vxbush 6/17/2020 6:11:58 AM

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Occasional Reader 6/17/2020 6:39:55 AM

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Indian Army:  "Sticks and stones will break my bones..."

ChiCom Army: Hold my beer. 

vxbush 6/17/2020 7:07:20 AM

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In #2 Occasional Reader said: Indian Army:  "Sticks and stones will break my bones..." ChiCom Army: Hold my beer. 

Not following, but I've been ignoring the news this week....

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 7:20:48 AM

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Morning NPR lunatic roundup:

1) Surprise!  We need the 1% after all!  NPR is shocked to discover that the society needs the well-off to spend money, because poor people don't spend that much and kind of live hand to mouth.  The economy won't recover until the rich start spending again.  You're astounded, I know. And, of course, NPR seems still kind of dense about the fact that the people who have money to spend on things like shows, fancy restaurant meals or big parties can't/won't really be doing that while the shows and restaurants are closed, the expensive shops are closed (whether from virus regs, having been looted, or both), and having large parties is forbidden.

2) They're dragging out Dylan Roof again.  Because, "white supremacy."

3) And, of course, what would a "white supremacy" discussion be without reviving "Reparations?"  You HAVE to listen to this.  It is off-the-charts bat-shit crazy.

4) And now for something completely different.  We have "conversations" about the issues of the day from "CHAZ."

There was also a discussion trying to push the need to blow a bunch of cash on "renewable energy" to "combat climate change," which tried to compare the Columbia River damming projects and rural electrification under FDR to Obama's "green energy" initiatives (oddly, Solyndra was not mentioned), and how---since we're spending a bunch of money anyway---we need to heavily invest in energy projects to "combat climate change," but unfortunately a certain Evil Orange Man won't do it.  The term "Green New Deal" was carefully minced around, but not uttered.

doppelganglander 6/17/2020 7:32:52 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 4:

On #4, every left-wing special interest group is coming out of the woodwork, trying to push their agenda and get some of that sweet bailout/stimulus money. Only I don't think there's going to be any, at least not for them. I also think there's going to be a lot of pressure to deny funds to cities that sat back and watched the world burn. You just know if Minneapolis, for example, got a bunch if money, it would go for rainbow crosswalks, implicit bias training, and diversity bureaucrats. 

Occasional Reader 6/17/2020 7:36:55 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 3:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/17/asia/china-india-himalayas-conflict-intl-hnk/index.html

From what I’ve read, the troops stationed at this border by mutual agreement do not carry firearms, so this brawl was carried out hand-in-hand, and, literally, with sticks and stones.

Occasional Reader 6/17/2020 7:38:59 AM

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In #4 buzzsawmonkey said: 2) They're dragging out Dylan Roof again.  Because, "white supremacy.

So the Roof, the Roof, the Roof is on fire, news-wise?

JCM 6/17/2020 8:03:16 AM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 6:

If it wasn't so serious that would be funny.

vxbush 6/17/2020 8:08:07 AM

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In #6 Occasional Reader said: From what I’ve read, the troops stationed at this border by mutual agreement do not carry firearms, so this brawl was carried out hand-in-hand, and, literally, with sticks and stones.

The map in that article is slightly confusing. It shows a region of both Pakistan and India that are claimed to be controlled by China. So where was the line of confrontation? 

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 8:10:08 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 5:

Regarding your comment last night, I don't mind Tess "Aunt Jemima" Gardella's performance in "I'm Laughing"; she's performing in the tradition of the "shouter"-type blues singers (Bessie Smith trended towards this style, as compared with some of the quieter blues performers like Alberta Hunter and Clara Smith).  That said, she didn't have a big career, and is hardly a favorite of mine.

The film "Stand Up and Cheer" has Warner Baxter appointed as Cabinet "Secretary of Entertainment" to help America "laugh itself out of the Depression."  The song "I'm Laughing," as you rightly note, is meant as a "socially inclusive" number: it starts with a ragged (presumably out of work) working man; goes to an Irish-Catholic stereotype; a "rural/hick" stereotype; a Jewish sweatshop-worker stereotype; a pro-police bit; a steelworker; a chorus-girl bit that slyly alludes to their having to resort to prostitution to make ends meet ("...if we can laugh, in these round heels..." is a reference not only to shoes worn out from looking for work, but to sexual promiscuity); the streetcleaners bemoaning their lot, which is also an allusion to the "end of the parade" being the end of the '20s boom; it then goes to two "transportation" clips, the blacksmith working on a horseshoe, whose "house will soon be paid for" (traditional skills, traditional transportation, traditional work will bring us success/security) going into a shot of a locomotive engineer (the then-modern transportation; both necessary) before going to the black/blackface concluding sequence ("even the poorest among us will be included in the better times coming").  It's brilliantly done.  

The finale of "Stand Up and Cheer" is almost like a Hollywood version of Leni Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"---or, perhaps more accurately, a Hollywood finale as if staged by August Sander.  Sander was a German portrait photographer whose Weimar-era pictures of working people in their characteristic costumes and tools of their profession are iconic.  In Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" there are a number of pictures of "work brigades" with shovels and other tools assembled in the Nuremberg rallies she films.  At the end of "Stand Up and Cheer," just when things seem blackest (I forget why), someone rushes in to Baxter's office and shouts, "Mr. Secretary, your plan worked! We're out of the red!"  which segues into the big, joyful "We're Out of the Red!" finale, which features marching work brigades (per Reifenstahl) in their characteristic work costumes and tools (e.g., bakers in white with chef's hats carrying trays of baked goods), per Sander. 

It would be interesting to see "Stand Up and Cheer" on a double bill with "Our Daily Bread," a film wherein a bunch of people out of work due to the Depression try to create a cooperative commune farm.  The farm almost prospers, then is about to collapse (I forget why; haven't seen the film in 30 years), but then in a last-ditch effort everyone gets together to dig the irrigation ditch that the farm needs for the crops to survive.  

It would be interesting to see a Hollywood-fascist and Hollywood-communist film together to note the similarities/differences.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 8:12:36 AM

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In #7 Occasional Reader said: Roof

Ya shoulda said, "DiMaggio"...as the old joke says.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 8:54:35 AM

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lucius septimius 6/17/2020 8:57:26 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 12: 

Murderer!

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 8:58:11 AM

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In #11 buzzsawmonkey said: Ya shoulda said, "DiMaggio"...as the old joke says.

I always heard it as "Mickey Mantle," but whatever.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 9:09:09 AM

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doppelganglander 6/17/2020 9:13:37 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 12:

No, I just had to make a virtual appearance at a couple of meetings. 

This would be an excellent time for a critical study, or at least a long article, about Hollywood's response to the Depression in movies like Stand Up and Cheer or Gabriel Over the White House. Or My Man Godfrey - I watched it again recently and paid special attention to William Powell's speeches. 

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 9:21:29 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 16:

Don't forget Golddiggers of 1933, which starts out celebrating the supposed end of the Depression with the shift to the silver standard (that's what "We're in the Money" is about), goes into Ginger Rogers basically saying "that's all bullshit" by her singing the lyrics in pig Latin, at which point the whole thing is interrupted by the sheriff repossessing the costumes and scenery.  And, of course, the film concludes with the "Forgotten Man" number which was a paean to the Bonus Marchers who'd just been routed from Anacostia Flats by the US Army.

doppelganglander 6/17/2020 9:38:10 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 17:

There's a lot of material to work with. Back in the mists of time, i.e. high school,  I wrote a term paper on literature in the 1930s. Basically,  I turned a history assignment into an English paper. I wish I still had it. I got an A, but it's probably a pile of nonsense. The thing that interested me most was why the US didn't go Communist like so many other countries. It would be worth revisiting the question today as we have a substantial minority ready to do just that.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 10:46:31 AM

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In #18 doppelganglander said: The thing that interested me most was why the US didn't go Communist like so many other countries. It would be worth revisiting the question today as we have a substantial minority ready to do just that.

Oh, we came close---very close.  There's a lot of communist stuff in the films and other work of that time; "comes the revolution" was a catchphrase for a while; certainly the Mussolini Modern buildings created in the Roosevelt era (post offices and other government buildings with their ever-so-PC WPA murals made by communist painters) resembled not only fascist architecture (it's a little disconcerting, once you start noticing the fasces on Roosevelt-era buildings, to realize how pervasive they are), but Stalinist architecture; and such things as the seemingly-innocent folk archive started by Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger laid the groundwork for the communist takeover of both history and popular culture we've seen in our own day.   Hell, the Leftist appropriation of Abraham Lincoln, and the groundwork for the communist inroads in the black community, began in the Depression years.

I'd suggest that what happened in the Depression was the laying of the foundation for what we're seeing today.

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 10:47:00 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 15:

I saw the Uncle Ben is not long for this world.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 10:59:45 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 16:

Gabriel Over the White House is a very strange film.  It is, of course, a reworking of the story of King Robert of Sicily being koepenicked---possessed/impersonated---by an angel, a story which is burlesqued by Saki in his short story "Ministers of Grace."

When Gabriel takes possession of the comatose president, played by Walter Huston---(interesting to contrast that role with Huston's banker role in "American Madness")---one of the president's secretaries says, out of the clear blue, "Do you suppose the angel Gabriel could have come down and taken possession of him?" or something like that.  One is left wondering where out of left field she pulled that, since there's no groundwork laid.

The "angelic" president then proceeds to go on a murder spree against the gangsters left over from Prohibition, which presages the early acts of the fascist president Buzz Windrip in Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (published 3 years after the film; was Lewis partly inspired by it?). He also meets with the "March of the Unemployed" in a way that the powers that be did NOT meet with the Bonus Army.  The film's obsession with war debts is reminiscent of Harry McClintock's song "Fifty Years from Now."

Occasional Reader 6/17/2020 11:57:48 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 21:

And again; I want to believe that your encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff could be widely shared and, frankly, monetized on your behalf. 

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 12:07:29 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 22:

The two things I really would like to do are to create the freelance-negotiation primer based on The Maltese Falcon, and to do a That's Entertainment-style clip film of all the stereotypes I can find---black, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Greek, homosexual, etc.---called, tentatively, That's Not Racist, which would basically tell people to get the hell over themselves and learn to laugh at each other again.  I'd want to match pictures of black cooks being "whitefaced" with pancake batter with "Our Gang" white kids getting "blackfaced" by backfiring auto exhausts; have the clips of James Cagney speaking Yiddish; the "I'm Laughing" number we've been discussing; etc.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 12:08:17 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 22:

Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 23:

Of course, the latter project I've mentioned would probably result in my being torn to pieces by an angry mob.

vxbush 6/17/2020 12:29:21 PM

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In #24 buzzsawmonkey said: Of course, the latter project I've mentioned would probably result in my being torn to pieces by an angry mob.

But maybe that's why we need it so much now--because the mob is seemingly in control, and we need alternatives. I know it won't change the mob's mind, but it will change the minds of those who will listen. I think it's a worthwhile project. 

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 12:34:01 PM

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buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 12:39:01 PM

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Reply to vxbush in 25:

James Cagney speaking Yiddish.

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 12:42:37 PM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 27:

Which reminds me -- the other night I had a dream in Yiddish.

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 12:43:30 PM

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In #28 lucius septimius said: Which reminds me -- the other night I had a dream in Yiddish.

And there you were...the Belle of the Matzoh Ball...

buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 12:44:17 PM

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In #28 lucius septimius said: the other night I had a dream in Yiddish.

If I visualize Hebrew characters while speaking Spanish, I'm actually speaking Ladino.

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 12:46:23 PM

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In #30 buzzsawmonkey said:

Trying to Luria me in with that one, eh?

lucius septimius 6/17/2020 3:42:00 PM

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lucius septimius 6/17/2020 3:52:09 PM

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buzzsawmonkey 6/17/2020 4:19:50 PM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 33:

Just Walk Away, Renee

JCM 6/17/2020 4:38:28 PM

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https://twitter.com/TheOfficerTatum/status/1273127849361358848?s=20

In two minutes the guy busts the (D)s......

Kosh's Shadow 6/17/2020 4:38:42 PM

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Occasional Reader 6/17/2020 5:08:10 PM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 32:

Holy crap. Stay safe, you guys.

doppelganglander 6/17/2020 5:08:21 PM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 32:

The ex says he hasn't seen anything about the walkout outside of Twitter. I've been busy cooking so I don't know what the latest is. But we're the lead story on Tucker!