Tender is the Night

When the man tried, he was great at everything: fighting, loving, drinking, dressing, pimping for once-in-a-century Presidents.

Of course, he was the greatest male pop singer of his century.

And -- when he tried -- Frank was one of the great movie actors of classical Hollywood.

Happy 100th Birthday.

Heaven. . .

. . . Is Eleven.

Heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars . . .

Rendezvous

Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable:

    For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite poem had been "Rendezvous" by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War One. Kennedy recited "Rendezvous" to his wife Jacqueline in 1953 on their first night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon. She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline.

    On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy met with his National Security Council in the Rose Garden of the White House. Caroline suddenly appeared by her father’s side, and she said she wanted to tell him something. He tried to divert her attention while the meeting continued, but Caroline persisted. The president smiled and turned his full attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead. While the members of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked into her father’s eyes and said:

    I have a rendezvous with Death

    At some disputed barricade,

    When Spring comes back with rustling shade

    And apple-blossoms fill the air-

    I have a rendezvous with Death

    When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

    It may be he shall take my hand

    And lead me into his dark land

    And close my eyes and quench my breath-

    It may be I shall pass him still.

    I have a rendezvous with Death

    On some scarred slope of battered hill,

    When Spring comes round again this year

    And the first meadow-flowers appear.

    God knows 'twere better to be deep

    Pillowed in silk and scented down,

    Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,

    Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

    Where hushed awakenings are dear...

    But I've a rendezvous with Death

    At midnight in some flaming town,

    When Spring trips north again this year,

    And I to my pledged word am true,

    I shall not fail that rendezvous.

    After Caroline said the poem’s final word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them said later the bond between father and daughter was so deep “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.” 

The first 100 minutes from the CBS Network, 52 years ago:

St. Francis

Who could have imagine it, prayed for it? More than 50 years after the death of Pope John XXIII (all three Witnesses for Peace in 1963 -- John XXIII, Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy -- would be dead or deposed within a year), 50 years of Paul VI's rollback of Pacem in Terris, the murder of John Paul I, John Paul II (the CIA Pope) and his support (née silence) regarding all things Reagan/Thatcher, all things corporatist and privatized, and fascist altar-boy Joseph Ratzinger ~ we have Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Pope Francis.

Who was it who said "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Look at the pile-on as Francis tours the world: over here we have Leftoids & Femoids bleating about sexual abuse of parishioners, gays, the separation of Church and State, gays, abortion, divorce, gays, and female ordinations. Over there we see Donald Tramp and the Fox News baboons howling about sexual abuse of parishioners, the separation of Church and State (from US reactionaries, no less!), abortion, divorce, and the Holiest of Holies: The Free Market. Yet to define the Catholic Church by the likes of its more recent Popes and their fellow pederasts is like defining togetherness along the lines of the Manson Family. In the face of virulent attacks from Rome (most of them directed by Ratzinger), the magnificent socialist liberations across Central and South America flow from Liberation Theology as does the continuing model of the Cuban Revolution.

The timing of the original attacks on the Church, ignited by the child abuse scandals, has always smelled. One thinks of Chomsky's defense of government: "There's a lot of things wrong with government, but what the US Elites hate about it is what is right: that government is reachable and controllable by the people, that it is the only weapon available against increasing privatization and inequality." The attempt to destroy the public face of the Catholic Church -- a jihad coincidentally began under the most extreme WASP war administration in US history -- emerged to destroy what is right with the Church: its remaining preference for the poor, its involvement with anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-capitalist movements across the world.

As far as is known, no part of the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the destruction of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern cultures, homes, women, children or old men. Nor is the Church part of the Holy WASP Capitalist Crusade against the world in places like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan or Afghanistan. (Or Greece.) Let's face it, the buggery of children has gone on forever in the hallowed halls of:

Yale Skull & Bones
The Council on Foreign Relations
The TriLateral Commission
Sullivan and Cromwell
The CIA
The Carlyle Group
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Presbyterians
Methodists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

And all the other WASP bloodsuckers who have caused the deaths of billions of people over the past centuries.

So who could have hoped for someone like this Pope, a man who speaks of tenderness and modesty, the end of capitalism and corporatism, who embraces once again Liberation Theology and the Church's preference for the poor, who prays for the destruction of the "altar of money" and a return to a love of the earth.

Let us embrace him and pray for his safety and for the safety of all those he embraces.

Then and Now

First Day of Elementary School, September 2010.

First Day of Middle School, September 2015.

Noir ~ and How It Gets That Way

Per David Walsh and Joanne Laurer, at WSWS.

The greatest noir of all:

Wonderful Life

Chuck Workman's earnestly detailed and paced picture (2014) of the art and times of George Orson Welles includes all the basic points and people one would expect. (Surprise guests include "critic" Elvis Mitchell, Steven Spielberg ~ the idiot who spent $55,000 at auction for a phony Rosebud sled ~ on Citizen Kane, George Lucas on Touch of Evil, and some crone named Julie Taymor on God knows what...) Yes, a rather straight and narrow glimpse of one of the most baroque artists of the American Century. Welles's life was a wonderful and necessary one, filled with miracles. So, good enough.

Summer

Happy 98th Birthday.

Joy

"All great films can be divided into one of two categories: the agony of making cinema; or the joy of making cinema." -- Francois Truffaut

Welles's last completed film seems to be an answer to the question: "If the distinction between real art and fakery is one that can only be made by 'experts,' is the faker who outwits the 'experts' a real artist?" -- an answer provided by the movie's stars: Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Jorge Luis Borges, Elmyr de Hory, and Welles girlfriend Oja Kodar.

F for Fake (1973) is a magic box, a jewelled sanctum, the cave of Orson Welles's imagination: a privileged place of transmutation, memory, and contemplation -- its space opening and shuttering like a concertina or a zigzag screen, the director bathing otherwise uninteresting people and things in a joyous radiance, a harmony and exactness parallel to the satisfactions of the world. One measured voice, quietly and exuberantly telling why this light, this color, this sound, this intrusion is precious in the life of the mind and of the heart. Here we watch a consummate artist intoxicated by his found vocation. All Welles passions -- movies, theater, magic, circus, radio, women, painting, literature -- are fused. F for Fake is not his best film, but its aura may be his most romantic, not because of the content or the narrative thrust, but because it is the final courtship of an artist with his art.

Every filmmaker who has followed him has done just that: followed him, for he is one of the hinges of movie history: there were movies before him and movies after him, and they were not the same.

The Touch

"What the camera does, and does uniquely, is photograph thought."

-- Orson Welles

Maybe the strangest great American film from the classical period, made while the classical period was passing away -- 1958, the year of movie astonishment, a year giving us more great or near-great American works than we've been given over the past 40 years combined: Touch of Evil, Some Came Running, Tarnished Angels, Bitter Victory, Man of the West, Bonjour Tristesse, Buchanan Rides Alone, Wind Across the Everglades, Paths of Glory, Vertigo: each work siding with -- embodying -- the eccentric and lawless, the sinister, the personal. During the Age of Conformity and Consensus.

From the first (legendary) shot, four minutes in length, Welles's Touch of Evil explodes with loathing, weirdness, and disgust as it heroizes the lonely fascist cop (in this case, literally a pig) over the Organization Man, he with the beautiful wife and the fetish for doing all things by the book. Not for a moment do we experience the world as does Mike Vargas. It is all Hank Quinlan: a Goya-like vision of an infected universe.

Good Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich and great Welles scholar James Naremore discuss the work.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Thief of Hearts

In the theater, you know, the old star actors never liked to come on until the end of the first act. Mister Wu is a classic example -- I've played it once myself. All the other actors boil around the stage for about an hour shrieking, "What will happen when Mister Wu arrives?," "What is he like this Mister Wu?," and so on. Finally a great gong is beaten, and slowly over a Chinese bridge comes Mister Wu himself in full Mandarin robes. Peach Blossom (or whatever her name is) falls on her face and a lot of coolies yell, "Mister Wu!!!" The curtain comes down, the audience goes wild, and everybody says, "Isn't that guy playing Mister Wu a great actor?" That's a star part for you! -- Orson Welles

Once in a Lifetime

The American Film Institute is neither a museum nor an institute, it is a mausoleum preserving in aspic every conventional, unexamined, and corrupt notion expressed about American movies and television since time began.

Yet even a busted clock is right twice a day . . .

Lost and Found

Sometimes you get lucky. Three years before Citizen Kane (1941), 22-year-old Orson Welles directed a stage adaptation of William Gillete's 1894 comedy called Too Much Johnson. The production was to be an interchange between the live action in the theater and a projected movie. In a pre-Broadway test done in Stony Creek, Connecticut, mechanical problems prevented Welles's movie from being shown. The audience hated the show anyway. Broadway was canceled. And the movie was lost.

Until recently. Joseph McBride with the details.

Let us pray we can someday get as lucky with the missing 45 minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons.

The Ecstasy and the Agony

One of the great conversationalists of his time in conversation with the worst talk show host of all time.

Orson Welles and Dick Cavett, July 27, 1970.

Welles and War

How many of us have actually taken the time to listened to it? An astonishing piece of radio art, and perfectly believable as the source of mass 1938 panic.

The background.

All of Welles's Mercury genius can be found here.

Student of the Month

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."

-- Hermann Hesse

Brother

Almost as rare as the man himself, a decent PBS documentary.

The Last Liberal

It is 1971, the year before Watergate. "Leftist" Emile de Antonio dumps all over the man who was the last progressive U.S. President we'll ever see.

Hearts of Age

[2015 will be the Centennial celebration year of the birth of George Orson Welles. This is the first in a ribbon of this blog's tributes leading up to the May 6th, 2015 anniversary day.]

Created in '56 and set in the 1920s, it is actually much closer to Méliès: stills become motion, motion becomes still again, then becoming revolving backdrops for the actors, for Welles, whose voice comes out of a beautiful blonde, and a handsome young man, and a middle-age doctor, out of everyone -- Welles the narrator rarely looking into the camera lens, but to its right or to its left. Amberson-esque tableaus, and docks becoming restaurants becoming libraries; and the tense of the story keeps changing.

"Fountain of Youth" can obviously be placed within the career-spanning Orson Welles theme of age. More important, it is yet another false step, false hope, an incompletion. Financed by Desilu in 1956, not aired until '58, this small masterpiece was to be the premiere episode of a sort of Orson Welles Presents. (At the close of "Youth," Welles describes next week's show: "a spook story with a seasoning of giggles, 'Green Thoughts,' about a man-eating tiger orchid" -- never to be seen or created.) Imagine. Let's say Welles directed 5 or 6, as did Hitchcock, of each year's 35 to 40 show output. Let's say OWP ran for 4 or 5 seasons (Desilu was at the height of its power): 20 to 30 short masterpieces as good or better than "Fountain of Youth." And let us say some orderly finds the missing Ambersons footage in a Rio de Janeiro sanatorium closet sometime in 2015 . . .

(Forgive the bad print and the even worse "Encore Entertainment" logo at the bottom. Still, it's great. And Joi Lansing ~ what a dish!)

What Is To Be Done?

Imagine corporate news shill Brian Williams kidnapped by a leftist cadre, one that forces him to make a video presentation letting the world know how things really areL that's the premise of William Gerrard and Anya Meksin's "The Professor," a brave and necessary short from 2013. While its seventeen minutes end somewhat in political confusion (what human being these days isn't confused?), they scream for something to be done, something extreme.

As the professor, there is Betsy Brandt. While she'll always be remembered as the funny, strange, and heartbreakingly beautiful Marie Schrader of Breaking Bad, Brandt's the only working American actress worthy of 1930s romantic comedy. Lovely, fragile, tender, tough, super smart and crazy romantic, Betsy Brandt awaits her Cary Grant and Howard Hawks for a 21st-century remake of Bringing Up Baby.

She may wait a long time. . .

And speaking of news pimp Williams. . .

Last Stand

A very sad start to the new year.

Mario Cuomo was the last man standing, the last still alive American political hero I had. What other post-Sixties American politician asked "where had the sweetness and tenderness gone from American life, the compassion and modesty and earnestness?"

Had Cuomo been elected in 1992 instead of Arkansas dirtbag Bill Clinton, he would've made an enormous difference on the spirit and future of the country, much as FDR and JFK did. He would've tried to take the post-Cold War U.S. in a very different direction, saving us from ClintonBush and Obama. (With a lot more of that to come, in whatever form.)

Of course they would have tried to Carter-ize him, or worse. (Look what they did to someone as harmless as Bill Clinton.) But I think Cuomo would have beaten them, perhaps becoming as big as Lincoln. I remember very clearly where I was when he announced his decision not to run in '92. I was stunned and heartbroken. He was far ahead in every poll for the Democratic nomination and well ahead of incumbent President Bush in the head-to-heads. We still don't know what happened there, but let's assume the Clinton gangsters and those anti-Catholic Italian "family" rumors had something to do with it.

Mario Cuomo, 1932 - 2015, RIP.