The second season of Deadwood has started on Movie Central with Episode 13, “A Lie Agreed Upon (Part 1)”. Deadwood, like other HBO shows, has started numbering episodes by absolute consecutive numbers. Movie Central uses the absolute episode number in its online program guides.
Category: Story & Song
Fulfilled
There was a movie on TV tonight: “Their Eyes were Watching God”. Halle Berry is in it and Oprah Winfrey produced it. The description of the movie in the newspaper was a young Florida woman’s quest for self-fulfillment in the 1920’s. The digital TV guide described it as the odyssey of a free spirit through stormy romances. After I noticed this show in the program guide, I search for information about the book and the writer online, and checked a couple reviews of the movie online. I watched the first half of the show before tuning out.
White Chicks?
I watched the Academy Awards show on TV on Sunday. I loved the actresses in their gowns. Eye candy. The Naughty Vicar was demanding to be heard. I loved Chris Rock, especially that skit where he interviewed people (I recognized some so I assume some of them were actors) about their favourite movies and got answers like Chronicles of Riddick and White Chicks. Hilarious. Hollywood likes to think of itself as a community of independent artists instead of a commercial community because it give awards to high class commercial movies instead of low class commercial movies.
Sideways
“Sideways” is worth seeing. It was released several months ago and is still playing in theaters. I saw it a couple of weeks ago at the Globe (which is a great theater for independent film in Winnipeg).
Tour de France – Lance again
BBC Sports reports that Lance Armstrong, now sponsored by the Discovery Channel and riding for Team Discovery Channel (warning: that’s a slow link to a site loaded with adware – I would view it with Firefox and set the adblocker to simplify future visits – but check out the Official Team jersey for $100 US and other merchandise) will compete in the 2005 Tour de France.
We should see TV coverage in Canada which will be entertaining and hopefully inspiring to the lads. The BBC Web sports site has good cycling coverage like this link to the 2004 Tour. Bicycling Magazine has a Tour news site. At this moment, it’s still mainly news from the 2004 Tour, and it hasn’t been updated for a while but it will be worth watching.
Early Winter 2004
I read a few mysteries and reviewed them at Blogcritics. “Bad Business” by Robert B. Parker – the latest Spenser, and “The Last Good Day” by Gail Bowen, the latest in the Joanne Kilbourn series. I enjoyed them. “Poisoned Cherries” by Quentin Jardine was trashy. I wrote some music and movie reviews too. Canadian folk singer David Francey, the DVD release of the movie “Coming Home“.
Epiphany
Several years ago Phillie Marcowicz, one of the hosts of one of CBC Radio’s folk, roots and world programs was on the Main Stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She asked the audience if anyone had experienced a musical epiphany that weekend.
Reading List – late October 2004
I finished Larry McMurty’s “Sin Killer” and reviewed it for Blogcritics. I have picked up the next novel in that series, but I haven’t started it. I haven’t finished “The Lives of the Saints”. I went to the River Heights Branch of the library to look for one or two books by Earl Emerson and came away with some other books in the display bins, which I read and reviewed first.
Cold Missouri Waters
In the summer of 1995, I bought a copy of James Keelaghan’s album “A Recent Future” at the bookstore at Lake Louise junction, and I was immediately caught by the ballad “Cold Missouri Waters.” Keelaghan had won the Juno for Roots and Traditional Album for his previous album “My Skies” in 1994 and was not nominated again in 1995 but the song is one of his best and has earned critical, artistic and popular support.
Keelaghan has since won the USA Songwriting Competition in 2002, in the Folk category for this song. It was covered by Richard Shindell, Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky on their joint album “Cry, Cry, Cry”. The song has also taken on an interesting life of its own. Keelaghan met relatives of the dead firefighters, and his song has a following among firefighters and park rangers. He rewrote a line in the song (originally he sang “North Montana” and corrected it “West Montana” in deference to how the people of the area see their land. Keelaghan recorded the slightly revised version of the song on his 2004 retrospective album “Then Again.”
In 1995 and 1996 I was posting regularly to a mailing list devoted to Canadian folk music with a special emphasis on the songs of life of Stan Rogers. In the fall of 1996 I followed up Keelaghan’s liner notes by reading Norman Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire” and I published a set of posts summarizing the book and relating it to the song. I have brought those posts together and edited them into one piece:
Reading List – early October 2004
In the last few weeks, I read a few books – mainly mysteries, mainly recent material. I followed some serials that I already knew, and I started a new series. I tried to write a review of each one for Blogcritics. I don’t want to turn this blog into a book review blog, and Blogcritics wants the text so that’s where the reviews have gone.