31 July 2012

Smile when you say that...

I watched part three of The Pacific last night... I must cry foul. The scene: The First Marine Division is on board ship, docking at Melbourne, Australia for some badly needed rest and rehabilitation. The people in Australia have realized that the Division's gallant repulse of the Japanese at Guadalcanal has secured Australia from attack, preventing an enlargement of the Japanese South Pacific Empire.

As the ship nears dock, the Marines are greeted by the citizens of Melbourne: banners lettered with "American Saviors," "God Bless the U.S.M.C.," etc. are carried by enthusiastic and beautiful young women, who are smiling and cheering madly. Confetti everywhere. Staged as it was in this production, it's a scene that reminds me of when the Beatles landed in New York City in 1964.

And yet the Marines on board ship look on glumly at the townsfolk, not a smile to be seen anywhere. I don't believe it!

Sure, they may have been exhausted and shell shocked, with many of them suffering from the effects of malaria. But these are red-blooded, healthy young men - oversexed Marines, to boot. Not even a smile on any of them? No... no, I just don't believe it.

I tried looking this one up, but the only thing I can find is the continual mention that the time in Melbourne was among the best for the Marines in the 1st Marine Division, very fondly remembered a lifetime later. (The word "paradise" crops up frequently.)

I'm not sure how what remained of the male population of the city regarded the Marines, but I'm sure it was more or less what the British thought in 1944: "The American boys are overpaid, oversexed and over here."

Last week I bought a 1960 Frankie Lane Western gunslinger Lp at a record store in Richmond: Hell Bent for Leather! It's in nice shape - very few clicks or pops - and in a very nicely recorded stereo. I know many of the songs form a cassette a friend gave me 25 years ago. The orchestrations and vocal arrangements are by "Johnny" Williams, now better known as John Williams, probably the best known living composer of famous film scores. An excellent recording all around.

Here's the Western gunslinger ballad/1960's early Rock and Roll hybrid "Wanted Man". It's catchy, but it's not the best song on the album. That would be the truly epic "Gunfight at OK Corral," I think.

The gunslinger ballad was in vogue in the early 1960's; I became a fan of the genre way back in 1965, when I used to play Lorne Greene's "Ringo" endlessly. I have a couple of Marty Robbins Lps - his "El Paso," a big hit for him in 1960, may have been the archetypal song in the style.

The Lp I want is the Johnny Cash Ride this Train record, which is more about railroads than gunslingers, despite the cover art. And I really ought to get that Lorne Greene Lp on CD now... oh, wow. On amazon.com the collection I want is $88! Whew. Maybe I'll just stick to vinyl digitizations.

I'm also in the process of digitizing my A Clockwork Orange Lps. Everyone knows about the soundtrack album - I see it at yard sales fairly often. I also have the 1972 Walter Carlos additional Moog Lp... better. I see it's been released on CD - yikes! Expensive. But horrorshow.

Angry Birds in Space just released a new game addition for my iPhone, which I have downloaded and been playing. The software is interesting... the game sometimes involves launching birds into the collapsing gravitational fields of planets. In one of these, there is actually a point, a Laplacian node, where the fields counteract and objects are held motionless. (I've read about the existence of these spots somewhere.) Fascinating, to see that coded into a video game! But then, I once spoke a friend at church who has a background in physics; he does coding for video games. When I went "Huh?" he responded, "There are a lot of physics in video games." Indeed!

30 July 2012

SEMPER FI!

I bought a couple of old Columbia Masterwork Lps at an "estate sale"- la-de-dah - Saturday morning. I also got a nice Time-Life book there on the subject of the world of Pieter Bruegel which somehow misses reproducing his most fantastic painting, The Triumph of Death. Wha?

In general, I spent far more time helping to run a yard sale than I did attend them. This one was huge. (In actuality, my wife showed up at 5:45 AM and stayed until 3:45 PM - a long, hot day.) Why so much stuff? Long story. My primary contribution was to suggest that the follow-on sales (there will be more) be held in the basement, where it's cool and air-conditioned.

As is becoming my practice for the weekend I checked out three films from the library - this time all war films - to see which I thought would be the best. Once again, I predicted wrong.

The Thin Red Line (1998) - It's about World War II despite the odd use of the line of poetry regarding British "Redcoats." A three hour film, I got through about the first 25 minutes and gave up because it was so utterly boring. (I learned my lesson from The Deer Hunter: Don't invest a lot of time in a flick that looks like a loser.) Also, it stars Sean Penn as a First Sergeant and John Travolta as a General - awful casting. There's one scene where Travolta and Nick Nolte have a conversation aboard a ship that seemed liek it was almost entirely ad-libbed... horrible.

Stalag 17 (1953) - This was the film I predicted I'd like the best, given that I prefer older films. I watched it late one night with my Dad when I was about thirteen or so; I didn't remember much about it. And while I did like it, I found it to be a little too jokey - and not funny ha ha jokey but rather dated humor jokey, if you catch my drift. Still, Robert Strauss as the Army's favorite unshaven slob G.I. Stanislaus "Animal" Kuzawa manages to steal nearly every scene he's in. (He got an Oscar nomination.) But, no, this was not my favorite of the three. It was,

El Alamein - The line of Fire (2002) - An Italian production about the British victory over the Italians in North Egypt in 1942. The Italian Army gets very little respect from anybody based on their World War II record, but it's reasonable to assume that there had to be some good soldiers therein who suffered hardships and fought respectably. This film is about them. It was excellent... one of the better war films I have seen, in fact. Poorly led, poorly supplied and suffering from poor morale in a miserable part of the world, a core of men attempts to resist an irresistible wave of British soldiers on the advance. It was quite gripping; a very well-directed film. Recommended. It stars Pierfrancesco Favino as the grizzled veteran sergeant, who must be one of the handsomest men in Italy. I found myself thinking, "I wish I had movie star looks," something I have never ever thought.

I also watched the first two installments of The Pacific (2010). I always knew I would, eventually...  My contacts who watch war films a lot - reenactors - all tell me the same thing: it's good, but not quite as good as Band of Brothers, the epic production about the World War II European Theater which preceded it by the same production company. They're right. Band of Brothers featured an unsurpassable device: each episode began with brief interviews by actual veterans, who were then portrayed by look alike actors in the dramatized segments. How can you top that? Band of Brothers remains my all time favorite war production.

I watched the overall weird opening ceremonies (epic and goofy, as expected) of the London Olympics Friday night. The two NBC commentators, Meredith Vieyra and Matt Lauer, outdid themselves. They were simply obnoxious. I kept thinking, "Will you please shut up?" It reminded me of the Fred Willard scenes in Best of Show, except that it wasn't funny at all. I tuned out as the parade of the nations began and didn't return for Paul McCartney; I wanted to watch the last thirty minutes of El Alamein! I'll watch the closing ceremonies when they're broadcast - hopefully Lauer and Vieyra will have been muzzled by all the bad press they got. Or perhaps I'll find a BBC feed. Yeah, that's the way to go, I think.

Oh, well... at least they started a good Internet meme.

More Gibby pics. My little grandson just gets cuter and cuter.

27 July 2012

Bloody good, wot?

I watched Jarhead (2005) recently; it's the story of a Marine's four days in combat during the 1990/1991 Gulf War. I didn't much like it. In many places it got into a sort of narrative bog. But... it has whetted my appetite for some USMC war films. Time to watch the miniseries The Pacific (2010) now, I think... all the more so since my pal Mike once sent me a WWII era reproduction USMC shirt from the production. When I got it a couple of years ago I could barely fit into it. 35 pounds lighter, it fits!

My book reading has been bumpy as of late; for some reason I've been disinclined to simply sit and read. It doesn't help that the last book I was in - about a Civil War era Union spy - didn't grab me, so I quit. I have now started Irving Stone's 1961 bestseller The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo. I wasn't a big fan of the film adaptation, despite the fact that it starred Charlton Heston. So we'll see how far I get with that book.

I've been listening to Eric Coates' London Suite and London Again suites: nice, easy, tuneful program music. But it doesn't satisfy like the more difficult to like stuff does. So I've also been listening to Peter Mennin's Fifth Symphony (1950). It's described as being "tonal, energetic and suspenseful," and so it is. The last movement is marked "allegro tempestuoso," and it certainly is tempestuous. I quite like it. You can hear it here if you are so inclined.

The opening ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics in London will be broadcast tonight on NBC; I'll tune in. I never bother tracking the games and the medals - I don't care - but I always get a kick out of the ceremonies. They are usually inept, goofy and grand at the same time. Plus it's great to see athletes from across the world, all marching out in garments manufactured in Red China and planning to have continual sex with one another in the Olympic Village - the thousands of condoms provided by the Olympic committee. Whoopee!

So what are the Brits planning? An enormous inflatable Big Ben or a meat pie? A Beefeater defined by laser light? Beatles music? I remember back in the Nineties, for the Olympics in Atlanta, they had a bunch of pickup trucks driving around the field, and the well-intentioned but ultimately hapless commentator said, "...and the pickup truck is so emblematic and important to the Southern culture...." HA!
Have you seen the Official Mascots for the 2012 London Olympics, Wenlock and Mandeville? It just doesn't get any lamer than this. Far better would have been, say, Winnie, the animated Spitfire. But that might offend the Germans. Musn't offend.

A news story I can scarcely believe: A European entrepreneur is planning a one-way trip to Mars for humans. Fox News calls it a "suicide" trip, but the organizers euphemistically call it an "extended stay." You know, just like one of those extended stay Marriott motels. Big attitudinal diff, there. I can see a great sci-fi/film noir hybrid developing as a result of this... In fact, yesterday my daughter and I were exchanging e-mails regarding possible story lines for a film involving isolation, loneliness and space - here it is!

The plan causes me to think of a modern opera I heard as a seventeen year-old, Aniara, by Karl- Birger-Blomdahl. Suffused throughout with Nordic melancholy, it's the story of colonists from Earth trapped in an out of control spaceship, fated to wander through space forever.

Check out this, from wikipedia: "One of the major themes explored is the nature and necessity of art, symbolised by the semi-mystical machinery of the Mima, who relieves the ennui of crew and passengers with scenes of far-off times and places, and whose operator is also the sometimes naïve main narrator. The rooms of Mima, according to Martinson, represent different kinds of life styles or forms of consciousness. The accumulated destruction the Mima witnesses impels her to destroy herself in despair, to which she, the machine, is finally moved by the white tears of the granite melted by the phototurb which annihilates their home port, the great city of Dorisburg. Without the succour of the Mima, the erstwhile colonists seek distraction in sensual orgies, memories of their own and earlier lives, low comedy, religious cults, observations of strange astronomical phenomena, empty entertainments, science, routine tasks, brutal totalitarianism, and in all kinds of human endeavour, but ultimately cannot face the emptiness outside and inside."

Whoo-hoo! Sounds like one of those Ingmar Bergman films which, upon completion, leave you in a semi-suicidal state. Or life in Helsinki as portrayed by director Aki Kaurismaki!

Weight: GAK. I gained about a half pound this past week. I attribute this to too many restaurants with a visiting child. Back on the regimen.

Have a great weekend!

26 July 2012

My daughter alerted me to this: A man with colorblindness who hears colors rather than seeing them. I like the comment one person made: "Sounds like a Batman villain origin story." Indeed!

The whole notion of hearing colors, or associating colors with sounds, is not new. As usual, there's a Greek name for it: synesthesia, or sound to color synesthesia - aka chromesthesia. But this is regarded as an affliction... there is also a school of thought that colors naturally have tones intelligible to nearly everyone.

For instance, the somewhat eccentric Russian composer Scriabin believed in the association of colors and tones. An interesting story: "In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight accorded with their claim: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that 'your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny.'"

I always enjoy a good Rimsky-Korsakov anecdote...

Speaking of color... I have noted a number of times that the loathsome James Holmes, the so-called "Joker" killer who has luridly dyed orange hair, is cited in the news reports as having hair dyed specifically to look like the Joker's. This may be what Holmes told the police, I don't know. But so far I haven't seen a reporter insert a comment that the fictional Batman villain the Joker has, in fact, green hair. Has no one working in the media seen an image of the Batman character? The Joker has green hair, folks, not red or orange. Green.

Now, having written that, a friend has insisted that she saw an image of a red- or orange-haired Joker somewhere on the Internet. Doing a search, I think what's she's seeing is certain images of Cesar "The Latin from Manhattan" Romero where it appears that, indeed, his hair couldn't really be called green and is reddish. I am uncertain of this, however. It may be a case of lighting or dye shift on some prints, because, certainly, Romero is shown wearing a green wig elsewhere. (See above.) This represents the customary makeup arrangement for Romero.

What's going on, here? I'm not sure. Cesar Romero was famous - or infamous - for refusing to shave off his mustache for the role; the white facial make up was simply slathered over it. On the standard resolution television sets of the 1960's, it wasn't a big deal. Perhaps he also tired of wearing a green wig, and insisted upon greater normality? Certainly, Romero's acting was still over-the-top no matter what he was wearing...

By the way, I'm the only person I know who insists that, to this day, Cesar Romero's Joker was the best and the closest to the classic character in the Batman comics. Jack Nicholson was just playing Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger was a revisionist, evolved sort of underplayed character. (Did he ever even ha ha laugh in the movie? The Joker always laughs.) There is also this: In the 1970's the D.C. editorial team decided that the Joker was a homosexual. (This was only hinted at in the comic books.) So was Cesar Romero.

The real Joker - the character depicted in the very first issue of Batman - hasn't yet been seen in a real life portrayal, I think. He is sinister in a way that all the others are not. And as far as makeup and styling are concerned, he would look like what inspired the character: Conrad Viedt as Gwynplaine. I would like to see that Joker.
I mentioned Richard Widmark as the sadistic gangster Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death earlier this week. Check out this video. Put the Joker makeup and costume on him - perfect!

You know, I never thought I would write this, being a Batman fan from 1964 or so, but I am now thoroughly burned out on the guy. Too many interpretations, too many portrayals, too many revisions. To my mind the best and most successful adaptation was the 1992 Warners animated series; I like those a lot. I haven't bothered to see the current Dark Knight film; a guy at church whose opinion I trust said, "At the end of it I thought 'That was stupid.'" That's all I needed to hear, as I wasn't a big fan of the Heath Ledger installment. I may catch the newest one on Netflix.

My visiting daughter leaves this evening to return to Utah; I don't know when we'll see any kids - or grandkid - next...

25 July 2012

Called to my attention by my daughter: Police art. You describe him, we'll nab him.

Last night I watched an unfunny comedy, Cabin Boy (1994), starring Chris Elliott. The main reason I wanted to see it was to see Ricki Lake as the ship's figurehead, really, the only clever thing about this film. I remembered that from years ago when I saw the film the first time. I like it when icons like figureheads, the Statue of Liberty, cigar store Indians, etc. come alive. It's a result of watching too many 1930's cartoons when I was a kid, I guess. (The Statue of Liberty enjoys a KOOL cigarette, a cigar store Indian starts walking at the 1:15 point.)

I like ship's figureheads a lot. It's a somewhat neglected art form, I think. When we visited the Mariner's Museum in Norfolk, VA in 2009 I saw a great collection. (Pictures start here.) You can see that not all figureheads were voluptuous women; those are the rather badly rendered ones reproduced nowadays in fiberglass.

I also came across another example of the art of Philip Featheringill, who used to do album cover collages for Columbia Records in the early Sixties. I like this style a lot. (I blogged about Featheringill last year.)

Interesting story about electronic key fobs in New York City. And here's something I picked up from watching an episode of Top Gear: You can "throw" a key fob's electronic signal further by pressing the fob to the temples on your head while pressing the buttons. It's weird but true, and I have demonstrated this to my satisfaction more than once. Why is this happening? I think it's because by pressing the fob to your body you are providing a partial ground plane for the transmission of the signal, which improves its coverage somewhat. Of course, you might expect that to happen by simply holding the fob, too. Perhaps there is some other explanation...

Yesterday's Gibson photo creeps me out. The first thing I thought of when I saw it was one of those John Donne memento mori images, where the English writer is draped in his funeral shroud. Gah!

24 July 2012

Called to my attention by my daughter: It's 1900 and Germans are speculating upon what the year 2000 will be like. Will mankind have personal flying devices? Moving sidewalks? Weather control machines? The ability to shove buildings on city blocks around by steam locomotive? A primitive form of television? It's all on these postcards. I like the roofed cities: a roof over roofs. That ought to keep the rain out!

Last night at the pool I saw a circa 1968 sky blue Schwinn Sting-Ray Fastback bike similar to the one I had when I was twelve. Spotting a rare car doesn't happen often; spotting a rare bike, even less. One minute video here. An account of the various childhood vehicles and bikes I owned is here.

My website Avocado Memories exists as a creative outlet for me to remember my childhood and as a journal for my children, but in creating it I also reawaken other people's memories. Recently I jolted a couple of reader's memories about the Kenner Car-Plane (an outrageous toy) and the bellows table (an ugly coffee table style). The relevant e-mails are here.

After discussing current Hollywood product with my wife (comic books, theme park rides, Saturday Night Live skits, sequels and explosions) last night, I felt a desire to see a movie produced by, about and for real adults. So I watched Road House (1948); I last saw it about a decade ago. It stars my film noir favorites Ida Lupino, Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark.

Widmark stars as Jefty, owner of the titular road house, which features a cocktail bar, the world's smallest spinet piano and that indispensable feature of 1940's American culture, a bowling alley. It is, then, a prime example of that rarest genre within a genre, Bowling Noir. Jefty also owns a groovy woodie station wagon - one with real wood on the sides - lettered with "Jefty." It just didn't get any cooler than that in the late 1940's. I once discussed this film with a fellow noirhead who told me, "If there was a place like Jefty's today I'd hang out there!" Me, too.

Ida Lupino is the hardboiled gal ("She reminds me of the first woman who ever slapped my face!") brought in to sit at the piano, sing mournful love songs and burn marks in the paint finish with her cigarettes. Her world-weary, tough as nails performance of "One For My Baby" (a signature Sinatra tune), sung with a croaky mezzo, is a standout in film noir. Celeste Holm: "She does more without a voice than anybody I've ever heard!"

If you have two men and a dame in film noir you have a bitter rivalry and eventually a murder, and that's what happens in this. A highlight: Widmark reprising his celebrated maniacal laughter he introduced to America in his starring debut Kiss of Death (1947) as sadistic gangster Tommy Udo. (Widmark premiered with a bang, shoving a wheelchair bound woman down a flight of stairs. When John Wayne met Widmark at a party he reportedly said, "Oh, so you're that laughing son-of-a-bitch!")

Because of old school craftsmanship, Road House doesn't wear out its welcome and ends after 95 minutes. Great film, lots of fun.

Speaking of the past, check this out: My pal Mike's collection of his crushed velvet bow ties worn during the Seventies. Yes, that's right, people actually wore these back then and were considered fashionable, even well-dressed. In fact, here's Mike wearing the dark blue velvet suit that goes with the dark blue velvet bow tie. (I hasten to add that I never wore anything like this.) My wife always recommends keeping old clothes - this stuff invariably comes back into style. (Be afraid.)

The news these days is rotten (the "Joker" gunman, the economy), but the smile of a baby assures us that there is always a glimmer of hope and joy. Yesterday my son sent me the first unequivocal photographed waking smile on the face of my grandson Gibson, reproduced above. It lit up my day! I am happy to report that the little guy is doing fine and is now generally past his baby acne stage - hooray!

23 July 2012

As it rained Saturday morning, there was only one yard sale going - and it wasn't great. So boo, hoo.

I've been listening to the songs on a two CD set entitled The Civil War; I forget where I got these from. I'm not sure if it's simply a recorded suite of new songs about the Civil War or from some musical production at Branson, MO. Songs are included which give a perspective of the war from slaves, a nurse, a wife who is left to work the farm, Frederick Douglass and even one Reb and a Yank soldier (nice they were included). They unaccountably missed the points of view of female musketmen, pack mules and the handicapped. I'm half expecting a song from Civil War homosexuals, but I'm only half way through it. Maybe it's in part two. In other words, this is a rampantly politically correct work - and the songs are mediocre. Bleah.

I found a colossal, like new two volume work at a library sale for only three dollars: Burke's Peerage World Orders of Knighthood and Merit; this is the currently published 2006 edition. It is very impressive - it contains many illustrations, nearly all in glossy color. Quite a book. I see you order it from Burke's Peerage for 295 pounds, which is about $458. I really ought to put this on e-Bay!

As is my occasional wont, I checked three documentaries out from the library on Friday to see if the one I think will be the best from looking at the covers is the best. Again, no.

Coma (2008) - By looking at the title I had supposed that this HBO work was about comas, how they happen, what's going on in the brain, the science behind it, etc. Nope... the title is misleading. This is about traumatic brain injury and recovering from a coma. It was the most thoroughly depressing documentary I have ever seen. Bummed me out. Yet another thing in life to fear... I'm sorry I watched it!

Been Rich All My Life (2006) - About geriatric tap dancing women from Harlem. I had high hopes for this one - "Sassy! Inspirational!" - and expected that it would be the best of the three. I'm not finished with it yet, but, no, I'm kind of tuning out. I may not finish watching it.

Bejing Taxi (2010) - In advance of the 2008 Olympics, Chinese taxi cab drivers cruise endlessly around town looking for fares and a living, a hardscrabble life. This was the best of the three. It was pretty low key, but I appreciated the view of modern Bejing.

The Chinese are erecting some odd, rather gormless looking buildings in Bejing. Eggs. Bird's nests. Bumps. Mandarins. Lego bricks. Weird crap in general (causing the site to ask if China is becoming the world's testing ground for bad architecture). The weirder the better there, it seems.

By the way, the city now known to us as Bejing has been known to us by many other names. I kind of wish they had settled on "Ji."

Gibson photos: Baby acne clearing up (hooray!), first appearance at church, "paying attention like a good boy." Sigh. I am crazy about that baby. Wish we lived closer.

Got to go... I'm having irritating problems with Internet Explorer.

20 July 2012

Max and Moritz

I mentioned Charlton Heston in yesterday's blog entry... it occurs to me that the essence of true Christianity can be gleaned from a line in Ben-Hur. In the film, Judah Ben-Hur, a strong but tormented man full of hate and resentment, returns to his lady from seeing Christ crucified, and reports that, even on the cross, Christ forgave His tormentors. "Even then," she says. Then Heston delivers the best movie line ever: "Even then. And I felt His voice take the sword out of my hand." Miklos Rozsa's supreme movie music then swells, the healed and restored family embraces, and the choir sings Hallelujah. Wow. No, they absolutely do not make films that that anymore; Hollywood is incapable of it.

I checked; that wonderful line is not in Lew Wallace's book... it's a creation of the scriptwriter. So... who was the screenwriter? Karl Tunberg is given the writing credit for Ben Hur, but there's an asterisk. From the IMDb: "Though Karl Tunberg is the only writer officially credited with writing the screenplay for Ben-Hur, and although he was the only writer to be Oscar-nominated for the film, he is also one of the few major creative people involved with it who did not win the Academy Award that year, and it has been documented that director William Wyler was completely dissatisfied with Tunberg's script. It was he who called in a host of celebrated writers, among them playwrights Christopher Fry and Maxwell Anderson, to improve the quality of the script.

According to a recent biography of William Wyler, Tunberg insisted on being the sole person given screen credit for the screenplay of the 1959 Ben-Hur, much to Wyler's displeasure. Wyler was apparently just as displeased when Tunberg was the sole writer who was Oscar nominated for Ben-Hur. So... who wrote that line? Reading a wikipedia article about the Ben-Hur script it appears we will never know!

I listened to some nice, tuneful, unchallenging program music this morning on the way into work: Eric Coates' London Suite. I am a sucker for just about anything having to do with that city... It's from an Lp I bought second hand years ago at an independent record store in downtown Hollywood. I am only now getting around to listening to it, having digitized it and put it on CD. I have to confess that I was attracted to it first by the appealing cover art and secondly by the program.

Sometimes you can judge an album by its cover! I am happy to report that it's what the Brits would call a lovely Lp. It is suprisingly well-recorded, given the limitations of the analog process and imperfections on the vinyl surface. But I have run it through Audacity's pop and click remover software and it sounds great!

I watched an A&E biographical piece on Mark Twain last night; I learned a new fact: He was awarded an honorary D. Litt. degree from Oxford, and took great pleasure in it. (As would I.) So much so, in fact, that he insisted upon wearing his flat hat and Oxford gown at his daughter's wedding - much to her embarassment. In fact, he wore it rather often in public. Twain was a man who didn't mind calling attention to himself in public... especially, it seems, as he got older.

Here's a interesting statement from wikipedia: "A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain's works is an ongoing process. Researchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995." That's remarkable, given that the man died in 1910!

Another thing I didn't know: Sam Clemens maintained that his pen name "Mark Twain" originated in a riverboatman's call to signify a river depth of two fathoms (twelve feet), and that's the version everyone has read. But there's a new theory, that it really refers to a running bar tab that Twain would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. He'd call out "Mark Twain" to mean, "Mark me down for two beers on my tab." Which is correct? I suppose it's like that line in Ben-Hur: we'll never know.

Yesterday's Gibson photo is a cheery thing: Here he is smiling and wiggling in the morning. Given that his mother is a hairdresser, I suppose the kid is fated to have his hair done up in odd, cute fashion. In this shot he looks like Moritz. He's now a month old!

[Dead halt.] Wait... do you get the Max and Moritz reference? Max and Moritz are the protagonists of Wilhelm Busch's immortal 1865 book. When I was in Berlin in 1989 I found an English language copy in a bookstore and bought it for my son, who very much enjoyed it when I read it to him. It's enormously clever and entertaining. Here's an online copy with an English translation. Read it and be amused!

It's confirmed: my weight is now a yo-yoing plateau. A special occasion happens - 4th of July or eating out with a visiting kid - and my weight goes up. Then I get control and it goes down again. It's once again three pounds up, which I suppose I'll lose next week. Actually, I've been on a diet for the past six months... I am growing tired of it.

Yard sales tomorrow, which I do with my visiting daughter! Have a great weekend!

19 July 2012



You'll get my boat when you pull it from my cold, dead fingers.

 With a grandson named "Gibson" and a son with good Photoshop skills, this photograph was inevitable.

I watched the naval epic Midway (1976) last night. A decent film - I'm inclined to like just about anything with Charlton Heston in it - but I had a rather hard time keeping track of what was going on. Carriers underway, planes flying, pilots identified with subtitles, bombs dropping...

The battle of Midway was complicated. The battle, fought just six months after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, was, of course, the turning point in the war in the Pacific. As far as I can tell it boils down to this: based on top notch cryptanalytic intelligence, the crafty Admiral Nimitz managed to fool the Japanese (we called them "Japs" when I was a kid) into thinking that the U.S. carrier forces were at Hawaii rather than at Midway. Launching an ambush, it then apparently became a matter of whose scout planes could spot whose carriers first, and who could send squadrons to bomb the hell out of the carriers. The U.S. forces sunk four Japanese carriers, the Japanese sunk one of ours.

The whole complex story is here, but suffice to say that the U.S. Navy inflicted irreparable damage upon the Japanese navy, so much so that the Japanese were unable to undertake major offensives. The Navy and the Marines were thus able to hop islands in the Pacific (a terrible phrase as it makes it sound so much easier than it actually was), eventually threatening the Japanese homeland itself. Needless to say, much American blood was spilled - the Japanese were a determined and resourceful foe.

Any avid World War II historian could find lots of anachronisms in this production, but as I know comparatively little about World War II, I was blissfully ignorant. Except for spotting "USA" markings on grey Navy Jeeps which should have been "USN." And Hal Holbrook's ridiculously long hair. And theatrical blood of too magenta a hue...

I mentioned that I'll watch just about anything with Charlton Heston in it. I have lots of favorite actors (Edward G. Robinson, Richard Widmark, Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier in addition to a host of film noir stalwarts), but Heston may be my favorite. You can chalk it up to seeing The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur way too many times when I was a kid. Growing up, he was my ideal of what it was to be a good man: strong and resolved yet adaptable. Measured and unexcitable, yet intelligent and willing to accept new viewpoints. (His transitions from Moses the Egyptian prince to Moses the Hebrew slave and prophet, or from Ben Hur the embittered Jew to Ben Hur the converted Christian, are epic.) It has been remarked upon many times that he had a larger-than-life film presence; when you saw that craggy face and those lips set in that strong jaw you saw something akin to a force of nature.

Of course it helps that we both share similar conservative political philosophies; like me he was a Democrat turned Republican. I have even read his excellent autobiography In the Arena; I own a treasured autographed copy of it via a rugby friend who worked with him for a time. President of the National Rifle Association? That lends him right wing credibility, of course, but I'm just as proud of him for having taken part in equality marches and lending his considerable presence during the Civil Rights Era. And in the Nineties when the entertainment companies were presenting the public with cop-killing gangsters as role models, Heston bravely called them on it. In Hollywood you criticize entertainment industry executives at the peril of your acting career.

He made three science fiction movies, all of them good ones: The Omega Man, Soylent Green and, of course, The Planet of the Apes... damn dity apes. He made war films, westerns, a couple of films noir, sword and sandal epics and even appeared in nuanced roles you would not automatically expect him in: Cardinal Richelieu in the 1973 The Three Musketeers and Brigham Young in The Avenging Angel. A good man, a good actor. I do not believe that Hollywood has been able to find his equal as a heroic figure. I suppose Mel Gibson comes close, but the flaws in his well-known private life lessen his film impact (at least for me). Russell Crowe? Nah. The Rock, John Cena, Steven Segal? Comic book characters - parodies.

I also watched an episode of SCTV, from the 1982 season after Catherine O'Hara, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas left the show. Normally that would kill any other sketch comedy show, but Martin Short was added to the cast, the writing stayed good, and the shows were still quite funny.

Last night we took my daughter to Mike's American Grill, the best restaurant in Springfield and, arguably, the best restaurant in Northern Virginia. I had a filet mignon that was to die for. Afterwards we cruised around old neighborhoods showing her what's changed since she was last in town.

It's funny, I have a memory involving one or more of the kids with nearly every business and location in Springfield: the place where I used to take the girls to smell scented candles when they were little, the store where my son bought his electric guitar, the paint store where I got the materials to do my daughter's room in smoothies store citrus colors, the Chinese restaurant where we dined out with grandma, the Toys-R-Us where I got my son his first treasured action figure, the Popeye's where I bought chicken for my daughter's cheer leading team, etc. Even a freshly painted red neighborhood fire hydrant where I posed my daughters for a photograph, or the tree in a park used for a series of photos of the three of them. So many memories... when I'm ready to retire it will be hard to leave.

18 July 2012

Randall Thompson at the pianoforte

Yesterday's all day workplace management training turned out to be much better than I thought it would be. It was conducted by America's Secret Weapon: Southerners. In fact, a pair of South Carolinians who were not only prepared with interesting things to say, but said them in interesting ways. I always like to hear Southerners talk... they have more fun with the English language than Yankees. I once had a Carolinian describe his unsettled stomach as "th' howlin' skitters." Ha!

I did very well in one management test. According to the couple, the all-time record is held by a group of Catholic nuns who work with each other in a hospital. I didn't lead my team into getting it done as quickly as they, but, without giving away any details, I had a couple of flashes of insight which enabled my group to finish first - well before the others. It was sort of like the Kobayahshi Maru scenario in the second Star Trek movie; I began by challenging the process and the preexisting conditions. It was nice being praised for original thinking in front of my bosses' boss. So... my employer should give me a starship and some spare dilithium crystals, I guess.

As part of the instruction yesterday, we also tried some buttermilk. (It was part of an lesson designed to get people to try something new.) I tried it once as a child. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. But I still managed to get a couple of people to try it anyway.

Last night I watched an advertisement thinly disguised as a behind the scenes documentary about Disney's Epcot Center, produced, I think, by some surrogate of the Disney Company. No matter. I want to return. We were last there a decade ago; they've added rides since then.

Speaking of which, a new employee at this training I was at - yesterday was his second day on the job - once attended a month of Disney University. As I expected, he spoke very highly of it. When it comes to service and customer relations, I've never seen better than Disney. I wish I could attend that - not the least of which reason is that there's a facility in Burbank, CA, where I'm from.

My youngest daughter arrived home last night; I think she's going to hang out at the pool all day with her friend. (The weather in town is supposed to be at the 100 degree point.) When she was a girl she was a major pool rat, and a lifeguards' buddy. (One of the elementary school age kids who latch onto the older teen aged lifeguards because they think they're cool - as they are.) All three of my kids were lifeguards at the neighborhood pool; while it was difficult, responsible work, it was in most ways better than working at a hamburger place. Not that there's anything wrong with that; that's what I did at my parents' business when I was growing up...

I listened again to Randall Thompson's Second Symphony on the way in to work this morning, an energetic and tuneful work. I really like it. The fact that the main theme of the fourth movement reminds me of the Judy Garland song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is unfortunate, but it's not he symphony's fault. Thompson's work preceded the composition of the song. And there's a trumpet call in the third movement that sounds just like the trumpet call I use for a ringtone on my iPhone. When I get to that part I reflexively reach for my phone.

From some liner notes I found on the interwebnets: "When this work premiered on March 24, 1932 ... 'its direct, lyrical, almost pop simplicity,' to quote from the program notes accompanying the CD, endeared the work immediately to the audience. Music critic Virgil Thomson, a well-known composer himself, praised the piece, writing that 'it grows in musical interest from the first movement to the end.' ... Within ten years Randall Thompson's Second Symphony had received hundreds of performances. Now, for some unknown reason, the work and its composer have fallen into near-obscurity." What a pity! C'mon, herr Amerikan music direktors! Instead of scheduling the 5,762nd performance of a Beethoven symphony, why not play this once or twice?
I miss Leonard Slatkin at the National Symphony Orchestra in the Kennedy Center... he was known for his willingness to give new works a play. I once heard an interesting Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra under his baton. His replacement, Christoph Eschenbach, hasn't shown me anything. He seems musty, overly traditional, unimaginative, fuddy duddy... as is our local classical radio station, Classical WETA. It's my nearly constant experience that whenever I tune in they're playing something written prior to about 1830 - and it's mostly baroque, which I regard as musical wallpaper (to use Bob Greenberg's piquant phrase). Every now and then they get daring and play some Tchaikovsky. I don't think I have never heard them play any Prokofiev, Bartok, Ravel or Stravinsky. YAWN.

We were driving across the country once and I found Radio Kansas, that state's classical station. What a refreshing difference! Well. I vote with my tuning dial: I now listen mostly to the two good classical stations on Sirius/XM. Phooey on WETA!

17 July 2012

I tried to find the name of the second composer who died with Mozart's name on his lips, but I can't find it. Perhaps there was just Mahler. But I'm sure I read that there was one other. Maybe what I read was in error...

Still, I did come across some interesting famous last words. Walt Disney's was "Kurt Russell," written on a slip of paper. No one knows why, including Russell himself, who was fifteen in 1966 when Disney died. And Stan Laurel's was interesting: "I'd like to go skiing." (Nurse: "Oh, do you ski, Mister Laurel?") "No, but doing that is better than what I'm doing." Ha!

Video: Face Time session with Gibson Clark (7/15/12). I encouraged my son to put his iPhone in the crib with the baby and shoot some creative videos which he can title, "In the Crib with Gib." Also:  Little sleeping guy and Ready for fun. I adore that baby! And I feel the intense sense of displeasure every grandparent feels who has to live far away from his grandchildren. This is Unsat.

I finished watching Mozart's Sister (2010), a fanciful movie. The actress Marie Feret, who plays the title character, barely emotes at all in this film. She's pretty... but about as interesting to watch as paint drying on a wall. The film moves at a glacial pace and is also historically flawed. Is there any evidence that, as the film suggests, Amadeus' older sister Nannerl was a colossal compositional talent like her brother? No, not really. Did she fall in love with the Dauphin and he with her? No, not at all. The whole business about her immense talents being stifled is, I think, more a case of feminist revisionism than historical fact.

My home air conditioning system keeps shutting down. The problem is some condensation that appears on the floor near the system. It triggers the wet switch, which is designed to shut down the system in case of, say, a basement flood. I have to then take a hair dryer and dry the wet switch (which I sit on a dry 2" x 4"), and re-start things. So... why the moisture on the floor? I don't know. I tested all the fittings for pipes and hoses, and they're all snug. No water from there. I guess I'll have to do some "watchful waiting." Tomorrow's supposed to be 100 degrees... isn't that always the way of it?

I am now watching a "Behind the Scenes" special about Walt Disney World. Did you know that when you're at the Magic Kingdom park you're actually standing fourteen feet above ground level? There are all sorts of passages and maintenance spaces underneath.

Hurricane Meredith (that's my youngest daughter) touches down in the area tomorrow. We have no plans... but some will develop.

I have mandatory management training all day tomorrow at work. I have read that you're not supposed to comment about workplace things on a personal blog, but GROAN. We're probably going to "break into little groups" and develop "toolkits." It's gonna be a LONG day. Can I please retire now? My belief gland is badly frayed.

16 July 2012

Yard sales were pretty bad on Saturday; all I got was a Penguin paperback, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Yesterday evening we went to a church associate's house to play cards. I hate playing card games and dice games... the rules for these are almost always too complicated for my scatter-brain and they usually bore me to tears.

We played some game which, annoyingly, nobody could give a definitive name to. It involved trumps and at first dealing three cards to each player, with the 3's being wild. Then 4 cards were dealt, 4's were wild, etc. up to ten cards dealt. People "sloughed" off cards. Before each play everyone bumped the table with their fists and announced how many tricks they were going to try to get. I got the distinct impression that the rules were being made up as we were going along.

At the end, we worked down to one card which were held up to our foreheads, so we could see everyone else's cards but not our own. I recall seeing my mother attempt to introduce this to a group of card players at a table once, when I was a kid. It looked crazy and she embarrassed me. Does anyone know what the name of this daft game is?

I am SO glad I live in a day and age where I can occupy myself without having to resort to playing card games!

Over the weekend I found a couple of items I had as a kid, and added them to my Avocado Memories Toys page: Topps' 1967 "Who Am I?" cards (I found these two - Henry VIII and Paul Revere - especially creepy) and the Gerett Astrological Bank. Mine was for Taurus, my sign, not Cancer - a Cancer bank was the only image I could find on the Internet. Apparently these things are rare nowadays.

I played my occasional weekend game of Videos, whereby I select a number of DVDs from the library, guess which one I'll like best by the covers and see if I'm correct.

Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design (2009) -  I was thinking that this was the most promising because my Mom did all sorts of crafts, and I was hoping for an entertaining look at eccentric craft making. What I got instead was a rather assertively feminist production featuring a lot of uptalking, tattooed young women. ("I make designs that are kind of different? You don't see these often? It's my way of bucking the commerically made aesthetic and supporting local industry?" etc.) I did like the theme song ("Hands On"), however, which I listened to about four or five times on the menu screen while waiting for my wife to come downstairs to watch this with me. It has a really good James Brown style bass line. The clever animated title credits were better than the film.

Hell on Wheels (2004) - About the Tour de France, the grueling bicycle race. My wife and I agreed at about the fifteen minute mark that this was boring, so we gave up.

The best of the three, by far, was the surprising Genghis Blues (1999), an account about the blind American bluesman Paul Pena learning Tuvan throat singing, and then traveling to Tuva (a small nation north of Mongolia and south of Siberia) to compete in a throat singing contest, and entertaining audiences with a Tuvan/Blues hybrid. It's hard to explain... this video sums up the documentary nicely. Highly recommended!

(Never hear of Paul Pena? You know one of his songs: "Big Jetliner," made into a colossal hit by the Steve Miller Band. In the link I provide he performs it on the Conan O'Brien show and knocks it out of the park.) Paul Pena, I am sorry to write, died in 2005.

I am now watching a French film about Mozart's sister. It seems to be about how Mozart took all of the attention away from his older sibling. Sorry, lady, but so freakishly and lavishly talented a musician was Mozart, that he would claim the attention away from anybody... There is no classical composer who is more revered among those who should know than he. In fact, his name was on the dying lips of two great fellow composers, Gustav Mahler and... I forget who the other one was. I'll try to remember and tell you tomorrow.

:)

13 July 2012

Friday the Thirteenth!

Did you read about San Diego's thermonuclear Fourth of July fireworks show? Impressive closeup video here (turn your speakers down, it's loud). All of the fireworks went off more or less at once, triggered by some computer mishap; I've always wondered what this would look like.

In fact, on the evening of the fourth, while watching fireworks being lit on a neighborhood cul-de-sac, I mentioned to my wife how wonderful it is that fireworks do not simply explode. Her dismissive comment was that the manufacturing procedures prevent it. Well, yes, but... I like the comment from the gal at the end: "This is the best fireworks show, ever!"

As you may know, Excedrin pain reliever has been voluntarily recalled and hasn't been found on the shelves for six months. Yesterday I read a news report about somebody paying more than $200 for a bottle of it on e-Bay! Three labeled types of Excedrin, all the same. The brand formulation of aspirin, acetaminophen and caffeine in the very same dosages is available as a store brand across the country. There is no reason to pay scalper prices for this formulation. Do people not read labels?

This morning on the way into work I listened to a huge, noisy, rarely-performed work by Richard Strauss entitled Taillefer, for orchestra, choir and soloists. Taillefer, in case you're not aware, was Duke William the Conqueror's juggler or possibly jester. He travelled with the Duke's invasion force to fight the Battle of Hastings in 1066. In fact, according to some accounts, he kicked things off by riding in between the Normans and Saxons at the start of the battle and doing some kind of balancing act with swords while singing the Chanson de Roland. Show off. A Saxon then presented himself to fight Taillefer, but was killed. And then for reasons unknown -impatience? - he charged the Saxon line and was cut down. That'll learn him... good riddance.

Reading the liner notes to this record, Strauss intended the piece for a very large hall, and wanted to highlight the musical depiction of the Battle of Hastings with rifle and cannon fire. That's right, he wanted to depict a battle fought in 1066 with small arms fire and cannon.

I found this album in an independent record store in Hollywood; I was attracted to it purely by the cover art, shown above. It's an adaptation of the famous Bayeux Tapestry. The section used on the cover shows, not Duke William, but the aged Saxon king Edward the Confessor. Hm.

This particular performance is something of a curiosity as it was reportedly recorded in 1944 by various Germans and the Symphony Orchestra of Radio Berlin led by Artur Rother. In other words, it's a work by a Nazi collaborationist - Strauss was so labeled - performed by and for wartime Nazis, conducted by a full-fledged Nazi party member. Curiously, Urania Record Corp. doesn't make mention of this. Perhaps it's a pity that they weren't using small arms fire and (loaded) cannon for this performance!

I must hasten to add, however, that while Strauss was criticized by some as a Nazi collaborationist, his diary makes it clear that he detested the Nazis. Strauss was primarily attempting to protect various Jewish family members and repeatedly interceded with various German officials and even the SS in their behalf. In short, he was put into the situation of having to deal with the Devil, a tricky matter in any age. (Did you ever see the Kraus Maria Brandauer film Mephisto (1981)? An excellent film on this very subject.)

Taillefer, I am sorry to report, is not very good. In fact, I read one review that reports this piece as Strauss' "nadir." I think I shall be content with a couple of listenings and remove it from my iPod.

One last interesting note about Taillefer which suggests a German link after all: the name is derived from the Latin incisor ferri, "hewer of iron." From wikipedia: "Near the end of the third volume of his works, Robert Ripley mentions Taillefer under the heading 'General Eisenhower,' pointing out the coincidences between the Allied general and the Norman knight. Taillefer debarked from the shore of Normandy where the Allies landed on D-Day in World War II. The Battle of Hastings was on 14 October 1066, and Taillefer died on that day; Eisenhower was born on 14 October 1890; and "Eisenhower" can be translated from German as 'hewer of iron.'"

I listened to a wonderful new (to me) symphony yesterday: Randall Thompson's Second Symphony from 1931, performed by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein - an American piece by an American composer performed by Americans. It's quite upbeat, it doesn't attempt to reflect the spirit of its times, and is written in a modern, post-Romantic vernacular. It's quite tuneful and easy to like - a quality missing from much 20th century concert music. I look forward to getting to know this piece.

Little Gibson Clark in full cry.

Every now and then I lapse into juvenile humor. I apologize.

Weight: I'm doing the yo-yo thing... I lost three pounds again last week. Up, down, up, down. I'm trying to dip below the 262 pound threshold, but it's eluding me.

The weekend beckons. Have a great one!

12 July 2012

I'm number 1,390,240!

That is, if you look up my website "wesclark.com" in Alexa.com, the popular website rating service, you will see that's my ranking. While 1,391,077 doesn't seem very high, reflect that there are, by various estimates, around 346,000,000 websites on the Internet. That makes puts me in the top .4% of all Internet websites. I guess I can brag about that... yes? No? No.

I took out one of the cypress trees in front of my house the other evening... bag worm damage. You have to kill them in early spring; once they get to chomping there's no stopping them. (I lost the other cypress tree to them last year.) They are rather disgusting; they make themselves a bag which hang from the branches. The bags look like a part of the tree.

I donated blood yesterday; at the registration/questionnaire desk the volunteer lady invited me to donate "double red," which is something I've never heard of. It involves connection to a machine which separates the various blood components. Donating this way effectively doubles the donation while drawing only the same pint as a regular donation. I declined for now until I read up on it some more. It involves not only being fitted to donate blood, but to receive it from the machine once the blood is processed. Uhhhhh.... not yet. I need to research this more.

Apparently I was the blood flow speed king in the Bloodmobile. Not that it's a race, but I filled the pint bag faster than the other two people in the chairs. High blood pressure? Nervousness? Big diameter veins? Serendipity?

My grandson: Bigfoot caught on film!

I watched a documentary about Roger Corman last night: Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011). Corman, of course, is the shock/exploitation producer/director of 400 films, including the great 1960's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendelum, The Raven, The Tomb of Ligeia... my favorite being The Masque of the Red Death, which I saw when it was first run in 1964. It made a huge impression on me; to this day it's still one of my favorite horror films. I didn't see it again until 1981; it was the kind of thing where I wondered for years, "Was that film as good as it seemed, or was it just that I was a kid and was easily impressed?" I was happy to discover that, yes, it was as good as I remembered.

My childhood friend Jimmy's sister Kathy took us to see it when we were eight. We got to choose between this film or a Frankenstein movie. Kathy, a huge fan of the Beatles, wanted to see this film because Jane Asher, Paul McCartney's then girlfriend, was in it. She was sizing up the competition! That and the fact that the poster art for this film was much more lurid than the one for the Frankenstein one, so we chose Masque.

I've always liked the climatic Dance of Death in this one. It's eerie.
In the documentary it was pointed out - accurately, I think - that with the arrival of the sensationalist Jaws in 1975, mainstream Hollywood had pretty much turned to Corman's way of thinking and had started to produce Cormanesque films of their own - with much bigger budgets. Quentin Tarantino, who knows a thing or two about exploitation films, credits Corman with setting much of the current tone in Hollywood.

Another good Corman film: A Bucket of Blood (1959), a horror/comedy/Beatnik/film noir hybrid. It is, I think, utterly unique. As I recall, there is one shot of the city where the action takes place that is just amazing, the perfect dreary and blighted urban environment in the half light of dusk or dawn - we film noir buffs go for that sort of thing. Hmmm. I may have to watch this one again...

You have got to admire Roger Corman's knack for making money taking advantage of the zeitgeist. In the 1960's, when the Youth Culture was being endlessly discussed, he presented Wild in the Streets (1968). The plot: A 22 year old rock star gets to the Oval Office based on his call for votes for fourteen year-olds. It stars Shelly Winters, whose volume and bombast perfectly suit the material. The amusing ending: A twelve year old resents being told what to do by a fourteen year old, The Man, and plots a social upheaval. Votes for twelve year olds! Hahaha!

Another Corman masterpiece: Gas - or - It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970 - note the Vietnam War phrase reference in the title). The plot? A gas is let loose upon the world that kills anyone over 25 years old. Brilliant!

I also watched a Globe Trekker travelogue last night: Megan McCormick in London. It was okay.

11 July 2012

I listened to Van Morrison's 1971 album Tupelo Honey this morning on the way in to work. As is the case with Moondance, I like it. And I'm somewhat surprised that I like it because Van Morrison, as a performer, has never really appealed to me. But his songs are persuasive. As Louie Armstrong said, "There is two kinds of music, the good and bad. I play the good kind." There is good music on Tupelo Honey.

I also finished listening to the Bizet First Symphony yesterday, the one he completed when he was seventeen. The second and third movements are pretty good; I like it. I have therefore ripped my CD to my iPhone to listen to when I'm on walks.

Last night I also digitized an Lp of Borodin's music, made a CD and ripped that to my various computers and electronic mp3 players. Doing this is a much easier way of hearing the music than plunking myself down on the sofa and listening to the vinyl; this way I can listen while walking, on my treadmill or driving in the car. I also selected some rarely heard Lps from my collection to digitize and listen to. I have a fairly voracious appetite when it comes to new music... fortunately I have a lot of Lps I have never had time to listen to. (Years ago a guy at work gave me nearly a thousand; I sorted through them and kept about five hundred.) As I now have a quick and easy process for turning these into CDs and mp3s I'll finally get around to hearing them.

Last night I watched the 1946 Disney feature film Make Mine Music, a collection of cartoon bits and pieces that Disney had accumulated during the war years, when the studio was primarily doing defense work. It's not that good, to be quite honest. The first segment, "Blue Bayou," is pretty but boring. The notion of having Nelson Eddy sing the part of a whale who wants to sing at the Met wasn't successful, and there's a love story between a fedora and a ladies hat sung by the Andrews Sisters that was just weird. The best segment in my opinion was a manic retelling of "Casey at the Bat." Also good was a segment of era teens dancing to juke box music. The longest segment, "Peter and the Wolf," was okay. I can see why this got broken up, with only some segments being shown often.

Yesterday my wife bought Baby Gibson some little pajamas with airplane designs on it. I notice that one of the planes is the famous WWII fighter the Lockheed P-38 "Lightning," final assembly for which took place about two blocks up from where I used to live in Burbank - ha ha!

We did a Face Time (Apple videoteleconferencing) session with my son, his wife and the grand baby. I am pleased to note that Baby Gibson is more alert than he was; for a time he was staring at our faces on the computer screen as we cooed at him. He's also taking on baby looks rather than newborn looks, if you know what I mean. He turned three weeks on Monday. He still has baby acne, which is heartbreaking, but we're assured that this will pass. One of my daughters had it for a time.

Speaking of Burbank, I posted a bunch of my pal Mike's discovered photos of City Hall. They look like the interior sets one sees in film noir, which is hardly surprising because the building was finished in the early forties, when noir became popular.

I donate blood tonight. I'm getting lazy. INNOVA, the local hospital system who administers the donation process, has facilities all over the area, but I only donate when they're nearby. Although, in my defense, I will state that the traffic patterns in Northern Virginia are pretty awful. Why drive when you don't have to?

The people "driving" around here while on cell phones don't help, either. It's contentious for me to assert this, but it's true: these are usually women. Nearly every day when I drive home from work I see a car swaying right to left in the lane or poking along more slowly than the prevailing rate of speed - pulling up and taking a look, a majority of the time it's a woman on a cell phone. An employee of mine got rear ended as he innocently sat at a light yesterday, in fact. I would be willing to bet that she (yes, it was a she) was texting, or otherwise futzing with a cell phone and not paying attention. Naturally, this being Northern Virginia, she was driving a gigantic SUV.

Cell phone and texting accident statistics.

10 July 2012

Some years ago I found Paul McCartney's Run, Devil, Run CD at a yard sale - it's the 1999 recording he did as therapy after his wife's death.

The idea was to get back in the studio with some simpatico musicians and lay down some tracks of the early rock and roll music he first performed when he was a young man. After recently reading a McCartney biography I decided to give it a more thorough listening.

One song from the CD that has been maddeningly going through my head is an original McCartney song, "Try Not to Cry." Here's a live performance on youtube. It is very Beatlesque; it could have been on their first album. Yes, that's Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on guitar. McCartney also did a good job with Elvis' "All Shook Up."

Last night I tried watching a Romanian vampire comedy entitled Strigoi (2009), but I just couldn't get through it and gave up. There's humor there... but it escapes me.
Yesterday I also digitized three Lps to listen to as CDs or on my iPhone or iPod. One of them was Georges Bizet's Symphony #1 in C major, which he wrote when he was but seventeen. The record was given to me years ago and I have never gotten around to listening to it. His opera Carmen is famously tuneful and melodic, perhaps the symphony is as well? The first movement sounds very much like Haydn to me - a throwback.

I haven't finished the rest of the work yet. But whether I like it or not, the fact that it was written by a seventeen year old and is considered a viable, performable symphonic work, is amazing. At age seventeen I produced nothing of any lasting value save a snapshot or two.

Over the weekend we also watched some footage of a 1972 performance by the Osmonds done by way of a West German television broadcast. Yes, the Osmonds. I never, ever liked them until recently, when I have been forced to give credit where it is - or was - due. They were an unusually tight, energetic, well-rehearsed and, yes, talented ensemble. Check out the 1971 performance of "Yo-Yo" on the old Flip Wilson Show. No way around it, this is a Seventies classic and is still a lot of fun to watch.

The German performance was interesting in that while they could and were often their own musicians (all of the brothers played some instrument), they also simply sang with a set of backup musicians. The Osmonds, of course, were famously clean cut. Their backup musicians were not. They looked like models for the Seventies Facial Hair Look. It was funny.

I was once in a guitar store in Provo, Utah, hanging out and avoiding college classwork. Somebody in a back room was absolutely wailing away at a guitar; he sounded great! Obviously a professional, he was playing the most thoroughly spaced out Jimi Hendrix style riffs. I asked the guy at the counter, "Who is that playing? He's great!" He shrugged and replied, "Donny Osmond's touring guitarist. He doesn't get to play like that with the Osmonds so he comes here from time to time." Haha!

9 July 2012

A conversation with my twelve year-old self. My son found this; it's clever and original.

Despite the fact that Saturday was the second hottest day of the year, six brave households held yard sales anyway. But they had nothing of interest.

As sweltering as it was, however, the show must go on: Monocacy Re-enactors Bring Battlefield Realities to Life. No, I wasn't at this. I wouldn't be at this! Too hot. One fellow is quoted: "...the soldiers still would have eaten hot food, worn their complete wool uniforms and fought just the same. 'They didn't grow up with AC,' said 14th Tennessee 1st Cpl. Kevin Zepp." Perhaps not, but they weren't stupid, either. Credit them with some common sense. Just because we don't have any images of them wearing their shirts without their wool jackets while in camp (photographic sessions were dress up affairs), I cannot believe it means that they didn't. Well, I would have. In fact, I did so while in the Marines. My usual uniform for sitting atop poles and doing telephone cable splicing on hot, sunny days was a tee-shirt and no hat. I cannot believe that soldier behavior 150 years ago was fundamentally different than today.

"'There's as many reasons for re-enactors as there are re-enactors,' 14th Tennessee infantryman Russ Seibert said." Indeed. I do reenacting for purely recreational purposes: it's fun to visit historical places doing historical things. I'm not out to educate anyone, nor am I playing soldier. I've done both in the past. I'm in it for fun - and when it ceases to be fun, I'm out.

I watched a few movies over the weekend:

Marjoe (1972) - Or, confessions of a very young huckster evangelist. I dimly recall this making a stir when it was released - it won an Oscar - but it's rather dull. It says more about Hollywood's dislike of religion than it does Christianity.

Thoth (2002) - This, too, won an Oscar. By the same documentary producer as Marjoe and included as a bonus, this is a much more interesting work as it examines S.K. Thoth, a creative and athletic New York City street artist. A dancer/violinist/counter-tenor/percussionist/fabulist, this gender-bending "prayformer" (his word) has written a solo opera in his own made-up language and performs it in public places. I enjoyed his music and performance art. Imagine a mix of David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Alfred Deller with some Yma Sumac thrown in (he trills, he growls). But he's clearly following his own muse. A video of Thoth tells you all you need to know. He didn't do well on America's Got Talent, but then, this is a show that extols the mind-numbingly conventional. What do they know? I like the guy. Perhaps if I'm New York City I'll see him someday.

Stage Door (1937) - A film with 1930's sass and attitude to spare, it examines the life of struggling young actresses/dancers living together in a New York City boarding house. It stars Katherine Hepburn (an actress I have never cared for), but it also features Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and Eve Arden, which are the primary reasons to watch. They're great! Snappy, tough and world wise, this is one of those "Say, whatta you tryin' to pull?"/"And how!"/"You can say that again, sister!" kind of Depression Era films. Lucy was an effortless comedienne even then, so early in her career. She was swell (to coin another phrase of the period).

Vinyl. It was a crappy Lp then, it's a crappy Lp now.

Gibson pix! The baby acne is heartbreaking, but Mom says it's starting to clear. It's very common.

Let the week begin.

6 July 2012

I finished watching Chaplin's The Great Dictator. It concludes with an impassioned, but ultimately silly, three minute speech/lecture at the end which, as Roger Ebert pointed out, is badly out of tune with the rest of the movie. It's also preachy, tiresome and badly unpredictive, coming as it did at the beginning of the most destructive war in human history.

Do I not believe in the possibility of the universal brotherhood of man Chaplin espouses? No, frankly, I do not - not in a world controlled by man. Even a casual reading of history indicates that human nature is such that evil men will always be with us... and they despise any form of brotherhood other than that of the cudgel. And as far as a world without national borders is concerned (Chaplin endorses this as well in his Jeremiad), that, too, is silly. (Eurozone, anyone?)

But one will never get awarded prizes for adopting my pragmatic viewpoint. There's much more money and fame to be made and admiration to be had in posturing as a world peace visionary. "You may say that I'm a dreamer/But I'm not the only one." No, you're not the only one, John Lennon. And I cringe whenever one of your ilk makes it in elective politics and attempts to give away the arsenal.

Interesting fact: Charlie Chaplin was also a hit songwriter. His "This is my Song" was a 1966 hit for Petula Clark. My mother used to swan around the house singing that. But she only knew the hooky song title ("Ahhhhh/This is my song/A serenade...") and, as was her wont, made up the rest of the lyrics, sometimes successfully but most of the time not.

Looks like, after much time and billions of dollars spent, scientists found the Higgs Boson, or they're hedging their bets and claiming they found a "Higgs-like" particle. I have blogged on this subject a number of times, guessing that they wouldn't. At least, I was hoping they wouldn't. As I have written before, the Standard Model of Physics with the Higgs boson is a mess. It just doesn't have the elegant simplicity that, say, E=mc squared, has. Or perhaps we just don't have enough information to arrive at the ultimate, beautiful, elegant, scientific Truth yet.

I think I mentioned that, despite my vows to avoid reading any more books about the Beatles I'm currently reading a biography about Paul McCartney. Odd thing: I'm at the part about the recording the White Album when, ding!, I get a text message from my son-in-law (a graduate in history), asking me about the Manson family years and the song "Helter Skelter." He wanted to know how widespread the social fear was in the aftermath of the 1969 Manson Family Murders, how old I was at the time and what my take on it was. I told him that I was thirteen and that, generally, people living in nice homes along Sunset Blvd. were the ones who became nervous. In the working class and middle class neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley where I lived, the Manson stories were more a confirmation of just how out of kilter American society had become. People there understood that they were not Charlie Manson's primary targets.

I explained what a "helter skelter" is, a traditional and rather attractive British amusement park ride involving a long slide down a chute attached to the outside of what is essentially a large cone (see image above). I once saw a Britnoir with a scene where people slide down one - looks like fun. Charlie Manson claimed that the song was a prophetic warning of societal unrest and race wars. Paul McCartney, the songwriter, quickly disavowed this - and anything else having to do with Charles Manson - and pointed out the obvious: that it was essentially about the ups and downs of a relationship being compared to an amusement park ride. (Bruce Springsteen would explore the same notion in his 1987 song "Tunnel of Love.") He also pointed out that on that occasion, the Beatles just wanted to make some noise.

Here's a helter skelter ride video. See? When he gets to the bottom he goes back to the top of the slide, where he stops and he turns around and goes for a ride, 'till he gets to the bottom and he sees you again.

The book reports that the four Beatles were crammed together as closely as possible for that recording, screeching and wailing away at their instruments in an attempt to make the raunchiest, most out of control racket ever for a song. Musically chaotic it was, race riot depicting it was not.

By the way, that's Ringo uttering the song's last words, "I got blisters on my fingers!," not John as usually reported.

Baby Gibson: His first photographed smile! Awwww.... two more photographs follow, use the arrow icons to click to them. After all, you must see every photograph of my grandson.

Geez, what is it about grandchildren that turns middle-aged men into such ardent promotional agents? Have you ever seen one of those "Ask me about my grandchildren!" bumper stickers? I'd sooner jam toothpicks into my ears.

Weight: Gak! I gained back 2.8 pounds last week! I know why: power outage-related restaurant eating, Fourth of July overeating and a lack of my usual exercise. (It's been too hot to walk, and my treadmill belt needs a repair before I can resume using it.) So I'm yo-yoing. This is unsat. Back on the regimen!

The weather forecast for tomorrow in Springfield, Virginia, where I dwell, is 102. A nice, humid 102. I can't imagine anybody, knowing that, will decide, "Hey, let's move all the unwanted household crap onto the sunny front lawn or into the un-air conditioned garage and make a few bucks!" But I shall do a quick sweep of the neighborhoods anyway. Last year I attended a big church sale on one of the hottest days of the year. You never know.

Have a pleasant weekend!