The short version: If you get a chance to see Leonard Cohen on his current tour, take it. You won’t see a better show this year.
In fact, if tickets are available, stop reading now and go buy some, fool. They’re pretty ridiculous, pricewise — the cheap seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Saturday were $65 plus service charge, ranging up to $250 — but like I said, this is a rare pop-music outing that’s worth the price. The 74-year-old Cohen plays for more than three hours, and if you have a favorite song, you’re likely to hear it. Alan is not an easily pleased concertgoer, and he turned to me after the third number and said, “This is a top-fiver.” That’s not an annual ranking.
An elegant stage set — a riser for the band, simple scrims lit by changing-color lights, everyone in black and white — walked a careful line that suggested the gravitas one of the greatest living singer-songwriters has accumulated over his long life, but never edged into pretension. This guy worked hard for the money. There was less love-me vibe coming from the stage than you’d find at the American Idols also-rans show. Cohen spent five years in seclusion at a Zen center during the 1990s, and he must have learned some powerful lessons about simplicity and understatement.
Oh, what am I saying? He’s known that for a while. Truth be told, I didn’t leap at the chance to go when Alan suggested it; it’s been my experience that singer-songwriters frequently put on lousy shows, and the sole time I saw Bob Dylan live will remain a lifelong disappointment. Get them in a small enough venue and it works, but what is Cohen about? The lyrics, and that mournful, whispery baritone. He plays best on CD, when you’re alone and able to concentrate and stare out the window at some Canadian landscape. The thought of seeing him overpowered by an electric guitar didn’t sound worth $130, plus service charges, parking and add-ons.
I shouldn’t have worried. The sound mix was a miracle — you could hear every word, even while the musicians did anything but fade into the woodwork. There was everything from a Hammond B3 to an oud to a gong onstage, and you heard every one as well as you did Cohen’s voice. Add three angel-voiced chick singers, one of them Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Sharon Robinson, and that was a stage full of talent that could have supported any singer capably.
At the final encore, everyone took a quick solo, and Cohen lined up the whole gang for an extended farewell that sounded like a valediction. “I don’t know when we’ll be passing this way again,” he said. In other words: This is it, folks. (The story goes that this tour was necessitated by money troubles, but ah well — even the greatest artists have to eat.) As the last show of a distinguished career, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.
[Pause.]
In other news at this hour, Kate and I went to see “Star Trek” on Sunday, and that was pretty good, too, although once time travel gets introduced into any movie plot, that’s my signal to stop asking questions and just let it wash over me. Fortunately, it was a pleasant bath.
If you’re looking for a way to intellectually justify your attendance at the same movie, take one op-ed and call me in the morning:
I can still remember the first time I saw “A Piece of the Action,” which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?
Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the “Star Trek” I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called “The Roaring Twenties”; and three, the clownish “Soupy Sales Show.”
I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister’s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of “Star Trek.” Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.
If you want to relate “Star Trek” to the new world of Hope and Change, well, you take that shit down to the comments, because in this bar, we take our big-explodey-movie fun straight.
Related: Hank Stuever on the Trouble with Quibbles, or how fanboys ‘n’ girls ruin everything. Or try to.
A final bit of bloggage: My poor suburb made it to the front page of Sunday Styles. Of course, it could have been better news — Grosse Pointe Blues.
jcburns said on May 11, 2009 at 3:15 am
My takeaway on sequels, especially of the science fiction kind, is: I want to go back there, to that very place that an old 60s series inhabited, cheese and all. If it’s a remake of Lost in Space, the damn Jupiter 2 better be the precise pie-plate of old, and the robot better look and sound like, well, the robot, down to the last rectangular colored button on front. And yet, these movie production designers feel they have to earn their keep through bombastic reinvention…make those nacelles bigger, make the uniforms brighter or beige-r or more flattering to the physiques of the aging actors.
But when, in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the cast was literally transported into an episode of the 60s Star Trek, they played it straight, and the exact-replica production design and the vivid, brought-to-you-in-living-color cinematography was just a treat. They brought me back to that place, and I enjoyed every moment of the emotional replay.
That said, what’s the point of going back if you’re too young to have gone there in the first place? I enjoyed, for the most part, this re-invention of Star Trek, and I was pretty much willing for them to go anywhere with the details, as long as they could rediscover the 40 year old interplay between the principal characters.
And so they did.
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beb said on May 11, 2009 at 8:17 am
We were surprised how long the new Star Trek movie was. it didn’t seem that long but it was 2 1/2 hours later when we creakingly got to our feet, feeling like we’d been on a roller coast all that time. Entertaining and exhausting!
It was a good movie, very entertaining, and the characters were very much on target, except…. Scotty was this genius who had been exiled for showing up his superior. Uhura could hear a “mouth breather” under her room-mates bed. Chekhov could calculate how to lock a transporter onto a falling body and the entire future would collapse into ruin unless James T. Kirk were sitting in that Captain’s Seat. There’s a word for writing like that — Mary-Sue. A term coined among early Trekkies for fan writing that was exaciously precious. Roddenberry didn’t create a show about a crew of super-geniuses but a show about ordinary people, well trained in their jobs and rising to the occasion. Over time the show and the characters have been mythalized and Abrams has fallen into that same thinking. He can get away with it this time but next time, when he has to top himself, it won’t be so easy. It’s hard to top yourself when you’ve already hit the ceiling.
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Julie Robinson said on May 11, 2009 at 8:44 am
Let me stipulate that I was never a Trekkie or a science fiction fan, nor do I usually like big-explodey-movies. It’s rom-coms and musicals all the way for me. But I thought the new Star Trek was great fun and got most of the characters very right. And Spock attracting the sexy girl no less.
Thanks, Jeff TMMO, for the link to your artist friend under the slab of wax. It’s worth the time to poke around his site. I was haunted by the image of Guantanamo made from the shredded Constitution. Powerful and right to the point.
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beb said on May 11, 2009 at 8:45 am
Steuver wonders why Hollywood remakes so many old TV shows or movies. The answer is that it’s a pre-sold audience they can milk for millions. But then you have to wonder why, if they’re trying to milk the nostalgia of fans, they felt compelled to re-imagine the franchise. For that you have to go back to Mel Brooks’ “History of the World- part one” where he shows us the first art critic. Obviously you’re not The Director of the project unless you can piss on what has come before.
Steuver assumes directors have only two choices, slavish following of canon which leads to death or blowing up the original and making something kind of like what the original was like. Following canon doesn’t lead to stagnation else no TV series would last past the first episode. The first Star Trek movie (directed by Roddenberry, if I recall correctly) failed because Roddenberry forgot to tell an exciting story. STII succeeded wildly because it had a great story that built on while being faithful to canon. The later movies, thinking they had to top the prevous simply had less and less credible story to tell.
Respecting the franchise isn’t what kills movies, it’s bad writing, everytime.
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James said on May 11, 2009 at 9:07 am
I really enjoyed the new Trek movie, which I saw with John (that’d be “JC” to y’all).
That said, set nerdiness to stun:
(oh… SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Ok… so Chekov could lock onto 2 bodies falling at terminal velocity toward a quickly developing planet-sized massive gravity well, but when another character falls into a developing sinkhole during a more standard transportation, he loses the lock??
Seriously?
(end nerdiness)
So… it was a little inconsistent. It was still fun.
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nancy said on May 11, 2009 at 9:11 am
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
James, my head didn’t explode until the Spock-meets-Spock scene, but that was near the end, so no big loss.
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James said on May 11, 2009 at 9:59 am
I always wonder about those time paradoxes… like… when one meets oneself, do you keep interrupting yourself because you already had this conversation (when you were your younger self)? Do you give them insider trading info (“Get out of the market by early 2008, and by the way… start renting rather than buying…”)?
The mind, indeed, boggles.
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coozledad said on May 11, 2009 at 10:03 am
James: Or “You’re not going to believe this, punk, but one day it’s going to cost you $25.00 just to get a hard-on.”
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nancy said on May 11, 2009 at 11:01 am
Hey, all:
I just spammed another comment from Dwight, after a certain amount of soul-searching that took about 12 seconds. I don’t mind disagreement, but I do mind aggressive trolling, so screw him. This is just FYI for transparency.
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brian stouder said on May 11, 2009 at 11:13 am
For the record, I think we all trust Nance implicitly – in all her judgements.
Henry Ford II may have been wrong about Lee Iacocca, but was onto something in his belief that you ‘Never complain; never explain’ – especially when it comes to trolls!
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Sue said on May 11, 2009 at 11:13 am
Thank you, Nancy. Thank you.
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LA Mary said on May 11, 2009 at 11:22 am
I have a friend who spends his weekends giving haircuts to the homeless in Santa Monica. A couple of years ago he was talking to a homeless woman who was a little different from the usual group. She said she had been Leonard Cohen’s manager, and that he had accused her of stealing all his money, and that she had spent every dime she had on lawyers. Of course my friend googled her name (which I don’t remember) when he got home, and she wasn’t lying.
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beb said on May 11, 2009 at 11:25 am
But the Spock v Spock conversation never happened before. From the moment Kirk was born in space instead of in Iowa nothing in the movie matches anything in the previous stories. This isn’t a story about a loop in time but a fissure between the old reality and the new reality.
But really, we shouldn’t be doing Spoilers this early in the movie’s release. Let’s save the big ones for a week from now, ‘kay?
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Laurie said on May 11, 2009 at 11:41 am
Leonard’s stuff, whether I’m starting at a moody Northern landscape or not, makes me want to open a vein. All due props to his poetry from a former literature major–a girl who spent plenty of time in late adolescence singing a moony version of “Suzanne” with guitar, badly. I must have thought it would make guys interested in coming down to my place by the river. They could read my address by the moon.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 11, 2009 at 11:55 am
Dwight can start a blog, and post entries to his heart’s content — i’ll bet you’d even give him one more comment link opp for us to bookmark, if we like, for old time’s sake.
I won’t miss reading the words “Mitch Albom Fan.”
The Grosse Pointe story would have gotten my attention for a Sunday afternoon read on wood pulp even without the quasi-connection here, and online i might very well have missed it. But what exactly was the takeaway? They’re all rich, unless they’re broke? It needed a few quotes from someone who shops at estate sales for the real poignancy mixed with opportunity.
It was an oddly inconsequential story for something that read as if they’d spent a week there; if that was the result of flights in a middle seat both ways on two sequential days, i’d say a good workmanlike effort . . .
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whitebeard said on May 11, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Thank you for spamming Dwight, even trolling has its limits.
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James said on May 11, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Beb: Where in the ST canon does it say where Kirk was born? I know he was from Iowa, but he still coulda been born elsewhere.
(Sorry… I keep hearing my responses in the voice of the Comic Book guy from the Simpsons…)
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor.
I’ll probably see the new version of “Star Trek,” but it will have to go mighty far to be more entertaining than the classic “Saturday Night Live” send-up with Elliott Gould as an NBC exec who shows up on set to cancel the series. John Belushi is Kirk and Chevy Chase is Spock, who keeps trying unsuccessfully to use his “Vulcan nerve pinch” to subdue Gould. It’s a comic masterpiece.
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Julie Robinson said on May 11, 2009 at 1:14 pm
No spoiler if I say there was one tee-hee moment in the movie; when the ship is hit everyone lunges over in unison and you can tell that the set did not move at all. Shades of every bad space show ever made. I started to giggle but the DH hushed me in deference to the true believers behind us. And Chekov’s accent was even more stereotypical than on TV.
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ROgirl said on May 11, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Leonard Cohen’s former manager is named Kelley Lynch. Here’s a story about the case.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060302/leonard_cohen_060302/20060302?hub=Canada
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brian stouder said on May 11, 2009 at 2:25 pm
You guys can talk about a reprise of a 40-year old “Wagontrain to the stars” if you want to – but my “Hallelujah” moment this past weekend was on C-SPAN:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/cheat-sheet/051109white-house-cheat-sheet.html?hpid=topnews
In politics, as in life, there is a fine line between stupid and clever — to paraphrase the great philosopher (and lead vocalist of Spinal Tap) David St. Hubbins.
The question percolating in Washington as a new week starts is whether comedian Wanda Sykes’s shots at conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Dinner were the former, the latter or somewhere in between.
Sykes, who provided the comic relief at the annual gathering of politicians and the reporters who cover them, had already skewered President Obama before turning her attention to Limbaugh. She suggested Limbaugh’s much-repeated insistence that he hoped Obama would fail in office was equivalent to “treason” before adding: “Maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight. . . . I hope his kidneys fail.” “Too much?” Sykes asked, when the lines drew a mixture of laughter and boos.
That was the question debated throughout Washington on Sunday — whether Sykes had crossed an imaginary line with her attacks on Limbaugh, turning a fun night into a harder-edged partisan affair.
I say “Hell no” and Hallelujah, indeed!
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Dexter said on May 11, 2009 at 2:29 pm
A few years ago I posted on a blog how much I loved Cohen, and named a few songs. A woman from Kansas City, sixty-some years old, posted back that she was shocked, as in all her years she had never heard of a man who appreciated Leonard Cohen. I questioned my masculinity for about ten seconds before taking the attitude she must have never discussed Leonard with any men before.
Ya gotta love Leonard Cohen, if for nothing else , the fact that he and Janis Joplin broke a bed in the Chelsea Hotel.
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Brian,
Few people deserve scorn and mockery more than El Rushbo, but I thought Wanda Sykes went over the line. It’s rarely funny to wish that someone dies. Worse, that rather lame effort takes away from some of the more brilliant bits she fired off, particularly her riff on the always lampoonable Sarah Palin.
Of course, if the big tub of goo would like to get into it with Wanda Sykes, it might be awfully funny. She’d probably kick his abundant ass in any kind of war of words.
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brian stouder said on May 11, 2009 at 2:55 pm
She was much better than Imus a decade ago; she had the virtue of actually being funny!
Anyway – the format is tailor-made for wince-worthy moments…I suppose there’s a reason it stays on C-SPAN and not, say, Comedy Central
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Oh man, Imus is one of those guys whose success is a complete mystery to me. What a bore. Yet all the big media and political stars must come by and kiss his ring.
If they could get Wanda Sykes this year, maybe Chris Rock next year?
Anyone out there listen to Rush today? I’m sure his ego forbids him from letting this kind of verbal assault pass without comment. And why not? When the former vice-president says he prefers you to Colin Powell as a symbol of the GOP, you are not going to let some comedian mock your ugly ass.
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alex said on May 11, 2009 at 3:27 pm
James, there’s a town in Iowa — I forget the name — but I once had to write a fluff piece about it for a travel publication. They actually have a replica of the Starship Enterprise in the town square and an annual trekkie fest that draws quite a large attendance. In one of those early TV episodes the town was named as Kirk’s birthplace.
Edit: That’s Riverside, Iowa. I just looked it up. And no they didn’t send me there with an expense account. They had me pilfer from other published sources but rewrite in such a way that it couldn’t be discovered.
Re Sykes: Her Limbaugh material could have been more clever, but there was nothing she said that was even one-tenth as offensive as anything Limbaugh utters on any given day.
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LA Mary said on May 11, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Back to Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire is a very fine song. I’ve had it stuck in my head since I first read this entry this morning.
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Alex,
Agree with you there, man, though like most big, fat, bullies, he doesn’t much like it when others push back.
Apparently,Rush spent much of the show fluffing Dick Cheney by answering a question posed on a political blog. To wit, why is Cheney out there yakking it up all the time when he has the approval ratings of the swine flu and the GOP is desperately trying to reinvent itself? Big Pharma says it’s because Dick just loves his country so much and hates to see what President Obama is doing to it.
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Danny said on May 11, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I don’t know much about Leonard Cohen (not really a fan), but the one fact that’s been jumping out at me is that he got with Janis Joplin.
Ummm, wow. Obviously, she’s an icon, but that is just very difficult to think about. ‘Nuff said.
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Joe Kobiela said on May 11, 2009 at 4:31 pm
For people who claim NOT to listen to Rush, Ya’ll seem to ALWAYS know what he is saying, I liked today’s piece on Nancy P. If a liberal lies and no one question’s it, is it still a lie? Referring to her claiming she knew nothing about using water boarding, when she and the rest of congress were briefed about it.
Oh well, just back from visiting Mickey down in Orlando this past weekend. Took the wife for mothers day.Rode the airlines down. No recession at Disney. set three record high temps while we were there. These 60’s feel cold.
Missed you all,
even Gas Man.
Pilot Joe
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Hey Joe,
This is one liberal who thinks any Democrat who signed off on torture ought to face the same punishment as any Republican. The chips should be allowed to fall where they may on this issue. We are America. We do not torture. Anyone from either party who allowed this stain on our nation to proceed should be driven from office.
BTW, of course Nancy Pelosi lies. She’s a politician. Ditto for Reid, Boehner, McConnell and, yeah, probably Obama, too.
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Kirk said on May 11, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Pilot Joe is correct. I’m often amazed at how worked up people get about the drug-addled blob. Life is too short to pay any heed to radio comedians, especially that bag of shit.
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Sue said on May 11, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Joe, here’s what that flaming liberal Glenn Greenwald said about Nancy P & co. just last Friday:
“As many of us have long pointed out, the extent to which Democratic leaders in Congress were complicit in Bush lawbreaking — including torture — is a major issue that needs resolution, and is almost certainly a key reason why there have been no investigations thus far.”
The word is complicit. No excuses about “being briefed”, or any cute language that might soften the idea that our elected leaders of both parties went along with something they should not have, or accepted information at face value that they should have questioned. I repeat: the word is complicit.
Liberals as you define them are quite possibly lying. They are being questioned about it, and they have been since assuming power and caving over and over on things that mattered. I’m not sure you’ll find many Pelosi-Reid apologists among those of us who’ve been paying attention the last few years.
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brian stouder said on May 11, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Hey Pilot Joe – I thought of you this morning. The young folks and I were just getting into the car at about 7:15, when I heard a smoothly rumbling engine noise, and looked up to see a very low-flying airplane; it was a yellow single-engine crop duster, and she was lower than 800 feet – and in a very sharp turn, almost right overhead; executing a 180 degree turn from northbound to southbound.
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20090511/LOCAL/905119958
But this was especially striking – and a little frightening – because we literally live in the shadow of channel 15’s 900′ TV tower – and the plane was flying within the space between the tower and the guy wires that support that tower. I suppose the lower he or she flew, the more space there was between the wires and the tower – but Good God!! I think I saw a preview of how I might suddenly die.
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 5:41 pm
An emergency medical helicopter carrying an infant and full crew crashed in flames in the suburbs of Chicago last year after striking the guy wires of a radio tower. All aboard were killed. The parents of the infant have filed suit against the helicopter company, alleging pilot error after the NTSB determined all the warning lights, etc. on the tower were in working order.
It was a terrible tragedy. The profiles of the crew members aboard underlined their commitment to using their flying skills to help others reach critical medical care in a timely manner. And, of course, the parents lost a child they believed was on its way to a life-saving intervention.
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Dexter said on May 11, 2009 at 5:49 pm
I go out of my way to avoid that fucking Limbaugh. I am the man who destroys any radio his hatred has contaminated.
I don’t read what he is saying, and I don’t participate in discussions on what I have missed. Why bother? Fuhgeddabouddhim, I say. This is as far as it gets.
I only type this to say he is not important . He is a nothing. He makes 50 mil a year because he rallies the hate-troops and they buy what he sells. Go ahead, have at it…I choose my own battles.
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Cosmo Panzini said on May 11, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Leonard Cohen? Feh.
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Dexter,
You offer some sage advice. My only response is that while Limbaugh SHOULD be regarded as a conservative ENTERTAINER, he is far too often taken seriously by large swaths of American conservatives as a conservative THINKER. Every single Republican who has criticized him has come crawling back to kiss his feet. That’s more than a clown. That’s a political power broker.
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Sheesh, now God is battling Lucifer over beauty pageant contestants. Here’s the lovely Miss California, Carrie Prejean, talking with Doctor James Dobson:
Three weeks after becoming a hero to conservative Christians with her answer to a gay marriage question at the Miss USA pageant, Carrie Prejean hits the big kahuna of Christian radio this week, appearing today and tomorrow on James Dobson’s daily Focus on the Family program.
In the most intriguing part of today’s interview, Prejean describes the battle between God and Satan as she was formulating her response to Miss USA judge Perez Hilton’s thorny question. I haven’t heard her describe those moments in such starkly religious terms before. Here’s the transcript:
Dobson: It sounded, Carrie, like your first reaction was to hedge, to say “Well, this is a free country” and then something took over.
Prej ean: It really was a switch.
Dobson: And you did one of the most courageous things I’ve seen anybody your age or anybody else do. What was going on in your mind?
Prejean: I started off by saying I want to win this pageant so bad, I’ve worked so hard, I wanted to sound politically correct but still stay true to my values. But I just knew at that moment that God was just telling me “Carrie, how bad do you want this? Are you willing to compromise your beliefs for a one year crown of Miss USA.” And I just knew right there . . . And I said you know what and the switch went off. And I said, “A marriage should be between a man and a woman and that’s how it should be. ”
. . . . And I knew there was no way I was going to win Miss USA. No way.
Dobson: So you put it on the line, that’s what I mean when I said you’re courageous because this was the goal of your life to that point. And yet you gave it up. And yet the Lord is using you all over this country.
Prejean: And we are all faced with that at times. And just by me being here, I want to encourage other people that when you’re faced with an issue which you know in your heart what to say, but you’re faced with someone asking it, don’t ever compromise that just for pleasing them. Your goal should be to please God, not to please man . . . .
Dobson: Why did you give the answer you did with regard to the affirmation of marriage?
Prejean: . . . I felt as though Satan was trying to tempt me in asking me this question. And then God was in my head and in my heart saying, “Do not compromise this. You need to stand up for me and you need to share with all these people . . . you need to witness to them and you need to show that you’re not willing to compromise that for this title of Miss USA.”
And I knew right here that it wasn’t about winning. It was about being true to my convictions.
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coozledad said on May 11, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Satan: “I’ll see your convictions and raise you a pair of plastic tits. You still in?”
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jeff borden said on May 11, 2009 at 6:54 pm
What plastic surgeons have joined, let no man put asunder.
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Sue said on May 11, 2009 at 6:57 pm
I love you people.
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LA Mary said on May 11, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I think she’s blaming Satan for those topless photos in her past as well. Completely understandable. Why else would an ambititious young woman with a nice bum and tits pose for topless shots or enter beauty contests? Satan. There’s your problem right there.
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alex said on May 11, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Asunder, no indeed. They were made for gentle groping lest she get Jenny Jones Syndrome. And she does need her little moneymakers once the God ‘n’ Guns gravy train finds a new spokesmodel willing to take it up the caboose.
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JPK said on May 11, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I don’t know much about Leonard Cohen (not really a fan), but the one fact that’s been jumping out at me is that he got with Janis Joplin.
So did Bill Bennett, at least according to vaguely sourced Internet rumors. Try getting that one out of your head.
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Rana said on May 11, 2009 at 10:00 pm
And Chekov’s accent was even more stereotypical than on TV.
I still have fond memories of the day we had to make up dialogue in Russian class, and my friend (whose Russian-class name was Pavel, no less) asked Где ваши ядерные лодки?* in his best Chekovian accent.
*Where are your nuclear vessels?
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Danny said on May 11, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Hilarious, Rana.
JPK.. No doubt!
Regarding Carrie Prejean, I’ve been following this pretty closely in the local papers. After all, she’s a local girl and she goes to a local church that is associated with the one I attend. But the last few lines of this feature editorial (May 3, 2009) by Michael Stetz caught my attention.
In a strange side note, Miss California Pageant co-director Keith Lewis said Prejean had breast implants before the Miss USA pageant. The organization helped pay for them.
Big deal, you say?
Well, I can’t help but wonder what else is fake.
Stetz is a homeboy of mine from B’more and we’ve corresponded a bit over the last couple of years (quite pleasantly, I might add), but when I read that, I thought two things.
1. Keith Lewis seems very invested in making Carrie Prejean look bad.
2. So does Michael Stetz.
Very cheap shot. And they’re not alone.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 11, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Surely someone Detroit-wise has *something* to say about the Grosse Pointe article with the obligatory snark about silent e’s doing all the work?
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coozledad said on May 11, 2009 at 10:55 pm
No one’s trying to make Carrie look bad. It’s a done deal. Some douches envision a world of female fuck-robots . She’s yours. Nobody’s denying that.
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Danny said on May 11, 2009 at 11:26 pm
No one’s trying to make Carrie look bad…
Um, right. Maybe in your little fantasy world that statement makes sense. Meanwhile, back in reality, everyone knows that’s just not true.
Your post devolves from intellectual dishonesty to foul to absurd. Awesome, dude.
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Dexter said on May 12, 2009 at 1:40 am
I have probably seen all the original Star Trek TV shows but not when they first were shown…I was five years late , and caught them on re-runs when they were on in the afternoons and I was flat-sick with mono.
I moved on and “lost interest in childish things” as I was instructed in church.
Now, I ain’t being prudish…I still follow sports, which some find childish and “stupid”, but “Star Wars” and the “Star Trek” movie franchise and all the stuff associated with them never grabbed me, although a friend insisted I see Lucas’s “Star Wars”, so I did, and to me it was just a cartoon, so no, I didn’t “get it.”
I preferred the “buddy movies” of the 1970’s, and the great films from that time, the Scorcese films, and films like “Chinatown”, “Scarecrow”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “The Godfather”, “Taxi Driver”…that was my genre … not space science fiction.
So what, you say?
I say this : I heard caller after caller on an XM station say that the new “Star Trek” is the best movie they have ever seen. Most of these callers were around 24-30 years old, and some were not franchise addicts (nuts) they said this film is so good they bumped it to #1 all-time.
So now I am going to see it this weekend, and I last went to a movie in 1998.
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CrazyCatLady said on May 12, 2009 at 1:47 am
Did anyone ever notice that the fatter and older Limbaugh gets, the meaner he gets, the more hateful, the fatter the lies/misinformation he spouts? He may have $400 Million dollars, but he has no wife, no children, and 3 ex-wives to support. I kind of feel sorry for the lonely old bastard. Oh, who the hell am I kidding… NOT!!!!! He can rot.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 12, 2009 at 7:16 am
Dexter, let me put it this way — it’s much better than “The Phantom Menace” was. Greatest of all time? That’ll set you up for major unnecessary disappointment.
A fun, wild ride with plenty of excellent character studies (even the red shirt gets a bit of dialogue and post-inevitability reaction from a lead character). Best movie evah? Not by a few light years, but finest starship cheesecake shot ever, no doubt (thanks to Saturn’s backdrop and Titan’s outer atmosphere).
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 12, 2009 at 7:59 am
Not to pile on Detroit’s miseries, but look out for the Blackhawks — the Wirtz Curse may well be crumbling!
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coozledad said on May 12, 2009 at 8:36 am
I earned a right to intellectual dishonesty. After all, I come from a long line of white rubbish that Roosevelt finally scooped up out of the ruins of the Civil War, fed, clothed and housed,and gave them running water and electricity so they could get back up on their feet and blame the fact that everything they touch turns to shit on blacks, Jews, gays, the devil, what the fuck ever.
I keep telling my wife that Roosevelt should have let the depression run its course in the south, and intervened only when the native Leninists had hung every fake aristocrat and mill owner from the handful of telephone poles that would have existed.
I am with Tom Hilton on this one. The fact that Grant and Sherman didn’t have nuclear weapons is a strong argument in favor of the nebulousness of God.
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ROgirl said on May 12, 2009 at 8:55 am
Dick Cheney and Rush are the most visible faces and voices of the Republican party these days. Sneering, bloated, cheap shot artists par excellence.
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MichaelG said on May 12, 2009 at 8:58 am
Can’t help but notice the contrast between the two beauty queens who have been much in the news lately: The former Miss North Dakota and the current Miss California. And with reference to the latter, nobody can make her look bad. Only she can make herself look bad. And doing a good job of it. Who can outawkward that sentance?
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brian stouder said on May 12, 2009 at 8:59 am
Just for the record, Coozledwight, the South doesn’t have anything like a monopoly on ignorance or racism.
Many of Meade’s tired troops had to march directly from the God-awful killing-fields at Gettysburg to New York City, to put down the terrible riots there, which were nominally anti-draft, but which very quickly turned into lots of Irishmen and other whites hunting down and lynching every black American they could get their hands on (literally hung from the light poles)
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coozledad said on May 12, 2009 at 9:22 am
Brian: I’m just an entertainer.
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LA Mary said on May 12, 2009 at 11:02 am
After choosing Joan Rivers as the winner of Celebrity Apprentice last weekend, Donald Trump now decides if Carrie Prejean can keep her title and her tits.
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