Please, no more Tin Pan Alley Irish
Patty just asked me to send money. Or was it her identical cousin Cathy? To be fair, I hadn’t seen her in years, and I wouldn’t have recognized her except for that distinctive voice. Yes, it’s fund raising time again at my local PBS station, and there’s always a reason to become a member.
Actually, I wish that PBS could simply run “real” ads. I mean, the US government can’t fund everything, and although public TV deserves a place on any well-rounded cable system, the amount of cash required to provide quality programming is insatiable. But, back to Patty. She was shilling for old(er) Irish music, the stuff that goes back more than two generations. No U2, or Enya, or Clannad, or Altan, or Deanta, or… in truth, the list of songs and performances on the PBS presentation were largely forgettable. I mean, do we really need yet another version of McNamara’s Band to get us through the season? Sorry, Mountain Lake, but this package won’t convince me to loosen the old purse strings.
This afternoon, in my desire to absorb a minimum of Oscar content, we watched Hurt Locker. Not a movie “for the ages”; nor is it “for all ages”. The bleak brown background of everything doesn’t grow on you. Nor does the realization that this movie is pretty close to what our own military faces on a daily basis over in Afghanistan. Check the stats: how many soldiers haven’t died from the IED (which is very different from the WMD we once believed gave reason to conquest).
I almost miss the familiar scenery of WW2 war flicks; where green, black, blue, white interspersed with brown.
