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December 29, 2013:

A FUN THING THAT HAPPENED IN 2013

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, in looking back over the year 2013 I forgot to mention one of the most fun things that happened – bringing this here site completely up-to-date.  We’d been trying to do that for four years and this was the year that we did it.  It was truly scary, daunting, time-consuming, but the company we hired got it all done in about three weeks and the new look and functionality was splendidly splendid – while keeping the feel of the old look, which I wanted.  Amusingly, I haven’t been keeping up with all the stuff we can now do, like posting audio clips of upcoming stuff, posting interviews, but we’ll get back to that in 2014.  And, of course, we completely updated our handy-dandy discussion board – that took a bit of tweaking and I’m rather proud to say that most of the tweaking was done by my very own self, just using my noggin’ and through experimentation, since the web host folks were busy getting the main part of the site done.  With some help from dear readers in the testing phase, I got 99% of the features working properly, added a bunch of stuff to the main page, and then we went live.  The company happily had no trouble saving all the archived notes and posts – in the case of the posts, that’s close to one million.  We’ve had a few hiccups in the past eight weeks, all due to the host changing data centers, but we think they’ve got most of that figured out now and we’ll hopefully be fine from here on in.  The one thing I have to praise about our web host is their response to problems.  It doesn’t matter when the problem occurs, even if in the middle of the night – they deal with it instantly, which is very different from our previous host.  But getting all this stuff current means we can continue being the most unique site on all the Internet, with a plethora of wonderful dear readers – yes, we’ve lost a few over the years, and yes, I get the blame for it, and I’ll accept the blame, but if I were to lay out the real circumstances for each and every loss, I think most here would see that there was a lot of overreaction or even complete misunderstandings, that could have easily been avoided and/or mended, and in a couple of instances, I tried unsuccessfully.  But, as in most things in this crazy caravan, people come, people go, like Grand Hotel.  But we get new people, too, and this year we got a few wonderful new dear readers.

Yesterday, I was up by eight-thirty, I did a two-mile jog, picked up my clothes from the cleaners, who are moving to a new location not five minutes from where I grew up, and for fun I visited a Best Buy to see some new TVs – including a rather stunning-looking Samsung 4K TV.  I’m not sure of the point of owning such a thing at this time because there’s no real content, but it apparently upscales really well.  It’s not even that pricey for the 65-inch version – under four thousand.  The interesting thing is you can stand with your nose up against the screen and everything is razor-sharp (they had actual 4K material playing, created by Samsung for stores).  They do make a 4K TV that’s 80-inches, but the price tag is a little heftier, namely $40,000.  I was most interested to see the new OLED Samsung, with that new technology, but they didn’t have one in the store and they won’t be getting one until early next year.

Then I picked up one package, came home, and waited for the Darling Daughter to arrive.  We went to The Smoke House for lunch – she had a shrimp Louis, we shared the garlic cheese bread, and I had a shrimp cocktail, a grilled artichoke, and a lettuce wedge with Thousand Island dressing, all great.  Then we discussed the Darling Daughter’s Christmas present and she decided on what I hoped she’d decide on – an actual present, to wit a new iPad air.  Her mother gave her an older model a year ago, a second generation one, but they’ve come so far since then it’s unbelievable.  She spends a lot of time on her iPad so she LOVED getting a brand new one (her screen on the old one is cracked) – now she has Siri, she can text and e-mail by speaking into Siri, which is great, and it’s five times as fast as her old one.  We got it working at the store, but she has to transfer her data plan over and that won’t happen until Monday because neither she or her mother can remember what the password is.  AT&T will do it over the phone, but since her mother set up the account, her mother has to do it.  We also stopped at K’s Donuts, because when I told her about the amazing chocolate peanut butter donut thing she said it sounded awful.  Thankfully, they had two left and I got one for her and one for me.  She ate hers in the car and I wish you could have seen the look on her face when she took her first bite – pure heaven.  She loved it big time.  Then we came home, she went on her merry way, and I finally sat on my couch like so much fish.

Last night, since I’m on a bit of a spaghetti western kick, I decided to watch the one that started the craze – Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, on an import Blu and Ray from a new 2K restoration that puts the US Blu-ray to shame in terms of the image itself and the fact that the import has the original mono track, which the US version doesn’t.  I saw the film during its original engagement and you just can’t know how startling it was and how different it was from US westerns of that time.  It was both refreshing and like being hit in the face with a bucket of cold water.  It didn’t look like any western you’d ever seen, it didn’t sound like any western you’d ever seen and certainly the amazing score by Ennio Morricone was like no western music you’d ever heard.  The credits on that original release were fun because they were trying to hide the fact that it was a dubbed Italian western.  Of course, Clint Eastwood’s voice was his own, but no one else’s was.  Morricone was billed as Leo Nichols and Leone as Bob Robertson.  The correct credits were used for all subsequent reissues, of which there were several in those days before home video.

The film is still bracing and original, its inspiration so clearly taken from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, that Kurosawa successfully sued and got a piece of the profits.  You know you’re in for something completely original right from the main titles, with that incredible music and the weird way the titles are presented.  And then from the very first shot you know you are in the hands of a master director with a very original way of shooting this type of yarn.  You can’t exactly call Mr. Eastwood the “hero” of the film, not in any sense of that word.  He does do a couple of noble things, but he’s mostly playing both sides of the fence and is all about the dollars of the title.  There are several cast members who’d appear in many other spaghetti westerns over the years.  And this transfer is pretty terrific – with almost perfect color, wonderful clarity, and excellent contrast.  The first Dollars film was a very low budget affair.  Leone got more money for the second film and even more for the third.  And like any true visionary director, Leone’s film had a profound influence on not only the hundreds of imitations that followed, but on cinema in general, especially western cinema.  The Bond films were similar – there had never been anything like them and right from the get-go there were hundreds of imitations.

Then I watched the PBS documentary on Marvin Hamlisch, which was very good.  It was nice to see pal Rupert Holmes interviewed, too.  Then I started another spaghetti western, this one rather late in the game, from 1972, called The Grand Duel, starring Lee Van Cleef.  I watched the first twenty minutes and it’s pretty good, and hopefully will get better.  It has a very good musical score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov, and if you’ve seen Kill Bill, you’ve heard the main theme from The Grand Duel ad nauseum.  But it’s a wonderful theme, and very much in the Morricone style right down to the female voice, the soaring strings, and the harmonica.

After that, I just relaxed and did stuff on the computer.  Whilst doing stuff, I found the very first Donny and Marie Show that Cindy Williams and I did.  If you begin at around twenty-seven minutes you’ll see all our stuff, including our rendition of The Continental, choreographed by A-Rab, aka David Winters.

Today, I believe I have no plans at all, either day or night, and that’s great by me.  I’ll jog, I’ll eat, and I’ll relax, and that’s great by me.

Tomorrow is our first Kritzerland rehearsal, which begins early, around eleven-thirty, I think, and which goes late, since we have to choreograph one number.  I’m sure some of us will go grab a bite to eat after.  Then it’s the final day of 2013 and our annual New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and you won’t want to miss a minute of our partay here at haineshisway.com because there will be merriment and mirth and laughter and legs and our balls will drop like no one else’s.  Then I begin 2014 by starting what will hopefully be my new book and I can’t wait to dive in.  The day after is our second Kritzerland rehearsal, and then I think Richard Sherman and I will get together to do one last little polish on our little song.  Then we have our stumble-through, then our sound check and show.  And each and every day I will be writing, of course.  I’m not at all certain how many pages a day I will do, since this is very much uncharted territory for me and I’m sure for at least the first week there will be a lot of futzing and fixing as I feel my way.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, eat, and relax.  Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them.  So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, truly happy that one of the fun things that happened was spiffing up this here site.

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