Last week, we were invited to preview a new documentary about the life of Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson -- August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, produced by the award-winning filmmaker Sam Pollard.

The documentary will debut on PBS stations nationally this week. This film is a beautiful legacy. It sheds light on a very gifted man who, like many creative people, was raised under difficult circumstances in an underserved area of Pittsburgh. All of his plays were "doors" into the black experience, and from many eras of the American story. In the film, several award-winning actors, who loved the man and the plays he created, shared his life through first-hand stories.

The documentary really touched me as I've been influenced by theater and the arts my entire life. A friend of my mom was the personal assistant to Mary Martin, the great "grand dame" of musicals. Each time Ms. Martin performed in Los Angeles, we were there. A highlight of the experience for a skinny eight-year-old, was the opportunity to visit her dressing room and see the mysteries of the stage first-hand. It was all so very exciting.

My father, Rex Stewart, was a jazz musician with Duke Ellington for over 15 years, and thus introduced my siblings and I to the world of entertainment at a very early age. Being raised in the 50s, it was really clear that seeing a play written by a black playwright was pretty rare, let alone attending a black theater, especially in Los Angeles where I grew up. New York City had a more robust black theater scene and better-established outlets for creative black people.

The Ebony Showcase Theater in Los Angeles was one of the few locally owned and operated black theaters in Los Angeles when it opened its doors in the '50s. Nick and Edna Stewart (Nick played "Lightening" in Amos 'n Andy), were determined to bring theater to the black community, and they wanted to make available a place where up-and-coming black actors and playwrights could practice their craft. Since the Stewarts were friends of my family, it was quite natural for me to visit the theater to see some of their shows and watch the whole practice of stagecraft.

To be honest, it wasn't until much later that I became aware of the importance of this theater and how many black playwrights and actors walked the boards there. I knew of the most famous plays written by black Americans, Raisin in the Sun, For Colored Girls, The Dutchman etc., were performed in this theater, but the theater was also the training ground for many who later became very well known -- John Amos and Isabel Stanford were examples.

February is Black History Month, and it is usually celebrated by the media and others by trotting out some of the older, well-known black heroes. I hold nothing against this practice, but to me, it's the "easy way out." Just dust off George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King (both great role models), and not take the time to delve into black history or culture to find other important icons. A playwright like August Wilson is someone to be publicly honored on a grand scale. His concepts, words and content, are clear insights into the ups and downs of the black experience. All of his plays received acclaim and nods from the beat critics and the general public.

The new documentary is an excellent opportunity for my grandchildren to understand where we came from and what our proud place is as black people in America. August Wilson's plays have done just that and captured the speech, culture, rhythm and heart of the black experience as seen through his eyes. This documentary catalogs such an important legacy, and I applaud those responsible for perceiving more than the obvious and supporting the production of August Wilson's life. PBS stations like WQED, WYCC, WNET and corporate entities like PNC Bank have moved forward together to tell a story that needs to be told.

Attending the theater continues to be important to me, and I hope to instill it in my grandchildren. Currently, I am a proud subscriber and supporter of the Lyric Opera, Chicago Shakespeare, the Goodman Theater, Steppenwolf Theater and Congo Square. However, what has become exciting is the increase in the number of black theaters, playwrights and actors on the stage. August Wilson died in 2005, but giants like him made this happen, and there are more creative black heroes out there who need to be seen and heard. Let's hope this film inspires more to do the same.



For more about the film, go to PBS.

For a full list of his ten plays visit August Wilson Playlist.

Valentine's Day had a little help getting things off the ground. This past weekend, the hit new movie Fifty Shades of Grey sizzled at box offices everywhere. The erotic drama took in more than $81 million, breaking records to make it the "highest-grossing Presidents' Day opener of all time." The movie is based on the popular book of the same name written by E.L. James. Leading up to the film's release, however, there was some question about whether it was moving in the right direction. Some who read the book thought Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson may have been miscast to play the roles of Christian and Anastasia. In fact, the announcement that they would be the stars of the much-anticipated film initially stirred up negative reactions from fans, particularly because both were relatively new to the public as leading actors. Many people were also concerned that the necessary chemistry for this movie wouldn't be there.

The fact that Jamie and Dakota might not have been as well-known as other actors probably factored into their landing the roles in the first place. It is likely that the producers wanted to bring fresh faces to the table so people could watch without preconceived notions about the leading man and woman, and allow their own fantasies to develop with that. Even so, this is not Jamie's first appearance on the big or small screen by a long shot. Among other things, he played a sexual serial killer in the British television show The Fall in which he was riveting and compelling.

Making a movie from a book can be challenging. When that book is such a controversial national best seller, it can be even harder. Many of us have been part of a discussion during which people tried to imagine the cast of an upcoming movie. If you have, you know how strong people's feelings can be about the topic. That's because everyone brings their own vision to the mix. People become their own casting agents. When the actual announcement is made about a movie they have thought a lot about, they can form fast and furious opinions before they even have a chance to see what the actors can do, and why they were chosen in the first place.

If you're skeptical about the movie being true to the book, and the actors doing justice with their interpretation of the characters, the best thing you can do is remain as open-minded as possible. Otherwise, you run the risk of shortchanging yourself as well as the leads in the film. While the movie may vary from the book, and the characters may differ from what you expected, you still might find yourself having a new and equally-good experience. It seems, considering the huge ticket sales, that in this case fans have been willing to put their concern and anger aside and take a chance by seeing Fifty Shades of Grey. That is really the most anyone can ask of them.

Hopefully, after seeing the movie, the new consensus will be that Jamie and Dakota have what it takes to recreate the chemistry between Christian and Anastasia. There is no question that they brought a little extra romance to Valentine's Day this year.

_____


Please tune in to the Doctor on Call radio hour on HealthyLife.net every Tuesday at 2 PM EST, 11 AM PST. First and third Tuesdays are Shrink Wrap on Call, second Tuesdays are HuffPost on Call, and the last Tuesday of the month is Let's Talk Sex! Email your questions dealing with relationships, intimacy, family, and friendships to Dr. Greer at askdrjane@drjanegreer.com.

Connect with Dr. Jane Greer on Facebook, at www.facebook.com/DrJaneGreer, and be sure to follow @DrJaneGreer on Twitter for her latest insights on love, relationships, sex, and intimacy.

For more on Dr. Greer, visit http://www.drjanegreer.com.

Sincere humility and gratitude aren't qualities one normally associates with the entertainment industry. That's why I was bowled over during the closing segments of Saturday Night Live's recent 40th-anniversary broadcast.

The "Wayne's World" sketch featured Mike Myers and Dana Carvey reprising their roles as hosts of a cable-access TV show that ends with a Top 10 list. Previous installments have featured rankings of their favorite albums and music videos (the more risquè the title or content, the better). On this outing, however, the ever-youthful duo's list was "The Top 10 Things About SNL".

The #1 item had nothing to do with sex, drugs or rock and roll. No, for Wayne and Garth, the best thing about Saturday Night Live is... the crew! The hosts gave a heartfelt thanks to the camera operators, cue-card holders, and all of the other behind-the-scenes employees whose hard work and dedication are rarely acknowledged publicly.

Yet in a national prime-time broadcast seen by over 23 million people, those tireless men and women were given a standing ovation by the show's hosts and an audience filled with the likes of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Jerry Seinfeld, Taylor Swift and other A-list celebrities.

Watch the segment here.

This morning, NBC's TODAY aired a segment that explained why Eddie Murphy chose not to get easy laughs by impersonating Bill Cosby on SNL's Jeopardy! parody. Murphy declined to participate in the skit because he didn't want to "kick a man when he is down," according to fellow cast member Norm Macdonald.

Are there bigger ethical issues in the world than the goings-on in a television comedy show? Yes. If Bill Cosby really is guilty of the horrendous charges against him, does he deserve to be punished? Yes.

But with public expressions of humility and gratitude so few and far between, the choices made by Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Eddie Murphy deserve our respect, because they are signs of something all-too-rare in popular culture or anywhere else: high character.

* * *

What do you think? As always, I welcome your thoughts.

Thank you for reading this blog. Live honorably!

Warm regards from ice-cold New York City,

Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D.
The Ethics Guy®
Keynote speech excerpts

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Pre-order my new book, The Good Ones: Ten Crucial Qualities of High-Character Employees, from your favorite independent bookseller or here.

Visit my website here.

It honestly feels like just a few weeks ago that I was sitting in a theater watching xXx (the movie, not the genre). Positioned as kind of an extreme sports response to the long-lived James Bond series, the 2002 Vin Diesel starrer (which I've often referred to as "Poochie: The Movie") starts out with a tuxedo-clad 007 doppelgänger being dispatched by the baddies in a manner clearly meant to announce that Bond was too staid and stodgy to make it in these modern times. Of course, that was thirteen years and four Bonds ago, so I guess we know where audiences landed when it came to that particular choice.

The point is that when it comes to screen spies, 007 is the undisputed distance champion, and where the failed xXx franchise went wrong was in attempting to take the piss out of the old man without first earning that privilege. Without kissing the ring, if you will. And that's where we see all the ways Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service steps right. While it's veritably awash in knowing nods to the tropes and iconography of the Bond canon, and could very easily have tipped over into Austin Powers territory, it manages to navigate the narrowest of tonal tightropes while spinning a ripping good yarn in the process.

Loosely (very loosely) based on The Secret Service, a comic series co-created by Vaughn, writer Mark Millar, and artist Dave Gibbons, the gleefully, gloriously R-rated film adaptation centers on a hush-hush spy agency in the vein of 007's MI6 (but operating outside of government oversight). When a rescue mission goes awry, one of their agents is killed in action, which in turn requires a recruitment drive to fill the vacancy. To that end, gentleman spy Harry Hart (Colin Firth), a.k.a. Galahad, takes a chance on a young street tough named Eggsy (Taran Egerton), to whom he feels a familial sense of responsibility.

Now, one doesn't need to have seen the trailers or poster to know the odds are pretty good that things will work out alright for Eggsy. If you've seen Men in Black or even Wanted (a far inferior Millar-inspired flick), this is all familiar territory. So then the only question is whether the journey to our inevitable destination is a properly engaging one, however predictable it may be. To that point, a fun exchange occurs between Hart and baddie Roderick Valentine, a tech billionaire played by Samuel L. Jackson (sporting a Mike Tyson lisp that viewers will either find amusing or maddening), with the pair discussing the precision predictability of the old timey spy flicks the one they're in is lovingly homaging.

Valentine's plan (which I won't get into here) is suitably bonkers, and while, like those early Bond adventures), there's no real suspense how things will pan out, the movie's biggest advantage is its own awareness that it's not really blazing a new trail. Kingsman is the film that Matthew Vaughn chose to direct in lieu of a follow-up to his X-Men: First Class. At the time I wondered if that was the smartest choice, but given how well Bryan Singer handled what became X-Men: Days of Future Past, and how much fun Vaughn clearly had putting this one together, I'd say things worked out exactly the way they should have. B+

For more of my thoughts on Kingsman, check out the latest episode of The MovieFilm Podcast via the embed below:

QI (the letters stand for quite interesting) is a wildly successful TV game show that has been running in the UK for 12 years. It reaches an extraordinarily broad demographic, not just in Britain but also in Australia -- where it is one of the country's most successful imports, and repeated so often that there have been complaints in Parliament.

The idea behind the program is that audiences are much smarter than they are generally given credit for, but not necessarily better-informed. We also think people deserve friendly, cheerful television.

QI debuts tonight at 8pm on BBC America and runs every Thursday, three shows a night for five weeks. If you think you're smart (or even if you think other people are smarter than you) you need to be there.

Because, as we say, "Everything you know is wrong."

The show, hosted by British polymath Stephen Fry, asks a panel of four comedians two different types of questions. The first kind are so obscure and so difficult that they barely make sense, such as "What is 15 miles away and smells of geraniums?" or "Why don't pigeons like going to the movies?" And the second kind are so pathetically obvious that even a five-year-old child could answer them: "How many moons does the world have?" "How many wives did Henry VIII have?" and "What's the tallest mountain in the world?"

The answer to the first kind of question delivers information that will astonish you and enlarge your perspective of the universe. The thing that is 15 miles away and smells (so scientists say) of geraniums is the Ozone Layer. Pigeons don't like going to the movies because they see in slow motion, to enable them to navigate through trees at dusk and avoid being run over by cars. A pigeon at a movie would have a really tedious experience -- a single still frame of, say, Brad Pitt, a slab of black, then another, ever-so-slightly-different frame of Brad Pitt, and so on ad infinitum (from a pigeon POV) for hours and hours.

The second kind of question delivers a knockout punch. Get one wrong and you risk a 10-point forfeit. The Earth does not have one moon, it may have as many as 80,000. Henry VIII had either two or three wives (depending on whether you believe his testimony or that of the Pope). And the "tallest" mountain in the world is not Everest, but Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which is massively taller than Everest from base to summit, because most of its bulk is under the sea.

Orologists, who study mountains, measure the "height" of a mountain from sea-level to peak -- but its "tallness" from base to peak. So Mauna Kea is "taller," but not "higher" than Everest.

You may find this pedantic, but children love this stuff. On the show, we call it "General Ignorance."

I met a 24-year-old teacher recently (who was 12 years old when QI began in the UK) and he estimated half his general knowledge came directly from the show.

QI was the first in popular culture to reveal that human beings have four nostrils not two, that Pluto is not really a planet and that coffee is not made from beans.

Tasked with coming up with the questions are a small team of researchers, dubbed by Fry "the QI Elves," because, with their tiny spades, they chip away assiduously at the Mountain of Knowledge.

What, for example, was Mozart's middle name? You'll be amazed to hear it wasn't Amadeus. The true answer is 'Wolfgangus'. Two years before we asked, even Wikipedia didn't know. Mozart was christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. (Amadeus is Latin for Greek Theophilus, "loved by God.") The first article about Mozart on Wikipedia in 2001 fitted comfortably onto a single page. Today, it's 18 times as long: Even the references take up more room.

The amount of available knowledge increases exponentially each day. One edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person in the 17^th century would have come across in a lifetime. You'd think, by now, everyone would know everything. But they don't. In fact, my guess is we know less than we did 20 years ago.

Because we don't need to remember anything any more: Whatever you need to know is there at the click of a mouse. Did you know, incidentally that mice prefer peanut butter to cheese? That's something I didn't know until recently, when the QI Elves delivered the MS for our latest book, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways, to be published by WW Norton later this year.

Our QI books, incidentally, have been published 'round the world, in 29 different languages -- the first one, a New York Times bestseller, sold over a million copies.

Each series of QI deals with a different letter of the alphabet. The one about to start on BBC America is the "J" series. So we're asking about jam, jargon, journalism, jungles, jobs, journeys, jingle bells and places beginning with "J."

And we always have more stuff than we can fit in. It's impossible to whistle in a spacesuit. The average US shareholding lasts 22 seconds. Nobody knows who invented the fire hydrant: the patent records were destroyed in a fire.

Adult fans of QI, older than the broadcasting Holy Grail of 16-30, find this kind of thing Quite Entertaining. Young people, however, have a very different take on the show. I've met 13-year olds who know whole episodes off by heart and can recite our books verbatim. Saudi Arabia imports sand. Sandcastles kill more people than sharks. Your brain uses less power than the light in your fridge. The Statue of Liberty wears size 879 shoes. Only 5% of the world's population has ever been on a plane. A raw carrot is still alive when you eat it.

Only this week, we discovered three new Quite Interesting things. In 2010, the US military built a supercomputer out of 1,760 Playstation 3s, penguins can't taste fish, and the strongest material in the world is snail's teeth.

Join us tonight on a mad meander round the universe.

Get more information, or catch The QI Elves' popular weekly podcast No Such Thing As A Fish on www.qi.com. Or visit Twitter @qikipedia or Facebook.

RACHAEL SAGE & JUDY COLLINS' "HELPLESS" EXCLUSIVE


photo credit: Nick Clark

According to Rachael Sage...

"I don't do many cover songs--because I've been writing my own compositions since I was a little kid, it's just not really my thing generally, and I can count the ones I've recorded on less than one hand. But there was something about this song, after I was invited to perform it at a Neil Young tribute at NYC's Highline Ballroom, that just slayed me. It's so essential, and has so much space built into the song itself which must be why so many artists love to reinterpret it; it breathes in such an effortless way, and sounds as expansive as what it's describing. It was such a thrill to record this track with Judy Collins, who has not only been a generous and inspirational mentor to me through the years, but who is also such a great master at making the songs of others her very own. We had so much fun singing 'Helpless' together as a duet in the studio, and it was also an honor as a producer to work with such a legend and do my best to capture what I can only describe as a feeling of pure joy."

******************************



A Conversation with Peter Asher

Mike Ragogna: There's a British Invasion tour that you're a part of, you having been the "Peter" of Peter & Gordon. How did it come together?

Peter Asher: A couple of friends of mine, Keith Putney and Andrew Sandoval put it together. They had asked me to do it last year and by the time they asked, I was so booked that I was only able to do the first one which was here in LA and the last one, which was somewhere else but I couldn't do the tour properly. The ones that I did do, I ended up MC-ing and hosting as well as doing some of my own songs. It was fun, I enjoyed it and the audience seemed to like it. All went well. This time, they asked me in plenty of time if I could put two weeks aside and do the whole thing, so I'm able to interrupt whatever projects I'm on because there's a deliberate gap in there. I can zip out and do these two weeks, it'll be fun.

MR: And you're both its host and performer.

PA: Yes, I host it and I do four or five pieces.

MR: You've been a producer, a manager, a background vocalist, a songwriter, and have worn even more hats. Which hat is your favorite?

PA: My favorite thing is the fact that I get to do them all. I don't do much management these days. I consult for a lot of people but I don't really do day-to-day management, but other than that I still do everything and that's actually my favorite. But to answer your question more accurately, if I had to choose one particular avocation, it would probably be producing records. I love being in the studio. I think I would pick that if I was obliged to for a desert island occupation, as it were. But I very much prefer the fact that I'm able to do everything.

MR: As a producer, you've been associated with many iconic artists including James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. What are some of the differences between how you produce acts now and how you produced years ago? From your perspective, how has your production style evolved?

PA: Gosh, I don't know. One hope is that with practice, you get better, but I don't think the producer's job has really changed that much. The tools that you use to do the job have changed drastically, but in the end, once you sit down with the act and you figure out the song that you're going to do and the best way to do it, your job is to frame the track and the record to be the best possible version of that song by that artist and to give the artist a track that they're comfortable to sing on. Then you hire the right musicians, you put the right track together, in the modern days you've got to program the right stuff beforehand, whatever it is. The methodology might have changed, but the mission I think remains the same.

MR: One of your earlier gigs was as the A&R guy for The Beatles' Apple Records and you have an impressive knowledge of music. When you're working with an artist, what is your process when it comes to what's going to work or not? How much of the intuitive comes in?

PA: Well, first of all, you very rarely ever feel like you know. It's a best-guess situation. One always has to be ready to backtrack. Indeed, I think one of a producer's main attributes is knowing when to stop. Knowing when an idea isn't working and when to move on or try a different course or maybe the song isn't as good as you thought it was, any of those things, quite apart from the fact t that in the studio the same thing applies. You need to know when to stop overdubbing, when to stop mixing, when it's done. Of course you make mistakes, but sometimes you do feel confident that something's starting to shape up, and it's, "Wow, we have a good one here," and that's exciting. But to some extent, it's always a process of trial and error. One just has to try and keep the error to a reasonable minimum.

MR: As producer, do you have those moments when you know you're making magic, for instance, with the JT or Heart Like A Wheel albums? As you're working with an artist through the process, do you ever think, "This is going to be fantastic"?

PA: Yes, you do, and it's thrilling. But you don't always know. JT was a fun album to make. James was in great form, we had just changed labels, we knew we were going to embark on a new leg of the career with Columbia records after Warner Bros. There was a certain exhilaration going on, and yeah, he delivered some great songs. Some of that's captured on the album. In the case of Heart Like a Wheel, it was the first album I produced with Linda from beginning to end. I'd helped her finish the previous album and when we were doing "You're No Good," for example, we did have a feeling of, "This is sounding pretty good, if this doesn't go on the radio I will be surprised." But sometimes you feel that way and it doesn't go on the radio and you are surprised. You never know.

MR: Before we leave Linda Ronstadt, there are moments on Prisoner In Disguise that are pretty unique sonically and production-wise for the singer-songwriter era.

PA: Yes, that was JD Souther and Linda, it was remarkable.

MR: It must have been an amazing era to be at the heart of. And you've handled the careers of icons like Carole King and Joni Mitchell. You really dug into what I guess you could call "intelligent pop."

PA: That's a nice turn of phrase. Yes, I hope so. I was lucky in the sense that the artists you mentioned are quite remarkable as writers and people. Luckily, they all remain friends of mine. I saw both Carole and Joni the other night.

MR: And more recently, you worked with Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer, Dave Stewart... You continue to have your fingers in a lot of pies.

PA: Luckily, yes. I like to keep working. I'm seventy years old, so officially, I'm past my prime days, but I have no intention of taking up golf or moving to Florida. I really enjoy what I do, so I feel very lucky that I do still get asked to do stuff. And I'm busier than ever, which is fantastic.

MR: And this tour brings you full circle back to your musical roots as a performer.

PA: Yes. I'm in middle of doing the next Steve Martin and Edie Brickell album but I'm stopping that for two weeks and jumping out there on the road. I'm actually taking three consecutive days off in the middle and jumping over to London because I've got this CBE thing, I have to go to Buckingham Palace and get my CBE from the queen and jump back on the road. It's going to be an exciting mixture.


photo credit: Gretsch guitars

MR: So how do you feel about gaining Commanderhood?

PA: You can't ask for more than that. It's thrilling. I was astonished the day I got the phone call.

MR: How does one decide something like that?

PA: I don't think anyone really knows, but it's not a vote. None of that democratic nonsense, this is a monarchy! I don't exactly know how it happens.

MR: I know this is going to be good, so here goes. Mr. Peter Asher...THE Mr. Peter Asher...what advice do you have for new or emerging artists?

PA: It's all changing, but the aim is the same, it's just to get people to hear your stuff. The ways you can do that now of course are myriad and varied and more than they ever were before, but the downside of that is those same windows of opportunity are open to everybody. The amount of stuff out there is just colossal, but it means any gig you can do, any club you can do, anyone you can open for, any online avenue that opens itself up to you, making a cool video and hoping to get some YouTube hits and putting tracks up there for free and giving your music away, all that stuff, just do everything. That's why it's important to get on this site and that site, "Should I be Tweeting all the time? Should I be blah blah blah?" The answer is yes. To every single one of those questions. It's the only way to do it.

When James and I started, there were less opportunities, but we took any kind of gig he could get. I remember one night I had him opening for The Who and people thought I was insane, but the slot came up and we took it. I realized, yes there twenty-thousand people there, and maybe the back fifteen-thousand weren't paying any attention to a lone acoustic guitar player, or the back eighteen-thousand, who cares, they might have been all chatting, but if the front thousand people heard this guy and went, "Hey, who's this? This is pretty cool," that's more people than we would've been playing to in a club and we made more converts. We would just play everywhere we could, and it worked because he was just that good. If you pursue all of those opportunities for long enough and nothing happens, it probably means the music just isn't fascinating enough because the competition is intense, no question.

MR: Having been a producer, manager and A&R guy, when you look at new artists, do you find yourself thinking, "Well, if they tweaked this," or, "If they did that..."?

PA: Sometimes, but usually my reaction is more visceral in the sense of, "Wow, this is great," or "This is a bit boring," just like anybody else. I don't necessarily think in terms of fix-its, but what's exciting to me is when I do somebody for the first time who's astounding. The first time I heard Ed Sheeran or the first time I heard Bruno Mars, the first time I heard Miguel. There are acts out there now who are just unbelievably good. You hear a song they wrote and just go, "Thank God it's still going on." Everything I felt about James forty years ago I feel about people like that now. There are fantastically brilliant people who pop up--Mark Ronson's a genius--for whom I have the utmost admiration. That's what makes it all worthwhile.

MR: And with you being the MC for the tour, it's almost like you can't put that particular hat down either!

PA: Well, no. I have no problem speaking, as you're discovering, and talking about people or introducing them, and I've got stories to tell about each of these friends who are on the road. We're a friendly group. We all know each other and, in many cases, have known each other since way back in the day. There's that sense of camaraderie and enthusiasm that tends to pervade the tour. In the couple of gigs I did last time, we really had some fun. That's why I'm looking forward to getting out on the road with them this time. And, of course, the fact that we're playing these relatively small places means we get to hang around afterwards and meet the audiences and sign stuff. It's a jovial enterprise. We have a good time. And because the nature of the sixties was such that it was fairly optimistic and enthusiastic music in general, that creates a certain tone that makes it, we hope, a fun evening.

MR: When you're in the midst of performing those songs, it's got to be beyond the reunion. I'll bet it's also flashback time for you.

PA: Sometimes, yes. And obviously, part of that is I miss Gordon. I'm singing songs I sang with an old friend who is no longer there. There are dismal aspects to it in that regard because it does take you back, but that's the same thing that it does for everybody. Before we'd done any of this, before Gordon and I got back together after what was actually a thirty-eight year gap in our career, I never thought it made much sense to sing the old songs. But when we did, which was for a benefit that Paul Shaffer got together, he persuaded us to get back together after this big gap. I was kind of astonished that you would look out into the audience and see people crying and laughing and smiling and whatever because it would be, "This was the song when I proposed to my wife," or "This song reminds me of my mother," or whatever it was. You are re-reminded of the visceral, intense connection that music has with parts of your brain, and one part of that brain, certainly, is memory. Music has a direct connection to that. That's when I kind of went, "Hey, this isn't an unrespectable thing to do," to sing these old songs and stir up old memories and emotions. It's an enjoyable thing, a cathartic thing.

MR: What are you most proud of?

PA: I don't know. That's a hard one to say, I think. I'm not immune to pride, none of us are, and I'm delighted at the various things I've managed to accomplish over the years, but I don't know if I could pick out specific highlights. That would be weird. It's been a good time so far. Like most people, the thing I'm most enthusiastic about is the thing I'm in the middle of now. I want this new Steve Martin & Edie Brickell album to be better than the last one, I want to win a couple of Grammys instead of one--last year they won one for "Best Song." I want to win one for "Best Americana Album" this time, please. My pride and ambition, in that sense, remains unabated. I'm only human.

MR: You're on the Barry Levinson project Rock The Kasbah, that's coming out this year, right?

PA: I actually don't know when it's coming out. Barry's been dividing his time between working on the movie, which is going to be hilarious and is great, and also the musical version of Diner opened to rave reviews. I'm actually not sure when the movie's going to get done, but when it does it'll be great.

MR: What else is coming out that you've had a hand in?

PA: Let's see... Once I deliver Steve and Edie, there are a couple of Hans Zimmer projects that I can't really talk about yet, movies he's about to embark upon. These days, they like to shroud a movie in secrecy before they put out press releases. I can't really remember what's next.

MR: Your radar is always up, isn't it.

PA: Yes. We've just come off Grammy week, too, which is a little crazy.

MR: And it has to be a major reunion night.

PA: Yeah, I'm a Trustee of the Recording Academy, so I go to all this stuff and we have a bunch of meetings, but the event itself was fun. There are all the other concomitant events like the Clive Davis one, and the Lifetime Achievement Award which was great. The whole week was thoroughly Grammified.

MR: Peter, don't you want to go into the studio and make some music of your own? Not necessarily as a commercial product, but at least for fun?

PA: No, not really. I get enough leeway and flexibility I'm constantly working. These new songs that Steve and Edie have written between them are so great. I've got Steve's banjo and Edie's vocals, I get the freedom to add stuff and try out stuff. I feel that way about going into the studio, anyway. It doesn't have to be my project; it just has to be a project I'm involved in. I get the pleasure of picking great musicians and making suggestions and trying stuff out and trying sonic ideas with my engineer and all that stuff. I'm working with such an amazing team that that, to me, is what makes it such a pleasure.

MR: What does the future look like for you? Are there things you want to get to that you haven't gotten to yet?

PA: I'd love to produce more with people as amazing as those I got to discover in the past. Make a record with somebody new and brilliant of course, but the thrill of discovering new music is something we all feel. If I were able to discover someone new and help them be their best, that would be very exciting for me.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne

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A Conversation with Denny Laine

Mike Ragogna: So Denny, you're on the British Invasion tour roster. What brought everybody together for this one?

Denny Laine: I've never done a sixties tour before, but I really like this guy called Andrew Sandoval who used to be a big time Rhino person who reissues all the old songs. He knows every song that I've ever done and everybody else has ever done. He's a real connoisseur. He put this together with Keith Putney and another company called the Agency Group. Keith Putney is a close friend and agent and also looks after Peter Asher. I use Peter Asher's backup all the time, most of them are on this tour as a backing group and Peter is on the tour as well. I've worked with them for quite a few years, so that's how it's come together musically and agency-wise, but as I said, I think it was Andrew Sandoval's dream to do something like this because he loves the music so much. I was quite surprised to be asked because I'm not necessarily looked up on as having had a lot of hits in the sixties like a lot of the other people did. I was more of a seventies person, but The Moody Blues' first album, The Magnificent Moodies, is the main material I'll be working from, and a couple of other things I wrote and had minor hits with--or someone else had a hit with one of my songs. But my set doesn't involve the seventies except maybe for the ending. I don't want to go into too much detail. I want to leave some surprises. Anyway, that's really how it came about. We did one set of dates and it went really well, so we're doing it again with the same people.

MR: What do you think about that era in general and how did it influence you?

DL: Well, it's when everyone in the music business started. Everyone started in the sixties. We're all part of that big roller coaster ride.

MR: And you were inspired by Django Reinhardt, right?

DL: He wasn't my main thing. It was just that I had a friend at school who taught me how to tune the guitar and his father was a jazz guitarist, so through those people, I started to listen to a lot of jazz guitar. Django Reinhardt was kind of my favorite I suppose, but not of all of them. I listened to a lot of people in those days. I was very much into modern jazz and gypsy jazz and all that sort of stuff. Ella Fitzgerald and Wes Montgomery. I was a fan of musicians moreso than singers, really. I also went from there into skiffle because I liked Lonnie Donegan and all that American music being rehashed. That's basically what we did, we took American music and we rehashed it and put an English feel to it and that became sixties music. I just loved to be able to sit and learn old songs and have a jazz approach to them. It's a little bit like the blues; you have a simple melody and then you embellish that melody and you take it everywhere you want to take it so that you learn all of the different styles of improvisation, musically and rhythmically around a very simple tune. That's what Django Reinhardt represented to me, amongst others, and that's why I liked it.

MR: Were Denny Laine & The Diplomats a product of all of that?

DL: Well, the Diplomats were more like a Birmingham band. We were required to be more commercial to get the work, but we weren't as commercial as a lot of bands. We decided to be more of an R&B and use obscure records that we found in our material. We were doing a lot of R&B stuff rather than pop stuff, but pop bands were the ones that got all the work and played all the hits. We didn't do that and I think we got more popular because people admired us for being a bit more inventive.

MR: From there, you moved on to The Moody Blues. How did that jump work?

DL: They approached me. They were looking to put a band together to go back to Germany. They had just come back from seeing The Beatles in Hamburg and hanging out with them. I decided that I needed to get out of my band because none of them wanted to leave Birmingham, except Bev Bevan who ended up doing ELO; he was the only one who wanted to take any chances. So Mike and Ray encouraged me and we formed The Moody Blues and it went from there and we got discovered. We were doing blues and R&B music as well in Birmingham, but we got discovered and taken down to London instead of going to Germany.

MR: What motivated you to leave The Moody Blues?

DL: Boredom, in a way. I was tired of being on the road all the time and I wanted to go back into the studio. We owed Decca another album anyway, but there was so much work that we were tied up to do, I just said, "Look, I want to go off and do something different. I'm just kind of bored with all this going on the road and playing the same songs every night." It was a time in my life when I was more experimental, I wanted to do something different. I didn't fall out, I just moved on. In fact, the first thing I did live without the Moody Blues was opening for them. I had Electric String Band and I played the first set and they played the second set. The weird thing was they were still doing the material that I used to do with them and that just said everything to me. I said, "At least I'm doing my own material now." They got to the point where they couldn't do that material anymore because people were just laughing at them. So that's why, for their own good, they were forced to change their material. That's why they wrote Days Of Future Passed. It was all in the cards, really, that that would happen. I was enjoying being a solo artist and doing my own thing.

MR: And to that point, Electric String Band had a couple of hits of its own. You even opened up for Hendrix and Procol Harum and others.

DL: Oh, yeah! That particular show was at the Saville Theatre. On Sunday nights, Brian Epstein used to have rock bands there. I think I was on a second Jimi show, and Paul and John and Peter Asher were in the audience. It was shortly after that that I got the call from Paul. If I hadn't had that call from Paul, I probably would've just gone on doing that, because I was getting pretty successful with that band as well. I'd been offered a deal in Holland from Philips Records but I didn't sign it, I was sitting on that offer and then I got the call from Paul and I went in that direction instead. That was just because I knew Paul and it sounded like he needed somebody he knew to get something together. I knew it wasn't going to be anything we'd done in the movies with The Beatles, I knew it was going to be all new material, so I went for it.

MR: I know the tour is going to be about your material from the sixties, but do you think you'll mix in one or two of your Wings songs?

DL: Maybe at the end, but I'm not going into any details on that. It is primarily a sixties tour, but I've got another tour coming up in the summer where I'm going to be doing more of a seventies kind of thing. It's two separate tours, really.

MR: Speaking of Paul McCartney, what do you think was his motivation for bringing Wings together? And what do you feel you contributed most to the band creatively?

DL: I think the most I contributed to start with is the fact that I knew Paul. We went to see Jimi Hendrix when he first came to England. We would go out to the clubs and see people play, so socially I knew him very well. That made it easier for us to work together. That was the first relief for him, to have somebody who knew him from the old days. It made it easier for him to put the band together. Then there was the fact that I was doing my own thing and he appreciated that from seeing me at the Saville Theatre. I think that made him feel like he could be more experimental and I would probably help him in that way. I didn't necessarily help him with a lot of the writing, but more with the ideas and the arrangements. Then I started to get into the writing a little bit more but I kind of left most of it up to him because he was a prolific writer.

If I'd been doing my own thing, I would've been doing writing for my own thing, but I looked at Wings as his thing, really, and I felt like I was the younger brother who came along and helped him do what he was doing. I learned a lot more about the studio, a lot more about playing different instruments, I went on to playing a lot more keyboards and bass and all different instruments within the Wings camp. In The Moody Blues, I was purely the singer and guitar and harmonica player, but with Paul I was more of a bit of everything, and, of course, I was involved a lot more in the harmonies than the lead. It was a completely different job altogether, and it was more interesting in some ways. In fact, there was more pressure on us as well. It forced us to come out with a hell of a lot more material in a much shorter time, but it was successful. If we had tried to copy The Moody Blues' success or The Beatles' success, it would've been a different matter.

MR: And with Wings, you had some of the biggest records of the era. Band On The Run was huge.

DL: To this day, I still don't get it. It was just the fact that the two of us put the music together that got us that feel. We were thrown in the deep end, really, because the two guys out of the band that were supposed to be turning up didn't turn up. We were thrown in the deep end and we had to restart. Paul had all the cassettes of the rehearsals they'd already done on some of the songs, but we had to start again fresh. It was very, "Let's get it done and get the hell out of here." As I said, no one's more surprised than me that it's one of the biggest albums ever. Who knew?

MR: What do you think about all of these sixties and seventies revival or tribute bands?

There are a ton of them out there. What do you think it is about that era that remains so popular, so much so that people who weren't of the era want to perform its music?

DL: I'm not going to knock it for people that want to go watch it, but it's not the sort of thing I would go and watch. I would rather go and watch the real deal, the people from that era who are still out there doing it. I would rather go see what they're doing now than what they were doing in the past. It's a nostalgic thing, it's like reading a book. You see the words but your mind is going somewhere else, remembering all the things they did in the sixties and seventies. As far as the musical tributes, they're all trying to sound exactly like the records and I find that really, really annoying. It's just not my thing, but I don't knock the market. Good luck to those who do it but I always wanted to be in my own band writing my own material and getting hits on my own. Thinking about the old days just makes me feel old.

MR: Denny, what advice do you have for new artists?

DL: When we were in bands, we never used to talk about this stuff, really. We weren't into the music, we just did that for a job. When we did interviews, it was everything other than music that we talked about. But regarding that advice stuff, the fact is that when we do shows and we're explaining how the songs came together, there's a lot of that storyteller stuff around. There's an educational side to it. The main thing is I didn't slay everything on the album...who knows what half of us did? We kind of threw ourselves into making albums. Sometimes Paul played lead, sometimes I played lead, it was experimental. We decided that we wanted to be experimental and not just go the simple route. You might not think that your own material is as good as what's out there, but it really is if you just develop it.

You have to have the ambition to develop yourself to the point where you're professional and what you're doing is as good as what you're listening to. That way, you're not so much a copier, you're more of like a sponge, you absorb all your influences and wring something out that'd got your own speciality in there that's just your thing and nobody else's. That's what I keep trying to encourage in people. The other thing, of course, is all of the administration, the management, the publishing, the agencies, all of those things are part of the whole thing as well and people have to know about that stuff. It's something you have to find out about as you go along. You can't just jump in at the top of the ladder and appear in the music business like you know it. You can only give a certain amount of advice. It's different for everybody. You've got to experience it yourself.

MR: Do you ever see an act that you like and think, "Gee, if only they did this little twist..."

DL: Eh, not really. I used to when I was younger and we'd see a lot of bands, but we don't get to see a lot of bands these days, we're just doing our thing. But I work with a younger band, a couple generations from me, and they're all music teachers and very, very good musicians who go down really well, it's all original material, too, but what they don't have is the same exposure of traveling around the country or traveling around working every night and doing it as a full time job. If you're not a full time thing it's harder to make it, and yet these guys do have that ability to be a big band. They just don't have the ambition to do it as their thing. You have to turn professional. There's a lot of good music out there, it's all down to how determined you are to make it.

MR: Are you surprised by the amount of success you had in your career?

DL: You're not aware of it as you're doing it, you're just doing it. I can't realize how much success it is at the time. You're just in the studio, you're making an album, you're on tour, you're in the studio, you're making an album, you're on tour. It's a repetitive thing and you're just slowly moving forward, whereas when you look back at it you can see it form a distance and that's when you really realize what you've done. Especially with all of these re-releases of albums you start reminding yourself of all the music you've done. With the new Moody Blues album out now I'm listening to all our songs and realizing what a good band that was, how tight and together we were, how good the harmonies were and the arrangements. It's looking back, I think, that you realize the success you've had.

MR: Have there ever been discussions of doing some gigs with them again?

DL: The Moodies? No, but I've actually been in touch with Mike and Ray a lot recently because of a new box set release. Steven Van Zandt and I have been talking about maybe doing a show and bringing in some guest artists and I might ask some of them if they want to do a song, but I don't know yet. You never know what might come about later on, but they're all kind of retired. I just do my own thing. If somebody asks me to do something then that's another story, but I don't go out and ask people to do things.

MR: What's the future look like for Denny Laine?

DL: Well I've got this tour and then I've got a seventies tour in the summer and I've also got an album that I'm going back to wrap and then I've got a musical I'm working on at the University up in Buffalo, New York, so I'm going to be pretty busy, but the new music means I can start thinking about doing other styles of shows now. That's exciting to me, to think that I've got new material to go out and play, as long as people want to listen to it. I've also got a CD that's about to come out, it's called Valley Of Dreams, and the musical I'm doing is called Arctic Song and it's an environmental piece. Those are the two things that I'm looking forward to doing, they don't involve the past so much.

MR: Arctic Song has an environmental theme?

DL: I've had this thing around for twenty years, I actually wrote it with a friend of mine years ago, but I ended up doing most of the work because he got too busy doing other things. We did present it to various people, and we had more charitable events where we used some of the songs from this musical. It's basically about the environment and saving the planet, the same old thing, but in those days nobody wanted to touch it. Now it's much more relevant, so people are interested in doing it. It's just seventeen songs about the environmental problems around the world set to the different styles of music that come from those areas. It's basically ...Space Odyssey meets the environmental artic regions of the world where all the problems are the most relevant. The north is where all the gases and pollution gather as the Earth moves slower up there. That's where the main problems are that we don't think about, like the ice melting and all that stuff. That's the concentration of all the problems. It's called Arctic Song because that's where it all begins and then it expands through the rest of the world.

MR: You had a sense of all this twenty years ago?

DL: Well, my friend, who used to actually work for Peter Asher in his bookshop, he went north to do research for a kids' book, Journey Round The Arctic Circle. He came to me and said, "Would you put some music to some of my ideas?" and he gave me a lot of ideas and a lot of song titles and I did just that. I ended up writing a story, an extension of his ideas, and I took it to another level. I wrote most of it myself in the end, but it all came through him, his name is Chris Hill. I'm trying to put it in all the universities that I can in America. I've got it in Las Vegas and now these other people are scoring the music as we speak.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne

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GOODNIGHT, TEXAS' "HELLO, NEBRASKA"


photo courtesy Goodnight, Texas

According to Goodnight, Texas bassist Bobby Kendall...

"I'm certainly inspired by the music of Goodnight, Texas, considering I've been lucky enough to tour the country and record with them as a bassist. I have always had a deep love for making videos, art--specifically drawing and coloring--and more recently, puppeteering. The 'Hello, Nebraska' video is a combination many of my favorite forms of art. The song inspired me to start by researching Nebraska landscapes, getting a giant sketchbook, and drawing and coloring a bunch of different backgrounds. Once the Nebraska setting got clear, I drew, colored and cut out all the characters. I created custom limbs on the band members with strings attached for puppeteering, and attached most all the characters to wooden sticks. My wife and I filmed ourselves puppeteering the characters on several different backgrounds, trying to outrun our many chasing shadows. 'Hello, Nebraska' tells a witty, funny story. I just wanted to tell that story, using paper puppets."

According to the Goodnight, Texas camp...

"Hello, Nebraska" is off Goodnight, Texas' sophomore album, Uncle John Farquhar, released last summer that made several best of the year lists (Pop Matters, the SF Weekly, Ear to Ground Music, the Digital Fix etc.) and received lot's of attention for the band's signature storytelling songwriting (Jambase, Relix, The Washington Times San Francisco Bay Guardian, Guitar World, CMT, Bluegrass Situation, San Francisco Chronicle, No Depression, Blue Ridge Outdoor Magazine, Country Standard Time and more). Goodnight, Texas are on tour with Wild Child through 2/22 and will be ending their winter tour on 2/27 at the Mercury Lounge.

http://hiwearegoodnighttexashowareyou.com
https://www.facebook.com/goodnighttexas
http://www.youtube.com/goodnighttexasmusic

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A Conversation with Big Star's Jody Stephens

Mike Ragogna: Jody, Rhino is re-releasing the Big Star box set Keep An Eye On The Sky as well as the deluxe edition of Chris Bell's solo album I Am The Cosmos. What's the story behind the reissues?

Jody Stephens: The boxed set was a labor of love put together by Cheryl Pawelski and crew. It tells Big Star's story in a way words never could. We all encouraged the reissue.

MR: Big Star--at least the original line-up--released relatively little material and yet the band is legendary. What do you think it is about Big Star that keeps it relevant? And are you surprised how much love Big Star gets after all these years?

JS: Life is full of discord. Music seems to return it to some emotional harmony; even discordant music can do it. While people might describe Big Star's music in different ways the common denominator is still their emotional response. Emotions are always relevant.

MR: There may be some people reading this interview that haven't explored Big Star's material or had a history lesson. Being an original member who was there through it all, can you tell the story of Big Star's origin, signing and the creative and recording process for that first album?

JS: Chris, Andy and I got together around March of 1970...17 and 18-year-olds. We had music and a sense of purpose in common plus we had John Fry--Ardent Studio's owner and Big Star's mentor, engineer. We got to develop as a band at Ardent. I would suggest that those not familiar with the music start with #1 Record. Chris was pretty much the producer of that album. We would lay down tracks as a band, then vocal arrangements and other instrumentation. Alex, Chris and Andy wrote great songs so I didn't have the inclination to write. John Fry captured it on tape and mixed.

MR: What do admire most about the band or Big Star brand all these decades later? And do you have any favorite band adventures, original lineup or beyond?

JS: Contrary to what the names Big Star and #1 Record might suggest, we and our music weren't shaped by a commercial goal. Being in the studio was the big adventure. The destination was always a revelation.
 
MR: There have been a few musicians that have occupied a couple of Big Star member spots over the years, at least live, like Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer. What do these musicians bring most to Big Star?

JS: Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow are brilliant players and singers in addition to being great human beings! They helped us bring the spirit of the band's live presence back to life. I met them around 1992 and they gave me a vinyl single of The Posies covering "Feel" and "I Am the Cosmos." They were very true to the original Big Star and Chris Bell versions. Their agreeing to join Alex and me in 1993 really gave me a sense of how Big Star's music has touched some people.


photo courtesy Jody Stephens

MR: Any favorite high points or moments in the box for you personally?

JS: The moment on the boxed set would be "All I See Is You." Andy brought me over to Ardent for the first time. Chris and Steve Rhea were working on that song.

MR: Jody, what advice do you have for new artists?

JS: Enjoy the effort and participation. The reward for me is being a part of the creative process. Having said that, I am glad if people hear it and like.

MR: What are you currently working on and what does the future bring for the entity known as "Big Star"?

JS: Continuing John Fry's legacy of "quality recording" here at Ardent Studios. Check out Greyhounds on the Ardent Music label.

Those Pretty Wrongs--Luther Russell and I--have a 7" coming out April 16 on Burger Records and have a couple shows planned for SXSW. Big Star's Third Live--Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter, Mike Mills, Jon Auer, Ken Stringfellow, Skylar Gudasz, Brett Harris, Charles Cleaver, Django Haskins, I and guests--continues to perform. As Big Star no longer exists, Jon, Ken and I have played a few shows under the banner of "Songs of Big Star" and have plans to play a tribute to John Fry and John Hampton here in Memphis. When confirmed, the date will be announced on Ardent Studios and The Levitt Shell websites.

http://www.rhino.com/article/new-release-big-star-keep-an-eye-on-the-sky

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A Conversation with Michael Barnes
 
Mike Ragogna: Michael, Red has a new album, Of Beauty And Rage? What's the percentage of beauty to rage?
 
Michael Barnes: I would say it is about even. The first half of the record is more Rage but even in those songs you can find Beauty. There is a small intermission called The Forest and the you have the more uplifting and redemptive songs that talk about reconciliation and overcoming your fears.
 
MR: This is your 5th album, how did you approach it differently from your previous ones?
 
MB: When we first started talking about this album it was early of last year. We had a few demos done for it but not a lot of direction yet. We met up  with our producer Rob Graves in Maine when a snow storm hit and it was 40 below 0. We ended up at a ski resort that his family always rents a condo every year for winter. At first it was just reminiscing and getting reacquainted but shortly after that we were right on it talking about a crimson forest that we had discovered in Poland that has these twisted black trees. Then the idea of a plague creature  chasing you came about. So inspiration was hitting us pretty hard visually at first. From there the songs started to shape and mold over the entire year. We made sure on this record that all the songs had time to breath. 
 
MR: What are your personal favorite moments on the new album?
 
MB: I love all the bridges on this record. Almost all the songs have like two or three sections in the bridge. We really didn't want to stick to any kind of formula on this record. Sometimes the song goes from the second verse to the bridge instead of the chorus or we don't even add a last chorus and just go straight to an outré. We really wanted the songs to take you on a journey and to tell a story. 
 
MR: Are there any songs that especially showcase what Red is all about these days?
 
MB: I love "Shadow and Soul" on this record. It is one of the most emotional songs we have written. It is a very painful song about lost love that you will see someday. What "You Keep Alive" is my favorite intense song on the record. It pulls you in right away talking about this thing that is dragging you down. It tells you that you need it and it brings you pain. Haha, pretty intense. I love at the end the person kills the need and triumphs. A very empowering song and sad at the same time. 
 
MR: Do you think your albums interlock in some way?

MB: It's cool that we have a storyline going to help bring the records to life for everyone. I think the goal of this band is to explore the human condition and find redemption even in the bleakest of situations. 
 
MR: How hard can this band get? Can a CD hold the level of rock Red can muster?
 
MB: I would say more then searching to go harder, we strive to pull out the emotion in every song we write. In this record we explored some pretty dark parts of our lives. When there were sad parts we made them sadder. When there were angry parts, we made them more ferocious. 
 
MR: Do you feel that your music or the band has a mission?
 
MB: Our main goal is to inspire change. I was brought up in the Church and became a Christian at an early age. So ultimately we tell people how Jesus affected our life and reached into the darkest parts of our life. 
 
MR: In your opinion, what is the state of Christian radio and even its music scene these days? 
 
MB: I think Christian radio and radio in general is going through an interesting period of finding its place. Radio was a big thing of what I listened to growing up. Now there are so many avenues of music with social media that it can be hard to keep up. I know that most of our listening audience goes to YouTube to stream there music. So it's hard to say what radio will do to adapt and survive. 
 
MR: Why did the band originally choose this path as opposed to being a secular rock band?
 
MB: I feel its because of who we are as individuals in the band. We share with people about God and how He has changed our lives. When we tour though it is mostly in the secular rock band market. We reach out to the people that may be on the fence about Christianity. Never do we try and cram down religion. We like to build relationships with our fans and show the love that was shown to us so many years ago. 
 
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
 
MB: Get ready to make a lot of sacrifice. Lol. You really need to be focused and passionate about what you do to make it. It takes so much hard work and thinking on your feet because everything is always changing. 
 
MR: Would you have taken that advice?
 
MB: I think ten years ago of course there would have been things you say, yeah probably should have done that differently, but everything is 20/20 in hindsight. It's learning from our failures and not being afraid to take criticism and improve each step of the way that has made us a better band for it. 
 
MR: What does Red's future look like?
 
MB: I hope and pray that our future can continue for us making passionate music that we love and sharing it with our fans. I would love to be a musician for the rest of my life. I know with of Beauty and Rage we created something new but familiar at the sometime for new and old fans alike. The bandmates and I are so ready to hit the road and start cranking this music around the world to eleven. 

[NOTE TO EDITORS: PLEASE ADD JASON APUZZO AS CO-AUTHOR]

What makes something a classic? It's a question worth asking as Hollywood devotes ever more of its resources to remaking movies, TV shows, and comic books from the past as the majority of our movie content today. Not that we mind the odd sequel (we're definitely looking forward to Spectre and Star Wars) - but 2015 will see an unprecedented number of sequels and remakes, including new installments in the Mad Max, Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park, Terminator, Avengers, and Fast and Furious franchises.

If you want a break and would like to see some movies that are truly unrepeatable and non-franchisable, we suggest you check out the upcoming 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival, returning to historic Hollywood from March 26th to March 29th, 2015. It's a marvelous chance to see some of the world's classic movies the way they were meant to be seen: on the big screen, and often with their original creators in attendance.



The classic movies shown at the TCM Classic Film Festival are inspiring because they are the result of what can be called "first-order," direct personal experience. They are not self-referential mash-ups of other people's work, but are original art works created by some of the cinema's greatest talents during Hollywood's Golden Age. The festival is one of the last opportunities our generation will have to encounter first-hand some of Hollywood's classic film artists - and it's an opportunity to be very thankful for.



At the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival, for example, we had the chance to attend the red carpet at the Chinese Theatre and chat with such Golden Age movie stars as Maureen O'Hara, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Shirley Jones, Margaret O'Brien, and George Chakiris. Each of them was charming, gracious, and ready with a witty quip - though none had more quips than legendary funnyman Mel Brooks - who we saw being interviewed by Robert Osborne in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel.

Also inspiring were the screenings we attended in some of Hollywood's glamorous movie palaces, edifices with evocative names like El Capitan, The Egyptian, and The Chinese. We saw in their hallowed halls singular movies like How Green Was My Valley, The Adventures of Robin Hood (with a wonderful presentation by Ben Burtt and Craig Barron on its special effects), and The Sorcerer (with director William Friedkin discussing afterward the film's extraordinary action sequences).

Equally memorable was an evening, pool-side screening at the Roosevelt Hotel of American Graffiti, with Ben Mankiewicz conducting a witty interview with cast members Candy Clark, Paul LeMat, and Bo Hopkins. It's not often you can watch a classic movie lounging with a drink in hand under a palm tree in the heart of Hollywood - but perhaps it's how all movies should be seen.



As for the year before, at the 2013 festival, we attended screenings of On the Waterfront, The Seventh Seal, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Mildred Pierce. We saw in person such stars as Eva Marie-Saint, Max Von Sydow, Mickey Rooney, Ann Blyth, and Norman Lloyd - and each of them was an absolute delight.

Seeing these classic stars and movies in person has a unique impact: it gives a tangible immediacy to movie-making. It makes the awe-inspiring and perhaps intimidating quality of classic Hollywood movies seem more real and attainable - if only just barely.

That's why as filmmakers we love going to the TCM Classic Film Festival: it gives us the chance to have contact with the people who made Golden Age Hollywood what it was. These artists helped found the medium of film and created film grammar in an era of astonishing productivity from the 1910s to the '60s/'70s that is still the touchstone of quality for every generation of filmmakers since. It's always a poignant experience to go to the festival, because we know these stars are aging and seeing them is a reminder of the too rapid passage of time - but it's still an experience not to be missed.

So what special delights are in store for TCM festival-goers this year? Highlights of the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival include an opening night 50th anniversary gala screening of The Sound of Music, with stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in attendance, a TCM special with Robert Osborne interviewing screen legend Sophia Loren - who will also present her film Marriage Italian Style - and star Ann-Margret presenting a 50th anniversary screening of The Cincinnati Kid. There will be dozens of additional special screenings and events that you can learn about by visiting the TCM website.

At the 2014 TCM Classic Film Festival press day, we discussed what makes classic movies so great with TCM Hosts Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz, and also with Senior Vice President of Programming Charles Tabesh and Managing Director Genevieve McGillicuddy.



When we asked Robert Osborne why the films of Golden Age Hollywood were so good, Osborne responded:

"I think the personalities were so different then. We wanted bigger than life personalities. We went to the movies to see dynamic people like Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck and people like that. Today we want everyone to be just like a real person. You want Robert Redford or Robert DeNiro to be just like the cab driver in New York ... so that's what we want, we want reality now..."

Osborne added:

"I think the world has changed, morality is different. We don't have heroes anymore. We love people smashing other people up. People don't talk to one another anymore, they're on their cell phones ... people today, they don't sit down at their dinner table with their kids ... so much of that used to be part of the ritual of people's lives, and I think that all that added a depth and a substance to people's lives. They also had great respect for writers, so we knew who James M. Cain was, and we bought his book ... Today you rarely see an author's name's mentioned in a movie title or anything anymore."

Ben Mankiewicz expanded on this importance of reading and writing. When we asked him how his grandfather Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane) and great-uncle Joseph Mankiewicz (All About Eve) had found the inspiration to write and direct so many classic films, Mankiewiecz responded:

"They read. ...The way you get to be a great writer is you read great writers. ... Back then, writing had to carry the movie. There was a value placed on wit, there was a value ... to fully embracing classic literature, and they [Herman and Joseph] read everything. When you go back and do research, when you read the newspapers from back then, you read the sports stories from the '40s and '50s, they're so good, they're written so well. That's what Billy Wilder was reading every morning, that's what my grandfather was reading every morning. There was a much bigger focus on writing."

We half-jokingly suggested to Charles Tabesh and Genevieve McGillicuddy that the Hollywood studios ought to pay TCM royalties for all the ideas they get from the classic movies shown on the network. Genevieve McGillicuddy responded that they do in fact get a lot of support from the film industry, and offered as an example that Anna Kendrick was a big fan of The Women and would be at the festival to introduce it.

McGillicuddy told us:

"I think that it is something that we're really trying to incorporate as an extension of what we do at the network with our guest programmers ... we hear that from the industry quite a lot [that they're fans of the network] and we're grateful and appreciative of the attention."

Charles Tabesh added:

"And to your point too, contemporary directors that we hear from all the time - David O. Russell, Alexander Payne and Francis Coppola have all reached out to us and said 'We love TCM, we're big fans' - Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, as well ... and it's gratifying for us because it means they're paying attention, and that's terrific."

Tabesh recounted that TCM also makes an effort to engage the contemporary film industry as much as possible, inviting notable directors and film figures to appear as guest programmers on the network or host screenings at the festival. Tabesh explained:

"We want to do as much as we can also to connect new and old Hollywood. We want people to understand that what they're seeing today from these directors - that there is a history and a language and an evolution that has led to what they're seeing today, and I think it's really important."

So why does all this matter for today's movie lovers, who may only be interested in contemporary movies? It matters because our movies are our leading story-telling medium - the predominant art form by which we express our collective dreams. The question is, how do we create fresh original works that will be tomorrow's classics?



Creating classics today seems to be getting increasingly difficult. The Internet and the libraries of content that are now available to everyone are having a dual effect: on the one hand, we have the wonderful opportunity to have more content available than every before - to rediscover gems from the past - movies, TV shows, songs, artworks - that we otherwise might not be able to enjoy. On the other hand, as a result of all this readily-available content, we're not always experiencing life directly, but are experiencing it through media. We're entering an era that tech pioneer Jaron Lanier calls "Retropolis," dominated by "second-order culture." Lanier writes in his prescient book You Are Not a Gadget:

"First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. ... Making echoes of this material in the radical, new, "open" world accomplishes nothing. The cumulative result is that online culture is fixated on the world as it was before the web was born."

This is a very interesting point to make. For example, Lanier notes that since the dissemination of the Internet in the '90s we no longer have decades marked by one particular look, musical sound, or style. Movies, music, fashion, and other cultural efforts in the digital era are often a pastiche of styles from the '60s, '70s, '80s, and other decades.

Yes, there is still originality today: the distinctive look of digital special effects in movies, digital prints in fashion, and the new possibilities of digital image manipulation in photography are all notable examples. However, if anyone looks at the most recent fashion collections and sees how they borrow wholesale the look of the '70s (bell bottoms, earth tones, suede, fringe), or looks at this year's blockbuster movies and sees that most of their source material is from the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, then one begins to get the larger point. When do we get to create something new - something that expresses who we are at this particular moment?

So this is the irony of loving classic movies and going to the TCM Classic Film Festival. We go to the festival not to copy the movies of the past, but to be inspired by their quality and originality, and to bask in the joyful life-spirit and first-order experience of the artists who created them. Then we return to our own lives and work to create something new.

As we reel back in from Valentine's Day I have no doubt that many people that are feeling a bit let down. She didn't put on that negligee you like. He didn't buy you jewelry like in that commercial or the latest Jennifer Lopez/Aniston RomCom. Many are feeling like Cupid missed them in his romantic conquests.

I consider myself a romantic, but I'm not sure how many guys can attest to the same. I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve and do overt romantic gestures for the people I love that I think they would enjoy, but the more that I speak to men about this the less I hear that they feel the same. I love romantic gestures, but over the years have noticed that romantic gestures tend to not always be enough.

I was talking to a dear friend the other day about why she should try online dating. Her response, "I don't want to meet a guy online! I want it to happen organically, like we both reach for the same cereal box at the grocery store."

I laughed at the joke but she was very serious. I asked her what gave her the idea that this type of thing happens "organically" and she said very matter of factly, "romantic comedies."

I decided to do a little research of my own, and after a night of Netflix and as many RomComs as I could handle, I realized that us men have a lot to live up to.

As a male in the dating world, I would like to invite my other male counterparts to view what is expected from us by doing what I did and watching romantic comedies. Needless to say, we have a lot to live up to.

Romantic comedies are a great way to distract yourself from real life, but that is purely what they are, a parallel to our normal "not-as-romantic" universe. I would love to tell you that most men think that putting together a flash mob in the middle of Times Square is the way to go to show that you love someone, but the reality is, most guys' minds don't even cross that thought.

What we are left with as a group of guys trying to get the gal are big shoes to fill, and we're competing with a bunch unrealistic of movies.

Guys definitely should be romantics, but not all guys feel comfortable doing the extra mushy stuff. It's just not part of some of our wiring. Many of my clients say, "Well, he should just know that this is what I want," and maybe he should, but he probably doesn't so don't be too hard on him.
Gentlemen, if you want to see what you are up against, find time to watch these classic romance gushers and pick up a few pointers.

The Holiday
Two women, one (Cameron Diaz) from America and one (Kate Winslet) from Britain, swap homes at Christmastime after bad breakups with their boyfriends. Each woman finds romance with a local man (Jude Law, Jack Black) but realizes that the imminent return home may end the relationship.

What you'll see: Finding love on vacation when you need it most. Probably hardly ever happens but Jude Law plays the ever-so-affectionate-and-sensitive guy that makes so many swoon. You'll spot him crying in one scene that really steals Cameron's heart (and the heart of every woman out there).

The Notebook
A poor and passionate young man (Ryan Gosling) falls in love with a rich young woman (Rachel McAdams) and gives her a sense of freedom. They soon are separated by their social differences.

What you'll see: A man who never lets go of the woman he loves no matter who or what may take her away from him. A man who fights to be with the love of his life throughout different obstacles life brings. Every woman I have talked to about this movie is swept away with Ryan Gosling's character (is it the rock hard abs?) because the idea of never giving up on the one you love and truly fighting for them is beautiful.

Friends with Benefits
While trying to avoid the clichés of Hollywood romantic comedies, Dylan Harper (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie Rellis (Mila Kunis) soon discover however that adding the act of sex to their friendship does lead to complications.

What you'll see: This whole movie is a cliché but it also is a HUGE lesson to be learned -- friends with benefits is NEVER a good idea and always leads to one person's feelings hurt at some point. Also, it shows that huge displays of affection (flash mob in New York perhaps?) is always a heart string puller.

These are my top picks because they are pretty diverse in the story line but one thing remains the same, after our wives and girlfriends watch these with their friends, they come back home to us. Sorry guys, you've been warned.

Tax credits documented in a new state report show that Alaska's film industry has continued to grow even as state lawmakers prepare to gut the film incentive program.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Bill Stoltze (R-Chugiak) would repeal the state's film production tax credit program. Gov. Bill Walker has also proposed eliminating the film office's only three staffers in the budget he submitted to the Legislature.

Both actions reflect an anticipated state budget shortfall of $3.5 billion or more, linked to plummeting oil prices.

At this point, Alaska's film credit program is effectively suspended because applications are unlikely to be approved, deputy revenue commissioner Jerry Burnett told a Senate committee during the first hearing on Stoltze's bill Thursday.

If either Stoltze's or Walker's proposal to cut the state's film tax program is approved by the Legislature, it's likely Alaska will stop approving applications for new film tax credits after July 1, Burnett said. While the governor's action would suspend the credits, Stoltze's bill would eliminate them completely.

The state will keep processing credits for pre-approved credit applicants, he said. But it's "very unlikely" the state's four-member film incentive commission will approve any new ones before July.

READ MORE AT ALASKA DISPATCH NEWS

Truth in advertising. Damian Szifron's Wild Tales is exactly that: an anthology of surprising and unexpectedly wild short stories.

Though it feels like there's going to be a connection, the individual stories share neither characters nor plotlines. Instead, they align along a similar theme: revenge, with an occasional overlay of class struggle. This Oscar nominee from Argentina also carries a cynicism about systemic corruption that suggests Szifron believes it may actually be implanted in Homo sapiens' DNA.

In the most primal of these stories, a guy in an expensive car, tooling down the freeway, finds himself blocked by a late-model POS that won't let him pass. When he finally draws even with the other car, he makes a point of rolling down his window to shout insults.

That comes back to haunt him a few miles later, when he suffers a flat tire and his antagonist catches up with him. It's amazing how quickly things go nuclear and a hurled curse ignites a life-and-death situation.

This review continues on my website.

When I reviewed Ivan Reitman's behind-the-scenes football drama Draft Day last year, I made the observation that pairing star Kevin Costner with any given athletic competition tends to pay crowd-pleasing dividends. And now here comes McFarland, USA to help me double down on the point. The true-life tale, directed by Whale Rider's Niki Caro and featuring Costner as the harried coach of an underdog cross country team in California's Central Valley, tells its by-the-bootstraps story so winningly that, predictable though it may be, it's still hard not to find it thoroughly rousing.

It's 1987, and Costner's Jim White finds himself with dwindling options career-wise. A series of altercations over the course of several coaching gigs has left him with the only job that will have him: serving as the extremely overqualified assistant coach for the extremely underqualified football team at McFarland High, situated in one of the most poverty-stricken municipalities in the entire country. With its student population comprised of a heavily Latino population where higher education is a secondary priority to helping their families earn a living harvesting crops, it sure seems like White has landed in career purgatory.

However, when he observes the preternatural skill with which some of the students are able to run, he realizes that while football championships may not be in the cards for McFarland, cross-country running glory is a possibility. Although he has no background in the sport, White pulls together a team of misfits and sets about getting them prepped. Now, given the nature of the genre, and the fact that this is a true story, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say the team makes good. What makes McFarland, USA such an effective entry in the genre then is the simple skill with which it takes us through its paces as the characters learn about themselves and each other.

Arriving so soon after last month's Black or White, which had the actor attempting to heal our country's racial divide, one could be forgiven for feeling like 2015 marks a program of cultural outreach for Costner, one ethnic group at a time. Nonetheless, there are so many moments where McFarland could easily have sprinted straight through the bright red barrier separating "complex" and "cloying" (as, indeed, Black or White did), but it never does. Part of this is Costner's easy likability in this kind of role. As I said last month, the guy is just fun to watch, and this is the kind of role that's practically tailor-made for him.

Now, given that I know even less about cross-country racing than I do about football, I kind of scratched my head when I first heard the movie's premise, wondering if it had enough juice to sustain an audience for 128 minutes, but I was happily proven wrong early on. Part of this goes to Caro's approach to the material. By grounding the proceedings in the individual characters' lives, the stakes (both emotional and actual) for each race are made amply clear and easily understood. She does a masterful job of staging the action in a documentary fashion, without pouring too much syrup onto the soundtrack to underscore every "big" moment.

Supporting turns are also solid across the board, from Maria Bello as White's extremely patient wife Cheryl to a cast of young newcomers as his racers (with Carlos Pratts making a particularly strong impression as the team captain). At its heart, McFarland, USA underscores the desire we all have to excel and exceed, to move past our limitations -- whether of class, culture, or education -- and truly distinguish ourselves. There's something so basic about that longing that it allows this story to transcend its specific time and a specific setting and achieve a universality anyone can run towards.

The only question I have now is which sport Kevin Costner will tackle next. B+

Author Eddy Badrina is a co-founder of BuzzShift.com, a digital strategy firm for mid-sized and large brands, and CherryPick, a content curation application for brands and bloggers. He is also an adjunct instructor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and on the board of Great Investors Best Ideas Foundation, which benefits at-risk youth.

By now, nearly everyone has heard about "Swiftmas," Taylor Swift's gift-giving extravaganza in which she and her team spent hours getting to know 32 of her fans, and then even more time buying gifts and surprising them with personal Christmas presents on their doorsteps.

On the other hand, the brands we work and interact with every day, the ones that spend millions and millions of dollars on TV spots, sweepstakes, radio spots, full-page magazine ads and email marketing, are absolutely lost. If these brands ditched that impersonal, mass advertising in favor of Taylor Swift's methods, not only would these brands make loyal customers for life, but the world might actually be a better place. Here's why:

She Knows Her Fans Are More Than Their Demographics

Most multimillion-dollar brands spend lots of money and precious time to analyze their customers. However, they do it in a very broad way. Spreadsheets, surveys, focus groups, social media engagement...and for what? To launch traditional media campaigns that, for the most part, nobody wants to see. 

Taylor Swift, on the other hand, studied her fans deeply. Taylor and her team already knew that her fans spend a lot of time learning everything they can about her. With Swiftmas, Taylor returned the favor. 

Not only did Taylor's team leverage social media and digital analytics, but they got to know her fans on a personal level, in what became known as "tay-lurking." And their analyses, unlike so many brand research studies, were not focused on her product. They focused on each individual person -- what she likes, what she does with her friends, and the gifts she might want. The details that Taylor mentions in her video and in the handwritten notes are personal and emotional. They show that she actually cares about her fans as people, not just consumers. 

She Learns How Her Fans Use Social Media, and Reciprocates

Because Taylor's dedicated crew spends so much time lurking on social media -- for Swiftmas and in general -- they've developed an intimate understanding of how her fans use social media. So many large brands still (still!) treat social media as a one-way street, responding to customer service inquiries and little else.

This makes no sense. Social media is a communication tool, just like email, a phone call, or even person-to-person interaction. If you owned a store, would you tell your employees to only pay attention to the customers who pitch a fit? Never. In fact, in stores you tell your employees to reach out first, not wait for the customer to ask for help.

Obviously you can't constantly ask all your brand's fans if they need assistance. But we see far too few brands engaging positively with their followers. Social media is a valuable customer service tool, but it can also build relationships between brands and individuals. Not every social media interaction has to be directly related to a product. 

She Gives Her Fans Real Rewards

Think about the last time you developed a contest for your brand or client. What was the prize: Money? A gift certificate?

Taylor Swift didn't just give her fans a box of cool presents. Instead, in the video, it's obvious that the handwritten note meant the most to recipients. The idea that their role model, this person they so admire and respect, spent her own personal time and resources to get to know them, buy specific gifts for them and write them a card was worth much more than any contest giveaway.

The best part about Swiftmas is that the result is actually touching to watch. How many times have you fought back tears watching someone win a brand's social media contest? Not only did Taylor make those 32 fans cry, we're willing to bet that fans across Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter were also in tears as they watched. Swiftmas wasn't just something a celebrity did for a fan; it's something one friend would do for another.

She Doesn't Restrict Access to Her Brand

Taylor Swift has built her brand around doing personal things for her fans. She engages with them on a variety of social networks. She gives them the freedom to create their own content about her (she even admitted to doing weird things on purpose so her fans can make GIFs). She trusts that this personal engagement will help ensure her shows sell out in 15 minutes for years to come.

Most big brands restrict access to their brand in the interest of making money. They cut back on initiatives that don't directly lead to a sale, and spend their time trying to figure out ways to sell more product, not to make their fans love them. It's a balance, obviously. Taylor Swift made the very public decision to cut ties with Spotify because she values her product, and wants revenue from her music. She struck the balance of giving access to her brand, but being focused about how people purchase her music products. She gambled (correctly) that removing her music from Spotify wouldn't harm her brand. She, like many luxury products, separated brand value from product exclusivity.

Maybe brands should be more like Taylor Swift. Maybe we should think about what our customers find truly rewarding, instead of throwing together a sweepstakes. And maybe we should ask what it really means to "surprise and delight" our customers, instead of assuming that a 25% off coupon will cut it.

She Doesn't Question Digital ROI

As an agency, we see it every day. "Why are we doing LinkedIn advertising?" "Do we really need community management?" It can be hard for brands rooted in the traditional world to see this, but Taylor Swift gets it: Online, the little things add up.

Every interaction, every customer service issue solved, every fan recognition, every article posted, are all in service of the overall strategy. It's the boon and the curse of digital marketing. There are lots of little things to do, but it takes a lot of time and energy for all of it to come together and make a great digital brand.

Instead of questioning digital ROI, remember that digital media is a direct connection to your audience. It may look like a lot of work, and it may feel like you don't immediately get the results you're looking for. I mean, we can't all be as instantly dazzling (or as wealthy) as Taylor. But we can be persistent, continuing with tactics we know will work.

We've all been saying this for years now, but digital media is changing the way brands relate to their customers. There's no doubt that Taylor Swift is leading this change. Maybe we should all do some "tay-lurking" of our own, and recognize that our brand wouldn't exist without thousands and thousands of real people. Then take what you find about those people, and build your brand around them.

It's often been said, "There's nothing like a Grateful Dead concert."

While that's certainly true, there is also nothing like a Hot Tuna concert. Unlike Dead Heads, Tuna Fans tend to be more rowdy and aggressive, less "Peace and Love, man" and more likely to scream out "Hot Fuckin Tuna" to regularly startle everybody.

The most recent Beacon Theater' Hot Tuna' concert on December 13, 2014 was exemplary in every way. And, it was the Beacon Theater that always makes it a grand Tuna affair.

When Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady play together, whether it's an acoustic show or righteously electric, Hot Tuna fans show up in force. And they're generally not playing hackey sack or selling bean sprout wraps in the parking lot. Much more likely to find them in close-by bars drinking beer and talking about "Come Back Baby" from the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey on 11/20/76.

While rowdier, Hot Tuna fans love their Jack & Jorma and each other.





When Jack & Jorma play together, it's a very special event.



Jorma and Jack were the guitar/bass backbone of the Jefferson Airplane; this iconic "San Francisco Sound" band practically invented the genre. Their two monster hits, "Somebody To Love" (#5 on Billboard) and "White Rabbit" (#8 on Billboard) in 1967 were the first two Summer of Love, psychedelic recordings to chart.

Hot Tuna started as a "side project" of Jorma and Jack's in early 1969, while Grace Slick was recovering from throat surgery. Albeit these were the given reasons, it strikes me that the real reason Hot Tuna was began was as a sort of "jumping off point" for Kaukonen & Casady who had an intense interest in the Blues. Factor in the alleged, rampant drug use; Jorma's apparent disillusionment with the Airplane as the lyrics to "Third Week in Chelsea" highlight; and the fragmenting and separation of the Kantner/Slick from the Kaukonen/Casady camps, and there are a plethora of reasons for the birth and growth of Hot Tuna. (For intrepid Tuna fans, there's an amazing day-by-day evolutionary path from the beginning and growth of Hot Tuna in January 1969 here.)

THE PERFORMERS

Jorma Kaukonen is legend.





Jack Casady is adored by bass players and Hot Tuna fans worldwide.






THE MUSICIANS

G.E. Smith, Guitar



GE Smith is a personal favorite of mine. I like his professionalism, his musicianship and his immaculate guitar mastery. Though he can rip leads with the best of him, his rhythm guitar chops are amongst the best out there. When he backs up another guitarist, that guitarist is backed up to the hilt.

Having started out as Hall & Oates lead guitarist, then spent 10 years leading the Saturday Night Live Band and won an Emmy, Smith is known and knows everyone in the music business. Backing up a serious "Who's Who" of celebrity musicians, Smith and the SNL band knew and played with virtually every musician of consequence. Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Al Green, Eddie Van Halen, Dave Gilmour, Johnny Winter ... I mean, the list is literally endless. Smith also toured with David Bowie and Bob Dylan while directing a lot of "Live Aid" and "Farm Aid."

Larry Campbell, Guitar, Mandolin, Violin, Pedal Steel



Larry Campbell seems to me to be one of the most multi-talented string players imaginable. And he plays them elegantly. Married to singer Teresa Williams, Campbell and his wife make a most picturesque duo and couple onstage. They are connected by more than just the music. And it shows.

Campbell is best known for touring with Bob Dylan from 1997 to 2004 and was very closely connected to Levon Helm, his Levon Helm Band and his Midnight Ramble concerts taking place at Helm's studios in Woodstock, New York. In addition to touring with Dylan and Helm, Campbell has also made significant guest appearances with The Black Crowes, Emmy Lou Harris, Elvis Costello, Further, Phil and Friends, Roseanne Cash and Peter Wolf playing guitars of all descriptions, fiddle, banjo, mandolin and pedal steel.

Teresa Williams, Vocals


Teresa Williams is married to Larry Campbell and together they form a formidable force in harmony and music. Williams has the voice of a soaring songbird and is the one female voice I can imagine competing with Grace Slick's. The Tuna crowd absolutely loved Williams and her mister, Larry Campbell.



Having just signed a recording contract with Red House Records on the very night of this Beacon Theater show, Williams and Campbell put on a special celebratory show to be sure.

Barry Mitterhoff, Mandolins



In 2002, Barry Mitterhoff started playing with Hot Tuna and plays all manner of mandolin superbly. Mitterhoff has also worked on and contributed to movie music scores such as "You've Got Mail" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou."

Justin Guip, Drums



Justin Guip is not your ordinary drummer. In addition to being the sound engineer and production manager for all of Levon Helm's Rambles, and drumming alongside Helm more than any other drummer, Guip has won three Grammys.

THE INSTRUMENTS



Myron Hart II is the guitar tech and production manager for Jorma & Jack and was kind enough to provide some of the quotes below. He's been with Jorma for 12 years and at Jorma's Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp since it began.


Jorma's Martin Signature acoustic

About the Martin M-30 Jorma Kaukonen acoustic guitar, Hart told me, "Jorma has three of those, #1, #2 and #80 something of a run of 120 of them; they sold out quickly and Martin did another run of them."




Jorma's Gibson "Chet Atkins" SST solid body acoustic guitar

Hart said, "I don't know that anybody has ever used an SST like Jorma ... the sound. The bridge is set-up like an acoustic guitar. It's an early '90s, that we split and use the built-in preamp."


Jorma's beloved Fender Jazzmaster which he just started playing recently

"This is a brand new Jazzmaster," Hart said, "that's a Mexican Fender customized to a 'Classic Player' Jazzmaster. I did some things to the neck and installed 'humm'-canceling pickups. I also shielded it with copper tape, so it's quiet."


Two great gits await their master


Jack's Epiphone Jack Casady Signature Bass

"Jack's bass is a late '90s model," Hart said. "He's had several basses because each time they have a production run, he gets a new one. It's really well-designed and made, unique. Bass players can afford to buy them because they're well under $1000, about $700 I think."


The inimitable G.E. Smith tunes his Epiphone


G.E.'s revered 1953 Fender Telecaster waits patiently for its turn


Larry Campbell's Fender Telecaster









The Louis Electric amps below are specialized amps that "sound old" (said Hubert Sumlin) and have been used by Keith Richards, Warren Haynes, Robben Ford, Jackson Browne and our hero, Jorma Kaukonen. Founded by Louis Rosano, these amps seem to be gaining some serious traction among artists.


The Louis Electric KR-12 amp head/cabinet and in foreground, a Louis Electric Deltone played by Larry Campbell


The Louis Electric Tremoverb used by Barry Mitterhoff


The Louis Electric '58 Tweed Twinmaster used by Jorma



The Jack Casady bass rig


An interesting use for a guitar amp: stage vocal monitor


Jorma's effects rack


Barry Mitterhoff's effects rack


Larry Williams' effects rack


Finally, the stage was set

THE VENUE
What can be said about New York City's Beacon Theater? "The Beacon Theater's ornate, neo-Grecian interior features 30-foot tall Greek goddesses flanking the proscenium arch of its curtain-less stage," can certainly begin the description. Built in 1926 and originally named the Roxy Midway Theater, the venue sat dormant for a few years due to financial woes and eventually opened on December 24th, 1929 as Warner's Beacon Theater. Hosting everything from the Tony Awards to the Allman Brothers Band' extended engagements to David Bowie to the Rolling Stones, the Beacon Theater has over the years been a damn fine venue to see Hot Tuna too.



THE SOUNDCHECK
Hot Tuna's sound-check was closed. But here, Jorma and Jack happily sign posters for sale at the merch table.



THE ARTIST COMMENTARY
Jorma has a new solo album available on February 17th, "Ain't No Hurry."



Jorma Kaukonen
What are you excited about? "I'm excited about life in general. First of all," Jorma told me a few weeks before the Beacon show, "Larry Campbell produced the last Hot Tuna album, 'Steady As She Goes' and also produced my new solo album, 'Ain't No Hurry.' And Jack played bass on 'Barroom Chrystal Ball,' so that was fun."

What kind of computer do you use Jorma? "I'm a modern guy, of course, I use a Mac."

Fur Peace Ranch is Jorma's 'boot camp' for musicians, guitar players and anybody interested in learning any stringed instruments imaginable. "I'm very excited were just ending our 17th year at Fur Peace Ranch. I live in a very rural area there at Fur Peace--beautiful surroundings, so it's an ideal place for people to come and learn new things or refine their technique. You can come and just talk to all us 'gear-heads' if you want; some people just enjoy that. We offer a four-day week from Friday to Monday and we focus on helping the instructors be fun and not intimidating." Fur Peace Ranch offers instruction with Jorma, Jack, GE Smith, David Lindley, Larry Campbell and many other string-playing icons depending on the timing of the session. They also have acoustic and electric Hot Tuna concerts there.

Didn't you always used to play Gibson L5S's? "Yes, I did love the L5S. For the Beacon show I'll be playing a Gibson 'Chet Atkins' SST for the finger-picking electric songs. I've been playing Les Pauls for years but now I'm playing a Fender Jazzmaster; I just love that guitar."

I understand Marty Balin will be a special guest. Will Marty sing "Volunteers" with you? Jorma laughs again, "How can you have Marty without playing 'Volunteers?'"

Is it fun being back that The Beacon? "Yes the Beacon is always fun for us. And it's Jack's birthday too," Jorma laughed heartily. "No, Jack's birthday is really April 13th but we thought we'd observe it at the Beacon. As other musicians will appreciate, New York gigs are an important gig and we usually do the New York gigs first, but this one is the last on our tour, so it will be special."

How long will the Beacon let you play with their strict (generally 11pm) curfew? "We'll play as long as they let us. Until 12, I hope," Jorma concluded optimistically.

Displaying a strong interest in giving back, Jorma said, "We're doing a benefit called Road Recovery for young musicians struggling with addiction."

Jack Casady
"We're having a ball on this tour," Casady started me off, "we just did three weeks in a row and the Beacon caps it all off."

Who are your bass playing influences Jack? "Charles Mingus, Scotty Farrell and Ray Brown all really do it for me," he told me.

Tell me about your starting out playing guitar in DC area bands with Jorma. "Well, it was all very disillusioning playing covers all the time because that's what the club owners wanted you to play. People were jumping from band to band, playing cover material in DC. I had some friends who played in an R&B band, you know, Ray Charles, Louis Prima, plaid tuxedos, 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off, five sets per night. 'Can you play bass?' they asked me. I figured, 'How hard could it be?'" Casady laughed out loud.

"Until, the summer of 1965, when Jorma called me up and says, 'Come out to San Francisco, I'm in a band and our manager will pay us $50 per week whether we play or not!' When I told him I had switched from playing the guitar to bass, he said, 'Hold on a minute.' I heard him say to the manager, 'Do we need a bass player? Yes? C'mon out Jack, we need a bassist too.' So I went out and joined the Jefferson Airplane at Jorma's invitation."

"In San Francisco, I found all the musicians came from different backgrounds and influences and that's what made such unique music. Playing at the Avalon Ballroom, Golden Gate Park, Winterland, Fillmore West, The Matrix--where we started out, all these places gave us the chance to go around to them all and see what everybody else was doing, what they were playing. Watching the growth; that was the fantastic thing, watching the growth of different musicians. Hendrix, Jack Bruce, Garcia, Lesh, Santana, they were all so brilliant. I look back on it, and it amazes me how compressed everything was and how much was happening, so quickly. Like Janis Joplin. She was such an amazing singer and I admired her so much. Jorma and Garcia were both working the Folk circuit, then when Jorma and Janis did the 'Typewriter Tape' in the basement, there was a real shift."

"When Jorma and I started sitting down and playing our own music, we quickly reached a point where we couldn't do both--be in the Airplane and play our music. Jorma and I have a love for Folk music and the Blues was what started us off. Jorma is such a great poet and musician and that's what makes Hot Tuna have such a long life. I base all my ideas around a song. It's necessary for me to have that song, so I can build on the melody and rhythm of that song."

Regarding his transition from guitar to bass, "When I first started playing bass, the Fender Jazz bass had just been released in 1960. I fell in love with the register of the J-Bass (Fender Jazz bass). My fingers started feeling the vibrations of the bass through the neck, not the whole instrument."

With respect to his beloved "Jack Casady Signature Epiphone Bass," Casady is justifiably proud. "My Epiphone bass is a real labor of love for me," he stated, "it's been on the market, selling well to other bass players for more than 16 years now. They like it on tour or for the studio. We designed it as a double cutaway. Originally like a Les Paul but I wanted to change the pick-up and I wanted to keep the hollow-body sound--the f-hole sound. I found a Les Paul Custom four-stringed bass at Chelsea Music next to the Chelsea Hotel in NYC."

Do you ever think of Papa John Creach? "I think of Papa John a lot and recently more after playing with Larry Campbell, who plays a mean fiddle, so he makes me think of Papa John."


Photo Credit: Jim Summaria

Jack Casady's chosen charity is the Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma Research Foundation.

GE Smith
I had wanted to ask GE about his guitars. "My Epiphone is a 1962 'Wine Red Sheraton,' he told me, "it's kinda like an ES-335 in body shape with deluxe appointments like an ES-355. This guitar is fantastic. It's a semi-hollow body and it's got resonances from the wings. I got it on eBay from somewhere out in the Midwest. I recognized it immediately as a great guitar that nobody ever made famous by playing it."

"My Telecaster is a 1955, on its way to a 'Butterscotch,' Fender changed the finish in 1955. I've had a lot of Tele's and that's one of the best I've ever played. My Mom bought it for me for my birthday when I was 11. Turns out, it was made in January, 1952 same as me."

"My amp was a 1964 Fender Vibroverb. It has one 15-inch speaker with a 45 watt amp. A beautiful tone; great package. I like 15-inch speakers and I like 10-inch speakers. Most use 12-inch speakers but I like 15's. I have one reverb pedal."

I asked him about one of the songs he did at the Beacon, "Long Gone from Kentucky." "I found that song about five or six years ago and the proper name is 'Kentucky Blues' by Little Hat Jones. I just got really interested in it. It was originally just an acoustic guitar and singer, so I rearranged it for an electric rock band."

THE SETLIST


THE AUDIENCE
A Hot Tuna audience is generally about as rowdy and ready for a fight as you'll find. With the graying of the congregation, so to speak, I'm not sure how true this is anymore. But those Baby Boomers like me, with an ounce of strength left coursing through their veins, rose to the occasion like a master bullfighter; cheering every drumbeat, every high note and every solo they heard that night.

THE SHOW

Jack came out onstage alone to start the show with a blistering bass solo.





Then his longtime friend Jorma came out and joined him for a little "Hesitation Blues."



And when a song or two later, GE joined in on slide guitar, the crowd went wild.



"Let Us Get Together, Right Down Here"



The Hot Tuna' classic "Hit Single #1" from the breakaway "America's Choice" album took the Beacon crowd to new heights.



"Bowlegged Woman, Knock-kneed Man" made a surprise appearance that featured Jack Casady taking over the stage for the booming, opening bass lines and prowling like a caged panther.




Jorma proudly playing his Martin signature acoustic guitar

Then, in a Jefferson Airplane reunion of sorts, Airplane/Starship founder Marty Balin joined Hot Tuna onstage. Singing "3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds" and "Plastic Fantastic Lover" (both from the "Surrealistic Pillow" album and written by Balin), one might've been transported back to the Matrix or Avalon Ballroom some five decades ago.





Balin sang, played guitar and just otherwise made the stage his canvas.





Then, at some point, Teresa Williams began playing the tambourine and dancing most ardently.



Her dancing became dervish-like.







And once again, Williams became soulful with Balin singing by her side.





An absolutely incendiary "Rock Me Baby" was the penultimate song of the first set. GE Smith's slide solo about halfway through was thoroughly haunting.



After a brief intermission, Marty Balin's acoustic trio came out and played several, well-received songs before Jorma and Jack's return.



At some point during the second-set festivities, Jorma and gang wheeled out a "birthday" cake for Jack Casady. "You still got it, my brother," Jorma told Jack to a cheering Beacon crowd. "I want you all back here for my 80th," Casady opined.












Teresa Williams, seemingly looking right at me

Referring as I did earlier to Grace Slick, I thought a brief analysis of Teresa Williams' vocal efforts was essential.

During this special night, Teresa Williams not only sang Slick's opuses "White Rabbit" and the generationally transcendent, "Somebody to Love" with grace (note small-g), style and aplomb but also sang The Grateful Dead's "Sugaree" which was an unexpected and sublime treat.




Hot Tuna bookends?

At one point in the set, Larry Campbell turned this Tuna show into a Dead concert by singing great versions of "Big River" and with his wife Teresa, "Deep Ellum Blues." Along with "Sugaree," these three songs quickly and collectively reminded me of how closely connected the San Francisco musical community really was. Jorma famously jammed with Janis Joplin on the "The Typewriter Tape" and with Jack, Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Spencer Dryden and others at 2400 Fulton Street, San Francisco in 1969 in what's called the "Airplane House Jam."






Toward the end of the second set, GE Smith cut loose audaciously on "Long Gone From Kentucky"


Kaukonen, Smith and Mitterhoff on a roll



The melodious, hypnotic "Water Song" was slipped into a 22-song, two-set show and most people were overjoyed it was.







"Funky #7" with Jack's opening bass riffs had the crowd swaying and rocking to the beat. GE's solo was searing.



The closer of the second set was "Volunteers" with Marty Balin. It was met with a huge roar.



As Teresa Williams closed out this magnificent Hot Tuna show with an encore of the traditionally male-voice, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" ...



... I looked back on a concert that even challenged the famed 11/26/76 midnight show at the Palladium NYC where Hot Tuna played for more than five hours straight. Having witnessed both, I realized I couldn't choose between them.








Jack and Jorma ... back in the day
Photo Credit: Unknown

All Photo Credits are Bill Robinson except as otherwise noted

Make your list now!

Culturalist.com is the place to shape, share and debate your opinions on anything and everything through Top 10 lists. Want to join the conversation? You can make your own list of the Top 10 Best 2015 Oscar Nominations by selecting your favorites, ranking them in order, and publishing on Culturalist.

With time running out on this year's Oscar race, movie fans are weighing in with their predictions of who will go home happy on Hollywood's biggest night...and some of their picks might surprise you. Below are the current standings of who Culturalist's list-makers think will win, but there's still time for you to weigh in by making your own list of the Top 10 Best Oscar Nominations? now!

Meryl Streep, "Into the Woods" (Actress in a Supporting Role)

Despite the buzz around Patricia Arquette's performance in Boyhood, Culturalist's list-makers are currently giving the edge to Meryl Streep's bewitching tour de force in Into the Woods.


J.K. Simmons, "Whiplash" (Actor in a Supporting Role)

In what is probably the least controversial category of this year's award season, we're looking for J.K. Simmons to complete his sweep for his brilliant portrayal of a musical tyrant in Whiplash.


Julianne Moore, "Still Alice" (Actress in a Leading Role)

Despite Rosamund Pike's breakout performance in Gone Girl and Reese Witherspoon's transformation to go Into the Wild, Julianne Moore's heartbreaking depiction of of early-onset Alzheimer's will see her taking home the statue.


Eddie Redmayne, "The Theory of Everything" (Actor in a Leading Role)

In what might be the toughest-to-call competition of the year, Culturalist's list-makers see Eddie Redmayne's performance in The Theory of Everything knocking off Michael Keaton's career-reinventing turn in Birdman.


"The Theory of Everything" (Best Picture)

Many professional Oscar-watchers see the Best Picture category as a two-horse race between Birdman and Boyhood, but our list-makers are predicting a major upset: The Theory of Everything takes the top prize.


Agree? Disagree? Think you can do better than the critics? Join the conversation by making your list of the Top 10 Best 2015 Oscar Nominations now!

We've emptied out the Marion Cabinets and stuffed the Neil Patrick Haggis to the brim, because you are cordially invited to Everything is Slawsome: My Annual Oscar Party Feast. All GIFs created by Matt Laud.

Specialty Cocktails

Upon entering the Jason Hallway, please help yourself to the freshly mixed Piñárritu Coladas, garnished with Americanned Snipears.

Appetizers



How to Train Your Dragon Rolls with Imitation Crab Game on extra sticky Inherent Rice, topped with David Oyellowtailo and Roeprah

Paul Tacos Anderson

Big Gyro 6-inch subs

Emma Stone Soup with a crusty Patricia Baguette and Birdmanchego Cheese

Ruffalo Wings



Main Course

"Song of the Sea(food)," - A hearty Captain America: Winter Sausage stuffed with Nightcrawfish, smoked with a Hint of Eastwood and served over a MIchael Keaton of Selmashed Potatoes (limitless pats of Foxcatchurned butter available).

For the exotic palettes, I recommend the Bradley Grouper with Poi-hood and Interstellarctic Char

Meat-lovers rejoice, The Eddie Redmeat is a Filet Marrion w/ Colliard Greens and fresh Steve Chantrelles (Or, if in season, Julienne Morrells).

This year we have a kosher option from our X Menu: Days of Future Passover - Lox Trolls on a Theory of Everything Bagel with a Kiera Knishly

That said, I highly recommend the Ham Zimmer.

From our Grand Brunchapest Hotel menu we have the Wes Anderson Omelette, which has Unbroken eggs from an Ethan Hawk, is cooked in the Grease Witherspoon from our famous Richard Link Sausages, and served with a basket of JK Sinnamon rolls and other assorted Breadward Nortons.

And my personal favorite, Prawn Girl, which is just a plate of uncooked Rosamung bean-encrusted Pike fish that can only be eaten with a box cutter. Watch out for the Felicity Bones.



Dessert

Laura Derjeeling Tea, Meryl Steeped in a "Turn the Michael Heat-on" novelty mug

Robert Duvalamode

A piping hot Benedict Cookiebatch with a side of Cool Whiplash

Julianne S'mores with real Guardians of the Ganache chocolate

Butter Lamp (while they last)


Thanks to Chefs and Contributors: Matt Laud, Kyle Sauer, Scott Hanson, Zack Poitras, Emma Chase, Christina Cody, Casey DiCocco, Joyce Lee, Emily Plucinak, Zach Kohn, and Paige Tibbetts.

Rap artist and Vine king DeStorm Power is handsome, hilarious, and huge on the Tube. His 2011 "How to Solve a Rubik's Cube" rap started as a challenge from a fan and ended in triumph for DeStorm, in the form of more than 3.8 million views and counting, proving his sweet rhymes can take any lesson from boring to bangin'.

In this episode of the VH1-What's Trending production Huge on the Tube (#HOTT), the "Victory Dance" creator gets real about his creative process.

He says it took several days to create the "Rubik's Cube" rap video -- not only did he have to actually solve the thing and translate the instructions into a cohesive song, but he had to time the puzzle solving to the beat of his rapping. Tricky, indeed.

Big thanks to Destorm Powers for taking part in this project! I also want to thank our special YouTube commentators for contributing to this video: Lisa Schwartz, Trisha Hershberger and Shanna Malcolm.

In case we needed proof that the male perspective influences just about everything that comes out of Hollywood, here's a collage of the protagonists from each of this year's Best Picture nominees. Notice anything? (Hint: They're all dudes.)

Now, we're certainly fans of all these talented men (and admittedly, just a tad heartbroken at Benedict Cumberbatch's recent wedding). With all the white-washing going on, we're thrilled that at least one actor of color, the fabulous David Oyelowo, is getting his due, even if he wasn't nominated for Best Actor. Bradley, Michael, Ellar, Ralph, Eddie, Miles -- you're all tops, too.

But...how come there's not a single female protagonist in any of the films nominated for 2015 Best Picture?

There are a few explanations, starting with the fact that the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are predominantly male. (A rather depressing 2012 study by the Los Angeles Times found that 77% are men and a full 94% are white.) It's a fact of human nature that people are drawn to things they know, that they can relate to. Hence...movies starring characters that look a lot like the voters? Those would be shoe-ins for Best Picture, naturally. Movies featuring, say, a woman battling early-onset Alzheimer's, or a woman grappling with the loss of her mother? Not so much.

Another explanation: Not many movies feature a female protagonist in the first place. So the pool from which to draw a "Best Picture" nominee is quite small. To make a Hollywood movie, especially one of blockbuster proportions, requires big money. The people who finance movies -- from professional investors to major studio executives -- are primarily men. Are they willing to gamble that much coin on female-centric films? Clearly not. In 2014, female characters made up just 23% of leads or co-leads in popular films, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Perhaps next year we'll see a change. But, as researcher Martha Lauzen, cautioned in her recent interview with us, don't expect progress to happen quickly. "The television and film industries are very large and do not change course overnight," she said. "It can take decades and even lifetimes for significant change to occur."

We'll see more roles for women (both on the screen and behind-the-scenes) when the powers-that-be like studio heads and union leaders acknowledge that Hollywood has a gender problem. We'll also see more opportunities when women (in general) control more money and can influence who and what goes into a movie. We can do our part now by supporting women's film events like Athena Film Festival, and applauding programs like the Camp Citizen Jane that encourage girls to aspire to be filmmakers.

And in the meanwhile, we can enjoy the films nominated for Best Picture. But let's save the popcorn for when we have a greater choice of flicks that better represent society as a whole.

Back in the day, The Twilight Zone did it right. Each episode started with an everyday routine, then it added a couple of wicked twists and before you could say, "Rod Serling," things went completely askew. Argentinean writer/director Damian Szifron has that same knack, which he exhibits masterfully in six wicked vignettes. Themes of injustice, outrage, vengeance and reprisals are neatly woven together in a way that that boggles the mind and raises a smirk.

(Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
'Til Death Do Us Part is one of six vignettes in the film Wild Tales.

Sit through all six, and you'll have a hard time distinguishing the one you liked best: Pasternak finds a plane full of passengers, who, upon starting haphazard conversations, realize they are all connected to one man, whom they've wronged. Once the plane leaves the ground, it's clear none are safe. The Rats shows a waitress in a dive diner serving a loan shark who pushed her father to kill himself. Revenge is a dish best served cold and poisonous. Road to Hell pits a dapper sports car driver against a man in a far less luxurious vehicle. It starts with someone flipping the bird and ends with a case of road rage that turns into road kill.

A demolition engineer, who blows up unwanted buildings for a profession, finds a way to get even when his car is towed and the DMV gives him the run-around in Bombita. The Bill is a tad darker than the other stories, but as engaging. A rich young man kills someone in a hit-and-run, and his dad gets their gardener to take the blame. Everybody pays the price. 'Til Death Do Us Part closes the movie. On their wedding day, a bride and groom struggle to come to terms with his infidelity. She, while still swathed in her Vera Wang wedding dress, one-ups him in front of the guests.

Slivers of life gone awry take you in funny or perverted directions, and they'll make you reconsider your rash actions and ponder karma. Credit Szifron for the brilliant storytelling and astute direction: The actors move along like checkers on a checkerboard, headed to the other side and not knowing which ones will make it. Some deserve their fate; others are destined no matter what they do. As an audience, through their performances, you rid yourself of pent-up anger. You tell off your antagonists. You get sweet revenge on dehumanizing institutions. You stick it to the lovers who wronged you. This may be one of the most cathartic films ever made. And it is a sick puppy.

Some vignettes move at a breakneck speed, others languish and make you wait. If you find yourself getting restless at points, be patient, a reward is coming. Overall, Pablo Barbieri Carrera and Szifron's editing is sharp as a butcher knife. Javier Julia's cinematography consists of perfect lighting and a great sense for color that highlights Maria Clara Notari's production design. It's rare that a casting director's genius is so obvious, but Javier Braier pulls together a huge, disparate cast that is dopey, baiting, mean or gloriously evil at the right times.

If a past transgression has been eating your soul alive, this twisted film could be your remedy. Group therapy in a theater. Wild Tales is like an Argentinean Twilight Zone for the repressed, and it was nominated for a 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It's that good.

Visit NNPA Syndication Film Critic Dwight Brown at DwightBrownInk.com.

(from "The Last Five Years", Jeremy Jordan, Anna Kendrick)


I made it to the 8:20 a.m. showing of, "The Last Five Years," and loved it. Nothing like a musical to start the day, not to mention, transport you to New York City via the story of a struggling actress, played by Anna Kendrick, newly married to the "It" author of the moment, played by Jeremy Jordan. Film director, Richard LaGravenese, sets the right tone so that every chord rings true. I barely noticed that the whole film is sung as I was so pulled into the story. To me, it seemed like life in your twenties, the way you get so hopeful and giddy with first love, and marriage, unprepared for the compromises and disappointments that inevitably present themselves. You feel for Cathy Hiatt (Anna Kendrick) as she struggles to make it as an actress only to have to go back to Summer Stock in Ohio, while you totally get how intoxicating success would be for Jamie Wellerstein (Jeremy Jordan) and how irresistible the temptations would seem. How can a young relationship survive?


At 10:00 a.m. I headed over to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, to see the documentary, "Gardeners of Eden," directed by Austin Peck and Anneliese Vandenberg, executive produced by, and, featuring Kristin Davis ("Sex and the City"). Dame Daphne Sheldrick founded The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya to protect elephants from the savagery of poaching that is wiping out the species at an alarming and heartbreaking rate. "We are the endangered species," Dame Sheldrick says at the beginning of the film, "because we have stepped out of nature." The worldwide population of elephants has gone from 3 1/2 million down to 300,000 today. We learn that in the Tsavo National Park, where animals in the wild are supposed to be safe, "poaching is epidemic." The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust runs an orphanage for baby elephants whose mothers have been killed. The babies are brought back to the orphanage and nursed back to strength until they are healthy and strong enough to be released back into the wild.


(Kristin Davis in "Gardeners of Eden")


We see the footage of the mother elephants after they have been shot, their tusks ripped out of their faces and their feet chopped off for trophies or stools. The film is horrifying and heartbreaking and several times throughout watching it I found myself wiping away tears. What has become of us? How can we stand idly by and watch this happen? The film lays out the problem clearly. We see the work that the Trust is doing not only in coming to the aid of the elephants, but in their Team going after the poachers (risking their lives) to stop them. The poachers are armed with AK47's. The high stakes are due to the market for ivory that still exists. Poor african villagers fall into poaching as a means of making money. The trade is equated to the drug trade. "Behind China, the U.S. is the second highest market for ivory." You hear facts like that and it makes you want to cry. How can we be so crazy?


(Kristin Davis)





There are things that can be done and that are being worked on that Kristin Davis spoke passionately about in the Q & A. (The film, "Gardeners of Eden, " was her idea.) Legislation in California is up supporting the President who tried to pass a nationwide ban of ivory sales but the NRA fought back. Kristin, who has worked for the trust for nine years, said that they are working on educating the children in Kenya. They are hiring the villagers and educating them so that they see the economic (tourism) value in protecting the elephants. There was a group of women in Hong Kong that did "an ivory burn." They are encouraging other "ivory burns." They are trying to use social media.

"Gardeners of Eden" is one of the most important and impactful films I have ever seen. It is a call to action that is directed at each of us. Do you get it? If we don't all do something what kind of world will this be? I applaud the work that Kristin Davis is pouring her heart into with this film, informing us of the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, giving us all a chance to act before it is too late. This is the power of film.

"Swains Island," is Director Jim Knowlton's film about this remote island located north of American Samoa, "one of the last jewels of the planet." Swains Island was owned for generations by the Jennings family and now is part of the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa. Knowlton films Jean-Michel Cousteau as he explores and swims around the pristine coral reefs surrounding Swains Island. Scientists and Jennings family members trace the history of the island. The island is less than a square mile and a lake takes up one third of it. Unless you want to make the 50 hour journey, 22 hours by boat, this film is a great way to travel to this very special part of the world.


(Jim Knowlton, Director)


(Jim Knowlton with Jean-Michel Cousteau)



Next on the agenda, Doc Shorts:Behind the Scenes, a selection of short documentaries that highlight the artisans in filmmaking, foley artists, italian voiceover actors, visual EFX artists and a 35mm projectionist at a Drive-In movie theater. "The Secret World of Foley," directed by Daniel Jewel, showed us the process of creating sound effects by filming two foley artists at work. In "Changeover," a film by David Ketterer and Connor Lynch, we discover how the changeover to digital projection affected the owners of a Drive-in who had used film projectors for 63 years. The cost to switch out from film to digital was so prohibitively expensive that they were not going to be able to stay in business. "It's Better In Italian,"directed by Jordan Ledy, showed us the Voice-over actors who have consistently provided the voices of American actors over a span of time. One actor had been "(dubbing) Elijah Wood for 23 years."


(Jordan Ledy and SBIFF Program Director, Michael Albright)


(Chandler Wild, Writer, "Changeover", Christina Lee Storm, Scott Leberecht, Jordan Ledy)


Finally, in, "Life of Pi," written by Christina Lee Storm, written and directed by Scott Leberecht, we learn about an L.A. based VFX company, Rhythm and Hues, that did the work that won the Academy Award for "Life of Pi," just two weeks after having to declare bankruptcy. We learn how their contracts locked them into a fixed fee that often cost much more, due to changes and add-ons, unfortunately at the company's, not the film's, expense. It was pointed out that there is no VFX union. Most shocking was seeing the footage of Ang Lee accept the Oscar for Best Director of "Life of Pi," and neglect to thank the VFX team! It makes your jaw drop.



(Christina Lee Storm and Scott Leberecht)

Finally, at 8:00 p.m., I headed over to the Arlington Theatre for the VARIETY Artisans Award event. The Artisans Award celebrates those who are essential to the filmmaking process and who have exhibited the most exciting and innovative work of the year in the respective fields.

This year those honored were: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, "Gone Girl," (Score); Dion Beebe, "Into the Woods," (Cinematography); Sandra Adair, "Boyhood," (Editing); Bill Corso and Katherine Gordon, "Foxcatcher," (Hair and Makeup); Suzie Davies, "Mr. Turner," (Production Design); Shawn Patterson, "Everything is Awesome," (from "The Lego Movie," (Song); Joe Letteri, "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" and "The Hobbit:Battle of Five Armies," (VFX)


(The Variety Artisan Awardees with Moderator, Tim Gray)

That's a wrap on this day!

Photo Credits: Sally Fay