Van Halen – "Finish What Ya Started" (1988)

Come on, baby

Finish what you started

I’m incomplete!

A couple of Christmases ago, one of my children gave me a year’s subscription to the Criterion Channel, a streaming service that allows you to watch thousands of classic and contemporary films from around the world.

Those movie offerings are supplemented with trailers, introductions, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, and commentary tracks.

My only problem with the Criterion Channel is that it’s hard for me to choose which of its many films to watch on any given night.  It’s like having access to a great wine cellar – how do you decide which bottle to open when there are so many great ones to choose from?

Like many streaming services, the Criterion Channel allows you to save titles you’re interested in to a list that you can browse through whenever you’re trying to decide what to watch.

That function is a disaster for people like me because I spend more time browsing through the channel’s film library and clicking the “add to my list” button as I do watching movies.

Currently, my Criterion watch list contains no fewer than 407 titles.  The chances of me viewing all those films are infinitesimal.  Nevertheless, I keep adding movies to it.

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If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know that I’m the poster child for people who don’t actually have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (“OCPD”) but act like they do.

Given my OCPD-ish personality traits – e.g., striving to do things perfectly, devotion to being productive, and preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists – it should have come as no surprise to anyone that when I got interested in Alice Munro’s fiction, I first obtained copies of all 14 of her short story collections from my public library and then read each of 140-plus stories in those books in chronological order.  I also meticulously recorded the titles of each of those stories along with the date that I read it in a notebook – which is how I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read for almost 50 years.

Likewise, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I took an equally systematic approach to choosing films to watch on the Criterion Channel.

After viewing a few random classics that I had heard about but had never seen – like Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – I decided to focus on French films.

My original plan was to start with The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut’s legendary 1959 movie, which I had seen when I was in college – and work my way through the films of Melville, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and the other French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) directors.  

I went to the library and checked out a comprehensive history of French cinema, which I planned to use to identify the movies I should watch.  But after reading the first few chapters of that book, I decided I needed to start by viewing the French “poetic realism” films of the thirties.

I began by watching Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, and then worked my way through the movies of Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko) Jacques Feyder (Carnival in Flanders), Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game – a truly remarkable film), and especially Marcel Carné, whose three-hour-plus Children of Paradise – which I had never heard of – is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all French movies.  (I wouldn’t argue with that judgment – it’s epic, dude!)

It took me a little over a year to work my way from Zero for Conduct to Henri Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, the 1942 movie that was the subject of a recent 2 or 3 lines post.  Altogether, I viewed about 30 French classics from the thirties and forties.

I didn’t watch old French films exclusively during the last year – I also saw movies by Kurosawa, Scorsese, Peckinpah, DePalma, John Woo, Tarantino, and Richard Linklater (my personal favorite) as well.  

I know all that because I’ve started keeping track of the movies I watch in the same notebook where I record the books I read.

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Who am I making that list for?  Who do I think is going to read it?  I suppose one or more of my children or grandchildren might flip through my notebook someday.  If they do, they might find it somewhat interesting that I bothered to keep such a comprehensive list of the movies I watched and the books I read – but I seriously doubt that they will spend much time mulling over my viewing and reading choices, much less let the movies and books I listed influence their own choices.

(If my father or grandfather had left behind a notebook listing the movies he had seen and the books he had read, I’d be fascinated by it.  That’s no surprise – someone who would keep such a list would be interested in someone else’s list.)

The fact that I keep such a list is very interesting to me.  But what’s even more interesting is the particular way I’m now choosing the movies I watch and the books I read.

Why?

Why did I read 140-odd Alice Munro stories?  And why am I going to watch roughly a hundred classic French movies over a two- or three-year period? 

No one assigned those tasks to me – I’m not a college student whose professor assigned those stories or movies to his or her students.  

And no one would give a rat’s ass if I stopped reading Munro halfway through her oeuvre, or suddenly switched from old French films to the Fast & Furious franchise.  

Except me, of course.  I would not be happy with myself if I didn’t finish what I started.  

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All this nonsense almost certainly has something to do with the fact that I’m almost 74 years old.  I rarely think about dying, but I’m not stupid – I know what it means to be that age.

And what it means is that I have limited time left.  And what that means is that I feel the need to accomplish more than I’ve accomplished to date.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to read all of Alice Munro’s stories and watch all the great French films the Criterion Channel has to offer before my time runs out.  

What I am sure of is that if it hadn’t been Alice Munro, it would have been someone else – Marcel Proust, perhaps.  (I’ve been planning to read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time for years.  Better late than never!)

And if it hadn’t been classic French films, it would have been Japanese films or finally getting around to watching all five seasons  of The Wire (which I’ve been saving like a squirrel saves nuts).

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The problem is that it doesn’t matter how many of these self-assigned labors I complete – there are infinitely more books to read and movies to watch than I have time for.  

Nonetheless, something is driving me to accomplish as many of these tasks as I can.  

At the same time, something is making me waste a lot of time every day – by lying in bed scrolling on my phone . . . or worse.

I keep hoping that writing about this stuff on 2 or 3 lines will help me figure things out.  But I think that what ends up happening is that I just dig the hole deeper and deeper.

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“Finish What Ya Started” was released on Van Halen’s 1988 album, OU812.  That was the band’s second album to feature singer Sammy Hagar instead of David Lee Roth.  

(Having trouble figuring out what the album’s title means?  Think about it, people.)

Click here to listen to “Finish What Ya Started,” which has nothing to do with Alice Munro stories or French films.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Van Halen – "Hot for Teacher" (1984)

I got it bad, so bad

I'm hot for teacher

Emmanuel Macron – who was elected President of France on Sunday – knows exactly what David Lee Roth is talking about in today’s featured song.

The 39-year-old Macron has something in common with Donald Trump: neither man had held elective office prior to being elected president.  

But there are differences between the two presidents as well.  For example, Trump is 24 years older than his wife Melania, while Macron is 24 years younger than his wife Brigitte.

French President-elect Macron
with his mother wife

According to the Washington Post, the fact that Macron is young enough to be his wife’s son rather than old enough to be her father “delights many French women”:

“Why can’t we marry younger men? I date them all the time,” said [Martine] Bergossi, the stylish owner of Alternatives, a secondhand-couture shop in Paris, who prefers to leave her exact age to the imagination.

“It’s normal to see men with younger women,” she said. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”

I wonder if Mme. Bergossi was aware that President-elect Macron and his future wife met when he was a 15-year-old 10th-grader at a Catholic school in Amiens, France, and she was a 40-year-old teacher who was married and the mother of three – including a son who was in Emmanuel’s class.

He's hot for teacher!

From the Daily Mail:

[W]hen the teacher-student relationship burst into an affair, the scandal was talk of the town . . . .

“It was a huge scandal at the time,” [said] Benoit Delespierre, a local journalist who is close to [Brigitte’s] family . . . .

“People are opened-minded about love and sex in France.  But still it was a big deal.  She was married with three children and he was her pupil.  You can imagine what the other parents made of it all.”

Emmanuel Macron’s parents were aghast when they learned their teenaged son was canoodling with his married middle-aged teacher, but chose not to make a corrupting-a-minor complaint to local police.

(Why is the President-elect wearing a shirt in this photo?  Hiding his moobs?)

According to Anne Fulda, whose book, Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man, was published last month, Macron’s mother confronted Brigitte and begged her to leave her son alone – at least until he was 18.  But “Brigitte said she couldn't promise her anything,” according to Fulda.

Macron’s parents packed their boy off to an elite secondary school in Paris, hoping the separation would bring an end to Emmanuel’s dalliance with his teacher.  “You won’t get rid of me,” he told Brigitte before leaving.  “I will return and I will marry you.”

And marry her he did – some thirteen years after the relationship began, when he was 29 and she was a 54-year-old grandmother of seven.  (The French newspapers have run photos of him giving a bottle to the youngest of his step-grandchildren.) 

She's hot for student! 

Inquiring minds want to know one thing above all else about this story: how old Emmanuel was when he and Brigitte started bumping uglies.  But she’s not talking.  From the Daily Mail:

Brigitte has refused to reveal when the unlikely pair first became intimate, proclaiming it “our secret.”

“Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story.  That belongs to us.  That is our secret,” she said.

Why won’t she spill the beans?  Surely the statute of limitations has run by now.  

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Do you think that the reaction to the Emmanuel-Brigitte relationship would have been a little different if he had been the 40-year-old married teacher and she had been the 15-year-old student?  (Or if both the student and the teacher had been male?)

Absotively posilutely!.  At least that would have been the case in the U.S. – the French might just say, “J’en ai rien à foutre.” 

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“Hot for Teacher” was released on Van Halen’s 1984 album, 1984.

Here’s the “Hot for Teacher” music video, which features Norwegian model Lillian Müller, who was Playboy’s 1976 “Playmate of the Year.”  

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Van Halen – "Everybody Wants Some!!" (1980)

Ev'rybody wants some!

Baby, how 'bout you? 

A lot of rock ’n’ roll bands have a shortage of superego and an oversupply of id.  But there has never been a band with a greater ratio of id to superego than Van Halen.  

Richard Linklater’s newest movie,  Everybody Wants Some!!, was named after one of Van Halen’s best records.  

It's the best college movie of all time – which is not surprising given that Richard Linklater also directed the best high-school movie of all time, Dazed and Confused.   

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Everybody Wants Some!! takes place at a fictional state college in Texas.  It's the weekend before fall classes begin, and there's really nothing much for the newly-arrived freshmen and the returning upperclassmen to do except get drunk and hook up.

The movie focuses on the members of the college’s baseball team, who live together and party together.  Linklater went to Sam Houston State on a baseball scholarship, and I’m assuming that many of the characters and incidents in the movie are based on his experiences.

Richard Linklater in 1980

There’s plenty of sex, drinking, and jock shenanigans in the movie, but on the whole the guys are rather sweet.  There’s not a single bully or sexual predator in the whole bunch.  Given that he was a college jock himself, it’s not surprising that Linklater humanizes the athletes rather than presenting them as low-IQ, high-testosterone clichés.

Click here to watch the trailer for Everybody Wants Some!!

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Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980.  Linklater is a stickler for getting the details right, so the clothing, hairstyles, music, and other period aspects of the movie are perfect.

For example, Linklater insisted that a Farrah Fawcett poster in one character’s dorm room be replaced.  “Fawcett was ’77, ’78,” he said.  “By ’80, it’s a Susan Anton poster.”

Susan Anton

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From Jacob Hall’s review of the movie:

Everybody Wants Some!! is more party than plot.  Remarkably simple and straightforward, there is no traditional narrative here and no three-act structure here.  Linklater, who also wrote the screenplay, simply asks the audience to tag along with a group of young college baseball players as they live it up the weekend before classes start.  Not much occurs, but everything happens.

Hall’s review gets to the heart of what makes Richard Linklater different from most of his peers:

Richard Linklater is defined by his empathy.  Few filmmakers love their characters quite as much as he does, and his affection fills his low-key dramas and broad comedies alike.  Linklater’s affection for the young men at the core of his new film, Everybody Wants Some!!, is evident in every frame.

Richard Linklater on the set
of Everybody Wants Some!!

One thing I really liked about Everybody Wants Some!! is that I didn’t recognize a single one of the young actors and actresses in the movie.  That made it so much easier for me to believe in the characters than if Linklater had cast the same hot young actors that we saw in the latest vampire and comic-book-hero movies – guys like Taylor Lautner and Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum and Zac Efron.  

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My favorite scene in the movie is at the very beginning, when five of the players crowd into a Chevy Monte Carlo and cruise the parking lots of the girls’ dorms while singing along to the Sugarhill Gang’s classic early rap song, “Rapper’s Delight.”  (You can click here to watch that scene.)

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If someone had taken a video of me watching Everybody Wants Some!!, it would show me grinning like an idiot for an hour and forty minutes.  I wish the movie had been twice as long.  There were no jokes to speak of – I can’t quote a single funny line to you.  But it was sooooo much fun to watch.

I don’t know if women will like this movie as much as I did.  I don’t really see it as a guy’s movie, although it’s about a bunch of jocks who spend most of the weekend getting drunk and high and trying to poke every babe they see.  It’s as far from a Will Farrell or Seth Rogen comedy as it could possibly be.  (THANK GOD!)

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The last part of the movie focuses on a budding romance between two adorable freshman – a baseball pitcher played by Blake Jenner (no relation to Bruce and Kris – thankfully) and a theatre-dance major played by Zoey Deutch (the daughter of Lea Thompson).

Zoey Deutch and Blake Jenner

Maybe they will remain a couple, or maybe they will quickly move on to other girlfriends and boyfriends.  I’d like to think that each of them will remember the time they spent together with great fondness, no matter what happens.  

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The soundtrack of Everybody Wants Some!! doesn’t disappoint.  It’s a mix of new wave, disco, country, and hard rock – everything from the Knack’s “My Sharona,” to Devo’s “Whip It,” to Chic’s “Good Times,” to ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad (I’m Nationwide),” to M’s “Pop Muzik.”

Last but certainly not least, the soundtrack includes “Everybody Wants Some!!”  Click here to listen to that track, which was released on Van Halen’s 1980 album, Women and Children First.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Van Halen – "The Cradle Will Rock" (1980)

And the cradle will rock

Yes, the cradle will rock

And I say, "Rock on!"

In 1978, singer/guitarist Beki Bondage helped found the UK punk band, Vice Squad.  Beki left Vice Squad a few years later, but in 1997 she joined forces with guitarist Paul Rooney to put together a reconstituted version of Vice Squad.  

Beki Bondage

Since then, the band has toured extensively in Europe and the U.S., and has released several studio albums of what they call "old school punk."

Paul Rooney e-mailed me about a 2 or 3 lines post that featured one of Vice Squad's songs, and he's now one of my more interesting Facebook friends.

Paul Rooney

Paul's been a guitarist since he was a teenager, and he's played in a lot of different bands.  He's forgotten more about punk rock, and glam rock, and many other varieties of rock than I've ever knew, and I particularly look forward to his Facebook posts about music.

Van Halen's David Lee Roth

Recently, Paul posted a video of Van Halen performing today's featured song on television in 1980.  Here's what he had to say about that band:

You know what?  I think in many ways showmanship, fun and excitement has been driven out of modern music.  I totally subscribe to the need to make worthwhile, thought-provoking, and meaningful music but the flip side must exist where music helps people forget the daily grind and the hassles and concerns relating to money, work, family and climate change.  Few bands these days can do that.

As Paul points out, Van Halen is one of those few bands.

Songs like "Runnin' With the Devil," "Hot for Teacher," "Panama," and "Everybody Wants Some!" were classic guilty pleasures.  The band members may have all hated each other, but singer David Lee Roth and the rest of Van Halen always sounded like they were having one hell of a good time.

Alex Van Halen

There are two particular things to note in this video of today's featured song.  The first is Alex Van Halen's elaborate drum kit – including four bass drums and some octobans (which are deep, small-diameter tube-shaped took-toms).  The other is David Lee Roth's astonishing outfit (especially the fuzzy boots).

By the way, the opening instrumental riff may sound like it was played on a guitar, but it was actually played on a Wurlitzer electric piano equipped with a phase shifter.

Here's "The Cradle Will Rock."  (Actually, I haven't seen Junior's grades.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: