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Even on a single network: ya gotta do a double-take:
FATHER-SON? - two MSNBC hosts: Joe Scarborough the former congressman .....
... and Chris Hayes - also a writer for "The Nation" and whose Saturday/Sunday morning MSNBC shows are worthwhile.
The walls are closing in .... but before they do, stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
ART NOTES - a photo exhibit of life during Nazi occupation (through the lens of a secret camera) is at the National Resistance Museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam through April 1, 2012.
ENVIRONMENTAL NOTES - although the African nation of Gabon is actively pressing to export natural resources, its president says he is committed to increasing support for national parks. Pressing the government to fulfill that commitment is a non-governmental organization financed out of the modest salary of activist Ladislas Désiré Ndembet - who runs a cleaning business on the side.
MONDAY's CHILD is Archie the Cat - a Georgia kitteh who has made a great recovery from an arrow shot through his left leg ..... and now shares a new home with a poodle and a Labrador.
HAIL and FAREWELL to Edgar Villchur - an audio pioneer who died last week at age 94. Last year, I did a profile on James B. Lansing of 'JBL' fame - by contrast, Villchur simply focused on home stereo. But his 1950's work on acoustic suspension led Hi-Fi News to rank him #1 among the "50 Most Important Audio Pioneers" in 2006. This concept - which made his 1950's Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers able to reproduce sound in a way formerly limited to refrigerator-sized speakers - led the editor of Stereophile magazine to say, "A guy's wife could accept their presence on the bookshelf in the living room."
Villchur's company did some things unusual for the time for a start-up company - they followed equal-opportunity employment practices, and employees received health insurance and profit sharing-benefits that were highly unusual in any but the largest firms in the 1950s and 1960s. The company was also known for its liberal repair policies, fixing most products for free no matter how old they were, and in general providing excellent customer service.
POLITICAL NOTES - For the first time in decades, support in Switzerland for the right-wing xenophobic SVP party has declined. But with a splintering of the center, the party's anti-immigration message is still strong.
THEATER NOTES - more than half a century after the premiere of one of the world's best-loved musicals, The Sound of Music is, for the first time, being staged in Salzburg, Austria where the story is set.
TUESDAY's CHILD is Lucy the Cat - a Canadian kitteh reunited with her family three months after she wandered away from a British Columbia campsite.
From the DO AS I SAY, NOT AS file - echoing the austerity message elsewhere, the Swedish finance minister Anders Borg has lectured Swedes about the dangers of borrowing too much money, saying "we can't live beyond our means". But he recently took out an additional loan so that now his overall mortgage ... is worth more than the assessed value of his home.
MOTHER-DAUGHTER? - two blushing brides who married in London during 2011 - Nancy Shevell (to Sir Paul McCartney) and Kate Middleton (to Prince William).
CHEERS to our annual trip to see friends in the Albany, New York area. I'll be heading out tomorrow for a long weekend of hiking, great food, great beer/wine and some old stories ...... OK, a lotta old stories.
THEATER NOTES - a one-act play written by Eugene O'Neill - based on the Nobel Prize-winning author's suicide attempt (when he was in his mid-twenties) that premiered in 1920, but was feared lost - has been acquired by a Yale University library.
ART NOTES - the first large-scale presentation of the works of Alfred Stieglitz - part of an overall exhibit including works from Matisse to O'Keeffe - is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to January 2nd.
BALLET NOTES - South Dakota may not be the first location one associates with ballet: but on November 4th, Rapid City native David Hallberg will make his debut as the first foreign member of the legendary Bolshoi Ballet company in Moscow - coming full-circle fifty years after Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West.
THEATER NOTES - a musical written by the singer Tori Amos - entitled The Light Princess, based on George MacDonald's 19th Century fairytale - had been scheduled to premiere at London's Lyttelton Theatre next April, but has been postponed over fears it will not be ready in time.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is the still-missing at JFK airport Jack the Cat - recently given his own Awareness Day ... regular updates on his Facebook page ...........
IN A CHANGE from trends elsewhere: the new prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt plans to return the age of criminal responsibility to 15 (so that 14-year old children cannot be imprisoned) as well as re-examine Denmark's controversial (and strict) law against carrying knives and sharp objects.
EDUCATION NOTES - nearly six months after they began, Chile's student protests - seeking a change to that nation's largely privatized education system - continue to grow (with OWS now providing a boost).
Reader Requested SEPARATED at BIRTH - two athletes: Phil Mickelson - the pro golf star ...
... and Lance Berkman - the baseball player you can see in this year's World Series.
TRANSPORTATION NOTES - passengers might soon be able to travel by ferry for the first time in three years between Norway and England - specifically, from Bergen to Newcastle - if smaller, more fuel-efficient ships can used to revive a route that cost both local economies dearly when it was abandoned in 2008.
ART NOTES - the first major U.S. museum show on graphic design since 1996 turns its attention to graphics in the digital era at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota through January 22nd.
MUSIC NOTES - the German city of Stuttgart is more known for commerce (Porsche and Mercedes) than music ... but its jazz heritage is being revived, beginning (before WW-II) when folks sneaked into illegal clubs to hear it and, after the war, the US Armed Forces Network played it over the airwaves, creating more German fans with each broadcast.
DUE IN PART to the diminishing importance of the G8 (and corresponding rise of the G20) an essay by the Irish singer Bob Geldof - founder of the "Boomtown Rats", and honorarily knighted as the organizer of Band Aid, Live Aid and Live8 concerts for African relief - suggests that this year's G20 meeting in Cannes is President Sarkozy's opportunity to rehabilitate some of France's lost reputation on Africa, and to fulfill promises for relief that the G8 made six years ago.
THURSDAY's CHILD is one of the staff at Canada's first Cat Café ...
... which is modeled after similar venues in South Korea and Japan.
EMPLOYMENT NOTES - concerned that it prevents employees from reconciling work with family and personal life: a national commission has recommended that Spanish work hours - which typically involve a 2-hour lunch break but which result in employees not leaving work until 7:00 PM - be changed to reflect working hours generally practiced across Europe.
TV NOTES - the 'Family Guy' star Seth Green is working on an animated sitcom based on the Star Wars saga - expecting to premiere within the next two years.
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? - the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and Professor Severus Snape (from the "Harry Potter" series, as portrayed by Alan Rickman).
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... although this space focuses on musical offerings, the career of Anthony Newley spans into the world of theater and films equally (as a composer as well as performer). Bruce Eder from the All-Music Guide notes the improbability of a working-class Cockney personality becoming a success outside Britain - but over a fifteen-year span: Anthony Newley truly achieved world-wide fame, and was an influence on a young David Bowie.
Born in 1931 in a working-class section of London, his parents split in his youth and was raised by his stepfather. Then he was evacuated during the WW-II blitzkrieg to Brighton, where a retired music-hall performer introduced him to a wide swath of the performing arts. Back in London after the war, he entered acting school in his mid-teens and won a spot in a children's serial film series, leading to his break-out role: in David Lean's 1948 film Oliver Twist - as the Artful Dodger.
After appearing in numerous British films during the 1950's, his first pop chart exposure came from "I've Waited So Long" - a song (loosely based upon Elvis Presley) that he sang in a 1959 film - that reached #3 in the UK charts. He also had UK hits with covers of the Lloyd Price song "Personality" and the Frankie Avalon hit "Why".
He made his composing debut in 1961 when he met the lyricist Leslie Bricusse (who is still alive at age 80). Together they wrote the play Stop the World: I Want to Get Off - which spawned several hit singles including Gonna Build a Mountain and "Once in a Lifetime". It ran on Broadway for 556 performances (with Newley in the lead role) and made the two men's careers.
Newley (along with his second wife Joan Collins and Peter Sellers) wrote a 1963 musical comedy Fool Brittania - based upon the sex scandal of John Profumo, forced to resign from the MacMillan conservative government. Newley and Bricusse also wrote the theme song for the James Bond film "Goldfinger" in 1964.
In 1965, they wrote their next stage production: The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd - which had a six-month run on Broadway and featured songs such as "A Wonderful Day Like Today" and especially Feeling Good - a hit for Nina Simone and was also covered by Steve Winwood with Traffic.
In 1967, Newley had a supporting role opposite Rex Harrison in Dr. Doolittle - a commercial disaster, but which gained Leslie Bricusse an Oscar for Best Original Song. Although Harrison sung it in the film: years later on the Tonight Show set, I recall Don Rickles just looked at fellow guest Newley and said, "Talk to the Animals!" - which broke up the audience.
Newley went onto other films, when in 1971 he and Leslie Bricusse wrote the score for the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - based upon the Roald Dahl book. The film generated led to a hit single for Sammy Davis Jr. with Candy Man reaching the Top Ten.
Newley and Bricusse worked on an NBC re-make of Peter Pan - with Mia Farrow and Danny Kaye - in 1976 as well as one final play The Good Old Bad Old Days - but did not work together afterwards. Newley wrote the score for the UK television show The Old Curiosity Shop and later in life in a guest role for the long-running EastEnders as an amorous used car salesman (and very apropos, as Newley came from London's East End).
Newley continued to work in theater (often as a director or producer), recording as late as 1978 and as an occasional talk show host - but his career on-stage stalled, and he often worked in Las Vegas cabaret, dinner theater or the Borsch Belt resorts (in part since his mother was Jewish).
In his later years he often appeared in a musical revue entitled Once Upon a Song but Anthony Newley's career was curtailed when he was first diagnosed with renal cancer in 1985, and had one kidney removed. The cancer returned in 1997, this time attacking his lungs, then spreading to his liver when he died in 1999 at the age of 67.
He left behind a legacy that includes a Tony Award in 1963 (for Best Actor in "Stop the World"), a Grammy Hall of Fame award for Shirley Bassey for the song Goldfinger that he and Bricusse wrote and induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989. He was the subject of Stop the World: The Biography of Anthony Newley in 2003, and has several compilation albums of his music. The All-Music Guide listing concludes that since Newley's death, his recordings "have acquired a new generation of listeners in England, and his albums are much sought after, following years of languishing in cut-out and bargain bins".
And while "Feeling Good" is my all-time favorite song of his, I also recently came across an old Far Side cartoon that reminded me of another Newley-Bricusse tune from "Stop the World" - one that won the 1962 Grammy Award for Song of the Year. It was recorded by performers as diverse as Shirley Bassey, Lesley Gore, James Brown,Tony Bennett, Clay Aiken and even ... Kermit the Frog. Most notably, Sammy Davis Jr. had a #17 hit with it in 1962.
In that Far Side cartoon (not online, alas) mentioned: a group of white-coat scientists are in a laboratory when one declared,
"Yes, gentlemen, they are fools. But ... what kind of fools are they?"
And at this link - if you skip to the 1:30 mark of the video - you can hear Anthony Newley perform it.
What kind of fool am I? Who never fell in love
It seems that I'm the only one
that I have been thinking of
What kind of man is this?
An empty shell
A lonely cell in which
an empty heart must dwell
What kind of clown am I?
What do I know of life?
Why can't I cast away the mask of play
and live my life?
Why can't I fall in love
Till I don't give a damn
And maybe then
I'll know what kind of fool I am
