Pop Culture Happy Hour: Silly Questions Live, For Special Guests

Three weeks later, my souvenir pint glasses remain fully intact.

I have a little unplanned cameo at the end of the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that posted today, the second of a two-parter recorded at the PCHH live show at NPR HQ on Dec. 10, 2013. That was the day my Slate story about the paucity of new songs in the yuletide canon posted, and the show was only a few hours after I'd been down the street at CNN taping a segment about that piece for The Lead with Jake Tapper. Someone in the audience asked for recommendations of new Christmas songs, and host Linda Holmes was kind enough to invite me up to suggest a few.

As I had been at the first PCHH live show a year earlier, at the old NPR bulding that's since been torn down, I was fighting a cold on this evening. I hope I didn't pass it on to you if we happened to shake hands. I did warn everyone who so much as made eye contact with me to wash their hands immediately. It's how I convey warmth and sincerity, you guys.

You can hear the episode here. Happy New Year.

I loves you, Porgy & Bess. Or The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess. Whatever.

Bess, Porgy. Porgy, Bess. Alicia Hall Moran and Nathaniel Stampley.

Yes, it's clearly an insult to DuBose Heyward, who wrote the novel Porgy, and to his wife Dorothy Heyward, with whom he collaborated on the script for a play derived from the novel, that the latest (2011) Broadway version is called The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess, as if the Heywards had nothing to do with the creation of an American classic. But I was still moved past the point of articulate expression by the show when its touring version stopped in Washington Christmas week, as my tongue-tied Washington City Paper review demonstrates.

Because I decided the most honest way to approach the piece -- which was assigned late, for a short run of a show opening on Christmas night, leaving me no time to prepare -- was to cop to the fact I'd never seen Porgy & Bess before, I left myself vulnerable to the accusation I lack the appropriate credentials to review it. That's a question I'll be addressing at length later this month.

Let's Do the Numbers! Talkin' Yuletunes on Marketplace

My face betrays the intense concentration required to form sentences in real time.

I'm not allowed to post the video of my Dec. 10 appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, (here's its blog accompaniment) and I don't have a photo from my appearance on Marketplace yesterday. So here's a screen cap from the CNN bit and a link to the Marketplace segment, wherein host Kai Ryssdal asks me a question for which I am completely unprepared.

Is there hope for a new classic Christmas song? | Marketplace.org.

I'll be wrapping up my talking-about-Christmas-songs tour with a segment on KPCC's AirTalk this afternoon at 3:30 Eastern. I heard that show a lot when I lived in Southern California circa 2000-2005, so I'm excited for that. UPDATE: Hear that segment here.

And of course, if you haven't grabbed my latest yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!, that awaits your loving attention here.

Merry Christmas!

Our Pottymouthed Year: 2013 on the DC Stage, Assessed.

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Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré in Studio's The Motherfucker with the Hat. (Teddy Wolff)

We're wrapping up a highly rewarding and admirably trend-resistant year on DC's stages, as I aver in this week's Washington City Paper.

Talkin' Yulejams on Word of Mouth

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Thanks to Virgina Prescott and Word of Mouth for having me back on yesterday to talk about the dearth of new Christmas songs and make a few recommendations of less-familiar old ones. They were awfully nice about it when the battery in the borrowed phone I was using died mid-interview.

You can listen to the segment here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: More Hobbits, and Christmas Music

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1973's Magnum Force inverted the premise of its prequel, Dirty Harry.

Thanks to Pop Culture Happy Hour full-timers Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and host Linda Holmes for inviting me back on the podcast this week to talk about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and a subject closer to my heart than that one, Christmas music. Have I mentioned that I'm very interested in Christmas music?

Our dissection of that enervating Hobbit movie feeds into a discussion of second installments, and some of the ones that really work. If you haven't seen Magnum Force in a while, there's no time like the present, Christmas T-minus five.

You can listen here or download the podcast from iTunes here. 

One element of our Hobbit talk that got cut for time was when I mentioned that I'd sought out a "High Frame Rate" presentation of this movie, because I'm interested in where action pictures might be headed. I remember James Cameron mentioning HFR as a potential new frontier in interviews from more than ten years ago, well before Avatar. (He has announced that Avatar's four sequels, coming in 2016, 2017, and 2018, will be released in HFR.)

I've read that director Peter Jackson messed with the color grading of the HFR version of Smaug in response to complaints that the prior Hobbit movie had a cheap, daytime-soap look. I love the irony that the newest, priciest filmmaking technology has the effect of making this megafranchise look like a shot-on-video-for-peanuts Dr. Who episode.

Anyway, whatever Jackson did seemed to my eyes to be for naught. Smaug has a distracting, video-gamey look that conspired with its pointlessly roaming camerawork to make everything in the frame feel weightless. I had a tougher time suspending my disbelief watching The Desolation of Smaug than I do watching the original 1933 King Kong, or a Ray Harryhausen joint. The illusion of weight, not size, is what makes impossible visions seem real.

Mourning Edition: Edgar and Annabel, reviewed.

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Maboud Ebrahimzadeh & Emily Kester. (Igor Dmitry) 

The short version of my Washington City Paper review of Sam Holcroft's Edgar and Annabel, now getting its U.S. premiere in a Studio Theatre production directed by the great actor Holly Twyford, is that you have to see it. It synthesizes about a half dozen well-chosen curated cinematic influences while remaining resolutely its own thing.