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papermoonloveslucy · 6 years

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SALUTE TO STAN LAUREL

November 23, 1965 on CBS

Directed by Seymour Berns

Produced by Henry Jaffe, Seymour Berns

Written by Hugh Wedlock Jr., Charles Isaacs, Alan Manings with Carl Reiner and Aaron Ruben

Cast (in order of appearance)

Dick Van Dyke (Host, Himself) was born Richard Wayne Van Dyke in West Plains, Missouri, in 1925. Although he’d had small roles beforehand, Van Dyke was launched to stardom in the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony Award. He reprised his role in the 1963 film. He has starred in a number of other films throughout the years including Mary Poppins (1964) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). From 1961 to 1966 he played TV writer Rob Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” He also starred in “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” (1971-74), “Van Dyke & Company” (1976), on which Lucille Ball guest-starred. Van Dyke was often compared physically to Stan Laurel.

Lucille Ball (Woman in the Park) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon, which was not a success and was canceled after just 13 episodes.

Ball has no spoken dialogue in her sketch.

Buster Keaton (Painter in the Park) was born in 1895 to parents who were vaudevillians. His legendary film career began in 1917. He became a star known for his slapstick comedy, pork pie hat, slapshoes, and deadpan expression. In 1960 he was given an honorary Oscar. Lucille Ball worked with Keaton on the 1946 film Easy To Wed. He died in February 1966, just two months after this special aired.

Keaton has no spoken dialogue in his sketch.

Harvey Korman (Policeman in the Park) is best known as part of “The Carol Burnett Show” (1967-77). He made five appearance on “The Lucy Show” as various characters. In 1977 he had his own show on ABC which lasted just one season. At the time of this episode he was a regular on “The Danny Kaye Show” (1963-67) which aired Friday nights on CBS. He died in May 2008.

Korman has no spoken dialogue in his sketch.

Bob Newhart (Himself / Uncle Freddy) is a stand-up comic with a deadpan delivery who headed two eponymous television sitcoms: “The Bob Newhart Show” (1972-78) and “Newhart” (1982-90).

Audrey Meadows (Pearl) is best remembered as Alice Kramden on “The Honeymooners” (1955-56), a role that won her an Emmy in 1955, against Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz on “I Love Lucy.” She also played Lucy's sister on an episode of “Life With Lucy” (1986). Meadows died in 1996 at age 73.

Meadows has no spoken dialogue in her sketch “The Perils of Pearl.”

Cesar Romero (Rod, Leading Man) was born in 1907 in New York City to Cuban parents. Despite earning more than 200 screen credits, Romero is perhaps best remembered for playing the Joker on TV’s “Batman” (1966-68) and in a Batman film in 1966. He played Ricky Ricardo’s buddy Carlos when “Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana” (LDCH 1957), the very first hour-long episode of “I Love Lucy” set in Cuba in 1940, as well as Lucy Carmichael's date in “A Date for Lucy” (TLS S1;E19). He died on New Year’s Day 1994 at age 86.

Tina Louise (Wilma, Leading Lady) is best known as 'the movie star' Ginger Grant on “Gilligan's Island” (1964-67). This is only appearance with Lucille Ball.

Louise has no spoken dialogue in her sketch.

Leonid Kinskey (Silent Movie Director) was born in Russia in 1903. He played a variety of Russian and middle-European characters. One of the few to share film credits with Stan Laurel, they were both seen in Hollywood Party in 1936. He died in 1998 at age 95.

Louis Nye (Mood Music Musician) was a character actor skilled in accents and voices. He appeared with Lucille Ball in the films The Facts of Life (1960) and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). He died in 2005 at age 92.

Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) was the star of two iconic television series: “Car 54 Where Are You” (1961-63) and “The Munsters” (1964-66), the role he reprises here. This is his only time working on the same show as Lucille Ball (although the two TV icons share no scenes together). He died in 1993 at age 66.

Gwynne has no dialogue in the sketch.

Danny Kaye (Himself) was born David Kaminsky in 1911 and left school at the age of 13 to work in the Borscht Belt of Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains. It was there he learned the basics of show biz. In 1939, he made his Broadway debut in Straw Hat Revue, but it was the stage production of the musical Lady in the Dark in 1940 that brought him acclaim and notice from agents. Also in 1940, he married Sylvia Fine, who went on to manage his career. She helped create the routines and gags, and wrote most of the songs that he performed. Danny could sing and dance like many others, but his specialty was reciting tongue-twisting songs and monologues. In 1964 he appeared on “The Lucy Show” as himself and Lucy appeared on his special in return. He died in 1987.

Phil Silvers (Himself) was born Philip Silversmith in 1911 (the same year as Lucille Ball). He started entertaining at age 11. He made his Broadway debut in 1939. In 1952 he won a Tony Award in the Broadway musical Top Banana in which he played a TV star modeled on Milton Berle. His feature film debut came in 1940. Silvers became a household name in 1955 when he starred as Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko. In 1963, Ball and Silvers performed the classic ‘Slowly I Turn’ sketch for “CBS Opening Night.” In December 1966 Silver guest-starred in “Lucy and the Efficiency Expert” (TLS S5;E13). A year later Ball and Silvers both had bit parts in the film A Guide for the Married Man (1967). He died at the age of 74.

Bern Hoffman (Pop / Street Bully / Cop) was a burly character actor seen with Lucille Ball on the first season of “The Lucy Show” and in the film The Facts of Life (1960). He was seen on Broadway in the original casts of the musicals Guys and Dolls (1950) as Joey Biltmore and Li'L Abner (1956) as Earthquake McGoon, a role he recreated in the 1959 film version.

None of Hoffman's characters speak.

Mary Foran (Mom / Tango Dancer) was a heavyset character actor usually cast for her size. She appeared as one of the women at the health club in “Lucy and the Countess Lose Weight” (TLS S3;E21) earlier in 1965.

Foran does not have any dialogue.

Gregory Peck (Himself) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five Academy Award nominations winning for his performance as Atticus Finch in the 1962 drama film To Kill a Mockingbird. Although Peck and Lucille Ball never appeared together professionally, his name was mentioned several times on “Lucy” sitcoms. He also never worked with Stan Laurel. Peck died in 2003 at age 87.

Archival Footage

Stan Laurel (Archive Footage) was born as Arthur Stanley Jefferson in England in 1890. Laurel began his career in music hall, where he developed a number of his standard comic devices: the bowler hat, the deep comic gravity, and the nonsensical understatement. He began his film career in 1917 and made his final appearance in 1951. From 1928 onward, he appeared exclusively with Oliver Hardy (1892-57). Known simply as Laurel and Hardy, the pair became one of the most recognizable comic duos in history. Stan Laurel passed away in February 1965, eight months prior to this tribute show. He was 74 years old.

Oliver Hardy (archive footage) was born Norvell Hardy in Georgia USA in 1892. He appeared with his comedy partner Stan Laurel in 107 short films, feature films, and cameo roles. He was credited with his first film, Outwitting Dad, in 1914. In some of his early works, he was billed as "Babe Hardy". He died in 1957 at age 65.

Dorothy Coburn (Nurse in “The Finishing Touch” Archive Footage) was ideally cast as a perennial foil for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in films like The Second 100 Years (1927) where Stan inadvertently covers her bottom with white paint; Putting Pants on Philip (1927) in which she is being chased by an over-amorous, kilt-wearing Stan Laurel around town; and as a dentist's nurse in Leave 'Em Laughing (1928). She died in 1978 at age 72.

Edgar Kennedy (Cop in “The Finishing Touch” Archive Footage) was seen with Laurel and Hardy in more than a dozen films. He was also seen in three RKO films with Lucille Ball in the early 1930s. He died in 1948 and his final film was released posthumously.

Betty Grable (Pat Lambert in Footlight Serenade Archive Footage) was a starlet who did three films with Lucille Ball from 1933 to 1936. In 1958 she appeared with her husband bandleader Harry James as themselves on an episode of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour.” Footlight Serenade (1942) was also supposed to feature Lucille Ball, but she refused to be loaned out to Fox to play a secondary role.

Stan Salute Trivia

The tribute was not well-received by critics, who opined that the program felt less like a celebration of Laurel's career than a promo for the new fall shows; the same critics were, however, in general agreement that Van Dyke's devotion was palpable and heartfelt. Consequently Laurel and Hardy biographers tend to regard it as well-intentioned, but ultimately inconsequential. Wrapping up the season in April 1966, TV Chronicle's Neil Compton would dismiss the special’

"Not much of a tribute to the late comedian (who appeared briefly in a number of film clips brutally hacked out of their original context), and did not enhance the reputations of participants such as Dick Van Dyke, Lucille Ball, or Phil Silvers."

Dick Van Dyke (who was also one of the producers) reportedly complained that his vision for the Salute had itself been hacked to pieces by network corporate types. Van Dyke had delivered the eulogy and Stan Laurel's funeral. An appearance by Fred Gwynne in full Herman Munster regalia clearly had more to do with CBS (home of “The Munsters”) than with Laurel. A lengthy biography of Phil Silvers in the show's second half also has little to do with Laurel. On the whole, the special is a tribute to both Laurel AND Hardy, who passed away eight years earlier.

The Salute aired opposite new episodes of “McHale's Navy” and “F-Troop” on ABC and “Dr. Kildare” on NBC. It was preceded on CBS by “Rawhide” (starring Clint Eastwood) and followed by “Petticoat Junction.”

The day before (Monday, November 22), “Lucy and the Undercover Agent” (TLS S4;E10) was aired for the first time. In the episode, Mrs. Carmichael goes undercover as Carol Channing to break into a government installation!

One year after this special aired, Lucy Carmichael and Mr. Mooney were put under hypnosis by Miss Pat, “the hip hypnotist” (a nightclub entertainer). Their hypnotic suggestion was to imitate Laurel and Hardy. Lucy, naturally, was Stan Laurel.

The underscoring of the Salute makes liberal use of “Dance of the Cuckoos” which was Laurel and Hardy's theme music. It was written by Marvin Hartley as the 'hour chime' for a radio station. It was first heard during a Laurel and Hardy film in 1930.

This was the last comedy performance of Buster Keaton, who had been diagnosed as terminally ill and would die a few months later. Lucy and Keaton were there own mutual admiration society, Lucy considering him her mentor and Keaton championing Ball's talents, even before her TV fame. In the above photo, Keaton and Ball watch the dailies from their sketch on the Salute.

Although Buster Keaton never guest-starred on a “Lucy” sitcom, he did visit the set of “I Love Lucy” to see his now successful protege.

The Salute begins with a production number called “Stanley” featuring singer / dancers dressed as Laurel and Hardy inter-cut with film footage of the pair and the opening credits.

After the first commercial Dick Van Dyke introduces the show. He says that he never got to meet Oliver Hardy, but did know Stan Laurel. Film excerpts from “Wrong Again” (1929), which was re-released by MGM as “Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20s”, a compilation of Laurel and Hardy shorts.

Lucille Ball and Buster Keaton perform a silent sketch set on a park bench. Harvey Korman plays a cop. The sketch is without words, but includes background music, exaggerated sound effects, and the ubiquitous laugh track.

After a brief clip from the Laurel and Hardy short “Putting Pants on Philip” (1927), Dick Van Dyke gives a lecture on comedy rooted in observing physical pain in others. He notes how comedy has changed, all the while having a series of funny accidents. This “comedy lecture” was specially written by Carl Reiner and Aaron Ruben.

Blooper Alert! When Van Dyke gets a waste paper basket stuck on his foot, he kicks it offstage. It apparently collides with someone off-camera, which makes Van Dyke laugh and apologize. Just before this happened, the boom microphone dips down into the frame.

The 'lecture' ends with Van Dyke tripping over a footstool on his way out, something he did in the opening credits of his show.

Bob Newhart talks about his research on Laurel and Hardy. He does his impression of a stereotypical kiddie show host named Uncle Freddy. Such TV kiddie shows were often the outlet for showing Laurel and Hardy shorts.

After a clip from “Call of the Cuckoo” (1927), an audience at an old time cinema sings about seeing ‘The Perils of Pearl’, the type of serial melodrama that typically played alongside a comedy feature by Laurel and Hardy.

Audrey Meadows plays Pearl, in a variety of her 'perils': As a women about to be bisected by a mill saw, a harem dancer pursued by an over-amorous Calif, a cowgirl burned at the stake by Indians, and a woman sitting atop a giant time bomb.

Movie-Goers: “Will they blow up little Pearl? Is her life at stake? To be continued [the look into the camera] ... after station break!”

After the commercial break, the movie-goers are still looking at the camera. They look back at the movie screen where Pearl is still atop the bomb.

Pearl laughs and her hat falls off. The matinee audience is suddenly onstage in a full out dance number!

Dick Van Dyke introduces a comedy sketch about the filming of a silent movie.

It stars Cesar Romero as The Leading Man, Tina Louise as The Leading Lady, Leonid Kinsky as The Director, and Louis Nye as The Mood Music Musician (aka violinist).

The comedy comes from Nye trying to stay out of the pantomimed action while providing the mood music to help the actors emote. After destroying several violins, Nye himself falls out the window.

Crashing through the door comes his replacement, Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne) playing the fiddle! This is the first time a 1865 TV audience has seen Gwynne in color, although his green complexion would be on display in a 1966 Munsters movie.

Danny Kaye is sitting beside Stan Laurel's honorary Oscar, which Kaye accepted for Laurel in 1961. A clip of “The Finishing Touch” (1928) shows Laurel installing a window.

Color (but silent) footage shows Laurel polishing his Oscar from his home in 1961.

Sitting among a stack of film reels, Dick Van Dyke introduces another clip from “The Finishing Touch” (1928) in which Laurel and Hardy are renovating a house.

Phil Silvers compares Laurel's youth as “a little man” to his own life story. A sketch shows a bespectacled Silvers in a baby bonnet and crib with his mother and father beside him. His teen years (in a page boy wig) feature his cracking voice singing “Shine On Harvest Moon.”

The mini-biography tracks Silvers' career from street performer to vaudeville.

In Burlesque, he plays Linksy's theatre (a pun on the real-life Minsky's Burlesque) wearing the same huge plaid cap that he wore onstage and screen in the musical Top Banana ten years earlier.

Actual footage from his big break in movies shows Silvers and Betty Grable in Footlight Serenade (1942). Silvers finally brings his story back to Stan Laurel, but not without a few quick clips of him in “Sergeant Bilko”!

Gregory Peck closes the program by thanking everyone and giving a last pitch for the new MGM film compilation of Laurel and Hardy's shorts.

The singers and dancers who opened the show return for a final chorus of “Stanley.” The number ends on a shot of a painting of Stan Laurel. This same painting inspired the creation of the show.

Dick Van Dyke returns for yet another pitch for the MGM film compilation “Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20s”. Van Dyke gets a face full of cake at the very end, inter-cut with Oliver Hardy slipping on a banana peel while carrying a huge cake excerpted from 1928's “From Soup To Nuts.”

This Date in Lucy History – November 23

"Redecorating the Mertzes' Apartment" (ILL S3;E8) – November 23, 1953

"Lucy's Contact Lenses" (TLS S3;E10) – November 23, 1964

“Lucy and Jack Benny's Biography” (HL S3;E11) – November 23, 1970

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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PATTERSON HOOD has been leading the Drive-By Truckers — a country-rock band with a hip-hop attitude — for more than two decades. Along the way, the Alabama native has become, in song and in prose, one of the sharpest observers of Southern culture and society since C. Vann Woodward, W. J. Cash, and the Southern novelists he read as a kid.

The Truckers’ latest album, 2016’s American Band, was widely hailed as one of the year’s best and as the group’s most directly political: its songs took on the killing of Trayvon Martin, the worship of the Confederate flag, the nation’s madness for handguns, and the role of the band’s native region in the whole mess. Hood, like fellow Trucker Mike Cooley, grew up near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and his father, David Hood, is the longtime bassist for the R&B studio’s famous rhythm section.

For many years based in Athens, Georgia, Hood moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2015. The Drive-By Truckers have just launched a US tour that brings them to Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre on February 9.

SCOTT TIMBERG: Let me start at the obvious place. In your writing, you often look at the South, at the complexity of the region’s history. And there’s a whole bunch of writers who’ve done this before: Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. I’m just wondering what, if anything, these people have meant for you?

PATTERSON HOOD: I probably first became aware of that type of thing, as a genre of literature, when I was assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. That was the first book I was forced to read at school that I actually loved and connected with. I fell in love with it, and the character of Atticus Finch reminded me of a very beloved relative of mine, who was kind of like a second father to me — so I really connected hard with that. And then later, in high school or in college, I read Faulkner a bit … I was too young to really get it. But it was a short story, “Barn Burning,” that I first read, and that was a good entry point, because I totally dug it, and got it, although I don’t think I would have been ready to read As I Lay Dying or anything. I love reading. I’m a fanatical reader.

And that goes back to childhood for you?

Maybe off and on. I remember times in childhood when I read a lot. I loved Old Yeller as a child — I really loved that book. And like everyone, I read Charlotte’s Web, although I don’t think I liked it as a kid. I read it to my son, actually, a couple of years ago, and fell in love with it. But I don’t think as a kid I was able to get past the fact that it was romanticizing a fucking spider. I have arachnophobia, so it was a bit of a leap on that one. So yeah, I went through periods of reading and not reading, I guess because it reminded me too much of school, and I hated school and everything about school at that time. I had to get past rebelling against it in order to enjoy it.

Yeah, I think a lot of us, especially boys, go through that phase, even if they become serious readers later. So when you were reading Harper Lee and the Faulkner story, and maybe some other stuff, what did you respond to, what made you want to go back to it, besides the fact that it was about the part of the country you live in? Did you feel it helped you make sense of the South?

Yeah, I probably just responded to the dialect, because that’s the way my people talked. And I responded to some of the manners — you know, the manners that everybody had, even the villains, who were these kind of ignorant, white trash, really terrible people in To Kill a Mockingbird. They still had a certain amount of decorum about them. When they weren’t spitting in Atticus’s face, there was still a certain amount of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” involved. And that was beat into me as a kid, you know.

So even though terrible things were happening, in a way, you felt like you were home?

Sure, sure. And I had a similar thing with R.E.M., early R.E.M., I fell in love with them really early. About two weeks before Murmur came out, I got turned on to Chronic Town, and in the press in those days, people talked about, “Oh, you can’t understand the lyrics, you can’t decipher what he’s saying.” But these things tended to be colloquialisms, which I could decipher. There’s a song by a side project called The Golden Palominos, and I remember reading a review by someone who couldn’t decipher what Stipe kept saying, like the hook. And it’s “fixin’ to go” — that’s all he’s saying is “fixin’ to go,” he’s fixin’ to go!

Of course, there’s more to being Southern than just a manner of speech. When did you get a sense that a key element of Southern literature was the question of race? How did Southern literature change the way you understood black people or the racial rift in the region?

Yeah, I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t aware of race, and the South’s role in that story. I don’t think there was ever a point in my life that I wasn’t, at some level, aware of it, because of what my dad did. He made his living playing on Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett records, when they literally weren’t allowed to go out to dinner with him, and so he brought that home, you know — the anger over that came home with him. And we’d see George Wallace on the television screen and my dad would just start frothing at the mouth. But we have family members who I’m sure voted for Wallace, and whom I love dearly.

So there was always that disconnect. I was also aware of the generation gap, of the ’60s, the cultural revolution that was playing out in my family too. My parents came of age in the ’60s, and my dad smoked pot, and rode a motorcycle, and had a beard and long hair, and my mom wore go-go boots and hot pants … And I spent an enormous amount of time with my grandparents and my great-uncle, who were from the Depression generation. And so I kind of viewed the counter-culture, the culture clash, from a front-row seat as I was growing up, and I think that’s probably part of my attraction to dualities in my writing and the stuff I do.

It sounds like you didn’t need Harper Lee to show you that race was an obsession in the South — you were seeing and living that every day.

Absolutely. And it’s funny, because I haven’t read the other book of hers that came out. I own it, and I plan to — it’s really just a matter of time … I’m aware of its flaws, but I do want to read it, because I’m interested in that. I’ve actually written a piece, a song that kind of deals with that, because when a New York Times critic actually reviewed the book, it was the week after I moved to Portland. I read that piece in The New York Times, and I literally broke down and cried. I got so upset at Atticus Finch. I got really, really mad for a couple of days.

And then I had this epiphany that it’s absolutely right, that it was important. I believe that she was of sound mind in deciding to put that out, because I think it was important — not to disillusion everybody of their hero, or to make everybody that named their kid Atticus wince — but because that’s how it was. That is the truth.

We’re talking about the fact that Atticus, who’d been this hero of racial justice, became sort of a segregationist, a racist …

It made me mad and upset, but once I got past that, it totally rang true to me.

In the ’30s he was defending this man who was wrongly accused. It offended him on a human level that Tom Robinson was accused of a rape he obviously didn’t commit, but that don’t mean Calpurnia could sit at the table with Atticus at dinnertime. That’s a different line. When African Americans were demanding equality, that crossed a different line, and all of a sudden Harper Lee saw her father, her beloved father figure — who to her represented the side of right and justice — all of a sudden she saw him as a hypocrite. And she wrote this thing first, in anger, and then she went back and wrote, from the view of her childhood, the book that everyone knows and loves.

That rang so true to me, and I wrote a song that, at this point, has never been recorded. I’m still hoping to do something with it. It’s called “At a Safe Distance.” When you look a little closer, not at a safe distance, you tend to see things that aren’t so pleasant — you see the cracks. It really rang true to me; I wish it didn’t.

I guess you could say this about all literature, but it seems that, more than any other, Southern literature is based on history. I wonder if you ever went back and read any Southern history, journalism about the South, about the Civil Rights movement, or any of that? You’re kind of born into the middle of the Civil Rights era — ’64, right?

1964, yeah. I was born either at the last moment of the Baby Boom, or at the first moment of Generation X. I’m right on the cusp, as was my mother, who was born the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which is the official start of the Baby Boom. Her birthday’s August 5, so with the time change, she was probably born about the exact moment that the Baby Boom started.

So yeah, all of that fascinates me. I’m obsessed with the Robert Caro books on Lyndon B. Johnson, which goes back to the duality thing, because he was the ultimate dual president. I mean, he was the best and the worst, and sometimes at the exact same moment. Sometimes he would say the worst thing possible when doing something amazing, and vice versa. He could be surprisingly eloquent as he’s just fucking you. He’s a never-ending source of fascination to me, and the fact that such a gifted writer has literally spent 50 years of his life chronicling this guy — I get off on that too. I’ve read all four books that have appeared so far, and I’m eagerly awaiting the fifth and final one.

Was Johnson a sort of Texas racist who grew up and saw racial reality? Or was he an opportunist?

He was all of the above. Caro’s take on it, I think, is that he is all those things, and more, at the exact same time.

When people say, “Oh, he didn’t really mean that — he just did the Civil Rights thing because he knew it would be good for his historical legacy.” Well, sure, he knew it would be good for his legacy, but he very well knew that it meant the South wouldn’t vote Democrat again for 50 years, which it hasn’t. It was the beginning of the great migration of Southern Democrats to the GOP. And when he did those things, he purposefully fucked over people who had helped him his entire career.

And yet, he was absolutely a Jim Crow guy for most of his career. And all of those things coexisted within him at the same time, and I think all along. He did have some awakenings at a young age, he did know extreme poverty, and he taught at a school that was pretty much all Latino students. And I think he was very moved by their plight, and he took that with him forever. And yet he was willing to put that in a box and not deal with it for many, many years, building a career as the LBJ that the Kennedys hated so much.

Your dad’s music, and the music you play with the Truckers, it’s all grounded in the blues and R&B. And the Truckers were founded, in some ways, as an homage to hip-hop …

Sure, sure. Though none of us would have tried to rap. But we were immersed in it. I really responded to how hip-hop seemed to be telling you the news — what was going on right now. Modern-day country was more about retro things. I wanted to sing about what was happening now, but in a country style.

Did any of this lead you into African-American literature, especially essays, from the South or elsewhere?

I got into it really late, really recently. Through reading Ta-Nehisi Coates I tried to learn more about James Baldwin, and then I Am Not Your Negro came out last year, which was so amazing. There are so many books; I’ve only scratched the surface. I can spend the rest of my life reading every day, and not even read a fraction of the things I’m really interested in.

Anything you’ve gone back to and loved the second time?

I love Mark Twain. I made it a point to reread Huckleberry Finn at a much older age, after loving it as a kid. Reading it in my 40s was great. What a remarkable piece of work. I do like reading the classics. I was turned on to Hemingway really late. I responded to the style — it’s like the opposite of Faulkner, whom I also love. Instead of long sentences, reall short, concise ones. I respond to both forms. Hemingway’s stories are so devastating; there’s no way to improve them. I loved A Farewell to Arms. I stumbled upon it accidentally. I was at my in-laws’ house and may’ve been sick, was cooped up, it was a rainy day. They had the book; I picked it up, read the first chapter, and couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing in like a day and a half.

Your old bandmate, Jason Isbell, is reputed to be a very literary cat. Did you guys turn each other on to books and writers when you were in the Truckers together?

We probably have more since we quit playing together. When we were playing together, we were in the eye of the storm. That was a crazy time. He turned me onto Peter Matthiessen, a trilogy of books that he rewrote as one book, Shadow Country, set in Florida in the Everglades, post–Civil War, when they were first settling that part of the country. It was kind of the last frontier. All of these outlaws that had been put out of business in the West being ended up down there. It was riveting — and one of Jason’s favorite books. He’s very well read, and a great writer in his own right.

Your last record, American Band, was your most explicitly topical. You wrote about racial violence and social tensions that were exploding around you. Did your reading of essayists, novelists, or anything else help shape that album?

I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me when I was in the midst of writing that record. I had already written “What It Means,” and I was going through a period of questioning: Did I have a right to write such a thing? Reading his book, I kept asking, “What can I do?” Maybe this is a small part of what I can do. Maybe there does need to be a goofy white dude, in a rock ’n’ roll band, with the following that it has, that can say Black Lives Matter. Maybe that is important. I didn’t write that song from the perspective of a black man being shot by police — I wrote it from the perspective of a goofy white dude, like me. Seeing this happening around me and saying, “This is wrong. Why are we at this place in 2017? Why is this still a thing?” And unfortunately, the song doesn’t have answers, it’s just questions. But at least questioning is a start, a beginning.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

The post All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Patterson Hood appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Pop Picks – April 1, 2020

What I’m listening to:

Out of nowhere and 8 years since his last recording, Bob Dylan last Thursday dropped a new single, the 17-minute (the longest Dylan song ever) “Murder Most Foul.” It’s ostensibly about the murder of President John F. Kennedy, but it’s bigger, more incisive, and elegiac than that alone. The music is gorgeous, his singing is lovely (a phrase rarely used for Dylan even in his prime), and he shows why he was deserving of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s worth listening to again and again. The man is a cultural treasure and as relevant as ever.

What I’m reading:

The Milkman by Anna Burns, the 2018 Booker Prize winner, felt like slow going for the first bit, a leisurely stream of consciousness (not my favorite thing) first person tale of an adolescent girl during “the troubles” in 1970’s Northern Ireland. And then enough plot emerges to pull the reader along and tie the frequent and increasingly delightful digressions into the psychology of terror, sexual threat, adolescence, and a community (and world) that will create your narrative and your identity no matter what you know and believe about yourself. It’s layered, full of black humor, and powerful. It also somehow resonates for our times, where we navigate a newfound dread. It’s way more enjoyable than I just made it sound. One of my favorite reads of this young year.

What I’m watching:

I escaped back in time and started re-watching the first season of The West Wing. It is a vision – nostalgic, romantic, perhaps never true – of political leadership driven by higher purpose, American ideals, and moral intelligence. It does not pretend that politics can’t be craven, self-serving, and transactional, but the good guys mostly win in The West Wing, the acting is delightful, and Sorkin’s dialogue zings back and forth in the way of classic Hollywood movies of the 50s – smart, quick, funny. It reminds me – as has often happened during our current crisis – that most people are good and want their community to be a better place. When we appeal to our ideals instead of our fears, we are capable of great things. It’s a nice escape.

Archive

February 3, 2020

What I’m listening to:

Spending 21 hours on airplanes (Singapore to Tokyo to Boston) provides lots of time for listening and in an airport shop I picked up a Rolling Stones magazine that listed the top ten albums of the last ten years. I’ve been systematically working through them, starting with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I just don’t know enough about hip hop and rap to offer any intelligent analysis of the music, and I have always thought of Kanye as kind of crazy (that may still be true), but the music is layered and extravagant and genre-bending. The lyrics seem fascinating and self-reflective, especially around fame and excess and Kanye’s specialty, self-promoting aggrandizement. Too many people I know remain stuck in the music of their youth and while I love those songs too, it feels important to listen to today’s music and what it has to tell us about life and lives far different than our own. And in a case like Twisted Fantasy, it’s just great music and that’s its own justification.

What I’m reading:

I went back to an old favorite, Richard Russo’s Straight Man. If you work in academia, this is a must-read and while written 22 years ago, it still rings true and current. The “hero” of the novel is William Henry Devereaux Jr., the chair of the English Department in a second-tier public university in small-town Pennsylvania. The book is laugh aloud funny (the opening chapter and story about old Red puts me in hysterics every time I read it) and like the best comedy, it taps into the complexity and pains of life in very substantial ways. Devereaux is insufferable in most ways and yet we root for him, mostly because A) he is so damn funny and B) is self-deprecating. But there is also a big heartedness in Russo’s writing and a recognition that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and life’s essential dramas play out fully in the most modest of places and for the most ordinary of people.

What I’m watching:

I can’t pretend to have an abiding interest in cheerleading, but I devoured the six-episode Netflix series Cheer, about the cheerleading squad at Navarro College, a small two-year college in rural Texas that is a cheerleading powerhouse, winning the National Championship 14 times under the direction of Coach Monica Aldama, the Bill Belichick of cheering. I have a new respect and admiration for the athleticism and demands of cheering (and wonder about the cavalier handling of injuries), but the series is about so much more. It’s about team, about love, about grit and perseverance, bravery, trust, about kids and growing up and loss, and…well, it’s about almost everything and it will make you laugh and cry and exult. It is just terrific.

January 2, 2020

What I’m listening to:

I was never really an Amy Winehouse fan and I don’t listen to much jazz or blue-eyed soul. Recently, eight years after she died at only 27, I heard her single Tears Dry On Their Own and I was hooked (the song was on someone’s “ten things I’d want on a deserted island” list). Since then, I’ve been playing her almost every day. I started the documentary about her, Amy, and stopped. I didn’t much like her. Or, more accurately, I didn’t much like the signals of her own eventual destruction that were evident early on. I think it was D. H. Lawrence that once said “Trust the art, not the artist.” Sometimes it is better not to know too much and just relish the sheer artistry of the work. Winehouse’s Back to Black, which was named one of the best albums of 2007, is as fresh and painful and amazing 13 years later.

What I’m reading:

Alan Bennett’s lovely novella An Uncommon Reader is a what-if tale, wondering what it would mean if Queen Elizabeth II suddenly became a reader. Because of a lucked upon book mobile on palace grounds, she becomes just that, much to the consternation of her staff and with all kinds of delicious consequences, including curiosity, imagination, self-awareness, and growing disregard for pomp. With an ill-framed suggestion, reading becomes writing and provides a surprise ending. For all of us who love books, this is a finely wrought and delightful love poem to the power of books for readers and writers alike. Imagine if all our leaders were readers (sigh).

What I’m watching:

I’m a huge fan of many things – The National, Boston sports teams, BMW motorcycles, Pho – but there is a stage of life, typically adolescence, when fandom changes the universe, provides a lens to finally understand the world and, more importantly, yourself, in profound ways. My wife Pat would say Joni Mitchell did that for her. Gurinder Chadha’s wonderful film Blinded By The Light captures the power of discovery when Javed, the son of struggling Pakistani immigrants in a dead end place during a dead end time (the Thatcher period, from which Britain has never recovered: see Brexit), hears Springsteen and is forever changed. The movie, sometimes musical, sometimes comedy, and often bubbling with energy, has more heft than it might seem at first. There is pain in a father struggling to retain his dignity while he fails to provide, the father and son tension in so many immigrant families (I lived some of that), and what it means to be an outsider in the only culture you actually have ever known.

November 25, 2019

My pop picks are usually a combination of three things: what I am listening to, reading, and watching. But last week I happily combined all three. That is, I went to NYC last week and saw two shows. The first was Cyrano, starring Game of Thrones superstar Peter Dinklage in the title role, with Jasmine Cephas Jones as Roxanne. She was Peggy in the original Hamilton cast and has an amazing voice. The music was written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, two members of my favorite band, The National, with lyrics by lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, directs. Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play is light, dated, and melodramatic, but this production was delightful. Dinklage owns the stage, a master, and his deep bass voice, not all that great for singing, but commanding in the delivery of every line, was somehow a plaintive and resonant counterpoint to Cephas Jones’ soaring voice. In the original Cyrano, the title character’s large nose marks him as outsider and ”other,” but Dinklage was born with achondroplasia, the cause of his dwarfism, and there is a kind of resonance in his performance that feels like pain not acted, but known. Deeply. It takes this rather lightweight play and gives it depth. Even if it didn’t, not everything has to be deep and profound – there is joy in seeing something executed so darn well. Cyrano was delightfully satisfying.

The other show was the much lauded Aaron Sorkin rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring another actor at the very top of his game, Ed Harris. This is a Mockingbird for our times, one in which iconic Atticus Finch’s idealistic “you have to live in someone else’s skin” feels naive in the face of hateful racism and anti-Semitism. The Black characters in the play get more voice, if not agency, in the stage play than they do in the book, especially housekeeper Calpurnia, who voices incredulity at Finch’s faith in his neighbors and reminds us that he does not pay the price of his patience. She does. And Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape – “convicted at the moment he was accused,” Whatever West Wing was for Sorkin – and I dearly loved that show – this is a play for a broken United States, where racism abounds and does so with sanction by those in power. As our daughter said, “I think Trump broke Aaron Sorkin.” It was as powerful a thing I’ve seen on stage in years.

With both plays, I was reminded of the magic that is live theater.

October 31, 2019

What I’m listening to:

It drove his critics crazy that Obama was the coolest president we ever had and his summer 2019 playlist on Spotify simply confirms that reality. It has been on repeat for me. From Drake to Lizzo (God I love her) to Steely Dan to Raphael Saadiq to Sinatra (who I skip every time – I’m not buying the nostalgia), his carefully curated list reflects not only his infinite coolness, but the breadth of his interests and generosity of taste. I love the music, but I love even more the image of Michelle and him rocking out somewhere far from Washington’s madness, as much as I miss them both.

What I’m reading:

I struggled with Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo for the first 50 pages, worried that she’d drag out every tired trope of Mid-Eastern society, but I fell for her main characters and their journey as refugees from Syria to England. Parts of this book were hard to read and very dark, because that is the plight of so many refugees and she doesn’t shy away from those realities and the enormous toll they take on displaced people. It’s a hard read, but there is light too – in resilience, in love, in friendships, the small tender gestures of people tossed together in a heartless world. Lefteri volunteered in Greek refugee programs, spent a lot of interviewing people, and the book feels true, and importantly, heartfelt.

What I’m watching:

Soap opera meets Shakespeare, deliciously malevolent and operatic, Succession has been our favorite series this season. Loosely based on the Murdochs and their media empire (don’t believe the denials), this was our must watch television on Sunday nights, filling the void left by Game of Thrones. The acting is over-the-top good, the frequent comedy dark, the writing brilliant, and the music superb. We found ourselves quoting lines after every episode. Like the hilarious; “You don’t hear much about syphilis these days. Very much the Myspace of STDs.” Watch it so we can talk about that season 2 finale.

August 30, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.

What I’m watching:

Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to:

The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.

What I’m reading:

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.

What I’m watching:

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life. While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading:

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library. It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more. It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching:

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to:

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.

What I’m watching:

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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dukereviewstv · 5 years

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Duke Reviews Tv: Smallville 1x11 Hug

Hi, Everyone, I'm Andrew Leduc And Welcome To Duke Reviews Tv, Where We Are Continuing Our Look At Smallville By Talking About Episode 11 Of Season 1, Hug...

This Episode Is About A Corrupt Businessman Named Bob Rickman Who Wants To Buy The Kent Farm To Build A Pesticide Plant But When Jonathan Refuses, Rickman Uses His Ability To Get Anyone To Do Anything He Wishes With Just A Shake Of His Hand To Get Jonathan To Sell Him The Farm, Wanting To Stop The Sale, Clark Goes Off To Find Rickman's Former Partner, Kyle Tippet (Played By The Health Inspector Who Took His Job Too Seriously While Dating Pheobe On Friends)...

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Who Was With Rickman During The Smallville Meteor Shower, Will Clark And Kyle Stop The Sale?

Let's Find Out As We Watch Hug...

We Start In...Metropolis, I Guess As Bob Rickman Talks With A Representative For The CEP Who Asks Rickman About Why His Boys Were Doing Surveying Down In Smallville To Which Rickman Tells The Rep That He's Planning On Building A New Plant Down There...

But In Showing Him Sludge From The Last Small Town That He Placed A Plant In The Rep Tells Rickman No Way, No How And What's Worse Is That He's Giving Rickman A Restraining Order To Stay Out Of Smallville Until Every Case Against Him Is Settled...

With Rickman Asking If There's Anything He Can Do To Stop This, The Rep Tells Rickman That Unlike His Colleagues He's Not Easy To Buy Off Despite Rickman Telling Him That He's Never Bought Off A Soul In His Life But Seeming Like A Good Sport, Rickman Shakes The Rep's Hand And Convinces Him To Commit Suicide...

Back In Smallville, Clark, Lana And Chloe Go Horseback Riding In The Woods Only Unlike Clark And Lana Who Have Ridden Horses Before Chloe Is Horse Impaired If That's Even A Thing..,

With Chloe Dropping Her Camera (As These Woods Are Apparently The Bermuda Triangle Of Smallville) Lana Goes Back To Get It For Her While Chloe Talks With Clark About How Surveyors From Rickman Industries Came Running Out Of The Woods, With No Memory Of What Happened...

Believing That Kyle Tippet Is Behind This, Clark Is Just Like "The Guy Is A Crazy Old Hermit Who Sells Sculptures In Town, How Dangerous Can He Be?"...

Hearing Lana Screaming, Clark Asks Chloe To Stay With The Horses While He Goes To Check It Out...

Finding Kyle Near Lana, He Runs Off When Clark Tells Him To Get Away From Her...

Grabbing At The Camera, Clark Looks At The Tape With Jonathan To Kyle Wasn't Trying To Harm Lana Whatsoever But Lana's Aunt Nell Thinks Differently As She Wants Clark To Go To The Police To Say That Kyle Spooked Lana's Horse And Attacked Her, Which Isn't The Truth...

It's No Wonder, Aunt Nell Became A Member Of The Royal Flush Gang, She's Just Willing To Frame Anybody For Stuff They Didn't Do...

Believing That They Haven't Heard The End Of This, Jonathan Asks Clark If Kyle Seemed Dangerous? To Which Clark Tells Him No, Just Scared, But Remembering What Chloe Said, Clark Wonders If There's A Connection To Which Clark Decides To Go Talk With Kyle Despite Jonathan Telling Him Not To...

Back At Rickman's Smallville HQ, Lex And Victoria Pay Him A Visit...

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(Start At 0:29, End At 1:43)

Paying Kyle A Visit At His Trailer, He Tells Clark That All He Was Doing Was Making Sure That Lana Was All Right, Asking Him About The Things That Chloe Mentioned, He Doesn't Want To Talk About It, Saying That He Left The World Behind For A Reason...

Asking Why He's So Unfriendly, Kyle Tells Clark That He's Not Interested In Friends Because All They'll Do Is Betray You...

This Is Kind Of True For Clark And Lex's Relationship, Lex Betrayed Clark And He Ended Up Becoming His Enemy...

Talking With Lana And Whitney At The Beanery, Clark Tells Them What Kyle Told Him, Despite Whitney Telling Him That If He Was There He Would Have Done Something About It...

Of Course, You Would, Whitney (Sarcastically) You're The Man...Not!

Running Into Lex On His Way Out, He Warns Clark About Rickman Wanting To Buy The Family Farm And That He's A Locust That Can't Be Trusted...

Paying Rickman A Visit In His Office, Kyle Tells Him To Leave Town...

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(Start At 0:05, End At 0:45)

Running Into Clark, He Asks Kyle What He Was Doing At Rickman's Only To Face The Anger Of Whitney Who Tells Kyle To Stay Away From Lana Or Else, With Clark Giving Kyle A Ride Home, Whitney Is Confronted By Rickman Who Gets Whitney To Shake His Hand...

Dropping Kyle Off At His House After Picking Up Some Groceries, Clark Asks Him If He Misses Having A Normal Life To Which He Tells Clark That Some People Just Aren't Meant To Have A Normal Life...

Shortly After Leaving Kyle At His Trailer, Kyle Is Attacked By Whitney, Who's Truck Clark Happens To See But When Clark Sees Kyle Attack Whitney, He Pushes Kyle Away So He Can Save Whitney...

With Kyle Being Arrested For Assault, Jonathan Asked What Happened, As Whitney Tells Him That After Kyle. Blew Him Off, He Came Out Here To Talk Because He Had A Feeling That He Was Going To Attack Lana Again...

But Despite Seeing Kyle Swing At Whitney, Clark Believes Kyle When He Tells Him That Whitney Swung At Him First, Which Pisses Off Whitney To No End...

The Next Day At School, Clark Asks Chloe To Try To Find A Connection Between Rickman And Tippet As Lana Comes In Equally Mad At Clark For Saying That Whitney Attacked Kyle, For Which She Believes That Whitney Would Never Hurt Anyone, But With Clark Bringing Up The Scarecrow Incident Again, Lana Marches Off Beliving That Clark Is Using The Incident As An Excuse To Frame Whitney...

Back At The Kent Farm, Rickman Pays Jonathan A Visit...

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(Start At 0:24, End At 1:57)

With Jonathan Selling The Farm To Rickman, Martha Is Extremely Pissed Off As Jonathan Tells Her And Clark That One Minute He's Telling Him He Doesn't Stand A Chance And The Next Minute He's Holding A Signed Contract...

Calling Their Lawyer, He Tells Martha That He Can't Do Anything Until He Sees The Contract But The Devil Made Me Do It Argument Will Not Hold Up In Court...

Asking What Rickman Did, Jonathan Tells Clark That All He Did Was Make His Case And Get Him To Shake His Hand And That Was It. Going To See Lex, Jonathan Tells Clark No, He Will Not Owe Lex Luthor A Favor But Martha Tells Jonathan To Stuff His Opinion Of Lex As She Tells Clark To Go See Him...

Meeting Lex At The Beanery, He Notices That Lana And Clark Aren't Talking To Which Clark Tells Him That It's Because He Won't Cave On His Opinion About Kyle, This Gets Lex Comparing Clark To Atticus Finch From To Kill A Mockingbird...

But As For The Contract, The Deal Is For 3 Times It's Market Value But The Contract Is Ironclad And A Dozen Extra Lawyers To Deal With It, Luckily, Though Lex Has A Few Million To Spare...

Yes, We Get It, You're Rich, Thank You For Sharing That With Us...

Meanwhile, Rickman Gets A Deputy To Shake His Hand So He Can Get Kyle Out Of His Way...

But Speaking Of Kyle, We Discover That He Has The Same Powers As Rickman When Kyle Gets A Police Officer To Shake His Hand...

With Kyle Disguised In A Police Uniform, Clark Blows His Cover (Great Work, Clark) As The Deputy Rickman Shook Hands With Shoots At Kyle...

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(Start At 0:58, End At 1:31)

Taking Kyle To Lex's, He Has A Weird, Jack Sparrow-Like Hippie Doctor Named Toby Look At Kyle's Wound And Sew Him Back Up While Mentioning Club Zero Again Making It The 3rd Time We've Heard About It On The Show With The First From Nixon And The Second From Phelan...

Wondering Why Clark Brought Him There, He Tells Lex That If His Parents Saw Kyle, They'd Freak And If He Brought Him To A Hospital, They'd Arrest Him Again, So, This Was The Only Option...

Returning To The Barn, Clark Finds Lana Waiting For Him, But He Doesn't Want To Hear What She Has To Say Despite Her Wanting To Clear The Air To Try To Preserve Their Friendship...

The Next Day At The Beanery, Lex Is Confronted By Rickman, Who Knows That Lex Is Challenging His Sale Of The Kent Farm And He Wonders Why?

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(Start At 0:39, End At 1:49)

Finding The Connection Between Rickman And Tippet, Chloe Tells Clark And Lex That Rickman And Tippet Were Partners In The 80's Selling Farm Equipment And Were Salemen Of The Year 3 Times In A Row But After That Rickman Started His Own Company And Kyle Went Hermit...

Showing Clark And Lex An Article From The Ledger That Shows That They Were Trapped In A Car During The Smallville Meteor Shower They Decide To Ask Kyle Some Questions At The Luthor Mansion But When They Get There Kyle Is Gone...

Returning To His Trailer, Kyle Packs Up Only To Be Confronted By Clark And Chloe...

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(Start At 0:09)

Meanwhile At The Luthor Mansion, Rickman Unexpectedly Drops By To Say That He's Waving The White Flag And The Kents Can Keep Their Farm After Realizing That Smallville Isn't Worth The Hassle, Asking Lex To Shake On It, We Don't See Anything ...

But When Lex Gets A Phone Call From Clark Stating That Kyle Wants To Go Public About Rickman, Lex Meets Them At A Gas Station Saying That He Called His Friends At The Planet And The Inquisitor And If Kyle Is Willing To Talk With Them They'll Write His Story...

Willing To Do Whatever He Has To To Stop Rickman, Kyle And Clark Get In The Car And It's After That We Discover That Rickman Got To Lex...

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(Start At 1:27, End At 2:00)

(As Lucille Ball) Oh, But Ricky!...

With Rickman Arriving At The Scene, He Gives Lex A Machine Gun, Telling Him To Finish The Job...

Eventually Finding Clark And Kyle Inside Of The Vacant Garage, He Tries To Get Lex To Listen To Him But Unfortunately He Can't Which Leads Lex To Shoot Clark Point Blank, He Isn't Hurt But It Forces Clark To Knock His Friend Into A Bunch Of Objects...

Meanwhile, Rickman And Kyle Face Off For The Last Time...

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(Start At 0:13, End At 1:04)

And By "Do The Same With His" It Means We Won't See Or Hear Of Kyle For The Rest Of The Series 10 Season Run!

And So, With Martha Healing Clark's Wounds, Jonathan Wonders Where Kyle Is, To Which Clark Tells Jonathan That He's Probably Out In The World Making A Difference Now...

With Lana Dropping By She Decides That She Doesn't Care What Happened To Kyle Now Because Their Friendship Is Worth More Than One Lousy Argument To Which Clark Agrees...

And By "A Long Time" Lana Means 4 And A Half Seasons Of Friendship, 2 Half Seasons Of Hating Each Other, 1 Season Of Romance Before She Ditches You And 5 Episodes Of 1 Season That's Just A Goodbye Before He Moves On To The Person He's Supposed To Be With...

Later In The Afternoon, Lex Visits Clark To Tell Him That Because Of Rickman's Death, They're Not Expanding...

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(Start At 0:23, End At 1:03)

In More Ways Than 1, Lex...

But That's Hug And It's Okay..

While Not The Greatest Episode, I Didn't Mind It. Everything From Story To Characters To Villain Was Just Okay Not The Best But It's Not The Most Horrible Episode Of The Series And To That, I Say See It...

Till Next Time, This Is Duke, Signing Off...

#smallville #the wb #the cw #tom welling #kristen kreuk #michael rosenbaum #dc comics #television #TV Reviews

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thatsnotcanonpodcasts · 5 years

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Apollo, E3 2019 & The Division

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – Nerds Amalgamated Go! We are here once again with your irregular dose of fun, news, entertainment and educational synopsis that we like to call a show. We hope everyone is surviving the rigours and tortures of university, college, school, work, life, or whatever else it is you do. This week we have another exciting show for you all filled with space, games, and some viewing material to look forward to. We hope you enjoy and let us know what you think, we do listen.

First up it is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo missions and Buck has brought us links to a number of different stories regarding them. Also, some of the myriad events that are happening around the world involved in the celebration for everyone to enjoy. We also talk about the movies inspired by events and documentaries about the rock stars who ride the bullet into space. What is your favourite Apollo story, movie, mission, or general piece of trivia? Drop us a line or post in the comments on the facebook page.

Next up we look at this year’s less than stellar E3. The major highlight moments were the Keanu Reeves appearance at the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Where he showed once again that indelible charm that makes everyone love him when people yelled out from the crowd. Why can’t he be the President of America? He would be a darn tooting sight better than almost everyone they have had for a long time. We also take a moment to acknowledge the fabulous Ikumi Nakamura, the director of Ghostwire Tokyo who just had fun. We also take a moment to glance at Devolver Studios and the madcap mayhem that is the ongoing saga of their E3 show. It is still so much more fun then must be legal. The biggest failure was the announcement that Bethesda is making Fallout 76 a battle royale (yayyyy, another one…yawn) in an attempt to save the game from becoming a complete failure (too late).

This week the DJ has the story of Netflix planning a new series based on Tom Clancy’s The Division. The discussion runs through the idea, worrying at the potential failure of yet another game to cinema/television cross over. Further the potential overload of too many post-apocalyptic shows (no, not with zombies either, we discussed that). We do know two of the cast members Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal, so it starts with two beautiful people surviving… or do they?

This week’s games are:

Buck is playing Assassins Creed 2 (Not Unity).

Professor is still playing Cataclysm: Dark days ahead (Listen in for how he dies this week).

DJ is once again playing Apex Legends

We have the usual list of shout outs, remembrances, birthdays and special events. Hidden somewhere in the show is Buck telling us about a delightful Pug that doesn’t like being licked in return. Listen out for that, we have the link provided, it is funny. Other than that, we just wish to say thank you once again for listening and supporting us. We do appreciate it. Please remember to take care of yourselves and look out for each other, and drink lots of water to stay hydrated. Peace out.

EPISODE NOTES:

Apollo 50th Anniversary

- http://www.astronomy.com/bonus/apollo_home

- https://www.nasa.gov/specials/apollo50th/events.html

E3 2019 - https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/jun/10/e3-2019-biggest-news-xbox-bethesda-ubisoft-nintendo-square-enix

The Division now on Netflix - https://variety.com/2019/film/news/jessica-chastain-jake-gyllenhaal-the-division-movie-netflix-1203238700/

Games Currently playing

Buck

– Assassin Creed 2 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/33230/Assassins_Creed_2_Deluxe_Edition/

Professor

– Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - https://cataclysmdda.org/

– Apex Legends - https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/apex-legends-ps4/

Other topics discussed

[un]featured Articles (That’s Not Canon Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/ufapodcast

Margaret Hamilton (Software engineer)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)

The Dish (2000 Australian movie)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish

Past Apollo programs

- Apollo 8 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

- Apollo 13 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13

List of Apollo missions

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Crewed_Apollo_missions

Funny Flat Earth and Anti Vax Shirt

- Picture - https://image.spreadshirtmedia.com/image-server/v1/mp/products/T812A1MPA3140PT17X10Y30D1021097368FS5253/views/1,width=550,height=550,appearanceId=1,backgroundColor=F2F2F2,modelId=1237,crop=list,version=1557984561,modelImageVersion=1554797138/anti-vax-flat-earth-mens-premium-t-shirt.jpg

- Purchase Link - https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop/design/anti+vax+flat+earth+mens+premium+t-shirt-D5c662501f937645575149bc8

Mars One

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One

How long does it take to go to Mars from Earth?

- https://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars/

Falltout 76 battle royale: Nuclear Winter

- https://www.gamesradar.com/au/fallout-76-battle-royale-mode-nuclear-winter/

Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2

- https://www.gamespot.com/articles/legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-2-revealed-for-/1100-6467700/

Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077

- https://www.gameinformer.com/e3-2019/2019/06/11/keanu-reeves-is-more-than-a-cameo-in-cyberpunk-2077

Battle Royale game from Devolver Studios: Fall Guys

- https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/fall-guys-is-a-kinder-gentler-battle-royale/

Devolver Bootleg

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/1066260/Devolver_Bootleg/

Ikumi Nakamura captures internet hearts

- https://www.cnet.com/news/e3-2019-ghostwire-tokyo-director-ikumi-nakamura-captures-the-internets-heart/

Netflix games announced on E3

- https://www.techradar.com/au/news/netflix-teases-new-games-at-e3-2019-including-a-location-based-stranger-things-mobile-rpg

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics

- https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/11/dark-crystal-age-of-resistance-tactics-announced-e3-2019

Collection and Trials of Mana now available on the Switch

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2019/06/12/collection-of-mana-is-now-available-on-the-switch-and-trials-of-mana-is-released-next-year/#4b9cd85b4876

Revolution (TV Series)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)

Prince of Persia : The Sand of Time (2010 film)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia:_The_Sands_of_Time_(film)

Prince of Persia (game franchise)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia

Movies Jake Gyllenhaal acted

- City Slickers (1991 movie) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers

- Zodiac (2007 movie) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(film)

- Nightcrawler (2014 movie) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

Movies Jessica Chastin acted

- Lawless (2012 movie) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawless_(film)

Pug doesn’t like being licked

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatthefuckgetitoffme/comments/77pqrb/pug_doesnt_like_to_taste_its_own_medicine/

Michael Jordan (American former professional basketball player)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan

Wayne Gardner (Australian former professional Grand Prix motorcycle and touring car racer)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gardner

Lady Godiva, Countess of Mercia

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Godiva

Shoutouts

8 Jun 2019 - Ashleigh Barty Wins the French Open - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/sports/french-open-ashleigh-barty-marketa-vondrousova.html

11 Jun 1955 - The 1955 Le Mans disaster occurred during the 24 Hours of Le Mans motor race at Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France on 11 June 1955. A major crash caused large fragments of debris to fly into the crowd, killing 83 spectators and French driver Pierre Bouillin (who raced under the name Pierre Levegh) and injuring nearly 180 more. It was the most catastrophic crash in motorsport history, and it prompted Mercedes-Benz to retire from motor racing until 1989.

11 Jun 1963 - Buddhist monk Quang Duc publicly burns himself to death in a plea for President Ngo Dinh Diem to show “charity and compassion” to all religions. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/buddhist-immolates-himself-in-protest

Remembrances

11 Jun 1979 - John Wayne, nicknamed 'Duke', was an American actor, filmmaker and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. He was among the top box office draws for three decades. He starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners extracted from the Republic's central creation myth." He appeared with many important Hollywood stars of his era and made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979. He died of stomach cancer at 72 in Los Angeles, California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

11 Jun 1999 - DeForest Kelley, known to colleagues as "De", was an American actor, screenwriter, poet and singer known for his roles in Westerns and as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy of the USS Enterprise in the television and film series Star Trek (1966–1991). He died of stomach cancer at 79 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeForest_Kelley

12 Jun 2003 - Gregory Peck, was an American actor. He was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five Academy Award for Best Actor nominations, and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in the 1962 drama film To Kill a Mockingbird. Peck also received Oscar nominations for his roles in The Keys of the Kingdom, The Yearling, Gentleman's Agreement, and Twelve O'Clock High. Other notable films in which he appeared include Moby Dick (1956, and its 1998 mini-series), The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear (1962, and its 1991 remake), How the West Was Won, The Omen (1976), and The Boys from Brazil. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson honored Peck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 for his lifetime humanitarian efforts. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck among Greatest Male Stars of Classic Hollywood cinema, ranking him at No. 12. He died in his sleep at home from bronchopneumonia at 87 in Los Angeles, California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Peck

13 Jun 1871 - Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, was a French magician. He is widely considered the father of the modern style of conjuring such as second sight, the ethereal suspension, the marvelous orange tree, robert-houdin's portfolio, the light and heavy chest. His reputation was so great that he was requested during the 1850s by the French government to help put down a tribal rebellion in Algeria using his skills. This is surely a feat that not many magicians can boast about. He died of pneumonia at 65 in Saint-Gervais-la-Forêt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Eug%C3%A8ne_Robert-Houdin

Famous Birthdays

11 Jun 1910 - Jacques Cousteau, French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. Cousteau described his underwater world research in a series of books, perhaps the most successful being his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, published in 1953. Cousteau also directed films, most notably the documentary adaptation of the book, The Silent World, which won a Palme d'or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. He remained the only person to win a Palme d'Or for a documentary film, until Michael Moore won the award in 2004 for Fahrenheit 9/11. He was born in Saint-André-de-Cubzac - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Cousteau

11 Jun 1933 - Gene Wilder, American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, singer-songwriter and author. Wilder began his career on stage, and made his screen debut in an episode of the TV series The Play of the Week in 1961. Although his first film role was portraying a hostage in the 1967 motion picture Bonnie and Clyde, Wilder's first major role was as Leopold Bloom in the 1967 film The Producers for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. This was the first in a series of collaborations with writer/director Mel Brooks, including 1974's Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, which Wilder co-wrote, garnering the pair an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Wilder is known for his portrayal of Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and for his four films with Richard Pryor:Silver Streak, Stir Crazy,See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You. Wilder directed and wrote several of his own films, including The Woman in Red. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Wilder

11 Jun 1959 - Hugh Laurie, English actor, director, singer, musician, comedian and author. Laurie first gained recognition for his work as one half of the comedy double act Fry and Laurie with his friend and comedy partner Stephen Fry. The duo acted together in a number of projects during the 1980s and 1990s, including the sketch comedy series A Bit of Fry & Laurie and the P. G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster. Laurie's other roles during the period include the period comedy series Blackadder (in which Fry also appeared) and the films Sense and Sensibility, 101 Dalmatians, The Borrowers and Stuart Little. Laurie portrayed the title character in the U.S. medical drama series House on Fox, for which he won two Golden Globe Awards. He was listed in the 2011 Guinness World Records as the most watched leading man on television and was one of the highest-paid actors in a television drama, earning £250,000 ($409,000) per episode of House. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2007 New Year Honours and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours, both for services to drama. He was born in Blackbird Leys, Oxfordshire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Laurie

11 Jun 1969 - Peter Dinklage, American actor and producer. Dinklage studied acting at Bennington College, starring in a number of amateur stage productions. His film debut was in Living in Oblivion (1995) and his breakthrough came with the comedy-drama The Station Agent (2003). He has since appeared in movies like Elf (2003), Underdog (2007), Death at a Funeral (2007),The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), Pixels (2015), and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), which earned him his first Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2018, he appeared as Eitri in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Avengers: Infinity War among other movies. Dinklage received universal acclaim for portraying Tyrion Lannister on the HBO television series Game of Thrones, for which he won three Primetime Emmys from seven nominations. He also received a Golden Globe for the role in 2011. He was born in Morristown, New Jersey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dinklage

Events of Interest

11 Jun 1959 - Postmaster General bans D H Lawrence's book, Lady Chatterley's Lover (overruled by US Court of Appeals in Mar 1960) - https://www.onthisday.com/history/events/june/11

11 Jun 1976 - Australian band AC/DC begin their 1st headline tour of Britain - https://www.onthisday.com/date/1976/june/11

11 Jun 1982 - "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore, is released in the United States. It opened at number one with a gross of $11 million, and stayed at the top of the box office for six weeks; it then fluctuated between the first and second positions until October, before returning to the top spot for the final time in December during a brief Holiday Season re-release of the film. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial#Release_and_sales

12 Jun 1942 – Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/anne-frank-receives-a-diary

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Email - [email protected]

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

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lowelowe7-blog · 6 years

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Your Actions To Health

Rory Bremner suspects he has attention deficit disorder (HYPERACTIVITY). http://secretsminceur.info of the Raven Young boys extremely, none fits into the rich pretender fashion I would certainly have marked all of them as, like Blue performed at first, considering that the tale allocates time for every of them, Adam as well as his concerns with his family members and being the scholarship child - though he did sort of frustrate me through participating in to the poor child scraping by on his scholarship to cream of the crop school fashion, and also Ronan as well as his concerns along with his brother as well as lifeless father brown. You additionally must decide on whether to generate a 32-bit or 64-bit model - you may produce media for either regardless of the equipment you're making use of. They wound up being actually a bit dry out, thus perhaps much less baking would help (I likewise incorporated the extra vegetation milk, but I may incorporate extra next time). I asked Homs if he was actually regarded that his employees would shed emphasis if they were devoting way too much opportunity on social media sites. The author was actually composing at once when modern technology was actually definitely starting to get cool, the electronic grow older was actually still many years out however folks were actually carrying out all sort of insane factors like hearing songs with little bit of conoids connecteded into their ears. I place everything around my eyes and also face during the night and also everything has actually improved. This possesses a yellow tint from the natural herbs and also olive oil thus don't utilize this within the day. Both topics overlap taking on The Child in the Striped Pajamas receives designated to youthful readers. This tip that there are gal books" and also young boy publications" and also girl lit" and whatever is the fella matching from chick lit" offers credit report to definitely nobody, especially not the children who will happily read through stories by females, concerning ladies. Conventional shave creams as well as soaps, on the contrary, teem with organic substances that support your skin as well as leave you smelling positively manly. IF is effective, but perhaps more user friendly - this is actually the type of company that you must place a long time into in order to get the intended results. When I started it, my insulin requirements went coming from over 300 systems a time to 25 within a short time. 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Shaving with http://secretsminceur.info will definitely get rid of the skin layer irritability and also give your face a well-maintained, well-balanced appearance since you are actually only utilizing one cutter rather than several that chew out your skin in order to cut your hairs. At that point you get to thinking exactly how these guys' spouses take care of without them at sea for 20+ days at once; clearly they reside in the crab-catching service as well. The disputable elections today in the US merely added to the magnitude of this manual. I had to play around with your dish since my partner caught me stuffing my confront with the dark chocolate version and indicted me from certainly not enjoying him (he loathes dark chocolate - I should be so lucky), so I scrutinized your dish and today he feels all hot as well as liked inside ... as well as today I am actually moving back for secs coming from the cookie container - have not yet chosen which I favor thus I'll just opt for a soupã§on of each forms of cookies! Yet I test you, gentlemen, to try a course from research in which you review the whole of some of these terrific speeches each time. In numerous methods that's a bit underwhelming the second time around, since the plot (which bunches of people will certainly presently understand considering that that's a retelling of the Russian transformation) is actually incredibly simplistic. Many incredibly, free of cost you acquire accessibility to every little thing, just your daily course opportunity is actually restricted. 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The tale is actually distinguished the standpoint of Scout (Jean-Louise Finch), a six years of age lady, through different activities that take place in the town from Maycomb as well as particularly, the litigation from Tom Robinson as her father brown Atticus Finch serves as Tom's support attorney. I do not have opportunity for on my own, my friends, my family or some of the important things I love. I have actually constantly possessed a soft spot for circuses and The Evening Circus has sastisfied and given birth to the festival that I've only observed in my imagination.

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titaniavs-blog · 7 years

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Macbeth, AP Calculus And Soccer: The Stressful Life Of Your Secondary School Senior

When studying American history, there's not a way to avoid the subject of slavery. During Tom Robinson's rape trial, we hear both Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell's versions of their encounter Mayella insists that Tom raped her, while Tom maintains that nothing inappropriate happened bewteen barefoot and shoes at all. During Tom Robinson's rape trial, we hear both Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell's versions of their encounter Mayella insists that Tom raped her, while Tom maintains that nothing inappropriate happened bewteen barefoot and shoes at all. There's been a large amount of research conducted lately concerning the amount of stress that secondary school seniors To Kill A Mockingbird summary are enduring. A quick To Kill a Mockingbird summary: The Finch family, which consists of father Atticus, older son Jem, and six-year-old Jean Louise, better known as Scout. Each point of view is different, and it's difficult to decide whose is correct, until we begin to see the actual events from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. This can be problematic, because so many colleges offer admission on a provisional basis, and make students sign a contract promising to take care of the degree of academic achievement that got them offered admission in the first place, and threaten to revoke their offer of admission if they don't. A quick To Kill a Mockingbird summary: The Finch family, which consists of father Atticus, older son Jem, and six-year-old Jean Louise, better called Scout. Though lots of people inside the community respect Atticus for his integrity, there are plenty of individuals that view his actions as treachery. In 1917, Gatsby had fallen in love having a young woman named Daisy while stationed near Louisville. One lie leads to another, and before she knows it, Olives friend is telling everyone at their school that Olive has lost her virginity. TV and movies make secondary school seem like a never-ending parade of proms and parties. The movies protagonist, Olive Pendergast (played to perfection by Emma Stone), lies to her friend about having to take up a date by having an older guy to avoid joining her friends family on a camping trip. They soon become very good friends and during the others of the novel Carraway remains his only real friend. Or when, in among those not-so-beloved To Kill a Mockingbird quotes, Scout insists that Tom Robinson is "just a nigger. Traditional history studies can familiarize students using the dates, names and facts associated with this time period, but it can be argued that it's only works of literature like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird that really can capture the true injustices, horrors, and hopefully, the triumphs of this period of American history. Jem and Scout, in addition to friend Dill, spend their summer speculating about their reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley. In the conclusion some live through it, while some don't. Each of the events is linked to theme of perception vs. In To Kill a Mockingbird, we possess the possibility to observe just such a thing. Then again, those folks who really want to experience devil's advocate might explain the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird isn't actually narrated through the young Scout Finch it's narrated retrospectively by a mature Jean-Louise Finch who is extremely effective at fleshing out her childhood recollections with the wisdom of experience. Each of the events is attached to theme of perception vs. It was just about an instant classic, and it still one of the few required reading novels that is almost universally beloved by middle and high school aged readers. It was just about an instant classic, plus it still among the few required reading novels which is almost universally beloved by middle and secondary school aged readers. The book is well-written so when a reader, you get a very realistic look at what life was like during those prosperous years after World War The story is both exciting and sad, and although the novel didn't receive the commercial success of Fitzgerald's other novels it is as simple as many thought to be his best work.

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phoenixdownerd-blog · 7 years

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To A Kill Mockingbird: A Novel And History Lesson In One

Harper Lee's classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, asks the reader to check at the same event from different perspectives a lot more than once. First published in 1925, it is still popular today and will continue to be a classic for years to come. Unless you've spent your whole life along with your head under a watermelon, you should be well conscious of the negative stereotypes that African Americans have long needed to endure, and also the discrimination with which they continue being faced. Scott Fitzgerald can be a classic American novel about life inside the twenties. During Tom Robinson's rape trial, we hear both Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell's versions of their encounter Mayella insists that Tom raped her, while Tom maintains that nothing inappropriate happened between them at all. So the question is, why? What makes this book so special? You don't need to read a whole To Kill a Mockingbird Summary to figure it out - all you must notice is something about a couple of of the primary characters. Each of the events is attached to theme of perception vs. When he returns years later, Gatsby is becoming rich and buys a deluxe house near where Daisy and her husband lives. Equally worth covering are the complex race relations available on this country of immigrants. Tom Robinson, who happily lends his services to a young white woman despite having their own family to feed, has been compared using the "contented slave" archetype. But the eye she receives soon proves being a double-edged sword Olive quickly falls victim compared to that old virgin/whore clich, and also since her schoolmates believe that shes no longer a virgin, its obvious what her new role must be. Film director Akira Kurosawa tackles this same notion in his classic film Rashomon, which shows multiple views of the brutal rape. Even after Scout figures out that it absolutely was Boo who came to their rescue, Atticus is reluctant to believe that Jem wasn't (unwillingly) responsible. Atticus Finch knows this. The movies protagonist, Olive Pendergast (played to perfection by Emma Stone), lies to her friend about having to take up a date having an older guy to avoid joining her friends family on a camping trip. In the end some live through it, although some don't. Instead of standing and telling the truth about what actually happened (or didnt happen) with her fictitious date, Olive, who is coincidentally reading The Scarlet Letter in her own English class (how convenient), decides to adopt a cue from Nathaniel Hawthorne and sew a red letter A onto all of her clothing, a show of solidarity with the martyred Hester Prynne along with a sly jab in any way of her classmates, that are supposed to represent the judgmental and cruel Scarlet Letter characters. Traditional history studies can familiarize students using the dates, names and facts associated with now period, nevertheless it can be argued that it's only works of literature like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird that really can capture the true injustices, horrors, and hopefully, the triumphs of this period of American history. Jem and Scout, together with friend Dill, spend their summer speculating about their reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley. In the conclusion some live through it, although some don't. Each of the events is connected to theme of perception vs. So many of which are told from a young age that it's crucial that each goes to college and that all of the hard work they devote in senior high school is for your purpose of having into college, so once they finally do get into college, who is ready to blame them for wanting a break?. Then again, those folks who really want to play devil's advocate might point out the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird isn't actually narrated by the young Scout Finch it's narrated retrospectively by a mature Jean-Louise Finch who is extremely capable of fleshing out her childhood recollections with all the wisdom of experience. Each of the events is connected to theme of perception vs. The children could not have thought that up for themselves: had our classmates been left To Kill A Mockingbird summary to their very own devices, Jem and I would have had several swift, satisfying fist-fights apiece and ended the matter for good. During the roaring twenties, American society enjoyed a higher amount of prosperity and life was good. Though it seems which everybody in her school (and town) is watching her webcast and that her reputation is restored, the truly wonderful thing about Olive is that, by that time, she no more cares the things they think.

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i-dont-care-i-wanna-be-a-ba-blog · 7 years

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To Kill A Mockingbird: The Result Of Racist Influences About The Young

When studying American history, there's not a way to steer clear of the subject of slavery. During Tom Robinson's rape trial, we hear both Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell's versions of their encounter Mayella insists that Tom raped her, while Tom maintains that nothing inappropriate happened together at all. Unless you've spent your whole life along with your head under a watermelon, you need to be well aware of the negative stereotypes that African Americans have long needed to endure, and also the discrimination with which they continue to become faced. There's been a great deal of research conducted lately concerning the amount of stress that senior high school seniors are enduring. So the question is, why? What makes this book so special? You don't have to read a whole To Kill a Mockingbird Summary to figure it out - whatever you have to notice is a thing about several of the main characters. But the attention she receives soon proves to become a double-edged sword Olive quickly falls victim to that particular old virgin/whore clich, and also since her schoolmates believe that shes will no longer a virgin, its obvious what her new role must be. This can be problematic, since many colleges offer admission on a provisional basis, and make students sign a contract promising to take care of the level of academic achievement that got them offered admission within the first place, and threaten to revoke their offer of admission if they don't. "Don't talk like that, Dill," said Aunt Alexandra. The heroine of the novel, Hester Prynne, can be found accountable for adultery (she even has a kid out of wedlock with her lover-scandalous!), and her punishment would be to wear a red letter A (for adulterer) on herself whatsoever times. They're not interesting. One lie contributes to another, and before she knows it, Olives friend is telling everyone at their school that Olive has lost her virginity. Based on that brief Scarlet Letter summary, Hawthornes classic novel might seem like a strange choice for any teen movie. While Atticus sagely warns them against making judgments about people they don't know, he's preparing for the toughest section of his career a lawyer: defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. The movies protagonist, Olive Pendergast (played to perfection by Emma Stone), lies to her friend about having to begin a date with an older guy to avoid joining her friends family on a camping trip. Harper Lee's ability to generate timeless characters like Atticus and Boo, and write sentences that have become often-cited To Kill a Mockingbird quotes have cemented her as among the very best American writers of the 20th century, although she never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird. Traditional history studies can familiarize students with all the dates, names and facts associated with now period, but it can be argued that it's only works of literature like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird that really can capture the true injustices, horrors, and hopefully, the triumphs of this period of American history. Though many people in the community respect Atticus for his integrity, you will find plenty of individuals that view his actions as treachery. Though many people within the community respect Atticus for his integrity, you will find plenty of others who view his actions as treachery. He turned in the doorway. One lie contributes to another, and before she knows it, Olives friend is telling everyone at their school that Olive has lost her virginity. Then again, those folks who really want to play devil's advocate might mention the proven fact that To Kill a Mockingbird isn't actually narrated by the young Scout Finch it's narrated retrospectively by an adult Jean-Louise Finch who is extremely effective at fleshing out her childhood recollections using the wisdom of experience. During the roaring twenties, American society enjoyed a To Kill A Mockingbird summary top amount of prosperity and life was good. During the roaring twenties, American society enjoyed a high degree of prosperity and life was good. In fact, the entire movie is told in retrospect as a part of Olives confession. Ultimately, whether the novel's portrayal of African Americans is a skillful narrative device or an oversight around the a part of Harper Lee us up towards the reader to decide.

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k88t · 7 years

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First things first: Yes, I will now be blogging To Kill a Mockingbird. No, I will not be making fun of this classic book. I will be making jokes about the plot and asking stupid questions about the events but I will not, I repeat, not make fun of this classic work of literature that I genuinely like. (Please put your hammers down now.)

A few notes: If you came to this page because you are having trouble sleeping due to an annoying bird outside your bedroom window, you should know that this book is not about how to kill a mockingbird.

Also, this book is not a biography of the rapper 2 Killa Mockingbird. This would be impossible because I just made that person up.

This is a novel by Harper Lee. Set in a small Southern town and told from the perspective of a young girl, it deals with issues as weighty as childhood innocence, racial prejudice, and human nature.

Part One – Chapter One

The narrator of the book introduces herself. Her name is Jean Louise Finch, but everybody calls her Scout. The origin of this nickname is never explained, but I have to imagine she got it because she loves Girl Scout cookies. It’s really the only logical explanation. Scout is going to tell us about how her older brother Jem broke his arm a few years ago, but first she’s going to tell us the full lineage of her family.

The first Finch to come to America (by which I mean “person with the last name Finch,” not the bird kind of finch. Miss Marm would’ve killed me if I'd capitalized that) was a guy by the name of Simon Finch who left England and created a farm off the Alabama River. The first Finch to move away from the farm was Scout’s dad, Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer in the town of Maycomb (where the book takes place. Stay with me.).

Atticus lives with his two children and their cook, Calpurnia, an older black woman. Scout and Jem’s mother died years ago. Scout doesn’t remember her at all, but Jem has memories of her that sometimes makes him upset.

Ordinarily I wouldn't comment at a moment like this, because it’s sad. But Scout tells us that when Jem thinks about his mom he will “sigh at length” and then go off “by himself behind the car-house,” and I can't help pointing out that “car-house” is an awesome word for garage. I think I’m going to refer to every room in my apartment as a “something-house.” Living room becomes “TV-house,” bathroom becomes “toilet-house,” but I’m still going to call the kitchen my “yum-yum-fortress,” because why fix what’s not broken?

Scout begins to tell us about one summer when a boy named Charles Baker Harris moved in next door. He introduces himself to the Finches and tells them to call him by his nickname, “Dill.” Once again, the nickname's genesis is not explained, but I'm betting Dill is known for overseasoning tuna fish with this particular spice.

The three kids play together all summer. Dill gets obsessed with Boo Radley, a mysterious neighbor, and suggest that they try to get him out of his house. Boo lives in a run-down building. Scout has heard that when he was a boy, he got in trouble with the law, and as punishment, his father kept him locked away. So just keep that in mind next time you want to leave the house with a skirt that short, young lady (this last sentence was sponsored by your mom. Your mom: giving you advice on your attire since she gave birth to you).

Dill does his best to get the Finch kids to help him on his quest. He dares Jem to run over and touch the house. Jem does it and nothing much happens—although Scout thinks she sees a shutter move slightly.

And so, with this simple act of trespassing, Scout, Jem, and Dill began a reign of terror the likes of which Maycomb County had never seen before. (Not true at all, but I felt like this chapter ended on a bit of a dull note, so I spiced it up a little.)

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thesnhuup · 4 years

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