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Music Throwback Saturday: What Do You Want from Life?

‘What Do You Want from Life?’ climaxes in a ‘hard-sell’ monologue by Fee Waybill, which name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams and Randolph Mantooth,

tubesWhat DO you want from life? Somehow I totally forgot about a song I own on vinyl until I saw a recent mention of it on Facebook. What was old becomes new again in social media, evidently.

After repeatedly hearing just one song on the local radio station Q104, I acquired the 1975 eponymous first album by a San Francisco area band known as The Tubes, produced by the legendary Al Kooper. According to Wikipedia, “The Tubes formed in 1972 in San Francisco from two Phoenix bands after they both relocated to San Francisco in 1969. The Beans…and The Red White and Blues Band…

The band’s loud, heavy jamming style didn’t attract attention and in order to make money the band would go back to Phoenix and sell-out shows to make rent.”

The album had other notable songs, notably White Punks on Dope, but it didn’t grab me as much as another tune. “The album track ‘What Do You Want from Life?’, which became another of the Tubes’ signature songs, satirizes consumerism and celebrity culture and climaxes in a ‘hard-sell’ monologue by [Fee] Waybill, which name-checks celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Paul Williams, and Randolph Mantooth, as well as well-known products of the period, including the Dynagym exercise machine and a host of American vehicles such as the Winnebago and the Mercury Montclair.” It is a peculiar song that I found rather funny, and now, a peculiar time capsule.

The band would gain greater commercial success in the following decade. “In July 2015, they started a 40th-anniversary European tour, including dates in Germany, Sweden, and the UK. Dates in the U.S. followed.”

LISTEN TO What Do You Want From Life HERE or HERE.

Eggs trordinaire

I never tried Green Eggs and Ham.

RussianFabergeEggChris E. asked: “Do you like eggs?”

No, no, no. I LOVE eggs.

Eggs were the first thing I could cook on our gas stove at home when I was growing up, using a cast-iron skillet. It meant that wouldn’t be destined to eat cold cereal for the rest of my life.

Eggs are versatile because I could scramble them or fry them or make an omelet. The best thing to put into the omelet are sauteed onions and/or mushrooms, or fresh spinach.

Eggs can be poached. Our household had this aluminum pan that allowed for three eggs to be cooked, with the water between the bottom of the pan and the trio of cups. Now, I just poach them in boiling water and utilize a slotted spoon. Now that I think of it, I haven’t made poached eggs in a while.

For the longest time, when my choir was having a party, I would bring deviled eggs, always. Secret ingredient: dry (powdered) mustard.

When I go out to eat, I often have eggs, especially a Western omelet, that has many different ingredients, because it’s too much work to keep all of those items fresh at home. I’ll even eat an Egg McMuffin if I were in a hurry.

I’m told that, despite scares about it, when dietary intake of cholesterol is decreased, the liver compensates by producing more cholesterol, leaving total cholesterol levels relatively unchanged, and vice versa. So one should be able to eat a reasonable number of eggs each week.

Growing up, I proved to be pretty good at the raw egg toss; I had soft hands in catching the oval projectiles.

Hmm: The CEO Obsessed With Making Eggs Without Chickens.

Culturally, I deeply mourned the terrible death of Humpty Dumpty. I never tried Green Eggs and Ham, but I own the book; it’s GREEN, after all. When I sing in excelsis, it sounds more like “in egg shell cease”. I groaned at Jaquandor’s eggscelent pun he swiped from Facebook.

And of course, I AM the eggman.

I also like the chicken, which came first, but that’s for another day.

Movie review: The Big Short

The Big Short is based on a Michael Lewis book that he was frankly surprised that was optioned to be a movie.

big-shortI walked into work at the same time as a colleague and told him I had seen The Big Short the night before. As it turned out, so had he, at a different cinema. I asked him what he thought of it. He said, “It pissed me off.”

I could quit there, I suppose, but need to mention that the movie is about that very real credit and housing bubble that collapsed the economy, and not just in the United States, in 2008. The big banks were greedy and lacked foresight. The government failed to do oversight. The characters here not only predicted it, but they also profited off of it.

The Big Short managed to take an amazingly dense, inherently boring topic and make some detailed sense of it, in part by using folks such as chef Anthony Bourdain, singer Selena Gomez, and Australian actress Margot Robbie (in a bubble bath) to explain some basic concepts. And, in spite of being often infuriating, the film was also rather funny.

This is an imperfect analogy, but it’s like how John Oliver will take a topic such as net neutrality (SNORE) and make you entertained enough to actually care.

There is great acting by Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt, among others. There are odd little vignettes of Pharrell videos and “real life”, there, I think, as a palate cleanser between big concepts, and to show how the world was going on as usual while the system was undermining people’s lives.

The Big Short is based on a Michael Lewis book that he was frankly surprised that was optioned by Brad Pitt and others to be a movie. I’m told Lewis does a great job at making a dense subject understandable and human, though a very different animal. Adam McKay, the writer/director of Will Ferrell movies such as Anchorman and Talladega Nights directed this film and co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Randolph.

The tags near the end suggest that we may not be safe from this disaster happening again. In fact, Michael Burry, Real-Life Market Genius From The Big Short, Thinks Another Financial Crisis Is Looming.

And now for some venting

On December 30, I went to my favorite venue, the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, specifically to see SPOTLIGHT for the 6:15 pm showing, meeting my wife right after work. But, for some reason, it was preempted by another showing of the new STAR WARS, a movie already showing there. Some group had apparently rented out a theater.

Don’t know where this fact was noted, but I felt blindsided, as did others. The ticket seller did not even know until he was told by another unhappy patron. I know this situation wouldn’t have happened under the previous ownership, who would have noted it on their weekly broadsheets well in advance.

And preempting for STAR WARS? I could almost see some special local film. But a film that has grossed domestically, as of that date, $629,034,583, and over a billion worldwide?

Landmark Theatres, you have really ticked me off. The fact that I found a decent film to see in lieu of SPOTLIGHT does not mitigate the dreadful customer service in this situation.

Movie Review: Joy

I was curious whether David O. Russell could pull off a third film with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (and technically, Robert DeNiro).

jennifer-lawrence-as-joyThis is how I ended up seeing the movie Joy. The choices at the Spectrum in Albany, my favorite movie venue, were showing Joy, The Big Short, The Danish Girl, Spotlight, Carol, Brooklyn, and Youth.

Oh, yeah, and some space opera thing that seems to be somewhat popular. I would have seen any of them, though especially Spotlight and The Big Short.

But we weren’t IN Albany, we were in Oneonta, about 75 miles away, on Christmas weekend. The only crossover between the mall theater in Oneonta and the Spectrum was Joy.

I was interested in seeing this movie in part because it was based on the real story of entrepreneur Joy Mangano, who invented a better floor mop. How can that be a compelling story?

Also, I was curious whether David O. Russell could pull off a third film with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (and technically, Robert DeNiro) after they had appeared in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. I’m thinking that it feels somewhat rather like the troop of actors who used to show up in Woody Allen films.

This is a pretty solid 100 minute-film. Unfortunately, it ran 124. There’s a lot of nice bits: real soap opera actresses (Susan Lucci. Donna Mills) as the soap opera that Joy’s mom, Terry (Virginia Madsen), though the joke went on too long. As a business librarian, I found the parts with QVC rather interesting; Melissa Rivers played her mother Joan.

I appreciated the actors, including Édgar Ramírez as Joy’s ex-husband/still friend Tony; Diane Ladd as grandma Mimi, the narrator who seemed to disappear for large portions of the film; and Isabella Rossellini, as Trudy, Joy’s financier and the girlfriend of Rudy (DeNiro). But the character of Joy’s half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm of Law & Order) is a movie contrivance, unrelentingly negative.

There IS a good film there, I’m convinced, and Jennifer Lawrence carries much of it. But it’s muddled, and the transitions from scene to scene often didn’t work. I’m not quite sure I “believed” the ending. All of that said, I did enjoy it at the moment, though – and this is always a bad sign – I checked my watch 2/3s of the way through.

Diane Keaton is 70

I do want to watch the movie Marvin’s Room.

Diane_KeatonMy love for the movie Annie Hall is well-documented. Diane Keaton is wonderful in it. I always appreciated the fact that Diane’s given last name was Hall, so all those references about Grammy Hall seemed more genuine. La-de-dah, la-de-dah.

Yet, I remain convinced that, though she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in the Woody Allen film, she was picked as much for the much darker film from 1977, Waiting for Mr. Goodbar. Or, at least, it added to her “body of work” that year that allowed an actress in a comedy to win an Oscar.

Her first claim to fame was performing in the original Broadway production of Hair, in which she refused to disrobe at the end of Act I when the cast performed nude. This was actually controversial at the time, though being naked was contractually optional.

She has appeared in a number of Woody Allen films, starting with Play It Again (1972) through Manhattan (1979), with a cameo in Radio Days (1987) and another starring part in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), all of which I have seen.

Interesting, and I could have noted this last month on Woody Allen’s 80th birthday, I now wait for the reviews and decide whether to see a Woody film. In the days when Diane was his costar, I saw everything he made. That’s probably more a reflection of his filmmaking than her star power, but there it is.

I’ve also Diane Keaton in The Godfather (1972 – she’s in all three films), Reds (1981 – nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride I and II (1991, 1995), The First Wives Club (1996 – which I liked a lot), Something’s Gotta Give (2003 – nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), and The Family Stone (2005).

I haven’t been drawn to see her more recent films, and I see her only in L’Oreal commercials. But I do want to watch the movie Marvin’s Room (1996), for which she received her fourth Academy Award nomination.

“Keaton wrote her first memoir, entitled Then Again, for Random House in November 2011. Much of the autobiography relies on her mother Dorothy’s private journals, in which she writes at one point: ‘Diane…is a mystery…At times, she’s so basic, at others so wise it frightens me.'”

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