Spitball Army

What I plan on listening to and looking at this week, and other things that are making my world a better place:

• The “Mr. Flynn!” scene  (film)
  There is a scene near the end of David Mamet’s film, Redbelt, where the main character – a top-ranked jujitsu fighting champion – literally fights his way through a crowd of people behind the scenes at a world-championship competition.  He is pursuing a fight organizer and, as security guards, media people, and personnel of the sporting facility all attempt to stop him in his pursuit of this man, he fights them off with a blow to the chest, a flip, a knee thrust.  He is, after all, a top-ranked jujitsu fighting champion.  Throughout this scene, he continues to shout loudly after the fight organizer: “Mr. Flynn!  Mr. Flynn!  Mr. Flynn!”  While watching this, I was reminded of the “Adrian!” scene from Rocky, the umbrellas on the courthouse steps scene from Foreign Correspondent, the scene from any number of films where the hero has to fight his way through a crowd while chasing the supposed lone assasin, The Terminator pursuing Sarah Connor through a packed nightclub.  The template for this two-minute stretch of film has been laid upon many, many movies, and its familiarity struck me as oddly conventional for a Mamet film, known for his twists on convention.  The twist, I guess, is that this fellow was uniquely equipped to get himself from Point A to Point B, being a top-ranked jujitsu fighting champion.

• Bigelow’s Fruit & Almond herbal tea (consumable)

  

  I have de-caffeinated myself for the third or fourth time in my life.  It’s a tough process, but after about five days of assault from withdrawal headaches, I have come out the other side clear-headed from the first waking moment of my day to the last, and without the aid of coffee (which I do love, for the record).  I replaced my morning coffee habit with a warm cup of herbal tea, and my current favorite is the Fruit & Almond blend from the Bigelow.  With about a half spoonful of honey, it really hits the spot, with only a hint of a fruit taste, but more of a dominant earthy almond taste, the earthiness likely due to the addition of chicory.  The only drawback is that it is very, very hard to find on my local market – I buy two or three boxes at a time, when I can find it.

• Bobby Bird (personality)
  Robert “Bobby” Bird, of MTV’s How’s Your News? is a marvel.  As one of the team of developmentally-disabled reporters on the How’s Your News? team, Bobby’s job is to interview celebrities and people on the street, and to experience a variety of everyday adventures while travelling around America in a microbus with other members of his team.  His handicap?  Bobby Bird’s speech is not understandable, even though he seems completely confident that it is.  This confidence, in fact, is what makes Bobby such an inspiration.  The Bobby Bird we see on the TV show is a guy who embraces every endeavor with an outsized vigor: witness his ride through the Spookarama carnival ride, where he’s more excited than scared, or his make-believe (I think) knock-down with an inanimate fighting dummy (both clips are below).  That’s good energy. “Ahbooya,” indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGnrHVDBa9w

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2kky7iwYbE

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG0NqjDkmCw

The currently ongoing Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFB) is one of the best indie film showcases in the country.  The IFFB has just shown a documentary film about the independent record store culture, entitled I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store.  Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Victoria Large has posted one of the first reviews of this film at notcoming.com.  Here’s an excerpt (and you can read the entire post at their very fine website here):

“What the hell happened to all of our record stores?” asks Matt Newman, the twenty-two-year-old writer-director of I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store, and his film provides viewers who share his indignation ample opportunity to celebrate and mourn. As someone who has managed to wax rhapsodic about the bygone days of hometown video stores, I’ll confess to being pretty sympathetic to Newman’s cause. Indeed, it’s easy to make a case for the romance of record stores as we once knew them: there’s something magic about an orphaned old record in a slightly musty sleeve bidding to make its way into your life, and something utterly charming about stores with real, distinct personalities in our era of slick big box retailers who only ever stock the new releases and Greatest Hits. As with old school video stores, indie record retailers held (and, when you can find them, still hold) the promise of discovery, and as Newman and many of his interviewees emphasize, they also fostered a genuine sense of community.

What I plan on listening to and looking at this week, and other things that are making my world a better place:

• 1975  (music)
  One of the fruits of my fastidiousness in cataloging thousands of mp3 files over the years is that I can organize and listen to my music library by year.  Lately, I have been listening to albums from 1975.  I know it doesn’t look brief, but here’s a partial list of some really good ones from that year:

America  Hearts
Joan Baez  Diamonds and Rust
10cc  The Original Soundtrack
Average White Band  Cut the Cake
Bee Gees  Main Course
David Bowie  Young Americans
The Doobie Brothers  Stampede
Bob Dylan  Blood on the Tracks
Eagles  One of These Nights
Neil Young  Tonight’s the Night
Wings  Venus and Mars
Steely Dan  Katy Lied
Bruce Springsteen  Born to Run
Patti Smith  Horses
Pink Floyd  Wish You Were Here
Joni Mitchell  The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Led Zeppelin  Physical Graffiti
The Kinks  Soap Opera
Daryl Hall & John Oates
Emmylou Harris  Elite Hotel
Elton John  Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Keith Jarrett  The Köln Concert
Earth, Wind & Fire  Gratitude
Electric Light Orchestra  Face the Music
Fleetwood Mac
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Nazareth  Hair of the Dog
Willie Nelson  Red Headed Stranger…
…and even though it wasn’t released until 1976, Frampton Comes Alive was recorded in 1975.

Some of the fun of immersing oneself in a “distant” sound world like this is hearing bands of today in music of then.  You know, i n f l u e n c e , that thing that music geeks love to talk about.  For instance, here is a track by 10cc that sounds like it could have come straight off of an album by current band Of Montreal:
[audio:10cc_Blackmail.mp3]
“Blackmail” from The Original Soundtrack (1975) by 10cc



I used to think that 1972 was the be-all, end-all year of pop music, and 1967.  Now I’m not so sure which one comes out on top.  There is a ten-year stretch in there between the mid-’60s and the mid-’70s when some of my favorite records of all genres were released.  I become firmer in my resolve about that with each passing year.

• Guilty pleasures (books)
  On my immediate reading shelf and table are things I feel I should be reading, and intend to read.  Volumes of essays, the new TC Boyle novel about Frank Lloyd Wright’s women, books on U.S. history, Plutarch’s Lives, and a copy of The Tain that I am determined to like as much as I detested it nearly 30 years ago in college.  But the book I have been picking up lately and enjoying (and I know that I most likely won’t be enjoying Plutarch’s Lives much when its turn comes along) is Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.  I’m not taking it seriously as literature, nor am I appalled at the evil machinations going on behind Robert Langdon’s back, but I am having one hell of a time turning the pages.  And there is a lot to be said for that.  There you go.

• Airplane watching (marvels of technology and childlike wonder)
  When I lived near San Diego as a kid, it was always a treat to go to the airport and drive underneath the planes taking off and landing at the edge of Mission Bay.  We never went to the airport just to sit and watch the planes take off and land, however; we were always picking up or dropping off, and then scooting back along our way.  Yesterday, I happened to be out along East Lake Blvd. in Birmingham, which skirts parallel along the Birmingham airport’s runways.  There is a graded area of several hundred feet between the road and the airport’s chain-link fence where cars can pull over and just watch the planes arriving and departing.  Someone – I assume it was the airport authority – has even installed large garbage cans every few car lengths.  They seem like an invitation to sit a spell and marvel in wonder at the flying machines.  There were no cars parked there when I first drove by, but on my return trip – at about 6:30 P.M. – I counted no fewer than five cars.  It was like a Lover’s Lane scene from some Southern version of American Graffiti.  I’m headed out there again tomorrow for work, and I think I will spend some time munching on celery, eating a chicken sandwich and watching the planes roar back and forth.