Whew!
OK, I know I said I’d put a Fred and Ginger post….but this number from the Nicolas Brothers has always been a favorite of mine also….and those splits….I get sore just watching!
You know you’d want to….
Car Nerd Ron here… (Hey, I’m from Detroit!)
Suppose you were a newly successful French film director in the mid ’70’s…
And, because you wanted to, you mounted a camera (with one can of 35mm film, 8 minutes worth) on the front of your car.
Where would you drive? Paris, of course!
So at 5:30AM, you’d make that drive….
ignoring traffic, red lights, pedestrians, and the very idea of limiting your speed at all!
Let ‘er rip! Claude Lelouch’s Rendezvous.
“There’s nobody left!”
Is this serious? Nope! It is a bit NSFW (and loud!) but I’ve been getting laughs with this….. I love the very last line.
A musical interlude…
Here’s a little something for our cat dancing bloggeress to get those kitties bouncing around the room too! Hat Tip to you, Mighty Amba!
Why, yes I did go.
I went to the Altan show that I had mentioned earlier last night. Pics and video interview over at Fluffy Stuffin. Enjoy!
A bit of color…
Normally, I do my Fred and Ginger posts over at my blog, Fluffy Stuffin, but I thought I’d share this one with the Ambiance readership.
Color Fred and Ginger from 1939! (there is no sound) This is from the film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the last film they made for RKO in the 1930’s. They did a color film 10 years later for MGM, The Barkleys of Broadway, but alas, no color for them in the RKO days except for little snippets like this. They were going to have a color sequence in 1938’s Carefree for the song “I used to be color blind”, but RKO cheapened out when Fred’s solo film in 1937, A Damsel in Distress, failed badly. This sequence is quite odd; it’s a fantasy dream sequence, mostly shot in slo-mo…and having it in color would have been cool! Hollywood experimented with color in small sections of black and white films, (The Women comes to mind) but they pulled out all the stops for the big blockbusters like Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind. I believe this bit we see here was shot with Ginger’s own camera, which she would take to sets:
An old friend returns….
One of the things I always liked to do is to follow a band, especially a band that you see up close in a relatively smaller venue.
I have several of these favorites, most of whom I’ve seen at the wonderful Ark venue, which has moved around Ann Arbor in several places before their excellent present location downtown. As I’ve gotten older the worst part of the place is the steep climb of stairs, done as quickly as possible to get ahead of the oncoming hordes. As is my wont, I always try to sit up front, as close to the band as I can get. That alone is its own special experience.
I was completely unfamiliar with Irish music (except the treacly pseudo-Bing Crosby pop) when a friend took me to see a highly thought of band….and they were awful! But Greg promised me the next band would not disappoint, and 25 years later, they still do not: Altan.
It’s hard to describe the joy you get from what to you is “new” music; music that doesn’t fit the cliches you “know”, music that shows you so many great things about the culture and the performers…I was buzzed about it for weeks after hearing them the first time, which in turn, has led me to see quite a bit of Irish and Scottish music, more than I ever thought I would growing up! Not everything reverts back to childhood joys!
There’s also something else — seeing a band over a long period of time. You want both the familar and the new, to see where they want to go musically! It doesn’t always work out, as I recall one tour where Altan was pressured to be a bit more “New Agey” than I think they were naturally inclined to be, but that’s the biz for you! If you love them, you stick with them in the hope of this being just a phase.
The moment I’ll always remember is when, Frankie Kennedy, one of the original founders of the band, the husband of the lead singer/fiddle player Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh passed away from cancer at a quite young age. I wasn’t sure if they would tour, but they did with Mairead in black, without the band mentioning his passing during the show. This lent a somber note to those of us who followed the band, but it was the first encore that nearly did me in. She came out to sing a song that she had done as a duet with Frankie playing the flute — alone. I couldn’t look, and covered my eyes so I wouldn’t get upset. Later, she upbraided me for that telling me that if I had started crying, she’d start crying, and she was on stage! Crying — and drinking — was for backstage.
A video taste of her singing for you…
I can’t wait to see them again, if only just to get in some solid footstomping to some of the more lively jigs and reels, like this one
If Altan comes your way….I couldn’t recommend a band more highly. If I can scrape together the $25 I’ll see them March 4th.
Captain Williard eventually becomes President on West Wing
continuing the Apocalypse Now! theme…
update: Martin Sheen gets demoted in the post title from Col. to Captain as he was in the film. [nod to Icepick]
Amen, Sister!
Ron here. I, too, will be having a melancholic Christmas, but I think for different reasons than Amba. My best friends mother passed away suddenly, almost 2 weeks ago (!), and this has caused her and her family considerable difficulty, as Grandma was a big part of financially helping a family with 2 kids and a lot of struggling themselves. I just saw her mother at a wonderful Thanksgiving and now… gone. I’m still having a hard time grasping it myself. And me? Things are bad for me and may get worse….I’m trying to keep myself in my home of now 26 years, but I’m having a hard time doing so. Even I’m unsure what will happen, as I have no family of my own to turn to.
But while Peter, Paul and Mary are one way to look at a Gloomy Tinsel Season, I’ve always chosen another song: Fairytale of New York.
My first thought was, hey, shouldn’t this be an Amba song, too? Sure, why not. It’s a duet between Shane MacGowan (poster child for British Dentistry) and Kirsty MacColl, and rapidly becoming a New Holiday standard, one I hope to record with my friend CamieVog someday. So, let’s hope the New Year brings better things for us all, God bless us.
Younger still…and still ridiculous
There’s 1962 Me in Harry Truman’s Presidential Limo with my Old Man (still wearing hats!) taken in the Henry Ford Museum.
Ambiance 