Carl “Uncle Zeb” Bartholomew Dies at 78
Carl Bartholomew, who hosted “Uncle Zeb’s Cartoon Camp” on KTUL Channel 8 in Tulsa from 1969-79 and on TCI from 1990-97, died today at age 78. The show was something of an institution for kids growing up in the Tulsa area, in which kids sat on a wooden bleacher while Uncle Zeb organized games and brought animal wranglers on as guests.
Kids screamed and cried as expected, but the great joy for those who appeared on the show was just being on TV. After a round of old Merry Melodies, Looney Tunes and Tex Avery cartoons and some old west campfire hijinks, the kids would walk down a wooden “bridge” and Bartholomew would let them say “hi!” to “My mommy, my daddy, my dog, my brother and everybody I know.” Almost every one of them said a slight variation on this, every day, Monday through Friday.
Uncle Zeb’s sign-off was “I’ll be lookin’ for ya,” and Bartholomew would stare into the camera as an old audio clip of a tearful woman saying “Auf wiedersehen, John. Auf wiedersehen” played. It was a bizarre show from the waning days of free-form television, and it was a great place to see the kind of whacked-out Warner Bros. cartoons that were deemed either too strange or offensive to play on the “The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” on CBS.
I never went on the show, but classmates I knew who did often came back with reports that Uncle Zeb didn’t like kids too much, but I tend to think of it as part of his act. In a 2001 interview with Infinity Press, Bartholomew said he refused to talk down to the children who appeared on the show.
“I had people saying ‘You don’t like children.’ In fact I really love children, and the things they do, and the spontaneity; that’s what really made the show work,” Bartholomew said. “It was ‘Hey, it’s you and me, kids; we’re in this together.’ So I would order them around. That came as a result of the limited amount of time we had on the air. ‘Get over here. No, I didn’t say there, over here. Now you wait over there where I told you.’ I learned within a day or two that this was not my show, this was their show. I had to be very flexible without them running amuck or running me into the ground. We were just trying to get organized, but it always appeared to be just organized confusion.”
Concert Review: Paul McCartney, August 17, BOK Center, Tulsa
Paul McCartney at the BOK Center Monday. (Photo by Tom Gilbert, Tulsa World)
Rating: 99
Paul McCartney does not sell out stadiums simply because he’s Paul McCartney. Sure, he could roll out a little over an hour’s worth of effort and generations of fans would be perfectly happy hearing a handful of Beatles classics and standout solo hits from his 50-year career, then go home and tell their friends and family that they had a nice, pleasant time with a legend. Instead, McCartney put his seemingly endless reservoir of energy to work ensuring that no one will forget the three hours they spent with him Monday night at Tulsa’s BOK Center, a concert that celebrated the venue’s first anniversary.
Beginning with “Drive My Car,” McCartney tirelessly powered through 34 songs with Beatles classics outnumbering solo tracks roughly two to one, but he delivered all his songs at full-tilt energy, whether it was last year’s “Highway” or “Eleanor Rigby” from 43 years ago. After recalling his recent driving tour of Route 66, which took him through Oklahoma, he paused in front of the 20,000-strong crowd “to take a moment to drink it all in.” Then, as he performed “The Long and Winding Road,” photos taken on “the mother road” flashed on the fiber-optic screen behind his band.
McCartney filled the set with historical grace notes, talking about how he wrote “Blackbird” during the Civil Rights Movement, “imagining a black girl going through all that,” and offering poignant tributes to his late wife Linda (“My Love” from 1972′s “Red Rose Speedway”) and fellow Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison. He began Harrison’s “Something” on ukelele, an instrument both men loved, then expandedthe song to its full “Abbey Road” arrangement as rare photos of Harrison flashed on the screen. When he played Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” he effortlessly segued into his former songwriting partner’s protest hit, “Give Peace a Chance.”
Early in the set, McCartney offered a cheeky bridge from the distant past to the digital future, performing 1966′s “Got to Get You Into My Life” as computer-generated Beatles from the upcoming “Rock Band” video game installment played in the background. And he clearly enjoyed opening his archival footage to his fans: during the title track from “Band on the Run,” he played footage taken during that 1973 album’s cover shoot, including shots of James Coburn and Christopher Lee mugging for the camera.
While McCartney left out some key classics he played during his 2002 show in Oklahoma City, it was hard to be disappointed by the massive set list as his band, featuring guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens and drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., masterfully recreated the classic arrangements on “Paperback Writer,” “Hey Jude” and “Live and Let Die,” which was accompanied by massive flames and fireworks rising from the stage.
At 67, McCartney still takes few breaks during concerts. After leaving the stage following his main set, the band returned for wall-to-wall Beatles classics: “Day Tripper,” “Lady Madonna,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Yesterday,” an incendiary “Helter Skelter,” “Get Back,” and a medley combining the reprise from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “The End” from “Abbey Road.” He showed no sign of fatigue after the lengthy show, having given Tulsa an extraordinary survey of what is arguably the greatest songwriting career in rock ‘n’ roll history.
Setlist:
1. Drive My Car
2. Jet
3. Only Mama Knows
4. Flaming Pie
5. Got To Get You Into My Life
6. Let Me Roll It / Foxy Lady
7. Highway
8. The Long and Winding Road
9. My Love
10. Blackbird
11. Here Today
12. Dance Tonight
13. Calico Skies
14. Mrs Vanderbilt
15. Eleanor Rigby
16. Sing the Changes
17. Band on the Run
18. Back in the U.S.S.R.
19. I’m Down
20. Something
21. I’ve Got a Feeling
22. Paperback Writer
23. A Day in the Life / Give Peace A Chance
24. Let It Be
25. Live and Let Die
26. Hey Jude
27. Day Tripper
28. Lady Madonna
29. I Saw Her Standing There
30. Yesterday
31. Helter Skelter
32. Get Back
33. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
34. The End
Video of the Day: Free Energy, “Free Energy”
Those 6 x 9 coaxials and that Rockford-Fosgate amp you just installed in your Trans-Am will be so happy to blast these sounds out of the T-top. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem produced this beautiful piece of happy stoner rock.
Movie Review: “District 9″
Rating: 90
All the best science fiction — the stories that survive no matter how technology advances — achieve their lasting impact because they say something profound about people, not machines. This is how Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” gets under the skin. It spellbinds with its performances and visuals, but its story about aliens living in South African shantytowns resonates because it’s based on humankind’s desultory track record of dealing with “others.”
In 1982, a large saucer appeared over Johannesburg, South Africa and just sat there, hovering over the city’s haze-covered skyline until helicopters were finally sent up to investigate. What the crews found were more than 1 million aliens — leaderless, malnourished and living in filth. Eventually the survivors were transported to the surface, but humanitarian efforts soon give way to a resentful containment strategy.
Their new home, a slum called District 9, makes Soweto look like luxury accommodations — the aliens, derisively dubbed “prawns” because of their crustacean-like appearance, spend most of their time scavenging through garbage piles, poring through the refuse for stray cans of the cat food they crave. Desperate for a solution, the South African government contracts with a Blackwater-like paramilitary corporation called Multinational United (MNU) to relocate the aliens to remote concentration camps.
That is where Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) gets embroiled in a kind of human-alien meltdown of relations. An amiable, pencil-pushing functionary for MNU, Wikus is chosen to oversee the relocation, but his close exposure to the aliens and what they’re really doing in District 9 creates a personal and global crisis. He becomes a victim of himself, the aliens, and his own company, and is hunted by a Nigerian warlord (Eugene Khumbanyiwa) who covets what Wikus has become. His only allies in the end are an alien named Christopher Johnson and his young son, and their alliance is tenuous at best.
What proceeds is a seamless, exciting and astonishingly artful thriller: “The Fugitive” in a politically and socially jagged environment — with aliens, no less — that is only a light extrapolation of South Africa’s recent history. Furthermore, Blomkamp made “District 9” for a reported $30 million, or one-fifth the cost of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” but his visual effects are as fluid and breathtaking as a typical nine-figure blockbuster, and they’re in service to a great story — not the other way around.
But while “District 9” certainly has a conscience, it should not be misconstrued as a heavy-handed polemic. This film simply rocks with a brain instead of having rocks for brains, and for that reason, “District 9” is the science fiction movie that could teach the major studios a few things about great effects on a shoestring and making action-filled sci-fi that stirs the mind.
Video of the Day: Mew, “Introducing Palace Players”
This first single from the exhaustingly titled No More Stories/Are Told Today/I’m Sorry/They Washed Away/No More Stories/The World Is Grey/I’m Tired/Let’s Wash Away is in line with what the Danish band self-identifies as “pretentious art rock,” replete with ominous laser-emitting monoliths. This screams for a gatefold sleeve designed by Hipgnosis.
Video of the Day: Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson, “Relator”
Those left unimpressed by Scarlett Johansson’s This Mortal Coil-alike collection, Anywhere I Lay My Head are likely to be more taken by this ultra-bouncy first single from her album of duets with Pete Yorn, Break-Up. They come off like a sunnier version of Dean and Britta (or a less-perverse Serge and Brigitte), and like Britta and Brigitte, Scarlett doesn’t hurt the visuals at all.
NY Times: Molly Ringwald on John Hughes
While I was eulogizing John Hughes last week here on Staticblog, I was surprised at how emotional I became when I learned about his passing and then had to sit here and convey my feelings about losing the director of films from my youth such as “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I spent the better part of that afternoon fending off a total blubbering breakdown, and there’s no question about it: I was mourning the loss of childhood as much as the death of Hughes.
While I was having lunch with Matt Price of Nerdage today, we were talking about how we both had this hope that he would come back after so many years away from the director’s chair, and capture what it was like to grow up and turn 40 the way he captured what it was like to turn 16, navigate the social Darwinism of high school, get married and have babies. It’s not equal to it, but the sentiment is generally the same: death brings a finality to some dreams, like the Beatles getting back together.
Here is a great guest column from Molly Ringwald in the New York Times on what it was like to be Hughes’ muse during those days, and how he abruptly ended their friendship once Ringwald made the decision to work with other directors. Its a bittersweet column in which Samantha Baker and Farmer Ted from “Sixteen Candles” grow up, start their own families, and find that the guy who was calling the shots on those teenage scenes still influences them well into adulthood. Very nice.
Video of the Day: Yo La Tengo, “Avalon or Someone Very Similar”
The third Yo La Tengo clip on Staticblog in the past two weeks, “Avalon” fits in with the band’s quickie aesthetic for the Popular Songs videos, and the song is utterly irresistible hot weather music. These perfect summer songs always seem to crop up at the end of the season, don’t they?
DVD Review: “I Love You, Man”
Rating: 73
“I Love You, Man” is a triumph of male-bonding awkwardness, a start-to-finish laugh marathon about a man who has no problem talking to women, but discovers by his mid-‘30s that he has no male friends. Realtor Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is the perfect boyfriend to Zooey (Rashida Jones), but as they plan their upcoming wedding, he realizes there will be no groomsmen standing in tuxedos with him. So he goes on a series of disastrous “man-dates” in hopes of meeting a best friend — and a best man.
Then he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), a free spirit completely at ease with himself and his role as a guy. What could have been an awful “Man Show” exercise is more about learning to ease up, relax, rediscover what made Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” so great and empowering in middle school, and enjoy life as men. Director John Hamburg ensures that both sides of the gender divide get their due — female bonding is illustrated more realistically in “I Love You, Man” than in most comedies explicitly geared toward women.
As for the extras, Rudd, Segel and Hamburg deliver a funny and insightful audio commentary that includes discussions of some gags that fell by the wayside, and the making-of documentary explains how a splatter-riffic projectile vomiting scene was achieved. But the best of “I Love You, Man” made the final cut in this “bromance” for the ages, and Rudd is to be commended for making inarticulate attempts at male-bonding coolness an art form.
Music Review: Amanda Blank, “I Love You”
Rating: 51
Philadelphia rapper Amanda Blank became buzzed-about thanks to her light-speed lyrical flow and taste for ultra-filthy rhymes, but after popping up on influential compilations and collaborations, Blank’s debut disc, “I Love You,” sounds curiously been-there, heard that. This is not a matter of hype and expectations capsizing a project — most of Blank’s first album simply sounds like extraneous tracks that didn’t make the cut on the latest M.I.A. or Santigold discs.
This comparison is due in part to Blank’s collaboration strategy. Her work on “I Love You” with frequent M.I.A. and Santigold mixers Diplo and Switch means Blank tracks such as “Something Bigger, Something Better,” with its gun-magazine samples and laser-gun effects, sound like pale imitations. On “Gimme What You Got,” featuring Spank Rock, Blank’s growl and flow makes her sound like a less frenetic version of underground rapper Princess Superstar — there’s plenty of emulation and precious little originality on display.
To that end, Blank scores one of her few surprises with a cover of “Make-Up,” a Prince song that appeared on Vanity 6′s self-titled 1982 album. Blank gels with the robotic sexuality of that track, and finishes “I Love You” with dreamy elegance on “Leaving You Behind,” a duet with Swedish siren Lykke Li. But the title of “I Love You” is telling: the rapper, who was born Amanda Mallory, spends too much time showing her love for other artists, ultimately presenting herself as a Blank slate.
