Tag Archives: elton john

08.25.19
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Tiny Dancer

So 6-year-old Prince George of England got mocked this week on network television for loving ballet.

It happened on ABC’s Good Morning America as pop culture correspondent Lara Spencer reported on the young boy’s curriculum in school.

After telling us he will take classes in computer programming, religious studies and poetry, Spencer could barely contain herself when she had to include ballet on the list.

It seems Prince William, George’s dad, revealed George absolutely loves ballet, Spencer noted through now full on giggles.

Yeah, we’re with you Rosie

Which then morphed into uproarious gales of laughter from the studio audience AND from GMA host George Stephanopoulos.  To which Ms. Spencer knowingly remarked, staring snidely into the camera:

I have news for you, Prince William, we’ll see how long that lasts.

Umm, what year is this???  Okay, if you say so.

I must confess that when I first heard about this I thought:

Oh Chairy, in the scheme of things, is it really THAT big of a deal.  I mean, look what’s going on in the world????

Point taken.

Not to mention, the f-n’ Rainforest is burning down and all those animals with it. Its destruction will destabilize weather patterns, threaten food production and cause…

Not today, Satan

I said POINT TAKEN!  To myself and, now, to you.

Nevertheless, and despite all my best efforts, I still can’t stop thinking about young George.  The idea that another little boy has to endure being mocked for wanting to dance or draw or sing or color… and on national TV no less….

I mean…

What year was Billy Elliot?  2000?  That was almost TWO DECADES ago.  And we’re not even including the 2008 Tony Award winning Broadway musical.

But we’ve entered a 21st century renaissance these last few years, haven’t we?  One in which we have been tasked to re-fight and re-litigate all of those pesky social issues we thought we had settled way back in the sixties and seventies.

Oh we hear them loud and clear, believe me

Men have the right to be men, especially when it comes their business(ES).  In business, anything goes.  Pollution is not personal, only profits are personal.

How big is the Rainforest? That BIG?  So can’t we spare a few hundred miles so your father can make a living?  If he doesn’t have a job or a company, you don’t eat, our worldwide economy slowly goes into the toilet and our standard of living….

Well, don’t even get me started.

And now we’re panicking. #ripEarth

This is why it’s not cool to have important boys like George, future world leaders, wasting their time with… ballet?

I mean, what IS important or worthy of any productive future MAN’s attention??  Certainly not… grand jetés and rondelets.

Get em’ George.

There’s a kind of insidious strongman sensibility circulating worldwide right now.  It seeks to define our aspirations, what we find valuable and how we define our behavior not only personally but towards the world and, most importantly, towards each other.

This is not about Lara Spencer, a woman who I never see on television and have no reference to other than at one time she used to host Antiques Roadshow. (Note:  Which in itself is proof she should know better).

Oh, and if truth be told I also once saw her on Flea Market Flip, a cheesy HGTV show I just remembered I watched five episodes of one lazy weekend afternoon before this current strongman nightmare started.

If only that show continued maybe she and I wouldn’t be in this pickle right now.

The show is still on, Chairy. #lol

Anyway, just like it’s now not okay to make fun of little girls who like to play basketball or soccer it’s now not okay to shame little boys who prefer to pirouette. Not only that but, mocking, shaming or snidely laughing at anyone of any age who loves to do something that doesn’t hurt anyone else is NEVER okay.

Don’t worry about me, Chairy. I’m like so, so, so, rich.

One would think this wouldn’t bear repeating but we seem to be living in a time when everything needs to be repeated ad infinitum, even the fact that you shouldn’t shame boys (or girls) under 10.

Though how are we to know that when half of the world leaders seem okay to hunt them, starve them, lock them up in cages or do worse.   And often right in plain sight, sometimes even on camera.

Is the affront like the one that happened to Prince George, earth shattering?  No.  Though once you really think about it, perhaps the answer is yes.

In the meantime here’s a challenge for Lara Spencer and all those supporting her, male or female:

Film yourself doing a proper twirl around the house to, say, Swan Lake, if you think it’s so easy.  We’ll be happy to post it here and let the public be YOUR judge.

KHS & Vincint – “Tiny Dancer” (Cover)

06.09.19
by

Back to the Future?

There’s a lot of talk about the past these days and it’s reflected in our art, in our politics and all through our everyday lives.

For instance, at the movies I found great solace in reliving Elton John’s life in Rocketman.  This was not only because I got to hear all those great songs performed by the pop star’s virtual movie doppelganger, Taron Egerton, who even captured the way Elton magically played the piano with his feet back when I first saw him perform live at Carnegie Hall in 1972.

He really knew how to put on a show

Instead, what made Rocketman soar for me was how it captured the sad isolation young movie Elton feels when, after his breakthrough performance at L.A.’s Troubadour, he wanders aimlessly at the celebrity after party he should be the star of unable to be his true self.

You don’t have to be gay (or a pop star) to understand what it’s like to not fit in anywhere deep down inside and to know for certain that you are likely the only one who feels this way.

By reliving those feelings and owning them, en masse, it helps us all to feel less alone in the present and to enjoy how far we’ve come in what, in the scheme of things, is a relatively short time.

Baby steps are OK #respectmyjourney

This same form of nostalgia operates in current political movements spearheaded by sizzlingly resonant catchphrases like Make America Great Again. 

More nimbly than a film and certainly more simplistic than ANY streaming show, that clarion call to the past asks the public to go back in time and remember that decade and those years when, overall, things really were GREAT compared to what they are NOW.

There might be some disagreement as to where and when but all the slogan asks of us is to agree that the PRESENT is relatively CRAPPY and that it DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY ANYMORE.

You sure about that Chairy?

You want to go back to the economic boom of the eighties, the pre 9/11 days of the 90s, the gauzy nostalgia of the 50s when everyone wasn’t so sensitive and America just was what it was, united under ONE flag?  It IS possible.  There IS hope.  Follow this logo and those promoting it and WE will take you there.

Just as the ascendance of a Make America Great Again candidate to the Oval Office in 2016 is a call to the past so, in its way, is the indisputable rise of former Vice-President Joe Biden to the very top of the Democratic field of POTUS contenders for 2020.

And here is the Joe Biden of the past… can you even?

In his very first announcement message (Note: Way back in…April) he asked us to recall what America IS, by reminding us of what it WAS.  He did this by citing the very words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

and holding them in sharp contrast to our MAGA president insisting there were very good people on BOTH SIDES when neo-Nazis marched openly in Charlottesville against local residents who supported the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue.

The fact that Jefferson, author of the very manifesto that created the principles on which our country was founded on, lived most of his life right outside Charlottesville was a more than apt metaphor to make the same point of how America’s once GREAT status has gone astray and whom we need to now follow in order to get it back.

This is the only modern Jefferson reference I can get behind #forreal

Biden’s words can’t be emblazoned on a MAGA-like hat but the fiery images of Tiki-torches and swastikas that were employed in present day Charlottesville quickly lit up his candidacy like no other in the 2020 field.  It was a clarion call to reclaim a different part of our pasts and has helped keep the Biden candidacy in a first place runaway lead since its inception almost two months ago.

There is, of course, no going back for any one of us.  We can’t literally enter a time machine and even if we could, memory is select and the exact past is not, to put it mildly, exactly what we are remembering.

This does not interest me. #AmericaSoWhite

As the filmmaking style of Rocketman so effectively demonstrates, our memories are mere impressionistic representations from years gone by intermingled with perceptions and images from other years, decades and time zones in between.  They are an imaginative evocation of our history but not literal.  They are what we recall happened but not entirely accurate.  Yet neither are they fictional.

We can’t literally believe that a young Elton John sang “Daniel” and “Crocodile Rock” decades before they were written just as we may never ignore that our Founding Fathers once owned slaves and literally trafficked and tortured other human beings out of their homeland in order to build a new one for themselves.

You tell em, Liz!

Still, this doesn’t disprove the overall message and/or intent of either.

We get to choose which, if any, of their themes resonate for us, and our futures, and to act on them accordingly.  Yet we need to not get too caught up in their golden-hued memories or isolated mistakes.  Instead, perhaps the best strategy (Note: Or strategery, if one is so inclined) is to use the biggest of their lessons and themes as a new clarion call to an even better future.

Unless, that is, we’re not done just merely remembering quite yet.

Elton John – “Crocodile Rock”