The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’m a day late, apparently, and thus too late to wish Sean a happy birthday; thus, I shall wish him a happy post-birthday weekend. Have a great weekend, Sean!
(See, I’m wishing him TWO great days, whereas all you people who remembered his birthday only wished him ONE. So there.)
It’s been Animation Week here in the Ol’ Homestead. (With a three-year old present, in a very real sense every week is animation week.) Besides the new Veggie Tales movie, new additions to our video library for Christmas included Monsters, Inc. and Ice Age, both of which we’ve watched in the last two days. Ice Age is the kind of movie that, had it been released four or five years ago, would have been called “surprisingly good” — that being back in the days when animation not bearing a Disney label was usually disappointing. Nowadays, though, it seems that the best animated films are coming from the non-Disney outfits. I find it interesting that the articles in the media pondering this phenomenon seem to concentrate on the quality of the animation, postulating that Disney no longer has a monopoly on quality animators. This is true; the “best and the brightest” are no longer guaranteed to be found working for Uncle Walt and Company. But it seems to me that the secret, as is usually the case and is equally usually ignored, is the writing.
Ice Age features the same kind of literate, quirky writing that used to dominate the Disney animated features but was almost never to be found in the non-Disney films, but has recently been more elusive. (Not that Disney’s films are badly written, by any means, but lately they are not as crisp as they once were.) The film is a buddy picture, in which three prehistoric animals — a sloth, a woolly mammoth, and a sabretooth tiger — team up to carry an orphaned cave-man baby back to its tribe. It’s not an earth-shakingly original story, by any means; what makes it work is the wit in the writing, in the same way that Shrek was such a delight. There are extinction and evolution jokes galore, including one scene involving dodo-birds that verges on full-fledged black humor. The voice-over work is first-rate, with Ray Romano and Denis Leary giving their characters excellent, but distinct, airs of weary cynicism to counter-balance John Leguizamo’s sloth, who is the “lazy dumb one” in the film’s unlikely trio of heroes. The animation itself is fine; the computer-drawn compositions aren’t as fine or as detailed as the PIXAR films like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., but the filmmakers are still able to give Ice Age a distinctive look and atmosphere.
The other big animation event was our attendance yesterday of an OmniMax screening of The Lion King. This is a perennial favorite in our home, and seeing it theatrically was a thrill — especially so on the gigantic screen. (I do suspect, though, that it would have worked a bit better on a flat IMAX screen as opposed to the domed OmniMax screen, which resulted in some distortion at the edges of the frame.) The Lion King is one of those movies that I enjoy greatly despite its flaws, such as a few overly-preachy speeches at the beginning of the film (“OK, Simba, time for your lesson on the Environment….”) and the voicing of adult Simba by Matthew Broderick, an actor I have not found particularly convincing in any role since he did WarGames when he was fourteen or something. The film’s opening number, when all the animals come to pay tribute to the new prince, has always been stunning and was especially so in the large-screen format. I hope that more Disney films are “retro-fitted” for large-screen releases, and I particularly hope for Aladdin to be done this way — although I suspect that certain sequences of that film, especially the magic-carpet escape from the Cave of Wonders, would cause some serious vertigo.
It’s always fun in the wintertime when TV news meteorologists hedge their bets as a storm approaches, by forecasting “anywhere between six and sixteen inches of snow”. In that spirit, I offer the following stunning predictions:
:: The number of players on the field in Super Bowl XXXVII, when the first points are scored, will be between 20 and 37.
:: The running time of Star Wars Episode III will be between 84 minutes and 329 minutes.
:: The 2003 New York Yankees will win between 45 games and 137 games.
:: The number of years George W. Bush will serve as President will be between 2 and 8.
:: The next President of the United States will be between the ages of 35 and 86.
You heard ’em here first.
Hooray! Bring on the playoffs!!
I’m actually enjoying those special commercials they’ve made to trump up the playoffs, the ones featuring actor Don Cheadle. The only problem is, after his fine recent stint on ER playing a surgical intern suffering from Parkinson’s, I partly expect him in the commercials to suddenly start twitching. That’s how well he played that character.
(BTW, refer to my original set of predictions for this season here.)
:: First, a postmortem on the Buffalo Bills this season. My original take on them was that Drew Bledsoe would invigorate the offense, the defense would still be lousy, and the team would finish 6-10 after last year’s 3-13 disaster. Well, Bledsoe did invigorate the offense, and the defense was lousy, but the team finished 8-8, and they were mathematically in playoff contention until the second-to-last week of the season. (Granted, thirteen of the AFC’s sixteen teams were still mathematically alive, but….) So, obviously, the Bills have to improve the defense for next year.
Two words, then: PASS RUSH. The Bills recorded only 31 sacks this year, less than two per game. That means their secondary pretty much bore the brunt of all their pass defense, and while those guys have talent they’re simply not up to keeping receivers bottled up and covered for the four or five seconds that opposing quarterbacks usually have to throw. The Bills have to improve their pass-rush.
They also need to improve against the run. Giving up more than 130 yards rushing per game is simply lousy. It allows the other team to set the tempo, control the clock, and grind down the Bills’ defenders.
So, they need to add some beef to the defensive line, and probably another top-flight linebacker. An offseason like the one following 1994, when the Bills added LB Bryce Paup and DT Ted Washington, is what’s needed now.
On offense, the Bills could add a legitimate center and a little depth on the offensive line. The o-line, which had been in decline for years, showed a lot of improvement this year (especially due to rookie Mike Williams and developing youngster Jonas Jennings), but they still gave up too many sacks and were too inconsistent off the line, especially at the end of the season. If Bledsoe is the immediate hope for this team, then the line – while improving – still needs to be better. Also, they need a good blocking back and a legitimate threat of a tight end. Larry Centers catches a mean ball, but he’s not that great a blocker while current tight end Jay Riemersma is, as far as I am concerned, a bust. (Oh, and resigning Peerless Price might not be a bad idea. Really.)
Finally, the Bills need to have better play selection next year. Bad play calling in crucial games killed the Bills this year, both in the Bills not adjusting their offense for the defenses they faced in the latter part of the season and in the Bills making very odd play selections in key situations, like calling a roll-out passing play on second-and-goal from the one-yard line or punting on fourth-and-one when in Patriots territory, but not quite in field-goal range, while trailing in the third quarter. Marv Levy was always criticized as being too conservative and unwilling to make changes in the face of what opponents were doing. The current Bills are the same way, and that needs to change.
No predictions for next year until I know who is on the team, so I’ll wait until late August. 8-8? I’ll take it.
:: Some people just don’t deserve the luck they have, like that guy in West Virginia who won the Power Ball – despite the fact that he’s already a millionaire. The New England Patriots are the same way. Once again, luck decides to smile on these guys, and the result is they won a game they had no business winning. First they get a defensive pass interference call against the Dolphins, on a play when the Pats receiver in question clearly pushed off. Then they get to sit back and watch as the Dolphins, late in the fourth and deep in their own territory with a slim lead to protect, decide not to run that guy in their backfield who has led the league in rushing this year and has set the Dolphins’ all time single season rushing records and has rushed for two-hundred yards in two consecutive games and has had a great day running the ball all day. No, clearly that situation calls for dropping back into the end zone and throwing the ball. And not just throwing it anywhere, but at the receiver who happens to be covered by New England’s best defensive back. I’m wondering if Dave Wanstedt was wandering the Miami sideline when he happened upon a looseleaf binder marked, “The Official Playbook of Mike Martz”.
And then, the Patriots not only win the coin toss in overtime, but they get the Dolphins’ kicker booting the kickoff out-of-bounds so they get the ball on their own 40, so all they have to do is pick up about 25 yards for their own kicker, who must have naked photos of the football gods in his locker, so automatic is he in anything remotely resembling a clutch kick.
That’s two weeks in a row I’ve rooted for the Dolphins, and two weeks in a row they’ve blown it. Stupid Dolphins.
:: But, all is not lost! The Jets blew out the Packers, putting both the Dolphins and Patriots on vacation. I’ll refrain from posting that goofy Jets cheer.
:: Time, then, to recap my predictions for the division winners and compare them to reality. Here are the actual winners, with my original predicted winners in parentheses:
AFC East: NY Jets (Miami)
AFC North: Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh)
AFC South: Tennessee (Tennessee)
AFC West: Oakland Oakland
AFC wildcards: Indianapolis, Cleveland (New England, Denver)
NFC East: Philadelphia (Philadelphia)
NFC North: Green Bay (Green Bay)
NFC South: Tampa Bay (Tampa Bay)
NFC West: San Francisco (St. Louis)
NFC wildcards: New York Giants, Atlanta (San Francisco, Chicago)
Not too bad. I picked six out of eight divisions correctly. I didn’t do very well on the wild-cards, mainly because I didn’t foresee the Rams and the Bears having seasons as bad as they did, relative to how they fared in 2001. I failed to account for the fact that in any given NFL season, some of the previous year’s playoff teams are going to have disastrous outings, which always makes for at least one clunker of a game on Monday Night Football, since those games are always chosen in such a way that at least one of the previous year’s playoff teams is participating.
:: My two Super Bowl picks are both division champs. The Steelers don’t have home-field advantage, so their chances of making the Super Bowl are actually better than top-seed Oakland’s, if recent history is any guide. Eight of the last ten AFC teams to go into the playoffs as top seed have failed to get to the Super Bowl (the 1993 Bills and the 1998 Broncos being the two that made it), and the home team has lost the last three AFC Championship Games. As for the Eagles, they’re home for the playoffs. Home field is actually important in the NFC, with the last ten NFC top seeds advancing to the Super Bowl seven times (the exceptions being the 1992 and 1997 49ers and the 1998 Vikings). So, I’m sticking with my picks until the bitter, bitter end. And maybe even beyond it….
:: If I’m one of the top college players, the guys who have a real chance at being the number one pick, I’d give serious thought to faking an injury at the scouting combine or something. Anything to avoid getting picked by the Bengals.
:: Just to return to the Eagles for one minute: there are a lot of fine coaches in the NFL right now, but Andy Reed (Reid? Ried? Reade? I should look that up….) has done perhaps the most impressive job. Like many observers, I gave the Eagles up for maybe a wildcard berth when Donovan McNabb went down, and then I gave them up for dead when Koy Detmer went down. That an NFL team having its third-string QB, a guy who hasn’t started a game since he was a junior in college or something like that, and not missing a beat on the way to securing the top seed in the playoffs, is surely indicative of one of the finest coaching jobs in modern history. In any sport.
:: The Dolphins swooning in December is nothing new, but who could have thought they’d get the running back they always wanted, the NFL rushing leader, and swoon anyway? And now they have to give the Saints two first-round picks. Didn’t pay off, did it?
:: The Cleveland Browns are in the playoffs? ‘Tis a strange new world, it seems….
:: Something tells me that Brian Griese will not be back in Denver next year. He was never very well liked there, and the Broncos’ underachievement this year will probably do him in.
:: Doing this every Monday has been fun this year. I’ll probably post some smaller bits about the playoffs as they happen, up to and including the Super Bowl. Congratulations to all the teams in the playoffs, and better luck next year to the ones who didn’t get there. Except the Pats and Dolphins.
[EDIT: Somehow I failed to include the Jets in the list of division winners.]
I finally completed the first draft of the story whose ending has had me in knots for months now, and I am already on to the next one. There is an interesting “contrast of processes” in play here: on the last story, I knew the beginning but had no idea how it would turn out, whereas on this new story I know the last scene but have no idea how the story gets there. This is usually how things play out in my writing; I simply cannot use an outline, finding them too restrictive and ultimately useless when halfway through the work I realize that there’s a new path the thing can take that I like a lot better than the outline.
But then, I also suspect my distaste for outlines for my inability to “write short”; perhaps it’s the lack of a plan that results in a lot of meandering that pushes the word-count to higher-than-publishable levels. I do tend to be a fairly malevolent editor of my own work, never excising less than ten percent of my material when I produce my second draft (and sometimes a lot more). That means that assuming that the word count on my first draft of the just-completed story is around 15,000 words (a guesstimate based on the number of pages covered by my scrawling), I plan to cut at least 1,500 words and hopefully more.
The last story, as noted, was about beer. The new one? It’s about baseball.
In the last three days I have watched films that contained two of the finest closing lines, ever. The first was My Fair Lady, of which I wrote yesterday. (“Eliza? Where the Devil are my slippers?”) The other, which I watched last night, is the always wonderful The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone. The film ends with Flynn, who has just been ordered by King Richard to wed the Maid Marian, calling out, “May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!” Of course, the greatest closing line in a film of all time comes from Casablanca (“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”), which is noteworthy for the fact that the line used was one of three possibilities, each of which was recorded for dubbing by Humphrey Bogart well after principal photography had ended.
Films don’t always need a great last line — none of the Star Wars films do, each of them ending instead with a fine visual — but they can really help. Here is a sampling of my favorites.
“I’ll be right here.” (ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. Maybe this one doesn’t quite count, since Elliot responds with a barely audible, whispered “Bye”. But I count it.)
“It turns out, I’ve got a rose garden.” (The American President. This one is iffy as well, if you consider the Sergeant-of-arms shouting “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!”, as Michael Douglas as President Shepherd enters the Capitol to give his State of the Union Address, to be an actual line of dialog. I file it under “ambient sound”.)
“I used to hate the water.”
“Can’t imagine why.” (Jaws. OK, so it’s an exchange and not a line. Ugh!)
“Made you look!” (Aladdin.)
“It’s nice to meet you.” (Sleepless In Seattle.)
“Fishgill!” (Wayne’s World. Well, maybe not.)
“Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game–the American game.’ He said ‘it will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up….” (Bull Durham.)
“I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.” (The Shawhank Redemption.)
Help me out here, folks. I’ve got to be missing a bunch of great last lines.
I recently checked one of Pauline Kael’s books out of the library (When the Lights Go Down), and in the course of dipping into this book I’ve been considering critics and the critical process.
On the face of it, a critic’s job is to examine some work of art – a movie, a book, a piece of music, an exhibition at an art gallery – and then to write about it, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, placing it in some kind of context with regard to the history of whichever form of art it is, and make a value judgment about the degree to which the work in question is successful. This is a bit more complex than the more popular concept of a critic’s job, in which we assume that a critic exists merely to tell us what is good and what is bad; the critic’s assessments are typically more complex than this, if the critic is of the thoughtful variety. We try to condense critical opinions, though, and to quantify them; when a new movie comes out, we turn to the critics not for an appraisal of its strengths as a film but for a simple answer to the question of whether or not we should see it. Thus we have things like star-rating systems, which give a quick idea of a critic’s assessment, or in some cases we reduce it even further, to a binary rating: thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
But star ratings are not always adequate. Consider two Roger Ebert reviews: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and My Cousin Vinny. The difference in the star ratings is a mere half a star, with the former film getting two stars and the latter earning two-and-a-half. But reading the actual reviews, one senses that Ebert’s estimations of the films are farther apart than that; one gets the distinct impression that he enjoyed the latter while he did not enjoy the former.
The reviews in the Kael book do not carry star ratings; I don’t know if she ever employed them. She wrote primarily for The New Yorker, a more “high-brow” publication, and her reviews are written in a voice that suggests that she knows that people are reading her reviews as writing pieces in themselves, at least moreso than Ebert, who as a newspaper critic presumably has a readership that is more concerned with what to go see at the local matinee. (Not that Ebert is not a good writer, mind you; in fact, Ebert is my favorite critic because of his writing style, which is squarely in the Chicago liberal journalism tradition whose favorite son was the wonderful Mike Royko.) Ebert has always maintained that his role as a critic is to convey, as precisely as he can, the actual aesthetic experience that he had when watching the film. This is also my approach when I write reviews of whatever books, films or music I encounter in this space.
I confess to being bemused by critics who take Kael’s tone. She writes using something like the “Royal ‘We'”, as in, “The film never engages our emotions” or “We never believe the heroine’s plight” and the like. Setting aside the fact that I’ve always found the Royal ‘We’ a bit creepy – I can’t help but envision the speaker referring to multiple personalities within her cranium – the implication of such a tone seems to convey a certain belief in the factual status of the critic’s opinion. This is something that bothers me about just about every critic I’ve ever encountered: the apparent belief that the critic isn’t saying “I, myself, think this movie is bad” but “This movie IS bad”. I am deeply suspicious of the critic-as-arbiter-of-quality, for a number of reasons. I tend to get defensive and occasionally resentful when someone sagely informs me that something I like is lousy, or that something I think is lousy is actually great, as if to say that I have somehow missed the boat entirely. My critical skepticism is also aroused almost immediately whenever someone, anyone, uses the word “objective” in any appraisal of any work of art. What critics so often take as “objectivity” is, in my experience, simply the application of a lifetime’s worth of subjective criteria and opinions combined with the actual emotional response the critic experienced in perusing a new work. I have also noticed that the claim of “objectivity” is almost exclusively made by people taking a negative view of something. I have read all manner of commentary on, say, The Phantom Menace that will include a sentence like this: “I’m not a Star Wars fan, so I can view the film objectively and describe its flaws”. This is rhetorical nonsense, designed only to put the critic’s views on some kind of a priori high ground compared with that of the other person. To dislike something is an opinion, precisely as much as it is to like it. Being able to qualify exactly why one dislikes something is certainly valuable, but it’s not “objective”. The height of Mount Everest can be determined objectively. The quality of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 cannot.
By far, though, the main reason I distrust critics as actual arbiters of artistic value is that they are, quite simply, often wrong. This is the inescapable conclusion I drew from a wonderful book, A Lexicon of Musical Invective. This book has a very simple structure and purpose: it is a collection of negative quotes from classical music critics about musical works that have long since entered the standard repertoire and become classics – works like Wagner’s operas, Brahms’s symphonies, Debussy’s preludes, Strauss’s tone poems, et cetera. The quotes in the book are from the leading music critics of the times in which the works were originally performed, at a time when classical music critics were far, far more important than they are today. Back then, nearly every major newspaper and many minor ones had full-time music critics, whereas these days relatively few major papers employ full-time critics, or even part-time ones. These were the “arbiters-of-quality”, the “objective voices”, the persons whose job it was to pass judgment on new works and inform the public as to whether or not they were good. And in so many cases, they got it wrong. The ultimate measure of quality seems to be the oft-cited “test of time”, but if that is the case, then the critic’s job becomes absurd, because it is quite impossible to decide what is going to last and what is going to fall by the wayside. It is also impossible to judge which works are going to immediately fade away but become more and more prominent with time, as the music of Bach did.
So what is a critic for, if not to tell us what is good and bad? Simply, in my view, to tell us what the critic thinks is good and bad. Ultimately, though, the rest is up to us. This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating ourselves, if we are interested in something deeper than mere enjoyment of something. If the fourteen-year-old kid next door tells me that the new movie out is a masterpiece, then this doesn’t hold as much weight as if Roger Ebert, with his lifetime of study and encyclopedic knowledge of film, tells me that the same movie is a masterpiece; however, this only applies to the probability that I will like the film. What ultimately matters is not the critic’s experience at the film or the fourteen-year-old kid’s experience. What matters is my experience. A critic, then, is only useful inasmuch as he or she reports objectively on the experience they had, without mistaking that for objectively reporting on the thing itself. Critics who acknowledge the actual emotional experience a given work of art provoked within them are far more credible to me than critics who seem to be ticking off a set of “required elements”, as if they are Olympic figure-skating judges. My question for critics of the latter type is this: If you know, to such a high degree of precision, what it is that constitutes a great work of art, then why aren’t you putting that knowledge to better use than this by actually creating great works of art instead of endlessly carping about works that fall short so massively obviously?
The traditional Christmas movie for most people, apparently, is It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve never much cared for that film, though — I find it overlong and cloying. The whole “Capra-esque fantasy” thing was done much more effectively, for my money, in Field of Dreams. My traditional Christmas-season film has nothing, really, to do with Christmas, but it has everything to do with dreams and love and the majesty of the English language. The film is My Fair Lady.
I’ve always loved musicals, and among composer-and-lyricist teams, Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner are my favorites. This is their towering achievement, when music of consumate charm blends perfectly with lyrics of sparkling wit and life. Only Lerner and Loewe could make wonderful songs of such character qualities as elitism (“Why Can’t the English”), sloth (“With a Little Bit o’ Luck”), drink (“Get Me To the Church On Time”), and misogyny (“I’m an Ordinary Man”, “A Hymn to Him”), all the while never depicting these qualities as desirable but not quite as faults, either. And what a film it is that does not treat the growing love between the two main characters, Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, into something they resist as strongly as they can as opposed to an elemental force to be cherished. A telling moment comes when Freddie Aynsford-Hill, hopelessly smitten with Eliza even though he has spoken to her but once, launches into a rapturous love song (“Speak, and the world is full of singing; my heart is winging higher than the birds….”) only to have Eliza harshly interrupt him (“Show Me”), because she is so sick of “words, words, words”. My Fair Lady is a film where Professor Higgins does not even admit that he has fallen in love with Eliza, but that she has become a part of his life in such a way that “her ups and downs are second-nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in”. Only Professor Higgins could admit his love in the words, “I’ve grown accustomed to her face”.
My Fair Lady also succeeds on the visual level. Every scene, almost every shot, is carefully considered with wonderful attention to nuance and detail. From the opening credits, ablaze with color in a montage of flowers, to the streets outside Covent Garden, to the Professor’s study (I want a writing-room like that), to the race at Ascotte, to the stunning glory of the Embassy Ball — My Fair Lady is a gorgeous antidote to the darkness that seems prevalent in movies these days.
And I haven’t even mentioned the glory that is Audrey Hepburn….
Last night CBS aired the annual Kennedy Center Honors, which were taped earlier this month. I don’t watch the Honors every year, but I try to catch at least part of it each time out. It’s vitally important that we recognize our artistic heritage and the luminaries who have shaped that heritage, which is what the Honors are all about. I do wish that there was an equivalent to the Honors for the non-performing arts, like writing and poetry, painting, and architecture; but to see classical musicians like James Levine honored alongside popular songwriters like Paul Simon and actors like James Earl Jones is always a thrill. (I must confess some ignorance, here: during the Paul Simon segment, almost no mention was made whatsoever of Art Garfunkel. Is Garfunkel still alive, and if so, was his parting with Simon that acrimonious?)
Since the conclusion of last night’s telecast, I’ve been wondering what figures in the performing arts right now are likely to become Kennedy Center Honorees in the future. Below are some guesses of mine; these are all people whose body of work as it exists now seems to me worthy of the Kennedy Center. I’m not making any conjectures as to artists who may produce a body of work worthy of such, even though there are some who are fairly new to the scene who I do think are more likely than not to get there. (I’m thinking of actors like Kevin Spacey and Leonardo DiCaprio, whose track records in the decade or so they’ve been on the forefront clearly indicate Kennedy Center potential.) I’m restricting my speculations here to music and screen, since I know very little about the Broadway world. For instance, I had never heard of one of this year’s honorees, Broadway dancer Chita Rivera, until I watched the actual telecast. I’m also not sure if the Kennedy Center Honors are meant for American citizens only. Persons like Placido Domingo, Sir Georg Solti and Julie Andrews have been honored in the past; I don’t know if those are persons who have become citizens or if the Kennedy Center honors artists of any original nationality who have made substantial contributions to American culture.
(A year-by-year listing of all the Kennedy Center Honorees can be found here, by the way.)
:: FILM: Directors, Producers, and Screenwriters.
Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, George Lucas, Stanley Donen, Ron Howard, Lawrence Kasdan, William Goldman, David Mamet, Rob Reiner, Robert Zemeckis.
:: FILM: Actors and Actresses.
Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Tom Hanks, John Cleese, Robert Redford, Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Robert DeNiro.
:: MUSIC: Classical and Jazz.
John Williams, Leonard Slatkin, Daniel Barenboim, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, Anne Sophie-Mutter, Kathleen Battle, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Wynton Marsalis, Chick Corea. (I’d personally include Jerry Goldsmith along with John Williams, in terms of his greatness and longevity as a film composer, but I’m not sure he has the cultural visibility that John Williams has.)
:: MUSIC: Popular.
Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen. (I confess that I’m not sure to what degree a “stodginess” factor would work against a lot of rock musicians. Would the Kennedy Center single out, say, Edward Van Halen?)
:: OTHERS: Television, Comedy, Et Cetera.
David Letterman, George Carlin (although, again subject to stodginess), Jerry Seinfeld, Ken Burns, Dick Clark, Stephen Bochco.
OK, the comments section awaits: who have I missed? Keep in mind that it’s “body of work over time” that applies here.
[EDIT: A link that was not working, is now working. The persons responsible for that link not working, have been sacked. The persons responsible for sacking those who have been sacked, have been sacked. And so on….]
I’ve made a couple of additions to “Other Journeys” at left. Rather than describe their content, I’m just putting them up and encouraging exploration. (They’re marked “New”, for now — meaning, “new” to my blogroll, not “new” in general. Even though one of them actually is “New”.)
Usual disclaimers apply: my linking to a blog does not imply agreement with the content of such. In fact, there are a couple to which I’ve linked that occasionally have me wishing to yank out my own hair, so strongly do I disagree. In cases such as those, other factors come into play.
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