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Arts & Life
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- Written by: Tim Riley
‘TIGER KING: MURDER, MAYHEM AND MADNESS’ ON NETFLIX
Pop culture is thriving right now on Netflix if for no other reason than most of the people not involved with essential businesses are trapped at home and tuning into programming that might not have gained a lot of traction otherwise.
Could that be the reason for the sudden national obsession with “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness”? What explanation is there for the fascination with all the misfits on the margins of society that inhabit the strange world of exotic animals held in captivity?
Everyone seems to be talking about a character named Joe Exotic, the gun-toting redneck, gay polygamist with the bleached mullet who runs the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma.
We are in the midst of a global pandemic with almost daily White House briefings from the coronavirus task force, and a presumed journalist asks President Trump if he’s considering a pardon for Joe Exotic now languishing in jail.
On to more of a serious matter is the question of whether Joe Exotic, whose real name keeps changing depending on the shedding of his birth surname to adopt a combination of names of the men he happens to marry, has obtained his long-sought-after celebrity status thanks to Netflix.
If he were not in prison right now, would Joseph Maldonado-Passage, aka Joe Exotic, be running for political office again, as he once did in his quixotic campaigns for president and then governor of Oklahoma in 2018, where he came in third in the Libertarian Party primary?
The seven-episode docuseries, featuring interviews of Joe and his employees, the oddball assortment of competitors, his campaign manager, shady businessmen, law enforcement officials and his greatest nemesis, raises more questions than answers about everything.
That Joe Exotic ends up in the Grady County jail is no surprise since the first episode establishes that he’s getting three square meals a day while languishing in a cell probably much more confined than the cages for his tigers.
Bragging of the over 200 tigers and other big cats in captivity at his animal park, the flamboyant showman Joe Exotic, dressed in colorful unbuttoned print shirts with a gun holster strapped to his waist, finances his operation by charging visitors to cuddle and play with tiger cubs.
Exotic’s tourist attraction draws the ire of his chief nemesis, Carole Baskin, the CEO of Big Cat Rescue based in Tampa, Florida, who maintains a sanctuary with her third husband Howard, who oddly enough could pass for a Prince Charles lookalike.
In her view, Carole maintains that the petting zoo aspect of the cubs which may make for great selfies is a form of abuse, but the real story is how these creatures become disposable when trafficked to other collectors.
As the series moves along, the bitter rivalry between Joe and Carole reaches such a disturbing level of hatred that the Oklahoma zookeeper regularly features the animal rights activist in various states of being harmed or killed in his Internet series of Joe Exotic TV.
Part of what motivates Joe’s extreme vitriolic behavior towards Carole, culminating in the murder-for-hire plot that lands him in the hoosegow for 22 years, is an outlandish conspiracy theory that she killed her previous husband and fed his remains to tigers.
The third episode has plenty of focus on the 1997 disappearance of kooky Carole’s second husband, the millionaire Don Lewis who spent a lot of time on frequent trips to Costa Rica. Exotic was only too eager to spread innuendos of foul play.
Other eccentric characters in the exotic animal trade are also highlighted and interviewed. The middle-aged Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, fashioning himself as a cult leader married to several young women, runs an animal park in Myrtle Beach.
Not to be outdone in the polygamy game, Exotic holds a wedding ceremony for his marriage to two men at the same time, one of which is the young Travis Maldonado who meets a tragic fate when demonstrating wrongly off-camera that a gun without its clip would not fire.
Another animal collector, featured only too briefly, is a former Miami drug lord Mario Tabraue, who claims that he inspired Al Pacino’s murderous character in “Scarface.” It’s astonishing that he comes off as more normal than others in Exotic’s weird orbit.
As for a shady businessman in the mix, enter Jeff Lowe, a felon who forms a partnership with a nearly bankrupt Joe to keep the animal park functioning and ends up in a bind for sneaking tigers into a Vegas hotel room.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the eccentric characters, some of them missing limbs and others lacking a good dental plan, that populate the surreal, strange world of the “Tiger King,” that is so appropriately subtitled as “Murder, Mayhem and Madness.”
The bottom line is that this Netflix docuseries is akin to watching a train wreck or a hundred car pileup on the interstate. Many of us have nothing more pressing to do than observe in disbelief.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
LCSA President Ed Bublitz said the action was necessary in order to comply with current health and safety regulations in California.
LCSA members and others who purchased tickets should have already received information about refunds or replacement options for the canceled concert.
Remaining concerts scheduled for this year – the August Baroque Concert, November Fall Concert and December Holiday Concert – are expected to take place pending approval by public health officials.
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- Written by: Ted Kooser
I'm writing this column on a summer day when a hungry crowd of Monarch butterfly caterpillars are eating the upper leaves of the milkweed just outside my door in Nebraska, and my wife and I are joyful that they're getting a good start at life.
The following poem is from Stuart Kestenbaum's new book, “How to Start Over,” from Deerbrook Editions. He lives in Maine and is the state's Poet Laureate.
Joy
The asters shake from stem to flower
waiting for the monarchs to alight.
Every butterfly knows that the end
is different from the beginning
and that it is always a part
of a longer story, in which we are always
transformed. When it's time to fly,
you know how, just the way you knew
how to breathe, just the way the air
knew to find its way into your lungs,
the way the geese know when to depart,
the way their wings know how to
speak to the wind, a partnership of feather
and glide, lifting into the blue dream.
American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2019 by Stuart Kestenbaum, "Joy," from How to Start Over, (Deerborn Editions, 2019). Poem reprinted by permission of Stuart Kestenbaum and the publisher. Introduction copyright @2020 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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- Written by: Tim Riley
‘OZARK’ ON NETFLIX
Sometimes it’s OK to arrive late to the party, and now that there is more time for binge-watching TV series, catching up with crime drama series “Ozark” on Netflix offers up the chance for a long-run.
“Ozark,” perhaps because of its illicit drug trade milieu, has been compared to series like “Breaking Bad,” and with the Redneck Riviera setting of the Lake of the Ozarks, maybe it’s a little bit more like “Justified.”
Jason Bateman, occasional director and star, has taken a darker turn than usual in his character of Marty Byrde, a Chicago financial adviser whose wizardry in moving around large amounts of money draws attention from the wrong people.
For Marty, the wrong people are not just the FBI, but the particularly vicious Mexican cartel kingpin Del (Esai Morales) who has entrusted millions of dollars in his care, only to discover that Marty’s associates have been skimming a share of the profits.
An ugly fate befalls those who get sideways with the cartel, and though Marty is spared a gruesome terminal outcome, it’s likely only because he just might be indispensable to making things right.
Giving up the gleaming high-rise office and the nice suburban home, Marty uproots his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and two children, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), for a move to lakeside living in Missouri.
Convincing the cartel that he can launder their drug money without drawing suspicion from the FBI in the Lake of the Ozarks, Marty goes about the business of looking for businesses that are either marginal or failing where he can pursue his trade.
Soon he’s involved with Rachel (Jordana Spiro), owner of a rundown resort motel, acquires a strip club by trickery and tangles with the conniving Ruth (Julia Garner), the sharp young member of a family of deadbeat crooks with designs of her own.
There’s also the not-so-small matter of tension in the Byrde family, from the revelation of Wendy’s infidelity to the teenage Charlotte’s angst and insolence to younger Jonah’s strange fascination with mutilated animals.
Almost everyone is grappling with demons in “Ozark,” from the undercover FBI agent monitoring the Byrde family who harbors secrets that could derail his career to a conflicted pastor holding services on the lake.
With comparisons to other crime dramas, “Ozark” has the surface feeling of being somewhat derivative, but it’s worth hanging in there to see if Marty can wiggle his way out of inevitable peril.
‘THE LOST CITY OF CECIL B. DEMILLE’ ON DVD
Cecil B. DeMille, early pioneer of American cinema, gained his directorial fame for the epic scale and cinematic showmanship of his films, most notably in the biblical-themed silent films “The Ten Commandments” (1923) and “The King of Kings” (1927).
DeMille obtained pop culture status in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, a demented former silent film star dreaming of a triumphant return to the screen, utters the famous line, “Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
Filmmaker Peter Brosnan, passionate in documenting an early tale of the famous director’s penchant for massive sets, devoted decades to an archeological detective story of unearthing the City of the Pharaoh in the sand dunes of a California beach.
“The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille” has been re-released on DVD and streaming sites to coincide with the traditional Easter airing on television of “The Ten Commandments,” the Charlton Heston-as-Moses version that remains a popular Biblical story.
DeMille’s “lost city” refers to what Brosnan heard about in 1982 from his colleague Bruce Cardozo. In 1923, the pioneer filmmaker built the largest set in movie history for the silent film version of “The Ten Commandments” in the sand dunes of a California beach.
After the shooting had finished, the rumor was that the film set, which included 20 sphinxes and four 35-ton statues of Ramses, was buried in the sand dunes of the small town of Guadalupe in Santa Barbara County.
Nearly 60 years later, Brosnan began his quest to unearth the remains of the Egyptian setting with the help of archeologist John Parker, who eventually quit the project after growing weary of permitting snafus.
As narrator, Brosnan recounts the annoying red tape battles with government officials dismissively referred to as the “permit people” who dithered over whether an original exemption from regulations would hold up.
At one point, Brosnan is described as having a “Captain Ahab-type obsession” in recovering whatever artifacts of DeMille’s faux Egyptian grandeur would be discovered.
In true documentary fashion, Brosnan interviews people who were involved in different ways with the film and still alive to tell the tale, including a gentleman who was a kid when he snuck on to the Paramount lot to witness how DeMille staged the parting of the Red Sea.
For serious film buffs, “The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille” also offers a fascinating look at the creation of epic films from the sand dunes of Guadalupe to location shooting in Egypt for the 1956 version of “The Ten Commandments.”
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.