Oscars 2013: who pulled off the dress

All this Oscar stuff! I look forward to it, I really do, and I’ve watched it for 30 years or more, but about 45 minutes in I always wonder what it is in me that triggers such self-punishment.

First there was this guy, this Seth somebody, Macfarlane or something. Looked like a used car salesman to me, or a Scientologist going door to door. And at first he’s pretty good, pretty funny, snappy and slightly jabby like you’re supposed to be. Then all of a sudden a GREAT BIG SCREEN slowly lowers down from the ceiling, and on it is. . .

William Shatner.

I have no idea why William Shatner is on this show. I like William Shatner, I admire his chutzpah (and he is Jewish, did you know that? From Montreal), and I do notice how he pops up everywhere, but heaven’s sake, here? It made no sense. Anyway, he went on and on about predictions Macfarlane would be considered the worst host in Oscar history, a statement that was eerily prescient.  Obviously this part was pre-recorded at his own convenience, because in the whole six hours or so, it was the only speech that sounded polished and un-muffed. But, moving on.

I did notice things, and I wrote them down on sticky notes as I watched, and by the end of most of the evening (I bailed at 9:00 o’clock after 3 ½ hours, though they had yet to perform the last, final, agonizing, closing musical number) I had a string of them as long as your arm. I finally had to stick the stickies to the stickies.

Screens kept dropping down. William Shatner? (one sticky).

How many standing ovations? (another sticky: everyone and his dog seemed to be getting one. If everyone is the best, then nobody is the best.)

Old singers. Shirley Bassey knocked my socks off for her sheer style, even if her voice faltered a bit. She nailed that last note, however, and looked elegant and even sexy, owning that stage. (Proving the old song was right: there is nothing you can name that is anything like a Dame.) Babs Streisand was a bit more disappointing, appearing frozen in time except for her very rusty pipes. She’s now a low contralto, and too careful for fear the fragile instrument will break (which it will, and soon). The tribute to Marvin Hamlisch was very touching however, as he did indeed leave us much too soon.

OK, two stickies down. Oops, some of these have things written on the back too: metal dresses.  Everyone was shiny last night, or almost everyone. Like they’d been dipped in molten gold or something. Well, if WE had personal tailors and dressmakers who fitted our gowns exactly to the contours of our bodies. . . no, we wouldn’t look that good, but at least we’d look better than we do now.

I took note of older women trying to pull off the gown, and most can’t. I liked Shirley Bassey’s netting idea: it looks like you’re showing a lot of skin, but you aren’t. It’s a soft-focus thing, and skaters use it to make sure everything stays in place.  I also liked some of the three-quarter sleeves on dresses: us women pushing 60 generally can’t flaunt a lot of upper arm. One older dame, well, 50 isn’t old, is it? – but she wore a white sleeveless gown and loose hair and looked a proper strollop. It just didn’t work. Do something else. Do what Nicole Kidman did, pull back the hair in a twist and let wisps float loose in front, a combination of structured and free. I have spoken.

(A tip, girls – nothing to do with the Oscars – if you’re a certain age, do not wear a low-cut dress with a push-up bra, or décolletage as they call it. Don’t, because even if it looks OK in the mirror, when you sit down to talk to somebody it will all squish up and wrinkle, just like the skin on your throat. Nothing worse than a wrinkled décolletage.)

I have George C. on one sticky. Oh yes, George Clooney! He said he sewed the beads on his girlfriend’s dress, and I hope he did. Later the host threw him a small airline bottle of booze, and he opened it and tossed it back. That George.

People who died. Every year there are a lot of them, and Old Hollywood is pretty much gone now. They always have that pre-recorded tribute, and it’s touching. But I am SO glad they did away with the former practice of having the audience applaud. Some dead people - big stars - got whoops and cheers (a standing ovation?), some just a smattering, and a lot of them dead silence because they were just “connected to the industry” or something, adapted the screenplay for Death of a Salesman or some other such nonsense and really weren’t important, it’s not like anyone ever heard of them.

WHAT was up with Renee Zellweger? Thank God she had two or three other presenters with her. My God! She couldn’t read. She has always been oddly squinty-eyed, but now she looked bizarre, and when she turned sideways her face sort of disappeared like it had been pushed in. Was she on something, just put in eye drops, or what? Richard Gere was sort of holding her up as she swayed (not that I would mind that), and when he showed her the card with the winner on it and said, “You take this one", she tilted her head very oddly and squinted her eyes almost shut and sort of pushed the card away. The next one was even stranger, because it was her turn to read the winner and instead she frankly handed the card off to someone else, Queen Latifah I think, who can still see. Has illiteracy struck her at a mature age? I wonder what has happened to Miss You-Had -Me-At-Hello.

That little black girl didn’t win. Good, because nobody can pronounce her name anyway, and we don’t need another Lindsay Lohan. If she wants to act, let her come back in 15 years.

Ang Lee is such a surprise, so humble and quiet. What a genius, responsible for a huge variety of movies that I can’t remember right now, but I’ll look them up. He can do anything, it seems, even be consistent. I won’t see Life of Pi, having suffered through the book, but I’m sure it’s good.

I was genuinely touched when the ethereal Daniel Day-Lewis won for Lincoln, and his wife leaped up and wouldn’t let go of his hand. I don’t know where else to put this, but there was a hideous Lincoln joke from Macfarlane that got a big laugh: "The actor who really got inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth."  It prompted a groan at first, but then he did some sort of "what? What? Did I say something?" and everyone roared with laughter. I know human beings are herd animals and will go along with just about anything (Hitler comes to mind), but this just seemed extreme.

But why was I so surprised? This is the States! The Vice President is running around telling everyone to go out and buy a shotgun! Hey, Lincoln couldn’t have been killed with a pea shooter, could he?

A musical mystery. There were some scenes shown from a foreign film called Amour, about an old couple: it looked like the wife was terminally ill and the husband was trying to help her die. The piano music however just mesmerized me because I had heard it before, and had no idea who wrote it. I finally decided it must be Schumann. Ransacked my CD collection and found very little Schumann on piano, but poked through another CD with SCHUBERT on it and hit pay dirt. Now I can find it on YouTube: the internet is kind. (It was the Impromptu #3 in G Flat Minor, in case you want to hear it yourself.)

And finally, as they say on Inside Edition: when they dropped another screen down from fairyland with Michelle Obama on it, I thought: Fixed. Rigged. Best Picture HAS to be Lincoln, but it was that other one, that – what’s it called anyway? Argot? Ingot? But I don’t watch this thing for the movies.

Captain Kirk gets jiggy with the Gorn!

WARNING: graphic violence, may offend some viewers

(I was going to write dialogue for these repeating vignettes - some sort of art doll Kibuki theatre - but I just couldn't do it. These dolls got their mojo workin' and are full of such palpable juju that I don't think I could touch one of them. Yesterday I snapped a Barbie's knees - they cracked audibly, like knuckles - and that was freaky enough.)

THE HOBBIT: where it all began

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, as sung by our favorite vocalist of the '60s. . .the only man besides Sonny Bono (and maybe Illya Kuryakin) who can really rock those bangs.

.

This is a unique form of choreography known as the Bilbo Bop.

                       

"He fought with the dragons! He fought with the trolls!" This involved someone throwing some kind of jumpsuit up in the air.

Yes! They're here. Last night my son showed me how to convert     
YouTube videos into gifs. After much fiddling around on a site called Y2gif, I came up with these, excerpts from one of my favorite videos. 

This is only the beginning. . . 

Gangnam Girl, Part 2

Go, Lauren, Go! The original Gangnam Girl appears on the Jumbotron at the Canucks Superskills 2013. Love that bouncy pompom (and the bouncy hair!). 

In this version, Daddy sees them on the screen and Lauren's glee increases. Daddy happens to be my son Jeff.

WHO'S THAT GIRL??

Who's the blonde in the pink coat? The one rockin' the Gangnam like nobody else? The girl with the pompom? WHY. . . IT'S LAUREN GUNNING! 

Yes, THAT Lauren Gunning. The one you've heard about. The Lauren Gunning you are sure to watch over and over again on this video from .17 to .23! 

The fact that I gave birth to her Daddy (sitting beside her in the stands) has nothing to do with this - I just think she's cute. Must be the Gunning (Gangnam!) genes.

WHO is that person singing?

This movie came on Turner Classics, and it was one of those things where I was going to watch 10 minutes of it, maybe record the rest. . . and I instantly fell in. I've seen it (Alfie with Michael Caine) at least twice before so there were no surprises. But it didn't matter. Like Gone with the Wind, you watch it because you know what's coming next. It sort of brands itself on you because we've all known someone like that, or maybe several someones, or maybe we've seen traces of it in ourselves.

I didn't remember the ending and in fact, the end credits were different in one version I saw on TV, they didn't have the rights to the music or something. . .because I remember thinking, hmmmm, aren't they going to do "that song"?, and they didn't. I knew the melancholy Dionne Warwick version, but WHO was this person singing, this raw, heartstring-wringing, out-on-the-edges-of-loneliness rendition that seemed to squeeze all the bitter pathos out of the detestable, irresistable character we couldn't stop watching for the past two hours?

The arrangement over the stylish black-and-white credits had a definite '60s context, a sort of harpsichord-flute-heavy-percussion feel to it, and that alone should've given me a clue (and it did, after the fact!)  Then partway through the singing I guessed, then held my breath, wondering if I could be right, if it would be in the credits at the very end, and it was. All I can say is, it's a singer whose voice later dissolved into a heap of unattractive mannerisms, but back then, in 1966, before her real heyday even began, she had something, something raw and magnetic, something incredible which literally made me gasp. Artistry, all of it. And Michael Caine, and all that he was able to express. There is something beyond the scurrilous crap we have to live with every day. Listen for it.

(Oh, and - the person who uploaded this cut a few seconds off the end - like cutting the final resolving chord off a symphony - PLEASE don't do this! It matters!)

(And P. P. S.: I dreamed about this song all night! I dreamed about the movie, watching it all over again with a man I was supposed to know, someone with tattoos who spoke Cockney and seemed like some version of Michael Caine. I kept saying I watched the movie twice back-to-back over two days, which I never did, I couldn't stand to.  Like a tattoo by an inept or even sadistic artist, it leaves a bruise, a dark sordid shadow of pity mixed with contempt. For all his seeming redemption at the end of the movie, we know Alfie won't change. He'll keep attaching himself parasitically to women, men too, lower companions that just get lower, until he ends up being found in a cheap room somewhere, a violent suicide. I've seen it. Believe me.)

Biggest idiots I’ve ever seen: or, why do we write?

So late at night

I don’t have to listen to the thumping and tumbling of my soul

Why do we we write?

Where was I born? I remember a front porch, and not

Much else. Always there were books around

A whole room of them, a den lined with books,

Most of them in German, seemingly,

Goethe Werke, Schiller Werke

Whatever the fuck that meant

So I tried to make my way
 

 

One day in the buriedness of deeply sucking at

An author I raptly chose

As my favourite of the moment or the day,

I had this thought: you can MAKE these.

Somebody makes them, somebody DOES them.

They don’t come out of nowhere, someone

Sits down and does them.

I began to write. In shaky block capitals at first,

Always in pencil like they told me to in school,

In case I made an error and had to take a pink pearl eraser

And rub it out, leaving disgusting grey crumbs like dead insects

And when I had finished the story

Which was probably about horses

I thought it was good

And I began to write out copies.

 

 

Does this mean I was published? If publishing

Means distributing written material

To a number of different readers, then yeah,

Just don’t count the numbers

As later on,

Having written novel manuscripts, poetry manuscripts, thousands of

Book reviews and gazillions of newspaper pieces,

I did not wish to count the numbers,

As I did have an income

From writing, a steady one,

Just very small,

So I hoped no one would count it up

And see that a paper boy would make more,

Or a counter person at McDonald’s.

 

Oh but you’re in the arts, someone would say,

So why do you even think about making money?

Why do you sully yourself, what’s wrong with you,

Don’t you think you’re lowering yourself by writing for newspapers?

Especially when they line birdcages the next day.

Or start fires, I mean in the fireplace. Good for that.

I didn’t want to tell them about Dickens and guys like that, I don’t want to

Look them up, lots of guys and maybe girls too, who plied their trade

Whatever way they could.

If it's out there at all,

it becomes Game,

Public property that prompts some people

(who always wanted to write but never

had the guts to even get started)

to send you Criticisms

which are For Your Own Good,

and aren't all writers 

interested in "feedback" from readers,

isn't it always a good thing

an educational thing

a thing that will doubtless hugely improve them

if they're "real" writers?

So then I'm a fake writer,

and you can have your fucking gratuitous, sneakily sadistic criticism back

open your mouth and I will return it to you

(or some other orifice, I don't care)

because you don't know what the hell you are

talking about

anyway.
 

But there are bigger problems than this 

I hope I don't live to see it

Grammar is slowly eroding, not the schoolmarm type, not parsing sentences, I mean the matrix below and beneath vocabularly

That helps the whole mess make sense.

 

I wonder how it will be in 100 years, if I came back,

Which I will not,

Even if I could,

Or 300 or 500, if the planet hasn’t blown up by then or is

Taken over by cockroaches, who could probably

Spell better

Than the lamebrain mutants on Twitter.

I wonder if I’d know what they were saying at all,

With the speed with which they were saying it,

The fractured syntax,

Verb never matching subject EVER,

With no one noticing or caring, not even really educated people

Or will there BE such a thing

As everyone spews Orwellian Duckspeak.

 

Maybe just bouncing brain waves off each other.

I would not mind dispensing with words, I mean for-bloody-ever,

Because I honestly wonder

What good they have done me

Except to light in myself

A feverish desire to be “read”

Which has never come about,

Not even in this-here blog

Which probably has an offputting title

That I sincerely thought might ignite some sales.

 

At the same time,

I am unable to wag my ass

Or kneel down

The way I suppose I am meant to

To “get ahead”, to play the game.

There is a randomness about it

So that squealing ambitious pretenders

Say, look, look, there’s 100 Shades of Swill or what-you-call-it

Look, SHE made it work by writing three atrocious books

Full of appalling sadism against women

And these were ebooks

Did you know that

She didn’t even have to send a stamped self-addressed envelope

Or print out 900 pages and parcel them up and mail them

Or put them all on floppy disks.

 

But this is the business part

I suppose I must keep it purely away

From the mad addiction that keeps me sitting in front of this machine

I know I would write anyway because I am an idiot

I am STILL involved with this abusive person, this sadist

Who throws me a crumb once in a while

And kicks me in the face the rest of the time
 

 

And who needs Fifty Shades of Grey

When you serve a Master

Who is so completely

And utterly

Sociopathic

I'm turning Japanese (I really think so)

I've got your picture of me and you

You wrote "I love you" I wrote "me too" 

I sit there staring and there's nothing else to do 

Oh it's in color 

Your hair is brown

Your eyes are hazel

And soft as clouds

I often kiss you when there's no one else around

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of you all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up and turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of them all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up I'm turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women

No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark

Everyone around me is a total stranger

Everyone avoids me like a cyclone Ranger

Everyone...

That's why I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

[guitar]

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so, think so, think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

But I got one of these in a cereal box!

Here was have it, the wonder of the ages, a calculator that only costs $345! I wonder what the expensive ones cost. I remember my Dad furiously working at an adding machine, and before that, I guess, we had the abacus. But this one revolutionized everything. You could actually lift it and carry it around (with difficulty). The only calculator I own now is a fridge magnet doubling as a clip to hold papers (usually my grandkids' fingerpainting and stuff). I got it free somewhere from some place that was trying to get rid of them. 

The mentally-challenged smart phone

Nothing is stranger, or funnier, than watching old TV ads where people gasp in awe over what we now see as dinosaur technology. This one was just jaw-dropping. You had to carry around a 25-pound suitcase around with you to make a phone call. Hell, why not just use a phone booth? It would sure cost a lot less. But hey, this was the '70s (or late '60s), the Space Age. It sure must have looked weird, however, toting that thing around. What happened when it rang, or could you only call out? Today we'd think it was a bomb and the guy would be arrested. Could he get it through airport security?

This is real Maxwell Smart stuff, though not quite as bad as the Shoe Phone.