Vulfpeck Cover Bob Dylans “Gotta Serve Somebody“
Why did the Grateful Dead stop playing ‘St. Stephen’?: Far Out Magazine
American Songwriter Readers Vote for the Best Female Songwriters of All Time: American Songwriter
Number one isn’t surprising but it is nice to see mygirl Lucina Williams in there.
Star Wars The Bad Batch Season 2: Is Captain Wilco From the Movies or Clone Wars?: Game Revolution
We’re big fans of The Bad Batch in my house so I’m pretty excited to see Season Two show up.
Rian Johnson listed this film as an influence on Glass Onion, his recent Knives Out sequel for Netflix (which is excellent, I highly recommend it) so I thought I’d give it a watch. Almost immediately the influences come flying right at you from the television screen.
The story involves a group of rich, beautiful, (mostly) young people who have found success in the movie industry. They’ve been invited by their friend Clinton (James Coburn) for a week aboard his yacht where he had prepared some delightfully complicated game.
The game involves revealing select secrets from each person (alcoholic, ex-convict, homosexual, child molester, etc) and will conclude with the revelation of who ran over Clinton’s wife one year prior and didn’t have the decency to stay with her and maybe call for help. Everyone more or less enjoys the game until someone actually dies and then it becomes a very real murder mystery.
Glass Onion is a lot bigger, a lot bolder, and a lot more fun, but The Last of Sheila is rather delightful in its own way. The cast includes James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch, and Dyan Cannon. It was shot on location in the Mediterranean. It was written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins of all people.
Clinton is a movie producer and he has an idea bout making a movie about his dead wife’s life. He wants everyone he’s invited on the boat to help him make it. They, scriptwriters, directors, and actors all, desperately need him and this movie to help their sagging careers. It is full of twists and turns, mysteries and reveals. The cast is clearly having a good time.
It isn’t quite as punchy as I’d like it to be, and the direction by Herbert Ross never excites. He certainly doesn’t make great use of the beautiful setting. It feels very much of its time. One of the big secrets is the character is homosexual which wouldn’t be a big deal now, but in 1973 could be quite detrimental for a celebrity working in Hollywood. That is more scandalous within the film (as is being an alcoholic and a shoplifter) than the revelation that one of them is a child molester which is shrugged off by the characters and the film. But mostly the film is a lot of fun and if you liked Glass Onion I highly recommend it.
Foo Fighters confirm they will continue without Taylor Hawkins: Uncut Magazine
The String Cheese Incident – “Can’t Find My Way Home” / “Way Back Home” – NYE 2022
The Ultimate Jimi Hendrix Mega Folder: Mega
Juliana Hatfield – God’s Foot: Internet Archive
Phish sing “Bohemian Rhapsody/Jungle Boogie – New York, NY (12/31/22)
The Grass is Dead Spring Tour dates for 2023
moe. rings in the New Year at The Fillmore Philadelphia
26 Albums that Turn 30 in 2023: WMMR
Man that makes me feel old 🙂
Michael Jackson – Bad Tour Los Angeles 27.01.1989 – Mega
Greta Garbo was one of the biggest movie stars of the silent era. She had a mysterious, luminous on-screen persona. Despite this she, or perhaps the studios, were reluctant to bring her into the sound era. She was born and raised in Sweden and didn’t speak a word of English when she first came to the United States. By 1930 she was fluent in the language but still spoke with an accent, which no doubt created fears in everyone’s mind that audiences wouldn’t take to the actress once they could hear her talk.
If you’ve ever seen Singin’ in the Rain you’ll know what they were worried about.
The fears were unfounded for Anna Christie her first “talkie” movie was a rousing success and she remained one of the biggest box office stars for the next several years.
MGM played up Anna Christie by promoting it with the tagline “Garbo Talks” (nine years later they’d play with that tag when she made her first comedy, Ninotchka by promoting it with “Garbo Laughs”.) Her famous first line is “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.”
For all that, the movie is actually kind of dull. Garbo plays the titular Anna who was abandoned by her father (George F. Marion) at a young age and sent to live with her cousins on their Minnesota farm. They abused her and she moved to St. Paul by herself where she became a prostitute. After a stint in a hospital, she moves back to New York in hopes her father will take her in and let her rest.
He does and they reconcile she meets a sailor and they fall in love. The big drama comes in whether or not these two men will still love her once they find out about her past. The ending is fairly typical for its time period but somewhat shocking as seen through modern eyes.
Garbo and the rest of the small cast are quite good. The story lacks any real emotional punch and the direction is mostly flat. There are a couple of interesting visuals including one scene on a roller coaster where the camera sits in the seat in front of Garbo looking back at her. The other gives us a bird’s eye view at one of those strongmen uses a hammer to ring a bell contraptions. But mostly the camera stays in fixed positions while the characters do a lot of talking. Presumably, the camera doesn’t move much because this is an early sound picture and they were afraid to much movement might hit a microphone or the characters might move to where the mic couldn’t hear them. Again if you’ve seen Singin’ in the Rain you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Actually, you’d be better off just watching Singin’ in the Rain again. Unless you are a big Garbo fan, this one is quite skippable.
When the new year rolls around I always make a big deal out of the first movie I watch. I don’t know exactly why except that it sit atop my list of movies watched for the year, and it seems like a way of setting the stage for my cinematic experiences in a given year. Like I don’t want to start the year watching a bad movie, or something depressing. I want a film to help me look forward to the following 365 days.
This year, I got a little weird.
Martin Scorsese is my favorite living filmmaker. He might be my favorite filmmaker ever, but he’d have to fight it out with Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa. He’s made some incredibly entertaining, interesting, and absolutely fascinating films. Not only is he a great director, but he has spent his life preserving films that are literally on the brink of destruction, and championing/producing films from a vast and diverse group of filmmakers.
The Criterion Channel currently has several short films made by the director at the beginning of his career and I decided to watch them today. The three films I watched were What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963), It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964), and The Big Shave (1967).
None of these films are amazing, I can’t say that I’d recommend them to anyone who isn’t already a Scorsese fan, but they are interesting, and they already contain some of the themes the director would return to over and over again. They also contain plenty of the style Scorsese would become known for in his long career.
What’s a Nice Girl Doing In a Place Like This? is the first official film Scorsese ever made. I say official because there is another film credit listed on IMDB.com called Vesuvius VI which the director made in high school with his friends, but I don’t believe it has ever been shown publicly and has never been released in any formal fashion.
It is about a man who becomes obsessed with a photo to the point where he can’t function as a human being. It is notable for being the first time Thelma Schoonmaker helped edit a Scorsese film. They would go on to be lifelong collaborators. Scorsese is already showing his influences here with clear nods to Fellini and Truffaut. The story is slight but his use of editing – juxtaposing a variety of images against each other to create interesting, and often very funny – is already vibrant at this early stage.
It’s Not Just You, Murray! has a bootlegger looking back on his life, documentary style. Careful watchers will see its influences on later Scorsese films like Goodfellas and Casino.
The Big Shave is the shortest film of the bunch, clocking in at just over five minutes. It is literally just a man sharing his face, which gets increasingly bloody as it goes along. They say it is a metaphor for Vietnam, but I’ll let the scholars explain that one. It is edited to the sounds of an old song and the camerawork, along with the editing is really interesting considering the confined space and limited time frame.
You can probably find all of these films on Youtube if you don’t have the Criterion Channel. They are well worth watching if you are a fan of the director.
So, why did I choose these three early short films from Martin Scorsese as my first films of 2023? To be honest, they were partially chosen because they were short. My vertigo has been acting up this weekend and I wasn’t sure how well I could watch something long and involved. But also I really do love Martin Scorsese and I’ve been meaning to watch these films for a long time.
These films represent the beginnings of an artist who would continue to create interesting and influential films for the next 60 years and beyond. Scorsese is set to release a new film, Killers of the Flower Moon later this year, and he has numerous other projects in his upcoming pile. He has produced dozens of films from up-and-coming and marginalized filmmakers, for decades. He’s created film foundations to help perverse films that otherwise might be lost forever. He is my hero, and these films are his beginning.
There is something very new year about that. It gives me hope to watch these early films from Martin Scorsese, realizing that when he made them he had no idea who he would become. Just a few years before he made these films he planned to enter the Seminary, not become a filmmaker. Now he is considered one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. Maybe this year is the beginning of me becoming something amazing. Maybe you will too.
A man of myth: How Bob Dylan created Bob Dylan: Far Out Magazine
Half-scale recreation of Grateful Dead’s Wall Of Sound up for sale to fund full-size model: Guitar.com
Billy’s Busy 2022: Guitarist Billy Strings Had Another Breakout Year:
Bob Dylan’s former Harlem townhouse on the market for $3.6 million: Nola.com
LP Giobbi Remixes Jerry Garcia: “I Wanted to Show This Beautiful World to My Community”: Relix.com
Rodney Crowell Is Still Trying to Unlock the Mystery of a Great Song: Rolling Stone
55 Years Later: Revisiting Bob Dylan’s Americana Leaning ‘John Wesley Harding’: Glide Magazine
Things have been a bit tight in the Brewster household this year. I own a construction business with my brother and father and with everything else going on in the world business has not been as robust as it has been in the past. We’re getting buy, but we’ve had to tighten our belts quite a bit. This meant a much smaller Christmas for everyone, especially me. The wife and I decided to forgo most of our gifts so that we could make Christmas a bit merrier for our daughter.
My mother-in-law did purchase me a fantastic Doctor Who set. They have slowly been putting out entire seasons of the Classic series on Blu-ray, loaded with extras, and as you can see I got the first season in which Colin Baker played The Doctor. He is not my favorite Doctor by a long shot, but I’m excited to add him to my collection.
She also bought me a really fabulous Omnibus collection of the Loan Wolf and Cub manga, but as it turns out, I already own a copy of that. Which is my own fault because I asked her to buy it for me. I keep a pretty large Amazon wish list and the manga was on it. What I had forgotten to do is remove it from that list when I purchased the manga for myself a while back. In fact, I had completely forgotten I owned it until I was randomly looking through the photos on my phone and happened to see a picture I had taken of it. Oh well.
While in Nashville we decided to visit McKays which is this amazing store that sells used books, music, movies and all sorts of other things. The wife and I decided to give ourselves a modest budget of $50 a piece to buy what we wanted.
I landed on a nice Georges Simenon short story collection of Maigret tales and two nice boxed sets of DVDs. I love me some Greta Garbo, and I’m a sucker for those old gangster movies. I’m looking forward to watching them all.
We had a very nice visit with my wife’s family, and then a not-so-pleasant journey home. We stayed in a really beautiful old log cabin on the east side of Nashville, Tennessee. The plan was to come home on Friday. The journey should have taken us just under 10 hours. I told everybody that I was setting my alarm for 8 in the AM, and that I wanted to leave no later than 10, but that I’d really like to leave earlier than that.
I looked my brother-in-law, who lives in Nashville and thus was staying at his home rather than the cabin, dead in the eye and reiterated my morning plans. He said that was no problem, they lived but five minutes away and would be there by 9 in the morning.
The alarm went off at 8. We got up, showered, dressed, and had breakfast. I loaded the car. We were ready by nine. Paul and his family were not there. We waited. We talked to my wife’s parents. We waited some more. We did one last walk-through to find anything left behind. We waited even more.
Finally, at 9:40 Paul showed up. And his son. But not his other son or his wife. She was in the shower, he said. I knew that meant at least another twenty minutes. We waited some more. At 10 I said we should go outside and wait. I figured we’d eventually get tired of standing by the car and then get in and go. At 10:20 this finally happened. As we were driving down the long driveway we saw the others pulling in. We said our goodbyes through the windows and we were off. I did the mental calculations, readjusting my time frame for being half an hour late. I figured we could make up the time during meals.
Not five minutes into the drive and my daughter says she doesn’t feel good. She needs to stop. I try to assess if it is an emergency – if I need to pull over or if she can wait until an exit, but get an evasive response. I pull off at the next exit. As I’m waiting for the green light to turn left into the gas station the first eruption occurs. The girl is throwing up in the back seat. Just as I’m turning she does it again.
Bless her ever-loving heart, when she’s done she apologizes to me. I tell her everything is ok, that daddy will take care of it. Luckily she had a blanket covering her lap so most of her clothes are still clean. She got a little on her sweater and I get her mother to take her inside to clean her up and get some water. I’m on car clean-up duty. It was gross. There was vomit in the carpet, vomit on the back of the seat, and vomit on the door. There was vomit pooled up on the door handle, seeping down into the window control. It was everywhere. It smelled very bad. I had to hold my breath to keep from vomiting myself.
But I didn’t. I cleaned it all up. The girl got cleaned up too. With all of that out of her system, she was feeling better. I could tell because she was back to laying down the sarcasm.
Back on the road, the travel went smoothly. There was a little rain and a bit of traffic. Both of which caused me to drive slower than I wanted to but that was ok.
Then we stopped for lunch. The wife wanted Chik-Fil-A which I thought was a bad idea. That restaurant is always crowded at lunch. I knew it would be in Jackson because we used to live near there and that particular store was a nightmare at lunch. Still, we stopped. Of course, it was crazy crowded. We opted for the drive-through. They screwed up our order, but we got it fixed. Then we drove to a Home Depot parking lot to eat. At least the food was good. Getting back on the Interstate took twenty minutes because of traffic.
The road was once again fairly easy. The rain had let up, but the traffic had not. But we made it to Russelville, Arkansas without incident. We stopped at a Wendy’s inside a gas station for supper. They were out of grilled chicken for the salads my wife and daughter wanted. The daughter won’t eat anything else at Wendy’s. We waited fifteen minutes for that to cook. I had to interrupt some storytelling by Wendy’s employees to remind them that we had ordered food and still wanted to eat it.
Back on the road, we made it to Oklahoma. The daughter needed a bathroom break and we opted for Braums (a local burger and ice cream joint) instead of a gas station, figuring the restrooms would be cleaner. And while we were there milkshakes seemed to be in order. Especially after that long, lousy ride.
Friends, they were understaffed and busy at the drive-through. The lady said it would be “a while” for our milkshakes so we left without anything sweet to eat.
A sad end to a sad drive. But an hour later we were home. It took us 12 hours and change.
I grew up in a small town. Most of my mother’s family lived in that same small town. On Christmas Eve we would gather with the aunts, uncles, and cousins and Grandma and Papa’s house. We had this tradition where if you were the first person to say “Christmas Eve Gift” to someone else then that person had to buy you a special present. Except we never did abide by the gift-giving aspect of that tradition. It was really about bragging rights about “beating” that person that year.
I have very fond memories of arriving at Grandma’s house early and then hiding behind the door or behind the couch and then jumping out at my aunts and uncles when they arrive shouting gleefully “Christmas Eve Gift.” We got so into this game that my mother would answer the phone (and this was before cell phones and caller ID) with the aforementioned phrase just in case it was someone in the family. No doubt surprising many salesmen in the process.
To this day I still play the game with my mother. It is much more difficult now that she knows who is calling. One year I saw that she had sent me a text (this was before I had a smartphone that showed me what the text said on my home screen) but instead of reading it, I sent her one saying that I didn’t know what she had just texted me but that I wished her a very merry Christmas Eve Gift.
This morning I printed out a large note that read:
I have my phone on silent so I cannot hear your voice, so Christmas Eve Gift!
Then I Facetimed her with video on and put the camera up to the note.
And to you my dear friends and readers I wish to you a very merry Christmas Eve Gift and a very Happy Christmas and a super joyful whatever you celebrate.
I will not be posting anything for the next few days as I’m taking some time off to spend with my family. Be well everybody and listen to some good music.
themidnightcafe.org 