Generation X Actresses I Have Followed on Twitter--The Rundown

It isn't as many as I thought it might be at first, though it is still embarrassing that I ever followed any of them at all. They were the whims of a series of fleeting moments


1. Mira Sorvino (b. 1967)

I had forgotten about her, but then I saw her in a movie from 1999 and was reminded that I had thought she was cute and that she was supposed to be fairly smart too, so I thought why not catch up with what she is doing? She is mostly concerned with matters of great seriousness these days, women's rights, defending immigrants, hating Trump, etc. She's on the self-evidently right side of all of them, of course, and fiercely, as is called for (though her fierceness at least is more in support of the righteousness of her causes than in seeking the personal evisceration of her opponents). Even though their positions on everything and even their way of expressing them are utterly predictable, I have to admit I have always kind of loved girls like this. They are what I know, and they generally really do want to be good people and unlike the relentlessly militant types, they can be pleasant enough if they like you. The fierceness is regarded as a necessary attitude to adorn to demonstrate one's seriousness, but I don't think it is really their nature. My wife, as I have noted before, is more of a throwback to the 1940s, or even the 20s, in her manner of speaking and approach to political questions, and puts a more original spin on why she believes what she does than most people are able to muster, but I have only met a handful of women remotely like that in my life.


2. Meredith Salenger (b. 1970)


Meredith Salenger gave up acting at 18 to go to Harvard, so I guess we can assume she is fairly smart. She certainly regards herself as such. She too takes a fair amount of jabs at Trump, sexists, racists, and the usual objectionable suspects, though with less straining and earnestness, and more of an assured air of repulsed superiority. Otherwise her internet persona is more or less polite, though one suspects that she probably gets some good zings in at people, even those who are purportedly her friends, in her private life. I can't say that I am getting a lot either emotionally or intellectually from following her either though she is an attractive enough person.


3. Liane Balaban (b. 1980)

Liane Balaban has appeared mainly in Canadian indie-type movies, so she isn't very well-known (it also makes me wonder why it never occurred to me to follow Parker Posey [b. 1968]). I followed her after finding an attractive picture of her drinking wine on the internet and watching a YouTube clip from her movie The New Waterford Girl. When she does tweet, she is about half a regular person and half a public figure. Needless to say, she loves all of the progressive things that are happening in Canada and the rest of the West, and hates the troglodytes who want them all to go away and for life to be horrible and ugly again.


4. Zooey Deschanel (b. 1979)


Zooey doesn't tweet much anymore now that her TV show is no longer on the air. Being the closest of this group to the height of her career she comes off as having an especially vacuous-seeming Hollywood lifestyle, though she is the only one of these people who has ever written anything that I found remotely funny or endearing. Other than occasionally showing support for LGBT issues, she never mentions politics, and as her stage persona is rather retro in an implicitly 1960s white-bread manner, some male commentators on the evil fringes of the political right have expressed the hope that in some areas at least she may be sympatico with their views. However I would be surprised if she actually did not support the Democratic party.


5. Christina Applegate (b. 1971)

I not sure what possessed me to follow her. She is pretty sexy in a it's-hard-for-me-to-turn-the-channel-off-of-her kind of way, but she was so disturbingly stupid on Twitter that I just couldn't take it and had to stop following her, which takes a lot for me.


6. Winona Ryder (b. 1971)


In a fashion befitting her status as perhaps the quintessential Generation X person who is indifferent to everyone except selected cool personal friends who are never you, Winona Ryder never sent out a single tweet for years after I started following her, and eventually deleted her account altogether.




Nowhere in Africa (2001)

This is somewhat notable for my imagined readership for having won the Academy Award for best foreign film (it's from Germany). It is also directed by a woman (Caroline Link), which perhaps is worth something as well, since, unlike in literature and other artistic forms, there are still not a great number of really renowned movies that I notice having had female directors (My personal favorites off the top of my head are Lena Wertmuller and Vera Chytilova, if you to get an idea of what I would like). This has a World War II/Nazi theme, though in this case the story is about a Jewish family with a young daughter that left Germany to go live out the war in Kenya. They were cultured people, and the father was a lawyer/intellectual type, but they were not able to get out of Germany with much money, so they have to make a go of it in Africa by farming and living off the land, which did not suit his temperament/skill set, especially at first. The mother's happiness, not helped by her neurotic personality, was tested by this displacement both geographically and culturally and the sharp decline in social status, which she acted out by seeking and in at least one instance having extra-marital relations with European men more acclimated to the new environment. It is based on a memoir written by the daughter, who is from around aged 6 to 14 or so in the course of the movie. I don't usually explain so much of the plot outline, but I'm not quite sure what to say about this. It isn't bad, but it is kind of joyless in that stiff Germans-trying-to-interact-with-(well, anybody who isn't them) way, even if the characters in this instance are Jewish. Also, though it is set in wartime (albeit the war itself is remote), and the upheaval of the family because of it is the basis of the family, this circumstance does not create the sense of overwhelming societal drama that is what makes the best civilian-centered war movies so effective. The African natives of course have no real stake in the European war at all, and while the British do, the movie is not especially concerned with them. At the end of the war (and the film and in real life) the family actually returned to Germany and seem to have lived out their lives there--the author of the memoir, Stefanie Zweig (no relation to Stefan or Arnold) died in Frankurt in 2014 at the age of 82--which seems like it could be the subject of an interesting book or movie itself.


Get Shorty (1995)

As I have often stated here, I am not much of a fan of 90s Hollywood. I have a soft spot for early 90s European cinema, and I suppose I like some of the American "indie" stuff from that era (though I haven't seen any of it in a long time), but the work of The Industry through most of this era seems to me regrettable to say the least.


Get Shorty is based on one of the best-known novels by the pretty highly regarded author Elmore Leonard, so I am assuming it is better than this movie (I haven't read it). If I remember correctly this was John Travolta's first big starring role after his comeback in Pulp Fiction (which I actually have never seen). It has a lot of famous Hollywood-insider type people of that era in it hamming it up for the camera and making annoying name-dropping movie and Industry references--Bette Midler is in this, Danny DeVito, Gene Hackman who was in every other movie in this period, Penny Marshall. Billy Crystal oddly is not in it, though I kept expecting him to turn up. Rene Russo, who probably would have annoyed me at the time, is also in it, but now that I'm nearly 50 her look in this is the kind most men my current age would find attractive in a 40 year-old.


I really did not like this.


Daylight (1996)

This movie concerns a group of people who get trapped in the Holland Tunnel due to an explosion of nitroglycerine or something like that and have to be rescued by Sylvester Stallone. I adopted a new system a few years back that was supposed to generate different kinds of movies which are sometimes of interest because they are better than their reputations, or they provide an interesting window into a time that is now past. This one, alas, was not any of those things.

Mid-Winter Music & Video Post

Consistent with the theme that has predominated with me of late, I haven't been enjoying much in the way of music recently, even any of the usually reliable awful stuff. My schedule tells me it is time to do a music post however, so I am going to try to remember a few things I have clumsily groped with over the past few months.

Dance contest to the Jackson 5 on Top of the Pops from 1970. I like the enthusiasm of the English girls in this period. Yes, they were reaping the great fun that the atmosphere of the age promised and provided, but they were also instrumental in the generation and diffusion of it as well. There was almost a virtuous cycle of fun, with boys and girls equally capable, it seems, of giving the opposite sex something of what it wanted, for a brief period there.

Here's another episode from the same time. The girls are even better in this one. I think the song is quite good, too. I had never paid close attention to it before. It possesses the realized form as well as interior fullness that is the first source of success in all human endeavor, whatever the scale.

For a while they were playing this song a lot on the golden oldies radio station I usually have on in the car, and it kind of grew on me, though of late it has been growing away from me again. Several of the comments on the video posit that it may be the worst music video of all time. I think it is a contender. Very creepy, full of static, odd-looking people and repetitive camera shots; even the cuteness of the waitress can't redeem it.

This is my favorite Carpenters song.

All right, it is the epitome of a bland white-guy pop song. It does have the kind of sound that is comforting when it comes on in an empty Rite-Aid on a gloomy winter afternoon in a remote corner of the country. Granted, something Greater would doubtless be even more comforting, but they probably aren't going to play that.

There were about a million guys in 1978 who looked approximately like this singer (and about half of them were named Steve, too). It was the generic white guy look at the time. Today the default for this demographic is to look roughly like Louis C K, which seems a strange direction in which to have evolved. It also seems strange, or at least counterintuitive to me both that people in the same generation should physically have certain broadly shared characteristics, and that these do not carry over to immediately succeeding generations. Yet the phenomenon is observed by almost everyone.

Towards the middle of this one there are a bunch of old men who, the minute you see them, you are reminded that that was what lots of old men looked like in the 1970s, their faces, hair, wrinkles and so on. I see hardly any old men who look like that now.

I am not a James Taylor fan at all, though I do kind of like this song and this little video, both of which are kind of New Englandy. James Taylor is rather famously from New England--granted, that part of New England that goes to boarding school and summers on the Cape, but then that is the part that most of the outside world thinks of when they think of New England. Indeed, it is the part I think of as representing the real New England when I am not bogged down in the boring details of day to day life. Anyway, there are a lot of obviously New England towns featured in this wistful and nostalgia-inducing video, several of which I am sure I have probably been to, but cannot exactly place because I was probably only there once. The only one I am fairly sure of is that the town around 2:40 is Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

I heard this on the radio the other day and remembered that I hadn't listened to any Jo Stafford for a while. It's important that I revisit her from time to time.

I have been going through one of my periodic (every 2-3 years maybe?) spells of Paris nostalgia. I couldn't find any music videos that really captured my mood. There is however, frozen forever in the late 80s period approximate to the first time I went there (1990), the good old 'French in Action' TV series, starring the incomparable Mirielle (Valerie Allein), Pierre Capretz as the excitable Gallic teacher, and Robert the American sporting around Paris with his Yale t-shirt under a blazer. I like Robert's character too. He seems practically laid back, unobsessive about burnishing his resume and modest about his intellectual prowess to be a candidate for the Ivy League nowadays, but I suppose the pushing fifty version of the character might have snapped to attention when this new zeitgeist came in around 1992-95 and allowed these aspects of his persona more play. The city I suspect is radically changed from what it was even when I was last there, which was in 1999. Paris is the city above all others (well, Paris & maybe Prague) that I have the most attachment to in the particular version in which it existed in my youth. My love for it, even stripped of and beyond the idea of it, or ideas in general, is one of the few things I feel to be real in the whole of my existence.

I had one of those intense dreams the other night that I was there, though I was actually only in the conference room of a mid-level American chain hotel eating breakfast. There was a black preacher running a service for a largely black congregation at this breakfast, during which however I was drinking and, most uncharacteristically, laughing giddily and otherwise acting out, much to the consternation of everyone present, so that my wife, who had not been there previously, had to come in and get me and lead me out of the room and down something like an airport corridor and then suddenly back to our own kitchen. I had been whisked straight back from Paris before I had seen anything, before I had even gotten out on the street. My wife told me I could fly back later on in the day or week, but you know the dream never got to that point.

Well, there is always this, too.

Sad Songs I Am Listening To, Many By People Who Are Now Dead

I had forgotten about this guy...

This particular style of singing, with its exaggerated, but still in a certain sense somewhat earnest, affectation of passion and a soul in torment, has never really been imitated satisfyingly in the English-speaking world. I guess some soul singers go for this effect, but I generally don't like them. I suspect this is because I feel like everything about their performance is ultimately about them more than about me, which puts a different spin on the affectations. Julio Iglesias, who has sold 38 million records, slept with 5,000 women, driven the best cars and drunk the best wine and hung out in the most beautiful places in the world for the last 50 years and seemingly enjoyed every second of it, is decidedly not singing for or about himself, at least the way other people do. His job, for which he has a great instinct, is to use his talents and gifts for showmanship to express the passion and torment of others in a more pleasing and entertaining way than they are able to do themselves. Highly gifted entertainers grasp this without needing it spelled out for them.  

I generally find this group annoying, but I heard this song somewhere the other day--already I can't remember where--and it struck me as poignant. So I've been listening to it for the last few days. I still don't like any of the other Talking Heads songs that I know. This band was wildly important to a lot of people just a few years older than I am; by the time I was at the age where one is deeply susceptible to pop music whatever emotional power they exerted over young people seemed to be in decline, and it never made much of an impression on me. But for a brief time they really got to people.

I have to admit I think this is a great song. In fact I like quite a bit of Zooey Deschanel and the rest of her group's pop music. I did not want to succumb to the too-obvious charms of this woman, and for a long while I did not allow myself to do so, but she kept after me with a persistence that I found both touching and admirable; indeed I was almost flattered by her seemingly perverse determination to please me and bring happiness into my life, on which point most female celebrities of the moment doggedly maintain they will never stoop to do if they can help it.

While we are on the subject of performer's instincts as far as how to approach/deliver a song and present oneself as a vessel through which to articulate a more palatable version of your audience's sense of the world, hers are as good certainly as any mainstream pop star currently out there that I am aware of. She is filling a (presumably lucrative) niche in the popular culture that seems rather obviously to have been screaming to be filled, but that no one else seems to have had the right combination of instinct, personality, type of brain development (I suspect she is pretty smart by most standards outside the realms of professional mathematics and science) and connection to this particular corner of the culture to fill.

I haven't gone back to the 40s for a while. This first song was referenced in a short story I read ("Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth--the mother sings a verse from it while they are in the car on the way to Ocean City on Independence day in 1943). The other selections here kind of followed from that. I like the voice of this singer Kitty Kallen here, whom I had never heard of previously. She was a serious looker too.

Going to have a bit of a Harry James fest here. This is another one that always puts me in a positive mood, no matter how far down into the existential abyss I am gazing. Terrific song.

Kitty Kallen again on another old favorite. Girl could sing.

This is a singer named Francey Lane, whom I find to have an interesting face, in that it looks to me more like the face of a woman born in the 1960s or 1970s than the 1920s. This clip (in which she sings while ironing dollar bills) is from a 1951 TV and is only one of two videos of her I have found, and the only one in which she sings.




The only other Francey Lane video I can find, evidently from the same TV program as she is wearing the same dress and interesting headpiece as in the other one. Here she is merely serenaded with a classic by future talk show host and game show producer Merv Griffin, who like so many of us got our start in the business as a singer.

Biographical information on Francey Lane is scant on the internet, but it seems she had something of a career on the fringes of real mainstream success, without ever really breaking through. Her name turns up in various projects or promotions dating from 1945 to 1956. Besides this TV appearance in '51 she appeared in two short movies as a singer ('45 & '52). She is probably most identified as a singer with the Johnny Long Orchestra. They put out a release of "Winter Wonderland" (1947) and an album of "College Favorites" (undated), at least. In 1949 Francey Lane had a hit song called "Easy Does It" and appeared on the cover of TV Guide. There are at least four different "busty" vintage promotional photos of her available for sale online. By 1953 she was posing with her arms and shoulders and neck covered up and was apparently heading her own orchestra. By '56 she was apparently still hanging on in the game (and was back to posing in strapless gowns) but her hair has been cut and the smile is forced and it isn't the same old Francey Lane I have taken such an interest in.

Music Video Deluge

I know I need to try harder than this.

I happened to be driving close enough to Maine on Saturday that I could pick up one of their public radio stations, which unlike those in the state I live in, actually play music once in a while. It was the 70th anniversary (May 7, 1941) of Glenn Miller's famous recording of "Chattanooga Choo Choo", so that was the centerpiece of one of the segments on the program I was listening to.



In contrast to the 10 and 20 year-old artifacts which seem to me to be more or less on a continuum with the present, this song seems a lot older than 70 years. Is it possible that anyone with any memory of the world out of which it arose can really still be alive? In addition Glenn Miller's music in particular sounds more dated right now than that of most of his prominent contemporaries. Besides that the more famous hits have remained ubiquitous enough even for people my age to have grown overfamiliar with them, their animating spirit is about as far from the current zeitgeist as it probably ever will be. I still like them, but they definitely come across as dead museum pieces that don't have anything to say about even my life going forward.

My favorite Elvis song. Probably in part because the Smiths did a partial cover of it, which led me back to the original. I have never really been much of an Elvis fan and was decidedly not one in those days.

That said, the young Elvis seems to be pretty close to the absolute limit of coolness, at least if you're white. He is untouchable. Pretty much everybody who has come along after him pays him deep homage, and ridiculing him on the grounds of one's own superiority to the King whether in taste, musicianship, breeding, manliness, overall worth to humanity, and so on, even if it is absolutely true, has little effect on the stature he possesses as an icon of modern life and usually recoils on the ridiculer, diminishing him and his claims to importance even more.

Someday, when I find a few more solid examples, I am going to do a post called Books and Movies Nominally Set in New Hampshire That Bear No Resemblance to Actual Life in New Hampshire (there are probably already enough to do a similar post for Maine, though). So far I can think of Peyton Place and Our Town. I haven't seen On Golden Pond, so I can't include that one for sure. There is some dispute as to whether the college in Animal House is supposed to modeled on Dartmouth or somewhere else. If it is Dartmouth, I can assure you there is no bar like the one Otis Day and the Knights were playing at within about a five hour drive of campus. The most egregious example by far of course is the first half of the 1962 Stanley Kubrick version of Lolita. As if!

Lolita is rare among films of the 60s in that it seems to be more popular among people around my age and younger than older cinephiles, who have always regarded it rather indifferently. It was a favorite among my set at school back in the early 90s. Of course at my school, especially at that time, it was frequently possible to imagine that something of the air of 1962, especially that particular strain of it illuminated (suggested?) in the movie, still infiltrated the atmosphere. This was one of the charms of the place. Whatever the purported flaws of the film are supposed to be, I would have to consider them as minor compared to the barrage of style, good humor, intelligence and coolness that bursts out of from practically every set, song, role and line in this movie.

If I may once have tried to qualify my interest in the following as a guilty and rather shameful pleasure, I have to admit now that I have moved beyond any sense of guilt. I am not giving them up.

The Lennon Sisters's father was Irish, for what it's worth (I am lately realizing that 90% of the girls I am in love with are substantially of Irish descent).

I was on a 70s kick a couple of weeks ago. This is rare but it does happen from time to time. I was listening to the Blackbyrds ("Walking in Rhythm"), Yvonne Elliman, who had a number of hits and also played Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, the songs "Midnight at the Oasis" and the pathetic "Seventeen", and last but not least, the immortal Andrea True Connection ("More More More") who is just a bit too much for this site's handling capacity. I've chosen this song because for some reason I was in love with the backup singer on the left in the video for several days. I am mostly over it now, but it still happened. She is very 70s looking and was probably a total bitch but I was taken with her look. That retro-1890s hairstyle was quite prevalent for a few years there, especially among the more fair-haired types. It didn't work all that well on everybody, but this particular woman has very fine, clear features and it suits her.

Leo Sayer, 30 years on and channeling Richard Simmons in a multitude of ways, came out of retirement to collaborate with the Wiggles on a version of his signature hit. Other than one goofy part in the middle it pretty much is a jam. Singing in Greek during the second half of the song was an inspired touch.

The guy in the yellow shirt is not the original yellow-shirt Wiggle. The original guy was the frontman, and he was much cooler, but he had some kind of illness and had to drop out of the band. I confess to being somewhat fascinated by the Wiggles. They are Australian, and when they get going, they really do appear to be having a good time--oh yes, and perhaps more importantly the hot Aussie girls that they have singing and dancing backup appear to be having the time of their lives too. The cuts are very quick--the dads don't really have time to leer at these girls at all, but they flash by just long enough that you are like "Wow! Who was she? I want, I..." They are really...at the bottom of it all, is there any better state of life to inhabit in 2011 than being a young stud in Australia with direct and eagerly welcomed access to perhaps the last large group of Western women on the planet who have some sense of how to have a good time? I am not seeing it right now.

Another retro Smiths video. I like it even though it doesn't really fit the song that well. The saddest thing to me is that the boys who are having such a swell and wholesome time in the film would be pounded into jelly and turned into quivering psychological wrecks within a couple of days at the typical high school nowadays.

I included this because the images in the video really grab your attention, and the song is great too. It reminds me of the summer I painted houses. Like almost every job I have had, I was dismal at it--on my most infamous day on site I spent the entire 8 hours painting a single closet that was supposed to have taken 90 minutes tops--which leads me to think that maybe I really was meant for a more aristocratic life. Almost everyone else I know is rather good at working, and at their jobs; or at least believe themselves to be so. I wonder why I am not good at doing anything. It is not merely laziness; for I know a number of essentially lazy people who are still very good at their work.

You really can't sing. I am pretty sure that you are evil, and I have resisted you for years. But I am giving up. You win.

She looks Irish too--and she is Irish. And French. That appears to be all. God, she must be a Catholic too (if we were still using 1960 requirements; which is how I count, by the way.)