My Last Memory of Roger Ebert

I felt more compelled to write this entry after reading a recent article in Esquire on Roger Ebert. The article details aspects of Roger Ebert's life after losing his lower jaw to cancer and thus being rendered unable to speak, eat, or drink. The article was so graphic and depressing at times it almost made me cry, but it was also a strangely uplifting tale, detailing how Ebert has emerged from his cancer with good humor and into one of the most productive and inspired writing periods of his life.

Before moving to Winston, I lived in Champaign, IL for several years, and Roger Ebert would bring in about a dozen shows a year to his own annual film festival (The "Rober Ebert Overlooked Film Festival"). I probably caught three or so a year. I remember Roger Ebert would introduce and then debrief every movie there and tell us why he loved them -- that was actually the first place I saw Junebug, which is now my favorite movie of all time. (And takes place in Winston-Salem no less. Weird.)

The last year I was in Champaign was also the year that Ebert lost his jaw to cancer. After years of introducing every movie, Ebert hadn't introduced any of them that year... he instead quietly sat in the back of the theater in a special Laz-Z-Boy chair set up for him, and watched as many movies as he had energy for. I think that everyone there thought that would probably be Roger's last Ebertfest.

My last memory of Ebert was when they showed "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" that year. The movie was chosen to close the festival, and bizarrely it was actually largely written by Roger Ebert. To everyone's amazement, he actually introduced that movie, and when he took the stage, his face looked something like a fish pulled out from deep sea, with buggy eyes, and puffy lips, and his neck was wrapped in a thick bandaged cast. But he also looked very happy to be there.

Since Ebert couldn't talk, he brought a laptop up with him, hooked it up to some electronic equipment, and pushed play. Out came an electronic voice that said "Hi, my name is Hal. You might remember me from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And today, I will be serving as the voice of Roger Ebert..."

Watching that film that day was one of the most memorable movie experiences I've ever had. Ebert's movie was full of random acts of violence, transvestites, and yes, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was hilarious and unexpected. When the movie ended, everyone stood to their feet and gave Ebert a standing ovation that lasted at least five minutes.

That day it struck me that Roger Ebert was really more than the guy who doled out thumbs up and down on Saturday every week as I was growing up -- he was a creative man who loved life deeply and desired to share that love with others through his writing. I hope that he has many years yet to share his gifts.

Summer Nights at RayLen, w/ Rosetta Stone Star

A little over a week ago I went to the second concert by my multi-talented friend Leah at RayLen vineyards. The first concert was a classical concert (which meant that I can't name any of the songs), which was held around April -- here's a picture that was snapped by alert concert-goer Brad:

The first concert was great and widely attended. But the second to me was even better. By June you could look around the RayLen grounds and see fields of ripe vines in every direction. We were just a day or two shy of the solstice, and so the days were long enough that the final songs of the concert were played against the setting sun. There were probably close to two hundred people listening to the concert over glasses of wine on the lawn in front of the winery.

The second concert also featured a much more eclectic set of music... only a smattering of classical songs that I couldn't remember the name of. This concert featured a set list ranging from Leah crooning Elton John's "Your Song" on the piano, followed by a cover of Vince Guiardi's "Christmas Time is Here" from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (a Top 10 Christmas song ever, btw). Over the course of the concert Leah played not just the piano, but also the bassoon and guitar, all while singing most of the songs. There were also some other unusual song selections which escape my mind at the moment. But I remember the last song sung at the finale was a sort of sensual version of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On," which Leah said she hadn't originally been planning to do but maybe the ambient wine got the best of her. I dunno.

In any case, it has been about a week since the concert, and I had sort of forgotten to do this post, until I was working through my Spanish using the Rosetta Stone software and stumbled onto none other than Leah again, who was providing important clues into the proper use of the past tense:


I am trying to get at the heart of the mystery on this one and have contacted Leah for clues. No answers yet, but she did perhaps unwittingly confirm that this is in fact her. So guitar, piano... bassoon... Rosetta Stone superstar... what doesn't she do?

Bruce Rocks Steensboro!

I'm not a particularly big Springsteen fan, but I do like a good music concert, and somehow my friend Paul was able to score four $100 tickets to get us onto the floor of the Springsteen show in Greensboro for about $40 a piece. So I rustled up Doodles and DJ Dan, filled my trusty flask with whiskey, and we headed off to the show at the Greensboro Coliseum.

Three hours later (including a six-song encore), the flask was empty and we had a lot of great memories from the evening:

	I love to see weird old people come out of the woodwork to rock out with bands that were big 30 years ago.
	Bruce goes through the crowd picking up signs for musical requests -- pretty much any song was game, even if not a Springsteen song. He played "Seventh Son" and "Hang on Sloopy" and a couple others. Sloopy was really fun...
	Town is renamed! (Photo from the Smith Family Times... check out their account of the concert.)
	Just Bruce looking like a fucking rockstar. (Photo by Nelson Kepley (News & Record)

Musical Flight

Short note that my pal & fellow contra-dancer Leah will be playing a couple hours of classical music starting at 5:30 tomorrow (Friday) at RayLen Vineyards as part of the Sky Meadow Strings trio. I expect it will be an entertaining couple hours with wine, fine music, and nice weather... My other understanding is that this concert is ultimately being performed to help the trio advance their noble goal (?) of collecting beer money to help kick the weekend off with a bang, so donations are appreciated.

Here's a link for more information -- hope to see you there!

http://www.raylenvineyards.com/index.php/Future-Events/

Southern Movie Fest

My friend J.J. paid a visit to Winston-Salem for a couple days and we took the opportunity to blaze through a slew of southern movies -- most of which I hadn't seen before.

• To get the Southern moviefest started, we popped in Junebug -- one of my favorite movies of all time. It was on the top five list even before I discovered that it was filmed in Winston-Salem (apparently a number of other movies have been shot in part in Winston-Salem, ranging from Leatherheads to Thank You For Smoking).
  
  
• After this, we went old school and watched Gone With The Wind. I had never watched it before, and now I am all the more confident that I will never have to watch it again. After almost four hours, if I have to hear Scarlet say "Oh, Ashley!" one more time I might have to kill myself.
  
  
• Next up we watched Deliverance, the point of which seems to be either (a) a cautionary tale to avoid canoeing down rivers in the south, (b) an opportunity to show Bruce Reynolds shirtless, shooting things with a bow and arrow, or (c) an attempt to make people feel a twinge of fear whenever they hear "Dueling Bangos."
  
  
• Not done yet, we shifted to Fried Green Tomatoes. Interestingly, I think this marked the second movie that I've seen with Kathy Bates swinging a sledgehammer. This movie was a little less scary than the first, but after viewing this one I will nonetheless probably find myself hesitating a bit before digging into the food at my next barbecue.
  

Not So Happy-Go-Lucky: Winston-Salem and the Art-House

After hearing a passionate endorsement of the movie Happy-Go-Lucky by an NPR film reviewer about a month ago, I was determined to watch it. I ended up going to moviefone.com and doing a search for the nearest place where I could watch the movie. The closest place ended up being Washington, DC, a good 300+ miles away. This in turn partially prompted me to embark on what eventually became my sugar-addled DC trip.

Since then, the movie's made it to Charlotte, Greensboro, Asheville, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, but not Winston. So the moral seems to be that if you're willing to drive, say, up to 100 miles, you can generally find the movie you're looking for if you give it a couple weeks. But generally, an art-house movie is hard to find in this town. I regularly attended the North Carolina School of the Arts' Films on Fourth movies last year, which brought in some great movies. But then the series ended last December, because there wasn't enough interest and attendance to keep them going. Outside of the RiverRun Film Festival in April (mark your calendar!), this town's got nothin'.

C'mon people! If this town is supposed to be known as North Carolina's "City of the Arts," we can do better than this!

DW2's Infinite Playlist

My brother DW2 is living in Los Angeles, and I'm pumped that I will be able to see him in a couple weeks around Christmas. DW2 is positioning himself to be the next big thing in Rock N' Roll. (In particular, he intends to be the next Jimi Hendrix... he's even learned to play guitar both left- and right-handed, so that now he just has to commit to setting the occasional guitar on fire.)

To celebrate my arrival, he said he would try to play a couple songs for me at one of the open mic nights in town. I ended up sending him a CD with about 40+ songs that I thought would work pretty well in an open-mic acoustic set, ranging from the Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man" to Stevie Wonder's "For Once In My Life." But the one I was most excited about was to hear him try to craft a version of Joni Mitchell's "California". For some reason it struck me that with some very minor alterations of the lyrics, this would be an awesome song for a male vocalist to sing (even if it's not exactly Jimi Hendrix-esque). I'm picturing the singer giving it sort of a Greg Brown folksy treatment:

Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won't give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had
Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't want to stay here
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here
Oh, but California
California, I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss the Sunset Pig
California, I'm coming home.

Oh California, I'm a-comin'! I'm going to see the folks I dig, and if I bump into the Sunset Pig I'll be sure to blow it a kiss.

Wending Our Way Through Crunchytown

A couple friends and I recently drove from Winston to the Smokies to see our friend Jenn get married (congrats! -- & more on the wedding later). Since my iPod was dead, we were reduced to listening to North Carolina radio for the entire trip. Which is awful... just awful. It seems like 95% of the stations are Christian Contemporary, or Pop-Country. Blech.

Luckily, a small oasis of music goodness was found when we passed through Asheville. We found a station there that was playing the Bluegrass Music Awards, and heard a couple gems. The one that really stuck out was Del McCoury's "Moneyland." I just thought it was awesome (here's a link).

We had enough time to make a lightning tour of Asheville before continuing to the wedding. We bought some cupcakes at "The Cupcake Corner" (a store which pretty much just sells... um... I can't remember), and then I got to the all-important task of seeing if I could locate some cold-brewed iced coffee for the road. We were on a tight schedule, so I wasn't quite able to find what I was looking for (more on this later also), but in half an hour we passed enough strange-looking people to convince me that Asheville truly was the great Granola Paradise I had heard so much about. Yes my friends: The legend is real.

In turn, this inspired me to write my own lyrics to be sung to the tune of "Moneyland."

CRUNCHYTOWN

Now it seems crunchy to me
When the people you see
Are reakin' of patchouli
As you wend your way through town

If you score some pot
Then you got a shot
To make more friends than not
If you pass that stuff around

You can go hikin' the Blue Ridge
Or catch a show at the Orange Peel
Spend some time at Malaprop's Books
Or find yourself a vegan meal

It's a crunchy nirvana
Stocked with marijuana
And its home to head shops
And white boys with dreadlocks
Its Crunchytown
Oh it might seem phony
'Til you're drunk and stoney
Its Crunchytown

Aaawooooooh, crunchy crunchy crunchy crunchy crunchy
Oooooh, hippie hippie hippie hippie hippie
Woooooooh, crunchy crunchy crunchy crunchy crunchy
Your clothes are made of hemp and you're chompin' on tempeh in Crunchytown

King of Kong: Just trust me

For weeks, I asked some friends to join me for a viewing of a movie called "The King of Kong." MJ for one asked me to describe it, and I told her it was a documentary about guys that play Donkey Kong a lot. Uh... you're not selling me on this one, she said. Just trust me, I said.

OK, so my sell wasn't very good. (My food sells aren't so good either, it appears... Aaron states: "Your food posts turn my stomach.") But in any case, I somehow conned a couple people to join me in watching this thing, and they ended up loving it. So there, you jerks. I know what I'm talking about. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll definitely mock. I'll just point you to the theatrical trailer and ask you all to do the same thing: just trust me on this one.

Little bit of weirdo goes a long way

Last summer around this time I went to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on a ticket I bummed from my friend C.C.B. (you're the best!), and was blindsided by the performance from the very strange Jamie Lidell (this is what I'm talking about...). Jamie brought no band, and so his performance mostly consisted of singing over the top of tracks. The total effect made me think of a very large-scale karaoke rendition of Stevie Wonder songs, but in the end this was forgivable. After all, I don't mind karaoke, and I love the Stevie, and the music was tight (or... whatever it is that the cool people say when music is cool). So I bought his first album Multiply, and proceeded to listen to many of the songs about 60 times (according to iTunes).



Anyway, Jamie Lidell's new album Jim just came out, and it is even better than the first. Jamie has really taken the 70's soul-thing he has going on to the next level, which is great. I have already listened to the first couple tracks about 30 times in the span of the week that I have owned it. And if you are my neighbor, you may have heard me belting out "Another Day" at full volume at two in the morning. For this, I apologize.