Merry

250

Happy Birthday, Ludwig!

A fine appreciation by Verena Nees and Peter Schwarz.

Claudio Arrau's immortal "Appassionata."

Dark Holiday

James Harvey -- along with Chris Fujiwara, Tom Gunning, David Bordwell, and Raymond Carney (except when Carney's writing about Capra) -- is one of my film writer/historian Gods. There is so much to learn from reading (and re-reading) Professor Harvey's three masterpieces, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood (1997), Movie Love in the Fifties (2002), and Watching Them Be (2015). Word is that Harvey's currently wrapping up a history of the Western to be published by Farrar Straus, and based on Movie Love's astonishing analysis of Johnny Guitar and The Lusty Men it is a release devoutly to be wished for.

The knockout punch for me in first reading Movie Love was the chapter on a forgotten and very hard-to-find (thank you, Karagarga) WWII noir called Christmas Holiday, directed by my favorite noir director Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady, Cobra Woman, The Suspect, Spiral Staircase, The Killers, Dark Mirror, Criss Cross, Cry of the City) and written by the ever-strange Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Perhaps Siodmak's most famous sequence, Phantom Lady (1944).

Or maybe the opening to The Killers (1946).

James Harvey:

The script that Herman Mankiewicz supplied for Siodmak's Christmas Holiday had some resemblances to his Academy Award-winning Citizen Kane screenplay. It has the same skewed chronology, the same overlapping flashbacks; and entering it is a bit like stepping into a labyrinth (one of Welles's favorite movie metaphors), mostly because it begins so far away from its main story and characters. It's almost fifteen minutes before the star and central character appears or is even spoken of. In the meantime, there are (the opening scene) an OCS graduation ceremony (even a speech); a scene in the barracks with a young lieutenant (Dean Harens) getting a Dear John wire from his fiancée; a passenger-plane flight through an electrical storm; a forced landing in New Orleans; and the soldier getting a room at a hotel where people are all sleeping in the lobby (it's wartime and it's Christmas Eve). In the hotel bar he meets a friendly, half-soused newspaperman, Simon Fenimore (Richard Whorf). You got troubles? I'll take you to the Maison Lafitte, says the newspaperman. What's the Maison Lafitte? "It's a -- well, let's face it -- it's a kinda joint a little way outta town."

It looks like a Wolf Man outtake when we get there: a crumbling porticoed mansion in a raging night storm, overarching trees bent by wind and rain in the foreground of a long shot, as the two men emerge from their car and struggle through the storm onto the front porch. But inside the entrance hall, it's light, with a Christmas tree by the door at the foot of a stairway, and a crystal chandelier overhead, as a maid in cap and apron takes their coats and lightning flashes through the windows, while a Dixieland band rides and rollicks on the soundtrack. And after all the neutral, generic places we've been looking at before this (from the parade grounds to the hotel room), getting to this one -- lush and lively and tacky all at once -- makes you feel the way a good song does when it finally gets to the chorus. Now, we know, we're really at the movies.

Buy the book.

Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday (1944).

100!

Happy 100th Birthday to the incomparable Dave Brubeck.

Nation

Requiem for a Eunuch

[Please don't waste your cash on the recently expelled flatulence from Barry O's $65,000,000 book deal. Perhaps take a look instead at a repost from January 2017 on this Wall Street pimp and droning mass murderer.]

What a degrading and despairing eight years it's been.

The presidency of Barack Hussein Obama began as the most shameful time in American history ended, a time flanked by two thefts: the first, a presidential election; the second -- through the transfer of over $20,000,000,000,000 from the public realm to the private -- that of the American State itself. In between: the end of habeas corpus and most other privacy rights; the handing-over of major parts of American "defense" to private armies and death squads; the institution of aggressive war as the vanguard of American foreign policy; the dissolution of what small room remained between corporate/government propaganda and establishment media; the de facto end of public education and general public concern on the part of the national government; radical, across-the-board changes in tax policy in order to keep power in the hands of the mutant elite; the packing of federal courts with extreme corporatists; the basic end of a citizen's right to declare bankruptcy; the further narrowing of labor law and its enforcement, making a worker's right to collectively-bargain essentially meaningless; the creation of a world-wide American archipelago of secret prisons; torture as national policy; the destruction of the United Nations as an independent force; the holding of prisoners without identity, legal representation, the naming of evidence, trial, or declared length of sentence; the largest increase in "defense" spending in world history, without a single military threat on the planet; the evisceration of the Freedom of Information Act, and the withholding of normal documents-release from past administrations; the politicization of science; the ending of all financial regulations and oversight; the takeover of environmental, health care, energy, workplace safety, worker safety, and product safety policies by corporate private tyranny; the denying and demonizing of the effects of global warming.

The beginning of 2009 really did feel like America, Year Zero. We were like punch-drunk fighters, too alone and without anything to grasp. The country had the feel of a devastated peasant society after a plague swept it or an army went through and destroyed everything. We had dissolved into an inability to respond.

I think our real hope was a mere wish to return to "normal," however ruthless and self-righteous that normal often had been during the American 20th Century. Of course, many of us hoped for much more. Why not? The country was repulsed by what it had gone through, the economy had collapsed, the out-of-power party during our dark time now had strong executive and legislative control. The decades-long suffocation caused by Free Marketeering was declared over. There was talk of nationalizing banks and other financial institutions. Talk of new public control over the Fed; even of its elimination.

And one national magazine had this on its cover:

Best of all, our new chief executive was a man of enormous political gifts: handsome, eloquent, elegant, brilliant, funny. His whole election campaign promised one thing above all: change. And a promise -- pronounced or implicit -- to reverse, so help him God, not only the ahistorical evils of his immediate predecessor but the larger anti-communal, anti-public course we had been set upon by the originator of the American nightmare, Ronald Reagan.

None of it has happened. Far from returning the country to its "normal" self, the only normalizing Barack Obama has done has been the normalizing -- intensifying -- of all things Bush/Cheney; and an acceleration of the sociopathic direction launched by Reagan. In January 2017, the country is now further to the right than at any time in its history, with a more debased political culture than ever before. More corporatized, with a completely hijacked State. There is more police power, private and public. Less personal and family privacy. Less freedom of movement -- physically, artistically, politically, and in terms of work. The connection between what people vote for and what they get is now completely delinked. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" -- a complex he allowed to be created by turning over national security policy to the Dulles brothers and to a complex that would murder his successor -- is now a military-corporate-intelligence state in complete control. Bush's wars have metastasized -- while staying exactly the same in effect in Iraq -- into a massive expansion in Afghanistan, a massive expansion covertly in Iran, Indonesia, and Columbia (with the heroic populist governments of Central and South America now in Robert Gates's drone-sights), and new wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Not one perp from the Bush/Cheney crime gang has been gone after. Obama has claimed the right to murder anyone, at anytime, for any reason, anywhere on the planet. There is less control than ever over the gangster state of Israel. The people of Palestine and Gaza are forgotten. As are the poor, desperate, and homeless here in America. NAFTA and GATT have been expanded and hardened rather than reversed. Cap-and-Trade was allowed to be hijacked by Goldman Sachs et al. - then killed. The BP/Gulf horror was not used to shift the country away from energy over-development toward conservation. Obama's Justice Department has Godfathered the public crucifixion of whistle blowers and true public servants such as Julian Assange (while setting Assange up for eventual extradition and Gitmo-ing), while also rewriting rules for use of Miranda warnings. There have been FBI raids on the homes and offices of anti-war activists. The criminal enterprise known as the Pharmaceutical/Insurance/Healthcare "industry" is now more powerful, corrupt, incompetent, and privatized than ever before. The last great industrial union -- Walter Reuther's UAW -- was destroyed by Obama and his henchmen by means which would've made Ronald Reagan blanch. Most state and local governments are bankrupt and abandoned. All public service unions are now on the run in America's new form of McCarthyism. Obama has set us up for the coup de main: the Neo-Feudal dismantling of all public and egalitarian struggles and accomplishments of the past 150 years. Checkmate.

So many of us were fooled. So many of us were tired of being on the outs with our own society, so tired of hating and withdrawing. So tired of not having faith and optimism and good cheer, of not feeling the very human need to belong. We looked to Obama and thought of him as a child of Kennedy. Even the Kennedy family felt that way. We, and they, were had.

For Barack Hussein Obama is the child of Reagan. His first son. They were both born from the dark flow of Kennedy backlash in the early 1960s, Obama physically, Reagan politically -- both conceived, it would turn out, from the swamp of hatred toward what "the 60s" would come to mean: earnestness, optimism, a sense of community, grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff ourselves up, and (perhaps most important) the assumption that people are basically good -- the actor by cheerleading for Goldwater, and calling for the privatizing of TVA, nuking North Vietnam, eliminating the corporate income tax, and saying things like "Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative' program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it's still old Karl Marx, first launched a century ago"; Obama by being tossed aside by absent, otherwise-engaged parents. . .

The assumption of Barack Obama cool, collected and calm has been a universal since this arriviste began to gain presidential timber throughout the campaign of '07. The media persona and Obama's two droning books convinced us that this "child of the 60s" was the very opposite of a hip-shooter: deeply thoughtful about most things; no personal experience with physical violence (has he ever been in a fist fight?); abstract and diffident; a professor from the Ivy League; most important, the child of a mother and father who separately personified the best of that glorious decade -- independent, free-spirited, anti-establishment, each with a virulent hatred of war and violence.

Now it seems altogether to the opposite. Rather than the happy product of such a union, perhaps Barry Soetoro experienced those years and those parents in a different way. An absent father, more concerned with his newer family, newer children, and political/diplomatic career than with the boy, to the extent that Obama never met his dad until the child was 10. And the absent mother: dumping her little boy onto maternal grandparents, also more concerned with lifestyle, lovers, and profession.

The baboons of the American Right have made hatred of the 60s their number one obsession for 40 years now. Nixon got elected on the wind of that hatred. So did Reagan. And George W. Bush made lots of hay in the darkness of that collective loathing. But theirs was political/power/values stuff. Not the result of private, everyday resentments, loneliness, confusion and heartbreak caused by the abandonment by two obviously self-absorbed parents. Barack Obama's 1960s hatred is honest and well-earned.

What if under the too-cool-for-school face burns a rage, a life- and self-hatred forever burning no matter what the ego satisfactions of the man's stunning career achievements? What if his whole public life has been little other than vengeance taken on absent parents and all they represented? What if he is just another ego-prick, assassin, liar, user? Now in charge of the greatest criminal enterprise in the history of Man -- Empire USA -- that would explain his spineless slimeball Presidency far more than any Miracle of Hope and Change smothered in its crib. A man whose identity is forever hidden because of his wayward parents grabs the ultimate brass ring by pretending to be an egalitarian Man of Peace, then governs as a Man of Total War, and the most lethal sort of elitist. How long can he contain such outrageous private contradictions on such a public stage?

Yet, eight years on, he still claims support. In fact, we are told he is now on a roll. Who are these supporters? They cannot be ideologues of any kind. (Those who see Nowhere Man as on the left or right of any political spectrum are just cheerleaders for their own brand of narcissism.) Aside from the enormous pride taken by black Americans at seeing a man who looks black at such a center of power, the rest must be that brood of iPad Sandinistas who basically adopt the following persona: "I'm smarter than you are. I'm more educated than you are. I dress better and have far better taste in music and movies. I'm cooler. My career is everything, plus I've memorized every episode of Lost. I'm on my second divorce and my kids are everything, except when they're not. I Twit, Kindle, and Kopi Luwak. And you don't." (Commander Kos would be the poster boy for this wad.) Not exactly attitudes one wants in a Sierra Maestra foxhole. No janitors here, nor watchmen, salesmen, grocers, bus drivers, plumbers, mechanics, railroad clerks, pharmacists, cloth cutters, electricians, security guards, pipe fitters or painters. No, all children of Reagan: a generation faced with no draft, no economic hardship if they play the game well enough (and Obama's remaining Pwog supporters do nothing but play the game), no industrialization, no assassinations, no race or gender revolutions, and remote control wars with no body bags allowed to be seen. And the leaders: a Reagan, a Clinton, and two Bushes.

Obama is King of the Nowhere People: born with looks, height, grace, eloquence. And the insides of a Cray CX1. He smells of nothing, sounds like room tone, makes faces like an Ogilvy & Mather ad director. After all the media pronunciamentos of his Great Speeches (most sickening the hysteria over his flatulent depoliticizing of the Loughner murders), try to remember just one line. (Rain puddles not allowed.) He's from Chicago, they say. Really? He's called a Kenyan? Huh? A product of Jeremiah Wright's Trinity Church. What? He is none of these. He is the Achiever severed from anything beyond the Achievement, a gentrified hologram of rootlessness, a product not only of many private demons but of an America without traditions, myth or meaning beyond the last branding cycle, of a coreless society.

It is all of us. Even as recently as one-year ago (in spite of the horror of the appointments, the turgid Inaugural, the already evident backsliding), the feeling was still alive that principle would matter, that the "weak" would have priority again over the "strong." How could we not think that? As Spring follows Winter, surely the fine and honorable part of our spirit would begin again to dominate. But experience does tell. We've been told little but buck up, keep your powder dry, and care only about yourself. "All for ourselves, nothing for others," in the words of Adam Smith. So the honor, the caring for others, the humility, compassion, patience, modesty, self-mocking wit, yes the bleeding heart, the "tender germ of embrace" in Simone Weil's words -- not here.

"The world for which I was made, is not here" - Thoreau.

The post-Bush/Reagan/Cheney/Clinton world this country was ready for, its only salvation from the coming darkness of collapse and terror, could not be made. There was much too much of the other stuff. In fact, it would be difficult to find what was not "the other stuff." Like a child beaten and deprived of all chance to use the sympathetic, empathic part of her heart, when we had to show it, we had nothing to show.

Take the debate over "health care reform." What that sickening and dispiriting process exposed is that there was nothing (on an establishment level) left of "the tender germ of embrace." What we saw was a war between fascist haters and greasy pole climbers. Sarah Palin vs. Rachel Maddow, Cheney vs. Biden, the Tea Party vs. the Salon.com Party, Fox News vs. MSNBC. What was exposed is that both sides are the same: my foot on your throat.

Two years on we now see that the main problem "liberals" were suffering since 2000 was merely being out of power. And now the main priority is keeping it, no matter how much principle is flushed or how many weasel legislative tricks need to be used. (And oh how those precedents will be used to create a Reichstag Fire-type Enabling Act under Palin, Petraeus, or Jeb Bush, when their time has come.)

Barack Obama, it turns out, is not some liberatory or revolutionary spirit. No, just a dime-a-dozen liar and hustler -- an arriviste of smarm -- and so the very appropriate role model for a generation of dick-swinging mediocrities and turncoats. He is our present, and our future: stand for nothing; stand-up for nothing; worship money; discard inconvenient friends and memories; exhaust yourself trying to convince others of your optimism and determination; be civil, compromising, dispassionate and groveling in the face of executioners ("Keep that Hate-o-Rade to yourself!"); make sure everyone thinks you're just swell; slather your face in moisturizer in order to better beam about your wonderful career and how everything is great.

He is Devo, and so are we.

Wisdom of the Heart

Henry Miller reads from his masterpiece essay, "To Paint is to Love Again."

Rainbow's End

Again, Smoke. If the Kennedy Years were a movie, which one? Like all things great and mysterious, it is a myriad: Psycho and The Birds. Lolita and Strangelove. Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Lilies of the Field and A Child is Waiting. Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Fail Safe. The Apartment. The Ladies Man and Nutty Professor. One Eyed Jacks and The Hustler. Advise and Consent. Courtship of Eddie's Father.

This is the one; our wound. 'Though made during the time, it breathes with the stunned sense of heartbreak we would feel about the time, about New York City, about adoration and elegance and honor and a way of falling in love, about how people must have been, even if they weren't.

Then and Now

Dr. Michael Parenti from 1990: what the US Vampire State did to Eastern Europe; what the Biden Vampire State will attempt to do to the entire world.

Facing the Music

From 1973 to 1998, Arlene Croce was the world's greatest dance critic and her Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book remains not only one of the premiere pieces of dance criticism, but also one of the most original pop culture books as well.

Here, she writes on what may be the greatest romantic dance ever filmed, "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936):

It could be subtitled "A Playlet." Astaire at the gambling tables in Monte Carlo has just lost all his money. The curtains close and reopen on the terrace at the top of the casino. He is elaborately shunned by society. Alone, he takes out a small pistol, but just then Rogers appears at the far side of the stage, twisting a long chiffon handkerchief and gazing out over the parapet. She steps up on it but he prevents the leap. Ruefully he shows her his empty wallet and the gun which she looks at unseeingly, then tries to snatch. He throws both away and sings.

How they get through all this without a laugh is their secret. The song is like one of those brave ballads of the Depression and the mood is awesomely grave. The dance is one of their simplest and most daring, the steps mostly walking steps done with a slight retard. The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread. A beautiful moment occurs when he promenades her as she holds a pose on half-toe with one lifted knee. Another when they circle the stage, turning first one shoulder then the other toward each other, and when she continues the tiny steps in a series of chaîné turns, her hands uplifted, and he follows with his arms encircling her waist. Still another: they turn away from each other in a swift kneel and as swiftly rise with a light jump, only to sink again on the other knee. Her dress, made of metallic threads and with weights in the sleeves and hem, winds and unwinds, a part of the dance. The exit, unforgettable, is another knee-sink but now side by side. Slowly they rise together and back off in a long fondu. Then: one, two, three, four paces, and they go off in a Jooss-type lunge, backs arched, one knee yanked high. At the suddenness and hugeness of it the audience does laugh, then immediately applauds its audacity.

What I find most moving in this noble and almost absurdly glamorous dance is the absence of self-enchantment in the performance. Astaire and Rogers yield nothing to Garbo's throat or Pavlova's swan as icons of the sublime, yet their manner is brisk. Briskly they immolate themselves. And within the enclosed theatrical setting of the number, everything finds its place.

My Kind of Woman

I suppose for all of us -- boy, girl, straight, gay -- there's a moment in adolescence when we see an object, usually somebody we don't know, who crystallizes for us all the lust we have and makes it burning hot. It is a great moment, 'cause from then on we begin to understand what we're attracted to.

For me it happened on a Saturday afternoon in my parents' home, sometime around the age of 11 or 12. I was watching on TV, but not paying much attention to, a colorful 1950s musical called The Band Wagon. About 20 minutes into it, she entered. A Brunette Dream. Eyes like black diamonds, skin clear and golden, goddess-like. Hair jet-black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's wing. Long-stemmed, and wearing the sexiest shoes ever created, on the sexiest feet.

I began to pay attention. Toward the end of the movie, there was this:

My boyhood was gone. . .

Uptown

Happy October

Blood Brothers

On January 20th, 1961, twenty-seven-year-old James Meredith -- nine-year Air Force veteran who had completed two years at "coloreds only" Jackson State college, and inspired by the inauguration of a young American President who'd called that day for citizens to stand up for their rights (and to help each other) -- applied for admission to the public university of his home state: the University of Mississippi ~ "Ole Miss." Since Meredith was black, the application was necessary three times. Denied three times. Led and pushed by NAACP Mississippi Director Medgar Evers, suit was filed in US Fifth Circuit Court on Meredith's behalf, which found in June 1962 that James Meredith had been rejected "solely because he was a Negro." An appeal by Ole Miss to the United States Supreme Court was denied by Justice Hugo Black and Meredith was scheduled to enter the University for the fall term beginning 58 years ago this month.

Five years before, at Little Rock (Arkansas) Central High School, the protection and enrollment of nine black students into the previously all-white campus was commandeered by US Army Major General Edwin A. Walker. Two years later, in a moment of awesome revelation, Walker joined the newly formed John Birch Society and discovered that all civil rights actions were part of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. Seeing the light, Walker immediately submitted his military resignation to President Dwight Eisenhower -- refused. Instead, Ike ordered the General to take over the 24th Infantry Division, made up of over 10,000 US troops stationed in Augsburg, Germany. Walker immediately began to indoctrinate his men in the ways of Communism by labeling Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson (and possibly Eisenhower himself) as "Reds." In April 1961, new Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara fired Walker and began a court-martial investigation against him. (Charges dropped.) Now a civilian, supported by Barry Goldwater and bankrolled by the H.L. Hunt oil family of Dallas, Walker announced his candidacy for the 1962 Texas Governor's race. (Won by John Connally.)

        
Throughout the summer of '62, the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert Kennedy was in negotiations with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to ensure the smooth and safe admission of James Meredith into Ole Miss. As the first day of school, September 20th, approached, agreement seemed to have been reached: Barnett would do what he needed to do politically -- make a paper tiger resistance to Meredith's admission, then -- given the Federal power at hand -- fold. Just in case, the Attorney General ordered first 100, then 600 Federal marshals to surround and protect Meredith. Thinking Meredith's admission into his dormitory was securely accomplished, President Kennedy went on the air.

The brothers were betrayed. As Kennedy spoke, the insurrection began, led by Walker. Governor Barnett made his own TV address, claiming Meredith had been sneaked in by helicopter without his knowledge. The three hundred local cops provided by Barnett for Meredith's safety disappeared into the night. The army of Federal marshals became surrounded by a mob of 3,000 seeking to take Meredith and lynch him. Carrying clubs, rocks, pipes, bricks, bottles, bats, firebombs -- and guns -- they attacked the marshals and whatever journalists they could find. The marshals responded with tear gas, but did not shoot back. The Kennedys ordered in the Mississippi National Guard. Rioting continued through the night. By morning, two were dead (one newsman) and over two hundred marshals and Guardsmen shot. Cars and buildings burned. A stolen fire engine and bulldozer each tried to knock over the walls of Meredith's "secret" dorm. And still Barnett failed to call back the disappeared state police force. What most enraged, and puzzled, the President and the Attorney General was the ass-dragging by their own United States Army, its strange failure to relieve Barnett's missing militia after many calls to do so. Why was the military being so unresponsive to the Commander-in-Chief? "Damn Army!" cursed JFK toward morning. "They can't even tell if the MPs have left yet. Where's the Army? Why haven't they left yet? Where are they?"

Hours had now passed since the President ordered the 503rd Military Police Battalion -- the Army's riot-control unit -- to move from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. Twenty phone calls from JFK to the unit commander failed to speed things up. The military was washing its hands of the Kennedys. It claimed to not know where to land its helicopters on the Ole Miss campus. So the President was forced to play air-traffic controller. He spoke directly to a sergeant on the ground to ensure there would be trucks available when the Police Battalion arrived. And it did arrive. Five hours late. Afterwards, Kennedy would demand an investigation of the timing of each call placed from the White House to the Pentagon, the time such orders were implemented, and an accounting for each minute in between -- causing a penultimate break between the President and his military leaders. (The final break would come several weeks later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.) And once the flow of troops began, the Army ensured it would gush, a deliberate overkill: 25,000 men descended on the University. A number exceeding the troops dispatched by John F. Kennedy to Berlin, Cuba, Laos, South Vietnam, and Indonesia during his Presidency -- combined.

The mob was dispersed; the town was quieted; several hundred rioters were arrested. James Meredith was officially registered and began classes that week, starting his own, daily ordeal. He would graduate in August 1963, despite having to be escorted to and from class by a squad of marshals, his father's house being three times firebombed, and endless reprisals attempted against his family.

Due to his "leadership" during the battle, Edwin Walker was arrested on the orders of Robert Kennedy the morning after the riot. He was flown to a Missouri psychiatric prison, charged with sedition, rebellion, and insurrection. Claiming himself to be "America's first political prisoner," Walker was released one week later, with the charges again eventually dropped. In April '63, he was the target of an assassination attempt as he worked at home in his study. The rifle bullet exploded above his head as he reached down to pick up a fallen paper. The Warren Commission, in its Oswald framing frenzy, would claim that the shot was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. (An idea pronounced "ridiculous" by Walker himself.) Mississippi NAACP Director Medgar Evers -- the man who drove James Meredith's court case all the way to the Supreme Court -- was assassinated before his family's home by a shot to the back, on June 12, 1963 -- the day after Kennedy's call for a "moral revolution" in the area of civil rights.

In June 1966, while leading the March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, James Meredith was shot from behind by a hidden sniper firing from some bushes.

Survived.

Tale of Two Boo-Boos

Yogi and Boo-Boo Bear, fifty years ago.

From more recent times -- Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Requiem for the Real

Looks like NBC has re-re-rebooted the vomit-inducing idea of a NEW "Rockford Files," formerly with some oatmeal face by the name of Dermot Mulroney, then with Hugo Boss model Josh Holloway, now with who knows?? Maybe Macaulay Culkin...

The real thing. One of the great episodes of this or any other TV series, "Requiem for a Funny Box."

Joe Santos, R.I.P.

Honor Man

In 1961, Patrick McGoohan turned down the movie role of James Bond because he thought Ian Fleming was a "talentless smut peddler." Then recommended best friend Sean Connery for the part. In his own masterpiece John Drake series trilogy, a trilogy about the intelligence world of the 1960s -- Danger Man, Secret Agent, The Prisoner -- he refused to shoot and/or kiss anyone. He was born in Astoria, Queens to Irish immigrant parents, quickly moved as a toddler to Mullaghmore, Ireland -- then to Sheffield, England as a boy. Married actress Joan Drummond in his early 20s, wrote love notes to her every day, and stayed with Drummond until his death in 2009, at the age of 80.

Patrick McGoohan is my favorite TV actor -- no one else comes close: he's always the most intelligent, elegant, interesting, courageous, and thoughtful man in the room. And the least egotistical. Watch him here in a scene from "Identity Crisis," one of two Columbo appearances for which he won an Emmy. The great Peter Falk is closing in, suspecting that a man called "Steinmetz" is actually an invention, actually Patrick McGoohan himself -- the real murderer -- in disguise.

"The T-33. . . . Silver Star": the moment when McGoohan realizes he's done, that his protected life -- again here the life of a top intelligence agent -- is over, yet his voice and eyes become modest and respectful ("I'll get your coat"): the better man has won. McGoohan's devotion is never primarily to himself, but to something outside and higher.

*

Danger Man premiered in Britain in 1960 (with American financing), ran for 39 episodes at 26 minutes per, and -- in spite of its enormous popularity throughout Europe -- was canceled when the US financing dried up. McGoohan plays unarmed undercover agent John Drake, working at times for British intelligence, French intelligence, NATO, and CIA.

One of the first incarnation's earliest and best, "View from the Villa," from September 1960. (The villa's location, by the way, is Portmeiron, North Wales -- The Prisoner's goofball setting.) And as we can see, Mr. McGoohan was an amateur middleweight champion.

Drake would return three years later under the same series title in Britain, called Secret Agent everywhere else. The running time for each story was now doubled to 50 minutes (with many two-parters), but the most significant change would be Drake himself. Now more of a le Carré-type character -- sick of his "professionalism" and sick of what it is he's supposed to be protecting.

"You're Not in Any Trouble, Are You?" from October 1965 (with Susan Hampshire as the very fetching dish).

Then came The Prisoner. . .

For me, no. Despite McGoohan's elegance, fascinating confusion, and very good humor, watching it is like being forced to wear a Nehru jacket, listen to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," watch Skidoo, and drink Tang all at the same time.

For a funny overview of every Prisoner episode, go here.

It is impossible to think of Patrick McGoohan without affection -- his ever-changing accents, his grace, his timing and nonchalance -- his wonderful pleasure in performance. His pride in craft. McGoohan embodies a vanished time when we had a more direct relationship to a performer. A generous-hearted actor (and man); a glamour without narcissism. He always seems to be in a blissful present, with an expression that says "You can’t imagine what it’s like being in this room and performing these words.”

Actually, watching him, we can.

As Long As I Have You

The corrupt thieving bore known as The Artist (2011) -- a product with syntax much closer to an Absolut Vodka "White" pimpery than to anything from 1927 -- puts me in mind of Zelig (1983). (The differences in wit, movement, understanding and sincere interest in its time, formal inventiveness -- as opposed to mere decoration -- is tragic.) While I stopped being a Woody Allen fan about the time it became clear he wasn't going to go anywhere upsetting to his mummified, contented audience -- the same audience, both in the seats and in the media, fooled by Michel Hazanavicius's fakery -- certain gems glow brighter as the years go by, as the 70s / Keaton works dim, and as US movie culture becomes more and more the result of Cranial Rectal Embedment (CRE).

It is sweet and honest and in mad love with the Twenties. And very funny. Allen's adoration of his co-star, now seen as tawdry and a cause for snickering because of the bizarre later happenings in the private lives of both Allen and Miss Farrow, deepens Zelig's heart and humor. As it does Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), his best three movies. Farrow was better for Allen's art than was Keaton, and surely better than what came after. . .

And. . .

A radically different view of the American 1920s.

"The common man would now have to find his one-eyed way in the Kingdom of the Blind." -- Dos Passos

While literati such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller move their feasts to Paris and gaze at their navels -- taking full advantage of the gap caused by the WWI deaths of half of all French males between the ages of 15 and 30 -- the pygmies known as the American Oligarchy regain full control, flushing whatever remains of late-19th / early-20th Century humanism, and roar their way through the Twenties, the decade of Prohibition, massive coast-to-coast KKK rallies, eugenics, the birth of Organized Crime, and major financing by American bankers of fascist movements across Europe. When things fall apart at the turn of the 30s, FDR steps in and saves US capitalism from (and for) the capitalists.

Who don't see it that way. . .

Apart

We've all heard Kind of Blue ~ one of the great achievements of 20th Century music ~ many times, on vinyl, tape, CD. "Legacy Edition" is best. . .

What's overwhelming is the quiet, the spacing, the stillness. . . and the growing sense of separation and aloneness among the men as we move through the five main pieces. An absolute must have.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

In honor of the convention month where the corporate totalitarian regime will shove the presidential race of Trump/Pence/Biden/[fill in name of female of color, anyone will do] down ours throats, the best English language documentary on the rise of Nazism.

Part One:

Part Two:

This Could Be the Start of Something Big

At last, they begin to emerge. And with timing almost as brilliant as Mr. Allen's.

Until now, nothing of Steve Allen's late-night TV work of the 50s and 60s had been available on DVD. Nor on places such as YouTube. And not much now either, but we do have a start.  What with the ongoing late-night wars, and especially with a flyspeck such Jimmy Fallon not only taking over Steve's old show but doing it in the very same NBC midtown studio space -- well, as Nixon used to say, now more than ever. . .

Westinghouse. August 15, 1962. Amid spacious views of early-60s nighttime L.A. and its cars, Steve plays piano on top a 75-foot flagpole while peeking into neighboring hotel rooms, talks to the passing KTLA traffic copter, and tosses down salamis to his waiting fans on Vine Street. Back in the studio, Steve does a duet with an audience member, teases a pregnant lady, gets involved with a gas experiment that falls flat, teaches us about Mexican jumping beans (there are worms inside?). Introduces his guests: singer Bill Kerry (?), the great and sadly forgotten Slim Gaillard (look at those hands!), and the very young Barbara McNair. Steve finishes by sharing mattresses with a very fetching blonde baby doll (without a single dirty joke), and lets the baby doll take over the show by letting Miss Mattress call her law student husband (who had a very important test that day), and then lets her belt out a rockin' version of "Hallelujah, I Love Him So." Little is planned, or what's planned is turned on its head. Nothing is locked in. Steve takes us wherever the moment takes us.

Just an average Allen show. No topicality, meanness, elitism, condescension, cynicism, or hate. In their place ~ good cheer, silliness, and lots and lots of smart. (Those thinking there's a connection between comedic smarts and Knowingness deserve garbage such as Fallon.)

When we were carefree. . . .

Running

In my post about the great Kim Novak, I mentioned the way of Hollywood and miracles. Novak and many classical stars were the result of happy accidents only possible in an isolated creation chamber where all bets were covered cold. So one could take a chance on an awkward, shy girl from Chicago who came to LA for she knew not why. Or on a rodeo rider/poker player/roustabout just wandering in from the rails, and turn him into Robert Mitchum. Archibald Leach was a trapeze artist from England. Poof! he’s Cary Grant.

And the movies. Can one imagine Detour (1945) being born under any other kind of system? Gun Crazy (1949), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Marrying Kind (1952), The Big Sleep (1946), Holiday (1938), Lady from Shanghai (1948), Out of the Past (1947), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), My Darling Clementine (1946), Angel Face (1952), White Heat (1949)?

Or Some Came Running (1959). Looking at the push novelist James Jones made as he proposed a $1,000,000 sell price for his yet-to-be-completed novel (by far the largest asking price in Hollywood history, eventually purchased for $200,000); looking at the best seller craze which dominated – and in many cases suffocated – 40s and 50s Hollywood; and looking at the seemingly too-cool-for-school cast, one might think the movie, hoping to catch From Here to Eternity lightning-in-a-bottle, would be just another middle-brow social issue project come down with elephantiasis.

Enter Vincente Minnelli. One would be hard pressed to find two male sensibilities as opposed as those of Minnelli and James Jones: Jones a brawling small town southern Illinois street kid who knew little beyond the military and the men in it; Minnelli the complete urban sophisticate, far more in touch with style, beauty, female sensibility, and affairs of the heart. Not a chance in heck that a director such as Minnelli (if we had one) would be brought together with a novel almost exclusively concerned with the problems of men, in the end-of-cinema Branding/Marketeer miasma we now must suffer. But it was possible in 1958. And it is this melding and confrontation between the two sensibilities which gives us the miracle of Some Came Running: a swaying back-and-forth, beyond the control of Minnelli, the true "story" of the film, a thematic resolution unresolved. Until it is.

James Jones – perhaps because of the money and because he was allowed to hang with the Rat Pack – seemed pleased with the movie adaptation of his 1,200 page opus. Which is kind of strange because Minnelli not only works to reverse the meaning of the novel, but challenges just about every part of Jones’s macho value system. Poker, drinking, broads, brothers, cars, back alley fights, the writer-as-warrior – all here, and all eventually trumped by a silly, stupid, madly-in-love girl named Ginny.

Veteran David Hirsch (Frank Sinatra) has decided to return home to Parkman, Indiana after 16 years away and a long hitch in the Army. Arriving from Chicago with a $5,500 poker bankroll burning in his pants, he learns he has arrived with something else as well.

Shirley MacLaine, here so natural and warm and lovely. . .

But for Dave Hirsch, other things. His successful older brother, mostly. In a beautiful mix of sequences, Minnelli shows how much a part of mid-20th Century American male ethos Hirsch is, almost to the point of caricature. Not quite. Minnelli (helped by Elmer Bernstein's fine score) temporarily embraces the ethos, particularly in the strange and moving shot of Hirsch's favorite books. And in the character of gambler Bama Dillert (Dean Martin).

Hirsch meets a girl with the appropriate name of Gwen French (Martha Hyer), the daughter of a famous poet. She's also the teacher of a respected writing class at the University. And she's madly in love with Dave's talents as a writer. As a writer.

Dave's already way past that.

She won't have it. So Dave does what any red-blooded American male would do in the face of female resistance: run off to Terre Haute for girls and gambling. (And to learn of Bama's hat obsession.)

Upon Dave's return to Parkman, Gwen French receives two visitors.

At last, David Hirsch sees the light. And loses his best friend.

In the most famous and bizarre sequence, the work's contradictions erupt into a holocaust of color and movement. The sins are paid for. And in a final gesture of pure cinema, Some Came Running resolves itself.

Superman Came to the Supermarket

In the midst of the conspiratorial cowardly betrayal known as the 21st-century Democratic Party -- a real man, 60 years ago this month.

Back to the Future

Perhaps our greatest post-WWII historian resides in two books: The Politics of War, 1890 - 1920 and Liberty Under Siege.

Walter Karp died in 1989, not long after completing Liberty, at the age of 55. He did most of his work for Harper's magazine, under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Lewis Lapham (our greatest post-war magazine editor). Liberty Under Siege tells the maddening, heartbreaking story of the hijack of our republic, one of many: 1976 - 1988. It begins with the giddy enthusiasms and hopes of our Bicentennial, the overthrow of Nixon, the end to the Vietnam War. A new age. Then came Jimmy Carter, presumably elected on the winds of goodness. To quote General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May, and as brilliantly detailed by Karp: "He was not just a weak sister. He was a criminally weak sister." Not for peace and domestic prosperity, as was the case with President Jordan Lyman in the Frankenheimer movie, but in the face of Restorationists, Oligarchs, Mass Murderers, and Thieves. The republic died here, and has yet to be resurrected. Karp's book is the best one we have on that enormously important point of turning -- that moment "when the Devils had they day, and Hawks stole something living from the gambol on the field."

It had happened before. The Politics of War, Karp's masterpiece and the definitive history of that time, embraces the eruption of community, civilization, citizenship, and hatred of the undeserving rich snuffed out by the war politics of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt (a racist thug and that most favorite of all America-Firsters), and Woodrow Wilson -- Wilson, the terrible swift sword against all things progressive and human. (Reading this book and remembering Glenn Beck's howls against Wilson as the "Father of Progressivism" shows just what that piece of toilet buildup and his bootlickers were all about.)

An excerpt:

In 1896 the leaders of the Republican Party had felt considerable trepidation when they forged their alliance with the major industrial and financial interests of the country. After the distractions of the Spanish-American War they had no fears whatever. The grand alliance appeared to be all that it had promised to be -- the foundation of permanent Republican supremacy, the practical triumph of discipline, organization, and wealth over the republican sentiments of the American people.

What the Republican oligarchy envisioned was an all-encompassing system of mutual aid. A handful of finance capitalists, preferably led by the prudent J.P. Morgan, were to take command of the national economy with the help of the party oligarchy. They would gain control of the nation's railroads, consolidate its industries into giants trusts, and monopolize control of capital under the aegis of the Republican Party. The financiers, in turn, would use their immense wealth and influence to protect and enhance the oligarchy's power. Working in close personal consultation, the partners expected to divide between them the two chief spoils of the public world. The Republican oligarchy would rule the people; Morgan and his colleagues would manage the economy -- with one eye to the needs and interests of the Republican leadership. To facilitate statesmanship among the capitalists Mark Hanna [McKinley's Karl Rove] presided over an extragovernmental body known as the National Civic Federation, which was composed of leading financial and industrial magnates and a few safe, compliant trade union leaders, including Samuel Gompers. The Federation's chief task was to mediate labor disputes, encourage "conservative" trade unionism, and in general, as a labor member put it, "bring into closer and more harmonious relation those two apparently antagonistic forces," capital and labor, the most obvious point of strain in the Republicans' voting coalition.

The new political order -- it was sometimes called "the system of '96" -- had some aspects of a bloodless coup. In the years after the Spanish-American War the national Republican Party became the most centralized, the most rigidly disciplined ruling party the American Republic has ever known. In the Senate, where the oligarchy convened, Republican senators took their orders from Nelson Aldrich, the "boss of the Senate" and a trio of his appointed lieutenants; they were known collectively as "the four." In the House of Representatives, Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois could marshal virtually the entire voting strength of the party minions for every arbitrary ruling and every obstructionist tactic he deemed essential for the good of the party. All this display of party discipline was impressive enough, for a time, to the American electorate. The national Republican Party, still trailing wisps of its ancestor glory, looked like a governing party, and its leaders generally comported themselves with statesmanlike gravity. As long as nobody asked them to do very much, no one could well dispute their claim that they alone provided the country with "responsible party government." Under their hegemony, America was fast becoming what Senator Lodge fatuously described as an "aristocratic republic." Firmly in control of the state party organizations, of most of the metropolitan press, of most of the political money in the country, with a jingo foreign policy to divert the electorate, the Republican oligarchy appeared to have nothing to fear, least of all from their token rivals, the Democrats, whose Congressional leaders were in all but open complicity with their Republican counterparts. By 1900 the national Republican machine had achieved the enviable position of serving the narrowest of interests -- itself and its big business allies -- while enjoying the support of a majority of those who bothered to vote. After the 1896 election fewer and fewer Americans bothered, which only made the oligarchy's task that much easier.

Yet the system had a flaw and that flaw was radical. Instead of serving as the indestructible foundation of party power, the new economy of finance capitalism was in fact a foundation of quicksand. The aging hierarchs of the Republican Party still talked of the "manufacturing interest" and the "propertied classes." Such nineteenth-century terms, however, ill-suited the new economy they had helped to create, an economic system in which few could control everything without proportionately owning much; in which bankers, not manufacturers, held the fate of industrial enterprise in their hands. The new finance capitalism was as fluid as water. A powerful financier might control a great economic asset one day only to discover on the next that a rival magnate had raided the stock market and wrested away his control. The new finance capitalists were utterly lawless. They bribed, they swindled, they defrauded; they ignored statute law, defied common law, betrayed fiduciary trusts. Worse, they were headlong, frenetic pursuers of monopoly, for competitive firms were useless to men incapable of running them and who would gain no further accession of economic power even if they could. The finance capitalists could not manage the economy; they could only prey upon it. They could not even manage themselves. The politically minded House of Morgan might wish to be discreet, might be reluctant to antagonize the public and make difficulties for the Republican oligarchy, but there were sharks in the waters of finance capitalism whom mighty Morgan could not control, against whom he felt compelled to do battle, inevitably with his rivals' weapons. It was virtually impossible for any finance capitalist to be more politic than the least politic among them. Hanna's vision of statesmanlike capitalists working in harness with the Republican oligarchy was only an old man's pipe dream.

In the failure of the new finance capitalists to serve the interests of their political allies, in the shocking spectacle of their lawless power lay the mainspring for a second national reform movement which was to provide the immediate background to America's entry into the First World War -- the revolt of the American middle classes against political and economic oligarchy, a revolt known at the time and ever since as the progressive movement.

*

The triumph of Wilson and the war party struck the American Republic a blow from which it has never recovered. If the mainspring of a republican commonwealth -- its "active principle," in Jefferson's words -- is the perpetual struggle against oligarchy and privilege, against private monopoly and arbitrary power, then that mainspring was snapped and deliberately snapped by the victors in the civil war over war.

Ths sheer fact of war was shattering in itself. Deaf to the trumpets and the fanfare, the great mass of Americans entered the war apathetic, submissive, and bitter. Their honest sentiments had been trodden to the ground, their judgment derided, their interests ignored. Representative government had failed them at every turn. A President, newly reelected, had betrayed his promise to keep the peace. Congress, self-emasculated, had neither checked nor balanced nor even seriously questioned the pretexts and pretensions of the nation's chief executive. The free press had shown itself to be manifestly unfree -- a tool of the powerful and a voice of the "interests." Every vaunted progressive reform had failed as well. Wall Street bankers, supposedly humbled by the Wilsonian reforms, had impudently clamored for preparedness and war. The Senate, ostensibly made more democratic through the direct election of senators, had proven as impervious as ever to public opinion. The party machines, supposedly weakened by the popular primary, still held elected officials in their thrall. Never did the powerful in America seem so willful, so wanton, or so remote from popular control as they did the day war with Germany began. On that day Americans learned a profoundly embittering lesson: They did not count. Their very lives hung in the balance and still they did not count. That bitter lesson was itself profoundly corrupting, for it transformed citizens into cynics, filled free men with self-loathing, and drove millions into privacy and depair.

Isolated, they nursed in private their bitterness and contempt -- the corrupting consolation of cynicism. Millions more could not withstand the force of the new state that had risen. It was easier, by far, to surrender to the powerful and embrace their new masters, to despise with the powerful the very opinions they themselves had once held and to hound with the powerful their fellow citizens who still held them -- the corrupting consolation of submission. Millions more simply bowed to the ways of oppression, to official lies and false arrests, to "slacker raids" and censored newspapers, to saying nothing, feeling nothing, and caring nothing -- the corrupting consolation of apathy.

Who Really Destroyed Hitler?

The Soviet Union did. That's it. The Americans and the Brits had little or nothing to do with it. (D-Day was a joke, merely the US mopping up after the Red Army had already destroyed the Wehrmacht.)

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin:

The Soviet Union fully fulfilled its obligations to its allies and always offered a helping hand. Thus, the Red Army supported the landing of the Anglo-American troops in Normandy by carrying out a large-scale Operation Bagration in Belarus. In January 1945, having broken through to the Oder River, it put an end to the last powerful offensive of the Wehrmacht on the Western Front in the Ardennes. Three months after the victory over Germany, the USSR, in full accordance with the Yalta agreements, declared war on Japan and defeated the million-strong Kwantung Army.

Back in July 1941, the Soviet leadership declared that the purpose of the War against fascist oppressors was not only the elimination of the threat looming over our country, but also help for all the peoples of Europe suffering under the yoke of German fascism. By the middle of 1944, the enemy was expelled from virtually all of the Soviet territory. However, the enemy had to be finished off in its lair. And so the Red Army started its liberation mission in Europe. It saved entire nations from destruction and enslavement, and from the horror of the Holocaust. They were saved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives of Soviet soldiers.

It is also important not to forget about the enormous material assistance that the USSR provided to the liberated countries in eliminating the threat of hunger and in rebuilding their economies and infrastructure. That was being done at the time when ashes stretched for thousands of miles all the way from Brest to Moscow and the Volga. For instance, in May 1945, the Austrian government asked the USSR to provide assistance with food, as it "had no idea how to feed its population in the next seven weeks before the new harvest." The state chancellor of the provisional government of the Austrian Republic Karl Renner described the consent of the Soviet leadership to send food as a saving act that the Austrians would never forget.

The Allies jointly established the International Military Tribunal to punish Nazi political and war criminals. Its decisions contained a clear legal qualification of crimes against humanity, such as genocide, ethnic and religious cleansing, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Directly and unambiguously, the Nuremberg Tribunal also condemned the accomplices of the Nazis, collaborators of various kinds.

This shameful phenomenon manifested itself in all European countries. Such figures as Pétain, Quisling, Vlasov, Bandera, their henchmen and followers – though they were disguised as fighters for national independence or freedom from communism – are traitors and slaughterers. In inhumanity, they often exceeded their masters. In their desire to serve, as part of special punitive groups they willingly executed the most inhuman orders. They were responsible for such bloody events as the shootings of Babi Yar, the Volhynia massacre, burnt Khatyn, acts of destruction of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia. 

Today as well, our position remains unchanged – there can be no excuse for the criminal acts of Nazi collaborators, there is no statute of limitations for them. It is therefore bewildering that in certain countries those who are smirched with cooperation with the Nazis are suddenly equated with the Second World War veterans. I believe that it is unacceptable to equate liberators with occupants. And I can only regard the glorification of Nazi collaborators as a betrayal of the memory of our fathers and grandfathers. A betrayal of the ideals that united peoples in the fight against Nazism. 

At that time, the leaders of the USSR, the United States, and the UK faced, without exaggeration, a historic task. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill represented the countries with different ideologies, state aspirations, interests, cultures, but demonstrated great political will, rose above the contradictions and preferences and put the true interests of peace at the forefront. As a result, they were able to come to an agreement and achieve a solution from which all of humanity has benefited.

The victorious powers left us a system that has become the quintessence of the intellectual and political quest of several centuries. A series of conferences – Tehran, Yalta, San Francisco and Potsdam – laid the foundation of a world that for 75 years had no global war, despite the sharpest contradictions.

Historical revisionism, the manifestations of which we now observe in the West, and primarily with regard to the subject of the Second World War and its outcome, is dangerous because it grossly and cynically distorts the understanding of the principles of peaceful development, laid down at the Yalta and San Francisco conferences in 1945. The major historic achievement of Yalta and other decisions of that time is the agreement to create a mechanism that would allow the leading powers to remain within the framework of diplomacy in resolving their differences.

President Putin's important and vital essay can be found here.

The Warmth of the Sun

1963 would mark the zenith of American moral authority. In a series of six speeches in the months before his death, President John F. Kennedy embodied the belief that government power should be used primarily to protect the powerless; and should be used to increase communion in the world and lessen domination.

June 10th at American University, he calls for an end to the Cold War.

The next night (!), Kennedy announces his intention to help lead the Black Revolution instead of fighting it.

Robert Drew's brilliant Crisis explains the background.

Two weeks later in West Berlin, in Wagnerian Cold War mode.

"Light cuts into the darkness":  the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963.

Before the United Nations on September 20th, he calls for a world government in the interests of peace, a world center for conservation and food distribution, a world system of health bringing all peoples of the earth under medical protection, and an international manned space flight to the moon.

Kennedy often spoke about his dreams and hopes for a better America, and never so eloquently as his tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College, October 26th, 1963.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy was both the glory, and the agony.

The Execution

Chuck Marler's documentary is the best and most detailed we yet have about what really happened in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry, June 5th, 1968.

The Martyr's Cause

In South Africa against apartheid, June 1966.

Running for President at the University of Kansas, March 1968.

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

High Hopes

On his 103rd birthday, John F. Kennedy speaks to us of privatization, secret societies, secret cabals, and in a very funny way. . .

Happy Birthday!

Decoration Day

George Cukor's The Marrying Kind -- one of the dearest American movies of the 1950s -- loves public space. The married couple, played by Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray, are almost never alone. They met in Central Park, adore their kids, have company over non-stop, and basically let friends and relatives run their lives: the husband and wife are just fine with that. In New York City 1952, others are not mere externals to be sniffed at. Beside its beautiful ending, its most memorable scene (set on Decoration Day) is one of the most peaceful -- and then terrifying -- in 50s cinema, Cukor signaling the upcoming horror by the panicked running of others.

And it breaks the marriage in two.

Of Course

Since the Dodgers swept the Yanks in the '63 World Series one week later, Ed's advice must've worked!

I Got

God Speed

When "doing whatever we set our minds to" meant more than a computerized drone attack.

59 years ago -- Freedom 7.

An Apple a Day. . .

. . . keeps the humanity away.

Perhaps the most righteous episode from a show that was as righteous, beautiful, funny, and brilliant as any cartoon show ever was. Here, Matt Groening takes down 21st-century capitalism, Steve Jobs, iPhonies, Twitter Twits, and YouToobers.

Futurama, from July 2010: "Attack of the Killer Ap!"

Do You Miss New York?

"My name is C.C. Baxter -- C. for Calvin, C. for Clifford.
However, most people call me Bud." -- Jack Lemmon

No one in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) calls him "Bud."

Sixty years after its release (it would go on to win Best Picture Oscar for 1960), The Apartment seems an object found on a distant planet; or perhaps from the bottom of the sea. Who are these people? These voices? This way of dress and directness, this way of relating and falling in love?

We all know the story: C.C. Baxter wants to be the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and throughout most of The Apartment seems ready to do most anything to achieve it. Along the way he falls in love with a lost, pretty elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine -- who's being used for sex by the Head of Personnel, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), a man who also happens to be C.C. Baxter's boss. The girl's heart is broken, she attempts suicide (in Baxter's apartment), and Bud is forced to choose between love and his ambition.

Sixty years later, who notices the plot? For the real story of the movie is the time in which it was made; and most astonishingly, the city in which it is set: round and round we turn and beyond the Wilder narrative is the other narrative: Manhattan in 1960 still drifts with the Sweet Smell of Success, and her most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a lady who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, which leaves her isolated from the mass of others. In this collective vision -- the nights come low onto the steep and lonely city, with its pallid heavy facades up on stony inclines, and arches and great dark courtyards and outer stairways on unknown buildings. New York then was still saying goodbye to the impression that once some single power had had the place in grip, had given it an emotional and architectural unity and splendor now lost and forgotten.

They say decades don't start on time. The Sixties sure did, on January 2nd (the day after the movie's story ends).

It begins (after the credits, where we're first introduced to Baxter's apartment front and Adolph Deutsch's immortal theme) with a float over Manhattan island, less architecturally congested and vertical than it became. A narrator tells us it is November 1959 and the population of New York City is over 8-million people. We learn of the narrator's workplace (Consolidated Life Insurance, home to over 30,000 employees), his job (salaryman), and his apartment (West 60s, half-a-block from Central Park, $85 per-month rent!). It is Jack Lemmon's voice and we should listen carefully, because once we're filled in with the background details, we never hear from the narrator again. (Good job, Wilder.)

It is a movie made almost entirely of interiors. Literally, the title refers to the space within which C.C. Baxter's willing corruption takes place. (It also refers to Wilder's belief in the terminal "apartness" of Modernist life.) Baxter's agreed to basically allow his bachelor pad to be turned into a brothel -- only the customers are his married bosses and the ladies are Consolidated Life co-workers. We see why no one calls him "Bud". . .

In the conversation on the landing, Doc and Baxter watch each other as if watching a movie screen, forever separate from whom they're talking to and what they're hearing. Joe Dobisch's desperate call for cheap sex (so cheap he demands the taxi change back from the wonderful Joyce Jameson) occurs in a telephone booth which could be on the dark side of the moon, as much as it is just off a crowded and smoky bar. For Wilder, no one is anybody's true "Bud" in 1959 New York City. Yet we've seen the movie's first "object of light": the dissolve on the fading television signal, to the glow of Baxter's heating blanket control-knob. What are these objects: love, luck, faith, holiness, fate, God? Perhaps all things not-Modernist. Whatever they are for Wilder, they follow Bud and Fran around: angels of protection. They surround Baxter as he falls asleep in Central Park.

In the elevator on the ride up to glory.

Fran's boutonnière near his heart, for luck.

Later at The Rickshaw: ceiling lamps, the candle -- and the daiquiri (which seems to be made of the same substance that blew-up the world at the end of Kiss Me Deadly).

Christmas Eve and all is bright.

To 1960.

The Apartment -- as we can sense from the first scene in Sheldrake's office -- has no point-of-view regarding American-specific capitalism, corporatism, or patriarchy. Consolidated Life may just as well be the Kremlin, NASA, IBM, or Krupp Industries. For Wilder, evidently all power systems are the same. (In 1960!) One needs only to look at The Bad Sleep Well from the same year. 'Though mostly buried beneath Kurosawa's stale updating of yet another Shakespeare play (this one Hamlet), The Bad Sleep Well is a direct attack on post-war zaibatsu structure, ethos, and dominance of 1950s Japanese society. Unlike Baxter, whose sole motivation throughout The Apartment is a mealy and vague sort of professional ambition, Toshiro Mifune as Kurosawa protagonist Nishi burns with a vengeance against all things corporate. Unfortunately, most of this heat is redirected by Kurosawa (by Toho?) into channels of Freudian irrelevance.

Before we meet Jeff Sheldrake, let's take a look at the workplace architecture of Consolidated Life (and New York City in general): elevator operators (and starters!); hat and coat racks long as football fields; cigarettes and water coolers; zero security: workers overwhelmed by Modernism as Wilder and photographer Joseph LaShelle diminish them under long vistas of oscillation: corridors, angles, fluorescents, endless desks, and vanishing points which pre-Kubricks Kubrick for theoretical coldness. And like Kubrick, a mere aesthetic abstraction untethered to any interesting vision of society or power.

Edie Adams. What a likable and talented gal -- she and Ernie Kovacs must've made a wonderful couple. Here, Wilder turns her into a bitter Modernist clown, right down to those ugly glasses. Being Mr. Sheldrake's gatekeeper (and ex-lover), she nastily waves Baxter into the inner sanctum.

And what a sinister hothouse it is. Most sinister being the man behind the desk, Fred MacMurray, in amazingly thick eye-makeup. (How did this monster get the TV role of uber-dad Steve Douglass?) Four hand-chairs match the strange painting at the back of four love-seats, matching the four users of the Baxter apartment, with some African-cum-Modernist print on the adjacent wall, also of four male heads. There's a wood-carving of a stronger naked man holding a weaker naked man over his head. "I sorta wondered what you look like, Baxter." Indeed. An appropriate setting because the scene is a flat-out seduction, rape-wise, to the point of the victim finally cumming with his hand-held nose-spray.

Fran leaves the Consolidated coldness, into the warm embrace of autumn New York. Before the city came down with Zagat's disease, she was honeycombed with hidden places, like tuning forks, vibrating with mystery: profoundly sophisticated with a deep acceptance of magic; places with a warm imagination and a gift that can lead to marvelous paths of coming to know someone else well. The movie seems to know the secret: that New York was sad before it was busy -- that it was a kind of inverted garden, with all the flowers blooming down beneath the ground. Like crystal notes or sparkling water, New York was still the potent formula of city lights, early death, and sounds at night. The Rickshaw is such a spot (is it Wilder's nod to Susan Alexander's nightclub?), embracing emotions the culture no longer has any use for. The heart turns over and produces a sorrow. Hardly any places are left to do that. . .

She enters, and this is different. There's an element of tenderness in Sheldrake's voice, and something veiled and remote in his eyes that Fran has never seen there before. He really is in love with her.

At the end of the scene, does Wilder "pull his gimp string," in the famous words of the ever-sour Manny Farber? -- by inserting a shot of Edie Adams as Jeff and Fran leave. Does Wilder pull it tighter by moving the movie's theme from major to minor key, as if embracing a suffering, wounded heart? Too bad, Manny. A beautiful and deeply-felt moment.

The Consolidated Life Christmas Eve Party, on the cusp of the 60s, wonderfully violating every sexual harassment rule imaginable.

Yet even during the party, the city beyond the windows is ominous, de-populated -- comparable to the mood of a landscape just before something awful is about to happen, or just after, one cannot tell. The grim buildings form a cemetery of Modernist tombs.

*

And so, in a rather unmotivated turn of events, Miss Kubelik attempts suicide in C.C. Baxter's apartment, after being abandoned there by Sheldrake on his way home for Christmas. (And after giving Fran $100 for her time.) Bud and Doc save Fran, and something in the two Consolidated employees both ache. Baxter lets his heart yield again towards her -- and his eyes, which have never left her face, which have never closed, slowly fill with tears. And his heart seems to burn and melt away in his chest.

Bud's apartment is an isolating arena of lonely experience. A sort of passageway like a sarcophagus angles through the central area. There's a strange stillness about the rooms, in their drabness and mostly rococo design. Among the Modernist prints on the walls and the Ella Fitzgerald albums, there lingers a kind of loneliness and happiness, as if it were a sunken place, and a feeling that it is good for one's heart to be there.

Cue the ominous music: enter cabbie Karl Matuschka, perfectly played by Johnny Seven. Wilder's idiotic stereotype of an "outer-borough" untermenschen truly does show him pulling the elitist gimp-string. Are Wilder's dead buildings actually walls to keep out the unwashed? (For the director, only Manhattan is New York City.) This class stupidity begins to mix with the expected smarmy cynicism, as the movie teeters.

                               Martin: "Why are you running?"
                               Anne: "Don't you know?"
                               Martin: "No."
                               Anne: "Because I am longing. . . ."
                                                                       Dreyer, Day of Wrath

As we approach denouement, there's a sense that The Apartment will end (as we expected all along) in some love cul-de-sac -- but who's to believe in it now? Coming after Buddy Boy informs Sheldrake that "the old payola won't work anymore" and quits, and after Karl the Kabman, why not just end the movie with Baxter grabbing hold of the fat new job, handing Fran off to the more than willing Sheldrake, and banging a couple hundred Consolidated Life gal Fridays?

The world of Billy Wilder's The Apartment is detached from everything we don't actually see in the movie itself: the worlds beyond Consolidated Life, beyond the island of Manhattan. Only now can we feel its longing to not be "apart" from what was soon to be born (and smothered in its crib): the feeling that the country was now part of the daily concern. One cared about it for the first time, the way you care about family or work, a good friend or the future, and that is the most exceptional of emotions.

Fran runs to Bud, as Billy Wilder ends as an unalloyed romantic. Stars are bright overhead and the buildings outline themselves on the sky. Below, the city is a black gulf. Winds blow, and limousines crawl through the night.

Outside, the first day of the 1960s was in all its glory. . .