I don’t remember when or with whom I first visited the Cotton Bottom Inn, a divey little bar hidden in a woodsy, upscale corner of the Salt Lake Valley not far from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, but I’m certain I started hearing about the place’s legendary garlic burgers while I was still in high school.
Okay, I’m officially tired of summer. That didn’t take long, did it? Blame a crowded, sweltering train ride into town this morning.
Of course, my sour mood wasn’t helped by the nicely dressed, very young man — did I mention he was very young? — who offered me his seat so I didn’t have to stand in the aisle. He insisted upon me taking his seat, actually, despite my polite refusals. I don’t quite understand his zeal considering that I am not (a) visibly disabled, (b) grotesquely overweight, or (c) all that old. I may have some gray in my beard, but give me a break, kid. Those Foundation for a Better Life PSAs are maybe a little too effective…
Over at Byzantium’s Shores, Jaquandor has a long post about the passions in one’s life, how some endure and evolve with you through the years while others burn out and fall away. I must admit, the specifics of the post elude me — I know little about classical music, and I’ve never read the author he references, nor does he sound like my cup of joe — but I get his overall point, and it’s a phenomenon I’ve observed in my own experience.
There was one paragraph, however, that really had little to do with the overall post but resonated deeply within me like a massive church bell gonging from ten feet away:
The Romantic in me is drawn to large gestures, bold statements, feelings so strong it seems that the force of my heart might well shift the world on its axis. Love is to be shouted from the rooftops; anger is to be no small irritation but a smoldering rage. Sadness is to be felt keenly and deeply, like the cut of a freshly sharpened knife, and beneath everything, every feeling, even happiness and joy, can be found a long streak of melancholy. That’s the Romantic in me, and he still lives within, sometimes under careful guard but at other times nearly allowed complete control.
Oh, yeah, I relate to all of that… especially the melancholy streak. Just another would-be Byron, that’s me.
It’s currently 94 degrees in the SLC, and there’s a gaggle of bare-chested, tattoo’d, and be-pierced skateboard punks sprawled on the plaza outside my building, in the shade near the fountain. I think it’s safe to say that summer has finally arrived.
To celebrate the arrival (which I’ll no doubt be cursing a month from now when 94 becomes 104), let’s have a listen to one of my favorite tunes, a golden oldie that always makes me think of summer for some reason, “Be My Baby” by Ronnie Spector and The Ronettes. The year was 1965, before most of us were born, kids:
Ronnie was a sexy little thing, wasn’t she? In a mid-Sixties, big-haired sort of way. Not that there was anything wrong with that at the time.
As a special bonus, here’s another summertime song that featured Ronnie twenty years after “Be My Baby,” Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight,” from 1986:
Talk about big hair…
Man, lately it’s really feeling like we’re at the end of an era, isn’t it? We’ve been losing so many of the men and women whose work meant so much to me in my formative years. The latest is the visual-effects genius Stan Winston, who died last night after a seven-year fight against multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer.
You know Winston’s work even if you’ve never heard his name. He specialized in what’re called “practical effects,” i.e., stuff that happens “live” on the set with the actors, notably effects that amount to very sophisticated puppets. The chromium robot skeleton that menaced Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies, the full-size T. Rex in Jurassic Park, and the little sweetheart you see in the photo above — the queen of Ripley’s nightmares in Aliens — were all Winston’s creations, full-size physical objects that came to life through the magic of hydraulics, compressed air, motors, and remote controls. He won three Oscars for the examples I named, and was nominated for several more projects, including the extra-terrestrial big-game hunter in Predator and the vicious-looking prosthetics worn by the gentle-hearted Edward Scissorhands.
In recent years, the sort of work that Winston excelled at has often been replaced by computer-generated models — for instance, the skeletal Terminators in the latest offshoot of that franchise, the Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, are mostly CGI — and even Stan himself has branched into the digital effects field. But for my money, CG puppets still don’t have the physical presence, the mass, or the menace of the real thing. I can still vividly recall the first time I saw The Terminator as a teenage boy sitting on his best friend’s living-room floor, my armpits drenched in flop sweat and stomach clenched in dread as that damned thing just kept coming, even after being blown in two by a pipe bomb. (That living room, by the way, no longer exists; my friend’s house was demolished years ago. But I still remember which corner the TV was in… and in my memory, the image on the screen is of that shining, red-eyed, mechanical skull dragging its own severed torso after its prey, unyielding and unrelenting even after being dismembered…)
No less intense was the first time I saw Aliens a couple of years later: it only takes a little mental nudge and I’m on the edge of my seat in a grungy second-run house, nervously tapping my fingertips on the sticky armrests like a three-pack-a-day-er in the middle of a nicky fit from hell as Ripley, armored up in an her industrial exoskeleton, slugs it out with the monstrous Queen.
That these experiences were so visceral they still linger after 20-some years is in large part because of Stan Winston. He made the monsters real, real enough for our heroes to defeat. His death at the relatively young age of 62 — the same age as my father — is a tremendous loss to the movies. He still had a lot of creatures left in him, I think, and I’m sorry that we’ll never have the chance to see them…
Quote:
If M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, “The Happening,” only cost $500 to produce, was made on scratchy 16mm film and cast the late Bela Lugosi, it would be a thousand times more charming than the utter disaster it is now.
Another movie meme, again via SamuraiFrog, whose post is only one generation removed from the original source of this one. I’m not familiar with The Sickness Cinema blog, but I like their touch with a meme. So, without further ago, The First (as in inaugural) Sickness Cinema Meme:
I’ve seen an unusual number of attractive movie-related memes over the last couple of weeks, but, as you may have noticed, I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with other matters. Still, no good meme can go unmeme’d, so bear with me now as I launch into a veritable orgy of meme-ing. Or something to that effect. Basically, I’m trying to warn you that there’s a mess o’ memeage coming down the chute. But you probably gathered that already, didn’t you?
The first up is a pretty high-falutin’ one that I borrowed from SamuraiFrog. What do I mean by high-falutin’? Well, just wait until you see some of the questions and then tell me that anyone but a total film fanatic and/or snob would even know who or what they’re about. I don’t think anyone would consider me a slouch in the film-buff department, and even I had to look up quite a few of these. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot…
Continuing on with the fun and games, it’s not often that a silly Internet quiz generates exactly the answer you were hoping for:
how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen
But then, the questions on this quiz are pretty leading…
Via the SamuraiFrog.
I was planning to write today about that big fire at Universal Studios a couple weeks ago, and how annoying it is that most of the media coverage has centered on the loss of backlot sets and tourist attractions that can be rebuilt, while ignoring or downplaying the far more significant loss of hundreds of 35mm film prints spanning the entire history of both Universal’s and Paramount’s catalogs. (The original elements are safely stored elsewhere, but given the expense of striking new prints and the industry’s determined march toward all-digital exhibition, it is unlikely that most of the affected movies will ever again be seen the way they were meant to be, i.e., projected by means of light shining through a strip of actual film, and I — being the unabashed analog-phile that I am — find that unutterably sad.)
I also thought I’d comment on the sad reports that one of the classiest guys ever to grace a movie screen, the legendary Paul Newman, is fighting cancer.
But you know what? After all the crapstorms I’ve weathered the last couple of weeks, I’ve about had it with the doom ‘n’ gloom stuff, so why don’t we just watch a fun video clip? The audio here is William Shatner performing Pulp’s “Common People” — stop rolling your eyes, this is actually a good song, a cut off The Shat’s album Has Been, which I found to be a surprise in about a dozen different ways, not least of which is how much it doesn’t suck — and the video is footage from the old animated Star Trek series, an early-70s Saturday morning classic. Enjoy:
I love how the mouth movements actually kinda-sorta synch up with the vocals, at least as well as they ever did back on Saturday mornings. As for that last scene with Kirk and Spock… well, that’s why these two have an entire genre of homoerotic fanfiction named after them.