ROLE MODEL: GENE WILDER

TCM had an excellent one-hour interview with actor Gene Wilder this week. Tivo had recorded it as a suggestion and I almost deleted it after reading a mediocre review in Variety, but I'm very glad I didn't. Alec Baldwin hosts an excellent discussion. Wilder is clearly a very intelligent man and committed actor. Actors in particular should see it.

Very highly recommended.

Congratulations to ME!

At 7:22 PM last night, an American Idol fan from Wichita, Kansas became the 10,000th visitor to my blog. His visit may have lasted less than a second, but it still counts!

I started this blog a year and a half ago as a way to communicate with students. It didn't work; instead I get baseball fans. Oh, well, it still works out to about 20 visits a day, and even excluding immediate family, that means I'm popular. Not enough to sell ads, but popular enough that I continue to write baseball updates.

Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends

AMERICAN MASTERS on PBS recently presented "Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends," produced by and featuring Clint Eastwood. It's pretty good. Bennett is not my favorite singer, stylistically, his bel canto is a bit old-fashioned, and he never could swing the way Sinatra did. But he's pretty much the last of his generation now.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the doc is seeing Alec Baldwin doing Tony on SNL. His impression is frigging amazing. They did the hair and nose makeup perfectly, and Baldwin does his voice and moves perfectly. It's eerie.

Worth watching.

Mixer Training

I will be hosting 310/508 mixer training sessions for the next two Friday afternoons. USC students in any sound classes are welcome to sit in on them. These are particularly useful for people who hope to be employed in the department as a mixer on 310/508 projects.

The material is as follows:

Friday 2/29 2-5 PM Dub A Euphonix Training
Friday 3/ 2-5 PM Dub B Icon Training

Please contact me if you are interested in attending.

GANGLAND

I've been watching an outstanding series on the History channel called GANGLAND. It's a brutally honest series about the many, many gangs in America. The show goes into great details about specific gangs, and has incredible footage of gangs in action and interviews with former gang members and police officers. The two best episodes were about the Hell's Angels (I can't believe this even made it to air) and the huge problem the military is currently having with gang members working within the war (including skinheads).

Even here in LA I learned about the Mexican gangs in LA. It's pretty scary.

I highly recommend the series.

AN UNREASONABLE MAN

AN UNREASONABLE MAN is a documentary about Ralph Nader.

It's hard to even write the word Nader without becoming overwhelmed with emotion. My wife and I were active in the 2000 election and it was painfully disheartening when Nader refused to pull out of the election, even though it was obvious that he was going to force a close race into a possible loss for the Democrats. With 7 years of hindsight, one could only imagine what would - and would not - have happened if Nader had dropped out and Gore had won. Perhaps no war, no Patriot Act, and no erosion of human rights here in our own country.

So I was a little afraid to watch the film. However, they approached the issue in the first few minutes as though they were going to spend the next 120 minutes haranguing Nader, which made me feel better about watching it.

Then they did something very smart; they spent an hour talking about Nader's accomplishments in the 60s and 70s. I knew all of it; I lived through much of it, yet I had forced it out of my mind with the sheer hatred I had built up for the man between 2000 and 2004. And throughout the hour, my opinion of the man slowly changed. Suddenly I began to feel sorry for him. Here's a guy who spent more than 30 years of his life doing amazing things for our country. So much of what we take for granted in our lives was started by him and his small core of followers in the 60s. And now it's very likely that he will be remembered for only one thing. Making Bush our president. Twice.

The film continues to humanize him by talking about his New England upbringing, and his family's involvement in local politics, very similar to my own.

Then suddenly the film leaps forward in time from the election of Reagan to the 2000 election, a leap of 20 years. It's a strange edit, but they spend a lot of time going into the election and how Nader botched things for America. There is a lengthy but very well-edited sequence intercutting his defenders with his detractors. Both sides are so overcome with emotion that neither really sounds intelligent in the argument.

This is definitely a documentary worth seeing, regardless of what your opinion of the man is or was. It is very thorough (almost to a fault, the running time feels long) and although the majority of the film canonizes his past, the important parts criticize his current involvement in politics.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A year ago, I wrote one of my most popular postings about all the things I have to be thankful for.

This year I have all the same things to appreciate, and one thing more... our dog Riley. My wife Rachel found Riley for us last January, and he has been a hugely positive influence in our lives. Dogs are wonderful. He is a pisher at times, but more often than not, he is a bundle of undying love. I always feel better when I get home and see him jumping for joy (literally). I think everyone should have a dog.

This year we celebrated with a fantastic dinner, and then watching USC beat Arizona State, which brings USC one step closer to the Rose Bowl. They still have to beat UCLA next week as their final regular game of the season.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Judgement Day

Only a few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who had made a few documentaries, and we were talking about how PBS has fallen apart as a source for intelligent television. I had pointed that how I knew scientists who had tried to get documentaries on the air, but were rebuffed when it was explained to them they they could not mention evolution or global warming because they were "hot topics."

Imagine my surprise when NOVA finally grew some gonads, and this week's episode was a two-hour exploration of the Dover, Penn. court case from three years ago, when science was put on trial in the courtroom (yet again). Honestly, it took a lot of courage to show the "Intelligent Design" argument from both sides... there really are NOT two sides to the argument.

It's just appalling to me that 150 years after Darwin, people are still arguing Creationism.

The real issue is that the founding fathers were wise enough to demand a separation between church and state, and here we are 230 years later, and the religious right are still trying to reunite the two.

This show should be required viewing for every school child, not only to learn the scientific method, but to understand how some people will blur education with a personal agenda. In this case, religion is used as blanket protection against any sort of criticism or serious examination.

Office Hours Revised Again

Revised Office Hours

Thurs 11/15 3:30 - 4:30 PM

Thurs 11/29 3:30 - 4:30 PM

Likely to be it for the semester. However, I will be around a LOT for 546 mixes, so contact me if you need to meet at another time.

Hearing Loss Update

The correct numbers for what I quoted off my head in class:


Noise Exposure
Level - Time
90 dB - 8 hours
95 dB - 4 hours
100 dB - 2 hour
105 dB - 1 hour
110 dB - 30 min
120 dB- 7.5 min
130 dB - potentially instantaneous

Hearnet.com
HEI.org

MPSE Sound Show!

I highly recommend the MPSE Sound Show for people interesting in learning more about the sound editing process. Click on the image below for more info:

SICKO

There are an awful lot of things I don't like about Michael Moore and his films. Most obvious is the terrible influence he has had on doc filmmakers that has encouraged the filmmakers to make themselves the stars of their own movies. He also is incredibly manipulative in his films, such as bringing 911 volunteer rescue workers to Cuba for "free" treatment. And "anonymously" donating $12,000 to his harshest critic to help his wife with medical care. (Is it anonymous when you mention it in a movie???)

But even with all the criticisms, SICKO is a very powerful movie. Perhaps it's because I have first-hand dealings with the health-care industry, both the good and the bad, that made it such an emotional experience for me, but I suspect anyone who has had health issues in their immediate family will understand his criticisms of HMOs. Unfortunately, his face will probably turn off a lot of people. And, he criticizes Hilary Clinton for taking money from health care industries, even though she is perhaps our best hope for health care reform in this country, so he will even turn off some liberal democrats.

Nonetheless, it's an important discussion and I think every American should see the film.

Office Hours

In addition to my normal Thursday office hours (3:30 PM - 4:30 PM) I will be adding office hours on Friday afternoons as well. For at least the next three weeks these hours will be 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM. (After 10/19 they may change.)

In addition, I will also be around briefly tomorrow (Tuesday). Please be sure to contact me for an appointment if you need to see me.

Happy Anniversary to Me!

The actual official first anniversary of this Blog was back in August, but I thought I'd take a moment now to celebrate, what with the lack of recent posts.

I started this Blog as a way to communicate with my students about classes, movies, music and other things that interest me. Looking at the "Labels" I use to categorize each post, you'll see over 130 posts about movies, most of them reviews of films I have seen. I see about 60 movies a year in the theater, but I see the vast majority of them during "Awards Season," which starts around November and ends with the Oscars. So this time of year is very slow for movie posts.

The next-highest number of posts is for baseball. Last year I wrote so much about baseball that students stopped coming to the Blog, so this year I promised I would only write about events I had personally attended. This year I saw 40 baseball games in person. With post-season coming up and the Dodgers out of it, I'll probably write a little about some of the other teams I follow (the Angels and the Red Sox in particular) even if I don't make it to any more games in person (although I certainly hope to!).

I've been to 2 USC football games so far this year. With baseball dwindling, I'll probably start posting more about football. I've been a Patriots fan my whole life, and even with the cheating incident, I'll probably continue to follow them. I also follow the Bills because the head coach is a friend of my family, but they are off to a weak start, are decimated by injuries, and are in the toughest division.

So don't stop reading just because it's been slow lately, it will definitely pick up as we get later in the year.

Fall Office Hours

My office hours this semester will be Thursdays, 3:30 - 4:30 PM. I will also have office hours on Fridays starting October 5th, and on some Wednesdays later in the semester.

American Masters: Atlantic Records: The House that Ahmet Built

This is an absolutely fantastic documentary on PBS about record producer Ahmet Ertegun,
the producer for Atlantic Records, who was played (not very accurately) by Curtis Armstrong in the movie RAY. He was an amazingly important person in the history of American music, and e died shortly after this doc was made. It's great that his work is immortalized in this film.

Highly recommended for fans of music history.

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film

PBS ran an excellent 4-hour documentary about Andy Warhol. If you are a fan of his, I highly recommend it. A few years ago there was an excellent exhibition at MOCA LA comparing his early commercial work with his later works, which I found fascinating. In fact, we went in the wrong entrance and ended up looking at the later work first, which made it very interesting to see his early drawings. Even if you're not a fan of his art, I think any art student would have to admit that he had an enormous influence on contemporary art. I think John Cage was interesting as a composer because many of the pieces he wrote challenged the audience to think about the definition of music.Warhol's works did the same, asking the audience to think about the definition of art.

I've seen several films about Warhol, including a couple of documentaries, and this one is by far the most all-encompassing. Of particular interest is the first hour, which covers the early part of his life, and which is the part least covered in other films.

Although it might seem like 4 hours is a long time to spend on one person, you still get the feeling when you're done that you have barely learned about this man. That's not a reflection on the quality of the doc, it's a reflection on how complex he was, and how much of an enigma he made himself to the public. He was one of the most famous people in the 20th century, yet most people know almost nothing about him, even people who were close to him.

INDIE SEX

INDIE SEX is a good doc series about the history of sex in cinema that has been running on the Independent Film Channel. It's pretty graphic, and not for everyone. My only problem is that they tend to lump all types of sex scenes together, from erotic and comic scenes, to rape and incest. There are definitely some unnecessarily explicit scenes in some films referred to in the documentary that might have been more effective if done differently, yet the film defends them.

Nonetheless, it's worth viewing for students of film.

Les Paul

I finally got around to watching the AMERICAN MASTERS documentary on Les Paul, the brilliant guitar player who was instrumental (pardon the pun) in advancing recording technologies for overdubbing, as well as designing solid-body guitars. Without him, the recording methods used in virtually all styles of music would not exist. The film is great, it explores his whole life and the many periods and styles in it. He's currently 92 years old and still performs publicly every week in New York.

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of recording technology, as well as fans of Paul and his wife Mary Ford.

Cinema Audio Society Quarterly

The new issue of the Cinema Audio Society Quarterly Magazine (with four articles by yours truly) is now available for download here.