Guido's Oscar Thoughts

This week on Between You and Me we talked Oscars with the Mom and Pop of Pop Culture, Julie Crabb & Jack Nachbar.  Here are Steve Downing's (Guido's) thoughts:

LIFE DURING WARTIME

            Watching the Academy Awards makes me squirm. Me, squirming, is not a pretty picture, so I tend to avoid those near occasions of sin. It’s not that I hate movies or the rich and famous people who make them, though I understand some of those folks are hateful. It has more to do with the unconditional, unmitigated, unabashed artifice of the whole ceremony. It’s a separate reality.

            For yours truly, Oscar night plays like a movie about the making of movies and the aftermath of the making of movies, while thumbing its nose at the three cardinal rules of the making of movies. 1) You need at least two stirring, eventually converging plotlines. 2) You need dynamic, three-dimensional sets-and-setting, preferably involving volcanoes and the deep blue sea. 3) And you need characters who’ll convince you they believe what they’re saying. How often does any of this happen at the Academy Awards?

            Or maybe it’s more (or less) complicated than that.  When I watch a movie, if I don’t care, really care---viscerally, emotionally---about anyone in the story, when there’s no moral difference between characters, or between means and ends, I’ll fall asleep. The narrative has to matter to me, ethically and aesthetically. Otherwise….

            Between you and me, Oscar night is a movie that, if tested against its own putative criteria, would wind up in its entirety on the cutting-room floor. I have to admit, though: after hearing Heidi and John’s conversation with Frank DeCaro on the Morning Show Friday, I’m thinking that a dinner party featuring the recipes of dead rich and famous people (The Dead Celebrity Cookbook) might be just the ticket for the likes of me. Barbecued Lamb ala Frank the Chairman of the Board Sinatra, anyone? Let’s watch the Awards with the sound off and Talking Heads/Popular Favorites as our soundtrack.

Steve "Guido" Downing's take on Christmas Music

This week Grant Frashier hosts KAXE's Between You and Me on Saturday from 10-noon.  His topic is Christmas Music.  Do you have a favorite?  Email us or call during the show 218-326-1234.  

CHRISTMAS BLUES by Steve Downing

            Between you and me, I do not love Christmas music, which I grew up singing, around Mom’s piano and in church choirs and school choruses. And playing, on every instrument I ever picked up. And it’s true that Dodger and I have a pile of Christmas CDs. But, with notable exceptions, I do not love it. Partly because of the brain-killing repetition. You hear the stuff, endlessly, hourly, from Halloween until the season’s over, by everybody from Bing Crosby to George Thorogood. On the radio, TV, in stores, out on the street, in the office, church, parking ramps, restrooms. It’s everywhere. You can’t not hear it. And when you achieve my great age, your relationship with Christmas music, as with body-parts and memory and the chainsaw, is simply tuckering out.

            My earliest difficulty with Christmas music, as a logic-challenged young man, was a philosophical dead end. The secular Christmas music had come to seem completely disconnected from the calendar-defining event in Bethlehem. And, more disconcertingly, the sacred music had absolutely nothing to do with what the Holy Day had morphed into: a godless, shameless, commercial lollapalooza. Gifts. Office parties. Gifts. Travel. Gifts. Light displays and fireworks. Gifts. Mass quantities of cookies. And so on. As I learned, you cannot resolve these contradictions. They’re too structural. Too big to fail.

            Jazz versions of the Christmas canon I can actually still listen to, especially if there’s no singing. And there’s one song on the compilation CD A Rock’n’Roll Christmas, produced by Bob ‘Bah-Humbug’ Bell on PolyGram, 1994, that I always get a kick out of: “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses.

            We also have a compilation put out by Rhino Records in 1995, titled Punk Rock Xmas. This one reliably provides a few chuckles over tumblers of milk-and-bourbon punch, Christmas morning, an old Dodge family tradition. It features bands you’ve never heard of. Bouquet of Veal. Pansy Division. The Celibate Rifles. Stiff Little Fingers. Dodger bought this, thinking of it as a Christmas gift for our nephew, Sam Dodge, when he was a kid, middle-school-age or so. Then we noticed the song titles. Some of them, if I said them out loud on the radio (even just the titles), would jeopardize KAXE’s license and very existence. We decided we should jury the CD before sending it off in the Christmas mail. It did not make it into the Christmas mail. We said at the time that we were protecting Sam from inappropriate material, but really we were protecting Dodger’s brother and sister-in-law, and our relationship with them. Sam would surely not have been corrupted by songs like “Daddy Drank Our Christmas Money” or any of the others---which, as I say, you cannot say out loud over any air waves---and, like us, he would deploy them once a year, no more, for a little merriment around the Christmas tree. Unless, like us, he has no Christmas tree. To get the full measure of Punk Rock Xmas, you should probably have a tree. Fake, of course.

            You can still buy this CD. I checked the other day, and Amazon had five new ones, at forty bucks each, and nine used, at twenty. Priced for the niche market, go tell it. Or you could borrow ours and copy it. But not right now. Right now, it’s tied up. It’s on.

Ice by Steve "Guido" Downing

This week on Between You and Me on KAXE (Saturdays from 10am-noon) we talk ice.  People have taken to the lakes this winter because our our lack of snow and reignited their passion for all things ice.  Check out the KAXE Ice Skating facebook page here

Here's Steve's story:

DOG THOUGHTS

            The hands-down best ice for skating is a lake that has frozen fast, overnight, when the lake was not generating even slow-motion waves, and before there’s anything more than a dusting of light fluffy snow. This sort of alignment occurs no oftener than once a decade. It’s as impermanent as a Martini. You must act right now, not tomorrow.

             Right now, between you and me, imagine that I’ve just pushed off from our house onto Shoal Lake, north of Grand Rapids. My skates are sharp. It’s a beautiful morning, sunny, no wind, cold enough that the lake is still making ice but not so cold that your eyelashes and front-brain freeze up.

            I  strike off into the southeastern bay, where the lake is outlined by gravel pit and swamp, no other houses. I’m about twenty yards from shore, on perfectly clear see-through ice, that looks to be four inches or so thick. The lake’s only six or eight feet deep here in the bay. Suddenly, something catches my eye down there, under the ice. I put on the brakes. Wheel around. Drop into a squat. There. It’s a boat, an old-timey wooden row-boat. Gunwales, seats, ribs: all cloaked in dark underwater moss. I first saw this sunken boat a few summers ago, from the canoe and kayak. Then it seemed to somehow fade away. Last year, it simply was not there, not anywhere. I presumed wind and current had moved it, or someone, implausibly, had raised it. But here it is, more or less right where I remember first finding it. I go down to all fours, for a better look, working on new theories. I’m sure the boat was closer to the surface the last time I saw it, from the kayak, so maybe the mystery is related to changing water levels, or maybe to processes and conditions on the lake-bottom or the underside of the boat.

            As I’m working through this, on hands and knees, my face probably an inch off the ice, I see…a dog. A dog, underwater, alive, swimming, with a mouthful of sticks, passing over the sunken boat, headed for deeper water. This so startles me, I jerk up, not quietly. I might even speak in tongues here, just for a second, hard to tell. The dog reacts. Its head swivels up. One eye registers my presence. It blinks, kicks, does a little course correction, and is gone.

            Of course it’s not a dog. It’s a beaver. Which only enhances the impact of the encounter. For one exceptional moment, I participated in that animal’s unexceptional morning. It does feel like a privilege. A beaver, on its way home after a hard day’s night doing dirty commerce, gathering provisions for the clan. Is it too much to hope for, that it might be able to stop and have a drink with the gang at the local watering hole? Too much to hope for, that it’ll get into some excellent trouble, moral and physical, between here and hutch?

            Suppose it does stop at the watering hole. Would it share with the gang anything about the exchange we, it and I, just had?

            Guys, you won’t believe what happened. Up top. This old four-legged-four-eyed geezer is staring down at me. At first I think it’s a dog. I’m serious. A dog. I wink at him. I do. I wink. The geezer flat-out has a stroke….

            And so on. Bar talk. Between you and me: I’m fine.

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Movies to Watch this Winter from KAXE

Last Saturday on Between You and Me Jack Nachbar and Julie Crabb joined Heidi Holtan to talk movies.  Jack is a retired professor of Pop Culture who hosts movies at the Edge Center for the Arts in Bigfork.  This Thursday evening at 6:30 pm he's showing "On the Town" and will lead a conversation afterwards. 

Here's the list of movies that Julie, Jack & KAXE listeners compiled:

Holiday movies:
Pieces of April
Home for the Holiday
It's a Wonderful Life
A Christmas Story
Elf
Scrooged
Holiday Inn
White Christmas
Jeremiah Johnson
The Santa Clause
Love Actually
Miracle on 34th Street
Meet Me in St. Louis
Bad Santa

Frozen River
Fargo
The Station Agent
Sweet And Lowdown

Strong Heroines:
Silkwood
Erin Brockovich
North Country
Norma Rae

John Hughes movies:
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Home Alone
National Lampoon's Vacation

Burt Lancaster movies:
Elmer Gantry
Come Back Little Sheba
Field of Dreams
The Swimmer
Trapeze
Crimson Pirate
The Killers
Local Hero
The Rose Tattoo
From Here to Eternity
Seven Days in May

other favorites listeners suggested:
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Way We Were
Dr. Zhivago
GiGi
Imitation of Life
Little Miss Sunshine
Groundhog Day
Out of Africa
Day of the Outlaw
Man from Snowy River
North to Alaska
Brassed Off
Winter's Bone
Romeo & Juliet
Moulin Rouge
Strictly Ballroom
Black Swan
Avatar
The Family Stone
SnowCake
Danny Deckchair
The Ref
Roxanne
The Jerk
Man With Two Brains
Mostly Martha
Reversal of Fortune
Damage
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Alfie
Annie Hall
The Big Chill
Fiddler on the Roof
Manchurian Candidate
Mystery, Alaska
African Queen
The Princess & the Cobbler
Singing in the Rain
Court Jester
The Man I Love
Zero Kelvin
The Last Place on Earth
Corner Gas
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
500 Days of Summer
I Love You Phillip Morris
Raining Stones
Wind that Shakes the Barley
Land & Freedom
Once
The Committments
Rebel Without a Cause
On Dangerous Ground
The Shining
Popeye
The Departed
The Sting
Shop Around the Corner
Insomnia
Culpepper Cattle Company
Outlaw of Josey Wales
The Greatest
Moonlight Mile
Rabbit Hole
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
High Noon
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
Sweetland
Asphalt Jungle
Lawrence of Arabia
Memento
25 Hours
Don't Look Now

Radio Potluck with Guido

PROSE POEM: POTLUCK

by Steve Downing, aka Guido

            Pot. Luck. Two words, become one. Let’s leave the first for another poem and focus on the second, as it relates to you and the thing our two-word word identifies.

            How is your luck running? At the potluck, there may or may not be E. coli in the home-made beef stew. Salmonella in the deviled eggs. A very long---or, worse, short and curly---hair or two in the fruit salad. Lead in the venison chili. Mercury in the pickled fish. Suppose whoever brought the gallon jug of ice-house punch has an axe to grind and spiked it with one or another friendly chemical: mescaline, say, or laboratory tetrahydrocannabinol.

            Still: at any given potluck dinner you’re more likely to discover a new (and nice) spice combination, or dessert presentation, than you are to assume your role in the next life, or even to wind up lie-down, sit-down, get-down sick.

            The offerings on potluck dinner tables always exude hope, don’t they. Hopefulness. Remember: potluck dishes, themselves, are no strangers to the vagaries of luck. Lovely as they look, they could easily have blown up in the oven, or collapsed as they cooled, or acquired the unmistakable flavor of dish soap somewhere, almost anywhere, in the process.

            To say nothing of the transit risk. Who hasn’t had a crockpot full of chutney curry soup turn dramatically un-full, in the car, potluck-bound, when a stop sign materialized out of nowhere, or a deer?

            A key tenet of old-school Occidental philosophy---“When something is spilled, something else is not spilled”---won’t mitigate the crockpot mess in your car, but it does remind us that everything is connected.

            And this is the point of the potluck meal, too: we may be up to our eyeballs in hard times and bad ways, but we’re in it together. What’s mine is yours. Yours, mine.

            That may warm the cockles of your chilled-out Marxist heart, but, between you and me, a cautionary note: think twice about bringing anything ostentatiously left-wingy-healthy to the potluck. Most folks will take a forkful and pretend to love it, but the Bubble-Up Pizza Hotdish with added blue cheese and bacon bits is what everyone will be talking about tomorrow.

            My theory: bring bread. Period. Not for nothing are there more than 300 references to bread in the Bible. And a loaf of bread that doesn’t catch on at the potluck will seem a lesser failure than a fussy, fancy (or un-fancy) tofu loaf that sits there on the table at the party looking just hopeful.