Well today’s poem was two lines about a gunner and is showing me how much of an uphill slog I’m looking at. When I looked at the two lines I had to ask first doesn’t that second line kind of redundant, and “does gunner mean man with gun or was it something more specific in the 17th century?”
To make matters worse, peacenik that I am, I had to spend five minutes going through visual references to see use how anyone even holds a rifle.
There was a little one-eyed gunner Who killed all the birds that died last summer.
Well with spring definitely here I decided to inflict another sketch challenge on myself , the theme this time, nursery rhymes!
Now hear me out it’s a lot cooler than it sounds! I happen to own a copy of The Annotated Mother Goose, along with a lot of these serving as commentary for the periods they took place you get a good feeling that a lot of them spent quite a bit of time being sung in bars before they got cleaned up a lot and found their way into a children’s nursery. Most of them are abstract as hell and whatever context they had disappeared centuries ago…. this makes them a CHALLENGE.
Better yet, they’re all listed by number which made it easy to do a random list to throw into the magic tupperware container. This makes this challenge I’ve done yet. I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to pull. There is no concept in the container I’m aware of to even look forward to doing! This makes me so pumped I’ve made this my first two month challenge!
So I am taking the first number from the magic tupperware container and getting number 110! Which is…
There was an old woman had nothing. And there came thieves to rob her, When she cried out she made no noise, But all the country heard her.
Okay. Maybe this wasn’t my best idea.
There was an old woman had nothing. And there came thieves to rob her, When she cried out she made no noise, But all the country heard her.
A very happy 117th birthday to Mr. Duke Ellington, so let’s celebrate by listen to him perform “Sophisticated Lady” with a little bit of help from his orchestra and saxophonist Harry Carney.
The basic idea for this week’s theme was supposed to be something to the effect of entertainers as members of the resistance in world war II, but in the end this became a bit of a stretch with the two films having very little in common , one being a slapstick farce and the other an adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
To Be Or Not To Be was the Mel Brooks remake of the film of the same name starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard directed by Ernst Lubitsch(Which I had intended to get, but couldn’t find it in the comedy section… in hindsight it was probably downstairs under Lubitsch)
It tells the story of a variety show in Warsaw Poland led by the egotistical Frederick Bronski played by Brooks and his wife played by Anne Bancroft. When Poland is invaded by Germany they find themselves pushed into the resistance with hilarity ensuing. This was a fun farcical comedy based on disguises and misunderstanding, though I admit It took me a little while to get into it since for me the farce and the subject matter (the holocaust which in his own way Brooks takes very seriously) it was addressing clashed a little too much. But once it got it’s pace going it’s hilarious with Brooks, Bancroft and their troop try to con their way to freedom and survival , with Charles Durning as the SS commandant nearly stealing the show.
Mother Night, starring Nick Nolte, as wasn’t quite what I expected.Sure I knew it was a Kurt Vonnegut novel and sure I knew Nolte’s character, Howard W. Campbell Jr was a Nazi propagandist who was actually sending coded messages to the Americans but I hadn’t realized that that was just a small part of the film. The majority of the story being about Campbell being labeled a war criminal, while being idolized by White Supremacists.
All in all this film was much better than I expected. It did a good job staying true to the material, which considering Vonnegut’s writing style is easier said than done, I was especially impressed by the framing device of Campbell writing his memoirs in an Israeli prison. And the way it shows what Campbell’s intentions were are almost irrelevant when compared to how history perceives those deeds
