Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Thursday April 30, 2020
Movie Review: Big Business Girl (1931)
WARNING: SPOILERS
You certainly won’t get any spoilers from the movie's synopsis on Amazon.com—where it's currently streaming in blurry black & white for $2.99—because they make it sound like a precursor to “A Star is Born”:
A delightful romantic comedy of a jazz singer and his working wife who are at odds after her new career and popularity take off while his stagnates.
Except:
- He’s not a jazz singer
- Her success (in business) isn’t the problem
- His stagnation (as a band leader) isn’t the problem—to him
- It’s not exactly delightful
IMDb’s synopsis is closer:
Thanks to her ability and her legs, Claire McIntyre rises in the business world.
Bingo.
Coming up for air
Was Loretta Young really only 18 when this was filmed? After being a romantic movie star for several years? Interesting math. She plays the aforementioned Claire, called “Mac” by everyone, who’s just graduating college with her boyfriend, Johnny (Frank Albertson), when the movie opens. It’s the graduation dance, couples keep ducking behind a folding screen to smooch, and Mac makes doe eyes at Johnny, who’s leading the band. But it turns out he’s the dreamy one. Outside, we quickly get a sense of their divergent personalities and interests:
He: Oh, this is a heckuva world. Why should people have to work?
She: Oh, honestly, Johnny, you’re only good for two things: making music and making love.
He’s set to go to Paris to lead his band there—quite the gig!—but doesn’t want to go without her. She's off for New York to start a business career but doesn’t want to go with him. That is, she wants him to have ambition. He doesn’t. She keeps calling him a boy. He is.
New York turns out to be tougher than she anticipated. She posts a Want Ad saying she will “consider position where remuneration and opportunity are commensurate with her ability.” The second one simply says this:
She can’t even get a gig as a secretary at an ad agency—until the agency owner, Robert J. Clayton (Ricardo Cortez, nee Jacob Krantz), shows up on a Saturday afternoon, no one else is there, assumes she works for him, and has her take dictation. Then he notices the legs. Soon she’s writing ad copy and has her own office. For a moment she’s happy. Then over the intercom she hears Clayton tell yes-man Luke Winters (Frank Darien), “Even if this copy isn’t excellent, she’s worth $125 a week as an office decoration. A girl with a chassis like that can be a half-wit and get by.” They laugh, she’s distraught.
This is where the movie gets murky. She winds up using that chassis to play men but to what extent is she getting played? She’s becoming … what they think of her? Is that a victory? And sure, certain clients are putty in her hands, but Clayton’s another story. She’s the last to leave a party at his place and he makes eyes and insinuates. Then he calls her a cab, she’s like “Phew,” but he gets into the cab, too. She keeps saying no. Then he walks her to her door. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me come in for a minute?” “That’s one of the correctest supposes you ever made in your life.” Except she takes too long to close the door and he slips in. And she still lets the door shut? That’s part of the murkiness. How knowing is she or how preposterously naïve? She seems half amused by his persistence. It gets worse. He says if he kisses her once she’ll be in the market for more. “Bless your healthy male egotism!” she says, but then she acquiesces. Does she think this will get rid of him? He’s a wolf, at the door, and after a long kiss, she says “Coming up for air,” and “Stop it,” and “No,” none of which work. She’s trying to push him away but he’s moving in for the kill.
Which is when Johnny walks in the room, spins Clayton around and decks him.
Kidding. He’s a boy, remember? He merely pipes up, more indignant than angry: “Not interrupting anything, am I?”
And Clayton still isn’t ready to go—not until he finds out Johnny and Mac are married. Is this when we find that out? Seems like it. Either way, she hasn’t told anyone. For this reason, she says to Johnny later:
When a girl is just starting out in business, well, if she’s married and everyone knows it, they’re afraid to give her a responsible job. Afraid she’s going to quit. Keep house for her husband, start a family and all of that.
It’s easy to dismiss such lines but women were still hearing that shit 40 years later. Some might still be hearing it today.
The rest of the movie is about which one she’ll choose: the wolf or the boy. The boy is so petulant and high-pitched, I almost preferred the wolf. She gets Johnny a gig as bandleader on the “Sun Motor Hour,” but he doesn’t know she was behind it and remains petulant. Clayton keeps them apart, lies to both sides, and sets up a “sting” from the days before no-fault divorce: “The old gag, you know: He goes to a hotel, we find him there. That’s all the evidence you need.” They’re all in on it. Even if Mac and Johnny are both filled with regret.
Two good bits come out of this: We see the hotel registry, full of Mrs. and Mrs. Smiths, Browns and Lees. And we get Joan Blondell as the prostitute he’s supposed to be caught with. She’s the best thing in the movie: knowing, droll, gum-cracking. Mac arrives first, she and Johnny put together they’ve been had, and they take the piss out of Clayton when he arrives. He finally gets the decking he deserves. Blondell gets the last line.
Hee Haw
Gotta admit, I have a real thing for a young Loretta Young. At one point, Johnny says “Did anyone ever tell you that the back of your neck is delicious and refreshing?” The refreshing is overdoing it but he ain’t wrong. She's lovely.
Was Cortez always the wolf? He also played “the other man” in “Behind Office Doors,” also from 1931, not to mention the randier Sam Spade in the first “Maltese Falcon.” (Again: 1931.) They groomed him to be Valentino but he became the bad boy you don’t root for. After B movies and a few shots at directing, he returned to Wall Street.
Not Albertson. With his high-pitched voice, youthful looks and gee-willikers attitude, he reminded me of one of those forgettable love interests in a Marx Brothers movie—the “Do you mean it, Julie? Do you really do?” types. Turns out: Yes. He was exactly that in “Room Service,” their weakest film. But you know what else he was? Sam “Hee Haw” Wainwright in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the swaggering, money-flapping cowboy real estate baron who flirts clumsily, or intrusively, with Marion Crane, and whose $40k cash payment sets her on a deadly path toward the Bates Motel in “Psycho.” Both are small but memorable parts. And he‘s good in them. Check out his scene in “Psycho” again. No “refreshing neck” lines for him anymore. He’s the wolf. Maybe we all become the wolf eventually.
Sadly, that was one of his last roles. He died in March 1964, age 55. His Times obit mentions “Room Service,” an early talkie called “Happy Days,” but not this one. And, interestingly, not “Psycho” or “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Neither had yet become the institutions they became.
According to the opening credits, “Big Business Girl” is “based on the college humor story” by Patricia Reilly and H.N. Swanson. Swanson wrote and produced a few randy, pre-code movies but is best known as a great literary agent—if that’s the same H.N. Swanson. Can’t find anything on Reilly. The humor story was adapted by Robert Lord—one of eight movies he helped write in 1931. He also wrote a few forgettable Cagney films ( “Winner Take All,” “Hard to Handle”) as well as the early Bogart vehicle “Black Legion,” which changed black and Jewish victims to Irish and Poles, but was still relevant to its (and sadly our) time. Then producing, which he’d begun in the early ’30s, took over: “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” “The Letter,” “In a Lonely Place.”
Young Loretta Young has to choose between the future Sam Spade and the future Sam Wainright. Hee haw.
Wednesday April 29, 2020
Silent Movies by Walter Bernstein
“By then I had been going to the movies for some time. The first one I was permitted to see was [the 1928 silent feature] The Noose, starring Richard Barthelmess. I was five or perhaps six. I have little memory of the film except of being frightened by the villain, an actor named Montagu Love. He was the first in a long line of movie villains who I always knew were indestructible. If the hero won, it was a fluke. The game had been fixed. There was no way in how I saw the world that any hero, crippled by sensitivity and honor, could prevail against such confident villainy...
”My grandmother liked going to the movies in the afternoon, when she had finished cleaning her house and preparing dinner, and she didn't care what was playing; all she wanted was an hour or two of undisturbed rest. She would settle down in the dark theater and go to sleep, lulled by the music and the silent figures on the screen. But she returned home one day upset and angry. She was finished with movies. The figures on the screen were keeping her awake. They were talking out loud. She felt betrayed and never went again.“
— Walter Bernstein, in his book ”Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” Other movies Bernstein mentions: The Patent Leather Kid, with Richard Barthelmess; Corsair, starring Chester Morris; and Jack Holt and Ralph Graves in Dirigible. I‘ve seen none of these, nor any movie with Graves or Holt—at least, not that I’m aware of. Bernstein has an unabashed love of movies throughout his memoir. There's just no place he'd rather be than a movie house.
Tuesday April 28, 2020
Movie Review: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
Oddly, Blondell and Kibbee are never canoodling, but if it‘ll sell tickets...
WARNING: SPOILERS
Over the years, I must’ve seen the musical number “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which plays at the end of “Gold Diggers of 1933,” half a dozen times without ever seeing the movie itself. It’s a Busby Berkeley paean to Great War vets, unneeded and dismissed in the early years of the Great Depression, and the woman (Joan Blondell) who stands by them. I’ve seen it so often because it’s one of the musical numbers Martin Scorsese talks up in his great 1995 BBC documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.” He talks about different genres (western, gangster, musical), and he's not exactly an MGM man. Plus the themes of the “Forgotten Man” are similar to the themes in another movie he talks up, Raoul Walsh’s “The Roaring Twenties,” where the forgotten man is WWI vet, ’20s gangster and ’30s hobo Eddie Bartlett, played by James Cagney.
(Scorsese had to love Cagney, right? What was Cagney but a short, quick-talking movie star, and what is Scorsese but a short, quick-talking movie lover? Both were geniuses, too.)
All of this got me thinking about the concept of the “Forgotten Man,” particularly as it related to WWI vets. When did it take hold? I searched for mentions in The New York Times archive and came away with this. It’s the number of mentions in each year:
- 1930: 1
- 1931: 2
- 1932: 39
What happened? FDR happened. Running for president, he mentioned it in a speech in April and it took off:
These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, but the indispensable units of economic power—for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down: that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Interesting that initially it’s not specific to Great War vets. Imagine what would happen today if a politician tried something similar: the howls of protest from the right (“How can Roosevelt stoop so low as to politicize our war vets?”) and from the left (“What about forgotten women?”). Maybe there was a bit of that then, too.
Barney & Friends
Anyway, I enjoyed “Gold Diggers of 1933.” It's zippy and brassy and risque. They’re not really gold diggers, by the way, just accused of it. The poster implies that they’re scantily clad and on the prowl when really they‘re scantily clad and perpetually underestimated.
It’s s tri-part drama:
- How do we get money for the show?
- How did he get money for the show?
- Let’s take those Boston Bluebloods for a ride!
It opens with a big musical number at odds with the times, “We’re in the Money,” focusing on lead singer Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers), which is at odds with the movie. Fay is not one of the three we root for; she’s the snooty fourth. But she was dating director Mervyn LeRoy, and she had the pipes, so she sings the opener. It’s absurd and fun: Near-naked women wear big coins in strategic spots. At one point, Fay sings the song in Pig Latin. But then the cops arrive and shut down the show because producer Barney Hopkins (Ned Sparks) hasn’t paid the bills.
Cut to: Our three girls lazing in bed rather than rising for another day where nothing happens because none of them can get jobs. Trixie (Aline MacMahon) is the cynical grifter who steals milks from a neighbor’s windowsill. Polly (Ruby Keeler) is the doe-eyed singer in love with Brad Roberts (Dick Powell), the smiling piano-playing songwriter across the courtyard. And Carol King (Joan Blondell) is the tough leader.
Soon they hear a big producer is putting together a new show, and they all get excited. Which big producer? Barney. Me: Wait, isn’t he the guy who couldn’t pay the bills on the last show? Why would this one be any different?
And it isn‘t. He says they’ve all got parts (yay!), and now if he could only get the money together (huh?). As they complain about the letdown, Brad across the courtyard begins playing his piano and Barney immediately recognizes his talent. He wants him to create songs for the show—and sing in it, too! Me: Wait, Barney didn’t even have songs for the show? What exactly did he have?
Brad’s cool with the songwriting gig but draws the line at performing. He won’t say why. Oh, and he can bankroll the production, too. In cash. $15k. Here you go.
Immediately Trixie thinks he’s a bank robber—that’s why he has dough and doesn’t want to show his face. Polly isn’t sure what to think but stands by her man. As often happens in’30s musicals, on opening night the nondescript and lame-ass male lead can’t go on (here: lumbago), so Brad has to take over. And he’s a sensation. And he becomes known. Turns out he isn’t a bank robber but a Boston blueblood, and before you can say Jack Robinson his older brother, J. Lawrence Bradford (Warren William), and their lawyer Fanuel H. Peabody (Guy Kibbee), descend on New York to make sure young Brad isn’t taken for a ride by any of these floozies. So of course both men get taken by these floozies. First they assume Carol is Polly and try to put a stop to their relationship. Instead, J. Lawrence falls for Carol (and she for him) and Fanuel/Fanny falls for Trixie (and she … ?).
Several weddings, implied and otherwise, and then the big “Forgotten Man” musical number to remind theatergoers the world they live in. The End.
So we go from “We’re in the Money” to “Remember My Forgotten Man.” Ain’t that America?
Rogers, losing money: “You could at least leave me car fare.”
Theresa Harris & Friends
A few notes.
This is still pre-code Hollywood, not to mention Busby Berkeley, so there’s a lot of titillation—including a sheriff’s deputy taking most of Ginger Rogers’ costume; the girls in the “Park” number protected by a metal swimsuit until Dick Powell gets out the can opener; and Blondell near-naked before the dressing mirror.
The “Pettin’ in the Park” number includes an interesting sweeping shot that takes in other canoodling couples besides Powell and Keeler. For the time, it’s a rather diverse bunch:
- sailor + girl
- older man + flapper
- skinny banker type + fat woman
- black couple
- Asian couple
Sadly, the Asian couple is way in the background while the black couple is comic relief. An older couple has a baby in a stroller (Billy Barty) who shoots peas at the man (Fred “Snowflake” Toones), who reacts all bug-eyed. The woman, concerned, remains classy; she’s Theresa Harris, whom I wrote about 10 years ago, looking as stunning as ever.
The Barty stuff is weird, and echoed in the later James Cagney vehicle, “Footlight Parade”: a lot of leering and eye-rolling. Sterling Holloway has a short, comic walk-on as a messenger. And Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan’s first wife, is apparently one of the gold diggers. Not sure if there’s a lesson there.
The movie opened May 27, 1933, the 84th of FDR’s first 100 days in office. Look to that history, kids. We might repeat it.
He’s comic relief; she's stunning.
Monday April 27, 2020
Like a Blacklist for Everyone
I read both of these passages the other night and they felt sadly familiar. First, there was this general overview of our culture:
While the cultural climate turned blandly inoffensive, the political climate kept turning mean and intolerant. There seemed no bottom to its meanness. ... X was big-time show business. Television, the new arbiter of discourse, loved him. He combined two elements that had always brought shows high ratings: he was a gangster in a soap opera. He lay over the country like one of those disease-ridden blankets that white settlers had given the Indians. He sickened the body politic. The few voices against him were weak and ineffectual. X went his brutal, demagogic way, swinging his sockful of shit ... Unreason ruled the land.
Then the writer describes how all of this affected him:
My life revolved around those friendships. They were almost entirely with other X people; we had circled the wagons and it was dangerous to go outside the perimeter. In the morning I tried to write—speculative scripts or articles or the occasional short story, but they were desultory, lacking conviction. I seemed to need a validation I could not produce from myself alone. The days were aimless, as they had been when I was waiting to be drafted. I felt suspended; my real life was somewhere else, on hold, waiting to be resurrected when the country came to its senses.
The writer is Walter Bernstein in his 1995 book “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” In the first passage above, the X is represented by Sen. Joseph McCarthy but it might as well be Pres. Donald Trump, who, of course, was taught by McCarthy's right-hand man: Roy Cohn, perpetual cretin.
In the second passage above, the X is represented by the blacklist. The line is: “other blacklisted people.” But it also seems like being a Democrat, or a sane Republican, during the Trump era—not to mentioin all of us during the Covid era: circling the wagons, real life on hold, waiting to be resurrected. Sadly, the Covid era is taking place during the Trump era, so instead of real leadership—how to get through these tough times and then get business and real life moving again in a safe and rational way, and hey, how about a hand for the front-line workers, the doctors and nurses and EMTs, as well as mayor and governors making tough decisions—Trump lies and misinforms, politicizes and avoids responsibility and casts blame. Did he really just suggest people inject disinfectant to try to kill the virus? (He did.) Then that becomes the topic, Trump's absurd proclamation, rather than our collective path out. He makes it all about him.
The Covid pandemic is like the blacklist except this time we‘re all on it. Which makes me think of Billy Bragg’s great song, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward”:
Here comes the future and you can't run from it
If you‘ve got a blacklist I want to be on it
Bernstein’s book is recommended. As is Bragg's song.
Monday April 27, 2020
Movie Review: Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)
WARNING: SPOILERS
At one point, as the sex scene continued into its second or third minute, I leaned over and whispered to Patricia:
When are these beautiful French girls going to put some clothes on so we can get back to the story?
I was only half joking. OK, I wasn’t joking at all.
“Blue is the Warmest Color” is many things, including a coming-of-age story with feints into issues relating to homophobia and class, but it’s mostly a love story. It’s about the passion and pain and pang of first love, and in this regard the long sex scenes actually serve a purpose beyond getting asses on the screens so they’ll get asses in the seats. Remember when you first become involved with that special someone and you couldn’t keep your hands off each other? Right? And remember how boring you were? Probably not. But happy loving couples are dull, deadly dull, even in person. And on screen? Worse. There’s a reason dramatists keep the lovers apart. There’s a reason I don’t watch pornography: sex is generally a suspension of the story.
Even so, I admired the effort.
We get a good performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos, who plays Adèle, the main character, our eyes and ears. She has about a dozen faces in this film. At times she seems as young as 12 or as mature as mid-twenties. At times she seems too cute, at other times almost tomboyish or butch. Occasionally she looks very, very dumb. For a few scenes I actually thought she was unattractive. But for much of the movie, sans makeup, with her hair up, she simply looks lucious. It’s impossible to look at her and not think of the word “ripe.”
We watch Adèle go from being taught to teacher; from inexperienced to weighed under by experience; from unsure what she wants, to knowing exactly what she wants (Emma, the alpha female, played by Lea Seydoux), to no longer able to get exactly what she wants. It’s a lesbian relationship but it’s an everyperson’s story, too. I flashed back to my own youth many times in a way that I didn’t with, say, “The Spectacular Now.” Adèle’s story is specific but universal.
ADDENDUM: This is as far as I got in my review back in 2013. I think I got stuck because the movie was being lauded by everyone—it won the year’s best foreign language film from both NY and LA critics—and I just didn’t feel it, and I didn’t have the words, or the courage, to say so. I saw it seven years ago, in a movie theater that no longer exists (Harvard Exit), and my main memories of it are: 1) the scene where they meet in a park, 2) Adèle’s masturbation scene, 3) my joke to Patricia, 4) how long it was. Overlong. I guess that’s the main criticism I have. “Blue” is a vaguely interesting story about not very interesting people which goes on too long. Those are the simple words I couldn't find to say in 2013. Fin.
Sunday April 26, 2020
COVID-19 Update: More Widespread *and* Deadlier?
Sunday morning, 9 AM
In the Covid-19 news that mattered this past week—i.e., not anything you'd hear at the Trump press conferences—a study out of Southern California, in which USC and LA County checked for Covid antibodies among the populace, indicates that the pandemic began in the U.S. much earlier than expected and is 30-50 times more widespread than currently thought. In LA County, they found that 4.1% of the adult population has the antibody.
This is both good news and alarming: Alarming because many people have it and don't know it and can pass it on; good news because it means the mortalilty rate is much lower than we think.
Maybe. At the same time, Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post has been raising flags about the ways beyond attacking the lungs that the Covid virus is killing us: causing strokes in otherwise healthy 30- and 40-year olds; attacking the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
Those were the big stories I came across this week. Both indicate the absolute necessity of having more information. We need to test everybody, not just those with certain symptoms. We need more PPE for medical workers. We need a coordinated national effort to come up with a vaccine.
Meanwhile, during his Thursday press conference, Pres. Trump suggested doctors and scientists should look into injecting disinfectant into the human body to kill the virus; he suggest ultraviolet light. Afterwards, right-wing media leaped to his defense with “This is what he meant” arguments and the next day Trump said he was being saracastic and couldn't you tell? He was joking. So the story became all about him, as it always does, rather than on the virus and what we need to do to combat it.
This guy gets it anyway.
If we want life to approach anything like normal anytime soon, we need a comprehensive testing program. It’s not going to be cheap, but it will ultimately pay off many times over in saved lives, saved businesses, and saved jobs. https://t.co/pnN9KVcvQR
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 24, 2020
Today, according to Johns Hopkins, there are 941,628 confirmed cases in the United States. Washington state, which was the U.S. epicenter a month ago, is now ranked 16th. We just got passed by Indiana. Georgia is currently ranked 12th with 23,222 cases. I mention them because their governor, Brian Kemp, reopened the state for business on Friday. We‘ll see how that goes.
BTW: If the USC study is accurate and can be extrapolated beyond LA County to the rest of the country, 28 to 50 million Americans are infected. That’s 8-15% of the population.
Saturday April 25, 2020
Azizi Street
Azizi Johari, given a name.
The other night, yet another night in the Covid pandemic, my wife and I watched John Cassavetes' “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” starring Ben Gazzara. I'm not a huge Cassavetes fan, to be honest, something I always feel vaguely guilty about. What's the opposite of a guilty pleasure? This is that: feeling guilty about not liking a thing you feel you should; that peers would give you shit for if they found out.
I kind of “Chinese Bookie,” though. It's slice of life, open-ended, very ‘70s. It’s got some of the least intimidating mobsters you‘ll ever see—and you’ll recognize most of them: perennial Cassavetes character actor Seymour Cassel; and Morgan Woodward, who played “the man with no eyes” in “Cool Hand Luke.” It's also very ‘70s in terms of nudity. Plus Gazzara’s character runs a strip club, etc., and he's got these girls, etc.
One of the girls, also Gazzara's girlfriend in the movie, is Rachel, played by African-American actress Azizi Johari. I was curious what else she'd been in, and, via IMDb, it turns out not much. As an actress, she was only in six movies/TV shows total, and usually in bit parts: “Girl” in one role, “Lady” in another, “Pussy” in her final film in 1981. “Bookie” is one of the few movies where she actually got a name. I wondered how she got the role. According to her IMDb bio, she was a Playmate of the Month in 1975, so maybe that? Maybe that's how she jumped from “Hot dog girl at snack bar” in “McQ” to Rachel in this? Her bio also mentions she was raised in Seattle and still lives here. That made me curious. Had anyone local written anything about her? The Seattle Times? The Stranger? So I Googled her name + “Seattle.”
Guess what Google gave me? Her address. It's like three miles from where I live. I‘ve passed within a block of her house a dozen times. That’s a little creepy. I mean, it was intriguing to find out, but ... really, Google? In this day and age?
The other day, I told this story on a text thread. Response: “You have way too much time on your hands.”
Guilty.
Friday April 24, 2020
Now Do Climate Change
Wednesday April 22, 2020
Robert Capa by Walter Bernstein
“[As a correspondent for Yank Magazine during WWII], I did not write about cowardice or doubt or the mistakes of generals or the killing of prisoners or the alliance with the Mafia in the towns we took. Or about the corruption that always follows war. Or about my own fear or the shame I felt when I refused the chance to go with a unit stringing wire under heavy bombardment, knowing the casualties it would take. No one forced me to go anywhere; these men were the ones who had no choice.
”But then, as if to demonstrate the murderous indifference of war, that particular bombardment reached back to the command headquarters where I stayed, forcing everyone to leap for cover. I dived into a ravine and cowered while shells fell with a gleeful lack of discrimination. A man wearing a correspondent's patch and three cameras around his neck jumped in beside me. Instead of cowering, he stood and smiled at me. He ignored the death raining around us. It seemed not to be worth his attention. There was something very graceful about him. Even in this bedlam of artillery fire, he had an air of delicacy and tact. He noticed my fright—not difficult to do—and started gently talking to me. He wanted to know if I had read much Tolstoy. He made it seem as though given the circumstances, the question was entirely natural. I have no memory of how I answered, but he eased me through my terror. When the bombardment finally stopped and there were only the shouts and groans of the wounded, he smiled at me again and climbed nimbly out of the ravine. Afterward I found out his name was Robert Capa. I remembered his photographs of the Spanish Civil War. I never saw him again and was saddened, but not surprised, when years later I heard that he had been blown up covering the war in Vietnam.“
Walter Bernstein, in his book ”Inside Out: a Memoir of the Blacklist"
Monday April 20, 2020
‘Ultimate Power, No Responsibility’
“A few weeks ago, during Trump's reopen-by-Easter flirtation, he admitted that he based the new deadline on nothing more than his gut and how ‘beautiful’ it would be. Now he offers a ‘science-based reopening’ plan, which includes a vague and uncertain three-stage path for states to resume everyday life. Yet the main precondition for doing so—widespread testing—is not only not in place but, according to Trump, not his problem. ‘The federal government shouldn’t be forced to go and do everything,' he said on Thursday evening. This might as well be his slogan for the crisis, and for his entire Presidency: ultimate power and no responsibility.”
Susan B. Glasser, “Trump's Pandemic Plan: ”Absolute Authority,“ No Responsibility,” The New Yorker
Last night, after another reading another Glasser article on the absolute ineptitude of the Covid respoinse by the bumbling Trump team, I was so angry I had trouble sleeping. This morning I awoke to the president of the United States, in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, attacking state governors who are trying to take care of their citizens.
You worthless, gaping asshole.
— Erik Lundegaard (@ErikLundegaard) April 20, 2020
Everyone was begging for tests in March. But you want loyalists, not competence, so the response has been incompetent.
“Anyone who wants a test can get a test.” Remember that? You said it on March 6.
Another lie. As people die.
Try to imagine a president who would‘ve been on top of things and listened to advisers and saw the dangers and didn’t discount them, one who didn't blame the media or the opposition party but worked hard to get test kits and PPE to every state—who might even have had virus specialists in China at the time to help there and get word out to the rest of the world. Try to imagine the thousand decisions such a president would‘ve had to make, and maybe getting half of them right, or one-third. Imagine how better off we would be right now. Instead we have this monstrous idiot who is at best 1 for 1,000—a squib single—but in his mind keeps hitting homeruns. He sees the ball clear the fence and land in the upper deck and doesn’t understand why no one is cheering.
Saturday April 18, 2020
Walter Bernstein on the Origins of Red Channels
More notes from Walter Bernstein's book “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist,” which is recommended. Bernstein's a great writer: straightforward and graceful, with self-effacing wit and no wasted words. And still alive at 100? Wow. Good for him.
Bernstein is one of the first guys I‘ve read who goes into the origins of Red Channels, the blacklist for television. Turns out it was three simple steps:
- “Back in 1947 three ex-FBI agents had formed American Business Consultants (ABC), bankrolled by a businessman named Alfred Kohlberg, best known as a lobbyist for Nationalist China. The ’Business' part referred to radio and television networks and the advertising agencies that controlled the casting for the network shows. The ‘Consultants’ determined, for a fee, whether these casts were free of Communist taint.”
- “ABC also published a newsletter called Counterattack that pointed out which tainted performers were appearing on what shows. It gave the names and addresses of the programs' sponsors and urged its readers to help defeat communism by writing in protest to these sponsors.”
- “Later ABC published a booklet called Red Channels, subtitled The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. ... Red Channels became the bible of the blacklist movement. There were eight listings for me, all of them true. I had written for the New Masses and Mainstream, both Communist publications; had joined organizations in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; had joined another organization to demand more rights for black veterans of World War Two; and had been active for Soviet-American friendship and Russian War Relief. I would have felt insulted if I had not been included.”*
* This line has a real “Here comes the future and you can't run from it/ If you‘ve got a blacklist I want to be on it” vibe.
The three ex-FBI agents who started it were, according to Wiki, John G. Keenan (co. president; businessman); Kenneth M. Bierly (later a consultant to Columbia Pictures); and Theodore C. Kirkpatrick (managing editor of Counterattack, group spokesman). Francis J. McNamara was the editor of Counterattack. He was a former Army intelligence major.
It’s tough to find out much about these guys. The New York Times lists nothing for any of them, for example. Or, more oddly, you‘ll find nothing under “Theodore C. Kirkpatrick” or “Theodore Kirkpatrick” but if you search for “Kirkpatrick ’Red Channels'” you‘ll get half a dozen from 1950, all of which inclulde some reference to “Theodore Kirkpatrick.” The articles began in late August and ended in late September and most focused on an actress named Jean Muir, who worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s, returned to the stage, and was a regular on an early TV show, “The Aldrich Family,” playing Mrs. Aldrich. She was fired that fall for being a “controversial person.” Why? Because for six months in 1946 she’d been a member of the “Congress of American Women,” which had been started by progressive Elinor S. Gimbel (yes, of Gimbels dept. store), but which was apparently affiliated with a Soviet organization as well. That's why she was named in Red Channels and why she lost her job when a couple dozen people complained to NBC. From her 1996 obit:
“I am not a Communist, have never been one, and believe that the Communists represent a vicious and destructive force, and I am opposed to them,” she said after being dismissed from “The Aldrich Family.” General Foods said it had no opinion on the accuracy of the charges against Ms. Muir but that it had no choice but to dismiss her because the accusations made her “a controversial personality.” Ms. Muir did not work in television again until 1958.
Again, this is why any current cries of a “blacklist” against right-wing actors, writers and directors is absolute bullshit. Are ex-FBI agents creating organizations to investigate conservatives and right-wingers in Hollywood—to see what right-leaning organizations they belong to or might've belonged to in the past? Whose names they print up in a booklet that encourages phone-calling and letter-writing campaigns to put these conservatives out of work? All while Democrats on a U.S. House subcommittee investigate same? And even jail people for not answering charges?
If anything like that begins to happen, please drop a line.
Friday April 17, 2020
Joe's Top 100: 1-10
Joe finished! Kudos.
So this is what I assumed the order would be vs. what it actually is:
No. | GUESS | ACTUAL | bWAR | RANK | POS |
10 | Oscar Charleston | Satchel Paige | n/a | n/a | P |
9 | Ted Williams | Stan Musial | 128.2 | 11 | OF |
8 | Walter Johnson | Ty Cobb | 151 | 6 | OF |
7 | Ty Cobb | Walter Johnson | 164.3 | 2 | P |
6 | Stan Musial | Ted Williams | 123.1 | 14 | OF |
5 | Hank Aaron | Oscar Charleston | n/a | n/a | OF |
4 | Satchel Paige | Hank Aaron | 143 | 7 | OF |
3 | Babe Ruth | Barry Bonds | 162.8 | 4 | OF |
2 | Barry Bonds | Babe Ruth | 182.4 | 1 | OF/P |
1 | Willie Mays | Willie Mays | 156.4 | 5 | OF |
See how Joe flipped the script with Stan the Man and the Splendid Splinter? The latter wore No. 9 and Joe made him #6; the former wore No. 6 and Joe made him #9. He must‘ve laughed to himself when he did that. I was actually fine with Joe’s predilection to rank a player by his uniform number: 45 for Pedro, 42 for Jackie, 31 for Maddux, 27 for Trout, 20 for Schmidt and Frank Robinson. Most wound up close to where they should be—with one exception: Tom Seaver at 41. Dude was better.
Most of my guesses were just flips of Joe's actuals: Satchel and Oscar, Ty and Walter, Bonds and Ruth. Can't believe I guessed Bonds second—I was disgusted enough when Joe chose him third. I totally ding Bonds for his absurd post-1998 numbers, his 35-40 years when, instead of declining, he grew to monstrous proportions and became The Incredible Bonds. BONDS SMASH PUNY BASEBALL. Nah. No chance. I give him cred for the earlier stuff but that's it. To me, Bonds is top 50, sure, but not top 10 and certainly not top 5. He's besmirched the record book. I will never forgive him.
And yeah, I know. Rankings, schmankings. Joe says the rankings are just a device in which to tell the stories—all the stories of fathers and sons, and America—what we were and what we became. Of course. And please read the stories if you get a chance, they‘re great. But rankings still matter. The delivery device still matters. We don’t argue about the stories, we argue about the rankings. That's the conversation.
But at least we ended where we needed to end; where we all hoped we would end. We made it home with the best of the best. Say hey.
Thursday April 16, 2020
Quotes of May 2017: ‘You Will Have a Pandemic’
“Sometime in the president's term, you will have a pandemic. Cutting the Centers for Disease Control, I think, leaves you very vulnerable and the American people very vulnerable.” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)
“They‘re making a very radical statement. The big picture is a movement toward suspicion of international programs. The administration is threatening to abandon multilateralism in a big way.” J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
“The next weapon of mass destruction may not be a bomb. It may be a tiny pathogen that you can’t see, smell or taste, and by the time we discover it, it‘ll be too late. ... The closed-border, highly nationalistic, America-first vision is not the world’s scientific view of how to keep a population safe and healthy.” Lawrence O. Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights
All are from the May 2017 New York Times article, “Trump's Proposed Budget Cuts Trouble Bioterrorism Experts.”
Wednesday April 15, 2020
Quote of Last Month
“It was heartbreaking to watch. If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”
Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American, who, from 2007 to 2011, acted as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, a role designed to help detect disease outbreaks in China, and a role which was eliminated last fall by the Trump administration. The last person in the role, Dr. Linda Quick, who trained Chinese field epidemiologists to help track, investigate and contain diseases, left in July because of the Trump budget cuts. Via Reuters.
Good fucking god.
So far, I never blamed Trump for the COVID-19 pandemic; I just blamed him for the way he's ignored and mishandled it, and the misinformation he's spread, and how every day he's making it all about himself. But he's such a fuck-up he may actually be responsible for some part of it.
As of today, there are 2 million confirmed cases, 134,000 people have died, and we‘re all sheltering in place amid a certain worldwide Depression.
Heartbreak is mild compared to how I feel right now.
ADDENDUM: It’s actually worse than I thought. I assumed this article was recent but it's from ... March 22? And never got traction? How did that happen? How screwed up is everything that this story did not get traction?
Wednesday April 15, 2020
Movie Review: Spielberg (2017)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Has anyone ever disparaged something as “So-and-So ’s Folly” and been right? The infamous historical example is the 1867 purchase of Alaska by Secretary of State William H. Seward, dubbed “Seward’s Folly,” when, in terms of cost (2 cents an acre), resources (oil, etc.), and global strategy (imagine the Cold War with Russia owning Alaska), it was anything but. It was the best thing Seward did. It was a better thing than his detractors ever did.
Then there's “Hammond's Folly.” In 1960, legendary Colubmbia Records talent scout John Hammond agreed to record a young folksinger, whose first album sold only 5,000 copies. The folksinger was dubbed “Hammond's Folly.” The folksinger was Bob Dylan.
“Sheinberg’s Folly“ is similar. Sid Sheinberg was the head of Universal Television in the late 1960s when he saw a short film called “Amblin” and thought the 20-year-old director had talent. He signed him to a 7-year contract and put him to work, directing episodes of “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Marcus Welby,” “Columbo,” “Savage,” etc. At 20, he even directed movie legend Joan Crawford in an episode of “Night Gallery.” But many in the industry thought he was a novelty. They dubbed him “Sheinberg’s Folly.”
You already know the punchline. “Sheinberg’s Folly” was Steven Spielberg, the most successful director in movie history.
Sheinberg, by the way, seems like a mensch. “If you come with us,” he told young Steven, “I will support you as strongly in failure as in success.” Spielberg adds: “And he was true to his word.” (Although how much failure did Steven have?) He’s also the guy who sent the 1982 book “Schindler’s Ark,” along with its glowing New York Times review, to Spielberg, telling him he should make it into a movie. Me, watching: Was Sheinberg ever wrong? Maybe we should get a documentary on him.
The main lesson here is you should probably think twice before dubbing anything anyone's folly.
The Outsider
I don’t think Susan Lacy’s documentary calls Spielberg the most successful director in movie history, as I just did, but it’s not even a contest. If you adjust for inflation—meaning asses in seats—no one compares. He has two movies in the all-time top 10 (“E.T.” and “Jaws”) and no one else has more than one. He has three movies in the top 20 (add “Jurassic Park”) and no one else has more than two. He has four movies in the top 25 (add “Raiders”) and no one still has more than two. He tapped into us. He knew what we wanted.
Maybe because we were what he wanted?
Spielberg was a Jewish kid in gentile Phoenix, Arizona, who just wanted to fit in. “Steve did not want to be Jewish,” his sister Anne says, “because it made us too different from everybody. And the ‘Father Knows Best’ family is an assimilated family. And I think he really yearned for that.”
Did he yearn for it so much he wound up creating it on film? Or creating what he thought we might like? As the outsider, he’d studied us more than we’d studied ourselves. Maybe that’s why he nailed it almost every time.
He was a nerd, uninterested in sports, and bullied, but he found respite in filmmaking. Key quote:
The second I finished a movie, I wanted to start a new one. Because I felt good about myself when I was making a film. But when I had too much time to think, all those scary whispers would start up.
What’s your follow-up to that? I have half a dozen. Spielberg says this at 70, so I’m curious if it was still true. If not, when did it stop being true? What were the scary whispers and did they change over the years? But no follow-ups here. Or maybe the follow-ups went nowhere and were cut? You never know. That happens a lot.
That said, I kept wanting the doc to dig deeper or connect dots. His scientist father was often absent, his free-spirit mother was more like a sibling, and his siblings were all girls. So what effect did the absence of men or authority figures have?
How old was he when his parents divorced? No idea. They split because his mother fell in love with the father’s best friend, but for years the father took the blame. Steven didn’t know the full story until he was an adult. Compare his early strong single moms—Melinda Dillon in “Close Encounters,” Dee Wallace in “E.T.”—with the single father saving his kids from an alien attack in “War of the Worlds” or the father pining for his wayward wife in “Catch Me If You Can.” It’s an old story: sensitive boys sympathizing with their mothers and as adults identifying with their fathers.
Eventually, of course, the Jewish kid who escaped into fantasy fled to the fantasyland that other Jews created in Hollywood. The legend is he took a Universal tour bus, left to go to the bathroom, waited until the bus left, then wandered around the lot. How did he stay? How did he not get tossed?
The first time he felt like an insider, he says, is when he became friends with the other, eventual, most-respected directors of the era—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Brian DePalma—but even here he was kind of the outsider in the group. It sounds like George hung more with Francis, Marty with Brian. The Zoetrope boys were long-haired rebels, taking on the system. Not Steven. “Steven was always a creature of the studio,” Francis says. “And his thinking and his methodology went that direction. And he became a master of it.”
Has a doc been made about these five? That’s an insanely talented group. I get a little Lennon-McCartney vibe here. They relied on each other, yes, but also one-upped each other. In the early ’70s it was all Francis: “Godfather,” “The Conversation,” “Godfather II,” Marty made “Mean Streets” (critically acclaimed) while George did “American Graffiti” (critically acclaimed and hugely popular). In’75, Steven changed Hollywood entirely with “Jaws (popular/critical) and two years later George one-upped him with “Star Wars.” It was never the same after that. By the end of the decade, the center couldn’t hold. Francis and Marty were making serious art (“Apocalypse Now” and “Raging Bull”) while George and Steven were busy updating another genre of Saturday afternoon kids serials: “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Was George more kid than Steven? Spielberg’s first two huge hits—“Jaws” and “Close Encounters”—are actually fairly adult films. There’s a complexity in each. We get politics (beyond imperial senates) and family strife (beyond wanting to go into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters). Then Steven bombed with “1941” and was depressed for a year until George pulled him out of it by asking him to direct “Raiders.”
I like the talking heads on Spielberg’s gifts as a director.
- David Edelstein: Right off the bat, it was clear that no one moved the camera like Steven Spielberg. … Who knows where that came from?
- Martin Scorsese I: Steven’s able to walk into a room, look for a second or two, say, “Here. Move that here. Give me a 25mm here. Put it this way. Face forward. Move it. Silhouette here. Two takes, three takes, that’s enough, thanks.”
- Martin Scorsese II: His strength is really the ability to be able to tell a story, in pictures, instinctively. I sometimes watch his pictures on TV without the sound. Just to see pictures.
Not for nothing, but I could listen to Martin Scorsese talk about movies forever.
Maybe the most prescient take was Pauline Kael’s in her review of “Sugarland Express.” She said it was one of the most phenomenal debuts in the history of film, and compared his feel for the medium to Howard Hawks. She also wondered whether there was great depth to go with it.
And is there? The’80s is when his output became split between summer popcorn flicks (the three Indiana Jones movies) and adult-themed films (“The Color Purple,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Always”). He even divided his DPs accordingly: Douglas Slocombe for Indy, Allen Daviau for “E.T.,” “Color,” and “Empire.” But even his adult-themed movies weren’t that deep. Here’s Tom Stoppard, who wrote “Empire”:
For me, it ultimately shaded into an unnecessary softness or sentimentality. I don’t know where it comes from, but he likes and enjoys sentiment. It’s part of him.
Six times during his career—most successfully in 1993—Spielberg released two movies in the same calendar year: a popcorn flick in the summer and an adult-themed movie in the winter. It’s like a look into a bifurcated soul:
YEAR | SUMMER | WINTER |
1989 | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | Always |
1993 | Jurassic Park | Schindler's List |
1997 | The Lost World: Jurassic Park | Amistad |
2002 | Minority Report | Catch Me If You Can |
2005 | War of the Worlds | Munich |
2011 | The Adventures of Tintin | War Horse |
Oddly, when he tried to combine them in “Hook,” he bombed. If there’s a movie that seems tailor-made for Spielberg, it’s the tale of the adult who forgot he was Peter Pan and then tapped into that boyish magic again. Instead, it’s a mess of a movie and garnered the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores of any of his films. For the curious:
- lowest RT score: “Hook” (28%)
- lowest IMDb score: “1941” (5.8)
- lowest domestic box-office after he became big: “Empire of the Sun” ($22 million)
- lowest annual box-office ranking: “Munich” (62nd)
That last stat is both sad and amazing. It’s sad because “Munich” is so good—to me, his best this century. It’s amazing because, while it's his low point, most filmmakers would give their left one to have the 62nd-biggest movie of the year.
The amen corner
The documentary credits his second marriage to Kate Capshaw with his growth as an artist and his acceptance of his Jewishness. Again, not enough is done with this. It took a shiksa to help him embrace his heritage? Because she was embracing his? Assimilating into it? “Wait, I want to be you, but—oh, you want to be me? OK.”
Question: Did he grow as an artist? He keeps going historical anyway. He’s become like your dad watching the History Channel. He’s given us World War II from the perspective of: a kid in the Japanese camps; Jews in a Polish ghetto/concentration camp; Americans on D-Day. He’s delved into the U.S. Civil War (“Lincoln”), World War I (“War Horse”), the Cold War (“Bridge of Spies”), the War on Terror (“Munich”), the war against the press (“The Post”). His popcorn movies, meanwhile, have gotten darker and more dystopian: “A.I.,” “Minority Report,” “War of the Worlds,” “Ready Player One.” But there’s still a love of sentiment in all of this. Even in the best of his 21st-century output, “Munich,” he lingers on the World Trade Center in a way he didn’t need to; he still thinks he needs to hold our hand.
How many movies set in the future has Spielberg made? Probably fewer than you think. At the least, it’s fewer than I thought—just three: “A.I.,” “Minority Report,” and “Ready Player One.” None are very good. All are dystopian. I don’t think he’s made for dystopias.
You know what he’s made for? Movies set in contemporary times in which ordinary people confront the extraordinary. Sometimes that extraordinary is benevolent (“Close Encounters,” “E.T.”); sometimes not (“Jaws,” “Jurassic Park”). But the ordinary people need to be amazed by what they see. As we are. We are them.
I enjoyed this doc. I’ve seen it twice now. It’s in his corner a little too much but how can you blame them? It’s a helluva corner.
YEAR | MOVIE | IMDb | RT% | Dom BO | Ann Rnk |
1974 | The Sugarland Express | 6.8 | n/a | $7 | n/a |
1975 | Jaws | 8.0 | 98% | $260 | 1 |
1977 | Close Encounters of the Third Kind | 7.6 | 95% | $135 | 3 |
1979 | 1941 | 5.8 | 42% | $32 | 22 |
1981 | Raiders of the Lost Ark | 8.4 | 95% | $248 | 1 |
1982 | E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | 7.8* | 98% | $435 | 1 |
1984 | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom | 7.6 | 85% | $180 | 3 |
1985 | The Color Purple | 7.8 | 81% | $98 | 4 |
1987 | Empire of the Sun | 7.8 | 76% | $22 | 53 |
1989 | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade | 8.2 | 88% | $197 | 2 |
1989 | Always | 6.4 | 67% | $44 | 43 |
1991 | Hook | 6.8 | 28% | $120 | 6 |
1993 | Jurassic Park | 8.1 | 91% | $403 | 1 |
1993 | Schindler's List | 8.9 | 97% | $97 | 9 |
1997 | The Lost World: Jurassic Park | 6.6 | 52% | $229 | 3 |
1997 | Amistad | 7.3 | 77% | $44 | 50 |
1998 | Saving Private Ryan | 8.6 | 93% | $217 | 1 ** |
2001 | A.I. Artificial Intelligence | 7.2 | 74% | $79 | 28 |
2002 | Catch Me If You Can | 8.1 | 96% | $165 | 11 |
2002 | Minority Report | 7.6 | 90% | $132 | 17 |
2004 | The Terminal | 7.4 | 61% | $78 | 35 |
2005 | War of the Worlds | 6.5 | 75% | $234 | 4 |
2005 | Munich | 7.5 | 78% | $47 | 62 |
2008 | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull | 6.1 | 78% | $317 | 3 *** |
2011 | War Horse | 7.2 | 74% | $80 | 41 |
2011 | The Adventures of Tintin | 7.3 | 74% | $78 | 44 |
2012 | Lincoln | 7.3 | 89% | $182 | 13 |
2015 | Bridge of Spies | 7.6 | 91% | $72 | 42 |
2016 | The BFG | 6.4 | 75% | $55 | 59 |
2017 | The Post | 7.2 | 88% | $82 | 39 |
2018 | Ready Player One | 7.5 | 72% | $138 | 24 |
* I don't get the IMDb rating for ”E.T.“ IMDb users rank it eighth among Spielberg's feature films. It's way behind ”Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,“ for example. I thought it was more beloved than that? Interestingly, if you drill down, the lowest rating comes from 18-29 year-old females (7.6) and the highest comes from 45+ females (8.3).
** ”Saving Private Ryan“ is the fifth and last Spielberg movie to be the biggest box-office hit of the year. The others: ”Jaws,“ ”Raiders,“ ”E.T.“ and ”Jurassic Park.“ Has any other director come close to this? Cameron's got three, Lucas three.
*** Spielberg has had 14 movies rank among the 10 biggest box-office hits of the year, and his last ”Indiana Jones" movie was the last time that happened. If you break it down by decade, it goes: two in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, five in the 1990s, and two in the 2000s. The 2010s is the first decade where this never happened.
Tuesday April 14, 2020
Trump: Total Authority, Zero Responsibility
“I don't take responsibility at all.” Donald Trump, March 13
“When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that's the way it's got to be. ... It's total.” Donald Trump, April 13
Got that? Total authority, zero responsibility.
The mind reels.
Sunday April 12, 2020
'I Understood Their Bigotry But Not Their Power'
“The Hollywood Ten were summoned before the House committee, but the [HUAC] committee members seemed only stupid; I understood their bigotry but not their power. Who, really, could be on their side? I also knew the Communist Party was no menace. After all, I belonged to it. The charge that we wanted to overthrow the government by force and violence was ludicrous. Nothing I had ever done or intended or even thought was designed for that. No one I knew in the Party even dreamed of it. Our meetings might have been less boring if they had. I took for granted that I could be both radical and accepted, since that had always been the case.”
— Walter Berstein, “Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist.” It's a great read because Bernstein is a great writer: straightforward, with a dry wit, and a slight shrug about the way of the world. The above reminds me of current Democratic complacency: “I understood their bigotry but not their power” and “Who could be on their side?” I'm also reminded of assumptions about the pre- and post-Covid worlds: “I took for granted [X], since that had always been the case.” One wonders what we took for granted on Jan. 1 that will no longer be the case on Dec. 31.
Bernstein went on to write “The Front,” starring Woody Allen. The memoir is available in hardover, paperback, and on Kindle for only $4.99.
Saturday April 11, 2020
Franny and Donny
If you need a good laugh or five or 10, check out Michael Schulman's interview with Fran Lebowitz in The New Yorker. What a treasure she is. First question is about how she's spending her time in the Covid era, and she responds, “It depends how much you count the time you spend sulking. Let me put it this way: when they compile a list of the heroes of this era, I will not be on it.” Well, she's on mine. She's my hero: Cynic, wit, grouch, germaphobe. I'm half those things and aspire to the others.
Sample:
Has this crisis shown us anything about Donald Trump that we didn't know before?
No. Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It's not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it's the most dangerous thing.
His absolute belief in himself, that is something that is not going to ever change. And he doesn't care. When people say he's not showing enough empathy—he doesn't know what it means. Whenever he uses the word “love,” which he does occasionally, I think of the word “algebra,” because I don't know what algebra is. I took Algebra 1 four times, because I failed it four times, and I still don't know what algebra even means. I know the symbols. And that is what love means to Donald Trump.
Yes yes, a thousand times yes. Virtually anyone would make a better president than Trump because most of us know what we don't know—and would rely on experts. Trump not only doesn't know what he doesn't know, he thinks he knows it “better than anybody.” See: list.
Friday April 10, 2020
Movie Review: Brittany Runs a Marathon (2019)
WARNING: SPOILERS
It’s kind of funny for a few moments—like in Central Park when the grade school kids, tethered together, are able to walk faster than Brittany (Jillian Bell) can jog.
Most of the rest is blah or downright annoying. I guess that’s what happens when you undercut your premise.
Is the moral high ground ever funny?
“Brittany Runs a Marathon” is about a woman in her late 20s who decides to get in shape because she’s fat and unhealthy and going nowhere with her life. Her doctor suggests she lose 55 pounds. “That’s the size of a Siberian Huskey,” she says. “You want me to pull a medium-sized working dog off of my body?” Eventually the other shoe drops. That’s her first realization—that she needs to do this or die young.
Her second realization—after she is able to do this—is that she needs to stop being a dick. Coupled with this is the realization that it’s OK to be not svelte. She loses 40 of the 55 pounds pretty quickly but then gets stuck. The rest is tough. Scratch that. There is no “rest.” She tops out at about 160. My weight.
But that’s OK. Getting in shape, says Demetrius (Lil Rel Howery), her African-American brother-in-law who lives in Philadelphia, “was about taking responsibility for yourself.”
Sure, I’ll buy that.
“My whole life people told me I was lazy because of the way I look,” Brittany says.
Um. Well, it was also because you were lazy. We saw it at the beginning of this movie. It's played for laughs but you were way lazy, lady.
The movie, in other words, fearful of being “fattist," loses the comedy for the moral high ground. That’s its primary problem.
It still might’ve gotten away with it if our lead hadn’t been such a dick. Brittany starts out rooming with a thin, pretty, Asian-American woman, Gretchen (Alice Lee), who’s a social media starlet, and who’s a dick herself. Why is she even rooming with Brittany? I guess because New York makes strange bedfellows? Worse, Brittany likes her, or wants to be around her, all the while disparaging their neighbor Catherine (Michaela Watkins), who simply wants building common areas kept free to trash. She also jogs, which means she’s a jerk or something. Until Brittany jogs, too. Here’s the thing: Catherine helps Brittany on her journey but Brittany keeps disparaging her. She barely, grudgingly accepts her presence. The two also hook up with a sweet gay guy, Seth (Micah Stock), who’s getting in shape to not embarrass his adopted son.
Eventually, Brittany sees Gretchen for what she is, gets a job as a daytime dog-sitter for a rich couple off on an extended vacation, and winds up living in the house with the night-time dog-sitter, and eventual love interest, Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar), who’s also shirking what responsibilities he can.
Brittany’s ultimate goal is to run the New York City marathon. Problem: If you’re an amateur you have to win a spot through a lottery (Seth does) or by raising funds (Catherine tries to help Brittany but ... yeah). Anyway, Brittany gets depressed, gains weight, keeps running, develops a stress fracture, can’t do the NYC marathon after all. Catherine and Seth do it, Brittany gets upset, heads to Philly, cuts all ties. Because she still hasn’t realized what a dick she is.
It’s the following NYC marathon she runs. And finishes.
Hold it
The story is based on Brittany O’Neill, the roommate of first-time writer-director Paul Colaizzo. It won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, which lets us know how much such audience awards are worth. It also got a 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which lets us know how much Rotten Tomatoes ratings are worth.
Final note: I watched it with my wife, who lived in New York for 20 years. There’s a recurring bit in which Brittany is running for a subway yelling “Hold it! Hold it!” When she’s fat, they never do. Once she’s actually a runner, they do.
My wife, with disdain: “No one ever runs for a subway in New York yelling ‘Hold it! Hold it!’”
Yeah. That, too.
Thursday April 09, 2020
John Prine (1946-2020)
This was pre-Covid times. I was taking a walk in Seattle over to Volunteer Park—named for the men who volunteered to serve in the Spanish-American War—and I think I was just leaving the park when, on my iPod shuffle, John Prine's live version of “That's the Way the World Goes Round” came on, and I felt such joy. It's more than the song; it's the story he tells about the girl who mishears the words.
The words go:
That's the way that the world goes ‘round
You’re up one day, the next you‘re down
It’s a half an inch of water, you think you‘re gonna drown
That’s the way that the world goes ‘round
And instead of “half an inch of water” she hears “happy enchilada.” Right. “It’s a happy enchilada and you think you‘re gonna drown.” So that’s what she aks him to play: “That song of yours about the happy enchilada.”
He tells that story halfway through the song and then finishes it up by singing her words in the chorus. When he does, there's a woman in the audience who lets out a scream of pure happiness and humor and joy. And I felt that pure happiness and humor and joy walking back home from Discovery Park. And here's the thing: I always felt that joy when I listened to the song. The whole thing is so perfect. The screw-up fits the theme of the song. You write a humorous song about the minor mishaps of life and someone comes along and totally mishears the words and renders the whole thing meaningless. How can you not laugh? How can you not embrace it? It's the way the world goes ‘round.
So I was happy that day thinking about how much I loved this song and John Prine. And I was sadder than I expected two nights ago when John Prine died from complications from the Covid-19 virus. I expected it when I heard he contracted it. He was not in good health. But there was still a sudden deep empty sadness.
I didn’t know Roger Ebert helped discover him. It was 1970, Ebert went to review a movie, but he left because his popcorn was too salty (really, Roger?) and went to a local bar for a beer. The bartender told him to check out the guy playing in the back room. He not only checked him out, he wrote about him for the Chicago Sun-Times:
“[Prine] appears on stage with such modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn't show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.”
Among the songs Ebert heard? “Sam Stone” and “Angel from Montgomery.”
Here's Prine on NPR in 2018:
“I never had an empty seat after that. I was still making my living as a mailman. And [after that review] I was singing three nights a week and two shows a night. And there was a line outside. And things just got better from then on.”
Kris Kristoferson helped, too, and took him to New York and had him open for him. Bonnie Raitt helped, too. She plucked “Angel from Montgomery” and sang it in 1974. The people who knew, knew. I was late to the party. I think I first started listening to him in the ‘90s? Bob Dylan writes the best story-songs I’ve ever heard but I doubt anyone ever told better stories before singing their songs than John Prine: Sabu. Oldest baby in the world. Sam Stone.
Before the live version of “Sam Stone,” about a Vietnam Vet who becomes an addict when he returns home from the war, Prine talks about how he and his friend had a day to kill in D.C., and this is what they saw:
- Lincoln Memorial
- Hot dog stand
- Kennedy's grave
- Vietnam Memorial
I love the addition of the hot dog stand. It's so true for D.C. You check out this, check out that, then suddenly it's 1 PM and damn you‘re hungry and hey there’s a hot dog stand. You eat on the Mall and continue.
I just like were they go. It's where I go. Jefferson Memorial, too, probably, and the new FDR, and Chinatown. I like looking at the statues around town. I mean, I‘ve done DC a zillion times, but those are my places, and I’m glad they‘re his places. At the same time, it makes me wonder where Republicans go when they go to DC. Lincoln was a Republican, sure, but everything he stood for they now repudiate; so where do they go? I’m kind of curious.
John and his friend also head to the Vietnam War Memorial, which is right by Lincoln on the Mall, and what he says about it is probably the most succinct thing I‘ve heard about the dark beauty of that Memorial. Worth listening to.
Tributes pored in from everywhere, of course: Bill Murray, my friend Jerry, Bob Dylan, my friend Adam, Jason Isbell. Even U.S. senators:
Some twinkle in the eye is gone from the world. But it’s also still here.
Wednesday April 08, 2020
Donald Jessica
You really have a way with words, Donald Jessica. https://t.co/y7C7YfEPy4
— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) April 8, 2020
I appreciate RR dealing with the horror of this tweet, particularly the almost parenthetical nod to “those that sadly lost a family member or friend,” with humor and grace and humor.
I mean, the idea of forgetting this? And any lessons we might have learned? About dealing with pandemics which will surely return at some point? That's so on-brand for Trump: screw up, create havoc, cause misery, learn nothing, move on.
In better news, make sure you watch Randy Rainbow's ode to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the tune of the most risible song from “Grease.” It's so perfect.
Wednesday April 08, 2020
Movie Review: For the Love of Spock (2016)
WARNING: SPOILERS
My wife Patricia isn’t a “Star Trek” fan—kind of despises it, actually—but she watched all of the documentary “For the Love of Spock” with me the other night. It was my second viewing. My first happened in Oct. 2016 when I was staying at my sister’s place in Minneapolis shortly after my mother’s stroke. One night, laying in bed with my laptop after another emotionally draining day, I found the documentary on Netflix. I’m long past my Trekkie days but I figured I’d watch a few minutes before falling asleep. I wound up watching the whole thing. It was a balm.
Not sure why it made me feel so good. Because it was something familiar at a time when everything was so horribly unfamiliar? Because it showcases a son’s love for a parent? The doc is directed by Adam Nimoy and was originally meant to focus on Spock, the character, but became about his dad, too, after Leonard Nimoy died in February 2015. It’s my past and our imagined future—both simpler times, both nostalgic. Watching it with my wife, during the social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, when life again is so horribly unfamiliar, I remembered things I hadn’t thought about in years. It just poured out of me:
“Hey, William Windom! From ‘My World and Welcome to It’? Late ’60s sitcom? He’s like a James Thurber type? This is from a second-season Trek episode, ‘The Doomsday Machine.’ Oh, and ‘Corbomite Maneuver.’ Who could forget that? You know who turns out to be inside this ship? You know the scary face we saw earlier? That’s Balock and that’s the image that shows up on the viewscreen, but it’s a façade. Like Oz in “Oz.” The real creature running things is this little kid played Clint Howard, Ron’s brother, a few years before ‘Gentle Ben.’”
I know. But she put up with me.
Something that’s a curiosity
Nimoy invented a lot of the character, didn’t he? “Enemy Within” called for him to deck evil Kirk, which didn’t seem very Vulcan to him, so he invented the neck pinch. In “Amok Time,” we visit Vulcan for the first time and he figured they’d need a greeting of their own, so he reached into his Jewish heritage and came up with the Vulcan salute. (Unmentioned: It would only work if Celia Lovsky, the actress playing T’Pau, could return the greeting—and she actually couldn’t do it. But she could manipulate her fingers into the salute off camera, and that’s how they made it work.)
Patricia [trying the Vulcan salute]: I can’t do it.
Me: [showing off with both hands] I think I had to practice before I got it.
Patricia: I didn’t know he was Jewish.
Me: Shatner, too. I think? They‘re both in Adam Sandler’s “Hanukah Song” anyway: You don’t need “Deck the Halls” or “Jingle Bell Rock”/ Cause you can spin a dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock—both Jewish!
The neck pinch and the salute added to the coolness factor of Spock—who was already the coolest character on the show. I particularly like the idea of coming up with a salute that’s accompanied by the phrase “Live long and prosper,” and seeing it doing exactly that.
At the same time, Nimoy keeps giving credit to others in the development of the character. He said the change from Jeffrey Hunter (an internal actor) to William Shatner (not) helped because it allowed Nimoy to pull back and emote less. Nimoy says he got a great note from the director of an early episode when the ship is being attacked and there’s all of this excitement and energy, which he got caught up in, and he says his line, “Fascinating!” full of that energy. “And [the director] said, ‘Be different,” Nimoy recalls. “‘Be the scientist. Be detached. See it as something that’s a curiosity rather than a threat.’” Nice. Since the episode they show in conjunction with this story is the aforementioned “Corbomite Maneuver,” that director was Joseph Sargent, who directed no other “Trek” episode, but went on to feature films and TV movies, including James Cagney’s final performance in “Terrible Joe Moran.” His most respected work is probably “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three”; his least is “Goldengirl” or “Jaws: The Revenge.” It’s a nice shout-out.
Nimoy’s early admission that before “Trek” he never had an acting gig that lasted longer than two weeks makes the scrambling nature of his post-“Trek” career more understandable. At the same time, I wish we’d seen more of that pre-“Trek” career. We get a montage of shots but it lasts maybe 30 seconds? I would’ve liked a deeper cut. On IMDb he has 69 credits before “Star Trek” and some of those involve multiple episodes. He had a great, lean look, with high cheekbones, and he wound up playing Native Americans a lot: Yellow Wolf and Yellow Bear, Little Hawk and Chief Black Hawk, Oontah and John Walking Fox. He wound up playing hungry people, too. People scrapping for their last best chance.
The doc also barely touches on the ludicrous singing career—he should’ve gotten more shit for that. It celebrates the kerchiefs he wore a lot in the late ’60s/early’70s ... but no. It delves a bit into his drawbacks as a father and husband—his tendency to pick work over family. Which is understandable. He was born in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, when the lesson was: Keep working because you never know when it’s going to go away. It's a lesson we may be relearning.
The alien in our midst
You know what I totally grooved on? Those photos of Nimoy, with Spock haircut, in late 1960s suburbia. I find them—sorry—fascinating. That mix of the future and the present—which is now our past. I always liked those episodes where they returned to our time, particularly “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” so maybe this is part of that. Or maybe I like the idea of someone so iconic hanging with us.
During its three-year run, “Star Trek” was nominated for a total of 13 Emmys and won bupkis. The noms came from what you’d expect—editing, effects … and Nimoy. He was the only actor to be nominated—and he was nominated every season. Who did he lose to? The Emmy categories were a bit odd back then. First time he lost to Eli Wallach in “The Poppy is Also a Flower”—but it’s a TV movie, a one-off, rather than a continuing series. The next year he lost to Milburn Stone, who played Doc on “Gunsmoke,” so that’s at least in the same territory. The oddity is Stone played Doc for 20 seasons and this is the only time he was nominated. At least for the ’68-’69 show, the Emmys changed the award to supporting actor for a continued performance. At the same time, they didn’t differentiate between drama and comedy, so Nimoy lost to Werner Klemperer from “Hogan’s Heroes.” So it goes.
To me, some of the best literary movements in 20th century America came out of the assimilation dynamic—Jewish-American, African-American, Southern American—and Adam Nimoy’s doc makes it clear that the power of Mr. Spock comes from that tension as well. He’s the alien in our midst. It’s why resonates; and probably why he endures more than the other characters. He's the survivor. Mr. Spock was the only character in the original pilot to make the jump to the original series, while Nimoy was the only actor from the original series to make the jump to the feature-film reboot. Spock lives long, and he continues to prosper.
Thanks, Adam, for twice helping me through tough times.
My autographed copy of the program for “Vincent,” which I saw at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1978.
Tuesday April 07, 2020
‘Well-Oiled Machine’
such a finely tuned, well-oiled machine https://t.co/15ceiJQ1Iw
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) April 8, 2020
Tuesday April 07, 2020
Al Kaline (1934-2020)
When I think of Al Kaline, I think of Bert Gordon, Realty.
Gordon was one of the title characters in Roger Angell's great article “Three for the Tigers,” which was published in The New Yorker in September 1973, as well as one of the talking heads kvelling Hank Greenberg in Aviva Kempner's great documentary “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.” I think of Gordon because early in the article, Angell describes Gordon going into his office in Oak Park, Michigan, on a Monday morning, taking off his shoes and sliding his feet “into a pair of faded blue espadrilles,” and then punching in numbers into a desk-model calculator, which, in my mind, is huge, heavy and metal, and which sits on a side table. He's calculating two things: as a Democrat, what percentage of Nixon's term in office remains (he doesn't know it yet, but he's going to catch a break there); and as a Tigers fan, what Al Kaline's lifetime batting average is. Over the weekend, Kaline went 1 for 7 against Minnesota, so on this Monday morning his lifetime average reads: .3000267. Angell writes: “Bert sighs, erases the figure, and picks up his telephone. He is ready to start his day.”
You should read the piece if you haven‘t. It’s available in the book “Five Seasons,” Angell's second compilation, where Angell includes an afterword. Gordon's first calculating ritual ended in August 1974 when Nixon resigned amid the disgrace of Watergate, the second when Al Kaline retired in October 1974. Before the Tigers last homegame, Oct. 2, Gordon realized late that he was missing his last chance to see Kaline in action, so he hopped in his car, caught Kaline's first at-bat (as DH) over the radio, and was heading into the stadium when he heard the roar accompanying Kaline's second. At least he'd catch the rest. Except that was it. In the bottom of the 5th, Ben Oglive pinch-hit for him. “The next morning,” Angell writes, “in his office, he punched out the final Kaline numbers: 10,116 at-bats, 3,007 hits, for a lifetime batting average of .297518.”
Kaline's last years were a battle between the counting numbers and the statistical ones. Yes, his lifetime batting average slipped below .300 at some point in 1973 (Bert could've told us exactly when), but on Sept. 24, 1974, he became just the 12th man in baseball history, and the first since Roberto Clemente, to reach 3,000 hits, with a double off Dave McNally at Memorial Stadium. It was his last extra-base hit. He fell just short of similar milestones in doubles (498) and homers (399).
When I think of Al Kaline, I also think of Harmon Killebrew. When I was a kid and began paying attention to baseball in 1969-1970, they were the eminence grises of two Midwest American League clubs: both white, quiet, somewhat bland, with “K” initials. They were also both very nice men. As a Twins fan, I assumed Killebrew was the better player. He was 1969 MVP, after all, and hit 500+ homers. But Kaline was by far the better fielder, winning 10 Gold Gloves, and bWar gives it to Kaline by a longshot: 92.8 (29th all-time among position players) vs. 60.4 for Killer. The Hall of Fame agreed. They kept making Killebrew knock before letting him in; Kaline got in his first time with 88% of the vote. He was the first Tiger to have his number retired, too, in 1980.
His best years were before I was born: 1955, when he led the majors with a .340 batting average; 1959, when he led in slugging and OPS; and 1961, when his 8.4 bWAR was third-best in the AL.
He died yesterday in his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. “No specific cause was given,” The New York Times reported.
Monday April 06, 2020
Tom Dempsey (1947-2020)
It feels like I‘ve always known Tom Dempsey’s name. I became a football fan in 1972, at age 9, when his 63-yard field goal for the New Orleans Saints to beat the Detroit Lions 19-17 two years earlier was already the stuff of legend. As was he. He had half a foot. That's what we were always told. Some part of me thought it was chopped off, like Kunta Kinte‘s, but he’d been born that way, without toes or fingers on his right side.
It was particularly the stuff of legend because I never got the chance to see it. You'd watch highlights on “NFL Films” Saturday afternoons, but it was recent stuff, not two-year-old stuff—at least not when I was watching. Or it'd be about winning teams, not the New Orleans Saints, for god's sake. I actually didn't see the kick until about two years ago when someone posted a video on Twitter. Check it out—it's astonishing. Like the Minnesota Vikings' Fred Cox, Dempsey was one of the last of the straight-on kickers, so it was just a couple steps back, head down, boom. Look at the distance traveled. The athletic way that field-goal kickers kick today, using their entire body, was known as “soccer-style” back then. It was the new wave. Cox and Dempsey were the old guys.
Back then, a 45-yard field goal was a nail-biter and anything over 50 was a big ask. Even Dempsey. In his first season, 1969, he tried 11 field goals from 50+ yards and made one. The year he did it, 1970, he was 3 for 9 from that distance. Career: 12 of 39. Even for Dempsey it was basically a 30% shot.
So 63 yards? Add on his handicap and it was a great story.
Some complained his half foot, and the special shoe that went with it, wasn't a handicap so much as a cheat. It gave him an unfair advantage. From the Washington Post's obit:
Tex Schramm, a Dallas Cowboys executive and chairman of the NFL's competition committee, compared Dempsey's shoe to “the head of a golf club with a sledgehammer surface,” and in 1977 the NFL passed “the Dempsey rule,” which required kickers' shoes to have a kicking surface that conforms to that of a normal kicking shoe. It was a rule that offended Dempsey.
“The owners make the rules,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010, “and my favorite saying about owners is, ‘If you threw them a jockstrap, they’d put it on as a nose guard.' They don't know a damn thing about football.”
The Post adds that recently “ESPN Sport Science analyzed the kick and determined that the shoe, now on display in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, actually was a disadvantage for Dempsey.”
Effin' Cowboys. Always screw shit up.
But this is how big and legendary that kick was. Dempsey broke the previous record (Bert Rechichar, Colts, 1953, 56 yards) by seven yards, which is like a Bob Beamon leap in excellence. No one even tied Dempsey's mark until 1998 (Jason Elam) and no one broke it until 2013 (Matt Prater). It took nearly a half-century—and they did it by just one yard. Is Prater legendary now? I don't know. I'm not a football fan or a kid anymore. I just know the place Dempsey had for us.
He had the longest NFL field goal three years in a row (1969-1971), and in 1971, now with Philadelphia, he led the league in field goal percentage (70.6%), but he was an All-Pro only once (1969) and he isn't in the Hall. The soccer-style guys took over. His last year in the NFL was in 1979, with Buffalo.
He retired with his wife, a school teacher, to a suburb of New Orleans, but the 21st century wasn't kind. First, came Hurricane Katrina, which flooded their home. Wiki has a quote from Dempsey, saying it “flooded me out of a lot of memorabilia, but it can't flood out the memories.” Then life took the memories: Alzheimer's and dementia. He was moved to a nursing home. This year, COVID-19 swept through the nursing home and he contracted it. He died this weekend.
Godspeed.
The moment before the moment.
Sunday April 05, 2020
Anthony Fauci's Fine Balance
From David Remnick's New Yorker piece, “Trump in the Time of the Coronavirus”:
Time and again during this crisis, Trump has questioned the science put in front of him. He has, in his familiar way, contradicted the experts in his Administration. The result is unnerving both for the experts and the public. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the officials who have tried to navigate doing their jobs properly and, at the same time, dealing with a completely unpredictable President. Fauci has openly, if subtly, clashed with Trump, telling him that it will likely take more than a year, not “a few months,” to develop a vaccine. “You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don't want to go to war with a President,” Fauci told Politico. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you tell the truth.”
Not news for anyone paying attention; and for those for whom it would be news, they won't pay attention. It's still worth repeating. It's still worth making sure you tell the truth.
How sad that telling such truth requires “a fine balance,” even when it means saving lives.
Further reading:
Sunday April 05, 2020
Movie Review: The West Point Story (1950)
WARNING: SPOILERS
James Cagney starred in only four musicals during his career, and it’s instructive comparing the first, “Footlight Parade” (1933), with the last, this one, “The West Point Story” (1950), 17 years later.
In both, Cagney is an impresario of musical numbers. He thinks them up and nurses them along. In both, the love interest is his straight-shooting blonde assistant (Joan Blondell, Virginia Mayo). Both are vehicles for up-and-coming Warner Bros. singing stars (Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler; Doris Day/Gordon MacRae). And in both, at the end, one of the leads can’t go on, so Cagney has to sing and dance the finale.
Those are the parallels. More interesting are the differences.
In “Footlight,” Cagney’s character is surrounded by scantily-clad chorus girls as the movie sells sex in the midst of the Depression. In “West Point,” Cagney’s character is surrounded by buttoned-up military men as the movie sells patriotism in the midst of the Cold War. The first movie is rat-a-tat-tat and scrambling; it’s gritty Warner Bros. The last is self-satisfied and cartoonish; it’s absurdly cheery and totally phony. You watch both and can’t help but wonder what happened to Warner Bros., the film industry, and us.
Many dilemmas
Elwin “Bix” Bixby (Cagney) is an exacting dancer/choreographer/director who’s making a go in a small club in New York. We see him hopping up and down angrily when his performers don’t do the routine just so. Then he shows them how. Then he leaves to place a bet on the horses. He’s got a gambling addiction. That’s the first dilemma.
His girl, the leggy Eve Dillon (Virginia Mayo), is going to leave him because of it; she says she got an offer to perform in Vegas. But then Bix gets a call from Harry Eberthart (Roland Winters), his corrupt ex-partner, who wants Bix to direct West Point’s annual musical, “100 Days Till June.” Why? It seems his nephew, Tom Fletcher (Gordon MacRae, five years before playing Curly in “Oklahoma”), is the star of the show. He’s a cadet who wants a military career but his uncle thinks he’s got a voice and wants him for Broadway. At first, Bix stands his ground. “I will not steal your nephew out of West Point,” he says in the Cagney manner. But then Eberhart mentions the Vegas offer for Eve—which he orchestrated—and Bix knows he’s trapped. He seals the deal not with a handshake but a sock to Eberhart’s jaw. It’s accompanied by comic sound effects. Eberhart rises, dazed, from behind his desk. All that’s missing are the animated birds circling his head.
That’s the second dilemma: Going to West Point to convince Tom to make a career out of singing.
Good news? Tom’s got a voice. Bad news? There are no women in the show, so the princess is played by the biggest of the bunch, Bull Gilbert (Alan Hale, Jr., 14 years before becoming the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”). Bix tries to show him how to do his dance number, Bull gives him a wolf’s whistle as a joke, and Bix cold-cocks him. Cue more comic sound effects.
For that, Bix is about to get booted from the Point before the job even begins. I guess that’s the third dilemma. The boys stick up for him but the commandant is wary. Bix’s own military record includes both absurd insubordination and absurd bravery. But a deal is struck. Bix can stay if he becomes a cadet himself.
That’s actually the germ of the idea that led to this movie being made in the first place. From John McCabe’s biography of Cagney:
[Cagney] recalled that his idol George M. Cohan, in preparing for a scene in one of his musicals, had inveigled West Point’s superintendent into allowing him to live as a cadet on the premises for a week.
So Bix gets a high-and-tight but remains the same short-tempered curmudgeon. Except now he wants to steal Tom for himself. In that regard, he gets in touch with his friend, movie star Jan Wilson (Doris Day, third-billed), whom he plucked from the chorus back in the day. She agrees to go to a military hop as Tom’s date. And it works! They fall for each other.
Except Eve finds out about Bix’s machinations and is ready to leave him again. Is this the fourth dilemma? Or is it when Bix loses the respect of the men because he lies about having a pass? This latter problem is solved when he admits to the lie and is forced to walk a punishment tour in the quad—filmed against a blue screen; the principles were never at West Point—but oddly it also solves the former problem. Tom explains to Eve what’s going on and Eve blows Bix a kiss and all is forgiven even though Bix is still trying to become Tom’s agent.
In fact, Tom and Jan get engaged! But instead of Tom agreeing to follow Eve to Hollywood, Eve follows Tom to West Point. So Bix finagles a way to get the studio to drop the hammer on her. That works, and Tom resigns his commission, but by now Bix doesn’t want to be Tom's agent, so … Blah blah blah. It’s like this, one dilemma after another, many of Bix’s own making, and it culminates with Bix convincing the French premier to pardon Tom by showing him the Medaille Militaire Bix was awarded in World War II. “This is our highest decoration!” the premier says, in case we haven’t figured it out.
So the West Point show goes on—with movie star Jan now playing the princess, and Bix replacing Hal (Gene Nelson, “Oklahoma”), whom he inadvertently coldcocks backstage. Tom and Jan wind up together (but pursuing separate careers?), Bix and Eve wind up together, and the boys present Bix with the book and libretto of the show so he can stage it on Broadway. The end. Mercifully.
Great guardians of human liberty
“West Point” was directed by Roy Del Ruth, who directed Cagney in four movies between 1931 and 1934: “Blonde Crazy,” “Taxi,” “Winner Take All” and “Lady Killer.” The first two aren’t bad, and even the bad ones are worth watching for Cagney. Not here. Cagney actually hurts more than helps. He overacts, particularly with the on-stage temper tantrums, and seems in danger of becoming a parody of himself: more Frank Gorshin than Rocky Sullivan.
MacRae is good, if a bit blank, while Day is saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt. Hale is fine. (Did Cagney act with other father-son combos? Hale Sr. appeared in several early ’40s Cagney flicks.) Mayo is fine, too, but she’s way too young for Cagney, who’s an old 51. He’s 17 years older than in “Footlight Parade,” and looks it, while she’s basically the same age as Blondell: 30 instead of 27.
The pre-code titillation of “Footlight” is sadly absent. Eve shows up at West Point in short shorts with legs up to here and not one cadet gives a second glance? Or a first? The camera in “Footlight” knows what it’s offering us as chorus girls change into their Busby Berkeley outfits, but this camera is as dumb as the cadets. It’s Sgt. Schultz: It knows nothing. Nothing.
But it knows everything about chest-beating patriotism. MacRae is forced to do a number called “The Corps,” which he mostly intones, as a military chorus hums and thrums behind him:
Duty. Honor. Country. This is why the dream materialized into the stone and steel and spirit that is West Point. A dream that can be measured by the names of its giants striding through the pages of American history. Giants whose voices rang so loud that the entire world trembled, yet who were once cadets, marching nervously across the plain. Cadets like Lee, Grant, Pershing; MacArthur, Wainwright, Arnold; Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower. And thousands of others, who left this point on the Hudson to end their earthly lives in the dirt and mud of foreign lands.
That’s laying it on a bit thick. But whatever. Depression, World War II, communist rise: Americans had been through a lot. So I guess … Oh, he’s not done?
Men who didn’t want wars and didn’t make wars but simply fought them because they had the understanding and the courage to want a free America.
“A free America”: That should be enough for HUAC, right? To show that Hollywood is patriotic and … What? More?
Because like Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, they believed in a dream that is West Point. A legend, a tradition, one of the great guardians of human liberty.
“Guardians of human liberty”! There we go. That’s the trump card. And … nope:
Please, God, may we always keep faith with them, as they have with us. For duty, for honor, for country.
Can you imagine a culture so scared and cloistered that this passes for entertainment?
Cagney liked it anyway. Via McCabe:
“It’s one of my favorite pictures,” said Jim. “Cornball as all hell, but don’t let anyone tell me those songs by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn aren’t worth listening to. They were sure worth dancing to.”
A year later, Del Ruth would direct a musical, “Starlift,” with a similar theme—military dude + Hollywood star—and with almost all the same actors: Day, MacRae, Mayo and Nelson. Just not Cagney. Or he was relegated to a cameo. As himself.
Watch “Footlight Parade” instead.
Cold War America: cheery, buttoned-up, sexless.
Saturday April 04, 2020
The Chaotic, Leaderless White House Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Timeline
This is your weekend read. Or your weekday read if you see this on Monday. Or on Tuesday. Or June 15. I don't care, just read it. Here's the full hed/sub from The Washington Post:
It's particularly enlightening on the behind-the-scenes stuff from the early days of the outbreak. Who comes off poorly? China, Xi Jinping, the CDC, Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner, but particularly Donald Trump, who didn't lead, didn't see, dismissed and downplayed. He golfed while COVID burned through the world.
Here's a timeline based on the story:
- Dec. 31: CDC learns of cluster of cases in China
- Jan. 3: CDC director Robert Redfield receives call from Chinese counterpart on Covid-19, tells Alex Azar, secretary of HHS, who tells the White House
- Jan. 6: Redfield offers to send U.S. team to China to help (and get virus sample) but is rebuffed for weeks
- Week of Jan. 6: Intra-agency task force of Redfield, Azar, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, begins convening
- Jan. 13: First case outside China is reported in Thailand
- Jan. 14: China still claims no evidence of person-to-person transmission
- Mid-January: Robert Kadlec, a physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, instructs subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act
- Jan. 18: Trump, in Mar-a-Lago, is briefed extensively via phone by Azar; Trump complains about other matters
- Jan. 21: First confirmed case in U.S./Seattle
- Jan. 23: China shuts down Wuhan province
- Late January: China refuses to share virus sample so U.S. can develop tests
- Jan. 22: Trump received first press query about coronavirus, says “We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. . . . It's going to be just fine”
- Jan. 24: Beijing officials block virus-sample transfer from Wuhan Institute of Virology to Univ. of Texas lab
- Late January/early February: White House task force convenes, including chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, dep. national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, Azar and Fauci Focus is on extracting Americans from China and closing border with China. No serious focus on testing or supplies
- Jan. 31: Azar announces restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering U.S. “But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month”
- Early February: Pottinger pushes for travel ban on Italy; met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who worries about affect on economy
- Early February: Panic from public health officials: “A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding”
- Feb. 5: Azar submits request to OMB for $4 billion to combat coronavirus; he's accused and dismissed as alarmist. Several weeks later, they whittle it down to $2.5 billion but Congress approves at $8 billion version, which Trump signs into law on March 8—a month later. The U.S. “missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves”
- Feb. 6: As the World Health Organization begins shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC starts distributing 90 kits to state-run health labs; they turn out to be unreliable
- February: Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, seeks authority to call private diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to enlist their help in creating tests; he's told to “stand down”
- Feb. 9: Fauci and Redfield hold coronavirus meeting with governors, who come away alarmed by the size of the potential crisis
- Feb. 10: Trump tells supporters at campaign rally, “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away”
- February: Trump goes golfing six times
- Late February: U.S. officials discover indications that the CDC laboratory is failing basic quality-control standards
- Feb. 29: CDC allows private labs to develop own diagnostics
- Feb. 29: First U.S. citizen dies of COVID-19 in Washington state
- March 6: Trump tours CDC, proclaims CDC tests perfect and “‘anybody who wants a test will get a test,’ a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet”
Some other key grafs:
For weeks, [Trump] had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn't downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration. ... In March, as state after state imposed sweeping new restrictions on their citizens' daily lives to protect them — triggering severe shudders in the economy — Trump second-guessed the lockdowns.
Trump spent many weeks shuffling responsibility for leading his administration's response to the crisis, putting Azar in charge of the task force at first, relying on Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, for brief periods, before finally putting Vice President Pence in the role toward the end of February.
Then there's Jared:
A team reporting to Kushner commandeered space on the seventh floor of the HHS building to pursue a series of inchoate initiatives. One plan involved having Google create a website to direct those with symptoms to testing facilities that were supposed to spring up in Walmart parking lots across the country, but which never materialized. Another centered an idea advanced by Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison to use software to monitor the unproven use of anti-malaria drugs against the coronavirus pathogen.
So far, the plans have failed to come close to delivering on the promises made when they were touted in White House news conferences. The Kushner initiatives have, however, often interrupted the work of those under immense pressure to manage the U.S. response.
Read the whole thing. Memorize it. Carry it with you into November. Never forget.
Saturday April 04, 2020
Curly Neal (1942-2020)
How much of a superhero was Curly Neal when I was growing up? The first time I saw him live—the only time I saw him live—when he and the other Harlem Globetrotters played at Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. in the early 1970s, he made that insane half-court shot of his from the corner (an example here, at 16 seconds in) ... and I was a little disappointed. I wasn't disappointed by that; I was disappointed that he didn't juggle like five basketballs perpetually through the hoop as he did in the Saturday morning cartoon show that my brother and I watched regularly—causing the scoreboard to literally blow up. I was disappointed because Curly Neal was not quite a superhero.
Was he my favorite? There was six in the cartoon and they each had bits:
- Meadowlark, the often-hapless leader
- Curly, the right-hand man and ... most athletic? I think he spins the ball on his finger more than anybody; also off his bald pate
- J.C. (J.C. Gipson), a gentle giant, who often scores baskets from balls that bounce off his stomach
- Geese (Hubert Ausbie), goofy
- Pablo (Pablo Robertson), short, perpetually dribbling
- Bobby Joe (Bobby Joe Mason), forgetful
Plus an old white lady (Grannie) and a yellow dog (Dribbles).
Curly was viewed as the great ball-handler on the team until Marques Haynes (“to show you how”) returned for the live-action Saturday morning show “The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine” in 1974. That's actually Curly's first IMDb credit since they didn't voice themselves in the 1970-72 cartoon. Meadowlark was Scatman Crothers, for example, while Curly was voiced by Stu Gilliam, a standup comedian. But the show was still groundbreaking—the first Saturday-morning cartoon show with a mostly black cast. (“Fat Albert” debuted two years later.) It was also my intro to basketball since Minnesota didn't have a team—we lost the Lakers to a city without lakes in 1960—so there was no local impetus to watch games. The first b-ball game I saw live was probably the Globetrotters at Met Center. They won.
When did it become too much? When they hung out with Scooby Doo? When they showed up on “Donnie and Marie,” “The Golden Hawn Special,” “The Love Boat”? Probably when they got title cred by visiting Gilligan's Island in 1981. That's part of the TV globe they probably shouldn't have trotted to. And with Meadowlark pursuing a solo career, Curly was left to be nominal leader. I think? I never saw the movie. I was a senior in high school by then.
Curly was born Fred Neal in Greensboro, North Carolina, birthplace of the sit-in portion of the civil rights movement in February 1960. By that time, Curly was playing at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, where, according to Wiki, “he averaged 23.1 points a game and was named All-Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) guard.” He wanted to go to the NBA but wasn't drafted. The Globetrotters was his back-up plan. His back-up plan made him a legend.
“I got a questionnaire letter, as a free agent,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “I would have to pay my way to [an NBA] camp. The Globetrotters sent me a plane ticket and gave me room and board.”
That Times article mentions the wear and tear of the years. It mentions a heart attack he had in Oct. 1971 at the age of 29. That sent him back to college to get his degree. In 2008, he was the fifth Trotter to have his number retired—after Wilt Chamberlain, “Goose” Tatum, Marques Haynes and Meadowlark. Not sure why it took so long.
Has anyone seen the 2005 documentary on the Globetrotters? Or the 1951 movie? I have the 1970 George Vecsey bio paperback of the team but I wouldn't exactly call it all-encompassing. Attention must be paid.
Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, tweeted the best epitaph of all: “Hard to express how much joy Curly Neal brought to my life growing up.” Amen.
Friday April 03, 2020
Hit Them Hard with the Truth
AOC is at it again. Thank god:
Didn’t you just put a doctor on your show who faked their employment at Lenox Hill hospital and touted a COVID “treatment” that you tweeted & Twitter had to remove because a man may have died trying self-administer it?
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 3, 2020
I’m sorry, why are you on TV again? https://t.co/Lfc6RvtBDS
For most of my adult lifetime, Dems have tried to counter the usual Fox lies with the truth but they almost seem embarrassed to have to do it. Because it's tough to, you know, sorta kinda let the other side know that, well, they‘re really saying things that are viewed, by most people at least, as, I guess factual is the best word to use here. AOC don’t play that. She plays hardball. We need her to do so. We need all of us to do so. Scatter the bullshit artists. Hound them. Reveal their lies. Reveal their financial backers. Yes. Just who are the millionaires and billionaires who are running this game? And to what end?
Hit them hard with the truth. Make it sting like a bee.
Friday April 03, 2020
‘Hank’ Gowdy, Super-Hero, Cont.
After posting this piece on Boston Braves first baseman Hank Gowdy being called a “super-hero” for his incredible 1914 World Series performance—one of the earliest mentions of the term I‘ve come across—I got the following email from my father:
Hank Gowdy also figured prominently in the 1924 World Series, but not so heroically. In the 12th inning of game 7 at Griffith Park, Senators leadoff hitter, Muddy Ruel hit a foul popup near home plate, but Gowdy tripped over his catchers mask and didn’t catch it. Ruel then doubled and scored the winning run, rewarding Walter Johnson, in relief, with the win.
It was the first time a Game 7 went into extra innings. The next time? 1991.
That last stat is pretty interesting—particularly since it involved the Twins—the original Senators franchise that moved to Minnesota in 1961. So the first two times a deciding Game 7 went into extras, it involved that franchise; and they won both. Not bad.
Also interesting? Though it hadn't happened in nearly 70 years when the Twins beat the Braves in 10, it happened again just six years later, in 1997, when Jose Mesa blew it for the Indians and the Marlins went on to win in 11. Then it happened again in 2016, when the Cubs and Indians took a rain-delayed Game 7 into the 10th. Right, the Indians lost both of those. So Senators/Twins win the first two Game 7 extras, Indians lose the next two Game 7 extras. Symmetetry. Sorry, Cleveland.
Despite my father's memory, Gowdy wasn't hounded into eternity for the ‘24 mishap, the way that Merkle, Snodgrass and Buckner were for theirs. In fact, tripping over the catcher’s mask isn't mentioned at all in Gowdy's 1966 New York Times obit. The subhed immediately goes to his '14 exploits, then mentions a truer kind of heroism: The fact that Gowdy was the first Major League Baseball player to enlist and serve in World War I.
Thursday April 02, 2020
If You're Wondering Where the Hell OANN Came From
“OANN [One America News Network] was founded 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire Republican donor from San Diego who made his fortune in the circuit-board business before starting over in media. His son, Charles Herring, president of One America's parent company Herring Broadcasting, told The Post last week that the channel ”is designed to report just the news“ and that ‘we would not describe our news reporting as right-leaning.’
”But for a 2017 story, more than a dozen former and current employees described Robert Herring to The Post as a heavy-handed unofficial news director who frequently ordered coverage favorable to Trump. It was the first channel to carry Trump's 2016 campaign speeches live, and internal emails showed Herring directing that other candidates' rallies not get the same treatment.“
from the article ”OANN threatened with removal from White House press room after correspondent Chanel Rion makes unauthorized appearances," by Paul Farhi, on the Washington Post site
Thursday April 02, 2020
Tweet of the Day
Many options for tweets in these dark times. Everyone's pushing back. Today I go with Ted Boutrous, appellate lawyer extraordinaire, who does what I could not do: He watches Trump's daily press conferences about Covid-19 and reports what he sees:
It’s hard to capture just how unprofessional and embarassing and unbecoming these performances are—false and nonsensical statements, praising each other as people die needlessly, obvious obfuscations, blaming the states and citizens for the president’s own gross derelictions.
— Ted Boutrous (@BoutrousTed) April 2, 2020
Nothing to add to that. Or everything.
Thursday April 02, 2020
Joe's Top 100: 11-20
A-Rod Day in the Bronx as the Yankees cut short his career. It rained.
Poor Joe. After two starts and stops—one about seven years ago, the other last year or the year before—he was finally, finally going to give us his complete list of the Top 100 Players in Baseball History. He had teamed with the website The Athletic to count them down during this year's hot-stove league, one day at a time, until he finished, at No. 1, on Opening Day.
Perfect.
And then it wasn‘t.
When Opening Day was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joe and the Athletic tried to delay the countdown just a bit. Instead of a player a day, including weekends, they’d just go with the weekdays. And instead of counting down the Top 100 every weekday, they'd add “favorite players” (Steve Dalkowski, Bo Jackson, Tony Oliva) every other day, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I guess. To me, though, it's delaying the inevitable—the list will still finish weeks or months ahead of Opening Day. That said, why the hell not. Plus I get to read about Tony Oliva.
And now, as the man used to say, on with the countdown.
I pretty much nailed 11-20. I figured either Frank Robinson or Mike Schmidt for #20 (their numbers), and it was both. Joe did two #20s and no #19. I figured A-Rod for No. 13 (his Yankees number), rather thann No. 3 (his M‘s/Rangers number), but Joe added the two: A-Rod was No. 16. Last time on the list, I wrote this:
In the next 10, we‘ll also see Mickey, Rogers, Tris. Maybe Josh Gibson? ... Also not sure how much bWAR cred Joe gives to the steroid junkies Barry and Roger. I hope they’re not top 10 but Joe often disappoints on the subject.
We saw Mickey (#11), Rogers (#17), Tris (#18), Josh (#15), and, yes, Roger (#13). The ones I didn’t guess? Who I thought might be Top 10? Gehrig (#14) and Wagner (#12).
Here's 11-20:
No. | PLAYER | bWAR | ALL-TIME bWAR | POS | TEAM |
20 | Frank Robinson | 107.3 | 24 | OF | Orioles/Reds |
20 | Mike Schmidt | 106.8 | 26 | 3B | Phillies |
18 | Tris Speaker | 134 | 9 | OF | Red Sox/Indians |
17 | Rogers Hornsby | 127 | 12 | 2B | Cardinals |
16 | Alex Rodriguez | 117.8 | 16 | SS/3B | Yanks/Ms/Rangers |
15 | Josh Gibson | n/a | n/a | C | Negro Leagues |
14 | Lou Gehrig | 112.4 | 18 | 1B | Yankees |
13 | Roger Clemens | 139.2 | 8 | P | Red Sox/Yankees |
12 | Honus Wagner | 130.8 | 10 | SS | Pirates |
11 | Mickey Manle | 110.3 | 20 | OF | Yankees |
Who winds up No. 1? Joe has already given us 6-10 so I know the top 5. Three of the 5 are who you'd expect: Babe, Willie, Hank. There's also Barry, whom I discount more than Joe does, and Oscar Charleston, whom I don't know enough about. I assume No. 1 has to be Babe or Willie. Me, I'd go Willie. Say hey.
Wednesday April 01, 2020
‘The President Doesn’t Have Accurate Information': How NPR Contorts the Language and Avoids Responsibility
Yesterday morning, on NPR's “Morning Edition,” Rachel Martin spoke with the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, about the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic See if you can spot the moment that made me want to throw the radio across the room.
(Hint: It's not anything the Republican governor said.)
HOGAN: Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer [D-MI] and I did an op-ed in The Washington Post today, together, talking about what governors need. And one of the things we need is what we—you—just talked about, which is more production and distribution and coordination of these materials and supplies, the PPEs, testing and ventilators. ...
MARTIN: But President Trump has suggested that the testing problems are over. They‘ve been fixed. It’s no longer an issue.
HOGAN: Yeah, that's just not true. I mean, I know that they‘ve taken some steps to create new tests, but they’re not actually produced and distributed out to the states. So it's a aspirational thing, and they have taken—they‘ve got some new things in the works, but they’re not actually out on the streets, and that's ... No state has enough testing.
MARTIN: Then how much concern does it give you that the president right now clearly doesn't have accurate information?
HOGAN: Well, it's ... We think it's important to get the facts out there, and I think there are people in the administration who are talking about the facts every day. And we‘re listening to the smart team, the coronavirus team, the vice president and Ambassador Birx and Anthony Fauci and people like that who are giving factual information on a daily basis.
Good news! A Republican governor is dismissing the Republican president—as all good Republicans should be doing. Look who he says are talking about the facts every day: Pence, Birx, Fauci. Who’s missing? You know who. As a country, we‘ve been in difficult situations before (Revolutionary War, Civil War, Great Depression, WWII), but during those times we generally had good leaders (Washington, Lincoln, FDR). Right now we’ve got a dipshit. People are going to die because 63 million Americans voted for a dipshit for president.
But I knew that. That's not what set me off.
What set me off was Rachel Martin's follow-up when Gov. Hogan told her that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, was saying things that weren't true in the midst of a global pandemic:
Then how much concern does it give you that the president right now clearly doesn't have accurate information?
Doesn't have accurate information? Like he's asking for it and isn't getting it? Like it's in the next room somewhere? Like aides are keeping it from him out of some kind of deep-state conspiracy? Could she divorce Trump any more from the misinformation he's daily disseminating? From responsibility or accountability of any kind?`
Good god, NPR.
So what should the follow-up be? Maybe: “Why do you think the president is disseminating misinformation?” Sure, you might get the same response, but at least you'd been honing in on the real question. At least you wouldn't be avoiding responsibility. Both the president's and your own.