Morning name on the 8th: Park Overall, the actor.
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Archive for the ‘Acting’ Category
Morning Name: Park Overall
December 10, 2015June’s L&G news
June 15, 2015Two pieces of recent news from the L&G world: a Tony for Fun Home (on the L side), a NYT interview with the French ambassador to the US (on the G side). Bonus on the G side: a photographic tribute to David Hockney.
Identities
June 10, 2015Today’s Zippy, continuing the story of Lazlo Crannich:
To remind you: Lazlo Crannich is an actor who performs the character of Zippy the Pinhead: when you see Zippy in public, you’re actually seeing Lazlo, and who knows where the real Zippy is or what he’s doing. So Lazlo is a kind of double — a permanent double, so to speak. Lazlo has a (very constrained) private life under his own name, which we catch glimpses of in the strip, but Zippy’s private life is forever invisible to us. It’s a kind of magic irrealism., a counterpart to the literary magic realism I write about here every so often.
In my own fiction writing about two people called Sundance and Butch, there’s a good bit of magic realism, plus a lot of play on identities, names, and the performance of characters.
Nook and Crannich
June 9, 2015Two recent Zippys, continuing the story of Lazlo Crannich, Zippy’s character actor:
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Hasn’t the world had enough of Zippy the Pinhead? he cries out in despair. But then it’s back to the job, the job of being Zippy.
Sam Waterston
May 31, 2015In the June 1st New Yorker, a brief piece “Stormy Weather: Sam Waterston plays Prospero, at the Delacorte” by Hilton Als:
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Illustration by Simón Prades
Hawaii Five-0 hunks
March 14, 2015(Not much linguistics here.)
In the middle of the night on Saturdays here the TNT network shows re-runs of the current Hawaii Five-0 tv series, so I’m kept alert by acrobatic fistfights, exchanges of gunfire, and car chases all over scenic Hawaii. And the banter between the two principal characters — it’s a buddy drama, a bro show — with significant interludes of muscular shirtlessness.
Two more mornings
March 14, 2015Two more morning names: yesterday, Robin Wright; today, the plant photinia.
Peter Sarsgaard, Harold in Italy
March 3, 2015Two unrelated morning names today: the actor Peter Sarsgaard, the Berlioz symphony Harold en Italie.
Local pronunciations
February 28, 2015Two notes on the pronunciation of proper names: on the city of Bangor ME and on the actor Ryan Phillippe.
Cops and DAs
February 24, 2015(About performances rather than language.)
Another note from the Oscars: on J.K. Simmons, who got an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (in Whiplash) I recognized him immediately as a regular on two different tv crime drama: as Dr. Emil Skoda, a police psychiatrist, who has appeared on three of the four incarnations of Law & Order; and as Will Pope, Assistant Chief of the LAPD, in The Closer.
I then reflected on the casting of these shows, and the enormous number of actors they consume — as regulars (playing cops, district attorneys, medical examiners, crime lab staff, defense attorneys, and judges) and in one-shot performances (as victims, suspects, witnesses, family members, etc.).
The one-shots are often well-known actors playing parts that run against their usual roles: recently in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit re-runs, dark roles for Dean Cain (Superman!) and comedienne Carol Burnett.
The regulars are also not infrequently recruited from successful careers of very different natures. To come: a number of tv cops and a couple district attorneys of this sort.