Merry Post-Xmas

Berit and I had a lovely couple of Xmas days away with our families. Hope yours was as pleasant.

Now, back home, back to kitties, back to work.

And back to the Friday Random Ten, from out of the 26,108 tracks in the iPod, with links to songs and info:

1. "Synthesizer" - Electric Six - Fire
2. "Those Were The Days (Italian-Language Version)" - Mary Hopkin - Foreign Language Fun, Vol. 1
3. "Oh, What A Price" - Link Wray - The Swan Demos 1964
4. "Cage and Aquarium" - They Might Be Giants - Then: The Earlier Years
5. "The Big Surfer" - Brian Lord - Pebbles Volume 4 - Surf'n Tunes!
6. "Progress" - Mission Of Burma - Vs.
7. "(I Wanna) Testify" - The Parliaments - Testify! The Best of the Early Years
8. "Atlantis" - Les Baxter & His Orchestra - Ultra-Lounge 1: Mondo Exotica
9. "Stockings" - Suzanne Vega - Nine Objects Of Desire
10. "Misery Goats" - Pere Ubu - Datapanik in the Year Zero (1980-1982)

In the last two days we lost two very very different legends - well, except maybe for their outspokenness when it came to certain activities of the US government.

Eartha Kitt has left us. Oddly, my father and I had just been speaking about her yesterday briefly when her version of a Christmas song came on the stereo (and I don't think it was "Santa Baby," which isn't a favorite of mine, much as I love her), so she was somewhere fresh in my mind when I came home to read the tribute lines to her from friends on Facebook.

Here's a couple of videos of her in her prime from a TV appearance in 1962 (thanks flyswatter for leading me to the first one):

There are SO many great clips of her on YouTube it was hard to limit it to this - go take a look there if you want more . . .

And also gone is the great Harold Pinter. I believe he was the greatest living playwright we had (who would it be now? I don't think I could pick another . . .) , and the second greatest (after Beckett) whose life has overlapped mine, and, like Beckett, his work just got better and better as he got older (while his early works, as good as they are, tended to get overrated in the long run). I can say no more.

Pinter started as an actor, and occasionally relapsed - I would have LOVED to have seen his Krapp's Last Tape in 2006 - and I think his deep understanding of the practicality of what works for the actor is a huge part of his inimitable style.

Rather than an excerpt from one of his own works, here is Pinter as The Director in Beckett's penultimate stage play, Catastrophe (dedicated to Vaclav Havel), also featuring John Gielgud in his last filmed appearance, directed by David Mamet (and I have some minor problems with the liberties Mamet took with Beckett's play - let alone the entire concept of filming a Beckett play - but for the basic staging and performances, I'm grateful for this film):

Back to the world of The Brick and the shows I'm to get up this year now . . .