July 2023 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Most awarded songs #13

Porter/Prater

We’re so lucky to be able to listen to some of the most awarded songs #13. Maybe they’ve gotten Grammys and/or Oscars. Rolling Stone magazine, RIAA, ASCAP, CMA, NPR, and others have said good things about them.

30. I Will Survive – Gloria Gaynor. An anthem. In 2019, I listed it as one of the Songs that make me think about life. “In 2016, the Library of Congress deemed [it] to be ‘culturally, historically, or artistically significant’ and selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry.”

29. Hotel California – The Eagles. “In the 2013 documentary, History of the Eagles, Don Henley reiterated: ‘On just about every album we made, there was some kind of commentary on the music business, and on American culture in general. The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California but for the myth-making that is the American Dream because it is a fine line between the American Dream and the American nightmare.'”

28. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon and Garfunkel. I wrote about this here.

27. The Message – Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five. I was very taken by this, that the newish genre in 1982 would address social commentary.

26. People Get Ready – The Impressions. Written by Curtis Mayfield, it’s a great freedom song, clearly written with the black church experience permeated in it. Heavily covered.

“I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend”

25. Fire And Rain – James Taylor. The singer has said that the song is in three parts, the suicide of his friend Suzanne, his struggle to overcome drug addiction and depression, and coming to grips with fame and fortune.

24. Soul Man – Sam and Dave. When I was younger I was a bit confused. The song was composed by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Sam and Dave consisted of Samuel Moore and David Prater. Porter/Prater; OK, got it. Booker T. and the MGs played on the song. “Play it, Steve” refers to guitarist Steve Cropper. Hayes also played organ on the track.

23. Yesterday – The Beatles. My problem with Yesterday was that is that it seemed EVERYBODY covered it. Some of them are even good. I must have at least three dozen different versions.

22. Papper’s Delight – Sugarhill Gang. I bought this 12″ vinyl with the more familiar blue label, probably in 1980. It might be the first rap song I ever purchased.

21. La Bamba – Ritchie Valens. The song originated in Veracruz, Mexico. It was recorded in the late 1930s and several times afterward. Valens gave it a rock and roll feel. The song was a big hit in 1987 when Los Lobos covered it for the soundtrack of the movie La Bamba.

Movie review: You Hurt My Feelings

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener

First off, You Hurt My Feelings is a terrible title for just about any movie. In fact, it’s so lame that I managed to forget it between the time I saw it at a Wednesday matinee at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany and a meeting I had that evening. Someone chided that the film itself must not be very memorable as I looked it up on my phone.

“You Hurt My Feelings, ” I said. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” they replied. “No, that’s the name of the movie,” I noted.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (Tobias Menzies) are practically joined at the hip. They share the same ice cream cone! The couple reminded me of RichAndAmy, characters in the comic strip Zits, “a couple that have gradually morphed into a single organism.” This, BTW, is cringeworthy to me.

Then Beth, a writer, and her sister/best friend Sarah (Michaela Watkins) overhear a conversation that therapist Don and Sarah’s husband Mark (Arian Moayed) are having.

This leads to a fundamental question about what “telling the truth” means when someone seeks your opinion. It’s a “film about trust, lies, and the things we say to the people we love most.” These characters – Beth, Don, interior designer Sarah, and actor Mark – are all having some doubts about their chosen profession. Beth and Don’s son Eliot (Owen Teague) is likewise stymied by his parents’ expectations about the book he has yet to finish..

Response

I’m interested in the disparity between the critics’ reaction (95% postive on Rotten Tomatoes) and the audience response (64% positive). In the former category was Max Weiss in Baltimore Magazine, who says “It’s wonderful to watch these great actors living out this minor (to us), but major (to them) crisis.” I will suggest that the sense that they all feel a sense of imposter syndrome makes their anxiety very relatable.

The audience summary notes that You Hurt My Feelings “is well-acted and sometimes funny, but it’s also slow — and it can be hard to care about the problems of some fairly unlikable characters.” It’s not uproariously humorous but its comedy is in the recognition that we know people like them. Or maybe we ARE people like them. I didn’t find them particularly unlikable once Beth and Don stopped sharing dessert.

Indeed, my wife and I talked about the basic premise for days afterward. Writer/director Nicole Holofcener has asked the question about whether we are obliged to be candid or be positive, and smartly doesn’t entirelty provide an answer.

I used to love the Emmys

2015 is old?

For the longest time, I used to love the Emmys. I enjoyed seeing the list of shows and performers who were nominated.

That was then, back when TV was predominantly broadcast and basic cable. Things changed as television started being delivered in different ways. The leading platforms of this year’s nominees were HBO Max: 127, Netflix: 103, Apple TV+: 46, Hulu: 42, Prime Video: 42, and Disney+: 40. I haven’t watched anything on these consistently, even though I can access Apple TV and Prime.

Of the nominees, I’ve seen exactly zero Best Drama or actors/actresses in the category.

I regularly watch Abbott Elementary (ABC) in the comedy realm, so I’ve viewed those performers. I’ve caught The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video) and Ted Lasso (Apple TV+), but not this season.

I did view some of the programs in the Best Talk category. The Daily Show With Trevor Noah (Comedy Central) – watched. Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC) – no. Late Night With Seth Meyers (NBC) – I’d watch A Closer Look news segments online. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (CBS) – rarely. The Problem With Jon Stewart (Apple TV+) -once.

My daughter started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race in the Best Reality Competition area, and I saw a few episodes.

The best game show is now in this arena. Family Feud (ABC) – I may trip over it. Jeopardy! (ABC) – well, yes. The Price Is Right (CBS) – not in a while. That’s My Jam (NBC) – I watched it for half an episode and hated it. Wheel of Fortune (ABC) – I caught one episode of the Celebrity version with Vanna White competing against the two JEOPARDY hosts, who are both up for best Game Show Host. As she noted, she shouldn’t quit her day job.

So I have no real sense about what nominations were surprises and which potential picks were snubbed.

The network program is dead

A year and a half ago, I suggested that the traditional television was, if not dead, then dying. Because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, ABC had a fall 2023 schedule filled with game shows and reality series. The FOX roster is much the same. And CBS has scrapped theirs, adding Yellowstone, U.K. ‘Ghosts to the fall lineup.

Oddly, this may finally get me to watch some series I had not seen before. My extant television is too old – from 2015! – to allow us to watch the streaming services easily. And I hate watching these shows on a 13″ laptop screen.

But the 24″ HD Smart TV I purchased months ago but never took out of the box until the most recent solstice may prod me to watch some of those extant shows. The DVR list has shrunk from over 70% when we returned from France in mid-May to under 30%.

Having said that, I hope the strikes are resolved soon, with the writers and performers getting a far larger slice of the pie on those streaming shows.

Clothes and my relationship with same

red Chucks

Annie from Cottage by the Sea wrote about of my Sunday Stealing response to How often do you buy clothes? I said, “Almost never unless they wear out. My wife buys me clothes because my criterion for ‘worn out’ and hers are not the same.”

Annie noted: “I started laughing so hard at ‘my criterion for worn out and hers are not the same.’ You should write a piece about that!”

I thought the topic was a little narrow. But it got me thinking more broadly about clothes and my relationship with same.

I’ve never cared much about clothes beyond their ability to provide sufficient covering for the particular season. A knit hat for the winter, a cap in the summer. It’d have to be extremely cold to wear a scarf. Conversely, I might wear gloves at 5C/41F, especially if I were riding my bicycle.

I almost never caed about “style,” in part because, even early on, I thought “fashion” was an artifice. It was also true that as a fat kid, trying on clothes was torturous. “I guess we’ll need a bigger size,” the sales clerk, stating the obvious, would say.

Now, sometimes people would bring me clothes I took a particular liking to. I think one of my sisters got me a couple of Guatamalan work shirts before I went to college, and I wore them until they fell apart.

The noose

I always thought that ties were stupid. A noose; how on the nose is that? My whole nuclear family was down in Charlotte, NC, when I was in my early 20s. My father and I were barely speaking to each other, for reasons. At one of those Olin Mills photo shoots, my father said to my mother, in earshot of me, “Wouldn’t Roger want to put on a tie?” Well, MAYBE, if he had asked me directly, but, under those circumstances, hell no.

In fact, I never even knew how to tie one of those things until I was 44, when a very patient coworker taught me. I was a clip-on guy before then.

My sister Leslie, who lives in Southern California, bought me a pair of white or off-white slacks in the late 1980s. “Don’t they look good?” Well, okay, in SoCal they did, but when I got back to the Northeast, they soon looked gray and dingy. That’s why I always wear pants that are black, dark blue, dark gray, or occasionally brown.

I wore a pair of red Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers for the longest time. They were so much “my brand” that someone got me a Christmas ornament with that design.

During my JEOPARDY warmups in Boston in 1998, I wore the red Chucks, which seemed to fascinate the WTEN Albany cameraman who followed me around. I made the tactical error of changing into new dress shoes for the actual episodes. It was probably a mistake because wearing those hard-soled shoes was exhausting.

My wife tends to buy my shirts from L.L. Bean. (L.L. Bean won me a trip to Barbados.)

To Annie’s point: if the pants are frayed at the end, that’s why God invented scissors. Who would know if there’s a hole in my T-shirt’s armpit if I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt over ith? And I usually do wear long sleeves, even in summer, because of my vitiligo. Actually, I have capitulated on this point, in deference to not only my wife but my daughter, who has been known to purloin my tees.

Review: Across the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales

There have been recent Marvel movies that I’ve thought about viewing (Guardians 3, e.g.) and I still may. When Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse came out, though, I HAD to see it. The fact that that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a pretty good gauge of popular culture on his Substack, loved it only added to my anticipation.

Spider-Man is my favorite character in the Marvel universe. During COVID, I saw all of the iterations of all of the Spidey films I had missed, which made No Way Home so delicious.

Still, my favorite webslinger film was the animated Into the Spider-Verse featuring Miles Morales. Across is a follow-up to that.

Isn’t it? The lengthy beginning of the film, before the credits, made me wonder for a time. Oh, yeah, there’s our young hero saving his neighborhood and frustrating his parents with… whatever secret he’s obviously keeping.

Gwen Stacy, a Spidey from a different sphere, shows up. This eventually prompts the Brooklyn-based teen to cross the Multiverse to join forces with other Spider-People to take on a calamitous villain Miles thinks he may be responsible for.

Without giving anything away, the film leans into the overarching mythos of the webslingers.

Obamaesque?

I was fascinated by the New Yorker article The Post-Racial Vision of “Across the Spider-Verse.” The subhead: “The movie treats its fantastical multiethnic team of superheroes and their forays into cultural determinism with Obama-like breeziness and tact.”

The key paragraph: “The appeal [of Miles’ character] is so universal—or, some might say, neutral—that even right-wing pundits who have dedicated the past few years to getting mad at every superhero or children’s film with a minority lead seem to have mostly given Miles Morales a pass. In what must have come as a surprise to its readers, ‘Worth It or Woke?,’ a Web site that disapprovingly assesses the wokeness of Hollywood releases, recently gave ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ a positive eighty-one-per-cent rating.

“Though it determined that the film took a ‘beloved character’ and ‘race-swapped in the name of Leftist virtue signaling,’ it briefly included the movie in its list of films that were ‘worth it.’ (The recommendation was ultimately pulled when the author of the review noticed that one of the characters had a ‘Protect Trans Kids’ sign in her bedroom.)” [Of COURSE it was.]

So Across the Spider-Verse has managed to walk the fine line of creating “representation” without ticking off the people who find the concept an anathema. Having Spideys from India and Japan, it appears, is OK by almost everyone.

The one structural difficulty is the same issue as Avengers: Infinity War; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1; and virtually every movie’s second act. I want to see the next film NOW.

Venue

I saw the film at the Regal Theatre at Colonie Center near Albany. It’s not my favorite venue, but, at the time, the Spectrum was closed on Wednesdays, fortunately no longer the case.

So many ads and infotainment! The noon movie started at 12:25.