A documentary retrospective called Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice has been making the rounds of film festivals this summer, most recently at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was a popular offering. Linda Ronstadt came to prominence in the 1970s covering songs in a style so distinctively her own that listeners could be forgiven for thinking the songs originated with her. Her first big hit, for example, was “Different Drum”, which she recorded in 1967 with the Stone Poneys. The song was first recorded by the Greenbriar Boys in 1966, and it was written in 1965 by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees.
An interesting twist to the story of “Different Drum” being written by Michael Nesmith is that most of the Monkees own hit songs were written by the Brill Building songwriting team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. One hit for the Monkees, “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, was written by another Brill Building songwriting team, Carole King and her husband at the time, Gerry Goffin. Those two wrote many hit songs for various artists during the 1960s, and after their divorce in 1969 Ms. King went on to a distinguished solo career singing her own songs.
Carole King at the ceremony to receive her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 2012. Photo by Angela George.
Her 1971 album, Tapestry, became an enormous success, enjoyed by both men and women, but it made its greatest connection with women who came of age in the 1960s, and in the 1970s were staking claims to have their voices acknowledged and heard independently of men. The female singer-songwriters of the 1970s enjoyed popular and critical success in a music industry dominated by men, and despite the obstacles, such as male promoters encouraging them to push their sexual allure ahead of their singing and songwriting talents, they persevered and became strong, independent voices.
In this 1974 episode of the television show The Midnight Special, Melissa Manchester performed “Midnight Blue”, a song she co-wrote with Carole Bayer Sager, an alumna of the Brill Building. Ms. Manchester released an album including “Midnight Blue” the following year, and the song became her first hit. It takes skill and artistry to sustain intensity and interest in a slow song, as Ms. Manchester did beautifully in this rendition.
The list of women who made indelible marks in the popular music of the 1970s is long and would inevitably leave out some names. Not all of them wrote the majority of the songs they made famous, but in the song choices they made they exhibited an independent spirit. Linda Ronstadt, for instance, as she expanded her repertoire to include the Great American Songbook, chose songs that reflected character, strength, and respect. Melissa Manchester, who learned songwriting in a course taught in the early 1970s at New York University by another Brill Building alumnus, Paul Simon, had several hits with songs she co-wrote, and has also been a song stylist like Ms. Ronstadt and has followed a similar path since the 1970s and ’80s with distinctive renditions of standards.
Carole King’s Tapestry, with its well-known cover photo of her, barefooted and wild-haired, on a window seat with her cat, started out a decade of great music from female singer-songwriters with songs that eventually became standards themselves, covered dozens of times by other artists, male and female. Incidentally, that famous cover photo was taken by Jim McCrary at Ms. King’s home in Laurel Canyon, outside Los Angeles, and in the 1970s Laurel Canyon became the locus of much musical talent, and especially singer-songwriters.
In a 1993 concert at Bushnell Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, Carole King performed “You’ve Got a Friend”, one of the several hit songs from her 1971 album, Tapestry.
The decade closed with Linda Ronstadt, another inhabitant of Laurel Canyon in the ’70s, as the most successful female rock and pop singer of the time. Singing out throughout the time in between, and whether coming from the cramped quarters of the Brill Building in New York City or the openness of sunny southern California in Laurel Canyon, were Melissa Manchester and dozens of others every bit as talented, and all with new and interesting statements to make, creating music that expressed their unique times and has lasted beyond, affirmation of their skill and artistry in giving voice to their experience.
— Vita
A story from a February 2019 edition of the television magazine show CBS Sunday Morning.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in France. May 19 is also the birth date of Malcolm X, whose posthumous influence on the film Mr. Lee acknowledges with a quote from him at the end, along with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.. The quotes are about non-violent resistance to oppression (the Rev. King) and the occasional need for violence in self defense against oppressors (Malcolm X). As throughout the rest of the movie, Mr. Lee makes no judgements, but merely puts those ideas out there for the audience to consider. Do the Right Thing provokes thought; it does not provide answers, and 30 years later the state of race relations in America has hardly budged from what Mr. Lee portrayed in the film.
The film did not win the highest prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, though it was nominated. It was not nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and the film that won the honor for 1989 was Driving Miss Daisy, a good film about race relations but a safe one for Hollywood, and a film that in the years since has receded in importance in the rear view mirror. Nearly 30 years later, Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars but lost to another safe film about race relations, Green Book. Both Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book are films produced by largely white filmmakers for consumption by a largely white audience, and are meant to comfort white liberals without unduly upsetting white conservatives. That each received Hollywood’s highest honor is a testament to the institution’s eagerness to pat itself on the back for occasionally making a social message movie without rocking too many boats.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X waiting for a press conference to begin in March 1964. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko for U.S. News & World Report, now in a collection at the Library of Congress.
What’s missing in that equation, of course, are African-Americans. In contrast, Spike Lee has made films for everybody, and Do the Right Thing was groundbreaking in that respect. All the characters he portrays are well rounded, with good and bad aspects to all of them. As the late film critic Roger Ebert noted, there are no heroes or villains that we can easily hang labels on. Those portrayals are more true to life than the safe, near-stereotypes portrayed in Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book. The complexity can also leave some viewers uneasy, since they desire the satisfaction of stories that follow a familiar arc leading to either a comforting conclusion or one that at least ties up some loose ends of the story. Do the Right Thing provides none of that. It is a wonder a major Hollywood studio, Universal, backed the film financially and distributed it widely. That it was popular with the public and, eventually, with most critics despite its unconventionality in style and substance is a testament to how well crafted it was by Mr. Lee and his cast and crew.
Ossie Davis as Da Mayor has a confrontation with some youths on the street in Do the Right Thing. Warning: foul language.
30 years laterDo the Right Thing stays with people who view it now for the first time as much as it did with people who saw it then, prompting the same questions in their minds. A few years before Mr. Lee made the film, there was the racially charged incident at Howard Beach in the New York City borough of Queens, an incident which informed the events in Do the Right Thing. Two years after the movie came out, there was the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and despite the incident being filmed by a bystander, showing the excessive use of force by the police, the cops were subsequently cleared in court, leading to riots in black neighborhoods. There has been no end of ugly, often fatal, incidents in America like those portrayed in the movie, and they just keep coming, like waves pounding the shore. The observations Spike Lee made in Do the Right Thing about race relations in America are still relevant today; the question remains – is anybody listening well enough to change things?
— Vita
“I just want to say – you know – can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?”
— Rodney King, speaking on television in relation to the riots in Los Angeles on May 1, 1992, after a jury acquitted the police who beat him the year before.
The past thirty years have been a golden age of film restoration, starting with the 1989 restoration of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Harris led that work, and he has had a hand in restoring many films since then, including Vertigo (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s a shame that great movies need restoration at all, a state of affairs principally due to neglect by the very studios that made them, often at a cost of millions of dollars. Hollywood studios were far less concerned about art or historical preservation than they were about business, and movies retained little value for the studios after their initial theatrical release.
Publicity still of Gregory Peck from the 1956 film Moby Dick. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Indeed that was the situation for movies until home video opened a new and lucrative avenue for the studios in the 1970s and 1980s. Until then, to the extent the movie studios kept original film elements at all, they kept them in slipshod conditions which allowed the films to deteriorate to one degree or another. By the time demand returned for some of the better movies, restoration was necessary to have a salable product. VHS (Video Home System) tapes could skate by with no restoration because of the low resolution of the format, but laser disc was several steps above VHS in quality and created the first push to restore old films.
Laser disc never caught on the way VHS did, however, and its appeal was limited to cinema buffs. The biggest nudge toward film restoration came in the 1990s with the popularity of DVD (Digital Video Disc), an improvement in quality over VHS at about the same price for content and playback equipment. With that change in the market, movie studios saw the value in packaging their backlog of films in the new format, creating a greater need to restore at least some of those in highest demand. Since the turn of the century, high definition televisions and further improvements in home video resolution have brought the home theater experience into the mainstream, and the demand for quality restorations of old films is at a peak and will probably stay on a plateau hereafter.
There is a limit to how much detail the human eye can discern in the limited space of the typical home theater. DVD was a huge improvement over VHS, and Blu-ray was almost as big an improvement over DVD. 4K resolution is not quite as great an improvement over Blu-ray as numbers alone would suggest, simply because the law of diminishing returns starts to take effect. In the confines of a home theater, even using the best equipment, viewers are less able to discern the finer detail there on the screen. 8K resolution is overkill for all but the most dedicated home video enthusiasts with deep pockets.
Another reason for home video improvements driving film restorations less in the future is the switch by consumers from owning content on physical media, such as a Blu-ray disc, and streaming content in a rental agreement over the internet. Already the rollout of 4K discs has slowed to the point that many good old movies may never be remastered for the format. The potential sales aren’t high enough to interest the major movie studios. As to streaming 4K content, that is subject to the vagaries of the consumer’s internet connection. Some of the 4K content may not be as advertised because of the huge bandwidth requirements, and streaming true 8K content would probably require a 5G internet connection and an actual unlimited data plan from a viewer’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).
In any event, these are good times for fans of old movies. Some classic films, like director John Huston’s 1956 version of Moby Dick, which have long deserved restoration but were nonetheless neglected for whatever reason by the major studios, have been restored by smaller distributors of home video content who have determined it would be worth their time and effort. The movie studio Paramount last year restored It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and remastered it in 4K, though in a sign of the times they have released the new version only for streaming and have not pressed discs of it. Another classic film, Life with Father (1947), awaits true restoration, and viewers should meanwhile beware the versions for sale which trumpet digital remastering or restoration.
Screenshot from Life with Father (1947), with Irene Dunne and William Powell. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Like It’s a Wonderful Life,Life with Father had also fallen into the public domain; unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Life with Father has not attracted anew the attention of the major studios. While Paramount has lavished care on restoring It’s a WonderfulLife, slapdash outfits have been appropriating Life with Father for the sales catalog, offering horrendously bad versions of it and relying on the phrases “digitally remastered” and “restored” to dupe the ignorant. They hope naive consumers will infer that “digitally remastered” means “improved”. It means no such thing; it means only that the film has been scanned to a digital format, a necessary step in making analog movie film available for home viewing on a DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K player. “Restored” is a relative term and can mean the absolute minimum amount of work was put into it, as is usually the case with the shadier outfits.
Robert Harris worked on this 2014 restoration and remastering of the 1964 film My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.
Check reviews online, preferably not on Amazon because the reviewers there rarely get to the nitty gritty about the quality of the transfer, and instead prefer to bloviate about the movie itself, seeing it as their chance to be an authoritative movie reviewer like Roger Ebert. Better are the reviews on news sites or websites specializing in film industry or home theater matters because they generally do mention the quality of the transfer, though consumers still have to take some of those reviews with a grain of salt when they include affiliate links to sites selling copies of the movie. Be wary during research and you’ll have less chance to regret a purchase and better enjoyment of a great old movie given the attention it deserves.
— Techly
There are some people who are so afraid of change that they would rather curse the darkness of their current situation than light a candle to change it. Such people curse an onerously expensive Comcast or Charter cable television and internet bill and the infamously poor customer service of those companies, and yet when they are presented with alternatives they hem and haw and drag their feet about contacting a competitor to the large cable television and internet providers. Part of the problem is fear of change, and part of it is the desire to continue having all of everything, all at once.
People living in or near cities have choices of providers for their television and internet services, while choices for people living in the countryside are far more limited. Nevertheless, while choices may be limited, they are available to people everywhere in the United States who are willing to forego having daily access to obscure specialty channels on cable television or to hundreds of GigaBytes (GB) of data each month for streaming content over the internet. People have to be willing to give up the passivity of slouching on their couches and letting Comcast do everything for them. If that’s what they want, then fine, but don’t expect everyone else to be sympathetic to complaints about high monthly bills for lousy service. Curse the darkness to yourself if you’re unwilling to light a candle to help yourself.
A waitress lighting candles in a bar in Paris, France, in 2008. Photo by Jorge Royan.
For everyone else, there is research to be done, most likely over the internet, a job for which it is very well suited. Research options for internet service providers other than the large companies. You may have to make sacrifices in one way or another when changing to a local, small scale provider, but that is part of cutting the cord. It’s like changing from buying most of your groceries at a national or regional chain grocer to buying them from a local farmers’ market or independent grocer. City dwellers will of course have more options when it comes to technology than country folks, but the important thing to realize is that there are options, as long as people ditch the idea of having all of everything done for them all at once.
The same thing applies to television service, which starts with cutting the cord without bothering to find a new cord provider. Get an antenna! Local television stations are adding digital subchannels every year, and receiving them with an antenna costs nothing. The two key things to remember in buying an antenna are that there is no such thing as a digital or high definition television antenna (an antenna is an antenna, built to receive electromagnetic frequencies regardless of whether the content of those signals is analog or digital), and that resolving digital television content requires a slightly more powerful antenna than in the old days of resolving analog content. Where a rabbit ears antenna may have done the job before, today an outdoor antenna may be necessary for adequate reception.
A nice story from the actor, Jamie Farr, about his early days struggling to make a living in Hollywood. Documentaries like this are much easier to find now on the internet than on cable television.
Some folks who are fortunate enough to have hundreds of GigaBytes of internet data available each month at a reasonable price can do away with cable or antenna television service altogether, and instead use their internet service for viewing television. Do your research! Ask questions of yourself first about what it is you watch most and can’t do without. How many different ways are there to receive that programming? Chances are there are multiple ways of receiving your favorite content, and continuing to rely solely on companies like Comcast and Charter is a disservice to yourself and a way of continuing to curse the darkness. To take documentaries – serious documentaries, that is, not Shark Week documentaries or anything involving Guy Fieri – as one example, it is obvious that cable television offerings have been replaced in the past ten years by what’s available for free on YouTube and by subscription on services such as Netflix. Don’t keep sitting in the dark – light a candle, just don’t expect it to vanquish all the shadows in your life.
— Techly
If in early 1977 you had dropped off for a long sleep and, like Rip Van Winkle, awakened many years later, in this case late in 2017, and you were an avid moviegoer, you would find many changes in the types of movies that were popular in the different eras. Some of the biggest changes would have come about because of Star Wars (1977) which was released shortly after you nodded off, and was the first successful movie with “B” movie themes made on an “A” movie budget, and because of Batman (1989), which was the first successful movie to take a comic book character seriously.
Now in 2017 those types of movies have all but crowded out the big budget movies with adult themes that the major studios used to make, the prestige pictures like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) that David Lean directed, as well as other pictures by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. A few prestige pictures still somehow get made and released each year, but most movies with adult themes are small budget, mostly independently produced affairs that have a limited run in movie theaters before going to a movie rental service. The big money in Hollywood goes mostly to comic book superhero movies, “B” movies made with “A” movie money, and they take themselves very seriously.
A promotional poster for the 1941 serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, with Tom Tyler on the left and Nigel De Brulier on the right. Serials like this would not even have had the status of “B” movie, since they were usually only about twenty minutes long instead of feature length, though their production values were just as cheap.
When Star Wars first came out in theaters, its director, George Lucas, knew perfectly well he was borrowing themes and story lines from old “B” movie adventure serials, and he reveled in those corny conventions with a wink at the audience, who understood the whole thing was a kitschy romp. Similarly for Lucas’s friend, Steven Spielberg, several years later when he directed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), an adventure yarn based entirely on the cheap movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s. George Lucas was the executive producer on that film, and both he and Spielberg, talented filmmakers who were steeped in old film lore, were like kids playing in a very expensive sandbox. Those movies made a lot of money, but still no one took their stories too seriously.
That changed with the release of Batman in 1989, directed by Tim Burton, who claimed he was never particularly enamored of comic books, but who wanted to take the tone of his film far from the campy take on the comic book superhero of the 1960s television show. Burton nonetheless injected some tongue in cheek bits into his movie, mostly in Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker, though that may have been as much Nicholson’s interpretation as Burton’s. The movie was a huge success, and studios took note of how intent the fan base was on seeing a serious treatment of the subject when the fans followed every rumor about the film’s production, especially the casting of Michael Keaton, known at that time mostly for comedic roles, as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Comic book fans were upset that the casting of Keaton hinted the film would be another campy treatment, like the 1960s television series.
A publicity still from the 1941 serial Adventures of Captain Marvel, starring Tom Tyler as Captain Marvel, here beset by two pesky foreigners.
When those same fans went to theaters and saw just how deadly serious Keaton’s Batman was, they were delighted. Ever since then, Hollywood has been ladling up more and more deadly serious comic book superhero movies to that fan base, who appear to be insatiable. Since Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has achieved convincing results rendering the fantastic world of comic books over the past ten or fifteen years, movie producers have tripped over each other turning out more of these movies. All that CGI isn’t cheap, and a comic book movie can cost upwards of 100 million dollars to make. With a worldwide release, however, and all the merchandising tie-ins that comic book superheroes lend themselves to, a film studio can pull in upwards of one billion dollars from each movie.
A scene from the 1960sBatmantelevision series, starring Adam West as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson/Robin, that points to the silliness at the heart of the dual identity superhero premise.
Lawrence of Arabia probably did not generate enough merchandising to be worth mentioning. It was also a complex character study, and therefore did not have the broadest possible appeal. Comic book movies do not have the broadest possible appeal, either, but they have a broader appeal than the old prestige pictures that asked some maturity of their audiences in order to understand their themes. Is this what we want? It is apparently what the portion of the public with generous amounts of disposable income and low expectations wants when they go to the multiplex, because comic book movies have come to dominate the marquee listings. It would be nice if more new prestige pictures made it onto the marquee, because those are movies worth paying to see on the big screen, and in a theater with a terrific sound system. For those moviegoers, unfortunately, these are times of poor pickings, and they might as well stay at home to watch movies on their own setup, or take a long snooze, waking up in forty years to see if “A” and “B” movies have returned to their rightful order in the alphabet.
― Vita
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his new bride, “actress” Louise Linton are the very latest models of a Washington power couple. The two gaga lovers tied the knot in June in a ceremony attended by Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood elite. You were not invited. Mr. Mnuchin, fresh off his stint foreclosing on old ladies for his company, OneWest bank, was sworn in to his new gig as Treasury Secretary in February in an exclusive Oval Office ceremony attended by only a select few. Ms. Linton was there, because even though she and Steve hadn’t gotten hitched yet, she was still his very significant other. Steve Mnuchin swearing in, with P. and V.P. in attendance, and the fabulous Louise Linton looking on soulfully. Now that’s acting! Wish you could’ve been there – not!
The two lovebirds have been caught up in controversy lately – oh, that liberal media! – which really amounts to nothing to people who know what’s really important, like shopping! First, the Mnuchster had to fend off a plea from his Yale (only the best schools) classmates asking him to consider resigning from his post in the administration due to some unfortunate remarks made by his boss – again, it’s the liberal media stirring up trouble! No way, he replied, I’m in this for the long haul and there’s plenty of draconian fiscal measures I have yet to implement with the boss’s blessing. Besides, all that brouhaha was stirred up by the liberal media mischaracterizing the words which spilled out of El Supremo’s mouth. The words (only the best words) would seem to indicate he is a white supremacist and a neo-Nazi sympathizer, but that’s only if you slant things by listening to the words in the order he said them.
Lionel Barrymore as the greedy, unscrupulous Mr. Potter tempts James Stewart’s George Bailey in the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life.
Shortly after that kerfuffle, the newly minted Mrs. Mnuchin, “actress” Louise Linton wrote some things on Instagram that the plebeians expressed indignation about, and Louise had to set them straight. To paraphrase, she told them to eat Little Debbie snack cakes, or whatever horrid stuff you working class dullards stuff in your mouths with your pudgy fingers. Louise and her figure are too fabulous to touch that kind of ick! Anyway, it all started with a plane trip to Fort Knox in Kentucky that Louise and hubby made – coincidentally! – on Monday, the day of the solar eclipse, in a place where the eclipse was near total. Fabulous! but a total coincidence, mind you! So there was a government plane involved, the shopping and eclipse viewing were fantastic! Eat your Little Debbie fudge fingers, or whatever they’re called, and shut up!
The talented and charming Eva Gabor sings the praises of luxury while Eddie Albert sings of integrity and honest toil. It’s not so much that they were giants in those days of the late 1960s, as that we have sunk to the bottom of the barrel since then.
That’s the news from the upper crust,your fabulous betters. You may return to your hog slopping or whatever it is you do, you pathetic prole. And pay up on that mortgage, slacker! Now go away.
― Ed.
Air conditioning and movies – or movie theaters – go together so well that it’s hard to imagine a time without the benefits of both together. In 1902, just as movies were getting started, Willis Carrier (whose company made the political news in 2016), a mechanical engineer, invented the first modern air conditioning plant to help a Brooklyn, New York, printing company solve a paper wrinkling problem at its facility. It wasn’t until 1925 that Carrier got together with a movie theater owner to install air conditioning at the Rivoli Theater on New York City’s Times Square. It was a match meant to be, and from then on the summer, which had been the poorest season for movie theaters, became the richest as people attended movies as much for the air conditioning as for the entertainment.
When The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, appeared in theaters in 1955, most houses and apartments did not have air conditioning. In the scene before this one, they leave an air conditioned movie theater after viewing Creature from the Black Lagoon, a 3D monster movie the appeal of which, for them, was probably not as great as the cool comfort of the theater itself.
Home air conditioners were still unusual in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s most homes had some form of air conditioning, whether central or window units. Movie fans no longer flocked to theaters in summer only for the sweet relief of a few hours respite from summer’s heat and humidity. People continued going to see movies in theaters in summer on account of children being out of school, and how air conditioning in theaters since the 1920s had established summer as movie season. Watching movies at home was still unsatisfactory because of small television screen sizes, low picture resolution and poor sound, and a lag of one or more years before Hollywood would release movies to television.
Meredith Willson, when he appeared on the Texaco Star Theater television program in 1967. Willson, who was born in 1902, coincidentally the same year that Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning, had a long career spanning Broadway theater, Hollywood movies, radio, and television.
All that has changed in the past forty years, of course, starting with home video technology and the ability to either buy or rent movies for home viewing. Theaters felt the pinch, and old style movie palaces shut down, relegating the movie theater experience for the most part to shoe box multiplexes at suburban malls. Drive-in theaters, another summertime movie going experience from a bygone era, shut down along with the air conditioned movie palaces. Now in the last ten years the home theater experience, for people who can afford it (and it becomes more affordable all the time), has progressed to the point that a fair portion of movie fans feel little pulling them toward returning to theaters. Their homes are air conditioned, their televisions and sound systems have gotten bigger and better, and Hollywood releases movies for home viewing so quickly that only the most impatient fans aren’t happy to wait a little while.
The old movie palace experience was something special that can’t be matched by watching a movie at home, no matter how comfortable and technologically sophisticated circumstances at home have become. Comedies and big, crowd pleasing musicals in particular seemed to take on a frisson of excitement when viewed in a well appointed theater among other patrons who were similarly enthralled. Now that theater owners around the country have finally gotten the message and are starting to move away from the nothing special, cookie cutter mall multiplex and toward building theaters that reestablish the grandeur that is only possible outside the home theater, it is questionable whether movie fans will return.
Meredith Willson’s most famous entertainment, The Music Man. Robert Preston, shown in this scene with Buddy Hackett, starred in the long running Broadway show before doing the movie version in 1962.
Some people have had time to drop the movie going habit, for one thing, and for another there is a relatively recent technology that has come into the equation which affects their enjoyment of movies – cell phones. In the theater, cell phone users interfere with the other patrons’ enjoyment of the movie, but at home, for those people who simply can’t do without their phone for even two or three hours, then at least they’re not annoying other paying customers, and for their own enjoyment of non-stop cellular connectivity there is always the pause button on their home theater remote control. Might as well stay home then to enjoy summertime movies, and keep your cool.
― Techly
Audio of FDR’s first Fireside Chat on March 12, 1933.The respectful, civil discourse of a leader speaking as an adult to adults. Listening to this does take a little over thirteen minutes, however, while reading a tweet takes less than a minute.
Last Sunday, March 12, marked the 84th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Fireside Chat, as the series of thirty evening radio programs he did over the twelve years of his presidency came to be known. It was one week after his first inauguration (inaugurations up through 1933 took place on March 4), and he spoke on the banking crisis. He spoke in calm, even tones, with the intent of calming down a populace which had lost confidence in the banking system and withdrawn their funds in a panic. FDR’s fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had famously touted the use of the Bully Pulpit when he was president at the beginning of the twentieth century, and now that radio had come into widespread use, FDR found himself with a Bully Pulpit that enabled him to speak directly to millions of his fellow Americans at a time, without the filter of the national press. FDR, to his credit, used the privilege of his Bully Pulpit to explain his policies in plain, respectful language, and to garner direct support for those policies from the populace.
FDR exiting car with assistance during a campaign trip to Hollywood, California, on September 24, 1932. Photographs like this are rare because press and official photographers avoided showing FDR’s debility out of consideration for the man.
Reminding us of all we have lost and may still lose.A poignant scene from Out of Africa, a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who by all accounts are good people as well as fine actors.
Now we have found ourselves in an age where a new technology enables the president to use the Bully Pulpit in a new way, but sadly we don’t have a TR or an FDR available to make the best use of it. This is our own fault. This is the culmination of a sequence of bad cultural and political choices by all of us over the past forty years or more. Now a reality television bully of no intellectual or humanitarian distinction whatsoever occupies the Oval Office and has the Bully Pulpit, both technologically from his tweets and personally from his rallies, and his ugly pronouncements echo through a press that eagerly pursues the latest noisy distraction as if chasing a fire engine, all while his deputies commit atrocities on the economy, on the environment, on the very working and middle class people who voted him in, on everything and everybody that isn’t part of the Club. If you have to ask, “What Club?” then obviously you don’t belong. Look at Rex Tillerson, aka Wayne Tracker, formerly head of Exxon Mobil and now Secretary of State, and you will be looking at a member in good standing with the Club.
There’s little point and less fun in belaboring the obvious that the current president abuses the Bully Pulpit to air personal grievances and distract the press and the populace from his administration’s shortcomings, and to gloss over policies that take away from the many, who have little enough, in order to give to the few, who already have more than enough. Here’s a recommendation on how to deal with that: as much as possible considering the position of preeminence granted by the office he holds, ignore his Bully Pulpit abuses. Take a lesson from the actress Meryl Streep and don’t refer to him by name. Deny him the satisfactions of power that he seeks. Yes, it is that childish; yes, it is that schoolyard. He has given evidence of that himself. In all other matters political, do as your conscience dictates, of course, but in this matter of the Bully Pulpit recall past experience with schoolyard bullies by denying him the attention and deference he craves.
― Vita
A fuller rendition of the same theme, by the Chamber Orchestra of New York, Salvatore Di Vittorio, Music Director, based on the great John Barry‘s original arrangement.
The ongoing dispute that Energy Transfer Partners, in cooperation with the federal government, is having with several Native American tribes over the Dakota Access Pipeline section that crosses the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota brings up questions about water and its importance to everyday existence. Obviously clean water is essential to life, which is apparently why the Army Corps of Engineers moved the original path of the pipeline from north of Bismarck, North Dakota, where it would threaten the integrity of water supplies there should the pipeline fail and leak oil. How is clean water then less essential to life on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation south of Bismarck, because that is where they relocated the pipeline? Besides the issue of trespassing on sacred grounds on the Reservation, there is the elemental matter of maintaining the integrity of clean water for the Reservation’s animal and human inhabitants.
The Sons of the Pioneerswere the first to perform this song written by one of their own, Bob Nolan, in the 1930s, and since then other artists have covered it dozens of times.
The Dakota Access Pipeline stretches from the oil shale fields of northwest North Dakota to an oil tank farm in southern Illinois, crossing much privately owned farmland along the way. The controversial use of eminent domain to gain access for a privately owned corporate partnership is another subject. The issue at hand here is how the elders of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which technically speaking in the language of treaties with the federal government represent the interests of a sovereign nation within the borders of the United States, can fend off this challenge to their land and their water. Does the federal use of eminent domain apply in their case? The common sense answer would be “no.” History has shown, however, that the “sovereign nation” bit in treaties between the United States and Native American tribes was a mere sop not worth the paper it was written on, and intended only to placate the tribes until such time as we needed their land for one reason or another. All bets were off then, and might made right. That’s what the current controversy comes down to, and after a brief stay from the Obama adminstration in continuing construction of the pipeline across Indian land, the new administration under Supreme Leader has weighed in with a sadly predictable decision.
Since the 1980s, when bottled water first started showing up in quantity in supermarkets in the United States, Americans seem to have taken for granted the rare and precious resource that is clean water. Particularly in the eastern half of the country, where (Flint, Michigan aside) municipal water supplies have been plentiful and largely free of problems, Americans have become deluded by the strange idea that the water coming out of their taps was somehow deficient and that the bottled water they bought from the supermarket was better. At first, due to the aura of prestige surrounding European bottled water brands like Perrier and Evian, people bought and sipped bottled water as a matter of status. Eventually it became just a thing to do. This proved to be a type of madness, particularly after the water in bottles proved to be no better, and in some cases worse, than the water coming out of most people’s taps, at least in the eastern half of the United States. People in the western half of the country often have had to cope with tap water that was unacceptably hard, and have had more reason therefore to turn to bottled water.
The Washita River Massacre portrayed in the 1970 film Little Big Man. Anti-war and anti-government sentiment of the time influenced this film, but its portrayal of Native Americans and their distressing relationship to their conquerors was a welcome corrective after decades of stilted, one-sided inaccuracies in Hollywood movies. The tune is “Garry Owen”, an Irish quickstep adapted as the marching song for Custer’s 7th Cavalry.
In some cases, buying and consuming commercially produced distilled water, even in the United States, the land of mostly wholesome public drinking water compared to much of the rest of the world, is not a bad idea. Other than that, the idea of giving international conglomerates like Nestlé and Coca-Cola more money and control over water supplies, a resource far more precious than oil, is foolish and insane. The Native American protesters and their supporters at Standing Rock have the sane and sagacious idea of protecting the water that courses through the Reservation, and considering the vital importance of that resource the rest of us had best pay attention now because it will flow our way in time.
― Izzy
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket, two marines engage in an ironic “John Wayne” face-off. Wayne’s chickenhawkish stances werewell-known and widely held in contempt by combat veterans fromWorld War II to Vietnam. Warning: foul language.
America’s wars continue with no end in sight, from one presidential administration to the next. One proposal to curtail the corporate oligarchy’s military adventurism is to bring back the military draft or to institute Universal National Service, the idea being that if a greater percentage of the population has a personal stake in foreign policy then they will be more likely to make their preferences known to their leaders, and people with a personal stake are less likely to want more war. The oligarchy knows this, too, as it’s a lesson they learned from an aroused public during the Vietnam War and are unlikely to want repeated if the public reawakens.
Since the draft ended in 1973, the per capita percentage of the population serving in the military has steadily declined, while the number of American military interventions overseas has drastically increased. Linking the two trends could be coincidental, but it’s worth considering that in the 40 years from 1933 to 1973, in most of which there was a draft, the US sent the military abroad on 27 occasions, and in the 40 years from 1974 to 2014 the US sent the military on 175 different foreign interventions. Has the world really become 6.5 times more dangerous since 1973? Or is it that the US has taken on in earnest the burden and profits of empire and the role of world policeman, putting out small fires everywhere, many times at the behest of corporate interests?
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
― Marine Major General (Retired) Smedley Butler, writing in the
Socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935.
The 1994 Robert Zemeckis movie Forrest Gump is an excellent portrayal of the diversity of experience awaiting Vietnam era draftees, though of course most of them did not want to be there. Warning: foul language.
The majority of Americans catch the news about these numerous foreign conflicts as they go about their daily business, and because they don’t know anyone in the military and didn’t serve themselves, the news pretty much goes in one ear and out the other. Who can get agitated or even interested about what’s happening in Kosovo or Libya or Yemen or the Horn of Africa, wherever that is? Afghanistan and Iraq, oh yeah, are those still dragging on? Are we going into Syria now, too? And so these busy Americans go on with their lives, paying their taxes and going shopping, surprised to learn that when the US deploys Predator drones to these foreign hot spots, the controllers of the deadly drones sit in air-conditioned trailers halfway around the world in Nevada or Germany. It’s the New Age, alright, a deadly video game.
Or so we might choose to believe. As technocratic and bloodless as the military brass and the politicians may try to make modern war seem in order to make it more palatable for the general public, it will always nevertheless be a nasty mess both physically and morally. They don’t want to show that part, though; they learned that lesson from Vietnam as well. Rah-rah Hollywood movies are not the answer to getting Americans to come to terms with their current situation in world politics. Far from it. There are far too many chickenhawks making movies in Hollywood and making policy in Washington to serve anything but the basest emotions of too many Americans, the “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots” among them, who are stirred to cheer movies glorifying war and the macho posturing of Supreme Leader. As long as they reflexively say “Thank you for your service” to a service member or veteran when they encounter one, they’re covered. Aren’t they?
― Ed.
An early scene in Full Metal Jacket depicts Marine boot camp in a less lighthearted vein than the boot camp of Forrest Gump. Some of that canbe attributed to the differences between the Marines and the Army, and some to the aims of the two films. Nonetheless, some of the drill sergeant’s insults will ring bells in the dark sense of humor shared by many veterans, an emotion Kubrick effectively turns inside out at the end of the scene. Warning: foul language, of course.
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