That's Show Biz

At first blush, it seems like the perfect storm: Julie Taymor, winner of Tony Awards and nominated for an Academy Award will direct. Music will be supplied by the Grammy Award winning supergroup, U2. And what will they be dripping their multiple talents upon? Everyone's favorite wall-crawler, Spider-Man. How could such a convergence not end in even more awards? I loved "The Lion King," and after we bought my son a truck to play with in his seat, so did he. We both agree that "Vertigo" may be one of the most awesome songs of the past ten years. We may disagree on a lot of things, but Spider-Man is the man around our house.
Why wouldn't I line up for tickets? Maybe for the same reason that I didn't rush out and get in line for the Green Day musical. It should be noted here that I am not a musical theatre snob. On the contrary. I was raised on a steady diet of MGM musicals and spent numerous evenings attending live performances of classic and contemporary productions. Original cast recordings found their way onto my turntable with surprising frequency. Sometimes I still sing along. But that was before the odd curve of inspiration began creeping down the Great White Way.
Maybe it started with Mel Brooks'"The Producers": a movie about two scam artists bringing the worst possible musical to Broadway in order to make a bundle became a hit musical itself and made a bundle. Then "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast" found their way from Disney's vault to New York, followed abruptly by "Shrek." In today's economy, it has become more and more important to have a sure thing in which to invest, so why take chances on something that doesn't have some sort of built-in audience? Make sure you can sell the T-shirts and video games before production starts, and you've got a hit on your hands.
Will I feel dumb if "Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark" turns out to be a smash? Maybe a little, just like "American Idiot." And I'll chalk it up to all those things that I still don't understand about show business, and then I'll download the cast album and learn to sing along.

Playoffs? Playoffs?

College football season is winding down. The big rivalry games will be played, then the student-athletes will start preparing for finals and other annoyances of campus life. Some of them will have bowl games to look forward to. Then all the powers that be will gather and begin the endless discussion that will create the mythical "National Champion" for this year. Who could dispute this highly scientific, computer-aided process? Anyone who has a brain, I suspect. The reason that certain teams are considered and others are not should be as simple as finding those that won all their games. But then the "big schools" that have tradition, history, and a large bankroll might get left out.
Take the case of poor old Ohio State. Their football team won most of their games, but not all. They lost to lowly Illinois, and have drifted south of the top five teams in the country since then. Meanwhile, two upstarts, Texas Christian University and Boise State have continued to win all of their games and have passed the Buckeyes, heading up to numbers three and four in the polls. E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University thinks that's a travesty. "I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it's like murderer's row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there's some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to (be) in the big ballgame." Gee, long an admirer of the BCS and the current bowl system, said he was against a playoff in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
That "Little Sisters of the Poor" chop was aimed squarely at TCU and Boise, who are seen as playing in less-competitive conferences. President Gee can point proudly to his university's national championship team of 2002. A couple of years ago, Ohio State lost only one game, and ended up playing in the "championship game" against Southeastern Conference member and loser of two regular season games, Louisiana State. No wonder Doctor Gee maintains his enthusiasm for the Bowl Championship Series.
Then there's this: Back in 1990, the University of Colorado finished the regular season with one loss and one tie, but still managed to find themselves playing in the Orange Bowl for that elusive national championship. Here's the interesting coincidences: The Buffaloes' lone loss came at the hands of Illinois. The president of the University of Colorado back then? E. Gordon Gee. Coincidence or Big Ten Conspiracy? You decide.

A-Little-Too-Friendly Skies

With the holidays squarely upon us, now seems like the perfect time to consider our collective fates at the literal hands of the Transportation Security Administration. At first blush, and I do mean "blush," it might seem as though we have little wiggle room when it comes to our safety in the air. The potential for danger exists in everyone's underwear, and consequently we must all submit to embarrassment or discomfort for a few moments while Security of the skies is assured. I've been taking my shoes off in airports for nearly a decade now, to the point where I hardly think about it anymore. It's as much a part of the pre-flight inventory as buying a "Rolling Stone." I know that I have to leave my Leatherman behind at home, and I am grateful that the amount of shampoo my bald head needs has dwindled to just about zero. I pack my belt in my luggage and I try to rid myself of any spare coins before I ever make my way to the line that stretches past the ticket counter. I used to be able to get a couple of flights out of your standard issue of "Rolling Stone." Now I hope that I still have album review to read by the time I board.
Now that everyone seems destined to be x-rayed or groped in order to get over the river and through the woods, Grandma may have more time on her hands this year.
We are assured that the scattering of our x-rays will not hurt us, even if it lets a couple dozen highly trained security screeners know what you look like naked. It does make me wonder when we will find out that members of the bin Laden family are major shareholders in American Science and Engineering.

Gratitude

I wasn't always in love with five o'clock in the morning. It is most often associated in my mind with having to get out of bed in an hour. Or in a worst-case-scenario, it could be that I haven't been able to get to bed until then. That's the home stretch. The last hour before the inevitable stirring and hitting the reset button on the day. Five o'clock in the morning used to feel like doom.
Late last week, however, I had a quiet change of heart. The room was still dark, and it didn't bother my eyes at all to open. There was a sliver of light coming in the window where the drape wasn't doing its job. The people next door were up and moving about. I heard them shuffle out onto their front door and down the stairs to the car waiting in the garage. They sped off into the traffic that lead them into their day, leaving me to stare off into the darkness once again.
That's when I heard my family. The dog's paws made a faint scratching sound as she pushed herself more deeply into her fluffy nest. My wife stirred just long enough to mumble a greeting to the new day, or comment on the dream she was trying to complete before the sun came up. Moments later, my son flopped in his bed, making contact with something hard enough to make a thump that would have awakened a less seasoned sleeper.
That would be me. I'm the one who never sleeps through anything. That's why I'm awake at five. This morning it doesn't seem like a curse. This morning it feels like an opportunity: safe, warm and quiet. I made a conscious decision not to worry about what might happen the rest of the day. I would have plenty of time to do that when I actually got out of bed. I pulled the covers up to my chin, closed my eyes, and listened to the pendulum of the grandfather clock tick off the moments I had left to face the day. And I was thankful.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Iran's president, always the clear-thinking rationalist, has announced that the best age for girls to get married was between sixteen and eighteen. Mister Ahmadinejad went on to suggest that boys should wait until they were nineteen to twenty-one. This comes six years after Iran's parliament raised the legally acceptable age of marriage for girls to fifteen from nine. This then sounds like real wisdom coming from the world's favorite Members Only model. Authorities have been encouraging marriage as a way to fight what they call the "spread of immorality among youth."
Maybe someone should point out to the hard-liners and clerics that immorality is the province of youth. Or at least it should be. That's why "the man" is so very hard on young folks, not just in Iran, but all across the globe. It's like Will Smith said, back before he became "the man": Parents just don't understand. Maybe that's why Will is so down with his nine year old daughter whipping her hair around like that. But I don't guess that even the former Fresh Prince would be down with Willow getting hitched to Justin Bieber.
Meanwhile, back in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty and more than sixty percent of university graduates are women, Iranian politicians try to figure out just how they can appeal to this young, educated, mostly female electorate. The fact that they aren't simply locking them up and even allowing them to vote seems impossibly progressive for a country whose president dances on the line of hypocrisy and psychotic with lines like, "I don't know why some countries do not want to understand the fact that the Iranian people do not tolerate force." The same country where stoning is a punishment and not a pastime. Maybe they should just lure kids into watching MTV long enough to catch a few episodes of "16 and Pregnant."

Genius

I have a lot of respect for Edward Norton as an actor. He gets big points for being Tyler Durden before Brad Pitt. He made a better Bruce Banner than Eric Bana. He's got a lot of artistic integrity. None of those things made it any easier to listen to his interview with Bruce Sprinsteen on National Public Radio. It made me think of the Steve Martin quote: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." It made my wife think about James Lipton. As much as I admire both Bruce and Ed, this interchange didn't bring me any closer to the music.
It makes me think of the way I can marvel at Robert De Niro's performances, but listening to interviews with him are like watching paint dry. It does not diminish the art in any way. I would much rather listen to "Darkness on the Edge of Town" than listen to the discussion about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of anecdotes, but the dissection of pop culture usually ends up being a pretty unsatisfying conversation. It's the part of Bruce Springsteen's shows that I miss these days. He used to do lengthy introductions to songs that infused the lyrics with meaning. These days, those moments tend to be saved for fitting in one more big hit or a pitch for the local food bank.
Nothing wrong with that, but as I sat there listening to forty-some minutes of back and forth between the Boss and his little buddy, I found myself wishing that they would just shut up and play some music. Contrast this with the joyful treat of Jimmy Fallon and that same Mister Springsteen singing their version of Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair." At just under four minutes, Neil Young and a scruffy, young Bruce bash away at a song that will be gone tomorrow, but I'm betting that their cover will be in your head for a good while after that. That's genius.

Pardon The Interruption

Recently, author and noted rock icon Keith Richards took the time to publicly dis Mike Huckabee's guitar skills. He did so in spite of the fact that, as one of his last acts as governor of Arkansas, the Huckster pardoned the Rolling Stone's axe man for a 1975 drunk driving conviction in his state. "Governor Huckabee also thinks of himself as a guitar player," Richards writes in his newly published memoir. "I think he even has a band." The name of the band, by the way, is "Capitol Offense." For his part, Mike remains a Keith Richards Superfan, holding out hope that his semi-major demi-god would deign to appear on his Fox TV show.
Maybe somebody should tell outgoing Florida governor Charlie Crist that, first of all, Jim Morrison is dead, and secondly that he doesn't have a show on Fox where Mister Morrison might appear if he may indeed turn up alive somewhere. It seems that, in a final act of altruism and tribute to Doors fans everywhere, Charlie wants to pardon Jim for the profanity and indecent exposure convictions dropped on him by the man way back in 1969. Was the Lizard King unjustly accused and found guilty on trumped up charges? "There was some doubt how solid the case was," explains Crist.
Maybe it's just me, but I would suggest that, with the time that he has left, maybe the governor of Florida could spend some of it looking into the convictions of the three hundred and ninety-three men and women on his state's death row. I would guess that very few of them have recorded anything on a par with "Light My Fire," but none of them will die in their bathtubs in France.