“Melancholy Baby,” semi-forgotten now, was supposedly the song that drunks demanded to hear, much to musicians’ distress. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker recorded it (with Thelonious Monk on piano) as a semi-gag. Here Bill and Lee take it for a ride in the mid-sixties, with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and Alan Dawson on drums….
Martha Redux
In my recent review of Charlie Chaplin’s painful misfire Monsieur Verdoux, I paid brief homage to “Martha Raye’s memorable performance as the grasping, guileless Annabella Bonheur, the one woman Verdoux can’t kill. I’ve always found Martha’s act hard to swallow, but it seems churlish here to deny her her one moment of glory.” Well, let’s…
NYT wins slanted but pretty much true headline contest
Who is more irritating, Steve Martin or 92Y? Also, Elaine is dead, Elaine’s is not
Last week I ran a piece highlighting Steve Martin’s so-bad-the-Y-gave-everyone-their-money-back appearance at the 92nd Street Y on Nov. 29. Even though Stevo generally came across as a pretentious old fart (he’s almost as old as I am, after all), I noted that Steve managed to end the conversation with a winner: “As for the Y’s…
El Stevo—even when he isn’t funny, he’s funny, sort of
I have, somewhere or other on the web, remarked that Steve Martin often is not funny these days. He takes himself too seriously, and resents having to appease the many-headed with, you know, humor. But Steve still can be funny, with David Letterman, for example. Hanging with Dave, who is, of course, as self-pitying and…
Motor Trend goes wild!
Over at Motor Trend, apparently a haven for latte-sippin’ tree huggers these days, a dude named Tom Lassa delivers a stunningly well-informed and downright high-larious beat-down to Rush “Fat Ass” Limbaugh and provides a few well-directed bitch-slaps to George “Prissy Bitch” Will along the way, all on the unlikely subject of that modern marvel, the…
Jason Moran plays “Thelonious,” 2009
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Kicking Ass, And You Don’t Even Know They Exist!
Admit it, you don’t, but, according to Jeff Stein’s “Spy Talk” in the Wash Post “Federal, state and local officials carrying out a counter-terrorism drill in Northern California Wednesday played out a scenario in which local marijuana growers set off bombs and took over the Shasta Dam, the nation’s second largest, to free an imprisoned…
Matt Yglesias is a girl
Yeah, I didn’t know either, but he totally is. He wants us to have a king so we can have royal weddings and look at pictures of chicks in big hats and guys in gray vests. Hey, Matilda! Move to Monaco! Now!
New at Bright Lights: Monsieur Verdoux
My take on Charlie Chaplin’s “controversial” and not very good film about a foppish wife murderer is up at the 70th issue of the Bright Lights Film Journal here. The full issue, NSFW as always, is here.