A Boyhood Friend, Now a TV Star (and in a commercial)

Like many peo­ple, I’ll bet you, dear reader, grew up with a few peo­ple who ended up being in the pub­lic eye, either as a celebrity or just some­one who got their ’15 min­utes of fame’. As for me, one of my clos­est friends when I was about 16 was Lance Red­dick, who shared my love of music — he was a fel­low com­po­si­tion stu­dent, and just as a pal through many of the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of being a teenager. Lance and I also ended up as fel­low stu­dents years later at the East­man School of Music in Rochester, New York, a place that both of us left before grad­u­at­ing back in the 80s. After that he went into act­ing, and I went into com­put­ers. His act­ing paid off big time; He starred as a reg­u­lar char­ac­ter, Lt. Cedric Daniels, in one of the most crit­i­cally acclaimed shows of all time, The Wire, which Pam and I watched reg­u­larly before we moved here (it was on HBO, and we didn’t get that after the move). Lance’s height, strik­ing looks, and nat­ural but intense act­ing style all made for a great fol­low­ing, and besides his roles in some movies (The Siege, Don’t Say a Word, I Dreamed of Africa) as well as either small parts or or reg­u­lar roles on other TV shows (West Wing, Law and Order: SVU, CSI: Miami, Oz, Fringe and Lost), he’s now attained the sta­tus of an iden­ti­fi­able star. No red car­pet appear­ances at the Emmies or Oscars that I’ve seen yet, but I’ll bet there are some.

So last week, on CNN, his face shows up in a Cadil­lac com­mer­cial:

I asked him (via Face­book) if they gave him one, and nope, they didn’t. I hope he gets a chance to shoot a movie or TV show up here, as it would be great to see him again (we got caught up at a friend’s wed­ding about 4 or 5 years ago). I’d say it’s only a mat­ter of time.

A Follow-Up to the Obama-is-Spock Meme

I wrote about this a month and a half ago. My fears were actu­ally drawn per­fectly (almost as if I had dic­tated the imagery to him!) by car­toon­ist Mike Luck­ovich (who appears to be only a few months older than I am, hence the same cul­tural references):

Gingerbread Houses, Vancouver Style

This morn­ing, I heard an inter­view on the radio about a com­pany Cre­ative Room who, in coop­er­a­tion with Van­cou­ver Spe­cial is spon­sor­ing a char­ity auc­tion of non-traditional gin­ger­bread houses. To quote their web site:

Hid­den behind a thin veneer of jujubes and smar­ties, the ubiq­ui­tous form of the gin­ger­bread house has stood unchal­lenged for too long! The malig­nant plague of cookie-cutter hous­ing which fouls sub­ur­bia can­not be invited into our homes this hol­i­day sea­son. No longer rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our mod­ern lives, held in place by no more than icing and a repress­ing layer of nos­tal­gia, the con­ven­tional gin­ger­bread house must make way for the gin­ger­bread house of today!

Cre­ative Room and Van­cou­ver Spe­cial are chal­leng­ing Vancouver’s best archi­tects and design­ers to rethink the gin­ger­bread house in a form more fit­ting for our mod­ern life: to rein­ter­pret the gin­ger­bread house within a mod­ern context.

Houses are to be judged by a panel cho­sen from Vancouver’s pre-eminent archi­tects, design­ers, and artists. Entries will be made from edi­ble mate­ri­als, con­structed at a scale to fit within an 16” cube, and dis­played at Van­cou­ver Spe­cial. The win­ning entry will be feted loudly bring­ing (more) fame and for­tune to its illus­tri­ous design­ers. Entries will be auc­tioned off such that they may grace the liv­ing rooms of a select few Van­cou­ver homes this hol­i­day sea­son. All pro­ceeds from this event will be donated to Pivot Legal Society.

While I don’t have the funds or space to house such a beau­ti­ful and tasty cre­ation, I thought a few would be worth show­ing here. Go to the auc­tion if you want to see more pics of them. Some are pretty spec­tac­u­lar, like this mod­ern ‘laneway’ house (part of the Van­cou­ver den­si­fi­ca­tion plan), and a recre­ation of the Moon mono­lith scene from 2001 a Space Odyssey:

Dr Atomic in Vancouver

A cou­ple of week­ends ago, Pam and I, as part of an early hol­i­day gift from my par­ents, went to a per­for­mance with them at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera in New York.  Well, not exactly. What we did do, was see a pro­duc­tion, by the Met live, in down­town Van­cou­ver, just as they were view­ing the same pro­duc­tion in Bal­ti­more. This is actu­ally a bit of tech­no­log­i­cal magic that I never expected to see work so well, and cer­tainly not so close to home.

Believe it or not, once a month or so, the New York Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera broad­casts live per­for­mances, via High Def­i­n­i­tion video and CD-quality mul­ti­chan­nel sound, to a satel­lite, which then beams them down to movie the­atres all across North Amer­ica, includ­ing a cou­ple here in Van­cou­ver (the Sco­tia­bank Para­mount the­atre on Bur­rard, as well as one in North Van­cou­ver). I’ve since learned that the Toronto Bal­let is doing much the same with some of their per­for­mances of the Nutcracker.

So on that Sat­ur­day morn­ing, at 10:00 AM (because it’s live, and in New York City it’s 1PM in the after­noon, the per­fect time for a mati­nee), we saw Doc­tor Atomic, the new opera about Robert Oppen­heimer and the Man­hat­tan Project by Amer­i­can com­poser John Adams.

Bear in mind that although it is pretty amaz­ing that you can do this sort of thing at all, the fact that it’s easy is even more impres­sive. Of course, I could buy tick­ets online and have them charged directly to my Bank Account via Interac (they were a lit­tle less than $25 apiece). There were no lines that morn­ing at the Sco­tia­Bank The­atre. The broad­cast was being shown in two the­atres, and one was nearly full, so Pam and I opted for the sec­ond, smaller the­atre, and got very, very good seats, the kind you could never get in New York.  If you were going to actu­ally attend the same per­for­mance in New York, $25 would prob­a­bly not cover the park­ing, much less your actual the­atre tick­ets for even stand­ing room, not even count­ing the plane fare, hotel and meals…etc.

Before the pro­duc­tion started, the movie screen showed the inside of the Met in Lin­coln Cen­ter. I’ve been there a cou­ple of times, so it was fas­ci­nat­ing to see it again, live, with audi­ence mem­bers either in their seats or arriv­ing, the famous chan­de­liers all in the down posi­tion (they get pulled up just before the show is about to start),  from the other end of the continent.

After a moment’s intro­duc­tion from back­stage by Susan Gra­ham, the host of the broad­cast, the cam­era cuts to the main tech­ni­cal direc­tor telling the con­duc­tor that it’s time for the per­for­mance to start.

The opera?  The first act was a lit­tle slow, dra­mat­i­cally, but the music was superb. I think it’s one of the composer’s best scores. The aria on words of John Donne (his Holy Son­net XIV) at the end of the first act is brilliant:

Bat­ter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Rea­son yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your ene­mie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you rav­ish mee.

I also was struck by the beauty of Adams’ orches­tra­tion and his ear for bril­liant sonori­ties, which I’d come to know from his ear­lier work (and one of my favourite orches­tral pieces) Har­monielehrer, a sort of three-movement sym­phonic salute to to roman­tic music of the late 19^th and early 20^th cen­tury. The end­ing of the opera is dra­mat­i­cally shat­ter­ing, with an extremely intense count­down to the bril­liant flash of the first atomic bomb test, the moment when Oppen­heimer and his cowork­ers saw that the human race now, for the first time in his­tory, had the power to destroy them­selves and the planet, a bur­den that we all bear to this day.

As we lis­tened to the music and saw the singers on stage, we also saw sub­ti­tles, so we didn’t have to won­der what they were singing. There was also an excel­lent bit of doc­u­men­tary and inter­view with the com­poser and some of the per­form­ers (and I kept feel­ing like they should be left alone to relax a bit after a half hour of straight singing rather than be bad­gered in their stage makeup by Ms. Graham!)

After the per­for­mance, I talked to my par­ents by phone. After all, we had all just been to the same per­for­mance together, and I wanted to see how they liked it. They told me that my cousin in Detroit had actu­ally also been to the same per­for­mance in her town, and talked to them by cell phone dur­ing inter­mis­sion. Score another one for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy. I guess the next step will be to recre­ate the Met holo­graph­i­cally for us in Van­cou­ver, and after that, it’s ‘beam me to Lin­coln Cen­ter, Scotty’.

Bad News, but I get to have Parents-on-the-Street

Pam and I have been watch­ing with hor­ror as the state of the US econ­omy just keeps get­ting worse and worse. While things here are nowhere as bad, still, there have been some lay­offs (notably about 560 jobs by Can­West, the Cana­dian media com­pany), and an old retail and music fix­ture in Van­cou­ver called A&B Sound, where Pam and I got our first flat-screen TV a cou­ple of years ago, has gone belly-up, the reports from the tele­vi­sion and radio net­works in the states are about as bad as I’ve ever heard. They are describ­ing every­thing except depression-era soup lines, but I can even imag­ine that soon, if things con­tinue the way they are going.

So it was with a lit­tle bit of sur­prise that I got an email from my father, that was a link to an NPR report by Jim Zarroli that echoed some of the worst of the news. What more could he add to the reports of woe? Why was he alert­ing me to this?  It turns out that he and my mother both hap­pened to be in down­town Man­hat­tan when NPR had one of those ‘Man on the Street’ reporters try­ing to get the pulse of the shop­ping dis­trict. So, if the news isn’t too much of a bum­mer, at least I get to hear them on the radio, albeit via the Internet:

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So the sky is falling, but at Lord and Tay­lor in NYC, they are hand­ing out sale coupons. Good to know.