October 2013 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

I want the NEW Paul McCartney

Hint to Wife: NEW by MACCA is #1 on my Christmas list,

My friend Karen, who I’ve only known since we were in kindergarten, wrote this article for our sixth-grade newsletter in which she was the winner of a contest to fly to England and see the Beatles in person. Back in 1980, her record company put out John & Yoko’s Double Fantasy album, but that was an arm’s-length situation.

Now, her current record company is putting out the new album by Paul McCartney, NEW, and while he’s in the New York City area, she’s spending time with him. This means she was THERE when Macca surprised a Queens high school with an auditorium rock show, plus Q&A on John Lennon’s birthday; she described it as a most satisfying experience. The day before, when she was with him doing interviews for nearly five hours, was another highlight.

I’m guessing she was present when Sir Paul surprised the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon audience by sticking around to perform seven more songs in a mini-concert.

I’m so very happy for my good friend, who has turned me onto new music for decades. I have only a soupçon of jealousy.

I haven’t gotten the new album, NEW, yet. (Richie has already ordered it.) I’m very pleased it’s gotten a good review in Entertainment Weekly and an even more interesting one in The New Yorker, plus others.

Hint to Wife: this is #1 on my Christmas list, even ahead of Beatles at the BBC, Volume 2. Get the deluxe edition, please!

Paul’s YouTube channel

Ranking the 21 Best Paul McCartney Deep Tracks. Some of these I had never heard.
***
Misheard lyrics of ‘Let ‘Em In’.

Reflecting on the movie “12 Angry Men”

We ought to have the trial anyway, even though “everybody knows” he or she is guilty.

Have you seen the 1957 movie, 12 Angry Men? I highly recommend it. It was nominated for three Oscars: Best Picture, produced by Henry Fonda and Reginald Rose; Best Director, Sidney Lumet; and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Reginald Rose.

The Golden Globes nominated the film, the director, lead actor Fonda, and supporting actor Lee J.Cobb. “A dissenting juror in a murder trial [played by Fonda] slowly manages to convince the others that the case is not as obviously clear as it seemed in court.”

Had a chance to watch it again this summer. I was doing apheresis at the blood bank which takes two hours, and this DVD, which I got for free about eight years ago by mailing some coupons from a Cheerios box, fit the bill at 95 minutes.

I was struck again by the racial/class issues. The defendant, who we see only at the very beginning of the film, with the judge’s charge to the jury, is young (18), Hispanic, and from a troubled neighborhood. The jury seems to think the case is a slam dunk, and quickly votes 11-1 to send the young man to his death. But as the Fonda character talks, he gets a second supporter. Immediately one juror thinks it’s the juror from the slums (played by Jack Klugman), but it’s not.

This film also starred Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, E.G. Marshall (who I know best from the 1960s lawyer show The Defenders, which also had a huge impact on me), Edward Binns , Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec (whose character has the best speech about the obligations of a jury) and Robert Webber.

The Fonda character, and his eventual allies, make observations about the inconsistencies in the testimonies, something a decent defense lawyer might have done. The young man, though, apparently had a court-appointed attorney who was going through the motions.

The film has always informed me or reinforced in me, several issues. 1) People with means generally have better legal representation than poorer folk. 2) We ought to have the trial anyway, even though “everybody knows” he or she is guilty. 3) Because of 1) in particular, I’ve long opposed the death penalty. 4) Because of 2), I wish we had more of a limit on pretrial and trial scuttlebutt.

Incidentally, there was a TV movie of 12 Angry Men in 1997, with a cast including recent Tony winner Courtney B. Vance; Ossie Davis; George C. Scott in the Cobb role; Armin Mueller-Stahl; Dorian Harewood in the Klugman role; the late James Gandolfini; Tony Danza; Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role; Hume Cronyn; Mykelti Williamson; Edward James Olmos; and William Petersen. I feel I should check it out soon, now that the original is fresh in my mind.

If I had a ballot for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

What I hope will happen is that they’ll pick the great guitarist Link Wray as an early influence, as they have done in the past with people who have shown up on the ballot, deserve to be enshrined, but who most people never even heard of.

From CNN: “Grunge groundbreakers Nirvana, disco dynamos Chic and the costume-clad, Gene Simmons-led pop metal band KISS are among 16 nominees up for election in the museum’s Class of 2014. The deep selection also includes ’70s and ’80s hitmakers Hall and Oates; college radio heroes the Replacements; New Orleans funkmeisters the Meters; sweet-voiced Linda Ronstadt; and pioneering gangsta rappers N.W.A.

“Completing the list: the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Deep Purple, Peter Gabriel, LL Cool J, Cat Stevens, Link Wray, Yes and the Zombies.”

CBS News adds: “Nirvana, Linda Ronstadt, Peter Gabriel, Hall and Oates, and The Replacements are among first-time nominees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

All eligible nominees released their first single or album at least 25 years before the year of nomination.

Fans can vote for up to five artists at rockhall.com and www.rollingstone.com and www.usatoday.com.

I’ve already made it clear that I would vote for Linda Ronstadt. Beyond that, there are probably seven artists for the other four slots. Pretty much a coin flip, my ballot would include:
Chic, which is newly chic, its sound still relevant.
Peter Gabriel, who was not only commercially successful in the 1980s, but put out great albums before that; if for the song Biko alone, which codified understanding of apartheid to the western world, he’d be deserving. I have a LOT of PG.
Hall & Oates, who not only had massive commercial success over a lengthy period – I am an unapologetic fan – but also are great proponents of music to this day. And though it ought not to matter in this context, I really love Daryl Hall’s solo album Sacred Songs.
Yes, in part as a paean to progressive rock, in hopes that King Crimson gets a nod next time out.

What I hope will happen is that they’ll pick the great guitarist Link Wray as an early influence, as they have done in the past with people who have shown up on the ballot, deserve to be enshrined, but who most people never even heard of.

The Meters, which helped beget The Neville Brothers, was essentially the house band for Allen Toussaint and played on a lot of other people’s albums, so I’m hoping that they’ll get picked in the sidemen category, as Leon Russell did a couple of years ago.

My other pick in these fan ballots was Butterfield, whose three Bs (Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop) were also individually important in rock

Not picking Nirvana, on their first ballot, who will get in anyway. I like them well enough; have three or four of their albums and their sound defined the early 1990s.
Hope the Replacements get in someday – it was their first year as well.
I had quite a bit of Cat Stevens in the day, and I’d pick him if there weren’t people I preferred.
Have the greatest hits of the Zombies, and I’m just not sure a few hits plus one great album warrants the band’s inclusion.
I know N.W.A. is massively influential, despite its limited output, but not feeling it yet.
Never cared for KISS.
Loved the hits of Deep Purple, but guess I don’t know the oeuvre well enough to decide if they merit inclusion.
Know LL Cool J better as an actor than a musician.

Which five artists would YOU vote for?

Who the heck designed that sign?

When The Wife and I came back from the Berkshires in western Massachusetts at the end of August, there was a terrible street sign. I mean “terrible” in terms of its efficacy.

See the bottom of the three signs above? It’s like that, only with four or five different pieces of information, and all the listings in the same font size and design, one line apiece. No arrows, as in the second sign.

One of the bits of information was that one should take I-90 west at the next left. My wife is driving and she didn’t discern it. I’m in the passenger seat, and I’m thinking, “Did that sign say what I think it said?” as we’re going by it at 45 mph. It wasn’t until we were through the intersection that I saw in my left peripheral vision a sign for I-90; otherwise we would have missed it.

Now if that green sign had had that red, blue and white interstate logo, I’m almost certain that our brains would have interpreted the information sooner.

(So, New York Erratic, you would have gotten REALLY lost here.)

I think about this kind of stuff, a lot, actually, especially since our NYS SBDC office put out a book called What’s Your Signage a decade ago. I had virtually nothing to do with the book except that I was doing the bulk of the reference at the time because the others were so busy with the text. While it’s geared towards a business’s signs, there are some information, about logos and color and size, e.g., that would be applicable for road signs as well.

MOVIE REVIEW: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I enjoyed the music of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, which included Paul McCartney’s new song, “New.”

Sunday morning, my brother-in-law calls; he’s fixing up a house in my area. His wife’s trip back from Ukraine has been delayed a day – he’s planning on picking her up at JFK airport then driving back to Pennsylvania with their daughter. With some extra time on his hands, did we want to go to the movies? He’ll pay. OK! The choice they made was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.

My family (wife, daughter, and I) meet them (BIL, daughter) at Colonie Center, and actually don’t enter the theater until the previews were already going for three minutes, then we see 10 MORE minutes of animated coming attractions, most of which convinced me NOT to see them.

By happenstance, my family had seen the first movie in the series and had liked it. This take, even in 2-D, was brighter visually, and better drawn – probably a result of a bigger budget – and I loved it. The recap of the first film was handled quite efficiently before launching into the new adventure.

Inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), who created the mess in the first film, is invited by his “idol Chester V (Will Forte) to join The Live Corp Company, where the best and brightest inventors in the world create technologies for the betterment of mankind.” Ultimately, Flint is sent on a sensitive mission involving his most infamous creation, which is creating food-animal hybrids; Chester tells him he can save the world. Flint’s supposed to do it alone, but he brings his crew, including girlfriend Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) and his dad (James Caan), with whom he finally connected at the end of film 1.

I liked it for what it was: a lot of funny visual jokes/food puns, and a narrative that suggests that work, in lieu of your friends, isn’t a good choice. It also suggests that hero-worship is highly overrated. The plot was serviceable, not great, but I enjoyed it, and the characters therein; my wife, and my daughter, did not. The story was not compelling enough for the Wife. It is true that the character upon which the resolution of the story fell was clear to me fairly early on. My sensitive daughter was scared by some seemingly hostile foods.

Subsequently, I listened to the Bat Segundo Show when Ed Champion interviewed writer Kathryn Davis, and about halfway through, they had a riff on the misunderstood monster. II then realized that perhaps there was more to the narrative of the film than I had originally realized.

The voice actors, which also included Andy Samberg, Benjamin Bratt, Neil Patrick Harris, Terry Crews, and Kristen Schaal, are all quite good. I enjoyed the music, which included Paul McCartney’s new song, “New,” some Mark Mothersbaugh, and Yummy Yummy” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

On a scale of 1 to 4, I’d give it 3 stars. Looks great, seemingly less filling (despite the food theme). The mixed positive reviews I’ve seen are mostly accurate. I do love how the storyline continues through the early part of the credits – WHY do people leave during them?