Category Archives: Entertainment

No Thanks, Mr. Luhrmann

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Back to posting around June 16. Not exactly a summer vacation, especially since the pace of for-pay work isn’t slacking off, but more like a warm-weather interlude. Except that it isn’t quite warm enough to be summer, at least not in northern Illinois.

I’ve heard about the latest version of Gatsby, and so decided to read the book again. I’m going to pass on the film, for reasons stated before. But also because I’ve heard about the soundtrack.

From hotnewhiphop.com: “The director, Luhrmann, spoke on the adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, and creating music for it that blends the Jazz Age with a modern spin. ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is peppered with contemporary music references specific to the story’s setting of 1922. While we acknowledge, as Fitzgerald phrased it, “the Jazz Age,” and this is the period represented on screen, we—our audience—are living in the “hip-hop age” and want our viewers to feel the impact of modern-day music the way Fitzgerald did for the readers of his novel at the time of its publication.’ ”

Something like Classical scenes in medieval paintings featuring clothes and armor that looks suspiciously medieval? No, that’s being too generous. The producers clearly believe (and correctly so) that a genuine period music soundtrack — or even one featuring closely authentic, newly recorded versions — wouldn’t sell as well as a hip-hop soundtrack, and are pretending it’s for artistic reasons. Yet posh Jazz Age clothes and cars seem to be OK for the movie (to judge by the marketing). I don’t see why Jay Gatsby shouldn’t be dressed like a hip-hop star.

I forget which costume drama I saw about Marie Antoinette some years ago, but it had the same problem — a distractingly modern soundtrack. In that case it was ’80s New Wave, which I’d prefer over hip hop any time, but it still didn’t sit well on the film.

Dog vs. Vacuum

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Some rain lately, and nighttime thunderstorms, but not as much as in April. Grass and bushes and flowers are luxuriating. It’s a good way to approach the real start of summer, which is around June 1.

I had another idea to elaborate on Dogs from Space today as our dog was attacking the vacuum cleaner. Dogs have famously testy relations with vacuums, and ours does her bit by barking at the thing while it’s running, and trying to bite the front end. Dogs might be smart, but not smart enough to attack the real source of their enemy’s power, the electric cord. I would discourage that in harsh terms anyway, but so far it isn’t an issue. Maybe she believes she’s won when the machine is turned off.

What are the mortal enemies of the intelligent dogs from the Sirius system like? Noisy, metallic creatures that suck up their environment looking for food.

Of course, a very simple Google search reveals that Hollywood had a go at the dogs as space aliens 10 years ago in a movie that doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact. Probably because it was bad, though that isn’t necessarily an obstacle to box office success.

Wednesday Gallimaufry

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Missed the conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and Mercury so far. Every night I’ve thought about it, it’s been cloudy. Every time it’s been clear, I’ve forgotten about it. Ah, well. I satisfied my need to see major celestial events for a while about this time last year with the Transit of Venus. If the next big thing I get to see is the eclipse of August 21, 2017, I’ll be satisfied.

Oz the Great and Powerful was an interesting failure. Ann wanted me to take her to a movie last weekend, and that happened to be one we could agree on, and playing at the second-run theater for $1.75. The 2D visual effects – layer-caked CGI – were worth that much, especially the colorful landscape of Oz. The story was uneven and so were the characters, especially Mila Kunis’ Wicked Witch of whichever direction.

Hyde Park on Hudson was likewise an interesting failure. Saw that on DVD a few weeks ago. Mainly I wanted to see Bill Murray give FDR a go. At times he did quite well with the part. Then there were moments I looked at him and thought, that’s just Bill Murray.

Chanced across this video not long ago. Wow, these kids are talented. How does that happen? It also made me look the original English version of the song. I can’t remember the last time I heard it.

The last book of the year that Lilly is reading for freshman English class is Animal Farm. She asks me about it, and I oblige her with what I know, but it’s all I can do not to overload her with detail about the Russian Revolution, Whites vs. Reds, Lenin, Marxism, Stalinism, Trotsky, show trials, old Bolsheviks, the gulag, Five Year Plans, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, etc., etc. Over the summer she’s supposed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’ll have to resist the urge to blather on about that, too.

Water-colored Water & Pink Flamingos

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Rain promised early in the day on Monday, but it didn’t come until late in the evening. So I had time to mow the lawn, a task that I’ve put off lately. I enjoyed cutting all the high dandelions and scattering their seeds to the winds.

We saw an odd feature of Lilacia Park: a fountain spouting blue-colored water. I’m pretty sure that the last time I saw the fountain, non-tinted water was used.

It made me think of Mon Oncle, which I haven’t seen in many years. One of the features of the ultramodern house in that movie, if I remember right, was a fountain spouting blue-colored water. It was something seen in passing, not commented on, but I think it was supposed to be a visual comment on the vacuousness of the haute bourgeoisie, or burgeoning postwar consumerism, or something (I’m entirely too Anglo-Saxon to care much about the subtleties of Gallic social criticism).

Also noted at the park: a couple of pink flamingos. There were exactly two that I could see, just idling next to one of the walkways. Say what you want about pink flamingos, I think there ought to be more of them in parks and gardens.

Life on Mars

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I saw a car in a parking lot the other day with a license plate frame that said MANCHESTER UNITED. Not something you see too much here in the heart of darkest North America, but maybe an expat Englishman drives that car. Or, in the Internet age, a local enthusiast who’s become a long-distance supporter.

Which makes me wonder: are there (say) Packer fans in the UK? Probably a few.

Speaking of Manchester, I managed to watch the first episode of the British Life on Mars not long ago, which adeptly combines cop show and SF. A modern-day (2006, anyway) Manchester policeman finds himself transported to an earlier time (1973, as it happens). Or does he? When I have time, I’ll make my way through the entire series, which is only 16 episodes.

Collegiate R&R

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May 4, 1983

It’s a little hard to believe I ever spent an afternoon and evening like this. I made a record of it, and if I think hard enough, I can remember what it must have been like. It was during that rarefied period after exams were over, but before the VU graduation ceremony.

I’m also happy to remember that at no time did anyone I was hanging out with during this period say, “Let’s go rent a video.” It wasn’t an option. We watched a bit of television, and listened to some records, but that was the extent of our electronic entertainment. I’d say we’re better men for it.

Late in the afternoon, Dan made an outrageously good chili-bean-Frito concoction, after he’d spent a few hours lacing up the boat we’ll use later this week (I had a small part in that). We had a fine dinner ’round the table in the Vomitorium [that’s what we collegiate wits called our dining room]. We consumed the tasty concoction, plus bread and the bottle of Egri Bikavér that I provided. Steve made the damnedest ice cream, milk and Italian liqueur drink, whose name I forget, but an apocryphal story says it was invented by a widow.

We played poker after dinner, mostly for laughs. At one point, Rich asserted that the next draw was “going to reveal my soul.” He drew a deuce. Much laughter. “No, it’s this one.” He drew another deuce. Even more laughter. He actually won the hand with his pair of twos.

As I was dealing Mexican Sweat, Rich picked up his cards, which you aren’t supposed to do, so I dealt him a new hand. He started to pick that up, and my hand dashed down to the table to prevent that, knocking over Rich’s ice cream drink. It went everywhere. Everyone howled with laughter, and that was the end of the game.

It was still light enough outside to play frisbee in the street in front of the house. I took the corner of Poston & 31st; Dan was in front of our driveway; Rich was down Long Avenue, in front of the house next to ours; and Steve was on my side of 31st across the street from Rich. We tossed a good many minutes. I got off some fine skips across 31st, aiming down and – thwack! – hitting near the yellow line and back up to Dan. Once, I nearly threw the disk into a cop car. The cop eyed us ne’er-do-wells for a moment and must have decided we posed no threat to public order.

At dusk we quit and came indoors. Dan inspired us to play Risk & it took hours. Eventually Dan was poised to conquer all from Asia and northern North America. I was bottled up in Africa, Rich had South America and part of North America, and Steve had Europe. On the last turn, I threw Dan out of half of Asia, but we were too tired to go on.

My Own 1968

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Finally this week Mad Men got around to something I remember, namely the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I don’t remember much about it, but I did think about it the next morning.

I also don’t know what conclusions I reached, but I was learning (without realizing it) that out in the wider world, it’s just one damn thing after another. Not much that happened in 1968 would lead to another conclusion.

I remember the assassination of Robert Kennedy better, because I got up early the next morning and turned on the TV. Regular programming was off the air — maybe I was expecting Captain Kangaroo — and some kind of bulletin was in its place.

The talk was about Kennedy’s death, and I was confused, since I was sure he’d died quite a long time before.

Tinkertoys Across the Decades

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Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and Legos – the big three among building toys, as far as my younger self was concerned. I thought about that recently when Ann latched on to the two tubes of Tinkertoys that we have around the house. At some point long after I quit using them, the tubes migrated from my mother’s house to mine, maybe in anticipation that one of my children would use them. Until the other day, no.

The tubes interest me now more than the toys themselves.

I think my grandparents bought that taller tube for my aunt in the late ’30s – it has her name on it (I saw her last month; maybe I should offer to return them, since isn’t 80 the beginning of second childhood?). In any case, it says Tinkertoy, the Wonder Builder, a product of The Toy Tinkers Inc., Evanston, Ill. I didn’t know Tinkertoys were from Evanston originally.

The design of the longer tube clearly carries a 1929 copyright, but the image, especially of the boy, harkens back somewhat further. Maybe the artist was middle-aged and recalling his boyhood.

My mother probably bought the shorter tube for me ca. 1970, though it’s possible my grandmother got it for me. Note that it doesn’t promise constructions as intricate as the earlier tube. It still has a retail price sticker on it: Winn’s, 77 cents. Winn’s was a dime store near our home in San Antonio that was there until the age of dime stores was over.

Surprisingly little is available on line about Tinkertoy history, at least on casual inspection – there are suspiciously many hits with verbage the same as other sites. Did the inventors of Tinkertoys really hire midgets to play with sets in department store windows in the early days of selling the toys? That’s a repeated story, and I’d like to think it’s true.

Argo

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Saw Argo on DVD recently. It deserved its praise for suspenseful plotting and all-around storytelling. Lilly and her mother watched it with me – Ann isn’t really old enough to be interested – and toward the end, Lilly said, “I can’t stand this anymore! What’s going to happen?”

I didn’t tell her. That would have spoiled a cracking good yarn. Part fictionalized? Who cares, if the results are good.

I faintly remembered the extraction of six embassy workers from Iran in 1980 as a momentary good-news pause during the early hostage crisis, and vaguely remembered the much-later revelation that a bogus movie production had been involved. I didn’t believe for a moment that Revolutionary Guards chased a departing Swissair flight down the runway in Tehran, or any of the other last-minute excitements depicted in the movie. Not that such things were impossible, but they seemed too cinematic to be real, and of course they were.

I enjoyed reading about some the real details of the operation afterwards. I especially liked the reason for the timing of the escape, which was on an early-morning flight. Revolutionary Guards, it was reasoned, don’t like to get up early either, zeal or no zeal.

“This was another reason for choosing the 7:30 a.m. Swissair flight,” wrote CIA agent Tony Mendez, who led the escape on the ground at considerable personal risk. “If we arrived at the airport at 5 a.m., the chances were the airport would be less chaotic. Also, the officials manning the controls might still be sleepy, and most of the Revolutionary Guards would still be in their beds. This was the case that Monday morning, 28 January 1980.”

Tuesday Orts

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I hadn’t heard that Jonathan Winters had died until this evening. I hadn’t known he was still alive, but then again his most recent roles seemed to involve voicing Grandpa Smurf, something I would never have known without reading his obit. When I was young, though, he seemed to pop up on TV a lot without warning.

But that’s understandable. A gig is a gig. As funnymen of my parents’ generation go, he aged a lot better than most.

The MIT Center for Real Estate is a big deal in real estate education. It educates real estate pros and generates some interesting real estate data. Also, MIT is also not known to be short on its endowment. So how is it that the latest thing on center’s web site, under the “News and Events” section, is dated November 30, 2011? How it is that the newsletters produced by the center stop around the same time? Did the person who was maintaining it leave, and the organization couldn’t be bothered with it afterwards? I can see that for a small organization on a shoestring — in which case the site shouldn’t promise “news” — but MIT?

More than 30 years ago, I spent a few days camped out in a dorm room at MIT. I noticed a few things while there, such as that everyone on the hall went to the common room to watch an afternoon showing of Star Trek, and everyone knew the lines. (The original series; because this was 1982, the only series. Patrick Stewart was still just a Shakespearean actor who’d played Sejanus for the BBC.)

I discovered that there’s a major collection of samurai armor and art in Dallas, of all places. At the newly opened Ann & Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Museum: The Samurai Collection. I mentioned that to Ed, who’s familiar with the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Switzerland, and he said, ” If it came out of the Barbier, odds are, it’s better than anything you saw in Japan.”

Another thing to see. But at least it’s easier to go to Dallas than, say, Geneva.