The Mysterious Death of a Musical Giant.

The world was shocked by the sudden, mysterious death of Marvin Hamlisch, the reason is because according to the family "he dropped death after a brief illness," a theory that strikes terror at the heart of everyone.  Did he have a heart attack?  A stroke?  A fulminant kind of cancer?  People just don't drop death out of the blue.  I understand they may want to guard their privacy, but by withholding the real reason, they are only fueling more  and more speculation.  He was only sixty eight years old and in seemingly good health, looking forward to composing more and more hits and contributing more and more to the world.  A man like that just doesn't drop death overnight.  It's a shame because instead of focussing on the huge loss his death represents, most of us are focussing on the mysterious circumstances.  He was a public figure, he belonged to us and I think we are entitled to know what he died of so we can mourn him properly.

Tony Curtis - Death of A fine, Underrated Actor

Why didn't Tony Curtis ever win an Academy Award?  He was a wonderful actor and a natural comedian but he never really got the credit he deserved.  I think Hollywood typast him as a "pretty face" early on in his career and he was never able to escape the label despite wonderful performances.  Sure he was a pretty face, one of the prettiest faces in the business but he was so much more than that.  He was a truly creative man and he proved that in the latter part of his career by becoming a talented painter.  Looking at his movies today you can see how much he invested emotionally in outstanding performances such as "Spartacus," "Houdini," "Trapeze," " "The Defiant Ones," "Some Like it Hot", "Sweet Smell of Success," and so many others.  His crowning achievement as an actor in my opinion was, of course, "The Boston Strangler," and it's an outrage that he wasn't even nominated for an Oscar for that astonishing performance where the beautiful Tony Curtis face all but disappeared to give birth to the tortured murderer Albert de Salvo.  I always felt that despite his financial success, audience adoration, many wives, affairs, children and drug and alcohol battles, he never really escaped the pain of his childhood .  I think he drew on that pain to give his best performances.  Farewell Tony and thanks for the memories.

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The Psychological Aches of Aging

We all know the physical aches of aging, that furtive process that seems to sneak up on you almost overnight.  But what about the psychological aches of aging?  What about coming to terms with the fact that your best years are already behind you?  That's a lot harder to deal with and to accept.  With people living a lot longer today you'd think that middle age would be easier, healthier.  We know so much more than our parents did.  We exercised our whole lives, we ate right and lived right so we should be able to make the transition a lot easier, shouldn't we?  Think again.  You feel more emotionally and physically vunerable.  You have less energy, you experience sleep disturbances for no reason at all.  Your eating and sleeping patterns also change.  You develop acid reflux for the slightest reasons so you can no longer eat to your heart's content, and no matter how strong or active you were in your youth, you become fragile.  You find yourself getting up several times a night and wake up with circles under your eyes.  You cry more easily and you begin to deal with your mortality almost on a daily basis.  Thoughts of dying and disappearing are suddenly very real and you want to leave something behind, something you will remembered by other than your next of kin and children.  The truth is you want to go on, life is a bittersweet affair but you love it, and you treasure it more and more in your later years.  But the mourning of your lost youth is very real and it goes on for a long time.  You ask yourself "how did this happen?"  How did I get here without even noticing it?  Where did those golden years go?  And believe me those were really the golden years.  The truth is that it was never easy, it was always painful because growing up is painful but you had a lot of time then, time to grow, love, learn and  make mistakes.  Now time has become your enemy and you're very aware of the brevity of life.  What to do?  How to adjust to this new reality?  I wish I knew.  I'm still struggling with it and mourning my lost youth.  Peace and acceptance will come I'm sure but it will take a long time and by then I'll have to meet new challenges.

Why Marilyn is still relevant today

She had the face of an angel, the body of a goddess and the soul of an artist, but those aren't the only attributes that made Marilyn one of the immortals of the world.  It was much, much more.  Some of the things were her relentless ambition, her courageous, almost ferocious climb to the top of the business despite her miserable circumstances.  And her long, painful struggle to be taken seriously touched all of us, even her detractors.  You couldn't help but admire her desperate need to better herself, to become a good actress, to matter, to leave something of substance behind.  She yearned for recognition and not as the world's greatest sex symbol but as an actress of value.  The tragedy of her life is that she became just that but she never knew it.  She died thinking we thought of her as a joke, a sexual thing.  Fifty years after her death we finally recognize what a good actress she was - this vulnerable, much maligned actress who has become a legend.  Would nominating her for the Oscar she so richly deserved for "Bus Stop" have saved her life?  Nobody can say but it would have given her infinite joy, some of the joy she gave others throughout her brief career.  She paid a high price for immortality but immortality she achieved.  The world will never stop talking, worshipping and remembering Marilyn Monroe and she will continue being discovered by future generations to come when we are all gone.  Perhaps that was her real mission in life, this magical actress the likes of which we have never seen again and probably never will.

The London Olympics Opening Ceremony

I don't know how most of you feel about it but I thought the London Opening Ceremony paled in comparison to the Beijing Ceremony.  Now I admit that Beijing was a tough act to follow but can't help but think that London didn't even try very hard to match it.  Perhaps realizing that it was futile to top or equal the splendor of the Beijing ceremony they settled for a mish mash of everything British that was at times quite silly and downright boring.  I endured it for two hours and realizing that I wasn't going to miss anything too special or grand, turned it off and went to sleep, didn't even feel like taping it certain that I had gotten the gyst of it and didn't much care for it. Judging from the mixed comments I saw today, it doesn't look like I missed anything spectacular.

The Tragedy of Madness.

By now everyone must have heard the horrific massacre at the movie theater in Colorado.  Twelve dead in cold blood and more than fifty wounded but I suspect the dead toll will continue to rise.  And why?  Because a once brilliant, promising student plunged into the dark world of madness and nobody saw it coming.  We try to protect ourselves from overt terrorism at the airport with scanning machines and secret service agents but how do we protect ourselves from the madness within our shores?  How do we protect ourselves from a man bent on destruction and self destruction?  This man was an American citizen, by all accounts what we classify as a "winner" yet now he joins the ranks of the many monsters that preceded him.  If  his parents saw the signs of his mental deterioration, shame on them for not doing something about it before it was too late.  Now they'll have to live with the blood of the innocent, fun loving victims on their hands.  And as for us, just another horrific example of the madness all around us we have to live with.  Just another horrific example of the fragility of our lives.  A madman or a terrorist can invade our subways, our stores, our supermarkets, our gyms or anywhere were a lot of people gather and carry out his monstrous deed.  He has nothing more to lose because he's already lost his soul so his goal is to take as many people with him as possible.  I suspect that in the dark world Mr. Holmes has retreated to, he feels like a hero today.  The man who once tried to be a great healer had successfuly made the switch to a great destroyer.  I suspect this man always had megalomaniac tendencies and it was only a matter of time before madness overtook him.  What will happen to him now?  Unfortunately nothing much.  He'll probably spend the rest of his sorry days in a mental institution, drugged out of his mind and pacing with all the other lost souls of the world.  He will never confront the horror of his actions.  He'll never think of the people he ambushed and murdered in cold blood or the ones he wounded and perhaps blinded or paralized for life.  We have the torment, because every time a horrific thing like this happens, we lose a little bit of ourselves.

Goodbye Ernie

A great actor has died, and make no mistake about it because Ernest Borgnine was a great actor.  During his long, spectacular career, he gifted us with many outstanding performances.  He will be forever remembered for his breakthrough performance as the lonely, lovelorn butcher in Marty, of course, but this fiery actor proved himself with many great performances long before that.  Sure he was typecast as the heavy in most of those movies but his performances were great nonetheless.  He acted with such power, such magnetism, putting the different sides of his personality in each and every film, that when he came on the screen we were mesmerized.  He was a star and an actor, and we were lucky to have him doing what he loved to do for so long.  I honored him by watching some of  his movies when I got the news and that's where he'll live forever, on the screen, for the enjoyment of generation after generation.