The Steve Reynolds Program - Issue #11
Hello, Peoples!
A friend sent me a picture of himself drinking a spiced colada as discussed in the last newsletter. And that made this weekly endeavor a success for me. Love it.
It's hard to recommend stuff when I'm mainly just watching with sadness and disgust the events on a national level. But I continue. Stiff upper lip or fingers in my ears? I don't know.
But the world needs me doing "What if Cardi B got her money stuck in a vending machine?" bit. So we go on.
Four Works This Jerk's For
1. Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices - I am greatly looking forward to the new Robert Pollard biography being released in August. Biographer (and newsletter subscriber) Matthew Cutter knows the subject very well and has put in a ton of legwork and research to properly put the genius from Dayton in context of musical history.
2. Moon Over Broadway - I love older documentaries with the fly-on-the-wall style where they let you feel and live moments happening. Modern docs will show a brief moment, then interview five people how the felt about the moment. This doc by DA Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, The War Room) is about the staging of a farcical play, Moon Over Buffalo, (starring Carol Burnett) from out-of-town tryouts to Broadway. The push-and-pull between Burnett, other actors, the director, producers and (especially) the writer is fascinating to watch. The way everyone nitpicks and criticizes, you feel we're watching a major flop in real time. It isn't. It does all right. But it's great to watch these professionals interact and understand the insanity of sinking millions of dollars into a non-musical in a genre that almost never works.
3. Meet My Friends The Friends - Only Tom Scharpling would be so ahead of the curve to parody TV show recap podcasts. And only Tom would be so thorough to get every detail right and then devolve into a great comic drama, write surreal fake ads and have a behind-the-scenes storyline that's half Curb Your Enthusiasm, half Scharpling and Wurster phone call. They've just finished rehashing season two, but each episode is 10-15 minutes so you can barrel through them in a road trip.
4. The Cake Server - Everyone loves complex machine videos (Rube Goldberg was so unique and innovative, but truthfully watching these in actions is more satisfying than his whimsical drawings). And for a guy who can't line up a dozen dominoes without accidentally knocking them down, it's awe-inspiring.
Nothing coming up this week on the performance tip, but big announcement soon.