CollisionWorks

And I realized again that I haven't seen enough Eleanor Powell, and knew pretty much nothing about her. I only knew the number above where she looks to be the best damned tap partner Astaire ever had (after making this film, he supposedly told Fayard Nicholas he'd never work with Powell again 'cause he made her work too hard) and two numbers from Broadway Melody of 1936 included on the Singin' in the Rain DVD, one of which is terrific (the "Broadway Rhythm" finale) and the other features Powell, a hoofer, in balletic choreography completely unsuited for her (as well as a hideously unflattering costume) which she still pretty much sells.

The Wikipedia entry on her notes that Broadway Melody of 1940 is available on DVD (okay, up it goes to the top of the Netflix queue!) but that almost nothing else of hers is, though a box set may be forthcoming "by the end of this year." In the meantime, here are a couple more short numbers from that film. First, Powell and Astaire again . . .

Now, Astaire, Powell, and George Murphy (a good dancer, but shouldn't be forced to be next to Powell and Astaire, dancing in unison, poor dope) . . .

And from Broadway Melody of 1938, a much longer number -- I love the way the person who uploaded this to YouTube (a non native-English speaker) describes this: "In This Clip You See Sophie Tucker Singing A Great Song, And After That You Can See Eleanor Powell." That about sums it up. If you're not interested in Sophie Tucker (shame!), Powell starts dancing at 3.22 in/5.11 to go:

We worship you, O Eleanor Powell.

Just read on Mark Evanier's blog that the beloved (by some, including me) Match Game stalwart Brett Somers has passed away. This is confirmed on Brett Somers' website (my god, there's a www.brettsomers.com!).

Of course she had a career and life outside of that game show, but I couldn't for the life of me have told you anything about that before reading the links I just included in this sentence. She was married to the Klugmeister? Huh. Somehow makes sense. Grew up around Portland, ME . . . lived in Westport, CT. Whaddya know?

And in tribute, a little piece of performance art from Mystery Science Theater 3000, as Crow T. Robot performs his one-robot show, a tribute to Gene Rayburn, Give 'Em Hell, Blank!:

I do indeed love the YouTube . . .

First, here's Little Jodie Foster doing a Serge Gainsbourg song with Claude Francois on a French variety show sometime in the 70s - the original was by Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, and when I saw the title I expected that Foster would be doing the Bardot part. Nope. Here's "Comic Strip:"

And from the first thought ("songs in foreign languages") we move to the next one ("songs in foreign languages with subtitles"), with this song in Flemish from a Belgian kids' show:

And continuing along that "inaccurate subtitling" thought, Hitler has some car trouble:

And continuing with the fine theme of Hitler humor, who else but Mel Brooks knows how to find the yuks in Nazis, with this video that actually wound up "banned" from most TV in the USA when it was released to tie in with his To Be Or Not To Be movie (I have it on Beta tape somewhere from when it was shown in the USA Network's Night Flight, surrounded by warnings that it might be "offensive"):

I haven't read any of her books in about 20 years, but for the 10 years before that, I read whatever I could get my hands on, including the classic A Wrinkle in Time which I read many many times (I identified with Charles Wallace a bit much, I think). Oddly enough, I don't think I've ever actually owned any of her books - I recall always having them from school or public libraries. Looking over her work now, it appears I read only a tiny fraction of her published work.

I was pleased and honored to have met and spoken to Ms. L'Engle briefly in 1987 (CORRECTION: 1984) and had dinner with her at her home in 1991 as result of being a classmate and later a friend of her granddaughter, Charlotte.

Recently, Berit and I had a mildly heated discussion with some friends regarding the Harry Potter books - which B & I both enjoy somewhat, but feel are just a bit overrated - I do feel they've gotten much better as they went along, and Rowling's writing skills caught up more to her imagination. However, B & I were making the point that yes, these books are enjoyable for adults to read, but they are still children's books, no matter how dark they may be. This is not a pejorative statement, I think, but just the way it is, but it was taken as a putdown by the people we were talking to, and we were challenged to name other children's books as deep and rich as the Potters.

Well, just thinking of the ones I still keep on my bookshelf and occasionally pick up and read for pleasure, I was able to name Roald Dahl's wonderful books, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (aka Julie Andrews), Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and (especially for my money) the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper (I enjoyed the Philip Pullman books the one time I read them, but I need to spend more time with them to see if I'd put them up there, too).

Once upon a time I would have included the Narnia books as well, but I reread them a couple of years ago in writing about them for the UGO.com Narnia hub, and discovered (having not touched them in almost 30 years) that they are definitely written for children (and written down to them, annoyingly) and not all that well. Very annoying books now. The other ones I've mentioned all hold up for me as an adult, not Mr. Lewis' annoying allegory. Ugh.

I didn't think of it at the time, but I should have included The Time Quartet. I think I'll check them out again - I may never have owned them, but Berit does, and they're on our shelves now. I have a tiny fear that they'll wind up closer to Lewis rather than Dahl or Cooper or Rowling, but only tiny.

And if you think that children's books that could be read with pleasure by adults (and which show that "children's books" should not be thought of a a negative term) began with Rowling, take a look at L'Engle.

Meanwhile, I've been slicing away at the dross on the iPod, and it's now at 20,474 songs, 71.57 gigs. I'm making some space on the thing. Of course, I've added around 500 songs to it while dropping 1,200, but that ratio is okay. I just heard they're coming out with a 160 GB iPod, too . . . no, that would be madness. Here's what comes up random this morning:


1. "California" - The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys
2. "Your Quimby Dollars at Work" - Mike Keneally - Hat
3. "Rockin' Shoppin' Center" - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
4. "Third World Man" - Steely Dan - Showbiz Kids: The Steely Dan Story
5. "Waiting for Mary" - Pere Ubu - Cloudland
6. "The Will of God" - Keith Bradford - MSR Madness 4: I'm Just The Other Woman
7. "You Me" - Procession - Oceanic Odyssey Volume 12
8. "It's Gotta Be a False Alarm" - The Volcanos - Northern Soul: The Cream of 60's Soul

Okay, this is from a comp I've never listened to in its entirety, and it's beautiful and weird -- it's an uptempo R&B/Soul song, with some orchestration, but prominently featured are a trombone (maybe a tuba?) that sounds like it should be in a oom-pah band and a clarinet that sounds like it should be in a klezmer band. Very odd in an R&B song . . .


9. "Mr. Tenor Man" - Lou Christie - Spazzy Answer Songs
10. "Please Hurt Me" - The Crystals - The Best of The Crystals

This may be the single most cheery, lighthearted and smile-inducing random ten I've ever had (with a slight drop on #10). How nice.

Ah, well, one more day of vegetating and watching TV - we don't have TV at home in Brooklyn so our time up here always involves vast amounts of "surfing the zeitgeist" as Berit calls it (though that winds up being primarily the watching of shows on Animal Planet and Discovery and reruns of C.S.I.). Yes, our idea of a vacation is hunkering down in a dim, cave-like room and not dealing with anything. {sigh} Sounds great to me a lot of the time . . .

Berit and I don't currently have a functioning camera, so we relied on the kindness of our actors, asking any of them who had a handy digital camera to bring it to the calls, as I've had good luck in the past with a whole bunch of cameras each taking a whole lot of photos producing some really damned nice ones.

So at the WGW/WGW call, there was a lot of this:



Here, Yvonne Roen, Mateo Moreno, and Stacia French take pictures of a scene they're not in as Sammy Tunis adjusts herself and Jessica Savage and Alyssa Simon lurk in the shadows.

Above photo by, I think, Iracel Rivero -- the problem is that as people were being photographed, camera were being handed back and forth, so I have no idea at times who took which shot.

Here's one of Iracel, taken with her own camera by, I think, Aaron Baker:



So, sorry friends if I don't credit these all properly -- here's another two from Iracel's camera, possibly taken by her, maybe by Aaron - first, the shadows of a flunky (Bryan Enk) and a goon (Roger Nasser):



As their boss, Louis the torpedo (Jai Catalano), sits in the shadows:



And the dressing room of The Brick, during the whirlwind visited on it by the regular presence of 29 actors in four shows for four weeks in very VERY little space:

I'll have actual show pictures in the coming days, and some more of these behind-the-scenes ones, too.

Good.

So, a morning Random Ten from the iPod now at 20,766 songs, 72.32 gigs:

1. "I'm Allergic to Flowers" - The Jefferson Handkerchief - Pebbles Volume 3 - The Acid Gallery
2. "My Way of Loving You" - Wallace Collection - Laughing Cavalier
3. "I Am" - Molesters - Plastic 7"
4. "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" - Martha Wainwright - Martha Wainwright
5. "Eloise (Hang On In There)" - William Bell - Soul of a Bell
6. "Get Back" - Laibach - Let It Be
7. "On the Road Again" - Andy Prieboy - ...Upon My Wicked Son
8. "Town Talk" - Ken Woodman & His Picadilly Brass - That's Nice
9. "You Were Born for Me" - The Tunespinners - Oceanic Odyssey Volume 09
10. "Baby, Baby Don't Cry" - The Miracles - Hitsville U.S.A., The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971

Meanwhile, a couple of links from our Rotten Sons of Bitches Department . . .

toddalcott, as always, writes something smart, in this case about Katrina, two years on, and what he's learned about the government as a result.

And shortly after Alcott's opinion piece, I was led by Jason Grote to a lovely piece of investigative journalism by Matt Taibbi that just seems to confirm all of Alcott's (and my) worst suspicions about the Administration's view of its job not to be the steward of this country, but to enable its cronies to loot as much from the Treasury and taxpayers as possible during their stint, and then get the hell out of Dodge and leave the mess to be cleared up by others. Depressing and enraging.

Some pertinent lines from a film noir (I forget which one) that I quoted in WGW/WGW:

THOMAS ARNOLD, the gangster-businessman: When I spill a drink on the carpet, the maid cleans it up for me.
NED DALEY, the honest private eye: When you spill blood, your lawyer is expected to do the same.
THOMAS ARNOLD: Exactly.

And from the Department of Cheering You Up After That Department, imomus has let me know that you can find the entire (hysterical) series The Japanese Tradition on YouTube. I have one of them on videotape, "Sushi," with an English-dubbed soundtrack -- which, frankly, I think increases the deadpan humor of the "trying to educate foreigners about our ways" -- but it only seems to be up on YouTube in Japanese with subtitles, and here it is:

There are more in the series, which I haven't watched yet, but I'm glad to know they're all there. Judging from the comments on them I see at YouTube, a LOT of people don't get the joke, and are confused or angered by them. Berit has often commented on how well the British and Japanese do this kind of deadpan humor that so many in the USA don't get (though judging from some of the comments, it's Japanese who are angered by the series - "Don't tell lies about us!"), and Momus, in his piece on these, makes the excellent comparison to the British Look Around You series. Well, I like them. A lot.

Also, from toddalcott again, a cheering-up link that made my morning, and will serve for this week's Friday Cat Blogging In Absentia, HERE.

Enjoy.