Collins no longer performs due to age and health reasons, which is very sad…but there was a time when he was ubiquitous to a staggering degree. From the mid-80s to around 2000 or so, you couldn’t get away from the guy. In fact, I actually OD’d on Phil Collins during my college years, which is a shame but also a blessing in disguise, because in recent years I’ve been lucky enough to gradually rediscover him. In his prime he really was an electrifying musician.
Here are a few Phil favorites. This isn’t even close to all of his music that I love, and I’m limiting myself here to just his solo work. I’ve had a long-form essay in my head about the Genesis album Invisible Touch for a few years now….
(This was my first-ever Phil Collins song. I remember listening to it via MTV and thinking, “Wow, who’s this guy?”)
(Of all the great Phil Collins ballads, this one might be my favorite. From the movie White Nights, this duet–featuring a singer named Marilyn Martin who had a brief career in the 80s, this song is everything an 80s power ballad should be.)
By the way, I should admit that the one Phil Collins song that seems to get the most airplay these days, “In the Air Tonight”, has never been one of my favorites. That’s just how it goes. It always amazes me, though, that Collins could do gentle love songs, emotion-dripping power ballads, fast-paced dance bangers, and then he also did this genre of what I call “noir rock”, very dark and almost harsh songs that showed up in the soundtracks of Miami Vice and the noir-tinged episodes of Magnum PI.
Peter Schickele died on January 16 of this year. He was a composer and a comedian who was best known as the self-styled musicologist responsible for “unearthing” the music of “P.D.Q. Bach”, the “21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 children”. Over the years, Schickele crafted an entire life history of his fictional composer, and used “PDQ Bach”‘s work as a springboard to lampoon much of classical music. I have to admit that I have heard very little of Schickele/Bach, but what I have heard has always amused me. It takes a very good musician to do pastiche at this level, after all.
Schickele’s work along these lines was quite prolific, and he leaves behind an impressive catalog of musical works and albums that won several Grammys for Best Comedy Album. Often his work rewards knowledge of classical music, like this work here, which teases throughout with familiarity before going in completely different, frustratingly hilarious directions. Here is the 1712 Overture by Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach.
Last week I watched not one but two musical movies. These two movies are about as different from one another as you can imagine; in fact, about the only thing they have in common is that they are musical movies. One is a “traditional” style of musical in which the characters do the “break into song and dance” thing, a la the old classic musicals of the MGM and Warners era, while the other is a kind of mashup of a rockumentary and romance film about a performing duo, so the music is a part of the movie in terms of performance.
I adored both movies. They were La La Land and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
I’ll start with Eurovision. It opens in an Iceland household, sometime a few decades ago, when Lars, the son of a local fisherman (played by Pierce Brosnan in a craggy, growling performance that will remind no one of James Bond) forms his lifelong dream: to perform in the Eurovision Song Contest for Iceland, with his best friend, local girl Sigrit, as his duet partner. The film shifts to these two in adulthood as they are still pursuing this dream, even while they perform nonsense songs for the local bar crowd. Events ensue that lead them to that very Eurovision stage, with some of those events being much more improbable than others. If you’ve seen any version of the “Young musicians from the backwater try to make it big” story, you can see virtually every plot turn in his movie coming from a mile away…but there are surprises, as the way the movie gets the plot to unfold is, at times, surprising in the most delightful way. For instance–and I will say no more about it than this–the famous Icelandic Huldufolk, the “hidden people” who live in a magical parallel world and are said to occasionally visit our world to delve briefly into the affairs of humans, may or may not end up playing a role in a particularly sticky point in the story.
It doesn’t really matter if this movie’s twists and turns are obvious. You know Lars and Sigrit are going to make it to Eurovision, and you know that they are going to get closer and closer–maybe closer than they should. You know that they’ll suffer a major setback right when it seems they are on the cusp of victory, and you know that they’ll have to break up but then meet again when events somehow conspire to get them back on the Eurovision stage. This is one of those movies where you’re not seeing what happens next, but rather how the next thing happens.
And you’re also watching for the music. At least, I hope you are. This movie is chock-a-block with some of the most delightfully, zanily weird music I’ve ever heard in a movie. Imagine Icelandic pop songs given the prog rock treatment, with stage productions that are as over the top as you might imagine–and that’s just what you’d imagine in a movie with this plot description. But it’s also a Will Ferrell movie, and even if you don’t like Will Ferrell (I love him, personally), you can never accuse him of not giving himself entirely to the task at hand. And the task here is to play an almost endlessly optimistic dreamer of an aspiring Icelandic rock star whose dreams and vision might exceed his talent. Maybe.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a gorgeous film to watch and hear, and the acting is really top-notch, given how pretty much everyone is required to be over-the-top throughout. Did I mention Brosnan’s growling, snarling Icelandic fisherman? I did? Well, I’m mentioning him again. And Rachel McAdams as Sigrit is a perfect foil for Ferrell’s Lars; both are weirdly naive, but they’re weirdly naive in different ways, resulting in a couple that’s two adorkably clueless people trying to navigate a world they don’t really understand but desperately want to inhabit.
Oh, and Sigrit spends much of the movie rocking a cute pair of overalls. I report, folks.
Some critics think this movie was overlong, with too much music or whatnot. For me, it was perfect. I loved it.
Next:
Then there’s La La Land, which I though came out much more recently than it did. I honestly thought it came out either during COVID or just shortly before, but it actually arrived in 2016. Netflix kept suggesting La La Land to me, but I kept resisting, until the suggestion was accompanied by the warning: “Leaving Soon”. So, one night last week when I was home alone, I decided to finally watch it.
A few days after that, when I was not home alone, I asked The Wife if she wanted to watch a movie, and I cued up La La Land again.
I absolutely loved this movie. Loved loved loved this movie.
La La Land is a full-on musical in the grand old fashion. It even starts with a “vintage”-style animation for the studio logo, and when the film’s title finally appears onscreen, also in the “grand old style”, it takes up the entire screen, with a copyright notice in small print down at the bottom. The movie opens with a Big Ensemble Number, which unfolds during an LA traffic jam. Then we meet our protagonists: Mia (Emma Stone), who is on her way to work but isn’t focused on driving as much as her phone call, and Seb (Ryan Gosling), who is also on his way to work but is stuck behind Mia. He lays on the horn, she gives him the one-finger salute. That would be the end of it, if this weren’t an old-school Hollywood musical being made in 2016. Of course Mia and Seb are going to meet again. Of course they are going to make bad impressions on each other, which will culminate in a song-and-dance number about the fact that they have made bad impressions on each other. And of course that very song and dance number will be when their impressions of each other start to shift the other way.
Mia is an aspiring actress who works at the coffee shop on the Warners lot, so she gets to serve the Big Stars who come in for coffee before she goes off to an audition, still in her coffee shop uniform of a white blouse and black pants. (Of course she’s going to plow into a customer and end up with coffee all over her white blouse and of course she’s not going to have time to change so of course she’ll audition with the coffee stained shirt, not get the part, and end up walking down the hallway from the talent office back to the elevator, passing a dozen other white-shirted baristas hoping to land the same role.
Meanwhile, Seb is a chronically behind-on-his-bills jazz pianist, so of course his apartment is a spartan mess and of course his car is the one good thing he owns. Of course his current job is being the piano player in a local lounge, and of course he chafes against playing the set list as written (it’s December, so it’s Christmas tunes). Of course he veers off course in the middle of a Christmas carol and instead goes on an improvisational tear, which leads to his firing. Of course his next gig is playing synth for an 80s cover band. (A scene where Mia is at the same party he’s playing, recognizes him, and tweaks him by requesting that the band play “I Ran” is one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)
La La Land‘s first hour isn’t surprising at all, but that’s not the point. These two characters are sympathetic and likeable, even if they don’t like each other just yet, and the musical numbers are really catchy and well-shot and excellently choreographed. Neither Gosling nor Stone is really endowed with a singer’s voice, but both do very well with what they’ve got, and the dancing is the real star here, anyway. As they segue from not liking one another to wooing one another, often in the backdrop of great music and great movies, the courtship culminates in a magical number set at the Griffith Observatory. This number is when I committed to loving this movie. (This movie makes me want to go to Los Angeles, which is saying something. I’ve nothing against LA, particularly, but it’s never been a place I want to visit, either.)
Stone and Gosling have considerable chemistry together, and it’s never hard to believe either of them, either separately as an aspiring actress and an aspiring jazz club owner, or together as a couple trying to enable each others’ passions and dreams while recognizing along the way that each is at times backing away from those dreams and settling for a life of unsatisfying comfort over a life of never backing down. Their relationship develops in a logical way and takes them to places that make sense.
It’s no surprise that their relationship is tested more and more as both Mia and Seb get closer to their dreams, in ways that seem to be costing them in terms of themselves and each other. The film’s ultimate resolution of their love story is bittersweetly satisfying, culminating in a long montage-like dance number that is so clearly modeled on the “Broadway Melody” ballet from Singin’ in the Rain that I was almost expecting a young hoofer to enter from stage right, singing “Gotta dance!” This is absolutely a homage and not a theft, though; ultimately La La Land is a modern love letter to the great musicals of Hollywood’s studio era. And this, I suppose, is a love letter to La La Land. What a wonderful movie.
No, I never met Kreskin. Never saw him in person either, though once I was in Laughlin, Nevada for a few days and he was playing at the hotel right across the street. I saw an ad — I think tickets to his show were $9.95 or even lower — and there was a number to call for reservations. I thought, “Reservations? If Kreskin’s any good, he oughta just know I’m coming and save a seat for me!”
But I never got over there. I’d have liked to see him because I liked his style and patter, especially when he was guesting on someone else’s show and had time restraints put on him. He had his own show for a while and I recall that he would take a solid three-minute trick and stretch it out to what felt like ten.
But! In the last decade or two I developed an aversion to magicians who pass perfectly simple magic tricks off as genuine psychic power or telepathy. I’m one of those people who believes — no, knows that there ain’t no such thing as genuine psychic power. I could tolerate and even appreciate it with someone like my pal, the late Max Maven. Max did it with style and in a manner that…well, you’d have to be really, really dimwitted to think it was anything but a trick.
But I have seen magicians who felt that a vital part of their act was convincing the audience that their “psychic powers” were bona fide. I have to wonder how many of them acted as a kind of gateway drug for the kind of people who fall prey to the Sylvia Brownes of the world. I’m talking about connivers who feign such powers to bilk the bilkable.
Reading this, I suddenly remembered: I saw The Amazing Kreskin perform! It was when I was just in 2nd grade. We lived in Elkins, WV at the time; this was 1978-1979. Kreskin is still alive now; he’s 89 years old, so he would have been around 44 when I saw him perform live.
I don’t remember much specifically about the performance, though I do recall that he did some “Blind reading” type stuff, where he’d purport to opening himself up to the mental energies of the room, and then he’d start saying things like “I’m getting something about…someone here has a loved one–a brother, maybe–in the hospital. The brother needs a procedure….” And eventually someone in the audience whose life kinda-sorta matched what Kreskin was saying would stand up and say “That’s me!” It was easy to fall for, honestly.
He also did some sleight-of-hand magic, which is what I liked the most. I only remember one trick, where he put his hands inside a thick pillowcase and had a couple of audience members tightly bunch it up around his wrists so he couldn’t move or do anything…and then suddenly he pulls his hands out, holding a glass of water. That trick was pretty cool.
I don’t recall a whole lot more than that. Mr. Evanier is right that magicians have to walk a careful line between willing suspension of disbelief and soliciting outright belief. David Copperfield (whom I also saw live, in 1996 or so) was–is?–a magnificent showman who created real tension and an atmosphere conducive to belief in what he was doing, but nobody really believed that he had been cut in half by the falling blade or that he had made the Statue of Liberty disappear or that he had actually passed incorporeally through the Great Wall of China.
I know that I didn’t come out of Kreskin’s show way back then believing in magic any more than I had the day before. I do remember a good time and being somewhat amazed by what went on that night. So, I think I came out ahead.
Edward Van Halen, in his signature pose: shredding while in mid-air.
Born this date: Edward Van Halen, in 1955. This is what I wrote when he died, in 2020–but I’d rather honor him on the day on which he was born.
It took me a while to start loving rock music. I heard a lot of it as a kid (benefits of having an older sister, which I did not appreciate at the time because there are things you need years to figure out, especially when you’re a not-terribly-smart nine-year-old), but for various reasons none of it really captured my attention until the early-to-mid 1980s. Part of it might have been a kind of peer-pressure, as I did tire of being the kid who had no idea what all of my friends were talking about when they started discussing music. Another part of it was the arrival of MTV, which even I, as a geeky kid, thought was pretty cool.
We didn’t have MTV at our house for a while, because it took several years before the cable company ran the lines out our road to where we lived. But I would watch a lot of MTV at a couple friends’ houses, when I did sleepovers and the like. There’s a lot of nostalgic hay to mine in the music videos of those first few years, but I’ll keep it to just one group here, for what are probably obvious reasons.
There was one very strange video I enjoyed in particular. It actually had a filmed introduction; the music didn’t start for a minute or two. Our opening scene has a spectacularly nerdy kid being put on the school bus by his mother. This dude is so nerdy that when his mother flattens his hair with her fingers, it squeaks. She’s giving him the standard spiel about making friends and having a good year and whatnot, but our boy–named “Waldo”–is not having in, replying to her in a voice that can’t possibly be his: “Awww, Mom, you know I’m not like the other guys! I’m nervous and my socks are too loose.” No dice; off to school goes Waldo, after discovering that the bus is loaded with what the 1980s held to be the standard “degenerate” types of kid.
Then our music starts, with some wild drums, and then the most blazing electric guitar work I had heard to that point in my life. And that guitar work remains the most blazing guitar work I’ve ever heard. The song, and video, were called “Hot For Teacher”, and the band was a hard rock group called “Van Halen”. That astonishing guitar playing? That was a guy named Eddie Van Halen.
That song, and the others from the album 1984 were my introduction to Van Halen. I would learn not long after that while I’d just discovered these guys, Van Halen had actually been around in a big way since the late 1970s after toiling in obscurity for several years before that, and that 1984 was their sixth studio album. Soon after that album came out, some internal drama happened with the band that led to their lead singer, a charismatic but troublesome guy named David Lee Roth, to leave the group; luckily there was another lead singer available by the name of Sammy Hagar who was between bands at the moment, so he slid right in and the band accommodated him, making new music in new styles to reflect the style of their new lead man, all the while maintaining the focus on the hard-but-fun rock.
And through all of that was the guitar work of Eddie Van Halen.
The music of Van Halen was a big part of my teen years, and I’ve never lost my love of it, though eventually I didn’t buy the albums anymore. 5150, the first Van Halen album with Hagar aboard, was the first rock album that I played almost literally to death, to the point where I knew each and every song on that album backward and forward. I’d quickly get up to speed on all of the Roth-era albums as well, each of which is full of great rock music (well, Diver Down is really kinda meh, isn’t it?), but I am probably one of the only people around who can honestly say that I don’t have a genuine preference between the DLR and Sammy eras…or, as some people phrase it, “Do you prefer Van Halen, of Van Hagar?”
In all honesty, though, if you put a gun to my head and said “Play the first Van Halen song that jumps into your head!” I will probably wind up selecting “Dreams” from 5150 or “Right Now” from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge before I choose any DLR song. That might not be a “preference”, but there it is.
Of course, Van Halen’s history got even more convoluted later on, when I had kind-of moved on from listening to them on a regular basis. Hagar was out, Roth was back in; Roth was out, and a guy named Gary Cherrone was in (for one album, that most people speak of in the same hushed tones as the Star Wars Holiday Special). Hagar was back! Hagar was gone again! Roth was back! Roth was out! Roth was back again! And so on.
Eventually Eddie Van Halen’s years of hard living started catching up with him, with news and rumors of his various health troubles, winding up in the end with cancer…and that’s what finally took him away from the world, at the age of 65.
What to say about Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing? Well…yes, he could play fast and he could do astonishing things with the guitar. But what always got me was the tone of his playing. There was often a sense of cheer behind it, of happiness, of warmth. A lot of great rock guitar playing often seems obsessed with speed for the sake of speed, and the electric guitar can sound almost angry and snarling in a lot of guitar solos, especially in 1980s-era “hair band” hard rock. Eddie’s tone was always clean and pure, and there was almost always melody there, even in the midst of his virtuosic displays of pure skill and talent. Eddie Van Halen made music with the guitar, and his solos always blend into the songs and seem a part of the song. Many guitar solos of the era sound like what they are: rhythmic cadenzas stuck in the middle of the song, where the singer stops singing but the bassist and drummer keep on going.
Eddie Van Halen made the guitar sing and laugh, and in a few songs he even made it seem like it was about to cry. The man wasn’t just a guitar god, he was a musician. Eddie Van Halen was to the guitar, for me, as Vladimir Horowitz was to the piano or as Hillary Hahn is to the violin or as Tine Thing Helseth is to the trumpet. In his best work, he isn’t just “shredding”, he’s making music. And that’s what I’m going to remember Eddie Van Halen for: the music.
Thanks for the music, Eddie. It was always good, and quite a lot of it was great.
A word about this last one, the live performance of “Best of Both Worlds”. My paternal grandmother died in 1986, when I was just about to turn 15. It was a deeply sad day; she was the first significant loss of my life. It was a Friday. After making the arrangements that morning, my father drove all the way home from Philadelphia, where Grammy lived, and then I remember my parents going out to hang out with their friends on what was a difficult night. I stayed home, as I typically did. Grammy’s passing didn’t really hit me until my father told me, after he got home, that she had remembered me during her brief hospital stay; apparently someone had said something that had triggered her memory of me. I lost it after that, and I remember being deeply sad for the next several hours, until I idly turned on the teevee and channel-flipped to MTV, which had the Video Music Awards (MTV’s big awards show–do they still have the VMAs anymore?), and not long after I tuned in, MTV went to a segment of none other than Van Halen, in New Haven, CT. (At the time I thought this was live, but it turns out that it was dropped-in filmed footage from a performance two months earlier, but did that matter? Not really.) They were on their big tour for the 5150 album, their first big tour with Sammy Hagar. This performance is the one to which MTV cut. Maybe it seems weird, but watching them do “Best of Both Worlds”–which is one of the best songs on that album–jolted me out of my funk. It was still a sad time, and Grammy’s death was just the start of what was a generally godawful sophomore year of high school for me, but…at least there was Van Halen. Always Van Halen. To this day, I can rely on Van Halen to cheer me up when I’m stuck in the mud.
So, yeah. Thanks again, Eddie. (And Sammy, and Dave, and Michael, and Alex. And heck, you too, Gary.)
Robert Burns, the great poet troubadour of Scotland, was born this date, 1759. For a basic primer on Burns, this article is a good place to start. For some true appreciation, though, skip the basic intro and go right to Sheila O’Malley.
He was prolific. As it stands, there are over 400 Robert Burns known songs in existence. He was a celebrity in his own time. The fame he achieved in his own lifetime, however, is nothing compared to his posthumous fame.
Some of his verses are so engrained in our culture we can’t even imagine anyone wrote them at all. They seem to have just descended upon us, whole, from the heavens, the ether, Olympus. If you’re drunk on New Year’s Eve, gripping a bottle of champagne, and singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of your lungs, annoying people on the subway, you are quoting Robbie Burns.
Burns is one of those poets whose work is best sounded aloud, or at least sounded in the mouth, even if one doesn’t make the sounds; one should at least feel them. There are verses of his that seem to make no sense, due to the Scots dialect, but when you sound them out, the meaning becomes absolutely, utterly clear.
For me, the union of Burns’s words and Dougie Maclean’s voice is one of those things of perfection that we get to enjoy once in a while in this world. Here is one of my favorite songs, thanks to Robert Burns and Dougie Maclean!
So, a while back I wrote about an injury Hobbes sustained back when he was running in our yard. Well, this has been a long time developing and the story still isn’t done.
As a refresher: Hobbes came up whimpering and lame while running in our yard. We thought he had clipped a tree or hit the fence, but even then I wasn’t sure how that would have resulted in a fracture in his ankle, given how glancing the blow would have been on that particular day. We have since concluded that he likely had a lingering injury from the race track that just happened to go on that particular day.
Treatment started with six weeks or so all wrapped up like that, with us having to help Hobbes hobble out to the street to do his business. When we went in for the checkup at the end of that, it turned out that he had healed somewhat, but not enough–and worse, the constant wrapping of his leg had left him with some nagging sores, which meant infection. At this point it was seeming likely that surgery was in his future…and surgery of this type can’t be done in Buffalo, because there simply aren’t any local specialist vets with experience in this sort of thing.
Another vet took over and did some treatments using sound waves to hopefully stimulate bone growth. We did this for another six weeks or so, and it did work…but not well enough. We determined that surgery to fuse the broken bone in the ankle was the way to go. So now we were contacting specialist vets, including at Cornell University in Ithaca, or a clinic in Mississaugua, outside Toronto. We ended up scheduling the surgery with a vet in Pittsburgh, and last week, down he went (with The Wife and The Daughter) for the procedure. (This was exciting in itself, as the weather in the 716 last week was not conducive to going much of anywhere.)
So, last Thursday they got him to this vet in Pittsburgh for the pre-surgery consultation–and here we actually got some good news: the ankle has actually continued healing, to the point that this vet thinks surgery wasn’t warranted at this time. The problem now is the sore on his leg; greyhounds have trouble healing when it comes to sores on their legs because they simply don’t have much skin down there to work with. While he isn’t getting the fusion surgery at this time (it is an option later on), the sore needs to be monitored for healing. The doc did a procedure to close it as best he could, and now, believe it or not, Hobbes has to go to Pittsburgh twice a week for four to six weeks. Ouch.
For all that, Hobbes is doing pretty damned well. His mood is good, he is becoming obsessed with car rides, and his appetite is impressive. We’ve had him about six months, which is roughly when new greyhounds start to really come out of their shell and show their personality. Hopefully once spring arrives we’ll finally have a fully healthy greyhound who does all the greyhoundy stuff.
Today is National Pie Day, which no one seems to really observe anymore seeing as how we’ve adopted March 14, “3.14”, as the quasi-official Pi Day on which we celebrate pie in addtion to pi. But anyway, that being the case, here is Henry Mancini’s “Pie in the Face Polka”, which he wrote to score the enormous pie fight in the movie The Great Race.
