So we're sitting home tonight, Mr. Muscato and I, watching that award-handing-out thingummy that y'all back there in civilization caught last night. Mostly what I'm thinking is, "Hmmm. Not all that interesting, the current crop of WAMPAS Baby Stars, are they?" Also, "What is George Clooney on and where can I get some?"
But they just did the criminally short bit assigned to this year's honorary award winners, and all I could do when presented with the spectacle of Lauren Bacall standing next to Roger Corman, the two of them being ovated by All Hollywood, was imagine what she was thinking: "What the f*** am I doing standing next to this hack, the Putz of Poverty Row? I've survived pictures from To Have and Have Not to Dogville - and he produced Attack of the Giant Leeches."
But he's thinking all "Yeah, whatever, Mrs. Bogie. At least I didn't make The Mirror Has Two Faces."
I tell you, by reading some of America's smaller papers, one can learn the most astonishing things. For example, the above gem comes to us from a feature in TCPalm, proudly serving "Florida's treasure coast and palm beaches."
If you pay close attention to the second paragraph, you'll discover something both astonishing physiologically and intriguing in terms of its implications to film history.
And as for the copy itself, well ... I suppose I'm not that surprised that this plucky little periodical doesn't have a fact checker, but really - couldn't they even spell her name right?
Mr. Warhol presents his portrait of Barbara Millicent Roberts. Should I be embarrassed that I know that the subject is depicted in her Superstar Barbie incarnation? It's a look that's half '80s trophy wife, half JonBenet, but Andy makes it work...
Poor cousin Winky tried to go on and act like nothing had changed, but she was never really the same after Aunt Marvelle expelled her from the Tri Tones. It's not as if there was much she could say, not after Marvelle stumbled on that little scene with Uncle Waldo in the vestry.
"That pert baggage," said Marvelle later, on learning of her niece's solo release, "would have been better off learning to say 'I don't.'"
UPDATE: Well, how very interesting; following a major blowback from local blogs, the site is suddenly, in mid-evening, unblocked. Certainly a turnaround in record time from our beloved monopoly Internet provider. Bravo to the local cybernauts!
This one's mostly for readers here in the Sultanate, but to those outside - enjoy freedom. It's a precious, fragile thing.
I've written about this before, but now our Local Information Overlords have really lost it, blocking just about the most interesting local expat voice on the Internet and, potentially, giving the country a real black eye in the estimation of people everywhere who care about freedom of expression. Yes, blocked as of this morning is Muscat Confidential, an invaluable resource and a great read.
Fortunately, on the Internets, everything is possible (almost), and it's my joy to do for MC's Undercover Dragon what he did for another site that recently faced the censor's axe: provide a link that, through the miracle of Google, allows local readers who don't have their own ways around the dungeon walls to make their own decisions about what they read.
Here it is: Muscat Confidential for all, Muscat Confidential forever! If things don't improve, I'll add a link over there on the right for more permanent use, but for the moment, I hope any local readers who stray by find it of use.
So apparently the Oscars are this weekend. Living in a country with, on a good day, three movie screens showing films not made in Bombay or Cairo, and most of those featuring things blowing up, it's easy to fall out of the habit of keeping up with Film Today, and I'm afraid I have.
I realized, in fact, when reading about the coming festivities this morning, that this is very likely the first year ever in which I have seen exactly none of the nominated films in the theatre, and only one of them on DVD (that was Inglourious Basterds, which seems to me far too weird to be an Oscar-winner).
Still, I remain intrigued by the people, if not the films, and I was pleased to run across a gallery of luminaries snapped at these year's BritOscars, the BAFTA Awards. It included the usual run of wholly obscure outside the UK TV types, but also two of my current favorites:
The excellent Stanley Tucci, whom I first fell for in Big Night and then A Midsummer Night's Dream. He has that nebbishy/hot thing down pat and gives every indication of being exceedingly smart and very, very funny. In The Devil Wears Prada he managed to be both funny and tragic at the same time, which is really a very New York state of mind. I just wish he played more in movies that feature shower scenes.
And my newest favorite, the irrespresible Miss Gabourey Sidibe. I'm actually kind of hoping she doesn't go home with the little gold gentleman, as I'm afraid it would doom her to one-hit wonderdom and eventually having to make movies with other one-time-rans like Marlee Matlin and Brenda Fricker. I think she's just about perfect and likely only to get better as she goes on.
I have to reason to hope that this year's is a record I won't repeat; if nothing else, it truly reduces one's interest in the proceedings, red-carpet gawping aside. Although that, after all, takes one a very long way; there's always the off-chance that Stanley will show up in the world's first topless tuxedo, isn't there?
Two birthdays come to mind, with no real relation between them except that funny way that odd allusions can fire random synapses.
First up, beloved UK canary Clodagh Rodgers, a performer whose moment in the spotlight as fourth-place finisher in the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest was forever overshadowed by the taking in vain of her name in one of the greatest of all Monty Python pieces, the extended "Cycling Tour" episode. I know it's hard to imagine if you haven't seen it, but "Ce n'est pas la belle Clodagh ... c'est Trotsky, le revolutionaire!" is one of the towering comedy moments of all time.
Here she is, though, at her moment of triumph, in all her be-hotpanted splendour, belting out her biggest hit; sadly, it's a song so idiotic that even here, when it was new and shiny and fun, even Clodagh doesn't look like she's having a very good time.
Also celebrating today, albeit in a completely Different Part of the Forest, is American broadcaster and writer Ray Suarez. His name, to me, will always conjure up a very specific time, one when his smooth, reasonable voice was, although I didn't know it then, something of an anchor for me.
In the early nineties, I was just coming off a spectacular, demanding, and really rather impossible job, one that had taken me around the world, allowed me to meet many of the people I most admired, and, when I left it, left me exhausted, adrift, and a little bit miserable. I was living in New York, I had contacts and friends and all sorts of potential opportunities, and I didn't want to do anything.
Which was a problem, since like most New Yorkers working in the arts, I was also quite thoroughly broke. Knew everyone, went everywhere, of course, but had a standing balance in the high two-figures down at the Chase Manhattan.
Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue; she needed someone to clean up tens of thousands of data records for a project on which she was engaged and decided I would do. Although I was a complete computer novice, she taught me the database program (Paradox in its pure DOS form, for those who care) and set me loose.
For the better part of a year I spent at least part of most days sitting in a tiny, windowless office off Times Square, completely alone, correcting spelling, making formatting consistent, and generally learning how data works (which is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Or at least I think so). At a time when I needed it, this seeming drudgery provided refuge, structure, and consistency. I would walk up from the Village, let myself in, turn on the radio, and sit down and try to figure out how to standardize international phone-number fields.
NPR was the background noise, and "Talk of the Nation" often the show; even today I can hear Ray Suarez's calm, reassuringly sensible voice. It brings back exactly that empty little room, the endless packets of Nabisco Vanilla Cremes I went through, the clanking sounds of pipes in the ancient, faded building.
Looking back, I suppose I was probably pretty depressed, and the undemanding routine of Paradox and radio just about the best therapy I could have had. As the project was ending, my friend - surprised, I think, that it had gone so well - asked me if I would teach other people, her clients, how to work with the product she was developing. Talk to people? It was a big step, but I gave it a shot, and it worked, and from there has turned into all sorts of other lines of work.
So here I sit today, on a nearly perfect morning on the far side of the world, with Mr. Muscato asleep upstairs, Koko curled up on the sofa, and the birds singing in the garden, and think gratefully of Ray Suarez, 53 today.
Were I a real writer, I'd probably try to find a way to link it all together - some kind of a pop-music epiphany/jack in the box/time in its flight kind of mashup, but instead all I can think of is Graham Chapman dressed as a French girl, shrieking "Oh, Maman! Ce n'est pas..." and so dissolve in giggles. Koko really must think me very odd.
...Hollywood's most fabled feud was nothing more than a PR stunt? I've never seen these two broads look more relaxed and at ease than here. And isn't it kind of fun thinking that maybe all those years they actually got together once in a while for a couple of vodka-Pepsis and a whole lot of laughing at their enemies?
So, as the tumbleweeds rolling around might have clued you in, life has been hectic for the past couple of weeks. Something vaguely resembling a lull, however, may be in sight, and so last night the Mister and I celebrated by retreating to our favorite pub. We normally sit on the terrace, which has great views of our little city and the sea and less smoke, but last night lots of folks were out and about, and so not a table to be had.
We sat inside, in a quietish booth near the bar. Mr. Muscato was actually quite pleased, as it meant he (vy. vy. butch, you know) could watch the big football match (Sultanate vs. Disdained Neighbor). So there we are, in a relatively quiet nook, him looking over my shoulder at the vast screen at one of the room and me... discovering that tucked into the other side of our booth was a mysterious little screen, the size of a computer monitor ten years ago, that for reasons wholly mysterious was showing a succession of Asian pop videos with the sound off.
I was lost. Football fans on all sides raged, our excellent meal came and went, and we were even treated to an especially choice version of one of our favorite bar sights (older and very respectable local man enjoying the company of a lady distinctly not his wife, sister, mother, or daughter, although very likely about the age of the last). My eyes stayed glued to the Silent Mystery Karaoke Screen.
One video especially stood out. Now, I know nothing but nothing about Asian pop; my last flirtation in that regard came two decades ago while I was living in Japan. I came home armed with only three words gleaned from the credits: Seaside, Super, Shinee. And, thanks to YouTubes, here it is. I think that what most enchants me is that both this video and the version in the bar featured handy English subtitles - which appear to be almost entirely different (last night's version featured a great deal of "going down the road of love," which is wholly absent here, for instance).
They do share, however, the deathless refrain that has provided the title above. I think the boys are Korean, they're certainly very energetic, and, unlike I would ever be, they're able to keep a straight face while exclaiming "Take me Take me Enjoy Today!" My current guess is that the song is "Seaside" while the band is Shinee. After watching it three or four times, Seaside Super Shinee is exactly how I feel.
One of the surprises of running the Café, I've discovered, is that despite being only at best intermittently about topics local, we still quite steady draw traffic from Gentle Readers here in our little Sultanate.
I therefore take the liberty of appealing to those in this part of the world who haven't already done so to pay attention to the current posting by fellow blogger Suburban, who is looking for insight into the realities (which seem very likely to be harsher than we realize) of crime in this generally idyllic place.
That I can do so while reminding myself of one of my favorite Kay Francis pictures is just a little of what my Lousiana pals would call lagniappe. Fortunately, the Villa Muscato features very little to attract a jewel robbery; now, if there were evildoers out to steal biographies of minor royalties or Garbo DVDs, we'd have something to worry about...
A little lesson from Miss Bakaire on the essentials of fabulousness - a headpiece to die for, a couple of insinuating numbers, and a deathless belief in one's own mythos. Even here, with all the limitations of an early-TV variety special, in Germany yet, Josephine demonstrates why she was one of the very great sensations and, among other things, a matchless dancer...
I don't know about you, but I just hate it when a sudden tension headache renders me unable to appear in an Indian-temple-dance-tribute-number.
Actually, we're having a rather Anacin kind of week at the Café, darlings, for which apologies. I'm sure things will look brighter by the weekend, which after all in this part of the world is practically moments away...
Just another night backstage at Carnegie Hall; it would appear that the Maestro likes what he sees, and why shouldn't he? Not all that remarkable, really, except that it was fifty years ago tonight, and Life was there.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, girls," grumbled Daisy. "Those dykes Lily and Rose are old news. I've got the latest and this is it: Stephen Haines is stepping out on Mary!"
The ranks of Hollywood royalty have thinned just a little this week, with the passing to Fabulon of MGM's prestige soprano of the early '50s, Miss Kathryn Grayson. Her brand of wholesome, high-brow appeal - a slightly too sweet amalgam of coloratura and cleavage - may not have aged particularly well, but during her moment in the sun, she was Queen of the Lot.
In memory, it will always be 1953, the year that saw her headline three of MGM's favorite things: a much-loved classic (The Desert Song), a hagiographic biopic (So This is Love, the story of Grace Moore, herself a onetime MGM asset), and a great big Broadway hit, Cole Porter no less (Kiss Me Kate). In the last, it must be admitted, she's really very good, happily sending up her image and gleefully sparring with dreamy costar Howard Keel.
If all her parts had been as challenging, as off-kilter, as Kate's Lilli Vanessi, she might have had a longer career, but audiences were tiring of operetta and what Lena Horne later called "pretty mouth" singing. After only one more picture (the creaky Vagabond King, from a 1925 Friml original, at Paramount and opposite the not exactly Keelische Oreste Kirkop), Grayson moved on to theatre, television, and graceful retirement.
She was a lovely lady with a lovely voice who appears to have lived a dignified and happy life, and if that's not the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood legends, it's still no mean feat. What leading lady of today will have as good a name in fifty years?
I'm not quite certain what's going on here, but I have a feeling that the next time those pocketbooks are put down - any minute now - there's going to be hair-pulling, drink-throwing, and recrimination all around.
I've been flying solo these last couple of days, with Mr. Muscato on the road for business. As usual in such situations, I have dived into the voluminous Villa Muscato film archive, taking advantage of temporary bachelordom to catch up on various obsessions that the two of us may not entirely share.
Last night's treat was the comparatively least celebrated of Warner Bros.' run of early thirty musical spectaculars, Dames. There are perfectly legitimate reasons that it doesn't have the stature of, say, 42nd Street or Golddiggers of 1933, but it's still a fine evening's entertainment.
Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler do their usual business (brash and blushing, respectively) quite competently, and Joan Blondell, as always, livens the proceedings. The plot requires Guy Kibbee and ZaSu Pitts, as Keeler's parents, to bumble and dither as is their wont, but Pitts is oddly absent, doing nothing with what is basically a pretty nothing part (she looks like she wishes she were back with Stroheim in Greed).
The real reason for these pictures, of course, isn't the plot, but rather the numbers, and here Busby Berkeley certainly delivers. From an idyllic Central Park setting for the rather treacly "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips (and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye)" to set the Powell-Keeler romance moving to the title number that highlights the inevitable show-within-a-show, the music moves along briskly. A bizarre Gibson Girl/Gay '90s number, "The Girl at the Ironing Board" gives Blondell the chance to frolic with an entire laundry's worth of en-puppetted long johns (a feint at least in part a result of her advanced pregnancy during filming).
One thing this picture does require is a very high tolerance for the standard that it launched upon the world, "I Only Have Eyes For You," of which one hears a very great deal in the course of the film's 91 minutes. It first appears early in the picture, but then gets the full-fledged demento Berkeley treatment later on, in an extravaganza that imagines the Second Coming as the Apotheosis of Ruby Keeler, or perhaps what Kim Jong Il might get up to if he had an unlimited supply of white organza (and Ruby Keeler). It might seem the last word in Bekeleyiana, but in reality it only sets the stage for the big "Dames" finale, which, like the rest of the best of Berkeley, is basically indescribable.
Actually, it's what Leni Riefenstahl might have done if she'd had better drugs and a sense of humor. In fact, it's odd having seen this movie and the Leni documentary in one week; it causes all sorts of thinking about what was really going on in people's minds in the 1930s.
I've decided that there is a truly fundamental difference between Riefenstahl's massed thousands of perfect Aryans and Berkeley's intricate compositions of giggling Hollywood chorus girls. It's that Leni came out of entertainment (having started as a dancer - of sorts, if the clips available are any indication - and actress) and applied what she had learned there to the glorification of Fascist pomp and circumstance. By contrast, Berkeley took his military-academy background - his love of regimentation, precision, the endless geometric replication of pattern - and applied it to the most basic tropes of show-biz: boy meets girl, kids meet fame (on a soundstage the size of all Burbank, in the company of endless numbers of extras moving in unison).
That is, although in some ways the products seem almost eerily similar, they're actually coming at each other from entirely different universes. One gilds a vacuous evil, giving it a frozen, gimcrack glamor; the other adds a backbone of steel to the June-Moon-Spoon of a thousand nights in Vaudeville, turning it into true cinema that's still, by virtue of its inherent absurdity, gloriously entertaining and oddly human in scale. Surely there can be few less Fascist concepts than 350 dancing Ruby Keelers, let alone having all of them serenaded by the keening croon of the eternal juvenile Dick Powell.
Over at his intriguing little corner of the digital universe, dear Norma has of late been engaged in pointing out the sad results of poor decision-making by a onetime glamour girl. Yes, it's true: the divine Marisa Berenson, if Norma's snaps are to be believed, has vainly sought eternal youth in a doctor's office, and it's not really very pleasant.
Still, I think we can't forget what an extraordinary creature she was in her prime, as here, a vision in orientalische Halston with the whole world ahead of her. There have been few more lovely women in recent decades, and if her film career never went much beyond Cabaret and Barry Lyndon, both of those are in their own ways landmarks in which she is very, very effective.
Here at the Café, Miss B. holds a special place, having been responsible for one of the very first little traffic spikes back eons ago when all of us were mere cyber-tots. Much should be forgiven the fabulous, but the killer combo of trout pout and a forehead as flat and immovable as the Antarctic do try one's patience, if not one's admiration for all that went before...
Well, if Clare Boothe Luce liked it, it has to be good!
It was especially thoughtful of the designer to have included this tome's original title, so that paperback buyers needn't have fretted whether Red Carpet for Mamie Eisenhower (or is it actually the more stentorian Red Carpet for MAMIE EISENHOWER?) was in fact a new and different biography than the seminal Red Carpet for Mamie that they had bought in hardback last year when they were on vacation at Ogunquit and it was the only thing the damn drugstore stocked besides the awful Taylor Caldwell novel that Aunt Gert gave them at Eastertime.
I finally got around this week to watching a Christmas gift - the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.
The film is far more than the story of Hitler's favorite filmmaker, the woman whose rollercoaster career took her from silent stardom in the now unwatchable genre of German Mountain Epics to scubadiving at 90+ in the Indian Ocean - heights and depths, indeed. What it really is, I think, is an almost continually frustrated attempt to answer one question: "What was she thinking?"
For decades she maintained one obdurate story: she was an apolitical artist, one who got caught up, all unawares, in the frenzy surrounding the rise of Nazism and who just happened to create its most enduring visual records. She was, in fact, a victim - of Goebbels, who repeatedly frustrated her perfectionist vision; of her postwar critics, who saw in Triumph of the Will the potent danger of a genuinely gifted eye meeting a poisonous message; and even of later writers, like Susan Sontag, who looked at Riefenstahl's '60s work photographing African tribesmen and saw a continuation of her Nazi-era celebration of what we know think of as body Fascism.
In the movie, she hews to this line, a nonagenarian vision of raddled UFA glamour as she tells her well-worn tales, dimpling guilelessly at the camera like the old pro she truly was. She compares herself, repeatedly, to Dietrich, whom she admires, it seems, not for her boldly anti-Hitler stance, but simply for having escaped and endured. She notes that she needed the same kind of lighting Marlene required - a high single spot to create the legendary shadows - and makes the dubious claim that she had been in the running to be Von Sternberg's Lola Lola in The Blue Angel.
Only once does the mask drop. Reunited in the stadium of the 1936 Olympics with two of the cameramen she had schooled to realize her almost demented glorification of athletic perfection in Olympia, she sits, during a break, chatting with them, apparently unaware her mic is live. Suddenly, briefly, her days as the toast of Berlin come to life. The three dispassionately move from talking about apertures and exposures to chitchat about the more routine assignments of who filmed who - "Ah, ja, you went to Moscow with Ribbentrop, no?" and for just that moment, you realize what an abyss she is, a vacancy, not apolitical but amoral, genuinely unable to fathom the bizarre experiences she has been through.
At the end of the film, she tries one last justification, another repetition of her tropes - I was not a party member, I never said anything anti-semitic, people lie so terribly about me, I was (looking very much intact) "shattered" to learn of all the atrocities, what could I have done ... and it occurred to me. Leni, in the end, really is a Lola Lola, a woman who, for film as the original was for sex, is so wholly self-absorbed, "von Kopf bis Fuß " made for nothing else, that she just ... can't help it.
For Marlene, Lola was just a role, the one that finally set her on the road to real stardom and out of the black orbit of National Socialism. Leni, though, was the real deal, Dietrich's dark shadow. It's a paradox, then, that she enjoyed a long, vigorous old age and, finally, a measure of renown apart from her vilification, even as her braver, more clear-eyed coeval languished in a geriatric haze of liquor and self-pity in Paris. Good choices don't always make for happy endings, but even so, while both women may have had "wonderful, horrible" lives, I have to think Dietrich's was the better path.
So we're sitting home tonight, Mr. Muscato and I, watching that award-handing-out thingummy that y'all back there in civilization caught last night. Mostly what I'm thinking is, "Hmmm. Not all that interesting, the current crop of WAMPAS Baby Stars, are they?" Also, "What is George Clooney on and where can I get some?"
