Month: March 2010

2001

The recent Acad­e­my Awards remind­ed me of a bit of triv­ia that I’ve had rolling around in my head for many, many years.

I have been a big fan of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey since I saw it in the the­ater in 1968 when I was 13 years old. I believe I man­aged to see it in the the­ater two or three times, an unprece­dent­ed event for me (and has rarely, if ever, hap­pened since).

In 1970 the book The Mak­ing of Kubrick­’s 2001 came out. I bought it prompt­ly. There are a cou­ple of pages devot­ed to the efforts required to make men look like ape for the open­ing sequence of the movie. At the end is a quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “2001 did not win the Acad­e­my Award for make­up because judges may not have real­ized apes were actors.” For a few decades I remem­bered that with the small addi­tion that the award for make-up went to Plan­et of the Apes. It turns out that the Best Make­up cat­e­go­ry did not exist until 1981.

But Plan­et of the Apes “was giv­en a Spe­cial Hon­orary Oscar for John Cham­bers’ ground-break­ing, out­stand­ing make­up.” Per­haps this is what Clarke was referencing.

For those who may not remem­ber what 2001’s apes looked like (the baby apes are real):

That make­up leaves the apes in Plan­et of the Apes look­ing very bad indeed.

Anoth­er bit of triv­ia that I learned from The Mak­ing of… is that “in the mid­dle of Absolute­ly Nowhere, Africa, the 2001 car ran into an oncom­ing truck and two of the pho­tog­ra­phers were injured.” I have cit­ed this in con­ver­sa­tion once or twice in my life when some­one observed that a cer­tain dri­ver was safe because there was no traf­fic where he or she was dri­ving. The car of pho­tog­ra­phers was in Africa tak­ing pics to use for the back­grounds of the ape sequence that was filmed in the stu­dio in England.

Who’s So Vain?

There seems to be a bit of renewed dis­cus­sion about just who Car­ly Simon’s song is about. Even The New Repub­lic and NPR are in on it.

It is pos­si­ble that You’re So Vain is about a par­tic­u­lar man. It is pos­si­ble that all of the details arise from one indi­vid­ual man. But I doubt it.

It is far more like­ly that the song is about many men and no man. Some of the details are like­ly made up from whole cloth, the rest from var­i­ous peo­ple that she knew or heard about. Car­ly was a beau­ti­ful woman from a bit of wealth who was mak­ing a liv­ing in the music indus­try (the song is on her third album). It is not a stretch to think that she had dat­ed more than one or two vain men

On Simon’s web­site is a com­pi­la­tion of bits of inter­views over the years on the sub­ject. In one she says:

I was at a par­ty and some­body walked in and my friend said to me “Does­n’t he look like he’s just walked on to a yacht?”. So, I thought to myself — hmmm, let me write that in my notebook.

At times she inti­mates that the song is about a com­pi­la­tion of men. At oth­er times she hints it is about one man. She seems to have a good idea of how to keep inter­est up.

Here we are in 2010. Simon has bare­ly been heard from since 1990’s Have You Seen Me Late­ly. The Wikipedia discog­ra­phy lists eight cd releas­es since then, but I don’t believe there has been a lot of suc­cess with any of them. Her lat­est release admits as much in its title: Nev­er Been Gone. She would­n’t have to tell us that if we did­n’t think she had been.

Three of those last eight cds were all cov­ers. One was an opera which I guess did so bad that she put a piece of it on the next cd, Let­ters Nev­er Sent, in hopes that the added expo­sure would help.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Nev­er Been Gone is all cov­ers of her own ear­li­er (more suc­cess­ful) material.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Car­ly sneaks in a whis­per to get every­one talk­ing about You’re So Vain once again after all these years.

For the record, I had always been a big fan of Car­ly Simon. But I have not been much excit­ed about her music since 1990.

Oh yeah. This is my 101st post!