Sunday watching

Sunday was a two-movie day. In the afternoon, I went to the movie theater and saw The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen. It was visually stunning but I was left rather cold by the performances. I also found myself visually confused by two secondary characters, Ross and Lennox, and had a hard time following the dialogue, even though I remembered a surprising amount. I know I read the play at least twice and I've seen at least one version on film (probably the Polanski version before I knew who he was). I just have never been enamored of Denzel Washington and didn't find his performance compelling. The best part was the three witches all played by Kathryn Hunter, who contorts her body like bonebreakers. 

Later in the day I watched Marnie, since it will be leaving the Criterion channel by the end of the month along with a slew of other Hitchcock movies. Apparently Hitchcock relentlessly tried to control Tippi Hedren and harrassed her on this film and The Birds. It was engaging.

Finally I watched the final episode of The Yellowjackets. Some truly excellent recaps over at autostraddle. This is a great show, expertly navigating the Todorov definition of the fantastic: there are equally plausible explanations of confounding events, both naturalistic and supernatural. A great cast, well written, with the collaboration of Karyn Kusama, this show really hit the spot for me.

Old school "Reading Rainbow"

Today I learned that this is Chaka Khan singing the theme song to Reading Rainbow. No wonder.

Tony Awards: duelling hosts duet

The Tony Awards Show was so much fun this year, and not just because Neil Patrick Harris was the host. One of my favorite bits was his duet with Hugh Jackman:
 

More than "the Dude"

We watched the portrait of Jeff Bridges on PBS' American Masters, called "The Dude Abides." He's a painter and a musician, and a very smart man behind the affability. I'd love to see some of the books of photographs he makes for each movie project.

Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.

Jeff Bridges has done so much more than the The Big Lebowski, One of his best roles was in Peter Weir's movie Fearless, with the amazing Rosie Perez.

We could just stop watching TV but...

Uh oh! In Feb 2009, TV as we know it will die, and if we don't jump on the digital television train, we will not be able to watch our reality shows! Withdrawal will be ugly.

I don't know if we had a TV when we were very little kids in Texas, before I was 5. I do remember watching Romper Room at least once, and I have a memory of Mr. Greenjeans, so there must have been a TV around, but my mother was very big on DIY toys and going out to play.

When we moved to Japan we had a TV, but of course most of what we watched was in Japanese. The only TV in English was the Danny Kaye show, and then the "Moonriver" guy. The rest was samurai movies, incredible animated cartoons (I still remember the theme song from Obake no Q), and Japanese variety shows. This didn't stop us from watching, but we had to invent our own dialogues for the movies.

Once back in the US, in 1968, the three of us kids gorged ourselves on color TV in English, fairly indiscriminately. If it was on, we watched it.

When I moved away to go to college, there was a TV in the dorm lounge, and in various apartments I shared, but watching TV was not something I did much of. For the years of graduate school, my parade of roommates brought TVs into the house, but nothing fancy. Sometimes there was no TV. I spent more time watching movies at the cheap arthouse cinemas than watching TV, although we did go through a heavy McNeil-Lehrer period, and I did get hooked on a Venezuelan telenovela. I remember this Black Flag song "TV Party" from those years.

When I moved to Minnesota, I got my first credit card and bought my first TV. It still works and we still watch it. No cable, no DVR, no satellite, just regular broadcast TV with crappy reception. No remote, so we change channels or volume with the little buttons. We do have a VCR and a DVD player hooked up to it, but now the laptop is my preferred way of watching DVDs (did I say we have no remote? can't watch the special features without one) because the quality of the image is so much better.

So this summer I think I will take old faithful to the electronics recycling center. The question I have now is, what now? I think I could live without TV again, but I'd like a better monitor for watching DVDs, etc.

One solution is to bet an HDTV to use as a monitor and hook it up to a Mac mini, thereby having a TV-computer set up that allows one to browse, show photos, etc as well as watch TV. Or I could buy and iMac and get Apple TV. I want to leave room for future developments in receiving and broadcasting multimedia content.
The geeks who game and have been doing all this stuff for years with their tinkering and hacking have all kinds of scorn for either solution, but I am that Mac customer who wants to take it out of the box, plug it in, and use it. I don't want to have to spend hours and hours doing research, buy features I'll never use, or pay twice as much as I need to.

TV Party Tonight!

My nephew is off to continue his college education at Berkeley. I know that he will not be partying like this (he doesn't drink) but this song is the quintessential frat boy party song from back when I was at Berkeley (it came out in '81 and was recorded in 2-3 versions). Pre-gaming, pre-internet, DVDs, back in the stone age, man! we were still listening to vinyl and I still had a reel-to-reel tape recorder!

A very young Henry Rollins is singing with hardcore band Black Flag "TV Party Tonight" more fun than some of their hardcore ragers, but just as testosterone fueled. It's been trotting around my head lately, so I wanted to remember all the names of the shows they shout out:


Lyrics
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!

We're gonna have a T.V. party tonight!

Alright!

We're gonna have a T.V. party alright!

Tonight!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

All our friends are gonna hang out here tonight

Alright!

We're gonna pass out on the couch alright

Tonight!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Don't talk about anything else
We don't wanna know!
We're dedicated
To our favorite shows!

(That's incredible! Hill Street Blues! Dallas! Quincy!)

We sit glued to the T.V. set all night
And every night!
Why go into the outside world at all?
It's such a fright!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

T.V. news shows what it's really like out there
It's a scare!

You can go out if you want
We wouldn't dare!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Don't talk about anything else
We don't wanna know!
We're dedicated
To our favorite shows!
(Saturday Night Live! Monday Night Football! Dynasty! Fridays!)

I wouldn't be without my T.V. for a day
Or even a minute!

Don't even bother to use my brain anymore
There's nothing left in it!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Wait a minute! My T.V. set doesn't work!
It's broken!
What are we gonna do tonight? This isn't fair!
We're hurtin'

We've got nothing left to do
With no T.V. and just a couple of brews

What are we gonna talk about?
I don't know!
We're gonna miss our favorite shows!
NO T.V. PARTY TONIGHT!

All things Star Trek

Tomorrow, we will go to see the new Star Trek movie. For some of us, it will be shot through with memories, while for my daughter, it will be completely unrelated to anything she has seen before. She knows nothing about Star Trek: not the original series, the spinoffs, the movies. Nada. It's so wrong to start her out with the prequel, but them's the breaks. Before we go see the pumped up, slick, CGI explosion-filled testosterone fest that this is bound to be, let us delight in all things DIY + Star Trek: