Queen is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. MTV European Music Awards gave Queen a Global Icon award yesterday.
I love Adam with Queen. He's not trying to copy Freddie, and his voice is big enough and he's theatrical enough to pull off Queen's music.
Update 11/8: I should note that Freddie did not have a chance to sing this song live before he passed, though he recorded it. Also, after The Show Must Go On, Adam and Queen performed We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions. MTV hasn't posted video of that part yet.
Ryan Gosling = young Brando. It's partly the voice and the smoldering sensuality and the way he rocks a white undershirt, but there's something else too. I just learned of him, though he's been in many things in recent years. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Half Nelson. He's in Drive and Ides of March, in theaters now. He was also in Blue Valentine and the quirky Lars and the Real Girl. He won an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss for The Notebook. I expect he'll win this award again for the kiss in Drive.
By the way, if you're thirsting for old school movie editing, with loooooooong shots, you want to see Drive. It's amazing how much fun you can have waiting for someone to blink.
Update 10/18/11 9:55 pm: Of COURSE I wasn't the first person to notice Gosling's similarity to Brando. See, for example, Gina Picallo writing at The Daily Beast:
Gosling is the most conspicuous of this latest bunch [of actors influenced by Brando]. As a boy, he deliberately disguised his Canadian accent to give it a little Brando bravado. Then there he was last month on the cover of New York magazine wearing a sexy frown, a tight white T-shirt and a toothpick, a la Stanley Kowalksi. In his harrowing relationship drama Blue Valentine, Gosling’s young working class romantic Dean would have fit right in on the docks next to Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
“You can’t help but be affected by him,” Gosling recently told The Daily Beast. “I think all of us are.”
And Robert Butler, movie reviewer for the Kansas City Star from 1977-2011, writing on the Senior Correspondent blog:
Ryan Gosling is the new Marlon Brando.
I feel not even a twinge of nervousness about that statement. It’s as obvious as saying that Earth circles the sun.
I am as late to this party as I was to the White Stripes party.
Adam's second album (title unknown) will be out in November, probably. Last night, at a concert in MontrealSte. Agathe, Quebec, he debuted a song, Outlaws of Love, from the new album. Video is courtesy of a fan.
The lyrics are sort of stunning to me. He's gone two years trying to avoid being a mascot for gay rights. In interviews after his Idol season, he specifically described not wanting to be an activist; he just wanted to be a singer. In more recent interviews, he's expressed ambivalence. This song, written by Adam, addresses the political issue of gay marriage, while being intensely personal. Lyrics below.
Lyrics:
Oh, nowhere left to go
Are we getting closer, closer?
No, all we know is no,
Nights are getting colder, colder.
Hey, tears all fall the same,
We all feel the rain,
We can't change.
Everywhere we go, we're lookin for the sun,
Nowhere to grow old, we're always on the run.
They say we'll rot in hell, but I don't think we will
They’ve branded us enough, outlaws of love.
Scars make us who we are,
Hearts and homes are broken, broken
Far, we could go so far,
With our minds wide open, open
Hey, tears all fall the same,
We all feel the rain,
We can't change.
And everywhere we go, we're lookin for the sun
Nowhere to grow old, we're always on the run.
They say we'll rot in hell, but I don't think we will.
They’ve branded us enough, outlaws of love.
Everywhere we go, we're looking for the sun.
Nowhere to grow old, we're always on the run.
They say we'll rot in hell, but I don't think we will.
They’ve branded us enough, outlaws of love.
Outlaws of love.
Outlaws of love.
Outlaws of love.
Outlaws of love.
YouTube seems to have become badly underpowered in the last month or so, so now videos take forever to load and can't play without interruption. It helps to lower the resolution to 240. It's worth the hassle to watch this, IMHO:
As detailed by the NYTimes, the road to the vote to legalize same-sex marriage in New York was paved with support from big-dollar donors as well as personal changes of heart stemming from family pressure. But at the heart, it was Gov. Andrew Cuomo's desire to make a meaningful difference, to have a legacy. This is what I wish we could have in a president. (To be clear, I knew when I voted in 2008 that Pres. Obama would not be that kind of a president.)
Andrew Cuomo, you're my hero:
There, in a speech the public would never hear, [Gov. Andrew Cuomo] offered his most direct and impassioned case for allowing gays to wed. Gay couples, he said, wanted recognition from the state that they were no different than the lawmakers in the room. “Their love is worth the same as your love,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Their partnership is worth the same as your partnership. And they are equal in your eyes to you. That is the driving issue.”
I guess barn-raisings are out of the question these days. Obviously I don't know the whole story but one thing I've always admired about the MN, WI, SD, ND cultures is that whole everybody helps everybody else out kind of mentality. Hope that's not changing.
Harmon Killibrew has passed away after a 5-month battle with esophageal cancer. He's much loved here. A street near the Mall of America (built on the grounds of the old Met Stadium where Harmon played) is named for him. The grounds of the new stadium, Target Field, is home to statues of Twins greats, including Harmon.
The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Carl Levin (D-Michigan) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), recently released the results of their investigation into the financial crisis in a 650-page report, "Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse".
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, summarizes the report thusly:
Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.
It was a class act for Pres. Obama to invite Pres. Bush to join him at Ground Zero. I think Pres. Bush's decision not to attend is unfortunate, but I think Pres. Bush's intent is classy too.
I'm sure this is bad news for many folks living in rural areas, but I have such fond memories of exploring gravel roads that I can't help being a little bit delighted:
The paved roads that finally brought rural America into the 20th century are starting to disappear across the Midwest in the 21st. Local officials, facing rising pavement prices, shrinking budgets and fewer residents, are making tough decisions to regress.
As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.
The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
NYTimes, if you're listening: please hire Ezra Klein.
