from Bruce
Anecdotes
Critics
• After seeing actress Diana Rigg in a brief nude scene in the play Abelard and Heloise, caustic critic John Simon wrote, “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.” The next day, as Ms. Rigg went to the theater, she hoped that no one would recognize her. Fortunately, all of the cast members knew better than to mention the review. After a few weeks, however, she began to think the review funny and soon started quoting it. (By the way, Ms. Rigg knows an actress — not herself — who saw Mr. Simon in a New York restaurant and took the opportunity to dump a plate of potato salad on his head.)
• Robert Benchley was asked to become drama critic for Life, a humorous magazine, but he was reluctant to accept the job. Workers at Life therefore asked him to stop by and look around. When Mr. Benchley arrived, they shoved him into the critic’s office and locked the door. Mr. Benchley worked for Life for eight years.
• For years, Percy Hammond was happy as a feared drama critic for the Chicago Tribune. Upon being invited to move to New York City and perform criticism upon Broadway productions, he hesitated, saying, “I’m 47, and it is very difficult for me to make new enemies at my time of life.”
• Drama critic Robert Benchley once watched a play that used dialect. Mr. Benchley could stand it no longer when these lines were spoken, “Me Nubi. Nubi good girl. Nubi stay?” He stood up to leave, and told his neighbors, “Me Bobby. Bobby bad boy. Bobby go.”
• The critics hated Mae West’s controversial stage success Catherine Was Great. Ms. West commented, “The way the boys wrote up the show, I’m surprised they weren’t raided. And to think I took out the stronger lines — on account of Lent.”
Dance
• Lee Schubert produced the Broadway show Americana, which featured some of Doris Humphrey’s dances. Mr. Schubert came to a rehearsal, watched for a while, and then said, “Some of the dances are too long. Why can’t they be cut down to the high spots?” Ms. Humphrey replied, “Your contract said these dances are to be intact.” Later, at a dress rehearsal, Mr. Schubert again said, “Miss Humphrey, too long!” This time, she replied, “Mr. Schubert, please keep your predatory hands off my dances.” Mr. Schubert shouted, “I’ll see you never have your dances done on Broadway again.” She answered, “That will be just fine with me.” Then she asked, “Do you know what ‘predatory’ means?”
• Grover Dale was hired to dance the role of Snowboy on Broadway in West Side Story. However, the success of Chita Rivera singing “America” caused a problem for his “Cool” dance, which followed it. Mr. Dale starts the scene doing pushups, and the applause for “America” was so prolonged that instead of doing three or four pushups, he found himself doing 10, then 20, then 30, then 40 pushups. Worried about whether he would have enough energy left to dance, he knew that he had to do something — so he collapsed, seemingly exhausted by the pushups. The audience laughed, and choreographer Jerome Robbins congratulated him afterward on his quick thinking.
• When Simon Robinson became a personal assistant to ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, one of the first things he says he learned is that “dance is pain.” Mr. Nureyev was dancing in The King and I in Cleveland, and a female dancer danced for a few minutes, then exited — and collapsed in great pain. Mr. Robinson came forward to help her, but she told him, “F**k off. Get out of my way.” With a great effort, she straightened up, made another entrance, danced a few more minutes, then exited — and staggered to her dressing room. The other dancers paid little attention to her — such a scene was not new to them.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Señor Brujo"
Album: CUMBIAS PSICODELICAS: VOL. 1 Ayahuasca (70’s Peru Cumbia Psych / Funk / Latin Soul) KILLER MASTERPIECE !?!?!
Artist: Los Radiantes
Record Company: repsychled
Record Company Location: Lima, Peru
Info:
“Repsychled: Peruvian independent label. We manufacture high-quality reissues from Peruvian rock music of 60’s & 70’s. Most of them came from original master tape and were remastered very carefully to avoid any distortion who affects the original intention of the albums’ recording. All our releases are fully licensed from labels or artists. Some of our reissue include bonus and unreleased tracks.”
Pako Buelna, a fan, wrote, “Great album and collection of songs. they somehow feel fresh and are really easy to listen to even if you don’t know Spanish. Favorite track: ‘Conj. La Miel - Mulata.’”
Matthew Woodman, a fan, wrote, “I can’t wait for volume II. The opening of ‘Las Oleadas’ is sublime.”
Price: €1 (EURO) for track; €5 (EURO) for 14-track album
Genre: 70’s Peru Cumbia Psych / Funk / Latin Soul
Links:
CUMBIAS PSICODELICAS: VOL. 1
repsychled
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Reader Comment
Baby Shower
Hey Marty ...
honestly…you just can’t make this shit up…
….gunfire erupted over gifts at a baby shower at 'Pittsburgh’s Polka Hot Spot’, the Kinloch Fire Hall in New Kensington, PA…
New Venture
Michael Egan
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
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Bonus Links
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bit cooler than seasonal.
Weekend Box Office
‘Shang-Chi’
If you seek evidence that theaters are well on the way to recovery, look no further than Disney’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Free Guy.” They continue to thrive, while Warner Bros.’ “Dune” opened well in its initial foreign territories.
If you suspect that exhibition issues abound, this weekend saw three new adult-oriented releases, led by Clint Eastwood’s “Cry Macho,” all of which had weak or worse domestic debuts.
“Dune” opened in 24 territories (starting either Wednesday or Thursday, in most) to an estimated $37 million, five weeks ahead of its domestic debut. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic performed as well or better than most recent hits in these countries. The film benefited from release right after its Venice premiere; it also benefits from better playing conditions, with many places lifting Covid restrictions. In the U.S., “Dune” will open with day-and-date on HBO Max; these dates offer no home access.
Beyond the blockbusters, other stats are discouraging. With $48 million across all films, this weekend ranks as the lowest in three months, and reflects 40 percent of the same weekend in 2019. Our rolling four-week comparison to 2019 dipped to 66 percent.
“Cry Macho” is #3, but managed only $4.5 million. (Like all Warners movies this year, it premiered day-and-date on HBO Max.) Surveys show its audience was 62 percent age 45 and older, and 66 percent white. Those demographics don’t propel ticket sales.
‘Shang-Chi’
In Talks
Howard Shore
While neither writer/director Peter Jackson nor the original cast are part of Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Ring series, Deadline hears there may well be an important point of familiarity. Howard Shore, whose work on the Middle Earth trilogy won him three Oscars, is in talks to compose the music for the TV series.
This is an important development for a series that carries a reported cost of $465 million for its first season, making it the most expensive TV series of all time. The so-far untitled series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novels, recently wrapped principal photography on Season 1, and is scheduled to premiere on Prime Video Sept. 2, 2022. Season 1 post production will continue in New Zealand through June 2022, and pre-production on Season Two will begin concurrently in the UK right after Jan. 1, 2022.
Amazon recently announced that move from New Zealand — where all three LOTR and three The Hobbit films were shot — to the UK earlier this year, and the elaborate sets built for the show will be shipped to the UK. It is unclear where exactly in the UK The Lord Of the Rings will shoot as part of the streaming studio’s efforts to expand its footprint in the country. Amazon, which has multiple series filming in the UK, is currently in the process of booking stages to house the sets. The late author Tolkien was English, and Tolkien reportedly based the Shire’s landscapes, climate, flora, fauna on rural England, The first season shot in Auckland.
Shore, whose film credits include The Hobbit trilogy, Twilight Saga, Hugo, The Departed, Pieces Of A Woman, Philadelphia, The Silence of the Lambs and many others, provided the unforgettable and often ominous score that framed the stakes in the battle between Sauron’s evil forces of Orcs, Goblins, and Uruk-Hai forces against the men, hobbits, elves and dwarves in Middle Earth.
Howard Shore
Hits Out
Nicki Minaj
Singer Nicki Minaj has posted the personal details of journalists who attempted to contact the source of her controversial Covid vaccine views on social media.
The targets of her ire were Sharlene Rampersad, who works for Trinidad’s Guardian Media Limited, and Daily Mail reporter James Fielding, the Daily Beast reported.
Minaj was left irritated after reporters attempted to contact her family members as well as her cousin’s friend, who she claimed “became impotent” after receiving a Covid vaccination.
Journalists, understandably, went looking for the man she identified – and Minaj retaliated.
"Sharlene Rampersad B***H YOUR DAYS ARE F*****G NUMBERED YOU DIRTY HOE," she wrote on Instagram, in addition to posting screenshots of the reporter’s attempts to contact her friends and family. Minaj also shared Rampersad’s phone number and image, along with Fielding’s business card.
Nicki Minaj
Holocaust Name Monument
Amsterdam
King Willem-Alexander officially unveiled a new memorial in the heart of Amsterdam's historic Jewish Quarter on Sunday honoring more than 102,000 Dutch victims of the Holocaust, and the Dutch prime minister vowed that it would remind citizens today to be vigilant against antisemitism.
Designed by Polish-Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind, the memorial is made up of walls shaped to form four Hebrew letters spelling out a word that translates as “In Memory Of.”
The walls are built using bricks, each of which is inscribed with the name, date of birth and age when they died of one of the more than 102,000 Jews, Roma and Sinti who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps during World War II or who died on their way to the camps.
Jacques Grishaver, chairman of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee, officially opened the monument with the king in the presence of dignitaries and Holocaust survivors. After walking through the gates, each picked up a white stone and placed it in front of a commemorative wall, a Jewish tradition when visiting graves.
The memorial is built close to a former concert hall where Jews rounded up by Amsterdam's wartime Nazi occupiers were held before being sent to the camps.
Amsterdam
Money Trail
Kevin
The two men stand shoulder to shoulder, posing for the camera almost like father and son. On the left is former President Donald Trump, flashing that money grin, the light glinting off his golden-yellow tie. On the right is the Republican congressman who, more than any other, has hitched his fortunes to Trump and positioned himself to fill the vacuum left at the top of the Republican Party after Trump’s 2020 defeat. To Trump, he’s known as “my Kevin.” To the rest of us, he’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California.
For four years, McCarthy dutifully served as one of Trump’s most loyal wingmen in Congress, defending the president after the latest racist tweet, running interference in both impeachment cases, and generally making himself available to do whatever necessary to defend the MAGA cause. When Trump tumbled down the conspiratorial rabbit hole after the last election, McCarthy followed after him, adding his name to a long-shot lawsuit seeking to overturn the result in several blue states and voting to invalidate the vote count in Arizona and Pennsylvania mere hours after the January 6th insurrection. McCarthy’s alliance with Trump has served him well: He now stands at the precipice of becoming the most powerful member in Congress, next in line to be speaker of the House if the GOP wins back the majority in 2022.
Yet McCarthy’s embrace of MAGAdom is rich with irony. Long before he was “my Kevin,” McCarthy was a “Young Gun” conservative, the face of a new generation alongside the likes of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor (remember him?) that couldn’t be more aligned with big business and the K Street crowd. McCarthy was the swampy Beltway creature that Trump raged against, the kind of Republican who was more at ease at a corporate fundraiser than a tarmac rally, the sort of insider who said behind closed doors that Trump was on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s payroll. (He later said he was joking.)
This slimy story, which is laid out in documents obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals how a crew of lobbyists, political consultants, and big-money donors seemingly masqueraded as grassroots tea-party populists in a bid to bolster McCarthy’s credibility with Trump supporters. The point of this scheme was to help McCarthy defeat a far-right challenger in an important intra-party election, elevating him to become the House GOP leader and ensuring that a corporate ally remained at the head of the party. For all of Trump’s bluster about draining the swamp, the dark-money campaign to elevate McCarthy shows how the GOP’s corporate enablers not only endured but also adapted their tactics to be murkier than ever — all while ensuring that the future of the Republican Party remained in friendly hands.
And here’s the kicker: The country’s broken election system and the willingness of dark-money groups to push the legal limits mean that the public wouldn’t know about this deceptive campaign to help McCarthy until years later, far too late for anyone to act on it.
Kevin
Tar Sands Pipeline
Minnesota
Along the eastern boundary of the White Earth Indian Reservation in north-western Minnesota, Indigenous Anishinaabe wild rice harvesters Jerry and Jim Libby set down a row of wooden pallets into the mud just beyond the dock of Upper Wild Rice Lake. It was a clear day, and tight, lush clumps of green rice heads were visible across the lake’s horizon.
In a typical year, the entrance to this – one of a long necklace of wild rice lakes in northern Minnesota to which the region’s Indigenous people flock every year in the late summer – would be covered in at least two feet of water. But now it is composed of suspended sediment as solid as chocolate pudding, through which the Libbys need to create a makeshift ramp simply to carry their canoe out to the waterline.
Minnesota is weathering an historic drought, but there is another problem beyond the weather: Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline has taken a substantial toll on watersheds in the region, including through a permit to pump five billion gallons of water for construction. In the case of Upper Wild Rice Lake, a road construction contractor named Knife River Construction stuck a pump directly in the lake this past June, sucking out an unknown quantity of water, which locals suspect was related to the use of heavy trucks for the pipeline.
The Indigenous-led struggle against Line 3, which seeks to move 930,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen daily from Alberta to a shipping and refinery hub in Superior, Wisconsin, has been the biggest environmental and Indigenous land protection campaign in the US this summer. More than 900 people have been arrested opposing the pipeline, including nearly 70 who were kettled in late August during protests outside Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s residence in Minneapolis.
Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands bitumen. Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company, has announced it will begin sending oil through the pipeline next month.
Minnesota
FBI Raid
Beverly Hills
After the FBI seized Joseph Ruiz's life savings during a raid on a safe deposit box business in Beverly Hills, the unemployed chef went to court to retrieve his $57,000. A judge ordered the government to tell Ruiz why it was trying to confiscate the money.
Ruiz’s income was too low for him to have that much money, and his side business selling bongs made from liquor bottles suggested he was an unlicensed pot dealer, the agent wrote. The FBI also said a dog had smelled unspecified drugs on Ruiz’s cash.
The FBI was wrong. When Ruiz produced records showing the source of his money was legitimate, the government dropped its false accusation and returned his money.
Ruiz is one of roughly 800 people whose money and valuables the FBI seized from safe deposit boxes they rented at the U.S. Private Vaults store in a strip mall on Olympic Boulevard.
But six months after the raid, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have produced no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the vast majority of box holders whose belongings the government is trying to keep.
Beverly Hills
Craters
The Moon
You only have to take a look at the Moon to see that it's had something of a rough time during its roughly 4.5-billion-year history, but a new study suggests that it's survived more early asteroid hits than its surface actually shows today.
The new research proposes that some of the oldest impacts on the Moon left near-invisible imprints because they were striking a softer surface: The global ocean of magma that covered the Moon in its youth before it cooled and solidified.
These relatively soft landings, leaving next to no permanent trace of ever having happened, could explain why the Moon as it currently looks doesn't match up with what scientists think happened to it in the first billion years or so.
"These large impact craters, often referred to as impact basins – formed during the lunar magma ocean solidification more than four billion years ago – should have produced different looking craters, in comparison to those formed later in geologic history," says planetary scientist Katarina Miljkovic from Curtin University in Australia.
The idea of a global magma ocean on the Moon is by no means new, but the research digs deeper into the potential timeline of magma and asteroid hits – and tries to line it up with what we think we know about what was happening in the Solar System at the time.
The Moon
Aluminum Wrap
Wildfires
Martin Diky said he panicked as a huge wildfire started racing down a slope toward his wooden house near Lake Tahoe.
The contractor had enough time to do some quick research and decided to wrap his mountain home with an aluminum protective covering. The material that can withstand intensive heat for short periods resembles tin foil from the kitchen drawer but is modeled after the tent-like shelters that wildland firefighters use as a last resort to protect themselves when trapped by flames.
Diky, who lives most of the time in the San Francisco Bay Area, bought $6,000 worth of wrapping from Firezat Inc. in San Diego, enough to cover his 1,400-square-foot (130-square-meter) second home on the edge of the small California community of Meyers.
The flexible aluminum sheets that Diky affixed to his $700,000 home are not widely used because they are pricey and difficult to install, though they have saved some properties, including historic cabins managed by the U.S. government.
The company where Diky bought his wraps gets about 95% of its sales from the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. Firezat Inc. founding president Dan Hirning estimates the Forest Service has wrapped 600 to 700 buildings, bridges, communication towers and other structures in national forests this year alone.
Wildfires
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