Vestron Video VA4479

BRITNEY SPEARS FINDS GOD AND STARTS HER OWN RELIGION:

  My prediction for 2008, well … I have many, but just for the sport of celebrity gawking I’ll throw in this prediction.:  
                     Britney Spears will find God, actually become a religious zealot. She’ll start her own religion; set up a compound/church in Iowa where millions of her disillusioned directionless fans will follow her.

                     A couple of years down the line Iowa will pass a referendum establishing itself as the independent Sovereign Nation of Iowa. By 2009, Mike Huckabee, having only ever won in Iowa, will run for President of Iowa and win. Meanwhile Britney’s sister, Jamie Lynn, disappears from public view only to resurface in 2012, when she signs with Blue Note Records as a jazz singer.  Her new approach emulates her idol Anita O’Day. Jamie Lynn then writes her own parenting book titled 'It’s Never Too Early to Start Good Parenting'. 
            
                    She’ll eventually marry the California Highway Patrol officer who pulled her over for driving under the influence, though he’ll tear up the ticket once he recognizes her from her Playboy spread.
                     
                -  Whitmore ("the thing of a thing of a thing..." Hollywood AMOEBLOGGER,
                                                                          member of the band  Listing Ship)

DOMINATRIX HILLARY CRACKS THE WHIP TO WARM LEATHERETTE

I predict Clinton will win the presidency and immediately win a hefty boob job. She'll then dye her hair red and sport a hip cyber-dominatrix uniform while cracking a whip madly with bill is on all fours on a leash in a pink muzzle by her side cranking Warm Leatherette by Grace Jones from a giant 80's boombox.on his back at her second State Of The Union Address.


                                      - Tim Ranow (Hollywood Amoeba Music)



USC, LAKERS,  AND GOOGLE ALL GOOD BETS FOR 2008:
 
 USC win Rose Bowl:   In addition to being the Pac-10 champions, USC will beat Illinois in the  Rose Bowl on New Year's day.
 
 Google Shares cross $800:  In 2007 Google's stock was as low as $437 per share and as high as $747  per share. 2008 will see Google's stock soaring past $800. Don't sleep on the  big G.

 Lakers in 08' :   Bold prediction - the Lakers will be the Western Conference champions only  to lose in the NBA Finals. Can't say who they will lose to.
                                                                                
                                                                                   - Rameen Mansour, Amoeba.Com Web Office

 

 

In no particular order:

This is part one in a series that will run over the next few days (up to and including New Years Day) featuring predictions for 2008 by folks somehow connected with Amoeba Music - staff, owners, and AMOEBLOGGERS (including The Bay Area Crew, Whitmore, Gomez Comes Alive!, and Eric Brightwell) plus other individuals who are either fans of the AMOEBLOG (such as DJ ALF) or have been featured in some way in past AMOEBLOGs such as hip-hop author/journalist Michael A. Gonzales (interviewed months back in a report about the book "Bronx Biannual") 

Each contributor was asked to make a prediction for 2008 on any topic - music, film, technology, politics, sports, social trends, etc. Their prediction could be real or imagined (IE wished for) and they could be done in all seriousness or in jest or in half-jest. And the responses could be anywhere from a few words to a paragraph or longer in length.  Very special thanks to those who took the time to share their predictions for 2008 including today's contributors: Eric Brightwell, Amoeba Marc, The Insomniac (Bay Area Crew), and DJ ALF - all below:

                  
INCREASING OUTSIDE PRESSURE ON THE USA TO CHANGE ITS WAYS:

    I predict that the biggest criminals in the history of humankind, literally having stolen the entire contents of the US Treasury several times over in the last decade, not to mention all the lives ruined or lost along the way, will continue their thieving virtually unabated in 2008.

The legendary saint, Cab Calloway, brought into existence on Christmas, was never off the cob, he was the heppest cat, the gasser on the scene, and scribe to the Dictionary of Hepology, not just any book of lingo like some hincty gate-mouth might cop to, emphatically no! This man’s a poet! Hey, Calloway was solid, a ready cat with serious chops, never capped, I mean never capped. Cabell Calloway III licks hit all the armstrongs every time with those "hi-de-hi's," and "ho-de ho's, singing in that blip beat key, swinging overcoats growling some hip and hot gammin’ grooves. Be it a gutbucket blues, the ready racket on the main kick or just some clambake where he’s got this cat riffing on the doghouse - hitting all the basso notes, cool Gabriel wigging on a boogie-woogie and some Jack on skins mugging heavy, Cab always crept out like the shadow, stylish threads togged to the bricks, walking hand made, custom to the thread mezz ground grippers … on each arm, a fine righteous queen he dug the last black, each dicty dutchess fresh off the dreamers and lily whites. 

At one point Cab was collaring 200 g’s a year, that’s one foxy stack of fins. Platter gravy coming on like a test pilot, cuts like "Minnie the Moocher", “Reefer Man” and "St. James Infirmary Blues" were everywhere man, chicks breakin’ it up, dropping a nickel or a dime note just to latch onto the hippest cat who could send the coolest riff riding high. Cab the man was the man; kids come again to the Cotton Club in the Apple, rug cutters Trucking, Pecking, or bugging to the Susie-Q, never no fraughty issue here. That’s the Bible baby! Cab and the cats digging a mess, one riff after another, and every hot killer jam taking off, that combo was always bustin’ conk, breaking up the joint like gangbusters. Zazu-zazu-zazu-zay! No room here for icky squares who can't collar the jive. The jitterbuggers at the Cotton Club always had a hummer of a ball. Yeah! Whipped up! Jumpin’ and mitt pounding till the chimes say its way past early bright. Ow!

Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. -- Edward S. Herman

Sympathy is much easier to come by than empathy.  Funny that, since it would seem easier to disinterestedly understand the conditions leading to another's feelings and reasons behind his or her actions than to actually share those feelings and agree with those reasons, particularly when the other is so different from oneself.  I suspect the dominance of the word 'sympathy' is largely due to not enough people appreciating the need for 'empathy,' or even understanding what the word means, as if the two terms were synonyms.  Thus, when the more ethnographically inclined among us suggest America needs to understand the environs or rational structures of a foreign entity perpetrating some act that we deem immoral, they get called traitors, or sympathizers.  HUAC in the 50s springs readily to mind, as well as the right-wing media's reaction to the intellectual Left's take on 9-11.  Classical liberalism, which serves as the bellwether for America's moralizing, defines the human as a self-regulating rational individual, and thus any action taken by an entity (our state, another state, or some hodge-podge collection of disagreeing radicals) that violates the rights of the human so defined is, ipso facto, inhumane.  Thus, any attempt at humanizing, eliciting empathy for, the ad hoc devil will be received about as judiciously as Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" in 60s Israel -- which is to say, not very to downright hostilely.  This negative reaction is always despite any potential moral agreement that the devil should still be hanged.

Tonight if you are in San Francisco, come on over to Amoeba and check out a DJ set by two musical masters of all things obscure:  Zach Cowie and Andy Cabic!

Andy Cabic you know from his band Vetiver.



Zach Cowie is a member of the LA-based DJ crew Small Town Talk and he is also single handedly responsible for turning me on to so many crazy tunes I never would have heard otherwise. 



In other words, their DJ set is gonna be flawless-- these guys are highly skilled pro-fessionals-- so if you are around, come and listen.  They'll be spinning vinyl from 7-9 pm.

Jackson C. Frank has one of the more sad stories in music history.


The good news is the music he created is fantastic.

He was a part of the folk music scene in the early/mid 60s.  He only released one full length album in 1965, which is self titled and beautiful.  It's a melancholy collection of songs, but it's one of my favorite records.  Frank's voice is strong and deep.  I feel like it brings a lot of emotion to the songs he sings.  I like the fact also that the songs sound a little faraway, like the equipment they were recorded on was old and on the brink of death.  Oh yeah, and it was produced with said eloquence by Paul Simon-- yeah, the Paul Simon.

Although he was American, Frank was thick in the scene of musicians in London in the mid 60s, and that's also where Paul Simon happened to be.  Frank was also friends with Sandy Denny, even dated her for a while, Bert Jansch, who covered "Blues Run the Game," Al Stewart and more.  Nick Drake also covered several of his songs and Roy Harper is said to have written a song about him.

Frank was able to pay for his initial boat ride to England due to a long-awaited insurance check--  when he was 11, while he was in music class, his school caught fire and he was one of the injured students, with bad burns covering much of his body.   Ten years later and with that check in hand, he lived the high life in England for a while, arriving at just the moment when folk and music in general was really taking off in swinging London.

          

Aritst Ron English, recently interviewed here on the AMOEBLOG about his new books and interviewed again here for this report, has just returned to the US after a most interesting visit immediately before Christmas to Palestine where he was a part of the unique Santa's Ghetto Bethlehem 2007 art project - where he joined several other "street artists" from around the world including renowned British artist Banksy (the project's mastermind).

While in Bethlehem Ron posted his art on the controversial Palestine wall and fence as well as in places nearby the wall.  The unique ongoing annual art exhibition was held in Bethlehem this year by Banksy reportedly in the hope that it would focus attention on the poverty of the West Bank and draw tourists back to the traditional birthplace of Christianity.

To the left and down below are some of the pieces by Banksy. Immediately above and below are two of the pieces by Ron English.  All of these pieces along with many others were posted on the website SantasGhetto which, note, in the days before posting this  blog, had just been been "closed" but may be open again.  Meantime check out both Ron English's Popaganda site where on the first page is  a segment titled "This Christmas in Bethlehem" and also Banksy's main website.

Banksy created the Santa's Ghetto project six years ago when, he said, that he felt that the spirit of Christmas was being lost. "It was becoming increasingly uncommercialized and more and more to do with religion, so we decided to open our own shop and sell pointless stuff you didn't need," said the artist in a statement at the time.  

Thorn EMI Video TVB2674

A Place To Bury Strangers-
A Place To Bury Strangers
(Killer Pimp)









Studio-
West Coast
(Information)









Justice-
Cross
(Vice)









Explosions in the Sky-
All Of a Sudden I Miss Everybody
(Temporary Residence)








Jens Lekman-
Night Falls Over Kortedala
(Secretly Canadian)

Continue reading

 

One morning earlier this year,  according to Royal de Luxe, The Little Girl Giant (above) woke up at Horse Guards Parade in London, took a shower from the time-traveling Sultan's elephant and wandered off to play in the park, and then sit down in her giant deckchair.

This art/performance piece, as well as the video of it above, is one of those simple yet beautiful images of this past year that stayed with me ever since I first saw it.  But not everyone finds it beautiful however:  many, including little kids as well some adults, find the Girl Giant model creepy or scary.

What do  you think: beautiful or scary?

Thorn EMI Video VHS 618

OK, here's another great collection carefully chosen by the vinyl mistress Alice...simply amazing...

Forum Home Video FH79013

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN ANTONIO (AP)

Lydia Mendoza, a Tejano music pioneer known as the Lark of the Border,
died here on Thursday. She was 91. She had lived in the nursing home portion of the Chandler Estate, a
retirement community. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Yolanda
Hernandez.

Ms. Mendoza, who scored her first big hit, Mal Hombre, in the 1930s,
became one of the first Mexican-American superstars by singing to the
poor and downtrodden. Her memorable musical style earned her a National Medal of Arts and a
National Heritage Award fellowship. She was also asked to sing at Jimmy
Carter's inauguration in 1977.

Ms. Mendoza recorded more than 200 songs on more than 50 albums,
 including boleros, rancheras, cumbias and tangos, for labels including RCA,
Columbia, Azteca, Peerless, El Zarape and Discos Falcon. In addition to
pursuing a solo career, she also enjoyed performing with her family.

Mal Hombre (Evil Man), released in 1934 on the Bluebird label, became a
hit on both sides of the border and was her signature song. Other hits
included La Valentina and Angel de Mis Anhelos.

She set the trend for others: Las Hermanas Cantu, Chelo Silva, Las
Rancheritas and other women who followed Mendoza's lead in the world of
Spanish music, said Lupe Saenz, executive director of the South Texas
Conjunto Association. Mendoza will be remembered for her unique style of the 12-string guitar
and unique voice and style of singing.

Coolest Guitar Solo of 2007

Hands down, Nels Cline guitar solo on Wilco’s “Impossible Germany.”  I heard the song several times before I knew who the band was, but I recognized Nels’ sound instantly. The solo ranks up there with Richard Thompson’s solo on “The Border” and Television’s “Marquee Moon”

Favorite Amoeba Hollywood In-Store Performances:

Vieux Farka Toure: Best son of a famous father to perform at Amoeba this year.

Paul McCartney:  For the sheer madness of it all.

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings:  The best in-store of the year.

Ollin:  The Chicano and Irish group performed Pogues covers for St. Patrick’s Day. They were so good The Pogues took them on tour.

Money Mark:  Money Mark’s back-up singers that night were Petra Haden and Cava. Are you kidding me?  It made all his sweet pop songs sweeter.

Antibalas:  It doesn't matter to me who left in the group, that they aren’t African or didn’t create Afro-Beat, the band still delivers and delivered that night.

Brother Ali:  Ali brought back that 1990’s Ice Cube flow to Amoeba that night.

K-Beech Video

We can all only wish that we will maintain the same sense of humor that an elderly Oregon man did right up to the time of his death two months ago. 

88 year old Oregonian Chet Fitch, who was well known by family and friends for his sense of humor right up to his death in October, pulled one final prank on loved ones from the grave when 34 Christmas cards, all hand-written by him  and with a return address of “Heaven” on the envelope, started arriving in mail-boxes  in the week leading up to this Christmas.

As it turned out the mailing prank was a plan that the late Fitch had been hatching for two decades in cahoots with his barber, Patty Dean, who told the Ashland Daily Tidings this week that the late prankster kept updating the mailing list and giving her extra money when postal rates went up. This fall, she said, Fitch looked up to her from the barber chair and said smiling,  “You must be getting tired of waiting to mail those cards.  I think you’ll probably be able to mail them this year.”   He died a week later.

The cards, which were met with varying degrees of shock and amusement, all contained the same greetings that read as follows:

 I asked Big Guy if I could sneak back and send some cards.
 At first he said no; but at my insistence he finally said,
’Oh well, what the heaven, go ahead but don’t (tarry) there.’
Wish I could tell you about things here but words cannot explain.
Better get back as Big Guy said he stretched a point to let me in the first time,
 so I had better not press my luck.
I’ll probably be seeing you (some sooner than you think).
   Wishing you a very Merry Christmas.
                                                                            Chet Fitch

Legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, whose influential career spanned seven decades,  died at his home outside Toronto, Canada on Sunday as a result of kidney failure. He was 82.

Greatly admired equally by his fans and by his peers, Duke Ellington once referred to him as the "Maharajah of the Keyboard" while Count Basie said that "Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I've ever heard."

"Oscar Peterson redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the 20th century up until today," once said Herbie Hancock of Peterson's influence on music.


Peterson's long and illustrious career included playing with such legendary jazz figures as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday.  He is also remembered for the trio he led with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis in the 1950s and the live concert clip below is that same Oscar Peterson Trio performing "A Gal In Gallico" in 1958.
 
Since his death on Sunday there have been tributes pouring in from near and far. In Canada, where he has always been revered as a national treasure, there have already been many tributes to the jazz great. But there have been tributes arriving from all over the world including from French President Nicolas Sarkozy who said in a statement about Peterson that, "one of the bright lights of jazz has gone out. He was a regular on the French stage, where the public adored his luminous style...It is a great loss for us."

United Home Video 1011

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
A new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

A merry merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so happy Christmas (War is Over, if you want it)
For weak and for strong
The rich and the poor ones
The road is so long
So happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A merry merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas (War is over, if you want it)
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
We hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

A merry merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now

- John Lennon

This quiet, early morning meditation brought to you in hopes that we can all band together in 2008 and shake off our passivity, and start the change our world desperately needs. The change doesn't start by marching in the streets, writing big checks to politicians, posting blog after blog, angry rants in dark bars ... the change starts in our hearts, in our minds.

God bless every one of us: the newborn baby, the man with a shopping cart on the street, Dick Cheney, a woman giving birth somewhere, the murderer in prison, a person who lays dying. The word God means so many things to so many people - and nothing at all to others, so let us let it be just that: let blessings rain down on everyone, because we all need it. Whatever it is, whatever this godlike state is, this state of love without judgment, I hope it for every human: maybe then we can start to heal this world. One heart at a time.

Today, December 25th, means different things to different people.  To many, including myself, it will now forever be the anniversary of the passing of one of music's greatest artist's ever: James Brown aka The Godfather of Soul, aka The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.  Exactly one year ago today, Dec 25 2006, James Brown died at age 73 from congestive heart failure resulting from complications of pneumonia.  And that shocking news, which spread fast and kept getting retold over that whole holiday week last year, put a damper on the festivities for many of us.


So this December 25th I say spill a lil on the curb for James Brown in his honor or drink a toast to the man's memory.  And  be sure to listen to some of the incredible legacy he left behind.  What is amazing about the music of James Brown, and of course the stellar JB band (as witnessed in concert footage below from '71), is that it never ages or loses its edge or uplifting vibrancy. And I for one can literally listen to James Brown all day long and never get tired of it.

R.I.P. James Brown.    We will never forget you!

Mac bought daddy a Rolling Stones album back in 1983...It had kind of a naughty cover... Daddy stored some Stones clippings along with the original shrink and xmas tag...





































Quite an amazing piece, possibly Wladziu is sitting up waiting for his brother George to call to spread a little holiday cheer???
1978 cheapo release on the Mistletoe label- a subsidiary of Springboard.  A complete Springboard post is in the works...

Above is your very own holiday yule log - one of many kindly posted on YouTube for those without a fireplace or a TV to watch it on a local channel. This one, which comes with its own soundtrack which you can replace with your own music, is from a station in New York and runs for about ten minutes, longer than most others posted, but you can loop it to keep it going.   And if you cannot enlarge it to fit your whole  computer screen from above then just click directly on the YouTube site stream of it and enlarge by clicking in the lower right corner.
                                                                   Peace for the holidays!

PM Home Video PM 239

World Video Pictures WV1069

Ali G is dead!  The always amazingly entertaining over-the-top junglist comic character and star of HBO's Da Ali G Show and one of several characters created by British comic genius Sacha Baron Cohen, has been killed off by its creator who simultaneously killed off  his  even better known character/alter-ego Borat Sagdiyev. 

The passing, or rather retiring, of both Ali G and Borat was announced in a British newspaper interview with Baron Cohen a couple of days ago.  "When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," the 36-year-old actor-comedian said in Friday's Daily Telegraph.

The good news is that Ali G and Borat are survived by Bruno, Baron Cohen's slightly lesser known, but no less over-the-top creation - the flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter character (with a knack for making people contradict themselves and look foolish) who is reported to be the star of Baron Cohen's in-the-works, next movie - the sequel to his 2006 surprise hit "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

In the meantime Baron Cohen has been spending more and more of his time on his acting career.  He plays the singing barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli in Tim Burton's just opened Sweeny Todd (starring Johnny Depp) and in last year's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby  he played Will Ferrell's arch rival the French Formula 1 speed demon Jean Girard.  Additionally he guest-starred in the finale of the fifth season Curb Your Enthusiasm. And more importantly, in perhaps the most challenging part as an actor, he plays the role of Abbie Hoffman in the upcoming biopic on the sixties satirist being directed by Steven Spielberg.

War Is Over...if you want it

"War is over!"  If only those three simple words were true. If only this current senseless war in Iraq, and the pending one in Iran  along with every other (inevitable) future war between nations were over and done with.  If only there truly could be peace on earth forever.  And why is this such a far-fetched idea?  Why in this current so-called progressive, high-technology, information age, where we should have learned long ago from history's mistakes (IE war is bad because war kills humans), are we still waging wars on one another?

The answer, I believe, lies in John Lennon's lyrics to this timeless anti-war song:  war is over if you want it  and I strongly believe that the reason we still have wars is because voters (especially in the USA) don't care enough to keep fighting for peace and not allowing administration after administration trick us into thinking mass murder is justified because it is done in the name of fighting for our freedom. If we really really wanted the war over, it could be.

The above video collage set to John Lennon and Yoko Ono/The Plastic Ono Band's classic Happy  Xmas (War Is Over) is put together by YouTuber Sakitamasao. The song itself was recorded 36 years ago at the Record Plant Studios in New York City with the help of producer Phil Spector.  The children singing in the background, who really add to the overall beauty and power of this song and who were fully credited on the single's sleeve and even pictured on its cover (above),  were from the Harlem Community Choir and would all be in their forties now, having lived through many more US wars since the Vietnam War - which was what the song was recorded in protest of at its recording back in November, 1971. 

Veterans Sounding Like New
Caetano Veloso- Cê
Bad Brains- Build a Nation
Os Mutantes- Live at the Barbican Theatre 2006



Dios Mio! Finally a New Release By These Artists!
Café Tacvba-Si
Manu Chao-La Radiolina
Tinariwen- Aman Iman: Water is Life



Hip Hop From Around The World
Calle 13- Residente o Visitante (Puerto Rico)
Mala Rodriguez –Malamarismo (Spain)
Tego Calderon –Contraataca (Puerto Rico)
Orishas –Antidiotico (Cuba)
Mokobe -Mon Afrique (France/Senegal)
Marcelo D2-Perfil (Brazil)
Bocafloja- El Manual De La Otredad (Mexico)

Take a break from the holiday madness and check out this fine collection of sign shaped stickers...

Starting off with a couple of soulful street signs from duos McFadden & Whitehead as well as Ashford & Simpson...










Now a couple of very similar highway signs from fairly dissimilar acts...







This Ramones sticker is actually kinda rare and it fits into a couple of other categories which I'm working on right now...movie tie-ins and collectible stickers....

Continue reading

TransWorld Entertainment #15012

Rough:  That's the only way to describe Edith Piaf's life.


La Vie En Rose, a recent film about her life, is kind of tough to watch in parts.  Edith lived with so much pain!  The woman who plays her, Marion Cotillard, truly becomes Edith and is likely to garner an Oscar nomination for her acting skills.  I liked how the film flashes between Edith's life at all different stages and ages-- it's not a linear narrative and that makes it all the more compelling.  In rapid succession we see both what Edith becomes and why she became that way, where she has come from.


Piaf's childhood alone is riddled with more drama than most people experience in an entire lifetime:  Edith was born in Paris, ditched by her mom and then her dad.  The film shows how she lived for a time in a brothel and was cared for by the prostitutes there.  She goes through a period of being blind due to ill health.  One day her father comes back for her and takes her off on the road with (of course!) the circus, where he is a contortionist.  When pops quits the circus, he is forced to perform in the streets for change, and one day he pushes Edith out and tells her to "Do something", so she opens her mouth and sings.  With her warbley voice and energetic charisma, she's a hit from the get-go.



From there Edith's life takes off in many different directions and she eventually became the singer we have all enjoyed.  She's got such a dramatic and intense personality and it bleeds right into her performances!  Before watching this film I really had no idea about her back story, other than (of course) that she was French and called "The Sparrow."  Her life was full of roughness and not much love, except  when she was on stage performing.  The film does a good job of showing how Edith becomes addicted to many things, but especially to performing on stage.  It's the one place she can feel flawless.  Her life shifts quickly and often between the highest highs and the lowest lows.  It's both compelling and painful to watch.

Forum Home Video FH79004

5 Disc Player (fancy!):

1. Lena Willemark and Ale Moller - Nordan


3. Mastodon - LEVIATHAN

4. earth - hibernaculum

Lorne Green’s greatest claim to fame is starring in the long running western Bonanza, playing the role of the family patriarch Ben Cartwright and being the first man most people ever saw in color on television. But Green’s oddest credit is that he had a number one single in the middle of the English Invasion in 1964: his talking ballad “Ringo”, (which ironically is not about the Beatle, but a Western gunslinger: Johnny Ringo).

This 7 inch record, “Must be Santa,” is his contribution to the subgenre of “annoying kids singing Christmas songs”, (of which I have somehow become a leading collector!?!), featuring some fine shrill warbling of the Jimmy Joyce Children’s Choir. Oddly enough the flip side, “One Solitary Life”, is the polar opposite; a morose, bleak, 2000 year old tale of loneliness, social deprivation and the ultimate execution of a doomed unnamed man (hint, hint) which is probably a more telling song of Christmas than we’d like to acknowledge. Loren Green really plays the fate card well.  Then again, years before Bonanza, Lorne Green was known to his fellow Canadian citizens as "The Voice of Doom", a nickname he earned as a radio announcer for CBC radio from 1939 to 1942, where his distinctive baritone painted the grim news of World War II in deep somber tones. Listening to such a desolate voice, especially on a Christmas record, is just a plain and simple holiday cheer killer …  that miserable tingling in your soul, its not unlike that vacant stare when you’re trying to find parking at the Glendale Galleria the weekend before Christmas, and you have an exhausted, yet frantic, raging, sugar-doped child in the back seat screaming that he wants to see Santa -NOW!- meanwhile babbling on a badly deteriorating cell phone connection is your employer going on about something trivial and asinine, and while looking at that pink parking ticket still stuck under the windshield wiper blades from the last failed attempt at shopping, you rear-end a new Lexus ...  

It would make sense that as time progresses that use of the language we share would likewise progress. But not so. The opposite in fact appears to be the case in our current culture.
As time marches on, despite all of the new technologies directly linked to the language, the use (nay abuse) of simple English, especially in the written form, seems to be regressing at a rapid rate. 

Quiz any English high school teacher on the general current state of students' penmanship, spelling, grammar, etc.  and odds are they will squeeze their face into a painful look and tug on their hair as they proceed to launch into a list of the many ills of today's abuse of the English language. And it is the written word, especially the typed or text word, that tends to be the biggest victim of this current decline of the language.

These days with typos and overuse of CAPS being the norm in the majority of Emails, IMs, and text messages, it is as if we are all granted a poetic license to type and spell however we feel fit. And of course this is all fine so long as the person on the other end of the two way communication can understand what the hell is been said or written.  And this is where the problems and fun begin.  In fact many amused bloggers have dedicated websites to the numerous abuses of the English language.

One of my favorites is one that focuses on the misuse of quotation marks. The blog of unnecessary quotation marks is a fun site to visit to check out sent-in photos of signs that have been printed up with quotation marks used when they did not need to be used such as the "live" reindeer in the poster above. But take a moment to check out the  blog of unnecessary quotation marks for many more abuses of the quotation mark and feel free to add to COMMENTS below  your pet peeve when it comes to the current abuse of the English language - be it spelling errors or overused terms like LOL.       

A quick Google search reveals (well, confirms) that the snooty de rigueur critical terms ‘lyrical’ and ‘poetic’, which let you know that a film is serious art, rather than déclassé entertainment, pop up frequently with discussions of Claire Denis’ BEAU TRAVAIL, but only accidentally, if at all, with William Friedkin’s CRUISING.  (‘Poetic’ even shows up as a plot keyword in the former’s IMDB listing, whereas the latter gets words like ‘perversion’, ‘evil’ and ‘stabbed in the back’.)  Yet both films feature extended sequences of men with beautiful bodies, clustered together and moving in rhythm to music; both are concerned with men of uniform in their habitus, either diurnal or nocturnal, performing a ritual; and both argue for a certain degree of fluidity in male sexuality – however, degree is implicated by using highly different narrative styles.  The “poetic” homophilia of BEAU TRAVAIL is more a suggestion through the recognition of the beauty of male movement, so any of its purported gayness has plausible deniability (like obsessive wrestling fans rewatching old matches of Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka), whereas CRUISING quite literally and graphically depicts the lure of homosexuality for even the most macho of men, NYC cops.  If the object of audience identification, a straight cop, Steve Burns (Al Pacino), can catch it by breathing in the salty air of late 70s S&M clubs and dirty rags drenched in amyl nitrate, then you might, too.  I guess lyricism and poesis don’t spring to mind when our hero is starting to get turned on by a greasy depiction of fisting.

That homosexuality might be taught, or that it could lure someone in, remains a controversial idea among gay rights advocates.  Essentialism qua naturalism tends to be a more comforting thought, and not without some good reason.  Religious demagogues work up the fear of right-wing parents by suggesting that their children might catch the immoral queer “meme.”  Thus, the possibility that homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality becomes a way of assuaging these bigoted fears, or at least as a scientistic defense.  But this has always been a fallacious debate.  Just because something’s natural doesn’t give it moral propriety.   If a murder-gene were found, society wouldn’t suddenly start calling murder moral.   And so it goes with homosexuality: regardless of whether Steve Burns starts off as latently gay, or begins to become more gay as he goes undercover in the gay S&M outre-mer to investigate a string of murders is unimportant, the moral questions raised by the film shouldn’t be any different.  Homosexuality is no more nor less moral for being biologically natural than heterosexuality.

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Celebrities, actors, politicians, actually any one with an ounce of fame and without an ounce of shame seem to always want to get into the glamorous record business. That is as true today as it has been for many, many a decade. And one of the simplest ways to back into a recording career is to release a Christmas record, either novelty or a heartfelt, weepy ditty. But I have to say it’s very odd when a cultural icon steps into these murky waters.

When Cary Grant recorded “Christmas Lullaby” in 1967 it was just a year after he retired from the movie industry, leaving as one of the most popular and respected actors of all time. Obviously, Grant learned a few things from his occasional, and unintentionally amusing, stabs at singing on screen. Check-out his performance as the Mock Turtle in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, or his attempt with a ballad in Kiss and Make Up, because in 1967 Grant mostly recites “Christmas Lullaby” in that perfectly invented accent of his. He gently whispers to his sleeping daughter the joys she’ll find on Christmas morning, about the time Grant promises that angels will always be there to watch over and bless her he breaks into song … well sort of … I guess it was easier for the former Archie Leach to invent the actor we know as Cary Grant then it is for Cary Grant to invent a singer. But who cares, it’s still Cary Grant! Like Audrey Hepburn’s line in Charade whenshe asks and purrs, "Do you know what's wrong with you?  Nothing." 

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