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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Strange Reasoning for a Guy

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First Lady Michelle Obama

This is going to sound like strange reasoning for a male of the species, but one of the main reasons why I want to see Barack Obama win a second term as President is my preference for Michelle Obama over Anne Romney.

Not that I have anything particular against Mrs. Romney, other than the fact that she is a blah corporate wife, but that Michelle Obama is nothing short of magnificent. If I were married to her, I certainly would not go canoodling with chubby interns. In fact, I would not mind if she were the President.

Listen to these words from her speech at the convention in Charlotte:

So today, when the challenges we face start to seem overwhelming – or even impossible – let us never forget that doing the impossible is the history of this nation…it’s who we are as Americans…it’s how this country was built.

And if our parents and grandparents could toil and struggle for us…if they could raise beams of steel to the sky, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with the touch of a button…then surely we can keep on sacrificing and building for our own kids and grandkids.

And if so many brave men and women could wear our country’s uniform and sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights…then surely we can do our part as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights…surely, we can get to the polls and make our voices heard on Election Day.

If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire…if immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores…if women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote…if a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time…if a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream…and if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Because in the end, more than anything else, that is the story of this country – the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.

Damn! She’s even a better speaker than Barack—and that’s saying a lot!

Compared to her, all the generations of Romneys are stumbling bozos (except maybe for George Romney, whom I respected far more than I do his son).

“All Here Are the Same”

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Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering, and everyone has the basic right to do this. In this way, we all here are the same, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Easterner or Westerner, believer or non-believer, and within believers whether Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so on. Basically, from the viewpoint of real human value we are all the same.—The Dalai Lama, “Kindness, Clarity, and Insight”

A Prickly Individual

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Alzheimer’s Disease

In 1968, I was hitchhiking on Wilshire Boulevard in West L.A., hoping to get a ride as close to the Los Feliz Theater on Vermont as possible. I forget the movie I was originally intending to see: All I know was that it was a French film.

I was picked up within a few minutes by a guy a few years older than me in a slate gray stick-shift Volvo. Just by coincidence, he was going to see a movie, too, except that his destination was a screening of Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. After a few miles on the road, I decided to go with him, not having seen the Elia Kazan picture and not being averse to the luminescent eyes of Natalie Wood.

My new friend, whom I shall call Marvin, and I became movie-going buddies. We would see a film and then eat dinner, doing the bubble-gum card trading which with us passed for film criticism. Films were either “great” or “a piece of sh*t”—there was no middle ground. Inevitably, we drifted apart, as we were both pretty stubborn in our views. Marvin moved back East and ran a comic book store in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I went on to do the things I did, working in computer software and marketing and eventually accounting.

About twenty-five years ago, Marvin started coming to the film memorabilia and comics shows in Southern California. We reestablished contact. Then Martine started working for him as a helper: Marvin’s hearing was rapidly deteriorating. His hearing aid was about as efficacious as a banana. Fortunately, Martine was able to interface with the customers while passing written notes to Marvin when it required his input.

This year, Marvin came to the Cinecon show displaying alarming symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease. He had forgotten to ship his film posters, which were the big money-maker for him, and instead just sold a few lobby cards, stills, books, and film magazines. He would keep asking me repeatedly what day of the week it was, and then promptly forget what I told him.

He knew something was happening to him. He frequently referred to his requiring a new memory chip. At the same time, he would frequently appear confused and agitated. He even misidentified Dorothy Dandridge in a still from Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess (1959). This is the type of mistake which, hitherto, Marvin had never made before; and other symptoms of mental slippage were beginning to appear.

Despite that, my friend was still his opinionated self and took issue with me because I read too many works of foreign literature that were translated into English (he never read anything not in English), and too much history. At the same time he was reading a John Grisham, an author deliberately not represented in my collection of mysteries.

Yesterday, when the show ended, we drove Marvin to the airport and dropped him off at the Delta Airlines terminal. I was relieved to hear from him by e-mail that he got back home safely, if tired. By return e-mail, I suggested that he see his doctor about his memory. With luck (my fingers are crossed) something could be done to reverse or ameliorate what looks like a precipitous decline.

Marvin is a prickly individual to say the least. He lives alone, though he had hopes of linking up with a woman from Northampton whom he knew. Alas, she died last year of taking several medications which didn’t agree with one another. Since then, Marvin has been more despondent than usual.

I’ve known the s.o.b. for forty-four years now, and I sincerely hope that his health improves so that we could continue our contentious friendship..

Gazing Into the Abyss

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.—Friedrich Nietzsche

Morose Delectation

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Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

Certain stylistic differences separate us from our ancestors; but every once in a while, we can see people from eighty or a hundred years ago as if they were alive today. That was brought home to me at Cinecon today, when I saw a rare reel of Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties outtakes shot at nearby Venice Beach.

The scene was that the director had the girls run into the ocean. Evidently, the water was too cold for them, and they pleaded with the director off-screen to let them get used to the cold. Suddenly, the outlandish bathing costumes of a century ago and the stupid ringlets that the girls curled their hair into didn’t matter any more. In every other way, the scene could have been shot yesterday; and the girls were cute and rather appealing.

On Saturday morning, I saw a 1930 Fox Movietone newsreel of a stage rehearsal of a troupe of chorus girls entitled Backstage on Broadway. Again, once you looked past the inevitable blonde ringlets, the girls were incredibly beautiful, with gams that most of today’s women would kill for.

It is sad to think that virtually all of these girls are now dead. We snicker at minor details that divide their time from ours, and which place a spurious distance between us and them. No doubt their slang was outrageously different; and their everyday beliefs were probably more puritanical (though that’s hard to know for sure). In the Mack Sennett film, the bathing beauties were probably seen as brazen women, and the very large and appreciative male crowd along the Boardwalk lent credence to that that guess.

One of the poster dealers at the Cinecon show had a nude frontal body shot of the lovely Louise Brooks, whose dark bangs make her sexy even today. But, alas, she was found dead in her house from a heart attack after years of suffering from emphysema and arthritis. Mabel Normand, the most famous of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1930.

I suppose it’s dangerous to fall in love with ghosts. And yet the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater of the Egyptian Theater was filled with aging film fans, some of them in wheelchairs, whose eyes lit up at memories of their youth and of the women who made their lives seem worthwhile. Now they themselves are slowly vanishing into the past. New generations will take their place with dreams of tattooed and pierced young women in the outlandish costumes of Hollywood nightclubs.

Just remember: The outlandishness doesn’t count. They’re just people like us.

To Be a Philosopher …

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.—Henry David Thoreau

Silents, Golden and Not So Golden

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Nancy Nash and Earle Foxe in John Ford’s Upstream (1927)

Silent movies are not for everyone. Because of the times in which most of them were produced, the results can be off-putting because of hokiness or a tendency toward melodrama. This week at Cinecon, I have seen silents that were great, some that were merely interesting, and some that were just plain bad.

The best of the lot was John Ford’s backstage drama, Upstream (1927), a film which was thought to have been lost. In 2009, however, a print was discovered by the New Zealand Film Archive. Although many scenes were spoiled by rotting of the nitrate stock, enough came through to make this one of Ford’s best silents, better even than the more famous The Iron Horse (1924).

The story was about a down at heels Shakespearean actor named Eric Brasingham (Foxe), who is courting Gertie Ryan (Nash), the partner of vaudeville knife-thrower Juan Rodriguez (Grant Withers). He gets his chance for the big time because a London theater is willing to take a chance on him because the Brasinghams are a famous acting family (even though Eric himself is a nonentity). His fellow denizens in a theatrical New York boardinghouse give him a big send-off, but he leaves Gertie in the lurch.

In London, he manages to succeed. He becomes conceited and supercilious, and omits writing to Gertie. She, tired of waiting, marries the knife-thrower. Then, suddenly, Brasingham descends on the boardinghouse as a publicity stunt and finds his reception is not what he had hoped.

Director John Ford does here what he specialized in: Characters who are well developed and interesting. Even the vaudevillian song-and-dance Callahan Brothers are unforgettable, as is the  “star boarder,” played by actual Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock. Even though the theatrical subject matter is not typical Ford—better known for his Westerns and Irish films—the director is at home regardless what he does. And certain stylistic touches link it with films as different as the Hamlet scene in My Darling Clementine (1946), in which Grant Withers is one of the Clanton boys.

More typical of the silents I saw was the excellent The Goose Woman (1925), directed by Clarence Brown and starring Louise Dresser. Graphically, it was a gorgeous film, but the melodramatic plot comes across as risible today: A famed Italian opera star has to make a choice between having a child and continuing to sing at La Scala. She has a child, and her voice goes kaput. What kind of illness is this? Was the baby delivered via the vocal chords? In any case, the singer becomes a goose woman on a farm and a full time lush, until she must make a Sophie’s Choice type of decision regarding her son, who is accused of murder.