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2022 Kennedy Center Honors

George Clooney, Amy Grant, Amy Grant, Tania León, U2

As is my tradition, I note the honorees for the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors. Once again, I am very familiar with four of the five selected in this 45th class and the fifth, not at all.

I vaguely remember George Clooney from shows like Roseanne and Sisters, though I seldom saw The Facts of Life.

Nor did I see him on another show. Nevertheless, he won me $1,200 on JEOPARDY in 1998. A VIDEO DAILY DOUBLE: “Hi, I’m Jason Alexander. This actor co-starred with me on a sitcom called E/R before starring in the medical series ER.” Something I must have read in People magazine or Entertainment Weekly got stuck in my head when Clooney first started playing Dr. Doug Ross.

Subsequently, I saw or heard him in several movies, such as Up In The Air, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Descendants, Gravity, and Tomorrowland. He directed and appeared in Good Night and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

He was the executive producer of Far From Heaven and producer of Argo and August: Osage County.

When I saw Alison Krauss and Union Station in Albany in 2003, Dan Tyminski noted how his wife enjoyed hearing his voice come out of George Clooney’s mouth when the actor “sang” Man Of Constant Sorrow in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? I have had the soundtrack for two decades, though I saw the film during the COVID lockdown.

“George Clooney is co-founder and co-President, along with his wife Amal, of the Clooney Foundation for Justice.”

Contemporary Christian and pop singer-songwriter

I may have only one Amy Grant album, a vinyl recording of The Animals’ Christmas with Art Garfunkel. It was written by Jimmy Webb.

She was the first self-identified singer of Contemporary Christian Music to go to #1 on the pop charts. There were “Christians” who were HORRIFIED that Amy was doing pop music, such as Baby, Baby. Oh, please.

Amy married musician Vince Gill in 2000. She’s been active in philanthropy for her entire career.

A legendary singer of soul, Gospel, R and B, and pop

I must have learned that Gladys Knight won Ted Mack’s The Original Amateur Hour TV show from reading Ebony or Jet when I was growing up. She was eight in 1952.

Gladys Knight and the Pips had minor hits on minor labels, most notably Every Beat Of My Heart in 1961 (#6 pop, #1 RB). She left the group in 1962 to start a family but rejoined in 1964.

The group signed with Motown in 1966. It always felt that the label didn’t know what to do with the act. Berry Gordy wouldn’t let the Miracles release I Heard It Through The Grapevine, but was OK with the Pips doing so. It became a big hit for the Pips (#2 pop for three weeks, #1 RB for six weeks); it is my favorite version of the song.

Gladys Knight and the Pips did have other hits on Motown, notably If I Were Your Woman (#9 pop, #1 RB) and Neither One Of Us (#2 pop for two weeks, #4 RB). But they also were recording the same songs that The Temptations were also getting.

Their move to Buddah generated their first #1 pop hit (for two weeks), Midnight Train To Georgia. More Top 5 hits followed. She had an active solo career and acted as well.

Cuban-born American composer, conductor, and educator

Alas, Tania León is the honoree I do not know beyond what’s in the KCH bio.

Iconic Irish rock band

In 1988, I told a friend of mine that The Joshua Tree by the band U2 was one of my desert albums. My friend said one couldn’t put a one-year-old album on such a list. Maybe not, but I still like it quite a lot.

Lead singer Bono and his wife of 40 years Ali Hewson, were recently interviewed by Norah O’Donnell for CBS News’ Person To Person with U2’s Bono. He talked about his new book “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” He shares how the band – he, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. – stayed together for decades and much more.

Here are some songs: Beautiful Day, One, When Love Comes To Town with B.B. King, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Rattle and Hum version), Where the Streets Have No Name, and Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Watch the show!

The Kennedy Center Honors took place Sunday, December 4th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Kennedy Center Opera House. It will be televised Wednesday, December 28th, on CBS. We watch it every year.

Performer Jeff Goldblum is 70

Brown Shoe

I’ve been following the quirky career of Jeff Goldblum for a very long time. While I saw him in early films such as California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), and Annie Hall (1977), I think I first really knew who he was in the remake of The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978).

I may have been one of the 14 people who watched Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (1980), in which “a con-man [Ben Vereen] and an accountant-wanna-be private eye [Goldblum] team up to fight crime.” It didn’t catch on despite being written by Stephen J. Cannell, the scribe of The Rockford Files and The Greatest American Hero.

He appeared in The Fly (1986) and Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) with Geena Davis, his wife from 1987 to 1991. After playing Jeff Goldblum in The Player (1992), he appeared in one of his franchise films, Jurassic Park (1993). I’ve only seen that first film. However, I’ve read he’s one of the only reasons to see Jurassic World Dominion (2022).

Jake Coyle of the Associated Press wrote in June 2022 that the actor has not been defined by his roles in Jurassic Day or Independence Day. “It’s more that Goldblum, in putting his own idiosyncratic spin on them, marks the characters, rather than the other way around.”

TV cop

This is true in Law and Order: Criminal Intent (2009-2010), in which he played detective Zack Nichols for a season. His character, like the man himself, plays a bit of jazz piano. And then he reprieved the role in, of all things, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in the Civil Forfeiture episode (2014) at 14:07.

Goldblum was great as Deputy Kovacs in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok (2017). He also voiced Duke in the animated Isle of Dogs (2018).

I haven’t seen The World According to Jeff Goldblum, but I suspect it’d be entertaining. As Coyle noted: “Chaos and harmony feature prominently in most conversations with Goldblum, an ever-riffing, cosmetically attuned raconteur.” he shows up playing

Heck, even his commercials for Apartments.com are a bit off-center. But he can also be serious, as this clip from Finding Your Roots shows.

Happy 70th birthday to Jeff Goldblum.

Angela Lansbury: stage, screen, TV icon

The Manchurian Candidate

When I was crashing at my parents’ house in Charlotte, NC, in the spring of 1977, I went to the downtown library to watch the 1944 version of the movie Gaslight. It starred Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten. In her film debut, 19-year-old Angela Lansbury, as the young maid Nancy, received a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Some folks did not know the meaning of gaslighting in 2013.)

In 2018, my family went to the cinema to see Mary Poppins Returns. In her antepenultimate film, she had a cameo at the end as the Balloon Lady. Her final film appearance was Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, in which she played Angela Lansbury.

Her greatest film role was as the mother of a would-be assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Casey Seiler of the Albany Times Union newspaper says she was “absolutely perfect” in “one of the few paranoid political thrillers that haven’t been outstripped by reality.” Here are just three minutes.

One of my favorite parts, though, is her voicing Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991). Here’s Tale As Old As Time.

She received an honorary Oscar in 2013 for her career as “an entertainment icon who has created some of cinema’s most memorable characters, inspiring generations of actors.”

Cabot Cove, Maine

Of course, the performer was best known as Jessica Fletcher, novelist and an amateur sleuth in Murder, She Wrote. She appeared for a dozen seasons (1984-1996) plus four TV movies between 1997 and 2003. She received an Emmy nomination for best actress in a drama series for every season, yet never won.

As The Hollywood Reporter noted, the program was “a huge ratings hit on Sunday nights following 60 Minutes. Both CBS shows appealed to intelligent, older viewers, and Lansbury was the rare woman in the history of television to carry her own series… ‘Nobody in this town watches Murder, She Wrote,’ Lansbury, referring to the TV industry, said in 1991. ‘Only the public watches.’

“The show was ranked in the top 13 in the Nielsen ratings (and as high as No. 4) on Sundays in its first 11 seasons but plummeted to No. 58 when CBS moved it to Thursdays in 1995-96 against NBC’s then-powerful lineup. The series finale, quite appropriately, was titled ‘Death by Demographics.'”

LA Times quotes her: “What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher is that I could do what I do best and [play someone I have had] little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman. Mostly, I’ve played very spectacular bitches. Jessica has extreme sincerity, compassion, extraordinary intuition. I’m not like her. My imagination runs riot. I’m not a pragmatist. Jessica is.”

I freely admit to watching the program regularly. Maybe, as one critic noted, it was an opportunity to try to solve the crime with, or maybe before, the author.

Theater!

As the Los Angeles Times noted, “It was her deep roots in the theater, and the many Tony Awards that followed that won the hearts of theatergoers and critics, who were often rhapsodic in their praise…

“Critic Rex Reed declared that she brought ‘the Broadway stage about as close to an MGM musical as the Broadway stage is likely to get,’ according to the 1996 biography ‘Angela Lansbury.’

“Her charismatic performance as the eccentric title character in a 1966 production of Mame vaulted her to Broadway superstardom and resulted in the first of her four Tonys for best actress in a musical.

“At 83, she tied the record for most Tony Awards won for acting when she received a fifth for portraying a medium in the 2009 revival of ‘Blithe Spirit. (Audra McDonald set a new record in 2014 when she won her sixth.)”

I saw the TV movie Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 1982, which was quite compelling. Her Broadway performances were undoubtedly even greater.

Here are Hollywood notables paying tribute to Angela Lansbury, plus A Critic’s Appreciation by David Rooney.

Favorite topics: history, books, movies, music

100 $100 bills;

Another Sunday Stealing meme. This one concerns some of my favorite topics: history, books, movies, and music.

What period of history is your favorite to read about?

“Favorite” may be stretching it, but it’s the period in American history between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the beginning of the Civil Rights era of the mid-20th Century.

Reconstruction included several black legislators; Jim Crow, which largely undid the progress; the “scientific” rationalization of bigotry; the Red Summer of 1919; the civil rights leaders who were ahead of the curve.

Tomes

What is your favorite genre of fiction?

I like fiction rooted in real events. The only Stephen King book I ever read was 11/22/63.

Do you choose a book by its cover?

Sometimes. Or at least the book jacket. Does this tell me something I didn’t know AND want to find out? Incidentally, it is true: some librarians DO refer to books by their color. “Can you get me that tall green book, please?”

Where do you do most of your reading?

On the sofa, near an end so that I can put one arm up.

Without looking, guess how many books are in your TBR pile. Now, look. Were you right?

Hundreds. Yup, hundreds.

Films

How many movies are on your TBW list?

That’s quite a different calculation. There are tons of movies on various platforms that make the enumeration of the same to be quite impossible. Now, if you’re talking about movies I have on DVD that I have not watched, maybe a half dozen. But I also have lots of unwatched TV episodes and the like.

What’s your favorite genre of movie?

Quite possibly the documentary. Beyond that, comedy.

Do you still go to see movies in the theater?

Yes, but it’s much more difficult. Albany County is currently COVID-red, so my wife is reluctant to go, even though we both got COVID in August.

Moreover, I got out of the routine. When I went regularly, there were a lot of trailers that helped me decide whether or not to see that film in the future. Now, I know there are trailers online, but 1) there are so many that I don’t have the time, and 2) trailers on a computer are not the same dynamically as trailers in a cinema.

BTW, I dislike seeing movies on a computer screen, though I’ve seen several since March 2020. I’m trying to decide if I should get Roku or a newer, larger television set.

Money

You have $10,000 and no strings or obligations for one full day. Where do you go, and what do you do?

Let’s further assume I can’t give it away to a charity, a political campaign, or to random strangers (100 $100 bills; it DOES appeal to me). It can’t be something practical. The one-day limit is a hassle. What I’d LIKE to do is buy out a large theater with at least a 500-person capacity and show a movie that people might want to see on the big screen, such as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. But I don’t know if I could pull it off logistically.

Tunes

How many songs are on your favorite playlist?

About 3,753. I don’t know that I have a favorite playlist. The idea of hearing the same songs more than a dozen times a year is alien to me.

What method do you use to listen to music (Spotify, iTunes, Pandora…)?

I play compact discs. In fact, I’m playing the Psychedelic Soul album by The Temptations as I write this. Before that, I listened to Lyle Lovett, Rebecca Jade, Paul Simon, Tom Petty, Weird Al Yankovic, The Beatles, and Television’s Greatest Hits (TV theme songs).

I do have songs on Amazon, but that’s my fallback position.

Christopher Reeve would have been 70

Paralysis Research

Lots of people have mused why Christopher Reeve, born September 25, 1952, was the perfect Superman. Part of it is that perfect early scene:
Supes: Easy miss, I’ve got you
Lois Lane states: You–you’ve got me? Who’s got you?
And it’s that little chuckle that I loved.

But also, he was my favorite Clark Kent. If you don’t accept Clark as distinct, it’s difficult to buy the secret identity of the superhero. I saw the first two films, and even though the second film is a lesser effort, it was not the failure of the actor in the lead. Here was his workout regimen.

I didn’t see him in much else. Remains of the Day (1993) and Noises Off (1992) I liked. Also Somewhere in Time (1980), during which Jane Seymour says she and Christopher Reeve were “falling in love.”

Then, “on May 27, 1995, the actor injured his spinal cord after falling off his horse in an equestrian competition… The blow left him paralyzed from the neck down and forever in a wheelchair. Reeve was only 42 years old. The doctors took away any hope of improvement, assuring him that it was ‘impossible’ to recover movement…

“As The New York Times revealed, if the actor had fallen one centimeter further to the left, he would have died on the spot. If he had done so to the right, he would most likely walk out with less than a concussion.

“Reeve reappeared in public at the 1996 Oscar Awards, a surprise remembered as one of the most exciting moments in the history of the awards.” I’m very sure I got a lot verklempt at that moment. Christopher quipped, “What you may not know is that I left New York in September and just arrived in Los Angeles this morning [March 25, 1996].”

The Foundation

The above paragraphs were from a piece on the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 1999.

Even before then, both Christopher and Dana were involved with activism. “In the years following his injury, Christopher did more to promote research on spinal cord injury and other neurological disorders than any other person before or since.”

As the AmeriDisability page notes: “Originally created in 1982 in response to the injury of Henry Stifel, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation – first conceived as the Stifel Paralysis Research Foundation, a community-driven nonprofit dedicated to curing spinal cord injury (SCI) – marks its 40th anniversary (2022). Over the last four decades, the Reeve Foundation has evolved to become the premier national, paralysis-focused nonprofit organization working to address a dual care-cure mission – providing free, comprehensive resources to help those impacted by SCI and paralysis as it advances the most promising scientific advances toward cures.”

Check out the Give.org page.

The most recent Charity Navigator listing for the Foundation gives it a “score is 87.31, earning it a 3-Star rating. Donors can ‘Give with Confidence’ to this charity.” Note that “this score represents Form 990 data from 2019, the latest year published by the IRS,” because the agency “is significantly delayed in processing nonprofits’ annual tax filings.”

Passing

In 1998, Reeve produced and starred in Rear Window. It is, of course, a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s great 1954 film. “He was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance.” Of course, it doesn’t compare with the original. But one scene actually terrified me. When the villain disconnected the Reeve character’s breathing tube, it was impossible for me to separate the role from the guy playing it.

On October 9, 2004, Reeve went into cardiac arrest after receiving an antibiotic for an infection. He fell into a coma and was taken to a hospital in Mount Kisco, New York. He died on October 10 at the age of 52, quite possibly as the result of an adverse reaction to a drug, something he had experienced in the past.

Dana Reeve married Christopher in 1992. Less than a year after his death, Dana announced that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. “She had never smoked but in her early career often sang in smoky bars and hotel lobbies.” She died on March 6, 2006, at the age of 44, at NYC’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

But their work lives on.