“This flower is fair and fresh of hue,
It fadeth never, but ever is new;
The blessed branch this flower on grew
Was Mary mild that bare Jesu;
A flower of grace:
Against all sorrow it is solace.”

In John Rutter’s carol “There is a flower” the last word is pronounced “so-lace” to rhyme with “grace.”

If James had a modium of belief himself, even in the British humanist tradition, we would have a film that has some spark of life rather than relentless, grim death.

His quest for personal solace—which the concise OED defines as “comfort in distress or disappointment or tedium”—-is a vendetta to kill the villains who blackmailed Vesper into betraying him in Casino Royale. And yes, spoilers follow.

The general consensus of QOS is that this Bond is missing the wit and attitude—-park rake, part bon vivant—-that has defined the character.

Cosmo Landesman, Times: “Bond has been stripped of his iconic status. He no longer represents anything particularly British, or even modern. In place of glamour, we get a spurious grit; instead of style, we get product placement; in place of fantasy, we get a redundant and silly realism. Craig makes an attractive corpse, but Bond is dead.”

Bond is extremely taciturn in this film. He does not banter, there is no repartee, and only minimal actual dialog.

A.O. Scott, NY Times: “Does every hero, whether Batman or Jason Bourne, need to be so sad? I know grief has always been part of the Dark Knight’s baggage, but the same can hardly be said of James Bond, Her Majesty’s suave, cynical cold war paladin. His wit was part of his–of our–arsenal, and he countered the totalitarian humorlessness of his foes with a wink and a bon mot.”

The lack of wit as a criticism, though, doesn’t make sense on the Bond timeline. Casino Royale and the QOS sequel predate Dr. No. Which means that we are in the land before the wise-cracking Bond. Same thing about his devotion to duty. It defines the character later, and is missing here—-but it’s in his future.

The other major criticism is voiced by the great Roger Ebert, “James Bond is not an action hero!” [Italics, his.] Everyone is drawing a parallel to Jason Bourne, and not in a good way. I think there’s also a lot of Die Hard going on, in the ridiculous amount of physical beating that JB takes without dying.

Beyond the action film is an atypical take on the Bond girl. Strawberry Fields is introduced (Jemma Arterton) as a quick, disposable conquest, who has the dubious honor of being a visual inverse of the disposable conquest in Goldfinger.

The other is Olga Kurylenko, an actual partner from the Bolivian secret service. But they don’t become lovers. Richard Corliss had an interesting observation about the title that I think is echoed in this shot.

“So this time the keepers of the 007 flame went with one of the short story titles, which sounds more suited for an Antonioni film than the highly torqued action adventure that is Quantum of Solace.”

Olga is “dusted” a tanning color for the role, making her look Mediterranean. She and Daniel look exceedingly elegant in the shot that is used for the movie’s poster, her dress an echo of the sixties chic, with the set-in waist and sweetheart bodice. Walking through the desert definitely has an aura of Antonioni about it.

Corliss also see shades of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jackie Chan films, Syriana, and more. I can’t hear Bolivia without echoes of Butch Cassidy’s last dream. In some ways, the film suffers from too many cinematic quotes.

Rebooting a character for a new century is tricky business. Going back to roots is one way to try it. Daniel Craig has the gravitas and authority to be Jame Bond in the Connery mold. What he needs is a story that connects his energized take on the character with the essence of what made his character special.

QOS is still big time Hollywood in its excess best. It’s slick, polished, and exhausting to watch.

I had the most emotional connection to it at the very end, when the classic theme song kicks in over the final credits. They need to start there for the next film, and give us a Bond that we recognize.

If by the time he drops the necklace in the snow, he has forgiven Vesper and himself, then he is on the road to back to humanity. The fans can only pray so.

The end of season two of Mad Men finds us all in crisis.

Crisis. It’s a very powerful and distinct word in the English language. It’s married to certain other words: the Cuban Missile Crisis (more about that later), the Energy Crisis of the seventies, the Savings & loan crises of the eighties, today’s Wall Street Crisis, the generic midlife crisis and spiritual crisis.

As we prepare to leave Don and the gang at Sterling Cooper, this is what we find:

Betty is in crisis from being forced to acknowledge Don’s cheating; Roger’s crisis is the classic midlife variety, with a woman younger than his daughter; Freddy Rumsen’s is the crisis of midlife unemployment; Pete Campbell has had several, from the death of his father to that of elusive parenthood; Joan’s is the most horrific—sickening proof her fiancé’s abusive nature—and not running from it.

And then there’s Don.

Don has finally been thrown out of his marriage by Betty, and while on the run in LA, he watches an aerospace presentation that portends the potential for Doomsday. There’s nothing like the reality of nuclear warheads to call attention to the meaning of your life.

From there, Don joins the Euro-grifters in Palm Springs, where he spends a lot of time lying down. In the final scene, he is nearly naked as a new-born babe, when Dick Whitman calls the first Mrs. Draper. This begins a series of flashbacks and present-day confusion, as he continues to be Dick Whitman, until he wanders into the ocean, either as Norman Maine, or as a seeker looking for the cleansing water of baptism.

Don is a living identify crisis-—not something you often see on television. I have vague memories of some characters in the seventies saying things like “I don’t know who I am” (oddly enough, Karen Valentine from Room 222 is popping into my head here, as is Ellen from Thirtysomething), but nothing that compares to the turmoil in Don’s borrowed soul.

I knew a priest who once told me that all crises after 30 are spiritual. (I was 26 at the time, but it still seemed reasonable.) And so it is that Don’s crisis is deeper than identity, it’s spiritual.

In today’s self-help language, it might be called a spiritual emergency. There are many blogs with personal transformation stories, like this one:

“I am an individual who has undergone a transformative experience that in this culture and setting would be identified as psychosis or schizophrenic. Other cultures and settings have other names for the same experience: kundalini awakening, shamanism, mysticism, gnosis, the psychotic-visionary episode, the dark night of the soul, ego death, the alchemical process, positive disintegration, post traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features, spiritual emergency, etc.”

I don’t know if Weiner knowingly tapped into this world of transpersonal psychology, or if he just had the creative idea of a man who takes another’s identity, and then plotted what he thought would be the emotional fallout from that. Either way, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency is an interesting touchstone.

As for the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis: there’s very little I can say about that. My parents, who both worked for Pfizer, sold a considerable amount of Pfizer stock when the market tanked in the uncertainty, and for one reason or another they didn’t get back in. The way they always spoke of it, I would have been a Pfizer heiress if the missile crisis hadn’t happened.

It’s art imitating life, all around.

You don’t want to miss the last live blogging of the season with Tom Watson and myself. Come back on Sunday night, 10:00 ET.

The most we can do is visit our fictional world of choice, where our hero is sitting on a jet plane. Hmm. An East Coast man, who is dissatisfied with his life with his wife and children and who has a penchant for reinventing himself, is heading out to California. Real-world thoughts start seeping in, and Werner Erhard pops into my head.

Why is that? Let’s see. John Paul Rosenberg was a used car salesman born in Philadelphia. He married and had 4 children before he decided he didn’t want that life. He went cross country with another woman, and reinvented himself as Werner Erhard in St. Louis. The Erhards bounced around the country for 10 years, but of course the important date is in 1971 when Werner held the first Est weekend in San Francisco after he created a personal empowerment program by putting multiple world philosophies into a cuisinart and turning it on high. Rosenberg/Erhard is a tale that would have much resonance for Whitman/Draper, the time shifting notwithstanding.

Rosenberg/Erhard actually relied heavily on an earlier work by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich, which came out in 1937 and which Dick/Don could have been familiar with. He certainly is acquainted with its three main principles: every achievement begins with an idea; plans call for their implementation and; what you think is what you do.

Don is a unique character on television in that reinvention of himself. We’ve met characters with 2 identities: Bruce Wayne/ Batman; Tony Soprano, suburban Dad/Mafia boss; Samantha Stevens, housewife/witch; Christian Slater now topping all that, with Henry/Edward.

But I believe Don is unique on our tv landscape in the very serious business of opportunistically shedding your identity and assuming another man’s life. It has dark undertones of metaphorical cannibalism, twinged with that most modern of nihilism: Don’s mask brings him no happiness.

But that’s depressing, and who can be depressed when we will all be visiting LaLa land together.

Come back on Sunday night when Tom Watson and I will forget about the stock market long enough to feel Don’s pain.

It’s been a week of certifiable madness.

Stock market insanity; bank and company failures on an epic scale; the dollar amount of 700 billion said with a straight face.

And now the maddening reality of the loss of Paul Newman, who embodied the sea change of generational sensibility that is rocking Don Draper’s world.

The gang at Sterling Cooper don’t drop many film references. Do none of these New Yorkers go to the movies? By 1962 they should have all seen Someone Up There Likes Me, The Long Hot Summer, Cat on a Hat Tin Roof, Exodus, and The Hustler. Paul Newman was in his early powerhouse years.

There are lots of interesting intersections here. Jon Hamm as Don Draper has that old school, classic movie star handsome look. Paul Newman did too, especially in his early roles. But he also was the energy and charisma of the new generation that was sweeping into the culture, the antiheroes of Butch Cassidy and the defiance of Cool Hand Luke. Newman did not win an Academy Award until 1986; many people thought Hamm was robbed of the Best Actor Emmy last Sunday.

The character of Don Draper and Paul Newman were born around the same year, served in WWII, and came to power in the postwar culture.

Draper has some of the detached cool of Ben Quick and Fast Eddy, and he has reinvented himself like Rocky Graziano and Ari Canaan did. Still, he is conservative in his worldview, except where his mistresses are concerned. They speak to a piece of him that wants to be freer. When his wife buys a yellow beach ensemble at the country club, he tells her it’s “desperate” of her. The wife/mother role is inviolate for many, but that’s still a pretty square thing to say.

This week’s episode is “Six Months Leave.” When last we saw Don, Betty had told him not to come home. Maybe she is giving him a six-month leave from their marriage. Come back Sunday at 10 as Tom Watson and I live blog the unfolding story.

“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Sterling

“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane

“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.Peel

Okay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic for their own recent past. The episode did not follow much of the story lines from the previous week—we learned nothing more of Pete and the loss of his father.

Instead, it was Betty’s day. From her horseback riding to being the show horse on Don’s arm, inquiring if the dinner at Lutece is one that she’s supposed to talk at or not.

We can compare and contrast her to Don’s new dalliance—she doesn’t qualify as a mistress—the wife/manager Bobbie Barrett. Much blogbabble ensued from Don’s ladies room move on Bobbie, when he grabbed her nether reigns to get her to do what he wanted. It was crude, because of the time and place—it’s not heat between lovers, but the violence of a desperate, frustrated man toward a woman he doesn’t much like.

Bobbie acquiesces, while it is Betty who ends the evening in tears in the car. A woman doesn’t cry genuine tears like that in from of her husband if she can help it. The anguish is SO out of context for the average man that he will have no way to process it. As it was for Don, who, when he asked why she was crying, believed the “I’m just so happy” line.

But Betty isn’t happy. We see her being fairly detached from her children. She tried to go back in to modeling, but was boxed out by the stratagems of several mad men. Her husband cheated on her, and she must have given him an ultimatum, which has kept him home. But it feels like a forced victory. It’s not that he much wants to be home with Betty, but he is doing it out of obligation. That would leave an emptiness where Betty wanted to find the core of her life.

In Alex Witchell’s NY Times Magazine article, this is what January Jones had to say about Betty: “She’s so lost. She’s supposed to be this perfect Grace Kelly wife of a businessman, and it’s just not going the way she imagined.”

It’s sadly ironic that she draws the analogy to Grace Kelly. There have been many stories about how difficult her fairytale marriage to Prince Rainier was. That he was cold and not very interested in her outside of his heirs, and how as a young bride his family did little to help her.

This Sunday brings us the episode “Three Sundays.” The advance clip on the AMC website has Betty saying that it is Palm Sunday, a designation you don’t often hear on tv episodes. Tom Watson and I will be back in the live blogging chair, come spend your Sunday night with us.

The National Air and Space Museum tells us that Pan American ushered in the Jet Age in 1958 with the Boeing 707.

American Airlines set a new speed mark when it opened the first regularly scheduled transcontinental jet service in 1959.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy spoke to a special joint session of Congress with these fateful words:

“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

And on February 20, 1962, six days after our Sterling Cooperite’s Valentine Day doings, John Glenn became the first American in orbit.

In this one little slice of time we see man’s first concerted efforts to lift his body into the firmament and suspend it there, for the length of a trip crosscountry or around the earth itself.

That’s quite a powerful parallel revolution to the forces afoot on the ground between the sexes and the generations. For some, I think it will help propel the spirit of the Age of the Aquarius—the light, heady feeling that leads to dancing in the park as we’ll see in Hair. The ideas of liberation that seized the imagination of various strata of society were fueled in part by the achievement of the commercialization of flight and the dawning of the space age. So much energy, so much hope and momentum all around.

Don Draper, however, is not flying to the stars. His body is weighing him down, as we see at the doctor’s, and he has come to some arrangement with his wife that tethers him home at night. (Although I didn’t get that plot point clearly until Matt Weiner explained it in the post-game session.) An arrangement that is making him feel leaden.

His feelings get some lift, some charge, when he reads Frank O’Hara. In the last scene we see him looking like a stodgy middle-aged man in his old-guard hat, enshrouded by the domesticity of walking the family dog, mailing a copy of O’Hara’s poems to someone. Midge? Rachel?

We’ll see. And we’ll see if Don takes flight of any sort— either to run away, or opening his spirit to the forces of the decade.

Come watch episode 2 of the new season with the newcritics, Sunday night at 10:00 pm ET. We love/hate the show in the very best way.

For another great perspective on what’s going on with Mad Men, go see our own Lance Mannion and his experiment with The Naked City.

And as a bonus, it just so happens that Frank O’Hara wrote a poem called “Quiet Time” that speaks to the mystery of flight.

When music is far enough away
the eyelid does not often move

and objects are still as lavender
without breath or distant rejoinder.

The cloud is then so subtly dragged
away by the silver flying machine

that the thought of it alone echoes
unbelievably; the sound of the motor falls

like a coin toward the ocean’s floor
and the eye does not flicker

as it does when in the loud sun a coin
rises and nicks the near air. Now,

slowly, the heart breathes to music
while the coins lie in wet yellow sand.

When we next see him, it will be Valentine’s Day, 1962.

While we may not learn exactly what he has been doing in the year and a half, we know that Jon Hamm, his alter ego, has been busy garnering awards, along with Matt Weiner and the whole crew: three Golden Globe, a Peabody, and 16 Emmy nods, including outstanding actor, supporting actor, writing, directing, and series.

Clearly it’s a show filling a hunger of the tv-watching audience of 2008. What are we finding there?

Well, it’s one heck of a kaleidoscope of recent history. The past forty years have seen powerful societal revolutions. MM gives us a chance to see these revolutions–which some witnessed first hand, and others, including the brainchild Weiner, inherited–all recollected in tranquility (and saturated color). Yes, the series is the poetry of our summer.

For instance, TV viewers born in each decade from 1960 on know there was a feminist revolution, but for nonboomers, we never saw exactly what it was trying to correct. MM dramatizes what women faced in the workplace when they entered it after the war. That’s not to say that women don’t still face sexism, but most of us don’t encounter it to this degree: “It’s like watching a dog play the piano”; Mr. Rumsen on the thought of Peggy Olson writing copy.

Drugs are entering daily life—the beats are getting high, and it’s the beginning of the “us vs. them” with the police. Don’t trust anyone over 30 is on the horizon. Music is energizing the postwar crowd. When the Twist comes on at PJ’s in the party for Peggy, a primal scream of delight goes up that we can all relate to.

The overarching revolution that’s coming is not old versus young—it’s old order versus the new waves of energy of those who think young, challenging that order. And Matt Weiner is giving us a front row seat to the sea changes, layered with personal details of characters amid the revolutionary swells.

I am not a complete disciple of the Mad Men. I thought the storytelling itself was weak and disconnected; there were lots of strong, interesting moments that did not build together well in larger arcs.

James Wolcott’s early post also voiced the minority vote: that the series isn’t as good as people think it is, and we wish it were.

But it’s still the perfect summer fare, and the sixties are the place to be. Which may be why New York is experiencing a full revival of Hair at Shakespeare in the Park.

This Sunday night, July 27, at 10:00 p.m., Mad Men second season premieres. Tom Watson, editor extraordinaire and I will be your hosts for live blogging of the episodes. Tom leads off this Sunday. So turn on the lava lamp and join the fun. Can key parties be far off?

She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, dripping with depth and expression. Her commanding downbeat to “Seeeeeee” those pyramids, still gives me chills. It’s powerful and sexy, and later “fly” is sung with such abandon. But what really captivated me about the song were the words—all that exotic travel. It never crossed my mind that the woman singing the song was the one staying home, and it was the man “flying the ocean in a silver plane.” That had to be learned later.

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember darling
All the while
You belong to me

It was also the way she sang “darling”—it was the epitome of grown-up love to me. I didn’t know that by the time I would be old enough to say darling, it would be all but gone from the modern lover’s lexicon, thrown to the rubbish heap of the affected.

See the market place in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember
When a dream appears
You belong to me

And I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember till
You’re home again
You belong to me

Many have covered the song, from Bob Dylan to Rose McGowen, I’m sure drawn to it by Stafford herself. But she owns it, now and forever.

But instead, they are part of the memorable fictional world of Conor McPherson’s 2002 play Port Authority, now at the Atlantic Theater Company until June 22.

In this ferry dock waiting room (erroneously referred to as bus station by many critics, I guess because New York’s Port Authority is a bus terminal. But that’s the jetty of Dublin harbor on the Playbill cover !), each is miles away in his own thoughts, which they give voice to as we all listen in.

It is a tour de force of monologue writing across three stages of man: the senior (Jim Norton), the middle aged (Brian D’Arcy), and the twentysomething (John Gallagher). They speak of life from the perspective of their age, and of love, which knows no such boundary.

With the barest of sets and the absence of any action, it is the sheer power of language and tale-spinning that pulls you in. That primacy of the spoken word reminded me of HBO’s In Treatment, where another Irishman, Gabriel Byrne, commanded our attention.

All three actors are superb, but Jim Norton is the first among equals. He embodies his Elder Everyman with amazing grace and the strength of deep experience, both as an actor and a man.

A line in Terry Teachout’s rave review of the play surprised me. He described it as a “series of interwoven monologues by three unhappy Irishmen.”

Unhappy Irishman. It never occurred to me that these men were unhappy. Their tales are so beautifully articulated-—surely you can’t be really unhappy if there is such beauty in your speech.

Okay, that may not be entirely true. But there is something about the Celtic soul that doesn’t think in happy/unhappy terms.

I saw Martin Sheen the other night on The Graham Norton Show. Graham was asking him what was the secret to having such a long and happy marriage. And Sheen said, it’s not really about happiness. What makes a loving marriage work is if your partner helps you to experience joy. It’s a subtle, important distinction.

Each of our waiting-room Irishmen speaks of specific moments of joy within their tales. There is also deep disappointment all around, and they all wish many things were different.

But they are Irish. Their wit and wisdom and whisky will sustain them, until the final Ferryman comes to take them across the river.

I saw Curtains on Broadway and Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 12 hours apart. Even for a professional, it was pop culture overload, as each is a mad frenzy of references and allusions. Surprisingly, there are many similarities between the two, including that they are somewhat entertaining but suffer from trying too hard.

But the important connection is that they share the same fictional time frame: it’s 1959 in Curtains, and 1957 for Indiana and crew. (With its “everything and the kitchen sink” approach, I half expected to see Indy in silhouette somewhere in Curtains Act 2, a la the Road pictures.)

Curtains channels 1953’s The Bandwagon, a film about producing a Broadway musical, with Karen Ziemba and Jason Danieley evoking their fifties counterparts, Comden and Green.

The musical was supposed to be in the same league as Kander & Ebb’s classic Cabaret and Chicago. Instead, in the words of Ben Brantley, it “ lies on the stage like a promisingly gaudy string of firecrackers, waiting in vain for that vital, necessary spark to set it off.” Ah yes—that elusive spark. Another thing Curtains and Crystal Skull have in common.

Debra Monk is the standout of the show—she’s in the tradition of Ethel Merman, another embodiment of towering talent. David Hyde Pierce is a quieter star—the Boston accent made his speech very odd and labored at times, but his sitcom timing translates well to the stage here.

The acting/dancing/singing is all good, the story/book is okay, and yet somehow it doesn’t sparkle. The whole is less than the sum of the parts.

I don’t have much of an emotional attachment to the Indiana Jones films. The only one I saw in the theater was Raiders in 1981 with my brother. (In the last scene, when the spirits first come out of the ark and are beautiful, I turned to my brother and said, “They are going to turn horrible and ugly.” When this happened, it freaked him out for years.)

For a great collection of Indy posts and assessments, pop over to the blog-a-thon at Cerebral Mastication.

For me Crystal Skull is a hodgepodge that lazily yearns to deliver real entertainment with an emotional payoff. Instead, the relentless allusions and over-the-top campy tone make it all self-indulgent rather than masterful. Didn’t the opening shot of the prairie dog remind everyone of the gopher in Caddyshack? Didn’t the next shot of the jeep and the roadster drag racing remind you of American Graffiti? And you better be careful when you try to evoke Brando’s Wild One. The visual quotes were exhausting.

The entrance of Indy in shadow was good, but Ford himself seemed very weak in the whole warehouse scene. He/his performance gained strength later on, but that first impression set a tone of disappointment.

I have no love for the 1950s, real or fictionalized. I find nothing lighthearted there, nor particularly appealing. Peter Stone/Kander&Ebbs and Spielberg/Lucas, however, clearly enjoyed sojourning there themselves.

So, what’s really going on here?

As Mahola Dargis said in her Indy review: “what’s absent is any sense of rediscovery, the kind that’s necessary whenever a filmmaker dusts off an old formula or a genre standard.”

I would take that thought one step further: Spielberg did no re-imaging of how Indy might relate to a 21-century audience. Crystal Skull’s 1950s time period was dictated by the calendar math of the earlier films, but Spielberg could have made this installment of the “30s/40s serial genre” more modern in sensibility. Dargis’s observation (and mine) could equally be said of Curtains.

I think the general critical disappointment of these two artistic creations—besides the “spark” that can be elusive for any creative endeavor and is what sets, say, Casablanca and Cabaret above the pack—signals that the curtain is coming down on the sensibility of Spileberg/Lucas, Stone/Kander & Ebb. We are witnessing the end of their like as we head toward the first double digit year of our century.

Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made a valiant attempt to focus attention on this Mozart of the popular song with his very ample 2001 biography Pocketful of Dreams. And for a brief moment, pop culture glanced at “the first white hip guy born in America” (Artie Shaw). References to him occasionally pop up: two recent are in Ken Levine’s post of Mariah Carey’s topping Elvis for number 1 hits: “If everyone in the United States buys copies of “Rubberneckin’”, “Kiss Me Quick”, and “Old Shep” Elvis Presley can reclaim his rightful crown (of being number three behind the Beatles and Bing Crosby) and order can once again be restored to the universe”; and Kim Morgan did a post on Crosby, citing one of his lesser known films, Sing You Sinners.

But those are the extreme exceptions.

Steed is always teasing that I don’t speak up for Crosby, one of my lifelong passions. And so for his birthday this year, I will.

And I’ll start with the sexy guy, Bing in the 1930s.

This Bing is unrecognizable to those who only know the smiling face in the santa hat on the all-time classic Christmas CD, or worse, the guy in the Minute Maid commercials in the 1970s warbling “there’s nooooo doubt about it.”

But in the beginning, Crosby was young and compelling. He had a distinct, astonishing voice and a way of singing that was unlike any other on the landscape.

He was a heartthrob, best seen in a movie that is almost impossible to get, the original Big Broadcast (1931, but before they started assigning years to them). Crosby plays himself, and the scenes of the women stampeding him are funny but entirely believable. Women fell in love with his voice on the radio, and the early shorts and movies use that as a story line.

Here he is, in The Big Broadcast, singing “Please” accompanied by the legendary Eddie Lang, and a bit of “Dinah,” looking like a male model for Banana Republic. Lang met Crosby when they were both in Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and Eddie followed when Bing left the band. They were very close, and Giddins writes how devastated Crosby was when Lang died, hemorrhaging after a tonsillectomy. It was Crosby who had recommended that Lang have his tonsils out to help with chronic laryngitis.

In 1932 Marion Davies insisted on Crosby as her leading man in Going Hollywood, a wild pastiche of a musical. It’s maybe best known for the Grand Central extravaganza number, while the “Make Hay While the Sunshine” is almost too hard to watch.

But there is one scene that deserves a place in film history: a drunk, disheveled Crosby singing “Temptation” intercut with close-ups of the smoldering Fifi D’Orsay. It’s dark and evocative, with other cuts to blurry, tightly-packed bodies, swaying to the pulsating rhythms of the song. The comments on YouTube tell it all: “how young he is” and “how sexy he is” and “Crosby has more talent in his little finger than Sinatra has in his whole body” [okay, that one is just a nice swipe at the other guy].

Yeah. That’s what propelled Crosby into the hearts and imagination of an entire generation, three quarters of a century ago. He does gain new fans amongst the young, but it’s one by one as people stumble upon him.

One more (audio) clip: Crosby in 1931 singing “Star Dust.” It’s nothing like the standard Nat King Cole. He sings it with a wild abandon. Pure passion. Pure despair. Pure, natural talent.

Heston was the most grown-up, adult man of my cinematic youth. He didn’t have the artistry of Burt Lancaster, or the sheer charisma of Kirk Douglas, but he was a Man, with that capital M.

I saw all their movies on what was charmingly called “The 4:30 Movie” on WABC in New York every day after school in the midseventies. These films were the last wave (or gasp) of old Hollywood. They were in color, just one signal that we weren’t in the same place as the days of Gable and Tracy. But we also clearly weren’t in the same place as that time’s Dog Day Afternoon and Marathon Man. I didn’t see those movies as a kid, but I remember the commercials for them, sitting amid my beloved 4:30 Movie, and I wasn’t very attracted to them.

But I was enthralled by The Greatest Show on Earth because of Heston. I thought Brad Braden was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. Even the character name was no-holds-barred manly. No wonder Betty Hutton was agog. Surely Harrison Ford based some of Indiana Jones on Brad: the hat, the leather jacket, the whip! Then there was The Naked Jungle. The title itself titillated the school girl, and again, there was that compelling body, finally pulling Eleanor Parker into its nooks and creases. I think they played Ben-Hur several times a year, which was fine with me. Nothing fires a young girl’s imagination like a chariot race with matching studs (read that as you will). Even Michelangelo—I clearly remember The Agony and the Ecstasy during Easter week one year-—was virility and passion incarnate.

Pauline Kael captured Heston perfectly in her review of The Planet of the Apes:

“With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power — and he has the profile of an eagle.”

Heston acted with that body to give authenticity to these Men. He wasn’t just saying the words—he was bringing a truth to the characters by his knowledge and expertise as a physically powerful man himself. There is a sense of confidence and entitlement that can’t be faked, and it made him the distinctive actor that he was.

Of course we watched The Ten Commandments in the evening at Easter, but his Moses didn’t impress me as much as his Brad. Maybe because there could be no good fantasy life with “the chosen of the Chosen People.” Much too holy for such thoughts.

I didn’t keep up much with Charlton as an adult. Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green are in the DNA of my generation, and he was great in both. I thought he was an excellent Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester’s Three/Four Musketeers, and I loved his guest appearance on Friends with Joey Tribbiani.

I also didn’t pay much attention to his politics, one way or another. It was too much of a buzz kill to the zing of my youthful fantasies about him.

Angel: You are a sourpuss, aren’t you?
Brad Braden: Yeah.
Angel: You want to bite somebody?
Brad Braden: Yeah.
Angel: Well, pick your spot.

I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation by the British. Maybe. (I have some thoughts on that subject here.)

Spoilers abound now for the film and play, but knowing what happens wouldn’t diminish the experience of seeing either. The acting in each is superb.

Kings is a lyric film based on the play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road by Jimmy Murphy. It tells the tale of 6 young Irish guys of Connemara who leave home in 1977 because there are no jobs for them and go to London (of all places) to be day construction laborers. Before they leave, they make a pact that they will only speak Irish to one another. And so the audience reads subtitles for most of the film. (Because most of it is in Irish, it was nominated for Best Foreign Film, 2007. Very cool.)

Of course Irish as a national language was stamped out centuries ago. Its only toehold is in the West where it held on in small pockets from generation to generation.

The film picks up with the friends in middle age, although two of them look like very old men; they are serious drinkers who live only to get from one pint to the next. It follows the tensions between the friends, particularly with Joe (Colm Meany, yes of Star Trek: TNG), the most successful of the lot, who would not give Jackie a job because he was an unreliable drunk amongst the serious drinkers. Jackie was a walking, drowning man, and the friends feel guilty when they can’t save him from the ultimate act of despair.

In flashback sequences we see the crew as young men, so full of hope and potential before the years of drinking wore away their life.

Theirs is world without women, although Mairtin is married, and has gone on the wagon for his wife. It’s been two days that he’s been dry when the story starts. But the wake for Jackie proves too much. He feels the pull of being with the lads much more strongly than any desire to be at home with this wife.

Jackie’s father comes over from Connemara to take his middle-aged son home to bury. It’s a very poignant scene as the little Aer Aran plane touches down at dawn in Ireland just as the the lads, barely keeping body and soul together in London, stumble home. The Irish language is a constant reminder of how alienated the men are in their London surroundings, and how deeply they are bound to each other.

The Seafarer is an engrossing, surprising play by Conor McPherson. We are in the lower working-class Dublin squalor of 2 brothers on Christmas Eve Day. The older brother Richard is a somewhat stereotypical happy drunk, as is his friend Ivan. Dick has the spirit, playfulness, and easy devotion of a child, with the mouth of a sailor. He went blind from an accident recently, but does not pity himself. His younger brother Sharky has recently returned home from a failed job opportunity in County Claire. Sharky is considered a failure all around, although from the minute the play begins we see how he does care about his brother and tried to care for him. He is on the wagon when the play opens.

Not so Ivan, the classic “Oh, me head, me head; I’m too drunk to go home to my wife” character.

Into this little wreck of a male trio comes 2 more: Nicky, a friend of the brothers now married to Sharky’s ex-wife, and Mr. Lockheart, although it is not clear how Nicky knows him.

The 5 gents are going to player poker on Christmas Eve. With a snap of the fingers to freeze time, Mr. Lockhart reveals that he is the Divel himself, come to collect Sharkey’s soul for an old debt.

It’s a startlingly chilling moment. When Lockheart starts to talk about the cold isolation of hell, even nonbelievers in the audience are deeply spooked.

The luck of the Irish is with the men, and they outwit the Devil in cards, with the help of 100 proof potcheen, in time to go to Christmas morning mass, partially attracted by the beer that the monks brew. It’s an alcohol-soaked play, from start to stop.

These pieces both addressed drinking with a consciousness I hadn’t seen before: there is a resignation to alcohol in these men’s lives. Alcoholism is a disease, but most of these blokes seem to be in the grey area between alcoholics and more willfully out-of-control drinkers. Kings in particular makes the distinction that Jackie was in the jaws of the disease, while his friends were just serious drinkers.

Can all these Irish souls be in such constant pain that they need to be continously anesthetized? I don’t know if that’s how McPherson and Collins see it. Some of the characters dance around stereotypes, but then become more dimensional. As for the cosmic root of the drinking–the centuries of oppression idea is not so far-fetched. It’s certainly part of what created the Irish epithet: “their wars are happy and all their songs are sad.”

To someone on the outside, it’s hard not to see an underlying sadness in these daily lives, yet you admire them for getting on with it all, as best they can.

Erin Go Bragh.

ALL SPOILERS

At the beginning of the film we see MC survive a car bomb, and then we get the “4 days earlier” message that resets the time frame. When we arrive at this point in time again, people are complaining that no suspense exists, because we know he survives.

That is true. But the car bomb scene is not about intrigue suspense, but about subtle dramatic revelation and a turning point for the character Michael Clayton. I haven’t seen anyone write about this.

At the beginning of the film, MC “fixes” a situation for a client in Westchester, and as he is driving toward home he sees horses in a field. He pulls over, gets out of the car and walks over to them. It is just dawn, and the lighting of the scene is very beautiful. Over his left shoulder we see his car blow up. He runs into the forest, and then we go back 4 days earlier and the story really starts from there for the viewer.

When we arrive back at this scene, we have important new knowledge and context. We have learned that MC’s son Henry is engrossed in a sci fi world of a book called Realm & Conquest. He gives a copy of the book to his dad, and to Arthur Edens, the other main character. Arthur is very taken with it, and bonds with Henry over it. MC hasn’t had time to look at it.

Fast forward to Arthur being killed. MC goes to his apartment to look around, and he finds the copy of the book. He flips through it and stops for a second on a page with an illustration of horses. (He continues to flip, and finds the receipt for the report that is at the copy shop.)

Now further ahead to Michael driving away from his task in Westchester. Again we all see the horses—but now we know that they are almost exactly like the illustration in the book. That’s why Michael stopped in the first place. He was amazed, surprised. Without this knowledge the first time, you have to wonder why he got out of the car for a bunch of horses. They are not an uncommon sight in Westchester.

This second time with the horses is a longer scene than the first. We see Michael’s reaction more fully, and it is beautifully dramatic. We now see on his face that he feels his grief over Arthur, and his deep love for his son, and that he is having an “ah-ha” moment of embracing life itself in the beauty of those magnificent animals. Then the car blows up. So, the illustration in Realm & Conquest saved Michael’s life. Hmm.

The evil corporate giant U-North is the antithesis of everything that is connecting in Michael’s head, and from that moment, he acts to finish what Arthur started, and bring down the bastards.

As I said, it’s a subtle moment. It wasn’t meant to be suspenseful about the car bomb. I think it’s a tighter film than some people give it credit for, and Clooney’s performance is very, very rich.

That said, they say that Daniel Day Lewis has a lock on the Best Actor nod. I will catch up, sometime.

The chance to see Fiona Shaw, however, sent me running to BAM for her limited engagement in Happy Days. I went with few preconceived notions. I had seen photos of Irene Worth somewhere along the way. Her aging music hall woman, with flapper headband, stuck in the sand never looked very appealing.

But from the moment I walked into the Brooklyn theater, I was carried away. Tom Pye’s “mound” is a visually stunning mixture of English seaside gone nightmare and post apocalyptic landscape. The lighting is piercingly LCD bright, unnatural, startling.

An elegant white parachute material curtain rises to the ceiling, and when it gently falls, Winnie is there, buried to her waist in the sand, gently folded over herself, with her head and arms resting on the ground.

A loud, jarring, ugly alarm sounds—jolting everyone–and Winnie wakes up. Her day is book ended by the buzzer that tells her to sleep.

She begins her morning rituals by brushing her teeth. The absurdity of the situation is heighten by the familiarity of it—-both in the normalcy of brushing your teeth in the morning, and in the fears being embodied before your very eyes: the fear of being stuck, or buried alive, or isolated from all humanity.

It turns out Winnie is not completely isolated. There is Willie, her husband, who lives in a hole to the side of her mound. He grunts monosyllabic answers to her questions and reads headlines from his paper. Winnie speaks of how wonderful it will be if/when he moves to the front of her mound and she’ll be able to see him without straining her neck.

The rest of Winnie’s world is a parasol and a black bag that contains her mirror, a revolver, and a hat. The sun is merciless, and she is baking. The hat offers a little protection, as does the parasol, until it mysteriously blows up.

Winnie’s life is ritual and verbal. Her conversation is peppered with quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Browning, Keats, Byron, authors who make her feel less alone. (Here is a guide to them–scroll down to the Literary Allusions). Even her oft repeated “sorrow keeps breaking in” is apparently from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The fear that she articulates is that there will be no one to listen to her. “Just to know that in theory you hear me even though in fact you don’t is all I need.”

Just how much of blogging did Beckett foreshadow? All of our voices “out there” in the barren landscape of the blogsphere in the hope that someone is listening. In the hope that we don’t come across as the droning, tedious wife. We bring as much of life as we can into the void, soldiering on through anxiety and angst. From the other perspective, Winnie is a consummate blogger, with her daily entries of conversation.

Back in her theactrical world, what comes across most in Act I is the life force at its purest. Fiona Shaw is luminous. Her “chatter,” as it has been called, is not grating in the least, but engaging, measured, rhythmically inflected, with extraordinary facial gestures and arm movements.

There is a lot going on here. The piece could be a metaphor for what happens to married couples when they settle into the coexisting grunting state. Willie as the henpecked husband, who has shut himself off from his wife’s eternal yammering. Winnie can’t stop yammering because she literally can do nothing else. Willie could leave the mound, could leave Winnie, and we have no idea why he doesn’t.

The gun is an ominous presence. Winnie kisses it, and could use it to end her situation, at least in Act 1.

In Act II, with no relative time to Act I, Winnie wakes up and is buried up to her neck; she can no longer do her morning rituals, or reach the gun. Winnie doesn’t comment directly on her worsening condition. She continues to try to organize her time as best she can, knowing that the song must be sung before the bell to sleep. That she shows no outward sign of complete despair is deeply unnerving.

At the end of the play, Willie moves to the front of the mound, ‘dressed to kill” as it says in the play in formal mourning trousers and top hat, and Winnie is excited that he is reaching out to her. She sings “The Merry Widow Waltz” (I love you so) since she can no longer open the music box. The last moment is Willie reaching up toward her, and the two looking at each other.

But is he reaching for the gun? Is it to use on himself, or her? It is a haunting ambiguity.

I grew attached to Winnie in the course of the play, drawn in by her spirit and determinism. “This will have been another happy day.” I could say the same from my mound here in blogspot.com. Lucky for me Steed always responds in full sentences and doesn’t like guns at all. In fact we BBBBBUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZ.

I had no idea he was so young. I watched Brokeback Mountain on HBO just last week, and was again swept away by the depth and magnitude of his performance. How could he be SO knowing about all the extraordinary angles of that role?

As I click around to all the blogs with posts for him, I am chilled by seeing the date, today’s date, January 22, 2008. A powerful reminder that we don’t know the date of our own death. Only those who remain see that side of the equation of our life.

We don’t know what was in his heart and mind today, and whether anything clouded his reason. Nor does anyone know how another carries the gift and burden that is life.

But from the outside, it seemed that this man had everything, except length of days.

John Lahr, The New Yorker

“But like most great art The Homecoming operates on a mythic as well as an immediate level. It insists that some shadowy part of you is part of it. It burrows under your skin and festers.

Mr. Pinter, you see, knows where you live.”

Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Then he knows I live about 60 blocks away from the current Broadway revival. Lahr and Brantley’s writing about this happening homecoming was so compelling that I bought myself a ticket to the Boxing Day matinee.

It was not a life-changing experience, but I am very happy to have seen Ian McShane onstage. He is a solid, self aware actor. He knows where to locate, where to center his character, and that makes him a compelling artist to watch. I am a huge Deadwood fan, and loved the perfect match-up of Swearengen and McShane. He certainly calls on some of the territory he explored through Al in his portrayal of Max, his much less successful Brit cousin.

Brantley has a very clear review of the revival here

I do not know Pinter’s works, so let me offer a fresh, nonacademic perspective. The story in a nutshell is this: an English philosophy professor working in the US brings his English wife to London to visit his family, whom she has never met, and she decides to stay there, as wife, mother, and whore to his 2 brothers and father. In generous terms, it’s an updating with sly twists on a Levirate marriage, if we want to throw some Old Testament its way; well, the wife is named Ruth.

Max, the patriarch, has three grown sons, whom we’ll call Hewy, Dewy, and Louie—-taking our cue from Pinter’s playful nature—-and a brother, Uncle Donald, of course.

When we first meet Professor Hewy and his wife Ruth, she is a bit catatonic. When they run into brother Louie, she wakes up and starts to flirt with him when Hewy has gone up to bed. Shades of things to come.

When Max first meets Ruth, he’s abusive, relentlessly calling her a whore, a scrubber. Hewy stands up for her, finally convincing the family that she is his WIFE, the mother of their three children. Oh. Then. All is sanctioned, all is well.

Until . . . Ruth alludes to her life before her marriage, before she met Hewy and had her children. She tells Louie she had been a model-—no, not of hats.

It’s a quick, slippery slope to her making out on the couch with Dewy, while Max, Uncle Donald, Hewy and Louie look on. Hewy is now the catatonic one, glued to his chair. Stage to black. When we come back, Hewy is still in that chair, Dewy comes downstairs—he’s been upstairs with Ruth for two hours,

When she comes down, Max and the boys have hatched a plot to ask her to stay with them, rather than returning with her husband to their children. She’ll have to pull her own financial weight; no problem, Louie is a pimp and he can get her work for four hours a night for bread and milk money. That way she’d have her days free to service them, and cook, and clean.

Ruth decides to stay—-she negotiates terms she wants. Hewy says goodbye, he can manage their kids as Ruth takes her place in Max’s chair, now the center of this London family.

It’s a funny play, in a discomfiting way. Ruth enters this house of losers, and decides she can be queen. Anything to save her from the life of an academician’s wife. That is pretty funny.

But it’s also bleak, that marriage could be so repressive that a woman would walk away from her family and into such a bizarre situation.

There are hints that it’s the mendacity of our lives that causes such psychic damage to relationships. Uncle Donald reveals a secret, that Max’s wife and best friend were lovers before they died.

Besides the hints that Ruth’s pre-marriage life was promiscuous, I think there are hints that Hewy isn’t really a professor of philosophy. In Act 2 brother Louie starts teasing/grilling him with some psycho-babble questions about the nature of reality and the logic of Christians tenets. Hewy isn’t able to retort at all. He keeps saying something like “that’s not my province.” If he had Ph.d in philosophy, he would at least be able to psycho-babble back in kind. And there are people who think Hewy and Ruth may not be married, because Hewy restates it SO many times.

One reading of this little tale is that the lies need to be exposed in order for the characters to start to return to health. Hence Ruth “wakes up” and takes control when her true nature is acknowleged. (Keeping in mind that that “true nature” is Pinter’s fantasy.)

This made me think of Dennis Potter, a challenging playwright whose work I do know. He took this idea to a further extreme in his 1976 Brimstone and Treacle. Pattie, who is brain damaged in a car accident, is brought back to consciousness when she’s raped by Martin Taylor, the young man whom her parents let into the house. Martin is likely Satan, the Devil incarnate, and so we see that evil is conjured by all the lying surrounding Pattie’s accident, including her father’s adultery.

Pinter doesn’t have that sense of evil in his house. It’s just Max and the ducklings being clods, as my grandmother might have called them. The story is told with remarkable economy of line, both verbal and visual. It is a good night at the theater.

Oh, the fuss is very well deserved.

MARY’S VOICE
I love him, dear Lord. Watch over
him tonight.

JANIE’S VOICE
Please, God. Something’s the matter
with Daddy.

ZUZU’S VOICE
Please bring Daddy back.

It’s a Wonderful Life tells a story that would exist whether Philip Van Doren Stern had ever written his short story “The Greatest Gift” or not. It’s part of being a sentient person to wonder what would things be like if you weren’t here, either from your death now, or backdating the idea to never being on the planet.

But what raises it up to a great film is its earthiness and common-sense sensibility. It draws situations with just a few strokes that have deep resonance for the experience of the solid middle class after World War II, like the family dinner scene before the high school graduation dance, the father’s fatigue at working at a job he doesn’t like, and George’s ideas of getting out: “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world.”

But most importantly, it captures the anger that lies just beneath the surface of so much of “nice” domestic life, a byproduct of all the primal life forces held in a precarious balance for family life to be possible at all.

Jimmy Stewart’s performance is strong throughout, and his anger is particularly convincing in various scenes.

In the phone call scene with Mary he portrays “panic of commitment” without cliché.

Script direction:
George can stand it no longer. He drops the phone with a crash grabs Mary by the shoulders and shakes her. Mary begins to cry.

“Now you listen to me. I don’t want any plastics and I don’t want any ground floors. And I don’t want to get married *ever* to anyone! You understand that? I want to do what I want to do.”

He’s angry and his sexual energy is dangerous as he’s drawn to Mary, his lust overwhelming his wanderlust. This is not a sentimental vignette. It is a clear-eyed look at one of the age-old realities of civilization: men don’t particularly want to participate.

George’s anger at Uncle Billy when he discovers the money has been lost is sharp: “Where’s that money, you silly stupid old fool? Where’s that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison. That’s what it means. One of us is going to jail - well, it’s not gonna be me.”

When George gets home he isn’t able to tell Mary what’s happened, he can only rage against the pedestrian details of his life: the broken banister, the kid banging on the piano, how cold the house is, the teacher who sent ZuZu home sick.

He is a hulking presence, terrorizing the family with his anger: Mary (in an outburst) “George, why must you torture the children?”

That’s when George runs out of the house and to his appointed destiny with Clarence.

PETE
Is Daddy in trouble?

JANIE
Shall I pray for him?

MARY
Yes, Janie, pray very hard.

TOMMY
Me, too?

MARY
You too, Tommy.
(on phone)
Hello, Uncle Billy?

George’s sojourn in the universe where he never existed is carefully plotted, and the details are deep. The town is ugly and the people mean and crass. He finds his mother is a harsh, suspicious landlady and Mary a withered, mousy woman. Mr. Gower is a rummy child murderer, his brother is in the cemetery and by extension, all the men in the transport because his brother wasn’t there to save them. The dots are strongly connected, and his actual impact on these lives is clear. Again, I see no mawkish sentiment here.

George’s nightmare is short-lived, as he returns to the bridge and prays to live again: “I want to live again. I want to live again. Please, God, let me live again.”

The snow returns and he is back to his life. My favorite part is him running through the town; it is the perfect visualization of a feeling of unbridled hope and joy. For the moment, anger—which is fueled by the maddening details of life and experience—is banished by the desire for life itself.

I think it is an excellent film. I think if Clarence’s line “Ridiculous of you to think of killing yourself for money,” helps one person gain perspective when things are grim, then it’s more than an excellent film. And I like its depiction of prayer. It reminds us that we don’t know how that grace works, but people have experienced its power, and so it should show up occasionally in our cinema lives.

Here’s a great gift from Imdb: the whole script is online.

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/It’s-a-Wonderful-Life.html

We watched clips from the heyday of live fifties tv, seeing the young, earnest pencil-tied Dave Brubeck Quartet in glorious black and white on the Timex All -Star Jazz Hour and Playboy’s Penthouse, then early sixties grooving on “Blue Rondo a la Turk” leading to seventies fusion on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, to a recent legends program where he performed with the great Dr. Billy Taylor, who was on the panel tonight too.

The evening was copresented with The Brubeck Institute, started in 2000 at The University of the Pacific to honor its illustrious alumni. They brought the current Brubeck Fellows to perform, five young musicians studying at the Conservatory on full scholarship.

They are deeply talented musicians, with great composure for being 19 or so.

But the thrill of the evening, without a doubt, was Brubeck taking over the piano on “Blue Rondo.” He is 87 years old—-I thought it was going to be perfunctory, but the piano became an entirely different instrument under his control. Javier Santiago, the young Brubeck Institute Fellow pianist, was great: agile, connected, a talented composer as they played one of his pieces. But once Brubeck was at the keys, Santiago’s playing seemed child-like. Brubeck’s mastery, experience, sheer depth of understanding changed the sound of the piano. It’s an amazing phenomenon to experience, how one instrument can sing so differently for different players.

What was also remarkable about seeing Brubeck is what a grounded human being he is. Somewhat ironic for the genius who lives in the space of odd, unbalanced time signatures. He exudes exuberance. He has been married to the same women for more than 60 years and they have 4 sons. He became a Roman Catholic in 1980, shortly after composing the Mass To Hope. It seems that the dark side of the force that swallowed up the genius of so many of his fellow greats didn’t touch him.

So the Devil can’t count in 5/4 or 9/8. Good to know.

The first event featured the the huge talents of Upright Citizens Brigade, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Amy Poehler, and “Matt Walsh” (who was unusually quiet*), and the second brought the whole writing staff of Late Night with David Letterman Show to the stage, in conjunction with the New York Comedy Festival. They were two fabulous evenings of connecting with the very root of some of the great sketch comedy on television.

I did not know UCB firsthand. I hadn’t watched their show on Comedy Central nor seen their live improv act. But since clips were shown throughout the evening, that wasn’t a problem.

And what clips. Mogomra vs. the Fart Monster, Jesus Camp, Psychotonomy, Hot Chicks Room, Flight Simulation—

Watching UCB’s television is to enter a bright world of inanity. As Ross Ruediger of The Rued Morgue writes in his review of the second season DVD, “Sketch comedy is rarely this meticulously plotted or strung together, and this material becomes funnier on repeated viewings, hence it is ideal for the DVD format.”

In person, the trio was every bit as sharp and witty as you would want them to be, something that always sets off seeing writers in person as opposed to actors. They spoke of their mentor, Del Chase, and his innovative improv framework “the Harold,” which they brought to tv to structure their 22 minutes (a little shorter than an average Harold).

Todd Hanson, of The Onion, was the moderator and obvious serious fan. (And what a fabulous voice—he should be on the radio.) Part of the discussion centered on the anger and rage at the base of this comedy. It’s a reaction to the status quo at large, and to personal issues, such as Besser’s grandmother sending him to a Christian sports camp.

“From the dawn of civilization, they have existed in order to undermine it. Our only enemy is the status quo. Our only friend is chaos. They have no government ties and unlimited resources. If something goes wrong, we are the cause.”

The show also used filmed real-life pranks, as the Brigade worked their magic on unsuspecting city dwellers. There’s an appealing energy to their work, and a slick yearning to skew anything that smacks of hypocrisy while goosing anything that just seems too pedestrian. (*Matt Walsh couldn’t make the evening, but sent an impersonator so that the quartet would not become a trio.)

The usual daily dose of silliness comes via the Late Night with David Letterman Show. What was cool about seeing the whole team onstage was that it made me think of the writing teams of the greats—Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns. This is the modern-day incarnation of those legendary guys. They craft the character of “Dave” as surely as their predecessors created the greats.

And “guy” is the operative word. I had to leave the evening early, and don’t know if anyone asked about the lack of women on the team. That’s a debate for another day.

Led by brothers/head writers Eric and Justin Stangel, each writer showed clips of specific things he had written. Bill Scheft, a longtime writer, was a funny moderator, and again, as witty and fast on his feet as you want your Late Show writer to be.

Whether you think it’s sophomoric or cutting-edge, the comedy on the Late Show is dependable. You have a horrible day, and you know you can turn on the tv as the day is finally ending and Dave is going to be there doing his thing for you. It’s a sure thing in an uncertain world. And like the great comic personas of the past, he needs a team to put him there.

Long live the writers’room—and may they be given what they deserve to get back into it soon.

Nov. 11

LazyEyeTheatre’s Piper comes off of Double Secret Probation to sing the praises of the cafeteria scene in Animal House, Cathleen Rittereiser wends her way through many moments before landing on an important David Steinberg bit, and Mr. Pelican offers a double decker post.

Nov. 10

“An overly emotional, overly excitable teenage girl residing in London,” sends us a charming take on from our friends Mr. Potato Head and Woody from Toy Story.

Nov. 9

Noel Vera muses, ” In this age of high-concept comedies . . . going back to a modest, semi-forgotten little comedy like Carl Reiner’s Oh God! can literally be, well, a godsend.”

Nov. 8

Tim Susman recounts a moment of nearly unbelievable RL slapstick.

The Man from Porlock engagingly reminds us why “Tootsie is the greatest modern showcase of the strengths of classical comedy structure.”

Nov. 7

Gee bobg tells us of a ninth-grade talent show, access TV, and a country county they called CHUD! that led to “astonished looks on our faces as the crowd dissolved into screaming laughter.” Good times.

Nov.6

Therapydoc offers a mixture of angels-on-a-pin/theological whimsey, and Jeremy sends a good old-fashioned joke via Blue Girl’s encouragement.

Jennifer gets into the spirit with a tale of an improv class at Chicago’s Second City Conservatory Program that really took off, and in that experiential vein, I offer a tale of unintentional hilarity at a Mensa meeting I attended, with respects to Mr. Allen.

As for pure fiction, Kathleen sends us a fabulous piece of her novel, which we can call Dominus Nabisco

We have our first Film Guy post. Oggs talks us into how funny Joyce Bernal’s Booba is, and why he returns to it “for a dose of much-needed chuckles during my most stress filled days.”

Then it became more clear that the “hallowed” of all Hallows Eve means holy or sacred, and that the ordinary people had to wait one more day for their do. Fine. That makes it doubly fitting to talk about The Who today—-they are many things, and ordinary isn’t one of them.

I had the thrill of seeing the premiere of the new biodoc about them, Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who, at the Paley Center for Media on Tuesday night. Besides the film itself, the thrill was having Roger Daltrey and Chris Stamp, their co-manager until 1973, in the audience.

It is an engaging, satisfying documentary. The story threads of the individuals are strong and easy to follow, and there’s enough performance footage to balance the talking heads. Luckily, the main talking heads are Daltrey, Townshend, and Stamp, so your attention does not drift. The filmmakers—-a team of Nigel Sinclair (No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) and Robert Rosenberg, executive producer Bill Curbishley, and directors Paul Crowder (Once In a Lifetime) and Murray Lerner—-have found amazing footage of the band when they were the High Numbers, among other rarities.

There are many highlights, but the absolute standout moment is the footage of the group performing at the Concert for New York in Madison Square Garden on October 20, 2001.

I had not seen that concert on tv, so it was a fresh, immediate experience for me here. The defiant downbeat to the unmistakable undulating A and D chords. Sublime tension drawn out . . . drawn out . . . drawn out, until the next merciful, scalding downbeat release:

We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Said out judgments were all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

Townshend is on fire, Entwistle is planted firm, and Daltrey’s voice is strong, certain

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray

WE DON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

The primal scream, now taking on meaning informed by the murder of 3,000 people.

The theater-sized screen, the souped-up sound system, the sheer power and brilliance of that performance: the Paley Center crowd broke into applause as the last chord rang out, even jaded first-nighters roused by reliving this painful, extraordinary moment in time. The filmmakers seemed to know instinctively to let this performance footage be the longest in the whole film.

In the panel discussion afterward, Daltrey said that it was Pete who decided that they would do rock ‘n’ roll, that others might be doing more gentle, “healing” songs, but he wanted to rock the place down.

And that’s why they are in my thoughts this sainted day, as the Church encourages acknowledging the saints we know in our daily lives outside of the litany.

Townshend & co. offered back to a shattered, grieving, stunned city the comfort of certainty. His music is in the DNA of at least 2 generations. The angst, the longing in his chords—the anger, the rebellion, the exuberance: THIS IS WHO WE FUCKING ARE. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll—it’s part of life. And a particularly American life.

We had just been attacked, in part, because of those values. Because a fundamentalist viewpoint sees the decadent West that must be destroyed.

But Pete, and Roger, and John pushed back as only they could and said NO. You can’t kill us—we will go on stronger, and longer, and louder. And we were all raised up then, and now in the rewatching, by the blistering, insistent, inspired performance of their anthem. Deo Gratia.

Check out Tom Watson’s own appreciation of the band if you haven’t already done so.

The film is being shown on VH1, commercial free, at 9:00 p.m., this Saturday, Nov. 3. I will definitely watch it again. The DVD goes on sale Nov. 6.

To offer some relief from this reality, Newcritics is hosting a comedy blog-a-thon November 6 to 11 to coincide with the New York Comedy Festival. We are putting out a call for posts that answer this question:

What is the purest comedic moment you have ever experienced?

This blog-a-thon is designed to cut across blog genres: we hope that you film guys will contribute the great movie moments; the lit crit types might regale us with scenes of Evelyn Waugh or Wodehouse that you find brilliant; you tv addicts will kick in the great small screen nuggets, and so on.

We know that to analyze comedy is to kill it, but this is also a personal question–it’s your most satisfying moment of experiencing what we collectively call comedy, but which will have a spectrum from the sardonic to slapstick.

Maybe it was at a standup performance, maybe listening to a comedy album, maybe it was at your best friend’s wedding. We look forward to hearing about it. And, like Joel McCrae learned at the end of Sullivan’s Travels, you never know when a story you share is going to lighten the day for one of your readers.

Send permalinks to josquin21@aol.com as you publish on your own site, Nov. 6 to 11. I’ll group them/post them at newcritics for all to connect to. Newcritics will also be posting an array of comedy-centric pieces all that week.

Comedy UPDATE: First Ever “New York’s Funniest Stand-Up” Award
The New York Comedy Festival has announced its search for “New York’s Funniest Stand-Up,” a comedy competition open to any and all stand-up comedians who think they have what it takes to be “New York’s Funniest Stand-Up.” An open call will be held at Carolines on Broadway on Tuesday, October 16, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Go here for details and rules.

On the one hand he is a self-made man who has ably demonstrated Galt’s creed: “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Just ask his half brother, or his poor wife and children.

I was surprised when Ayn Rand was brought into Mad Men via Mr. Cooper. Other than on The Simpsons, she’s not a sixties cultural touchstone that turns up in TV shows the way Kennedy/Nixon, The Apartment, and Maypo might. The fact that this week–in fact I believe it’s today–is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged makes it all even more intriguing.

Personally I don’t see Don as a Rand hero at all. For one thing he isn’t good enough at his job. Her heroes are extremely competent to brilliant at what they do, and Don’s creative ideas just aren’t that good. Does anyone remember Bethlehem Steel?

“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” Francisco d’Anconia

What Don is good at is impersonating a life, something Rand would have contempt for. He didn’t earn the Purple Heart, he didn’t marry a soulmate, and he supports the system he works in, even if he is good at manipulating it. He hates Kennedy, maybe because he senses another poseur like himself. As Robert Dallek tells us, Kennedy’s image of youth and health was an illusion: “Films at the Kennedy library . . . . suggest that the variety of ailments Kennedy had struggled with for a long time—spastic colitis, osteoporosis, prostatitis, urethritis, and Addison’s disease (a malfunction of the adrenal gland)—may have been the principal contributing factor” for his hands shaking. Very little, we all learned later, was what it seemed in Camelot.

“To me, there’s only one form of human depravity–the man without a purpose.” Hank Rearden

Draper doesn’t take his responsibilities as husband and father, two honorable roles, as a true purpose. Becoming a partner in an ad agency might be purposeful to him; leaving his family and starting a more sincere life over with Rachel might be a purpose.

At the end of the day, if Don is going to fulfill a TV destiny as a latter-day Rand hero, he must become what he now only pretends to be.

“A is A.” John Galt

Come back at 10:00 ET as we watch the all-important penultimate MM episode.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH–that’s one great lead-in to tonight’s journey

We have been warned. We have never been warned before. Children, please leave the room

“Duck,” is this part of the hunting metaphor Pete started a while ago–is that gun going to go off in this act?

What, she doesn’t want secrets? Would someone clue her in on the gist of this show–

A polka crowd. Says it all. This is 1960 isn’t it?

Peggy’s metamorphis to matron is extreme. How could she so so completely submerge her youth?

Oh Pete, you are so not being smart here–

So the real Draper was an engineer–how Randian of Weiner !

That was a fairly compelling portrayal of world collapsing in. Don really is the hollow man. Can we get a little T.S. Eliot riff going? “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”

You go Don–Pete is that awful. I’m finding some respect for Draper here

Actually burying himself. Very effective.

So the season arc becomes more clear, takes more shape. Don is an opportunist, not a split personality.

Next week we bring it on home–see you then.

Last week I was interested in how MM was channeling some of the great film directors, from Stahl to Sirk to Lynch. I omitted the master himself, Hitchcock, who was certainly invoked in the first scene, with the birds. I am more than making up for that slight as I pay homage to Rear Window myself, sitting here in light blue men’s pajamas, my leg in a “boot” and crutches at my side. My accident was not as glamorous as photographing a crash at a race track, but was very New York: falling while running for the subway.

I do not have binoculars, and am lucky to have open views from my windows. But watching television is voyeurism of a sort, and as the hours pass, I am bonding more and more with Jimmy Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies. Come back at 10:00 for the live action, and here is the essay that caused offense to the film directing gods, not that I’m superstitious.

Two weeks ago Mad Men our episode began with a sunny shot of Betty in striking sunglasses, and ended with the crazed Bonnie Parker in pink Fredericks of Hollywood out for the 1:00 p.m. kill-the-neighbor’s pigeons session. It felt to many that we had taken a turn into David Lynch territory, because these two scenes had an unreal/hyperreal feel to them with Lynch’s underlying disturbing creepiness.

For me those sunglasses were a visual quote back to the all-time creepiest use of sunglasses in film history, in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). As described in the allmovie guide, “Gene Tierney portrays a beautiful but unstable woman who marries successful novelist Cornel Wilde. “ Swap out novelist to ad man, and we have a match. Tierney becomes so obsessed with her husband that she cannot bear him spending time with anyone but her, including his crippled brother. She lures the boy into the lake to encourage him to swim to get stronger as she spots him from her rowboat. One day she takes him out further and further, then puts on sunglasses and rows away from him as he calls out that he’s getting tired and needs to get back in the boat. The camera focuses on Tierney, expressionless, sitting there in those sunglasses as the boy struggles, and struggles, and drowns.

“It’s deepest noir in the brightest Technicolor”—a description some would apply to suburbia. And it was directed by John M. Stahl, who directed the original Imitation of Life in 1934 with Claudette Colbert and the original Magnificent Obsession in 1935 with Irene Dunne. Thus Stahl begat Sirk who begat Haynes—-with all those permutations of Heaven titles between them.

Matthew Weiner certainly draws upon that body of film work, where the director with his cinematographer is responsible for the creative essence. But in the producer’s medium of television, it’s Matt, as creator/producer, who has all the power to get his creative vision on screen. Episodes are parceled out to numerous directors, who work within the established sensibility of the show (and channel David Lynch when necessary).

Mad Men has an enviable “A” list of directors: Alan Taylor (who just won for The Sopranos “Heidi and Kennedy” episode); Ed Bianchi and Tim Hunter (Homicide, Deadwood); Lesli Glatter (The Closer, West Wing) and the multitalented Paul Feig, who directed “Shoot.” It’s the reason the show is so compelling to watch—-you can virtually feel that talent in the direction.

Should we call 1960 the year of the plaid?

May-po!

“You people are not watching enough television”–I agree. More television for everyone.

Red is dressing very 1965–how does she do it?

Trashing Psycho–these guys are on the losing side of everything

Okay, another plot detour. But I like Blonde Friend. Her being fired is a genuine moment, maybe it will connect to something

Should they be having this conversation IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OFFICE?

Is this the DoubleMint gum campaign

Turning off the air and raising the temperature–I haven’t thought about that since college

Oh, the lucky ones get to leave

Must we hit all the male fantasy zones in one freakin’ show?

Wow–Draper knows how to take control of a situation

The multiple plot lines on this show feel so forced–it’s all so choppy. So now we return to the Stepmother plotline, but all the seams are showing.

How realistic is it that a television was in a hospital lounge in 1960–that doesn’t feel right

Well. We learned the mystery of the whore child. I am genuinely baffled as to how so many people, many of whom’s opinion I respect, can find this series compelling. It remains bits and pieces of some good moments, beautifully filmed and often masterfully directed, but with such weak storytelling that, as Tom says, it’s often boring.

I think there are three more episodes to go. I will be sitting and mending through them all. Good night everyone.

“. . . and I shambled after as I’ve