George Carlin – “Football and Baseball” (“SNL” – 1975)
From the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, Oct. 11, 1975…
Meat Loaf – “America the Beautiful” (2012)
This pretty much summed up the Republicans’ election of 2012… freaks, idiots and has-beens coming out to make asses of themselves for ol’ Mitt. I actually feel a little bit embarrassed for him. You know Mitt was on that stage thinking, “Well, this is the final nail in the coffin for me.” Classic stuff!
Woody Allen Remembers Ingmar Bergman (2007)
Woody Allen’s remembrance of Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman, from a New York Times article, dated Aug. 12, 2007…
Got the news in Oviedo, a lovely little town in the north of Spain where I am shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.
I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of The Seventh Seal. And so on a summer’s day, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.
I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly 60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films. Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 