Music Video Of the Week - November 15, 2024

"Unholy Rollers" by Screen Syndicate (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video of the Week - January 12, 2024

"Death Race" by Screen Syndicate (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Screen Syndicate - Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House (2022)

A concept album about the career of an obscure B-movie star?  It's not as far-fetched an idea as you might think, especially when the star in question is the late Roberta Collins, a talented actress lauded by Quentin Tarantino for her performances in exploitation movies that were usually screened at drive-ins.  Collins, who starred in cheesy movies about women's prisons and futuristic dystopias with plenty of sex and violence, had always hoped to break through to the Hollywood mainstream, only to do no better than a few guest appearances on TV series and a mainstream flop film or two before giving up on acting in 1986.  Her tragic death in 2008 from what was believed to be a narcotics overdose, only a year after her son died, occurred with little if any notice.

Screen Syndicate is the brainchild of southern Illinois indie-rocker Stace England, who set up this group as a sideline to perform songs about the movies in tandem with film clips as a multimedia experience.  Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House is Screen Syndicate's love letter to Collins, presenting her as an actress who was far more than a pretty blonde face and as a symbol of women's empowerment in B-movie mogul Roger Corman's film productions in the 1970s but also lamenting her failure to escape the exploitation-movie treadmill and prove herself as A-list material.

The songs on Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House take their titles from Collins' films, and the lyrics illustrate the plots and present them as metaphors for Collins' performances in films released by Roger Corman and her efforts to define herself as an actress and as a woman.  The music is as underproduced as the movies they describe, and that's a good thing.  Rhythm guitars are ragged and raw, with plenty of grit underlining tasteful leads and solos, with solid bass lines and dry drums carrying pulsating tempos.  "The Big Doll House" and "Women in Cages" set the pace with their sympathies toward oppressed female inmates striking back at their jailers while zeroing in on Collins' dramatic turns, and then things get really interesting.  "Unholy Rollers" has a fast, circular tempo that evokes the roller derbies of the movie it takes its title from, besting Jim Croce's "Roller Derby Queen" with a full-contact thrust, while "Death Race" has a fast techno vibe with a subtle synthesizer drone that betrays the post-apocalyptic world of homicidal road rallies depicted in Death Race 2000 (in which Collins played a neo-Nazi race car driver).  A heavy-metal buzz drives "Caged Heat" while a funky soul groove underpins "Three the Hard Way," all to celebrate Collins at her peak as a bad-ass icon.

Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House fuses the persona with the personal, as England's songwriting looks introspectively at his admiration for Collins and chronicles her efforts to be taken seriously.  "Eaten Alive" is a futile plea to casting directors to recognize her potential for bigger things while urging her not to be ashamed of B-movie parts she nailed.  But as the album progresses, the melodies slow, the music is less brash, and England's frustration over Collins' decline and her bad breaks grows.  "Hardbodies I & II" sadly recounts her fading appeal, while "Vendetta" (named for the movie with her final role) addresses her like a lover, begging her not to go, to the heartbreaking sound of innocent doo-wop backing vocals.

If mainstream albums like Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, the Eagles' Desperado, and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are cinematic albums of rock and roll, Screen Syndicate's Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House is a rock and roll album about the cinema. It's a sonic show that works without the movie scenes it's meant to accompany in live performances, because it casts Roberta Collins as a three-dimensional woman and as a secular saint, the matron saint of unrealized ambitions.  The closing song, "Sweet Kill," is England's funeral for a friend, remembering "a life reflected in scenes that never really showed who you are" and expressing sorrow for her fatal downfall.  Not since Leadbelly's memorial song for Jean Harlow - a woman Collins played as a supporting role once, and I'll explore that in a separate post - has anyone simultaneously expressed such nostalgic joy and painful sorrow for a star of the silver screen gone too soon. 

"And now that all your dreams are gone," England and his bandmates sing, "there's no reason to hang on . . . you can fade away . . .."  To know of Roberta Collins is to have loved her and to miss her.  I can't hear "Sweet Kill" without getting upset.  It may be the greatest cinematic finale ever expressed in sound.

2022 And All That

I leave 2022 with a lot less confidence in the future than at any time in my whole life . . . maybe because I've always been disappointed when I looked forward.  I wrote earlier this year how I pretty much gave up on a lot of my ambitions - foreign travel, reconnecting with friends, getting a better job - mainly because of the pandemic (which, last I checked, is about to rev up again).   I've even given up on small things, like going to the movies or art museums - especially in New York, thanks to a local bus line that's drastically reduced its schedule to favor commuters over daytrippers. 

Now, more than ever, I've given up on activism and causes.  I continue to unsubscribe from the e-mailing lists of issue-oriented and liberal activist groups, fleeing them like a vampire from a cross.  If anyone dares to ask me what I' like to volunteer to do for issues such as a fairer tax system, support for the arts, support for public education, or even abortion or climate change, my answer is nothing.  Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I don't wish to remain anonymous, I wish to be left alone.  The causes people try to sign me up for either do not concern me or are too daunting a battle to fight.  I've had it.  I don't want to get involved anymore.

I'd love to change the world, dude, but I'm leaving it up to you.

Nothing underscores my attitude more than my end of promoting Martin O'Malley for President.  After being disappointed by presidential candidates I'd enthusiastically supported who won, I was even more disappointed - and disgusted, in fact, by how advocating for O'Malley's 2016 presidential candidacy turned out, especially when it became apparent that he lost any ambition he had for the Presidency or any other office after serving as governor of Maryland.  Considering how horribly he was treated as a presidential candidate, I don't blame him for quitting politics.  Although he continues to be an advocate for causes such as abolishing the death penalty - and good for him, I say - I'm so disillusioned that I can no longer support not only causes but candidates as well.  I will vote for candidates for office but I will do no more than that.  Don't expect me to be a cheerleader for any candidate for office ever again. 

I hope I get my mojo back in 2023.  Maybe I'll get that fresh start I always hope to get at the start of a new year, a new month, and a new week (January 1 being on Sunday and all) all at once.  Maybe I'll finally get to have again the life that COVID robbed from me three years ago.  But for now, I've had enough.

Happy new year.  See you 'round the clubs.

Christmas Greetings

 

Detroit Auto Show Blues

After a three-year absence brought on by COVID, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit returned this month, today being the last day of the show.  The most notable display at the show may have been this vehicle.

That sums it up.

Any auto show that relies on a display of the Flintmobile car that George Barris developed for the 1994 "Flintstones" movie to draw crowds can't be all that good.  And to think, in 1994, while The Flintstones was being shown in theaters, the auto show circuit that year featured the Volkswagen Concept One, which became the New Beetle.  My, how times have changed.

By all accounts, this show has been a big snooze fest.  Only two highlights came out of it - President Biden's visit to promote new American EVs and the debut of the seventh-generation 2024 Ford Mustang, the last real car Ford produces in this country.  Most of the displays were smaller than before, according to Lalita Chemello of Jalpnik.com, with almost nothing in between - least of all live bodies. In short, like Detroit itself. "More than anything," she wrote, "what was most notable was the emptiness — the swaths of blank walls, the shocking amount of bare space between cars."

She's right.  Look.

President Biden's appearance at the Detroit auto show was notable for the vast emptiness around him, and it had less to do with providing maximum security for the President than the paucity of show attractions - there was simply nothing there.  Looking toward the end of the pandemic during an interview with "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley as the two of them walked through the convention center, the President noted that no one was wearing face coverings.  Well, of course they weren't, there was plenty of room for social distancing!

Chemello wonders if auto shows have a future.  It's increasingly unlikely that they'll survive, given how more efficient it is for automakers to promote new product online and how expensive it is to set up a traveling show of props and product presenters for the auto show circuit every year.  Heck, the cars themselves are uninspiring - more and more SUVs and pickup trucks, and they're dominating the electric-vehicle market as much as the traditional internal-combustion-engine car market.  I can count the number of new cars I find impressive on one hand with fingers to spare, and that's certainly not much of an incentive to attend an auto show when I would have to spend more time getting there and going home than actually being there.         

I'm sure President Biden had a good time at the Detroit show.  He probably didn't have to pay to get in.

At least the Detroit show is now being held in September, at the start of the new-car model year. Who the heck wants to go to an auto show in Detroit in January anyway? 

Memorial Day 2022

Mother's Day 2022

 

Easter Greetings

Le Poison Le Pen

This wasn't supposed to happen.

French President Emmanuel Macron was seen as a shoo-in for re-election because of his ability to stand up to Vladimir Putin in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   But, as in America, inflation, immigration, and intolerance have contaminated the electorate in France  to the point where right-wing populism has not only become acceptable, it's become, like an Ungaro outfit, fashionable.  And the far right's best known spokesperson, Marine Le Pen (below) could possibly be elected president of France on April 24. 

With her plain-speaking campaign style and her resemblance to a kindly but strong matriarch in an André Téchiné movie, Le Pen seems harmless enough.  Until you remember she's the leader of the ultra-nationalist National Rally (formerly National Front) party, and her campaign platform includes restricting immigration from Third World countries, forcing Muslim women to stop wearing headscarves, ending free trade, privatizing public broadcasting stopping subsidies for renewable energy, and pulling her country out of NATO.  Sound familiar?

Le Pen blames the stagnating economy and rising energy prices in France on the centrist Macron government, and she's even taken to speaking out against what we Americans call "wokeism" to incite fear and envy among the French working class that she claims the elites have forgotten.   Le Pen, 53, isn't trying to copy Trump.  She, like her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been spewing this right-wing populist rhetoric since before Trump got into American politics.

If there's anything positive to say about Le Pen (and I'm stretching it here), it's that she's not as extreme on social issues as she used to be.  She's more accepting of abortion and same-sex marriages and she no longer calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty, which France abolished in 1981.  Trump Republicans aren't yet where she is on those issues now.  None of this, however, should obscure the fact that, if elected, she'd be the most reactionary French leader since Pétain.

Like voters in the United States who are ticked off at President Biden, voters in France are fed up with COVID restrictions, inflation, and economic malaise.  They look to be ready to punish Macron and replace him with an ogress who would terrorize liberals, minorities, and intellectuals with her raw-meat fascism.   Here's what I don't get.  Americans have a lot to be mad about, because we haven't been able to have nice things for at least forty years.  The French, on the other hand, have the highest-ranking health-care delivery system in the world, high-quality public transportation (including the intercity bullet trains), a first-rate school system, and paid maternity leave.  What the hell do they have to be upset about?

You know, I sort of hope Marin Le Pen wins on April 24.  We Americans had to live for four years and suffer under his policies while our country became the skunk of the world. I'd like to see French spend the next five years learning how that feels!  Maybe a President Le Pen will abolish and repeal some of those nice things we Yanks still lack.  How did Joni Mitchell put it?  "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone."

(And, maybe she'll demonize anyone opposed to her to the point where they get guys with tiki torches marching through Cherbourg and chanting anti-Semitic slogans.  In France they hate on Main Street.)  

Lady Razz

It was one of the most cringe-worthy moments in the history of cinematic award presentations.  It was a major insult to the intelligence of many, and it could have been avoided if someone who clearly knew better had shown restraint.

Yes, having to acknowledge with a Worst Picture Razzie a filmed stage performance of Diana, The Musical that should never have been done is enough to make anyone cringe.

What, what did you think I meant?  😃

I once suggested that Broadway musicals would never come back to Broadway in a pandemic-ravaged New York theater scene, but I was wrong.  I also was wrong that Diana, The Musical would never make it to Broadway after COVID prevented its planned March 2020 premiere.  But I wasn't as wrong about any of that as you would have been if you thought a cheesy musical based on the short life of one of the most sainted and martyred women of the twentieth century would work.  And it didn't. Diana, The Musical opened in October 2021 and closed after 33 performances.  And yet, someone had the not-so-bright idea of filming a performance of it to show on Netflix.  And so the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation (GRAF) awarded to Diana, The Musical Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Jeanna de Waal), Worst Supporting Actress (Broadway Veteran Judy Kaye), Worst Director (Christopher Ashley) and Worst Screenplay (Joe DiPietro and David Bryan).  That's five out of nine nominations, folks.  You can go here to see what the other nominations were. 

(Aside: Basketball player LeBron James won the Worst Actor Razzie for his role in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which should serve as a warning to future basketball stars interested in working with Bugs Bunny and his friends: If it's not Michael Jordan with the Looney Tunes gang, it's just not the same.)

The GRAF called Diana, The Musical an "all-singing, all-dancing, all-awful, royal mess," but theater critic Jesse Green of the New York Times probably spoke for most people when he dismissed the effort to turn Princess Diana's troubled life into entertainment as tawdry and exploitative, adding that "if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying."

But at least it didn't end with a car crash.

The movie version made for Netflix was not one of the Broadway performances from this past fall but was in fact filmed in the summer of 2020 under COVID restrictions without an audience.  Bad move.  If a filmed version had not been made, the musical would have been forgotten once it closed, and none of the actors involved would have been documented on screen for all eternity.  You can always get out of a bad play and you can move on from it without regret.  But you can never get out of a bad movie.

I would suspect that stage actress Jeanna de Waal (below), who played the title role, will have this 800-pound gorilla of a production on her back for the rest of her career - which could be a week.

The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation is cruel, but fair. And it's honorable.  As a joke, the GRAF created a special category for this year's Razzie Awards: worst performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie. Willis was nominated no fewer than eight times for the roles he played in 2021 for such movies as American Siege, Apex, Cosmic Sin (the winning performance), Deadlock and Out of Death.  But when it turned out that Willis is suffering from aphasia, a medical condition that makes it impossible to speak or understand speech, and is retiring from acting, Razzie co-founders John Wilson and Mo Murphy took back the award, saying that aphasia likely had an effect on Willis's acting of late and that it was in bad taste to mock someone for having to struggle at one's craft with such a disease to contend with.  

"If someone's medical condition is a factor in their decision making and/or their performance," Wilson and Murphy said, "we acknowledge that it is not appropriate to give them a Razzie."

Wilson and Murphy have class.  Unlike the people who put Diana, The Musical together.

As for Jeanna de Waal . . . honey, you're about to become the answer to a trivia question.

So I heard something happened at the Oscars?

(And tomorrow . . . the Grammys are on!)

St. Patrick's Day 2022

Broken Record

The 2022 Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for January 31, has been postponed to a date yet to be determined due to what I call the omicorona - the Omicron strain of SARS CoV-2.

And, I assume, even when they do have them, you'll see more masked musicians than when Kiss last attended.

I could give a twit less.  No, not really, I couldn't.  Most of the nominees for the major awards are pop and hip-hop stars, who make more noise than music, and of course white guys with guitars - demonized for the past decade, especially in the 2020 movie Trolls World Tour - are unrepresented.  The only honky I could find among the Album of The Year nominees is - Justin Bieber??

Given the tasteless presentations and performances of recent Grammy Awards shows - including a Moonie-like mass wedding ceremony at the 2014 Grammys - it's obvious that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences would rather honor the popular culture of the times more than the "music" that's supposed to represent it.  As far as I'm concerned, the Grammy winners should just have their awards mailed to them.  Yeah, I know I sound like a Mr. Wilson, but most of these performers are menaces to society.

But I hope Brandi Carlile wins the Song of the Year Grammy for "Right On Time." 😊

New Year's Greetings

 

Georgia Back On Our Minds

Stacey Abrams is running for governor of Georgia again.

The press, no doubt pushing a narrative to pleases their media-baron bosses with no regard to how it could threaten democracy in America, is already making Abrams the long shot in next year's gubernatorial election because she is a Democrat who will be running in a Republican year in a state where the voting laws have been tweaked to all but ensure a Republican victory.  I agree that, as of now, her election to the governor ship is highly unlikely - but not for the reasons above. Read on.

On the Republican side, Governor Brian Kemp - who rigged the last Georgia gubernatorial election in his own favor as the state's Secretary of State, the office with power over the voter registration lists - is facing a challenge from former U.S. Senator David Purdue, who has gotten himself in solid with Donald Trump while Trump is angry at Kemp because Kemp accepted Joe Biden's win of the state's electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election.  Kemp's supporters, however, point to his strong conservative record as a reason to give the governor another term.  Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who is not running for re-election himself, supports Kemp and says it's time for the GOP to admit that Trump lost and move on.  Georgia Democrats are counting on a big Republican bloodbath in the primary campaign before the GOP picks a nominee in the Georgia gubernatorial primary on May 24 while the Democrats get behind Abrams and present a united front throughout.

So why do I think Abrams will be unsuccessful, if it's not because of trends favoring Republicans - again, pushed by media narratives - or voter-suppression laws?  Simple  It's because there are a lot of white people in Georgia who will go through hell and high water to make sure that a black woman will never sit in the governor's chair in Atlanta.

It comes down to that simple fact.  Sorry.