Well, dear readers, I am sitting here listening to the Capitol Records monophonic recording of what was for many years a Holy Grail of classical record collecting, The Genesis Suite, a wonderful and weird suite composed by some of my favorite composers, including Arnold Schoenberg, Alexandre Tansman, Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Stravinsky, and Ernst Toch. When I finally secured a copy of the LP back in the early 1970s, I really enjoyed the album for its weirdness and almost film music-like qualities. Naturally, when I found out it was released on CD I got it the minute it came out. There is narration, which does get in the way of some of the music. It would have been really fun if they’re released it with and without, but I’m guessing the narration was done with in the room with the band. Werner Janssen conducts, and I suppose one could consider it kitsch, but I like it, I’ve always liked it, and if that makes me a kitsch lover then so be it and bring on the damn kitsch. The narration was originally by Edward Arnold when the record was released privately. But when Capitol picked it up, the narration was re-recorded by whoever is speaking it. If it’s of interest, there are copies on Amazon for under three bucks. I may buy an extra just to have it. And I don’t care who knows it. I did manage to watch two Flix of Net things prior to The Genesis Suite listening. The first Flix of Net thing was an almost great documentary entitled Don’t F**k with Cats, about a psychopath attention-seeking person on the Internet, who began with videos of him doing harm to cats (not shown, thankfully) and thereby violating the number one Internet rule, i.e. don’t f**k with cats. And so, a bunch of Internet sleuths figure out who the guy is and predict he will move on to murdering a human, which he does, posting a video. He takes delight in his celebrity and eluding everyone. The police won’t even listen to the Internet sleuths and discover who it is after he kills the human – had they listened, they might have prevented the death – and they never apologize or even mention not listening. The Paris police come off as completely incompetent, I must say and have said. The psycho is finally caught, blames it all on some guy named Manny, but Manny turns out – wait for it – not to be real. He’s now serving a life in prison sentence. The first two hours are really great, but it kind of falls apart in the last half of the third episode, where suddenly everything is wrapped up in a much too perfunctory fashion. But up until then, it was really good.
Then I watched the second Flix of Net thing, The Woman in the Window, starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, and others. This is yet another in the never-ending now series of thrillers that have a big TWIST and you can be sure when it arrives that it’s already a hoary old cliché twist at that. The movie was supposed to come out in 2019 but tested so poorly that another writer was brought in to do rewrites and then there were a bunch of reshoots. None of it helped and the result is a big old piece of film garbage. I had no idea who wrote the script or directed, other than that they were terrible. Well, the director was just about my least favorite director working today, the terrible Joe Wright, and the writer was Tracey Letts – I’m told this man is a great writer, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from this tripe. I’m sure the novel is equally terrible. Danny Elfman did the particularly endless and uninteresting score. The heroine, an agoraphobic, sits at home and watches Alfred Hitchcock movies and there are a zillion “homages” – some Rear Window, some Psycho, some Spellbound. Well, Mr. Wright is not Mr. Hitchcock. Amy is very good, as always, but the rest of the cast is not so hot, and that includes the preposterous performance of Mr. Oldman. The final twenty minutes are as stupid as any you’ll ever see. Highly not recommended by the likes of me.
Yesterday was okay. I did get nine hours of sleep, I answered a LOT of e-mails, mostly about casting and some charts that we’re missing, and then I went and got some Taco Bell for food. I’d thought about going to the mail place but didn’t go. Perhaps I will today. The Taco Bell was fine, I did some work on the computer, mostly organizing stuff for our show, then I finally sat on my couch like so much fish and began my viewing – I did watch another episode of Ozark, just so I could see Julia Garner, but it wasn’t much better than the first episode. After all the viewing, I went out and got a chocolate chip muffin, came home, and ate that – it was good.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, but I’m going to try and make today a ME day, although I may do a little writing. I’ll go to the mail place, I suppose, and then I’ll get something light to eat – probably a salad of some sort from Stanley’s – and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, I have an actor coming to sing for me, a potential candidate for the Yacko role. Otherwise, I’ll be writing. On Wednesday, we have our first rehearsal, learning all the group numbers for the show, and doing however many solos we have time for. Then on Thursday we have choreography and the same on Saturday. Then the following Tuesday we begin in earnest.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, try to have a ME day save for a little writing, I’ll go to the mail place, eat a salad, and then I can watch, listen, 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, happy to be a kitsch lover.