Archive Listing
May 23, 2009 - May 16, 2009

Sunday, May 25, 2008

STILL HERE. It's the day we remember those who made the greatest sacrifices in uniform for our country. As I thought about it, I couldn't imagine a better year in which to highlight Proud, a modest movie from 2004 about the USS Mason, a WWII destroyer escort whose enlisted crew of 160 men were African-American. I saw it about a week ago, stumbling into it on a cable channel so that I missed the beginning and had a deal of catching up to do, because while it has a none of the cinematic brilliance of Glory, it has an altogether different quality which you have to watch through to the end to discern: a kind of innocence that contrasts sharply with the sometimes bitter subjects it relates.

The USS Mason was assigned to the North Atlantic convoys and experienced the danger of both U-boats and the extremely severe weather that brought many naval vessels to grief during the war. Ossie Davis (the last film project of the late actor-director-WW II veteran) narrates the experiences of the crew, and it takes a while to realize that this is not simply a filmic device but an authentic memoir of what occurred. The action proceeds not as a plot but as a series of anecdotes, mingling events of war with the characters and conflicts of the men involved.

I kept thinking as I watched, "This is not a good movie. What a shame." The interactions between characters are stilted, stagey, at their worst like a bad play, and all our glimpses of the families back home seem glossed with an overdone prettiness, which results eventually in a sense of unrealism and sentimental excess. "This could -- should -- have been so much better," I thought.

But I was wrong. I won't reveal the cleverest devices of the movie, but I will tell you that anyone who's had a close relative who was a wartime veteran will recognize at last the validity of the chosen narrative technique. The men who commit their own war experiences to paper as a memorial -- not as a bid for some Mailer-esque heavyweight writing championship -- tend to do it just this way. With the idealized eye of those who look back from far more experienced old age and see the good in the friends of their youth, the unforgivable acts of certain others, smoothing some of the rough spots along the way and spotlighting some of the key events, which are known to be key because they have been remembered and learned from throughout a long lifetime of reflection.

This movie dramatizes the memory of a virtuous and humble man, one who loved his country and wanted to serve her despite many provovations to the contrary. In the end, what appears in the telling to be a certain cleaning up of the facts actually confirms the solid values and honor of the narration. It's like listening to your own grandfather -- what he wants you to take from his hard-won experience, without all the clutter of real-world complications that so often obscure what's truly important.

Go find this movie and watch it. Note that I haven't given away any of the details. Behind the pride there is real courage, both physical and moral, real racism that had to be contended with, valorous behavior by black and white men, and a realization of casualties deserving of remembrance on Memorial Day that go far beyond flesh-and-blood wounds to encompass lifelong hurts which may or may not be salved by memorializing their pain with almost perfect dignity.

P.S. A CBS DISGRACE. Last Veterans Day, 60 Minutes chose to ignore any recognition of the U.S. military and focus instead on the twenty-something brats who are joining the white collar workforce. We noted it at the time as a suspiciously ill-timed story. Now, 60 Minutes has run exactly the same story this Memorial Day weekend. There can be no possibility that it's a coincidence. It is a deliberate, malicious slap in the face of our armed forces. The only mention of Memorial Day on the Sunday program was a self-absorbed reminiscence by Andy Rooney that dealt exclusively with the friends he lost in his own WWII experience, with no mention of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who represent the strongest antidote to the emerging plague called the "millennial generation." To CBS and the other sick narcissists of the MSM, the brave young men and women presently serving in uniform don't exist at all. (Oh yeah, there was a mention of Iraq -- another bad news story about the peril of Iraqis who "collaborated" with the U.S.) Andy Rooney wants a "new religion" that does away with war. It appears that until this ridiculous dream is realized, he prefers to stare haughtily down his nose at all things military, just like his corrupt fellow-travellers at CBS. All we can do is call them on their arrogance and their dishonorable omissions. And remember what they refuse to.

Friday, May 23, 2008

REMEMBERING. I don't know why this had to be the first one, but it just always was. I was never that much of a fan of Matt Dillon -- and Chester, and Festus, and Miss Kitty, and Doc, ugh -- and even as a kid I grew weary of the fact that Dillon always got shot in the shoulder. Damn, the man must have had a hole the size of an apple up there after all those gunfights in Dodge. But Marshal Dan Troop, the Lawman, was believable somehow.

Why do I remember this guy as something special among all the TV western stars of the early sixties? I don't recall a single episode or plot of the half-hour series. I think it's that he was somehow more modern, in both his acting and his on-screen character. No bravado. But he was obviously a man. And he was the law. Excuse me. The Law. The way we'd all like to think the FBI is, only it isn't. Here's what his fansite (yes!) has to say about the show:


You can read more about him at the fansite, but I'm going to quote one more paragraph here because it demonstrates, I think, that even in the old hokey days of television we've come to laugh at the medium still possessed the power to burn through artifice and reveal the genuineness, or lack of it, of the people inside those tiny screens.


"Villain or secondary lead." You see, that's how you get to be forgotten even if you've been "decorated for valor at Guadalcanal." That's why I remembered him above all the other western TV stars. When the Lawman left his office to go get the bad guy, his specific gravity was ten times greater than anyone else's. Even to a kid.

What I didn't know when I started looking for him was that he had also played a key role in the last great western Hollywood ever made. No. Not Unforgiven.(Someday I'll hack that piece of overpraised nonsense up the way it deserves, but not today.) The last real western made was Pale Rider, Clint Eastwood's flawed but still excellent reworking of Shane. I was shocked to discover at John Russell's fansite that he had played the part of Marshal Stockburn, the movie's equivalent to the Jack Palance character in Shane and, under Eastwood's direction, almost as mythic in his villainy as "The Preacher" who comes from wherever (?) to kill him.


If you read the user comments on Pale Rider at imdb.com, no one remembers who Russell is. They think he's a Lee Van Cleef lookalike. But Lee Van Cleef couldn't have played this part any more than Jack Palance could The Stockburn character works because he's every bit as skilled, experienced, and determined as a 60-year-old gunman could be, but he can also show the sudden fear of a brave man who knows that his number is unaccountably up. It's a key contribution to the movie. He doesn't run. He stands his ground. But he knows -- and through him we know -- that the Preacher isn't just a man. Stockburn would kill any man.

If you read further, you'll find that Russell was very ill when he made Pale Rider. He's no longer with us. But I, personally, can't wait to see Pale Rider again. Hats off to Clint Eastwood for giving the Lawman his final bow. And if you're an obsessive about trivia, here's what is still known about each and every episode of a series that honestly couldn't be more forgotten.

John Russell. Wish I could have met him. How about you?

Thursday, May 22, 2008

TIRED, AIN'T YOU? The Dark Ages are already here. Western civilization is exhausted and moribund. To some degree it doesn't matter how it happened, although possible causes are as numerous as the rational social-engineering constructs that have swept through the intelligentsia like deadly silent viruses for more than a century. What matters is that the thrust of creavity which animated civilization for 500 years is spent. Every form of learning and art in our society is stone cold dead. That's the real meaning of the term "post-modern." Europeans mostly know it, and that's why they have stopped having children. Americans mostly don't, but that's only because there's a certain illusion of momentum that goes with the loud, active lives we conflate with the term 'vitality.' We are still in motion, so caught up in our own hysterical overdose of sensory input that we haven't yet perceived the emptiness of everything we consume.

But it's over. Absolutely. Caput. Ironically, the American preoccupation wth all things racial -- and the real and false divisions created thereby -- has actually served to conceal from us the dire nature of our situation. For example, we -- all Americans, that is -- take pride in the transformative power of the musical traditions African-Americans invented, puffing out our chests at the way they have captured the world audience, without noticing that all the taproots, variations, derivations, and inspired responses have died.

Of all these, jazz is the crown jewel -- of both African-American and greater American twentieth century culture. It has been characterized as a great breakthrough, a step beyond the practiced mathematical brilliance of Bach and Mozart to the spontaneous and improvisational supra-mathematical genius of Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis. Maybe it was. Dead now. Cold, cold in its grave. Today's jazz afficionados are either old men or anarchical contrarians. They are no longer "the people."

The same is true of every other vein of supposedly life-giving African-American music. Motown is ancient history, a moment in time that incites nostalgia but no new artists. Rhythm and blues still sells records, but everyone knows who the icons are, and nothing new is being done. Black vocalization -- the determination not to sing written notes but everything around them -- has become a rank parody of itself, a sorry cliche observed slavishly (and for the most part, ridiculously) by the legions of the untalented who bid for nano-second stardom in the annual American Idol contest. As for the blues which started all these traditions, there's no one who will ever have the credibility of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Done.

Rock and roll is dead. Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones still outdraw every band who came afterwards. And you can chart the gate receipts in reverse order of age. U2 still attracts bigger audiences than Radiohead. Rock and roll is dead. As a damn doornail.

Hip Hop has been the great surrender, the abandonment of actual music for pre-conscious apostrophizing. Which entirely suits our post-Christian culture. We are tired of the individual self-consciousness initiated by Socrates and so exquisitely refined by Jesus Christ. It's too demanding, too painful, too rapacious in its constant insistence on the awareness of others. Hip hop is the testament of the empty "I," the salami thin soul of those who envy the fame of Miles Davis without realizing for a second the death he was experiencing to set them free from all purpose and pain.

But Miles was hardly the only saint of the new religion of unconsciousness. Each form of art and learning has had its own savior/slayer. Art as painting is dead. Poetry is dead. The novel is dead. Formal classical music is dead. Philosophy is dead. Science as a particularized branch of philosophy is dead. Even the one genuinely new art form of the twentieth century -- film -- is dead.

Yes, I toss the term "dead" around quite a lot. What do I mean by it? That there is nothing left to aspire to, only a constant insistence that everything is drab, arbitrary, randomly hurtful, and rarely worth fighting against. That art in its most illuminated form is only a decorative collage of all the phony beliefs that obtained in the past. The prevailing message is always that harmony is an illusion, love is temporary and probably a joke, God is a hypothetical fantasy feeding brute sentimentality and violence, and life itself is just one damn thing after another, to be observed, sometimes measured, but taken seriously only by fools. Which is not to say that genuine humor ever enters the equation. Humor lives in juxtapositions. There is absurdity, which is funny if there is also meaning. When there is no meaning, there is only absurdity and therefore nothing to contrast it with. The joke that is life has no punchline.

That's the "post-modern" logic which turns everything on its head, defies analysis, and turns virtue into crime and vice versa.

But that's where we are. It's why the barbarians are massing at the gates. They have never needed to be conscious because their religion regards them all as drones in an obedient hive. With the sense of the hive, they have detected that we actually aspire to be like them -- even if it means our own punishment, suffering, subjugation, and death.

To the extent that you sympathize with them and make apologies for them, this is why. To the extent that you are not willing to fight them and die opposing them, this is why. If you have ever wondered why they stand for things you think you cannot abide -- violent abuse of women, totalitarian restrictions on speech and thought, wanton disregard of the value of human life, virulent anti-semitism -- and yet you find yourselves making allowances for them, this is why. You are so sick of being conscious that you can't wait to go "gently into that good night." And "good night" is the river that carries their faith through the ages.

Antidote? None. Unless you can find some way back to a love of life, past Picasso and T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett and David Mamet and Eminem and Phillip Glass and the New York Times Magazine to something like a new Renaissance.

Good luck with that.

Dog Bites Man:

GERMAN HUMOR. Free-association commenter Penny will be all over us on this one. She doesn't like it when we don't keep up with the rest of the blogosphere on a timely basis. She may have a point this time. The blog entry we're referencing goes all the way back to April 9. And it concerns Ace of Spades, who isn't exactly at the top of our list of estimable bloggers. (We'd like him a lot more if he used some of his ad income to hire a damn copy editor to correct his spelling and apostrophe errors -- its, it's, its, it's, its, it's not all the same, pirate boy.) What can we say? We don't pay all that much attention to the blogosphere. So sue us. Today, we're writing about old news. In defense of Ace. The "Me Too" king of the Internet.

Even so. Ace is frequently smarter than he is redundant and careless. And he made a perfectly good point about Obama's "Let's Talk About Race" speech:


Okay, true, that's the whole thing. End of post. (How else do you get to be Conservative Blog of the Year?) But what's interesting sometimes is what happens after the right harpoon has been cleverly sunk in the blubber of the whale. Here's what Europe's "Best Humorous Blog in 2004," from Germany, had to say in response:


I especially like the phrase "whole legions of Jews." Has a certain Teutonic ring to it, doesn't it? But not as much as the part about how they "get refused service at Cracker Barrel1..." [sic] Yeah, that's what really steams all the Jews I know (and don't start with me, you Sadly Neiners; I do know some Jews). If it weren't for the Cracker Barrel thing, they'd be completely okay with the fact that the minority they've done more to help than any other ethnic group on earth, going all the way back to the earliest days of the civil rights movement, is delighted to parrot all the anti-semitic bile uttered by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Wright. Particularly at a time when most of the 'civilized' Old World is blithely willing to give Adumjihad a pass on his stated intention to nuke Israel out of existence.

It's absolutely fine that another ethnic minority is voluble about the desire of many of its members to see you and your homeland wiped off the face of the earth as long as there are no embarrassing incidents at third-rate chain restaurants.

It takes a really discerning intellect to reduce a question like Ace's to irrelevant, contemptuous farce. One might almost say it requires a German intellect. Which is odd. Given that when I made fun of Sadly Nein's boast about its European awards and German origin, its bloggers were quick to point out that they weren't really German, just smarter-than-average Americans.

Guess what? I'm thinking you're Germans. I'm thinking you're goddam Krauts. Only a Kraut would be too arrogant to realize that this is one subject people with ties to Germany should know better than to be superior and dismissive about.

Fick dich.

P.S. If you're wondering about relevance, don't. Here's what's happening now.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

DAVE.39.1-43. I never knew when Jimmy Stewart's birthday was. It was a surprise to discover in Mark Steyn's outstanding essay on the man today that it's only one day after my Dad's. Another dutiful Taurus. That's not all they had in common. But the coincidence moved me to look up an old post I wrote when I was blogging without a computer more than 10 years ago. Here it is:


Yes, it's an acknowledgment and not much more than that. For a beautiful treatment of Stewart as an actor, read the Steyn piece. It's well worth it.

Now. If you don't like family bragging, stop reading now. We don't do a lot of it here, because we don't like it either. But I'm going to do it today because I'm feeling nostalgic about my Dad, who died eight years ago. He was 14 years younger than Stewart, but also a WWII pilot, and they went to the same boarding school in Pennsylvania, Mercersburg Academy, as did I. (Along with Benicio del Toro, Robin Thomas, Franchot Tone, and Tom Drake.) In fact, James Stewart roomed with a cousin of my Dad's at Mercersburg and Princeton. Perhaps because of all this, I actually saw Jimmy Stewart in person, when he received an award from the Hasty Pudding Society in 1970. I was a freshman and not yet a member, so I sneaked in with the help of a kind steward and an understanding upperclassman. He was ten feet away, standing alone, waitiing to be called for the ceremony. Tall. Distinguished. Looked exactly like his pictures. All I had to do was walk around one couch and speak to him.

I chickened out. I left without invading his space. Sometimes I'm sorry about that. Mostly I'm not. He looked like a genuinely nice man, a private man. I didn't have anything to say to him other than that I was a fan and went to a school he had gone to. I think I caught his eye for one brief look and a smile. That's enough.

He left us all those movies, which are still a pleasure to watch. Only an ingrate would lament not having more than that.

NO JOKING ALLOWED. Just got a nasty email from Mrs. CP. "Where's the funny?" she asks. "You guys have gotten as depressing as everyplace else on the Internet. STOP IT!"

Sorry. It's a gray gloomy day in the neighborhood. We're only human. So here's what we were able to find in a desperate search across the web for "funny."

An Onion article about the terrible trauma to children caused by Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.


A TMZ photo gallery that might be funny unless it's just plain loathsome.


A site about Engrish. Yes, it is. You know it is. Funny.


Many hours of funny in the form of the top 50 comedy skits of all time. Forget your angst. Enjoy.


And just in case you've forgotten why it's suddenly gotten so hard to find and be funny, here's an explanation of what funny is and why it's so damned inappropriate with the Messiah about to mantle us with salvation.


You see. There isn't going to be any more humor when the Obamillennium arrives. Laugh at Michelle and watch your own head go rolling down the street. So enjoy it while you can.

Monday, May 19, 2008

DAVE.32.1-26. I don't want to overdo this, but once I got started thinking about it, I couldn't stop. So take all that follows with a grain of salt, but also remember that salt is a miraculous spice which somehow heightens the keenness of the taste buds so that it doesn't change flavors so much as increase our ability to perceive them.

What got me started was this morning's Drudge Report:



As he sometimes is, the tabloid king of the Internet was right. The scene of Obama's latest campaign exploit was part religion and part Hollywood. There's something of the sacred ceremonial rite and something of the pure cinematic scene in it. But what if those two perspectives are really the same thing? What if the salvational liberal vision that is always so reluctant to consider the long-term consequences of its policy prescriptions is actually no more substantive than the happy ending of a classic Hollywood movie? Is what's being sought, in fact, merely a dramatic plot resolution that highlights the heroes-villains duality of our emotional cosmology and then immediately fades to black before the messiness of ongoing reality can disrupt the happy sensation of closure?

It's an idea that can't be tested or even fully explained without an example. So I went looking for famously perfect Hollywood endings, most importantly ones that preclude lame sequels, which are notoriously the mark of mercenary Republican capitalists who start planning Spiderman 8 after the initial blockbuster windfall because it's so easy for them to believe that every epic conflict will have to be repeated again and again, and again and again and again, based on the logic that truly final endings are an invitation to bankruptcy.

Which made me think of Casablanca. Yeah, I know some TV whore once contemplated or produced a sequel (who cares which, unless there was actually some godawful TV series), and some idiot is presently planning a remake, but this is a movie everyone knows ended with the scene shown above. It's an archetype, so embedded in our popular culture that the most lucrative exploitation of it was a Woody Allen comedy that fleshed out the process by which Hollywood fantasy becomes personal, even semi-scriptural, allegory.

Call it a post-modern deconstruction. Liberals love that kind of intellectual exercise, don't they? What can we learn about libs by analyzing an ultimate filmic happy ending?


Sorry. Truly. I love the movie, too. I think it's one of the best Hollywood ever made. But there is no happily ever after. Real life is not a static model. There is no single point at which all that has been done wrong can be automatically corrected by a moment of deep-down good intentions. Hostility does not fade away under the relentless pressure to talk people's passions into acquiescence, and most of the people you talk to don't look like Ingrid Bergman anyway. Evil is not disposed of by a single revolver shot fired by a man so much in love that he crosses the ultimate boundary to stop a long overlooked nemesis. Eternal friendships are not created on the fly by morally ambivalent rivals whose interests momentarily intersect. The consequences of years of cynical inaction, fence-sitting, and generalized contempt for everyone cannot be swept away with a last minute, wholly self-interested decision to act. And deciding that the object of your personal decision to commit murder is a Nazi does not bring automatic absolution to those who believe they are living in a godless universe where the only possible crime is murdering someone who's not smart enough to believe in nothing.

If you really truly think you believe in nuance, try walking a mile in the shoes of the producers who make the sequels. Try imagining that after the credits you think portend salvation for all the supporters of Obama there will be another soul-challenging plot, and another, and another, another. Until he has to confront the evil in himself to know what it takes to protect those in his charge.

You see, that's the biggest thing liberals can't bring themselves to believe in -- that time and life and history will still keep going after the end of history they imagine will proceed from their nomination of a deus ex machina to fix everything wrong in the world with the right goddam platitude.

I'm inclined to agree with them. Of course, everything in life can be fixed with a platitude. My tragedy is that I'm old enough to be literate. Obama is incapable of generating the right platitudes. He's just Jimmy Carter with better diction. A pessimist with bad vibes, a sour wife, and enunciation that doesn't remind anyone of backwater country music. But just as grim. And, as commenter Guy T. points out, the mien of an undertaker.

The only movies starring undertakers are horror movies. And they never have happy endings. What would Dooley Wilson think?

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