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December 22, 2012:

LOOKING BACK ON 2012

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, Christmas vacation has officially begun, at least for me. I am done with everything save for some book notes and one one-hour work session for the January Kritzerland show and one little meeting. It’s not a full two weeks, but at least it’s something. I tell you, this year has flown by, like a gazelle eating pork rinds. It was a pretty satisfying year for me and over the next few days I’ll be looking back at some of its highlights. The easy place to start is the first day of 2012, when I began Album Produced By, which I wrote in a white heat, finishing it less than four weeks later. I could not stop, and on the craziest days I was writing twenty pages a day, which I’ve never done except on very rare occasions. It was the best way to start a New Year, and it’s been how I’ve started a lot of New Years – always beginning a new book. And then there were the Kritzerland shows – what an amazing time we’ve had and we hit our two-year anniversary. We’ve had extraordinary performers and guest stars and somehow in the two years we’ve been doing them, I’ve become completely at ease being on stage again. That has been really fun for me. The most moving of the shows this year were the two tribute shows for Michelle Nicastro. The most fun – maybe the Bob Merrill show. But they’re all fun and we’ll just keep on doing them as long as they stay fun. We began the year leaving the Gardenia and going to Sterling’s Upstairs at Vitello’s, which we thought was going to be our new permanent home. Three months later, Michael Sterling moved to The Federal and we went with him and were the inaugural show in that club. I wasn’t sure about it, but within five minutes of the first show there, I knew we’d be fine and we have been.

Then there was the East Coast Singer, who I began working with at the end of 2011. We continued on our journey and I created a nice act for her, which she did in several venues. We’re still working on it and every time we do it gets better. Then we recorded her Christmas album, which was the first time I’ve been back in a studio with a big orchestra, and boy was it fun. We did the band in New York and the vocals in LA and we mixed it all at my engineer’s house. It came out very well, and then I whipped together a version of it that she could do at the Signature Theater – that apparently went well, and then she did it again at the Metropolitan Room, with me giving notes and direction from LA via Face Time.
I was very gratified at the reaction to Album Produced By and it’s ended up being the biggest selling book I’ve done. I’ll continue looking back in tomorrow’s notes.

Yesterday was a pretty okay day. Nothing really great, but nothing annoying, and that’s fine by me. I got up at six and announced our three new titles, which took a really long time, then I went back to bed and slept for another two hours. Then a local dealer came by and picked up some CDs. Then I printed out lots of orders, then moseyed on over to the editing room, where we made the uncompressed and compressed versions of episode four. He put them on the hard drive, but when I came home that folder was missing – very strange. Something must have happened just before we ejected it because the Quick Time file folder is completely gone and there’s another folder there that doesn’t belong there. So, next week we’ll do it again. However, the editor sent me the compressed version via You Send It and so I’ve got that here in case I feel like showing it to someone. I left the editing room and went directly to the mail place, where I picked up the package I’ve been waiting for, along with a couple of others. An envelope I was hoping would arrive, didn’t, so hopefully it will be here today. Then I came home, printed out more orders, had a visit with Richard Jones, and then went and had a cup of chicken noodle soup and a quesadilla, both excellent.

Then I came home and listened to our first release for January – I’d forgotten to give the mastering guy the information on combining a few tracks, so I sent that to him and he did that quickly and that’s all approved now. Then Jane Lanier came over with the ten boxes of caramels. She recommended putting them in the refrigerator until giving them out, which I did, save for the one box for me. I immediately ate five of them and they are as yummilicious as I remembered. Then I finally sat on my couch like so much fish.

Last night, I watched a motion picture entitled Life of Pi, a colorful adventure yarn that I enjoyed quite a bit. The beginning plays like Renoir’s The River, and then it turns into something else, a stranded-at-sea yarn. There is plentiful CGI, but it’s well done, some of it astonishingly so, and the stuff that’s very obvious I believe is obvious on purpose. The film is done as a flashback, and in the film’s final scene, there’s a little dialogue and it’s an ending that is causing a lot of controversy. I gather the novel ends the same way. I don’t want to say more, but I’d be interested to hear how others feel – with proper spoiler warnings, of course. It’s a beautiful looking film – Ang Lee has a nice visual sense, and certainly this may be the only Ang Lee film I’ve actually liked.

Then I watched the first forty minutes of the new restoration for Once Upon a Time in America, which has an additional twenty-something minutes. Those aren’t in evidence in the first forty minutes so I just watched to see what the restoration was like. I love this film, and I love its direction by Sergio Leone and its brilliant camerawork by Tonino Delli Colli. The one thing about Leone is all his films have a very consistent look and color palette. The US Blu-ray of the long version (but not THIS long) looked like the release prints looked. Disc came today. Basically, what I’ve seen thus far is a complete botch job of the film called Once Upon a Time in America. Mr. Leone and Mr. Delli Colli would be fuming if they saw what their beautiful film has been turned into. I saw this film seven times in its short version and about seventeen times in its long version, and owned a beautiful LPP 35mm print of it. The photography is stunning. You would not know that from this new restoration. I have no idea what the new prints or DCP look like, I can only go on what this Blu-ray looks like and it looks like crap. The restorers have said that they used Mr. Martin Scorsese’s personal print as a reference and I simply do not believe it, because his print would have had to look like my print and my print looks nothing like this so-called restoration. The restorers said they were going for the muted look, and that the 1960s scenes were supposed to look pallid. Really? The op-art decade? Please. So, what do we have here? There is no contrast – just milk. The detail is blah. Worst of all is the color. Awful. What a joke. As I said, if you want to see the correct color and contrast, just pop in the old Warner Blu-ray and you’ll see it perfectly because that’s exactly what the prints looked like in terms of color and contrast. I find it hard to believe I’m saying this, but there is far more detail in the Warners Blu-ray than this sorry mess. You see it right from the first shot and it gets worse as you go. When it goes to Fat Moe being beaten to a pulp his blood is – brown/orange. Not vivid red – brown/orange. Note to restorers: That’s not how it looked. His hair, which is red – is brown/orange. Then you go to the Chinese theater and gone are all the shadings and the beautiful reds and golds, rendered here lifeless and blah. Then you get to the scene in the rain where Noodles’ buddies have been shot down. There’s a fire truck. Brown/orange. Fire trucks are not brown/orange, they are red. Then you go to the scene in the station and see that beautiful Coney Island mural – hard to make that blah, and yet… Then Noodles comes back older and the mural is now the big apple of the Big Apple. What color is an apple? Well, in this instance it should be bright red – it’s brown/orange and hardly bright. And so it goes. I put them side by side and there’s no question that even if you don’t like the bitrate of the original Blu-ray, if you want a Once Upon a Time in America that actually looks as it should, that’s the only choice right now and that original Blu-ray is far from optimal for a slew of other reasons. I fear for watching the rest of this thing, but since none of the additional footage has appeared yet, I’ll mush on just to see how all that works. So far, a complete failure. This is an Eyetalian import so perhaps there’s hope that by the time Warners put this out here, it will be corrected.

Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I would like to get a good night’s beauty sleep.

Today, I shall deliver two of the boxes of caramels – one to Teddy, and one to Malcolm and Christine at Mystery and Imagination Books. I may also give a box to the folks at the mail place. That would leave me six, and I won’t need more than that. Then I’ll hopefully pick up some packages and the envelope I’m waiting for, and then I’ll eat something light but amusing. In the evening I’ll go to Gelson’s and do the shopping for the Christmas Eve Do.

Tomorrow, I’m just taking it easy. In the evening, I’ll make the tuna pasta salad so that will be done. Then at noon on Monday I begin the spaghetti sauce, which then simmers all day long. Then we have our Do and I will, of course, have a complete report for you. Christmas Day I got to Cissy Wechter’s partay, and I do hope I’ll be seeing the Darling Daughter but as of yet, not a peeparooni. Then at some point I’ll do the one-hour work session, and I have a meeting on Thursday, I think, but that won’t take very long.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, deliver caramels, I must hopefully pick up some packages and an envelope I’m waiting for, I must eat, and I must shop. Today’s topic of discussion: What were your favorite things that happened to you this year? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland where I shall continue looking back on this mostly terrific year.

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