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Friday, June 16, 2006

ABF Friday:  Little Things

When you wake up in the morning and find that someone has left the basement refrigerator door wide open, and that there is no milk in the house, and that the dog has dug a huge hole under the front steps in search of chipmunks, even though her crazed chipmunk hunt is what gave her an eye infection in the first place, thus necessitating those four-times-a-day eyedrops . . .

that’s a good time to remember all the little things that make life worth living.  Like, for example, in the world of percussion, Joel Vincent’s poppin’ fresh work on the bass drum in Spiral Starecase’s 1969 hit, “(I Love You) More Today than Yesterday.” Otherwise unremarkable AM fare with nice full-out (though, as Janet notes, characterless) vocals on the choruses, but my goodness, that bass drum kicks it.  Or, for another example, Brian Doherty’s pair of stutter-steps on the snare in the middle of Freedy Johnston’s “Responsible.” Or the cowbell in Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” Yes, the dang cowbell!  I’m not kidding.  I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that. Listen for the quarter note, quarter, quarter, pair of sixteenths.  You’ll thank me.

Or from another medium: Bill Murray replying, “Sure,” when, in Ed Wood, Baptist minister G. D. Spradlin asks him if he renounces Satan and all his works.  (Another movie with the best supporting cast ever!  Even better than True Romance!) Alan Rickman’s excruciating delivery of “By Grabthar’s hammer . . . what a savings” in Galaxy Quest.  (Yet another movie with the best supporting cast ever!) Kevin Kline trying to read his lines off the teleprompter in the final scene of Soap Dish (I think this film may just have the best supporting cast ever!) And, queen of them all, Lisa Kudrow explaining how she invented Post-It glue in the extended dream sequence of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, a half-minute of thespian excellence so excellently excellent that it has been immortalized on YouTube.  Check out Kudrow’s subtle eye-flash and quarter-smile at “thermoset your resin,” as she begins to realize to her delight that she actually knows what she’s talking about—and that, consequently, she is about to blow the A Group away.

So, as I head off to repair the huge hole under the front steps, here’s this Friday’s Arbitrary but Fun exercise: what little things, in the long history of human expressive culture, make life worth living?  The catch is that they have to be little.  You can’t cheat and say, “Der Ring des Nibelungen always does it for me, personally” or “I find myself turning once again to the Chorus’s ‘Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man’ speech in Antigone” or “You know, I’ve always been fond of Joe Morello’s solo in ‘Castilian Drums.’” It has to be really, really minor, a mere grace note, like Philip Seymour Hoffman continually pushing his glasses up his nose in Owning Mahoney, which is widely recognized as the most minor film ever made.

Have a great weekend, folks.  Me, I’ve got some work to do and some milk to buy.

Posted by Michael on 06/16 at 09:56 AM
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