Movie Reviews: The Commuter, Paterno

The Commuter
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Occasionally certain actors and directors just seem to work really well together regardless of the material. Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington. Quentin Tarantino and Samuel Jackson. Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro. And Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra. 

The Commuter is somewhat similar to Neeson's previous film Non-Stop and for that matter Murder on the Orient Express but it's much more engaging than the latter film mentioned. This film largely takes place on public transportation, in the New York City metro area, to be specific.  The film went over the top with some seemingly impossible coincidences and contraptions but it never failed to entertain.

Michael MacCauley (Neeson) is a sixty year old Irish immigrant. Having previously worked as a police officer and found that the money wasn't enough to make it in the NYC area or perhaps having become disgusted with departmental politics, Michael has switched careers. For the past decade he's worked as a life insurance salesman. He's able to provide well for his wife and son but he's not really rich. Similar to many high income house poor people, Michael is rarely more than a few paychecks away from disaster.  He lost almost everything in the 2008 financial meltdown. 

Movie Coming Attractions: The Equalizer 2

Well as much as I enjoyed the first film I'm thinking I'm going to enjoy this one as well. This looks like something worth seeing in theaters when it first comes out in July. Of course if you have no tolerance for filmic mayhem then you won't want to see this.

Monkeys Bathe in Hot Springs

What else can monkeys learn to do by watching humans? Monkey see, monkey do I guess.

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Night Sky Over Tahquamenon Falls

We are currently in International Dark Sky Week, if you didn't know. The idea is to enjoy the night sky free from the increasing light pollution which humans are producing. I live in a subdivision that is right on the edge of rapidly declining open land and farmland. In another decade or so it's likely that almost everything will be paved over. It is amazing that people have so many lights on at night that it's becoming almost indistinguishable from day. Stepping out of the subdivision puts you into a semi-rural community or rather what's left of one. But doing that you immediately notice the difference in lighting at night. Without the super bright porch lights and street lamps you actually know what darkness is. More importantly, you can see the stars, which is the main benefit of having things be dark at night.

People tell me that I was taken on a fishing trip to Lake Superior when I was young with my father and maternal grandfather but I don't remember. In the years since I haven't been back to the Upper Peninsula. It is a place I would like to visit and perhaps retire some day. For now I can just enjoy the pictures of the changing night sky over Tahquamenon Falls near Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There is a lot of natural beauty in this world if you just look around.

Music Reviews: Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is a retired mathematician, satirist, parodist, writer, Army veteran, NSA agent and pianist. Among other things, he wrote music for the PBS show The Electric Company. Lehrer has a certain gift for finding absurdity in everyday life and a knack for writing songs with "blue" material but without any banned words. 

I first heard him on the Dr. Demento radio show, which I used to fall asleep listening to back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth. At the time I shared a bedroom with my younger brother who said then and maintains to this day that as oldest I got away with things which my parents would have shut down instantly had they known about, one of those things most definitely being the Dr. Demento show. Of course (1) you really shouldn't give credence to everything said by resentful younger siblings with questionable memories and (2) by today's standards the Dr. Demento show of the seventies and eighties is quite tame. And even back then Tom Lehrer was already something of an old fogie. He's been around a while. 

I enjoy Lehrer's musical and lyrical humor. Lehrer can occasionally evince something of a dirty mind (listen to I got it from Agnes and then listen to it again until you understand why Lehrer initially couldn't perform the song outside of adult nightclubs despite not using a single bad word). Lehrer usually expresses himself in a classy way with lots of did I really hear what I thought I heard plausible deniability.

I also like Lehrer's song The Elements, which lists all of the elements of the periodic table to the melody from Gilbert and Sullivan's Modern Major-General Song from The Pirates of Penzance. Some might say that you have to be slightly bent in your worldview to enjoy Lehrer's humor. I don't deny that he can appeal to the absurd, dark, cynical, and satyric that lurks within us but he also appeals to anyone who enjoys puns, wordplay and lyrical witticisms.

Brooklyn Museum Hiring Fracas

The Brooklyn Museum recently hired a white woman to be its curator of African Art. Some people didn't like this hiring decision, to put it mildly. 

A recent decision by the Brooklyn Museum to hire a white person as an African art consulting curator has prompted opposition on social media and from an anti-gentrification activist group that argues the selection perpetuated “ongoing legacies of oppression.” In response to a letter from the group that stated its concerns, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said in a statement on Friday that the museum “unequivocally” stood by its selection of Kristen Windmuller-Luna for the position. “We were deeply dismayed when the conversation about this appointment turned to personal attacks on this individual,” Ms. Pasternak said. 

She also extolled the expertise of Dr. Windmuller-Luna, calling her an “extraordinary candidate with stellar qualifications.” Dr. Windmuller-Luna, 31, has Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Princeton, and a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from Yale. She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. Her appointment to the Brooklyn Museum was announced late last month.

In its letter earlier this week, the activist group Decolonize This Place called the museum’s selection of Dr. Windmuller-Luna “tone-deaf” and said that “no matter how one parses it, the appointment is simply not a good look in this day and age.”

“Seriously, @brooklynmuseum? There goes the neighborhood for good,” opined Philadelphia journalist Ernest Owens on Twitter.

Music Reviews: Nikki Giovanni, Camille Yarbrough, Sarah Shook

Nikki Giovanni
Truth Is On The Way/Like A Ripple On A Pond

Nikki Giovanni is a poet, writer, professor and activist among other things. Her list of awards, works and accomplishments are far too long to list here. I think she's definitely one of the greatest living poets. She was one of the first poets I remember reading. My maternal aunt gave me her collection of poems titled "Ego Tripping and other poems for young people" all those years ago. Giovanni is often described as radical or militant or other such words but I think that those terms are limiting. Her politics and approaches to life have varied over the years, as with anyone else. 

If there is one theme in her work that hasn't varied it is that black people (especially black women) are human and beautiful. In the early seventies as now such a message may be thought of as militant or threatening but I never saw it as such. One thing that was current in the early seventies is that the music produced by black entertainers and musicians wasn't solely concerned with the lowest common denominator of sex and violence. There were actually still some themes of love and sacrifice. It seems like that's been lost in a lot of the music that is popular today but I could be wrong as I don't listen to much pop music. 

Hmm. Anyway, esteemed musicologists can argue over when and where rap begun. Some people confidently point to the late seventies South Bronx. Others will go back further in time and farther afield to Caribbean/Jamaican toasts or West African chants. Others will claim it was all started by spoken word performers/rappers like the Watts Prophets, Last Poets, Wanda Robinson, and Gil Scott Heron. Some will point to scat singers like Eddie Jefferson or Ella Fitzgerald, or rock-n-roll founders like Bo Diddley. Wherever you start the discussion of rap's creation and growth, certainly the spoken word albums that Giovanni created in the early seventies deserve some consideration.