I used to really like Star Wars. I used to work in a grocery store. What happens if there's some kind of time rift where both are combined???
Making fun of George Lucas is frankly justified and yet, I'll concede, often can be mean-spirited (I've engaged in my share of the hate over the past nine years). These parodies are not only clever and hilarious but refreshing and reverent in tone. They're accessible to casual folks who enjoyed the movies as well as the hardcore geeks. Lucas is a big fan, and the guy who does Vader, Matt Sloan, actually went on to provide the voice (I guess he was cheaper than James Earl Jones) for LucasArts ' game Empire At War.
Darth Vader had a younger, somewhat less ambitious brother named Chad. This is his story....
I'm still wrestling with whom to vote for on February 12th during the Virginia presidential primaries. Tonight, it's that awful motherfu...I mean, it's lame duck President Bush's last State of the Union address.
Governor Kathleen Sebelius from Kansas is giving the official Democratic Response this evening. A year ago, Jim Webb, the then newly elected Junior Senator from Virginia, gave the response to Bush's penultimate State of the Union.
I am extremely proud I voted for this man and that he represents my family and me in Congress. Thanks, Macaca.
One of our greatest contemporary actors has tragically left us. His range was impressive and diverse. One of his last films was I'm Not There, the Bob Dylan kaleidoscope biopic. Ledger played his Dylan as the reclusive family man from the late sixties and early seventies. Exactly when this song was recorded...
Watch again or for the first time if you've not already seen it (a couple of years since hype and renewed culture wars temporarily obscured its universal insight and genuine heartbreak) Brokeback Mountain. You'll see some of the best acting ever filmed...
The national Martin Luther King holiday is tomorrow. This weekend, I've been thinking about Dr. King's legacy and how it relates to the 2008 elections and where our country is now. How do people my age and younger (Generation X and the Millenials) acknowledge the challenges and struggles of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Do those successes and scars still resonate with my peers of varying backgrounds and ethnicities?
Consequently, I'm reading Senator Barack Obama's two books now - Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope. I haven't made up my mind yet whether I'm voting for him or Senator Hillary Clinton in the Virginia primary on February 12th. So many people, including many I know very well, are swept up in Obama mania, I wonder if they've taken a measure of the man and, more importantly, asked hard questions about what he would actually do to bring about "change".
I admire both of these senators, and I will likely support whoever has the Democratic nomination in November (unless I vote for Bloomberg!) Mostly, I'm concerned with electing who will likely win the November general election (against likely Republican nominee John McCain). Most Democratic candidates adhere to major tenets in their governance that Dr. King was willing to (and did) go to jail for back in the 1960s. His is a legacy worth pausing to consider not just annually but frequently.
Like countless other white suburban kids in the early 80s, I first really connected with MLK's powerful rhetoric via U2's "Pride (in the name of love)" from their Unforgettable Fire album. I doubt if I have to tell you what an inspirational, soaring song it is (if slightly historically inaccurate).
In 1988, when I was seventeen years old, Martin Luther King III came to speak at a Baptist church in my hometown of Roanoke, Virginia. My aunt and I were the only white people there. Well, the city's caucasian vice mayor showed up with his wife and two kids to say a few remarks, as I recall, but then left with his family halfway through the service. (I found hard to believe the Roanoke vice mayor had something so pressing personally or professionally that he couldn't stick around for another half an hour or so. I was embarrassed, but I did see some striking rhetoric that morning, and I felt welcome in that church's congregation.)
Last Thursday night, at the famed Birchmere in Alexandria, I saw the one and only Isaac Hayes perform live in concert. He's one of the greatest singer-songwriters out of Memphis and was a vital instrument in the Stax Records machine that produced so much great music that was a soundtrack for the civil rights movement. He had a stroke some years back, so he was a little unsure and frail walking to the stage in his black robe last week. Once he arrived at his keyboard, his voice was as resonant and strong, as leonine and sexual as ever. With the help of one of his back-up singers, his mashed up cover of Glen Campbell's "By the Time I get to Phoenix" with Bacharach and David's "I Say a Little Prayer" was ingenius and thrilling. It was a fantastic show!
So in addition to reading some of Dr. King's works this weekend or throughout the week, as well as deeply considering whom you're going to vote for this year and why, I'd suggest also watching Wattstax, the documentary about the 1972 concert that was Stax Records' last hurrah before financial insolvency (but not irrelevancy).
Issac Hayes wrote "Soulsville" for the 1971 movie Shaft, as well as that movie's Oscar winning theme. Here is Hayes' moving performance of the former song from Wattstax and it remains, sadly, entirely too current thirty five years later:
The NFL's most infamous "12th man" was in front of me at the security station at DFW International Airport yesterday. She's short. I assume she was splitting town in a relative hurry.
Before she moved on to killing major sports franchises, Jessica Simpson was murdering American popular standards with her amiable ex-husband:
Apparently, if you catch the credits, I directed this trainwreck. I can't remember, so I must've been in my usual cocaine haze before the carnage ensued...
Here's "Folsom Prison Blues" at various key points in Johnny Cash's career:
1959
1969 - the San Quentin prison concert
2003 - just a couple of months prior to his death...June Carter Cash had just recently passed, contributing to (as a guy who also married his beautiful true love) an unimaginable heartbreak, but notice how professional and strong he is playing...
...yeah, I bet even Old Scratch might've widened his eyes, read Bob Dylan's Statement on Johnny Cash, taken a deep breath, and just let Johnny give a fantastic concert to the eternally damned until the right folks cobbled together the waiver to let him join June in heaven.
Happy 60th birthday to one of the funniest and most literate singer-songwriters ever: Mr. Donald Fagen! There will be much more about him in the future on this blog. For now, since I'm in a bit of a rush to compose this actually on his birthday, all you need to know is he wrote and co-wrote many, many great songs, including the one I lifted my blog's subtitle from above.
Now to more important matters. If you were a bookish American teenager in the early 1960s, as Donald was, would your biggest concern be whether you could survive a nuclear war with the Soviet Union or whether you could use your dad's fallout shelter to get laid?
Because it's his birthday, I have arranged for this unknown pixaleen to favor the Donald (and you lucky readers) with a spare reading of a Steely Dan classic:
The Library of Congress recently announced the official selections for inclusion in the National Film Registry for 2007. Each year, hundreds of titles are nominated by the public, the National Film Preservation Board and the Library’s Motion Picture Division staff to be on the list of National Registry films. 25 are annually chosen.
"Even as Americans fill the movie theaters to see the latest releases, few are aware that up to half the films produced in this country before 1950—and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920—are lost forever," said [Librarian of Congress James] Billington. "The National Film Registry seeks not only to honor these films, but to ensure that they are preserved for future generations to enjoy."
With the passage of decades, more and more films are vanishing due to deterioration of the nitrate stock on which older films were shot, or to the more recently discovered "vinegar syndrome," which threatens the acetate-based stock on which most motion pictures were reproduced.
Among the films included are William Wyler's 1939 adaptation of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights": You can watch the entire movie on YouTube. Here's part 1:
As brooding as Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are in this film, and even though I was an English major in college, just reading the words Wuthering Heights immediately puts in my head Kate Bush's epic hit single from the 1970s. After I heard "Running Up That Hill," I had a massive adolescent crush on this awesomely weird British chick. Most other guys my age had Heather Locklear posters on their wall. Worrying my parents, I instead went with this valkyrie girl:
Here, inhuman octaves intact, is the woman responsible for every Tori Amos song you've ever hated with a passion:
I've always suspected "Wuthering Heights" is the more literate UK version of something like Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light": a song you're ostensibly supposed to despise, but it's sure fun to sing along to in your car. "Wuthering Heights" is such an institution in Britain, some artists have enjoyed tweaking its conventions. Here's the Puppini Sisters' 1940s-esque version:
Joining Kate's "balls in a vice" high notes, young kiwi classical songstress Hayley Westenra premiered a more recent version:
What's all this then? Stop this! It's silly! Stop this silliness this instant! This is classic literature! How dare we be silly!
Now let me get in gear and badass this blog up! Here's a Tarantinoesque shout out to another 2007 National Film Registry selection - 1968's Bullitt.
You shouldn't need me or even the Drive-By Truckers to tell you how cool Steve McQueen is. I will tell that when I was sixteen years old, I had a 1969 Mustang Mach 1. 351 Windsor engine. It was a fastback model just like the '68 featured here. My Dad even had a similar Dodge Charger when I was little like the other vehicle in this most famous car chase .
I've driven on these same San Francisco streets, though not at nearly 110 miles per hour. I'm still awed even via a blog screen by how visceral this sequence is. Wuthering heights, indeed.
(By the way, if you watch all the way to the end, you'll see an actor rarely seen outside of a late 70s American sitcom.)
Today is my fellow arty Southerner Michael Stipe's 48th birthday. Since the Iowa caucases were yesterday, the 2008 election season has officially begun. I feel like I was with these guys in the trenches back in 2004. I sure hope there's a different outcome this fall for (ahem) the good guys (and good women if Clinton gets the nomination).
Here's REM's ever timely "Bad Day"
From the 1993 Inauguration ball celebrating President Bill Clinton, here's Stipe and Natalie Merchant with the 10,000 Maniacs' "Candy Everybody Wants". Does Natalie ever worry about spinning herself to death? Or has she ever considered doing a PSA about the dangers of twirling? (Impressionable girls are watching, that's all I'm saying...)
From the same concert, the semi-legendary "Automatic Baby" performing U2's "One":
And this one goes out to a very close friend who told me this week she learned over Christmas that her grandmother has terminal cancer. I, too, remember what it's like to leave a hospital room knowing I was seeing a loved one alive for the last time. You never forget, but you do somehow hold on.
