George Orwell & George Michael: The June 25 Odd Couple
Happy birthday to George Michael, who is 50. He shares June 25 with George Orwell, who would be 110 if he were alive today. What else do they share, other than magnificent artistry? Ahem:
• “George Orwell” and “George Michael” are pseudonyms for men named Eric Blair and Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, respectively.
• Both Georges grew up with two sisters. Orwell had an older sister named Marjorie; Michael has an older sister named Melanie. Close enough.
• George Orwell’s most famous book is Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Michael’s breakthrough album with Wham!, Make it Big, was released in 1984.
• George Orwell wrote of regretting his role in British empire as a young police officer in Burma. George Michael wrote of regretting his libertine image as manufactured as a young pop star in England.
• George Orwell wrote Keep the Apidistra Flying, and George Michael wrote Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, both about naive young artists who struggle against the corrupting power of money and greed.
• George Orwell had tattoos of Burmese-ritual origin on his knuckles. George Michael is rumored to have a cross tattooed on his ankle. (And a discreet ass tattoo invoking the BSA jacket logo from his “Faith” video. Again, rumored.)
• George Orwell’s successive novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are reported to have “sold more copies than any two books by a 20th-century author.” George Michael’s successive albums Make it Big and Faith have sold more than 30 million copies.
• George Orwell deliberately got arrested in December 1931 to write about spending Christmas in jail. (He was released before the holiday.) George Michael said his own 1998 arrest for engaging in a lewd act in public was a “subconsciously deliberate act” meant to end any questions about his sexuality.
• George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, in which the pig Napoleon trains a platoon of attack dogs to do his homicidal bidding. George Michael wrote the song “Shoot the Dog” as a reaction to greed and war in the Middle East. (The song also references “calling the pigs” to break up a party; they never show up.)
• George Orwell made “Freedom is Slavery” one of the ruling-class slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the song “Freedom,” George Michael also rebuked his baby’s own perverted take on the concept.
• George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has yielded no fewer than a dozen direct adaptations to film, TV, radio, and even opera; hundreds more references to the book’s ideas can be found throughout pop culture of the last 60 years. George Michael’s “Last Christmas” has been covered, by one estimate, nearly 500 times.
• George Orwell was shot in the throat by a sniper during the Spanish Civil War. George Michael underwent a tracheotomy in 2011 while being treated for severe pneumonia. Both men nearly died.
• George Orwell wrote six novels. George Michael has written six albums.
• Today, 50-year-old George Michael is healing after having fallen out of moving Range Rover on May 16. He was not wearing a seatbelt when he went to adjust the loose passenger door; then tumbled from the vehicle onto the M1. “He had a deep cut above his left eyebrow which was really bleeding down his face into his teeth," said one witness.
And what did George Orwell prophesy? “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” (Orwell did not live to see fifty.)
Alison Brie's New Film Is Only the Second-Weirdest Thing Happening in Toronto Right Now
From a press release:
Production has begun on NO STRANGER THAN LOVE,a quirky, romantic comedy starring Alison Brie (AMC’s “Mad Men,” NBC’s “Community”), Justin Chatwin (Showtime’s “Shameless”) and Colin Hanks (Showtime’s “Dexter,” “Orange County”). Nick Wernham will direct from a script by Steve Adams. The film is currently shooting in Toronto.
NO STRANGER THAN LOVE follows Lucy Sherrington (Alison Brie), a heart-breakingly attractive high school art teacher in the small, secluded village of Spot Valley, where there is not a male in town who is not secretly or openly in love with her. And who can blame them? She is kind to everyone, and helplessly sympathetic, yet romantically she keeps them all at a polite distance…until tonight. Tonight she has agreed to a rendezvous with Clint Coburn (Colin Hanks), the married high school football coach who’s been on a lustful quest in Lucy’s direction for the last five years. Just as they are about to begin their affair, Clint disappears down a hole that opens up in Lucy’s living room floor. But this is not just any hole. It is an inter-dimensional, one-way hole of infinite darkness that leaves Clint stranded and floating in oblivion.
In this unpredictable love story, Lucy Sherrington must embark on a harrowing quest to rescue Clint Coburn and keep their love affair a secret, all the while avoiding a dark stranger in town, Rydell White (Justin Chatwin), who has one thing in mind: finding Clint Coburn.
Jason Molina, the leader and architect of the bands Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., has been on my mind a lot since news of his death emerged on March 18. He died a few days before that during a protracted hiatus from recording and touring. In 2011, fans, friends and peers helped raise money to support Molina's long and ultimately unsuccessful recovery from alcoholism. I wish I had known then, and I wish I had contributed. I also wish I'd known how much his songs would possess me over the last month and a half, because I might have held off revisiting them for a while. As it stands, 45 days after Molina's death, I cannot silence them.
"HOW MANY LIVES COULD HAVE POSSSIBLY BEEN SAVED OR CRIMES SOLVED BY THE AGENTS OVER THE YEARS WHO HAD JOINED BECAUSE OF" DIE HARD ". This does'nt excuse any crime commited but sometimes one must take into account the totality of the individual. The epic moral sensibilty in the work of John McTiernan needs a voice once again . The culture cries out ! Who knows who or what his work will inspire ! So , it is with this that I call all who can be if help to possibly help -FREE JOHN MCTIERNAN. Prayers to St Patrick to Intercede ."
Robert Davi found the FREE JOHN MCTIERNAN Facebook page, thank God.
"[Rob] Thomas is responsible for delivering not only a movie to his devout Veronica Mars following, but also the tokens customarily promised to Kickstarter backers for their various levels of largesse. At 9 this morning, that meant no fewer than 34,763 limited-edition t-shirts. It meant 17,919 DVDs of the finished film (plus Blu-ray copies for the 7,222 backers who have pledged $100 or more) and 8,092 Veronica Mars movie posters — 2,885 of which must be signed by the film's cast, as ensured by Thomas. At least 967 backers at the $175 and $275 levels will receive the complete Veronica Mars TV series on DVD. The vast majority of these rewards must be designed, manufactured, packaged and shipped new to the organizers, who then must repackage and reship them (within the US only!), after various stages of customization, to their respective backers. [...]
Looking at the figures and the estimated deadlines for delivery (most are concentrated around Thomas' projected release date of February/March 2014, an astoundingly tight production schedule even for a film with whole-hearted studio backing), the obvious question is, "How can this be accomplished?"
“I think it’s meaningless, almost, now,” says Mark Crumpacker, the chief marketing officer with Chipotle. “You could claim that something very heavily processed was fresh, I guess. I don’t think there are any rules around ‘fresh.’ You can just say it with impunity. And I think lots of people do.”
So maybe “Is it fresh?” isn’t the question we should be asking ourselves as we lose the tortilla, slice up freshness, and muddle through the trenches of fast-food trends. Instead, amid the varying strategies, we have a much more basic and far more crucial determination to make: What does fresh even mean?
I've wanted to write for a while now about Sacramento's tragic history with cultural self-esteem, and how the shiny and expensive new airport terminal somehow signifies both the city's long, singular cry for help and a turning point in its cultural identity. Until then, here is the 56-foot-long rabbit art that now salutes Sacramento's visitors while enthusiastically sending its citizens out into the world. It frightens and exhilarates and exhausts me; I fell in love with it almost instantly.
The First Show, or: On The Dead Milkmen, Dec. 7, 1990
I still have the ticket somewhere: The Dead Milkmen. Dec. 7, 1990. Cattle Club. Sacramento, Calif. Supporting acts: Mojo Nixon, The Cave Dogs. All ages. $10. The promoter had squeezed all the details into a rectangle in some horrible screaming serif font, replicated eight times on a standard 8.5×11 page, and photocopied maybe 40 pages, fanzine-style, on Kermit-green card stock. The Cattle Club couldn’t likely hold many more ticketholders than that. Not that everyone that night 22 years ago would have a ticket, but I had mine — my first show attending parentless.
The fact remains that these are postmodern exercises in American image worship, handmade and preserved the same way for 50 years by skilled workers under the auspices of a league for which every snap, every pass, every hit, every fumble wields sumptuous visual portent. And from the fetishized brutality of “NFL: Moment of Impact” right down to the ageless satire of “Football Follies” — Sudden Death Sabol’s reminder of the flaws rife within his beloved game’s glossy veneer — these workers uphold an equally ageless duty to make a viewer feel football. This is not broadcasting. This is filmmaking. This is art.
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