Sales & Sons

Cynthia Turner provided a nice memory today of Milton Supman, better known as comedian Soupy Sales, in her daily Cynopsis e-mail digest of media-related news:

"And a nod to Soupy Sales, who passed away at the age of 83 late Thursday night. When I was 10, I was stuck at the JFK Airport in New York with my mother for three days and two nights—a result of a massive snowstorm. We had the good fortune to spend the time in the American Airlines Admiral's Club, in relative comfort, much different than most of the stranded, who were in the main airport areas downstairs. There were two celebrities also staying at the Admiral's Club—Goldie Hawn, TV's current It Girl on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and Soupy Sales. Goldie Hawn didn't speak to anybody, and clearly did not want to be spoken to, either.

"Soupy was wonderfully approachable, for both the adults and me. He stayed awake for most of our 60-hour detention, spending the overnight hours downstairs putting on free stand-up shows for the throngs of people. I liked him on his television show, because I was just a kid. But I liked him better for what he did to make so many people's uncomfortable predicament altogether bearable, memorable, and even fun."

I don't remember Sales much from my own childhood except for an occasional pie hitting his face on Saturday-morning TV. However, I've always found it interesting that his sons, Hunt and Tony, are rock musicians who played drums and bass, respectively, on Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust for Life and later formed the rhythm section of the David Bowie-fronted Tin Machine in the late '80s.

Before all that, though, the Sales brothers were two-thirds of Runt, Todd Rundgren's first band after he left Nazz. The two Runt albums, 1970's Runt and 1971's Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (my favorite album of all time), have since been reissued as Rundgren solo albums—he did write, produce, and sing every song on the two albums, and he played most of the instruments, and he's the only member of Runt who gets any face time on the album covers—so perhaps he felt overwhelmed at the time by the prospect of releasing anything under his own name, especially if it were to bomb. Rundgren, after all, was only 21 when he recorded that first album. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, Tony Sales was 18 and Hunt was 16 when they recorded Runt.

Rundgren, it turns out, was the oldest runt in the litter.

serving up a silent birthday wish

The October 3 TV listings in the Chicago Sun-Times offered a preview of that night's episode of Saturday Night Live:

"Saturday Night Live" (10:30 p.m., WMAQ-Channel 5): Ryan Reynolds ("Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story") hosts, with Lady Gaga providing musical and visual entertainment.

Never mind that Reynolds starred in two of the summer's biggest movies, the superhero adventure X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the romantic comedy The Proposal, or that he's signed up to play the Green Lantern in his own big-screen superhero franchise—as far as the Sun-Times is concerned, he'll never be better than he was in a TV movie that aired on NBC in February of '95. The stars of Serving in Silence were Glenn Close and Judy Davis, but an 18-year-old Reynolds really must have impressed someone in the Chicago newspaper's fact-checking department.

Coincidentally, Reynolds turns 33 today, but I refuse to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RYAN REYNOLDS! YOU'RE SO CHARMING AND FUNNY AND IMPOSINGLY MUSCULAR! I MEAN, I GUESS THAT THIRD QUALITY IS WHY YOU GET HIRED TO PLAY SUPERHEROES, BUT I DON'T REMEMBER HEARING STORIES ABOUT MICHAEL KEATON OBSESSIVELY HITTING THE GYM BEFORE HE PLAYED BATMAN 20 YEARS AGO! BUT MAYBE HE DID AND I JUST DON'T REMEMBER! IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, OBVIOUSLY! WE'RE ALL GETTING OLDER! AND IF IT SOUNDS LIKE I'M SOMEWHAT JEALOUS OF YOUR PHYSIQUE, WELL, SURE, I'M MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT THAT! YOU KNOW, I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OFF THE CAPS LOCK AND STOPPED USING EXCLAMATION POINTS AFTER THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THIS BIRTHDAY WISH, BUT I'M ALMOST FINISHED, SO BEAR WITH ME FOR A FEW MORE SECONDS, OKAY?! LET ME JUST CONCLUDE BY SAYING YOU'RE SWELL, RYAN REYNOLDS, AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A TERRIFIC BIRTHDAY, AND I ESPECIALLY HOPE YOUR WIFE, THE LOVELY SCARLETT JOHANSSON, TREATS YOU TO SOME ADULT SITUATIONS AND PARTIAL NUDITY!

Yep, I refuse to say any of that. The part about Reynolds's wife is inappropriate, for one thing.

By the way, you can read more about Wolverine and other freaky creatures in a few entries I didn't finish writing on the dates listed below:

4/10: "No, my brother—you've got to buy your own."
7/6: the boomerang of satire
8/20: sassy cannibals spawning, preaching, living, and loving

lists

I used to like making lists of things when I was younger: favorite movies, biggest-grossing movies, favorite songs, favorite TV shows, girls I liked. It went on and on.

I don't like making lists of things anymore. Now I waste my time in more mature ways, like endlessly moving stacks of old newspapers and newspaper clippings around my apartment.

I'm proud of myself.

the realistic and the impossible

Back in June I saw a postcard in a bookstore that had Che Guevara's face on the front—one of those painted reprints of Alberto Korda's famous photo of the Cuban revolutionary, to be exact—and the slogan "Let's be realistic: try the impossible!" underneath. Close by was Spain Rodriguez's graphic novel Che: A Graphic Biography (2008); last fall Publishers Weekly deemed it "for the most part unalloyed hagiography, which can seem more like something produced by revolutionary committee than an artist."

Six years ago Lawrence Osborne wrote about Che worship in the New York Observer and attempted to set the record straight:

Of course, it was Che's role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba's Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce. A Cuban expedition to Congo to prop up the anti-Mobutu forces fighting there ended similarly.

Che, in fact, failed at anything requiring real ability and perseverance. He was a charismatic dilettante, like most professional revolutionaries, but in between he lived the activist high life: the Bandung-generation Third World conference circuit, dramatic speeches at the United Nations, clandestine peregrinations from country to country, murky deals, love affairs and connections in high places. None of it amounted to anything, however. In the end, Che had to foment real revolutions or nothing.

While attempting to spur a revolution in Bolivia in 1967, Guevara was captured by that country's military on October 8 and executed the next day.

In January I saw Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-hour biopic Che, starring Benicio Del Toro. As Soderbergh told the Chicago Sun-Times, he split the story into two films—part one is subtitled "The Argentine," part two is "Guerrilla"—because "one, you didn't understand why [Guevara] thought he would succeed in Bolivia if you didn't see what happened in Cuba. And two, you had to go back to Cuba to answer the question: How did he become the Che that is the guy on the T-shirts?"

Del Toro isn't the only movie star in the film, but he's the only one who has a lead role, and it's interesting to see how Soderbergh, one of the most intelligent and unpredictable filmmakers around, uses other famous faces.

I recognized Julia Ormond in the first part of Che as an American journalist interviewing Guevara, but I’m not sure if that will be the case for every viewer, mostly because it's been over a dozen years since she had a lead role in a high-profile American movie—1995's Sabrina. Besides, you hear Ormond's voice several times in Che before you see her face, but since she’s using an American accent I didn’t recognize her voice. (Ormond also had roles in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008.)

Guevara was a world-famous figure by the time he made his trip to Bolivia. A celebrity, even. When he arrived people wanted to shake his hand; they were awed by his presence as well as the myth that surrounded him. But he was afraid most peasants would be suspicious of a foreigner trying to rally them to revolution, even though he was an Argentinean who was able to rally Cubans to revolt against Batista’s government nine years earlier. (In Bolivia he was worried about being labeled a Cuban, which he was by that point, of course.) He was a stranger in both countries, if not exactly a stranger in a strange land. His fame turned him into an outsider once again.

When Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon show up in part two of Che for brief cameos, it has a jarring effect—you lose focus of what’s happening in the story at those particular moments as you stop and say to yourself, "Is that who I think it is?" just as Guevara’s revolution lost focus in Bolivia due to his celebrity status. It’s a canny move by Soderbergh that parallels the on-screen action.

Yes, I do love Die Hard, but I also love my memory.

And what I remember of that 1988 classic doesn't sound anything like the new Jamie Foxx-Gerard Butler movie Law Abiding Citizen, at least not according to this description from an advertisement on Facebook:

Love DIE HARD? Click for Law Abiding Citizen where a man turns raging assassin, avenging the murder of his family.

That sounds more like Death Wish. But since Bonnie Bedelia hasn't appeared in a Die Hard film since the first sequel in 1990, why not kill her off for the fifth installment? It can go into production once Bruce Willis gets bored with his career again or needs a new yacht or needs to prove to himself that he's still in shape.

John McClane has to be tired of saving the world from terrorists by now, even if they do occasionally threaten members of his family. He needs a more, shall we say, personal project to complete next time around.

I'd like to suggest that the Die Hard series return to the template of the first two films, in which all the action takes place in a central location: a skyscraper in the first film, an airport in the second. And to make things topical, how's about Holly McClane (Bedelia) loses her home in a foreclosure and goes to the bank to set things right when an insane lender blows up the place with Holly inside?

Cut to John McClane in ... wherever he's living (we'll figure that out later) as he learns his ex-wife is dead! He goes into a rage! He still loved her, see! It's not fair! Why not him?! Nooooooooo!

So he goes to ... another bank ... where he finds the lender ... lending in a new position ... and ... look, we'll figure all of this out later. The main points are: (1) Holly dies; (2) John seeks revenge; (3) banks blow up so Americans feel better about this miserable recession.

Save a seat for me!