The internationale.

The I Bistro/State Theater complex has been for too long been the sleeping giant of Starkvegas eating and entertaining options. It finally looks like a crew knows what they're doing and might get it right. Financial backing from the Bryan family of West Point can't hurt either!







I went with my dad about an hour and a half after their 11:15 am ribbon-cutting ceremony. 1st impressions of the dining area were all positive. Where Doe's had the unadorned feel of an unloved institutional cafeteria; they've replaced some tables with booths, added mood lighting and a whole lot of music-related art on the walls and in some cases (metal rooster sculptures) floor, and thus generally made the place feel like a downtown Tribeca glass and brick warehouse-type place. Oh yes, and the menu has real variety, good for vegetarians and more generally people who don't like only steak and potatoes. Alas, Cisco failed them on the oyster delivery, so instead of my desired Poboy I settled for Catfish & fries with a side of slaw a more than ample portion and at $7 a real price point beater. Ty Thames having set the local blue plate special value at $8. They beat Chef Tyler a bit (Oyster PoBoy 7 versus 9) but then he local sources all his food and wouldn't have run out of oysters so early. so we'll charitably call it a draw all around. Both fine lunch places, just somewhat different clientele and different purposes to the two establishments. Dinner will be an interesting later investigation as they also feature pizza and pasta then.

Hard to be believe but the 2 blocks of downtown Starkville now have 4 quality lunch options!


Their new executive chef is JJ or Double J seen here in more relaxed climes sans his black uniform.



Not only is he the executive chef but he drums in their House band, The Crooked Letters. You know Mississippi: M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-humpback-humpback-I. Apparently to be in the band you have to hail from MS and work at the venue. They would back Blind MS Morris on opening night about which more later.

Angels & fuselage.

Huh? No, not a serious discussion of Air France Flight 447, but rather a pan of the devastatingly horrible latest film by Ron Howard to enter the cloyed atmosphere of Dan Brownia. Ironically it immediately puts me in mind of one of the great American movies of the 1970s: Don Siegel's 1971 masterpiece, Dirty Harry.

Huh? you say again. Laconic hero played by era-defining icon races from one well known site to another in a cat and mouse chase with a perverse serial killer. The differences beyond the obvious Rome versus San Francisco setting; Siegel's tight crisp blocking and easily digestible montages versus Howard's herky jerky handheld operas that read like a Greenglass film on 'roids (see much of first 30 minutes of film as well as McEwan's parachute descent to St. Peter's Square). Furthermore, Siegel builds tensions through the Fink's scripts showing us believable distances to be traversed by an ever tiring Eastwood. He actually sweats on screen. Any perspiration we perceive on Hanks has been backlit by Haskell Wexler and skillfully applied by makeup & wardrobe from an atomizer. Yes you can get from church to church to church in the time allotted, but it all still seems unreal, staged, extremely photogenic and all around too good to be true.

What to say about this mess of a movie? In places it's downright beautiful, they certainly put the money they spent on the film on the screen. The recreations of various iconic spots in Roma are believable. Director Ron Howard is at his best in painterly moments where he can compose shots like a grand master. Think the scene when the Camarlengo (Ian McEwan) is invited to the conclave by the College of Cardinals. He enters the Sistine Chapel and they face him arrayed for all to see like a Raphael or Velasquez masterpiece. Here the movie shines as it does in some of the acting perfirmance specifically Armin Mueller-Stahl as the crafty veteran Cardinal who pursues gentleness at almost all costs and Stellan Skarsgard as the Germanic head of the Swiss Guards. Even McEwan shows greater depth of range than he did as a young Obi Wan Kenobi. At least it's an improvement over The Da Vinci Code, not that that's much of a recommendation.

So the biggest problem with the whole Dan Brown mania is his own self-presentation as a popinjay. He sells his books based on absurd claims about how detailed is their research and how accurate his portrayals. Like in Angels & Demons fer instance [THERE BE SPOILERS COMING] where Langdon and Vittoria discover the secret passageway between Castel San Angelo and the Papal Apartments of Vatican City. Well yes there is such a passetto; only it's no secret, below is a map from a decades-old Michelin Guide to Rome clearly marking said passage way for tourists. Sorry Dan you lose.The scans do not lie: You are a buffoon and a fraud. But don't worry nobody will ever get their ill-spent money back.









Final verdict: Without the aid of antimatter device, this movie crashes and burns on impact. Avoid like the plague. Read a real historical mystery thriller like Waterland, The Daughter of Time, or The Wench is Dead. Or go see Possession or The French Lieutenant's Woman instead.

New dawn fades.

When I saw State of Play I first thought to myself wow I'm seeing the death of newspapers and of the genre of newspaper movies played out in almost real time as papers in Denver and Seattle vanish and The Globe and The Sun-Times are under real threat. Elsewhere I wondered aloud if I would ever see another great Hollywood presses rolling/newspaper printing/front pages scrolling classical montage to which my college housemate Kyle justly retorted, "Yes! It's called The Soloist." Oops! I did go see that movie within the week. I think, however, the larger point remains true. We are at, for lack of a better term, a Tipping Point with respect to print journalism in the US. Whatever newspapers will remain and for how long is very much up in the air. Of course the notion of the death of this particular movie genre is not new. It's been around since at least 2006.

So in honor of the topic I'd like to take a little trip down memory lane and consider one o Hollywood's greatest singular inventions: the genre of the Newspaper movie from The Front Page and His Girl Friday through Libeled Lady to Ace in the Hole AKA The Big Carnival to The Fortune Cookie to All The President's Men right on through to The Paper and Zodiac. And then of course, there's Welles' Kane!

First let's begin with a definition because "that's a very good place to start." We can roughly divide newspaper movies into two large categories: 1) the classic genre really taking off in the 30s and 2) the modern paranoid thriller staple of so many of the 1970s best films. There is no clear cut dividing point between the two types, although we can be said to be venturing from one to the other during the 1950s in approximately the time period between Billy Wilder's 1951 Kirk Douglas classic Ace in The Hole (the style of the reporter is definitively old school but his story smacks of the new tabloid journalism) and the 1957 Burt Lancaster/Tony Curtis vehicle Sweet Smell of Success, with again a prototypical star columnist in JJ Hunsecker who looks back to such characters as Waldo Lydecker in Laura and Sheridan Whiteside in The Man who Came to Dinner, themselves both thinly veiled versions of the New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott. Here again a classic early newspaper figure has been linked to a coming modern "fad", the jazz guitar stylings of Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), who is unfairly tarred as a dope smoking Communist in another newspapers different gossip column in a tip planted by press agent Sidney Falco (Curtis) during the films' noirish revenge plot.

The basic elements of the classic type of a Hollywood newspaper movie:

At least one super wisecrackin' ace reporter often with a cool Fedora featuring something stuck in the hatband. More classically a bickering couple of reporters straight out of Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick giving the lie to Cavell's notion of the "Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage." The language is crystal and sharp and spoken at an incredible pace. Do people really talk like that? No, they do not! But you'd do well to imitate this dialogue in your written prose. Finally there's almost always a classic Hollywood montage involving a rolling printing press and a rapid succession of headlines and/or scrolled front pages. As Thomas and Vivian C. Sobchack note, "in the United States, montage came to mean a series of shots, often with superimpositions and optical effects, showing a condensed series of events, for example a crime wave in a a city" (486). The classic trifecta: It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story. Well the latter is about a scandal rag rather than a newspaper proper, but it's more or less the same thing. And Spy magazine is printed Tabloid-style.

The ultimate outlier: Citizen Kane, totally sui generis. Note in the two textbooks referenced below the examples of Hollywood montage both come from Kane and both involve newspapers. Kawin (100) focuses on the famous Susan's operatic career sequence with competing newspaper headlines, all bombs except Kane's The Inquirer, which is drinking the home brew. Similarly the Sobchack's focus (122-23) on the justifiably famous compressed aging at the breakfast table sequence, where Kane and his now wife Susan read different newspapers to signify the distance growing between them, something which is physically replicated in the later shots of the montage.

For the latter style: think the classic paranoia fantasies of the 1970s. Reporters become everymen and heroes of the depressed and downtrodden fighting back against implacable invisible foes (The Tri-Lateral Commission, anyone?). Government is absolutely corrupted and life sure ain't what it used to be. A trifecta: All The President's Men, The Parallax View, and Network. As above the last one is part and parcel of the genre while in fact being about a different medium of communication all together. But we're still "Mad as hell" and we're "not gonna take it anymore!"

A Short Chronological List of Good Newspaper Movies Not Already Referenced Above:
How Men Propose (1913)
Platinum Blonde (1931)
The Front Page (1931, 1974)
I Cover The Waterfront (1933)
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Meet John Doe (1941)
Woman of the Year (1942)
The Big Clock (1948)
Deadline USA (1952)
Teacher's Pet (1958)
Continental Divide (1981)
Absence of Malice (1981)
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
The Killing Fields (1984)
Salvador (1986)
Switching Channels (1988)
I Love Trouble (1994)
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
Never Been Kissed (1999)

Bibliography

Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard Film Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.

Bruce F. Kawin, How Movies Work. Berkeley: U of CA P, 1992.

Richard R. Ness, From Headline Hunter to Superman: A Journalism Filmography. The Scarecrow P, 1997.

Thomas Sobchack and Vivian C. Sobchack, An Introduction to Film. 2nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1987.

Celebrated summer.

The first 10 minutes of Adventureland bring a Replacements song I actually like (Think Tim Side 2), a semiotic signfying joke, and The VU. Now that's my kinda flick!

A little gem of a soundtrack, two funny supporting bits with Hader and Wiig, the honey from Twilight, a panoply of well known character actors (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin, Matt Bush, Josh Pais) plus some crushing punches below the belt.

Written and directed by that pomo Mr. Clean, Greg Mottola. The fact he was born in 64 has something to do with how this speaks to me I'm sure.

Met a gurl; liked her; made her a tape to play in the car . . .





Had my own version of the film's middle dramatic confrontation discussion at a picnic table outside Blackwelder end of summer 1988.

Something died in me on 12/6/88 when you sat directly across from me and said "I realized I don't have any close friends in the area."

But like any good film, "it"(whatever "it" was?) wasn't over yet. No "close friends in the area," but I kept getting mail and notes about her life and stuff.



She was always really resourceful about what she penned notes on: index cards, the corner of a cancelled check (just her name and a new phone number and thus I felt no reason to reproduce it), the back of a deposit slip (see below), et cetera.



Here was one about meeting her and some girlfriends at The Guild in Menlo to see Jaglom's farce Eating (1990). I went and it was a good time though most assuredly not a date.



Alas life seldom turns out like a romcom no matter how many times she reappears, which is why Casablanca has the perfect ending . . .



Make sure to spend your time at Pittsburgh's best low rent amusement park.

It happens every spring.

Phoenix-like TNA shakes off the dust and arises. I've already updated the book reviews and movies (somewhat) in my sidebar. Will work on getting the music current. Note I've added a new blog link to Fuori Borgo, a friend's blog about her life outside a small village above the Ligurian coast, where she resides with three kids and my college classmate and occasional New Yorker contributor.

I'm also liberalizing my blog entry naming convention to any appropriate title (Book, Movie, Song) so I don't run out of appropriate intertextual jokes. Par example, I had already used the Hüsker Dü title track appropriate for this entry. So instead a good but not-so-well-known 1949 baseball flick starring Ray Milland, a kind of hardball Flubber.

For movie and acting buffs Dustin and Larry redux!: "Try acting dear boy."

In the coming weeks: coverage of the Cotton District Arts Festival, a book review or four, and our exciting local elections (especially the Mayor's And Ward 5 Alderman's races).

Kick out the jams.

A catalogue of great live performances/videos. Enjoy.

The single best performance on Saturday Night Live, and I'm not now nor have I ever been an Eddie Vedderhead. Watch Jeff Ament at the 4:00 mark.



Close Seconds







The greatest power trio ever. Nirvana who?



7 years later and 1443 miles to the SE, we're still jawin' with the crowd, and the Kids are Still MORE than Alright!



Václav Havel's favorite band. I was at this show and unwittingly sitting within 5 seats (to the right) of the videographer; my interview with Iva Turnová, female bassist who introduces the song, and front man/saxophonist, Vratislav Brabenec, after the same is forthcoming on Perfect Sound Forever



Talking Heads via Skynyrd at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville



The Weddoes in full video flight plus bonus live covereage from homebase of Leeds



MBV, "Feed Me With Your Kiss"
Who ever put together this Hollywood montage is really gifted.



Mission of Burma still rules after all these years . . .



Birth of the Cool, Indeed!



A Foot Tappin' Number



Mingus, "Blues with the Saw" (1971)



The WOLF . . .



The famous Shindig performance with Elvis' guitar player James Burton



Alas, still no footage of James Brown and the Fabulous Flames at The T.A.M.I. Show (1964).

Have a Great Thanksgiving everyone. TNA will be back next week.

Manic monday (parte dos).

Too much to do and not so much time. The Universe has altered for the good. 2 World Series championships for the Red Sox in 4 years with the prospects of more to come. How do you like them (Big) apples, George?


(Ed Andrieski/Associated Press)

After some early morning work in Mitchell Memorial Library at MSU, I headed home to complete yardwork delayed by the almost non-stop rains we had for much of last week. Finally the ground is firm enough to mow my grass. After a lunch of red beans and rice and some leftover garlic mashed potatoes with hombrewed iced sun tea (Peppermint Lemon Earl Grey), I headed to Starkville Public Library for Clyde V. Williams' discussion of Mississippi's own Dana Andrews' role in Otto Preminger's 1944 noir classic Laura.

Not quite sure what tonight will bring, although I assume it will involve Ted, Barney, and their pals . . .

COR-REC-TION[Intoned In My Best Adenoidal Drone]

The show was a re-run, and besides I was attending this lecture by a very smart man.

High Concept Costume of the Day:

Stanley Kowalski
Bud Man . . . Red Sox Fan!

Coda 10/30/07

Well the Pinker talk was a fantastic success, at least in terms of attendance. People spilling into the aisles; it's a good thing the Fire Marshall wasn't around. Given the number of kids getting IDs electronically scanned after the lecture, I suspect some extra credit bribery was involved (probably explicit rather than the supposedly superior implicit kind discussed by Pinker). Still better that than the half empty auditoria which have met many a speaker at MSU back in the day. I would say the Faculty turn-out beyond invited dignitaries and dinner guests was sparse, a testament to the intellectual curiosity of the faculty in general! The talk itself was only so so. Fun and, when he gave examples off script, quite fascinating, but a demonstration of what Ian Parker in The New Yorker famously complained about PowerPoint presentations: their absolute cookie cutter structure. By the end of the talk, we had heard all of his poitns in identical language at least three times. A bit much methinks!

Happy birthday mr. president.

Marilyn Monroe would have been 80 years old today. Whatever you think of her "acting" abilities, she is undeniably the iconic female beauty of the second half of the 20th century, as this amazing Magnum Photos slideshow reminds us!

An elegant chaos.

People I see
just remind me of mooing
Like a cow on the grass
And that's not to say
That there's anything wrong
With being a cow anyway
But people are people
With the added advantage
Of the spoken word
We're getting on fine
But I feel more of a man
When I get with the herd.

That's probably my favorite all-time song verse, which might say more about how much attention I generally pay to lyrics than the essential quality of Julian Cope's drug addled visions. Anyway it's the last verse of "An Elegant Chaos" from World Shut Your Mouth. Equally as cool is the emphatically sung grunt "Uh" that highlights the middle of the second verse: "Its not a problem of secrecy / I take it in my stride / Did I learn to breathe / To be killed like this? Uh." I just got a "used" CD copy in the mail of this favorite from my time as a Rotary Post-Graduate Fellow in England.

Julian Cope has always been sort of a mystery to Americans. The Brits certainly overhype his original group, The Teardrop Explodes, much as they do, in my opinion, their better known Liverpudlian brethren, Echo & the Bunnymen. But I will admit "Passionate Friend" is a nice single. Since the Teardrop really exploded, Cope has been on some strange musical journey of self-realization whose highlight is probably the double eco-psyschedlic classic, Peggy Suicide. World Shut Your Mouth is his most accessible album.

Today I did one of those 5 DVDs for 5 night deals. In alphabetical order:

Baadasssss
De Lovely
La Dolce Vita
Napoleon Dynamite
Ray, which didn't quite finish last week.

Given the rain coming down out there right now, I might get through two of them today. Forthcoming on TNA will be a new set of entries about my "Great Teachers," personal odes for personal heroes.

Once more.

I saw Sideways again last night and unless Million Dollar Baby completely blows me away, there's no doubt THIS is the GREAT movie of the year and frankly one of the best American movies of the last five years. People don't realize just how difficult comedy is to do well. It's a shame that the Academy is populated by people who always seem to fall for the most maudlin of sentiment but can't find it in their disease-of-the-month-lovin' souls to get a sophisticated joke when they hear or seen one. I mean there's a reason Cary Grant is the greatest movie star of all time, and it has to do with what Stanley Cavell calls those classic "Hollywood comedies of remarriage": Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Awful Truth. If he'd quit making movies in 1940 and never met Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Debora Kerr, Grace Kelly, or Audrey Hepburn, he'd still be a cinematic God: for his pratfalls, his one takes, and his delivery of zingers like "She has a horror of men who wear their hats in the house" or "To hardly know him is to know him well."

The thing about Sideways is it's well nigh pitch perfect: one minute you're laughing your ass off and the next something deadly serious has transpired, yet you don't feel manipulated by the film. The four main characters are so finely drawn and fully developed that the movie has an internal logic all its own. For another take on the brilliance of this movie from across the pond, see Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian UK.

The boys are back in town.

Just back from the mountains of Western North Carolina. Drove up there in the snow and then had the coldest Christmas Day I can remember, but then most of my Christmases have been in warm climes like Florida or California. DID some serious cocooning and read several books including Greenblatt's Will in the World, Lewis' Moneyball, and Kemp's Dixie Lullaby. Got the nifty black Sony DVD I was hoping for, so now I can watch DVDs on a real TV and listen to them through the stereo and not at my computer. I might have a viewing session to see the Galaxie 500 and Wire discs. Also picked up a case of my favorite mid-range California Zinfadel at the Asheville Wine and Cheese Market plus a bunch of good English/Irish beer there including Young's Waggledance Honey Beer, Murphy's Stout, Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter, Boddignton's Pub Ale, and and my beloved Yorkshire regular tipple Tetley's Real Ale with a widgety can.

This year has certainly ended far better than it began; with any luck next year will continue apace as I roll through 2005 like (pardon the inappropriate metaphor) the German Army through the Maginot Line, the Polish Defense Forces, etc. Depending on what writing and/or speaking projects come off, I might be blogging less frequently under deadline pressure, but that's a good thing.

Saw three movies. In order of veiwing:


Sideways at the Fine Arts, Asheville, Biultmore Avenue
Laughed my ass off throughout. hard to believe Thomas Hayden Church the stooge from Wings and more creditable as the villain in George of the Jungle can really act. The entire cast is great. Viriginia Madesn has never looked lovelier, Sexier yes, but lovelier, no! Plus any movie that talks about wine incessantly and drives through the Central Coast of California's Santa Maria moutains gets a double thumbs up from me.

Finding Neverland Carmike 10, Asheville
Despite a seemingly sentimental premise, a wonderful film with subtle portrayals all around and a fine Scottish accent from Johnny Depp. The kid who played Peter Llewelyn Davies(Freddie Highmore) was fantastic; he's playing Charlie in Tim Burton's upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The soundtrack was quite nice and the dream sequences exist somewhere between Julie Taymor and Cirque de Soleil.

CloserBeaucatcher 7, Asheville
Like many filmed plays the dramatic lines don't work as well with the close-up aid of a camera. Not that the four leads aren't quite engaging and impossibly attractive. I don't buy Natalie Portman as a stripper but maybe that's my problem. Most fun was catching site of all the locations in London in the film I'd been to like the cafe atop the National Portrait Gallery (break-up signing divorce papers scene), the South Bank promenade outside The Globe Theater complex (where Julia gets the ballon from Clive), and Postman's Park in the City--Charterhouse EC1 (where Jude and Natalie end up after hospital and where Jude went wit his father as a kid-I've had lunch there).

Well I have a car to unpack. See you at Dave's for Del and Friends around 9 pm. Out.

Rock you like a hurricane.

Beer and the Bard or how Dutch hops made the English English

Shillingsburg made me do it

Funny I was good enough for Oxford University Press

Jonesin' in USA Today

Being for the benefit of Mr. Peel

Wire at the Double Door in Chicago

The Fieldstones, Memphis Blues Today!: You simply must buy this record

Perhaps My Favorite Song of All Time

Thanks, Eric!