Twenty Third & Seventh

New Faces Of 1937

Link: Searchable TV Guide.

We can never resist watching these old films that capture the last of Vaudeville and the early Broadway on film.  Almost all of them fail as films but they also contain priceless footage of the Vaudeville and Broadway greats who survive largely in name only.

One does sense that this story might have been remade in the late 60s under a different name.  And later turned into a stage musical...?

Movie: New Faces Of 1937 Time: 1.50 Channel: 2 Duration: 95 Minutes

A crooked producer sets out to make a flop and pocket the money from the backers. Western Leigh Jason Joe Penner, Milton Berle, Harriet Hilliard 1937, B&W R, G,

Extreme reality television.

Link: Searchable TV Guide.

This could make very interesting viewing. Where I live, skating is street for fucked up on ice [crystal meth].   The idea of watching celebs skate seems perversely appealing running from that use of the word...

Whitney needs another season of her show- 'cracking with celebs'.

Skating With Celebrities Time: 9.10 Channel: 10 Duration: 60 Minutes
	The celebrity skaters must execute an unassisted, one-legged lunge. Watch the pairs test their skills as the degree of difficulty increases. Will they successfully pull off their routines ­ or freeze under pressure? Hosted by Olympic ice skating medalists Scott Hamilton and Summer Sanders. Reality TV

An American Family resurrected- review.

It's a bit spooky to think that reality TV began at Hotel Chelsea.  From small acorns...

Link: An American Family rescreened in the Netherlands.

For 12 hours at Casco a handful of dedicated viewers watched the entire run of An American Family, which drew a weekly audience of over ten million when it was aired on PBS in 1973. Billed as the first ever reality TV show, An American Family is also notably credited with having offered the first unbiased, mass-media representation of a gay youth. These two claims belong to an official story, dutifully rehearsed at Casco by co-director Susan Raymond in conversation with Stuart Comer, the curator of the event (which will be reshown at Kunstverein Munich in April). For seven months in 1971 she and her husband, Alan, recorded every move of the Loud family, a statistically average example of California’s white upper-middle class. Susan went on to explain how, with microphones imbedded throughout the suburban house and thanks to a mutually affectionate relationship with the seven-member family, the Raymonds became invisible, capturing on film what no ethnologist or sociologist had before, namely the ‘live’ disintegration of a prototypical American household.

In the programme’s second episode Pat and Bill Loud’s 20-year-old son Lance strikes the first blow to the ideal private microcosm, as he moves from Santa Barbara to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There he quickly forms a surrogate family of sorts, in the gay art set presided over by his long-time idol and father figure, Andy Warhol.

...continues

Katie Couric Moves Centre of Universe.

Oh yes, I'm on about Katie Couric again.  I shamelessly adore Katie.  I'm more than a little bit sorry to hear that she is leaving NBC Today.

For so many years she has been my line through to NY, faithfully on the TV live from Rockerfeller Plaza.  During my more NY dependent periods my sleep patterns will shift to accommodate the delayed broadcast at 04:00. 

In the past, when life in Sydney still had a bit of joy in it, a big night would ritually end in checking in with Katie.  There's nothing quite comparable to the unreality of having been out all night to come home and find Katie greeting you to yesterday!  The time differences mean that we will see Wednesday's episode, by way of example, on Thursday morning.

I believe Katie is a genuinely good woman.  I chanced upon her at the Olympics and she was delightful.  Stories from others confirm a real enough person.

But, this is about me, not Katie.  'My' New York relies on Katie being in Rockerfeller Plaza to maintain it's centre of gravity.  On my first trip, the first thing I did on day one was find my way to the NBC studios to see Katie.  It was at that moment that it really landed on me that I was in the real Gotham and that it was even better than it looked on TV. 

Good luck Katie, I'll miss you.

Pass the Preparation H- Ring of Fire

The early hours of Saturday morning will almost always find me up watching the delayed telecast of NBC Today, playing about on the computer and hoping against hope that we get a Broadway preview. [They almost always do those on a Friday]

One wonders, however, whether being up at 04:00 for a preview of Ring of Fire: the Johnny Cash Musical was worth the lost beauty sleep.  The Act 1 Finale was so dull that I nearly slipped into a coma.  I was wondering why they weren't performing in costume.  Until I realised that the frumpy skirts and black shirts were 'costumes'. 

Knowing my luck, this will be the only musical that will drift it's way over here within the next decade.

Janis and Gloria Swanson!

From the Sydney Morning Herald. 

I'd wager the very same set is available in the civilised world also.  It's such a pity that this set is so dominated by VD spreading hippies. AND Paul Macartney. We just have to see Janis with Gloria Swanson, Paul Mac or not...

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons

The American ABC network’s Dick Cavett was no hipster but his late night talk show (1968-75) bridged the divide separating the conservative establishment from the rock’n’roll counterculture. You’d never catch Sly Stone rubbing elbows with Debbie Reynolds on The Johnny Carson Show.

Disc 2 is devoted to three episodes featuring Janis Joplin with whom Cavett seems to have developed an unlikely chemistry. Contrary to all expectations, Joplin is a live wire, affable and friendly toward guests including Raquel Welch, Gloria Swanson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Gloria Swanson and Edith Head leaving Sardis circa 1952.

Manhattan Memories

I'll half-watch anything on TV if it has enough Manhattan locations, it's a compulsion I've no intent of altering.

This afternoon I've scored super-well with whatever is blahing away.  Our central detective character just pulled up in a cab at the corner of 23rd and 7th. 

Writhing on the floor like Madonna in a gondola, I was. 

The cab pulled up and got out on 7th, just above 23rd where there still stands a dodgy menswear shop that seems caught in a pre-yuppie timewarp.   The scenery was so familiar that I might just have well been looking at my own home.  I still can't imagine what level my brain must have spent those six weeks at, the detail stored away is amazing for someone who can't remember his mobile phone number two years after acquiring it.

Scoring a shot of 23rd and 7th is a BIG moment for long distance Manhattan obsessing.  We found some other things of interest in the [original] Producers on Sunday.  There was much that was highlighted location, I sat and watched the film on TV, despite having it on DVD, because the theatre settings will draw me in every time.

The moment that left me to wonder was in the closing scenes.  The theatre used as the location for the Opening Night scene is the theatre at which I saw ...Virginia Woolf.  I can say that with the certainty of recognition that I can only call 'famliar', the sort of recognition that suggests the safety of a known location or person.  I recognised the candelabra in the tiny foyer so very clearly that all kinds of wacky hormones happened and I cried.

We're doing a car-chase now.  I just followed the unlikely pursuit of a speeding truck down Canal. We're now in MePa right near where the Eagle is.  The Eagle is where I groped my first Go-Go boy, an enjoyable novelty.  Anything else that happened at the Eagle doesn't need reciting here.

Oi!  We've changed burroughs...  Jamaica, Queens[?] what's worse.  Turn this crap off and do some housework time, methinks.

Happy Gary Coleman Day!

It's Gary Coleman's birthday. In honour of such a momentous occasion we plan to celebrate exploiting people with hormonal disorders and listen to Avenue Q a lot.  Who knows, it might even call for... a toast!

Television Turns Weird

I'm watching one of my post-Manhattan indulgences, Two and a Half Men.  The show has always had eye candy value, I've been in love with Charlie Sheen since he was his father.  It's the other one,  John Cryer, who draws me in.  We shared quite a bit of chatter and a couple of drinks at the Tonys after-party.  He is beautiful in person, TV does him no justice.  The joke, on me as ever, was that I was particularly enjoying his company because he was a fellow non-famous person.  Swimming in the shit of my own assumptions, I took him to be the non-famous partner of his [much less famous] companion for the evening.  The sense that he looked a bit familiar was numbed by the  excess of the night, I still can't describe the inverted cerebral functions that take over in a room that is 80% a-list faces. It's likely that all calculations were distorted by where I did recognise him from, Pretty in Pink.

So, here I am back in heat-struck Sydney watching Crier play a straight man trying to pass himself off as Charlie's lover. [It's a sit-com, don't ask!].  I'm wondering why I find that conceptually erotic but annoying to watch. 

Maybe it's just hearing Charlie say "I'm more of a bottom type myself".  I'll take him up on that challenge...

Nana's Drug Ring and other found objects

PERTH grandmother Evelyn Harvey - allegedly caught running an interstate cannabis operation from her housing commission unit - has become the latest Perth senior arrested by organised crime detectives on suspicion of drug trafficking.

A failed attempt by Oprah to make the 2005 celeb deadies list. Fix your plane, cheap bitch.

And while we're doing Oprah, guess who is a self confessed crack ho?

Michael Jackson has not overdosed. But we haven't given up hope yet

Isn't being burned to death in the happiest place in the world an honour? Who are these people?

A not so warm review of Edmund White's memoirs. "Sexual glutton and a slut for selfhood" indeed.

Oh, shock! Men and women use the internet differently. Where do I get a research grant to state the screechingly obvious?

The racist genie is out of the bottle in Australia