Eve

Merry Christmas to all!!

And what better way to celebrate the holiday than watching the best movie of the 1950s!

Joy to the World!

Mister Leonard

Auteur, indeed.

Sheldon Leonard was producer/sometime director/always chief creative boss of The Danny Thomas Show (1957-64), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), I Spy (1965-68), Gomer Pyle (1964-69) (one of the funniest shows of the 60s, Vietnam be damned, thanks to the professionalism of Jim Nabors and the comic greatness of Frank Sutton), plus the one season (1969-70) of the Emmy-sweeping My World and Welcome To It. No creative force dominated American TV culture as widely, as humanly, and with as much variety as did Leonard's product during the transition from Eisenhower to Nixon.

The jewel in the crown -- the best show of its time (and perhaps ever) -- was of course The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66). While it was Carl Reiner who drove the DVD car, Sheldon Leonard provided the road map, and what a map it was . . . kind, gracious, graceful, elegant, brilliantly funny, modest, super smart, humane -- with (like the time of the show itself) always the good speaking. The variety of Leonard's genius can best be felt by comparing DVD with Danny Thomas. The two shows overlap across four seasons, an overlap set within the entertainment world of early-60s New York City. Yet Thomas drifts with the Sweet Smell of Success: nightclubs, bars, agents, penthouses, taxicabs, tuxedos, and at times an almost hysterical aggressiveness. Van Dyke is quiet and gentle: it exists in back offices, suburban living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens, in a neighbor's dental chair. Throw in a small Southern town contained inside a bell jar, the black-and-white world of international intrigue, a military barracks, and the fantasy-filled study of a Thurberesque writer. . . amazing. Even more amazing: all of it good-hearted.

One of the funniest Van Dyke episodes (and the only one with a nightclub setting), stars the man himself: "Big Max Calvada" from November 20, 1963, on the cusp of the Unspeakable.

The Worst Person of the 20th Century

No, not Adolf Hitler. This Chosen piece of shit:

Milton "Grand Vampire of Neo-Liberalism" Friedman

Chris Hedges and David Harvey with more on this malignant midget.

Changed

The best documentary so far on the Dallas background, mostly made from outtakes of Assassination Weekend: reporters primping themselves before going on-air; color home movies of the entire motorcade, not just Dealey Plaza; local security warnings announced before Kennedy's arrival; corridors of the panicked Parkland Hospital; the sinister suffocations of the police department and Sheriff's office. Rare and fascinating stuff from pre-Technology Land.

The movie takes no POV on what happened that day or why. One thing stands clear: Lee Harvey Oswald was a tough motherfucker. Through the two days under arrest and before his public execution and silencing, Oswald never backed down, never stopped complaining about his treatment or lack of legal representation, never lost his cool, never made a single political pronouncement, and never admitted guilt. This isn't a man who's just committed political murder. This is a man with terminal confusion.

Darkness at Noon

"Kennedy is moving toward something that is not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have: depth, humanity, and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will fully break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination."

-- Thomas Merton, November 18, 1962

John Kennedy's decision to turn toward peace regardless of the consequences to himself is reason for gratitude. We should think of him around Thanksgiving Day, which always falls around the anniversary of his death. And sometimes, as it does this year, on the anniversary itself of the gift of his life. If he had not turned and given us that gift, the world would now be a nuclear wasteland. The fact that he did turn -- and was murdered by an unspeakable power which continues to rule us more strongly than ever -- raises profound questions about our own need to face the same darkness, and to accept the consequences. As he did.

100

And on a scale of 1 to 100, this episode hits the top: "One Hundred Terrible Hours" from 5/5/65.

Emily

I dwell in Possibility

A fairer House than Prose

More numerous of Windows

Superior of Doors

Of Chambers as the Cedars

Impregnable of Eye

And for an Everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky

Of Visitors, the fairest

For Occupation, this

The spreading wide of narrow Hands

To gather Paradise

-- E.D., 1862

Winding Lee

Boo!

Astonishing.

And a three-hour interview with writer-director Nikolas Schreck.

Tale of Three Cities

Los Angeles, California, United States of America. On the nights of August 9th and 10th, 1969, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Tex Watson, and Leslie Van Houten brutally murder seven upscale Caucasians in the Benedict Canyon and Los Feliz sections of the city. Three months later, the five killers -- known as The Family -- are arrested and put on trial for their lives. The following year all are convicted and sentenced to death, death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole, due to the California Supreme Court's People v. Anderson decision invalidating all capital sentences imposed in the state prior to 1972. Forty-nine years later, Manson remained incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison for the remainder of his life; Tex Watson at Mule Creek State Prison; Patricia Krewinkel and Leslie Van Houten at the California Institute for Women at Frontera. At Frontera in 2009, Susan Atkins passed away of brain cancer.

My Lai and My Khe, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of Vietnam. On the day and night of March 16, 1968, in the peasant villages of My Lai and My Khe, over 500 men (mostly elderly), women, and children are killed and mutilated; most of the women raped before death. The twenty-six murderers are part of an organization known as the United States Army -- more specifically Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. Only one of the killers serves any time, a Lieutenant by the name of Calley, whose punishment is to be held under house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia, pending appeal. Three years into his little vacation, Calley is pardoned by President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Evil

Chris Floyd:

Quinlan: Come on, read my future for me.

Tana: You haven’t got any.

Quinlan: Hmm? What do you mean?

Tana: Your future’s all used up.

A grotesquely bloated, corrupt cop stumbling through a self-created mire of lies and death, sick of the world and his own ugly, irredeemable self. Glints and flecks of a better person, far in the past, appear, reflected not in his own time-assaulted visage but in a despised Other, a strong brown man with a beautiful wife, the kind of glamorous woman he used to have. A lowly Other, as he sees it, an inferior creature putting on airs … yet embodying the gritty nobility and thirst for justice that he, the bloated one, the one whose soul is already rotting in its putrescent flesh, once held in his own heart as his ideal. This comes out every time he speaks the Other’s name, in a slurred drawl that mixes loathing and yearning in equal measure: “Vargas.”

Orson Welles’ portrayal of Capt. Hank Quinlan in his 1958 film “Touch of Evil” is perhaps the most courageous self-immolation in cinema history — even Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” makes sure there is a kind of ruined beauty and grandeur in his portrayal of Kurtz. But Welles —himself once a glamorous golden boy of American culture, at one time married to one of the most alluring women in the world, Rita Hayworth — cuts himself no such slack. There is no ruined grandeur in the jowly, sweating, loathsome wretch he pushes at the audience — often in large, intense close-ups. This is what we can come to, he says, using himself as a canvas of human degeneracy. Perhaps, he hints, this what we are — this is all we are — at the core.

To cover up his own long-term corruption, Quinlan tries to frame both the upright Mexican detective, Miguel Vargas, played by Charlton Heston (not a brown man at all, of course; but then again, the Other is always a fiction, generated by a fearful mind) — as well as Vargas’s new wife, played by Janet Leigh. (This “mixed marriage” is another rumbling undercurrent in the film.) In the end, Quinlan is shot by his disillusioned partner, and dies in a pool of industrial wastewater. 

Just before this, Quinlan visits a brothel-keeper, with whom he once had a relationship. He’s now so rotten and bloated that she can barely recognize him. She’s played by yet another person once considered one of the world’s most alluring women: Marlene Dietrich. He thinks she’s reading cards for fortune-telling —she says she’s just doing accounts — and he asks her to tell his future. That’s where the dialogue above comes in.

This exchange comes to my mind more and more as I read the staggering farrago of the daily news. In this light — or rather, in this darkness visible — Quinlan increasingly appears not just as an emblem of universal, institutional and individual corruption, but as a prophecy of America’s present reality… and its destiny.

As many have noted, Donald Trump’s presidency does not represent some kind of aberration in the nation’s politics, or in its character; it is much more of an apotheosis. Or perhaps a long-simmering impostume finally swollen to the bursting point, dousing us all with fountains of rancid pus, built up over many generations. Trump has held a mirror up to America’s nature — and shown us, in its reflection, a gigantic close-up of Quinlan. 

The chronicle of a nation’s death is oft foretold, of course, without the prophecy necessarily proving true. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that we are now in uncharted waters, with the ship of state fatally holed. Just as Trump is bringing the country’s racist, grifting, shallow, violent, psychosexually disturbed quintessence to the fore, we are also witnessing the collapse of almost every institutional force that once stood as a bulwark — or at least a light brake — against our worst instincts.

The political opposition is utterly enfeebled, clueless, corrupt and compromised. The media is, if anything, even worse: vapid, ignorant, juvenile, and largely in the hands of corporate behemoths and oligarchs; its main act of “resistance” has been the resurrection of a rebooted McCarthyism that paints America as the innocent victim of a Kremlin ogre, while letting Trump skate on the manifold and manifest ordinary crimes this cheap hood and his ilk have perpetrated over decades. Academia? Also on its knees to corporations and oligarchs. The justice system? Forget it. It’s now a killing machine running wild in the streets, combined with a shakedown operation looting the people with fines, fees, bail and confiscation. Hollywood? You mean the industry making movies with the military and the CIA, when it’s not bludgeoning us with vigilante superheroes and mind-numbing CGI spectacles, all of them featuring dehumanized, demonized Others who deserve destruction? (They also slashed up “Touch of Evil,” then relegated it to B-movie drive-in fare.)

No one can see what’s yet to come. But the image we see in the American mirror today – a corpulent, desolate wreck, sinking into poison water, grunting out his last breaths of humanity – makes one fear the nation’s future is indeed all used up.

Touch of Evil (1958):

The Greatest Sequence in Movie History?

The husband has tried to kill her. Worse, he has broken her heart.

By the Fire

Three of the most beautifully intimate scenes of classical Hollywood, all scored by Bernard Herrmann.

Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, and Anne Baxter.

Ryan and Lupino.

Novak and Stewart.

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

YIPPEE!!

Caitlin Johnstone, Max Blumenthal, Dmitri Orlov, and Patrick Martin with much more to say about this mass-murdering cocksucker.

Not Anyone

One of the glorious moments of 50s cinema, with the wonderful Hadda Brooks at piano.

Programmed

Not at this radio station. Not then, not ever, as WKRP in Cincinnati -- cancelled by CBS after continued pressure from the Reaganoids and the Falwells -- went out with its bravest and most heartfelt season. This lovely and very funny episode from Christmas 1981 celebrates the days when radio disc jockeys were actually allowed to program their own music. Imagine that. . .

Shy

A beautiful essay by Hugh Iglarsh.

Please Make It Stop!

From when the show was good, we've seen both a moving and a very funny episode of Leave It to Beaver. Now for the bad. . .

From November 22nd, 1962, and my choice as the only cultural object from the early-60s (aside from Connie Francis, the Lennon Sisters, Vic Damone, and Art Linkletter) which completely sucks: "Beaver Joins a Record Club." (If Lee Oswald did shoot at John F. Kennedy - which we know he did not - watching this episode may have planted the seed.)

And that final season opening. . .

Jelly Roll

My daughter rolls with laughter whenever she watches this episode, which unfortunately has been around 20 times this week.

One of the best in the series: "Wally's Haircomb" from May of '59. (And dig that crazy music!)

Listen

Each day the miracle known as Saya teaches me more about life, love, joy, sadness, right and wrong than all the books I've read, all the teachers I've had, and all the "friends" I've mistakenly listened to. And she's just a normal kid. (Okay, a lot cuter than normal.) Saya-chan is also the most demanding teacher I've ever had, requiring complete attention. One must look at her when she speaks, and listen carefully to all she says, even if what she says she's already said twenty times.

Surprisingly, one of the best pop culture embodiments of her gift and wisdom is Leave It To Beaver. Surprisingly because my memories of the show (what little there were) pictured the show in its "ABC incarnation." Because of Saya I picked up Shout! Factory's magnificent LITB Complete Series box. (For the most comprehensive review I've ever seen of any box set, go here.) Having now watched most of the first couple seasons, and remembering some of what followed those years, it's clear there were two LITBs. Aside from one obvious answer -- namely, Jerry Mathers growing up into a rather awkward adolescent -- what were the reasons for the dramatic shift in tone, look, and quality? We can mark when the shift occurs: when the Cleavers move into the second house. In "First House" incarnation, everything is different. Ward is a handsome, charming, even dashing figure, reminiscent of a younger Pat Riley: a relaxed, happy man with a good life. His boys adore him. June ~ what a dish! With a style clearly based on the middle-1950s Grace Kelly, she's witty, graceful, and very much in love -- and in lust -- with her husband. And that's the first major part that goes out the window when the Cleavers move into their new airplane hanger of a house -- the sexy, fun, adoring relationship between the parents, at its best worthy of comparison to some of the screwball comedy couples of the 1930s. Why did they get rid of this? Why did they change Ward from a stylish, man-about-town into a cranky, always worried, humorless stiff?

And what they did to June was worse. Everything she wore in the first house was beautiful, especially her hairstyle. After the move, she becomes this dull, washed-out mannequin, with the worse haircuts possible from the time. (And the early-60s was a Hall-of-Fame time for bad hairstyles.) And the boys! In the first couple years, the brothers are in love with life, always thinking about what was the right thing to do (and often failing); caring more about others then themselves. The family moves -- the boys become different. Now often nasty and selfish, and generally looking at their parents as old fogies who don't understand anything about fun and life. (Considering what June and Ward became, I guess the boys were right). Wally becomes the obnoxious Big Man on Campus. Beaver becomes a BMOC-wannabe. And their second-house friends! Eddie, Lumpy, Larry, Whitey, Richard, Gilbert. Whatever happened to the cool Chester or the blind Chuey? Or the sweet-and-cute Benji with the very strange voice? Couldn't the boys have one second-house friend who wasn't a conniving butthead? Who were the producers of the show trying to appeal to once the show became a hit, because once they decided to base LITB on a "kids are more fun and smarter than their parents" theme, the show really goes downhill. And the look of the show as well. In the first two years, LITB glistens with an almost Fassbinderian white glow. About the best-looking TV black-and-white I can think of from the time. Then they move -- and everything suddenly seems as if it had been shot in someone's garage. The same is true of the music. There's that lovely, sad melody they use in the first two years -- after they move, it's gone.

So what happened? Answer: Leave It To Beaver changed networks. It went from uptown CBS to downtown ABC -- and the shark swallowed it whole.

My favorite episode from when the show was good: "Beaver Runs Away," June 1958.

From the Heart

Robert Francis Kennedy on CBS's Face the Nation, November 26, 1967, (complete).

"Something Has Happened in the Pantry!"

What did happen in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, midnight, June 5th, 1968?

Tim Tate has some answers.

"Something Has Happened in the Pantry!" -- II

So does Shane O'Sullivan.

"Something Has Happened in the Pantry!" -- III

More answers from Shane O'Sullivan.

Breaking the Heart of the American Dream

Part Three of Bobby Kennedy for President, "You Only Get One Time Around"

RFK RIP

"Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live."

-- Robert Francis Kennedy

Part Two of Bobby Kennedy for President, "I'd Like to Serve"

Passion Flower

50 years after his execution -- decades of domestic and foreign calamities, dominated by aggressive war and horrific economic choices, leading to the collapse of the political system -- the nation would be unrecognizable to the man who fought every day for the weak against the strong. Robert Francis Kennedy did not have to face the heartbreak of the country he loved so much and worked so hard to humanize being turned into a snake-pit of psychopathic ambition, grimness, self-delusion, historical ignorance, and endless lies. For what is left on a popular or establishment level of the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

Nothing. There is nothing left of that. Which is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from Bobby Kennedy for President will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, but they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything RFK (and JFK) stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others sought. Born from the gore of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry (and Dealey Plaza), they've achieved it.

Part One of Dawn Porter's Bobby Kennedy for President, "A New Generation"

The Last Hero

JFK in '63. Malcolm in '65. MLK, Jr. in April of '68.

But it was the execution of Robert Francis Kennedy on June 5, 1968 which not only broke the country's heart, but ripped that heart out for good. Looking back, it was the moment that opened the door to the fetid, depraved, lying, psychopathic shitpile we've become.

He descended to acknowledge his victory -- victory in the California primary and with it the chance to kick Richard Nixon's ass in the fall -- to talk about the violence and the hope, and to let a world discover in his death what it never understood or appreciated about him during his life.

The Heroic Life of Walter Reuther

48 years ago this week, the greatest labor leader in American history was blown up in his airplane (after many previous assassination attempts) on orders from Richard Nixon's National Security State. (It would be quite a spring for Nixon: defending William Calley at My Lai, launching his aggressive war against Cambodia, murdering students at Kent State, Reuther's assassination, murdering students at Jackson State, overthrowing the Argentine government. Poor misunderstood Quaker. . .)

The sadness of the interview is great. A major power player in United States 1958, Reuther's union would be exterminated at last under the stoogeship of the Great Black Hope in 2009.

Dr. Michael Parenti honors Reuther with a passionate tribute.

And the inspiring '58 interview with the chain-smoking (and already insane) Mike Wallace.

Quizzzz Master

He never got the serious attention or the awards. And after the series was over, he told people he was embarrassed to be associated with the role. Yet Ted Knight is by far the best thing in the show; really, the only character that has not dated.

At his best: "Ted's Moment of Glory" from October of '75.

March 2018

A very important month.

And a very important man.

The Wound

What is there about this intense, brave, confused, very funny, and very tender-hearted campaign -- lasting a mere 82 days -- that haunts us 50 years later? Why is it impossible to see or hear even a glimpse of Robert Kennedy without feeling, in Norman Mailer's words, "sorrowful as rue in the throat"?

Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign moves us toward the answer, in a way that is more like a piece of music than a literary creation. He makes us understand that the campaign -- the wound that will never heal -- was not constructed as an ideological pursuit, and as Clarke takes us forward we understand it doesn't make much sense politically as well. Yet it's impossible to imagine a campaign which has ever embodied something as intensely specific as this one: what it means to be human. For Robert F. Kennedy that meant obsessive concern with all that is hurt, hungry, ignored, degraded, invisible; tenderness toward the broken; self-deprecation bordering on shame for all he was blessed with; political, moral and physical bravery that would make Hemingway flinch; self-criticism and self-learning.

He burned with everything that's been burned out of our land and out of our culture. The last campaign recalls us to those moments in our lives, so rare, that made us fully alive, better than we thought we could be, more romantic, more brave, more moral. He lived that way every day, at least toward the end. The heartbreak of the book is, of course, the knowledge we have of what followed the extinguishing of the flame. Nixon. Watergate. Carter. Reagan. Let's mention that one again: Reagan. Bush I. Clinton I. Bush II. Obama. Donald Trump.

As someone who worked for the Obama campaign beginning in 2007, the book makes me quite angry. Perhaps a leader, especially in the cool ironic virtual world of our own, cannot burn by such a light. Yet the comparison goes beyond. Compared to RFK's campaign, Obama's didn't do a thing to challenge the paradigm of spin, calculation, focus groups, or safety which has suffocated every national campaign since 1968. In the closing days of the '08 primaries, Barack Obama was giving the same stump speech in South Dakota he gave back in Iowa in January. Kennedy changed his message all day, every day -- challenging whomever he was speaking with, saying the things which would irk them the most. Whenever Obama came to a fork in the road, between going toward courage or going toward safety, he chose safety each time (denouncing his pastor, leaving his church, suddenly turning into an anti-Castro Cuban in Florida, changing his positions in several ways before AIPAC).

Thurston Clarke's book is as passionate and human as was the campaign he's covered. And as short. One takes it slow. One does not want it to end. It is a major achievement. Norman Mailer, once more: "Tragedy is amputation. The nerves of one's memory run back to the limb which is no longer there."

Robert F. Kennedy - R.I.P.

JFK for Senate

Ren

One of the great movie actors of our time has died, at the age of 66. Osugi Ren is best known for his work with director Takeshi Kitano, yet his work stretches back decades and includes performances under the best Japanese directors of the past 40 years (Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Higashi, Kore-eda, Yukisada). He was the ultimate professional: elegant, subtle, romantic, tender, reserved, and very moving.

From Hana-bi (1997), the greatness of Osugi Ren. (And Kitano.)

Warmth of the Sun

JFK playing golf, boating, swimming, being a father -- the summer of '63.

Beautiful Dreamers

The most delightful, moving, and funniest parts of current US culture -- parts I never would have dreamed of -- have been given to me by my daughter Saya. She is crazy for (as I am) The Powerpuff Girls and she began to ask about a name that kept popping up: Craig McCracken, the show's creator. So we checked and found something even more wonderful: McCracken's second anime series (2004 - 2009) Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. (The great Wander over Yonder is the third.)

Foster's Home is literally an orphanage for characters once cherished by their children creators -- then forgotten due to the children "growing up." It features 8-year-old Mac and his sassy, bossy imaginary pal Bloo. And their special circle of friends: Mr. Herriman, the proper English bunny who runs the place; a red, very tall drink of water named Wilt; Eduardo the purple minotaur who cries at everything; grand dame Mrs. Foster who owns the orphanage; her granddaughter and housemaid Frankie; and Coco -- part palm tree, part airplane, part deflated raft -- and very beautiful. (Coco was imagined by a small girl who was stranded on a desert island after surviving a plane crash, after floating to the island on a raft.)

Here, Mrs. Foster and Mr. Herriman throw an Adoption Fair for the orphanage -- sabotaged by our friends, for who wants to lose any of these wonderful creations?

Blue Rose

Lee

The best movie of 2017, I Called Him Morgan is the story of Helen Moore, wife of the most beautiful trumpet player of his time -- the woman who shot him dead.

When It Rains

Going back a couple or three decades, even with the perspective time gives which tends to goldenize works of the past, there hasn't been much to cheer about in the dreary Marketeer world of American movies. Look at our recent director heroes: Eastwood, the Coen Boys, Shyamalan, James Cameron, David Fincher, Lynch, Ronnie Howard, Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, P.T. Anderson, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Jonzzzzz, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofksy, Peter Jackson.

Christ. . .

The exception that proves the point: Charles Burnett.

Funny, because the greatest American filmmaker of his generation can't seem to find work. Since 1995, the year of "When It Rains," Burnett has been allowed to direct nine made-for-TV movies destined for the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime; and a half-dozen mostly self-financed shorts. Theatrical features since 1995? None. (Ron Howard and the Coen Boys?: Forty.)

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

A strong case can be made that Charles Burnett is the most gifted and important black filmmaker this country has ever had. . . . Given the difficulties he had in the 70s and 80s [and 90s and 00s and 10s] getting films made, Burnett seems in danger of becoming our Carl Dreyer -- the consummate master who makes a film a decade, known only to a small band of film lovers.

Rosenbaum lists the 13-minute short "When It Rains" as one of the ten greatest movies ever made.

A fine way to start the New Year.