Doin' It To Death

    I never really thought I'd had to write this post.  More later on this very, very sad event, but it seems you can now count the genuine titans of modern music on one hand.  If you don't already own in, buy Startime! when you raid the stores, and we know you will, on Boxing Day.  Until then, take in Wikipedia's lengthy bio of the man, which even still only provides a broad summary of his astonishing legacy and impact.  The man practically invented funk, revolutionized R&B, and made the modern concert into the kinetic, mercurial marathon it now so often is.  And, breathtakingly, he was still a better dancer in his seventies than most are in their twenties.  A titan, a bad-ass stand-on-the-scene outta-sight muthafuckin' Titan. 

 

    But today's about celebrating a famous and even inspirational birth.  Let's do that now.  Happy Humphrey's Day, Happy Humphrey's Day everyone.

 

    Now I gotta get ready to act as a jungle jim for little ones.  Merry, well, you know....

The Twinkie Defense

    Now and then, I'm occasioned to temper my cynicism.  Sometimes that's a bit like swallowing one's tongue, especially considering how much this age tends to render yesterday's cynicism into tomorrow's prescience.  Even more oddly, those occasions tend to happen with figures normally dismissed out of hand.  Not long ago, I remember having to concede a few virtues on the part of Justin Timberlake, of all people, when he not only showed class in acknowledging an award he received really belonged to Johnny Cash, but then demonstrated a surprising degree of comic skill on Saturday Night Live.  In both instances, you could have knocked me over with a feather, but suddenly I had to give young Justin not just a new look, but worse--- credit.  He was so easy a target, and then suddenly he's showing glimmers of promise.  One begins to wonder if some bizarre carnivalism is setting in, whereby the good become awful and the awful become good.  It's a good thing, I think.  Proves you can still be pleasantly surprised.  Proves *I* can still be pleasantly surprised.

 

    So it's with a bit of happy trepidation I'm being forced to rethink Leonardo DiCaprio.  For me, he'll always be the little brat they brought in to "young-up" Growing Pains, which was like taking broken-down Lada and painting the bumper.  And of course, there's the stuff he's most famous for, the twinkie stardom of Titanic and The Beach, to say nothing of his plainly risible attempt at Shakespeare in Romeo & Juliet.  By that point, it was easy to deride him as a child-star who finally showed potential (in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and The Basketball Diaries) and then sold out to setting a-flutter all the hearts he could.  He's still smirk-worthy in many ways, but it finally occurred to me today that the chap's making a Napoleonic assault toward legitimacy.  Since 2002, he has cozied up to Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorcese, and with each film he started to show more and more, wait for it, Genuine Acting Talent.  Gangs of New York was a bit of a mess, but with The Aviator and The Departed, he has been cultivating credibility.  But, I'll admit it; after The Departed, I would probably have said the first of its merits was that he got shot really well in it.  In the head.  From out of nowhere.  By a character we had largely forgotten.  Cooooooool....  All us not-so-pretty boys were not-so-secretly tittering with girlish glee.

 

    Then the bastard goes and does Blood Diamond.  Yes, the movie's preachy and a bit heavy-handed, yadda yadda yadda.  But for the first time, I saw something new in little Leo:  charisma.  Who knew?  It's a solid performance, it staggers me to say; it staggers me further to confess he reminded me of Humphrey Bogart more than a few times in it, and not simply at the level of awkward imitation.  He finds a snarl that isn't just snarkiness or petulance; he finds a menacing charm that's really rather impressive; he finds, forgive me, a leonine charisma that I had not imagined he might be able to convey, much less possess.  And, damn it, he pulls it off.  The movie offers lots of vignettes that seem meant to draw him, or his character at least, against the Bogart model.  There are bits right out of Casablanca (a get-out-of-here goodbye, no less), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Diamonds!  Diamonds!), The Big Sleep and Key Largo, as if to demand the comparison.  And--- Gawd help me for saying this--- little Leo doesn't come off too badly in the comparison. 

 

    Yes, that is hard to admit, damn it.  If he had failed, just imagine how many African Queen jokes we could have made.....

 

    But, suddenly it seems the boy has mettle, that he's finally going past that boyishness that puts him on magazine covers with despicable regularity.  So, I have to give the chap his props.  Maybe those three films with Scorcese helped him refine his sense of gravity, and to roughen some of those too-too-fine edges.  Colour me impressed, for now.  So I guess I owe little Leo a little mea culpa for the not-so-little fun I've made of him over the years, which I offer now, even if that cynical bastard in me hopes he gets suckered soon into Titanic II: Return of the Waifish Drowned.  Told from the iceberg's point of view, of course....  

 

    (See, eating crow isn't too awful.  Just do it one bite at a time.)

Why, You Shouldn't Have....

    I guess if you're going to pander, you might as well go for the gusto.

 

    Sorry, updates unlikely today.  Recovering from nearly two straight days of household renovation.  Oy vey. 

And Always, Twirling, Twirling, TWIRLING!

    Just in case you were jonesing for more angstrionic whingeing, it seems the diva of vapid-fire dialogue, that whirling dervish of allusive verbal diarrhea, is about to spin again.  Prepare to be dazzled by the dizzying display of dottily drivelsome damseltude!    Delight!  Delectate in the demi-grandiloquent dippiness!  The delicate debuDantescan drollery!  The delirious directionlessness!    The tediously dainty, dimply, Dopaminic digressiveness of it all!  I'm dillying!  I'm dallying!  I'm depressurizing!  Whee!!!!

 

    Whoa.... Damn, I'm getting ditzy just thinking about it....  Excuse me a moment while I throw up and grow my Y-chromosome back....

The Cutting Edge; or, Just A Little Off The Top

    Oh, an eternal dilemma:  to halve and halve not....  Er, NYT, just a little tip:  Point taken.  (Ahem.)  But no man wants to see the words "circumcision" and "halved" in the same headline.  Ever.  That is all.  You can go about your business.  Move along, move along.

I Was Gonna Make Espresso

    It's always sad when a class act like Peter Boyle passes.   Some of you may want to refresh yourself on two of his funniest moments from Young Frankenstein:  this one, featuring top hat and tails; and this one, featuring an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman.  Unfortunately he had to do a lot of schlock over the years, but his performance in Joe was terrific.  He'll probably now be best remembered for Everybody Loves Raymond, which is something of a mixed blessing.  The show has become such a staple of syndication it necessarily garners the hatred that comes from over-exposure; but it also had the audacity (these days, anyway) to deliver the equivalent of a one-act play each week, in which the actors were responsible for generating and sustaining comedic momentum.  Boyle, in that ensemble, had to be the anchor by making a broad caricature believable and funny, and he did it did brilliantly, almost effortlessly.  In other hands, the words "holy crap" would have become tired on their third utterance; he turned them into an arabesque, each time slightly different, each time disarmingly, and almost inexplicably, riotous.  I should add another adverb there:  Unfailingly.  Few comedic actors, and even fewer comedians, learn the fine art of dealing with an inevitable line or an inevitable reaction; Jack Benny was probably the great master of this, and Johnny Carson and lately Jon Stewart its most obvious practitioners; but Peter Boyle was one of the select few that could act in this tradition and make it look easy. 

 

    RIP, Good Sir. 

 

    Now I have to watch Young Frankenstein again.  With holiday shopping heating up, maybe we all should. 

In Perfect Harmony....

    It seems Zelda has tagged me with a meme to name 5 songs that represent how I feel right now, including one Christmas song.   I should reject this out of hand for insisting on a Christmas tune, but it's Zelda, so here goes, assuming the added level of difficulty of not citing anything by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison or Leonard Cohen:

1. Ray Charles, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (there, that gets the Xmas selection out of the way); alternate answer, Three Dog Night, "Joy To The World"
   
2. John Lee Hooker, "Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)"
   
3. Frank Sinatra, "That's Life"
   
4. Stevie Nicks, "Sometimes It's A Bitch"
   
5. The Band, "It Makes No Difference"; alternate answer, "The Weight"

Ah, not an especially ecstatic list, but then again 'tis the season.  M'kay, let's tag RB; I'm sure he needs something to do. 

Them Little Indians

    It hardly needs saying what I think the key quote is in this entry.  

Every Man and His Humour

    Something tells me Christopher Hitchens' pipeline of hate-mail has finally dried up.  I suspect, however, this piece should renew his supply. 

    Nice to see at least that Hitchens hasn't sacrificed verbal elan for the sake of political correctness; I imagine more than a few columnists are sorting out their indignation to respond to phrases like "bless their tender hearts" and "cunning minxes that they are." 

    Key quote:  "For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical.  But without tragedy there could be no comedy."  True enough, that. 

Hasta La Vista, Baby...

Some key ways in which a Microsoft product is like a Significant Other:

• It's unfortunately necessary: there are too many things fun and functional you just can't do without it.
  
  
• In fact, you're probably stuck with it a priori; you're just expected to have it. People will wonder why you don't.
  
  
• On first encounter, it takes forever to get ready, telling you all the while, "Please be patient." As it prepares itself, it's in contact with its support team and exchanging all kinds of information about you, but you shrug it off because it looks good--- and, frankly, you're excited because it promises that you'll be able to do stuff with it that other products wouldn't let you do.
  
  
• At first, everything seems cool. At first. Keep in mind that what you like about it at first will become what you hate most about it later.
  
  
• Once it's in your life, it takes right over and starts telling you what to do. But you let it, for the reasons stated above.
  
  
• It has an almost unnatural fondness for cookies, which you casually dismiss as one its little eccentricities.
  
  
• It messes with your library first, promising to "organize" it. You learn quickly, however, that what's Yours is Its--- and what's Its is Its. This is okay, you tell yourself, until it takes you two hours to find something you used to be able to find in a minute.
  
  
• No matter what it suggests, it is NOT as limber as it proclaims to be. "User-friendly," you'll discover, applies to other people using it, not you.
  
  
• Once it is completely settled in, it insists on keeping track of everything you do. Then it goes off and does whatever the hell it wants to do and doesn't tell you a thing.
  
  
• Before long, not only is it chewing up half of your resources, it's also becoming wildly unpredictable. Or, in fact, predictably unpredictable: you just sit there, waiting for something to go wrong, which invariably it does.
  
  
• And when something does go wrong, it's your fault. There's also no arguing with it. Ever. So there. This, by the way, is that mysterious Sixth Law you heard about in high-school science class, but of which no one ever spoke directly. Now you know.
  
  
• Of course, it never tells you what's wrong. (Occasionally it offers "details." These will provide no help whatsoever.) It will simply, and almost huffily, stop responding. Quite often, you'll just have to give up, shut everything down and consign yourself to the interminable process of restarting. This will work for a while, but sooner or later, it won't--- and your product will insinuate that you are to blame for damaging or corrupting it. You may even have to bite the bullet and bring in another programme-- or worse, another person-- to help fix things.
  
  
• Soon enough, you're changing everything for its sake. If something is incompatible with your Microsoft product, it has to go. Eventually, you'll realize it has its tentacles everywhere.
  
  
• Two words: Usage Rights.
  
  
• Even occasional engagement with your Microsoft product will soon involve you in its dubious suggestions about things you need and ergo Must Have. Perform a minor task, and you'll be directed, with no trace of subtlety, to places to go to buy stuff you really don't want. Your product wants other products--- and even if you won't buy them, it will keep showing you ads, hoping you'll just cave to its pressure. Sometimes you will. This will stop nothing.
  
  
• Dare to flirt with a non-Microsoft product, especially those Open Source sluts that are just giving it away, and it'll feign compatibility with it until it can undermine those Other Products appropriately.
  
  
• As a matter of course, you'll soon be spending most of your time maintaining and updating your Microsoft product, ripping your hair out as you do. Pretty soon, you'll tell your product to update itself behind your back just to avoid the incessant asking.
  
  
• It'll turn out, your Microsoft product isn't half as stable as it suggested, nay assured, it was. Each week will bring a fresh array of insecurities and contradictions with which you'll have to deal like Alan Alda in a triage scene.
  
  
• But when you attempt to address those insecurities, your Microsoft product won't simply ask for validation. It will demand it. Constantly. And you will oblige it, because you have to.
  
  
• Eventually, it'll stop recognizing your equipment, and all those "plug-and-play" promises will become bitter memories of why you got yourself into this mess in the first place.
  
  
• After a while, you'll realize your product has become bloated, sluggish and downright impossible. Your misery with your Microsoft product will tempt you a million times to leave it, but you won't because it'll prove too much a central part of your existence. You depend on it. Besides, if you try to get rid of it, it'll probably take half your stuff with it. So, you mutter expletives under your breath when you deal with it, and you entertain fantasies of the day you'll finally rid yourself of it, even if you never do.
  
  
• Never do, that is, until a new Microsoft product presents itself, and you go through the maddening process of deciding whether or not to ditch your miserable old product for the new one. All that updating behind your back by your old product will force the issue, as it all but shuts itself down in preparation for its replacement. (And, yes, probably takes half your stuff.)
  
  
• Before you know it, you'll have to make the leap to the new Microsoft product: there are too many things fun and functional you just won't be able to do without it. In fact, you'll just be expected to have it. People will wonder about you if you don't....

Woolly Bully

    All together now:  ~~ One of these words doesn't belong here.... ~~  (At least according to the pictures I most certainly have not seen.   )

Carleton 'Tards

    Ah, Canadian universities: as ever, sanctuaries for tolerance and diversity....

The New Authorised Version

 

And yet, not a word about secondhand smoting....

     Marx was wrong when he said that religion was the opiate of the people; it's the crack-cocaine, complete with its dependency, agitation and paranoia.  Oh, and its persistent insistence on having its demands met.  

All Over Again: Some Vues From The Cheap Seats

    Managed to see a couple of the flicks new to theatres, including Casino Royale and Deja Vu.  The former, I'd shrugglingly say, is only a marginal improvement over the recent Bond excursions.  Yes, it figures Bond in darker terms, and cheekily plays with--- or plays away--- some of the Bond mythology, but the action sequences are ludicrously true-to-form, and so about as thrilling as tap water.  Daniel Craig's turn as Bond is fine, even if he looks like Prince Charles' blond-headed nephew, and Eva Green sizzles reliably, though she's given precious little to do.  I gather, however, the filmmakers could only muster enough irony for the irrelevant flourishes regarding martinis and swimsuits.  The specious spectacles are as impossibly contrived as ever, with a high-altitude fight-sequence that's a birch's-leap away from Crouching Tiger, and a poker game that's obviously scripted by someone who knows the game but has never played a hand.  And only Bond could have a heart-attack in the middle of a poker game--- and return to the game with an undepeleted chip-stack.  So don't believe the hype, or any of the reviews; it's just more of the same, with a few cosmetic touch-ups--- or touch-downs.  As for the inauspiciously-titled Deja Vu, the less said the better.  It's just a cross between Minority Report and Laura, executed with the sophistication of Timecop.  It also proves a law that hardly needed re-proving, that any movie that fucks around with time eventually ends up fucking with itself--- and leaving time sadly wasted. 

 

    More delightfully, I've been rediscovering the many virtues of two older macabre comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace and the original The Ladykillers.  Of the former, I have to confess I had forgotten how good Cary Grant is in it:  his performance is a manic aria of antic genius, that characteristic cool of his as much a victim of the comic action as any of the bodies in the basement.  It's all farce--- and farce on top of farce, on top of farce, a kinetic piling on of ridiculously exasperating complications--- but it's a brilliant exercise in infectious lunacy, thanks largely to a terrific supporting cast that includes Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, and Jean Adair and Josephine Hull as the dotty old aunts with the deadly decanter.  Most importantly, though, the movie's still laugh-out-loud funny.  I assure you, you'll never be able to hear the word "charge" again without chuckling, and certainly no movie in film history uses a bugle more effectively. 

    What Arsenic does for the bugle, The Ladykillers does for the minuet, Boccherini's in fact, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a better example of comic menace than Alec Guinness' performance, a parody of his friend (and onetime biographer) Kenneth Tynan that's touched with bits from Alistair Sim and Raymond Massey for good measure.  Guinness gets most of the laughs, his eyes somehow droller than droll, and it's a hoot how he weaves subtlety into what might otherwise be described as a caricature.  There's a bare second, for example, in which he manages to make Boccherini seem funky, but it's a perfect little arabesque that's both broad and wry at the same time.  (Tom Hanks tried creditably for both of those qualities in the Coen Brothers remake, and failed on the latter.  The temptation toward shamelsss mugging was probably just too great.)  The movie's not perfect--- it wraps things up a little too abruptly--- but it's still a hell of a lot of fun; and it and Arsenic and Old Lace will cause you keep your distance from those little lopsided old ladies.  They only seem harmless. 

 

    Is it worth adding that I also saw Robin Williams' Man of the Year?  No, it's not, save to make two brief notes: first, that it's one of a number of movies shot partially in my neck of the woods lately; secondly, that Williams has, I think, become terminally unfunny, the only laugh in that celluloid craptacular coming from Lewis Black, one of the few living practitioners of the manic aria.  Of course, the script is bad--- very, very bad--- and the flick goes entirely off the rails when it decides to follow the dead weight that is Laura Linney on a storyline.  (She's a vaguely competent actress, but she has a vampirical effect on every movie she's in, sucking every fluid ounce of life out them, like Meryl Streep used to do before she got cheeky.)  Robin, though, has become everyone's boring uncle.  He gestures wildly and says things that are supposed to be edgy and audacious, but it's all schtick and noise and distraction that's distracting no one.  He's not an expired talent by any means, as his dramatic roles prove quite well; but I'd suggest he look back on some of his great comedic forebears, like Cary Grant and Alec Guinness.  The former has a lot to teach him about sustained mania, and the latter a lot about going beyond the predictabilities of broad comedy.  Right now, Robin's movies are closer to Casino Royale and Deja Vu than they are to The Ladykillers or Arsenic and Old Lace.  They're familiar before we even see them, as contrived as they could possibly be, and they leave everyone too much apprised of time too sadly wasted.  Not just ours, frankly, but his.

Art's Like That

    I realized the other day a few more books that have mysteriously disappeared from my collection, including John le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy and Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before.  When did I realize this?  Natch, while watching the film version of Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Take a moment to savour the irony.  (And all four of you that do will impress the Doc immensely.)

 

    Where did said books go?  Alas, if only I could say "honourable schoolgirls."   

Noblesse Oblique?

    A pithy observation, at a tilting slant, from Wallace Stevens, truer now than when he said it sixty-odd years ago:

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility.

    --- from "The Noble Rider and The Sound of Words," The Necessary Angel

Stevens' notion of nobility is considerably more complex than I'm indicating here, but even taken at the superficial level, the assessment seems on the mark.  I wonder if this has anything to do with my don't-give-a-shit mentality toward most contemporary poetry.  A note toward a supreme contradiction? 

'Tis The Season

    Forget the usual Christmas pap: enjoy the funniest two-and-a-half minutes from Saturday Night Live in years, featuring the magnificent Darlene Love. 

 

    (My younger readers here will probably only know Ms Love as Danny Glover's wife in the Lethal Weapon movies, but those of you a bit older will remember her for having one of the most distinctive voices in pop/soul-music.  She still sounds great.)

Conversation Pieces

    In the spirit of Overheard in New York and its kin, a few random chunks of conversation from recent days, mostly (and regrettably) noted, as the 'Lizabethans used to say:

• "She's got more than a little junk in the trunk.  She has a giant dump."  
  
  
• "A gangbang's the only way to go."  Said by a young woman in a context I don't even want to know.  One imagines she'll be a loving and loyal wife one day; perhaps the prototype of the soccer-team mom?  (A voice for Conservatism in the next twenty years, like the hippies that came to vote for Reagan?)

Less memorably, after a bit of a chat in which my knowledge of poetry came up, I was asked, "Are you gay or what?"  No, I said, I'm as miserable and sardonic as they come.  Obviously, my attempt at a quip fell largely flat, but for once I'm rather pleased to be so negligible.  Oh, the bewilderments of accidental company....

Under Milked Wood

    Hold hard, those ancient minutes in the cuckold's month. 

Dryden Pressed

    Watching some of the speeches from the Liberal leadership candidates last night, it occurred to me that the main reason Ken Dryden isn't in better shape is that he isn't in better shape.  Almost universally respected, he gave by far the best speech last night and demonstrated real strength for rough-and-tumble of campaigning.  The only reason I can gather for his weak showing is that he doesn't look like the typical Prime Minister: he's bulkier than the average leader, something that's not as absurd as it sounds.  Think Martin, Chretien, Trudeau, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, all of whom were either lanky, like Trudeau, or average-with-a-gut, like Martin.  An odd thing to note, of course, though I wonder if there's something in the optic-driven political world that demands leaders in Canada be, if not "lean and hungry," then at least acceptable approximates thereto.  I can't help but wonder if that's what subconsciously influenced the formation of the Top Four.  Instead, Dryden gets dumped to the ignominious laureate of being "the conscience of the party," which is roughly equivalent to a suitor being told what a wonderful friend he is.  The best man never wins; he gets nudged, and then pressed, to the side, where he's remaindered to wistful stalwarcy.  It's a shame.  He deserved better.  Then again, maybe he's better off not being baloney's bridegroom.  There's no way that stuff's good for ya.

 

    FOOTNOTE:  Yes, I know there's no such word as "stalwarcy," but "stalwartness" is such an ugly word.  I like my invention better.

Brace Yourselves For Some Weighty Tomes

    Because, one suspects, slim volumes would be out of the question.

 

    I'll still have to wait, I assume, for the Balkanization of academia to allow a programme in Lanky, Cranky Canajian Studies.