Two Movie Reviews (2016Dec13)

Posted by XperDunn on December 14, 2016

Tuesday, December 13, 2016 11:30 PM

“Suicide Squad” & “Florence Foster Jenkins”

“Suicide Squad”:

There was a burst of potentially-watchable movies in my video menu this morning—all kinds of movies—must be the run-off from the summer-movie influx in theaters. It’s strange for those of us who wait for the movie to leave the theater and get onto cable—we see the summer movies in winter, and the holiday movies in summer.

I started with “Suicide Squad”. I’ve pretty much had it with comic book retro-fits—and Suicide Squad is a poor excuse for even a comic book. But I like Will Smith—and I always enjoy it when some hot young actress does a star turn as a psycho-killer, as Margo Robbie does in this. But sometimes the over-arching concept of one team of good guys against a team of bad guys can strain the bounds of credulity—even within the ‘willing suspension’ paradigm.

In this movie, a ‘transdimensional’ witch with seemingly unlimited power, both natural and supernatural, stands against a group of admittedly tough customers—but none of them equipped to face down something from beyond the limits of time and space. Well, there’s one—a reluctant pyrokinetic with supernatural powers of his own.

But the rest of them have to be kept busy fighting minions of the witch, to distract from the fact they can’t possibly fight her. It’s just senseless—and believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of sci-fi and comic book foolishness in service of maintaining my willing suspension of disbelief—and enjoying the story—but there has to be a minimal coherence to the thing. I need to be accorded that much respect.

Anyway, for a two-hour movie full of nonsense, it went by fairly quickly and painlessly. I gave it a few hours, then I went back.

“Florence Foster Jenkins”:

I went back earlier this evening for another film, “Florence Foster Jenkins”, starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg.

There was a French film on Netflix recently, “Marguerite” (2015), with a similar story—a moneyed matron of the arts is surrounded by sycophants who never tell her that she has a terrible singing voice—a secret carefully kept by a mad-cap retinue, using carefully-curated venues and selectively-bribed music critics to maintain the illusion until the catastrophe of a large, uncontrolled, public performance threatens to expose the entire charade.

Both films claim some basis in historical fact—but the French film is set at the turn of the century and the American film is set in 1940s New York. This leads me to wonder if rich woman are historically misled about their true abilities—and, if so, why? But beyond that question, there’s the tone of such a movie. In the case of “Florence Foster Jenkins”, much like “Marguerite”, there’s a contradiction between the hilarity of bad singing and the tragedy of a person being lied to by everyone around that person—supposed friends and lovers who, whether through kindness or avarice are, nonetheless, doing the poor woman no favors.

Even the surprising tenderness that Hugh Grant brings to his role as FFJ’s husband cannot render this story a happy one—or a particularly funny one, since the impending slip-on-a-banana-peel is always the looming exposure and destruction of the woman’s sense-of-self. Meryl Streep brings humor to the character, but for me, the set-up is more suitable for a psychological horror-thriller, such as ‘Gaslight’, than for any light-hearted costume-comedy.

No one could fault the technical efforts, or the performances of the cast, in this film—but I guess I’m just too squeamish to enjoy laughing at someone who insists on making music badly—perhaps it cuts a little too close to home for me. Yes, that’s probably it—I see a little too much of my own musical strivings in the story of “Florence Foster Jenkins”.

History With A Grain Of Salt (2016Dec03)

Posted by XperDunn on December 8, 2016

Saturday, December 03, 2016 1:41 PM

I’ve just watched the first five episodes of Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” on Netflix. The thrust of his re-telling of our modern history begins with an analysis of Russia’s virtually lone struggle against Germany, transforming what we think of as the main events of World War II into relatively minor clashes—in terms of land-area fought over, scale of destruction, length of time, and number of lives lost and persons wounded—and the stats certainly make that much plain. The Western Front was smaller, shorter, and less bloody in many respects—even with the Pacific War thrown in, ‘our’ War involved about a tenth of the size and horror of the struggle between Hitler and Stalin.

As he continues to explore the question of Truman’s decision to use the bomb, he frames it as more a demonstration for the Soviets than a body-blow to Japan. Stone suggests that the end of the Nazis enabled Russia to turn and join the US, as agreed, in fighting Japan, months afterward—and that their announcement of their intent to do so—came at about the same time as the two nuclear blasts—and was a great shock to an already-battered Japan. Thus, he presents the possibility that Russia, and not our new A-bomb, was responsible for Japan’s surrender, as well as Germany’s.

His revisionism also puts America squarely in the docket, to blame for nuclear proliferation, the military-industrial complex, and the entire Cold War that followed—and we must admit that the USA, being suddenly omnipotent (and not having their country reduced to rubble by the fighting, as was the case almost everywhere else) became the prime superpower—and had all the problems and corruptions that absolute power is known to herald.

Oliver Stone does have a habit of mentioning Stalin’s atrocities in asides, often, as if afraid someone will accuse him of glossing over them (which the asides almost accomplish, ironically). But while Stone presents a new perspective and a clarification of several old false assumptions—and highlights some overlooked or hidden aspects that radically change the context of certain events—he is still dealing with the problem of ‘history as general summary’.

His review, for example, leaves out the details of China’s suffering and transformation, its revolution and great famine. The British role in the man-made starvation in India during World War II, resulting in a genocide greater than the Nazis’, was overlooked as well (see Howard Fast’s “The Pledge”). An historical review, by its nature, leaves out more than it puts in.

His view of the last seventy years may be clearer-eyed, less American-centric—but it is still an impossible task to pick and choose the stand-out events of world history over so large a span of time, without putting one’s own ‘centrism’ into the picking. Still, Stone’s gruesome view of modern American history is, unfortunately, solidly-grounded in facts and records, shorn of the ‘spin’ which events are often given in their own time, and which tend to continue to stand as fact, absent an Oliver Stone.

The show, ultimately, is a flat statement to Americans that being ‘the world’s greatest superpower’ and being ‘the good guys’ are, almost by definition, mutually exclusive concepts. He almost makes us embarrassed that we don’t see something so obvious. Our laser focus on the high-points of American History, and our brushing aside of all the many sins: the original genocide of the natives, the kidnapping and slavery of the Africans, the dehumanization of ethnic and racial minorities, the industrialism that spawned sweat shops, child labor, tenements, and all the rapacity of Capitalism—we wave these things aside and point to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation. Don’t look over there—look here—o, pretty!

Most of history is a horror—and American history no exception. If you think about our greatest moments—the Bill of Rights, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, etc.—they are all merely points at which those in power finally conceded, for this specific case, for that specific group, that people should not be used and abused like farm animals. Points on the Timeline when those in authority declare, “Oh, did that hurt? I’ll stop now.” It’s almost funny that we have these tremendous struggles, usually over the question, “Why should I treat you like a human being?” It’s as if, when someone gets a little power, the rest of us have to turn as one and shout at them, “Hey, right and wrong still apply, douchebag!”

I suppose the great lesson of history is that victory is a sort of lobotomy—it convinces the victor that force is effective. And with force must come control. And with too much control comes the need for struggles anew, and a new victor, and on it goes.

In sum, I was reluctant to watch another rehash of the last seventy years of world conflict—but I was not disappointed in my hope that Oliver Stone wouldn’t have bothered to make this series without some surprising and new information—and observations that really change the context for lay-historians like myself. I love this sort of thing, because you can’t really change the accepted view of history without adding in some new data—and this series exposes many overlooked, obscured, and newly-discovered bits of information, and makes connections that seem obvious once made—making one wonder why Oliver Stone had to do it, all this time later. But I’m glad he did.

The subject guarantees that viewing will be somewhat daunting, and hardly inspiring—but looking ourselves straight in the mirror is ultimately a very healthy thing, if uncomfortable. I can’t help reflecting, however, that if Oliver Stone can take the old story and re-tell it as something almost unrecognizable—then I suppose someone else could do the same to his. When studying history, one must never neglect the grain of salt.

Personal (2016Nov29)

Posted by XperDunn on November 29, 2016

Sunday, November 27, 2016 6:47 PM

Spencer has made bread. Claire has come home from the gym. I’ve had a full day, for me, but I’m not going to embarrass myself by telling you what I did—little victories are my stock in trade these days. Real little. Okay—I moved two very-light pieces of furniture. That’s a full day for me—okay? You happy now?

It’s getting dark way earlier all of a sudden. Winter is here. I’m still working on video-ing the Big Book of Christmas Carols, front to back. It’s slow going—most of them are very familiar, but some of them need many ‘takes’ before I play it through with some semblance of accuracy. Sometimes, like just now, a few minutes ago, I’m too tired to get a good take. I have to wait for tomorrow’s supply of energy and alertness.

I have my mind set on it. Indeed, I’ve considered keeping the idea, and only posting videos of entire books from now on. I have a large manuscript library, but only a few of them are easy-to-play enough for me to play the whole book. So, I guess I’ll try it with a few books, after the carols are all recorded, and then forget about it and go back to my random recordings.

That’s the thing—I start every new day with a fresh head—any long-term plans I might have do not survive the pleasant distractions of waking up each morning. There’s usually a thread or a hint lying around somewhere, but if I don’t look for it, I miss it. Fresh head—every damn morning. I’m considering tattoos….

Monday, November 28, 2016 5:45 PM

I freely admit that I binged the new Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life, on Netflix—which is as good as admitting I watched the whole series, back when (which I did, of course). But it’s not just because I like that kind of show—you go ahead and check—Kelly Bishop, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel—they’re all great actors who have done lots of great stuff, outside of fictional Connecticut.

That’s the trouble with bingeing TV, isn’t it? It’s over now—nothing to wait ‘til next week for. That’s why I like to stay busy—as I get older, I’m becoming really picky about my viewing. At this point, if it isn’t as pleasant as listening to myself play the piano, while I look at pictures of my granddaughter, then I don’t need to watch it. I’m building a library of granddaughter/piano YouTube videos—I’m stockpiling this stuff. If the TV won’t give me what I want, I can make it myself. And, with my new Wi-Fi-enabled TV—I’m just another channel.

I’m working on two projects at once. Longer-term, I’m working on the next installment of Xmas Carols—the Series. And today I’m also processing a treasure trove of pictures and videos from my favorite movie stars—Jessy and Sen. The two will go together nicely—but eleven-Xmas-carols is always a lengthy video—so I’m here waiting for the music-video pre-edit to finish saving-to-disk. I’ve prepped the pictures into video, and the raw videos from Jessy—so now I just have to put all of that into one video….

I played a Chopin Mazurka on the e-piano, with the Harpsichord setting—nice result. I don’t mean I played all-that-well—but Chopin sounds just swell on a harpsichord. That’s a trick I noticed about good music—you can play that stuff on anything. There’s a guy who’s famous for playing Bach on Harmonica—I used to own the LP, hand to God—and it wasn’t half bad.

I can only use the first half of all my Carols recordings—I stay pretty cheery and spritely for a few songs—but then it becomes a Bataan Death March of sight-reading, turning every song into a dirge. You’d think I’d know all this stuff by now—I can feel my fingers remembering as I play them—why can’t my head do that?

Tuesday, November 29, 2016 3:28 PM

Okay, I must be in a post-Thanksgiving metabolic ‘trough’ these last few days—my energy levels are nil. My aches and spasms are small but many. My mental focus is a joke—I’m not even sure if I’m entirely awake. Partly, I stressed myself out—I finally finished the five videos and doing five videos at once makes my head swim—it’s hard to keep everything straight.

But I’ve got them all done now, just waiting for the last two to finish uploading to YouTube. I’m going to try to process my videos one-at-a-time from here on, if I can—it’s a tricky little maneuver that I’ve gotten very comfortable with—but doing more than one at a time makes it ridiculously complex.

ttfn.

Reviews (2016Oct18)

Posted by XperDunn on October 19, 2016

Tuesday, October 18, 2016 2:14 PM

Beautiful day. Leaves is fallin. Sun is shinin. Can’t beat that. Sarah McLachlan may be an acquired taste, but her music is fantastic—what a voice. I’m making a video—I just played Bach’s keyboard arrangement of a Vivaldi Concerto in D, an early transposition from an early influence of old J. S.’s.

Then I played an improv—I don’t know what I’m doing, but it felt good. Now if it only sounds good. I called it “High-End Stroller” because that’s what baby Seneca rolls in these days. There’s a break about a minute in—the camera does that every twenty minutes, making a new file, but it loses a second or two of recording. I took too long with the Bach, I guess—it’s not usually a problem because I rarely play piano for more than twenty minutes—and I often restart the camera recording when playing for longer. What I really need is a film crew, I guess.

Shall we discuss politics? No! It’s far too nice a day for that—and tomorrow’s the final Shootout at the OK Corral, so let’s wait, shall we?

Autumn preys on my weakness—if anyone ever wrapped themselves up in melancholy, it’s me—and that time of year (thou may’st in me behold, when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang…) sorry, Shakespeare got me—this time of year makes me dive deep into memory, loss, and the unending cycle of change that is living.

I fairly delight in depression while the summer fades, the leaves fall, and the winter looms. We must remember that ‘clinical depression’ is an imbalance, that modest, occasional depression itself is natural—a way of crawling into bed and putting the covers over our heads, while working or relaxing. Chronic Depression, the problem, is much in the news nowadays—but if you get depressed, sometimes, there’s no need to panic—it is only when it takes over your life that it becomes a problem with a capital ‘P’.

I used to prefer the grey, rainy days—but now I settle for leaves falling—the wet weather chills me to the bone, making me stiff and achy. I still enjoy breezes—you’d have to be dead not to enjoy a breezy day. But enough about the weather.

I just read a sci-fi book called “Machinations” by Hayley Stone. I was disappointed that the plot was a straight rip-off of Terminator, but it was well-written, with good characters, so I finished the book. Dear Ms. Stone: It isn’t science fiction if you don’t have a new idea—it’s just writing, however good. I took one star off of my Amazon rating—because it was a good book, but it wasn’t good science fiction. (If I finish a book, I usually give it full stars.)

I saw the “Ghostbusters” re-make—loved it—loved everyone in it. I don’t see how they could have pandered to fans of the old original any more than they did—and it was nice. Anyone who wasn’t satisfied is just too hard to please.

I enjoyed a few episodes of “Lucifer” on TV, but as with all outlandish premises, they try to ‘mealy-mouth’ it down to a drama, instead of juicing it up into a comic-book fantasy. I watched nine episodes of “Luke Cage” on Netflix, but I’m getting too old for the kid stuff. I’m having trouble with stories that contain corruption, violence, and amorality—they just upset me. My options are narrowing tightly—I’m down to mostly biopics.

I’m trying to read the new Bruce Sterling book, “Pirate Utopia”, but it’s hard—I’m sorry, I just can’t stand ‘alternate history’ sci-fi—it’s a bridge too far for me. Woulda, shoulda, coulda—that’s all it means to me. But Bruce Sterling is heavy-sledding—I’ll keep on for now, and see if I get drawn in. It might be one of those books you don’t get until you re-read it. Sometimes, they’re the best.

VOD Movie Reviews: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and “Kung Fu Panda 3” (2016Jun29)

Posted by XperDunn on June 29, 2016

Wednesday, June 29, 2016 1:01 AM

“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” stars Tina Fey—I can’t think of any previous dramatic film role, unless you want to count “This Is Where I Leave You” (2014) which was a dramedy—a humorous take on a serious subject. And there is certainly humor in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”—though it has rare moments of comic relief rather than an overarching comedic tone. So it would be stretching things to claim that Ms. Fey has suddenly dived into dramatic roles. Still, it would be wrong to overlook her jumping decisively into this wholly dramatic role with both feet—and sticking the landing, IMHO.

Tina Fey’s performing career is just a late bloomer, I guess. She did a whole lot of writing before she became a well-known SNL cast member—I’m not an expert on her career arc, but to take on a serious movie role for the first time, a few years after winning the 2012 Mark Twain Prize for her life’s work in virtually every aspect of the comedic side of the entertainment industry—that’s taking one’s time in developing an acting career.

I don’t know much about Kim Barker, either—I haven’t even read her war-correspondent memoir “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan”, on which the film is based. I’m both tempted to go and read it now, having seen the movie, and reluctant to go even deeper into the troubling truths being confronted in the film.

There’s the ‘big picture’ stuff, like how our military can fight and bleed in a faraway country while the citizens at home can’t even be bothered to hear about it on the news. And there’s the personal, like how a woman can find herself trapped between the opposing extremities of being an invisible desk drone—or doing stand-up reports amidst flying bullets and shrapnel. In the end I was left with the impression that the big, cold world is more pervasively evil than the discrete violence of a war zone. In spite of my penchant for happy, sappy, ever-after-type movies, I enjoyed being fed this more serious fare, with Tina Fey as the spoonful of sugar that made it go down.

Being sixty years old, I was, of course, embarrassed to watch “Kung Fu Panda 3” all by myself—this stuff was much easier to explain when the kids were small. But I loved it—sue me, I’m a sucker for a good animated film. And I was reminded that these films are serious business when the end credits listed the voice actors (most of whom spoke in all three films): Jack Black, Bryan Cranston, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, J.K. Simmons, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Kate Hudson, James Hong, Wayne Knight, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Try making a live-action movie with a cast like that—it’d be a hundred-million-dollar budget before you even began shooting. Angelina Jolie must have enjoyed the recording sessions the most—all of her and Brad’s kids are also voice-credited in the film.

I know that the messages in these kid films are simplistic—but I still believe in teaching kids to care, even with a silly movie. When Po sacrifices himself to save the whole village, it cuts a little close to the edge—the authors of the New Testament may have a case for plagiarism there—but he returns from the ‘world of the spirit’ (falling on his butt upon landing) so we are left with the ‘out’ of interpreting the whole thing as ‘clever strategy’, rather than a re-telling of The Messiah, so no harm done.

I think I favor the Kung Fu Panda franchise because its fantasies always have two components—the traditional threat of a big, mean bad-guy, and the search for wisdom as a means of defending against the impending evil. Po spends equal amounts of screen time worrying over the enemy’s arrival and his struggles to please his teachers and learn the lessons he’s being taught. He doesn’t go looking for a great weapon or go on a quest to destroy the one ring—he always goes looking for wisdom. I like that.

Movies With Madness (Three Reviews) (2016Apr28)

Posted by XperDunn on April 28, 2016

Thursday, April 28, 2016 4:11 PM

Movie Review: “Nina”

I watched “Nina” on VOD yesterday—a film about Nina Simone, the legendary blues singer (incredibly played (and sung!) by Zoe Saldana) at the end of her career, facing instability, alcoholism, and illness, with the help of a male nurse, Clifton Henderson (as played by David Oyelowo) and marking a triumphant return to the United States with a live free concert in Central Park. Oddly, historical records indicate that she performed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre in Newark upon her return to the US—and that it wasn’t ‘free’—but Nina Simone did perform in Central Park several times in her earlier career.

Other reviewers and critics take issue with lighter-skinned Ms. Saldana playing the very much darker High Priestess of Soul—but while I can understand a rejection of ‘blackface’ white performers playing black people—I think it’s going a bit far to complain of one African-American woman playing another. It makes more sense to complain that Zoe Saldana is too young and too thin—but this is a biopic, not a documentary, and her performance is often riveting, even if the historical accuracy of both her depiction and the story-line goes a bit by the boards. As with Jamie Foxx’s “Ray” (2004), “Nina” is as remarkable for the star’s vocal efforts as it is for the purported subject—though I wouldn’t have minded hearing the actual, recorded voice of the late Nina Simone sing a few bars at some point in the movie.

But you can just do what I did—go to YouTube afterwards and check out the real Nina Simone singing all the songs from the movie and more—that’s as much of a treat as the movie—and since the movie got me there, hooray for the movie. But see the movie first or you’ll never get over the very real difference in both appearance and vocals.

Movie Review: “The Lady In The Van” (2016Apr28)

I was eager to see “The Lady In The Van” because Maggie Smith gives good ‘crabby old lady’—and she certainly doesn’t disappoint in this movie that could have been written for her, if it wasn’t based on an actual woman. Still the film is based on the 1999 play—and takes place even earlier, in the seventies—so perhaps the film was only made to showcase Ms. Smith.

She plays a poor and confused woman who lives out of a van, which she parks in various places in the neighborhood until stricter parking regulations (and perhaps complaining residents) make it necessary for her to park in a driveway—that of the playwright, Allen Bennett, who forms a limited friendship with this loner who has reached the age when being a loner becomes problematic. The film is as much about the man as the lady—and both are seen by the Gloucester Crescent inhabitants as odd ducks. As with many stories about fragile, vulnerable people, the common run of humanity is portrayed as coarse and unsympathetic—from the whispering neighbors to the van-rocking toughs.

One striking element is the conflict between the personal care of Alan Bennett and the more ‘public’ care offered by the periodic appearance of a social worker—to be nice by nature is far different from being nice by the rulebook. It is especially telling when dealing with the mentally unstable, where a little patience and understanding can do so much more than the brusque attentions of a civil servant.

A few movies, like “The Lady In The Van”, are remarkable also in showing us Yankees how very different the British can be—it is so easy to assume that they are just ‘differently-American’, when they are really quite another thing altogether. This film, in showing both the similarities of such situations and their differences, informs us just how foreign England can be.

While Alex Jennings’ and Maggie Smith’s performances contain a lot of humorous touches, the overall plot is insurmountably bleak, so I wouldn’t watch it unless you’re in the mood for something good and serious.

Movie Review: Infinitely Polar Bear (2015)

I just watched “Infinitely Polar Bear” (it just showed up on cable this weekend) written and directed by Maya Forbes, starring Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Imogene Wolodarsky, and Ashley Aufderheide. I’m a long-time fan of both principles—I could go on all day about Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana—neither one has been in a movie I didn’t like. Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Aufderheide did a great job being directed by Imogene’s mom, Maya.

It was my favorite kind of movie—it was so engrossing that I immediately stopped being aware of watching a movie, got sucked completely into the story, and got that heartbroken/furious-combo feeling when it ended because I wanted it to keep going so badly. Mark Ruffalo plays a bi-polar father who makes you worry for his kids—in spite of his generally appearing to be a better father than most. But the best part of the movie is when it shows the madness of sanity against the relief of his specific bi-polar symptoms—his grandmother is crazy, his neighbors are crazy, the waiter in the restaurant is crazy—but all in ‘sane’ ways that society finds acceptable. At the same time, his madness makes him a better person in many ways—even while it cripples his ability to relate to the sanely-crazy.

It also shows that sometimes the only one hurt by insanity is the person himself—or herself—that being different is its own punishment in a world full of people busily trying to fit in. We tend to have more sympathy for a hero that resists peer-pressure than for a hero who isn’t aware of it—but in both cases, the reactions of others are the others’ problems, not the hero’s. The film shows the girls being educated by their father’s disability—rather uncomfortably, but in the end, to good purpose. I found it all very uplifting—maybe I relate a little too strongly to a crazy father.

VOD Movie Reviews: “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs” (2016Feb18)

Posted by XperDunn on February 19, 2016

Thursday, February 18, 2016 3:43 PM

I watched two movies – “Trumbo” and “Steve Jobs” –both bio-pics, obviously, but truth is stranger than fiction and Hollywood has done as much with non-fiction drama as it has with plain old movies—and I use the phrase ‘plain old movies’ advisedly, since the most impressive movies of recent days have either been historical (“Selma”, “Straight Outta Compton”) or biographical (“The Imitation Game”, “Unbroken”) or both (“Jersey Boys”, “Race”) and, since the first blush of CGI’s thrill has long since worn off, block-bluster fictional movies like “Spectre” or “The Force Awakens” (or any Marvel or DC movie) just seem that much more formulaic. Movie-making embraced childhood with its abject surrender to science fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy, and especially comic books—all the things that leant themselves to the new SFX tech’s possibilities. Now that such whiz-bang-ery is a given, these themes are poised to return to the children’s entertainment from which they came.

Don’t get me wrong—good science fiction (and yes, I’ll admit it, for Tolkien’s sake—fantasy) can still be great entertainment, suitable for grown-ups—but science fiction encompasses both sweeping visions and ‘space opera’ (i.e., soap operas with spaceships in them, like the Star Wars franchise) and for every Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” there are a thousand “Transformers”. So I’m glad that science fiction has been taken out of the kiddy-corner—now all we need is a little judicious bifurcation between age-levels, and everything will be fine.

Maybe it’s my age—or maybe it’s my lifelong interest in history—that makes me lean towards the ‘based on actual events’ movies. Or maybe I just like the challenge—everyone knows that a movie is a movie first, and a historical archive last—and my favorite thing to do is watch a historically-based movie, especially one based on a serious non-fiction book, like “Unbroken” or “The Imitation Game”, and compare in my mind what I read with what I see. I have discussions with myself about why they cut this interesting fact or added that spurious made-up scene. It’s like a review quiz for those of us who read the book first. And it’s a reminder that all history, written included, has to be taken with a grain of salt—we can never know the whole story, because even the people who lived it never know the whole story—the whole idea of ‘knowing’ history is a misunderstanding of what history’s limits are.

We see it on the news—especially now, during campaign season—the call and response ritual of two people trading ‘That’s not what I said’s back and forth—illustrating that even in a single conversation, the ‘truth’ is a combination of context, syntax, attitude, and intent—all whipped together with the vagaries of language and the pitfalls of hasty assumptions. To imagine that a student of history from a century or two back would reach any more than a vague abstraction of what really happened is, well, silly.

Those abstractions, however, are dead serious—they are the paradigms of our present. Our ideals, our ideas of what our country is, of what we are—are all bound up in the history that led to this present. Thus the desire for history to be something we can nail down and dissect—but all we can ever really do is postulate—to suggest that this is the way it might have gone. To me, this is one of the great reasons for the need for pluralism—disagreement is a given, within groups as often as between groups—and so we should see groups of any kind as a superficial distinction that is always overridden by our commonalities.

But I was talking about movies. Okay, first off, I read “Johnny Get Your Gun”, Dalton Trumbo’s historic novel, when I was a teenager. Being a bookworm, I just came across it—no one warned me what it was about, or suggested it—I just opened to the first page and started reading. Oh my fucking God!—this book was meant to be an ‘anti-war’ novel—it starts with a disembodied person talking to himself, wondering why he’s blind, and deaf, and can’t move. It turns out, as you read along, that you are reading the thoughts of a wounded veteran who is lying in a hospital bed, covered in bandages and missing an appendage or two. I can’t remember specifics—just the horror of Trumbo’s description of what it’s like to be blind, deaf, helpless, and alone. The book turned my stomach—I recommend it to anyone who’s considering enlisting, just for a second opinion.

But I didn’t hate it—I was enthralled by what I was reading—disagreeable as it was, it pulled me in. And I think that is what made Dalton Trumbo both a martyr of the Blacklist, and its vanquisher—he not only wouldn’t look away from the unpleasant or the inconvenient, he was bound and determined to get you to look at it too—but in a way that made it impossible to look away.

As for the movie—it was great. I’m a big fan of Bryan Cranston and Diane Lane and Louis CK and John Goodman and Helen Mirren—jeez, if they’d made a bad movie, hell would’ve froze over. I watched the movie, then I hit the replay button on my remote and watched it again.

As for “Steve Jobs”, I vaguely remember writing a blog not too long ago where I defended Aaron Sorkin from reviewers who shrugged at his latest effort—even though I hadn’t yet seen the movie. Well, I’ve seen the movie now—and I was right. It’s fantastic—it tells so many stories in the interstices between the obvious stories—to call it multi-layered is to damn it with faint praise.

Again, big fan of Fassbender, Winslet, and Rogen—and Sorkin, of course—so I expected great things. But the ‘frame’ everyone made so much of—the movie being set in the minutes before three major product launches, separated in reality over many years of actual time, is very fitting for a historical precis—each launch was a nexus of time, pulling together all that went before and all that would follow, and the combination of personal, business, and technical conflicts in the moments before—well, it gives a lot of depth and texture without trying to nail down exactly who said what when, and that sort of thing.

I said something in yesterday’s post about my favorite artists’ biographies invariably disappointing me by revealing that they had feet of clay—Jobs is certainly in that category—but every movie needs a bad guy—even if he’s the hero.

*-*-*

Okay, here are three new improvs:

Ta Ta For Now…

Talking Movies (2016Jan27)

Posted by XperDunn on January 27, 2016

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 12:55 PM

I saw “Goosebumps” last night—I doubt I enjoyed it as much as a fan of the book series might have, but I enjoy Jack Black in anything and I enjoy any story where horror gets a light touch—the paranormal is usually treated with such darkness in films. I also saw the re-boot of “Fantastic Four”—I wondered at a re-make of such a recent film, but then I remembered the original had Chris Evans playing Johnny Storm and he’s now obliged to play Captain America in the whole tapestry of Marvel movies. The good news is that this new cast allows for a meeting of Fantastic Four and the Avengers in some future ‘free-for-all’ Marvel movie—wouldn’t that be cool?

DC Comics is making up for lost time with their new WB series “Legends of Tomorrow” and the upcoming film “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice”. Marvel has done a great job of translating their comics library into films, but DC has made more inroads into the television-series-adaptation and the animated films (I also watched an excellent animated “Wonder Woman” yesterday)—in a way, DC is more true-to-form in that comic books are for kids, and TV series on ‘the WB’ and animated films are more kid-centric, where Marvel sticks to live-action cinematic realizations meant to cover all age demographics.

I preferred DC Comics as a kid in the sixties—but now that I’m sixty myself, I lean towards the Marvel efforts. I can see how “Legends of Tomorrow” would appeal to the young—it has as many characters as Pokemon and it plays with time-lines and time-travel, creating a wealth of niggling details that appeal to obsessed kids, but are a turn-off for grown-ups. The WB already had Green Arrow and Flash series (and Supergirl is on CBS) which provide a steady stream of villains, co-heroes, and sidekicks—meat for endless discussions over ‘who can beat who’. The ultimate ‘who can beat who’ is, of course, “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” But I’ve never seen the fascination—Superman is Superman—Batman could spend his life in a gym and it wouldn’t help much—besides, who wants to see to good-guys fight each other? Aren’t there any villains, for crying out loud?

Anyhow, my VOD menu is pretty empty now—I’m trying to psych myself up to watch Spike Lee’s “Chi-raq”, but I expect it’ll be fairly heavy sledding. Greek Tragedy and Inner City Violence—not a light-hearted combo—but Spike Lee is a great filmmaker, so I’m going to watch it—I just need to steel myself first.

My biggest problem is the passage of time—I’ve watched a lot of movies. As a fan of the classics, I’ve seen silent films, black and white films, the classics, the not-so-classics, and ‘the essentials’ (as TCM calls them). I’ve seen many movies in drive-ins, in old movie palaces in NYC, and in local theaters—and since my illness, I’ve had ample opportunity to watch films on TV—some of them multiple times. With the exception of a few genres, like straight horror, I’ve seen every movie there is. I’ve thought about their stories, their plotlines, the process of movie-making, the work of acting, and the possibilities and the confines of dramatic tension—if I were any more involved with movies, I’d have to get a job in Hollywood.

This is a problem because I have acquired some pretty high standards—and originality is pretty hard to come by, after a century of creative people racking their brains for new angles, unexpected twists, and engaging serendipities. It’s been said that there are only a few stories—and that all stories are variations of these few ‘wireframe’ concepts—but I don’t know about that. There are a lot of stories out there—and while many of them are ‘road trips’ or ‘buddy’ films, ‘quests’ or ‘comings of age’, there are also a lot of unique stories that have no variations or spin-offs—modern-day fairy tales, and fantasies of myth, romance, or science that are unique in both plot and setting. Still, while there may be more than a handful of basic story ideas there are still not enough of them to fill sixty years of movie-watching with unending surprise. I’m in danger of outgrowing movies entirely—though I’m sure there are those who might think I should have done so long ago.

After all, movies are meant to be diversions from real life—and when illness took away my ‘real life’, I leaned heavily on diversion as an anchor for my sanity. Unfortunately, diversions are not meant to be the whole of a person’s life—so I’ve come to ask of movies rather more than they can possibly provide.

And now for the musical portion of our presentation—two improvs from last night that I share with you now. I’ve recently begun to question whether I should bother to post my improvs—their uniqueness is questionable and while they may each be technically unique, their style and sound is deathly familiar. I’m only one person playing one piano—the same person playing the same piano—and I’ve been posting improvs for years now. That’s my excuse, but it still makes me wonder some days why I bother. By my calculations, a person could listen to my YouTube improvs for a solid week-and-a-half—that’s hundreds of two-to-six minute improvs—and even Beethoven and the Beatles would get tiring in such large doses, never mind that I’m no Beethoven.

Still, here are two more. The first one, “In The Old Town” is followed, at the end, by a rendition of “A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight”—a song old enough to be in the public domain, so I don’t give it ‘cover’ status on YouTube, even though, officially, I should. The second improv is so weird that I had to call it “Spaghetti Fingers”. I hope you like them.

VOD Movie Reviews: ‘The Martian’, ‘A Walk in the Woods’, & ‘Irrational Man’ (2016Jan14)

Posted by XperDunn on January 14, 2016

Thursday, January 14, 2016 12:45 PM

“The Martian” is Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Andy Weir novel—I had just read the novel a few months back, so I was very jazzed to see a big-screen imagining of same—and this movie does not disappoint. I don’t know what it would seem like to someone who expected a straight action sci-fi pic—I think the movie was just as exciting as any of them. But the book, and thankfully, Scott’s movie, are both throwbacks to the age of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov—when the science-fiction was science first, fiction only as a palliative to help you swallow all the information. Even without the book’s realistic, exhaustive explorations of how a sole person can produce his own oxygen, water, and food—and how to turn a Mars habitat plus a Mars rover into a Mars mobile home—the movie is replete with technological and engineering problem-solving.

Mr. Ridley very ably constructs the story so that one can do what I used to do reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace—I just bleeped over all the long Russian names—and you won’t need to study hard to follow the gist of the story. But as I understand the book’s evolution, it was something of a thought experiment—and there are no evil aliens—so I’m glad the filmmakers embraced the Clarke-ian aspect of “The Martian”—a thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable movie.

Matt Damon seems genetically structured to play an astronaut—so that’s good casting. His character’s frustration with his music playlist, which the Commander had filled with only disco music, was funny in the book—it plays a far larger part in the movie—and skates the edge of letting us all feel the horror of being trapped alone on Mars with nothing to listen to but Gloria Gaynor’s greatest hits. (Not that I don’t love Gloria Gaynor—in moderation.) At nearly two and a half hours, there’s an awful lot to like (and learn) in this film. I find that much comes out of Hollywood these days, but we still have to wait a year or two for something really good to come out—especially in the sci-fi genre—and “The Martian” is one of the good ones.

“A Walk In The Woods” stars Robert Redford who, like Woody Allen, has been a big part of my cinematic life since the seventies—it also co-stars the equally familiar but more erratically-careered Nick Nolte. This movie was perfect for me in some ways—two old guys, grumbling about age, wondering what their lives had really been about, now that it’s too late to change them, and doing stupid stuff they’re too old for, because we never learn to stop liking the things we enjoyed—we just lose the ability. It’s definitely an older person’s movie—I can’t imagine a teenager sitting through it.

It made me proud in a way—the whole movie, I kept telling myself, “Hey, you’ve walked the Appalachian Trail—not all of it—but you’ve hiked alone through the cathedral of nature’s solitude.” Unfortunately, that thought was inevitably joined by the memory of how very long ago that was—and, worse yet, I couldn’t help thinking that those two geezers were still in better shape than I am—I couldn’t hike a half-mile, and don’t even ask about carrying a forty-pound pack on my back.

The cinematography was too beautiful to go unmentioned—but I hear that, since the movie, trail guides have been bitching and moaning about the sudden surge of wannabe hikers getting lost and needing rescuing on the trail. So, maybe the camera-person should’ve made it a little uglier—although, that’s a tall order. I’ve been, as I said, and despite all the rigors, the Trail is unendingly beautiful—awe-inspiring, really. Of course that poor little dirt trail is over-run after a movie like this—remember—it may be two thousand miles long, but it’s barely two feet wide in some places.

Still, “A Walk In The Woods” gave me a sudden thrill when it made me flash-back to my own time alone in Appalachian woods—I’d forgotten how magical it was. Plus, it’s always nice to see Redford on screen again—he’s pretty old now, but so am I. Great soundtrack, too.

“Irrational Man” makes me wonder what Woody Allen has against college professors—they often feature in his stories, rarely to the benefit of their image. But this movie pretty much spells it out—there’s something suspicious about people whose career involves having a kind of absolute power over the most easily-manipulated group of people in the world—college students.

The best education teaches not what to think but how to think—a familiar adage that overlooks the fact that teaching someone ‘how to think’ is not an absolute act—there is bias in human thought. We speak of machines that think—and by inference we imagine our brains as computers. It is ironic that the greatest challenge facing developers of AI software is that the human brain does not perform mechanically—indeed, no one is exactly sure how we think. We certainly don’t think in binary—we know it’s some sort of messy, organic process—we know that brains are processing feelings, senses, and emotions while they calculate, plan, and reason—but we don’t know how.

Further, in “Irrational Man”, Mr. Allen shows us how easily intellectualism can devolve into a tool for rationalizing narcissism and immorality. But it also shows, in the Emma Stone character, how core beliefs can be held without any rational underpinning. It’s pretty right-wing stuff, for a leftist Manhattanite. While the story of a man who disappears up his own ass is fairly familiar territory, Woody Allen makes it into a Greek tragedy—I could have done with a few more laughs from a director famous for comedy—but at least he’s learned to avoid awkward pretension in his serious films, replacing it with his own style of seaminess.

The inexorable nature of Greek tragedy is not my favorite entertainment—if I want disaffection, disappointment, and confusion, I can have all that without turning the TV on. However, I can’t deny that I share the auteur’s belief that watching a movie is not a waste of time—that cinema has intrinsic value—particularly for someone as unbusy as myself. And Woody Allen makes a watchable movie—I just wish he’d consult me about the subject matter. Then again, he’d probably tell me to go make my own damn movies.

VOD Movie Review: “Ant Man” (2015Dec08)

Posted by XperDunn on December 8, 2015

Tuesday, December 08, 2015 5:06 PM

Ant Man is a strange choice for a superpower—to get very tiny hardly seems like an advantage aside from crawling through key holes to get into locked rooms. But Ant Man’s power is that he retains his inertial mass—Dr. Pym, played by Michael Douglas, explains it as ‘making the space between atoms smaller’ which makes tiny Ant Man capable of punching with all the force of his full-sized self—but it is, of course, all nonsense.

Like Superman’s power of flight, which has no connection to any notion of propulsive force, Ant Man’s inertia is very convenient in its manifestation. It doesn’t make Ant Man leave behind man-sized-deep footprints or make him weigh as much—but it works when he’s punching the bad guys. But one doesn’t watch superhero movies for the logical train of physics—that just spoils the fun.

Insouciance was a favorite feature with the old-school superheroes—but it has lost cool points here in the twenty-first century. Paul Rudd, thankfully, has managed an updated, Portlandia-ish style of insouciance that is fun to watch. And the supporting cast of bumbling petty crooks tilts the movie towards farce, but not too much. As with all the Marvel movies, there was a business-like hand at the directorial helm—so the movie didn’t push any envelopes, other than casting Rudd in the first place. And there was the obligatory tie-in sequence that only die-hards get to see after all the credits have rolled.

The tie-in got me to thinking—when they’re done, these Marvel movies are going to be a ‘Sistine Chapel’ of movies—a panoply of stories, each with their own features, but each a part of a whole—I can imagine 24-hour viewings of chronologically ordered Marvel movies—just an immersive group-journey into the mind of Marvel. Only the Star Wars series and the Tolkien movie series can match it for single-themed sequential run-time. Actually, the Tolkien movies top out at six and the Star Wars, while (I assume) unfinished, is only at episode seven—while the Marvel movies—well, let’s see: there’s the Iron Mans (are there three or four?—I can’t remember.) there’s the Hulk movie (take your pick) two Captain Americas, two Thors—they’ve already exceeded both franchises and they’re just getting started over there, it seems to me. Comic books have been selling for decades—why should they ever stop making movies of them?

DC Comics, you say? Sorry—yes, there are plenty of movies of DC heroes, but they’re not themed—they’re not centrally coordinated by a far-sighted team that treats them as a single brand, as Marvel does. Don’t ask me why. Then again, if we look at the younger graphic novel scene—there are far more movies based on Dark Horse comics and the like than even Marvel can match, so it’s not as if they’ve cornered any market but their own—still, they’ve done a better job than DC. And I appreciate the glimmer of grandeur they give their whole enterprise (not an easy thing for me to say, since I’ve always preferred DC, as far as comic books go) by tying together all their movies, giving it the resonance of a cinematic tapestry. It counterbalances the simplicity of the stories themselves because let’s face it superhero movies have a pretty narrow scope for story-telling, by the time you’ve gotten past the origin story, the intro of the villain, and all the frippery of human-interest plot-points.

Ant Man is a case in point—the storyline is packed with exposition and development—there’s hardly time for the big action sequence at the end. Paul Rudd and buddies (played by Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and T.I.) add all the humor they can fit into the script—but the rest of the cast are straight-faced enough to more than balance it out. It’s hard to say whether a longer movie might have allowed some more breathing room into this story—or whether that would have destroyed that balance. I enjoyed it—but you can’t go by me—I have the critical faculties of a ten-year-old. All I can say is, they promise a sequel and I’m looking forward to it.

On VOD, Reviewed: Three Films (2015Nov05)

Posted by XperDunn on November 5, 2015

Tuesday, November 03, 2015 12:40 PM

Pre-Reviews (2015Nov03)

Okay, I’m an old fuddy-duddy—I added these movies to my “Cart” from the “Just In” menu of my Cable VOD listings: “Best Of Enemies”, a documentary about the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, the then-champion intellectuals of America’s political right- and left-wings, respectively; “The End Of The Tour”, a re-enactment of Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s road-trip/interview with the late novelist David Foster Wallace during his 1996 book tour promoting his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest”; and “Inside Out”, the animated Disney feature about the inside of a young lady’s head, populated by characters that represent emotions—Joy, Anger, Fear, etc.—as she experiences the trials of childhood.

As a twelve–year-old, I remember finding the Buckley/Vidal debates excruciatingly boring—they talked of issues I knew nothing about, using words I couldn’t understand—I hope, forty-seven years later, I can understand them a bit better. I’m actually looking forward to watching “Best Of Enemies”—even though my memories of those talks are vague, I still miss their obvious insistence on clarity and correctness—something so absent from the politics of our new millennium. Ironically, it was most likely the entertainment value of their last exchanges, which devolved into anger and name-calling, which brought forth the kind of nonsense we see in modern debates.

I’m not sure whether I’ll enjoy watching “The End of The Tour”. David Foster Wallace’s writing is a beautiful stream-of-consciousness cornucopia of vocabulary and images unmatched by other living writers—but his subject matter was unfailingly dark, disgusting, and full of despair. Add to that the unpleasant highlights of his blurb-biography—and the fact that he committed suicide in 2008—and I’m left with the suspicion that I won’t have much fun watching the film, no matter how well-made. Having plowed through “The Broom Of The System” and “Infinite Jest”, and having read the first few stories of “Oblivion: Stories”, I’m afraid to read any more of his stuff, especially now that he’s killed himself—I have my own struggles with depression and I don’t need my leisure pursuits to reinforce my worst impulses. I think I want to watch the movie just to get close to his beautiful mind again, without having to actually join him there by reading his works.

“Inside Out” should be fun for me—as a kid, I used to run cross-country—and I’d pretend my body was a mechanism, and I was a controller sitting inside my brain, behind my eyes, ‘flying’ myself around the track, or through the paths in the woods behind our school. Besides, I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow Disney animated films—they’re the best—and if the reviews and box-office are anything to go by, this is one of their better efforts.

Wednesday, November 04, 2015 9:51 AM

Post Review (2015Nov04)

“Best Of Enemies” is an enjoyable documentary and I found it especially so because it gives impressions of the two-party mind-set just as that paradigm was coming to the surface. Prior to World War II, social friction was between Rich and Poor—easy-peasy, simple as that. During that War, America put on its best overalls and pretended we were ‘all in this together’. Immediately post-war we busied ourselves fighting against ‘Red propaganda’, touting liberty, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. Having gone from competing armies to competing ideologies, America’s entitled found themselves in a quandary—many of the free world’s ‘good features’ were populist and inclusive. Unions were acceptable, racial integration had begun in the military, and women were fresh from the workforce—pushed out by returning servicemen and the closing of war factories, but still cognizant of what they had achieved during those years spent in so-called ‘men’s jobs’.

To me, religion is the most elusive aspect of those times—we were claiming that religious freedom was a touchstone of modern civilization, but there were many Americans who assumed that Protestant Christianity was the default American faith. This allowed the establishment (an old term for the rich and powerful) to take exception to some freedoms as ‘sinful’—particularly when talking about women’s roles and rights. As we had seen during the war, women were legally accepted as equal—able to work in factories, offices—even serve in the military as ‘support’—but the Bible gave chauvinists the ammunition to reverse that acceptance. The invention of the Pill brought birth control into the equation—and we were off to the races. Women’s equality saw such a backlash that it would be the 1970s before any pushback from women was heard. Still, theocratic mores had permanently embedded themselves into the toolkit of the rich and powerful.

Law and order was another meme adopted by the establishment—but it was used as code for white supremacy. Any public outcry or demonstration in favor of racial justice was characterized as lawlessness—urban rioting was blamed on the rioters, not on the issues that got them rioting. This double-talk would appear legitimate until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were adopted—afterward it became increasingly difficult to characterize social progress as ‘troublemaking’. And to this day, police brutality is rationalized by the rich and powerful as ‘maintaining the peace’.

Our half-century of ‘war on drugs’ was also a thinly-veiled attempt to persecute African-Americans. The criminalization of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the CIA’s involvement in flooding American cities with crack cocaine, our present-day swollen prison population—mostly non-violent drug offenders—are all examples of how drugs (which are a legal, billion-dollar industry) are still being used to persecute minorities. The establishment remains rabidly anti-drug, in spite of evidence that the War on Drugs created an underworld market—a subculture that makes it easier for their own children to get ensnared by addictive drugs than if they were legally sold over the counter, like cigarettes or booze.

Post-war Americans retained many wartime attitudes—‘get it done, no matter what’ was a common phrase while fighting to save the world from Fascism—but after the war, we still felt that a good person would just ‘get it done’. Those who couldn’t ‘get it done’ were useless, rather than helpless—they deserved our derision, not our sympathy. The old, the sick, the poor, the unemployed—these people were useless—they didn’t deserve help—that was the establishment line. Buckley habitually described the poor as ‘lazy’—as if poverty was a choice.

So we see the kernel of modern conservatism in Buckley’s battle of wits with Gore Vidal—biblical fundamentalism, thinly-disguised racism and sexism, and blaming the victims in lieu of social support programs. Buckley’s early work in stymying social progress and maintaining white male supremacy can seem silly to us today—but his fatuous reasonings were acceptable to the staid, close-minded majority of Americans of his time. Today’s conservatism has become far more sophisticated—it has had to, since the majority of Americans today see things more from Vidal’s point of view. We are, by and large, far more open-minded and inclusive about race, sex, and sexuality—and we have documentation proving that social support programs help the whole society, not just those who need them. Yet the philosophical battle rages on—proof, to my mind, that it is what it has always been—rich versus poor, those in power versus those without a voice.

Thursday, November 05, 2015 7:39 AM

Post-Review (2015Nov05)

“The End of The Tour” is well-acted, beautifully photographed, mysterious, engrossing—a surprisingly powerful movie, given the scope of the action—and most importantly, it is not a documentary. We aren’t led through a delving into the details of David Foster Wallace’s life and work—in fact, much of the dialogue displays Wallace’s fear of being detailed and analyzed.

David Lipsky, author and journalist, had just published his own novel when Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” exploded onto the cultural scene—and we see that he is appalled by the rave reviews for Wallace, and then more appalled by reading “Infinite Jest”. I can attest to the impression made by that experience—Wallace’s writing is unbelievably good and can’t help but evince a touch of despair in anyone with pretensions of writing. Rather than being repulsed by such overbearing competition, Lipsky becomes fascinated and cajoles his Rolling Stone editor into letting him interview Wallace as he completes his book tour.

Thus begins a short road trip, an awkward bro-mance between two equally neurotic intellectuals who couldn’t be more different. Lipsky is torn between admiration and envy. Wallace is torn by his sudden celebrity, which represents a sort of pinnacle of all the failings of American culture so deftly deconstructed and demonized in his writing. Few films make such an open-and-shut case for the theory that all great art is the product of suffering—or the irony that subsequent success only adds to the suffering.

Adapted from David Lipsky’s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself : A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace”, a book which expands on the original magazine article, this film has a quiet beauty that belies the ugly struggle of creative expression and its practical side-effects. It has a camaraderie that belies the intense rivalry endemic to artists—and it has a peacefulness that belies the internal struggles of extreme, self-conscious intellectualism. For a film that is the opposite of an ‘action’ movie, it is a terribly exciting adventure.

Thursday, November 05, 2015 2:29 PM

Post-Review (2015Nov05)

“Inside Out” is excellent family fare, as we’ve come to expect from Disney/Pixar. It is packed with humor yet isn’t a comedy—a special formula that had served Disney well for decades. Drama, with all the fear and confusion that is the subtext of childhood, is what elevates their product above the pabulum Hollywood often offers to children. I’m reminded of my own childhood reaction to Mary Poppins—which, for the 1960s, was pretty mature fare for a family film—there is no greater satisfaction for a kid than to be entertained without being condescended to.

The story has complexities that one usually associates with adult drama—there is an interior story—the characters inside the girl, Riley’s, mind—and an exterior story—Riley’s family moves to California. The interior story involves anthropomorphized emotions and other details of the mind’s inner workings that are simplified, but correct, as evidenced by the credit roll’s expression of gratitude to the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute of Columbia University. One learns through the course of the film some fascinating elements of brain function and memory.

As a story, the most telling effects are the back and forth between the inner emotions of Riley and her exterior words and actions—the two stories are not overwhelming in themselves, but the interplay of the two brings a richness to the vicarious environment. There are also hints at the same ‘committee of feelings’ inside the mind of Riley’s mother—and indeed, by the movie’s end, we get a peek inside all the characters’ minds.

As a story-telling ‘frame’ it is a rich vein of original situations that bodes well for an ongoing franchise of ‘Inside Out’ sequels. However, this first movie’s central theme—the necessity, in maturing children, for their joy to accommodate their sadness—will be hard to replace with an equally stout tent-pole in subsequent stories. Still, this cleverly wrought mechanism of interior dialogues will add spice to any tale—and I’ll probably watch as many sequels as they can produce.

If the movie has a valuable message for young viewers, I’d say it was the distinction made between disaffection, or the loss of joy—and sadness, a necessary emotion in life. One hopes that children will see this film and have a better sense of their own emotional states—and be better able to withstand the pot-holes of bad days and rough times. Let’s hope so.

Well, that’s it—three films in three days cost me $16, over and above our monthly cable fee—so don’t expect regular installments of movie reviews—I ain’t got that kinda cash. I admit, though, that if next week’s New Listings on VOD has three equally attractive titles, I’ll probably do it again—it’s not like I’m a Zen-master of self-control or anything.

Improv – Two Etudes (2015Oct29)

Posted by XperDunn on October 29, 2015

Thursday, October 29, 2015 3:38 PM

When I listen to other music, I am open-minded and forgiving—if something doesn’t catch my ear at once, I’m willing to give it a chance. When I am feeling very hard-headed and down-to-earth, I can’t enjoy music as much as I otherwise do—engaging one’s critical faculties too completely puts one in the position of ‘finding fault’—and no creative impulse can survive such a negative onslaught.

It only now occurs to me that I always turn my criticism on ‘high’ whenever I judge my own efforts—and in doing so I’m being less fair to myself than I would be to a long-dead stranger—so today I’m having a moratorium on self-doubt and self-criticism. I enjoyed playing this improv on my piano and that’s all there is to that.

Speaking of being open-minded and forgiving—I just watched Chris Columbus’s “Pixels” on VOD. Liberals doses of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ are required (and a little THC doesn’t hurt either) but if, like me, you are a fan of Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, and video arcade games—then “Pixels” is funny, and a lot of fun.

First of all—I love movies where the characters start as children and then, through the magic of “30 Years Later…”, we begin the real story of the characters in the present day. It’s a great way to give a story depth, especially something as goofy as “Pixels”. Secondly, I love a movie where no one is inherently evil—childishly stupid, yes—misguided, greedy, not thinking things through, … whatever—yes—and I think this is closer to real life. Reality never seems to have a positive villain—for every issue there are just a lot of sides, a lot of needs, and a lot of pigheadedness—but rarely pure evil.

The good guys win and the guy gets the girl—other features I’m always in favor of. No lengthy wrong-turns into gloom and despair—another plus. Factoid hunters on IMDb point out that many game characters used were derived from post-1982 video games, which belies the film’s premise—but if that was the most unbelievable part of this movie, the world would be a very strange place.

What I enjoyed noticing was all the kid actors’ credits—many of the smaller roles were played by children with last names like Sandler, James, and Covert (one of the producers of the film) and I can only assume that the film’s set was very much a family affair. And if you look closely, you’ll catch a glimpse of the actual Professor Toru Iwatani, inventor of Pac-Man, doing a cameo as a game repairman in an early scene, at the Electric Dream Factory arcade. Good times.

In my walk earlier, I felt a strong regret that I hadn’t brought my camera, so I shot a few snaps out the window to use for today’s video:

Update (2015Oct13)

Posted by XperDunn on October 13, 2015

Tuesday, October 13, 2015 5:28 PM

Putin has kicked the hornet’s nest—he may have been forced by circumstances beyond his control to throw his weight around and make Russia’s military relevant (Do you know anyone who wants to invade that charming country?) but he obviously hasn’t been paying attention to America’s forays into the Middle East. Didn’t he know how much American blood and treasure we’ve spilled there—and what have we accomplished? With few exceptions, other countries, including Russia, have sat on the sidelines and waited for us to bring capitalism there, so they could find new business partners—why would any sane leader allow his or her nation to become equally embroiled—without even teaming up with the existing effort? Will Russian mothers allow Putin to waste their children supporting Assad—and why?

Iran has voted in favor of the nuclear-disarmament agreement—a blow to the hard-liners there, but a good thing for all of us. American meddling in that country made them hate us—with good reason. Anything we can do to restore good relations with the Iranian people would benefit everyone.

The magazine Playboy has announced that it will stop publishing photos of nude women—a victory for women’s rights and dignity? ‘Fraid not. They simply need to stop shelling out cash for the same pictures anyone can get on the inter-web—not to mention try to keep a magazine relevant in a post-paper society. There will still be plenty to ogle for those that still subscribe—just not full nudity. I always felt their decision to go that far damaged the ‘brand’ anyway—in a world where there are naked pictures of women, who needs Playboy? If your brand is titillation, why marry the cow? Sorry gals—that just slipped out.

I’m so excited by this week’s VOD movie offerings that I can’t decide which to watch first—“San Andreas” (starring the Rock) or “Tomorrowland” (starring the Clooney). I split the difference and watched “Entourage—The Movie” while I made up my mind. Everyone said it was awful (no surprise) and I always feel compelled to watch something everyone hates—I usually like those movies. In this case, I’d say that if you enjoyed the series, and you don’t mind paying a premium to watch an extended final episode—you’re good. If you wanted a movie, well….

Now “San Andreas” will undoubtedly be noisy and have lots of quick cuts—a guaranteed headache, especially if I watch it after seeing one movie today, already. “Tomorrowland”, on the other hand, is just the kind of movie I love—sci-fi, futurism, happy ending (I assume). I don’t know if I want that to be ruined by my being already tired from watching “Entourage”, either. Still can’t decide. Maybe not watch either until tomorrow. I was enjoying Kathryn Grayson on TMC early today—something where she co-starred with Mario Lanza—maybe that’s what makes it hard to pick a pay-video movie—nothing in my cart has the oomph of old Hollywood—modern movies rarely do. I can’t wait for the new Spielberg, with Hanks in it—that’s definitely got a shot.

I didn’t watch the GOP debates—those people have me reaching for the remote just from a sound bite on the news—there was no way I’d listen to their idiocy for hours at a time. But tonight’s the Democrat debate—should I watch? I’m already for Hillary. I already like the sound of Bernie better, but I know he can’t win nationally, so why torture myself? And the other three—well, if you can name them, you’ve got more on the ball than I do. People have been assuming Hillary will be elected our next president ever since she stood aside for Obama—and I know the media needs drama grist for their mills—but I’ve made my decision, and I think I’d rather watch something else. If I had the energy to really follow politics, I’d get involved, not watch it on CNN and tell myself I was involved.

I’ve considered politics—after years of getting furious at incompetence in public service, I’ve often thought about it. But all we civilians get are the sound-bites—politics is a long hard slog through meetings and conferences and conversations with other politicians. When I vote these days, I’m not only rooting for a candidate—I’m grateful that they’re doing what I could never have the patience for. I hope that they will do well by us, but I don’t make the mistake of assuming they have an easy job. Only the bad politicians have easy jobs—the good ones work like dogs, and for few rewards. Look at poor old Jimmy Carter—a great man ousted from his job by a movie star, after cleaning up Nixon’s mess and getting Americans to believe in the system again. No, I’d just as soon light myself on fire as become a politician.

No News Is Good News (2015Sep29)

Posted by XperDunn on September 29, 2015

Tuesday, September 29, 2015 12:19 PM

I’m exhausted—and no wonder. The pope, the speaker, the UN, refugees, drought in California, water on Mars, a super blood moon, the new Daily Show once again precedes the Colbert show… is it just me or is the world turning twice as fast these days? Have you noticed a lot of news shows start their segments with, “Well, there’s a lot to cover tonight…”? That used to signify a ‘busy’ news day—now it’s just what they always say.

My personal life, away from the TV, isn’t quite as busy. But I did just post a big Brahms performance I’ve been working on for months—and I just found out today is my son’s 27^th birthday! (I wish Claire had told me before I said to him, “Good Morning”—like it was any other day…) We had our daughter and her husband here for a visit from California last week. Claire just passed her big OT qualification test—a culmination of years of study for her OT Master’s Degree—and a sign that she will soon be job-hunting. But first she has to do jury duty in NYC—we were relieved she was only called downtown last week for Thursday morning—commuting right through the pope’s visit to ground zero—that would have been a hassle. I’ve got a road-test next week that will re-instate my driver license, if I pass it—Spencer just passed his a few weeks ago. So, okay, maybe I am busy.

As they say, it beats the alternative. I’m sitting here at my keyboard, on watch to tip the delivery man when he gets here with birthday lunch Chinese take-out. Tuesday is new movies day On Demand—Melissa McCarthy in “Spy”—so there’s even a good movie in my ‘cart’. Time to catch my breath, I think.

Patton was right—“Americans love to fight”—but I think he oversimplified it, thinking in bellicose terms. Our Revolutionary War was a declaration of our willingness to fight when we encountered unfairness. “Live Free or Die” seems overly familiar and trite to us today but it was a formula for suicide in the centuries before the Declaration—when the greatest prior advance in social justice had been the allowance that a person owned their own soul at death—“Free Doom”. Somewhat less ambitious, wouldn’t you say?

And after the revolution, when Texas was willing to enter the Union rather than submit to Spanish imperialism, we fought for them. Then the majority of Americans decided to fight against slavery—give or take a week-long Civil War historians conference on the ‘root causes’. It was unfair—and we were willing to fight over it. In both World Wars, we entered on the losing side—fighting unfairness. The internal struggles over racial equality, gender equality, and the rights of the sick, disabled, LGBT—all fights over unfairness. You show me an injustice and I’m ready to start swinging—why? Because I’m American, that’s why. I really would rather die than live in unfairness.

There are always those who don’t get the central premise—as early as Hamilton’s arguments with Jefferson over Federalist versus Republican, there were those who sought out the ‘easy win’—people who felt that leaving the mother country was simply a chance to be an England of our own, with a monarchy and all that implies. They wanted Washington to be “President for Life” and be addressed as ‘your majesty’—but Washington said ‘no’, like an American. Hence he is known as the Father of our Country not just because he fought the war, but also kept the peace as an American would and always will.

Today we have many people who don’t get the central premise—they think America’s greatness resides in its wealth and power—its shock and awe. Nonsense—childish nonsense. The unbelievable success of our country comes not from any material richness or military prowess—it comes from our ambition to fight for the truth. Yankee ingenuity has been finding new shortcuts towards a better future since the founding. Freedom of speech has made our democracy into the strongest of ties between a government and its people of any country on Earth. Open minds and open commerce have exploded into a global community of digital thinking, space exploration, genetic manipulation, super-sonic travel, and on and on.

Our greatest threat is the explosive variety of our success—the ‘easy wins’ float around like fish in a crowded barrel—the opportunities to exploit our success by working either in lieu of the American spirit (through hyper-capitalism) or in direct opposition to it (through extremist bible-thumping and xenophobic exclusion) are more numerous, and get better media coverage, than the real goals of true Americans.

The enemies of America seek to reinstate unfairness through new pathways—income inequality, religious division, jingoism, and denying the existence of intractable racial injustice—and all their arguments are based on fear and hatred, with a big dollop of laziness and greed to top it off. They make me tired—traitors in our own land. Fight the power!

There—I had to get that off my chest. I always get self-righteous after watching a documentary. I just watched “Standing In the Shadows of Motown—The Funk Brothers”—about all the great studio musicians whose uncredited artistry was behind hundreds of number one hits—hits that I remember from my childhood as the ‘product’ of the lead singers and groups whose names are so familiar to us all today. A handful of men in a Chicago basement would be responsible for over a decade of a multi-million-dollar music industry, without so much as a credit on the dustjacket. That kind of unfairness burns my chaps and it always will. Why? ‘Cause I’m a ‘Murican, that’s why.

Strong Baby (2015Sep22)

Posted by XperDunn on September 24, 2015

Tuesday, September 22, 2015 6:48 PM

Last night started out good—I’ve become a fan of The Big Bang Theory and it had a season premiere last night—they’re pretty funny. I enjoy the comfort of an established sitcom with a toolkit of running gags and themes—all expositions, settings, and character intros have long since been made and the thing just chugs along—funny, funny, funny.

Had a big meal (Bear makes a mean chicken) maybe too big—I felt like I had to have some coffee. But then I watched TV until 2:30 and my eyes still refused to droop. I didn’t sleep at all last night—I was reading a couple of great sci-fi books—“Appleseed” by John Clute is a book I bought about ten years ago but forgot to read; and “Nexus” by Ramez Naam, which I finished at about 6:30 am—fortunately it’s only the first book of a trilogy, so there’s more. But no more coffee at night for me!

Now here’s a bit of lyric for all you strong babies out there:

Strong Baby

Hard muscle—lean cut—on a stri-king frail.

A hard look—a straight shot—makes my ego bail.

When she looks like a tank made o’doves

I could almost cry.

Talks like the drill sarge o’love—

I could nearly die.

Strong women—make me crazy.

Wo-o-ork it out—don’t be lazy.

Watch those ‘ceps pop—makes me dizzy.

Dat can’t be a woman—is she?

My god—that’s a lot of power.

Think it’s time for my cold shower.

Awe me with that rock of muscle

Tell me I can lose that tussle—please!

Baby—please—it’s too much—

Thoughts so hot they make me blush.

I’m a man with a plan but

A strong, fit woman there’s no man that is better than.

When you tell me I got-to-be nice

Then it’s understood—

No need to-tell-me the same thing twice

You know I’ll be good.

Strong women—make me crazy.

Work all day—make men look lazy.

Legs like trunks of trees of satin,

Eyes the light from stars get fat in,

Smell so sweet it makes me twitchy

And that voice so low and witchy.

Stand there like a tower of power.

Going strong from hour to hour.

Beauty—brains—and all that muscle

Tell me I can lose that tussle—please!

We poor men—fit and strong is supposed to be our thing. When we find strong women attractive, it’s confusing and a little embarrassing—but there’s no better make-up than muscle tone, nothing more youthful than a proud bearing. It’s funny—we talk about over-idealizing one standard of beauty—but that’s just the suits that make corporate decisions about magazine covers and such. For all our fixation on women, we men find attractive a myriad of flavors—tall women, short women, small women, big women, full-figured or skinny, any color hair, any color skin, librarians, firewomen, GI Janes, and nurses.

I find the spirit of a woman shows in her face and bearing—no matter what her outer appearance. You can see a person’s personality, male or female, and I find myself attracted to the spirit rather than the package—I think we all do.

Dy’ever have one of those days where you feel like instead of reaching a peak, you feel off the cliff? With health issues like mine, I often watch myself become more and more energized from day to day—recovering from whatever circumstance blew out my reserves of strength, like bad news or car trouble or just a crazy day. Each day I feel more like myself, more capable, containing more potential to get something done—and today was going to be one of those peak days where I really made a splash in a video, or in writing, or something. Or so it seemed, leading up to it. But today, phht!—nada, nothing, goose-eggs, zippo, kaput. I might as well go back to bed.

Wednesday, September 23^rd, 2015 10:31 PM

I saw “Pitch Perfect 2” on VOD yesterday—it was okay, but “Pitch Perfect” was one of those movies that caught lightning in a bottle—beyond the premise, the characters, the songs—there was pacing, introspection, coming-of-age notes were hit—it was a perfect movie, in some ways. “Pitch Perfect 2”, I’m sad to report, was more like an extended episode of Glee guest-starring Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson. It was so busy hitting all the old themes and adding new material, that it never gelled into a movie. It wasn’t terrible—the songs were nice, Rebel is funny, and I’ve got an age-inappropriate ‘thing’ for Anna Kendrick, so it was watchable, but a let-down, still.

I’m too old for Glee—they sing contemporary songs and mash-ups—which I enjoy, but for me a sing-along uses songs my parents, and even my grandparents, used to sing. If I was a little more dexterous I’d get a job playing karaoke back-up piano—when you’re no virtuoso, it’s great to have voices drowning out the piano-playing. In today’s video of 1940s Song Covers, I even try to sing along myself—but that doesn’t help so much, since it distracts me from the playing—and I’m no Andreas Bocelli, either. I left in a brief interruption, where I’m begging my son to sing along with me—and he, being kinda shy, pretends to have a sore throat—someday I’ll catch him in the right mood.

This second video is more song covers—I would have called it Part II, but these songs aren’t from the 1940s—more like the 1930s thru the 1960s. I guess I just felt like singing today.

And here we have another ‘stitched-together’ improv that is really three different segments from among my cover recordings, when I stopped to take improv-breaks.

I’m running into some confusion lately—my improved piano-playing ability makes me very happy, and I enjoy posting new recordings of pieces that I’ve posted before, but much more listen-able. But even today’s posts, which came out pretty fair—I was tempted to not post them and wait for a better take. I also consider playing pieces many times over before posting a recording—something I am doing now with the Brahms Opus 117. Trouble is, even in my new condition, even when I’ve rehearsed a piece, I’ll still spaz out or stumble over a chord; I’ll still have pages to turn; I’ll still get folks wandering through my recording studio (our living room, that is). So perfection ain’t gonna happen—I post what I get and I hope for better in the future. But it is confusing sometimes. I would like to become a real boy (said Pinocchio the wooden pianist).

Jonathan Kruk — Legendary (2015Sep23)

Posted by XperDunn on September 23, 2015

My old friend, Jon Kruk, has been telling stories to schoolchildren for decades. His premiere ouvre, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is a great favorite here in Westchester, where Washington Irving originally set the tale–and Jon’s lively re-telling verges on a one-man re-enactment. Below I share with all my readers his latest email:

Hi My Friends –

My headless horseman gallops live! If, you support me in the chase.

One sleet-gripped November evening, a couple for years ago, Andrea, my film-making wife, galvanized a crew of film makers to gather in 17th century Old Dutch Church. We got an audience of fans to fill the ancient setting of the “The Legend.” Jim Keyes pulled out all the stops on the grand pipe organ. They filmed me performing with passion and panache, my signature story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Here’s the two minute trailer.

Now, we need to your help producing and getting the out film; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – a solo performance by Jonathan Kruk, Master Storyteller.” Here’s the full story, in just three hundred in fifty words,a trailer and a pitch (two and four minutes each)

Please click below. https://www.gofundme.com/kz2xzwfw

And here’s the website with everything Jonathan and headless horseman.

http://www.jonathankruk.wix.com/legendofsleepyhollow

This film captures the drama and vitality of my retelling. Please jump in and help me catch my dream of reaching new audiences.

Thanks very much –

Your Storyteller

Jonathan

—

Storyteller Jonathan Kruk, M.A.ed.
www.jonathankruk.com
1.800.578.4859
Author – Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley
“Best Storyteller in the Hudson Valley”
Good Citizenship Medal – The National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Silver Medal – Parents’ Choice & N.A.P.P.A.
“Barkface & Rootnose” Parents Choice Approved
“Once Upon the Hudson“ – The Hudson River Ramblers Parents Choice Recommendation
“Revolution on the River” – The Hudson River Ramblers – “Best CD in the Hudson Valley”
The Rainbow Dragon, Rip Van Winkle, Halloween Tales!

VOD Movie Review: “Love And Mercy”

Posted by XperDunn on September 13, 2015

Saturday, September 12, 2015 10:47 AM

I just watched “Love and Mercy” (Director: Bill Pohlad, 2014) a Brian Wilson biopic, starring Paul Dano as his ‘past self’ and John Cusack as his ‘future self’. It was beautifully made—not just the photography, which was stunning—but Atticus Ross’s musical collages, made for the soundtrack using samples from the Beach Boys’ oeuvre, had a way of (very appropriately) making Brian Wilson’s inner nightmare sound like a cyclone of Beach Boys tunes. And John’s sister, Joan, isn’t fooling anyone with her uncredited cameo as one of the back-up dancers in the scene that recreates the “Fun, Fun, Fun” televised performance—she’s only in the background for an instant, but there’s no mistaking that toothy grin.

The Beach Boys were a guilty pleasure of my youth—much like Anthony Edwards’ character in “Downtown” (Director: Richard Benjamin, 1990) who meets with disgust from Forest Whitaker’s character when he claims the Beach Boys as his ‘jam’. (It gave me inordinate pleasure to see Whitaker’s character’s ‘family’ become Beach Boys fans by the end of the film.) While the politics and social agendas of other song-writers’ lyrics of the time made many dismiss the Beach Boys as insubstantial party music, Brian Wilson’s musical genius shone through for people like me who cared more for the sound than the ‘meaning’.

Also, there is great yearning and loneliness in songs like “In My Room” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” that was audible to those of us who shared Wilson’s suffering under draconian parenting or his isolation from less-sensitive, less-artistic family and friends. So often, people condescend to Beach Boys music as fluff—while overlooking Wilson’s subtle but profound reflections of domestic abuse and teen angst—perhaps it takes a ‘fellow traveler’ to hear that subtext.

“Love and Mercy”, like other Beach Boys biopics, made my skin crawl with the depiction of his horrendous father—and then added an even creepier note to Wilson’s life by depicting his twisted therapist. Both nightmare scenarios resonate strongly for me—too strongly to enjoy the story, in spite of the incredible cinematic skill brought to this effort. But I gloried in the deconstruction of their classic hits as we are shown recreations of the production process Brian Wilson goes through, experimenting and fine-tuning every instrument, every beat—to create the overall sound that we find so familiar. I especially enjoyed the evolution of the passage that combined Theremin and cello within “Good Vibrations”—so hard core, yet so outside the box of ‘rock’—an ineluctable sound if there ever was one.

I also wanted to cheer when Melinda Ledbetter (played by Elizabeth Banks) throws open her office door to confront the monster therapist (played with Oscar-worthy monstrosity by Paul Giamatti)—what a moment! Though difficult for me to bear, the movie was overall a tremendous experience—a true masterwork of film in many ways—and a welcome further examination of the life behind some of the twentieth century’s finest music.

Here’s a YouTube playlist that shows my ongoing struggle to mind-meld with Brian Wilson:

GOT—Grown-Olds’ Tolkien (2015Jun15)

Posted by XperDunn on June 15, 2015

Monday, June 15, 2015 5:04 PM

When Game of Thrones started on HBO I avoided it, assuming that it would be the soft-core-porn/period-costume-soap-opera/bloodlust-gross-out that most semi-serious Premium-Channel Series-es are. It wasn’t until the genius of Trey Parker and Matt Stone presented me with the three-episode trilogy-spoof of GOT on South Park (with that unforgettable theme: ‘Floppy wieners, floppy wieners…’) that I became interested in just how outside the norm this show was.

Parker and Stone seemed to think that HBO’s dramatization of George R. R. Martin’s decade-long book series, “Fire and Ice”, was representative of homoeroticism, women-hating, and a thirst for bloodshed that didn’t speak well for Martin’s interior life. (–And that he talked a good dragon game but when it came down to it there wasn’t much actual dragon in the story.)

Having watched seasons four and five now, I have to agree with Trey and Matt. But as I considered that, I was also struck by the differences between George R. R. Martin’s GOThrones and J.R.R. Tolkien’s TLOTRings (via Peter Jackson). While the double-R middle initials are indicative of just how derivative GOT is of everything Middle Earth, the differences between the kids’ fantasies and the adults’ fantasies are somewhat surprising.

Martin is only one of a long line of ‘followers’ of Tolkien’s original vision of a realistic fantasy world, but Martin’s creative plagiarism is far exceeded by his creative originality in transforming Tolkien-ish memes for an adult audience. That is something even Tolkien never did (and we won’t go into the question of whether or not he just had too much class to go there). It may not have been possible to do so, had Martin not lucked into a generation of grown-ups who grew up on Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf—but that’s part and parcel of our modern media-hungry culture. It’s no worse than going from Star Wars to Terminator, if you think about it.

Most interesting, to me, is the difference in variety. In a child’s fantasy there are kings, princesses, dragons, wizards, ghosts, monsters, elves, dwarves, and woodland creatures that speak in English accents. In adult fantasies there is sex, violence, power, and corruption—oh, and dragons. Is this representative of the Uncertainty Principle—like Schrödinger’s Cat? Does a child’s fantasy need to match the breadth of a child’s potential future, while an adult’s fantasy needs only indulge the lusts of adulthood? I’m afraid so.

And we see this phenomenon elsewhere—puberty as a singularity, wherein all childish dreams are resolved into the comparatively dreary day-to-day urges of adults who have shed their dreams. I blame it on Capitalism—on our modern beliefs: that money is power—that money is everything—and that dreams are only for children. Something some Tea-Partier said to me online the other day during an exchange over illegal immigration seems to sum it up—he said, “It’s good to be nice, but…” And that, to me, says it all—today, we believe that the things people have always believed in should always bow before the power of money—ethics, scruples, charity, mercy—all bullshit when the bill comes due. I’m sorry, but that’s fucked up.

Like freedom, ethics and principles only exist when we are prepared to lose something for them. I’m not just talking about the grandiose idea of being willing to die for what you believe in. Today, the question is: Are we prepared to be inconvenienced for what we believe in? Are we prepared to make less money, even to make no money until we find another job? When we try to minimize the importance of our urges to ‘cheat’ on our principles in the smallest of ways, we are really minimizing the importance of the principles themselves.

Yes, that does sound like some goody-two-shoes bullshit right there—fresh off the farm. But when you consider the insidiousness of today’s commercialism; when you consider the constancy of the thousand cuts that lobbyists inflict on our government; when you see or hear the thousand new ways to lie spawned by global media—perhaps you can see where some determination in those of us on the side of the angels is in order.

I feel for the fundamentalists—I do. They want to strike back at the filth. But the true filth is invisible to them—just as their ignorance makes their own hatred invisible to them. As I’ve heard many times—‘if you want to kill someone in the name of your God please start with yourself’. Plus, I feel that any attitude that includes murder, or even mild violence, is lacking in the rationality department. (And, yes, trying to legislate women’s reproductive organs and ostracizing gays are both forms of violence).

Some people look at Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. as people who had the courage to face violence without offering violence in return. But many people look at them as people who were murdered. They don’t acknowledge that a person’s principles are not a suit of clothes—they are a part of ourselves. If we give them up, we die in a far more final way than when we meet the inevitable, whenever that may come.

I have some experience in this so I can tell you—it’s nearly impossible to talk about being good without sounding like a goody-two-shoes or worse, sounding grandiose and all Christ-complex-ey. But fuck all you assholes—I’m gonna be good—and if that doesn’t work out to me being rich and famous, I don’t give a fuck. I’m doing it anyway. Fuck all y’all. Oh-and fuck George R.R. Martin’s GOT—twenty minutes of shame-walking a naked woman through city streets for the season five finale—what the fuck is that? Misogyny much, George?

Reviews In Review (2015Jun09)

Posted by XperDunn on June 10, 2015

Tuesday, June 09, 2015 5:10 PM

I’ve just finished reading:

“The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, (Ken Liu -Translator)

“(R)evolution” by PJ Manney (‘Phoenix Horizon’ Book 1)

“The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi

And watching:

“Jupiter Ascending” (2015) – Written and Directed by The Wachowskis and Starring: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, and Eddie Redmayne

“Kingsman: The Secret Service” (2014) – Directed by Matthew Vaughn and Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, and Samuel L. Jackson

[Note: the following three book reviews were published on Amazon.com yesterday]

In “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu, I was treated to some rare Chinese historical fiction, as the story involves both alien invaders and their contact on Earth—and, in a fresh take, someone on Earth other than an American establishes First Contact. The protagonist’s story begins with her childhood during the most horrific times of the many Reform movements that swept China early in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting that far back, we are given a small primer in modern China’s history and culture by the time the story’s climax reaches the present day.

But there’s more. There’s science too—radio astronomy, virtual-reality gaming, extra-dimensional manipulation, near-FTL travel, and a planet with an unusual orbit, to say the least, are only some of the highlights. Things get technical enough that I glimpsed one reviewer in passing, complaining that this book ‘read like a tech manual’—but I found it refreshingly reminiscent of Clarke and Asimov. This is still a nerd’s genre—if you can’t take the heat, you’re not going to enjoy the story.

The characters and relationships are, however, as fully fleshed-out as one could wish—this is no space opera—and the plot is so clever that I hesitate to give even the slightest of spoilers. You should discover this book for yourself. And—good news—it is the first in a series—so there’s even more to come!

In “(R)evolution” by PJ Manney, I found an entertaining and involving thriller based on the idea of nanotechnology used to facilitate the brain/electronic interface. While there is little new in the scientist who experiments on himself, or in super-secret societies that control our businesses and governments from the shadows of limitless wealth and power, there’s still a freshness to the storytelling that kept me turning pages until late into the night. Good writing, if not especially great science fiction.

“The Water Knife” by the reliable Paolo Bacigalupi is a story of a near-future America suffering through the destruction of the American Southwest due to water shortages. The draining of the aquifers, combined with the lack of snow-melt from the Rockies, leaves California, Nevada, Arizona, and displaced Texans all struggling in a world where rivers are covered to prevent excess evaporation. Water rights become life or death matters for cities Las Vegas, LA, and Phoenix, AZ—where most of the action takes place.

The ‘water knife’ is a euphemism for an enforcer of water rights and a hunter of anyone trying to access water without legal authority. Angel is one of the best, in the employ of the sharp female administrator of Las Vegas’s Water Authority, Catherine Case. He becomes involved with a hunt for a water-rights treaty granted to Native Americans—a priceless document so old that it would take precedence over all existing agreements—and in the process, becomes involved with a female reporter who’s gone from being an observer to being in the thick of the life and death struggle of everyone in Phoenix as the water runs out and the dangers only grow more unbeatable.

However, the most frightening thing about this novel is its basis in fact—much of the disastrous environment described has been warned of in a non-fiction book, “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water” by Marc Reisner. That book was published in 1987, and much of what he warned about is starting to manifest itself—such as the present severe drought conditions in California.

Like most doomsday-scenario stories, “The Water Knife” describes people on the edge, people in trouble, and twisted people who take advantage of chaos to create their own little fiefdoms of violence and tyranny. I never read such stories purely for the goth-like rush of people being cruel and dark—but in cases where I feel the story will give insight into something real, I put up with it—especially from a writer as good as Bacigalupi. And this is an exciting, engrossing tale of intrigue, passion, and ‘history as a hammer’, for all its darkness.

[Here ends the text from my Amazon.com reviews]

Having just finished “The Water Knife”, right on the heels of “(R)Evolution”, I’ve had my fill of dystopian cynicism and game-theory-based ethics—or lack thereof, rather. “The Three-Body Problem” was the worst, however—a Chinese woman endures such a horrible childhood under the Red Revolution’s Reform Era that she wishes for aliens to take over the Earth—how’s that for misanthropic?

Science Fiction at its best can be wildly hopeful and uplifting but let’s face it—the vast majority of it deals with rather dark subject matter. I can only hope that my next read will have a little leavening of the stainless-steel truth in it. At heart, I’m a Disneyfied, happy-ending kind of guy.

In between, I watched a few movies. The latest include “Jupiter Ascending” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service”. Talk about dark!

“Jupiter Ascending” is a science-fiction movie based on the premise that Earth—that is, all the inhabitants of Earth—are just a crop being grown only to ‘harvest’. Our unknown alien overlords are just about to harvest (i.e. slaughter) the Earth’s population for the purpose of creating the ‘rejuvenation juice’ that makes them immortal.

Our only chance is a young lady who is surprised to learn that she is the genetic double of Earth’s former ‘owner’, a wealthy noblewoman of the alien master-race whose death left her planetary holdings to her evil son, including the fabulously overpopulated Earth. The evil son is none too pleased to learn that a mere Earth girl is capable of confiscating his prize planet—and the hunt is on. Helping the girl evade the evil son and realize her destiny is a grizzled veteran of the alien military special-forces who’s been unfairly drummed out of his squad.

Some romance between the two slips between the non-stop CGI laser-beams and space destroyers, but even with a happy ending, it’s hard to get past that nightmarish premise.

“Kingsman: The Secret Service”, being a more straight-forward action movie, might lead you to expect a lighter tone. But this Cinderella/James Bond story has several scenes of wholesale slaughter in hand-to-hand combat. Poor old Colin Firth ends up killing an entire congregation of a church—and while their preacher prefaces the scene with rankly bigoted ravings beforehand, it’s still not very enjoyable to see them all slaughtered for their ignorance.

The fight scenes (though in this context, I’m tempted to call them ‘slaughter scenes’) are so busy that the film has to freeze into slo-mo for each death-blow (or death-stab, or head-squish, etc., etc.) just so the naked eye can follow all the mayhem. This is one of the bloodiest films since ‘Reservoir Dogs”, but it has all the trappings of an arch re-mix of James Bond meets Agent Cody Banks.

The director seemed to have trouble fixing on a genre. Samuel L. Jackson is a chipper, lisping arch-villain; Colin Firth is a chipper, upper-class Brit in the style of Patrick Macnee in ‘The Avengers’ TV series; and Taron Egerton gives us a well-meaning but troubled English lad thrust into an unusual situation. But all the set dressing, style, and verve is drowned in a sea of blood that leaves little room for those delicious bits of comic relief that leaven the best action thrillers.

Having said all that, I must admit that as far as quality goes, these were two exceptional movies compared to the dreck that comes out of Hollywood most of the time. Had “Jupiter Ascending” had a gravitas more in keeping with its somber theme, or had “Kingsman” relied a little less heavily on squibs, they might have been great movies. As it is, they were merely good.

Guilty Of Surviving (2015Jun07)

Posted by XperDunn on June 8, 2015

Sunday, June 07, 2015 11:53 PM

Guilty Of Surviving

I condemn you, berate you, accuse you!

No I don’t—I’m just stretching

My dramatic muscles—

Getting ready.

I’m gonna write my life-story

As a Broadway musical

Starring everyone I know—

With the nicest people

As villains.

I’ll post it on YouTube—

An instant classic with no class—

Featuring myself as the Ass.

We open on a cozy log cabin

In a Long Island maternity ward

Where I am born to only parents

With four other children.

I am a child of the sixties,

Seventies, eighties, nineties—

I’m immature—who’re we kidding?

Then I die

Ten years ago

But forget

To stop breathing.

I’m doing it wrong.

How can I write a life-story

After it’s over

When it’s still unfinished?

Instead of rhyming June and Moon

I’ll couple Jew with Moo.

If you had died ten years ago

You’d be confus-ed too.

The tunes I’ll pluck from

Out the ether

Somber songs, but none so

Sweether.

What to call this mess-terpiece, huh? Anyhow, I’ve been watching movies on TV. I saw “Larry Gaye—Renegade Male Flight Attendant” starring the guy from ‘Royal Pains’. I also saw “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water”. They are both extremely silly movies—which means two thumbs up in my book. “Larry Gaye” seems like someone who loved “Airplane!” decided to write an updated script for the new millennium—it’s always just a hair’s breadth from a real movie, but always veers into nonsense before it quite gets there.

“Sponge Out Of Water” tries real hard and Antonio Banderas is just as engaged in silliness as he was in “Puss in Boots”—but I’m afraid nothing in the sequel compares to the scene in the original Spongebob Squarepants movie where David Hasselhoff transforms into a jet-propelled hydroplane. Nothing could follow that.

After the movie, I was inspired by the calypso-style music played over the end-credits scroll. I played the following improv, but I never actually got any Caribbean rhythm into it. Still, it came out okay.

Beethoven’s Pastoral Sixth and Disney in Stereo (2015May22)

Posted by XperDunn on May 23, 2015

Friday, May 22, 2015 10:52 AM

When I was a boy, I liked to lie on the floor of a dark room and listen to classical music. My closed eyes became an IMAX screen for Rorschach-fueled fantasies—vague daydreams of struggle, passion, voyaging, and victory. Back then, I didn’t listen to music the way I do now—I simply heard a soundtrack to an invisible movie. Dvorak’s New World, Tchaikovsky’s 1812, Smetana’s Moldau, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter—they all suggested vague plotlines of grand adventures, terrific battles, and transporting joys—and Beethoven’s symphonies were right up there in my ‘top hits’ list. Classical music has always been the soundtrack to my daydreams.

Because I felt that classical music (mostly Romantic, and symphonic, at that time) was a ‘drug’ that would take me on a ‘trip’, I preferred listening to it on my bedroom record-player to sitting in the audience at Lincoln Center—a privilege that my public school provided as often as twice a year, thanks to the wonderful Mr. Freeman, our music teacher. Young people, and non-musicians of any age, I suppose, can hear music without truly appreciating that musicians have to make it. In a sense, music, to me, came from a flat, round piece of vinyl.

Walt Disney and I had that in common, sort of—but he was not a lifelong music-lover—he didn’t come to appreciate Classical Music until he had already become a successful filmmaker. But upon discovering these treasures, they became his passion. He began to use it in his “Silly Symphonies” animated shorts. While working on an extended Silly Symphony of Dumas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (a comeback role for Mickey Mouse, who was slipping in popularity) Disney determined to make it part of the full-length feature that came to be known as “Fantasia”, a set of eight animated classical works performed by Leopold Stokowski (the premiere conductor of the times).

I was in my late teens by the time I saw a reissue screening of what, by then, had become a classic film. The original 1940 release of “Fantasia” was marred by the start of World War II—the lack of European market revenue, and the mixed critical response, made the film seem a failure upon its opening. Plus, there were high costs involved in making an animated feature film—even more so in the case of “Fantasia”, as it was the first film shown in stereophonic sound, and ‘Fantasound’ equipment had to be installed in every theater that screened the film!

“Fantasia” is a treat—a celebration of both music and art, created by the world’s most beloved and successful commercial artist. Every musical piece in the film brings out special features of the individual pieces—and of music itself. For someone familiar with the music, the animation ‘accompaniment’ brought a whole new dimension to the works—and for those hearing them for the first time, it was an indelible, endearing introduction. The skill and effort of the creative teams, the innovations of artistry and technology used to achieve the film, gave the final collection of flickering images and sounds substance to rival the great pyramids of Egypt.

Now, having said all that, it’s not hard to imagine that today’s musicians could find “Fantasia” to be dated and superficial. It may be difficult for any of us today to appreciate the technical challenges of 1940—with the debut of “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991, we experienced the first CGI-generated animation (and the first animated film to be nominated for a “Best Picture” Oscar). Yet, to me, the old Disney animated classics are still marvels of effort and organization—and the proof is in the enduring value of the surviving individual cels, as collectors’ items and as works of art suitable for framing and hanging on the wall. That’s what those old films were—a sequence of hundreds of thousands of hand-painted artistic masterpieces! In comparison, CGI animations are akin to pyramids built with modern construction vehicles—still impressive, but hardly the same effort.

More importantly, serious musicians focus on the pure sound—what else is there, in music? Music videos have been a part of our culture since the 1980s—with their tendency to push more-pedestrian music’s popularity using provocative visual accompaniment, they can make ‘adding visuals’ seem overly manipulative. Plus, there are now many serious composers who are known for their soundtrack compositions made specifically for film, such as Richard Stephen Robbins’ score to “The Remains of the Day” (1993)—or even Karl Jenkin’s score for the DeBeers diamonds ad (1994). It is understandable that today’s musician might see “Fantasia” as opportunistic or exploitative of the great composers. But that would be overlooking the educational and popularizing effect of those times.

It was only the previous decade, the 1930s, that public radio broadcasts of classical music had allowed the masses to hear concert music—prior to radio, classical music had remained as much a privilege of the ‘upper class’ as it had been in the days of noble patronage, centuries before. And Leopold Stokowski, José Iturbi and Arturo Toscanini were still freshly-minted radio stars—the NBC Symphony Orchestra gave its premiere broadcast in 1937. Classical music, in 1940, was in a certain sense, the ‘latest thing’.

Plus, Disney’s animations ‘closed the distance’ for new fans of classical—instead of seeing the mechanics—a film of the orchestra itself, playing—we see the kinds of fantasies that listening to such music can inspire. Disney’s “Fantasia” showed music from the listener’s perspective, not the performer’s.

So when we are tempted to dismiss the film as trite or silly, we ignore its historical context. I’m reminded of Owen Wister, the author of “The Virginian” in 1902. Today we laugh at the clichés of Westerns—the shootouts at high noon, the schoolmarm sweethearts, the strong, silent gunslingers—yet all of these memes were original ideas when Wister first penned them. They only became clichés because these images were so powerful that they were copied and varied ad infinitum, for a century. In the same way, Disney’s enormous influence on our modern viewpoint blinds us to the originality and impact of his work when it was first created. Respect must be shown.

Not that I don’t respect Beethoven. I loved his Sixth Symphony long before I saw “Fantasia” and I love it still, in spite of the fleeting mental image of bare-breasted, gamboling centaur-nymphs imprinted by the film. I also see dancing mushrooms whenever I hear Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and feel the urge to belly-laugh whenever I hear Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours—but I’m sure the composers themselves, if we could ask them, would be flattered to have received the loving attention of Walt Disney.

False Principles (2015Apr04)

Posted by XperDunn on April 4, 2015

Saturday, April 04, 2015 11:15 AM

The Copernican ‘Principle’ is the latest catchphrase for bifurcating religious belief and scientific inquiry, interpreting Copernicus’s astronomical observations as a ‘non-geocentric’ view. And a new movie being released, “The Principle”, presents the modern-day argument against Copernicus, based on a book entitled “Copernicus Was Wrong”. It may feel exhausting to learn that there are people here, now, in the twenty-first century claiming that the Earth is the stationary center of the universe, but it is my sad duty to inform you that such is, in fact, the case.

In the usual way, controversy over this film has centered on the very public disavowal by scientists filmed for this documentary of the edited comments they make in the course of their interviews. God forbid the media focus on the actual point of the controversy—the cosmology itself. It is far easier to have a grand ‘he said-she said’-type of verbal rumble than to examine the science and/or theology of the filmmaker’s representations—and more entertaining, as well, since actual thought is not necessary when discussing the ins and outs of a gossip-war.

These days I’m often tempted to become paranoid. I’m tempted to entertain the possibility that the powers-that-be are subsidizing the public discourse on anything that is so outrageous that sensible folks are taken aback at the mere mention of the premise. Denying evolution fits into this category, to my mind, as does climate-change denial. But geocentricism is just one step up from a belief in a flat Earth—surely no serious grown-up would argue that we should revisit the idea that our little planet is the very center of all creation—not just our own galaxy (in which our entire solar system is demonstrably placed far out on one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms) but of all the galaxies.

The fact that our discovery of other galaxies in the universe is fairly recent, and the product of modern science-based cosmology, doesn’t seem to faze the geocentrists. Neither do the geocentrists consider, as most scientific-minded folks might, the newness of our knowledge about other galaxies to be a warning sign against making premature judgements about their nature—like many apologists, they rather consider such ‘early returns’ an opening for wild theories about how we can return ancient myths to the realm of factual data.

This never fails to frustrate me. I can accept all kinds of argument about what this means, or what that means—I can accept that there may be many things that we, as humans, misunderstand. But I will never see the connection between that mystery and any sort of confirmation of ancient scriptures that describe ancient man’s encounters with ‘The Creator’. To me, that’s a pretty big hole in an argument—that its only backing comes from people who were basically fresh from inventing the wheel.

The problem, for me, is that we are not comparing the science of ancient times to the science of today—we are contesting the primacy of ancient myth versus modern science. When we make statements today, they are based on observations and calculations. When we choose the religions of millennia gone by, we are working exclusively by hearsay, without any information. And believers will make a point of this, insisting that ‘faith’ must operate outside of the scientific method. For them to turn it around and use their faith as an alternative to science, to attack science as an enemy of faith, seems like an argument against itself.

One thing that struck me was the filmmaker’s comment, during an interview with Church Militant (!), that cosmologists have been forced to go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the creation of the universe without starting from the assumption of a Creator. Well, yes, Mr. Smarty-Pants, science without the benefit of Magical Thinking does get a little complicated. Everything gets complicated when we don’t allow ourselves the luxury of saying, ‘just because’. Apologies if that makes your poor little brain hurt.

Also, these Christian pseudo-intellectuals always gloss over a very important point—who says that humans are capable of knowing how or why the universe was created? If scientists can’t figure it out before lunch, does that mean that our only fallback position is to return to the crumbling scrolls of ancient civilization? Only if that’s where you meant to end up in the first place. Science is very useful stuff, but no one ever claimed it would replace all the ‘knowledge’ and ‘explanations’ provided by superstition. Science is handicapped by its insistence on being transferable to any culture or society. As Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, “The great thing about Science is that it’s true, whether you believe in it or not.” But no one claims that science is a complete answer—only religion offers that brand of snake-oil.

And in the context of this film, “The Principle” we aren’t even addressing the truth of science—we find ourselves in a discussion over the correctness of certain interpretations of scientific truth. After all, the question is easily decided—Einstein tells us that everything is relative to ‘an observer’. If we wish, we can interpret the rotation of the Earth as the rest of the universe spinning in the opposite direction while the Earth remains still. By the same token, we can consider ourselves stationary when walking—that the ground beneath our feet is moving backward as we float in a set point. Relativity allows us these mental games—and they are true in the technical sense. But they are no more true than the standard interpretations—that the Earth does spin, that we move while we walk.

Recent archeological research has determined that the ‘history’ in the Bible may not be entirely accurate. For instance, the movement of the Jews from Egypt into Canaan is represented in the Bible as a military campaign led by Joshua, who conquered city after city. Recent evidence indicates that the Jewish culture infiltrated the region in a less obvious way, and on an entirely different time-line than that given in the Old Testament. The show’s narrator speculates that the biblical account may have been a form of propaganda, written long after the actual events took place. Thus the Bible, which long ago lost its claim to scientific fact, is losing its last claim to relevance—as the only source of ‘historical’ documentation of biblical times.

But this very questionable bit of literature remains, amazingly, our fallback position whenever we are stymied by the stubborn nature of scientific truth. Even more hilarious, to me, is the Christians’ easy assumption that if religion is legitimized that Christianity will, of course, be the most legitimate of all the religions—a double-whammy of wishful thinking!

I don’t know about most other atheists, but I am constantly deluded by the fantasy that I can one day say, “Alright, you guys—that’s enough childishness. It’s time we started facing things like grown-ups. The fairy tales are nice, but we’ve got some real issues we need to deal with, and religion ain’t helping.” It is nearly impossible for me to accept that most people would hear such a simple statement as ‘crazy talk’. This is the greatest challenge for atheists, particularly lapsed Catholics like myself—the longer we live without religion, the sillier other people’s faith becomes. Eventually, it becomes very difficult to believe that they really are serious about their fantasies. We forget what it was like to simply accept magic in our lives without question.

They say that Love is the only socially acceptable form of insanity—but in my opinion, Religion takes the cake in that contest—Love doesn’t even come close. When Love creates difficulties in our lives we agonize over it—“Is this really Love?”; “Is this love worth that sacrifice?”, etc. But when difficulties arise over Religious beliefs, we refuse to even discuss the issue—talk about crazy. I’m not even going to get into the whole ‘beheadings’ business—jeez!

The filmmaker complains that his movie should win an award for “movie most reviewed by people who’ve never seen the film”. I’m afraid he’s right about that—but I don’t need to watch a whole film to understand what he’s trying to do by making it. I can just look out my window at dawn and ask myself whether the sun is rising or the Earth is turning towards it—and whether the astronauts looking out the ports of the International Space Station would agree with my answer.

More TV Movies (2015Apr01)

Posted by XperDunn on April 1, 2015

Wednesday, April 01, 2015 1:09 PM

I love Tuesdays—that’s when Optimum adds newly released movies to their VOD menu. Yesterday was “The Imitation Game” and “Interstellar”. Both were excellent movies, although back-to-back blockbusters can be a strain on these old bones—and what a headache, too, after staring at my big screen for almost six hours straight. Were I a more considered sort of guy, I would have spaced them out and waited another day to watch one of them.

“The Imitation Game” was an excellent movie. I want to say that right at the beginning, because I have some caveats that have nothing to do with cinema, but I don’t want that to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy myself.

This movie is a perfect example of why it is so important to read the book before watching a movie based on a book. One can read a book afterwards, but it’s rather like smoking a cigarette before having sex—it puts the cart before the horse. A two-hour movie cannot possibly cover the amount of information to be found in an almost-eight-hundred page, carefully-researched biography—nor should it even try. “Alan Turing—The Enigma” covers Alan Turing’s childhood, his academic career, his social and family life, his sexuality, and his multi-faceted, almost unbelievable career.

Turing wrote “Computable Numbers”, which introduced the concept of using symbols for both numbers and characters, amounts and instructions—and for many years, only a handful of people could understand what he wrote. Even fewer saw the grand implications of the “Turing Machine”. He then used those ideas to help England puzzle out the Nazi’s enigma code-machine, which shortened, perhaps even won, the war and saved millions of lives. But he (and everyone else involved) was sworn to secrecy about both his scientific achievements and his heroic contribution to the war effort.

After the war, he began to work on a universal machine—a machine that would not only do a specific job of controlled calculation, as at Bletchley Park, but would be capable of doing any such job, whether it be the calculation of orbits in space, the half-lives of radioactive materials, or the guidance of a rocket-propelled missile. The strangest thing about the early history of computers is that very few people saw the point. But, once they got on board, his government took the work out of Turing’s hands. So he started working on the chemical processes of morphogenesis—the mechanism by which cells create articulated creatures, rather than a featureless sludge.

Everything he turned his mind and hand to, every idea he highlighted for the rest of us—was amazing, unbelievable, mind-blowing. Think about it. First he said, ‘In algebra, we use letters to represent numbers—why can’t we use numbers to represent letters?’ Then he said, ‘I can break the unbreakable Nazi code and win WWII.’ Then he said, ’War’s over—I’m going to build a machine that can think.’ Then he said,’Now I have a computer—I’m going to figure out how life began.’ Then he turned forty. Then, at forty-one, he ate a poisoned apple and killed himself.

The film says nothing of all this. The film doesn’t even mention his mother, who was a big influence on his life in the book. It says nothing of his visits to America, before and during the war. It reduces the crowds of people he interacted with to a handful of on-screen characters—and it makes far too much of his relationship with Joan, simply because movies have to have that sort of thing in them, even when the leading man is a recognized homosexual.

Movies have had a lot of practice at this. There’s nothing terribly untrue about what was in the movie—it is simply missing so much that it tells a story quite different from the story told in the book. I don’t blame the movie-makers—this is in the nature of filmmaking, particularly adaptations from books. It is an accepted fact that the reactions of a movie audience are more important than the details of the story being told. This gives books a tremendous advantage. However, as I said, it was an excellent film.

“Interstellar” was likewise excellent, but equally limited by virtue of its being a movie. The physics of space-time are conveniently ignored or, more likely, misrepresented by beautiful CGI effects. In a movie so focused on the scientific aspects of modern life, it is notable for its lack of realism and its tendency to resemble a dream-state more than scientific research.

But science fiction has always tread carefully on the borderline between fact and fantasy, using the suggestion of science to make an allegory about the human condition—quite similar to fantasy, which explains why the two are usually considered a single genre, sci-fi/fantasy. “Interstellar”, with its spaceships, scientists, and robots, presents itself as hard science fiction, a sub-genre that usually treats with sub-atomic physics or cosmology in a futuristic setting. But the story being told is one of wish-fulfillment and easy shortcuts—the opposite of hard science fiction.

We get only the most fundamental features of science fiction in this sort of story—we get to be awed by the vastness of space, by the mystery of time, by the power and reach of technology, and by the inexorable terror of Mother Nature. But we don’t learn any actual science, as we would when reading Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov.

Asimov is a telling figure in the world of science fiction—one of the most popular and prolific writers in the genre, but where are his movies? There’s “I, Robot” and “Bicentennial Man” –but both of those are very loosely based on the original short stories, retaining little of Asimov’s genius beyond the “Three Laws of Robotics”. What about the Foundation Series novels, or the Robot Detective Series novels? Movies, while lots of fun, are simply too stupid to encompass an Asimov story—he deals in ideas, not images. He is trapped in literature.

Or look at Clarke’s works—one movie, and that one movie is based on one of his short stories, “The Sentinel”. Stanley Kubrick, possibly the greatest movie director that ever lived, spent more than two hours on screen with “2001: A Space Odyssey” trying to tell one short story from a hard sci-fi author. Where is “Rendezvous with Rama”, or “The Fountains of Paradise”, or “The Lion of Camarre”? Hence the glut of comic-book adaptations—only science fiction intended for children is easily adapted to the screen.

But the relationship between science fiction and childhood rates a closer look, as well. Early science-fiction in the pulps was considered childish reading matter—strictly for kids. It wasn’t until we landed on the moon in reality that science fiction was able to show its face among adults. But I don’t believe this was due to children being the only ones stupid enough to be interested—it was due to children being the only ones open-minded enough to see the value of it.

Even today, the value of science fiction is considered mostly monetary—between Star Trek and Star Wars, sci-fi has become big business. But the real good stuff remains locked away in books, too concerned with science and ideas to be adaptable into stories and images. Still, “Interstellar” was fun to watch, and it had a happy ending. I do love a happy ending. And I’d rather watch Matthew McConaughey drive a spaceship than a Lincoln….

A Taste For The Real (2015Mar30)

Posted by XperDunn on March 31, 2015

Monday, March 30, 2015 6:49 PM

I watched TV all day. I got caught up in “Muhammed Ali’s Greatest Fight” (2013) about the Supreme Court justices, and their clerks, at work on the decision whether to uphold Ali’s conviction for draft evasion—a conviction they ultimately reversed in a dramatic series of events (if we take the movie at face value). I felt it to be a stirring illustration of a point in time when reasonable men were confronted by their own prejudices and confused by the tug-of-war between the ‘traditions’ of racism and its incompatibility with even-handed protection of constitutional rights.

Then I saw a PBS documentary about the author/illustrator of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” (1939), “Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place”. This tells the story of the life and art of a “Renaissance woman”, innovative children’s book author/illustrator, textile designer, painter, and sculptor in granite, marble and wood. The film goes to places on Cape Ann that inspired ‘Jinnee’, including her home and studio, Folly Cove, Gloucester Harbor and the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Her designs of her children’s books reflected her efforts to compete with her sons’ fascination with comic books—one of the film’s commentators remarked that her books were the first examples of the graphic novel. She also founded Folly Cove Designs, a textile collective prominent during the Craft Art Revival era, employing many locals who went on to become accomplished craftspeople in their own right—the collective’s works were retailed in major stores and exhibited by several museums. When Virginia Lee Burton died in 1968, the remaining members of Folly Cove Designs decided to shut its doors.

Then I watched “The Valiant Hours” (1960), an American docudrama about William F. Halsey, Jr., and his efforts in fighting against Admiral Yamamoto and his Japanese Navy in the Guadalcanal campaign of World War II. This film was the sole product of James Cagney’s production company, and Cagney gives a great performance as Halsey. The story is a nail-biting bit of head-to-head between the US and the Japanese in the Pacific, with Guadalcanal becoming the high-water mark for Japanese conquest and the beginning of the turning of the tide of that war. Told from the point of view of an admiral who spends most of the battles sitting at his desk drinking coffee, the film is careful to annotate the fates of those regular marines with whom Halsey meets during his personal visit to the island.

That visit impacted the morale of the tired, struggling soldiers who felt on their last legs before Halsey even took over for poor Woolsey (whose only mistake, says Halsey in one scene, was in ‘getting there first’). Japanese intelligence even credited the strengthening of resistance among American forces to that visit. Moreover, it was in an attempt to bolster his own troops in the same way that Yamamoto was later shot down by American flyers in transit. The film is a wonderful tough-guy cameo of both the Admiral and of the War in the Pacific.

It occurred to me during all of this that I had, in some sense, outgrown fiction. Earlier in life, I’d been puzzled by people who never read novels or watched movies or TV, preferring to read only non-fiction. It seemed a draconian approach to information-gathering, since much of fictional art has a lot to say, both about the people and times of the story, and about the story-teller.

And I don’t think that my recent change in taste is a concession to that point of view—but the information to be gathered from fiction has reached a point of diminishing returns for me—I’m familiar with the rough outlines of social, economic, and military history, with the cultural oddities to be found in Dicken’s London, Cervantes’ Spain, Michener’s America, and Clancy’s Cold-War, with the habits and jargon of Berkeley’s Broadway, Ford’s Old West, and an endless list of other times, places, and peoples.

Further, while this information source dries up for me, the settings, plotlines, conflicts, and dramatic devices become ever more familiar. I find that large swathes of popular culture are not only intended for the young, but are utterly predictable and unsurprising to an older audience. More importantly, the vicarious experience becomes problematical when the characters are concerned with something as jejune as first love or first career-step or becoming new parents. I can’t place myself in the action when the action concerns a teenager, or a twenty-something, or even a thirty-something.

The ultimate effect of most new movies that appear on my VOD menu is to make me depressed about how old I am, when I’m not in full critic mode, questioning the decisions made by the directors, the writers, or the actors. So I find myself, after the end of an interesting, fact-based program, desperate to find something of equal interest—something that treats with real life, rather than a diversion meant to make me laugh, feel desire, or dream of the future.

But there is a silver lining. The occasional excellent movie will be appreciated that much more—they do still make them, though they’re few and far between. Meanwhile, my health has improved to the point where I can read almost as much as I used to—and books have much better ‘pickings’ than cable TV when it comes to jaded, over-experienced audience-members like myself.

A Quiet Day (2015Mar24)

Posted by XperDunn on March 25, 2015

Tuesday, March 24, 2015 10:38 PM

My apologies to all you who didn’t share this experience today—but I had a nice, quiet day. Turner Classic Movies showed Cole Porter musicals all day—I caught most of “Silk Stockings” (Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse) and the first half of “DuBarry Was A Lady” (Red Skelton, Lucille Ball). By that time, I felt an itch to do a little Porter of my own. I’d also felt a yen for this particular Jerome Kern song last night. Probably came into my head because it has ‘Spring’ in the lyric. Anyway, I had that all queued up, so you get one by Kern, two by Porter.

These scores are tough sledding—very thick chords, some of them. I’d give anything to just breeze them along in a nice tempo, but I work with the tools I have—my apologies. The improv is short today, but I thought it was kind of cute. You decide.

Again, source material credit for my graphics has to be given. Source graphics courtesy of : The Rijksmuseum Website. The Rijksmuseum Website, by the way, is a great site for at-home museum visiting—and if you’re digitally crafty, you can download anything you see, for free, and use it in a project of your own. It’s Gr-r-reat! https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

Table cover, Christiaen Gillisz. van Couwenberg, c. 1650 – c. 1675

Gezicht op Derwent Water, in de richting van Borrowdale (Cumberland), Thomas Hearne, 1754 – 1817

Why We Fight (2015Mar19)

Posted by XperDunn on March 19, 2015

Thursday, March 19, 2015 2:19 PM

I’ve got a new theory. Right-wingers are people who, in early childhood, got a taste of bullying and found that they liked it. Then they grow up and find that life is not about bullying. Disappointed, they spend the rest of their lives trying to make the world safe for bullying again, like in the good old days.

Left-wingers are people who, in early childhood, got a taste of being bullied and found that they did not like it. Then they grow up and find that bullies belong in jail. Relieved, they spend the rest of their lives trying to reinforce civilization and restrict the bullying to kids’ playgrounds.

The remaining people don’t care about politics. Most of them live in poverty, have always lived in poverty, and don’t expect anything to change—can you blame them? The rest are made apathetic by their entitled, smug self-assurance that nothing will ever change their private little upper-income paradise—the same self-assurance that tells them there’s nothing wrong with their spoiled, wasteful lifestyles.

These four groups try to share the same planet but, inevitably, the bullies start new bullying, the bullied start new protests, the poor get angry at the rich and the rich get scared of the poor. There’s a lot of trouble brewing out there, but at this point the conflict is mostly muted due to the artificial information broadcast by the rich who own the media. To hear them tell it, obnoxious people wearing business suits can be trusted to run the world and make sure there’s liberty and justice for all. I’m not convinced, but they sure are. Or they take money to keep up the pretense (see Cenk Uyger’s documentary, “Mad As Hell”).

But when the truth is suppressed or, as has become more common, is distorted, society can have a lot of festering ills boiling beneath the media’s gloss. And we do—boy, how we do. Even the super-wealthy are blinded by the news blackout—they have no idea how their neglect of their society is fouling their own nests. Gated communities only offer so much protection—when the pressure gets too intense, they’ll actually be the most endangered of all of us—because they’ll be the only ones who have what everyone else wants.

As bad as things are now, there is still plenty of food and water for most people, particularly here in the world’s wealthiest nation. For now, the rich have all the privileges—but soon they’ll have all the food, too. That will be the time for them to start whining about class warfare, because then they will surely have it—and it won’t be political.

There are too many people. Global population growth proceeds apace, but it has long since passed the point where the Earth can easily support so many. Why do we keep flooding the Earth with more people when we already have too many? Because being human is not being sensible. Being human is not questioning the instinctive imperatives that our lizard brains insist upon, even when they run counter to survival, ours or our species’.

And the pressure from population density has humankind, and its attendant filth, filling every living niche on the planet, killing off or pushing out the rich, natural biodiversity that keeps our air and water clean. We are even stupid enough to cut down the very last tree in the last rain forest before we realize that there is a limit to satisfying humanity’s greed. It’ll happen. We’ll wonder why. Well, I won’t—the answer is depressing simple—we’re too stupid to live.

We used to be somewhat safer from our own mistakes. There are places on Earth that no one would live in, places that are barely survivable—so we stayed away from them. But now we go into the Arctic, we dive deep beneath the oceans, we delve far into trackless wastes—and drill for oil. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? What harm can an oil drill do? Well, it turns out that a certain, inevitable amount of spillage, fires, water-fouling, ground contaminating, and small-arms fighting can result from even a small oil field in development. Everywhere we go, we leave nothing but mud, toxic waste, and species-loss.

I won’t go into the damage that oil-industry incursions do to the societies they impose themselves on. There’s an excellent documentary produced by Brad Pitt, “Big Man”, which gives a scathing account of the interlocking forces and corruption caused by oil developers in Africa—I won’t duplicate that effort here. The morons in that story are fighting solely about the money—a level of stupidity I won’t descend to today.

So why are we so stupid? Well, I think it’s that old ‘weakest link’ effect. The greediest and most thoughtless people rush in to fill any gap left by people of conscience and thoughtfulness. It isn’t enough to simply not do bad things, we have to stop each other from doing bad things. And we all know what happens when one person tries to stop another person from doing what they want. We fight.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the problems that cause our fights and our wars were ever solved, either by the fighting or by the victors. But history tells us that when we fight, even when we fight something as horrible as the Nazis, and even when we win—we end up becoming the thing we fought. When the Nazis first bombed cities full of civilians, it was a new and shocking war-crime that everyone condemned—now it’s standard procedure for any military. Is that progress? I’m afraid it truly is.

Review: “All Is by My Side” (2015Jan15)

Posted by XperDunn on January 13, 2015

20150113XD-Jimi_AllIsByMySide

(Just out on VOD:)

“Jimi: All Is By My Side” (2013) [originally “All Is By My Side”] 118 mins.

(A drama based on Hendrix’s life as he left New York City for London, where his career took off.)

Director, Screenplay: John Ridley

Starring: André Benjamin, Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots

This bio-pic was fittingly obtuse in some ways, hard to follow—not unlike its subject. I’ve never been quick on the uptake—much of my favorite music is music I disliked on first hearing—and Hendrix certainly falls into that category. But the funny thing is that I appreciate and enjoy Hendrix more with age—and having seen this movie (and allowing for its being a cinematic work rather than a reference work, but nonetheless) I think Hendrix was too prolix and light-heartedly free in his music for the age of the super-serious, socially-conscious music stars such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan. That was certainly my youthful problem with him—so maybe I’m just projecting.

But being unlimited in what he could do with a guitar, his penchant for musical playfulness, flights of fancy, and unabashed abrogation of anyone and everyone else’s songs, styles, and techniques was to be expected. He was a virtuoso in a time after the recognition of virtuosity. His newer age had ‘discovered’ that emotional depth and spirit outdid pure expertise every time, but we (I was a way-too-serious ten-year-old on Long Island during Hendrix’s year in London) may have overlooked the fact that some virtuosi, such as Mozart or Chopin, were expert musicians as a side-effect of their unbounded talent and artistry—as was (is?) the case with Hendrix.

My confusion with tenses needs explaining—it’s just that musicians may die, but in our time, music lives forever; and it’s hard to separate the person and their music. If, when listening to Hendrix’s recording of Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”, I lose myself inside Hendrix’s performance, is he not alive? But, that’s my issue—so I leave it here.

In my youth, there was a compulsion among some of my peers to analyze the lives of their musical heroes—as if the biographical data, no matter how trivial, always gave greater insight into the music they so revered. I was never reverential about anything—I was raised to ‘show respect’, which I quickly learned meant speaking and acting in such a way as to avoid getting beat up or killed, so I reserve my true respect for very few things, and even fewer people. I suppose those music-obsessive friends of mine bothered me because they were the exact opposite—too quick to give their respect, unthinkingly and completely.

But in this movie, which covers a pivotal, but single year in the life and career of Jimi Hendrix, I was shown that biography can indeed be a powerful way of granting insight into, if not the music, certainly the musician. How effective it is for those who only know the sixties second-hand, I can’t say—but that is neither the filmmakers’ nor my problem. I didn’t require the big-picture, historical back-fill—and I was tickled by all the little details, drenched with significance by their connection to his more broad-cast iconography.

André Benjamin does a great job, although I was given pause by one aspect of his performance. He depicts Jimi Hendrix as a thoughtful, gentle, infinitely peaceful dude—but then, in one scene (and I assume it’s historically accurate) his character, in a sudden rage, repeatedly smashes his girlfriend’s face with one of those old pay-phone phone-receivers—she ends up hospitalized. Now, either Mr. Benjamin, or Mr. Ridley, or someone—did a little image-buffing here, or there was a far more physical side to Jimi Hendrix than we see in the course of this film, outside of that one scene.

And it is remarkable that Hendrix’s past is well-indicated, that his childhood was not an easy one, nor his father quick to give approval (or able to) while also depicting his on-screen self, the product of that environment, as very self-contained, almost demurring. He is shown to be unusually sensitive, it’s true, and unstable in some ways, but extreme sensitivity, raised in a harsh environment, rarely produces the o-so-civil young adult portrayed through most of the film. But now I’m just spouting—is it the film, the history, or my own assumptions that raise the issue? Anyway, it just stuck out as a question, to me, plus I was shocked by the sudden savagery—which distracted me from the film. Is that too critical?

All in all, I was swept up by the experience (if you’ll pardon the pun). I won’t say I enjoyed it, because the story of Jimi Hendrix is not a happy story with a happy ending—and I do love happy endings. Based-on-fact films, however, are not famous for predictable, tied-in-a-bow endings—and I watch them for engagement and education, more than mere enjoyment. And “All Is By My Side” certainly succeeds in that sense.

Cats, Tabbies, Felines… What’s That Word? (2014Dec18)

Posted by XperDunn on December 18, 2014

Thursday, December 18, 2014 12:39 PM

Oh yeah—Pussies! That’s the word. Anyone who is afraid to go see “The Interview” at a movie theater—anyone who is afraid to show the movie in their theater—all world-class pussies who bring shame to our proud heritage. Some anonymous hacker makes a vague threat against anyone going to see this movie—and we do his bidding? I could scream with frustration.

Let me be clear. I think the Seth Rogen comedy-film paradigm, even propped up by the legitimacy of his friend, James Franco’s, reputation, has run its course. I anticipated being disappointed with the derivative ‘mad-cap’ zaniness of this farce, but I’m a tough audience—I’ve watched a lot of comedy, decades of it, and I’ve become somewhat jaded. But that doesn’t mean the kids wouldn’t have enjoyed it.

One of the things that made me anticipate disappointment was the crass hook of the story—joking about assassinating a living head of state (even the head of a crapulous state like North Korea) is unquestionably in poor taste, not to mention how it suggests bad behavior—it strikes me as just about the worst premise of any comedy I’ve ever heard of. Plus, the South Park boys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have already used the idea in “Team America: World Police”, although they were talking about Kim Jong Il, not Kim Jong Un. And it must be said that the meta-comedy of Parker and Stone is far more fertile soil for geopolitical satire than this latest offering from Rogen, the reigning king of the rom-coms (at which he is excellent).

But the quality of the film is beside the point. This is an issue of freedom of speech. How outraged we all would have been if SONY had made a boardroom decision not to release this movie for political reasons. How we would have poured into the streets in protest if our own government had tried to stop the release of this movie. But some jerk with a keyboard mentions 9/11, and we censor ourselves!? Unbelievable.

I call on SONY to release this movie immediately, to offer it on DVD, to stream it online. I call on theater owners to run this film night and day, in the name of their country. And I call on everyone to go see this no-doubt-average film, just because they don’t like being told what to do. Stop the cowering. Release “The Interview” now!

The Hook (2014Nov15)

Posted by XperDunn on November 15, 2014

Saturday, November 15, 2014 1:02 PM

Everything today is about the hook. I saw an online ad for Star-Trek spaceships (“Enterprises”, that is) for a low, low price—plus plenty of free extras—the only catch was that it was a subscription, and they would be sending me different spaceships, once a month, forever—and billing me for them, of course. I saw a newly released movie on my VOD menu. It was about a boy and girl who were far distant from each other but could see what each other thought and hear what each other said—it was a romance. I’ve seen the same premise, but only seeing through the other person’s eyes—it was a horror movie about a serial killer. Communication is so important.

The king of the hooks would have to be ‘The Heart Of Joy”, AKA the Hallmark Channel. Every year about this time (just before Thanksgiving) their schedule becomes one long expanse of Christmas-themed movies, most of them produced by Hallmark itself. I am shamelessly addicted—it’s worse than Law & Order re-runs. I just saw one where the young lady protagonist, who just happens to be named Krissy Kringle and just happens to live on Candy Cane Lane, receives a lot of mistakenly-delivered letters to Santa. One little girl sends a book, explaining that Santa had accidentally left his “Naughty or Nice List” when he visited her in the hospital.

Hijinks ensue, of course, and of a very Christmassy flavor. In the end, people are healed, lessons are learned, and Santa gets his book back. It’s like heroin—I can marathon this stuff for days at a time. But it got me thinking. Hallmark is like the Manhattan Project of sentiment—all things treacly are massaged to a fair-thee-well and dutifully squished out like Play-Doh from a Play-Doh factory. Is it evil? It’s difficult to say with the rubber hose between my teeth, probing for a vein—but I have my suspicions. I mean, it makes perfect sense—here are these actors—and actors are paid to pretend—so they pretend that they, and basically all people, are earnest, conscience-stricken, and well-fed.

It’s the season, so it’s no fair calling them out on the ugly truths of domestic poverty, bad parenting, etc., etc.—thus the problems are manageable in these movies, unlike the real problems we face in the real world. But then they have to add in ‘the real Mrs. Claus’ masquerading as a nanny for a troubled single-parent family or an Elf who wants to see what’s outside of Santa’s Workshop (and in a masterpiece of fiction, doesn’t go sprinting back home in screaming hysterics) or an old homeless man who turns out to be someone’s long-lost father, just waiting for love to make him whole again.

If, like me, you’ve seen news stories about some of the nightmares that pose as nannies for unsuspecting families—or rape statistics for elfin-shaped young ladies just moved to the big city—or the mental health obstacles that are so much of the problem when trying to undo homelessness, then you may find yourself strongly attracted to the Heroin, I mean Hallmark Channel. But is it healthy? I guess what I’m really wondering is—is it merely escapism, or is it as delusion-inducing as the Southboro Baptist Church? If we whip ourselves into a frenzy of Christmas-time love and faith, we may find ourselves hating The Un-Christmassy enough to kill somebody. It wouldn’t be the first time someone got upset about someone else killing the mood.

And what of the crash? When I switch off the TV and walk into the kitchen, I may find it difficult to handle the newspapers, visitors, and telephone calls I find there. Those other people may not have watched the same movie as me. They might not be quite brimming with the same surplus love of their fellow man—and punch me right in the nose, figuratively or literally. Watching the Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie Marathon may make it impossible for me to survive, away from my hi-def flat-screen.

However, there are commercials. The TV commercials, even Hallmark’s own, have a different texture from the movies—the treacle is still there, but the main motif is altered to ‘you need this thing to be happy’ followed by ‘buy this thing’. And even a Hallmark movie can’t completely obliterate such unadulterated huckstering. So, to be fully dosed with Christmas syrup, I always make sure I have a book to read. Yes, a book! You wouldn’t believe how long the commercial breaks in these movies are. One can easily read three or four pages before the movie comes back on—and, of course, I’m a virtuoso of the mute button—so I go from movie to book and back to movie quite seamlessly. The tone of the book can be problematical—the otherwise phenomenal Stephen King, for instance, is not recommended for this particular purpose. But I find that science-fiction novels can be a wonderful counter to Hallmark, as they both believe in wild optimism—even wishful thinking—but in two very different settings. My current commercial-break reading material is “The Peripheral” by William Gibson. It’s excellent, so far (as Gibson always is) if you’re looking.

But let’s return to the movies. By the end of New Year’s, I’m actually relieved to turn to that channel and find “Little House” re-runs, or something equally repulsive. I turn to the more reality-based programming of the other channels and Christmas is over for me. So what is this extended trance that takes me hostage each year? Perhaps, for me, it supercharges the ambient ‘Christmas cheer’ that naturally occurs in our lives. Or perhaps it makes more visible the falseness of the Season, a specific time in which we are obligated to be better people, to think kinder thoughts. Is it the human condition that caring must have a start and end point, like a race? Maybe we have the Holiday Season because humanity cannot bear very much reality—and the reality of kindness and caring is just too much of an effort to be part of our ongoing, normal lives.

It could be that the season of giving, rather than being a false pretense of our ‘better selves’, is really just the best we can do—one month a year, we try to be good. We don’t necessarily succeed—but we try—and that’s more than we can be bothered to do the other eleven months of the year.

Telstar (Original Recording – 1962)

Posted by XperDunn on March 31, 2014

Monday, March 31, 2014 10:04 AM

What is it about this Tornados track that makes me play it again and again? It could be that it was inspired by a dream Joe Meek had. It could be that the inspiration for the title was the launching of the first Telstar Telecommunications Satellite launched into orbit on July 10^th, 1962. Did you know?—the Telstar (or ‘geosynchronous-orbiting satellite’), or rather the idea behind it, originated in an Arthur C. Clarke story! The science fiction and the rocket launchings of the 1960’s broke my childish mind into fireworks-like dreams of flight, exploration, and technology. If you are interested in learning more about the song, watch “Telstar: The Joe Meek Story” (2008)—it is an excellent film and a real slice of history, painlessly presented by a very entertaining director.

Judging from the dreams it calls up from deep in my memory, the AM radio playing on the dashboard of my parents’ station wagon while we drove home from Jones Beach, I heard it at a time when I was happy in the way only children can be happy. One of five siblings, I was usually rolling around in the back of the wagon, avoiding the back-seat infighting (and the ensuing parental yelling).

Those trips to Jones Beach were happy, but they were full of fear, too. The waves could sometimes become (to my young eyes) skyscrapers of water, looming above, letting me know I’d be crushed and rolled and dragged over the rough surface beneath the water. I often wondered whether I’d be let back up again before my breath gave out.

Sometimes there was sky-writing!

And there was separation anxiety, too. Jones Beach was huge, disappearing into the horizon in either direction, thousands of families and friends laying out the towels that made the space temporarily their own. All the new ‘portable radios’ were tuned to the same AM station (Cousin Brucey) and the songs followed along wherever one went.

There were regularly spaced Life Guard Towers every hundred yards or so. If the waves tumbled me too far along the shore I would be faced with a beach that looked exactly like the one from which I had walked down to the surf.

The only difference would be that my family was nowhere to be seen. This was a tricky little trap, for me at least—if all my siblings were in the water (which was always) I’d be looking for our blanket and cooler—not much to go on in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ world of Jones Beach in High Summer.

Plus, if I chose to go the wrong way, the result was getting further from my goal instead of closer. In the end, my mom usually had to yell at her confused, lost-looking little boy from her place beneath the Sun Umbrella. O, yeah. I forgot to mention, almost everyone had eight-foot-tall sun umbrellas—like patio umbrellas, but with a big spike for sticking it into the sand.

But aside from all that, I loved Jones Beach. Ice cream and hot dogs and soda never tasted so good—even if the line at the Snack Concession was stupendously long. The sand was perfect for sculpture and construction—and the ebb and flow of the tide made everything transient—even if it wasn’t kicked over by some other kid.

But just imagine it—the TV was full of ‘space race’ news, the beach was full of joy, and the music coming out of all the radios was futuristic and new—but none compared to “Telstar”. We have become overly familiar with synthesized sounds—in the 1960s it was unheard of except for “Telstar”. To hear in the music itself the sound of electronics—it was a Pentecostal experience, but for the ears instead of the tongues. From that point on, I was less and less interested in acoustic music (and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that) and more and more craving the sounds of synth.

And that was actually a logical progression—one of the draws of rock n’ roll was the electrified sound of the guitars and the reverb, wah, and other effects added to the players’ or vocalists’ amplified sounds. But nothing says Synth like a keyboard.

I remember playing Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach” for my family, expecting them to be as enthralled with the sound (and the idea) as I was. But my Uncle John said it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks playing classical music. Everyone roared with laughter—and I was nearly in tears. What can I say? Music has always been very important to me.

The things music can do never cease to amaze me—it can make a chill go down my spine; it can make the hair on my arms stand up; it can bring me near tears; it can make me jump up and start dancing; it can make me laugh, sing along, howl along (if drunk enough), and even make me stare into space, lost in the wonder of it. I haven’t been to Jones Beach in decades—but music can still take me there.

When You Wish Upon A Piano (2014Mar16)

Posted by XperDunn on March 17, 2014

XperDunn plays Piano Covers
March 16th, 2014

Improv – Th’Irish Wristwatch: All credit goes to Geo. Takei’s FB post of this seasonal (St. Pat’s Day) tongue-twister!

Improv – Debbie Reynolds & Tony Randall: I just watched their amusing movie (on Turner Classic Movies channel): “The Mating Game (1959) is an MGM film directed by George Marshall and starring Debbie Reynolds, Tony Randall, and Paul Douglas in his final screen appearance… It’s a great film, especially if you enjoy 1950s-1960s rom-coms. It stuck with me, and I needed a title for this piece….QED

George Winston’s “Longing” and “Lullaby”: I’m a rabid fan of George Winston–when I first began piano lessons, one of my goals was to be able to play some of his music someday–and while that day is yet to come, I get a real kick out of sight-reading through the music-book score!

The Finger On The Button (2014Feb20)

Posted by XperDunn on February 20, 2014

Thursday, February 20, 2014 12:52 AM

gallery

The beauty of the world can be so sharp it cuts—the singer’s voice, the crystal etched, the colors of the paintings, the smell of weather outside the front door—it’s really quite painful when one fully opens oneself to it. So, with paradoxes like that, it seems lunatic to expect our society to make the least bit of sense. Michelangelo said that there is no beauty without some strangeness of proportion—and the Japanese craftspeople always add an imperfection to finish their works, as a concession to the Universe. We research scientific minutiae without the slightest regard for all the really big, completely unanswerable questions in life. We speak of differences of opinions and orthodoxies of faiths—we know nothing, we understand nothing—we care only for ourselves, except when love kills our sense of self-preservation.

I was just watching “The Life of Emile Zola” (1937) on the TV—its ending focused on Zola’s championing of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Officer falsely accused of treason and kept imprisoned on Devil’s Island even after the French War Dept. were informed of his innocence—just to save the Army Ministers from the public embarrassment. It is a damning portrayal of corrupt authority and the injustices it forces on all of the people they purportedly serve. Then, before I turned off the TV, CNN showed footage of the Kiev riots, in Ukraine.

Those Ukrainians were protesting their government’s choice to sign a trade agreement with Russia, rather than sign a trade agreement with the EU. Many people were killed and hundreds wounded as Kiev riot police clashed with huge mobs of protestors—I couldn’t say what the truth is, concerning the Trade Deals, but I do know that it is much easier to have a meeting with concerned groups’ leaders than to start a pitched battle in the streets of the capitol city.

There’s been a lot of news stories lately about legislation that is in the interest of banks and corporations, rather than the good of our country’s citizens. These, combined with recent rulings allowing unfettered financial support to political campaigns, are only two of the many unsettling changes we seem to face in 2014. Capitalism has evolved into a modern weapon, and the taking hostage of our government is its most threatening act. We were fine with using it against other countries, subsuming their living culture into our consuming culture, but now that it has turned on us we are at a loss. What can we do against the owners of everything, even those who own the right of self-expression, i.e. the media moguls? How do we fight an enemy that we use as a reference source? How come history is so full of stories about corrupt leadership and self-interest among authority, yet we still act as if our leaders are honorable folk?

When I see a parade of legislators on TV, each making statements more ignorant than the one before, I always wonder why anyone takes these people seriously. Whenever they lobby to roll back some piece of modern progress I am stunned to hear them advocate racism, sexism, rejection of science, rejection of our social conscience, and the social services it compelled.

These are double-whammies in that a supposedly sane and educated person mouths these foul sentiments and that our media amplifies their ‘legitimacy’ by covering such things in lurid detail, leaving no even-stupider sentiment go unheard in the process. There should be a military base somewhere, with a guy whose finger is on the button, ready to call ‘bull-squat’ on any of these distracting idiots, and cut them off from all media notice with the touch of a red button. Now, that’s national defense. Call it Home-brain Defense—stupidity, psychos, and rank fiction will no longer be tolerated.

Trouble is we’d probably have to impeach every member of both houses, at least 48 governors, and who knows how many mayors.

Beautiful Weather We’re Having…

Surprise, I Run This Hell-Hole!

Posted by XperDunn on February 1, 2014

Friday, January 31, 2014 8:59 PM

Unfortunately, my PC’s sound system is not up to drowning out “Undercover Boss”’s final reveal moment in the next room. The unctuous ‘boss’ is being patrician in stages, ticking off each of his encounters with the female employee and the ‘prizes’ that come with each so-called lesson he’s learned in ‘his time with her’ (a condescending angel in the lower muck of the masses, I guess) which I couldn’t hear clearly but were obviously greater and greater ‘gifts’, judging from the female employee’s greater and more tearful outbursts of thanks and disbelief with each new debt paid off, new car given, and all culminating in her promotion to some heavenly post within upper-middle management.

I have two problems with this noise blaring through from the TV room. Firstly, it’s mostly men bosses and female employees—just as well since a female boss would not need to ‘learn’ that it matters how the staff are treated; that not everyone can charge off whatever comes along on the old Amex card; or that human nature creates office politics like air comes from trees.

Secondly, it seems to encourage an attitude of ‘classes’ of people—something that is never acceptable outside of the workplace. Most bosses take advantage, consciously or unconsciously, of the fact that employees aren’t actually answering a bosses questions so much as answering the question ‘Do you want to keep working here?’’ When the boss smiles, the employee smiles back—what in hell else is he or she supposed to do?

And no acknowledgement is made of the fact that of the many millions of ‘employees’ (AKA people) who are not appearing on “Undercover Boss” this evening—that all the fairest and rightest things gone awry in their lives, find their only succor in daydreaming about being this poor working girl who is brought to tears by the idea of living without fear and want and injustice (or, at least, with less fear and want and injustice.)

Besides, all this ‘reality-TV’ stuff gets my goat—people, like Heisenberg’s sub-atomic particles, change their behavior as a function of being looked at—and these programs are the best evidence of this theory I’ve ever seen. Not so long ago, most citizens would back away from the idea of being on camera—it is only with the decades of reinforcement that TV equals money, that celebrity equals money—people nowadays are actually becoming sociopaths to achieve this new ‘goal’ which, only a generation or so ago, required professional people be well-paid to even consider doing. Comedians are laughed at in theaters and on TV, around the world, for a virtual eternity—how many of us are comfortable with that idea? Not to even mention paparazzi…

Three Films just out on VOD (2014Jan14)

Posted by XperDunn on January 15, 2014

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 6:23 PM

Just watched “The Butler”—very inspiring and uplifting. Even Cuba Gooding, Jr. was afraid to make a joke. There’s such a division between me and black people—their last half-century is a history of struggle and strength and dreams and has, for the purposes of this movie, at least, found a happy, even glorious, ending in Obama’s 2008 election as the first African-American President of the United States. My last half-century has been spent resembling the rednecks whose behavior and ignorance have brought shame to all Caucasian-Americans.

But enough about me—every president in the movie is a major star (I can imagine the wrestling agents, maddened by the blood-scent of a good cameo role). As the story of one man going through his life, the only meaty roles went to Oprah Winfrey (Gaine’s wife) and Cuba Gooding, Jr. (White House co-worker). There were many characters in passing, which I didn’t even get a good look at before their brief time on screen ended, but whom I learned watching the ‘Cast’ credits, was over-stuffed with actors and actresses who wouldn’t normally be seen in bit parts.

I also watched “Enough Said”, James Gandolfini’s last film, which also starred Julia Louise-Dreyfus, and in which both are confident, comfortable actors with a great script. Humorous, but not cringe-worthy—and I think that’s a rare compliment among Hollywood’s recent romantic comedies. Granted, the two star-crossed lovers are divorced fifty-year-olds—but as a fifty-something myself I can tell you that it was a much-appreciated crumb thrown in the direction of we ‘old people’.

Last night, I screened the current remake of Stephen King’s “Carrie”, which kept me awake until 3 am, but not because I was scared. Perhaps I was put off by the demonstration of how mean girls of today torture their classmates—worlds away from 1970s practices, but no different in their cruelty. In this case, a reminder that ‘the only constant is change’ was an unwanted one. Modern CGI gave a few interesting moments to the graphics, but they forgot to put anything behind the characters’ faces–which made it very hard to stop seeing them as actors and to get involved in the story.

Magnificent Seven (2014Jan06)

Posted by XperDunn on January 7, 2014

I watched “The Magnificent Seven” yesterday and was reminded of one of the reasons it’s a classic–that incredible Elmer Bernstein score, including the theme used for so many years by ‘Marlboro Man’ TV spots, back when Marlboro cigarettes were allowed to advertise on TV. Unfortunately, my improv has no connection with that stirring music, except as the inspiration for today’s title…

Perhaps it will help if I include a YouTube link to the M7 soundtrack

(It’s most Magnificent thing about the movie):

Good News

Posted by XperDunn on October 18, 2013

Thursday, October 17, 2013 5:52 PM

Aaah! What a difference a day makes. The happy couple, off in Cancun, are not here anymore and, while we miss them, it sure is quiet around here with just Spencer and the Wonder Dog (and Bear and I). Politically, the fiscal disaster has been averted but perhaps more importantly, the Tea Partiers’ disastrous tactics have been roundly condemned in poll after poll. You won’t be able to tell from listening to them because one of their hallmarks is to talk ‘through’ realities and ‘preach’ their crazy gospel at the same time. Then there’s the great time I had recording videos yesterday (please feel free to give’em a listen on YouTube) and the fact that I thought I was out of tobacco, but then found a whole tin I’d forgotten about—so my ‘next day rush’ order for more will not be a marathon nic-fit. Add a hot cup of coffee and the day couldn’t be better.

The greatest new thing (as Rachel Maddow would say) is Peapod. It may not be available in your area, but they have me for a new customer. Peapod is a website that lets you shop in the Shop&Go online and have your groceries delivered the next day! I’ve just tried it out, I ordered cookies and cheese and cereal and lots of other stuff and the next day, Poof!, there it was at the door. This may seem silly to a lot of people, but I no longer have a car. And even if I had a car, it’s difficult for me to go and drive and shop and bag and lift and load and carry and put away.

Up until now I’ve been relying on Claire to do all the shopping—but now I can have anything I want, no muss, no fuss. It’s so luxurious I haven’t gone on Peapod a second time yet—I’m still enjoying the pleasure of having stuff delivered. It always bothered me—I mean, a lot of places deliver stuff—pizza, Chinese food, UPS, Amazon-dot-com—but nobody ever delivers what I want most—food and drinks, fresh produce, bread, and sundries.

And they used to. I remember our old house in Katonah had a boarded up rectangle in the kitchen wall—and the same on the outside wall of the house. Someone explained that that was once the ‘grocer’s pantry’. The delivery boy would deliver groceries to this over-sized cupboard without having to ring the bell or be let inside. Likewise, the cook could then unload the grocer’s pantry from inside the kitchen. Back before the Model T, delivery boys and messenger boys were everywhere—better for them to run back and forth than the customers.

But it’s been decades now since the internet first started casting about for a cost-effective technique for online grocery shopping and delivery—and Peapod is the first successful prototype of this concept. I’m very excited.

When I was a boy, one of my favorite books was “My Big Ball Of String”, written and illustrated by Marion Holland, 1958. A boy gets a cold and has to stay in bed. To satisfy his needs without getting out of bed, he begins to tie a string to the light switch, and then the doorknob, and pretty soon he’s got zip-lines and pulleys and his room looks like a giant spider web. I was enchanted by this vision of remote control.

Ever since the Internet arrived, I’ve been searching for new ways to do anything I want from inside my home. And Peapod is my newest ‘string’.

Yay!

p.s. check out my movie reviews at StreetArticles.com

Seven (7) Solid 60’s Covers
(click here)

Peapod Comes
(Click here)

Tip The Driver
(Click here)

Keep Trucking On
(Click here)

The Bitch

Posted by XperDunn on September 26, 2013

Thursday, September 26, 2013 1:58 PM

Everybody loves a bitch. The Stones had a big hit in “Bitch” (Sticky Fingers 1971) I think, in large part, because we kids loved to sing along. And it’s just a fun word to say—“bitch, bitch, bitch.” We love them. We go crazy over them—especially the mega-bitch. A mega-bitch is a completely evil, incredibly hot woman, such as Shannon Doherty’s role as Brenda Walsh in the series “Beverly Hills, 90210” (1990). Women are drawn to a bitchy character because she is self-determined and adversarial; men are fascinated by a bitchy character because no matter how evil her mind, heart, or voice—she’s still a woman, and men, by and large, want women.

I’d venture a guess that the proliferation of old witches and crones in our folk stories were a product of male story-tellers who were more comfortable with a bitchy character bereft of any hint of fecundity—but I’m no archeological psychologist, I just know myself.

I’ve just had a rather embarrassing email exchange with a writer friend, whose first serialized on-line novel I’d found instantly engaging and compelling. Some poor schlub’s horror-of-a-girlfriend character was a constant spur to my interest. But when she debuted her new novel’s first chapter, set in a sort of antebellum Edwardian atmosphere, I instantly attacked her for it, saying the whole thing was worthless, a pile of junk. (Jumping the gun is a favorite hobby of mine.)

But when, at her urging, I went back and re-read the chapter, I suddenly found, by focusing on it better, that it was a well-paced, tightly written piece of fiction—so, feeling like a jackass, I sent her my apologies. I was confused—it was well written, yet it repelled me at first—and even having found that it was good, I still lacked any inclination to read more.

But this morning it came to me. There was no bitch. Moreover, there wasn’t a bad-guy or an evil influence in sight. When I had my health, and was a terrible bookworm, I would casually allow myself (and the author) the first 150 pages as a ‘gimme’. I’d had plenty of experience with writers with a slow burn—and they were often the best, if I could ride out the slow start.

Now I have a more modern sensibility—I need a quick fix. I need coercion, I need conflict, I need me a bitch. I truly miss those good old days when I could re-read Robin Hood in that wonderfully drowsy ‘dear reader’ kind of style; I could re-read the Iliad and be charmed by the interplay of human drama and Jovian fate and the symbolism and the repeated phrases that made it as much a chant as a story. I read everything and anything—and fast—I averaged 1.3 books a day—unless they were little things of 300 pages or less. Before I lost my health, I got to where I preferred only 700+ page-books, like King, Follett, Clancy, and Ian Banks. Anything less than that frustrated me—I would hardly get comfortable in the writer’s world when I would find myself reading the exit sign: “The End”.

But today, I mostly do TV. When I do commit to a book, I start reading like I always used to—but then I quickly find my neck aching, or my eyesight blurring, or just a mental inability to follow along as I read. I put it down, wait an hour, try again. In the last half of the book I will become transfixed, and I’ll wonder why I don’t still do this all the time. But the next day, after I finish the book, I’ll have blurry vision most of the day, and little aches and pains and spasms from holding open the heavy book and from focusing my eyesight (through magnifying glasses) on the page for hours at a time.

So, long story short, I don’t read much anymore. When I do, I get impatient of any settling-in type beginnings and intolerant of any slack in a storyline. I prefer to be left wondering to being given more than I need. I’m become the same audience as the illiterate—just show me eye-candy with music, please.

And the end result is a media with a narrow range, stories that introduce conflict from the first sentence and keep it hot right until the big car crash (with explosion) at the end. All the best told stories are the opposite, they build and build a world around you, inserting conflicts at strategic points, adding detail and suspense and character development with the tidal flow of their story’s pace—only with such subtle storytelling can an artist ever build up to a tidal wave far more awesome than a mere car crash—but without the leeway to do this, merely good writers can outperform the great writers, making wam-bam-thank you-ma’am plotlines the industry’s default quality.

Fortunately, the treasure house of the past is still easily accessible to anyone with a library card. But be careful to read the book before you see the movie. I had read “The Lord Of The Rings” three times before Peter Jackson got his green light—so the freeze-dried husk of the CGI version will never mar my memories of the happiness I felt marching along with the Fellowship through Tolkien’s worlds. Or stalking Clancy’s cold-war villains from one end of the Earth to another. Or shivering from my immersion in the horror of King’s nightmare town, Kerry, Maine. How I wish I could still spend whole days there, day after day.

But this isn’t about me. My writer friend has brought into focus a dilemma that all modern writers face—subtle writing is to small audiences as simple writing is to big audiences (and big money). And I’m not suggesting that today’s writer has to ‘dumb-down’ their writing to be popular—I’m saying that the leeway enjoyed by earlier writers has contracted to a fine point—a tightrope that must be walked. Mass audiences actually require intelligence in their entertainment—but it must be a carefully monitored dose, administered with precise timing and dosage, from moment to moment in their favorite tales.

Stephen Spielberg cracked this code, creating movies that blew us away, while not insulting our intelligence. The use of levity is essential is his formula, but he also kept the mayhem and the fear going at all times.

And perhaps most restrictive of all, today’s popular stories must start with high drama—either dread, rage, sublime ecstasy, or just plain explosions. My writer friend, in beginning with a busy, happy family scene, had failed to grasp me by the throat—but was that her failing, or mine?

Two (2) Piano Covers (2013Sep22)

Posted by XperDunn on September 23, 2013

“Green Leaves Of Summer”
and “Happy Heart”

“Green Leaves Of Summer”
(From the Batjac Production “The Alamo”. A United Artists Release.)

Music: Dmitri Tiomkin
© 1960 Leo Feist Inc.,
Batjac Productions, (NOTE: this was John Wayne’s own Prod. Co.)
and Erosa Music Publishing Corp.

——————————————

“Happy Heart”

by James Last and Jackie Rae
© 1969 Panorama Song, GmbH, Hamburg, Germany (West Germany, at the time)
USA & Canada Rights – Miller Music Corporation

——————————————

{From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia}

“Happy Heart” is a song written by James Last and Jackie Rae.

The song was recorded by both Petula Clark and Andy Williams and released as a single for each at the same time in 1969. “Happy Heart” reached #12 on the Easy Listening chart and #62 in the UK for Clark, while Williams went to #22 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100, #19 in the UK, and spent two weeks at #1 on the Easy Listening chart.

Clark was reportedly dismayed when Williams was a guest star on her second TV special, with the plan to perform the song they were both launching as a single. In Australia both Clark’s and Williams versions charted both peaking at #22.

It was notably used on the soundtrack accompanying the British film Shallow Grave (1994), starring Ewan MacGregor and Christopher Eccleston, and directed by Danny Boyle. The female impersonator Holly Woodlawn lip-synced to the Clark version in the 1998 Tommy O’Haver film Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.

*****

PLEASE NOTE: for the Graphic Background on the Titles and Credits:

Proletariërs aller landen verenigt U
(Factory workers stand strong united.)

by Jan de Waardt, (1900)

courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

“Lovelace” – Deeper than ‘Deep Throat’ (A Movie Review)

Posted by XperDunn on August 23, 2013

Click here for Amazon mp3 page;

Well, I saw “Lovelace” on VOD yesterday (a biopic of the famous star of “Deep Throat”, the first porn film to be shown in major cinemas). As you may imagine, her life was no bed of roses–nor did the men in her life ever give me cause to be proud of my gender–at least insofar as they were portrayed in the movie. But let’s face it, the 1970s was a golden time for male narcissist psychopaths–women still felt un-empowered, but the women’s lib movement gave all the male bullies an excuse to batter and disparage their ever-so-lucky girlfriends and wives.

So, for me, the movie had a stench about it (which is, I guess, a testament to the filmmakers) which was the aroma of self-serving, lazy men of the seventies abusing their responsibilities whenever they conflicted with their sexual appetites. It was also, as you may imagine, the magical land of non-enforced child support–long before ‘deadbeat dad’ legislation was ever dreamed of. I think the worst circumstances created by that decade’s ignorant blindness was the plight of a teenage girl who has to choose between her hateful father and the dangerous boyfriend. Lots of girls got themselves involved with execrable boyfriends who were, in their minds, at least a change from the ignorant hatred and violence of their fathers’ or step-fathers’ home life.

As an accurate depiction of just how ugly 1970s society had been, this movie gets five stars–but it doesn’t do enough to show how Lovelace’s suffering was of a piece with all the women of her time, from teenage girls to mature housewives–all of them still subject to the ugly laughter that was the misogynists’ hunting horn. You know, back when we could all laugh at the idea of women being the equal of men, ha ha.

I must confess, I have never seen the movie which made her famous–I’ve never been comfortable with porn, it’s not my bag. I think it’s because no matter how well the women in them act out male fantasies, I can still see the humanity behind their masks.

So, Great Movie! But, not so great for me, personally… It’s one redeeming feature was the soundtrack, which I paused at, during the ‘credits scroll’, to write down a list of the mp3s I didn’t already have.

Some of these songs I already owned, through my continuing quest for the most overpoweringly nostalgic playlist of all time (for people my age, that is). But I’m weak on the ‘soul’ music song titles, of which there are several used in the film.

The great BJ Thomas’s “Fooled Around And Fell In Love”, and the even greater Billie Holiday’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” are both missing from my list, but are on the soundtrack CD, which I discovered in my search for the URLs to purchase each mp3 on my list from Amazon.com

The soundtrack album is also available–which contains songs not on this list, or performed by different musicians. Nevertheless, having gone to the trouble, I produce them here for your perusal:

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

“Lovelace” Movie Soundtrack Album {** indicates song on soundtrack album}

** “Gimme Little Sign” – Brenton Wood
“Rockin’ Boogie” – (recd by Sammy Price)
** “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” – Gladys Knight and the Pips
“Out All Night” – Everybody Else
“Get Ready” – (recd by The Temps)
“Where We Belong” – (recd by Passion Pit)
“Time For The Gallery” – (NOTE: recd by Ochre/Alb: ‘Early Learning’)
** “Spirit In The Sky” – Norman Greenbaum
** “Funky Funky Way of Makin Love” – John Ellison and the Soul Brothers

** “If You Ain’t Getting Your Thing” – L. J. Waiters and Electrifiers

NOTE: the above mp3 for sale ONLY as part of the “Lovelace” soundtrack album (which has all these songs and more)

** “Shotgun Shuffle” – KC and the Sunshine Band

** “Oh How I Love It” – The People’s Choice

** “Keep On Trucking” – Eddie Kendricks

“Your Mama Wants Ya Back” – Betty Davis

“Panhandle Stomp” – Satin and Heartaches (recd by Billy Briggs):

click for Wiki page of “Lovelace”

A Busy Thursday

Posted by XperDunn on August 15, 2013

XperDunn plays Piano on August 15th, 2013 Improv – Concord Grapes: NOTE: ‘Grapes’ graphic downloaded from https://www.facebook.com/oldmosswoman on 08/15/2013

Improv – Concord Grapes (2013Aug15)

I fell asleep watching “The Big Wedding” last night, so I watched the end this morning. Great movie, BTW. Then I noticed that the End Credits music was a jazzy, personalized, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” by a familiar-sounding female vocalist. So I waited for the music credits at the end (as I usually do) and saw that I was right–it was one of the cast singing, Christine Ebersole. I had never enjoyed “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” quite so much before, and she inspired me to do my own improv on the tune. While looking her up online, I found her husband’s, William J. Moloney’s, artwork, so I snagged it for my the Title screen of my video…

Improv – “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (2013Aug15)

NOTE: Christine Ebersole, winner of the 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, gave her all (talents-wise, that is) for her latest movie, “The Big Wedding”–during the end credits, Christine Ebersole (who plays ‘Muffin’ in the

film) sings her jazzy rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, which inspired me to fiddle with it too…

In looking her up I learned she is married to William J. Moloney, a graphic artist–so I stole one of his collage images for the Titles and Credits cards! See the actual work of William J. Moloney [including Collage: “Love’s Oasis”]

at williamjmoloneyDOTcom.
——————————————
XperDunn plays Piano August 15th, 2013 – Three (3) by George and Ira Gershwin- “Embraceable You” “A Foggy Day” & “I’ve Got A Crush On You”:

“Embraceable You”/”A Foggy Day”/”I’ve Got A Crush On You”

XperDunn plays Piano
August 15th, 2013

Three (3) by George and Ira Gershwin:

——————————————
“Embraceable You” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin

[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“Embraceable You” is a popular song, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The song was originally written in 1928 for an unpublished operetta named East is West. It was eventually published in 1930 and included in the Broadway musical Girl Crazy. where it was performed by Ginger Rogers in a song and dance routine choreographed by Fred Astaire. Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005.]

——————————————
“A Foggy Day” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

[“A Foggy Day” is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress. It was originally titled “A Foggy Day (In London Town)”, and is often still referred to as such. {I have mislabeled it here on the video, as }”A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, a romantic British popular song written in 1939 with lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and music by Manning Sherwin. {Sorry for the confusion!}

Berkeley Square is a large leafy square in Mayfair, an expensive part of London. The Ritz Hotel referred to is also in Mayfair. With its sweet, wistful song the European Robin is a likely source of the legendary Nightingale, as birds, stimulated by the street lights, can often be heard singing in cities during the night.]

——————————————
“I’ve Got A Crush On You” Music by George Gershwin Lyrics by Ira Gershwin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

[“I’ve Got a Crush on You” is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It is unique among Gershwin compositions in that it was used for two different Broadway productions, Treasure Girl (1928), and Strike Up the Band (1930).]

Be Careful What You Wish

Posted by XperDunn on August 6, 2013

When I was a kid I wanted much more science-fiction movies! How should I know? I just watched “Oblivion”, with Tom Cruise as ‘Jack’. It was a so-so sci-fi short-short story, rendered visually with painstaking ‘realism’ by use of CGI, Green-screen, and whatever else those people do out there in Hollywood. Add to that (no small budget item, itself) the enormous additional cost of casting Tom and Morgan Freeman, et al. and shooting an ‘actual’ movie to splice into the CGI, or vice versa—however it goes.

And I appreciated the effort. Cinematically, it was sophisticated, fast-paced, and suspenseful—everything you want in a great movie. But I never got past this feeling I had while watching—I felt like I was being read to. To read this story in print would be a brief experience—probably less time than it took to watch the film.

But I would have supplied my own imagining of what the drones looked like, what the bubbleship looked like, and how they each sounded. The author would use words like gleaming, razor-edged, ‘a soft chime’, status: ‘green’, and so on—nothing like those full-spread-masterpieces of today’s leading graphics artists that one sees on the screen—more like suggestions. The words would hint at a form and my mind would imagine what that would look like—whether it was a character’s face, or a killer robot, or a moon-sized space station parked next to the remains of our Moon.

And, no, perhaps I wouldn’t have imagined anything quite so cool as the movie’s designers’ vision. But it would have existed in the center of my brain, where I can really feel it. You see, the trouble with movies is that we see and hear them—they’re all ‘front-loaded’—and watching them is a very conscious experience—even a social occasion. We read books when we are alone and relaxed—we use them to take us away from the moment, to enjoy a vicarious experience, to past the time quickly. We watch today’s movies as witnesses—yes, albeit a fictional sort, we are witnessing, watching and hearing, we stake out our audio and video monitoring surveillance sensors and we consume the movie.

We control the movie. We pause the DVD so that we can hit the head without missing the cool part. We adjust the volume. Even pinned to our seats by the sensory overload of a 3-D IMAX screening, we will have been previously encamped with a small, portable den’s-worth of provisions, settled in and waiting for previews to start. But a book—a book controls you. You don’t hear. You don’t see. You don’t notice the passing of time. You are inside the book, enchanted into a scene of which you are one of the players. They are two totally different experiences—as different in their effects as they are in their media.

And here’s the bad news—reading a book has not gone away. You will still need to read—and to understand as much as you possibly can about what you read. There are reasons why ‘dead’ languages haven’t died. There are reasons for teaching the ‘arts and letters’ that are just as important as the reasons to learn math and science. The reasons for the Arts are harder to explain because they are subtle—and being subtle is one of the very important things one learns by the studying of our arts as well as of our sciences. The ancients once saw science and art as part of a whole—they called it the search for understanding (‘philosophy’). And the only reason science and art seem so divided from one another, to us, is that we have distorted our natural world and have gone from trying to understand the world and our place in it, to trying to control the world and make ourselves ‘the deciders’ of whatever happens on it.

It’s a simple premise—business-people are developing every square inch of land, digging down miles and miles into the Earth, fishing the oceans until there are no fish left, cutting down most, but not all, of the trees. And their favorite industries involve a panoply of chemical toxins they blithely dump in the Hudson, or the local water supply near you, and onto the land. Did you know that many water sources in Iraq are contaminated by radiation from the spent-uranium-shells the US Army used? O yes—and will stay so for a century, at least.

You won’t see any businessperson start up a company that detects, collects, and disposes of all those spent-uranium-shell fragments scattered around their top-soil. You won’t see that because that business wouldn’t make any money. But I’ll bet, market forces allowing, that there’s still plenty of money to be made manufacturing more of those spent-uranium-shells. Get the picture?

The obvious solution is that we ignore all this karmic payback until the poop really hits fan—then we’ll find new ways to survive on our spoiled planet. We will probably get right back on that bicycle, too. Rich, powerful people telling everyone else to shut up and keep working. I think Edison and Einstein would be proud, don’t you? I mean, how else do you see this thing working out?

Do you really believe we can just ignore our problems until one day someone says, “O, it’s all over. It’s okay, we fixed it—all seven (maybe eight, by then) billion of us will be fine from now on”? …And we live happily ever after—just like Jon Lovitz (as ‘Tommy Flanagan’) used to say on SNL, “Oh, yeah? I wrote a book about rock and roll. Yeah, it was about the guy who invented rock and roll. Yeah, that’s it! In fact, it was.. it was an autobiography! Yeah!”

Sure, it could happen. But something has changed in my appreciation of Sci-Fi—it’s the ‘Neo’ meme—‘we only think we control our world and ourselves—but it’s really aliens plugging into our brains and making us live in a dream.’ Sci-Fi purists would probably call it the “Puppet Masters” meme, since Robert Heinlein’s Novel, “The Puppet Masters” (1951) pre-dates “The Body Snatchers” (1955), a novel by Jack Finney. So the ‘Neo’ meme is older than I am (born in ’56)—sorry, Keanu fans.

But the change is this—the more post-modern the Sci-Fi gets, the less upset I get about the idea of aliens taking over our planet or our lives—it’s kind of, like, ‘How much worse could they do?’, You know?

There is a small body of work, most notably Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”, which posits a forcefully beneficial type of alien that just overwhelms our tech and mandates a more communal, more cooperative, or more conservative culture over the entire globe. Some of those are fun to think about. My favorite, and I wish I could cite the book and author, is one story where suddenly, everyone on earth feels what they do to others. So, every time someone took a sock at a guy’s face, that attacker’s teeth would come flying out of his mouth. Of course, such a state would make surgery very difficult, but nothing’s perfect, right?

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