This issue is one of the most divisive in the Western World. In the United States, many more people who used to accept that global warming is happening no longer believe it. Even when reputable institutions like NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) put out evidence recently that this is a problem, still many people more seem to flock to the more comforting idea that mankind is just a simple creature unable to have a long-term effect on the planet.
That is why climate-warming deniers always cling to any shreds of a hacked e-mail or a scientist or a celebrity who tells us that our industrial economy doesn't come with a nasty effect on the atmosphere of the planet. The facts are that hundreds of climate scientists say that the earth is getting warmer, period, and have been saying so for years.
I believe human beings do have the power to change our climate--and all the name-calling I've read on websites researching this topic tells it is so hopelessly politicized (at least in the USA, where one-quarter of the greenhouse-effect emissions come from) that it will be a long time before we realize how fragile this planet is and how American and Chinese and European lifestyles are making this planet warmer.
It was all put together quite well for me in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times (from July 22) . I include a portion of this editorial because I feel this gets to the heart of the state of denial too many Americans are trapped in by misleading punditry and conspiracy theories that aim to do nothing but pretend the forests aren't dying, the masses of plankton and coral reefs aren't diminishing and the world isn't getting hotter.
"You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice melted at a record-setting pace in June.
"The heat can probably be attributed at least in part to periodic and entirely natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure — the El Niño/La Niña phenomena most likely played a role. But the fact that peak years are getting hotter while even relatively "cool" years now tend to remain above historical averages (the 10 warmest years on record all occurred within the last 15 years, according to the NOAA) shows that something else is at work. A consensus of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but the national scientific academies of the United States and the rest of the developed world, have identified that "something else" as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, which reflect the sun's heat back onto the Earth rather than letting it escape into space."
A wonderful and rare moment in a variety television show. Orson Welles reciting the "sheeri-sack" speech from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part Two" from Act Four of the great Elizabethan history play.
As a young writer/director, Welles redacted five of Shakespeare's plays--two featuring the mischief-making reprobate Sir John Falstaff--into a late 1930's Broadway production called "Five Kings".
After playing all of Shakespeare's great tragic characters--save "Hamlet"--either on stage, screen or television in between, he played the "fat knight" himself in his own favorite film "Chimes at Midnight" (1964). Here he is four years later on his friend Dean Martin's program, recreating a brief bit of his original theatrical genius for millions of viewers.
From their 1986 album, "Please". This is a song I could relate to while living in a suburb not without its rough edges,including pit bulls going about, the odd car-bomb going off in the middle of the night, people who drove cars too fast in school zones, and a general bit of increaed surliness and defensivness in people.
Californian sububria--the place of escape and peace in the 60's and 70's--became for many like me a place to be weary of staying in.
Of course, there were always good people and humor here and there, and there stil are, but it seemed at my particular patch of "the good life" like a good time to get out of metropolitan California. This song brings it back, even with the more docile English suburbs represented as well here.
From wikipedia: "The song's primary inspiration is the 1984 Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, and its depiction of violence and squalor in the suburbs of Los Angeles; in addition, the tension of the Brixton riots of 1981 and of 1985 hanging in recent memory led Neil Tennant of the duo to thinking about the boredom of suburbia and the underlying tension among disaffected youth that sparked off the riots at the least provocation.
"The various versions of the song are punctuated by sounds of suburban violence: rioting noises and smashing glass, as well as snarling dogs on the re-recorded single version (extended even further on the music video), which were derived from scenes in Suburbia."
For years, what I had read about the Norman Invasion of England was summarized by the events of the Battle of Hastings in late 1066, when King Harold Godwinson and his "Saxon" forces were defeated by William the Conquerer. King Edward (the Confessor) had left no surviving heirs and the Witan council had named Harold king. His elevation to regal status was short lived.
There were three major battles that year, and all had been bloody tests for the English forces: first, the northern earls (at Fulford Gate) and for King Harold (at Stamford Bridge and Hastings) . This is from a review of this same book by Carla Neyland, and sets the stage for the rebellion to come after William of Normandy came to power in London:
"'The English Resistance' begins with a survey of the three battles of 1066. Gate Fulford was fought just south of York on 20 September, when Tostig Godwinsson and Harald Hardrada defeated Earl Edwin of Mercia and Earl Morcar of Northumbria.
"Stamford Bridge was fought east of York five days later, when Harold Godwinsson defeated and killed Tostig and Haradrada after a forced march from the south of England. Hastings was fought on 14 October on the south coast, when William of Normandy defeated and killed Harold Godwinsson (after Harold and his army had marched all the way back from Stamford Bridge)."
Harold's ships and levies of soldiers were all too taxed from a bloody battle against the Vikings in the north of the kingdom to get back to Hastings with any measure of rest and preperation. The Norman Duke knew all about Harold's troubles with the Norwegians and William was poised to strike across the Channel when he found the time just right.
Harold and his men could only march hundreds of miles-- again--- and still had reinforcements coming up when the Battle of Hastings was all over.
It was the end of the story, at least as far as popular history goes. One assumed after the victory at Hastings, William the Conquerer (or the Bastard) moved on quickly to quell most of Britain and that was that.
Peter Rex's book shows that was not all that.
For the next five to six years, and sporadically for decades after, the English (with Welsh, Scottish and Danish support) refused to accept the Normanization of their islands and their lands. While rebellion around London and the southern regions of the kingdom ended around 1067, the remaining Earls of the Saxon dynasty and the various groups of 'silvatici' (forest dwellers) was just getting started.
There were vast parts of England (Cornwall, Northumbria, many parts between thee Humber River and the Wash, et al) that hadn't seen any Normans yet and hadn't got "the memo" it seems that the fight was over and their lands were forfeit to William's fighting chums. In Wales, for example, Eadric "the Wild" gathered forces to give the Normans a warm welcome when they moved westward.
Norman progress in the north toward Yorkshire was not all that smooth---newly-minted nobles were set upon and killed by the locals. York itself was attacked as soon as the Normans got their castle up in 1068 and the combined English-Danish forces drove the surviving invaders and their quislings back down to safer turf. William himself, dealing with problems in his own territory back at Normandy, had to rush back to lay siege to towns like Chester.
Only William's own leadership saved the day for the Normans in this new realm, filled with angry "outlaws" who hoped for a new Saxon king in the shape of Edgar the Atheling ( a young man gathering what forces he could in Scotland as a guest of King Malcom) or even in the hopes of a restored "Danelaw" king who could drive the Normans back to the Channel and restore the less onerous burden of Norse foreign rule.
A video on early Norman attempts to isolate and destroy resistance:
Rex's book focuses a great deal on one man in particular, Hereward the Exile or Hereward the Outlaw. He was one of the leaders of those forest dwellers and a military strategist who ranked up with William the Bastard or Harald Hardara of Norway, only without the loyal forces these monarchs enjoyed. Hereward (also called "The Wake" by a later generations) made inroads up and down the northern coast of England and at the then island of Ely near the deep marshes of the Fens. Needing to keep his restless Danish allies sated, Hereward sacked treasure from the abbeys that the Normans solely needed to finance their campaigns against rebels on both sides of the Channel. William responded in more than kind. It was, in Rex's phrase, William the Bastards' "government by punitive expedition."
It was all of course a bloody and brutal affair, but there is little evidence William expected anything else. To combat the forces of the resistance, The Bastard lead men up and down the north in a "harrying" operation that left farms burning and innocents slaughtered. The major battled at Stafford took on tactics that would be, in Rex's view from the surviving documents, precursors of German occupation atrocities 900 years later in places like occupied France.
Eventually, lacking loyal support from the Danes, who may never seriously considered taking on the Normans in a major battle, and after the Norman invasion of Scotland in 1072 sent Edgar Atheling to Flanders and safety and made Malcom a more passive neighbor, the English resistance dwindled. But Peter Rex and other historians he cites make a strong case that it took almost a decade for William to consolidate his 'total victory' at Hastings.
The last part of the book recounts the blending of English and Norman Noble families over the next few decades into a group with a increasingly independent identity from Normandy. As for Hereward the Outlaw, he apparently escaped from his last big stand at Ely as the Normans built a causeway and forced their way across. Hereward also escaped from any reliable historical account as to how he spent his last years. That he was the prototypical horse-mounted knight--likely trained at Flanders while in a previous exile imposed by the Confessor--is very likely. That he might have also served as a precursor to the legends of Robin Hood have also been proposed. Its his whereabouts with his bands after escaping Ely that makes for the intriguing speculations and where history and legend cross over into the great theme of resistance to foreign powers that characterizes English history just after 1066 and for centuries to come.
And now a word on 11th Century Norman taxation schemes, read by actor Chris Bailey . It looks a lot like what a Public Service Announcement from Bill The Bastard's New Order would "encourage" the public to prepare for :
An 89 year old Jewish Holocaust survivor (Adolek Kohn) from the Second World War revisits sites in Poland where millions were gassed by the Nazis. His grandchildren accompany him to the site.
This video has drawn controversy and a rebuke from the American Jewish Anti Defamation League. I see it as a celebration of survival and the continuance of a cultural thread that goes back thousands of years.
This film was one of the biggest hits Hollywood put out in 1933, the very teeth of the Great Depression, and the biggest film at the box office for Warner Brothers Studios in that year.
While the story varies little in the way most musicals of the time carry their slender plot-lines, it is still I believe a landmark film. The movie combines a popular and "high-kicking" attitude with the grim realities of a land of opportunity now totally veering toward a place as "tapped out" as any country that any emigrant came to America to get away from.
in this clip Ginger Rogers performs one of the most popular songs of the period. This is the opening sequence of the film, and its important to note that the film audience here is being intentionally mislead--this upbeat production masks a hard reality. The police are on the way to close the theater and seize the costumes and sets of the would-be Broadway production. Even the things that make for frivolous entertainment --uptempo songs that stay in your head long after the show, sexy costumes, romantic love scenes with attractive stars--are not immune to an America with one quarter of its labor force out of work, soup kitchens and hundreds of banks closing from sea to shining sea.
The film opening features Ginger Rogers singing part of the lyrics in "Pig Latin"--an innocent bit of fun she did in rehearsal with the other ladies of the chorus. She later confessed she thought that diversion might get her fired when the producers overheard this clowning about. Instead the musical director, Busby Berkeley, kept that interpretation in the number.
This also features an early use (in sound films at least) of a super camera close-up of the aforementioned star. I'm sure shots of Miss Rogers uncapped choppers had many dentists in the film audience quite engaged by the spectacle.
Not all of the film is so bally-hoo of course, as the last production number "Remember My Forgotten Man", makes clear. (The second production is viewable in the comments section below.) This one--which seemed so remote and distant to me when I first saw it years ago--has a familiar ring to it today. Joan Blondell, a forgotten star of musicals and comedies, delivers some very soulful goods here in a lament fro the lost dignity of soldiers, farmers and industrial workers cast aside by harsh economic conditions. The finale, with an army of "dough-boy" soldiers in retreat from a unseen battlefield, shows the mixed nature of what people wanted from films of this popular caliber---escape, yes, but also a recognition of the struggles facing most people just outside the doors of the local movie house.
Yesterday The Senate, by a 60-39 vote, passed bill to regulate at least some of the cavalier tactics used by Wall Street, the mortgage industry and the credit card oligopolies. This legislation will likely be signed by President Obama next week.
While its clear a great deal of this is tantamount to fixing the lock on the barn door after the horse has escaped the corral, it is also clear that nothing can be done until we replace the mind-set that big shareholders and hedge fund sharpies can police themselves. Even three Senators in the Republican Party agree with these measures. There will now be a nw Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, regulation of the Derivatives Markets, and a requirement that all investment agencies over 150 million face sharper regulation and more transparency and a greater institutional stake in their investments. Securitization, the process through which bad mortgage loans could be bundled up to spread throughout the economic system will be tough to cover. Best of all, this may herald the end of taxpayer bailouts of major investment banks.
Were these new regulations likely watered down by financial lobbyists? Will new financial chicanery arise, possibly methods difficult to detect and enforce in all cases? Too late for millions of Americans to fully recover from the effects Wall Street and the sub-prime mortgage panderers already set up? The answer to all these questions has to be yes.
But in a democratic society you cannot make the good the enemy of the perfect. And we are not the first generation to face tough times. Not everyone has received the message yet--that a just society cannot exist with only rules for individuals but car-te blanche for corporations.
But as the economy recovers, and I believe it will albeit very slowly, this point will be remembered I believe as the beginning of the end of the Era of "Irrational Exuberance" (Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's phrase) and a return to greater accountability. We may not be going forward fast, but with the passage of this bill by an overwhelming margin, we are not going to down the same road again anytime soon.
"Petulia" (1968) is a film set in a particular time and place--the San Francisco of the late 60's Hippie Cultural Revolt-- but yet its still one of those movies that doesn't seem to age, certainly not like 42 year old movie should.
It was always a "dark horse" of a film, one I saw a couple times many years apart. Now, finally, it was put on DVD last year,and hopefully is available. It is an unconventional film in a variety of ways.
What starts out looking dangerously like a Goldie Hawn vehicle from the 70's--- a "too-cute" film about a kooky young married jet-setter Petulia (Julie Christie) who falls in love with an older surgeon named Archie (George C. Scott). Why she falls in love with him is revealed a bit later.
The story changes its tone quickly. Petulia is a kooky woman, but she is also a fully realized human being who is desperate to escape the clutches of a hasty and mediocre marriage to a spoiled all-American upper-class man/boy David (Richard Chamberlain), who has a violent streak that rightfully should put him in prison. But his father (Joseph Cotton) can smooth over anything, except the world he once knew, a world crumbling before his eyes.
Scott's character knows not where he's going, expect that he doesn't want to be married anymore to his former wife (Shirley Knight) and he doesn't want ot get burned again in a relationship. He's a man in flux, not even sure a liaison with a beautiful and bright woman can heal what is eating away at his soul.
Petulia has no such limitations on herself, but she also has a past that won't just fall away and let her be free again.
This friction between the two characters, both running from an unsatisfying past, leaves them with much more in common than Archie realizes, at the very end, what he has to grab unto...if she is still there for him as she was at the first.
All the actors are superb and even George Scott, an actor known for conveying rage perhaps all too readily is both subdued and still powerful in this change of pace for him. The music by the great John Barry is a mile away from his work on the James Bond films, and hits the mark all the way through.
Moving back and forth expertly in story-line between, past present and future this film grows into a much stronger feature about the nature of attraction, love, the woes of divorce, domestic brutality, and the perils of accepting ones life versus fully living life 100 percent by letting go of the past. Nicholas Roeg's cinema photography captures all levels of the backdrop of the city, from the electric energy of the club scene of the time--Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead can be seen playing throughout parts the film--to the ennui-inducing shallowness of matters like the penguin act at Aquatic Park or a society charity show at the Fairmount Hotel.
Even if you don't care much for the 60's and flower children and all, be assured this is a movie you are likely not to forget. I couldn't and I'm glad its now available in a clear print to a wider audience.
In this scene, Archie puts up with his ex-wife's new fiancee and runs into Petulia. (Where else in San Francisco but at a Cable Car Crossing?)
See the following brief scene between Petulia and Archie at Aquatic Park at the first comment below.
La Mourisque, Les Quatre Branles Dance Music from the 1500's This is one of my favorite traditional compositions from this Era--it is often on the short list of any high school or college program of Renaissance music. Suffice to say dancing had to be a bit more formal 450 years ago than now. Hard to find a good Volta Dancing School these days ;-)
Hope you enjoy. Here a bit more on Tielman Susato (1500/1515--1570), the composer, from Wikipedia.
"Not much is known about his early life, but he begins appearing in various Antwerp archives of around 1530 working as a calligrapher as well as an instrumentalist: trumpet, flute and tenor pipe are listed as instruments that he owned. From 1543 until his death he worked as a music publisher, creating the first music press in the Netherlands; until then printing had mainly been done in Italy, France and Germany. Soon afterwards, Susato was joined by Pierre Phalèse at Leuven and Christopher Plantin, also in Antwerp, and the Low Countries became a regional center of music publishing. It is possible that Susato also ran a musical instrument business, and he attempted several times to form partnerships with other publishers but none were successful. In 1561 his son Jacob Susato, who died in 1564, took over his publishing business. Tielman Susato first moved to Alkmaar, North Holland, and later to Sweden. The last known record of him dates from 1570."
This is the second book in former Washington Post staff writer Rick Atkinson's "LIberation Trilogy". The invasion is a desperate effort by the Western allies to attack "the soft underbelly of Europe" (Churchill's phrase) and provide some measure of a Second Front to relieve the pressure on Soviet forces in the East.
The invasion of France cannot come until the Spring of 1944, and these landings--at Salerno, Anzio, and other paratroop landings--are plagued by fratricide and mismanagement on a scale that heightens the "butcher's bill" of war above and beyond what the German enemy can accomplish.
Ultimately, despite the failures of strategy, the Allies succeed on raw attrition and war material in their chief goal of driving the Germans up the peninsula.
During the Sicilian Campaign in the Summer of 1943, the chief prima donna of the commanders appears to be Montgomery, followed closely behind by his rival, George S. Patton. Montgomery orders his commanders to take both roads to Messina in the drive to push the German and remaining Italian units off the island. He was only supposed to take the one road. Montgomery's estimation of American troops never fully recovered from the disaster of the Kesserline Pass battle of 1942, where the Americans were badly bloodied by Rommel's forces.
Humbled and not amused, Patton sends his lieutenants on a a dash north- westward for Palermo with the main part of his Army, a city of limited strategic value but one where he, like "Monty", can enter with his men as a conqueror. Both Armies join up in Messina to push off for Italy itself, but it is clear that joint operations are subject to unexpected change.
In Matt Clark, the head of America's Fifth Army, Atkinson puts together a portrait of a prima donna commander so xenophobic of his British, Canadian and New Zealand allies that that makes Montgomery look accommodating to a fault. Clark, an egomaniac who can give orders but often fail to carry them out.
In May of 1944, with a good part of the American Army still stuck at the Anzio beachhead they took in January, Clark deliberately defies orders from his senior commander, Britain's General Sir Harold Alexander, during the "Operation Diadem" offensive in order to ensure only the American Fifth Army, "Matt Clark's Fifth Army" as his press attaches call it, will arrive first in Rome.
Even his US commanders, like Major General Lucian Truscott, regard Clark's actions as utter folly. But he carries them out because there is no choice short of mutiny and to ensure morale.
Not only does the book focus on the efforts of American commanders--Eisenhower, Patton, Matt Clark, Lucian Truscott, et al, their immediate subordinates, but also the battle-scarred majors and colonels and the fast-disappearing green lieutenants and ordinary "jar-heads" and "dog-faces" as they slog through a Dante's Inferno from the mountains of Sicily in the Summer of 1943 to the European mainland.
Reading the narrative, one realizes how unremitting combat is for an invader (or liberator) trying to send men and mules and tanks up the Italian peninsula from the boot of Italy to the great goal of Rome itself. The action on the ground is ferocious. At one point, after the Anzio landing south of Rome in early 1943, the Allies make just seventy miles of headway up the Italian boot in five months! Getting stopped by murderous defenses at San Pietro, The Rapido River, Monte Cassino. The whole peninsula seems a piece of geography fiendishly set with a constant high-ground advantage for the defenders, in this case the Germans under Field Marshall Albert Kesselring.
This from the New York Times review, sums up the tone of the book well:
"Modern readers may be repelled by the amateurishness of the American generals, most of whom had been majors and lieutenant colonels just a few years earlier. Atkinson is unsparing of their blunders. Eisenhower allows the Germans to slip away from Sicily. Patton is high-strung, profane and unpredictable. Mark Clark is duplicitous. Yet they learn and grow. Eisenhower emerges after Italy as the indispensable leader of the war in Europe. Patton becomes a byword for bold, slashing attack. Clark matures in command. Soldiers, as always, pay the butcher's bill: Friendly antiaircraft fire shoots down our own paratroopers; battles are mismanaged at Gela, Brolo and Troina, where the fabled First Division -- the Big Red One -- gets mangled."
This book is one that covers a somewhat neglected chapter of the war and brings out the painful and fatal lessons all the forces learned in fighting ever uphill against an implacable foe. Atkinson does not neglect the efforts of the Free French/North African soldiers who make the first break-out toward smashing "The Gustav Line" in front of the fortress-like citadel at Monte Cassino. Or the Polish units that are the first to enter the destroyed monastery at the top of the mountain a few weeks before the fall of Rome.
It is as a researcher of the common soldier that Atkinson is at his best I think. Here is an audio transcript of him reading about "The Dead Country" the infantry of all nations faced in the long Winter of 1944 in central Italy.
The news that eleven New Jersey Russian Americans from the posh suburbs outside New York City are now in Federal custody, accused of being sent by Kremlin's SVR, Moscow's foreign intelligence service, brings back visions of Cold War gamesmanship to many.
It perhaps says something about the odd way my brain has developed from those "Spy vs. Spy" years to recall that when the news was first announced I thought of Boris and Natasha. (pictured left).
The images from television, movies and books I read about Moscow versus London and Washington in dealing with real-lie espionage agents of course had at least a semi-serious entertainment value. Images of Sean Connery as the tough and wise-cracking James Bond, Michael Caine as the intrepid if slightly flawed Harry Palmer, and, on the lighter side, Don Adams as Maxwell Smart leap to mind.
Some authors wanted to make a stronger case about the seemliness of spy-craft itself and the sometimes ambiguous moral traps and personal problems spied had. Sober portrayals of cold war intrigue were offered up by John LaCarre in his George Smiley novels or Graham Greene in "The Human Factor", where one of his characters defects to Russia out of a personal favor done to him and his lover in South Africa by a KGB agent. Both LaCarre and Greene had served in British Intelligence.
But the earliest inkling in my memory banks that NATO nations and our former Friends in the East were having t each other came from a 1960's cartoon show called "Rocky and Bullwinkle". Rocky was a plucky flying squirrel, and Bullwinkle a dimwitted moose. They were two friends from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota who were frequently running up against the nefarious and short Boris Badenoff and his Amazonian partner and apparent girl-friend, Natasha Fatale.
Pictured here with their two-dimensional spymaster, known only as "Fearless Leader"(above) , this pair of idealized Russian spies set a path of ineptitude and total bad luck that made it rather hard for me and other kids I knew to properly take the Cold War spy-game with too much seriousness.
Parody like this, intended for both children and adults, only went to prove to me that the threats of international communism that had spread like wildfire in the America of the 1950's had been so overplayed that by the next decade it was clear the public wanted relief from such paranoia about "Reds under every bed" .
That the "heroes" of the espionage stories in the Rocky and Bullwinkle saga were none other than a rodent and a large cow-like dufus with antlers only heightened the sense that some politicians in Washington had gone too far in trying to make people stop thinking and just be afraid. This was one man's (Jay Ward, the producer) parody against blacklisting and the politics of red hysteria under men like Senator Joe Mc Carthy, Richard Nixon and others.
But now we live in a post-modern world where irony can pop up anywhere. The irony of Russian agents being sent to an America to gather information while posing as ordinary upscale citizens seems not only unnecessary (what do the Russians need to know about us? That Wall Street mortgage and hedge fund shell-gamers and con-men decimated the economy? That we can't get out of Afghanistan just as they couldn't? That our environment takes a backseat to our desire for natural resources? ) but daft.
Here's the "new Natasha", Titian-tress-ed beauty Anna Chapman, on a news-spot featuring a You Tube video she made before her arrest along with her husband and others..
