Randy Newman, Oscar-winning composer of music for Disney cartoons, channels the Lord and gives us an idea of what God might be thinking about this weekend:
A friend dug this up and posted it on Facebook. It’s me in high school as the William Jennings Bryan character from Inherit the Wind. I should note that the fellow whose hand I am shaking went on to a fine stage career.
A couple of years ago, a lab test for possible colon cancer came back positive. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly worried … I’m aware of the percent of false positives, if I have cancer it’s taking a long time to gestate or I’d weigh 120 pounds, and it’s generally agreed that the point of these tests is to catch it early, so even if I did have it, it was unlikely to be life-threatening.
Having said all of that, when I was scheduled for further tests, I admit to feeling skittish. The test … I forget what it’s called, but they spend a lot of time looking inside your colon … sounded pretty awful, and I didn’t look forward to it. That test bothered me more than the positive lab result. Not sure why I worried about it … I’ve had kidney stones, so I’ve had tubes stuck places I’d rather not mention, and I have MRSA, so I’ve had some pretty ugly moments in that regard. But I was worried, nonetheless.
Still, I did what I was asked. There were two preparatory classes, and I took them both, after which I waited to be scheduled for my colon test. But the test was never scheduled, and I never bothered to remind them that they’d neglected to follow up.
Last week, I took the lab test again. If it came back positive a second time, even I would be proactive about getting further tests.
But I just got the results back, and they were negative. (I’m reminded of what Lon Simmons once said about an injured athlete: “The x-rays came back negative. Aren’t all x-rays negative?”) So I don’t have colon cancer. What’s more important, I’ve avoided that awful test for another year or two.
My son turns 36 today. I was 36 in 1989, a year that the Giants went to the World Series. Neal and I enjoyed the pennant-winning playoff game against the Cubs at Candlestick, one of my favorite memories of the two of us:
Of course, today marks the first birthday in Neal’s life where he can enjoy saying “The World Champion San Francisco Giants.” Here is a picture of Neal and I at China Basin, moments after the Giants clinched the NL West:
Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976). Jeff Pike had this at #48 on his Facebook Fave Fifty list, and I’m trying to check out any movie on Jeff or Phil’s list I haven’t seen, so I finally sat down and watched this 35-year-old paranoid thriller, about which I knew little except that it had famous dental torture. It’s incoherent, but lots of these conspiracy movies are. A bigger problem is that no one seems to care. The film has some excellent set pieces, and it keeps moving so you don’t have time to think about it too much until it’s over. But for some reason, the overall feeling of paranoia isn’t strong enough to support the movie, so you care less about Dustin Hoffman’s lead character than you do about similar characters in other films (think DePalma’s Blow Out, or Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, or any of a dozen Hitchcock movies, usually starring Jimmy Stewart). 6/10.
“What’s Opera, Doc?” (Chuck Jones, 1957). #35 on my Facebook list, and reviewed there. 10/10.
Police Story 3: Super Cop (Stanley Tong, 1992). #34 on my Facebook list. 8/10.
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008). Yet another Let’s Get the Family Together for the Holidays movie. This one is different in that it’s French, and it’s good. Although there are the usual plot machinations and familial discord, there is also an appealing matter-of-factness about much of what we see. Catherine Deneuve has just discovered she has cancer, and her reaction to this news isn’t exactly blasé … she’s very interested … but she seems relatively fearless. There is a wonderful scene where she shares a cigarette with her least-favorite son. He asks if she still doesn’t love him … she says she never did … and they continue the conversation, comfortable in that family way where a little dislike doesn’t erase the blood ties. There’s a lot of subtle honesty here, along with some fine acting, not least from Chiara Mastroianni, who got a head start on the rest of the world in the looks department: her parents are Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. She looks more like Dad in this one, and it’s very becoming. #78 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 250 movies of the 21st century. 8/10.
On an overcast spring morning in Seattle, Bill Russell, wearing a green Boston Celtics cap adorned with a shamrock and No. 6 — his old jersey number — welcomed … Mr. Welts … They sat down near an autographed photograph of President Obama that thanked Mr. Russell “for the inspiration.”
Mr. Welts said what he wanted to say [about his coming out], and asked whether Mr. Russell, whose aversion to speaking with the news media is legendary, would agree to talk to a reporter for The Times. “Of course,” Mr. Russell recalled saying. “Anything.”
As Mr. Welts shook the massive right hand offered to him, he felt a rush of nervous relief. “I was really now on this journey,” he said.
I’ve had a couple of days to try out Amazon’s Cloud Player on the road. The obvious problem is that when your cloud access disappears (or even lessens), the tunes will quit playing. The Cloud Player lets you download songs to your phone, which I did for the playlist I constructed beforehand. At Thursday’s Giants game, though, I found out I’d be coming home alone, meaning I needed another playlist, pronto. So I created one on the fly and had the Player download everything to the phone during the 9th inning.
Here, in the grand tradition of Jeopardy, are a few of the songs from that last playlist. All of the songs start with the letter “A” because I was in a hurry and the tunes were listed in alphabetical order.
I knew of the Feelies, a cult band from Jersey, but didn’t pay much attention to them in their prime. I loved their third album, though, Only Life, and saw them a couple of times in concert around that time. The first time, they opened for fIREHOSE, and the friend I was with, who was a fan of the band’s earlier material, was dumbfounded, saying he’d never heard them sound like that. Me, I didn’t know they sounded any other way. Here they play “Away” 20 years after it was released:
Gretchen Wilson is a great example of music in the 21st century: I don’t know anything about her, have nothing interesting to say about her, but I know a few of her hits and, in at least one case, I love it very much. And she gets Charlie Daniels, Hank Williams Jr., Kid Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy to guest in her video for “All Jacked Up.”
Here’s another take on the same subject. Brad Paisley’s another one of those folks I know by their hits, in this case, my favorite, “Alcohol.”
I know a lot more about this act, but then, so do you, so I don’t need to say anything:
And finally, a song that doesn’t start with an “A” … a parenthesis comes before letters in the Cloud Player’s version of alphabetizing … “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”:
Heck with the “played via the cloud” concept … you can never have enough Jackie Wilson live. So I’ll close with this … Jackie’s got Darlene Love, the Chambers Brothers and the Righteous Brothers (nice dance moves!) on backup vocals:
I’m going to the Giants game tonight, and it will be the first time this season that I’ll be meeting everyone at the park instead of all going together. Which means I’ll be listening to tunes on the way there. Which means I have to decide what software to use (I only switched to an Android in mid-September of last year, so I haven’t had a chance to give it the “going to the Giants game” test yet).
The options on my Android phone are:
Amazon’s cloud player. I’ve got 739 tracks there, and I could add some more between now and this evening if I’d like.
The music player that came with my phone. I don’t know how many songs I’ve uploaded onto the phone … not 739 … so it would be like the Amazon player but with fewer tracks.
Pandora. There are some good things about Pandora, but I mostly use it to play music on the weekends when Robin is around (I’ve built a station that is pretty good at playing stuff she likes to hear).
Rhapsody. It doesn’t play any of my own MP3s, but that’s not really important, since I have access to the 8 trillion songs in their collection.
Sprint Music. Haven’t used it much, but I think it’s just a supercharged version of the phone’s regular player.
I could also listen to podcasts, but I save those for when I go to bed. And I could listen to a baseball game on MLB At Bat, but that’s overkill.
I think it comes down to two choices. The Amazon player makes it slightly easier to access the music I own. Also, I could duplicate most of that music on Rhapsody, but even Rhapsody doesn’t have every song ever recorded … most obviously, they don’t have the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. So if I have a hankering to listen to those bands, Amazon is the choice.
Rhapsody gives me the widest variety of tracks, and I can set up a playlist to suit my mood (as long as my mood isn’t to listen to the Beatles and Led Zep).
Not sure which I’ll choose, but we’ve come a long way since the Walkman.
Steven Hyden and Noel Murray have a fascinating discussion over at A.V. Club that asks the question, “Why do pop-culture fans stop caring about new music as they get older?” (Hat tip to Ted Friedman for this one.) Outside of the part where the two writers, in the process of talking about getting older, confess to being 33 and 40 years old (wait until they’re 57, then they’ll know what being out of touch really means … young whippersnappers), it’s a fascinating piece. I’m going to quote Hyden in the hope you’ll read the whole thing yourself:
If it’s worth caring about new films, new TV shows, and new books—I assume A.V. Club readers care about these things—why does new music so often fall by the wayside for pop-culture omnivores as they grow older? Why is “slogging” through new music no longer worth it, but plopping down 20 bucks for this week’s big (probably shitty) release at the Cineplex is considered a worthwhile investment? I feel like the continuum perspective is common among fans of other kinds of pop culture, and yet with music, we’re still tied to our own childhoods. Why?
From Here to Eternity. #37 on my Facebook Fave Fifty list. #727 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They list of the top 1000 films of all time. 10/10.
Doctor Zhivago. Sporadically entertaining, which is the kiss of death for a movie that lasts for close to 3 1/2 hours. The production is impressive, but you can only be impressed for so long before you want something more. The Russian Revolution would seem to be a topic epic enough for a film like this, and the spectacle is often worthy of its subject. But that subject is diminished by the primary story, the love between Zhivago and Lara. Historical events exist only to advance the romance plot, and it’s not sturdy enough to withstand all the weight of history. Imagine Casablanca, if it had a huge budget, took twice as long to tell its story, and skipped the part where the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans. And I haven’t even mentioned that awful song. #330 on the TSPDT list. 6/10.
Black Swan. Hysterical melodrama straight out of Repulsion, with a fascinating performance by Natalie Portman (perhaps best described by Stephanie Zacharek, who notes that Portman “gives the best female lead performance of 1955.”) Incoherent, perhaps purposely so … it’s hard for Portman’s ballerina Nina Sayers to separate fantasy from reality, but Darren Aronofsky wants us to experience Nina from the inside, so he makes it hard for the viewer to separate fantasy from reality, as well. There is plenty going on, but I liked it better as a horror story than I did as some kind of legitimate examination of the life of an artist. Aronofsky leaves plenty of talking points, but ultimately they are just something to discuss at a party. It’s a pretty good horror film, though. #85 on the TSPDT list of the top 250 films of the 21st century. 7/10.
His Girl Friday. #36 on my Facebook list. #101 on the TSPDT Top 1000 list. 10/10.
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