Month: March 2018

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #3: “Men O’ War”

(1929; director: Lewis R. Foster)

Beautiful weather in a peaceful park in the Jazz Age. A glittering pond on which happy couples float lazily in rented canoes. Flowers everywhere. Pretty girls strolling in the sun. Lively chatter around a gazebo. Not one hint of a whisper in the air about any coming Great Depression. What a nice day.

Until Laurel and Hardy show up to ruin everything, God bless ’em. This is funny stuff, though the best joke is that Stan and Ollie are sailors on furlough. Can you imagine them being on a boat that they don’t manage to sink? Or going in for their military physical and not somehow setting the office on fire?

So in this one, our heroes meet a couple of man-crazy young women due to a mildly racy misunderstanding that involves ladies undergarments that accidentally fell off a passing pile of laundry.  Next thing you know, they’ve scored a double date in an old-fashioned soda shop (the guy behind the counter is past and future frequent L&H foil James Finlayson in his first sound film ) and then in a rowboat for what should be a romantic paddle across the water, but that goes completely wrong. It’s no spoiler to say that boat’s going underwater, somebody’s getting smacked silly with an oar and everyone’s going to start fighting.

The gags here are expert with the most valuable player award going to Oliver Hardy. He’s still a riot almost ninety years later, whether in awkward flirtation with comely flappers, dealing with man-child Stan or trying to maintain something that resembles dignity but losing it so easily.

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Robert Pollard-Mania #1: Introduction and FOREVER SINCE BREAKFAST

Let’s face it, Robert Pollard is a sick man.

He puts out more records in one year than a lot of bands release in ten years. He has one of the most insane legacies in rock and it continues to expand all of the time. At his age (born on October 31, 1957), he’s learned just about everything that there is to know about rock music, but he somehow missed the lesson that said that your body of work should be neat and clean and not confuse people.

Terrible iPhone photo shot by yours truly, taken from Guided by Voices playing in Austin, TX, September 2012.

Robert Pollard also never learned that lo-fi isn’t all right.

Nobody ever told him that a songwriter who can write a brilliant pop melody shouldn’t write far-out psychedelic stuff, too.

And he never listened to anyone who’s ever made the point that rock music is a business and not the place for a restless creative mind that comes up with more than twelve songs a year.

Yep, we’re talkin’ a real sick-o-rama.

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