by Dean | Mar 2, 2014 | General
Thieves’ Highway (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Highways, delivery trucks, post-Ellis Island immigrants, fierce competition—all this makes Jules Dassin’s 1949 Hollywood piece, Thieves’ Highway, a distinctly American film. But that’s not all.
Many, many bad things are done by the people in this film. The chief theme is the struggle to make a living in the midst of corruption. It’s a shame, in point of fact, that the harsh fruit merchant acted by Lee J. Cobb is a caricature—he’s extremely corrupt—but there you have it. Though the movie’s sophistication starts slipping in its last twenty or twenty-five minutes, Thieves’ Highway—screenwritten by A.I. Bezzerides (whose novel Thieves’ Market is the source for this picture)—is not only exciting but also gritty and as concerned as it can be about verisimilitude. A corker.
by Dean | Feb 26, 2014 | General
Cover of Libeled Lady
Financial disaster is always looming, for someone—in this way the screwball rom-comLibeled Lady (1936), directed by Jack Conway, is highly relevant to early 20th century America and other Western nations. The disaster in question will hit a city newspaper threatened by a staggering lawsuit unless a jobless fixer (William Powell)—he needs the money—can smoothly deceive Myrna Loy into dropping the suit. Ah, but the hurdles arise because of a conflict between two traditional institutions. Jean Harlow demands a marriage, right now, from the paper’s managing editor, Spencer Tracy, panicky over the business. Powell, predictably, falls for Loy and refuses to see any real danger to the business. There does come to be a danger to himself, though.
Like Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, Libeled Lady is (in my opinion) not all that funny, but it hardly matters since, again like Hay Fever, its plot and characters are supremely interesting. This describes MANY of the Thirties screwballs. The movie is based on a story and adapted by three writers—how could
that many heads ruin it?—and its actors have no trouble with comedy or farce (albeit it’s a non-farcical role for Loy). But hold it: Loy plays a party girl!? . . . Go ahead and suspend disbelief. The only thing that will worry you slightly is the possibility of Hollywood remaking this notable confection.
by DaveStuff | Feb 24, 2014 | General, Music, Technology
The (trivial) setup in Reaper (Photo credit: Roo Reynolds)
Back in the music lab again…Recording my latest and greatest masterpiece… It is yet ‘untitled’ Maybe I’ll just keep that name for the record. Uh……..?
I must begin by saying that getting this 6 year old macbook is improving my lab tremendously. I have sought out to do some DAW recording now that it’s the computer age…But the PC hassles just seemed to be too much… I had recorded other songs.. Like one that my friend Neal wrote.
It was recorded on a PC using Reaper DAW software. It came out pretty good.
At any rate… I was having to many troubles at the time… And no energy to fight the computer issues…
I actually have video of some songs on my Youtube Chanel. . Including the one above… If your interested. I may blog about each one of them one of these days… – Whatever
All I know for sure is that those tracks can never be finished because I had the files stored on an external hard drive that was stolen by a past acquaintance. Hey… I luv them dudes and dudettes from my past… I just can’t chill that way anymore…
Why?
There’s to much life left in me… Ya know what I’m sayen?
So.. I have a 2008 Macbook… A Shure SM58…. An LP worth of electronica that I worked up with Acid years ago…And a fresh copy of licensed Reaper installed. And I’m laying down tracks… Cause Macbook and Reaper is where it’s at.
Hey…What else is there to do? I got something to say after all!
Do YOU?
Send me some files of you saying silly stuff… I put it on top of these techno tracks… Ya know? Blah blah blah…..
by Dean | Feb 23, 2014 | General, Movies
A true sense of tragedy intermittently comes through in August: Osage County (2013), the John Wells film of Tracy Letts’ play, as the troubled Oklahoma characters blow it big-time. Successfully Letts adapted it, confidently Wells directed it.
The complaint has been made that the movie contains too much Meryl Streep (as the ranting, pill-addicted Violet Weston). I’d say that considering the thoughtful, unself-conscious magnificence of Streep’s performance, she has exactly the right amount of screen time. Julia Roberts is stunningly impeccable as a candid and discontent wife and mother, while Margo Martindale is very good at making Violet’s sister complex.
Chris Cooper delights with common-man qualities, but the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, for all his effort, is not meant for the role he was given. Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis are engaging enough that we miss them after they drop out of the film. (I do, anyway.)
Wells’s movie was made a lot closer to where I live, which is OK’s Tulsa County, than other movies are. It’s a funny-bleak work not without faults, but whose acting means a lot and is not to be underrated.
by DaveStuff | Feb 22, 2014 | General, Music
Back in the early days here in Tulsa OK my friend Gary Hunt and myself shared a house over by Tulsa University… We
Biblioteca McFarlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
were *like* college kids…But didn’t go to school at TU. You know what I’m saying?
Yes folks…We were right there on campus.
We were a bunch of kids thinking we would make a difference in Tulsa pop culture.. We were the underground music kids. We were busy working out our sexual frustrations and tortured youth with a Fostex 4 track recorder.
We drank beer, wrote songs, drank beer wrote songs, drank beer, wrote songs.
Do you see the pattern here?
We talked about art and dreamed big… And, you know? Had fun!
Are you interested in learning more about it? See here:
D&G ARTS
That is an old static html site I designed years ago that talks a bit about that period… It has several songs for download if your into that sort of thing… They are all LoFi stuff of course. – To us, back then…They were HIGH FI
We were cutting records after all… Ya dig?
image (Photo credit: davestuff7)
Demented Dave – My Solo Project
I recorded a short EP of songs I had written during this period. I believe it is rendered a a little better bit rate than the songs offered on the D&G pages:
Download Demented Dave
Hey! It’s all for free! You could be listening to this stuff while driving around… On your bike tonight! -With your iPhone
Song Titles
- Welcome to My Show
- Music
- Zero
- Tina How are You
- Oklahoma Cowboy
- Drumming with myself
by Dean | Feb 20, 2014 | General
Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cinderella in Cinderella (2010), a “graphic novel” by Chris Roberson (writer) and Shawn McManus (artist), is a fairy tale figure-cum-action heroine. Sound bad? Not quite. In fact, it’s okay. It’s a breezy, pleasantly drawn and colored page-turner with a cable-TV miniseries plot. . . Granted, Cinderella is too strong for a girl, but it must be remembered that she is what is called a “fable” and thus not human. Nor is there any indication that she does what she does—spy stuff—to make a feminist point. She is just the uncomplicated female spy we want her to be—in a comic book.
The second novel in the series is Cinderella In A Bikini. Well, no, it’s Cinderella: Fables Are Forever (2012), but it’s more harmlessly sensual—for several pages Cindy is in a bikini, and so is her adversary: a grown-up Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz!—than the first book. It’s better than viewing P***y Galore in an objectifying James Bond picture.
