August 2012
“The real challenge is if you don’t look super sexy, like a Brad Pitt, you’re going to have to try harder. You’re going to have to make up for it in other ways. You’re going to have to charm the pants off them. You’re going to have to make them laugh. But those are good hoops to have to jump through. You’re going to have to do some writing. Let’s face it, the great comedians now that are handicapped in the looks department are tremendous writers.”
—Jack Black on comedian stereotypes
From WHYY in Philadelphia...
And this is Fresh Air.
We found this gem on graphic designer/illustrator Levi McGranahan’s blog. And he took this picture this past weekend at a little truck stop somewhere around Richmond, Indiana. From Levi:
I found this completely by accident on my way to a family reunion this past weekend. I pulled into the first parking space I saw and noticed this stencil on the parking block. This is the best piece of truck stop graffiti ever. So great…I’M TERRY GROSS.
Have you spotted this Terry Gross stencil? Send in your tips.
“Damon Wayans and I would rate movies using snaps. The fun of In Living Color was exposing black culture, and in that sketch, gay culture, that I don’t think America had ever seen at that point. I had already done Dreamgirls on Broadway, and being in a musical and working with other performers who were gay, I was privy to that vocabulary backstage. They were being themselves. So a lot of it was hijacked from what I heard in the theater and what was permeating around. Now at that time, if a gay person was going to read you — to tell you off — it was always accompanied by snaps. Now I don’t know if it was a gay thing, but it was also a very black thing.”
—David Alan Grier on the snaps from In Living Color
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One time in 1965, our family all piled in the car and we drove across the country to California. The car broke down in the salt flats. I remember going to a gas station and my father gets out, because our air conditioner was broken. He must have been in there for 10 minutes. He got in, ashen-faced, and quietly said, ‘Everyone stay in the car. They don’t like Negroes here.’ That was a rude awakening.
We had to spend the night in this small desert town. My father and mother told us not to play in the pool, to stay in the room. My brother had a skateboard. I remember we wanted to play. It was bewildering. It was not psyche-shattering because I didn’t grow up in that kind of world. My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call Little House on the Prairie tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from. … Our household was infused with black history. I grew up in a home and in a world in which you can do anything. We were all expected to go to college. My father was a doctor.
” —David Alan Grier on what his father taught him about being African-American in the US
Why would he be obsessed with Porgy and Bess? My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea. He’s a retired psychiatrist. And all of a sudden, I go, ‘Of course. Now I understand. He’s seen all these productions of Porgy and Bess, and he ultimately came to the show. Which, boom — this was him, in a lot of ways, to have this opera depict [Porgy] on stage. In a lot of ways, this was an aspect of him that he saw, and it became infused with so much more for me.
David Alan Grier on his father’s obsession with the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
“I’ve been a real loud active voice in the movement to get marriage equality. And I had gone up the month before to Albany, when they were days away from that historic vote, to rally and to see who I could talk to, and just be another face out there saying let’s do the right thing here. … I had read a beautiful story in The New York Times about the couple who were getting married, and that Mayor Bloomberg was going to preside over their wedding at Gracie Mansion. And my friend called me and said, ‘They’d love to have you come and sing.’ And I was floored. I was so honored. And I cried like a baby at that ceremony. And I brought my daughter. And it was a very moving moment and a very teachable moment having my daughter there. And as far as she was concerned, it was just another wedding. She doesn’t really see the issue, which is great. So that’s how it came about. It was a beautiful day.”
—Audra McDonald on performing at the first legal gay wedding in New York City
“My agent called me and told me that this letter [appeared]. You know, you get certain calls and the phone rings in certain ways, and it just doesn’t sound good. And that was one of those times. I was shocked. I knew how much Steve loves Porgy and Bess. He’s never shied away from how passionate he is about this particular opera. And I think he is a genius; he is one of the great composers of American musical theater. And I respect his passion. But I know how I feel about this opera. I know how I’ve always felt about this opera. And I have never had anything but the greatest love and respect for this opera. So even if that’s how it came across in the piece — or that’s how it came across to Steve in the piece — there’s not one iota of disdain for this opera in my heart. And that’s apparent by my obsession with it over the years.”
—Audra McDonald on Stephen Sondheim’s critical letter in The New York Times about the production before it began previews
The final Broadway performance of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is September 23rd. The production won two Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical.
The last melody in the show, after an entire night of [Bess] singing and being raped and kicked and beaten and all of this stuff, is ‘Summertime,’ and it’s a lullaby, and it’s high, and it has to be high and pretty and sung to a baby,” she says. “And it freaks me out that after all this, I have to sound high and pretty and fresh. And I’m always holding onto that baby, going, ‘I know you’re just a doll, but help me.’
—Audra McDonald on what it’s like to sing such a strenuous role
“It’s a GI’s word most often used for officers, and in particular, officers who are full of themselves. The first military leader to have been called with the A-word — both by his men and his superiors by the way — is George Patton, and that makes perfect sense, particularly if you read the unexpurgated Patton, not the Patton of the movie. … It’s a word that looks up. And the A-word always does. It’s a critique from below, from ground level, of somebody who’s gotten above himself.”
—Geoff Nunberg on the origins of the A-word among griping WWII officers
“The feminists use it to replace ‘heel’ as a word for a guy who mistreats women, and to cover all forms of entitlement.”
—Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the A-word being adopted by feminists in the ’70s
“I had been a metal-head for a number of years by that point, so it was in my DNA, there was no way I was going to lose that. And what I got to have then was the influence of hip-hop. Hip-hop was the music that everyone was listening to in Rosedale, not to mention much of the rest of the United States, but it was just starting to really bubble up and become the popular music. And I just got to take that on as well and it was only years later that I sort of thought about it and realized both hip-hop and heavy metal are both working class male power fantasies, right? That’s all they are: ‘I sold my soul to the devil and I am now an overlord,’ or, ‘Look at my car, I got a lot of money.’ They are both about, ‘I don’t have anything but I want to get something,’ and for that reason, both of them had a great impact on me and it wasn’t so hard to take both on.”
—Victor LaValle on being a metal head and getting into hip hop
Victor LaValle Loves Monsters, Especially Godzilla
What’s beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it’s in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they’re affected by it. But rather than make a movie where they sit around and say, ‘Man, that was really rough, those bombs really did a lot of damage,’ they said, ‘What did it feel like? It felt like a 100 foot-tall giant lizard came through our city and crushed it.’ And I really felt I understood that experience to some degree. I really connected with that fear and that power because, at times, when I was a kid, I would say the chaos in my household — the chaos in my life — felt very much like a 100-foot reptile crushing everyone and everything.
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I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. I was doing very poorly, certainly academically, but even mentally…I’ve never been institutionalized, [but] it doesn’t mean I haven’t had brushes with real psychological problems — I just was never hospitalized for it.
And I managed to graduate after working pretty hard through some summer courses, but at the end of that time, I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going to go because I was just a mess in every way. I had destroyed myself, is the truth of it…I had tried to do myself in in various ways and then to my utter surprise, some people who were close to me suggested that maybe I talk to someone, I get a little help, and I found some people who helped me out…they did a lot for me, they helped me psychologically and quite frankly, even just to feel like you [I] can do this thing you [I] want to do, which was write, and I wasn’t really believing I could do that either.
” —Victor LaValle on his own mental health