As Hollywood's Big Night Nears...

The Academy Awards are on Sunday night. As is my long-time custom, I won't be watching. But as is my short-time  custom,(this is my third year observing it), I've watched from the comfort of the love seat in my den all ten of the films nominated for Best Picture.

From bottom to top, from least favorite to most, here are my quick thoughts on each of them. (These are not plot summaries, so if you don't know anything about these movies, my comments may not mean all that much.)

10. Frankenstein - Dark and turgid throughout, I really disliked this one. Definitely took a nap-een during it, and didn't miss a thing. Other than, presumably, some dark and turgid whatever. Give me Boris Karloff in the 1930's horror flick. Or Peter Boyle in Mel Brook's madcap Young Frankenstein any old day

09. F1 - This is a perfectly entertaining old-fashioned movie. Brad Pitt can still bring plenty of good looks-ness and charm. But F1 could have been made 50 years ago. It's not that I disliked it. There was one movie the nominee list that I actually hated. (Looking at you, Marty Supreme.) It's just that F1 didn't seem, to me, to have enough of anything distinctive to merit a nomination.

08. Marty Supreme - I like Timothée Chalomet. I really do. Liked him in Little Women. Loved him as Bob Dylan. But I found Marty Supreme one chaotic mess, with Chalomet frenetically ping-ponging around for two long hours+. It was all just a bit too much. The fifties atmospherics were interesting, and I suppose it was inspired to cast a-hole businessman Kevin O'Leary (he of Shark Tank fame) as an a-hole businessman. But a supremely hard pass on Marty Supreme. 

07. Hamnet - This is one beautiful film. Just gorgeous. The acting was fine. But it left me cold. My one takeaway is that the kid who played Hamnet looked a lot like Prince George.

06. One Battle After Another - There was some great acting, and some wonderful bits. I loved the white nationalist rich guy cabal. And Sean Penn as Colonel Lockjaw (a character highly reminiscent of now-demoted ICE honcho Greg Bovino) was deleriosly hilarious. But I found OBAA pretty confusing. And, as I find almost every movie that runs over 2 hours, way too long. But I liked it well enough. 

05. Sinners - There's lots to admire about Sinners, especially the acting (e.g., Michael B. Jordan) and the setting in Depression-era Mississippi. I also liked the look into Black life (however surreal many elements were). But magical realism is not now and has never been my jam, so there were parts that lost me. 

04. Bugonia - If a little magic realism goes a long way, well, so does a little science fiction, a little fantasy, and little horror. And Bugonia had some of all of the above. But it also had a ton going for it. Like Emma Stone. And the on-point portrayal of richy-rich CEO life, the horrors of big pharma, and the left-behind working class. So the good outweighed the bad, and I much enjoyed Bugonia. 

03. Secret Agent - I even mucher enjoyed Secret Agent. Okay, there was too much violence to my liking. And although Secret Agent didn't drag, does any movie need to run 2 hours and 40 minutes? They could have saved a good slug of time by cutting out the hairy leg stuff, which did nothing to advance the plot of how harrowing it is to like in a violent, repressive, thug-ridden, poor, authoritarian country, as was Brazil in the late 1970's. (I shudder to think that our country may just be a few degrees of separation away from this state...) 

02. Train Dreams - What was it that drew me right into this low key movie? The low key-ness. The simplicity. The generosity. The quiet (even when noisy). The humanity at its core. The incredible natural beautiful of the Pacific Northwest setting. This is a very sad movie, but it's devoid of gimmicks, special effects, magical realism, and surreality. And I loved it. Contributing to my loving it, Train Dreams clocks in at 102 minutes. Yes!

01. Sentimental Values - Although I pretty much saw all of Imgmar Bergman during my prime movie going days, I was never a huge fan. The movies were almost always a slog, heavy going, moody, depressing. But I pretty much love anything in a Scandinavian settin, so Sentimental Values was right up my cinematic alley. Plus Skellen Skarsgard who plays the no longer relevant, aging acto paterfamilias of an artsy/acting Norwegian family. The movie deals with memory, resentment, intimacy, war, parents, children, rage, and the house you grow up in. What I loved about this - other than the Scando setting, the acting, and the house to die for (before they modernized it) was that it was intensely real. No tricks up its sleeve that I could see. My favorite movie of the Big Ten, but not all that much farovite-y than Train Dreams or Secret Agent.  

I will check on Monday to see which movie won. Unlikely to be one of my faves. (I'm thinking Sinners for the win.) 

Meanwhile, I haven't checked on the contents of the swagbag yet, so I don't know what goodies the illustrious nominees for Actor/Actress/Director/Picture et al. get for showing up. And after watching 30 movies over the past three years, the majority of which I didn't particularly care for, I think I deserve a swagbag for myself.

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Image Source: LA Lifestyle

At the movies

Tomorrow's post will be my overall take on the ten movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Although I seldom go to the movies, and never watch the Academy Awards, I've been doing this the last couple of years. Which means I've been sitting through a bunch of movies I wouldn't necessarily see if they weren't nominated.

What's different this year is that I didn't actually see any of these movies at a theater, but watched from the comfy-cozy of my very own home.

Which got me thinking of some of the odder experiences I've had in movie theaters over the years.

One of my first movie-going experiences was seeing Disney's Cinderella at Worcester's Park Theatre. My father took me, my sister Kath, and my brother Tom, and once we'd gotten settled in, he gave us each a dime to get a drink from the flat soda machine. Kath got Tom's, no problem. Put the dime in the slot, grabbed a paper cone cup,  and the Kool-aid-ish sweet drink was dispensed. She then took care of her own. Again, no

problem. I, of course, wanted to DIY the experience. I put my dime in, but, alas, there were no more paper cone cups. And I stood there and watched the orange fake Kool-Aid go down the drain. 

Why I didn't tell my father, as he surely would have gone out to the lobby and demanded justice in the form of a paper cone cup and some sticky-sweet orange gluck. Guess I had already embraced the motto of my time and place: oh, just suck it up. 

Fast forward a couple of years. I can't remember what the movie was - no doubt something Disney - but I wasn't there with my father. I was with Kath and our friends. I believe we were in downtown Worcester at the Plymouth Theater, which was well known for the sticky cement floors they never seemed to wash. Anyway, for some reason - it was during my peak religo years - I had brought with me the "crystal" rosary beads I'd been given for my First Communion. And somehow managed to lose them. We all searched high and low under the seats, spotting discarded paper cone cups and assorted detritus, but not, alas, my rosary beads. Did I ask an usher to come look with his flashlight? Of course not. As noted above, I had already embraced the motto of my time and place: oh, just suck it up. 

I didn't go to the movies all that often, but often engough. And during the remainder of my grade school years, and on through high school, college and grad school, my theater going was without incident. 

And then, in 1974, I went with my sister and brother-in-law to Cambridge's Orson Welles Cinema to see a late night duo of The Harder They Come and Gimme Shelter, both of which are pretty loud and noisy. A young, hippie-ish couple had taken an infant in with them and, not surprisingly, the baby was disturbed by the noise and, no doubt, the fact that it was closing in on midnight. The baby started crying - make that screaming. And screaming. And screaming. 

I thought for sure my sister Kath, who is pretty outspoken, was going to say something. I sensed her agitation and reached out to pat her arm a couple of times as we sat there hoping that the new parents would come to what few senses they had. (Seriously, who takes a baby to the midnight showing of Gimme Shelter?) 

As it turned out, it wasn't Kath who blew her stack. It was me of the notoriously long fuse and placid disposition.

"Take that baby out of here!" I yelled.

The couple left in a huff, the father yelling back at me, "You care more about this fucking movie than you do about my baby."

Not quite the burn he hoped it was, as I had the perfect followup: "You obviously do."

Anyway, I got a nice ovation from the theatergoers. 

Also in 1974, as a foreign movie aficionado (that is to say, snob), I went to see Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away at the now long gone Exeter Theatre (a somewhat "high culture" venue) with my friend Mary Beth. If Swept Away wasn't the worst movie I ever saw, I can't think of another one. (Okay, I can: A Walk with Love and Death which I saw in college, with Mary Beth, among others. Assaf Dayan was hot. Other than that...) We were sitting there deciding how much longer we were going to endure the show when they announced that the theater was being evacuated because of a bomb scare. This was well pre-cellphone, so it was't one of the patrons who was calling in a bomb scare. But most of us sure were hoping for it. And, miraculously, it happened! Yay! We kept our stubs as rainchecks, which we got to use at a later date. (What for, I can't remember.)

(A few years later, I was with Mary Beth when we had a fairly amusing experience when we went to see Unmarried Woman at the Cheri. The Cheri was a multiplex, and the ticket seller needed to know which movie the two elderly women in line in front of us wanted to see. Unmarried Women? she asked. The two woman gave each other a somewhat questioning look, shrugged, and one of them told the ticket seller, "Yes. We're both widows."Honestly, the ticket seller should have comped the Golden Girls the tickets.)

Movie-ing on, somewhere in the mid-late 1970's, I was with my husband watching Barbet Schroeder's documentary, Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait. We were enjoying this chilling and weirdly comic film when we heard an unmistakable noise a few rows behind us and, blessedly, a few seats over. Yes, someone had whipped it out and was peeing. We looked over and saw an exceedingly large stream of pee coursing down the floor underneath the seats. Fortunately not our seats. But we decamped to a safer space in what was a nearly empty theater.

In 1981, at the Charles Cinema, my sister Trish and I were watching Mommy Dearest when a man ran into the theater. Chased by another man pointing a gun at him. Remarkably, Trish and I were the only ones in the audience who fled. I can't remember whether the police were called, but after hanging in the lobby for a few, we were assured that things were now safe, and we did end up seeing the rest of the movie. But it was all very odd. 

I can't remember the theater or the movie, but somewhere in the late 80's or early 90's, I was at the movies with Trish and our friend Peter. I was sitting on the aisle and was passed the large popcorn bucket we were sharing when it literally flew away. I have no idea what happened, but my bucket-holding arm flung out and most of the popcorn ended up in the aisle. Oops! Peter and Trish gave me "what just happened?" looks, but damned if I knew. My inner poltergeist took over? Who knows.

As time went by, I went less and less to movies in person. Instead of going to the movies, we rented videos and played them at home. And now I stream, as I did with all of the Best Picture nominees.  

Anyway, nothing else all that memorable has happened in a movie theater. No bomb scares. No screaming babies. No bad hombres chasing each other with guns. But is it any wonder I'm just as happy to watch from the comfort of my own home, knowing that, if I want a soda, it won't be flat and I won't have to drink it out of a flimsy paper cone.  

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Image source: Amazon

Flutes 'r' Us. (Who knew?)

I knew that, with Zildjians being made here, Greater Boston is the hub of the U.S. cymbal industry. Kind of like what Pittsburgh once was to steel. Just lower scale in terms of the economic value it yields. But until I saw a recent article in the Boston Globe, I had no idea whatsoever that Boston isn't just the hub of the universe, the hub of cymbals. It's also the hub of the flute industry.

I do associate Boston with music - BSO, the Pops, Berklee - just not necessarily with flutes. Other than the fifes played by ye olde colonial reenactors. What's flutes got to do with us, do with us?

Plenty, it seems. 

The US auto industry isn’t what it used to be, but if it were, Greater Boston would be the Detroit of flute making — home to a host of world-class manufacturers. And unlike Detroit, the Boston area has retained its crown, as artisans trained at well-established companies have continually launched new firms of their own.

William S. Haynes of Acton begat Powell Flutes of Maynard, where Abigana, an award-winning flutist, works as sales manager. But the region is also home to Brannen Brothers Flutemakers of Woburn, Nagahara Flutes of Chelmsford, Levit Flute in Natick, Di Zhao Flutes of Westford, Burkart Flutes and Piccolos in Shirley, and Emanuel Flutes of North Andover. (Source: Boston Globe)

I began racking my brain trying to come up with the names of any famous flautists, and came up with three: James Galway, Lizzo, and Jethro Tull. (Or course, Jethro Tull isn't the name of the flute player; it's the name of the group. I was never a particular fan of this 60's-70's band. That would be my brother Tom. Given his incessant playing of the album, I was quite familiar with the innards of Aqualung. But I had to look up the name of the group's flute guy. Ian Anderson.)

My wandering took me to wondering whether James Galway, Lizzo, and Ian Anderson play Boston flutes.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Galway plays a Nagahara: Chelmsford, Mass. Anderson plays a Powell: Maynard, Mass. Lizzo mostly plays a Japanese-made flute, although she does have one from New Hampshire flute-maker John Lunn. Given NH's adjacency to Massachusetts, it's almost three out of three for the flute players I'm familiar with having local ties.

You might be thinking, just how much goes in to flute making. After all, isn't a flute a hollowed out metal rod (or wooden stick) with some holes in it? That and the thing you blow into (which is called a headjoint)?

The answer is, of course, of course there's a lot.

Local flutes, many custom-made, are available for a wide spectrum of prices, from a couple of thousand way up to the six figure range. And there's an awful lot of complex precision work that goes into the making of one. Plus technology.

There’s a lot of advanced technology in a modern flute. Powell Flutes invented a way of bonding sterling silver and gold to create a lighter, less-expensive flute that still conveys the warm, rich sound of a 14-carat instrument. Some companies use parts created at local machine shops. Here the parts are fabricated in computer-controlled milling machines to tolerances within a thousandth of an inch, much thinner than a human hair.

The technology angle is interesting, given that Maynard, Mass. (Powell) and Chelmsford, Mass. (Nagahara) were both tech hubs of yore. Maynard was the home of Digital Equipment, and Wang Labs was in Lowell, right on the Chelmsford border.

Anyway, there's a lot of detail in the Globe article on the history and the precise manufacturing process of local flutes, but one thing that struck my eye is that the making of a silver or gold flute produces a lot of dust.

Haynes recaptures gold and silver dust worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by sweeping the floors, benches, and chairs.

Thar's gold in them thar sweepings! 

“I’m surprised they let me wash my clothes at home,” [David Schipani, Haynes’s director of product design and development] said.

Well, I'm just a sucker for anything that's made in Massachusetts. 

Not that I know a damned thing about fluting, but YAY, MASSACHUSETTS FLUTES!

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Image Source: Emmanuel Flutes

Sorry I missed this concert!

Sometimes there's a party on the street behind me that has loud music blasting after I've gone beddy-bye. Very annoying.

The house next door has a temporary rental on its bottom two floors. There's never been a blasting party there. The temporary renters tend to be business people, or quiet families, or middle-aged-girl getaways. This is not an unfettered Airbnb part-ay spot we're talking about. But there is outdoor space, and sometimes the folks are up late with a bottle of wine. Or, if it's business guys, with cigars. And the outdoor space is about 10 feet from my bedroom window. People can get a bit loud. Fortunately, they're not usually louding after midnight. So while it may be annoying, the annoyance is, like the rentals, temporary.

Still, I have on the rare occasion hollered out the window- very nicely and genteelly hollered - asking when the gathering will end, or requesting that folks use their indoor voices, even if they are technically outdoors. 

So I do understand that sleep interruptus can make one cranky.

As it did the Anglican Bishop of Fulham, when a concert in his church went a bit overlong and disturbed his peace.

Perhaps he would have more forgiving if the choir had been performing music that was sacred rather than profane, but the City Academy Voices choir had just finished up a rousing rendition of "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me." Which did anything but get the good bishop to love them. 

As they were about to perform their last song, a man appeared on stage wearing a blue dressing gown with no shoes. He took the mic, described their singing as a “terrible racket” and told them to get out, leaving the 360-odd people in the room shocked and dumbfounded. 

“You are in my house, can you leave it now please,” he said. The man, it appears, was Jonathan Baker, the bishop of Fulham. In a video posted on social media, the bishop can be seen telling the choir it’s past 10pm and calls for the night to be “over." (Source: The Guardian)

Perhaps Bishop Baker didn't want to hear the final number, which was scheduled to be Abba's "Dancing Queen." Which I imagine could have gotten plenty raucus.

The choir isn't associated with the church, but the church does hire itself out as a concert venue, and City Academy Voices has performed there in the past. One choir member thought the bishop in the bathrobe was a Monty Pythonesque part of the show:

She said: “At first, I thought it was a comedy act or some actor doing a scene. But when we realised, oh no, this isn’t an act, this is real, it was just a bit surreal.”

 ...Describing the sequence of events, the choir member said: “We were singing away. This was our penultimate song. Then, we were going to do one final number and get everybody out of the aisles and dance.

“Then, all of a sudden, the lights went out. At first I thought there may have been a power cut. But then the instruments were still playing.

“We were picking back up to sing when all of a sudden everything went quiet. I could see this guy in what looked like a dressing gown talking to the audience on the mic.”

After the Bishop's appearance, a church worker came out asking everyone to leave quietly, telling choir and audience that "this is a residential home." (Well, actually it is a church. But the Bishop of Fulham may well think of the church as his home-away.)

But the choir and audience had other ideas. Racket-smacket. They started booing. And shouting. They were anticipating that dancing queen in the aisles ending, and they were annoyed and cranky that they were being denied. As they made their way off the stage, the choir decided to perform a capella, much to the enjoyment of the crowd.

If the Bishop had just waited another few minutes, the show would have been over. The reaction to his entrance prolonged the show beyond those five minutes. 

The next day, the Bishop contacted the show's organizers to apologize for his be-robed (just not bishop's robe) appearance. Seems the show started a bit late due to technical issues, and had run a bit over. 

But it was only a bit after 10 p.m.

Guess the Bishop of Fulham is an early to bed, early to riser. 

Those in attendance will likely be talking and laughing about this ending for a good long while.

Sure am sorry I missed the concert. 

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Image Source: Sky News

Sure The Royals are preposterous, but what a source of entertainment!

ME: The very idea of the British Royal Family in a modern context is utterly ridiculous.

Also ME: The British Royal Family is an endless source of fascination.

I'm not going to lie about having no idea how this dumb-ass article on Camilla appeared to me. I know exactly why the royals keep showing up as suggested content. It's because, as often as not, I'll click through the dumb-ass headline that shows up as suggested content, and read the entire dumb-ass article about why Zara Tindall didn't want her kids to have titles. Why Wills won't invite Harry to his coronation, if and when the day comes. How Andrew is once again demonstrating that he's a meretricious buffoon. 

I lapped up The Crown. And the more-facts/less-conjecture The Royal House of Windsor on Netflix, even though it was less juicy and enthralling than The Crown.

Prince George's nickname. Click. Through.

Wallis Simpson as fashion icon. Click. Through.

I do NOT seek out stories on the royals. But when they come my way, this Irish-American girl, raised to scorn the Brits and the entire royal apparatus, will click right on through.

So of course I was going to go for it when this headline and subhead appeared right before my wondering eyes: 

Queen Camilla improperly overtakes King Charles III in act seen as breach of protocol during public greeting

Royal watchers left stunned after blink-and-you-miss-it moment sparks fresh chatter

As a character, Camilla is, of course, hard to resist. The earthy, horsey, royal-ajacent gal that Charles shoulda/woulda/coulda married if only she'd been a virgin. The ever-present third party to the marriage of Chuck and Di. The late in life romance that finally got to play out.

And here she was, unconsciously or deliberately spitting in the face of royal protocol during what should have been a routine walkabout to meet and greet the common folk.

As the King paused to greet the crowd with his usual gentlemanly grace, Camilla casually picked up the pace and, in full view, overtook him. It may have lasted just a few seconds, but the implications landed with a thud.

Royal etiquette isn't just old-fashioned-it's the monarchy's playbook

For a family that thrives on symbolism and precise protocol, who walks in front of whom is no small matter. In this case, Queen Camilla's brief overstep broke with the deeply rooted rule that the monarch always leads. (Source: Marca)

Queen - or is it still Queen Consort - wrong foots it in the public eye, jumping ahead of the ultimate liege lord. Heaven forfend! (I've always wanted to say 'heaven forfend.')

I don't think that this is quite on the same level as when, during his first reign of terror, our Boor-in-Chief walked in front of Queen Elizabeth, nearly body blocking her so he could be right up front. Never mind royal protocol. Americans really don't have to observe it, do we? Not yet, anyway. But here was Good Queen E, old enough to be Trump's mother. At min, he should have walked beside her. But no...

Royal watchers were quite quick to point out that King Charles - and it still takes some getting used to "King Charles" being anything other than a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel - with his characteristic "royal grace"... "clearly aware, handled it with polished charm, subtly catching up to retake his place."

Royal watchers have pretty much warmed to Charles, even though his mother was a tough act to follow. But they have not wholeheartedly warmed to Camilla

And moments like this don't help. Some say it's her relaxed, almost carefree style-others think there's a more ambitious streak behind that easygoing front. Whether intentional or accidental, overtaking the King in public sends a loud message: one that doesn't sit well with traditionalists who believe in the order and structure the monarchy represents.

Tut-tut-tutty-tut-tut.

I find all the who-curtsies-to-whom, who's entitled (literally) to use which royal style, who gets to okay the bride or the groom (that would be the reigning monarch) nonsensical. Fascinating nonsense, but nonsense none the less. 

Yet it's all so Duke of Earl...

At some point, the Brits will likely join that other European nations in jettisoning more of the trappings of royalty - including official authority over some matters -  and use the Royal Family for (less costly) symbolic and touristic purposes only. 

Until then, they remain quite the source of entertainment.

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Image Source: CNN

Dubbing? Why is it so awful?

A few weeks ago, I binge watched Secrets We Keep on Netflix. The series got pretty good reviews, and I like a good mystery (and a good binge watch), so I tuned in. The premise was reasonably interesting: the disappearance of the Filipino nanny of a super-rich Copenhagen family. And the questions it raised about the exploitation of the nanny cadre, the secret lives of early-adolescent boys, and the life-

styles of the uber-rich were provocative enough. (Talk about house porn: the two key families lived in unimaginablly super-designed and curated modern splendor. Of course, the only rooms that held any warmth or personality, any indication that a real person lived there, were those where the nannies lived.)

Despite the pretty rave-ish reviews I saw, I thought the plot was largely meh. But my big problem with the show was the dubbing.

Why is it that the dubbed voices always sound so fake and unreal? It really doesn't bother me that the lip movements may be a little off. It's that the voices never seem to match what you'd expect to come out of the mouth of the actor being dubbed. And the acting always seems just awful. 

I'd prefer subtitles any old day, even though you have to pay more attention and can't get lost in Sudoku or doomscrolling. You really have to look at the screen and follow along with the non-bouncing non-ball.

It isn't just Secrets We Keeped. 

Earlier this year, it was Just One Look, a Polish series based on a Harlan Coben novel. As with Secrets, the plot was interesting enough, as was the depiction of middle-class Polish life and Polish policing. But the dubbing drove me to distraction!

Dubbing always sounds to me like the "acting" in Clutch Cargo, or one of the other cheesy cartoon action shows of yesteryear. 

How is it that the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Yogi Bear sound real, while the voices of human cartoon characters are always so stilted and fake? Ditto for dubbed shows with real humans. Just awful.

The worst case of dubbing I remember was from my wayback.

Over New Year's 1989-1990, my husband and I were in Berlin to see The Wall fall. One day, after an exhausting visit to East Berlin, when you still had to go through Checkpoint Charlie, we got back to our (West Berlin) hotel late afternoon and just collapsed. For some reason, I told Jim that I could really go for an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. In an unbelievably weird bit of timing, Jim turned the TV on and what to our wondering eyes did appear but an episode of Die Strassen von San Francisco.

It was a truly excellent espisode - the one in which Rick Nelson plays a washed up rock star turned murdering pimp - and one we were familiar enough with that we didn't actually need the subtitles to follow the plot. (My husband did have some German, but it was scientific not conversational, so he didn't know the words for key things like flute-player and teen prostitution ring.) 

Anyway, the dubbing was beyond outrageously bad, probably made all the more so in that we were familiar with the voices of stars Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, not to mention Rick Nelson, whose California-dude, still vaguely adenoidal voice we'd been hearing since he was Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

So, dubbing: yech!

Fast forward a few years, and I had a business meeting in Amsterdam with my company's Dutch partners. When we were out to dinner, I asked them how they had acquired such wonderful English, right down to perfect accents, the idiomatic Americanisms, and the latest slang. They told me that, unlike American TV shows in Germany, American TV series were subtitled, not dubbed. So they could actually hear how Americans spoke. (At the time, they were picking up cop slang from NYPD Blue. So they knew what skells were.)

Another advantage of subtitling over dubbing!

Not sure what I'm going to do when something else I want to watch turns out to be dubbed. Turn the sound off and the closed captioning on? Maybe. All I know is that dubbing is just plain awful. And it'll no doubt get worse once AI gets a hold of it. 

Sigh...

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Image source: Rotten Tomatoes

Not quite Gwyneth Paltrow nutty, but still...

I had heard of Sydney Sweeney, of course. But I really had no idea who she is. Blonde? Young? Actress? Hotty? 

All of the above, I guess.*

And all of the above is what makes for a new soap from Dr. Squatch, a natural body care brand, that uses Sydney's bathwater in its mix.

Apparently, the soap-consuming public (Male Division) had been clamoring for it, so on June 6, Dr. Squatch brought out a limited edition "Sydney's Bathwater Bliss." 

Nearly a million folks signed up for the opportunity to win a free bar. (One hundred bars available, so your odds weren't great.) And the remainder of the lot - I've seen lot sizes of 5,000 and 8,000 - were available on Dr. Squatch for $8 a bar. Whatever the number available, they sold out instantly. And were instantly available on eBay for $40, $80, $250, $375, $420...

You don't need me to tell you that people are nuts, that's for sure.

It all started last fall when Sweeney did some promo for Dr. Squatch, posing in a bathtub. What to do after the photoshoot? After all, you don't want to throw any bucks out with the bathwater now, do you? 

“When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it, or turn it into a bar of Dr. Squatch soap,” the 27-year-old said in an official press release for the product.

She continued, “It’s weird in the best way, and I love that we created something that’s not just unforgettable, it actually smells incredible and delivers like every other Dr. Squatch product I love. Hopefully, this helps guys wake up to the realities of conventional personal care products and pushes them towards natural.”

Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss is a medium grit exfoliating soap made with sand, pine bark extract and "yes, a touch of Sydney’s real bathwater." As for what it smells like, the soap bar delivers notes of pine, Douglas fir and earthy moss that brings users to the forest, as well as Sweeney's actual bathtub. (Source: People)

From a marketing standpoint, this is all, of course, brill. 

A million people looking to win a free bar? A million emails for the Dr. Squatch mailing list? 

Articles in People, Adweek, Newsweek, and - natch! - Page 6. 

The limited edition selling right out, at a reasonable gag-gift price of $8, and then popping over to eBay for orders of magnitude beyond the gag-gift price. (Not that anyone IRL is going to pay $420 for a bar. It's just that someone is asking that. Which creates mo better buzz.) 

Marketing genius!

Yet still weirdly disturbing.

No, it doesn't quite rise to the nutiness level of Gwyneth Paltrow's selling a candle that smelled like her vagina (sorry), but still.

We are one crazy-arsed culture, that's for sure. 

Unfortunately, I don't see where there's any turning back other than going the Handmaid's Tale route.

Sigh...

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*Turns out I kinda/sorta knew (shoulda known) who Sydney Sweeney is, as she was in White Lotus Season One playing the snotty college girl daughter to some rich folks. And I do watch White Lotus. Still, she didn't register with me, other than vaguely.

Image Source: Sydney Sweeney's Insta

Sandbox Memories

A while back, a small, no-big-deal "news" item caught my eye.

Massachusetts will soon be home to a children’s activity center featuring the largest sandbox in New England. (Source: MassLive)

Sandmagination is set to open at the Northshore Mall in Peabody in late spring, according to a press release.

Designed for kids aged 10 and under, the facility will feature interactive exhibits, play stations as well as STEAM and STEM activities. The space will be fully accessible and designed for children of all abilities.

The goal of Sandmagination is for children to learn and explore through hands-on play in a sensory-rich environment.

Sandmagination is the brain child of a local STEAM-y STEM-y couple  -  she's a biotech PhD, he's an IT guy/writer - who created the space with their own kids in mind. 

“At Sandmagination, we are building a space where kids can unleash their creativity, explore, and learn in ways that are both fun and meaningful,” the couple said in the press release. “As parents, we know how important it is to provide a safe learning environment, and we cannot wait to open doors here in Peabody.”

It all sounds wonderful, and I love the idea of kiddos having the opportunity to have a sandbox experience, where they get to enjoy - as the Sandmagination website states - an "experience that combines STEAM-based learning, sensory exploration, and hands-on creativity. Our interactive exhibits inspire children to experiment, build, and discover through open-ended, imaginative play."

Yes indeedy. Get the kids away from the screens and into a place where they can just dig in. It all sounds great, but it did make me a bit wistful for the the days of yore when kids got to create, explore, experiment, learn, whatever - in a space that may not have been an intentional STEAM-designed, "safe learning environment" but was a fabulous, unsupervised, kids-only, outdoor place where you could have - dare I say it - just plain fun.

The sandbox of my childhood was pretty good sized - in my memory, it was huge, but I'm guessing it was only about 36 square feet. It was made up of four knocked-together boards with triangular watch-out-for-slivers seats at each corner. There was no foundation, no floor. The boards were just pushed into the ground a bit - no doubt by my father hammering or stomping on them - and the whole shebang all held together by those corner seats. It was located in a shady spot in the yard, right next to the wooded ravine that was part of our property.

My father was no carpenter, but he was handy enough to build for us what was, in those simpler times, a fantastic place for "sensory exploration," etc. 

I can't remember what the original color of the sandbox was -  green, I think - but at some point it was repainted in an ugly orchid. (For some reason, I think we used to call this color pistachio.) There was nothing in our house of that color, so it wasn't leftover from anyting. And I can't imagine that my father deliberately chose it. My guess is that he went to the hardware store and they had a quart of a color that someone had buyer's remorse about after it had been mixed. So it was available for near-free. Sold!

Color aside, our sandbox was wonderful, and I spent many hours there - with my sibs, with my friends, on my own. 

I/we made sand castles, shoveling dampish sand into buckets, pounding it down, unmolding it, and decorating the ramparts with sticks, leaves, pebbles, and scraps of paper (those were the flags). 

We made tracks through the sand and raced the boys metal Tonka trucks, and the cheesy green/silver and red/silver rubber cars with yellow wheels you could get at Woolworth's for a dime. (These days, you can get one on eBay for $12.95.) I may be crazy, but I think the heads of driver and passenger were often decapitated, bitten off by someone unleashing their inner Ozzy Osbourne, before we knew that Ozzy Osbourne even existed. 

We also brought our dolls out to the dandbox beach. And we played restaurant and picnic, making "food" out of patties of sand, twigs, weeds, leaves, pebbles, berries, acorns and pignuts. (I don't know where those red berries came from, but we knew/thought they were poisonous, so didn't eat them. We did occasionally dig the meat out of pignuts and take a bit of a taste, but that meat, while it may have been harmless, was bitter.

We celebrated spring by heading to the sand-and-gravel pit to buy a couple of bushel baskets of clean sand to restore the sandbox for the coming season.

I'm not sure when I outgrew our sandbox. Maybe age 10, the upper edge of the Sandmagination age range. But I hung on for a while, playing there with my sister Trish (a decade my junior) when she didn't have any of her buddies around. 

Anyway, our sandbox was nothing fancy, but it was just plain magnificent. All it was lacking was the ability to fly - unlike the flying sandbox chronicled in one of my favorite early-childhood books, the eponymous Flying Sandbox. Or course, since our sandbox was bottomless - and completely destroyed the grass under it; it took decades after the sandbox was decommissioned for the grass to grow back in as anything other than dead yellow - if our sandbox took flight, we would have been hanging on to those corner seats for dear life.

Good luck to the Sandmagination. However brainy and planned out it is, I'm sure the kids will have fun. And I hope that some of them imagine taking off and flying around the neighborhood in it. 

How low can they go? How about Hunger Games for citizenship?

The only season of Survivor that I watched was the first one. 

Just wasn't that interested in watching a bunch of sun-drenched, buff connivers compete against each other by winning studip manufactured competitions, and figuring out how to backstab and manipulate their fellow contestants. Sure, it was a certain "reality" of the kill-or-be-killed, when you come down to it everyone's pretty much a POS, variety. But, essentially, yawn. And yuck.

If I'm going to watch a competition that pits non-athletes against each other, I'd rather see three nerdy know-it-alls - my kind of peeps - go at it on Jeopardy. Give me the librarian from Tucson who knows that Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer for Beloved in 1988; the accountant from Providence who knows that the real Tesla - Nikola - helped figure out the AC electrical system.

But people do seem enamored of the reality and faux reality show world, to the extent that Donald Trump, that hyped up fake business sucess, that creature of faux reality, was elected president by a populace who apparently would rather be entertained (and dictated to) than be governed (and actually know what things like due process are). Sigh.

Anyway, it's no surprise that in today's world o' Trump, there's a pitch circulating in the Department of Homeland Security - the organization headed by the brazen Kristi Noem, cos-player extraordinaire - that would have would-be citizens compete for the privilege of becoming an American citizen. And no surprise that Rob Worsoff, the producer who's promoting this idea, is the fellow who was behind Duck Dynasty, a show that followed the day to day antics and dramas of a bunch of good ol' Lousiana boys who ran a company that made duck calls. Or something. 

The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television show that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges to get American citizenship, officials said on Friday.

The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said the department was still reviewing the idea...

“The pitch generally was a celebration of being an American and what a privilege it is to be able to be a citizen of the United States of America,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “It’s important to revive civic duty.” (Source: NY Times)

Contestants would be chosen from those already vetted for starting along the path to citizenship. Each episode would feature a Heritage Challenge, an Elimination Challenge, a Town Hall Meeting, and a Final Vote. 

One of the challenges suggested would take place at NASA and would involve assembling and launching a rocket. Another would have the contestants heading to Wisconsin for log rolling. In Detroit, would-be citizens would work on an assembly line, putting together a 1914 Model-T chassis. They'd be clam-digging in Maine. Panning for gold in San Francisco. Delivering mail by horseback - a la the Pony Express - in Missouri. (Details on the challenges come from an article in the Daily Mail.)

So many skills that would help our country! And no Heritage Challenges like avoiding a lynching while registering Black votes in Mississippi? Or walking along the Trail of Tears with the indigenous people forcibly removed from their homes and dispatched to what's now Oklahoma? 

Give me your tired and poor, alrighty.

I've read contradictory statements on whether Kristi Noem has approved the idea, but this bit of nonsense seems right up her little cosplaying alley. Imagine Kristi in a Pony Express uniform? As a 49-er? A clam digger? 

And I can't think of anyone who'd love this more than President Reality Show himself, who would no doubt be the pol enlisted to swear the winner in as an American on the steps of the Capitol Building. (This show was proposed during the Obama Administration but was, no surprise here, turned down.)

Worsoff claims that this would be a massive commercial hit - he's probably right. That it would attract all sorts of commercial sponsors to donate prizes, like free gasoline for life - he's probably right. And that there wouldn't be a dry eye in the house at the finale. Nah. There'd be something dry in my house, and that would be the sound of me retching.

Just who would this jamboree privilege? Would all those robust South African Boers coming off the planes with their luggage carts overflowing be competing against starving Sudanese who showed up with (maybe) a change of clothing and a baby suffering from malnutrition?

Seriously, other than maybe the Boers, I can't see anyone wanting to take part in this other than a bunch of American knucklehead bros. 

It will come as no shock if this debased, Hunger Games-like spectacle were to be approved. Trump runs on attention, and loves his ratings. And focusing on this would be such a fine distraction from the current immigration/deporation debacle.

How low can this country go? Just when you think we've bottomed out, here's yet another thing that will only prove that things can always get worse. 

Chuck Barris was a game show producer (and star) in the 1960's and 1970's, known for such crowd-pleaser, cringe-inducing shows as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show. I believe it was Barris who, somewhere along the line, said that if he proposed a show in which people could win money to do things like kick the cane out of the hand of an old lady, there'd be a staunch American audience for it. He was probably right. Too bad he's no longer around to let us know what he thinks about this shitshow.

O, Buffy. All very sad, but I believe her.

I'm an old folkie. 

When everyone else my age was listening to the Beach Boys and the Beatles, I was giving more than equal time to Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Tom Rush...And Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Her Many a Mile album was frequently spinning on the turntable throughout my high school and college years.

So many great songs: "Must I Go Round," "Maple Sugar Boy," "Piney Wood Hills," "Until It's Time For You To Go," and the still painfully relevant but no longer the reality "Welcome, Welcome, Emigrante." Her voice was so heartbreaking. I loved listening to her, and singing along with her - just without her pure, heartbreaking voice.

I liked Buffy, but didn't know all that much about her. She was local. A UMass grad. I knew that. At least I may have. And I definitely knew that she had Indigenous ancestry. Only we would have said Indian. And there was something Canadian floating around there. Canadian Indian?

Turns out, the Massachusetts part was right. But the Canadian and/or Indigenous. Maybe not so right.

It's all very murky. 

Sainte-Marie has certainly long been an outspoken advocate for Indigenous causes, and over the years, she has written a number of songs that focused on Indigenous peoples and issues - "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," "My Country Tis of Thy People Are Dying." 

She has long been associated with Canada. In the late 1970's, she was asked by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to sing for Queen Elizabeth when Queen E visited our neighbors to the North. At the time, she apparently told Canadian officials that she was an American, not a Canadian. But she was Canadian enough.

And when she was a young adult, Sainte-Marie was adopted by a Canadian Cree Piapot family, and began self-identifying as someone with Indigenous roots.

Anyway, it's not surprising that Canadians started thinking of Buffy Sainte-Marie as a Canadian, with bonus points for having Indigenous roots. More bonus points when, in 1983, she won an Oscar for co-writing the song "Up Where We Belong," from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.

Along the line, she started to rack up Canadian awards. Junos, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies. The Polaris music prize. Induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Membership in the Order of Canada. 

Then this winter, Canada's government stripped Sainte-Marie of her Order of Canada award. In the days that followed, her other Canadian awards were rescinded as well.  

O, Canada had come to the realization that Buffy Sainte-Marie wasn't a Canadian. 

O, Buffy.

The story had been buzzing around for a couple of years that Sainte-Marie wasn't Canadian (and probably not Indigenous either). A journalist had sleuthed out er birthcertificate: born in Massachusetts, to Americans of Italian (the father) and English (the mother) descent. (If you're wondering about the French last name, at some point during World War II the parents, sensing antipathy towards Italians, Franco-phoned their last name from Santamaria to Sainte-Marie.)

As I said, it's all very murky. 

When the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) "outed" her American roots in 2023, Buffy Sainte-Marie had this to say:

"My growing up mom, who was proud to be part Mi'kmaq, told me many things, including that I was adopted and that I was native," Sainte-Marie said. " And later in life, as an adult, she also told me some things that I've never shared out of respect for her. That I hate sharing now, including that I may have been born on the wrong side of the blanket."

The singer also said she'd always been honest about not knowing some details about her roots. "I don't know where I'm from, who my birth parents are, or how I ended up a misfit in a typical white, Christian, New England town," she said. (Source: NPR) 

I'm with Buffy here. 

It's entirely possible that her mother told her that she had some Mi'kmaq heritage. Lots of New Englanders do. 

It's entirely possible that, later in life, her mother told her that her father wasn't her biological father, a man who could, in fact, have been Indigenous.

It's entirely possible that Buffy Sainte-Marie was, in fact, born in Canada, to Indigenous parents, and taken from those parents and shipped off to a set of adoptive parents in America. And that her original birth records were destroyed, her adoption records falsified into an American birth certificate. (A lot of really terrible things happened to Native-born children in Canada and the US, with the government and religious organizations conspiring to seize children and place them with "civilized" families. This was going on as recently as the 1980's.)

It's sad that Buffy Sainte-Marie has had her honors rescinded. And it's understandable that Canada wants awards designed for Canadians go to Canadians - even if Sainte-Marie never explicitly presented herself as a Canadian citizen, and these organizations had just assumed that she was.  

But it's entirely plausible that Buffy Sainte-Marie is an Indigenous person by birth (and not just from her young-adult adoption). And it's also possible that she was born in Canada. 

If we wait long enough, maybe Massachusetts will become Canada's 11th province, mooting the entire argument.

Meanwhile, I believe in Buffy. And still love her voice. 

Those hills are still alive for the Trapp family

I have long been a lover of the Great American Musical. Not anything even vaguely "current." Not a fan of Les Mis, not a fan of Miss Saigon. I may be the only person in America who hasn't seen Hamilton. The most recent musical I have any familiarity with is Rent, and that's been around for about 30 years. 

But give me one of the classics any old time. There's my all time favorite, West Side Story. And South Pacific, Kismet, Show Boat, The Music Man, Oklahoma, My Fair Lay, Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls, Carousel, Peter Pan, Pajama Game, Bye Bye Birdie, The King and I, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, How to Succeed in Business, and - how could I forget? - The Sound of Music. 

Cue up pretty much any of these, and I can warble through the entire album.

Unless you count the Notre Dame Academy class play, I've never seen The Sound of Music live. Actually, other than The Music Man, which I saw as a kid in summer theater -  a thrilling excursion to the Carousel, a summer stock theater-in-the-round in Framingham - I've never seen any of those classics live. Mostly, I know them through the albums and/or the movies.

And that includes, of course, The Sound of Music. When it first came out in 1965, my friend Susan and I took our younger sibs - her brother Joe, who was five, and my sister Trish who was six - to see it in downtown Worcester, proudly taking the littles on the bus and treating them to the movie and popcorn. The movie hasn't aged all that well - to me, anyway, at nearly three hours it's way too long - but the music is still great. (The original Broadway show music was better. The movie left out "An Ordinary Couple", "How Can Love Survive?", and "No Way to Stop It," replacing them with "I Have Confidence" and "Something Good," which were far inferior.)

Anyway, the movie is ultra-loosely based on the life and times of the von Trapp family singers, who came to America in the late 1930's. Some of the elements are true: Captain von Trapp had been in the Austro-Hungarian navy. (If you're wondering why two landlocked countries needed a navy, the Austro Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire did include countries with coastlines.) Maria von Trapp had been in the convent before taking time out to be a governess. There were a lot of kids. They did sing.

However: there was no thrilling escape over the mountains to flee the Nazis. The family left by train. And there was no romance between sweet, naive Liesl and bad-boy Nazi Rolf. In fact, there was no Liesl. The names and ages of the kids were fictionalized. The family did perform throughout the 1940's and 1950's, but they sang Austrian folk and religious songs, not pop tunes from the musical. (And by the way, the family never made a penny off the Broadway show or the movie. Maria unfortunately sold the rights to their story away for near nichts.)

But there was a von Trapp Family, and they settled in Stowe, Vermont, where they bought a farm - the location reminded them of Austria - and eventually turned it into a lodge.

Remnants of the family still own and run the von Trapp Family Lodge, which is being swanked up and has now been rebranded as the von Trapp Family Lodge and Resort.

It’s currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation with refreshed guest rooms and common spaces. The lodge retains an old-world feel despite the new carpets, upholstery, and wall coverings. It’s still intended to evoke the feeling of staying at a classic chalet in Austria.

Adding “resort” to the name is fitting because the Lodge is more than a place to rest your head on a pillow and dream of Edelweiss. It has a fitness center, indoor pool, sauna, hot tub, disc golf course, tennis courts, pickleball courts, a climbing wall, mountain biking, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing. You can also tour the sugar house — the Lodge produces its own maple syrup — visit with the herd of Scottish Highland cattle, or meet the sheep. It sits on 2,600 acres, complete with a microbrewery and kaffeehaus. (Source: Boston Globe)

It's sounds all kinds of swell, other than that - or perhaps because - they're not playing "The Lonely Goatherd" and "Do-Re-Mi" on a perpetual loop so that fans of the musical can sing along while they're snow-shoeing or visiting the Scottish Highland cattle.

The place is still owned and operated by echt von Trapps. The manager is Kristina von Trapp Frame, one of Maria and Georg's grandchildren. And they do offer:

...a well-attended daily history tour, which includes an introduction with stories from a staff member who worked at the hotel when Maria von Trapp was still alive. That’s followed by a film featuring Maria returning to Salzburg. At the end of the program, von Trapp Frame comes in to answer any remaining questions.

And guests can collar family members for photo ops. So there's that bit of gemütlichkeit.

Other than the movie "featuring Maria returning to Salzburg" - yawn! - it all sounds very wonderful, and all looks very beautiful. 

But, much as I love Vermont, I won't be yodeling up there anytime soon. Even with the kitsch played down, it's a tiny bit too cornball for my tastes. And there's this:

At one point, my mother and her friend Ethel took a trip to Vermont to stay at the Trapp Family Lodge. This was when Maria was still alive. (She died in 1987.) They were both fans of the show and were thrilled when they had the opportunity to meet Maria up close and personal as she made the rounds in the dining room.

Ethel, who had grown up in New York (and was herself very musical), told Maria that she had seen the family perform at Town Hall in NYC shortly after they came to the States. And Maria von Trapp quite rudely cut Ethel dead, giving her a look that translated into something along the lines of I could give zwei scheisse. Sure, I'm sure it was nothing she hadn't heard a million times. And sure, I'm sure it was boring. But, but, but...This is not the way you treat your guests (i.e., your paying customers). My mother and Ethel were hurt by the cold, borderline nasty way that Maria treated them, and it pretty much ruined the trip. 

How do you solve a problem like that Maria von Trapp? Not that I was going anyway, and not that I think the sins of the grandmother should fall on the granddaughter, but if you're me, you solve it by not patronizing the von Trapp Family Lodge and Resort. 

And now, I must away to put on The Sound of Music (Broadway) CD...