That’s all I can think after glancing through this offering of “one-line films created by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.”
Which, the credits tell us, were produced by The New York Times Magazine.
And which star Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Bradley Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and others.
Wow. Apparently, some newspapers still have money to waste…
“Donovan in Concert” — the album cover.
There are some things that just have to be corrected — but never will be, because they were recorded as they are, and will be replayed as they are, as long as there are devices capable of playing them.
“Donovan in Concert” is a long-time favorite of mine. The singer-songwriter recorded it at the Anaheim Convention Center on September 23, 1967. It was released the following year, and some months after that, a teacher of mine — I want to say it was a social studies teacher, although is seems more like something an English teacher would do — wanted us to sit quietly and write creatively for an hour. Or maybe it was study for an hour. I don’t know. In any case, he wanted us to be in a contemplative state, and he played this album. I found it so conducive to the state of thoughtful attention that I ran out and bought it on vinyl.
A few years back, one of my daughters gave me an extended version on CD, and I transferred the sound files to my computer — and thenceforth my phone and tablet.
So I was listening to it today, and was once again really bothered by this spoken intro to the song “Widow with a Shawl (A Portrait).” If you want to go listen to it, it’s technically at the end of the preceding track, “Guinevere:”
This next song, you must imagine, takes place in the 18th century, in England somewhere. This song tells the story of a young lady who is lamenting her lover who has gone to sea. This is in the days of the sailing ships, and when they went to sea, they went away for a long time — 25 years, maybe 30 years. Well, this is a widow — she supposes she’s a widow — and she’s walking along the beach. And this is her song.
Now, I don’t know in which universe English sailing ships went away for 25-30 years, but it wasn’t this one. There was nowhere to go that took that long, even with lengthy stops to refurbish and repair the ship. The survivors of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe, two centuries earlier, returned after three years. Yes, whalers sometimes deliberately stayed out for years, but by “years,” I mean two or three or four. And occasionally, exceptionally unlucky sailors would be on their way home after a couple of years out, and get pressed into a Royal Navy ship and go out for another year or two.
I suppose there would be cases of a ship that returned to its former port after 25 or 30 years — but it would have been captured by hostile forces, renamed, lived a whole separate life or two or three, been recaptured, and returned as an entirely different ship (having been refurbished multiple times in everything but the bare hull, and much of that repaired), with a different crew, having been through many other crews in the intervening years.
This widow is indeed a widow, and if she expects to have children, much less grandchildren, to comfort her in her old age, she need apply to the authorities to have her man declared dead, and start over. Her man reminds me of something the fictional Jack Aubrey said of Ulysses — he utterly dismissed his excuses for taking 10 years to get home from Troy to Ithaca. Men turned to swine, indeed — it was nothing more than malingering in port, and poor seamanship.
Now that that’s settled, there’s another error that’s been bothering me, although not as long.
In the double disc of live music by The Beatles on the BBC (the first one, not the one just released), a BBC host introduces a song by saying:
The Beatles… with Paul McCartney paying tribute to the Everlys with ‘Lucille.’
It is followed, of course, by Paul doing his best to impersonate Little Richard.
Why the Beatles didn’t stop right there to correct the guy, I don’t know. Why the people who packaged this album used that bit of introduction, I don’t know. But it really, really bugs me that every time someone plays the track, the guy will say that, and will stand uncorrected.
Yes, the Everly Brothers also covered “Lucille,” but it sounded like this — nothing at all like the original. It’s somnolent, morose-sounding by comparison.
Paul McCartney is most definitely, most assuredly, not paying tribute to the Everlys.
OK, now I’ve done my bit to set those things straight. Makes me feel slightly better.
I find errors such as these inexcusable. Yes, I’m well acquainted with errors, and have made a few in my day, with some of them appearing in print. But that was in daily journalism, when there was barely time to write something in stream of consciousness, and no one had more than a very few minutes to check behind you. I am less patient with errors in monthly magazines, and not at all forgiving of them in books.
After 46 years, of course, the Donovan error is an artifact, and to change it would be to change who he was. One can accept it as valid evidence of the dizzy romanticism of Flower Power, which means it does communicate something that was true.
But I’m still glad I set it straight.
Yesterday, I reTweeted Salon’s link to the “‘Official’ Breaking Bad alternate ending,” which is said to have been made for the DVD box set, which is to be released Nov. 26.
But I didn’t have time to view the video clip right then. By the time I tried this morning, I got a message saying Sony Pictures Television had had it taken down.
No worries, thought I. I had paid for the entire last season, via iTunes, which was supposed to include all supplementary clips, so I figured it wouldn’t be closed to me. But then I saw there was no such clip awaiting me at iTunes.
But then, this morning, my favorite chap-hop artist, Professor Elemental, tweeted out a link that worked.
It says at the end, “provided courtesy of Sony,” so for the moment, I guess it’s OK.
Enjoy it, while it lasts — before the content powers-that-be change their minds. (And doesn’t it seem far more logical that they would want the video out there, to create buzz for the DVD set?) For “Breaking Bad” fans, it’s fun.
And just to remind you how the show really ended, here’s some mood music from Badfinger…
Doughboys of the 64th Regiment celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918
I originally posted the below material as a comment on the “Top Ten War Movies” post from over the weekend. Bryan suggested that today, it should be a separate post. I suppose he’s right.
The context is that I was responding to two previous comments — one by Rose praising the TV series “Band of Brothers,” and the other from Phillip about “anti-war” messages. This lies in the larger context of a long debate of several years’ standing, in which Phillip takes the position that all sane people oppose war, and I take the armchair-warrior position of “not always”…
“Band of Brothers” was the best thing ever made for television.
And it had the kind of anti-war message in it that I appreciate [as opposed to the kind of anti-war message I hate, which I had described earlier as “one that beats you about the head and shoulders with the idea that war is futile and stupid and anyone who decides to involve a nation in war is evil and unjustified, and we should never, ever engage in it”]. It’s very similar to a powerful one in “Saving Private Ryan.”
There’s this great scene in which the actor portraying David Kenyon Webster — the writer, from Harvard — is riding past thousands of surrendering Germans being marched toward the rear (the opposite direction from which he and Easy Company are traveling) and he spots some senior German officers. He starts shouting at them (excuse the language):
Hey, you! That’s right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That’s right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin’ Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives… For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?
To explain what I mean by this… I grew up with shows like “Combat,” which gave a sort of timeless sense of the war. Sgt. Saunders and his men were soldiers, had always been soldiers, and would always be soldiers. And they would always be making their way across France in a picaresque manner, doing what they were born to do.
Well, what Webster is shouting at those Germans is that NO, we were NOT born to do this. This is a huge interruption in the way life is supposed to be.
That lies at the core of Tom Hanks’ character in “Saving Private Ryan.” His men think HE was born to be a soldier, and can’t imagine him in any other role (as Reuben says, “Cap’n didn’t go to school, they assembled him at OCS outta spare body parts of dead GIs.”) — hence their intense curiosity about what he did before the war. And their stunned silence when they learn the reality:
I’m a schoolteacher. I teach English composition… in this little town called Adley, Pennsylvania. The last eleven years, I’ve been at Thomas Alva Edison High School. I was a coach of the baseball team in the springtime. Back home, I tell people what I do for a living and they think well, now that figures. But over here, it’s a big, a big mystery. So, I guess I’ve changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me, whenever it is that I get back to her. And how I’ll ever be able to tell her about days like today. Ah, Ryan. I don’t know anything about Ryan. I don’t care. The man means nothing to me. It’s just a name. But if… You know if going to Rumelle and finding him so that he can go home. If that earns me the right to get back to my wife, then that’s my mission.
There, you learn this this is NOT supposed to be where he is. This was not the way his life was supposed to go.
Now… on the other hand…
Dick Winters was a real-life guy who had no desire to be a warrior. After surviving D-Day (having led his men in an action that should have gotten him the Medal of Honor, but he “only” received a Distinguished Service Cross for it), he took a quiet moment to pray that “I would make it through D plus 1. I also promised that if some way I could get home again, I would find a nice peaceful town and spend the rest of my life in peace.”
That’s all he wanted.
And yet, by having been forced to be a soldier, he and everyone around him found that he was superbly suited to it. He was one of those rare men who thought quickly and clearly under fire, and communicated his calm and his self-assuredness to his men. He knew what to do, and how to give orders so that it got done. He had a gift.
And that gift actually was a thing of value — to his society, and to the world. And here’s where we separate. Here’s where we draw a line between being “anti-war” as an absolutist position — that war is always wrong and evil and has no redeeming qualities — and my position, which is that sometimes nations need people like Dick Winters to step forward and exercise those abilities that they have. In other words, the warrior is a valuable member of society like the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker (actually, nowadays, perhaps more valuable than the candlestick-maker).
Which seems like a good place to stop, a little more than an hour before 11 o’clock on Nov. 11.
Clint Eastwood firing two MP40s at the same time in “Where Eagles Dare.”
Yeah, I know, The Guardian. I’d as soon ask Jane Fonda for her top ten war pictures as I would The Guardian.
But I didn’t ask; they just published it on their own initiative the other day, and I find such lists irresistible. So here is their list, but with my comments on each:
10. “Where Eagles Dare” — They included one slam-bang, fun-to-watch action picture, and I appreciate the gesture. I actually think of this one as less a war movie, and more an action/spy story. But it is of course technically a war picture, and probably fires more (blank, I hope) rounds from Schmeisser machine pistols than any other film ever made (in this scene alone). Best bit — the battle on the cable car/ski lift thing.
9. “Rome, Open City” — Haven’t seen it. Sounds intriguing.
8. “La Grande Illusion” — Also sounds interesting. Need to put it on my list.
7. “The Deer Hunter” — Some fine performances by some great American actors, but perhaps a bit too ponderous, too impressed with its own seriousness. And the whole Russian roulette thing only makes sense in the way The Guardian sees it: “as a metaphor for America’s suicidal intervention in south-east Asia.”
6. “Three Kings” — Saw this, but quickly forgot it. “Kelly’s Heroes” did the same thing better (or at least, more entertainingly, although it is unfortunately an exemplar of the wearisome “WWII was so much fun!” genre so prevalent at the time). All I remember is a character’s graphic description of what a bullet does when it enters the body (or was that in something else?). Why did The Guardian include it? Why else? “What Three Kings is really concerned with is challenging some of the bogus US triumphalism that clung to the war at the time.” Bogus? Really? I thought that was supposed to be the “good war” in the estimation of people who opposed going in and finishing the job in 2003.
5. “Come and See” — Haven’t seen it. Sounds like something extremely unpleasant, that would mostly tell me something I knew — the Nazis were really, really bad guys.
4. “Ran” — The Kurozawa classic that I’ve never seen, and need to. It’s in my Netflix queue. Maybe this weekend.
3. “The Thin Red Line” — The most disappointing war picture I’ve ever seen. I went to see it right after reading James Jones’ superb novel, and was sickened by Hollywood’s cheesy, gauzy, preachy version of it. I hated it so much I wrote a column about how bad it was, which you can read here. (It’s a Word file — you have to go to your “downloads” folder to read it.)
2. “Paths of Glory” — I’ve only ever seen parts of it, and I want to see the whole thing. It probably deserves to be here more than another Kubrick film that too often makes lists such as this one, “Full Metal Jacket.”
1. “Apocalypse Now” — An awesome piece of film-making. Although this is another one that I don’t exactly think of as a “war picture.” The Vietnam War is just used as a setting for retelling Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is more about the war in men’s souls than a bang-bang war. Most people’s favorite bits, such as Robert Duvall’s surf-mad air cav colonel, are to me fun to watch, but distracting, and degrading to the film’s artistic value. I like the slower, darker, quieter, more contemplative narrative, the plot thread of the film that stays true to Conrad. I like the parts when Willard is talking to himself, narrating. So did a lot of people, obviously, since this seems to have launched a whole new career for Martin Sheen doing commercial voiceovers.
Mainly, what’s glaringly missing from this list are such obvious greats as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Platoon,” “Black Hawk Down,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Stalag 17,” “The Big Red One,” and maybe “The Hurt Locker.” (And, for sentimental reasons, because I loved it as a kid, “The Great Escape.”)
And of course, “The Thin Red Line” would be on a 10 worst list, if I were compiling it.
Aside from the foreign classics that serve to air the critics’ erudition, their guiding preference for iconic anti-war works, and the fun pick of “Where Eagles Dare,” it’s like they phoned this list in.
Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today on Long Island. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May
.
With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. “One chord is fine,” he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. “Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”…
… I happened to remember the above video. It’s one of Andy Warhol’s “screen tests” that he did of various people who hung around The Factory back in the mid-’60s.
Basically, Warhol would turn a camera loaded with a short bit of film (about four minutes worth) onto one of his subjects, and just let that person be for that length of time.
Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips put 13 of those clips to music, and I saw their show at Spoleto in Charleston a couple of years back.
Somehow, their lyrics seem appropriate to express just how old we’ve gotten since Reed sat there drinking that Coke.
For some of Reed’s own music, I include the clip below…
Well, as you know, today is John Lennon’s birthday — he would have been 73.
Or maybe you don’t know. As I’ve said in the past, it falls on the same day on which we celebrated Ecuadorean independence, back when I lived there when I was a kid. So it’s easier for me to remember.
It’s not exactly “Ecuadorean Independence Day.” It was the day that the city of Guayaquil managed to free itself from Spanish rule. The rest of the country had to wait a bit.
I lived in Guayaquil for two-and-a-half years — the longest I ever lived anywhere growing up. I attended 5th and 6th grades at Colegio Americano. The city had a major boulevard named Nueve de Octubre, and we celebrated the date with a whole week off from school. By contrast, we only got a day-and-a-half for Christmas. (But then, the school year ended a week or two later, so that was something.) Kids remember things that give them a week off from school.
But I digress. Anyway, I’ve told you all that before.
Today I ran into something on the Web headlined, “It’s Johnny’s Birthday: Nine Lennon Tributes.”
I checked it out, and it contained some usual suspects such as George Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago,” and Paul McCartney’s “Here Today.” And the first thing I thought was, wouldn’t it have been great if they’d been at the height of their songwriting powers at the time, which they weren’t? Then the next thing I thought was, no, I’m glad their best was lavished on the stuff we know and love that wasn’t all about the tragedy of Lennon’s death.
So I thought, what would be a great song to remember John Lennon by? Not the overly celebrated “Imagine” — I’m sorry, but he wasn’t even a Beatle anymore then. And definitely not “Across the Universe,” which was an almost entirely ignored song on the ragged “Let It Be” album at the time. Kids who were born years and even decades after the Beatles broke up think “Across the Universe” is a great Beatles song. They even named that movie for it (starring a kid born eight years after Lennon’s death). Personally, I like the Fiona Apple version better. She made me realize how good it was. Great video, too.
And then I thought of something far better.
The first time I heard the live BBC recording of “All My Loving,” I wasn’t ready for it. I was in a music store (remember those?) in Columbiana Mall, thumbing through discs, and it came on, and I thought, Nice… a live version of “All My Loving.” Which, of course, is a song on which McCartney sang lead.
But then, 1:14 into it on the YouTube clip above, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I heard John harmonizing with Paul on the second “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you…” And it was a shock. I hadn’t expected it. It was like he had risen from the dead to sing along with the tune, right there in the store. It was very clear, but raw and immediate-sounding.
I later realized that he was singing behind Paul on the original recording on that part, but George Martin had recorded it so smoothly that the backup doesn’t POP out the way it does on the more primitive BBC version.
Anyway, it caused me to appreciate the song on a whole new level.
There’s just something about that tune…
Sometime later, we went to see McCartney perform at Williams-Brice Stadium. He started out with “Drive My Car.” Then he did a couple of other songs, and it was nice, but not special. It’s like I was seeing and hearing “Wings” Paul instead of Beatles Paul.
Then, without warning or preference, he launched into “All My Loving,” and a tidal wave of You are really here and that’s an actual Beatle washed over me and the whole audience, or the Boomers there anyway. It was the sort of reaction you might expect on “She Loves You” or “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” but this was the one that did it. We were there with our three oldest kids, but suddenly everything felt just like 1964 — only better, because I didn’t get to see the Beatles live in 1964, even on TV (on account of being in Ecuador). There was a magic, for a moment, that I don’t think I’ve ever felt at another live show. Also, some sadness, since there was no John on the harmony.
So it may seem odd, that being a Paul song, but I like it better as a John Lennon tribute than any of those other things…
AT&T U-verse offered free Showtime this past weekend, which means I got to see the first episode of the new season of “Homeland.” (SPOILER ALERT: Carrie’s off her meds again. But that probably won’t come as a shock to anyone.)
Anyway, it also meant I got to see “Lincoln” for the second time, and it was just as great as when I saw it in the theater.
But I was a bit puzzled by the synopsis, pictured above, that was provided on my guide.
Fascinating. The whole country seceded? And there were two confederacies, not just one? (Two separate confederacies, just in case you missed the “two” part.) And he “joined the Union” in order to deal with it? What, was he not a part of it before?
You just learn something new every day.
I had to laugh at this story on the front page of The State today:
By SAM HANANEL — Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Glued to your desk at work? Cross that off the list of reasons not to exercise.
A growing number of Americans are standing, walking and even cycling their way through the workday at treadmill desks, standup desks or other moving workstations. Others are forgoing chairs in favor of giant exercise balls to stay fit.
Walking on a treadmill while making phone calls and sorting through emails means “being productive on two fronts,” said Andrew Lockerbie, senior vice president of benefits at Brown & Brown, a global insurance consulting firm….
Once, the Execu-ciser existed only as an expression of Woody Allen’s sense of the absurd. Now, it’s real. Such are the times we live in.
Can the Orgasmatron be far behind?
The actual TR800-DT5 Treadmill Desk from LifeSpan.
Stan Dubinsky shared this today, saying:
For those observing Yom Kippur, may you have an easy fast and a meaningful day of prayer …
… along with links to this Leonard Cohen song.
I knew the song, but did not realize it was, according to Wikipedia, based on the Unetaneh Tokef, an 11th-century liturgical poem recited on… Yom Kippur.”
I thought that was a cool new thing to know, so I pass it on.
This doctor thinks so, and makes a pretty compelling case. An excerpt:
While most medical shows—much like the health system at large—focus on acute presentations, hospitalizations, and procedures, Breaking Bad follows its patients far beyond the walls of the hospital. When Hank, the DEA agent brother-in-law of the show’s meth-cooking protagonist, Walter White, is shot by the cartel, he is immediately rushed to a hospital where he gets the usual TV doctoring: wailing sirens, complex jargon, rickety stretchers and tense surgeons. But while most shows would either move on to the next thrilling emergency or end with the patient disappearing into the credits, Breaking Bad did neither. After initially being scared witless by the thought of being discharged, Hank spent almost an entire season in bed, obsessing over minerals and pornography. He became depressed, despondent, and angry. He vacillated between motivation and apathy. In short, he didn’t stop being sick as soon as the bullets were pulled out of his chest or when he was discharged from the hospital. If anything, that’s when his journey started. While most shows focus on the heroics of EMTs, surgeons, and doctors, Breaking Bad shows that the heroism of patients and their caregivers goes on long after they have moved on from an acute care facility. And importantly, Hank walks with a limp to this day, dispelling the notion of magical cures.
Another telling scene that somehow escapes the attention of most medical shows is the look on the faces of Skyler and Marie, Walt’s and Hank’s respective wives, when they receive their spouses’ medical bills. Not only do the bills make no sense to them, the doctors appear as bamboozled and helpless as the patients. In fact, a popular Internet memesuggests that Breaking Bad would not have been possible in a system which provides universal free health care, such as Canada’s, because Walt would never have been desperate to collect the money for his treatment. …
Good points, I thought.
If “Breaking Bad” has appeal in Britain, it’s probably for the same reason that westerns were once popular abroad. A depiction of a health care system so wild, primitive and uncivilized, where every man is on his own, is probably particularly fascinating for people who don’t have to fret about such things. It’s even set in the wild West. (Hmmm. According to this, it’s NOT popular over there, so forget my theorizing. I guess it’s just too far-fetched for them.)
But aside from health-care politics, it’s true that “Breaking Bad” is more like real life. There’s no brilliant cure within 43 minutes. Hank still walks with a limp…
Last week, I thought I had finally found an aspect of “Breaking Bad” that no one else had delved into.
I should have known better. As into the series as I am, I knew that there were people out there who apparently have no lives whatsoever, and they’re always going to be several steps ahead of me.
But here’s my post on the subject anyway…
Volumes have been written (although probably not yet actually assembled into physical volumes) about the main characters, such as this one last week wondering if Hank Schrader was turning into Walt White. Or rather, into another Heisenberg.
But how do you really get to know somebody? Well, you go to his house, and you look at what he’s got on his bookshelf. (Or, if you’re Rob Fleming in “High Fidelity,” you look at his records, and then judge him unmercifully.)
Last week (the episode before last night’s, that is), we got a look at Hank’s and Marie’s bookshelf. Jesse Pinkman walked over and idly picked up a copy of Edmund Morris’ Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. I half-expected Jesse to remark on it, but he didn’t. (If he had, what would have had said, yo?)
Since Jesse said nothing about it, I froze the screen and looked at what else was there. A sampling:
Anything else jump out at y’all as revelatory?
I love details such as this. I’ve always thought I’d love to work in movies (or good television). I’m fascinated by the people who come up with these little obsessive details to put in the background, details that reveal character subtly, or which reflect an era accurately — when done right.
Of all the things I like to write about in spite of knowing nothing about them, music is one of my favorites.
Lately, I’ve been boring members of my family by making them listen to the opening of Leon Russell’s “I Put a Spell on You” from his eponymous album (the one before the Shelter People one). No, not a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover. Totally different song.
It has one of those “you are in the studio” false starts at the beginning. Actually, two or three of them. I’ve always thought those things were a little obnoxious, because they seem to play on fans thinking it’s cool to hear their rock ‘n’ roll heroes being informal, making mistakes, and it seems self-conscious, as in “We know y’all will enjoying feeling like you’re rubbing shoulders with wonderful us in the studio, so we’ll throw you a bone.”
Or maybe I read too much into it.
Anyway, I like this one because of what Leon does with it. There’s one false start. Then another. Then he, and a guitarist, play a sort of winding, downward pattern. And then suddenly, Leon does that thing where you run your finger down the keys in one long flow, from right to left (what’s that called?), and then the rollicking song actually begins.
It feels, to me, like the musical version of jump-starting a car with manual transmission by letting it roll down the hill and letting out the clutch with the gearshift in first. If you’ve ever done that (I’ve had to do it a couple of times with my Ford Ranger), see if listening to this kind of feels that way to you.
Or maybe I’m just crazy.
Here’s the other musical thing I wanted to bring up. This is probably a question for Phillip Bush, like when I asked why awesome songs such as Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” are so awesome. What musical tricks make the endorphins flow?
I’m thinking that about the theme song to “Orange is the New Black,” which we’ve touched on here previously.
The magic seems to occur in two places. One is when Regina Spektor gets to the line, “And you’ve… got… ti-i-IME!” What is she doing there? It’s unusual, and very appealing. The other cool part is the bridge (I think), where she shifts gears and goes:
Think of all the roads.
Think of all their crossings…
Anyway, it’s very appealing, whatever she’s doing. I wish I could put it into words. But if I could, I guess we wouldn’t need music, which would be a shame…
Just passing that on. I didn’t come up with it; it was mentioned to me by a local attorney.
It arises from the fact that Mayor Steve Benjamin is being opposed for re-election by Councilman Moe Baddourah and former FBI analyst Larry Sypolt.
If the mayor would only make this one little change, think of all the great national coverage the campaign would get.
It’s meant to be. There’s already a major heading in the Wikipedia page about Larry, Moe and Curly headlined, “The Columbia Years.” I am not making this up…
Bryan Caskey shared the above video clip via Twitter, saying “Here’s what happened before the vote on a Columbia #StrongMayor was defeated.”
This clip contains one of my favorite lines ever: “I didn’t get a ‘harrumph’ outta that guy.” Kind of like me presiding over editorial board meetings, back in the day.
Some seemed to doubt the premise of the preceding post about how static and dull and lifeless popular culture has become (or at least, to discount the importance of it). But to someone who was young in the ’60s, there’s something very weird about living in a time when a photograph of people 20 years ago would look no different from a photo today (assuming you could get them to look up from their smartphones for a second during the “today” picture).
As I said in a comment on that post…
I’ve written in the past about how enormously exciting I found American pop culture when I returned here in 1965 after two-and-a-half years in South America without television. My words in describing it are probably inadequate. It was so amazingly stimulating, as though all my neurons were on fire. It was like mainlining some drug that is so far unknown to pharmacology, one that fully engages all of your brain.
If I had returned at that same age in 2013 rather than ’65 — meaning I had left the country in March 2011 — I doubt it would have been such a huge rush. It would be like, “Oh, look: The latest iPhone does some minor stuff that the old one didn’t. And now we have 4G instead of 3G. Whoopee.”
Most of the big movies would be sequels of the big movies when I left — or “reimaginings” of Superman or Spiderman. The best things on TV would still be “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” “Firefly” would still be canceled. I’d be disappointed that “Rubicon” had only lasted one season. And I’d marvel at the fact that, with hundreds of channels out there, everything good was on one: AMC. (HBO hasn’t impressed me since “The Sopranos,” and that would have been over years before I left the country.) “The Walking Dead” would be new to me. Again, whoopee.
I just can’t imagine what I’d grab hold of and say, “Wow, THIS is different and exciting…”
But consider this list of things that I saw and heard for the first time in 1965, either immediately when I got back into the country, or over the next few months:
OK, taking off on that last one, let’s just take a quick run-through of the TV shows, icons of the era, that were either new in 1965, or new to me because I’d been out of the country:
I want you to especially note the variety in those shows — they weren’t all manifestations of the same cultural phenomenon, the way, say, “reality TV” shows are today. (A phenomenon that would not be new to me at all from a two-year absence.)
I’d like to include “The Beverly Hillbillies,” but it actually premiered shortly before I left the country, and I’d seen it once or twice. And I won’t cite the ground-breaking “Batman” because it premiered in January of 1966 – which was still within my first year back in the country. Also, I never saw “The Andy Griffith Show” before my return, but that was my fault — it had been out there for a year or so before I left.
This may all seem silly and superficial to y’all, but I think it’s actually significant that our popular culture is so static and unchanging today. Someone, trying to dismiss this, said on the previous post that I was ignoring the fact that the dynamism of popular culture in previous decades was just a First World, affluent-society phenomenon.
No, I wasn’t. In fact, that is sort of my point. I had come from an unchanging, static culture in the Third World into one of the most exciting cultural moments in the life of the most affluent country in human history. I would even go so far as to suggest that the dynamism of the popular culture is related somehow to economic dynamism.
And maybe the economic stagnation that is the New Normal today is related to cultural stagnation. We could feel our economic horizons expanding in past decades. No longer…
My dear virtual friends, here is something to mess with your head a bit, late on this Monday afternoon, which is so much like so many other Monday afternoons.
It’s a piece that I missed at the time (10 days ago, in the WSJ), checking it out only when I saw a letter to the editor referring to it. It’s by Pulitzer-winner Henry Allen, who says he “used to be Ziggy Zeitgeist, Harry Hip,” a guy sufficiently plugged into the Zeitgeist to write a book about what each decade of the 20th century felt like to life in.
Now, he is adrift:
Now I am disquieted. It’s not that I see things changing for better or worse, for richer or poorer, or even not changing at all. It’s something else: The most important thing in our culture-sphere isn’t change but the fact that reality itself is dwindling, fading like sunstruck wallpaper, turning into a silence of the dinner-party sort that leads to a default discussion of movies.
Is some sort of cultural entropy homogenizing us?
As novelist Douglas Coupland has pointed out, ordinary people in photographs from 1993 are indistinguishable from people in photographs now. Can you name another 20-year period in modern American history when this is true? 1900-20? 1920-40? 1970-90? His analysis: There’s not much geist left in the zeit….
I think he’s onto something, especially with that bit about how people look the way they did 20 years ago. You can look at pictures from the 60s (especially of famous, trendy people, like the Beatles) and pretty much tell what year it was. Every year felt and looked so different from those that preceded. Things slowed down a bit after that, but you could still recognize the decade. Until the last 20 years or so.
There’s more thought-provoking stuff in the piece:
We have individualism but we have no privacy. We are all outsiders with no inside to be outside of.
Or: We’ve lost our sense of possibility. Incomes decline, pensions vanish, love dwindles into hooking up, we’re not having enough babies to replace ourselves.
No arc, no through-line, no destiny. As the British tommies sang in the trenches of World War I, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”
I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt that anyone does. Is our democracy turning into a power vacuum? What will fill it?
Will organized religion die? I got talking to a girl from an Episcopal youth group in Missouri. “Episcopalianism is great,” she said. “You don’t have to believe in anything.”
Like most people I used to think the world would go on the way it was going on, with better medicine and the arrival of an occasional iPad or an earthquake. That was when I knew what was going on….
But you should just go read the whole thing…
Critic Hank Stuever over at the WashPost makes this intriguing point, as fans await the first of the last eight episodes of “Breaking Bad,” coming up Sunday:
I have my own little pet theory about why “Breaking Bad,” which is demonstrably the best show of this decade and among the best shows in TV history, never quite had its “Sopranos” moment: It was set in a place no one really cares about.This has a lot to do with East Coast default settings — an I-95 thing, a New York-New Jersey-Boston-centric culture bias for urban grit, guido-ness and mob narratives. What chance does a show set in Albuquerque have to hold us in its grip? I say this as someone who has watched plenty of New Yorkers deplane in my beloved Albuquerque and, thoroughly unimpressed, sprint for the rental cars that will speed them to the tourist destinations of Santa Fe and Taos.
Georgia O’Keeffe, a prairie-raised woman who couldn’t stand another minute of New York, was really no different in this regard when she sought solace in the gorgeous emptiness of New Mexico; she was about horizons and mountains and bleached bones. All that nothing becomes something.
“Breaking Bad” also was into bleaching some occasional bones. It inhabited the riches found in both the literal and criminal expanse, but it was also about the terrible beauty in Route 66 decrepitude; those neglected lawn xeriscapes; that magnificently ugly car wash; the slimeball attorney officing on the North Valley strip….
Set anywhere else, I don’t think “Breaking Bad” would have achieved its eerie sense of remoteness and moral unease. Walter’s story simply lives better in the greatest, beige-est stretch of the flyover. Much of what made the show work was its backdrop; for New Mexicans, it occasionally verged on the documentary genre…
I think he’s right. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. To the extent that the importance of the setting had struck me, it was that it underlined the banality and ordinariness of Walt’s pre-meth existence. But as Stuever says, there’s a lot more to it than that.
So now that the ground has been broken, maybe I’d better get to work on that riveting comic-drama about life in a Southern state capital…
Over the weekend, I denied being a “geek,” at least according to the parameters that Amazon set out.
However, I admitted that I may be such a geek that normal geek-dar doesn’t pick me up on the screen, in that my enthusiasms are slightly more esoteric.
For instance, I denied being a Trekkie, and that was true. But I was into the even lower-quality “Lost in Space.” I thought it great that TV had turned a comic book I was into — “Space Family Robinson” — into a prime-time show.
Anybody remember that? It was published by Gold Key Comics. For that matter, anyone remember Gold Key comics?
I was originally attracted to the comics by the obvious play on “Swiss Family Robinson,” a movie I had enjoyed (I never read the book). I haven’t touched a copy in nearly 50 years (I wasn’t foresighted enough to keep them until they grew in market value), but I still remember one edition causing me to think about how immense space was. There was a story in which the Robinsons received a signal from about 20,000 miles away, and one of the kids said, “That’s practically right next door!” Which is really trite, except to a kid.
Of course, no one has ever evoked the vastness of space as well as Douglas Adams:
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space…
As someone at the BBC wrote, that should be in every science textbook.
That’s Matt Moore, second from right, with some other modern SC politicos and some fugitive from the early 19th century, at a political forum last fall.
You’ve probably seen this silliness:
COLUMBIA, SC — The chairman of South Carolina’s Republican Party says he will not allow CNN or NBC to broadcast debates of Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina unless the networks refuse to air a documentary on Hilary Clinton, a possible Democratic nominee for president.
NBC plans to broadcast a miniseries starring Diane Lane as Clinton, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State. CNN has also announced plans for a feature-length documentary on Clinton’s career.
Monday, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent letters to NBC and CNN telling them he would ask the RNC to ban any Republican candidates from participating in presidential debates hosted by NBC or CNN unless the two networks agree to not air the programs.
Matt Moore, South Carolina’s newly elected Republican Party chairman, said he agreed with Priebus…
Matt Moore is doing what party chairmen do — inspiring ire toward the opposition (and, if you’re a Republican, toward media, which is perceived by the most ardent loyalists as the opposition), inspire the constituency to say “hell, yeah!,” and keep them giving money.
Making sense is not a job requirement.
It is extremely unlikely that I will watch either of those programs, mainly because the chief reason I have a TV is to have something to watch movies on. These programs do not seem to fit into the category of things I deem worth spending time on.
But it seems to me that given the far less interesting and compelling figures who have inspired docudramas in the past, Hillary Clinton certainly qualifies as legitimate fodder. I found it interesting to see what Emma Thompson did with the Hillary-inspired character in “Primary Colors” — a movie that, by the way, was far from laudatory.
People make too much of such things. And they ignore the fact that these things can do as much harm as good to candidates. I’m mindful of the how media overexposure (much of it on her terms) eliminated Sarah Palin from consideration for the presidential nomination in 2012, despite her popularity for a year or so after the 2008 contest.
People have always made too much of such things. I vividly recall the way full release of “The Right Stuff” was delayed to avoid charges that the filmmakers were boosting John Glenn’s chances in the 1984 Democratic nomination process.
If only they had been able to do so. If that awesome film (which never got the attention it should have, due in large part to its on-again, off-again release) could have gotten him elected or even nominated, I would have been much happier than I was with the choice available to us that November.