Now Playing: The Polyphonic Spree--"Younger Yesterday"
This Saturday will be my last day at the new job. After almost two months, I've been forced to conclude that I can't do both jobs and give them the energy they both deserve, mainly because it's kicking my ass. As the season will only get busier, it would be unfair to them for me to keep working there with a progressively declining rate of effort (and unfair to me as... it's kicking my ass). The plot thickened after I was made "head cook" at my main job a few weeks ago. Don't be fooled--it's really just the job I've been doing for the past three years at greatly expanded hours with much more baking. The good thing is that I'll start doing a lot of R&D at home, which I eagerly anticipate. It's a shame, sort of, as the new crowd is a pretty decent sort, although a little prone to the kind of macho bluster that stereotype generally assigns kitchen workers (if I have to hear anyone say "fatties"--nothing to do with marijuana--one more time...). The results? I"m a little over a grand richer, I've received confirmation of my cooking skills from yet another independent source (everyone said they'd be sorry to see me go), I've managed to save a fair amount of money by not going out as often as I used to (although I miss my friends, and it'll definitely be nice to hang out again), and I've picked up a nice little grab-bag of other prep skills, which will stand me in good stead, if not in my main job, then in my cooking research at home. I've also discovered that I really don't want to end up in the world of fine dining. I suspected this before, but it was nice to have it confirmed. More on that later, maybe.
Stalag 17 (1953): William Holden never quite became the "brand-name" star that semi-contemporaries such as Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne did, which is a shame, because he was a great actor and made some fantastic movies, several with one of Hollywood's greatest directors, Billy Wilder. It may have been because he never really established an easily identifiable on-screen persona, as with Wayne's Paleolithic masculinity and Stewart's aw-shucks shambling (belied in the latter's case with Anthony Mann's tough Westerns and the Hitchcock masterpieces like Rear Window and Vertigo, but still his main folk memory, I think). He came pretty close in some of his movies with Wilder, though, particularly in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Stalag, with a hard-bitten cynicism that probably came too close to that of Humphrey Bogart (his co-star in the next Wilder collaboration, 1954's Sabrina) for him to make it his own. In Stalag, accurately described by Leonard Maltin as the "grandaddy of all World War II POW movies," he plays Sgt. Sefton, an inmate in a German camp for Air Corps sergeants, and widely suspected by his fellows of being the stoolie responsible for all their escape plans going awry. Wilder was one of Hollywood's greatest masters of genre-blending, with liberal dollops of comedy (particularly courtesy of Robert Strauss as the lascivious "Animal," Harvey Lembeck--the future Eric von Zipper in the "Frankie and Annette" Beach Party movies--as the wisecracking Shapiro, and this other guy whose name I don't remember who does genuinely entertaining movie-star impressions) mixed in with the grim seriousness of the situation. While The Great Escape (1963) is a much greater cinematic experience, I think Stalag 17 is actually a better movie. Sefton's the "hero," but it's quite clear that he's more than willing to go out for himself when the circumstances demand it. The paranoia engendered by the stoolie's actions make the moral situation much more ambiguous than in the later POW escape movies, and it's a testament to Wilder's ability that the drama and comedy are so expertly blended (the only false notes being the rather rushed bit in which everyone discovers the stoolie's identity, and one jarringly uncharacteristic move by Sefton towards the end). Peter Graves is in it, too, by the way. That makes two blog entries in a row. You know, people used to make jokes about Michael Caine, but he's fucking everywhere!!! One couldn't take leave of it, either, without mentioning Otto Preminger's hilarious, Werner Klemperer-inspiring performance as the commandant (who finds it necessary to put on his boots when getting a call from Berlin and then take them off again when he hangs up).
Lily Allen, Alright, Still... (2007): I probably first read about Lily Allen in Entertainment Weekly, and just as probably rolled my eyes both at the shit-talking she was apparently doing concerning the eight billion or so other hip-hoppy young female British warblers currently extant, and at the revelation that her father was Keith Allen. The latter is an actor with whom I've never had a particular problem, although one's encouraged to check out this glorious review of an apparently awful movie from 1993 with a decidedly gimlet eye cast upon Mr. Allen's thespian talents. So imagine my surprise when I was at Aubree's in Ypsilanti one day and heard a wonderfully catchy little song on the speakers that I later discovered was Lily Allen's "Smile." That was the last I heard of it for a while; you'd think with the five Dave Matthews songs 107.1 plays every hour, they'd have time to play a few more Allen tunes, but apparently not. Then my friend in Akron sent me a few mix CDs, one of them with another Allen song, "Take What You Take." The rest of the CD doesn't quite live up to these two catchy numbers, but it's rather good, with "Everything's Just Wonderful" and "Nan You're A Window Shopper" particular highlights. The sound's a pretty good example of the pan-genre stuff that presently exemplifies the zeitgeist, with hip-hop and folky elements softened and mixed by Mark Ronson's production and Allen's at once vulgar and refreshing delivery, particularly on "Knock 'Em Out." Every time I think that global music's irrevocably sliding in quality, something like this comes along and informs me that, no, I'm just getting prematurely old.
Updated: 17 September 2007 5:01 PM EDT
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