The Colbert Report opened last night with a segment called “Stephen Colbert’s Tribute to Having Paul McCartney on His Show, Featuring Paul McCartney, With Special Guest Stephen Colbert.” And, for the next 12 minutes, Paul and Stephen covered a lot of ground. Because McCartney has just released material from Wings — a 1976 concert film called Rockshowand a reissue of Wings Over America — the conversation begins with the Wings era: how Macca started all over again; drove to gigs in a van, with no hotel reservations booked; eventually recorded a fine album (Band on the Run) in Nigeria, amidst a cholera outbreak; and began performing live for the first time in years … which led to inevitable questions about the Beatles: why they stopped performing live in 1966, and how their songwriting evolved. It all ends with interviewer and interviewee singing a charming duet of Irving Berlin’s 1936 classic “Cheek to Cheek.” Later, McCartney treated the Colbert crowd to six songs. We’ve embedded a couple of clips below. You can watch the full 60-minute show here.
In the 1990s, somewhere on his long road to stardom, Louis CK made an appearance on a satirical “Artumentary” aired by MTV. In it, CK plays the role of David Cross, a would-be artist who specializes in photographing toilets filled with ink — a not-so-subtle metaphor for the tripe that often gets passed off as avant-garde art. In case there’s any ambiguity about the underlying message, Cross add wryly, “Basically, see, MTV will show you a lot of crap, and they’ll tell you it’s art. But I show you crap, and it’s, like, art.”
Buzz Aldrin is maybe the coolest ex-astronaut alive, with the possible exception of Story Musgrave. Both of these guys are forging ahead with life at the age when lesser humans pack it in. At 77, Musgrave has a five-year-old son and plans to go back into space soon (as a tourist); 83-year-old Aldrin is developing a new sci-fi series based on his 1996 novel Encounter with Tiber. Cool, right? Just maybe don’t ask Buzz to dance to ‘80s synthpop. He does have a great sense of humor, though.
Watch Aldrin duet with Thomas Dolby on “She Blinded Me With Science” above. Buzz gets to shout “Science!” and bop back and forth like your grandfather rocking out at your wedding reception. It’s cute. The performance happened during a daylong Smithsonian conference called “The Future is Here.” Aldrin was one of the fourteen featured speakers who delivered “narrative talks that focused on both great triumphs and future innovations in science and technology.”
In sixth grade, my friend Amy Osborn’s parents took us to a screening of Annie Hall. The bedroom scenes with Carol Kane, Janet Margolin and Diane Keaton were chaste by today’s standards. The repartee was so beyond my frame of reference, it caused but little discomfort. What did me in was the two-line exchange between a cartoon Woody Allen and Snow White’s Wicked Queen concerning her period (or lack thereof). Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was our sacred text, but its most sensational subject matter—menstruation—was deeply taboo outside of my 1970’s Indiana tribe. I could have died, knowing Mr. Osborn was sitting right there. The one consolation was that my own parents weren’t.
These awkward encounters can be defining, which explains why the Tribeca Film Festival sought to ferret them out as part of its One Question series. It’s impressive that the four directors and one producer featured above decided to pursue careers in film after inadvertently sharing with their parents such tender moments as a masturbating Philip Seymour Hoffman in Todd Solondz’s seminal (pardon the pun) Happiness or the relentless defloration scene at the top of Larry Clark’s Kids.
Perhaps you can relate. If so, please spill the gory details below. Provided you’re strong enough to revisit the trauma, what was your most cringe-inducing moment at the movies with your mom or dad, or—let’s not be ageist here—your kids?
Mother’s Day can elicit complicated emotions in the human animal. Not so Mother Hamster. While you were out to brunch, she was matter-of-factly devouring the runtiest of her litter. And not because he failed to present her with a bouquet and flowery card. “It’s a good morsel to recoup some of the vitamins and protein that are lost during childbirth,” she explains with a shrug.
This heartwarming vignette is but one of the revelations in Mammas, the latest web series from the inquisitive and extremely game Isabella Rossellini. Having embodied a variety of insects, arachnids, and marine life in the science-based Green Porno and its follow-up Seduce Me, the mother of two is currently suiting up to play some of the Animal Kingdom’s most notorious mothers, from the opportunistic Cuckoo to the self-sacrificing Australian subsocial crab spider (Diaea ergandros).
The comically inventive costumes are an added bonus, particularly for any human mother (or father) with an aversion to dressing their animal-loving offspring in store bought disguises, come Halloween. Catch the complete series here.
Given such a prodigious output, he wisely turned to science to quantify his ardor in the reproduction above. (His physician’s scrawl can be difficult to decipher — a transcription is supplied below.)
SALLYBURGER,
If you took THE NUMBER OF SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES IN THE UNIVERSE and multiplied that number times itself THAT MANY TIMES; and then added the total number of MICRO-SECONDS since the beginning of time, times itself; and then added 803—you would STILL have only the tiniest fraction of A BILLION-BILLIONTH PER CENT of the amount of love I HAVE FOR YOU.
Love,
your candle partner,
the romantic Mr Carlin,
your eternal flame
A portion of these sweet nothings were collected in The George Carlin Letters. Its subtitle, The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade, was taken from the note he left on her computer the day he died, two days shy of their 10th anniversary.
Great talents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invented the form and then broke the mold when they were finished with it.
One of the best modern examples of this virtuosity is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and nearly all of the Looney Tunes cartoon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 characters, was famously hard-working. At one point in his career, he scrambled from studio to studio around Los Angeles to work on 18 radio shows in one week.
As Malcolm Gladwell likes to say, that kind of practice leads to mastery. And, in Mel Blanc’s case, it may have saved his life.
Radio Lab, broadcast over WNYC, recently aired a piece about Blanc (listen below) featuring an interview with his son Noel Blanc, who is also a voice actor. Noel Blanc tells the story of a terrible car accident that badly injured his father in 1961 as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco. Mel Blanc, driving an Aston Martin, collided with another car on Dead Man’s Curve. Blanc was almost killed and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s son and wife spent two weeks at his bedside trying to revive him, but got no response.
One day, about 14 days after the accident, one of Blanc’s neurologists walked into the room and tried something completely new. He went to Mel’s bed and asked, “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?”
There was a pause while people in the room just shook their heads. Then, in a weak voice, came the response anyone would recognize.
“Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?”
The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there too.
“I tot I taw a puddy tat,” was the reply.
It took seven more months in a body cast for Blanc to recover. He even voiced Barney Rubble in the first episodes of The Flintstones whilelying in bed with a microphone dangling from above.
The Radio Lab piece includes excerpts from an episode of This is Your Life when Blanc’s doctor tried to explain how he revived his patient. “It seemed like Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life,” was all he could say.
Radio Lab features another neurologist’s opinion: Blanc was such a hard-working professional that his characters lived, protected from the brain injury, deep in his unconscious mind. The doctor’s question must have sounded like a director’s cue.
Essentially, “Mr. Blanc, you’re on.”
And he was, until 1989. Listen through to the end of the podcast. The end of Blanc’s life is as remarkable as his long career.
Below, we have added a related documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website to see more of her work. Follow her on Twitter: @mskaterix.
A couple of days ago, Mick Fleetwood told NPR that a band’s greatest hits belong to its fans “to be reinterpreted and create a backdrop for parts of their lives.”
With that in mind, who among us has not related … or yearned for the boyfriend or girlfriend that might allow us to relate to Peter Criss’ chart-topping “Beth”? The power ballad went gold for Criss’ band KISS in 1976, and has reigned as an ear worm on Classic Rock stations ever since:
Beth, I hear you callin’
But I can’t come home right now
Me and the boys are playin’
And we just can’t find the sound.
Close your eyes and visualize poor Beth, alone in her negligee on that giant bed, the scented candles guttering in sad recognition that art always comes first for a soulful dude like Pete.
Now open them wide for the alternate and extremely spirited take above. This version gives us Beth’s side, compliments of writer Bob Winter, director Brian Billow of Anonymous Content, and actress Lilli Birdsell, MILF-ing it up to vintage perfection as she juggles the kids and a meatloaf in the oven. Rockstar husbands’ salaries aside, Birdsell’s Beth is the embodiment of the red-blooded female multitasker popularized by the Enjoli commercial of the same period. The news that her husband “can’t” come home right now is met not with a tear, but a hilariously flat “What?” (I loved how it took several repetitions for the lyrical hook to register with her.)
I was rooting for this Beth to pull a Thelma and Louise, loading the twins into the Country Squire and dumping them at the studio for their father to deal with. Sadly, our heroine is no match for years of built-up fan interpretations. Guess Betty Draper’s not the only pretty woman doomed to sip her dinner as she stoically ignores both children and partner’s empty plate.
- Ayun Halliday hasn’t even started to think about what’s for dinner tonight, so quit asking. Follow her at @AyunHalliday
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