Hugh Laurie puts out his first blues album tomorrow.
If you’re American (actually, if you’re anyone with a television who’s not British), you know probably Hugh Laurie as Dr. House, that snarky doctor with the good writers and a screechy female following. If you’re British, you know Hugh Laurie as that guy your parents talk about who seems to be sort of common-law married to Stephen Fry.
"The question of why a soft-handed English schoolboy should be touched by music born of slavery and oppression in another city, on another continent, in another century, is for a thousand others to answer before me: from Korner to Clapton, the Rolling Stones to the Joolsing Hollands. Let’s just say it happens."
And if you’re into New Orleans blues, you have no idea who Hugh Laurie is at all. But don’t worry! He isn’t doing a blues album because that’s the cool thing for actors to do now, and he isn’t trying to convince anyone that he was born in New Orleans. He’s doing it – well, he’s doing it for no discernible Hollywood-esque reason. He’s a musician and he love New Orleans blues, and in the context of his celebrity it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and he knows and admits that: “Let this record show that I am a white, middle-class Englishman, openly trespassing on the music and myth of the American south.”
As someone who – well, I’m not like a jazz expert, let’s just say As a 21 year old who knows who Jelly Roll Morton is, there were two things that made me want to pay attention to this album. The first was the preface he wrote to the album, at once gushing about the greats and saying that he doesn’t want to see blues “confined to a glass cabinet, under the heading Culture: Only To Be Handled By Elderly Black Men”. The second was his recording of St. Louis Blues, which starts out with a seriously impressive (but not obnoxious) piano intro, and features Hugh Laurie singing in all his British earnestness, and it somehow works. This is not the album of a poser or a bored celebrity. Elvis Costello reportedly said, upon hearing Laurie play, “This guy is a musician before he’s anything else. He’s probably a better musician than an actor.”
But as the storm moved north and decreased in intensity, eventually being downgraded to a tropical storm, grumbling started among people who had spent two hours looking for bread, and New Yorkers especially began saying that the hurricane was gratuitously over-hyped. A New York Times article noted that, unlike the forewarnings, “Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.”
And there was quite a bit of hype about Irene, mostly in the northern states, where hurricanes are less common and therefore more exciting for meteorologists, like this poor weatherguy who pretends to be buffeted around as people hang out on the boardwalk:
(The worse part is when the anchor says “There are, like, people sightseeing behind you. We can see them.” and he says “That’s because they are hardcore weather-watchers!“)
New Yorker Editorialist Adam Gopnik called ‘startling’ “the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about.”
Many commentators, like editorialist Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast called out news stations for rabidly covering anything to do with the hurricane while failing to adequately cover the political events in Libya.
And of course, there have been deaths and significant losses in states all along the coast. Just because New York City didn’t collapse doesn’t mean that Irene wasn’t a significant disaster, and every time a columnist starts to talk about “sensationalism”, they are quickly reminded of this fact. But this just adds to the media’s kind of embarrassingly transparent public introspection that seems to be common now after significant unplanned events.
And just for fun, here’s that video of that reporter reporting while getting covered in sea gunk:
The Decemberist’s latest music video (for Calamity Song, from their most recent album The King is Dead) portrayed a scene from David Foster Wallace’s mammoth novel Infinite Jest, and the probability that somewhere within 100 yards of you a humanities major is freaking out increased by about 600%.
And this is awesome not only because 1) The Decemberists are awesome and 2) Infinite Jest is awesome, both of which reasons would be plenty justification for awesomeness, but it’s awesome because Infinite Jest is so huge and complicated and a-linear and full of bizarre details that it seems only slightly short of a miracle than anyone would even be able to succesfully portray in film just one scene from the novel, and yet Michael Schur (known for writing for SNL, The Office, and Parks and Recreation) managed to have the scene play out almost exactly as I imagined it – which I understand is a hideously biased judgement but I really only have my own imagination to go by, and perhaps the fact that film adaptations of writing almost never do that for me bolster the impressiveness of my statement.
The scene fromt the book, by the way, was brilliantly and kind of impressively chosen too – it shows the students at a tennis academy playing Eschaton, which is a ludicrously complicated game involving a mentally-projected map of the world on a tennis court, socks and tshirts representing different strategic targets, tennis balls (lobbed by each country) representing nuclear bombs, and insane algorithms (that David Foster Wallace all but teaches you in the book) to determine the damage and population loss of each hit. Colin Meloy sitting in the place of Michael Pemulis, one of the main characters of the book, with his characteristic sailor’s hat, is weirdly perfect. Schur’s attention to details from the novel made the video, I think, bringing yelps of excitement from readers of the book seeing a scene from possibly the most bizarre and un-movie-able piece of fiction they’ve read portrayed (almost) perfectly on film, but also allowing people who haven’t read the book to still understand what’s going on.
So, in summary, props to The Decemberists for being awesome, postmortem props to David Foster Wallace for being brilliant, and mad props to Michael Schur for creating a visual reality out of a piece of something as abstract and wonderful as Infinite Jest.
Ai Weiwei: sunflower seed enthusiast, among other things
So Ai Weiwei has been in the news recently because he spoke for the first time about the details of his 3 month detention. “Who the heck is Ai Weiwei?”, you ask? LET ME TELL YOU.
Arrest
Some background: Ai is sort of a politically active artist (or artistic political activist) who’s famous for speaking against the People’s Republic of China, specifically its inhibition of free speech and cover-ups of police brutality and general nastiness towards anyone who complains about anything the government’s doing. The People’s Republic of China demolished Ai’s studio earlier this year and arrested him on April 3rd (just as he was getting ready to fly to Hong Kong) for the kind of horrifyingly vague reason given that he had “other business” to attend to. One of Ai’s anonymous associates was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “[Ai] told me that when he was taken from the airport, the police told him: ‘You always give us trouble, now it’s time for us to give you trouble.’”
Later the People’s Republic of China rather unconvincingly changed the charge on Ai to tax evasion.
Artwork
Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”
Most everyone else, however, figures that the reason has something more to do with his vocal political activism, both on his Twitter account and in his artwork, like the photo triptych of him breaking a Han Dynasty urn, or Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle, which doesn’t seem terribly political until you find out that the title, in the original language, sounds something like “F*** your mother, Chinese Communist Party.”
Ai Weiwei, "Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle", the title of which sounds like "F*** your mother, Chinese Communist Party" in Chinese
The Growing Human Rights Movement in China
Ai Weiwei is just the most media-visible figure in a large network of grass-roots human rights activists in China, one that can only continue to grow. And every effort the People’s Republic of China makes to cover up a situation or detain an inconveniently vocal activist creates a chain reaction of others publicly calling for that person’s release and bringing more, not less, attention to protestors: Zhao Lianhai, who spent time in prison after he organised a group seeking compensation for families of children who died or became ill due to tainted baby formula, was shortly detained after calling for Ai’s release; this drew more attention to Zhao and his claim that he was force-fed through the nose while on a hunger strike. Wang Lihong, an activist who draws attention to and investigates instances of suspected government injustice, was arrested in March and faces prison time for “creating a disturbance“; her case is in turn receiving public attention largely because Ai Weiwei is calling for her release.
It’s kind of nerve-wracking to watch but it seems sort of inevitable that as China becomes more prevalent in the international economy, it will become harder for the Chinese government to censor communication across the internet, and the human rights movement will become something impossible for the government stifle.
Things are going to get serious, is what I’m trying to say, and the human rights movement in China is going to be getting a lot of attention in the next decade.
Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC released its first commercial in Iowa:
The ad encourages Iowans to write in Texas Governor Rick Perry (and to make the ad just unserious enough, Iowans are instructed to spell the name Parry, “the A is for America.” Good job, whoever had that idea.) in the Ames Straw Poll, which is a “nonbinding” political poll that has less democratic integrity than eeny meeny miney moe but is politically taken more seriously than the primary results of whatever states hold their primaries last.
Fun facts: Admission fee for the Ames Straw Poll is $30. From the Ames Straw Poll website: “Some folks say the Iowa Straw Poll is like the Iowa State Fair – but better because politics is involved.”1
1Iowans quoted here are hypothesized to have either meant “worse” instead of “better” or to not actually be human beings.
So, back in 2008 Universal Studios and Hasbro announced a movie deal that would center around Hasbro games like Battleship, Ouija, Clue (wait, don’t we already have a Clue movie? How can anything without Tim Curry be any better?), Candy Land, and Magic the Gathering. Most normal people promptly forgot this fact because our attention spans don’t last the length of a movie production with no news. But on August 3rd we found out that Universal was dropping Clue (though Gore Verbinski will still be making it), Monopoly, and Magic, leaving them with Battleship, Candy Land (CANDY LAND??), Ouija, and Stretch Armstrong. Personally, the potential of 7 board game movies being released in the next decade makes me want to buy stock in foreign companies.
And so Battleship is going to be the first lovechild of this unholy coupling of basically plotless board games and film; the trailer was released in late July:
It stands to reason that battleships might be the worst things with which to fight aliens – aliens that, bizarrely, don’t seem to want to attack a city or government or mine for Unobtanium or whatever, but just want to trap some Earth ships, which are defending nothing, in a semisphere of their intense technology, instead of just flying over them or dropping some huge alien bomb on them, which one assumes they could do.
Rihanna will appear in Battleship, inexplicably, dressed in something suprisingly unsexy; requisite hot-daughter-of-authority-figure-and-romantic-interest-of-authority-challenging-protagonist1 is played by generically-hot Brooklyn Decker (the trailer opens with a “There will be sexiness as well as battleships!” shot of her in denim shorts and a white bikini straddling the authority-challenging-protagonist on the beach).
Liam Neeson, Oscar and Golden Globe nominee, known best for his iconic role in Schindler’s List (and less fondly for his hideous hair in Star Wars I), will be delivering lines like “I don’t know what my daughter sees in you.”2
The only connection to the actual game of Battleship seems to be that there are ships and, presumably, a battle – but I guess that’s really all they had to go on anyways, short of making the ships have giant pegs on the bottoms of them.
And yes, everyone thought Pirates of the Caribbean was going to be terrible, and yes, Pirates of the Caribbean was awesome, but the justification of similar hopes for Battleship becomes extremely weak when the last, super-duper-intense-and-awesome lines of the trailer are:
Liam Neeson: Prepare to fire.
Man In Charge of Firing: Sir, which weapons?
Liam Neeson: All of them.
I mean, seriously, I know this isn’t where art films come from, but is this all our big movie businesses can do? Slam out as many potential fad-ish movies as fast as they can and hope something has that Pirates magic? A sad day for the movie industry, I think, but what makes this sadder than the release of Spy Kids XVII is that they’ve sucked real actors into it this time.
1is that a trope? I feel like it is. This is basically like half of all leading females ever (Elizabeth Swann in Pirates, Neytiri in Avatar, Lucilla in Gladiator, Jasmine in Aladdin….
2Okay, okay, or “What my daughter sees in you is a mystery to me”; they didn’t fool me by using crappy verbs and putting it in passive tense. [Also, did you know that “Liam” was short for “William”? His name just got a lot less cool and foreign, sadly (sad for him and also a sad indication of what my standards are for coolness). This is like when I found out that “Topher” wasn’t some cool nonWASP name but in fact just an abbreviation of one of the WASPiest names out there. Sigh.]
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