How do you know when you've gone to the same Wendy's too many times? Is it:
I think it's that last one.
December 12 movie: Meet Me in Las Vegas. What luck that I got to see this movie! I've wanted to see it for a long time, I even recorded it once and our bad DVR crashed and didn't record it. (Since then the cable company replaced the box with one that works.) The info guide got it wrong and IDed this as Meet Me In St. Louis, so I didn't set it up to record. And then I happened to turn on the tv just as it was starting!
Dan Dailey plays a down-on-his luck rancher with a gambling problem. Cyd Charisse plays a ballerina performing at the Sands. Whenever they hold hands, they literally cannot lose at any game of chance. It's not a great movie, but fun to watch. Thurston Howell from Gilligan's Island plays the head booker at the Sands and there are cameos by a lot of stars.
December 12 movie: There Goes My Heart. The first time I saw this, I thought it was just a knockoff of It Happened One Night. Well, it is. And I've seen it a couple more times, and it's grown on me each time. There's a sweetness to this movie that's really charming. Virginia Bruce and Fredric March have great chemistry, and Patsy Kelly and Alan Mowbray are funny as the secondary couple.
It's been a fun, busy weekend. Let's see, Friday night we went to a "drive-through living nativity" with D. and S. I was seriously impressed with how well the event was put together. They gave us a CD at the start and told us when to start playing it. The CD describes each scene and told us when to pull forward to the next scene. There were 5 (maybe 6) scenes, and at each one people were acting out the same thing we were hearing on the CD. Somehow they managed to get it almost perfectly in sync with the CD, which they could not hear because we were playing it in our car. I'm still trying to figure out how they did that. Did they have some system of cues that we couldn't see? Or had they just practiced a lot.
The event did involve evangelism but very low-key and non-intrusive. The first guy just asked us if we had a home church and invited us to come to theirs. He described their church using a few key phrases -- charismatic, non-denominational, "we're all about Jesus" -- which I'm sure would have told us everything about their church, if we understood the lingo. Especially that last one. I would think all Christian churches were about Jesus, so that must mean something specific.
Saturday was the busiest: first a get-together for the North Durham Obama team. About 8 people came and it was really nice to see them again. Unfortunately a few folks I had really wanted to see couldn't make it. We're talking about having another meeting right after the inauguration since two of our group are going.
Then after the meeting Georg and I went to the farmer's market. We visited the famous pie lady, and her pies are as good as advertised. By the time we got there all she had left was a pie with roasted cauliflower, raisins and capers. It was excellent. Next time we're going to go earlier so there's more to choose from.
Then we did some shopping, including new lights which we put up out front when we got home. They're LED stars that change color. Corny, perhaps, and that's why we like them. The LEDs use much less power than regular lights, and the color changes are less abrupt too.
In the evening we made a sweet potato gratin for dinner and I worked on my end of the year theme shows. There's the Christmas show next week. More properly called a holiday show, because the 21st is also the first day of Hanukkah so I'm going to play Hanukkah music too. Then the week after is the last show of the year, and I'm going to a four-hour retrospective with a song a year for the entire time period covered by the show. Well, that's what I'm going to try to do. The oldest song I've ever played was from 1911, and it's going to be hard to do a song for every year from the teens. There is recorded music from that era, but I don't have much of it. On the bright side a lot of that really old music is in the public domain so it can be found online.
Anyway, once you get to 1923 or so it's easy peasy thanks to Wikipedia. They've got a "year in music" page for every year that lists the most popular recorded music of the year. That's what I did last night, just went through the list and wrote down a couple of songs for each year. I got up to 1957 before I started to feel really tired & then I ended up falling asleep in the middle of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
This morning we had dim sum with S. and D. It was particularly good this morning, and our only disappointment was that the chinese broccoli didn't come out until we were too full to have a plate. We've been getting there early because they get so crowded; maybe next time we should experiment with arriving later and see if different food is available.
Of course I had my show this afternoon, and in about an hour we're on our way to a Christmas party. Busy weekend!
December 11 movie: Pepe. Santa Salsera and I got together and watched this. It was a comedy starring Cantinflas, a famous Mexican comedian. Basically Pepe is a Mexican magical black man. He appears out of nowhere, fixes all the white people's problems, asks for nothing for himself, and then disappears whence he came.
The movie was still enjoyable for the staggering number of cameos. Greer Garson, Edward G. Robinson, Billie Burke, Charles Coburn, Ernie Kovacks, Bing Crosby, Jack Lemmon, William Demarest, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ann B. Davis ... that's just the first 15 minutes. It's also got all five members of the Rat Pack, and singing by Bobby Darin, Shirley Jones, Sammy Davis Jr. and Maurice Chevalier. Plus more cameos by at least a dozen other celebrities. The stars are Shirley Jones and Dan Dailey. Most of the other celebrities play themselves.
Pepe was a bit too long. Well, about an hour too long. It felt very episodic, like watching an entire season of a half-hour drama on DVD. When we reached the "when is this movie going to end" phase we started talking about Latin music. I had heard this song on Pandora a few days before, "Ay, Azabache!" by Ibrahim Ferrer. It's caliente, and it turned out Santa Salsera had it in her collection! (I'm not surprised actually. Her music library is pretty amazing.) She put it on and liked it so much she jumped up and started spontaneously dancing.
Santa Salsera also hooked me up with an early 60s album by Rene Touzet. I had never heard of him before. He's terrific! The cha-cha version of 'S Wonderful must be heard to be believed.
December 10 movie: High Noon. It's hard to find anything to say about an iconic movie like this. so I'll just say that it's one of those movies that you either get or you don't. I love it, but if you don't, don't say I didn't warn you.
My two favorite Christmas movies are scheduled to air on Turner Classic Movies in the next couple of days:
The Man Who Came to Dinner tonight at 12:15 am.
Christmas in Connecticut tomorrow at 4:00 pm.
Both terrific movies. Don't miss them!
December 10 movie: Cowboy from Brooklyn. Dick Powell stars as a down-on-his-luck musician who gets stranded in Wyoming, finds a dude ranch that will feed him, learns how to sing cowboy songs to entertain the actual cowboys, gets mistaken for a cowboy himself and "discovered" by a New York talent manager, who names him "Wyoming Steve Gibson" and takes him back to New York to be a radio star. Oh, and also he's deathly afraid of animals.
That description makes the movie sound terrible, but I enjoyed it. Except the part where Powell shrieks like a baby and runs away from birds, prairie dogs etc. That was lame.
December 9 movie: Smartest Girl in Town. Cute screwball comedy starring Gene Raymond and Ann Sothern. The supporting cast included Helen Broderick, Eric Blore and Eric Rhodes, which made it feel like a Fred and Ginger movie minus Fred and Ginger.
We won at trivia tonight! I think our team name, "Candidate 6," was lucky for us. The questions were really hard and we did badly (only 14 points out of a possible 31), just not quite as badly as everyone else.
There were a few questions that we should have gotten right, but didn't:
Overall we agreed that it was a hard trivia contest, but the good kind of hard. The questions were fair, just really difficult. Very few stupid questions, and they avoided my pet peeve: entire categories geared towards a specific age group. For instance "one hit wonders of the late 90s" or "video games of the early 80s." These guys did a good job of coming up with questions for a variety of age groups.
Just as the trivia contest was ending, my friend Ezra from one-stop showed up! We had exchanged email a couple of times but hadn't seen each other since early voting ended. He came over after his class which lasted until 9. He said next week is the last week of the class, so after the holiday he'll be able to come in time for trivia.
In other news, this afternoon I put up most of our outdoor Christmas decorations. While wearing shorts and a t-shirt, with the front door wide open. Crazy NC weather! We had left the string of LED lights on the porch up all year, so all I had to do was plug them in. Then drag out the big white tinsel tree, set it up on the porch and put string lights on it. The tree is a bit too big for the porch, and we have to stand it up on top of a platform to make it visible from the road. Which makes it hard to maneuver around the tree to string the lights. Every year I end up with little scratches all over my arms from the tinsel branches.
I played a recording of my Sammy Davis show while working on the tree and lights. I suppose I should have played Christmas music but I wanted to hear how the Sammy show had turned out. Pretty good I think! There were a few moments that I felt awkward about at the time, that didn't sound too bad when I listened to it.
It rained pretty hard while we were at trivia, and I hear we might get severe storms tomorrow as the temperature drops. Crazy NC weather.
So it turns out the governor of Illinois is really, really corrupt. Is this a surprise? Maybe in degree if not in kind. I must say, I'm relieved that early reports indicate Obama was totally uninvolved and I sure as hell hope it stays that way. What kind of a schmuck would I be, if I had given months of my life to help a man get elected who immediately became implicated in a scandal of this magnitude?
In brighter news, Ambinder reports that North Carolina had an 8% increase in turnout over 2004: the biggest increase of any state in the nation. Go us!
When I first started volunteering for Obama, I never thought we'd win North Carolina. My goal was to help make it just competitive enough that McCain would be scared into spending money here, so he'd have less for the real battleground states like Ohio and Florida. When we became a real battleground ourselves, I was stunned. Afterwards our field organizer told us that she had been told the same thing: they weren't expecting to win, they were here to be a thorn in McCain's side. She and the other field organizers were told that the only way we could ever win NC was if they went all out, every day, every hour. And she did; all the field organizers did. I was there often enough to see how long and hard they worked.
In other politics-related news, if you're hankering for an Obama memento, Durham for Obama are still selling t-shirts. I never bought one during the campaign because they only had men's sizes. Which I will not wear because they fit me so badly. Now that the election is over, they're ordering small runs of shirts so they can get whatever size you want. I ordered a youth XL, which fits me perfectly. Nice shirt too. Gildan is a good brand.
In other other political news, according to that whack-job lawsuit claiming that Obama isn't eligible to be president, the same logic would also call my citizenship into question. The lawsuit said that Obama's father was a British citizen, therefore Obama had dual British and American citizenship, therefore he isn't a "natural-born citizen." I have no idea if Obama's father was a British subject or not, but mine was. And I can say definitively that having one British parent does not automatically grant dual citizenship. My parents talked about getting dual citizenship for me but they never got around to filling out the paperwork. Which was a good call, as it happens. I'm quite happy being an American -- natural born, thank you very much. Damned wingnuts.
December 7 movie: All Night Long. Based on Othello, this stars Richard Attenborough and Patrick McGoohan and is set in the London jazz scene in the early 60s. Includes a bunch of musicians, including John Dankworth, Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus. McGoohan plays an American jazz drummer and sports one of the worst American accents I've ever heard.
This is the part where I would expect to write, "well the movie isn't that good, but it's worth it for the jazz luminaries and for McGoohan's accent." Thing is, I can't. Because this movie is horrible. What can you say about an Othello in which Othello doesn't kill Desdemona, but just chokes her half to death, so the movie can end with her running after him, begging him to take her back. Think about that for a minute.
December 6 movie: Swing Time. They must be featuring Ginger Rogers this month. I so love this movie. I've had the "Waltz in Swing Time" in my head all day.
December 6 movie: Bachelor Mother. Ginger Rogers finds a foundling baby, everyone thinks it's hers, she and David Niven fight over and then bond over the bay. I have mixed feelings about this movie. It's funny and entertaining, but. The part in the beginning ... they compel her to keep the baby by threatening to destroy her if she doesn't, even though she keeps insisting that it's not hers. It's awful, even for the time.
December 5 movie: Our Blushing Brides. This one was a talkie, and costarred Robert Montgomery. Joan Crawford, Anita Page and another young lady are shopgirls in a department store. Each has a difficult relationship with men. One marries a crook and is implicated in his crimes; one shacks up with a society man who inevitably drops her, crushing her spirit; and Crawford refuses Montgomery's advances, seeing the damage men have done to her friends.
Everything wraps up at the end in a weird, tacked-on happy scene that doesn't belong at all. Without it the movie is a decent melodrama with good acting by Montgomery. There's a nicely done scene where he tries to comfort Crawford, but pulls his hand away without touching her shoulder. It's a small movement that adds a lot to the story.
Just about finished putting together the playlist for tomorrow's Sammy Davis Jr. tribute show. It was really fun to go through my collection and put the songs together into meaningful sets -- his earliest sides for Capitol and Decca, his work with the Rat Pack, live recordings, "the cheese factor" from late in his career, etc. I'm not going to play anything really bad from his later work. No "Candyman" for instance. And I had to include one set whose theme is simply "songs I really like." Hard to narrow the show down to just 2 hours!
I didn't finish rereading the books but I've got more than enough material to fill the talksets. I don't want to fill the entire show with talk anyway, just a couple of minutes of interesting anecdotes between sets. Sammy was such a larger than life character that just like with the music, it's hard to narrow down the talkset material. For instance I was originally planning to talk about that infamous photo where Sammy hugged Nixon. Why did he do it, and what a huge mistake it was for his career and his standing in the black community. If it happened today we'd call it his "macaca moment." But looking at the flowsheet I don't think I'm going to have time to work it in.
All those who like Sammy, hope you can tune in tomorrow from 2-4. 88.7 if you're local, wxdu.org if you're not. And if you don't like Sammy, what's wrong with you?
December 4 movie: Grosse Pointe Blank. This movie was genuinely funny. I had forgotten that. I'd seen it a couple of times before (including when it was new) and never realized before yesterday that John Cusak and Minnie Driver are supposed to be the exact same age as I am. The high school reunion is for the class of 1986. That must be why I enjoyed the music so much. There were a few misfires (Guns N Roses, ugh) but it was mostly good stuff.
December 4 movie: Our Modern Maidens. This was the second in Joan Crawford's series of three alliterative flapper movies, preceded by Our Dancing Daughters and followed by Our Blushing Brides. This one was in an odd transitional phase as far as technology goes: it had sound, but not sync sound. So you get crowd noises and announcements over the PA system, but all the dialogue is still on intertitle cards.
Like Our Dancing Daughters, Our Modern Maidens is basically an excuse for carousing and sexy dancing. Crawford has one dance number in a sort of animal print outfit with a skimpy bikini top and a big flowing skirt slit to the waist, so that when she twirled her underpants showed. Like all these pre-code movies there's a moral tacked onto the end to justify all the sex. The moral is really strange though: a total "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" message.
I was going to say this was one of Joan Crawford's first movies until I looked it up and saw on IMDB that it was actually #27 or 28. I must say, back in 1929 she had an extraordinary presence on camera. Whenever she's on screen it's hard to look at anything else. Her eyes were luminous.
December 3 movie: Captain Blood. It was our lucky day: TCM showed two of the all-time great swashbucklers back to back. Basil Rathbone looms large over this movie: I always remember him as being the costar, and then I watch it and remember that he's only in the movie for about three minutes. It's such a great character, I wish he had had more screen time. And I wish Alan Hale were in it!
December 3 movie: Prisoner of Zenda. What a delightful movie! I'm embarrassed to admit that I had never seen this, the 1937 version before. I had only seen the remake with Stewart Granger. The cast is spectacular: Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, David Niven, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Every one of them shone. The movie hangs together perfectly and the fight scene at the end is terrific. I don't know if this can unseat The Adventures of Robin Hood as my favorite swashbuckler, but dang, it's too close to call.
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