July 2021 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Actor Geoffrey Rush turns 70

Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner

Although I’ve seen or heard the actor Geoffrey Rush in a number of movies, I always associate him with one. And no, it’s not Pirates of the Caribbean.

It’s Shine, from 1996. IMDB notes: “Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.”

Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor. The film received several other nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Dramatic Score. I bought the CD of the score; it is recommended.

Sometimes, it’s one movie that propels a performer from a working professional to someone who people can recognize by name. But I know almost nothing about the man’s life, other than he’s from Australia.

Again, from IMDB: He was born “in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, to Merle (Bischof), a department store sales assistant, and Roy Baden Rush, an accountant for the Royal Australian Air Force. His mother was of German descent and his father had English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. He was raised in Brisbane, Queensland after his parents split up…”

“He performed in theater for a number of years… Film-goers finally began taking notice of Geoffrey after his performance in Children of the Revolution (1996).

“This led to THE role of a lifetime as the highly dysfunctional piano prodigy David Helfgott in Shine (1996). Rush’s astonishing tour-de-force performance won him every conceivable award imaginable, including the Oscar, Golden Globe, British Film Award, and Australian Film Institute Award.”

After SHINE

“Shine not only put Rush on the international film map but atypically on the Hollywood ‘A’ list as well. His rather homely mug…” Ouch. OK, he’s certainly not classically handsome, but…

His “completely charming, confident and captivating demeanor” allowed him to “more easily dissolve into a number of transfixing historical portrayals, notably his Walsingham in Elizabeth (1998) and Leon Trotsky in Frida (2002),” both of which I saw.

I’ve also appreciated his work in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; Lantana (2001), a murder mystery; Finding Nemo (2003), voicing Nigel the seagull; and The King’s Speech (2010) as Lionel Logue.

“Rush’s intermittent returns to the stage have included productions of Marat-Sade, Uncle Vanya, Oleanna, Hamlet, and The Small Poppies. In 2009 he made his Broadway debut in Exit the King,” written by Eugene Ionesco, co-starring Susan Sarandon, and co-adapted by Rush. He got a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance.

On television, he played Peter Sellers in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) on HBO, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award, meaning he’s won the acting Triple Crown.

“His marriage (since 1988) to Aussie classical actress Jane Menelaus produced daughter Angelica (1992) and son James (1995). Menelaus, who has also performed with the State Theatre of South Australia, has co-starred on stage with Rush… She also had featured roles in a few of his films, including Quills (2000) and The Eye of the Storm (2011).”

Geoffrey Rush is a successful, talented actor, who largely travels below the radar of a lot of people.

The Third Reconstruction

fighting voter suppression

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week to further declaw the Voting Rights Act I found to be a kick in the gut. SCOTUS, by a 6-3 vote, overturned a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. It had found that two voting laws passed in Arizona “had both the effect and intent of discriminating against Black, Latino and Native American voters… The decision… will make it much harder to block other laws that have a discriminatory effect on voters of color.”

We’ve already seen a plethora of “voter suppression laws that hide their racist intent but have clearly disparate effects based on race.”

The “ruling significantly increased the level of discriminatory and burdensome effects that plaintiffs must demonstrate for a voting law or procedure to violate the Voting Rights Act, giving lawmakers or officials who enact such rules great deference in the interest of preventing supposed fraud—even without any evidence of such fraud…

“Some legal observers had warned before this latest decision, known as Brnovich v. DNC, that… the Supreme Court could make it so difficult to comply with the requirements to prove discrimination that the VRA would nevertheless become meaningless. That is, in essence, what happened.

With Congress so closely divided, it’s difficult to imagine it passing what is needed. That would be passing a new Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act, which would, among other things, expand voting protections.

July 4th Oration

I was thinking about this as I listened to Rev. Roxanne Booth at The Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence in Albany on Saturday, July 3. In person! after being virtual last year.

She spoke about The Third Reconstruction, as laid out by the book by The Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Beacon, 2016). The subtitle is How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear.

You know about the first, after the Civil War, until it was undercut by forces, starting with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. The second was the Civil Rights Era, starting with Brown v. Board of Education and the death of Emmett Till, undermined by the policies of Nixon, then Reagan.

The third, the authors argue, started with the election of Barack Obama, and was almost immediately sabotaged by forces that early on wanted him to be a one-term president.

Moral revival

The book is “Rev. Barber’s call for building and sustaining a movement for justice for all people.” From this Unitarian Universalist site: “The Third Reconstruction offers helpful, practical guidance for engaging with justice movements born in response to local experiences of larger injustices.

“Drawing on the prophetic traditions of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, while making room for other sources of truth, the book challenges us to ground our justice work in moral dissent, even when there is no reasonable expectation of political success, and to do the hard work of coalition-building in a society that is fractured and polarized.”

So when I asked Rev. Booth about how one gets over the disappointment of the Arizona decision, she noted that we have to keep doing the work of social justice, even when the short-term prospects may be bleak.

I’m reminded that many changes in our democracy have started with situations that seemed hopeless in the beginning. Consider joining the Third Reconstruction, a “revival of our constitutional commitment to establish justice, provide for the general welfare, end decades of austerity, and recognize that policies that center the 140 million are also good economic policies that can heal and transform the nation.”

The independence to be boring

“boring in the best possible way”

There are lots of important, vital things that this country still needs to address. Climate change, failing infrastructure, social justice, economic inequity, increasing violence – the list is too long to note here.

Yet I’ve been feeling independence from a certain level of stress much of this year, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. That is until I saw this in the Boston Globe.

Joe Biden stays out of our face. Isn’t it great? For the first time in decades, America has a president who avoids the limelight.

“Five months into his presidency, it is clear that Biden… isn’t gripped by a desperate craving to be seen and heard and talked about. After four years of a president whose narcissism was bottomless and exhausting, and, before him, eight years of a president who also didn’t suffer from any lack of vanity, Biden’s willingness to stay largely behind the scenes is not just refreshing, but downright admirable.”

I would be exhausted by the daily barrage of tweets and off-the-cuff comments at press conferences by his predecessor. In fact, I’m convinced that if he had avoided those COVID briefings, or said nothing, he might have been REALLY reelected.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby doesn’t necessarily agree with “Biden’s policy agenda. From his gargantuan spending bills to his outreach toward Iran to his embrace of woke racial ideology, I think he is on the wrong track.”

Not dominating every news cycle

However, “Biden is content to stay out of public view and not make himself or his thoughts each day’s top story. He doesn’t comment on every political development. He doesn’t give daily briefings. And he doesn’t weigh in on every Washington dispute.” The silence is refreshing.

As Peter Nicholas wrote in The Atlantic, the Biden White House has made the “conscious calculation that people don’t need — or want — to hear from the president on an hour-by-hour basis.”

As one anonymous former Biden campaign aide told Nicholas: “He’s boring in the best possible way. We need boring. We want boring.” He’s an antidote to an in-your-face presidency.

Joe Biden “endured a fair amount of ‘Where’s Joe?’ mockery” during the 2020 campaign. “But it didn’t keep him from winning the election. Perhaps he and his advisers have concluded that staying out of the spotlight will continue to work to his benefit, both by demonstrating how different he is from Trump and by minimizing opportunities for the gaffes to which he himself says he is prone.”

1961 looks the same flipped (I96I)

two instrumentals

One of the more arcane things I remember growing up is that 1961 looked the same flipped over or right-side-up if you used the correct font. Roger Maris hit 61 home runs for the Yankees in ’61.

I was watching that Hemingway series on PBS by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The disastrous Bay of Pigs incursion meant that the author would never be able to return to his beloved home in Cuba. He died that very year.

By 1961, we’re up to the #1 songs I mostly can recall.

Tossin’ and Turnin’ – Bobby Lewis, seven weeks at #1. It’s one of those songs on every other compilation of songs of the late Fifties and early Sixties.

Big Bad John – Jimmy Dean, five weeks at #1, gold record. I loved this song as a kid, more a spoken word recording. But is anyone weirded out by him still plugging his sausages on television commercials when he died in 2010?

Runaway – Del Shannon, four weeks at #1, gold record. Bonnie Raitt did a great cover version.

Wonderland by Night – Bert Kaempfert and His Orchestra, three weeks at #1, gold record. Instrumental.
Pony Time – Chubby Checker, three weeks at #1. His previous #1 was The Twist in 1960. His subsequent #1 was The Twist in 1962.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight – The Tokens, three weeks at #1, gold record. A song with a complicated history.
Blue Moon – the Marcels, three weeks at #1. Probably my favorite song from that year, written in the 1930s by Rodgers and Hart.
Take Good Care Of My Baby – Bobby Vee, three weeks at #1. I KNOW this song, but not from this version, or Bobby Vinton’s. (For a while I thought Bobby Vee and Bobby Vinton were the same person.) Or the Beatles’. Hmm.

Two Weeks at #1

Calcutta – Lawrence Welk and his orchestra, gold record. Instrumental. I watched Welk a LOT growing up.
Runaround Sue – Dion, gold record. Dion seemed somehow cooler than the other ’59-’62 artists.
Michael – the Highwaymen, gold record. This a song – “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” – that my father used to sing, then my sister Leslie and I would sing with him in concert. BTW, the singers were the 1960s “collegiate folk” group, not the ’80s supergroup of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.

Travelin’ Man – Ricky Nelson. I wonder if he performed this on the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966)?
Quarter To Three – Gary U.S. Bonds, gold record. I love this song.
Hit the Road, Jack – Ray Charles. One of the great call-and-response songs ever.
Surrender– Elvis Presley, platinum record. I hear the intro and think of some spy movie.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow – the Shirelles. My favorite song, as performed by Carole King.

A single week at #1

Mother-in-Law – Ernie K-Doe. I first heard this song on a Herman’s Hermits album; this is much better. I should note I love my MIL.
Please Mr. Postman – The Marvelettes, gold record. I heard this first by The Beatles. I’m fond of both.
Wooden Heart – Joe Dowell. I remember this song, but I couldn’t have named the artist. In fact, ask me in six months, and I probably still couldn’t.
Moody River – Pat Boone. No recollection of this song, thank goodness.
Running Scared – Roy Orbison. I appreciated him more in retrospect.

Wait: did I write that?

Instead of writing blog posts as a good blogger should, I have spent an inordinate amount of time recently skimming my blog posts from May 2010 through February 2017. Why would that be? Primarily for posterity. And I discovered a lot of “did I write that?” moments.

I was getting rid of these “Continue Reading” tags in my blog. And I discovered some interesting things.
1) I used the words “couple of” WAY too often.
2) The majority of the typos I found were me typing the same word twice: “the the”, e.g.
3) I had some yeasty discussions going on with Uthaclena and Sharp Little Pencil and New York Erratic and of course Jaquandor and Arthur and others. It was fun!

Polly ticks

In fact, I found a comment Arthur made in early 2017 about a post I wrote about the Electoral College. “About the possibility of many states having recounts—SO?!! Apart from the cost to taxpayers, it seems like a necessary price to pay for democracy. And the result would have to be pretty close to get many states recounting.”

The problem is, of course, that Arthur, as a rational being, was thinking about a logical process, one without people ginned up by conspiracy theories, crackpot lawyers, and, of course, a pathological liar-in-chief.

My, I ended up writing about Agent Orange, my preferred moniker for him at the time, a LOT, especially by January 27, 2016, when I was willing to state: “I’m now convinced that Donald J. Trump could be elected President this year.”

My wife recently asked me why I thought that way back then. In part, it was probably because of the prognosticators during the 2015 Republican nomination season who insisted that he had a 20-30% “ceiling” among Republican voters. But that was when there were 17 candidates.

Once Jeb Bush, the presumptive nominee, failed to catch on, the race was up for grabs. And after Marco Rubio lost the Florida primary in his own state on March 15, 2016, the race for the nomination was essentially over.

Huh?

But what I found really fascinating is that there were blogposts concerning ME, that I wrote, that had totally slipped my mind. And they weren’t all that long ago. For instance, getting a ride from a total stranger because she thought I looked like Santa Claus. Oh, yeah, that’s right.

Or my Thanksgiving 2016 piece about buying someone some pizza. I had TOTALLY forgotten about this story. Heck, I read it and said, “Hey, this Roger fellow isn’t a bad guy.”

Here is one of my greater failings. I am MUCH more likely to remember things that I should or should not have said, should, or should not have done than the good stuff, from FOREVER ago. They are always there, just below the surface.

Anyway, now that I’m back from a brief vacation with my family, and I have completed my obsessive/compulsive task, I have about seven more posts clogging my brain until I dislodge them onto you.