This Is Indeed, A Wonderful Life

Saturday, 5 PM, The Repertory Theatre of St Louis.  We see This Wonderful Life, a one-man interpretation of It’s A Wonderful Life, the classic Jimmy Stewart/Frank Capra movie.

It was well done and very touching.  It’s hard to convey how a single actor can play something like 30 characters, but he did it, and did it well.  The set was remarkable, almost another cast member.  It kept exuding bridges, furniture, stars, and storefronts as required to set the scene.

I hoped it would include the famous “lost ending,” where Uncle Billy remembers what he did with the money, and the whole town cheers George Bailey on as he beats the crap out of Old Man Potter. No such luck.

But you have to wonder if we’re on a slippery slope.  On the way to work the other day, I noticed a billboard advertising A Wonderful Life, a musical version of the story.  I can tell where this is going.  It’s A Wonderful Life on Ice is no doubt in the works somewhere, that’ll make the ice breaking scene look authentic.  And then we’ll have the Bollywood movie version, It Is A Different Life, But It Is Still Wonderful.  The ballet.  The rock opera.  The TV potential, Burt the Cop and Ernie the Cabbie already have their own spinoff.  Video games.  Action figures.

The mind boggles.

Poppa

Building the Thanksgiving Plate

Building the Thanksgiving Plate actually starts weeks, possibly months before Thanksgiving, depending on who is in charge of orchestrating the meal.  If you are completely in control, you can leave everything to the last few weeks, since the most important part, deciding what to eat, was determined decades ago.  If you are depending on friends or family to assemble the menu, you may need to spend months, even years, conditioning your loved ones to ensure the critical items are included.  I usually do this by whining and moaning about the importance of The Key Components of a Proper Thanksgiving Meal whenever the opportunity comes up.  If this fails, you must be prepared to provide the missing components yourself.

The Key Components are:

Turkey
Stuffing (or dressing)
Mashed Potatoes
Gravy
Green Bean Casserole
Corn
Yams (preferably candied)

Many people consider the Cranberry to be a Key Component.  While I prefer my cranberries mashed up and mixed with vodka, I don’t object to cranberry products on my plate as long as I don’t have to eat them.  I do think they have a negative impact on the visual presentation since they add an unsightly note of color to what is ideally a palette of muted Earth tones.

Once the Key Components are spread out on the counter and the starter’s signal has been given, an experienced trencherman should have no trouble maneuvering close to the front of the line (being at the actual front of the line is considered crude).

Holding the plate in the weak hand, begin to build the Primary Assembly.  The Primary Assembly consists of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  The turkey should be placed first, directly on the plate, in order to serve as the foundation or base.  It should cover almost, but not quite, half the surface of the plate and should be off-center, so that the outside edge of the Primary Assembly is close to the edge of the plate.  With the foundation in place, apply stuffing over roughly half of the turkey and mashed potatoes over the other half (be advised it is very bad form to completely hide the turkey).  Use the serving utensil to put an indentation in the center of the mashed potatoes.  This will facilitate gravy retention.  Then pour gravy over the entire Primary Assembly.  When the Primary Assembly has been completed, cover the remainder of the plate with roughly equal amounts of yams, corn, and green bean casserole.  There should be no space visible between any of the components.

At this point, you may add non-Key Components if there are any, just enough to be polite.  Try to keep them away from the Primary Assembly.

Locate a place at the table, obtain a beverage, and enjoy!

Repeat as required.

Poppa

The Saint Louis International Film Festival, Part Three – We Power Through

Saturday was our last trek to SLIFF.  It was a light day, we only saw three films.

First was Carny, a documentary about, you guessed it, carnival workers.  When I was little, my parents wouldn’t allow me to camp out in our back yard while the Kossuth County Fair was in town because, “There are weird people hanging around the fair, carnival workers.  They’re like GYPSIES, and they might steal you!  Or do something else to you.”  I didn’t figure out what “something else” was until much later.  In the summer of ‘69, at the ripe old age of 17, I was helping my friend David and his sister Karen run a concession stand at the fair.  David and Karen realized none of the other food stands were opening until the fair started, around noon, so they fired up the grill early in the morning and cornered the market on carny breakfasts.  I got to meet a lot of carnies while they were off duty.  None of the carnies tried to steal me, but I think one tried to pick me up.  I’m can’t be sure, I was pretty naive about that sort of thing back then.  That must have been the “something else” my parents were trying to warn me about.

Since I figured my grades were going to rule college out, becoming a carny was one of the two ways I could see to get out of Algona that didn’t involve joining the Army and going to ‘Nam.  The other was becoming a railroad worker and living in a caboose.  I’m glad I didn’t do either.  Certainly the documentary makes it clear that the Military Industrial Complex Dental Plan is vastly superior to the Carny Dental Plan.  And I’ll bet those cabooses weren’t air conditioned.

Then we saw a short documentary, Letter of Thanks, the heartwarming story of how a letter written on the eve of Desert Storm to Elvis Costello by a young female soldier became a song.  Lots of footage of dogs being washed (really), but we never got to hear the @#%$*! letter OR the song.

Next was As Slow As Possible, an emotional account of a young man about to loose the last of his vision after 15 years of slowly going blind due to retinitis pigmentosa.  The documentary portrays his 2004 pilgrimage to Halberstadt, Germany to be present for the first note change in a 639 year-long organ performance of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible.  The performance started in 2001 with a 17 month rest.  The first audible note was heard in 2003.  The documentary was good.  The thought of a 639 year-long musical performance blows my mind.

So that’s it for this year’s SLIFF.  We saw some good stuff and some not so good stuff.  Next year I might take some time off work to volunteer and attend some films on the weekdays.

Sunday we were back at the Touhill Performing Arts Center to see Explosions, a ”percussion festival” put on by members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.  The first half of the performance was Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.  I first encountered Bartók while watching old episodes of The Ernie Kovacs Show.  Kovacs used a Bartók composition as background for a silent sketch.  It was wonderful.  But I don’t think the Bartók composition we heard today is very accessible.  The Sonata seems to wander eratically all over the place with percussive bits occurring seemingly at random.  It’s apparently one of his most frequently performed compositions, but my theory is that it’s popular because the technical expertise required to play it appeals to musicians and audiences comprised of musical mathematicians bored with rhythmic pulse and melody.  It is to classical music what pìobaireachd is to bagpipe music; you can’t dance to it or march to it, and you surely don’t want to make love to it.

The second half of the performance was three musicians playing the sort of traditional North African Arabic music that inspired the Bartók work.  One man was playing an oud, the Arabic predecessor to the European lute.  Two percussionists were alternating between tars (simple frame drums), riqs (a sort of tambourine), and a dumbek (a goblet-shaped drum).  They produced a greater variety of tones with these three instruments than the performers from the symphony with all their tympani, snares, cymbals, bass drums, gongs, and xylophones.  At times it sounded like there were more than two drummers because I couldn’t tell who was producing all of the tones I was hearing.  They were playing extremely complex polyrhythms, there was nothing simple about what they were doing.  But there was a major difference between what they were playing and the Bartók sonata.  I felt something besides bewilderment while I listened to them.

That’s enough culture for a while.  I’m going to veg out with some EC Comics Weird Science reprints I picked up on Saturday.  To those unfamiliar with EC Comics, in the ’50s they were considered responsible for the Seduction of the Innocent.

To those familiar with EC Comics, “Spa fon!“

Poppa

The Saint Louis International Film Festival, Part Two – Our Butts are Getting Numb

Saturday morning we settled in for a full day of keeping our butts planted in theater seats.

At noon, we went to Song Sung Blue, a documentary about a couple who call themselves Lightning and Thunder and perform a Neil Diamond/Patsy Cline tribute act.  Never have I been whipsawed back and forth between distain and admiration so fluidly.  The documentary reminds us that sometimes when you scratch what appears to be a lump of clay, you find gold inside.  (Ha!  You thought I was going to say Diamond, didn’t you?)  Nan and I both gave this the highest rating possible.

In the afternoon, we saw another set of documentary shorts.  These were all focused on women’s stories.

Passages – An absorbing account of a young woman’s difficult delivery.  Well-done simple rotoscoped animation, a potentially tragic ending for the child who may have been harmed by a delayed Caesarean.  The woman filed a protest with the hospital and was told, basically, “Don’t have a child in July, the doctors are all on vacation and the residents are all inexperienced.”  The big picture is, the hospital saved both her life and the baby’s.  The little picture is, who can look at the big picture when your baby’s health is at risk?

The cynic in me could also point this out as a failure of Canadian socialized medicine but I’m too noble for that.  Or maybe not.

Mariners & Musicians – Slow, rambling, out of focus, fatuous, and booooring.  At 24 minutes, it was 22 minutes too long.

Unbridled – About injured women healing injured hoses.  A serious subject badly presented.  Mercifully short.

Kick Like a Girl – Empowered elementary school-age female soccer-knockers who took on boy’s teams and (mostly) won.  The male chauvinist in me feels compelled to point out that the nature of soccer prevents the boys from utilizing their main physical advantages over the girls, their upper body strength.  Still, an enjoyable film.

In the early evening, we saw the full-length film Fashion Victims, an entertaining German comedy about a fashion industry rivalry getting tangled up in a disintegrating family.  Good but not great.  Fun as always to see the day-to-day life in a foreign culture.

We closed out the day with a selection of animated comedy shorts.

Breach – Grotesque.  Thankfully, the story arc was shorter than the credits.

It Was a Dark and Silly Night – Art by Gahan Wilson.  The kids are looking for a place to have a party since their parents won’t let them play Jell-O tag in the house. They decide a cemetery would be perfect since there’s no one residing there.  They’re wrong.

The Inquisitive Snail – An amusing little claymation fable.

Chicken Cowboy – Very modern-style animation with great voice talent and a funny story line.  “I don’t want to die like a man; I want to live like a chicken!”

Botnik – Stylish classic beatnik-era animation with great music.

Codswallop – Surreal and interesting, credited to the Brothers McLeod.  I’ve seen some of these images before, but I can’t remember where.

Hot Dog – A very funny short by Bill Plympton.  His work is always worth watching.  In fact, you can watch a sample of Hot Dog right here.

In August – Slow, lyrical, beautiful, inscrutable.  I was drifting by the end of this, so I may have missed a part that made it scrutable.

Lavatory – Lovestory – Amusing and simple.

Let Them Grow – Umm… anti genetically modified corn tirade?  Anti corporate farming tirade?  Both?  Neither?

Mita – German mix of photography and claymation.  Incomprehensible.  There may be a cultural gulf at work here.

I hate You Don’t Touch Me or Bat and Hat – Weird.  And gross.  And SO weird.

The Parcel – A very short stop-motion story about a guy freezing to death.  I think.

Token Hunchback – A claymation story about an actor who’s typecast as a hunchback because he has a hunchback.  Very good.

Chainsaw – Rotoscoped.  About chainsaw safety, Chainsaw the Bull, a bullfighter, Ava Gabor, suicide by chainsaw, closes with more chainsaw safety.  Interesting.

Sunday, we began with two documentaries about local Catholic institutions.  The first was American Pioneers (35 minutes) a history of Old St. Ferdinand Shrine in Florissant, Mo.  Yawn.

The second was That All May Be One (55 minutes), a look at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet and their place in the South St. Louis neighborhood where they’ve lived for more than 150 years.  This started a little slow for me, but once they got past the historical background and we started to hear the Sisters speak, it became more absorbing.

Since I was raised as a Protestant, nuns and monks have always been a foreign concept to me.  Giving up The World always seemed too great a sacrifice to understand.  The Sisters made me appreciate what they get in return, membership in a huge family of like-minded people who will cherish you your whole life.  That, and freedom from choice.  (Nan REALLY disagrees with this last comment and thinks I’m just being smarmy, but I mean this seriously and I don’t view this as a bad thing.  Freedom from choice can be liberating.  It’s why I work for somebody else instead of myself.  And I’m not suggesting the Sisters are robots.  They’re where they are because they chose to join initially and choose to stay every day.)

Then we saw Amal, a feature-length fable of a New Delhi autorickshaw driver who is left a fortune by an eccentric millionaire.  A story beautifully photographed and wonderfully told.  We both liked it a lot.

Now we’ve got next weekend to look forward to.

Poppa

Thing I Like About Living Here #458 – The Saint Louis International Film Festival

The Saint Louis International Film Festival comes to town once a year and we wallow in movies for a week and a half.

The first film we saw at the festival was Friday night (11/14) - Late Bloomers, a Swiss/German movie that proves there’s an audience demographic for Feisty Little Old Lady films.  Apparently most of the St. Louis segment of this demographic was with us the night we saw it; the audience would erupt with laughter every time one of the FLOLs would so much as arch an eyebrow.  Don’t get me wrong, the movie was enjoyable, but the quirky-underdogs-persevere-against-the-squares clichés were layered on with a trowel.  I laughed a few times, but the most interesting aspect of the movie for me was the window it presented into rural Swiss culture.  Turns out there are a LOT of flies in rural Switzerland.  Kind of made me homesick.

Next, we attended a presentation of dramatic short films.  The first was September, a movie so artsy-fartsy and pretentious we mistook an intermittent projector glitch for just another attempt by the director to be avant-garde.  Includes gratuitous “pretend” freeze frames where the actors would stop in mid-motion, hold their position for a few unsteady moments, and then start moving again, floating girls who speak in an unknown (to me) language, the beating of cheap toy drums, and shots of beer-swilling fast food employees.  Whoo whoo!

Next was A Day in a Life, a well-done 21 minute Belgian caper film with an interesting timeline that loops back on itself like spaghetti.  Nothing cutting edge here, but intriguing enough to make me want to see it again so I can connect some missing dots.

The Adventure, an amazing 22 minute short filmed in a North Georgia park.  It’s by far the most creative concept I’ve seen in a while.  I don’t want to say much about the plot, save that it veers in an unexpected direction early in the film and then just keeps veering.  See this if you get a chance.  (Warning: This movie may not be appropriate for people who just want to see stuff get blown up.)

Song of David, a 20 minute look into a Yeshiva through the eyes of a young Hasidic Jew driven to express his faith through Rap.  Several nice bits where ambient sounds morph into Rap beats.  I don’t like Rap, but I liked this film.

More later…

Poppa

Who Knew Pittsburgh Was Beautiful?

Pittsburgh by Night

Well, we’re back home after a long, grueling weekend of sightseeing, shopping, and sybaritism in Pittsburgh where we ate our way through the city like termites.  We hit Primanti Brothers (the city’s most famous sandwich), Vincent’s Pizza Park (where the pizza toppings are so thick it’s like eating a pizza stew), Pamela’s (or Paula’s? a popular local breakfast place with excellent home-made corned beef hash and buttery thin hot cakes), Tessaro’s (a bar with justly famous cheese burgers), and Chaya (a little Japanese restaurant that makes a great pork cutlet).

We met Boots the Cat, saw Fort Pitt, and Nan built a customized six-pack at a combined beer store and hot dog emporium (Arrogant Bastard Ale ”You’re Not Worthy”).  We tried to go to a legendary Hungarian place, but the owner/operator was apparently also legendary since he wasn’t there when he said he’d be.

Best of all, we got to meet The Boyfriend.  Darren is smart, funny, and fun to be with.

You done good, Leah.

Poppa

Election Day 2008 – One for the History Books

Heard while waiting at the polls:

“They’re going to be beating up the homeless people today!”  (woman on cell phone)

WTF?  Was she expecting Rove and Cheney to beat up homeless people?

“It’s all a game, they already know who won, the one with the most money wins, but somebody’s going to throw some salt in the game.” (the guy behind us in line)

Repeated about 20 times and directed at no one in particular.  Grrrr…

“Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me.”  (poll worker without a clue about Queue Management)

He would come out of the polling place, walk down the line saying “Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me” and escort six or seven people inside.  When I asked him if he meant “S through Z” he just repeated, “Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me.”  We were almost to the door before those inside finally told him it was “S through Z.”  Consequently, for the first hour and a half, everybody with a last name starting with S or Z got to vote before anybody whose last name started with T through Y.

Bonehead.

Still, shaping up to be a glorious day!

Poppa