Steven Rubio's Online Life

on the death of ron bushy

And the drum cover by Sina, which got a big thumbs up from Ron's wife:

music friday: george shearing, rockpile, pink

George Shearing, Concord, 70s. I guess I revisit this one every once in a while. I think this is the third time I've written about, mostly just cut-and-pasting what I wrote before. The two most important items: I shook his hand, and he was featured in a scene from On the Road:

And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of his piano in great rich showers; you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to “Go”. Dean was sweating, the sweat poured down his collar. “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!” And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. “That’s right!” Dean said. “Yes!” Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. ‘God's empty chair,’ he said.”

Rockpile, Oakland?, 8-12-79. They opened for Blondie, and due respect to the headliners, but Rockpile blew them off the stage. They only recorded one album as Rockpile ... a live album from the same period was released a few decades later ... but in effect, they had several albums released as solo discs, as Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. To the point, Edmunds once released "Heart of the City", a Nick Lowe track, simply overdubbing his own vocal atop Lowe's version (which Edmunds had played on). They were a fine band. Other members were Billy Bremmer on guitar and Terry Williams on drums.

Pink, Warfield, Fillmore, San Jose, Oakland, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2018, 2019. Not much to add about Pink ... seen her six times, all since this blog began so I've written about her for almost 20 years. She's one of the few music artists to get her own category on the blog, so if you want to take a trip down memory lane, go here.

geezer cinema: medium cool (haskell wexler, 1969)

Medium Cool is legendary for a reason. Haskell Wexler used documentary techniques to tell a fictional story, and knew where to go and what to do with the camera. He may not have been able to predict just how crazy it would get in Chicago in August of 1968, but he knew it was a place to be, and that something could happen.

Robert Forster plays a news cameraperson, John Cassellis, who ends up on the streets of Chicago and learns something about how the people on those streets perceive the work he and his fellow journalists do. Part of him maintains a distance from the story, but he's too smart to avoid some of the implications. It's a key moment for John when he finds out his network lets the cops and the FBI see his footage.

Meanwhile, the entire Medium Cool project confronts the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Verna Bloom, a professional actor from New England in her first movie, is so convincing as a woman who has moved to Chicago from West Virginia that some people thought she was an amateur. Bloom has talked about the odd dual nature of her performance ... Wexler had her walking around during the police riots on the streets, and Bloom is both doing her job as an actor and experiencing the violence in reality. It is these documentary-style scenes that lift Medium Cool above the norm, as the plot is serviceable but no more, and some of the larger political points are muddled. But as the riots take hold, Medium Cool is gripping in ways that surpass the usual film.

The ending is weak ... it feels out of place, like something out of a more traditional Hollywood movie. But the last shot, of Wexler pointing a camera at us as the crowd chants "The whole world's watching!" is the perfect summation.

[Letterboxd list of Geezer Cinema movies]

further updates

After the surgery:

The next day: