Goin’ home.
March 12, 2009
GEORGE CLOONEY
Charles Dickens said that when he finished writing “David Copperfield,” he felt if as someone had died. In a trivial way, I’m starting to feel that way about the approaching end of “ER.” I can’t explain my attachment to this show – especially in the past couple of years which I have spent straining to hear at least every third word uttered by Parmindra Nagra, who could win the Emmy for mumbling – to go along with her Guinness entry for sustained angst. I don’t even like the show enough to ever watch a re-run – on TV, never mind on line. Now that the end is in sight, the producers have been bringing back former characters, including Noah Wiley, who had a contractual obligation to do the encore. If he had known he was going to wind up on dialysis, he might have been more careful with his fountain pen. Julianna Margulies and Maura Tierney are among those expected at the reunion. Anthony Edwards, Abraham Benrubi, and William Macy have already picked up their name tags. Smart money says George Clooney will be nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, my regular television viewing will have been reduced to “Seinfeld” reruns. For the rest, baseball in season and occasional TCM movies and PBS productions – such as that wonderful “American Masters” profile of Jerome Robbins – will have to do. “Gray’s Anatomy” and “Scrubs” are just not up to – or down to – my standards for medical shows. It’s a been a long run from “Medic” through “St. Elsewhere” and “Chicago Hope,” but now, I’m afraid, I’m a permanent outpatient.
“Where have all the flowers gone?”
March 12, 2009
The Wall Street Journal reported today on the growing concern about man-made debris – the flotsam and jetsam of space missions launched over the past four decades. The junk orbiting the earth is both a danger to those of us on the surface of the planet who could be in the way when some scrap makes it through the atmosphere and a hazard to navigation up there. This is a case of the future imitating the past, isn’t it? What did the corporate “we” think was going to happen if every vehicle launched into space left its share of detritus? Probably the same thing we thought about all the batteries and vacuum tubes and flip tops mouldering away – or, more to the point, not mouldering away – in our landfills; the same thing we thought about all the chemical waste and scraps of mylar swirling around in the feeding grounds of dolphins. What’s that you say, Mr. Seeger? Oh, yes: “When will they ever learn?”
The old order passeth
March 11, 2009
When Dan was fixing the Beetle the other day, he pulled out the radio in order to get a code he needed. Don’t ask. The point is that when he pulled the radio out it fell apart in his hands. Literally – the facing and one of the circuit boards actually crumbled into bits. Dan is getting me another one from the VW dealer, and it’s going to be cheap, because the radio is obsolete in the sense that it plays audio casettes. I couldn’t be happier, because the radio in Pat’s car plays only CDs, and I have scores of audio tapes – store-bought and bootlegged. Life passes us by in such a hurry these days. Audio tapes were an inovation an eyeblink ago, and now they’re obsolete. The same thing applies to that Beta video player/recorder under my desk and all the Beta tapes that are squirreled away in the garage and in the den. I have all the “Taxi” episodes on Beta tapes. Why did I bother, Latka? Who knew that those tapes would so soon go the way of the flour sifter? The Baltimore Sun reported today on a video rental store in town that has been in business for 20 years – imagine! – and still does a brisk VHS business. One of the reasons for its durability is that the store has a very large selection and stocks hard-to-get stuff such as the complete works of the Russian director Sergei Einstein.
Dan is going to put the new radio in tomorrow. Where did I put those Jimmy Durante tapes?
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bal-americain0310,0,6848231.story
“Hey, aren’t you ….?”
March 8, 2009
The man mixing it up with Carl Malden in this photo is George Mathews, whose face was as familiar as the next door neighbor for almost three decades. Mathews appeared in nearly 60 properties – mostly television, including many of the major series. He made himself immortal, in a way, when he played Harvey, the tough guy Ralph Kramden – with a lot of help from Ed Norton – challenges to a fight after a poolroom argument in “The Honeymooners.” I don’t know how much stage experience he had, but in this photo he is appearing with Paul Newman, Malden, Patricia Peardon, and George Grizzard in a 1951 Broadway production of “The Desperate Hours.” We saw George Mathews last night when we watched “Pat and Mike,” one of the seven movies costarring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Mathews, as always, played a heavy – one of a trio of thugs trying to pressure Hepburn, through Tracy, to throw a golf tournament. George Cukor had the three thugs play it for laughs, and Mathews contributed at least his share. He appeared on “Death Valley Days,” “The Phil Silvers Show,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Gunsmoke,” and “The Untouchables,” among many other programs, and his movies included “The Man with the Golden Arm.” Mathews, who died in 1984, was the quintessential actor that everyone recognizes but no one can name. On the Internet, at least, it seems impossible to find out anything about the man beyond the dates and places of his birth and death and the list of his television and movie appearances. In death as in life, he is The Unknown.
“Ain’t nobody’s business if I do”
March 8, 2009
As we were leaving the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, Pat and I were discussing whether we would find any video of Bessie Smith on the Internet. A man who had come out before us overheard us and volunteered that there is a clip on YouTube of Bessie Smith singing “St. Louis Blues” in the 1925 film by the same name. Although it seems to have been a critical success, this film is all but lost. The YouTube clip runs a little more than nine minutes, and it gives a sense of the power of Bessie Smith’s performance. Of course, there is a lot of audio available from her recording career.
We were at the George Street Playhouse to see “The Devil’s Music,” a one-act musical show that recounts the life of a woman who was a major star in the 1920s and ’30s but is largely forgotten today. Miche Braden plays the singer and does justice the part. An interesting thing about Bessie Smith is that she led a life of drink and sex and violence that most of us would not condone in the abstract, but it was that very mode of life that fed the blues that she sang. She paid heavily for her recklessness, paid in ways that broke her heart, but somehow she tore out of her sad life a body of work that speaks for many souls who had the blues, too, but neither the voice nor the spirit to make their misery heard and make the rest of us think twice about dismissing them.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrd9c_bessie-smith-st-louis-blues_music
A close call in the post-modern world
March 6, 2009
Sometimes those who tell us the truth don’t do us any favors. For example, I’d rather Dan hadn’t told me what was wrong with my car. The battery was dead when I tried to start the Beetle on a recent morning, but Dan couldn’t find anything wrong with the battery, the alternator, or anything else in the car. The car ran for a week or so, but after it stood idle in the garage for a few days, the battery was dead again. After a closer and more invasive inspection, Dan told me that the battery went dead because of a bad door latch on the driver’s side. Dan says there’s an electronic component in the door latch that “tells” the car when the door is closed. But that component is defunct, so that the car “thinks” the door is open all the time – so Dan says. If the car thinks the door is open, it doesn’t shut down some systems and lights that are shut down when the door is both closed and locked – in other words, in “sleep mode.” As a result, Dan says, these systems are out there in the garage or the driveway humming away as though it were normal business hours. They’re “talking to each other” – those were Dan’s words – and heaven only knows what they’re saying, particularly what they’re saying about me. What if one of those systems had the personality of HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? It might have decided that a driver too negligent to have a working door latch – and lock the door, for Pete’s sake – was incompetent to drive the machine. The systems that have been out there whispering in the night might have wound up, as the Scripture says, taking me where I did not choose to go.
“How about that?”
March 2, 2009
HANK BAUER, TOM STURDIVANT, and MICKEY MANTLE
It wasn’t enough that this snow storm is disrupting my life; I had to wake up to the news that Tom Sturdivant had died. There may be more glamor attached to Yankee teams of other eras, but when names like Tom Sturdivant, Art Ditmar, Andy Carey, and Hank Bauer bob to the surface, I am again sitting on a summer evening on the step in front of our grocery store, tuning my GE transistor radio until I hear the voices of Mel Allen and Red Barber. I was in paradise, and I knew it: I’m glad of that, at least. During Sturdivant’s brief time as a top starter for the Yankees, I was in high school, I wasn’t serious about life, and others were looking after my welfare. I wasn’t concerned because Mickey Mantle was a drunk, Billy Martin was a brawler, and Enos Slaughter was a racist. These were my gods when they were on the field; I asked nothing more. I won’t look back at more recent Yankee teams with the same naive sentiment – and not because the teams and players have changed, except in the details of their fallibility. I already know – intellectually, at least – that I’ll never sit on that front step again and listen to those southern voices turn the progress of a game into poetry. On this cold day, I didn’t need to be reminded.
Netflix Update No. 1: “Starting Out in the Evening.”
March 2, 2009
At the suggestion of a friend who seems to have unerring taste, we watched “Starting Out in the Evening,” a 2007 film with Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, and Lili Taylor. This film, based on a book by Brian Norton, concerns Leonard Schiller, a retired professor whose run as a successful novelist is behind him. He keeps up a rigid routine as he works on his fifth novel, but it already has been ten years in the making. His books are out of print, and he is forgotten by everyone except the occasional literary wonk. One of the latter is Heather Wolfe (Ambrose), an Ivy League graduate student who wants to base her master’s thesis on Schiller’s work and who thinks she can simultaneously call him the reading public’s attention. Schiller at first rejects the idea of such a distraction, then cautiously agrees to cooperate with the student, and eventually becomes involved in a uniquely delicate personal relationship with the young woman. The secondary and related plot involves Schiller’s daughter, Ariel (Taylor), who is about to turn 40 and is anxious about her prospects for ever having children. Her decision to renew a relationship with a former boyfriend – for whom Leonard has no respect – is a source of tension between her and her father. Beneath both of these plots is a critical part of Leonard Schiller’s life – the turning point in his marriage – that he had hoped would remain buried in the past.
The complex story which explores issues of personal freedom is very nicely performanced by Langella, Ambrose, Taylor and Adrian Lester as Ariel’s rediscovered lover. Those who wish to can become engrossed in matters of literary criticism – the subject of a lot of the dialogue in this film – but the complex human stories these actors tell were enough to keep us from looking away.
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