Saturday Music Hall: Graceland

Given the midterm election and my illness and recovery cutting into the time I can devote to this blog, our Saturday Music Hall entries have been neglected for some time now. I'm pleased to report I'm feeling better each day, although the fatigue and pain still linger. I'm back at it, but still running on just a few cylinders.

During my recovery I've been hanging out on the daybed in our den in front of a TV tuned mostly to Turner Classic Movies. I mean it. I've been too spaced for reading novels and don't have the energy to do much else. Thankfully, I've found It a perfect channel for sickies, one that takes me back to well worn Hollywoodland images and celluloid dreams. No blaring ads. No yelling or extreme violence. No fast-cut camera angles. Instead I've been comforted by all those mostly black and white, often cornball images so familiar to my subconcious from childhood and beyond.

I've found it easy to fade and in out of sleep not caring how much I've missed in the storylines populated by Clark Gable, Betty Davis, Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Barbara Stanwyk, Gary Cooper, Joan Blondell, John Wayne, Eva Marie Saint, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra and many more. There are also the entertaining shorts from the 30s with awe-inspiring performances by costumed dogs, dead-end kids and wealthy debutantes in formal wear. You could say that old movies have been my graceland over the past several weeks. Which brings me, in a round-about way, to today's music video by Paul Simon.

Not only did I get a chance to see TCM's screening of The Graduate -- Dustin Hoffman's career-making movie with Anne Bancroft, accompanied by the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack that sold millions of records in 1967 -- I got to see Paul teamed with Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michael on the excellent Sundance conversation series, Iconoclasts. It made me remember how much I've loved Paul Simon's music over the years, his musical imagery traced into my subconcious as strongly as those flickering images from Hollywood in its heyday. He's been producing creative, intelligent, innovative music since the long-ago days when I was buying 45s for my mono record player. I hope you enjoy him doing a live version of Graceland backed by a contingent of fabulous South African musicians. I'm outta here and back to my tv lair. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are calling me back to Hollywoodland, to Graceland.