Two Great Singers: Adele and Darlene Love

Yin and Yang – 

One’s an unlikely superstar, 

the other a legendary heroine

Adele

     Doesn’t everyone love Adele?  Would she have taken off in the U.S. if not for an appearance on Saturday Night Live in late 2008 and a profile on CBS News Sunday Morning in 2009?  That combination is one of the best arbiters of the next big thing and it’s aimed squarely at the middlebrow that will take a chance on something new.  19 quietly built a major audience and 21 (2011) became a phenomenon.  Not only did she possess an instantly identifiable contralto voice with the phrasing of a mature jazz singer, she also wrote her own 

Adele's More
Vulnerable Side

songs.  After people realized she could be simultaneously bawdy and shy, she became a superstar.  If only Sam Smith had a sense of humor, the hype about him would make a little more sense.  

Adele's 2015 NBC Special

     Adele’s pre-eminence was evidenced in her Holiday special from Radio City Music Hall this past December, which backed up 25, the biggest selling album of the year and the fastest selling since electronic tracking began in 1991.  That special lived up to its name; she held an audience in her palm by remaining almost completely still.  It was also the perfect length – one hour – for presenting her strengths.  It’s obvious from that show and from her liner notes that Adele loves her fans.  25 provides just what her many fans want:  mid-tempo ballads about break-ups, getting over break-ups, hoping for another guy that are delivered by a big voice with scrupulous production, whether it’s in a symphonic pop setting or in a grittier R&B one.  She’s sort of our contemporary Dusty Springfield.  It’s a shame that the famously insecure and generous Springfield couldn’t have had a major popular success like one of Adele’s.  

     When I first saw the video “Hello,” I thought it was amazing there were still the traditional scarlet phone boxes in England.  If there aren’t, then perhaps Adele is so big a star they found her one.  She sounded great, though the song is a little mopey.  Even though SNL did a funny “Thanks, Adele” skit, I had to agree with the woman working at the BMV who said, when the song came on the radio, “this is the song you hear as you’re jumping off a bridge,” then immediately apologized because she hadn’t meant to say it aloud.  

Adele 25

     Perusing the album’s song titles made me wonder if Adele needs to talk with someone because things don’t sound good for her (“I Miss You,” “When We Were Young,” “Water Under The Bridge,” “Can’t Let Go,” “Why Do You Love Me”).  The gorgeous “Million Years Ago,” reminded me of Charles Aznavour’s “Yesterday When I Was Young,” in terms of its theme and lyrics and the time signature.  She sings it with ferocious regret, however, which is nothing like Aznavour, but does recall Shirley Bassey’s cover.  Okay, I realize for Americans Aznavour and Bassey are – at best – footnotes, but they’re enormous in Britain.  In some ways, Bassey is to the British what Aretha is to Americans as a representative cultural icon, though their repertoire and styles of singing have little in common.  I’m certain either Adele or her intriguing mother are acquainted with Bassey’s work, though she doesn’t list her as an influence.

     Adele will continue with a great career, there’s no doubt about it.  That voice is still maturing and she has developed an even richer tone since recuperating from surgery.  Her songwriting has also grown over the past eight years.  However, I wish she’d try different types of songs in terms of tempo and lightness; there’s never a throwaway track on her albums, which means there’s never a moment for a listener to catch a breath.  Fourteen tracks on the Target version of 25 is generous, but three could have been cut.  There were a number of producers and it amazes me that they were able to maintain such a consistent tone.  Did they have to subsume their individual artistic personalities to the juggernaut that is That Voice?   Perhaps, but the album would have been stronger if someone had said, “No, let’s keep this for the next album or let’s not use it.”   

     The most exhilarating album I heard this year was Introducing Darlene Love, which covers a range of genres in American pop since the late ‘50s by one of the great voices of the last sixty years in an electrifying collaboration with producer Steven Van Zandt (yes, the guitarist of the E Street Band and Silvio Dante from The Sopranos).  To anyone that 

Christmas on Letterman

loved the girl groups produced by Phil Spector in the early ‘60s or Letterman’s Christmas shows from 1986 on, Love needs no introduction.  But radio, streaming, iTunes, and media publicists aren’t too interested in a 74 year old with a clear mezzo chest voice, which is a shameful indictment of American popular culture.  “Still Too Soon To Know,” a duet with The Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley should be a new standard if those running the music business had any memory or sense of excellence. 

     Love’s career has been about resilience and an optimistic attitude.  She could have settled many scores (especially with Spector), but has refrained from doing so and has always taken the higher road.  Most tellingly, she first thanks her backup singers in the liner notes.  On disc and on screen, she emanates warmth and genuine humanity. There’s a smoky tone to Love’s singing that’s reminiscent of Etta James, but without the baroque phrasing that James employed in her later career.  Rather than calling her a soul singer, I’d say she’s of the Spirit – her roots in the church as a minister’s daughter played into the call and response that Spector was the first white guy to turn into top 40 pop in the late ‘50s in New York while Berry Gordy was doing the same thing at the same time in Detroit.  

     Van Zandt’s three decade long friendship with Love has resulted in a work that moves from gospel tinged pop to an evocation of Spector’s Wall of Sound, R&B, ‘80s rock, contemporary rock, contemporary covers of some Brill era songs (where most famously Otis Blackwell, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Jerry Goffin and Carole King, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, composed) and closes with traditional Gospel.  I’m not certain how Van Zandt did it, but he’s somehow reproduced the Wall of Sound, which involved recording all the musicians and singers on mono because recording technology did not involve multiple tracks until the mid-60s.  However, the clarity on that Mount Everest of Brill Building songs “River Deep, Mountain High” indicates that he must have employed multiple tracks; I’m just not certain how many.  

Darlene Love

     The list of great songwriters on this collection beside some of the Brill geniuses includes Springsteen, Joan Jett & Desmond Child, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Webb, and Van Zandt himself.  Love does justice to all of them especially the generation that came of age after Glam Rock.  She has the power and emotional range to actually find what Costello writes, but cannot quite sing himself and on Springsteen’s songs she sounds like the older sister who taught that scrawny white boy teenager from the Jersey shore what he needed to know about women. 

     I felt the natural ending point for the album was “Last Time,” a passionate and elegiac maybe farewell to a friend or lover or even life itself.  However, as Neil said, “they’ll pull this full circle.” They do and it’s by emphasizing the importance to Gospel both to Love and, more broadly, to American music.  I realize that the electronic chatterers are obsessed with the semi-talented, the pre-pubescent, the badly behaved, and some performers that combine all these qualities.  Therefore, whatever else happens with Introducing Darlene Love, I’m grateful that it was released at all.  And I hope that this review influences someone to try out something new that’s simply GREAT.

David Bowie – Au Revoir to Whoever You Were

     As most anyone who cares about rock music knows by now, David Bowie died on January 10.  It was a head scratching moment because there were no public reports that he was ill.  However, Bowie’s career longevity was based on surprise and this was yet another and one that cannot be topped.  He instinctively understood that popular music in concordance with the exploding media venues of the 1960s meant that physical image was as important as the song.  He took Concept to its metaphysical end by turning his performing persona into a concept depending on what his next album required.  He displayed discretion and maturity by rarely revealing much about his own personality or background – that was usually done by those around him looking to shine in his reflected glory.

    Bowie was labeled as a chameleon so many times that it stuck even though I could always tell when he was singing.  He had a voice that always sounded like it was on the edge of strain.  His vocal tone was flat, though his gift for melody and joy in trying different production settings for his songs made up for it.  Unlike Dylan whose voice declined over time, but who tried to make up for it with phrasing that veers from the obscure to the bizarre or Neil Diamond who successfully smothered his intriguing lyrics with a third generation commercial saloon veneer that verges on glop, Bowie kept his singing very real even with – or maybe despite – the wildness of his physical appearance.  It was this incongruity that lent him power and longevity.

     As a child in England, I thought he was weird, but secretly delighted that he was so public.  I lumped him in my ten-year-old consciousness with Elton John, but I knew about half a dozen of Elton’s songs as compared with only “The Man Who Sold The World” and “Ziggy Stardust” by Bowie.  My uncle who’d recently been a DJ sent me Lodger as well as Pure Prairie League’s latest as a birthday gift in 1979.  PPR was okay, but the new Bowie was an adventure in itself.  I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  Only when I started college did I find others who felt connected to Bowie, but were already looking on to The Talking Heads, The Replacements, and R.E.M. 

      By the mid-‘80s, Bowie was enormous and everyone liked him.  I think this was most evident in his “Dancing in the Streets” cover with Mick Jagger.  He surprised again by backing off and re-thinking what else he wanted to do with his music and himself.  I sort of lost touch with his music since my attention was taken by the American Alternative rock groups of the ‘90s and various other performers of the past fifteen years.  However, I’m thankful that he was fearless in visually presenting whatever he might have been feeling or thinking about.  It wasn’t until I heard he died that I realized how much he meant to me.

Entertainment Weekly: So long and goodbye, though I loved you

My Subscription (1990 – 2005), R.I.P.

Entertainment Weekly- Issue I with K.D. Lang

     I started reading Entertainment Weekly in the local grocery store magazine aisle when I was unemployed and didn’t think I could afford to buy it.  My Mom started my subscription as a gift.  I loved it because nothing else was on the market that covered movies, television, pop music, books and computer software (at that time).  It also connected popular culture with what was happening in current events.  Its trenchant and hilarious comment upon the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings was to cast all the major (Thomas and Anita Hill) and minor (various senators, etc.) players as they’d appear in an A-list Hollywood movie, a major network mini-series, and a Lifetime movie.  

!990s Music

     Where EW took off in the early ‘90s was in being able to handle the three major genres of popular music:  Rock (and Indie rock), Hip-Hop, and Country.  Rolling Stone writers could only really handle rock, Spin could critique rock and rap, but no one was seriously considering country.  EW was the first mass market magazine to present Garth Brooks just as he was turning into the number one singing star and the many others coming out of Nashville.  There were countless times when I’d read about an album or a new musical act in EW and think I should check it out.  It did not approach classical or jazz and it flirted with world music as a genre, but dropped it by the mid ‘90s.  It also dropped anything to do with computers, which was smart because Wired could present something that was broader than initially imagined and which required an entire industry to understand its importance.

Lisa Schwartzbaum

     EW had a remarkable stable of writers at its inception that was comparable to Esquire in the ‘60s including Ken Tucker covering TV, Owen Gleiberman handling movies, a number of good book and music reviewers, and the MVP Lisa Schwartzbaum, who could write about anything in popular culture with joy and wit.  In the ‘00s, Stephen King provided “The Pop of King” column.  I looked forward to it because it was impossible to know what he’d write about next.  His easy-going, but somehow slightly curmudgeonly air, leavened his extensive knowledge of English language highbrow and pop culture forms and his expertise in examining what was artistically and commercially significant.

Few made as big a deal about it, but I thought it was as classic as Pauline Kael’s reviews from 1967 – 1980.  

Blockbuster Movies

     EW had (and has) some blind spots.  It covered theatre only sporadically, but it’s tough to get a handle on a form that is most innovative and excellent in many different cities around the U.S. while only NYC gets the attention for its tent pole productions.  Movies were always put first even as television was more popular and emerged by the late ‘90s as more creative.  EW bought into the big studio crap wrought by Hollywood after X-Men (2000) and Spiderman (2002) became blockbusters and producers and directors turned to comic books as their salvation with instant storyboards.  The indie film movement that EW championed in the ‘90s was left in the dust by the mid ‘00s.

Stephen King Exit

     I began to sour on EW after King’s column concluded, Schartzbaum left a couple of years later, followed by Gleiberman, and writers like Mark Harris were no longer being asked to write columns.  The newer writers weren’t as knowledgeable (nothing pre-dates 1985 in their world and 1967 is Reviewer Year One to them) and the editorial pieces began obsessing about everything since its 1990 inception.  The overall look of the publication changed from sensible and readable with some classic covers such as the Seinfeld ensemble posed like The Beatles and, a decade later, a stunning shot of Julianne Moore for the year end round up.  In the last couple of years, the font is practically unreadable, the photographic reproductions are so muddy they look like something out of a bog, and the layout is purely fugly.  Parochial schools did a better job with mimeographed publications back in the early ‘70s (as I’ve said, an era that no longer exists for the current writers).  Most of the covers pander the latest Hollywood dregs.

     Oh well, one hates to dwell on the negative.  In its prime (1995 – 2008), EW was right up there with the best magazines of various eras.  Unfortunately, it’s hit a rough patch that may be its New Normal.  Rolling Stone hasn’t recovered since the U.S. found idealism too expensive in 1980, Esquire hasn’t located a new mojo since the late ‘70s when the last of its significant writers licked up the gold of the West Coast, and Living might as well have given up after Martha Stewart served her prison term.  Two major magazines have somehow kept it together:  The New Yorker, probably because it’s such a literary behemoth and O because Oprah still keeps her eye on where it is and how that relates to how it started.

"The Waterfall" by My Morning Jacket Disappoints

My Morning Jacket

     My Morning Jacket, a Louisville band with a deserved national reputation, has become a major independent neo-psychedelic rock band.  If they’d formed in 1992 instead of 1998, they would probably have become mainstream stars.  Instead, they’ve charted a more intriguing course by not selling out.  They’re almost legendary as a live band because they’ll play one of their entire albums and then cover five or more songs by various other artists that wouldn’t seem to fit them at all.  We haven’t seen them live, but know them from Evil Urges (2008) and Circuital (2011).  These are two great albums that are almost symphonic in their ambitions to collect songs into a greater whole and to refer to a range of ‘60s through millennial styles.  

Lead Singer and
Songwriter Jim James

     Their latest album The Waterfall fuses ‘70s progressive rock with ‘70s southern rock (Deep Purple meets Lynyrd Skynyrd) and refashions it with their mumblecore sensibility.  What I mean is that they’re low-key, type B personalities who put the music first and chat, but don’t really speak.  Lead singer and songwriter Jim James feels like Mark Duplass’s character in Your Sister’s Sister (2011) if he were a musician.  On Palladia’s Storytellers series, James talked interminably with a sweet sincerity that was both refreshing and excruciating.  

     The Waterfall acts as a stop gap between more major works and may not be the best jumping off point for new listeners.  It takes forever to take off with its fourth track “Waterfalls.”  As a band, they’re generous to a fault and want to play all night long in the tradition of The Grateful Dead or Phish.  Good for them!  Unfortunately, jammin’ along on an album can become too much of a good thing, especially if it’s a cut that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  Things get really interesting around the eighth and ninth cuts (“Big Decisions,” “Tropics (Erase Traces)”) that utilize some musical phrasing from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975), thereby uniting English and American baroque arena rock of the ‘70s before bogging down again with “Only Memories Remain.”  Those memories are from the first three tracks, which I didn’t want to remember.  They sing an abbreviated version at the end, thereby informing the listener how tough it is to get over a break-up.  Yup, it’s sad all right.  I can’t wait for their next album.

Nellie McKay's "My Weekly Reader" Delights

Pop Singer Nellie McKay

     Nellie McKay is a wonderful, complicated idiosyncrasy:  a pop singer who isn’t a fawned over superstar, a multi-instrumentalist in an era when singers can barely play “Chopsticks,” and a historian of popular music who puts the song before her ‘interpretation’ of it.  In short, she’s extraordinarily talented and unique.  Geoff Emerick, who engineered a number of The Beatles’ albums, has been a key collaborator as her producer from her debut Get Away from Me (2004).  She can also sing in any genre:  Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, Country, Jazz, Great American Songbook.  She feels like the granddaughter heir apparent to Dinah Washington and Rosemary Clooney.

     Whether singing her own compositions or covering other composers (her 2009 album Normal As Blueberry Pie – A Tribute to Doris Day), she is neither cynical nor self-serving.  Her songs, however, generally touch upon contemporary and/or continuing social issues, which used to be a primary root of American popular song.  Unfortunately, the music corporations place little value in that so McKay moved from Columbia to Verve – a better fit for her in the long run.  She wanted to rediscover an era that was artistically and politically sincere for her latest album so she turned to the Vietnam War, concentrating on songs from 1965 – 1973.  Though she hasn’t written the songs on her latest, she plays about eighteen different instruments on it.  

     From the title My Weekly Reader, recalling the urban underground press’ heyday, to the production that initially sounds like the move from mono to stereo, this sounds like the late ‘60s.  However, she presents further nuance especially in Moby Grape’s “Murder In My Heart For the Judge,” which speaks to urban unrest in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing and the Ferguson, MO riots and Crosby, Stills, and Kantner’s “Wooden Ships,” a haunting, wistful note on which to end the album.  She sounds like she could be Mary Hopkin’s younger sister on Steve Miller’s “Quicksilver Girl” or Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park,” and even channels the profound sadness of Sandy Denny on Ray Davies’ “Sunny Afternoon.”  It’s a treat to hear Paul Simon’s “Red Rubber Ball,” and Frank Zappa’s “Hungry Freaks, Daddy.”  I didn’t love Richard Fariña’s  “Bold Marauder,” mainly because it seemed musically monotonous and her straight ahead version of”Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” is respectful, but it doesn’t reveal her in the way of Rickie Lee Jones’s 1989 version.

Nellie McKay appears at the 20th Century Theatre in Oakley on September 17, 2015.

the20thcenturytheatre.com

Is Mark Ruffalo the heir apparent to Gene Hackman? –PART II

Recent viewings:  Night Moves

     A week or two ago, we watched Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), a neo-noir private eye thriller that’s become a cult movie.  It’s understated and oozes with the betrayals of Watergate, starting with a former D-lister starlet hiring a retired football player to find her runaway teenage daughter and ending with the image of a motorboat going around in circles and a hero who may have passed out or been mortally wounded.  However, it’s on a small scale; there isn’t the baroque corruption hidden by the vast ambition at work in Chinatown (1974) or the classic misperception and sardonic turnaround ending of The Conversation (1974) that also stars Hackman in a completely different performance as a small, damaged man in a big, regular guy body.

     Hackman gives a fully fleshed out performance in Night Moves as someone who’s been around the block a few times and takes himself seriously, although no one else shows him the same respect.  He’s in over his head, but doesn’t understand it until it’s too late.  He thinks of himself as ‘a white knight’ out to save others and the title actually refers to the moves a knight makes in chess, as well as what goes on after dark.  There’s a squirming moment, which put me in mind of Ruffalo, when he wonders whether he should take advantage of Jennifer Warren’s damaged character.  As H.L. Mencken said, “Never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own,” and Hackman’s character looks like he remembers that phrase while making that decision.

Jennifer Warren and Gene Hackman

     To digress yet again, what didn’t happen for Jennifer Warren?  In her screen roles, she was intelligent without having to be eccentric or daffy, attractive without having to be pretty, and sensual without having to be sexy; she was a real American woman, but that seems to be too much for either directors, producers, or executives so she didn’t get a chance at leads; instead, she turned to producing.  Joanna Cassidy found herself in a similar boat about a decade later, but turned to TV for some sharp, wild, but smaller parts.  She was, however, a great professional ‘80s heroine in Under Fire (1983), co-starring with Hackman. The list could go on, though a number of top actresses – Laurie Metcalf, Allison Janney, and now Viola Davis – have gone from the theatre straight to television with movies on the side instead of as the main dish.  The result is that television has ascended and film has descended.  They’re all just movies and many of them are no more than jumped-up, third-rate, whorish comic books.

Melanie Griffith in Night Moves

     Another era change has to be Melanie Griffith’s role as the young jailbait runaway.  She plays a couple of suggestive nude scenes that probably would be cut today.  On the other hand, her death would be much bloodier nowadays and lingered over.  Hackman’s character behaves responsibly because he possessed an avuncular quality, especially in parts where he was co-starring in or supporting a female star vehicle (Lucky Lady, All Night Long, Postcards from the Edge).

The French Connection

     He’s best known for The French Connection I and II (1971, 1975), but he could be hilarious, especially his blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974), a western hero in Bite the Bullet (1975) or western villain in Unforgiven (1992), and he could do war movies, thrillers, suspense, and even cartoons, though he defined Lex Luthor in the first Superman series.  I wish he’d had the chance to play Robin Williams’ role in The Birdcage (1996), rather than the more one-note senator stooge.  He could have passed easily as straight and then still provided a sense of kink.

     Part of Hackman’s maturity as a performer and understated, but extraordinary range, was nourished by years of being turned down for parts.  He seemed on the verge when he was cast as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), but as Mark Harris recounted in Pictures at a Revolution (2008), he knew he’d be fired.  There was an unstated physical reason, I believe.  Watching a bear maul a chipmunk is not funny, but watching a squirrel wrestling with a chipmunk is very funny, which is why Murray Hamilton made sense visually with Dustin Hoffman.  It wouldn’t have been believable to consider Hackman existing with Mrs. Robinson in such a sorry marital state.

The Royal Tenenbaums

     Hackman’s last great role was as the eponymous patriarch of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), which is probably as close as we’re ever going to get to the essence of J.D. Salinger making it to the screen.  His vigorous, wild, brilliant character provides the soul to the movie and deserved far greater attention than it received.  I know some reviewers look at Owen Wilson as Hackman’s heir apparent, perhaps because of their noses that both display a somewhat phallic quality, but Wilson, while a gifted writer and a happily relaxing presence, doesn’t display the performing tension of a strong actor.  Maybe Hackman could be persuaded to come out of retirement for a one-off movie with Ruffalo.  That would be worth seeing.

Is Mark Ruffalo the heir apparent to Gene Hackman? –PART I

Recent viewings:  

Foxcatcher and The Normal Heart

Mark Ruffalo

     A few weeks ago, we saw Foxcatcher, written by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman and directed by Bennett Miller right after The Normal Heart, directed by Ryan Murphy, written by Larry Kramer from his 1985 play.  (It took Julia Roberts’ participation to realize The Normal Heart; even Barbra Streisand couldn’t make it happen back in the ‘80s).  Mark Ruffalo displayed powerful range in both roles:  a top wrestling coach, who happens to be a decent family guy in over his head with a billionaire psychopath, and a gay civil rights and AIDS activist, who becomes more prominent and controversial than he’d ever wanted.

You Can Count on Me

     I’ve liked seeing Ruffalo ever since You Can Count on Me (2000), where his insouciant portrayal of a likeable drifter earned him comparisons to a young Brando.  I could see it in terms of looks and his vulnerability, but he didn’t possess Brando’s power or the sense, as Ellen Barkin once put it, that ‘he had secrets’ that she wanted to know.  XX/XY (2002), although little seen, takes a look at a ménage a trois, in which the male is the emotionally weakest character.  We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), based on two André Dubus stories, examined two adulterous academic couples; it was the apotheosis of a serious American independent movie with excellent actors stuck in something that thought it was serious, but was actually dreary.

Zodiac

     Where his persona (and career) took off for me was his performance as Detective Dave Toschi, the primary investigator, in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which was one of the most ignored excellent movies of the past decade.  With a great cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards, and Chloë Sevigny, among others) and extraordinary production design that re-creates San Francisco in the 1969 – 1980 era, it goes so far as to unmask the identity of the Zodiac serial killer.  He was funny, foot loose, and sexy as the sperm donor out of his depth when he meets his adolescent children and their lesbian mothers in The Kids Are All Right (2010).  

Begin Again

     However, 2014 was his year with Begin Again, Foxcatcher, and The Normal Heart by playing three vastly different roles.  He was up for the Oscar for Foxcatcher, a movie that could have been released in the ‘70s with its presentation of complex characters and the revelation of the establishment’s sinister entitlement.  That type of movie only seems to receive major studio distribution nowadays if it’s about historical events, rather than fictional ones (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and the earlier Miller/Frye/Futterman productions Capote or Moneyball).  Steve Carell went the whole way as the creepy, psychotic John du Pont, but it was Ruffalo and Channing Tatum that provided the soul to the proceedings as the Olympic wrestling Schultz brothers.   

Channing Tatum

     To digress for a moment, what about Channing Tatum and when will he get taken seriously?  He’s a wonderful dancer (I thought that watching him on the bus in Step Up  as we rode to Canada in 2006) and he has a wicked sense of humor, but he raised the stakes in Foxcatcher and was criminally overlooked.  He remade himself physically for the part and expressed such a depth of rage that I would have thought he’d be a lock for award nominations, but no.  We haven’t had a smart, funny hunk who can move for a long time:  Burt Reynolds facetiously trashed his career, Sidney Poitier was stuck being a credit to his race/nation/the whole world, which killed his humor – the same thing happened to Barbra Streisand after she and everyone else decided she had to be important – so we have to go back to Burt Lancaster to see his actual forebear.  Tatum can already produce a movie.  If he sets up a production company, goes after great material, and works with European as well as American directors, then he could be the next Burt Lancaster.  And Lancaster never coasted, never called it in, and was still funny and could still move until a stroke ended his career in his late seventies.

Foxcatcher

     So back to Ruffalo and the two moments where he displayed greatness recently.  About halfway into Foxcatcher, Neil said, “I don’t see where this was so good,” and then the scene comes where Ruffalo’s character is pushed into saying something he doesn’t believe and there’s a horrible, squirming moment in which his eyes don’t lie and his fate is sealed.  After that look, we didn’t talk back at the screen anymore, which is really saying something.  The other moment was in The Normal Heart where Ruffalo as Larry Kramer’s stand-in is getting ready for a date.  He’s been pretty low-key and might even pass for straight, but he’s nervous and running out of time and his wrists turn loose and he slightly flounces and we know this date is important to his very essence.  It’s a scene that many gay men can identify with because of those hands and, even more tellingly, he doesn’t use that gesture again.

Award Shows Round Up

Snow between the Grammys 

and the Oscars (with our predictions)

30s Hollywood Glamour

Bette Midler's
45 rpm Hat at the
1975 Grammys
with Stevie Wonder

     What to do on a snowy day?  How about write up the biggie award shows?  The Grammys were set up to get people to buy LPs (yes, it was that long ago) and the Oscars were set up so that Hollywood moguls could try to class up a glamorous factory system (yes, it was even longer ago).

Rosanne Cash, the Big Americana Winner

     The Grammys are now about promoting current and upcoming A-list tours because it’s the only way to guarantee a big income, thanks to downloading. The show is about who wins the night, i.e. the performer who makes the biggest

Girl Singers

Tenderly, Rosemary Clooney, 

Darlene Love, and Bette Midler

Rosemary Clooney

Susan Haefner

     Tenderly:  The Rosemary Clooney Musical played at the Playhouse in the Park, where it was extended for three weeks.  It presents Clooney’s life, as centered around the therapy she received after her onstage nervous breakdown following Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968.  Susan Haefner captured Clooney’s singing style, which was warm, engaging, and unassumingly powerful.  She was very convincing in conveying Clooney’s over-riding impulse to put on a happy face and take care of others as her world was

Miranda Lambert: Platinum

Yet again, Lambert delivers 

tough vulnerability with exquisite precision

     Miranda Lambert’s latest solo album Platinum was released five months ago, which was when I picked it up and I’ve played it about a dozen or so times since then.  It’s an easy collection to hear a number of times because it sums up the past of country and western music, while also placing Lambert in the forefront of where C & W may go next.  Along with Beck on Morning Phase (Alternative Rock/Rock) and Pharrell Williams on Girl (R&B/Pop), Lambert has taken stock of a musical genre and stated why it is and has been important to American culture.  For me, those are the three most significant albums released this year.

     Lambert wrote/co-wrote about half of the songs on this album and performed works by some other top C & W songwriters.  She comes across as Western because of the

Laverne Cox Shops at JCPenney

NKU establishes itself 

on the map for LGBTQ issues

Laverne Cox at NKU

     As one audience member said, it was a historical moment at NKU when Laverne Cox presented.  She's been an Emmy nominated member of the Orange is the New Black cast.  She's also been a spokesperson for the transgender

Rosanne Cash: The River & the Thread

Exploring the south and her roots – 

a lovely record, but magisterial in concert

Our Seats at Clowes Hall

     We were in Indianapolis last month and Neil happened to see that Rosanne Cash was going to perform at Butler University’s Clowes Memorial Hall.  Since we were able to get seats that guaranteed no one would be standing in front of us,

Chrissie Hynde

A really good album  by an icon    

    Chrissie Hynde has been one of the coolest performers in popular music for over three decades.  She possesses an intriguing alto voice that wrings a subtle, supple sound from a limited range.  It can also forcibly attack such as on The

Some Recent Milestones

Talent exploding through a multitude 
of works = Genius in retrospect

   Two milestones this week were reminders of watershed eras in American and world popular – Shirley Temple Black’s death and the 50th anniversary of the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.  

Shirley Temple

   Shirley Temple was the most famous American child at the age of six, driven by a stage mother desperate that her little girl would be a movie star.  There were a number of women with this psychological need in that generation, the most

Another Beatle Anniversary

February 9, 2014 marks 50 years 

since their American debut

Meeting Ed Sullivan

      The Ed Sullivan Show was America's guide to pop culture for three decades.  If one appeared on his weekly Sunday night program, then there was cause for one to be noticed.  If that included a telegram prior to your performance from Elvis and his manager, Col. Tom Parker, then there was definitely going to some conversation on Monday morning at the office and school.  After weeks of anticipation, The Beatles would make their first of 3 consecutive appearances as they criss-crossed 22,621 miles across North America on their first tour here. That was all in a little over a month that sold 453,950 tickets.  For a front-row seat the cost was $4.

      The No. 1 song on Billboard's chart the week of February 1, 1964 was "I Want to Hold Your Hand".  For their first live performance in America, they chose to perform "All My Loving" to screaming female teenagers in the Ed Sullivan theater and across the country for those poised in front of their black & white TV sets.  For the three performances, they received a whopping $10,000.   It all became a life-changing time in our history that if one was lucky enough to experience first-hand, one can never forgot it.

Natalie Maines: Mother

A great singer whose first solo album disappoints

The Dixie Chicks in 2003

     Natalie Maines possesses a big, clear, keening voice that is inimitable.  She was the front woman for The Dixie Chicks, the last superstar female-centric band.  They began as a country group and immediately crossed over to enormous mainstream pop success after other female artists like Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and LeAnn Rimes had led the way.  Unless you lived under a rock in 2003, you know

Pistol Annies: Annie Up

Smart, funny, independent, and sexy, 

the soul of American country pop lives on

Dexter Cozies Up to Lambert, Presley, and Monroe

Miranda Lambert

     I respect Miranda Lambert’s solo career and admire her gutsy songwriting talent, but her singing voice is an acquired taste.  Her timbre and range are probably closer to Hank Williams than any male singer who’s been influenced by him.  And, I realize this will make me sound like an American pop heathen, but I

Joan Rivers: Our Little Secret

Whether you like her or not, Joan Rivers nails the laughs

Joan Rivers

     The other night, we were watching one of our TV guilty pleasures:  Fashion Police on E!  We don’t watch it weekly, but we’ll turn it on while channel surfing and usually stay with it until the end.  It repeats a number of times weekly so it’s not too difficult to find.  Joan Rivers is the host and den mother with panelists Kelly Osbourne, who has an almost

Stanley Tucci: Actor/Gourmand

Stanley Tucci as Flickerman in The Hunger Games

     Stanley Tucci is one of those excellent performers, a so-called ‘character’ actor because he isn’t conventionally good-looking, who has quietly given heft to some of the most charming and sinister roles of the past twenty years.  He came to prominence with his mysterious and duplicitous portrayal of

Debbie Gibson: Thanks for Putting Our Pride First!

Debbie Gibson Performing at the 2013 Cincinnati Pride Festival

     Debbie (Deborah, as she was referred to in the ‘90s) Gibson headlined the main stage at the Cincinnati Pride Festival and gave a spirited hour-long set.  She began ten minutes earlier than scheduled with “Proud Mary.”  This was an excellent selection because her voice is powerful, but it also possesses a pinched, nasal quality that provides her the