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Monday, April 30, 2012

Violets

Wood-violets


The Providence Journal recently featured a list of the official Rhode Island state symbols on the front page.  Here are a few:

 

 

State motto: “Hope.”  Nice.  Brief, and thoughtful.

 

 

State drink: coffee milk.  Well, hm.  Unique, anyway.  There was a political struggle over this honor between coffee milk and Del’s Lemonade some years ago; finally someone pointed out that the state shouldn’t be getting behind any particular trademarked brand, and coffee milk – of any brand! – won out.

 

 

State song: “Rhode Island, It’s For Me.” I’ve never heard it.  Hang on a minute and let me chug over to YouTube to see if I can find a version of it.  Yikes! Save yourselves, kids.  I’m not even gonna give you a link to it.  “Waters rich with Neptune’s life”? “Rhody stole my heart – you can keep the forty-nine”? Narsty gluey stuff.  One of these days I'll post "Rhode Island Is Famous For You," which really ought to be the state song.

 

 

State mineral: Bowenite.  State mineral: Cumberlandite.  I believe I have seen samples of both at the Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History.  They are okay, as rocks and minerals go. 

 

 

State bird: Rhode Island Red.  Yes, we are one of the two states with a chicken for a state bird.  (I will email you a cookie if you can tell me the other.)  The children’s zoo in Roger Williams Park has a couple of Rhode Isand Reds strutting around; they’re more auburn than red, but they’re perfectly nice chickens, and I’m sure they’d be delicious fried.

 

 

State flower: Violet.

 

 

Ah.

 

 

It is now spring in Rhode Island, and there are violets everywhere.  They are in the grass outside our apartment complex.  They are in the weeds alongside the road.  They poke up through the cracks in the sidewalk.  I was walking alongside Grace Church (built c.1850) in downtown Providence the other day, and there were throngs of violets in the patches of earth alongside the building: purple, lavender, white.

 

 

This is the perfect symbol for our state.  Violets are small and modest and lovely.  Even the leaves are pretty, when the flowers have finished blooming.  People don’t mind when they invade their lawn; they’re fresh and colorful, and they thrive.  They are fragrant and charming.  The flowers last no time at all, but they leave a pleasant memory behind.

 

 

Now there’s a state symbol I can feel good about.


 

 

Sunday, April 29, 2012

For Sunday: "Show Me The Way," sung by Peter Frampton

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I was in the generation that didn’t quite get George Frampton.  He was just a bit after me.

 

 

But he’s wonderful.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 


 

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Ann Romney, the average American housewife

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Here is a brief excerpt from a presentation given by Ann Romney a few days ago in Stamford, Connecticut:

 

 

Romney also recalled raising her boys solo until the birth of her fifth son.

 

 

“I didn’t have help for many many years. As a matter of fact I didn’t have help at all until the fifth baby was born and I had emergency surgery when he was four months old,” Mrs. Romney said. “And I was in bed and realized I couldn’t take care of five boys with Mitt working so hard and needed a little extra help. “

 

 

She offered more detail than usual about her life at home.

 

 

“I know what’s like to finish the laundry and to look in the basket five minutes later and it’s full again. I know what’s like to pull all the groceries in and see the teenagers run through and all of a sudden all the groceries you just bought are gone,” Romney said to the crowd. “And I know what’s like to get up early in the morning and to get them off to school. And I know what’s like to get up in the middle of the night when they’re sick. And I know what’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have.”

 

 

Romney alluded to the fact that not all women can stay at home saying, “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

 

 

Did you get that?

 

 

Ann loves the fact that some of us don’t have a choice, and can’t hire outside help – even after our fifth child! – because we don’t have enough money.  (Why exactly she loves that is a little beyond me. She loves the fact that people struggle?)

 

 

The husband was pulling in mucho cash, and we are told to believe that Ann was worried about grocery money, and exhausted from doing so much laundry.

 

 

Give. Us. A. Break.

 

 

How much household help do you have, reader?  (Partner and I have only stuffed animals, who are utterly useless when it comes to household chores.)

 

We Democrats are hoping Mitt brings Ann out a lot more often on the campaign trail.  She really speaks to women.

 

In all the wrong ways.


 

 

Friday, April 27, 2012

An aspirin a day keeps cancer at bay

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 A new study shows that a low-dose aspirin a day keeps cancer at bay.

 

 

Sorry, I didn’t mean to rhyme.  But that’s what the study said.  A low-dose (under 100mg) aspirin once a day not only assists in ongoing cancer treatments, but seems to help in preventing cancer.

 

 

I love simple solutions to heavy problems.  If this will help, then by god I will do it.  My mother’s family (and Dad’s too) is rife with cancer; both my parents and both my sisters died of it.  If this will help, then I will by god do it.

 

 

That’s this year’s conclusion, of course.  Last year, it was found that the problems caused by aspirin (including internal bleeding) were significant enough for the medical authorities to caution people from taking the drug.

 

 

Internal bleeding?  Hell, that’s like a paper cut, or a scraped knee.  That’s an everyday occurrence for me.  If I lose the same amount of blood because of one aspirin, and I gain some traction against cancer, then sign me up!

 

 

(For now.  Until they find otherwise.)

 

 

(Remember my kidney stone?  Until very recently, doctors were recommending cranberry juice as a preventive measure against kidney stones. My student employee Noah, only last summer, told me that his father drinks gallons of the stuff for kidney stones, on the advice of his doctor. Now, however, there’s reason to believe that cranberry juice is (at best) useless, and (at worst) a contributor to kidney stones.)

 

 

(This is how medicine works: a step at a time.)

 

 

(We work with what we have.)


 

Thursday, April 26, 2012

The Idaho Spud

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There is a nice website called Hometown Favorites, which markets grocery items from around the country: items that are generally only available locally.  In Rhode Island, for example, we’re talking about Eclipse Coffee Syrup, and Kenyon’s Clam Cake Mix, and New England Frozen Lemonade (sorry, kids, I don’t like Del’s). 

 

 

And sometimes I long for the candy bars of my Pacific Northwest childhood, and Hometown Favorites has them.

 

 

They have Mountain Bars.  They have Rocky Road bars (my favorites: chocolate-covered marshmallow bars, with bits of cashew in the chocolate).  They have Zero bars (white chocolate).  They have bags of Brach’s Chocolate Stars, which, inexplicably, you can’t buy in the Northeast.

 

 

And they have the Idaho Spud.

 

 

What?  You've never heard of it?  It’s only “the candy bar that made Idaho famous.”  It’s made in Boise (I checked the wrapper), by the Idaho Candy Company.  It’s an ovoid-shaped bar, rather like a used bar of soap, and it has a nubbly chocolate-coconut coating.  The inside is marshmallow mixed with something else I've never quite figured out. I gave an Idaho Spud to a coworker not long ago, and she described it this way: “The outside was delicious. The inside was – just flavorless.  Like a husk.”

 

 

And yet: I still buy them, five or ten at a time, and I eat them, or I give them away. I tell people: “Even if you don’t like the candy bar, the wrapper is a novelty.”

 

 

But, sincerely, I like them.  They remind me of my childhood, for one thing.  And there’s something profoundly simple about that brown wrapper.  And I like giving them to people who’ve never seen them before, who invariably say: “What is this thing?”

 

 

Why, it’s an Idaho Spud, you silly goose.

 

 

Just close your eyes and surrender to the experience.


 

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The Turkish toilet

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Ah, my dears.  If you have never visited the Third World, you will probably never have seen a Turkish toilet.

 

 

It is just a hole in the ground, with two ceramic footholds on either side.  You plant your feet on either side of the hole, and you squat, and –

 

 

Ahem.

 

 

It is, for an average American, difficult to welcome something like this into one’s daily life.  It took me a while, god knows.  But the body is very insistent about its own needs, and one does what one has to do.

 

 

At a Halloween party in Tunisia in 1985, a friend of mine dressed as a Turkish toilet.  She put a big piece of cardboard around her neck, and glued a pair of flip-flops to it, one on each side of her head.  See, her head was sticking out of the hole –

 

 

Ew.

 

 

I was lucky in both Morocco and Tunisia; my apartments in both had regular Western-style toilets.  Nevertheless, one had to use Turkish toilets from time to time, in public places.  One got used to them.  One thought noble thoughts and did what one had to do.

 

Ew.

 

 

Once, in Morocco, I was attending a training session in a big old-fashioned school that didn’t have Western amenities.  It was a warm afternoon, and I was going back to my room for something.  Walking down the hall, I encountered a kitty-cat –

 

 

It wasn’t a kitty-cat.  It had a long hairless tail.  It was a rat.

 

 

It ran away from me.  Don’t ask me why, but I ran after it.  It ran straight into the bathroom, and I ran after it –

 

 

The last I saw of it, it was diving down the hole in one of the Turkish toilets.

 

 

Now: imagine how much I enjoyed using Turkish toilets after seeing something like that.

 

 

The only upside of this was telling people about it, and watching their faces, and knowing how they were going to feel whenever they used a Turkish toilet in future.


 

 

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Book report: "Trout Fishing in America," by Richard Brautigan

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I was feeling a little down lately, and old, and depressed. 

 

 

Prescription?  Run to the bookshelf, and find my 1970s copy of “Trout Fishing in America.”

 

 

This (if you don’t know) is a little shapeless novel by Richard Brautigan, published in 1967.  The chapters are anywhere from one to four pages long.  It really doesn’t matter what order you read them in (although you should read the final two chapters in their place, last of all).  It’s kind of about trout fishing in America, although it’s kind of not.  The narrator roams all over the western United States, fishing in trout streams, describing small towns, rural locations.  There’s a character named “Trout Fishing in America,” who seems to be a person, but he’s also (literally) Trout Fishing in America.  There’s also a character named “Trout Fishing in America Shorty,” who’s a foul-mouthed guy in a wheelchair (sometimes).

 

 

My friend Ardy gave me my first Brautigan novel when we were both in high school: “In Watermelon Sugar.”  It’s a slightly more traditional novel, strange and spacey, but haunting.  (I think you had to be there in the 1960s/1970s to really get these novels.)

 

 

I went on to read all of Brautigan’s hippie output: his other novel, “A Confederate General at Big Sur” (which is very good), and his early poetry (collected as something like “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster”).  There’s a wonderful early poem sequence – “The Galilee Hitch-Hiker” – that’s really excellent.

 

 

But now you have to explain what it was like in the 1960s / 1970s. 

 

 

I tried to explain this twice over the past few months.  I failed both times.  Both people thought that “Trout Fishing in America” sounded like a stupid concept for a book. One of them was very young, in her early twenties. She invoked the Tet Offensive at me, for god’s sake! (Does she think the Tet Offensive was begun by American troops?)  Anyway, I said to her: “We thought, in the Sixties and Seventies, that the world was actually getting better.”

 

 

“Sure,” she said scornfully.

 

 

“I’m serious,” I said, feeling suddenly very hippyish.  “We thought we were changing the world.  Eighteen-year-olds could vote.  The Vietnam war was grinding to an end, and we were doing something about it.  There was something called the Equal Rights Amendment (which came to a bad end, but that’s a different story). Roe versus Wade happened.”

 

 

“And then what?” she challenged me.

 

 

Oh, kids, she was right.  We didn’t follow through.  Reagan happened.  George H. W. Bush happened. 

 

 

We thought the revolution would be self-perpetuating.

 

 

We were wrong.

 

 

(Go read “Trout Fishing in America.”  Maybe it’ll inspire you.  Or at least make you feel that there's hope for the future after all.)


 

 

Monday, April 23, 2012

Movie review: "There's No Business Like Show Business"

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Recently TCM showed “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” with Dan Dailey and Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe and Donald O’Connor and Johnnie Ray and Mitzi Gaynor.

 

 

About halfway through, Partner – who was, I think, watching “The Good Wife” in the next room – got up and very quietly closed his door.  Too much Mermanization, I assume.  She really does fill a room, doesn’t she?

 

 

This film is big and bloated, a regular Baby Huey of a movie.  It’s the story of a show-business family through the years, from vaudeville to Broadway, with radio along the way.  It pulls out all the stops: a son (Johnnie Ray) who becomes a priest, another son (Donald O’Connor) who runs away and joins the army, and – ahem – Marilyn Monroe (extremely unconvincingly) as a big Broadway singing star.  (Her big number – “Heat Wave” – is one of the most entertainingly embarrassing musical numbers ever filmed.)

 

 

 

Then there’s the gay angle.  Seeing Dan Dailey (the father of the all-singing / all-dancing Donohue clan) and Johnnie Ray (the son who aspires to become a Catholic priest) performing together, along with gay icon Ethel Merman – well, I’m surprised blood didn’t start spurting from my ears.  (For those of you who wonder how I know that Dan and Johnnie were gay: well, sadly, Johnnie was arrested several times in the benighted 1950s for soliciting sex with men.  Dan was fingered by the 50s Hollywood gossip magazines, and it seems to be pretty much accepted that he was gay.  Information from those days is obscure, certainly.)

 

 

But, oh my dears, the musical numbers!  And the goofiness of the production!  This is Hollywood at its Velveeta cheesiest. 

 

 

Which means also, perversely, that this is Hollywood doing what it does best. 

 

 

Please put it on your list.  One way or the other, whether you think it’s terrible or wonderful, it’s a must-see, a classic.

 

 

(Some other time we’ll talk about Ethel Merman and her short-lived marriage to – gasp! – Ernest Borgnine.

 

 

(Essay question: what do you suppose that honeymoon was like?)


 

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Movie dialogue

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“You know that great John Goodman line from 'The Big Lebowski’?” Apollonia asked me recently.

 

 

I've only seen “Lebowski” once.  “Which line?” I asked.

 

 

“You remember,” she said:

 

 

Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”

 

 

Okay.  That's pretty good.

 

 

So often, a really good line of movie dialogue needs a lot of setup.  In the movie “Jumbo,” for example. Jimmy Durante is trying to hide an elephant.  It's right behind him!  The policeman says something like, “We're here to take the elephant.”  And Durante (with the elephant right behind him, remember) says, with great innocence:

 

 

“What elephant?”

 

 

Sometimes it's tone of voice.  The young Hayley Mills, in “The Trouble with Angels,” was able to deliver this line at least twice, in an unforgettably passionate teenage British-accented voice:

 

 

“I've got the most scathingly brilliant idea!”

 

 

Maybe Katherine Hepburn as the scheming Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter”?:

 

 

“Of course he has a knife!  We all have knives!  It’s 1183, and we’re barbarians!”

 

 

You've got to ask yourself: will it mean anything to the people who haven't seen the movie?  We movie-lovers are, after all, a very odd lot.  We speak in code, like any mysterious medieval guild. 

 

 

Okay.  “Sleeper,” with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.  He's wearing this ridiculous inflatable suit, and she's riding on his back as they speedboat across the river, and the police are shooting at them as they're escaping, and she's crying and pounding her fists on his back and shrieking: “I hate you I hate you I hate you!”  And Woody says, very calmly:

 

 

“Try not to get upset.”

 

 

Perfect.

 



 

Friday, April 20, 2012

Clinical trials

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The evil pollen arrived early this year.  Everything bloomed out of season: the forsythia, the cherries, the dogwood. And every year my allergies get worse.  I used to get a mild cold in the springtime, and thought nothing of it.  Then I realized it was allergies, because it was always at the same time every year. (I keep a diary, so it’s easy to check these things.) 

 

 

I normally soldier through with no pharmaceuticals, but this year I felt a little frail, so one day I took a Claritin (loratidine), on Partner’s advice.  No result.  (I know these things are supposed to take time to build up in your system, but I’m looking for immediate relief, you know?)

 

 

“Nah,” Paul the Brown shuttle driver said.  “Zyrtec.”

 

 

So that evening I went shopping for drugs.  I bought some CVS-generic Zyrtec (a dollar a pill!) and some CVS-generic Benadryl (much cheaper).

 

 

Next morning I took a generic Zyrtec, AKA cetirizine. Nothing. Again, Then I realized that I was getting lively and intense, and I though, Oh god, here it comes.  (Antihistamines make most people sleepy; some of us, the really lucky ones, react as if we’d had a shot of adrenaline  It’s artificial energy, and I end up exhausted at the end of the day, when the pill wears off.) 

 

 

The following morning: generic Benadryl (diphenhydramine).  Immediate effect: it dried me out right away.  I was still coughing, but my throat felt tight and nasty.  And there was that same rush of fake adrenaline energy.  (Luckily it went away in a few hours.)

 

 

“Why do you do this to yourself?” my friend Cathleen said to me the other day.

 

 

“Clinical trials,” I said. “I need to find out what works. I’m my own test subject.”

 

 

She groaned and shook her head.

 

 

Following day: no drugs.  I gave up.  And you know what?  I felt much better. It was cooler, that’s true, and there was probably much less pollen in the air.  

 

 

And so I tucked away all my pills in the medicine cabinet.

 

 

Until next year, when the pollen comes back, and the clinical trials resume.

 

 

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Movie review: "Clash of the Titans" (1981)

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I’m not sure why I didn’t see “Clash of the Titans” when it came out in 1981.  I certainly remember the advertisements!  They were everywhere.  I seem to recall that it sounded a little foolish; sword-and-sandals seemed like a 1960s thing.

 

 

I finally caught the movie on TCM a while ago, and I am now officially a big fan of this movie, and I understand perfectly why they remade it.

 

 

Ray Harryhausen’s effects are lovely.  They’re certainly not CGI – they look stiff and artificial, compared to today’s effects – but I was very sufficiently alarmed when Perseus (Harry Hamlin with an Olivia Newton-John hairstyle) faced off against the slimy Kraken, and the snaky Medusa, and the brutish Calibos.

 

 

There’s also a darling little mechanical owl named Bubo, a gift to Perseus from Athene and Hephaestus. Bubo chirps and tweets like the spawn of a slide-whistle and an early Macintosh computer; he is a very silly addition to the story, and he is perfectly adorable, and I wish I had a little mechanical owl just like him.  (Hephaestus, by the way, is played by a big brawny actor named Pat Roach, a former wrestler who also played the German who beats up Indiana Jones, and gets chopped up by the plane’s propellers. He does not get to say one wordin "Clash of the Titans," but does get to squint meaningfullyinto the camera).

 

 

How did they assemble this cast?  Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Claire Bloom as Hera, Maggie Smith as Thetis, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite (though I don’t think she says more than three words in the movie), Burgess Meredith as Perseus’s chum / mentor Ammon, Sian Phillips as Cassiopeia.  It’s high camp, but they all have fun with it; the scenes on Mount Olympus are all just standing around and looking noble anyway, and Meredith is a good enough character actor to do pretty much anything.  (Only a few years later, Sian Phillips would turn in one of the great camp performances of all time, as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in “Dune.”  You may also remember her as the Emperor Augustus’s wife Livia in “I, Claudius.”  Such a nice lady!)  Flora Robson of glorious memory is in there too, as one of the Stygian witches, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you which one.

 

 

Myth can tolerate any amount of stretching and alteration, and somehow it still holds true.  The Calibos character isn’t in the original myth; I assume, from his name, that he’s a reminiscence of Caliban from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.  Bubo the mechanical owl is pure invention, and I don’t remember anything in the myth about Medusa being a champion archer.  But who cares?  The story still works.  Perseus still kills the Gorgon, and he still rescues Andromeda.

 

 

This is good clean fun, exciting and suspenseful.  (Funny that you can still feel suspense even though you know the end of the story.)

 

 

And we were all so much younger in 1981.

 

 

Now: release the kraken!


 

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Movie review: "Jason and the Argonauts"

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Funny how a movie can make an impression on you.  I remember watching this movie when I was seven or eight years old, on television in our living room.  All the lights were on, for some reason, which means it had to be an occasion – a holiday, or something. 

 

 

But, of that evening, I only remember this movie.

 

 

If you’ve seen “Jason and the Argonauts,” you know what I mean.  As sword-and-sandals epics go, this is Shakespeare.  The cast is very non-Hollywood (although many of them were notable stage performers and had made their share of British movies), but they’re wonderfully cast: Todd Armstrong as an intense dark-eyed Jason, Honor Blackman as the dignified mother-goddess Hera, Laurence Naismith as the spry ol’ boatwright Argus (who, as an older man, has no problem taking his shirt, or peplum, or whatever, off), Nigel Green as a brashly funny hairy-chested cheerful non-musclebound Hercules (who nonetheless gives you the distinct impression that you’d better respect him), John Cairney as the insinuatingly clever (and very cute) Hylas, Nancy Kovack as the darkly beautiful Medea. 

 

 

Do I need to speak of the Ray Harryhausen effects?  They are the heart and soul of the movie.  The huge statue of Talos that comes to life on the Island of Bronze, terrorizing the Argonauts.  The Harpies swooping and diving at poor Phineas.  The horrible army of skeletons that grow out of the ground in Colchis.  The gigantic figure of Poseidon rising out of the water (crown and all) to hold back the Clashing Rocks, his fishtail slapping in the water, allowing the Argo to pass through.

 

 

Now, watching it as an adult, I notice all kinds of other things.  I notice its fidelity to the original myth.  I giggle a little over the exotic-dance numbers, which were a standard part of any 1950s / 1960s mythology flick; these, in “Jason,” actually aren’t bad.  I listen with interest to the Bernard Herrmann score, conducted by the composer and played by the Royal Philharmonic, which is full of late-Romantic barbarism and glory.  (The Phineas/Harpies scene uses xylophone glissandos!  I certainly never noticed that as a kid.)

 

 

(Partner told me that he skipped school to go into Boston and see it back in 1963.)

 

 

(Time well spent, if you ask me.)


 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Theater review: "A Perfect Wedding," at Brown University's Leeds Theater

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Partner and I saw the latest Brown theatrical production, “A Perfect Wedding,” on Saturday night.

 

 

These college kids are talented!  They can act, they’re funny, they can sing and dance and play instruments.  Most of them (by the laws of averages) will almost certainly not be going into entertainment-related careers. (This is sort of a shame, in a way, because most of them are just as talented (if not more so) than most of the people in movies and TV.)

 

 

Then there’s the youth effect.  Partner put it best: “I like going to these shows,” he said, “because they’re all so energetic, and it makes me feel young too.”  Ditto for me. 

 

 

So: this show.  Some negatives first (which feels harsh, like bopping a puppy on the nose for making a mess on the carpet): the play was far too wordy.  Too many endless repetitive speeches.  A little too much overacting here and there.  Lots of peculiar stage accents, which did not make for a terribly comprehensible evening. 

 

 

And long, dear Jesus, the show was long.  The first act was ninety minutes, with only a few good laughs in the whole thing.  Partner and I commiserated with one another during intermission; we were trying to make the best of it, but we were both moodily considering how long the second act was going to be, and whether we’d be home by midnight.

 

 

But the second act was the payoff.  It began with some terribly long/wordy scenes too, but the atmosphere quickly changed: there was a bizarrely concocted funeral scene, with cymbals and bagpipes and conch shell, and a procession with a coffin. 

 

 

And, finally, the play took flight. 

 

 

The whole thing ends with three dynamite musical numbers, each as different from one another as night from day, and all of them done with that raw college-student energy and talent that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.  (I won’t tell you what the musical numbers are. If you see it – and I hope you do – it would spoil it for you, I think.)  All I will say is that everyone is romping around, dancing, leaping, playing instruments and singing.  The choreography is good, and the staging works beautifully.  

 

 

We were promised audience participation, and we got it.  We even got something to eat and drink (which was perfect for me, as I was starving).  During the wedding preparations in Act Two, one of the characters came over and politely asked Partner to help him change clothes, and they worked together like professionals, and carried on light conversation the whole time.  (And a cute little bugger the actor was too.)  Whenever I hear “audience participation,” I think of getting drenched with seltzer water, or dragged on stage to be part of a Theater of Cruelty bondage/torture session.  In this production, the “audience participation” was light and funny and harmless.  “What side of the family are you on?” the character asked Partner.  “Groom’s side,” Partner said smoothly, without missing a beat.

 

 

We got home at eleven p.m., giggling, having had a wonderful evening at the theater.

 

 

I need not tell you that the play is partly about sexual politics, and gay marriage, and straight marriage, and the meaning of marriage in the first place.  These issues are beside the point.  It’s about love, and commitment, and the rituals we use to commemorate both of those things. 

 

 

The play could easily be thirty minutes shorter. And maybe less screaming.

 

 

But please keep the musical numbers just as they are.

 

 

It’s running through next weekend: the last performance is Sunday April 22.

 

 

Those of you in southeastern New England should come see it.

 

 

It will bore you a bit at first, but it will leave you laughing and singing.


 

Monday, April 16, 2012

Movie review: "The Three Stooges"

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(There are spoilers in this review.  Read on at your peril.  Oh, what am I saying?  It’s a comedy.  Read on anyway.)

 

 

I have been a lover of the Three Stooges for fifty years.  I remember a children’s-show host on 1960s Portland TV – Mister Duffy, a portly ringmaster with a black top hat – explaining to us kids that the Stooges did not use real hammers and shovels and baseball bats to clonk one another on the head, and that little children should not hit each other with shovels and baseball bats in any case.

 

 

Well, hmph. That took all the fun out of it.

 

 

You either love the Stooges or you don’t.  There’s a common belief that the Stooges are a masculine taste, and that women don’t like them.  Honeychild, I am the least masculine thing in the world.  Any day now, I expect daisies to sprout from my ears.  And I love the Stooges.

 

 

Anyway, Partner and I saw the preview for the new Stooges movie a few weeks ago – lots of crashing and whacking and banging – and both of us confided to the other that we needed to see this movie.

 

 

Well, we saw it yesterday, and we both liked it.  The physical humor was raw and inspiring and beautifully choreographed: people thrown under street sweepers, lots of pirouetting lunges and slaps and kicks, lunatic dance steps, people getting hit on the head with church bells.  The Farrelly brothers – local Rhode Island boys who have made lots of stupidly wonderful movies like “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary” – have put their personal stamp on the movie: you hear a fragment of Jonathan Richman’s song “Road Runner” near the opening of the movie (Jonathan, in case you don’t know, was the crazy guitar-playing narrator in “There’s Something About Mary”); at another point you hear part of an advertisement for Al Cerrone Chevrolet Buick (Al Cerrone is a brother to Mike Cerrone, who co-wrote the movie). 

 

 

And so on.

 

 

Casting: four stars.  Chris Diamantopoulos, of whom I had never heard, is the perfect Moe, intense and jut-jawed (and, as Partner pointed out, much better-looking than the original Moe Howard).  Sean Hayes (Jack from “Will and Grace”) is a manic Larry.  And one of my personal favorites, the gigantic Will Sasso (whom I remember very fondly from “MADtv,” where he did wonderful sendups of people like Kenny Rogers and Randy Newman), is a big bouncy fighting yelping Curly.  We get Larry David in drag as Sister Mary Mengele, and Sofia Vergara as an evil housewife, and Craig Bierko doing his usual seductive-weasel routine, and Stephen Collins (the poor man’s Robert Wagner) as a scheming lawyer, and Isaiah Mustafa (remember those Old Spice ads with the unbelievably handsome black man?) as a grinning reality-TV executive.

 

 

Now the bad stuff.

 

 

The movie slows to a crawl repeatedly.  It insists on character development!  It gets sentimental!  (I thought it was a good sign early in the movie when the orphanage kids began to sing, and Larry David / Sister Mary Mengele ordered them to shut up.  There’ll be none of that, I thought.  Sadly, there was far too much soupy sentiment in the movie.  We needed a lot more of the acidulous Sister Mary, and of characters like the bulldog nurse who chases the boys through a hospital.  The Stooges were always a lot more fun when they were either hitting someone or running away from someone. Especially in disguise, and most especially in drag.)

 

 

So: overall, the movie is a little good, a little bad.

 

 

But listen: if you have ever longed to see the “Jersey Shore” crew get the crap beaten out of them, this is the movie for you.

 

 

And who hasn’t longed for that? 


 

 

Sunday, April 15, 2012

For Sunday: Martha Raye sings "No Time At All" from "Pippin"

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Partner and I saw “Pippin” on stage at Brown a year or two ago. It’s a charming (if slightly dated) musical, with some nice songs. 

 

 

This number is one of them.  It was first sung by Irene Ryan (Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies”), who famously died just after performing this song on stage back in the 1970s. 

 

 

This is a video of Martha Raye doing the cutest imaginable version of Pippin's grandmother Bertha in a 1980s production, with William Katt (who used to be on a really dreadful TV show called “The Greatest American Hero”) playing Pippin.

 

 

 


 

 

Saturday, April 14, 2012

BeachBallWorld

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I was watching a TV show about the Cambrian Explosion the other evening.  This was a period in Earth’s history, about 500 million years ago, when the fossil record suddenly blossoms: there are all kinds of animals, all over the place – trilobites, things that look like early fish, everything.

 

 

Why this explosion of life?  There are lots of theories, and some are better than others.  The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book (which I devoured back in the early 1990s) called “Wonderful Life,” which analyzed a group of fossils called the Burgess Shale, and concluded that something at an early point of Earth’s history caused a huge proliferation of life forms, which have narrowed and died down since then. 

 

 

Do you see?  Instead of the usual tree arrangement – simple life branching out into forms of more and more complexity – Gould theorized that the tree exploded into a forest early on, and that the forest has become thinner and thinner since then.

 

 

His theory has failed on many points.  He misinterpreted a number of the Burgess fossils; one he turned upside down (he had it walking on long spine-like legs; turns out that the spines were – of course! – on its back).

 

 

Gould portrayed early life on earth as a drowsy microbial cloud, purring and oozing.  Along the way, and in among the other creatures, he mentions an especially interesting early form of life called only “the Ediacaran fauna.” 

 

 

These are interesting.  For maybe fifty million years, they were pretty much everywhere on earth.  Some were big globular things, and some were flat.  They lay in water, or on shoals (we don’t really know), and basked.  Maybe some of them remotely resembled jellyfish; some of them (maybe) resembled modern creatures called sea pens, big wavy feathery things that anchor themselves in the ocean floor. 

 

 

Ediacarans were soft, and didn’t leave fossils very often; it took a lot of looking to find them.  They have been found on every continent now. 

 

 

I like thinking of those ancient seas – pink? why not? – under skies filled with hazy tropical clouds, with waving forests of feathery creatures just under the water, and big flotillas of lazy pancakes and big pink beachballs bobbing in the surf. 

 

 

Because one of those big pink beachballs may have been your grandmother.


 

 

Friday, April 13, 2012

The death of Mike Wallace

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Mike Wallace died this past weekend.  Andy Rooney (of the unruly eyebrows) died last November.

 

 

The old CBS brigade is beginning to fade away.

 

 

A few of the ancients are still alive.  Charles Osgood (age 79) still anchors “CBS Sunday Morning.”  Morley Safer (age 80) is still around, I think.  Bob Schieffer  (age 75) still hosts “Face the Nation,” also on Sunday mornings; he’s wonderful, but he seems to be getting a big weaker over the past few years.  The wonderful Bill Geist (a mere baby at age 66) is still going strong. 

 

 

But still!

 

 

CBS – journalistically, anyway – is an octogenarian’s network.  Look at the list above!  They’re old!  There are a few younger correspondents – the lamentable Steve Hartman, for example, with his mournful insincere face – but they’re the exception.  (And Steve Hartman, let’s face it, is just a feeble Charles Kuralt wannabe.)

 

 

Listen, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t mind old.  I’m getting there myself.  I’m fifty-four going on fifty-five, with sciatica and kidney stones.  I understand the demographic, and the concerns.

 

 

But even I become impatient with CBS’s news division when they explain the “Internet” to me as if it’s a strange new concept, or “Whole Foods,” or “Cyndi Lauper.”

 

 

I’ve said before that CBS is the geezer network.

 

 

I thought I was exaggerating.

 

 

I was wrong.


 

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Rose Macaulay's "The Towers of Trebizond"

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While I was living in Morocco in the 1980s, I fell in with a bunch of British people.  They were a very close-knit group, funny and intelligent and shockingly well-read.  I, who thought myself all of the above, was very outclassed.  But they were all very kind to me, and housed me from time to time as needed, and lent me books, and were generally good to me.

 

 

One (whose name was the same as a great seventeenth-century British biographer and antiquarian – something I was too stupid to realize at the time, as it certainly meant that he was descended from the man, or at least related to him) was an elderly man who’d served in the British Foreign Service for decades.  His first name was John.  He was living in mellow retirement in North Africa with his much younger (and very handsome) Senegalese lover / companion.  John was very serene, and very happy.

 

 

(I’m sure John and his British friends were all quietly amused by the fact that I didn’t recognize his family name. Well, ha ha, I figured it out eventually, thirty years later, didn’t I?)

 

 

One evening at dinner, I accidentally quoted Jane Austen (“I do not cough for my own amusement”).  It was enough to catch John’s attention, and we began to talk.  He talked about Olivia Manning, whom he had worked with, and whom he had not liked (“We knew she was always noting things down, writing about us”).  A few years ago, finally, I bought the NYRB edition of Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy,” and I still have John’s quiet words ringing in my ears, and I still have not read it completely, because I keep thinking: “John said she was a bitch.”

 

 

On another occasion, he said: “Have you read Rose Macauley?  Peculiar woman. You must read ‘Towers of Trebizond.’”

 

 

I made a mental note of it.

 

 

Years – decades! – later (I’m sure John has passed away by now, god bless him), I finally read Rose Macauley’s “Towers of Trebizond.”

 

 

Oh my dears.  Read it.  It is lovely.

 

 

It is about a youngish middle-aged woman who goes with her Aunt Dot and a priggish Anglican clergyman for a tour of the Black Sea coast of Turkey in the 1950s.  Aunt Dot has a camel, which becomes a very important character in the novel. (“Take my camel, dear,” is the first line of the novel.)  Within not too many pages, Aunt Dot and the clergyman have bolted over the Turkey/Russia border to convert the Communist heathen.  Our narrator is left behind in Turkey to ruminate, and travel, and consider what might happen next. 

 

 

This novel is funny, and sad, and has the most astoundingly shocking ending of any novel I’ve ever read.

 

 

John was right.  This is an essential novel.

 

 

Don’t make my mistake. Don’t wait to read it.  It is too funny, and too lovely, and too sad.

 

 

John and I and Rose will love you for it.

 


 

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Grandma's first public breakdown

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Most families have stories that start like this: “Grandma was running around the house looking for her glasses, fit to be tied!  And then Tillie said: Grandma, you silly thing, they’re right on top of your head . . . “

 

 

This is very amusing.  It is probably also the Beginning of the End for Grandma.

 

 

A few months ago, I myself had a Grandma moment.

 

 

I went to Rhode Island Hospital for a diagnostic X-ray.  The technician was a lean older guy, probably around my age (maybe a little younger). He was a little brusque at first.  “Go in here,” he said, pointing to a cubicle about the size of an airplane toilet, “and strip to your underwear, shoes, and socks.”  He gave me a smock.  “Put this on.   Once you’re ready, go have a seat, and I’ll come get you.”

 

 

Then he gave me a plastic bag marked PERSONAL BELONGINGS and left.

 

 

I was nervous and befuddled.  I know how to take my clothes off, so I did that first.  I put on the smock; I had a little trouble tying it, but I reassured myself that most people probably have trouble tying a knot from behind. 

 

 

Now: PERSONAL BELONGINGS.  Okay.  Wallet, keys, BlackBerry, pen.

 

 

I’d just come from work, so I also had my suitcase, and a bag of other miscellaneous stuff.  It was cold, so I had my heavy jacket and my nice scarf.  I created a huge pile of things, and was stowing them in all directions, with no real idea of what I was supposed to be doing.

 

 

Finally I organized everything, and felt very calm.

 

 

And then I realized that the PERSONAL BELONGINGS bag was missing.

 

 

Wallet!  Keys!  BlackBerry!

 

 

I searched frantically.  There wasn’t anywhere that the bag could have gone.  Could someone have come in and snatched it?  There’s no telling these days, it’s possible.  I was frantic –

 

 

Radiologist comes back in.  “Ready?” he says blandly.

 

 

“I had the bag!” I babble.  “The Personal Belongings bag!  And it’s gone!  Did someone take it?  Did – “

 

 

“It’s right there,” he says calmly.  “You’re carrying it right now.”

 

 

And sure enough, there it was.  I’d put the PERSONAL BELONGINGS bag into the other bag I’d been carrying, and looped it over my shoulder, and forgotten all about it.

 

 

The radiologist was very solicitous and sweet after that.  He helped me re-tie the back of my smock.  He walked me very slowly to the X-ray table.  He talked to me very soothingly, asking me all kinds of questions – Where did I work? What did I do? Where was I from? – and I’m sure it was his usual schtick, but he seemed especially determined to calm me down and reassure me. 

 

 

Kind of the way you do with a mental patient.

 

 

It’s official, kids.  I’m a Goofy Grandma who forgets that the glasses are right on top of her head.

 

 

Oh please someone shoot me.


 

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

The angry Jesus

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Last year at this time, I did all kinds of Easter-themed blogs.  This year, not so much.  I used to try to feel Christian; then I felt sort of post-Christian; now, I don’t really think about it much.

 

 

But I think the mood of the nation is going in the opposite direction.

 

 

I was asked approximately 17 times this year what I was doing for Easter.  Each time I answered, steadily, that Partner and I weren’t doing anything, that we had no plans, we didn’t really observe the holiday.  No one seemed to believe this.  It’s Easter!  He is risen!  You have to do something!  At least have a ham dinner!

 

 

 

Meh.  (Actually, we did have ham for dinner. But it was nothing out of the ordinary, although it was very good.)

 

 

Anyway: last week I saw this article about the differences between the ways Korean Christians and American Christians think about Jesus.

 

 

Americans, for whatever reason, think of Jesus as the ultimate positive guidance counselor.  They associate him with “love” and “amazement.”

 

 

Korean Christians, on the other hand, associate him with words like “pain” and “suffering.”

 

 

Cultural?  Perhaps.  Probably.

 

 

But wow.

 

 

Now, all you Americans, think about it for a moment.  Jesus (as depicted in the Gospels) is never seen to smile or laugh.  He is, on the contrary, as serious as a heart attack.  He is not depicted in the Gospels as an adorable guy. He did not resemble your football coach, or your pastor, or your favorite movie star.  He was skinny and Semitic and crochety.  He called his own mother “woman”! 

 

 

And a happy Easter Week to all of you.

 

 

(I’ll take Ganesha any day.  He’s usually cheerful, and he is easily placated with sweets.)


 

 

Monday, April 9, 2012

Movie review: "The Hunger Games"

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I read “The Hunger Games” last summer when Partner and I were vacationing on Cape Cod.  It’s a quick and compelling read: lots of suspense (which I normally hate), violent, sentimental. 

 

 

The movie came out a few weeks ago.  Partner and I waited until this past weekend to see it, to allow the crowds to thin out (you may have heard that the movie had the third-largest opening in Hollywood history).

 

 

Positive news first:

 

 

·       Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, the intense deadly heroine, is just about perfect.

·       Liam Hemsworth (aka “Thor’s brother”) is dark and brooding and handsome as Gale, Katniss’s darkly broodingly handsome boyfriend.

·       Stanley Tucci is wonderful as a noisy empty television announcer with blue hair.  Donald Sutherland freezes the camera with every glance as President Snow. Woody Harrelson can really act.  And Lenny Kravitz, who was so unexpectedly good in “Precious,” turns in another low-key precise performances as Cinna the hair/makeup guy. 

·       Also, like the book: lots of action, lots of tension, lots of suspense.  The movie departs frequently from the book, but it makes the story a lot more accessible for those who haven’t read the book.

 

 

Now the not-so-good stuff:

 

 

·       You notice I didn’t mention Josh Hutcherson, who plays Peeta, the doe-eyed baker’s boy.  Well, meh.  You can only get so far playing vulnerable, and Peeta looks like he’s about to burst into tears at any moment. 

·       The cinematography is shaky and unfocused.  I know it’s supposed to make you feel that you’re running through the underbrush with Peeta and Katniss, but it just feels blurred and sloppy after a while. 

·       Speaking of blurry: when Katniss finally kills someone, the camera conveniently goes out of focus so that you can’t see the death.  You can explain this away any way you like – Katniss’s remorse, blah blah blah – but Partner and I agreed afterward that this was mostly a way to get the movie a PG-13 rating.  (It’s one thing to read a book about twenty-four teenagers trying to kill one another, but just try making a movie out of it!)

·       Also filed under “cinematography”: I am always irked by movies that present long complicated scenes in thick darkness, so that you can’t see what’s going on.  I was mildly pleased by “Hunger Games” on this score, because the first few nighttime scenes were clear and well-photographed.  Well, without ruining the movie too much for you, I will tell you that the climactic finale scene takes place in the dark, and I had no idea what was going on most of the time. 

·       The movie, unlike the book, flags frequently.  We get long pastoral moments, long romantic moments, long meaningful-glances moments . . .

 

 

Ah well.  It wasn’t bad, I suppose. 

 

 

And it had a bigger opening weekend than any of the “Twilight” movies.

 

 

Which means that the world may not be coming to an end after all.


 

 

Sunday, April 8, 2012

For Sunday: Alkan’s “Scherzetto” (op. 63, no. 47), played by Laurent Martin

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I was lucky to discover the music of Erik Satie when I was still in high school.  Since then, I’ve discovered that I have a real taste for the kind of odd disconsolate abbreviated keyboard music that Satie specialized in.  Chopin wrote some, and so did Schumann (and actually Mozart and Beethoven wrote a bit of it too!), and later Scriabin, and Glazunov, and Medtner, and Mompou.

 

 

But most especially Alkan.

 

 

Charles-Valentin Morhange Alkan was a French piano virtuoso of the mid-19th century.  He wrote very extraordinary music: etudes, sonatas, concerti.  Somewhere along the line, he became a recluse, and a Talmudic scholar.  The story goes that he was killed when he tried to take down a heavy volume of the Talmud from a high bookshelf, and the entire bookcase fell on him, crushing him to death.

 

 

Here is the 47th of the 49 sketches from his Opus 63 “Esquisses," entitled “Scherzetto.”  It is a strange pianistic scherzo, full of peculiar gestures and loads of nervous energy.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

47_Motifs_(48)_for_piano_('Esquisses'),_Op._63.mp3 Listen on Posterous


 

 

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Movie review: "It Should Happen To You"

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I caught another odd interesting movie on TCM a while back: “It Should Happen To You.”  Quick synopsis: Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday), down on her luck, meets lively interesting documentarian Pete (a young Jack Lemmon), who tries to cheer her up, and who (incidentally) finds her fascinating.  Then Gladys gets an idea: why not invest in a billboard?  It will be in Columbus Circle in Manhattan and it will just say her name: GLADYS GLOVER.  If nothing else, it will make her feel better about herself.

 

 

Things go wild.  Evan Adams III (a young and sickeningly handsome Peter Lawford) tries to buy the billboard away from her for his family’s soap company; then, of course, he falls for her.  He makes a bargain: if he can have the Columbus Circle billboard, he’ll give her six others, strategically placed throughout Manhattan. 

 

 

People start to recognize her name.  How can they not?  It’s plastered all over the city.  A cynical reporter does a story about her - just another crazy New Yorker -  but realizes quickly that the audience likes her goofy sincerity.  Soon she’s on TV, with 1950s celebs like Ilka Chase and Wendy Barrie and Constance Bennett.  Lawford’s soap company makes her their spokesmodel.  Gladys is suddenly famous, and enchanted with the idea of being famous.

 

 

Poor Jack Lemmon is sulking at the sidelines this whole time.  Finally, of course, being good-hearted, Judy realizes that her fame is based on nothing, and renounces it, and marries Jack.

 

 

Is any of this resonating with you?  Is the name “Kardashian” occurring to you, or “Paris Hilton”?

 

 

The movie works for a couple of reasons.  First: Judy Holliday.  The woman couldn’t turn in a bad performance.  She always played the same character, of course: uneducated but smart, quick, funny, deadpan.  Jack Lemmon is at his young/goofy best too (this was his first movie).  Also there’s the writing: it’s a Garson Kanin screenplay (supposedly inspired by a comment he made to his wife Ruth Gordon during a downtime in their careers, when he pointed up at a prominent Manhattan billboard and told her that her name would be up there someday), and the dialogue is very sharp.  He knew how to write for Judy Holliday (she was in both “Adam’s Rib” and “Born Yesterday”), and I would love to know how much of the dialogue came from Garson’s typewriter and how much was pure Judy.  It’s also a nostalgia romp for old-timers like me, with the black-and-white cinematography of Manhattan. (I swear there are whole streets and avenues that haven’t changed since this movie was made; at one point Partner sat up and pointed at the screen and said: “Bickford’s! I remember eating there!”)

 

 

But, for me, it was mostly about the anatomy of fame. 

 

 

Lots of old movies are about the perils of fame: “Meet John Doe,” “Nothing Sacred,” “A Face In the Crowd.”  It makes one realize that Hollywood has not changed, nor human nature, nor our appetite to be rich and famous, nor our appetite to be close to the rich and famous.

 

 

The movie has a silly squishy ending.  It also has a very mawkish song.  I’m just warning you, in case you see it.

 

 

But do see it.

 

 

It will make you laugh a couple of times, but it will also make you think.

 

 

A little.