Dammit, William Goldman died. Justly celebrated for his screenwriting, credited and otherwise, but if you haven't read his original novel THE PRINCESS BRIDE, remedy that ASAP. As much as you may love the movie, the book is leagues better. Rest in witty, ironic peace, sir.
Interesting remembrance here. Among other stories—
I sat with Bill for the last time Monday, in New York City. His friend of 80 years, John Kander, was there, too. With his lyricist Fred Ebb, Kander wrote "Cabaret" and "Chicago" and the song "New York, New York." They had shared an apartment in the 1950s on West 72nd Street along with Bill's older brother, James Goldman, who wrote "A Lion in Winter" and the book for "Follies." Imagine the magic in that apartment, when they were all young and everything was ahead of them.
Sad to hear about the death of Simeon Booker, one of the best to ever do it. As the correspondent for Jet, he was crucial in telling the story of Emmett Till, and the civil rights movement from its infancy. https://t.co/mZILb4fKhD
Simeon Booker, a trail-blazing African-American journalist and first full-time black reporter at The Washington Post, dies at age of 99. https://t.co/NkiK1cPS0o
His work brought national attention to the murder of Emmett Till, which became one of the flashpoints for the civil rights movement. Mr. Booker’s article in JET Magazine included an open-casket picture of the boy that shocked the nation. Rest in power, sir. And thank you. https://t.co/TfbPT4wCAu
I hadn't known about his World War II experience, described by the Washington Post. It certainly is of a piece with how black soldiers were treated—
Drafted into the Army... Mr. Hendricks served in France after the Normandy invasion. But his most harrowing wartime experiences came from mistreatment by white soldiers in his own army, he recalled more than six decades later to Lee Ellen Martin, a University of Toledo graduate student writing a thesis on the singer. Mr. Hendricks said U.S. military police officers fired at him and other black soldiers they suspected of consorting with French women.
Out of fear, the black soldiers fled their unit. As a battalion clerk with access to military papers, Mr. Hendricks said he requisitioned a car and two trucks, loaded with gasoline, food and other supplies. He and the other African American soldiers sold the goods on the black market for several months before they were arrested and charged with "desertion in the face of the enemy."
"What enemy?" Mr. Hendricks said he responded. "You mean the white military police firing on us?"
He spent nearly a year in custody, before being returned to the front.
It's an enormous legacy to try choosing from, but here's a treat from the early days:
I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin' toward a coffee colored Cadillac
I was pushin' through the crowd to get to where she's at
And I was campaign shouting like a southern diplomat
There are not five better lyrics in all of American music better than that verse. Hell, I'm not entirely sure if I can come up with five better verses in all of English poetry if you spotted me Mr. Yeats and the entire Oxford Anthology. The comic desperation of the protagonist is impeccably limned. The meter's perfect, the imagery sublime. Have you ever seen a coffee-colored Cadillac? Me, neither, but I have heard Southern diplomats campaign-shoutin'. I surely know what that's about so, yeah, I trust the poet on the Cadillac, too.
Chuck Berry invented the language of rock and roll and, through that, reinvented the English language for several generations. He did it in that most American way possible, the way Mark Twain did it, or Walt Whitman, or Kerouac. He did it by experimenting, by playing with the language as though it were the greatest toy he'd ever found. Consider the other things he did with it.
As I was motorvatin' up over the hill/I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville. (Maybellene)
You'd motorvated in your time, too. You just didn't know the word for it.
Pay phone, somethin' wrong, dime gone, will mail/ I ought to sue the operator for tellin' me a tale
Ah, too much monkey business, too much monkey business/ Too much monkey business for me to be involved in. (Too Much Monkey Business)
Close observation of the human condition. (You had similar botheration last week, didn't you?) And, from it, Bob Dylan was inspired to write "Subterranean Homesick Blues."
They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale/ The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale. (C'est La Vie).
Coolerator. It's where you get the cold drink after a hard day of motorvatin' and campaign shoutin', I guess.
And, finally, the restatement of the American Dream for a new century, just the way Walt Whitman yawped it in the streets of Manhattan.
His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man,/ And you will be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around/ To hear you play your music when the sun go down.
Maybe someday your name will be in lights/ Saying 'Johnny B. Goode tonight'."
That "maybe" is the poet's touch. It's depthless in its possibilities. It might happen. It might not happen. But it has a chance to happen, and that's all that ever has mattered in America. That chance. Of course, the possibility gets a little brighter when you hang it on that riff. The Riff. The only Riff. The riff that reached across the Atlantic and into Keith Richards and John Lennon and also reached all the way down through the years, like the faint echoes of The Big Bang, unto the generations.
Larry Colburn, who became an 18-year-old American hero when he intervened with two comrades to halt the massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by United States soldiers in 1968, elevating an innocuous hamlet named My Lai into a watchword for the horrors of war, died on Tuesday at his home in Canton, Ga. He was 67.
...
Mr. Colburn was the last surviving member of a three-man helicopter crew that was assigned to hover over My Lai on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, to identify enemy positions by drawing Vietcong fire.
Instead, the men encountered an eerie quiet and a macabre landscape of dead, wounded and weaponless women and children as a platoon of American soldiers, ostensibly hunting elusive Vietcong guerrillas, marauded among defenseless noncombatants.
The crew dropped smoke flares to mark the wounded, "thinking the men on the ground would come assist them," Mr. Colburn told Vietnam Magazine in 2011.
"When we would come back to those we marked," he said, "we'd find they were now dead."
Audaciously and on his own initiative, the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., swooped down and landed the copter.
"Mr. Thompson was just beside himself," Mr. Colburn recalled in an interview in 2010 for the PBS program "The American Experience.""He got on the radio and just said, 'This isn't right, these are civilians, there's people killing civilians down here.' And that's when he decided to intervene. He said, 'We've got to do something about this, are you with me?' And we said, 'Yes.'"
Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm.
"Y'all cover me!" Mr. Thompson was quoted as saying. "If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!"
"You got it boss," Mr. Colburn replied. "Consider it done."
Mr. Thompson, Mr. Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, the copter's crew chief, found about 10 villagers cowering in a makeshift bomb shelter and coaxed them out, then had them flown to safety by two Huey gunships. They found an 8-year-old boy clinging to his mother's corpse in an irrigation ditch and plucked him by the back of his shirt and delivered him to a nun in a nearby hospital.
On this particular day, Charles Pierce adds—
To me, this always has been one of the more astonishing displays of courage of which I've ever heard, and I heard about it the way everyone else did, years later, because the Army did its best to cover the whole thing up and to slander the reputations of the helicopter crew involved. (Needless to say, the Nixon Administration was particularly venal in this regard.) Were we a truly vibrant and evolved republic, Larry Colburn's funeral would be on national television. Children would read about him in school. There would be memorials on the National Mall and at West Point.
At the very least, there would be an earnest panel on television discussing the many facets of courage, from John Glenn's piloting a dangerously crippled spacecraft back to earth to, "You got it, boss," in the face of friendly fire. If there were a few more Larry Colburns in our politics, that would be nice, too.
2008: Colburn with Do Ba, whom he rescued at My Lai
Chitose Suzuki/Associated Press
The word "hero" is thrown around a lot these days, but there's no denying that former astronaut and Senator John Glenn was a real hero. He died today at the age of 95. Glenn was the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth in 1962, and was one of the seven original astronauts-- the Mercury Seven -- selected by NASA for spaceflight. In 1998, he became the oldest to fly in space when he flew on the Discovery space vehicle at age 77. As a Marine aviator, Glenn flew 59 combat missions in the South Pacific in WW II and 63 combat missions during the Korean War. As a Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio from 1974 to 1999, Glenn was the principal author of the 1979 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act.
Really sad to learn both of his death, and of his having had Alzheimer's for several years.
I can't think of anyone who made me laugh more. That it was almost always as part of an ensemble is a testament to his talent and seriousness as an actor.
Wilder was wonderful in all roles I've seen. I remember "Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx" from around 1970, when it was released (and has had limited availability since). The plot may have been over-the-top whimsical, yet I've always wanted to see the film again, on the strength of Wilder's sincere and un-cutesy performance.
That his timing was brilliant goes without saying. From all accounts, he seems to have been a genuinely sensitive and thoughtful person.
Those qualities came across as a sincerity that made it easy to feel a personal connection. With that, it's comforting to hear his nephew describe himself and Wilder's wife each taking a hand, just before the passing, as—
...incredibly, on a random speaker playlist, Ella Fitzgerald, who was his favorite singer, started to sing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."
...he kept going and going and won some of his greatest victories in the 21st Century, near what would prove to be the final years of his life. In his hometown of New York, he successfully fought to end the stop-and-frisk policies that unconstitutionally targeted blacks and Latinos. In the bigger arena, he challenged America's right to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without trial, and won his battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.
His words from 2002 about the United States and the so-called "war on terror" were particularly prescient:
"A permanent war abroad means permanent anger against the United States by those countries and people that will be devastated by U.S. military actions. Hate will increase, not lessen; and the terrible consequences of that hate will be used, in turn, as justification for more restrictions on civil liberties in the United States."
[Rep. John] LEWIS: People respected him because of what he stood for. He came out against the war in Vietnam, so - became one of the first leaders to speak up and speak out against the war in Vietnam. And the Georgia legislature challenged his seating, and it went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. But he never gave up, never became bitter or hostile. He kept the faith, and the Supreme Court ordered the state legislature to seat him.
...
...Julian must be remembered as one who inspired another generation of young people to stand up, to speak up and speak out. He traveled all over America, speaking on college campuses, but also to large groups of - for peace, for nonviolence and for protecting the environment. One of his latest - probably the last thing that he wrote - it was about including the gay, lesbian, transgender communities as part of the civil rights legislation of 1964. He supported that effort.
She was one of the first women to join Magnum, later leaving the agency to control her work.
The NYT Lens blog calls her a "force of nature" over her fifty year career—
Perhaps Ms. Mark’s best-known work was her intimate series on prostitutes in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, that was published in The New York Times Magazine in 1987. She said that the book of those images, "Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay" (Knopf), "“was meant almost as a metaphor for entrapment, for how difficult it is to be a woman."
Lens quotes Mark from its 2012 interview—
"I don’t like gimmicky pictures; I’ve always hated them""...
"I think that's what's happened in photography now, which is too bad. Everything’s become overdone and overcomplicated and over-retouched. You know? There's no retouching in these pictures at all. None. It's all by light. You don't need to retouch if you know how to light."
Lens quotes former Magnum head Charles Harbutt
"I think she would probably be happy that she died working,"” he said. "That would have been a matter of pride for her. She never gave up. She always was out there trying to tell the most important story she could think of as best she could. And that was very good."
Mark's most recent project was an exploration of New Orleans to mark the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The project will be published later this summer by CNNMoney.
Despite the range of his work, he acknowledged in a 1998 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I guess it's my lot in life to be identified with Nixon."
That was an unanticipated result of the 1992 suit Kutler and Public Citizen filed against the National Archives, which held over 3000 hours of Oval Office tapes. Until the plaintiffs won, only 63 hours had ever been made public (at the time of the Watergate hearings and prosecutions).
Although the unvarnished conversations reverberated with incriminating observations by Nixon and his inner circle, Professor Kutler said his lawsuit had as much to do with securing access as revealing culpability.
"This is all about establishing further precedent, to make things more transparent," he said in 2011.
Still, the tapes provided Professor Kutler with grist for a book that became a standard reference on Watergate, "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes"; a play that he wrote, "I, Nixon"; and a television program that he created with the comedian Harry Shearer, "Nixon's the One" a series of vignettes that enacted transcripts from the tapes verbatim. Mr. Shearer described it as "dark comedy."
The tapes, Professor Kutler said, "alternately amused and appalled" him.
"Here, we have both exceptional candor and a practiced level of deceit; the display of a constant calculus of political considerations; the exhibit of raw, human emotions; and, above all, the revelations of extraordinary, illegal, seemingly unprecedented presidential behavior and power," he wrote in "Abuse of Power." "These tapes are the bedrock in laying bare the mind and thoughts of Richard Nixon."
"In the end," Professor Kutler wrote, "Nixon's tapes convicted him.
Shearer on his collaboration and friendship with Kutler, "a historian who made history"—
Courage is a virtue we're taught to associate with generals, and athletes... Stanley Kutler, history professor in the little college town of Madison, Wisconsin, had the balls to stand up to the former president of the United States and his financial supporters, and to see the battle through to victory. ... What Stanley Kutler gave us is a gift that will keep giving, not just to comedians, and historians, but to anyone curious about those with powerful really act, and talk, and think.
"I coiled up an old garden hose into the shape of a trumpet ... and bound it in three places with wire to make it look like it had valves. ... And for the bell on the other end, I found a not-too-rusty kerosene funnel."
He played his first instrument after neighbors chipped in to buy him a pawnshop trumpet. From those beginnings, Terry went on to nearly seven decades as performer and music educator.
From Italian TV in 1958, members of the Ellington band's trumpet section perform "El Gato." (Left to right: Shorty Baker, Clark Terry, Cat Anderson, Ray Nance)—
London, 1967—
Leading a quintet in 2000—
Along with so many accomplishments as sideman and leader, Terry created a long-running sub-genre: the scat singing of his alter ego, "Mumbles."
Here he is in 1965, with the Oscar Peterson trio—
Scatting and mumbling, with Aretha and friends in 2001—
Like Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Nance, Terry found it natural to combine the highest levels of musicianship with entertaining showmanship. The humor of the Mumbles-Aretha dialog even seems to harken back to black vaudeville. It reminds me (a bit) of the "indefinite talk" routines credited to Mantan Moreland. Other comedians (including Moreland's one-time partner, Flournoy Miller) would perform it; Moreland was perhaps its originator, and certainly its brilliant master.
Not to digress too much, but—the Encyclopedia of Harlem Renaissance (K-Y) entry above suggests (on page 813) that after hundreds of low-budget films, radio work, and an occasional A-picture, Moreland "apparently ... was even considered as a replacement for Shemp Howard in the Three Stooges comedy team."
To think: what might have been... Certainly, an African-American Stooge would been used to set up the crude punchlines of the time. Yet there also could have been rich slapstick opportunities; it's easy to picture the diminutive Moreland dodging Stooge fights and emerging triumphant, as other heads knocked together.
But back to a different legacy: Clark Terry's frequent musical channeling of this sort of comic tradition. It's captured well in this version of "Never"—
UPDATE: Meanwhile, the GOP good-will ambassador to the third world's boy bordellos and notorious spokesmodel for better living through chemical dependency, Rush Limbaugh says that Robin Williams suicide was because of his political leftist attitude.
It was natural for someone with his good looks and genial air to have been cast as heroes.
The image may not have been so different from reality. Garner does seem to have been humble enough to remember his past; according to the NYT, it included his leaving home home at 14 to escape abuse, then drifting for years before finding his way to acting.
When actor James Garner decided to help organize and attend the March on Washington in 1963, he wasn't just listening to his conscience. He and other actors who attended may have been embarking on Hollywood's first large-scale political act since the days of McCarthyism and Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.
Garner's involvement was part of a long career of political activism. He told people he met his wife, Lois Clarke, at party for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. (Clarke gently corrected him in an appendix to his memoir, "The Garner Files" — they actually met at an earlier party, she said.)...
You have to admire a star who not only had the same wife for 58 years, but who wanted to say he had met her thanks to Adlai Stevenson!
Nelson continues—
...Though he believed in supporting causes political and environmental, Garner was staunchly against actors holding office for the most part. In "The Garner Files," the self-identified "bleeding-heart liberal" wrote:
Too many actors have run for office. There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.
The "most explosive revelation" in his autobiography was that Garner smoked marijuana for much of his adult life. "I started smoking it in my late teens," Garner wrote. "I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn't like the effect. Not so with grass. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving. I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn't like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don't know where I'd be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I've concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal."
I best remember Garner in the role he named his favorite. (Co-star Julie Andrews said the same of her part.) It's understandable that the actors felt that way about this one.
NPR's piece included audio clips from an old interview, with some memories of how his immigrant father encouraged him when he was young.
Even if the quick summations emphasize the "hard bop" label, Silver had a great melodic gift. The beauty of tunes he composed is inseparable from how it's also impossible to sit still, when hearing the propulsive beat of Silver as arranger and pianist.
Hers was an authentic American voice, as much as are Whitman or Dickinson, Melville or Dylan, Poe or Twain or Baldwin or Wright. It at first was marginalized as an American voice because she was an American whom Americans wanted to marginalize. But she broke through. She made art out of her life, and she made her life into art. She touched every element of the freedom struggle, from the marches in the streets to the arguments in literary salons, to the demand of the African American voice simply to be heard. She insisted on telling her story in order to tell the rest of us something about ourselves. She insisted -- nay demanded her place in the collective American narrative. She engaged in a lifelong project of reinvention, and she put that reinvention always to high and noble purpose, and that was what made her an authentic American voice after all. Her passing leaves a silence, but only a brief one. We will come back to Maya Angelou, again and again.
Among other worthwhile comments is this thought—
David Clayton · The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
That she continued to live and die in the newly insane state of North Carolina should give readers of this blog hope for the future. Our greatest light has gone dark, but thankfully her voice will never be extinguished.
What I will always remember about Tony Benn is a sort of pop quiz he devised to put truth to power. He explained it in 2001, during his farewell speech to the House of Commons:
"In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person — Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates — ask them five questions: 'What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?' If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system."
... Seeger spent his life in the most honorable way possible -- he tried to teach America about itself. First, he helped teach it about itself through all the music it had forgotten, a darker and more fascinating place than the America that was selling itself Brylcreem on the TV...
...
Then he tried to teach it by his example, by being a gentle presence in the issues of the day, from Civil Rights to Vietnam to nuclear power to environmentalism, to adventurism in Central America, to the Occupy movement... And he did it with a smile...
Good comments; a reminder of Seeger's involvement with the GI coffeehouse movement was followed by another commenter noting a revival since W. Bush's wars. Which got Pierce looking into it, and finding this.
He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music... His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.
Digby, remembering some Seeger testimony before HUAC. And here: "How the private sphere coalesced with the public sector to destroy lives with the anti-communist blacklist." The latter links to Corey Robin, on the First Amendment stance Seeger took with HUAC—
While invoking the Fifth was not without its perils—most important, it could put someone on the blacklist... it had the advantage of keeping one out of jail. But the cost of the 5th was clear: though you could refuse to testify about yourself, you could not refuse to testify about others.
So Seeger invoked the First Amendment instead. A far riskier legal position—the Court had already held, in the case of the Hollywood Ten, that the First Amendment did not protect men and women who refused to testify before HUAC—it was the more principled stance. As Seeger explained later, "The Fifth means they can't ask me, the First means they can't ask anybody." And he paid for it. Cited for contempt of Congress, he was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison. Eventually the sentence got overturned.
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