Steven Van Zandt

Little Steven Van Zandt may be one of those rare performers whose live performances are actually better than those he produces in the studio, but either way, his music is great. 

I Am a Patriot (Live)

I Am a Patriot (Voice of America)

He has been known to say that leaving the E Street Band when he did was a mistake, but I don't think so. He was moved to actually say something important with his music and so many performers are not.  I am grateful for Van Zandt's work outside of the E Street Band. His songs were beautiful and they mean something. 

Native American

I have no doubt that there are people in South Africa who are also grateful to this day that Steven Van Zandt didn't close his heart or his music to their suffering. Thirty years down the road and this video still makes me cry. 

Sun City

You see in the 80s, we didn't understand how far down the crapper things had gone politically.  We still believed we could change the world with our actions. We were coming down off our hippy protest high as a nation, and poor fools that we were, we kept trying, but that’s what made us great as a rock and roll generation. We pointed fingers and we publicly disapproved of injustice, and we wanted it to stop and we wanted to help.  I miss that. Sure there was a bunch of crappy music too, but so much of the music that was happening was really good and Little Steven was a part of that. 

We had Live Aid and Farm Aid and Band Aid and we were not going to sit still for Apartheid. While Ronald Reagan laid wreaths on Nazi graves,  Little Steven told us about things that didn't make the five o'clock news. 

Los Desaparecidos

Bitter Fruit   (Short List, there's more, google it if you want)

Steven Van Zandt tried to simultaneously keep us informed and unite us.

Solidarity

Thank you Stevie and keep rockin' brother. We need your art now more than ever. 

Guards! Guards!

I always go through this phase after watching a series of anything, where everything else looks weird for a time afterward. It’s true if I read a whole bunch of one author as well. A long time ago I read everything Dostoyevsky ever published and then when I finished doing that, everything else just looked strange to me so I had to gear up and read all the other 19^th Russian authors if I wanted anything else to read. I didn't like Tolstoy much, but I really liked Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov. I have no intention of going back and re-reading all that to find out if all my likes and dislikes hold true. My brain is too mushy for that now.  

If I re-read anything a million times these days, it’s Terry Pratchett. He’s funny and smart and builds a story like nobody’s bidness. I re-read Guards! Guards! just recently for about the umpteenth time just because it always amazes me how well Pratchett lays out a story. This particular tale is set up similar to a murder mystery except instead of a crazed human killer, our boys in brown must figure out how to stop an enormous fire breathing dragon. In the middle of all this “detectoring,” Pratchett creates memorable 3D characters that are loveable, well, not loveable like say Winnie the Pooh, but loveable like FrankTagliano without all the swearing, who I find myself really rooting for.

Pratchett won’t leave off with just being entertaining like many authors do, he’ll sneak in a Discworld version of String Theory and multidimensional universes and does so expertly. In fact, unless you’re really paying attention, you won’t even realize you've just been taught a lesson, you’ll just come away magically smarter than when you before. Now while this sort of info might be old hat to some of us now, when Pratchett wrote Guards! Guards! in 1989, it was news to a whole bunch of people. He deals with Quantum Physics in his own special way in most of his stories.

"What're quantum mechanics?"
"I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose." –Eric

I read about String Theory for the first time in Equal Rites. Yes a book in popular culture introduced me to a branch of Physics that wasn't even being discussed in universities at the time. Well not in my state school in Alabama anyway. I know this for a fact because I was suffering through all sorts of Physics classes and science courses that began with the word “Quantitative” at that very point in history, so Thanks Terry Pratchett for stepping in where public education, that I paid a lot of money for, failed me.

Anyway, I said all that to say that I’m going through a viewing readjustment phase after watching eleven seasons of Poirot back to back. Everything looks strange to me right now except The Sopranos for some reason and I am not up to writing about that probably ever. I tried to watch the latest version of Frankenstein last night, but for some reason I couldn't get any audio. I decided that this was probably a sign from Blind Io and I went back to reading instead. I have to wait until my internal viewing receptors reset themselves before I review another show. 

Now I’m drinking tea, watching it snow and moving back to a story I’m writing about elves because I just can’t get enough of fantastical worlds filled with magical creatures where the Koch Brothers don’t exist.

Agatha Christie's Poirot

I stand by my claim that I’m the last person in the civilized western world to know about good things like books by new authors and great television programs. In 2014 I discovered Agatha Christie’s Poirot, thanks to Netflix, and it only took me a quarter of a century to find it. Now granted, it might not have been floating around and available in the US, after all they only started making it in 1989 and went on making it only until 2013. So much crap is made here in the US, that there's not always enough room for work from other countries. I found Poirot the year after they stopped making it.  At least I didn't have to sit around for 20 years wondering what was going to happen on the next episode.

Poirot is a role David Suchet was born to play, and he gives enormous depth to the funny little Belgian detective. Over the span of my lifetime, I've probably read most of the Poirot books and never have I felt so much sympathy toward the character. The complexity of feeling Suchet is able to transmit to the audience with a look is astounding. He can convey meaning with a glance. If you’re familiar with the books, you’ll know that Poirot was frequently ridiculed for being different and for being foreign to England. Suchet’s performance conveys the pain this must have caused Poirot over the years though it’s not really remarked upon in any detail in the stories as far as I can remember. Granted when I read some of them I was babysitting Methuselah and playing with my pet dodo at the time. In other words, it’s been a while. Frankly the television show makes me want to go back and re-read some of the stories. 

I think about Agatha Christie a lot. Not a lot like every day for several hours, but frequently. I wonder what it is about her work that keeps people intrigued. Her characters aren't ruggedly handsome or dashing. They are decidedly not what our society seems to value in a lead these days, yet Monsieur Poirot and Miss Marple are still with us and doing well thanks. A short little dandy and an elderly spinster have captivated readers since she started cranking them out in 1920.  What they have in common besides being a little eccentric, is that they are deadly smart and are able to solve terrible crimes that seem unsolvable. 

The plots are usually very interesting, at least to some of us. People who make movies and television can’t seem to stop coming back to these stories to present them to the viewing public again and again, though I figure everyone else can hang up trying to portray a better Poirot than David Suchet because I don’t believe it can be done. Maybe in a few hundred years somebody will program a specialized acting droid to give a better performance, but I doubt it.

In the early productions, these shows lasted around an hour. Later, they've been stretched out closer to two. You can sit down and watch any single one anywhere in the timeline and have a great, stand-alone presentation of a Poirot story, but I truly recommend watching them in order from the beginning. Seeing Poirot move through the different stages of his life is a moving experience as we come to know and understand the character. Of course the actor is aging along with the rest of us and so is Poirot. If you’re familiar with the books you’ll know that Christie took Poirot right up to the end and though I haven’t reached the last of the series, I imagine I’ll cry like a little girl when I do.

The supporting cast is flawless though sometimes a guest star can be a little weak, it’s rare. The sets are fabulous. I’m tempted to write OMG and use multiple exclamation points to describe my feelings about them, but I’ll try and use actual words and not resort to emoticons. If you enjoy Art Deco, you will love what they've done with Poirot, especially the early shows.* I could probably be happy with a slideshow of the sets and props, but I get to see a brilliant and interesting program along with it. The art department really outdid itself on almost every occasion and the director of photography lines up these amazing shots to capitalize on it. If I were filthy rich, I would do my entire home in an art deco style. It might cause the dogs to throw up, but I’d be happy.

In later Poirot stories, Christie focuses on philandering spouses and the evil they do in the world. I have no doubt this is because she was a scorned woman herself. Mr. Christie carried on an illicit affair that broke up their marriage and the couple was divorced in 1926. Agatha Christie was able to get literary revenge on her husband in several novels which no doubt was very cathartic for her and probably a large number of her readers. An amazing example of this is Five Little Pigs. I don’t like to spoil overmuch because it irks me, but the production of this story by the cast and crew is some of the best television I've ever seen. Now I know this might not be a big endorsement from someone who doesn't watch a ton of TV, but it’s because intelligent, interesting, well-made programs aren't always readily available. I guess it’s just as well or I’d never get anything done.

*If you’re interested in learning a little more about art deco and Christie, this is an excellent article.

http://www.archdaily.com/346555/through-the-lens-art-decos-debt-to-agatha-christie/