Stan Dubinsky, purveyor of cool stuff he finds on the Web, shared this today. As he observed,
Would that all songs were so organized and logical. – S
I don’t know; maybe they are. I haven’t tried mapping any. But this one’s one of the best, organized or not.
Back on this post, we had a sidebar about the film “State of Play” — Kathryn mentioning that I really should see the original British series, and I will certainly put it in my Netflix queue. As it happens, though, I saw the American film over the weekend, and it was, mediocre.
I’m reminded of it again today because I went by to visit folks at The State, and ran into Sammy Fretwell, and told him I had thought about him over the weekend. That’s because the one detail the filmmakers got right in Russell Crowe’s depiction of a reporter, aside from the fact that he worked on a ridiculously old PC, was his workspace. I would say “desk,” but this was the sort of workspace that has worked itself up into a fortress, with piles of papers, magazines, newspapers, files, publicity packets, all sorts of stuff in unsteady towers of material dating back 10 years and more, stacked on desk, credenza, nearby filing cabinets, and other items of furniture that can no longer be identified.
I saw that and thought, “Sammy!” (And I say this with all respect; Sammy’s a great newspaperman. He’s awesome. This just happens to be a common characteristic of great newspapermen.)
Beyond that, the screenplay was evidently NOT written by anyone who had ever worked at a newspaper. The characters just weren’t right. And they said ridiculous things that only non-journalists would ever say, such as “sell newspapers.” You know how people who want to criticize a paper for a story say the editors just ran it to “sell newspapers?” That’s always a dead giveaway of a clueless layman. I’ve never met a journalist who spoke or thought in terms of “selling newspapers.” Most journalists didn’t care if you stole it, as long as you read it. Selling was the concern of the business side folks (and a poor job they’ve done of it in recent years, huh?). Another real prize bit of dialogue, which you can hear on the above trailer: “The newspapers can slant this any which way they want to…” Who wrote this stuff?
The one really true bit was during the credits, when they show the Big Story that the movie was about going through the production process and onto the presses. They got that just right. I’m guessing that’s not a tribute to the knowledge of the writers. The producers probably just asked a newspaper to produce a page with this story on it, put it on the presses and run the presses. And THIS part got me. I haven’t really felt nostalgic about the lingering death of my industry, but this simple device of putting the camera on the actual physical processes sort of gave me a lump in the throat — the film coming out of the imagesetter, the plate being made, the plate being fitted onto the press… THAT was real.
But nothing else was. Not even the messy desk, as it turns out. When I mentioned it to Sammy, he said I was behind the times. He took me over to his little fortress in the corner, and it was NEAT. He had gotten permission to take three days off from covering the news and spent the time imposing order. It was freaky.
Sort of made me want to go back and make sure the imagesetters, platemakers and presses were still there…
Whoa. I had thought the plant we were trying to bring to South Carolina (a prospect which is looking better, given Boeing’s union troubles elsewhere) was for building airplanes.
But you know what this photo looks like to me? Yep, the Stargate, from the movie of that name starring Kurt Russell.
Now, that would certainly give South Carolina a leg up into high-tech manufacturing…
And yes, I realize it’s a cross-section of the fuselage of the 787. I’m just talking about what it looks like…
Gene Garland, back during this discussion, mentioned the two wonderful BBC mini-series based on the first and third books in Le Carre’s Karla Trilogy.
Nothing better has ever been offered on the telly, in my view — with the possible exceptions of “Band of Brothers” and “The Sopranos.”
The amazing thing about them is that they are such good representations of books that are essentially about … meetings. Meetings and interviews. Sort of gives me hope that someone will see gripping drama in a story about an editorial page editor. (Guess I need to write the book first, though, huh?) All of the key action happens in meetings. By contrast, the middle book in the Trilogy — The Honourable Schoolboy — was all about action and exotic locales. Which is why the BBC didn’t do that one — too expensive. But it was also the most forgettable of the three. Smiley was in power in that one, whereas in the other two he was in exile, only the Circus couldn’t make do without him. (Perhaps you think, given my situation, I’m harboring fantasies of Oliver Lacon coming to my house one night and asking me to straighten out the newspaper, unofficially of course. Well, I’m not. But it’s an intriguing plot line…)
This could have fallen completely flat on the small screen, but it’s to the credit of all concerned that it positively glittered in the BBC version. And not just because of Alec Guinness as Smiley. The whole cast was fantastic.
For the best use of meeting dynamics ever on television, I invite you to watch the first two minutes and 8 seconds of the clip above, which in a beautifully understated manner, and only one very short line of dialogue, sketches the personae of the four major characters (other than Smiley). Entering the room on the clip are, respectively, the actors playing Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Percy Alleline and Bill Haydon. (As Control said, “There are three of them and Alleline,” the characters whose code names give the book its title.)
This is just so real. If you have, as I have, spent ridiculous amounts of time in meetings with a small group of people you knew almost as intimately as member of your own family, the little touches of how people establish their roles and characters in small ways will ring as true as anything you’ve ever seen. It feels, for me, exactly like the daily editorial board meeting, with each person wandering in in his own unique way and initiating wordless rituals that say so much.
Anyway, enjoy.
Remember when I mentioned running into Valerie Bauerlein (formerly of The State, currently of The Wall Street Journal) recently? She was having breakfast at a neighboring table with Tim Rogers, interviewing him for a story on longtime letter writer Clif Judy’s sadly successful campaign to close the Sheds to rehearsing bands.
I told her that sounded like a candidate for the page one feature read in her paper. She said that was what she and her editor hoped for. You know the story I mean — it’s generally at the center of the bottom of the front page. It’s almost always a great read, an excellent example of why the WSJ has long held the reputation of the best-written paper in the country (they told me that in J-school in the 70s, and it’s still true). According to Valerie, this story is called the “A-hed.”
Well, today Valerie’s story made the A-hed. (Although in this case, they ran it on the right-hand side rather than the middle.) So congrats to Valerie.
As for the story itself, here’s an excerpt:
COLUMBIA, S.C. — It looks like any other block of garage-sized metal storage units. But Sumter Street Self-Storage has long been the heart of this city’s rock ‘n’ roll scene.
Located on an industrial strip at the edge of the University of South Carolina, “The Sheds” are legend to local rockers — college kids with guitars, gray-beards still nursing band fantasies and hard-core professional musicians who have been cranking up their amps inside the units most nights for two decades.
It was in one of the 139 bays of The Sheds that hometown favorites Hootie & the Blowfish wrote and practiced hits like “Hold My Hand” and “Only Wanna Be With You.” Those songs, included on the 1994 Grammy-winning album “Cracked Rear View,” sold 16 million copies.
But thanks to a nearly two-year campaign by a local activist named Clif Judy, the music at “the Sheds” is coming to an end…
To me, it’s sad about the Sheds; two of my sons have been in bands that rehearsed there. First, complaints to police helped shut down the legendary punk club “2758;” now the Sheds. What are kids supposed to do?
Earlier today, I set forth a morally ambiguous view of the Franken amendment. For the simpler, this-is-such-a-slam-dunk-it’s-funny view, I share with you the way the matter was presented by Jon Stewart.
You can’t say you don’t get all sorts of views here. And there’s no question, this whole gang-rape issue is funnier the way Jon Stewart tells it than the way I do, but… oops — is the way I just put that prejudicial? (Could it be I’m one of those fogeys who is offended by the idea that so many college-educated young people rely on this guy for their news?)
Whatever. Just go ahead and make up your own minds.
You may have noticed that I did not write about the famous missing balloon boy when he was allegedly aloft — or when he was “missing,” or when he was “found.”
That’s because it never struck me as real news (and also because, since I don’t watch TV news and God is merciful, I missed most of it). It was not anything about which you or I needed to make a decision as a voter or a citizen. It did not give any of us “news you can use” — seriously, how many of the suckers who watched that “drama” unfold on the telly took away any useful, cautionary information from it? (“Hey, Martha, before we cut loose that helium-filled balloon in the backyard, let’s make sure none of those pesky neighborhood kids have crawled into it. Boy, am I glad I saw THIS!”)
Yes, weird occurrences are a legitimate (although lesser) form of news. And in a saner day, before 24/7 TV “news,” before “news” outlets maintained small air forces in such markets as Los Angeles, ready to go aloft and stay aloft in a tacky modern mockery of the Strategic Air Command’s mission in the Cold War, all in the mad pursuit of live, but meaningless, video (the O.J. Simpson “chase” being the definitive example of such “news” that told us exactly nothing that we needed to know), such a tale would have been reported — once the facts were in. You might read a news feature on a boy’s terrifying drift into the Wild Blue, if he turned out to have been on board. You might even read of how law enforcement was taken in by a crazy story, as you are now doing. But you would not have had breathless live, real-time coverage of what turned out to be nothing. Or perhaps I’m idealizing a better time that wasn’t really better. Perhaps. (“Why, back in my day we didn’t know when our kids drifted off in balloons, and we LIKED it!…”)
The 24/7 TV “news” culture and its twin, “reality” TV, created the Heenes. People like them could not exist in a world without those media forms. And that same culture, by the way, has infected the “serious news” of politics. Otherwise, the Joe Wilson “You lie!” story would have ended with his apology that night. But instead, his supposed “defiance” went viral, and he pulled in $2.7 million (so far), which made him a whole lot less sorry. And thus another media monster was created.
By all means, charge the Heenes with a crime. But remember that from the beginning, this was a bogus story, whether the Heenes were lying or not.
Ever since I watched the start of “Life on Mars,” as previously mentioned, I’ve had Bowie’s song of that name stuck in my head.
It’s not that the tune is so great, when you hear it in isolation. And I find the original Bowie video visually off-putting (I’d forgotten glam went that far, but it does help me recall why I wasn’t into it).
But the way it was used in the TV program — as the background for the pivotal moment when the protagonist is transported back to 1973 — is really effective. I complained that the series disappoints in some ways, and it does, but that was a really good bit.
By the way, that scene bridges this clip and this one on YouTube. Word in your shell-like, to again use a phrase I picked up from the show…
It’s come to my attention that some people are actually making like it’s a bad thing that the Swiss locked up Roman Polanski.
I can’t imagine why. A word in your shell-like: The guy’s a major perv. Here’s a source who seems to have her head on straight about it. But DON”T READ THIS if you don’t want some pretty horrific details:
Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in “exile” (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.). Let’s keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she’d rather not see him prosecuted because she can’t stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let’s take a moment to recall that according to the victim’s grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, “No,” then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.
I don’t even get what she’s on about with that “how awesome his movies are” stuff. Not really. “Chinatown” had something going for it, but it had some pretty perv-y elements to it also, as I recall.
Here’s Calvin Trillin’s take on it, which is also dead-on (and thanks to KBFenner for passing on the links):
A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he’s been punished for this lapse–
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He’ll miss the movers and the shakers.
He’ll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He’s suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?
This man is brilliant, that’s for sure–
Authentically, a film auteur.
He gets awards that are his due.
He knows important people, too–
Important people just like us.
And we know how to make a fuss.
Celebrities would just be fools
To play by little people’s rules.
So Roman’s banner we unfurl.
He only raped one little girl.
What more is there to say?
Seems to me we need a break from our exhausting (to me, anyway) discussion of civility, one in which I find myself engaged deeply in discussion with some of the blog’s worst offenders (Lee, “Mike Toreno”) because I feel like I have to consider them thoroughly, give them every chance, before tossing them out, if that’s what I’m to do to keep order. Oh, the fundamental fecklessness of liberal democracy! Perhaps I should just conjure a virtual Gitmo for them, and to hell with due process! One of my friends, a liberal Democrat (in the big D sense) through and through, says I’m guilty of WASPish diffidence, and perhaps I am…
We need some escapism. Let’s talk time travel.
Yes, I know Stephen Hawking says there’s no such thing (his proof: that there are no time tourists from the future — that we know of, I would add), and I figure he’s probably right. That doesn’t keep me from being a sucker for it as a plot device — “Back to the Future,” the H.G. Wells original, variations on the H.G. Wells original (such as the enjoyable thriller/romance “Time After Time,” which starred Malcolm McDowell as H.G. himself), and on and on. Not that it’s always satisfying: “The Final Countdown,” aside from having one of the least relevant titles ever, is probably the most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen. For two hours you build up to the 80s-era USS Nimitz getting ready to go up against the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then the battle is prevented by a plot evasion as cheesy as, “… and then he woke up.” All because the producers lacked the budget to stage the battle, I suppose. The earlier scenes, such as when the F-14s splash the two Zeroes and the confrontation between the Japanese pilot and the historian, are pretty decent though…
I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my favorite novels to reread when I want to relax my mind is Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. Why embarrassing? Well, when you explain the plot — “It imagines what would have happened if the Confederacy had had AK-47s” — you sound like an idiot. But it really is GOOD.
Let me hasten to add that I like the more reputable A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court much better, and have ever since my first reading as a kid. But the Turtledove book is still enjoyable.
In real life, we all engage in a bit of time travel to the best of our means. We all think back to moments in our past when we might have done something differently. This ranges from bitter recrimination (“What I should have told him was…”) to tantalizing wistfulness. I suspect most guys have experienced in their heads some version of Steppenwolf’s “All Girls Are Yours” fantasy.
You run into trouble with such imaginings when you try to make them believable. First, there’s the device — time machine? bump on the head? For that matter, if it’s a machine, how does it work? It’s generally best not to explain it in too much detail. Michael Crichton made that mistake in Timeline. His characters explain that what they have discovered is actually travel between universes in the multiverse, which somehow magically ACTS like time travel in that if you leave a note for yourself in one universe, you can read it 600 years later (or what SEEMS later) in the other. I could explain further, but it gets more ridiculous the more it tries to be serious. Doc Brown’s “flux capacitor” is much more believable, and more fun.
Then, what are the rules — is history mutable, or not? And if not, why not? And let’s not even get into the grandfather paradox. And if you go back to a point within your own life, can you see your younger self as a separate individual (in which case you might have a lot of explaining to do to yourself) or are you back inside that earlier version of yourself, only with what you now know in your mind, like the Steppenwolf back with all his past loves?:
At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in early Spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly…
Anyway, I’m thinking of all this this week because I rented the first two episodes of “Life on Mars” from Netflix. Premise: Cop in Manchester, England, in 2006 gets hit by a car, wakes up as a cop in 1973.
Promising. You’ll recognize it as the “Connecticut Yankee” device — physical trauma, followed by the time dislocation, which the protagonist can’t explain and at least at first doesn’t believe in, but has to come to terms with. In this case, the hero keeps hearing voices and other sounds that persuade him that he’s in a coma in 2006, but then he is beguiled by the richness of irrelevant detail in his 1973 existence. He keeps thinking, Why would I have imagined that?
I’ve enjoyed it so far, but ultimately it falls down on an important measure for time-travel fiction — the evocation of the visited era. The writers of the show seem unable to go beyond bell-bottoms and vintage cars. Their notion of the difference between being a cop in 2006 and 1973 is that back then the office was a lot grungier, and the cops liked to slap subjects around and disregard proper procedure. Oh, and it took longer to get stuff back from the lab.
Which, I’m sorry, is pretty inadequate… I was in college in 1973, and people were just as insistent upon rules and standards then as now (despite their really, REALLY bad taste). And ultimately, watching this show, I don’t really FEEL like I’m back in that era. And I realized why when I watched a bit of the “making of” video — the writers and others who made this flick were too young to remember that date, which still seems pretty recent to me. The protagonist would have been 4 years old in 73, and the writers and producers seem to be his contemporaries.
Not only that, but they get their idea of what the 70s were like from watching cop shows of the period. In other words, since Starsky and Hutch bent the rules, that’s what real-life policing was like. Sheesh.
The soundtrack’s pretty good, though. The sequence in which the cop is hit by the car and goes back happens to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (hence the title):
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
… first on an iPod, then on an 8-track.
I’m going to watch the next disc; I’ve got it ordered. To see if he wakes up or whatever. But I’ve seen time travel done better…
Once again, I am puzzled by Beatlemania.
The first time, I was living in Guayaquil, Ecuador in early 1964. Communicating with the States — or Britain, for that matter — was a cumbersome affair, hardly speedier than in the Napoleonic era that I enjoy reading about in those books I’m always on about (just finished reading The Fortune of War for the fourth time). The only television we had was one local station that was only on the air from about 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night, and ran mostly American cartoons and TV shows dubbed into Spanish. Imagine being an Ecuadorean and trying to grok “The Beverly Hillbillies” with Granny and Jethro speaking Spanish out of sync with their lips, and you will begin to see the roots of whatever appreciation for the absurd that I today possess. For our part, we didn’t bother — we left our TV set gathering dust down in the bodega with the shelves of canned goods ordered from the Navy Exchange in Panama, for the entire two-and-a-half years we were there.
But we did occasionally see The Miami Herald, although generally a couple of weeks late. And it was on the front page of one of these old papers that I saw the shouting banner headline, “Beatles Hit Miami,” or something like that. I thought it referred to an insect infestation of Biblical proportions, given the huge play.
Eventually, I figured it out, and was entranced. My Beatles fanhood in those early days was probably intensified by the difficulty of keeping up with the Fab Four at a distance. I occasionally found a 45 for sale in a local tienda (I think my first was “Love Me Do”), and I still treasure the first album I ever owned, an Odeon release titled, “La Banda Original de la Pelicula ‘A Hard Days Night.”
Anyway, to bring you to the present day — I fear that I am fated to remain confused by the most recent manifestation of Beatlemania. Or perhaps I should say “alienated” rather than “confused,” because I sort of understand it, but am put off by it. This one is different.
This one doesn’t arise spontaneously, up from below. It’s not a cry of love from the fans. It seems a calculated effort to impose enthusiasm upon a new generation, imposed from above by the masters of the marketing universe.
Note the display I photographed moments ago in the Barnes & Noble from which I am blogging. Not that I’m criticizing Barnes & Noble; I love Barnes & Noble as Winston loved Big Brother. Drinking wonderful Starbucks coffee, listening to “Instant Karma” via Pandora, sitting near a foreign chap wearing a T-shirt that proclaims “FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR PALESTINE” who looked furtively about him as he sat, seemingly expecting someone to challenge or argue with him or something, and in another direction a cute schoolgirl bent low doing her homework with an ipod in her ears, who kindly watched my laptop while I ran to the head… WHOA! The caffeine seems to have taken hold… where was I?
Oh, yes… nothing against Barnes & Noble. And certainly nothing against Starbucks; my slavish affection for Starbucks is well-documented. But both are very much apart of this vast commercial conspiracy to market the Beatles like mad, all of a sudden.
Is it really all prompted by the release of a video game? That’s the way it appears. I know it’s not a plot by Michael Jackson, who sneakily snapped up the rights to the Beatles’ songs years ago, because I seem to have heard that he is no longer among the living. It got quite a bit of play, as I recall.
So what’s it all about, Alfie? And how should a true Beatles fan react?
Let’s have a little discussion about human nature.
First, take a look at this story from yesterday’s WSJ, which reveals the rating inflation that plagues (or blesses, depending onyour point of view) the Web:
The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.
One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five…
Did that surprise you? It did me, a bit. But then I got to thinking about the one place where I’ve done a lot of rating — Netflix, where over the years (in a vain attempt to teach the site to predict my preferences) I’ve rated more than 2,000 movies. And since I love movies, and do a certain amount of selection before watching them, I knew I had given really high ratings more often than really low ones — specifically, I had awarded 5 stars (to such films as “Casablanca,” “The Godfather” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”) 156 times, and 1 star (examples: “Dances With Wolves,” the made-in-Columbia “Death Sentence” and “Dune”) only 24 times.
Still, if you count up all the movies I’ve rated between 1 and 5, you come up with an average rating of only 3.4. And if you factor in the 815 flicks I’ve rated as “Not Interested,” awarding them a 0 score, it drops to 2.0. But that’s misleading, because some of those are good flicks that some time or other I gave that rating just as a way of saying I wasn’t interested in seeing them at that time. But if you count just a fourth of those, it lowers my average to 2.9.
Which is about where you’d expect me to be. I’m a born critic — flaws leap out at me, and I remember them. And my detractors (such as those who think I’m too tough on Mark Sanford) see me as all criticism, as one who never gives my subjects their due. Actually, though, some of my detractors (such as those who were furious that I continued to admire John McCain throughout the 2008 campaign) attack me for the opposite trait — the fact that I can the good outweighing the bad in some people and some things. (You ladies who love Jane Austen may think of me as a health mix of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, only without their wealth.)
Back to human nature: Why would folks be so overwhelmingly positive on the Web (except, of course, here on this blog)? The story in the Journal speculated as follows:
Culture may play a role in the positivism: Ratings in the U.K. average an even higher 4.4, reports Bazaarvoice. But the largest contributor may be human nature. Marketing research firm Keller Fay Group surveys 100 consumers each week to ask them about what products they mentioned to friends in conversation. “There is an urban myth that people are far more likely to express negatives than positives,” says Ed Keller, the company’s chief executive. But on average, he finds that 65% of the word-of-mouth reviews are positive and only 8% are negative.
“It’s like gambling. Most people remember the times they win and don’t realize that in aggregate they’ve lost money,” says Andy Chen, the chief executive of Power Reviews Inc., a reviews software maker that runs Buzzillions…
Aha! I think I understand… at least, I now understand a possible reason why people gamble.
I don’t know about you, but I have not gambled since I was in college. I went through a period when I shot pool (nine ball being my game) and played a few hands of poker. But the last time I played pool for money and the last time I gambled with cards are etched unforgettably on my mind because of the spectacular ways in which I lost. My opponent at the pool table had had a shocking run in which he had pocketed the nine ball on the break several times in a row. After hours in which no one had had a hand nearly as good, I risked all (even writing a check to another player to get cash to stay in the game) on a full house — only to lose to a full house that was one card better (queens as opposed to jacks).
I’ve never understood, since then, why people would gamble. But this tendency to remember the anomalous wins more clearly than the losses would explain it.
But is that truly human nature?
Frankly, I find myself doubting the very premise of the story. As a newspaperman of 35 years experience, I am so accustomed to hearing from the people who are AGAINST something, or who didn’t like something in the paper, that such universal satisfaction seems unlikely to me. Take letters to the editor. One of my favorite examples were the letters we got for a week or so after U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001: They were overwhelmingly against U.S. military action. I knew they were not representative of South Carolina, not by a long shot, but they were the people who were taking the trouble to write. And that seems to me to be the norm.
Yet this story is saying otherwise. What do you think is true, and why do you think it’s the case?
Today, I’m listening to Jethro Tull on Pandora, the virtual radio station site. I’m often disappointed by Pandora because it seems their collections don’t go very deep. And sometimes they don’t even touch the surface in the spot where I want them to. For instance, I created a 10cc channel that keeps throwing Queen songs at me on the grounds that they are “like” 10cc. On my Donovan and Elvis Costello stations, they keep playing Beatles. Hey, I love the Beatles, but when I want to listen to them I’ll tell you.
Then there was the time that I had a hankering to hear Roger Miller’s “Dang Me,” so I created a station by that name. And it played me a couple of Roger Miller songs that I didn’t want to hear, and then other songs “like” Roger Miller. But so far, no “Dang Me.”
I strongly suspect Pandora to be a subsidiary of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, famous for its drinks machine that produces a substance that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
But I’m enjoying the Tull station a bit more. Not that I’m getting pure Tull, of course, but the stuff that Pandora judges to be “like” Tull is mostly enjoyable. Led Zeppelin’s “Rain Song.” Some live Who. And, I’m happy to say, quite a bit of Tull.
Including recent Tull, which is a bit of a shock, because I didn’t know such an animal existed.
For instance, did you know there was a Jethro Tull song titled “Dot Com?” Seriously; I’m not making it up. This is a surprise coming from a band that I associate with “Aqualung.” And no, not the one that the kids listen to. To me, Tull is quintessential 70s. I hadn’t even thought about them in years. It was only when a real radio station (94.3) played “Thick as a Brick” this past week that I was reminded of their existence, and created the station just to, shall we say, do a little living in the past.
The Jethro Tull of my memory lived in a universe that had not thought of, and could not even have imagined, anything called a “dot-com.” It was, I don’t know, like finding a previously unknown Jane Austen novel that’s about television. You know, like:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sitcom in possession of a laugh track must be in want of a joke.
I’m picturing Mr. Darcy earning his “ten thousand a year” hosting “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he repeatedly refuses to dance with attractive young women on the grounds that they are “tolerable,” but not “handsome enough to tempt me.”
Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was weird.
I’ll be reprising my (very tiny) role in “The Producers” tonight at 8 at Workshop Theatre. I urge you to come see it — if you can get a ticket. I’ve heard that they’re pretty scarce.
But if you can’t get in tonight (which is my last performance), the good news is that the show’s been held over. And I promise, it’s almost just as good without me.
Just some scattered thoughts as I listen to the GOP debate last night via the Web. Can’t call it “live-blogging,” but it’s kind of like that, so I’ll call it “dead-blogging,” which sort of reflects my level of enthusiasm about the candidates so far, a few minutes into it. Some random observations:
OK, I’ve got to stop watching now… lunch appointment. More later, if I get time…
Wow, I am really humbled by the nice things some of y’all said about me running for office back on this post (am I sounding like a candidate yet? they’re supposed to say stuff like that, about being humbled, etc.).
But again, what office? The context was that we were talking about Congress. But as Karen suggested, maybe I’m better suited for state office. State issues are the ones I’m most knowledgeable about and passionate about.
Not that I don’t know as much as (or more than) the other declared candidates for Congress about national and international issues. I’m pretty confident that I do — or at least that I can hold my own, and I can certainly approach those issues in a fresh way that would break the partisan, shouting-back-and-forth pattern that I, for one, am sick of.
But what if I were elected to Congress? I would just feel pretty weird going off to Washington and watching another lame governor take office back here. And you know what? My own mother called me up the other day and said I should run for governor. So that’s one vote I could count on, I guess. (Right, Mom?)
You know what I need at this point? I need Peter Boyle to come see me and make a pitch. You ever see “The Candidate?” Excellent movie. Peter Boyle plays a political consultant type who talks Robert Redford — son of a prominent politician — into running for the U.S. Senate. Redford is a nonprofit activist who is uninterested in the compromises one must make to run for office. Boyle promises him he can stand up for everything he believes in, and points out that this is a great opportunity to give those things he believes in greater exposure. Redford asks something like How does that work? or What’s the catch? and Boyle hands him a matchbook on which he has written two words: “You lose.” On that basis, Redford agrees to run.
But as the campaign proceeds, the itch to win — or at least not lose by an embarrassing margin — starts to get to him….
Anyway, to run for office what I need is a Peter Boyle moment — somebody to say, we’ll take care of the mechanics of the campaign, you just be the candidate. Because I’m an issues guy, not a mechanics guy. Renting an office and getting phone lines set up would be the overwhelming part for me. Seriously.
This, of course, is why most people run under the auspices of parties. Each of the parties has loads of people like Peter Boyle who can say, here’s your infrastructure, you just concentrate on running for office (and raising money).
What I need is an UnParty Peter Boyle. I guess that would be a party stalwart who has become disillusioned. Or who sees greater opportunity in breaking away from the two-party dichotomy.
It’s interesting to contemplate where such a person would come from. On an earlier post, I speculated that if I were to give in and run under the banner of one of the parties next year for pragmatic reasons (see the above discourse on Peter Boyle), especially for Congress, it would probably have to be the Democratic Party. Why? Well, not because I’m a Democrat, but because I don’t see a Republican having a good-enough shot against an incumbent of that party. Too much of an uphill climb.
But it occurs to me that if I run as an independent, my theoretical Peter Boyle would be more likely to come from the Republican Party. It’s the party in trouble. It’s the party that’s falling apart, rather pathetically clinging to tired slogans and petty resentments that have not served it well of late (whereas the Democrats have been doing OK, for the moment, with their tired slogans and petty resentments). It seems more likely that a smart Republican would calculate that an UnParty bid would be advisable than that a smart Democrat would do the same. Democrats are smelling opportunity now, and are unlikely to jump ship.
Then again, there could be a smart Democrat who would rather see me elected than Joe Wilson, and who also sees as I do that Rob Miller is not the best candidate to take advantage of this moment, and yet he’s the Democrat with the money, and has a leg up toward the nomination. Going with me might be the way to step around that problem. I don’t know. That’s the kind of hard-eyed political calculation that I’m depending on this Peter Boyle person to make — I’m the candidate, not the backroom strategist.
Anyway, now would be a good time for my Peter Boyle to step forward. I’ve got a job interview later this week, and possibly another soon after. This window won’t be open for long (I certainly hope.)
The kindness of friends is one thing, and I truly appreciate the supportive things y’all have said here. But at this point I need a nudge from a hard-eyed professional who truly believes this can be done. You might say I should go out and find that person. But I’m thinking that if I truly have a chance, that pragmatic person will see it and come to me. If I don’t — if it’s just me indulging myself and some friends egging me on — then there’s no point in continuing the discussion. Does that make sense? It does to me… Call it the first test of my viability…
We don’t normally do celebrity news at bradwarthen.com (with rare exceptions), but I happened to run across this item via Twitter:
Although more and more brands, movie stars, sports figures, and other celebrities are moving to Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook as a way of interacting and sharing with fans, many of Hollywood’s A-List stars are still avoiding social networks.
George Clooney is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars — he’s handsome, congenial, and talented — and also Facebook-page free.
People.com reports that when asked about Facebook at the Toronto International Film Festival last Saturday, Clooney responded:
“I would rather have a prostate exam on live television by a guy with very cold hands than have a Facebook page.”
… and it inspired the above headline.
Of course, the message we are to take away is that George Clooney is such a big star that he doesn’t have to promote himself. Which is true. But he doesn’t have to be so snobby about it. I mean, it’s one thing for me to turn my nose up at celebrities, but they’re not supposed to do it right back at me…
I don’t know about y’all but I didn’t see this until just now. Mildly amusing, although certainly no Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. And of course, it’s yet another needless embarrassment for South Carolina. I share it for what it’s worth.
Well, I did my little cameo appearance last night in the Workshop Theatre production of “The Producers.” It went fine. Although I’ve got to tell you that by the time my cue came early in the second act, I was much more anxious not to mess up than I had been before the curtain went up.
That’s because the show was so good. Everybody was turning in such an impressive, high-energy performance that if there had been ANYthing wrong with my part, short as it was, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. The stakes had been raised. I was sitting there thinking that I was out in right field. You know that feeling? It’s the one where you stand there and stand there and stand there, and the ball never comes to you, and you get used to the ball not coming to you, and you never get warmed up, and then when the ball finally does come to you, the stakes, the consequences of screwing up seem so huge and overwhelming that… well, you screw up. (For that reason, I always infinitely preferred playing pitcher or catcher, where you’re involved with every pitch, to playing the outfield.)
By the time my bit was approaching, everybody on stage was SO warmed up — Matt DeGuire, as Max Bialystock, had worked up a visible sweat before the second scene — that I felt like I’d never be able to come off the bench and jump into something moving at this pace. I felt like the whole show would trip over me or something. But I guess it went OK, because no one threw rotten tomatoes.
After that, I was able to enjoy the rest of the show without that feeling of dread hanging over me. And I really enjoyed it.
Which, I can admit now, surprised me.
Not that I didn’t think the folks at Workshop would do a good job. I assumed they would. My problem was with the show itself. I tried to watch the movie version with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, and I got sick of it by the end of the first scene. I’m a huge Ferris Bueller fan (who isn’t?), but I found Broderick’s trying-too-hard impersonation of Gene Wilder really off-putting. And frankly, as I thought about that, I realized I hadn’t been crazy about the Wilder-Mostel version either.
For me, “Young Frankenstein” was Mel Brooks’ masterpiece, and “Blazing Saddles” had its amusing parts, but it trails off after that. And the movie versions of “The Producers” fell somewhere below “Spaceballs” in my estimation.
So I was startled to see that something that didn’t work for me on the movie screen was so entertaining in a live show. But it was. And it was more than the fact that “over-the-top” fits the live stage better than the wide screen, which prefers subtlety. It was the wonderful performances of these individual local actors — particularly DeGuire as Max, Kevin Bush as Leopold Bloom, Mandy Nix as Ulla, Kyle Collins as Franz and on and on (there are no weak performances) — and the chemistry of how it all came together.
This was the best thing I’ve seen on a stage in Columbia (except, of course, for the shows that my children were in…)
You should definitely go see it. Even though I won’t be in it anymore. Or perhaps, especially since I won’t be in it anymore…
You have to understand that to me, Elvis Costello is The Latest Thing. He came along late in my life — after I was married and had kids already — so it’s actually a testament to his considerable talent that I became a big fan of his. He was the last popular musician to enter the ranks of my favorites along with the Beatles and others from my youth.
So normally, I would not have gotten the joke when Stan Dubinsky over at USC sent this link with the message, “Kanye West insults the USC website.” I’m still not entirely sure I get it, but at least I know who Kanye West is — sort of. That’s because my 23-year-old daughter went to “The Producers” with me last night, and since I had gone early to check in with the stage manager, we had time to chat before the show, and we started talking about current events, and she mentioned this West guy.
All day long, I’d been seeing references to him on Twitter, but I didn’t know what it was about. My daughter explained it. OK, so now I see why some people were referring to him and Joe Wilson in the same breath. Then she said something about Serena Williams, and I knew who she was, but didn’t know what she had done to cause the world to buzz. I don’t follow sports, either. (FYI, I just learned that USC will have a home football game on Saturday, which means I will stay over on my side of the river all day to avoid the craziness. I appreciate the warning, and thought you might appreciate my passing it on.)
Good thing we had that chat, because now all this stuff has entered the print universe — some of it was the subject of a column in The Wall Street Journal this morning — and I’m glad I knew about it going in.
But I still can’t tell you of anything Kanye West has ever sung.