The Great Confluence
Is it wrong to be interested in a musician just because of the way s/he looks? I have frequently been flipping through the used/cheapo section of my local CD store and happened upon an album that looks interesting because the photography, design, and — above all — the singer looked interesting. I have yet to actually buy an album just because I like the looks of the chanteuse, but I have certainly contemplated doing so.
But now with the internet, it’s a wonderously no-harm, no-foul situation: a songstress catches my eye, and all I have to do is look her up on Last.fm or do a Bloglines search to see if anyone has posted some of her songs for sampling and consideration. So I was pleased to trip across the above illustration of Emmy the Great in the New Yorker and then have the Vulture point me in the direction of some of her songs a mere two days later. This is confluence of pleasing proportions. I am older than the protagonist in the mellifluously charming song “24”, but it is the one of the three that most struck me personally, and not just because of the references to the Jack Bauer Hour of Power Hour.
As EtG is the band, and more than simply the as-depicted Emma Moss, I shall now resist saying “she” when I refer to them. Give them a spin.
Additional Resources:
+ Official Website
+ MTV.uk video sessions
+ MySpace page, with one streaming song at present
+ Buy their 7″ vinyl single
Academia
So the 80th annual Oscar award ceremony — excuse me, “Oscar®” award — starts in about a half hour, and many weeks ago I planned on writing about my experiences watching the five contenders for the Best Picture nominee, and I suppose if I’m going to write something, I better do it quick.
In addition to watching all the Best Picture nominees and writing about them, I had this whole plan about creating an image for the piece that was a collage of all the ticket stubs from the films. I saw the five nominees at four different cinemas, and I always save my ticket stubs, so I thought it might look kinda neat, plus adding a sense of verisimilitude to my “expertise” on the matter. I couldn’t find but two of the tickets, though, looking around the apartment for the last fifteen minutes. Found the stub from National Treasure: Book of Secrets, though! That’s a keepsake and no mistake! Sigh… Anyway, so in lieu of my original plan, I have simply stolen the above image from New York Magazine’s entertainment column, “The Vulture”, who provide me with daily snark and excellent coverage of all things spangly.
I don’t watch the Oscars® anymore. I can’t recall when I stopped, precisely, I remember being outraged at an interview that Danny Elfman gave wherein he stated that he’d never win an Academy Award, because the snobs on the original soundtrack section of the Academy looked down upon his rock ‘n’ roll background and would never see him so nominated. (Although, now that his compositions no longer fill me with joy, I note that he’s listed as a member of the Academy on the official press release.) I remember watching the Oscars in early 1995 and loving Dave Letterman’s schtick, and bemoaning the fact that I didn’t record the “Do you want to buy a monkey?” montage. So I was confused when he recieved such bad press and aghast that Forrest Gump won some many accolades. Somewhere between the 1994 and 1998 Oscars, I gave up on the whole shebang, and instead started stumping for a system that ignored the word “best”, and instead concentrated upon a merit-based system of awards. If there was a good enough film to be worthy of recognition, it would be celebrated, but one wouldn’t choose between five just because millions and millions of dollars had been spent on three hundred-odd movies over the course of a calendar year, and they needed some spectacle to make it seem justifiable.
It’s 7:03pm EST now, so I’ve run over my allotted time in which to generate some comment before the program starts. Suffice it to say that this is the first year in a considerable amount of time where I’ve felt like the nominations left me spoiled for choice, and all five films were of distinct voice and a high caliber of storytelling. Not all five deserve “Best” picture status, but I would be glad if any of them one. Yes, even if Jason Reitman, Skidmore College’s hottest dropout, vaults still further into a realm of success I couldn’t hope to grasp or even glimpse. Juno is too slight, and too immature in its storytelling to really stand next to the complexities of the other four, but I like the fact that it’s there.
Anyway, it has been my assessment for some time that movies tend to win, not on their actual content, but on the psychic bulk of baggage that comes along with the film. Philadelphia wins for making people feel guilty, and Gump wins for making people feel good. Martin Scorcese wins because he’s been snubbed in the past, and actors win for previous parts that were amazing, but not sufficiently showy. On these criteria, therefore, I predict that the Coen Brothers will win for their unrecognized body of work, which shadows and hovers around Old Country with palpable force. None of the other films has sufficient behind-the-scenes personality to win for the best film, as Daniel Day Lewis is the only comparable presence in the running. But Daniel Day Lewis is no Paul Thomas Anderson, and while the producers may collect the Best Picture award, it always seems like they are a second — but more important — Best Director award.
In closing, here’s a picture of Ellen Page not smoking a pipe. Let’s see that hit count shoot up now!
Ledger
I dreamt I woke up this morning to find the strings from my venetian blinds wrapped around my neck and a thug from the Joker’s clown gang crouched by my bed. “They can’t all look like suicides,” he said. “Some have to look like accidental death or home invasions.” Then I woke up, and resisted the urge to clasp at my neck to see if the cords were really tangled around my throat.
Like Bryan, I don’t know why I have been pursuing the new reports of Heath Ledger’s death with such relentless fervor. I’d only even seen him in 10 Things I Hate About You and The Brothers Grimm, and he was not a ping on my Hollywood radar. I think the reason it — “resonate” is the wrong word, but I’m going to use it anyway — has resonated with me is because I read an Associated Press story after Brad Refro’s death about whether certain young celebrities and their trepidatious lifestyles necessitated the preparation of early obituaries. I don’t think that Ledger would have merited such preparation, nor do I hold much truck with the Rule of Three with celebrity deaths (inspired, I assume, by the Valens/Bopper/Holly crash), but thinking about the potential need for young obituaries and then reading one has left me with a need for details, as if specifics would provide me with a perspective that would allow me to not think about it again. And certainly to stop dreaming about it.
One last thing: for those who haven’t see it, this is a flier from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, calling for a picketing of Ledger’s funeral in order to gleefully send him off to Hell for participating in Brokeback Mountain, claiming his death as a victory for God, and saying that this performance, this sin, is the only thing “relevant or consequential” he ever did. My first instinct was to picket the picketing with a simple Let He Who Is Without Sin… placard, but I prefer Jon Sung‘s idea: “a bunch of people dressed as Batman and the Joker beat the living shit out of [the WBC] in full view of news cameras.”
Unreadable
I was going to do a little collection of some of the best nasty reviews I’d even encountered, but the internet is not being cooperative. Which is a good lesson for me… I tend to forget that while almost everything has existed in both print and digital form for the past ten years and that lots of antiquities are being added as digital archives, that there is a plentiful amount of stuff that exists only in the temporal print form in which is originated.
So while I would like to link to some of these marvelous, cutting dismissals, I cannot. Instead, I link to their placeholders for the digital future, or the place where they would be if you were a paid subscriber.
Review of: Wilson, by David Mamet
Reviewer: Rebecca Pidgeon, aka “Mrs. Mamet”
Substance of review: “Impenetrable.“
Review of review: Why wasn’t this pithy quote plastered all over the book jacket? If I had read that even the wife of the celebrated author found the book to be almost unreadable, I would have been perversely moved to take a crack at it! Much more so than whatever standard one-word superlatives normally grace a given dust cover. What a missed opportunity!
Review of: “The Fugitive” soundtrack by James Newton Howard
Reviewer: Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker
Substance of review: “The only thing that [Howard] seems to think is more suspenseful than banging a drum is banging a drum more loudly.”
Review of review: The above is a paraphrase of a dearly cherished memory of the moment that I realized I wanted to be a film reviewer. That is fantastically mean. I want more! I want in! But, there is the possibility that I have remembered the line wrong, as the article doesn’t exist online yet. However, I feel it must be close, because in his one-paragraph summary, he still takes the time to typify Howard’s score as a “rude horror“. Ouch.
Phenomena (Doot Doo Do Doo Doo!)
It’s 4:30pm, and the sun ain’t set yet. You winter people can complain about the rain and the fog and the fifty degree days and the other things that are melting and destroying your precious, precious snow. I got news for you: the days are getting noticeably longer again. The end is near.
Sure, not near enough that we won’t have to suffer through a frigid couple of weeks after this annual January thaw (read: “tease”) and the bleakness of February, the longest month of the year… but it’s acomin’. Be sure of that.
In other news, the ever popular Mahna Mahna phenomena is actually from the soundtrack to an Italian sex travelogue of Sweden. God love the Muppets. And god love the A.V. Club, who provided me with this particular fact.
LIVEBLOG: Primary or Primate?
10:52pm: with 73% of districts reporting, NPR has called it for Hillary. Over an hour ago, they had called the Republican side for McCain, with something between 50% and 60% reporting (my notes are unclear).
Of course, in 2004, the Associated Press called it for Kerry with only 19% of districts reporting, so I’m slightly more pleased with the press this time out.
I’m off to bed. I’ll listen to the speeches and the pontification about what this all means tomorrow on my way to work. I’ll only say, 1) that the New Hampshire primary is lousy at predicting actual victorious presidents. 2) That said, I did hear an article telling me that in the last twenty or so years — perhaps more, I can’t put my fingers on the article — the person eventually elected president has never finished lower than second in the New Hampshire primary. So, statistically, we’re down to four possible people who could be sworn in on January 20, 2009. Woo.
9:21pm: Dave Barry sums everything up:
The voters of New Hampshire have made their decision, and the big winner is: Change. Here’s the final vote tally:
- Change — 43 percent
- Hope — 28 percent
- Hope For Change — 17 percent
- Hair — 9 percent
- Experience — 2 percent
- Dennis Kucinich — 1 percent:
Now it’s time for the politicians and the press to drop New Hampshire like an ant-covered corn dog and sprint for the airport, leaving the residents of The Granite State to spend the rest of the winter plucking 239 billion candidate signs out of their snowbanks, all the while wondering if there ever really was a candidate named “Mike Gravel,” or if that was just teenagers playing a sign-planting prank.
In actuality, though, the final tally is far from in at this point. National Public Radio has the reporting districts at only 44%, and New Hampshire Public Radio doesn’t yet have the all-important Epping and Newmarket results in their town-by-town results.
Mr. Barry’s other columns on the primary are worth reading, if only for his keen observation on New Hampshire’s state-run liquor stores — “One of them is located — I am not making this up — in a turnpike service plaza, apparently for the benefit of motorists who are, for whatever reason, running low on gin.” — and to familiarize yourself with the name “Dick Harpootlian“.
3:26pm: The recorded voice of Ron Paul’s wife greets me from my answering machine. I don’t know how I get calls from a Republican candidate. If I were registered as an independent, I would have expected barrages of calls from candidates of both parties, but it’s only in the past week that I’ve been getting autocalls from the Paul campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s only pretending to be a Republican, and so he’s either bought both the Democratic and Republican registers. Or maybe he’s cold-calling the whole state.
Or perhaps Anthony and Christine Fay, for whom I still get phone messages, yea these eighteen months after I procured this phone number, gave out their number to the Paul campaign. They give out their number to Realtors, car salesmen… the sort of people who plead for a number and who you’d rather not have actually call you. Instead of giving out a fake number, the Fays have been known to give out their old number… their old number which has been reassigned to me. Oy! Tony! Stop giving out my phone number! Oh, and your grandmother wishes you a happy Christmas.
3:11pm: My Nixon/Agnew button gets the approval of the guy manning the ballot box, though he informs me that he saw a button for Adlai Stevenson the previous day at a rally, so I’m not quite wearing the coolest button so far. I could quibble with him that, I’m certainly wearing the coolest button so far on election day, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile. He at least didn’t seem to care that I was far too young to wear a Nixon button, whereas two or three people holding candidate placards outside the City Auditorium were taken back. But even they weren’t as flummoxed as the woman who confirmed my registration. She seemed momentarily at sea due to the fact that I was registered as a Democrat and wearing the badge of a former Republican president.
2:19pm: Rhu, my assistant, brings over the Concord Monitor’s Primary Election Guide for my perusal, specifically because there is a candidate in both the Republican and Democratic columns of whom she’s never heard: on the former side, is the traditional Silly Party candidate Vermin Supreme, but on the other side of the aisle was the putative Democratic candidate O. Savior. In the Monitor’s helpful guide, all the candidates had website addresses to head to in order to find out additional information, except for O. Savior. Perhaps we’ll just have to try the Bible?
10:45am: These are not, I repeat, not the results of the official town polling station located in the gymnasium of Belmont High School. This is an informal poll of voting-age and non-voting-age Belmont and Canterbury students.
Belmont High School Mock Primary:
School Population: 480
Total votes: 305 (63%)
Results compiled by Dane Loomer
Democrat
- Barack Obama: 145
- Hillary Clinton: 33
- John Edwards: 18
- Bill Richardson: 8
- Dennis Kucinich: 4
Total votes: 208 (68%)
Republican
- Mike Huckabee: 34
- Mitt Romney: 22
- John McCain: 21
- Rudy Guliani: 15
- Ron Paul: 5
Total votes: 97 (31%)
This looks like a standard case of votes equating to a certain media popularity, more than any issues-based alliance on the part of the voters. Of course, if Huckabee and Obama carry their respective nominations, that will be the national story anyway: the new breed of populaism.
7:03am: The city polls have officially opened, and the race is on. Carl Kasell has just told me that Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location have had their traditional midnight ballot, and successfully polled each of their fewer-than-100 eligible residents. Both towns ended their vote with John McCain and Barack Obama in the majority position.
Despite the midnight cache that each of these towns enjoys, New Hampshire Public Radio informs me that the two towns considered to be bellwethers for the state are Epping and Newmarket.
I’ll be voting in Ward 5, Concord, later today. Belmont High School is hosting polling in the gymnasium right now (the school is doing some self hype/entertainment for people waiting in the lobby by doing a clipshow of BHS News segments, including my promo spot for 24 Hour Comic Day). We did an informal poll of the students yesterday, and for what is generally considered to be a socially conservative town, the results were fairly interesting. More on that when I can sit down with the hard numbers.
Ring-A-Ding-Ding-Along With Me
Bits and bobs to begin being the beguine, if you take my meaning…
+ I’ve closed down The Brothel, an internet forum I’ve hosted since March of 2003. It was good fun, and good conversation. If you participated in it in any way, thanks for hanging out. I find that I miss it, and still have regular instances where I find I’m itching to go there and type out something. My hope is to start writing this stuff in letters again, like I used to. If I used to e-mail you a lot and don’t any longer, now would be a good time to hit me up again for my patented brand of twitchy correspondence.
+ Aileen regularly gives her fellow statemates a bit of a going over for complaining about the weather. And she’s got a point. Complaining about the weather is a particularly ineffectual use of one’s vitriol, whether one is bitching about the unpredictability of the daily expression of the climate, or whether one is moaning about the totally predictable display of living someplace where there are seasons. And even if one had gotten used to the past three years of warmer winters, brown Christmases, and less frequent shoveling, one really can’t find much in the way of forensic ground to complain about a return to normalcy.
That said, the guy who who plows my driveway got stuck in the snow and ice that had accumulated there over the past few days. It’s a hoary old joke, but yeah. The plow. Got stuck. In the snow. I think it’s time to call a moratorium on precipitation for a little while, okay, Old Man Weather?
+ My mother has just called me to recommend that I go see Lars and the Real Girl, the heartfelt tale of one man’s relationship with his Real Doll. I can’t tell if this is because she thought it was weird and funny, or is that she’s given up on my ever getting married and has switched to a twisted new tactic.
+ There are a couple of films that I watch annually. While Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo recently debated the best Christmas movie of all time (Die Hard all the way, baby!), I find myself deviating from their list and regularly rewatching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment as my sole piece of personal seasonal entertainment. Bridging the gap between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it’s my touchstone of a certain kind of solitary melancholy.
This year, upon rewatching, I was suddenly struck by the presence of a Chagall painting in the background in one scene.
How odd, I thought, that this Chagall would be used as a print in both The Apartment and years later in Notting Hill. It was an odd sort of subtle tribute. Or maybe it was because the rights to displaying the image were held by the studio. Or something else. In any case, it was an interesting coincidence, and the sort of blog post that Glenn Kenny would have been proud of. I scampered off to grab a screencap from both films, only to find out that it wasn’t the same painting at all.
I haven’t the faintest idea where else I’ve seen the painting in The Apartment, then. I had a suspicion that it was in the Chagall exhibit at the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, but a review of the programme indicates otherwise.
So I got nothin’. Instead, I’ll merely quote the endearing Richard Curtis dialogue from Notting Hill:
ANNA:
I can't believe you have
that picture on your wall.
WILLIAM:
You like Chagall?
ANNA:
I do. It feels like how
being in love should be.
Floating through a dark blue sky.
WILLIAM:
With a goat playing the violin.
ANNA:
Yes... happiness isn't happiness
without a violin-playing goat.
New England Intellectual
While we’re playing cameo-watch, let me chronicle one more in a admittedly discursive manner:
I love acting companies. I love stables. There’s a gleefulness about watching actors work with each other in a variety of manners. It’s one of the things that makes watching television so fun in that, if the writing holds up and is sufficiently varied, one gets to see that all-important group chemistry in a series of situations, and the actors get to play off each other in ways that are both familiar and new. It’s why reviewers look for the naturalness of the ensemble cast, because there’s an extra degree of trust that allows for a greater risk-taking and spontaneity in the communal and individual acting.
I am at least always partially conscious of the unreality of film- and stagecraft, and an ensemble cast helps me quiet my qualms that Hollywood is so cutthroat, so mercenary. So many comments about how “we’re all a family here” often rings like hollow EPK hype, and the appearance or sense that actors have formed a band or de facto company that actually feel loyalty and camaraderie that is personal as well as professional allows me to better appreciate a work as a work and simultaneously as a piece of entertainment. I like hearing stories about directors who always include their friends in their projects in some manner. I like directors, writers, and producers who will — in a small way, not in a nepotistic, I’m Gonna Get My Nephew Screenwriter Credit On This sort of way — include their “family” and friends in their work.
Aaron Sorkin is pretty-well recognized for reusing people in his various projects. There are a number of people who crossed over between SportsNight and The West Wing as well as The West Wing and Studio 60. So it was fun to notice in the midst of watching Charlie Wilson’s War that one of the SportsNight tech trio had a one-line moment for those paying particular, if not obsessive attention. Yes, yes, everyone loved the on-again, off-again relationship between Casey and Dana and the slashtastic friendship between Casey and Dan, but one of the best reasons to watch SportsNight were the frequent deadpan moments shared by the supporting ensemble. Watch the writer’s block sequence from the “Dear Louise” episode, but watch the rest of the room. Watch the actors. This is almost an outtakes reel. SportsNight, particularly during their famous Christmas episode where they thanked, on-air, the actual production crew for all their hard and largely unsung work, often had this palpable sense of production verité. And that sense made the moments with the actors playing the production staff all the more interesting. And while I couldn’t really tell you which of the tech guys was Chris, Will, or Dave, it still gives me a thrill when I see them turn up on other Sorkin projects.
If you find yourself similarly inclined — I prefer “inclined” to “obsessed” — then when Tom Hanks is cutting through the House of Representatives, calling in IOUs to support his budget increases for Afghani weapons, and he is talking to a group of “Northeast intellectuals”, then prepare yourself for 3.7 seconds of a cameo by Ron Ostrow. It made me very happy, anyway.
BATMAN: Uel
It’s been a while since we’ve had a Batman-themed post, so here’s a still from the newly-released trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming sequel, The Dark Knight:
I realize that this isn’t the most dynamic, stunning, or cinematic image from the trailer. It’s not Bruce Wayne cradling his bat-mask despondently, it’s not the Joker standing in the middle of the street, it’s not the infamous bat-cycle, it’s not Batman’s silhouette against the Gotham skyline. Nope, it’s Gary Oldman with a moustache and some other bloke. Not especially promotional.
Until! Until you realize that the some-other-bloke in particular is none other than Nestor Carbonell. Carbonell has been doing a good job for himself recently playing a series of hot, vaguely psychotic toughs in fare like Cane, Lost, Smokin’ Aces, and Daybreak, but I choose to believe that the reason why he was cast in this role was not due to his rakish good looks and his suave, leaderly demeanor. No, I think it’s a fabulous nerd cameo, because Carbonell has played Batman’s Latin analogue in the live action series of The Tick. That’s right: the second Batman movie features Batmanuel.
Best nerd cameo ever, I claim. Although, like on Lost, it may make it a little difficult for me to take his scenes seriously.
Commercial Identity, part 2
So I’ve paid a considerable amount of attention to Apple’s most recent slate of announcements about their iPod and iPhone upgrades. I do want an iPhone, but I have never been a first-adopter and I want to watch a few more kinks shake down from the highest branches before I make the plunge (just to mix my metaphors). However, the announcement about the effective “limited edition” 4GB iPhone — because it’s being discontinued and therefore being sold at a considerable discount — has made me want to dash into the fray, only to emerge with the most recent piece of mechanical obsolescence. Knowing something is just off the boil, probably won’t be supported past the next upgrade, etc., always makes an object’s faults and inconveniences that much more psychologically comforting.
I was more amused by the changes in the lineups of available iPod Nanos and Shuffles. I love my Shuffle. I like the size and the shape and the belt-clip and the fact that unlike my original 512MB plastic model, the aluminum casing might make it a little more resistant to being shut repeatedly in the car door (although the clip is more helpful in preventing it from slipping there in the first place). And while it is a little annoying to add new music to the library and then not be able to refer to just who is that strange new group anyway, I’m glad to trade a display for the extra miniaturization. But while Apple used to make color choices easy — everything was gloss white, and one had to pay an extra hundred dollars to get a given product in sleek black — the second-gen Nanos and Shuffles came in a small but potent array of varying hues. I dallied with the grey, as I didn’t want my personal music player to be ostentatious, but went with orange because I frequently use orange in my decorating and design and identify with the color somewhat.
But it was also of some small import that nothing else Apple offered came in that color. The Nano had no parallel in its various offerings, and it made the orange Shuffle that much more appealing. It was part of the line, but not part of the overall scheme. So it pleases me unduly that the most recent announcement informs us that the orange Shuffle is no more, replaced with a soft violet. Now I really want my outdated iPhone to go with my other outdated Apple accoutrements.
In other technology upgrade news, one can now search one’s Google Reader feed archives. Thank goodness! This upgrade makes the fact that my preferred Stylish reader scripts are currently incompatible with the various updates. EDIT: Wow, that sentence really doesn’t make sense, does it? Ahem! This upgrade almost makes up for the fact that certain Google Reader mods no longer actually work, due to essential alterations in their code.
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