Live Video Exclusives: The Giants' Victory Parade, St. Patrick's Day, Mom's Birthday

GIANTS VICTORY PARADE 2008

Somehow the Giants' Victory Parade of 2008 took away some, but not all, of the stink of the Mets' "7, 17" collapse of 2007. I'm not even a Giant fan but as a Jet fan I was pulling for the Giants. This is a New York thing. The negative corollary is that a Met fan cannot root for the Yankees in the World Series.

At the column hed is a still pic and below is some live video shot from the corner of Broadway at Liberty. Sounds like a title for an M-G-M Navy musical. The still looks like a scene out of Mecca. On the sidewalks of lower Broadway, the Canyon of Heroes, are some very impressive names of people and groups for whom the city has held ticker tape parades. Lindbergh, Churchill, MacArthur, de Gaulle, the Apollo 8 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. And Sammy Sosa. I wonder what the hell was going through Giuliani's sports-happy mind when he suggested this one? Hey Mayor Mike, is it too late to scrape the memorial plaque off the lower Broadway sidewalk?


ST. PATRICK"S DAY PARADE

The weather's been rotten in March but the skies cleared for St. Patrick's Day. I stood at 60th Street and environs facing Central Park in the late afternoon and noted that security was tight as usual. When you can't walk more than a few blocks without taking a detour down a side street, it helps control the crowd. The still pic is a salute to my friend Kerry and my brother Brendan.

The vid is "Anchors Aweigh" on bagpipes, although you're forgiven if you mistook it for a bagful of cats being run over. I like the bagpipes like I like reggae--too much of a good thing is bad for you.





MOM'S 89th

Finally, we celebrated Mom's 89th birthday this month. Like Old Man River, she just keeps rolling along. Her secret to longevity is that she has something to do everyday. Don't call Mom alert. It's an insult. Yeah, she may have ("may have" I say) slowed down an eighth of a step but if you talked to her on the phone today you'd hire her tomorrow to work a full five and a half day work week, like she used to do for Domino Sugar down on the waterfront back in the day. (Mom on left, Sis on right.)



ADAMS PREVIEW

I signed on to HBO for the month so I could see the Adams miniseries. This went under the radar for me as I first heard of it recently from an ad on a bus shelter. I read the McCullough bio on which this is based and from what I've seen so far, HBO has done the near impossible--show life as it was, be historically accurate, and entertain the hell out of you. More on this next month.

Off-Broadway: ADD1NG MACH1NE

I’m not sure that you’d have to be a middle-aged man who’s been laid off at least once to get the first part of Add1ng Mach1ne, which opened last month at the Minetta Lane Theatre, but it helps. The last time I was laid off, the home office sent an officer of the firm to do it, apparently a legal nicety when a couple of people are getting canned at the same tine. The boss (the guy who hired me) was nowhere in sight. It seems to me that the guy who hired me should have been the one to show me the door, and that’s what happens in the musical Add1ng Mach1ne, based on a play by Elmer Rice.

In the 1920s, Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch) is let go (’20s-talk for laid off) by the boss. Zero had been expecting a promotion from the position of hand-tally man to the front office after 25 years of service. The daily morning nag from his wife (the opening number “Something to Be Proud Of”), plus the revelation that an adding machine was taking his job, drives Zero to a murderous rage. He kills his boss and lands on Death Row on the way to Heaven, an afterlife that’s not what he expects or even wants.

Minor criticism: I had a problem with the accents of Mr. Zero and Mrs. Zero (Cyrilla Bear). Was it working-class American or Cockney? Mr. Zero maintains his accent when he sings but Mrs. Zero lapses into operatic pronunciation and sounds less of a nagging shrew.

There’s a very clever bit of staging in Scene 1, where we are looking down at the couple in bed. The bed is standing on its bottom and I wondered how they kept the covers looking natural but not falling down so to speak.

Elmer Rice wrote a scathing play about capitalism’s bosses but he’s not too crazy about the workers either. Jason Loewth and Joshua Schmidt’s libretto, with Schmidt’s often discordant music, evokes the rollicking 1920s with the dark mood of the1930s (the real 1930s, not the movie version). There’s welcome comic relief in the role of Daisy (Amy Warren), whose unrequited love for Mr. Zero is given flight in the gentle ballad “I’d Rather Watch You.”

Since most of the show is sung, if you don’t like musicals I wouldn’t recommend Add1ng Mach1ne. If you do want to spend a very fast 90 minutes at an entertaining expressionistic musical that could be a harbinger of the bleak times ahead (as Rice’s play was in 1923?), if this week’s Bailey Savings and Loan–like run on Bear Stearns is any indication, then go. This was a bargain at $28 (TDF tickets).

1 On the Town is back on the town. My employment prospects have picked up in the last few weeks and I hope to once again offer the reader reviews of the best in bargain theater. The downside is that the more I work the less time and energy I have to go out. Ah sweet mystery of life.

Justice League: The New Frontier on DVD

Justice League: The New Frontier is a PG-13 direct-to-DVD animation from the DC Comics universe, from a story by Darwyn Cooke. Based on a six-part comic book, it takes place in the 1950s, before any of these heroes were updated or killed or became evil and then good again. You know it’s not for kids when we see Superman (Kyle MacLachlan) come upon a scene in Southeast Asia. His old friend Wonder Woman (Lucy Lawless) is celebrating with a roomful of local women with guns. Wha’ happened? asks the big Boy Scout. These women were raped and left in cages by their brutalizers, she explains. I just disarmed the men, left their guns in a clearing, and liberated the women from their cages. What happened next was up to the women. Superman is horrified and Wonder Woman tells him, hit the road spaceman. She’s even a smidge taller than Superman, letting you know who’s boss here.

Full disclosure: I am a big fan of the Flash (first two versions) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan of course) and was thrilled to see their prominent roles in this movie. Flash rescues his reporter/girl friend (what it is with superheroes and beautiful reporters?) from Mr. Freeze in ring-a-ding-ding Las Vegas and Green Lantern’s origin is retold. Unlike most origins, GL’s is simple and unchanging: man finds dying alien in desert, receives his power ring, and his job. The ring actually seeks out Hal, bravest person on Earth, to take the place of Abin Sur, who had been the Green Lantern for our sector of the galaxy. Any more on this would be TMI for people who don’t follow comics and too trivial for those who do.

Batman kicks butt bigtime and transitions from the original creepy-cowled maniac of the 1940s to the friendlier-cowled, ward-watching superhero of the 1950s. J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is revealed to be an accidental visitor to Earth, trying to blend in but without the advantage of growing up with the Kents. Aquaman even shows up in the last scene but why spoil it? Needless to say, the scene takes place on the beach.

The Justice League is a club for superheroes. Writer Darwyn Cooke borrowed a concept from Paul Levitz, that in the 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy hounded the masked vigilantes of the League into the shadows, except for Wonder Woman and Superman (they signed loyalty oaths). For Batman it’s business as usual and he keeps up the franchise working underground from the Batcave. The analogy of this plot to real life is the blame put on comic books by politicians for juvenile delinquency. Most of the major superhero titles, except Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, went under.

The DVD extras contains a fascinating history of the Justice League. I was stunned to hear the unmistakable voice of Stan Lee (from the might Marvel universe) on this documentary. Then we see Stan, who reveals that the Fantastic Four was cooked up on the golf course when Marvel’s president asked Lee and Jack Kirby to come up with something to compete with DC’s Justice League.

Oh yeah, the plot: the League reunites to fight a living island of dinos and monsters.

While the ending is never in doubt, it’s a fun ride to get there. I like this movie a lot and look forward to more in the series. One of the extras was a preview of Batman: Gotham Knight, an anime-style direct-to-DVD. Promotion is calling it a bridge between the previous and upcoming live-action Bat flicks. I call it a must-see DVD.