Some thoughts (NOT about modern fascism for today):
*
Bob Dylan just sold his catalogue of songs to SONY for
(some guess) $200 million. That buys a lot of stuff. But, I don’t get it. I
keep my mind open to music, even – gasp – hip hop (although rarely find anything I can tolerate). Twice in the last few years
I have spent a couple of days listening to Dylan, thinking maybe I’d get it if I
became familiar enough with it. No epiphany the way I had with Van Gogh. I’m
62. Yet I have never had a single person tell me Dylan was their favorite
artist. I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned him to me since I was a kid. I almost never hear him played on a radio station. I doubt most people
face to face who say they are fans can name more than the same few songs I can
(probably 4 I think are good). The Nobel Prize? For what? I’ve never had anyone
quote him to me, never heard anyone suggest anything he said was wise, never
have been to someone’s house or in their car when they put him on or said, can we listen to Dylan. Never. I’ve
read the lyrics and all I could think was – really? Personally, I think just
from his era, he can’t compare to Paul Simon (whose music is still played endlessly and even kids know it - some kids),
Lennon & McCartney (The Beatles are the top sellers of all time and I have
read no. 2 THIS CENTURY!!!!), Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull – Anderson was an extremely underrated writer) and many others. Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash were better
writers. And don’t say, well, it’s folk music and that's different, because he was no Woody or Arlo
Guthrie or Peter, Paul & Mary either.
But, they gave him the Nobel Prize, and I’m sure he’s on the
top 100 lists. I can’t prove it, but I best most people who say he’s awesome
have rarely if ever played him – at least in 30 years. Sort of like the people who
wanted to believe Princess Diana was one of the most beautiful women in the
world or that Wonder Woman was a good movie. I don’t have to accept it.
I will leave a squinch of room for subjectivity and
taste, but I don’t get him.
*
Is there anything so beautiful yet so horrid, so
useful yet so dangerous, all at the same time, as fire? Some wit will respond –
women, so I’ll beat them to it.
*
This is what I think it was like when the comic book character, The Hulk, was being developed. There’s no punch line. Just hard to imagine who knew he’d be a great idea.
Boss, I had a
great idea for a new character. He’s a scientist who is hit by gamma rays.
So, he dies of
radiation poisoning?
No, he turns gray.
I pay you for
this?
But he also grows really
big and strong and his clothes are destroyed in the process.
That mean naked?
Of course not. His
pants and underwear get bigger.
Why don’t they get
destroyed?
I don’t know. Who cares?
Okay, got a name?
“The Hunk.”
Hmmm. Okay. So,
what does he do?
He jumps around
and smashes things.
Why?
So, he can say “Hunk
smash!”
He sounds like an
idiot.
He is.
Anything else?
Yeah, he has a girlfriend.
What woman would
want to date him?
Same ones who date NFL linemen. They’d be lining up.
And so on. It’s just my imagination and not exactly what happened. now because after I wrote that, I thought - everything is on the internet. What's the real story? I know how successful the character has been, but it just seemed to me at the beginning it must have seemed like a terrible idea. In real life he was thought up by comic book geniuses, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who obviously knew better than the rest of us what would work. At the time of his creation, monsters were all the rage in America, and they were trying to capitalize on it. It was Kirby’s idea to have a monster as a continuing character. Ironically, The Hulk, was, in fact, originally gray, not green, just as I guessed, as a joke. They changed him to green pretty quickly though. At the same time, his speech went from at least somewhat intelligible to more primitive.
But, again, just like I imagined . . . it actually wasn’t a success and quickly cancelled. But then he came back later in other heroes’ titles and eventually took off. Many changes happened over time. Not just skin color and speech, but whether he was controlled by others, whether he changed back to Bruce Banner, and whether the Hulk only appeared at night (originally), or as it was later on, when Banner got angry or stressed out. There’s actually a whole story to the development, which I read here - Lee & Kirby & Ditko: The Development of INCREDIBLE HULK – The Tom Brevoort Experience.
I do think he is a great character and I used to love the Hulk in comics, tv and movies. Now they have somewhat ruined him by creating multiple versions, like they do of all successful comics these days – a Devil-Hulk, a She-Hulk, even now a wise-cracking buddy type Hulk for the Thor movies. Now, if I watched any movies at all, I would not really be into super-hero movies anymore. And, it’s them, not me.
*
The other day someone sent me a link to an article in which Peter Dinklage, the successful actor who happens to be a dwarf (e.g., Elf, Game of Thrones), was complaining that Disney was remaking Snow White. He sounded rather bitter about it: “It makes no sense to me. Because you ‘re progressive in one way,* but you’re still making that fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the fuck are you doing, man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soap box? I guess I’m not loud enough.”
*I note He says progressive because Snow White herself will be played by a Latina. That doesn’t make much sense either, because traditionally SN's skin is as white as snow. Henece, She has pale skin. Snow White is Germanic (although similar fables throughout Europe but often about white-skinned princesses) and I’m sure there are light skinned Latinas out there. Not the one Disney chose though. Does it make sense to have a dark-skinned actress play the character whose skin is supposed to be white as snow? Of course, not. But, that’s woke or progressive craziness for you and what is important in modern woke movie making is to be able to say - look, I'm X, but I'm a princess, or a cowboy, etc. You know, the same thinking which keeps saying that the next James Bond has to be black or a woman or both to satisfy them, even though that’s not the character. I don't care what color a person's skin is when it doesn't make a difference character-wise, but that's not the trend. The trend is to shout identity politics at the audience, which is boring to me and thus, privately I cancel them.
Anyway, immediately on reading Dinklage’s comment, because I’m not woke and grew up watching The Marx Bros. and Don Rickles, I thought - I guess he’s auditioning for Grumpy. I admit, I cracked myself up and was rather proud of the line. But, imagine if someone said that on a television show. At least, if it was a white male, he’d immediately be fired.
And that, my friends, is one of our biggest problems – the hyper-sensitivity now taught to kids from the cradle. Everybody wants to be a victim, and not just when it makes sense. They get offended if there is any possible connection to their identity, even a completely innocent connection. They just figure it must be mean-spirited. I get it, Dinklage is a dwarf and he thinks Snow White is making fun of human dwarfs. But, they are really not. In fact, he is making it about them.
Leave aside that the dwarves in Snow White are heroic (and leave aside – they live in a cottage, Peter, not a cave! They are miners who work in a cave!) - it’s also because the dwarves in Snow White, a Germanic fable, like the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, aren’t humans, Peter! – they aren’t shorter than average humans who have a gene mutation. They are a legendary magical race - creatures inhabiting a fable. Hence they have allegorical nicknames, like Happy and Bashful. And, in the European legends, the dwarves did hang out in caves. A cottage is an upgrade. It is Dinklage (who by the way, I like as an actor and I think I like personally, having seen him give an excellent college commencement speech about acting and not giving up) who is making Snow White about people like himself. The woke look to be offended. I don't know if he is generally woke, but he is acting like the type of moron who imagines Baby, It's Cold Outside is about date rape.
I get it that human dwarfs have been oppressed,
ostracized and so forth. Still are, no doubt, particularly when growing up. You
feel sorry for anyone who has been made fun of because of a physical or mental
characteristic to the point it has an impact on their lives. But, should big people
be making a fuss because Disney is making the movie Giants? Of course
not. The giants in fables or movies
aren’t humans either – they are legendary creatures. And, unlike the dwarves,
they are often portrayed as dumb and villainous. Now there’s a complaint in the
making.
Of course, Disney can make the movie anyway it wants.
There have been many variations of Snow White I would think Dinklage would have been
smart enough to snare the role for himself and make it something good and
creative. Or, maybe he is auditioning for it, and . . . now I get it.
*
I’d like to say a word about Bruno Kirby, the actor,
whose real name was - Bruno
Giovanni Quidaciolu Jr. Whenever
anyone asks me who I think the best actor is or was, I usually say Kirby. I
know he wasn’t that big a deal to the general public and you might not even
know who he was, but I thought he could play almost any character and do it
well. A few examples:
When Harry Met Sally. . .,
in which he plays Harry’s Billy Crystal’s best friend, Jess - a nice guy, genteel,
a yuppyish, an intellectual, a writer.
In City Slickers, also with Billy Crystal, he
played another best friend, but this one loyal, athletic, fiery and
opinionated. Still a good friend, but with a completely different personality.
In Good Morning, Vietnam, he played the angry
Lt. Hauk, being spiteful, stupid and with a very bad sense of humor, making him Robin Williams’ character’s foil and target.
In The Godfather II, he plays a young Peter
Clemenza, Corleone’s buddy. In this movie he is a womanizer, cocky,
temperamental and animated – a young gangster whose personality so differed
from DeNiro’s much more placid Corleone. He also speaks fluent and expressive
Italian in the movie.
I’m sure he was in a lot of other things, but I’m not
Wikipedia or IMBD. He died young, 57, of Leukemia.
*
So, what happened to all that exciting proof we were
going to see about UFOs from the government? As I predicted then, and will
continue to predict every time there’s a flurry of activity over aliens, it was much ado
about nothing. Frankly, when I look at the videos, the supposed craft looks
like a bug trapped on their windshield or a reflection. Sometimes it looks like a drone.
I wish it were more exciting, but we are alone – not in the universe – but on our planet. Honestly, 7 billion people is enough company.
However, aybe there is some exciting news out there.
I do disagree with Tabetha's premise that we should only go to alien theories as a last resort. My reason is that on the only planet we are really familiar with - Earth - there is intelligent life that can discuss itself and has in fact moved into space, at least a little. We are responsible for a lot of phenomena that a sentient being, traveling by, would imagine was created by intelligent life (go ahead, make your jokes about there not being intelligent life on Earth).
So, when phenomena are seen in space, though we do not know it is created by an intelligent being (ironically, most people still believe the universe was created by one), we should simply take it as one more possibility, neither more nor less likely unless something else rules it out. We can't dismiss them for the unscientific reason that they are too interesting or exciting.
*
Now, this is really bad luck. All through WWII, there
were zero combat deaths in the lower 48 up into 1945 (obviously, not Hawaii where
the invasion of Pearl Harbor began our war and believe it or not there was a
Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, where they stayed for a
while). Then, May 5, 1945, shortly before the war ends, boom, 6 people in
Oregon die from a Japanese bomb.
It’s a crazy story, but true. Losing the war, the Japanese came up with a strategy that seemed destined to be ineffective, launching thousands of bombs at America, FuGo, or fire balloons, with about 11-33 pounds of explosives attached to them, which they hoped would float thousands of miles across the ocean on the jet stream to land in the U.S. Oddly, just as balloons were the first aircraft in the 18th century, these were the first inter-continental missiles. Relying on the winds was a pretty inefficient system, if you think about it – considering how much trouble even airplanes had dropping bombs right on their targets. It shows you how desperate the Japanese must have been. But roughly 3% of the balloons did land here. Fortunately, nothing really happened except to one family and some students, and, almost prophetically, to the power supply to a nuclear plant involved the Manhattan Project, which was slightly damaged, shutting it down for a short time.
The victims were Archie (a minister) and Elyse Mitchell (a pregnant school-teacher) who were driving along with some of her students. Archie pulled over because Elyse got sick. He talked to a construction crew and Elyse and the schoolkids walked down the road together. Elyse’s last words to her husband were “Look what I found, Dear," Boom. She and four students died instantly and a fifth student shortly thereafter. It is expected that one of them kicked the bomb.
Of course, a few months later, we would drop the big ones
on Japan, Russia declared war on Japan and the war would end. Even before that,
the Japanese, unaware that any but one balloon had ever landed in America,
stopped the program. Too late for the
Mitchells and the kids.
Timing and luck count for so much.
*
I was never good answering essay questions in high school (so I often didn't) or even in college. I got better at faking it in law school and it was good training for being a lawyer.
I just told this story to someone who was asking for help on a school essay about Socrates/Plato. It was a difficult assignment and she was having trouble writing it. After we were done talking and she was going to give it a shot, I told her about my freshman literature class where the teacher asked one student to read her paper on the symbolism in a story we had read. As she went through the symbolism she found in the story, the rest of us were clearly disappointed or stunned that we hadn't seen any of it. After class, I approached the other student (normally, I would have been too shy, but I had gone to high school with her and knew she was pretty shy too). I asked her, how did you know what all that meant? She answered, almost a little embarrassed - I made it up.
Ah hah. Life lesson.
*
I’d guess some people in my age group would know who
Artie Shaw was. In short, he was a top of the heap jazz clarinetist, composer
and band leader in the ‘30s and ‘40s. But, I bet most don’t know this:
Shaw sounds Irish, but he wasn’t. Like so many in the
entertainment industry, including band leaders, he was a Jewish boy, born
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky. He learned to play pretty quickly, taking up the sax at
13 and beginning to tour with the clarinet at age 16.
He became a star in his 20s, after playing with a lot
of groups. Begin the Beguine and Stardust were huge hits. But, he
wanted to be innovative and his fans wanted the popular songs of the time ("'Begin the Beguine' is a pretty
nice tune. But not when you have to play it 500 nights in a row.")
He was the first white band leader to hire a full-time
female vocalist to tour the south. The South didn’t take it so well and she had
to quit. He quit the clarinet in
the ‘50s, describing himself as unable to continue due to compulsive
perfectionism. In the meantime, Downbeat magazine, one of the premier
jazz magazines,
He was phenomenally popular, earning $60,000 a week in
1940 – which would be well over a million a week now. To show you how much
money that was – Burns and Allen, for whose radio show he provided the music
and was a cast member – were making $5,000 a week, 1/12 his salary. And they
were doing great! Oddly, though we remember them (those who do, anyway) as married,
they didn’t appear that way on the radio show until a few years later, and Shaw played one of Gracie's romantic interests.
And, he was romantic. No, not with Gracie, but with
his EIGHT wives! EIGHT! That’s a man who does not learn from his mistakes. That
includes Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, both who complained of abuse from him.
Turner had a nervous breakdown.
He was in the Army during WWII, sometimes playing 4x a
day in battle zones. It didn’t sit well with him and he got a medical discharge
(but, he really couldn’t stick with anything or one long) and entered
psychoanalysis.
They should have put him to different uses during the
war as he was a nationally ranked marksman, no. 4 at one point. And . . . he
found time to be an expert fly fisherman.
Aaaand . . . he was an author. I don’t mean he had a
ghostwriter as most celebs do. He wrote an autobiography, a novel and short
stories.
My favorite Shaw piece - Concerto for Clarinet. Sort of Irving Berlinish.
*
Since we are talking music, I was turned
on to Spotify during the Pandemic and have been listening to a lot of music. My
tastes are nothing if not eclectic. I find some people are almost offended by
it, as they prefer whatever types of music they were exposed to when younger
and refuse to listen to anything they are not familiar with.
I’ve probably listened to close to 2000
songs the past 2 years, many of which I looked for, many of which I came upon,
or read about. I have a lot of playlists, some eclectic themselves – that is for
everything I like regardless of category, but others just for classical, jazz,
crooners (Sinatra, Martin, etc.), 1950s, 1960s, disco, country, rock, girl
power, guitar greats, really, you name it. There’s even some opera and rap
among them.
Lately I notice I have become very
interested in a number of female singers, and no, it is not a physical attraction (though that has happened). These are a few that blow my mind
(BTW, I consider Whitney to have had the greatest voice in recorded history,
but this is not about her).
Annie Haslam. Annie, now a
retired painter in Pennsylvania (she sells stuff online), was a member of
Renaissance in the ‘70s. They had a hit song, just one - See the Carpet of
the Sun, which I was crazy about then and still am. Thanks to Spotify I learned that she had a long career and cut a number of albums. Famous for a 5-octave range,
she has sung some of my favorite songs. One, a cover of Going Home
(based on a Dvorak symphony) that I listen to over and over. Her Rockalise
pretty much just shows off her voice in coloratura (you can google that)
fashion and then breaks into a rock song.
Mary Fahl. Mary is a
lot like Annie, just younger. Actually, they live near one other in Eastern, Pennsylvania.
I don’t know what range she has, but the songs I know are with a deep, hypnotic
and powerful voice. You probably know her without knowing it from the singer on
television commercials. She also has a song she wrote called Going Home,
like Haslam, but it’s not the same song, just equally good. She also wrote Dawning
of the Day, based on a traditional Irish tune, for the Broadway play, Guys.
Allison Krause: Another great
singer. I first heard her years ago when she sang for the movie, Oh,
Brother. Where art thou? It’s an incredible soundtrack to begin with, but
her performances on I’ll Fly Away with Gillian Welch and Down to the
River to Pray are really beautiful, hypnotic, mesmerizing, and other adjectives. I have them on my "sleep" playlist. Maybe
you’ve never heard of Allison. I hadn't until then, but she’s won 27 Grammys. If you are wondering whether that is a lot, it was more more than anyone else in the history of the award until Beyonce broke it, and among men, only Quincy Jones has1 more and Stevie Wonder the same number as her. So why haven't most people heard of her? Well, she concentrates on country-western. But, it is almost like reading a who's who seeing who she has collaborated with. Lately, it's been Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame.
Daniella Andrade: I’ve written about her before. Still a young woman, she started putting her covers of songs backed by her solo acoustic guitar in her bedroom or house posted on youtube. She is now world famous, with just shy of 2 million subscribers. Not page hits, subscribers. These are not Mariah or Bieber numbers, of course, but she isn't a household name. She still releases mostly on youtube, but her song’s production values have increased. I don’t know if that is good or bad. What I love about her is the pure beauty of her voice – I swear it sounds like goodness or fresh baked chocolate chip cookies or something like that – the sound of her solo guitar, and the patient slow pace of her songs. Try some. My favorites are Crazy (orig. Gnarles Barkley), Creep (orig. Radiohead), La Vie en Rose (orig. by Edith Piaf, but covered a zillion times; Daniella’s is my second favorite after Christin Milioti's short ukelele version for How I Met Your Mother) and Ayayai, which I think is her own (not sure, really). Plus, any number of her Xmas songs, but especially – Christmas time is here and Santa, Baby (a song I often always like, depending on the rendition).
I'm done.
