the very same thing that kept her being able to roll with the emotional punches of life?
Or that in some way she’s also deserving of sympathy?
One thing for certain: It’ll be an interesting case to watch as it unfolds.
Anybody care about the Grammys?
Seriously, just wondering.
Yes? No? Helllllllooooooo….
Much ado about not much with “Aida.”
So, the wife and I caught the Tim Rice/Elton John musical “Aida” at the Schu last weekend, and we both thot it was pretty much much ado about not much…
Actually, more than that: Rather dull and disappointing, esp relative to the level of hype.
When you take an opera that is known and loved and rev it up into something contemporary with a bunch of mostly shouted pop/rock songs, it isn’t necessarily an improvement, y’know? In fact, it can all seem fairly silly…
Not faulting the local folks for bringing it… frankly, if I’d paid NYC prices for it there, I woulda been really hacked off… So it was helpful to have it come to Dayton; i appreciate the chance to experience the show on home turf.
But in the end? Yawn.
Anyway, what’d anybody else think?
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Next up: The Police come back!
I think it’s gonna be a good week for classic rock, kids…
First there was Prince kickin’ butt at the Super Bowl for the first halftime show in years that was actually more fun to watch than most of the commercials (altho that one for Emerald Nuts with Robert Goulet was one of the silliest, most hilarious things I’ve seenin a lonnnng time; my vote for No. 1). As you can tell from all the comments down below on the blog, lots of the rest of you liked him, too … though there are a couple of “Prince sucked” knee-jerkers out there; who the heck do YOU guys like? Toby Keith? Go home and watch your NASCAR and leave the reviewing to us with taste, willya?
Meanwhile, the next-biggest-hyped musical event of the season is coming Sunday: Yep, the reunion of the Police!
They happen to be getting together again at the Grammys, but face it: Nobody really gives a rat’s hind end about the Grammys, unless John Legend wins some more of them, and so the producers know they’ve gotta gin up the show with lots of high-profile performers to lure us in.
This time, it might work. I might just have to record “Rome” and watch Andy, Stewart and Sting get back together. Of all the concerts I saw back in those days, I never caught up with the Police and regret it to this day. Looking back, they may have been the best, certainly one of the best, outfits playing in their era, and surely get credit for being one of the few rock bands ever to create a unique signature sound that suffers no imitators.
But OK, here’s a question for ya’ll: What was the best concert you ever saw? Give us a coupla details. Why did you like it? Feel free to offer us a runner-up, too.
My fave: Bruce Springsteen at the Agora in Cleveland for the WMMS 10th anniversary show in 1978. Fourth-row seats, and my friend taping it off the radio back home so that I got to hear it again later. Didn’t get much better than that.
Your turn….
PRINCE ROCKED!
So, what exactly did we expect from Prince in the SupBowl halftime show? Did we expect him to misbehave, dropping all this Jehovah’s Witness nonsense and coming out in buttless pants, a la the MTV awards?
Did we think the man who dropped off the grid for several years to release music only off his own website might pull a fast one and play songs that none but the hardest-core fans might know and love?
Did we think he might play “Darling Nicki” and bring masturbation to a national TV audience that still frets about the …gasp! … sight of a pastie just a few years ago? Horrors!
NAAAAAAAAH. The Purple One played it very very straight, coming out with a straightforward classic-rock show that acknowledged and paid proper respect to the venue and the event. He opened with a blazin’ version of “Let’s Go Crazy,” from his “Purple Rain” days, and even dipped back into that title song from the era in which most viewers likely knew him.
Which is what made Prince a pretty sure bet for the Super Bowl show. He’s well known, professional, and yet seems a tad bit edgy to a large number of thhe people watching this most mainstream of mainstream events…. And he met that challenge with a wonderfully entertaining set that hit a lot of high notes, threw in a ton of great hard-rock guitar (it’s easy to forget what an excellent player he is) and a sexy show of old-school hits that met everybody halfway and also satisfied those malcontents amongst us who kinda wish he’d just soooooooooooooooooorta misbehaved, just to stir things up a biit.
Good thing he was grown up on our behalf. I knew I loved that guy!
America’s national holiday: Supe Sunday!!
Let’s face it, kids: While many Americans may think of our country as a Christian nation that holds Christmas or Easter close as the main and most important holidays that draw us all together, they are wrong.
And while others may say that the best and most self-defining holidays in the USA are those that are more patriotically based, such as the the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving (look it up; Lincoln started it during the Civil War to perk up folks in the Union, when things weren’t going well…), they would also be off the mark about that.
We all know what the True National Holiday in the United States is: Yep, it’s today.
Super Bowl Sunday has become the national day of rest, the celebration of all the things that speak to our lives in contemporary America: Major-league sports, glitter, partying, drinking, overeating, hanging out with your friends, not having to work, watching TV, being exposed to television advertising, brand worship, bean dip and shredded cheese, Bud Light, public vulgarity, ridiculously spent piles of money, short attention spans, shameful waste of electricity, halftime shows that appeal mostly to baby-boomer classic-rockers, pornified cheerleaders, car advertising, ultra-fast video editing, armchair quarterbacking, interminable pregame shows that mostly exist to provide more advertising time, and games that nobody really cares that much about anyway.
And we love it. Deplore it we might, but there’s no escaping it. You can’t escape your culture. It is, after all, yours, and you helped create it … whether you meant to, or not. Pass the chips, willya?
Have fun today hanging out with your friends, and remember: If you call in “sick” tomorrow, the Boss won’t care…. He’s playing hooky, too!
Go, Colts!
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50 years after his death, Bogie still the best
If you’re a movie fan (and who isn’t?), January was a big month, whether you knew it or not: The 14th was the 50th anniversary of Humphrey Bogart’s death.
I wasn’t aware of that, myself, until a big, beautiful book landed in my mailbox commemorating the man. Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart even sports an official-looking Bogart 50th seal that strongly suggests this might just be the first of many such books and tributes we’ll get this year.
Fine with me. I don’t think it’s possible to get too much Bogart. In fact, the movie world could use a whole bunch of it these days.
Now, I’m not one of those misty-eyed nostalics who reflexively thinks that the good old days were all better than what we’ve got today. And I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that movie stars from the 1940s all had some special quality that’s lacking in today’s actors and actresses. Tom Hanks would have been a big deal any time he’d come along. Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, Cate Blanchett and Charlize Theron would have done as well for themselves in the black-and-white era as they do now, I’m guessing.
Rather, my praise for and interest in Bogart is quite Humphrey-specific. It took me years to fully understand this, but he’s the greatest Hollywood star of all time, bar none. There are two classes: Bogart and everybody else.
No, don’t tell me Clark Gable is the one. He had one great role in one great movie (I’ll let you guess which one) and did a sly, sexy turn in It Happened One Night. But the guy was all looks. Don’t make an argument for Cary Grant, either. If he hadn’t been that handsome, you never would’ve heard of him. Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, sure, but his knack was mainly for elevating character roles into starring parts. And besides, did anybody ever really buy him as a serious romantic lead?
When I was a kid, I was a big John Wayne fan and watched all of his movies that I could find on late-night TV, back in the pre-DVD era. I still think he’s under-rated as an actor, but he’s no Bogart. Bogart’s star power seems more luminous because it’s so hard to explain. He wasn’t handsome like Gable, but he was undeniably charismatic. He shouldn’t have been a lady-killer like Grant, but he managed to convey a sort of smoldering, barely repressed sensuality that appears to have worked on more women than Lauren Bacall.
He wasn’t a big fellow like Wayne, but he filled the center of many an action picture with a kind of coiled-spring energy that implied explosive potential. He may not have been as chameleonic as Stewart, but did he need to be? You went to see Bogart be Bogart — the tough guy with the tender heart, the complicated heavy with the hooded gaze that conveyed threat, fury, cockiness, lust or wariness in quick, firm measure. The guy who embodied cool before anybody knew what that meant.
Think of the movies, more than 75 in all: The bad-guy cragginess of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the slick-operator snap of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. The cowardly breakdown of Angels with Dirty Faces. The rainy seduction of Key Largo.
And each time you see him, there’s the essential mystery at work: How such an ordinary-seeming, unpretentious guy could become to iconic. What was it, that thing he had? I think it was loss. Bogart’s best work has loss at its center — a reserved, sad loneliness that is never far off, even when things seem to be going well. It’s something we all identify with, or a fear we have — and he had it worse than any of us. Dying fairly young, at 56, as he did, just brought it into real life.
Yup. Bogart and everyone else. It’s not even close.
