Did You Know...

Happy birthday, Maria Taylor.  She may not be that well known, but she's got a nice sound.

The Other Side

Let's say goodbye to Ray Manzarek, whose organ sound--including the bass parts--defined the Doors as much as Jim Morrison's voice.

Officially Over

The Office went out with an hour-and-fifteen-minute finale befitting a show that's been a mainstay of the NBC lineup for the last nine years. Finales are tough to pull off, especially for sitcoms.  Half-hour comedies deal with the little things in life, and generally--even when there's an arc--each week starts as if you hit the refresh button, but you want big, decisive things to happen in a finale.  Also, sitcoms may be sentimental, but they're mostly about laughs, whereas it's hard not to overdo the emotions at the end.

In fact, they did overdo it.  More "touching" moments than they needed.  But there were still enough decent gags, and enough earned emotion, for it to work, if not quite wipe out the memory of the last two weak seasons.

The finale started a year after the last episode, so we got to see how all the characters ended up.  Dwight and Angela get married--the main action of the show.  Andy became a national laughing stock due to an embarrassing TV audition going viral, but landed on his feet with a job at Cornell admissions and a memorable commencement address. (It was sort of hard to buy this happy ending, but then, Ricky Gervais gave his own Office character a fake happy ending, so it's a tradition.) Erin reunited with her parents.  Kevin, who got fired by Dwight and now owns a bar, reconciles with his old boss.  Stanley is in happy retirement.  Darryl is doing well at Athleap (originally Athlead). Oscar is running for office.  And so on.

Then there's Jim and Pam.  If the show had gone off the air two years ago, it would have been about Michael as much as anyone, but now he's a bit player as Dwight's best man, and the whole show (and documentary) turns out to be about Jim and Pam's relationship.  Last seen, Jim had given up his dream of working at Athleap to hold on to Pam, but we knew that couldn't last--Pam couldn't be seen as holding him back, so in the end she sells the house and Jim will get to join Darryl.

Happily, it didn't end happily for everyone.  Ryan and Kelly, the two most self-centered characters, return long enough to run off with each other, abandoning a handsome, successful husband on one side and a baby boy (likely to be illegally smuggled into Poland by Nellie) on the other. Sweet, harmless (yet annoying) Toby is an unemployed, failed novelist living with six roommates in New York.  And Creed (it's finally admitted he was a member of The Grass Roots) fails to disguise himself properly and is going to jail.

So that's it. It's like the last day of school.  It's over, and we won't get to see these characters we used to see regularly.  Except on reruns.

Spaghetti'd

Happy birthday, Susan Cowsill.  The Cowsills were a family who became a popular musical act in the 60s. They were the inspiration for the The Partridge Family.

The act was mom Barbara and six of her kids, all boys except the youngest, Susan. (Sadly, the mom and three of the kids are now dead, including Barry, who got stuck in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and drowned.) In their heyday, they had a handful of catchy hits.

Books I Never Finished Reading

I just checked out Chris Elliott's The Guy Under The Sheets, his "unauthorized autobiography," but bailed halfway through. Not that it's worthless, but it just wasn't what I wanted.

I was hoping for something approaching the story of his life.  It could have been a fairly straight account, it could have been filled top to bottom with humorous stories.  Instead we get a highly fictionalized tale of Elliott's life, so fictionalized it might as well be a novel. For instance, instead of his father being Bob Elliott, of "Bob and Ray" fame, Chris claims it was Sam Elliott--and his mother Bette Davis.

The story follows in this vein, featuring only the vaguest outine of his career--from Letterman to Get A Life to Cabin Boy and so on--with almost all facts and quotes made up.  It's quite a stunt, in a way, to keep up for over 200 pages,  and the jokes aren't bad, but panning for the occasional nugget of real life wasn't worth it.

Joey Joey Joey

Happy birthday, Jeffry Hyman, aka Joey Ramone. If he were still alive, he'd be in his 60s today, showing other punks how to grow old.  As it was, he was perhaps the most distinctive voice in the movement.

May The Circle Be Unbroken

I came home yesterday and there was a message on my phone.  It was an automated call--no matter how many times I sign up for the "no call" list they still get through.  But this one was unusual.

It was a guy who had a story to tell--a long story, as the whole call took four minutes.  Apparently, years ago he had a personal religious experience, and he wants everyone to know. (So much for keeping it personal.) What was the story?  You know.  The kind you can hear all the time on TV or the internet.

More important, he asked me if I wanted to be saved.  (Before that he asked me if I wanted to be removed from his list--just press 8--though he noted he was not legally required to do this.  Am I supposed to give him points for this?)

In case you're wondering how, he made it clear it's not done by joining a church or a religion, or doing good deeds and living a moral life.  No, I would have to be born again, which I could do by joining him in prayer.

After the prayer, he asked if I wanted to be added to his prayer circle--just press 1.  Hey, he found me without my help, can't be pray for me without me joining him?  (And why does he pray anyway? I thought actions couldn't save you.)

Go, Joe, Go

Happy birthday to Big Joe Turner, one of the great blues shouters.  Before rock and roll, we had guys like Joe showing the way.

Plunked Out

I was listening to "Plink Plank Plunk," a charming pizzicato novelty composed by Leroy Anderson.



The piece has some built-in dissonance.  Then I saw Lawrence Welk did a version and I had to hear how he dealt with these off-notes.



Sure enough he cut them out--or "fixed" them.  Guess he thought they were too harsh. Can't give those old people heart attacks.

Oscar, Oscar, Oscar

One of the more fascinating periods in Oscar Wilde's short life was his year-long lecture tour of America in 1882 when he was 27. So it's nice to have an entire book devoted to that time--Declaring His Genius by Roy Morris, Jr.  Wilde had done little to merit attention at this point--he'd published a small and decidely minor book of verse and written an unproduced and not very good historical play.  But he had become a celebrity.

He moved to London as a young man and before long was a local character. As the story goes, while walking down the street he heard someone exclaim "there goes that bloody fool Oscar Wilde" to which he noted "It is extraordinary how soon one gets known in London." He became the face of the burgeoning aesthetic movement (not that he founded it or was its leader), and as such was regularly parodied in the press.  His greatest notoriety came came from Gilbert and Sullivan's highly popular Patience, with its character the poet Reginald Bunthorne, who "walked down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand."

With Patience touring the colonies, why not send the real Bunthorne?  So Wilde was booked on a tour that would ultimately take him to 140 cities, including almost every major metropolis in the U.S. and Canada, and quite a few of the smaller towns.

He had an hour-long lecture on the British artistic renaissance and another on the home beautiful.  Instead of the wit of Gilbert and Sullivan, or even of later Wilde, he apparently gave a fairly straightforward talk.  He had a sing-songy voice and read his speech (at first, anyway).  In fact, he often got bad reviews and many audiences were bored.  But, if nothing else, the curiosity factor made the tour an overall success.

Even if the lecture wasn't always riveting, he didn't necessarily disappoint.  He often appeared in his flamboyant costume--a cloth hat with flowing locks underneath, a fur-lined green overcoat, a gaudy tie, knee breeches and silk stocking.  His reputation preceded him (as did performances of Patience) and at Harvard a bunch of undergraduates loudly entered fiften minutes after the scheduled start of the lecutre and conspicuously sat in the front rows, dressed as Wilde and carrying lilies (or was it sunflowers?). This and other types of mockery often attended him in later talks.

His visits to each town excited great interest in the press, who interviewed him at every stop.  Some of his lines became famous. The most famous, echoed in the title of the book--Wilde telling a custom official he had nothing to declare but his genius--probably never happened, but Wilde was more than happy to let people think it did.  He also stated about his voyage that he'd found the Atlantic disappointing--so someone wrote a letter to a paper saying he found Wilde disappointing, signed, the Atlantic Ocean..  He also said Niagara Falls was one of the earliest disappoinments of American married life.  In fact, his sharp tongue often got him into trouble.  In every town he'd be given a tour, and while generally gracious, was free with his opinions.  In Chicago he didn't like the Water Tower, which made the town fathers unhappy--it had only just been built after the great fire and is still a symbol of the city. (I agree with Oscar here.  It doesn't really fit in and never has.)

He seemed most impressed with the West.  There was the vastness, which made America seem like its own world.  And there was the openness of the people, compared to the East, which was like an imitation Europe.  And though he was an aesthete, he showed in Colorado that he could drink miners under the table.

Along the way, he met quite a few celebrities, many more established than he--fellow poets Whitman and Longfellow, not to mention Henry James and Jefferson Davis.  Unfortunately, he missed Mark Twain, who was in the South when Wilde was in the North and in the North when Wilde was in the South.  (They probably passed each other on the Mississippi, but there wasn't so much as a wave.)

The tour was remunerative, and, for all the caricatures of Wilde in the press, helped establish him.  But really at this point he had little to say.  He might have tried to explain what the aesthetic life was, but neither his views nor his overall philosophy was very deep (and probably never became so).  Really it amounted to little more than an affected if well-spoken young man making pronouncements on beauty, both artifical and natural, that few were going to take seriously.  But it was a useful training ground for the work he'd soon be doing.

Wilde was generally fond of America and lectured on his impressions when he returned to Britain.  It was a detour in the life of a man searching for his milieu.  It provided what he wanted--notoriety, though he'd soon get more of that than he could handle.

Morris's book is short, but even then padded, with long asides on characters Wilde meets, and Morris's 21st century opinions on 19th century politics.  Still, it's nice to have a big land opened up before us, just as it was for Wilde.

I Don't Care If You Don't Get It

From a piece on Benedict Cumberbatch (the best name in show biz since Stirling Silliphant), who's in Star Trek Into Darkness, which opens today.

In the film there’s a debate among Starfleet personnel over how best to extract an enemy in a distant part of the galaxy — and whether that enemy should be subjected to due process.

The British actor says: “It’s no spoiler I think to say that there’s a huge backbone in this film that’s a comment on recent U.S. interventionist overseas policy from the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era.”

I see. So they finally decided to do Paul Kinsey's script.

Jonathan, What's Happenin'?

Happy birthday, Jonathan Richman. He's never been huge, but after all these years, he keeps chugging along.

Trini Trills

Happy birthday, Trini Lopez.  He did the sort of fun pop/rock in the 60s that doesn't really exist any more.

Three More Thrones

Amazingly, the third season of Game Of Thrones is 70% over.  Just like each episode, the ten shows are over before you know it.

If the show has a flaw, it's that so many separate characters are in so many places the story only moves forward by inches each hour.  And so for most of the season everyone is maneuvering around.  But it's not so bad. The smart dialogue and fascinating characters often come out best when they're just maneuvering.

After the latest, "The Bear And The Maiden Fair," where are we?

Well, Sansa and Tyrion seemed resigned to their upcoming nuptials.  We'll see if they have to go through with it. (I haven't read the books, so no spoilers.) They've become two of the most sympathetic characters, even though they couldn't be more different. He's short and squat, but very clever.  She's tall and slender, but hopelessly naive. (Naive enough that some viewers are sick of her, actually). If anyone is really unhappy about their marriage, it's Shae, but what did she expect?  Tyrion loves her, but won't run away from being a Lannister, it's all he's got.

Other action at King's Landing--Joffrey is schooled by Tywin and out in the water Gendry learns from Melisandre how important he is.

Meanwhile, Jon Snow travels south with the Wildlings.  Ygritte is certainly very cute, but the way she mocks him every step of the way is getting a bit tiresome.  Speaking of tiresome, we've now had at least three weeks straight of Theon being tortured.  They're even starting to cut off parts oh him he'll miss.  Either free him or kill him. Then there's Bran, still having visions. He's been having visions since season one--also time for a payoff.

Then there's Robb, the conqueror, bogged down in the rain on his way to Walder Frey. I'm not sure how his strategy is working out, but Talisa's pregnant--that's got to change things a bit.

More troubling, Arya, who's turning into a very dark character, runs away from her fairly nice captors, Beric and Thoros, who were about to sell her back to her family, and into the arms of Clegane (I think).  Not sure what the Hound will do, or whom he's loyal to, but he knows he's got something and won't be letting go if he can help it.

The most fascinating stuff is at Harrenhal and out East.  First, we've got the new odd couple, Jaime and Brienne, who've both seen better days.  Roose is ransoming the Kingslayer to the Lannister clan back in King's Landing.  He leaves Brienne to the tender mercies of Locke, and no sooner is he gone than the Maid of Tarth is in a pit with a wooden sword and an angry bear (hence the title).  Jaime uses his leverage to rush back and save her, putting himself in danger.  So they're back together.  Not sure what will happen, but they've gone from mutual contempt to a deep connection.

Finally, we've got Daenerys (whose list of titles keeps growing) and her gang outside the walls of Yunkai.  She's advised to leave it alone, she doesn't need to take it.  But she can't stand the idea of 200,000 slaves and offers her terms of peace--let them go and I'll let you live.  Pretty nervy. She's offered gold and ships, but refuses, and they rebuff her right back.  Is she going to attack now, freeing all the slaves between here and the Narrow Sea?  No matter how her plan goes, it's great to see the Mother Of Dragons feeling her oats.  Her development has maybe been the most interesting in the series, from timid sister and frightened wife to dragon owner and powerful leader.  And considering she spent most of the first two seasons in impotent fury, it's fun to see her finally get to release it. I don't know who (if anyone) wins in the end, but Dany's got my vote.