Copious Notes

EW's New classics: Up for debate (of course)

John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Is it really the No. 1 classic movie of the lat 25 years?

Last weekend, the editors of Entertainment Weekly dropped their annual summer double issue and gave  us a good two weeks of debating material.

Is Pulp Fiction really the best film of the last 25 years?

Does Amy Winehouse's year-old debut already deserve Top 10 classic status?

Public Enemy doesn't make the Top 50?

Yes, it's another set of lists. We say that with no derision, because hey, we're going to give you some lists on Sunday. Lists are fun, because they are always a matter of opinion, which means most everyone who reads one will have some modicum of disagreement with it.

EW's new lists are pretty ambitious: The New Classics is 1,000 of the best movies, TV shows, albums, books and other stuff over the past 25 years. My favorite list was actually the final one: Tech, where they named the, "top 25 innovations that changed entertainment."

Even there though, I'd argue against ranking the iPod at No. 4, below the DVD player, Napster and TiVo. Yes, the DVD is a cool advance in home video, but it still was just another method of delivering the videos in some tangible form. The iPod introduced the concept of owning a whole album without leaving your home, or even just picking and choosing the songs you want; singles, but you choose what's a single. It's the most radical change in the distribution of recorded music since the beginning of recorded music. How do you top that?

See, arguing it is almost inescapable.

Pulp Fiction, for me, was a good place to start. I've always considered it a bit overrated, over romanticized. Good movie, snappy dialog and engaging story structure, but not quite all that.

But if you want to argue towering influence, then its No. 1 seems a bit more legit. How many Pulp wannabes have we seen since 1994? Interestingly, Forrest Gump, the movie that beat Pulp Fiction for the Oscar for best picture, isn't even on EW's Top 100. (It's worth noting that EW has always been in love with Pulp.)

There are some nice picks on the movie list, such as Blue Velvet at No. 4, acknowledging the off-kilter brilliance of David Lynch, and giving Merchant Ivory's A Room with a View a nod at No. 24. The Helena Bonham Carter starmaker ushered in the chick-flick-as-literary-costume-drama era we're still in today.

 The music list had several nice visionary choices, such as Madonna's self-titled 1983 album at No. 5, OutKast's Stankonia at No. 12, and R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant at No. 32. All were great albums, and all set the stage for the artists' subsequent chart toppers -- Like a Virgin, Speakerboxx/The Love Below and Document, respectively. But then, somehow, Nirvana's Nevermind is left off in favor of MTV Unplugged. ?!

See, debating is sooooo easy. And fun.

I will also give EW props for trying to limit the number of entries from any one artist to one or two. I seem to remember years ago when Rolling Stone dropped a list of the best rock albums ever, and half the Top 10 was by The Beatles. But then, that list also gave this young rock fan a lot of listening to go do.

And this list from Entertainment Weekly seems to come at a perfect time, right before the laziest days of summer. I'd write more, but I've got some watching and listening to do.

P.S.: A very cool thing about the Top 50 stage list is that four of the shows -- Angels in America (No. 1), Elaine Stritch at Liberty (17), Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk (24) and Topdog/Underdog (49) were all directed by Frankfort's own George C. Wolf. People, we don't revere this guy enough.

So, are you saying your critics are being bought?

Sometimes commercial campaigns puzzle me. Like, why would cell phone or computer companies think I'd want to buy their brand because their pitchman in a condescending jerk? Why would a soup company think I would be seduced by the idea that their product could turn me into a gurgling zombie?

The current Hotels.com campaign really bugs me.

Now, I like Hotels.com. I have used it to research and to book lodgings on trips and think it's a good service. I've even liked some of their previous commercial campaigns, but the current one . . .

It is probably the first commercial campaign I've seen that highlights the user-reviewer, the citizen critic that is now weighing in on the virtues and pitfalls of virtually every product out there, from hotels to movies to nose-hair removers. Once again, nothing against user reviews. They can be informative for people buying products or services, particularly sight unseen off the Internet. I'll often use them, though in the case of hotels, I usually also check in with professional critics at, say, Frommer's or Fodor's.

The problem with the Hotels.com commercials is the implication that their reviewers are being bought.

In one, a family is checking into a room, and the mom tells the bellman that they picked the hotel based on reviews at hotels.com, and maybe they'd be writing a review. The bellman opens a suitcase full of cash and jewels and says, "I bet you will."

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hotels want a good review so bad, they'll try to buy you off if you use Hotels.com. Ha, ha.

That was cute, and to any of us who write reviews for a living, it probably reminded us of a time when someone sort of blatantly tried to curry our favor, knowing we were writing reviews -- not that I or anyone I know has been offered a briefcase full of cash and jewels.

But there are a few spots that bug me, because the traveler accepts and encourages the gifts. In one, a man finds a fur bathrobe in his room, and when the bellhop fesses up that it was a bribe and gets ready to take it back, the guest strokes the robe, says he'll let it slide, but don't do it again, especially when he comes back on a specific set of dates. In another one, a man finds two tubes of shampoo, and when his wife says maybe they were trying to butter him up for the review, he shouts, "It's working."

Yes, these are jokes. And maybe I am a little hypersensitive because I am a critic and I don't like to see things that impugn the integrity of that craft.

But the message of these commercials is that the reviewers take and are being influenced by the bribes. Is that really the message Hotels.com wants to send?

Has Jamie G really moved up?

A few weeks ago, we bid farewell to intrepid Herald-Leader culture writer Jamie Gumbrecht, who took a job at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer -- bigger city, bigger opportunities.

But, looking at the video of Jamie jumping into the "grit pit" in Warwick, Ga., we must ask, is she truly in a better place?

Dateline Flyover

Michael Friedman, Jim Lewis and Steven Cosson (L-R) discuss This Beautiful City, the play about the evangelical community in Colorado Springs, Colo., which they created as part of 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actor's Theatre of Louisville. Photo by Maggie Huber | Lexington Herald-Leader and LexGo.com.

Note: A few weeks ago, I was invited to join the bloggers at Flyover, a blog at ArtsJournal.com written by nine arts journalists from across the country who work outside of the major cultural capitols such as New York and Chicago. It was quite an honor, which I compared to being asked to join your favorite band, as I have been an avid Flyover reader since the blog launched. I also like being part of it because it makes Lexington part of a national arts conversation. So, today I put up my first post. Sometimes, when appropriate, I'll cross post between here and Flyover, and sometimes I'll write posts exclusively for that blog. Here's an excerpt from today's post, and I invite you to follow the link at the bottom to go over to Flyover and read the rest and read posts from my fellow Flyover bloggers:

Last week, I saw a performance of Lee Blessing’s new play, Great Falls. It was a great piece of theater that belied the bells and whistles of so many shows today by focusing on two terrific, well-traveled actors under the guidance of a first-rate director.

And I was nowhere near New York City. Not even Chicago or San Francisco. I was in Louisville, a town most people only think about the first Saturday in May. But every year, somewhere around the last weekend in March, the Derby City becomes the center of the theater world with critics and theater professionals flocking in for the Humana Festival of New American Plays.

The festival, which has launched critically acclaimed plays such as Crimes of the Heart, is now into its fourth decade. It has had its up years and down years, but with recent hits such as Dinner with Friends and Omnium Gatherum, people still come to Humana hoping to be among the first to discover the next great thing.

See the end of this post at Flyover.

Double the opera from UK

Colleen Lauve as Gretel and Sarah Klopfenstein as Hansel during the dream sequence from UK Opera Theatre's production of Hansel and Gretel. Photo by Tim Collins | University of Kentucky.

Every University of Kentucky Opera production has two casts. The main reasons are the UK voice program wants to give stage experience to as many students as possible, and the opera company schedules its performances on back-to-back nights. Performing many operatic roles two consecutive nights would be a voice killer, somewhat akin to asking the UK football team to play two games on consecutive days. The voice of an opera singer, like the body of a football player, needs time to recover. So you’ll notice most professional opera companies such as Louisville’s Kentucky Opera schedule their performances on a Friday and Sunday, or some other lineup with at least a day between shows.

So, since UK Opera doubles up, a lot of opera goers end up seeing a different cast from many of their friends, and only one of the casts gets reviewed for the paper. We think UK Opera is worth reviewing because of the generally high quality of its productions and its status, without a pro opera troupe here, as Lexington’s de facto opera company. With adult tickets going for more than $30, they're also charging real money to get in, which obligates the company to perform at a certain standard. But, with limited resources of time and space, plus a desire to get you a timely review, we usually only review the opening night cast. (And  when you're talking about one of these gut-wrenching Puccini or Verdi operas, you can only take it once a season or so.)

Sometimes I do see both casts though, and it’s always interesting to see how different performers interpret the same roles and music. Such was the case this weekend when after having reviewed the “Hansel” cast of Hansel and Gretel the previous weekend I ended up in the Lexington Opera House Saturday night seeing the “Gretel” cast. This happened through a combination of my daughter receiving a free ticket to the show through her school and my lovely bride being cool to the idea of venturing out to drive on ice and in sub-freezing temperatures.

The affirming thing was the other cast did not alter my overall upbeat assessment of the show. But stage director Sally Stunkel did allow the actors latitude to do their own interpretations of the characters, which gave us different views of the show. The biggest alteration came in the role of the Witch. In the Hansel cast, Mark Kano played up the clownishness of his dude-looks-like-a-lady assignment to steal the show. Gretel cast Witch Natalie Krupansky had more of a psycho take. There was never a hint of safety in her wild-eyed performance.

As the title siblings, Sarah Klopfenstein and Colleen Lauve of the Gretel cast seemed like a slightly more sophisticated, older take on the kids than the Hansel cast’s Brandy Lynn Hawkins and Amanda Balltrip. But the primary difference there was in voice: Hawkins and Balltrip are simply two of the strongest voices at UK, and hearing them unite provided some thrills. Speaking of vocal thrills, Eric Brown sang the role of the Father in the Gretel cast.

Was either cast appreciably better? That’s somewhat in the eye of the beholder.

But the third reason UK double casts is it can. The voice department is fully capable of fielding two casts for the same show, and the winners are local opera fans, particularly ones looking to get two-for-one on each show.

See a photo album from Hansel and Gretel.

10 Years on the Job

Lately, I've been having these weird realizations:

~ Jim Clark  has been president of the LexArts more than five years.

~ HorseMania was eight years ago.

~ The Lexington Legends are heading into their eighth season.

~ Broadway star Laura Bell Bundy is nearly 27 years old ... and I ­covered her senior-year musical at Lexington Catholic!

They're moments that can make you go all Edvard Munch (right).

They're moments when you realize that you've been around long enough that things that were once news are now fixtures on the landscape. I'm feeling like something of a fixture, too.

Ten years ago today was my first day of work at the Herald-Leader. I wasn't sure where to park or what to do when I got through the door.

Back then, I was a young reporter with a young ­family. Today, my Lexington tenure is twice that of my first two gigs combined, and my kids are in the latter stages of elementary school. Like them, after a decade in this sort of job, I hope I've learned a few things. Things like ...

It's good to have been around a while: When I got here, I was hearing about groups such as Junkyard Players and Lexington Musical Theatre and people like University of Kentucky sculpting legend John Tuska and Lexington ­Ballet founder Nels Jorgensen - all of whom would live for me only in yellowing newspaper clips and stories people told me. But I also got to meet and cover folks such as now-retired Singletary Center for the Arts director Holly Salisbury, former Lexington Arts and Cultural Council director Dee Fizdale, the late Lexington Opera House impresario Dick Pardy, and artist and philanthropist Lucille Caudill Little. They all played critical roles in the development of Lexington's arts community, and it's good to have been here in time to cover them and see firsthand what they brought to the table.

I've seen moments of discovering new talent, like Adam Luckey popping out of bed naked in Actors Guild's 1998 production of The Monogamist, and things coming to an end, like the Lexington Shakespeare Festival.

In these 10 years, there have been groups that have flourished, others that have gone through trials and come back, and others that have suffered and never been quite the same.

A decade gives you perspective, and the No. 1 thing I can say about Lexington arts during the past 10 years is that they are growing.

Farewell to Jamie G

Jamie Gumbrecht on the beat, checking out the jukebox at The Fishtank. Copyrighted photo by Angela Baldridge.

Jamie Gumbrecht did not have an easy act to follow when she got to the Herald-Leader, especially in my eyes.

She was succeeding Heather Svokos, the pop culture writer extraordinaire who, for my money, was the bees knees, had hung the moon and all that. Where on earth could we find someone to match her wit, personality and breadth of popular culture expertise? And could that possibly be found in a 22-year-old, straight out of college? C'mon.

The first half of that question started being answered when I was around 13 years old, appropriately in this case, on television. It was an episode of M*A*S*H where Corporal Klinger was having a hard time filling the shoes of wonderful Radar. At some point near the end of the episode, Col. Potter had to explain that while jobs are the same, people are different, and they do their jobs differently. But that doesn't mean they can't do them equally well and wonderfully. So, I went forward in life with a mentality that people will come and go, and we need to appreciate them for who they are; not trap them by preconceptions of who we want them to be.

The bigger answer came when Jamie flew in for her interview. We went to dinner at Alfalfa's, and I was reminded that people can be wise beyond their years. She was definitely a product of her pop culture generation, but was well aware of the history that preceded it.  And she was extremely well rounded, having traveled to Cuba while in college, interviewed figures such as Condoleezza Rice, and completed internships at the Dallas Morning News and Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- that was a big clue we would not be keeping her forever.

How we cover the Barnstable Party

Jamie Gumbrecht, left, Angela Baldridge, and I try to piece together our canopy before the Barnstable Party. Copyrighted photo by David Perry.

Whenever I go shopping to get prepared for the Barnstable Brown Party, I always find myself in the camping section. That's sort of what covering the party for the Herald-Leader is like: camping, in formal wear.

We have some unique challenges covering Derby Eve's  biggest celebrity magnet. We have no home office in Louisville, but unlike most of the other print media there, we are on deadline. Photos, copy, and now video have to be flowing to Lexington. So, we have to have an office. Hence, I've turned in receipts over the years for things like a canopy tent, lanterns and fold-up chairs. Oh, and a tuxedo.

Some years, we've just set up a table and a few chairs for a work station under the stars. This year, we needed every bit of the hardware and then some. That's why I was in Wal Mart buying tarps -- I'll be sending you the bill, Uncle Herald -- for last night's soiree. And that paid off when an aggressive and extended storm blew into L'ville at about 6:30 last night.

We had a five person crew last night: Photographers David Perry and Angela Baldridge, videographer David Stephenson and writers Jamie Gumbrecht and myself. Angela gets an MVP award for figuring out how our canopy should be assembled, despite the fact the instructions were somewhere in my garage, where they weren't doing us a lot of good. If it hadn't been for Angela's ingenuity, we may have been standing there with an unfinished frame when the rains came.

The canopy still had a nice coat of dust on it from last year's Ichthus Festival. Yes, the gear does come in handy for an event that is more like camping camping. Since my first Barnstable party, things have changed quite a bit technologically. Where we used to have to get the phone company to set up a line outside the Barnstables for us to send stories and images, now we're all on  mobile wireless cards, and the information flows a lot faster. 

And we keep it flowing. Usually, while one reporter and photographer are up front talking to the stars and snapping photos, the other is in the back filing images or quotes with the newsroom in Lexington. Then we hand off, sending the other scribe or shooter back to file.

The Barnstable Party also used to be a little local media get together, but now, we have to elbow for room along with places like Access Hollywood and People Magazine. Click here for more on that.

Sometimes, when we are trying to squeeze our ways through the party to get from the front to our work station out back or trying to piece together a tent frame, we have to remind ourselves this is a "glamorous" gig. But really, I keep asking for the Barnstable assignment because it's the only place to be Derby Eve.

And I keep visiting the camping section.