The_Triple_Lindy

I think when it comes to modernized Shakespeare adaptations, the far-out ones can be built around a solid core concept (ie. McKellan's Richard III as a Nazi allegory, or the hyper-stylized Luhrman R&J) but can become exhausting in terms of the viewing experience, which is exacerbated by the fact that the shortest of W.Sh. plays is 90 mins. Somehow, the adaptations that are a bit truer to historical context, like Branagh's Othello (with Lawrence Fishbourne) or even the more recent Merchant of Venice with the woefully miscast Al Pacino as Shylock, don't wear me out the way that some (not all) "updated" versions can feel. If you want an updated version of Shakespeare, I think you'll have a better time going with the 10 Things I Hate About You or Lion King route -- same story but new characters, setting, and language. Although, the best counterargument to this might be, ironically, the updated of Othello of O with Mekhi Pfiffer. Along these lines, I just recently watched Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, which is a very interesting retelling of Lysistrata. It's not the original text, but it is written in verse with contemporary vernacular, so the whole movie has a battle-rap feel. Again, gets a bit exhausting toward the end, but it's built around an interesting central conceit.

It's just soooooo over-the-top and heavy-handed. And the final scene, with Ian/Richard screaming across the battlefield in a panzer screaming, "A horse! A horse!" -- it's unintentional comedy gold.

I don't know ... Ethan Hawke's Hamlet was pretty bad. And if there's one that is truly worthy of this show, I'd say it was Ian McKellan's Richard III.

I've been out of the musicals loop for a while. No need to put me back into the MM rotation but I would love to get the Classics watch parties going again.

............................. something something "taste is relative"? Something something "cross-species cultural difference in beauty standards"? Fair enough, I guess.

I don't know. For me, the word "glamour" will forever be tainted by its association with "Glamour Shots," which are decidedly "lower-class-aping-upper-class." Taking your point about what "jellicle" means, I don't think that precludes the possibility that Grizzabella was the most "glamour-shottiest" of all the jellicle cats.

Not just human-size, but above-average humans. I'm 6'8" which translates to 2.1m, roughly ... I only know that because I learned my metric height before touring Germany because literally any time I meet a stranger, they remark about how tall I am. So a cat that's 2.16 meters tall is slightly taller than the tallest person your average person has ever met in real life (if we go by what I'm told during these conversations). See ... we were having a nice little chat about poetry and prostitution, and you had to bring math into this.

Obviously everyone has read "Prufrock," but who else here has read XJ Kennedy's "A Prominent Bar is Secaucus, NJ"? It's a narrative poem about an old woman -- who could be seen as either a prostitute or maybe just an old floozy -- who talks about how she used to live the high-life before she became an old junkie. The speaker in the poem made her life sound pretty glamorous in her youth, but the climax of the poem is her being led away by police as she says: "For when time takes you out for a spin in his car You'll be hard-pressed to stop him from going too far And be left by the roadside, for all your good deeds, Two toadstools for tits and a face full of weeds." The woman in the poem sounds like she could be a Grizzabella- type ... once a gorgeous dame who in her prime had money and attention, smoked cigarettes rolled in gold, bet on the horses, and stayed at the best hotels. Now, she's an old woman who causes a scene at the bar and gets arrested. Maybe a sex-worker, or maybe a girl who took all advantage of her lot in life to party hard while she could. Of course, the main difference is that while the speaker in "Prominent Bar" lived the high life in her story, Grizzabella's song tells a different tale: "She haunted many a low resort Near the grimy road of Tottenham Court She flitted about the No Man's Land From "The Rising Sun" to "The Friend at Hand" So Grizzabella is not from the same side of town, it would seem. But that doesn't automatically make her a sex worker -- perhaps she was just aping upperclass glamour, and now that she's been brought low by time and age, everyone around her takes a certain schadenfreude in her current state.

I'm not sure that this was mentioned in the episode but -- there actually is a Heaviside Layer. The Kennelly-Heaviside Layer, to be exact. Apparently this layer is reflective of radio waves, and bouncing these waves off the sky makes it possible for them to reach beyond the horizon. I suppose this could mean that sending a Jellicle to the Heaviside Layer for a new life could literally mean just sending them into the stratosphere so that they'll land somewhere far away, thereby beginning a "new" life? The layer was discovered by British physicists in the 1920s, which is around the time Eliot started writing poetry, so odds are this was a word he overheard at a tea party sometime, and 20 years later, he used it in his cat poems. EDIT TO ADD: the dumbest thing about this is that it was named for the guy who discovered it -- Oliver Heaviside.

I'll admit that I like "Prufrock" -- not because it's a particularly great poem, which it isn't, but because that post-war nihilistic stuff is what I most enjoy reading. It's basically the only thing Eliot wrote that I ever enjoyed reading ("Wasteland"? More like "waste" of time, amirite?). I put Eliot in the same category as Matthew Arnold -- their poems are pretentious and melodramatic and pedantic because they're critics on top of being poets, so all their work has the air of self-gratification and certainty in how brilliant they are. Their poems are so much "uncontainable expression of self" and more "flexing what I know about good poetry." Eliot reminds me of what I remember someone saying about Axl Rose during the Use Your Illusion records -- every song has to do everything that that Axl Rose knows how to do as a musician, just to show that he knows about great music.

Twice while listening to this episode, I checked my phone to make sure the podcast wasn't playing at 1.5x speed. Anyone else think that Paul was talking like he was awarded free cafe lattes for life from Java World?

Shout out your favorite plagiarized lines from Velocipastor! My top two were: 1. "War is hell, and hell never changes" -- pretty much straight ripped off from every game in the Fallout franchise. 2. "I want you to have 11 kids and spend 15 minutes with each of them" -- very reminiscent of something Danny Kaye says to Bing Crosby at the start of White Christmas. Is that reaching? Maybe ... what else is there to say about a movie that's so in on its own joke, every thing we might point out could be shrugged off as touch-in-cheek. I guess I mainly think that the schvitz duvet thing sounds cool. I love a good sweat. But also Catholics don't wear their rosaries as necklaces, the cross with flame logo that's on the outside of the church is actually a Methodist symbol, and blah blah blah.

Just sat down to watch this tripe, and my wife actually just as the credits were rolling, "So, this isn't some kind of Kirk Cameron movie, is it?" EDIT to add: 30 secs in, and I already hate it.

As someone who shares walls with noisy neighbors whom I hate, I feel this in my heart.

Can I say that I've listened to this episode three times now and think it is one of the funniest they've done in a while and that I've laughed harder this week than I have in months? Also, Paul, please ... we just GOT to hear more about June's self-reincarnation theories -- who she's reincarnated from, how her system works, when she started to believe this, the works. We "put it over there for a minute", but it's been many minutes now, so dish.