Joe's View

Tomorrow night, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers are doing a special New Year’s Eve show at the Ridgefield Playhouse that will, no doubt, be a celebration of the special power and excitement of live performance.
The band will be rolling into the Playhouse after a series of five East Coast holiday shows and Fairfield County is home to Kellogg so it should be a hot night.
But, Kellogg and the Sixers are also providing an exclusive digital bonus for everyone who attends — an instant live recording of the show.
“We’ve always been cool with taping,” Kellogg told me in a recent phone interview.
“You can’t fight the tide,” he added of the determination of music fans to record — and share — the work of artists they love via the new technologies.
“People are going through tough times right now so we wanted to give people something special,” Kellogg said of the drop cards audience members will receive for a digital upload of the band’s two live sets. Only those who attend the show will get the code.
Kellogg and the Sixers have been on the road for the past three months — the “Celebrating Five Years” tour — hitting some of the best venues in the country, including a two-night Thanksgiving Weekend booking at the Bowery Ballroom in downtown Manhattan.
Fans are still buzzed by the 2007 album, “Glassjaw Boxer,” with 11 wonderfully melodic and personal songs by Kellogg and his bandmates. Critics have compared the material to the work of everyone from Springsteen to Seger to Dylan, but there is a straightforward, intimate quality to the lyrics that isn’t quite like anyone else’s music.
Kellogg laughed when I told him that it seemed lazy for writers to put his work in someone else’s niche.
“That’s a mixed bag,” he said of the way critics have compared his music to other people’s stuff. “It helps bring people in the door.”
“But, hey, I don’t mind it when they are grabbing the names of the best people ever to play music,” he said, with a chuckle.
Kellogg has mixed feelings about this new and uncertain age for popular musicians, with the whole concept of an “album” of related songs under siege and the opportunities for making a living from recorded music dwindling for all but the biggest acts.
On the plus side, live music seems to be as popular as ever and the Internet — and file sharing — can bind fans much closer to their favorite acts than was possible in the “golden age” of album rock and pop.
“I do like the old school,” Kellogg said of the days when a new album by The Beatles or Nirvana would be studied track by track (and the album cover art was an integral part of the whole experience).
“You just have to try to roll with it, because you can’t fight the changes,” he said,
When Kellogg and the Sixers were putting together “Glassjaw Boxer,” the performer viewed the project in “old school” terms. “I still think of it as an album with two sides — track five is the end of side 1!,” he said of his pre-CD vision of the recording.
The musician hopes audiences will always see the value of a structured collection of songs: “Everything can’t be a single.”
(Tickets are $65 for tomorrow night’s show. The doors will open at 7 and the music will start at 9. The Alternate Routes will play before Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers. For more information, call 203-438-5795.)

I can’t remember the last time a non-fiction book charmed and moved me as much as “Mona Lisa in Camelot” (DaCapo Press), Margaret Leslie Davis’s wonderful new book about the brief visit of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece to the United States in the winter of 1963.
Davis shows how First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy played a key role in getting the French government (and the Louvre) to lend the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan.
The first art museum “super show,” the brief exhibition resulted in close to 2,000,000 visitors filing past the little painting and raised the profile of museums — and art — in this country at a time when gallery gazing was still considered something of an elitist hobby.
“The painting’s successful debut awakened a passion for culture that had been dormant in the national psyche during the provincial postwar years, and the sensational exhibit ignited a national love affair with the arts,” Davis writes in her introduction.
Readers who are baby boomers — or older — will find the slim volume to be a deeply nostalgic journey back to the “Camelot” era of Jack and Jackie Kennedy when the promise of a new era in politics and culture galvanized much of the country (and the world).
Jackie Kennedy believed that the arts were just as important as any other aspect of American society.
“She shared with President Kennedy the belief that art was a great unifying and humanizing experience. To her mind, art was not a distraction in the life of the nation, but rather a testament to its very quality of civilization,” the author points out.
The Mona Lisa visit came as a result of Jackie Kennedy’s passion for French art and culture. When she and the president visited France in the late spring of 1961, Jackie reached out to a writer she had idolized for years — Andre Malraux — who had become his country’s minister of culture.
Malraux and Kennedy formed an immediate friendship — solidified after he visited Washington, D.C. in 1962 — and when she suggested the Mona Lisa be lent to her beloved National Gallery, Malraux put the wheels in motion for a journey that at first seemed impossible.
The Louvre and its staff opposed the idea, fearing the delicate painting would be damaged. Jackie’s friend — National Gallery Director John Walker — also secretly hoped the idea would be rejected because he was terrified of the responsibility of guarding the painting’s safety while it was in this country.
But the charm and determination of Jackie Kennedy — and the power of her important ally at the Washington Post, political reporter Edward Folliard — cinched the deal.
“Mona Lisa in Camelot” shows us how the painting was sent over in the first class cabin of the S.S. France — the French wouldn’t risk having the painting damaged in a plane crash — and was then guarded by the Secret Service the whole time it was in the U.S.
Walker’s anxiety escalated when the French decided that the Mona Lisa should spend a month on view in New York City, too, and the National Gallery Director had his duties of guarding the painting expanded.
Davis hooks the reader on the first page and tells the story with the flair and page-turning momentum of a thriller writer.
The author was allowed access to Jackie’s papers and we get a whole new insight into her humor and powers of persuasion as we read the First Lady’s correspondence with Malraux and Walker.
Jackie’s dreams of an American minister of culture were crushed along with so much else when her husband was murdered nine months after the Mona Lisa returned to France, but she set the stage for the public arts explosion of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The ageless Eartha Kitt exuded icy glamour in most of her stage, film and TV appearances, but offstage she was remarkably warm and down to earth.
The star who died yesterday at the age of 81 told me several years ago that she always thought pieces of property — and not diamonds — were a girl’s best friend. Kitt enjoyed nothing more than working in the garden she kept on her Fairfield County property, close to her beloved daughter.
The first time I interviewed Kitt I was intimidated by the legend and the history surrounding the star — friend of Orson Welles and James Dean, enemy of Lyndon Johnson — but after a few minutes, it was like talking to an old pal. A very funny and very honest pal.
“A woman of the earth,” was the way Kitt thought of herself, digging around in the garden between her Broadway and nightclub gigs.
She was nominated for a Tony three times — most recently in 2000 for “Wild Party” — and played the most fashionable clubs in New York City up until last year.
Online today, the New York cabaret star Justin Bond tipped his hat to Kitt, noting that she was always able to be “glamorous and political,” a reference to the star’s gutsy confrontation with President Lyndon Johnson (above) when she was invited to a celebrity women’s luncheon at the White House in 1968.
Kitt took the event seriously and told Johnson and his wife Lady Bird that she thought the Vietnam War was a terrible mistake and that it was decimating the young black male population in America’s inner cities.
For speaking her mind, the star was essentially blacklisted in this country, with most venues canceling her bookings. Kitt also was made the subject of a secret federal investigation that included having her house bugged and being tailed by Secret Service agents.
Kitt spent much of the following decade working in Europe before the fury died down and she was able to pick up where she left off.
Lots of people write about speaking “truth to power” but Eartha Kitt actually did it when she had the chance.

Have you seen the new January GQ?
There on the cover is everybody’s favorite girl-next-door — Jennifer Aniston — stripped almost-naked, carrying on like she has always dreamed of being Barbi Benton, circa-1968.
I realize that we are in the “post-feminist” era, but who knew that Hugh Hefner was still such a style setter for magazine editors and show biz folk eager to be on their covers?
Actresses facing 40 — or “30 plus 10” as Aniston told an interviewer for Vogue last month — have always been an endangered species, but it is distressing to see the charming star of “Friends” and more than a few good movies carrying on like “The House Bunny.”
Perhaps I am being sexist in thinking that a mature woman might come up with a better photo lay-out concept to sell her latest movie (in Aniston’s case “Marley & Me,” opening nationwide tomorrow). Of course, Aniston has every right to be proud of the state of her body and face as she faces her fifth decade of life on Earth — she will turn 40 on Feb. 11 — but it is hard to imagine one of her male peers stripping down in a similar manner (Brad Pitt in a Speedo? George Clooney wearing only a tie?)
The article accompanying the photos by Michael Thompson is a sniggery affair — “Lordy, Lordy, This Woman is 40” — where writer Mark Kirby carries on about being “hugged” by the star.
“Aniston has been famous — REALLY famous, 25-million-viewers-a-week famous — for my entire postpubescent life. So going into our meeting, I’d been fairly convinced that she’d be too familiar to seem sexy in person — that after years of quirky Rachel Green-esque roles, it’d be impossible to see her as anything but merely cute, or that if she DID seem sexy, it’d be a Mrs. Robinson thing. Not so. Jen looks at least as young, if not younger, than she did during her ‘Friends’ days, this despite her looming fortieth birthday . She looks BETTER, too — fit and sun-kissed as always, but somehow in greater possession of herself and seemingly at ease with her age.”
Yikes!
Would a sob-sister hack journalist, writing for a fan magazine in 1958, have dared to carry on like this in print?

Most movie music is so disposable that it barely registers on a viewer.
In one of the big industrial Hollywood action films, the music is generally dwarfed by the ear-splitting sound effects — explosions, guns being fired, screams, collapsing buildings etc.
In the case of the more expensive blockbusters, the producers generally hire some pop or country composer to supply a big ballad that is played under the credits as we exit the theater (that was the case in “Pearl Harbor” in 2001, with Diane Warren earning an Oscar nomination for “There You’ll Be”).
I remember lots of images from “The Dark Knight” and “Wanted” last summer, but not a note of the scores that were written for the two movies. I certainly would not want to own either CD.
This is where the Paris-born Alexandre Desplat stands apart for musical scores that heighten what we are watching on the screen, but also stand alone as works of great beauty worth listening to away from the films.
Last night, I saw “The Curious Case of Banjamin Button” and was bowled over by Desplat’s subtle score that adds to the beauty and strangeness of this tale of a man who ages backwards, from his 80s to infancy. The movie covers almost 100 years and the way that Desplat has been able to boost the emotional content of individual scenes without ever overshadowing what we are watching is amazing.
After scoring dozens of movies in his native France, Desplat made his first big splash here with the music he composed for “Birth” in 2004. Director Jonathan Glazer had such confidence in his composer that he allowed the mood to be set by the music in several otherwise silent sequences.
The climax of the film (above) features its star Nicole Kidman coming to terms with the tragic implications of her future as a hopelessly unhappy new bride. Desplat seems to be entirely in tune with the subtle changes of expression on Kidman’s face and the result is one of the best marriages of music and image I’ve ever seen in a movie.
Desplat works similar magic in more than one key moment in “Benjamin Button.”
Give this Frenchman an Oscar!

Cynthia Baxter is using the world of travel journalism as the background for a new mystery series that begins with “Murder Packs a Suitcase” (Bantam Books).
Baxter is already responsible for a very popular series of veterinary mysteries set on Long Island — which I haven’t read yet — but the new series featuring the slightly reluctant travel journalist Mallory Marlowe is a winner, too.
Mallory is still recovering from the accidental death of her husband — and coping with two college-age kids who aren’t sure what they want to do with their lives — when she takes on a job as a freelance travel writer for The Good Life magazine.
The Westchester suburbanite hopes her first assignment — a search for the kitschy old Florida tourist sites that pre-dated Disney and Universal — will get her mind off her shockingly unexpected widowhood and fast-approaching middleage.
On the plane from New York City to Orlando, Mallory meets a boorish (and garishly dressed) passenger who tries to claim her aisle seat. Upon arrival at her hotel, the writer is stunned to learn the creep is one of her fellow journalists on a big Orlando travel writers’ junket.
It’s no surprise when Mallory’s new enemy Phil Diamond is found stabbed to death in a hotel fountain, but fortunately for our heroine most of the other writers on the junket — and some of the hotel and tourist staff, too — have perfectly good reasons for wanting to see this hack journalist dead.
“Murder Packs a Suitcase” is a very light entertainment — perfect train or plane reading — but Baxter fills out the background of her story with sharp reporting on the rather corrupt quid pro quo world of travel journalism. She also supplies a very entertaining tour of vintage Florida attractions such as Gatorland and Cypress Gardens Adventure Park.
Mallory (and Baxter’s) affection for the more modest — and homegrown — tourist places that folks visited 50 years ago comes through on every page.
Bantam promises another mystery in this very promising series in the early spring. “Too Rich and Too Dead” will be taking Mallory to Aspen, Colorado.

Can a big new mixed-bag Broadway show like “Shrek The Musical” survive the current economic downturn?
Already the financial forecast for January and February is so grim that about a dozen Broadway shows will be closing right after New Year’s Day — including last year’s Tony winner for best musical, “Spring Awakening,” which should have had a few more year’s life in it.
Hoping to tap into all of that extra money Disney has earned from Broadway, DreamWorks Animation has launched a theatrical division with “Shrek” as its first New York production.
I was at the show last night for research purposes — a forthcoming piece on one of the performers and another general Broadway story for next month — and while the audience response was good, it wasn’t that over-the-top hysteria that now seems to be mandatory for a musical “hit.”
DreamWorks hired top talent to put “Shrek” on stage. The composer is Jeanine Tesori whose credits include one of the best Broadway scores of recent seasons — “Caroline, or Change.” The book and lyrics are by David Lindsay-Abaire who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for “Rabbit Hole.” And “Shrek” is directed by Jason Moore whose staging of “Avenue Q” was a major factor in that show upseting “Wicked” in the Tony race five years ago.
Unlike some of the Disney musicals which have tended to feature rather anonymous ensembles, “Shrek” has a few of the best performing talents on Broadway at the moment — Sutton Foster, who won a Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Mille,” Brian D’Arcy James who has scored in a number of big musicals in recent seasons, and the comic dynamo Christopher Sieber who was a Tony nominee for “Spamalot.”
Each of the three stars gets a chance to score in a big number, but “Shrek” doesn’t really hold together as a musical. In trying to put a hit animated film on stage — in very literal terms — DreamWorks has run into an almost insurmountable obstacle. The show can never really break free of its cartoon origins and too many scenes subject the leads to embarrassing low comedy (Sutton Foster as Princess Fiona and Brian D’Arcy James in the title role indulge in a belching and farting contest that made me cringe for the stars).
The green-skinned anti-hero all too often plays like a cruder version of the green-faced “wicked witch” in the long-running hit “Wicked.” That show already hammered audiences with the “beauty is only skin deep” message that “Shrek” treats like a newly minted notion. The stage Shrek also gets more than one “I’ve got to be me”-style anthem that sound like pallid echoes of the “Defying Gravity” crowd-pleaser in “Wicked.”
From my point of view the night was redeemed by two killer numbers. Sieber as a pint-sized Lord Farquaad leading a terrific dancing chorus through “What’s Up, Duloc?” (above) and Foster’s Act Two opener, “Morning Person,” which allows the actress her only opportunity to sing and dance full-out. (I hope the 6’2” Sieber has a physical therapist on call — he spends the entire show on his knees to achieve the effect of only being about four feet tall).
I was glad to see those two stars score in such clever numbers, but the rest of the show does not measure up.

Last night, I screened a DVD version of the hard-to-classify comedy, “Freezer Burn,” that is receiving its local premiere tomorrow night at 8 at the Community Theatre in Fairfield.
The movie is the work of former Southport resident Charles Hood who has been living and working in Los Angeles since he graduated from USC three years ago.
Hood shot the film here in the fall of 2005 and spent the subsequent two years editing and scoring it.
While it is an impressive piece of work, it is easy to see why Hood has had a hard time finding a distributor after screening the film at 11 festivals. “Freezer Burn” spans several different genres — science-fiction, romantic comedy and domestic drama among them — and it doesn’t have any stars.
It’s unfortunate that so many indie films with B-list actors or has-beens have an easier time finding a theatrical life than a finely acted ensemble piece with promising young unknowns.
Hood has melded elements of the Woody Allen comedy “Sleeper” with a few scenes reminiscent of “Re-Animator” to come up with an entertaining tale of a scientist experimenting on freezing human organs who decides to freeze himself for more than a decade so that his unrequited love for an underage girl will become possible (and appropriate).
Robert Harriell (above, left) plays the slightly mad scentist Virgil Stamp and his partner in crime is Michael Consigilio (above, right) in the role of the wheelchair-bound wise guy, Rex Turner.
The screenplay is smart — how many other movies have you seen where two people talk about their love of the Michael Connelly character Harry Bosch? — and while the story could move a bit faster, Hood keeps the twists and surprises coming after Stamp spends 11 years on ice.
“Freezer Burn” has an unusual melancholy tinge to its comic take on time displacement — Virgil finds himself alone and disoriented when he comes out of the freezer.
Hood will be on hand to answer questions after tomorrow night’s screening, which is free.
(The Community Theatre is at 1424 Post Road in Fairfield Center.)