tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25037716245203157112024-02-18T18:35:46.132-08:00doug's Site"I Came, I Saw, I Stuck Around!" Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.comBlogger970125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-51073688910644339342015-01-27T12:58:00.001-08:002015-01-27T12:58:24.102-08:00'The Good Lie' : Making A New Life In America - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster<a href="http://www.blogster.com/dnoakescharternet/the-good-lie-making-a-new-life-in-america#comment-28ha8">'The Good Lie' : Making A New Life In America - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster</a>Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-7379306679126577882015-01-19T20:34:00.001-08:002015-01-19T20:34:25.420-08:00American Sniper: The Toll of War - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster<a href="http://www.blogster.com/dnoakescharternet/american-sniper-the-toll-of-war#.VL3aw9roZDg.blogger">American Sniper: The Toll of War - dnoakescharternet's Blog - Blogster</a>Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-12671349500003518282015-01-07T12:43:00.000-08:002015-01-07T16:06:06.809-08:00Review: "Big Eyes" (2014) - Tim Burton, Amy Adams Movie HD<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2xD9uTlh5hI" width="480"></iframe><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">"Bright Eyes" is an offbeat Tim Burton directed movie, which ,might seem redundant for those familiar with his earlier films. Amy Adams ("Enchanted", "Trouble With the Curve") plays Margaret, a young single mother who flees bad marriage in 1958 and takes her daughter to a bohemian part of San Francisco to make a new life with her young daughter. While looking for a regular job as a commercial artist, she also tries her hand at selling her work free-lance, her specialty</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;"> </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #141823; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">being heartfelt but rather obvious portraits of children with large eyes. Her work is given a boost by her new Type-A boyfriend, Walter Keane, played by Christopher Walz ("Django Unchained") who is a dabbler in the arts with a great talent for self-promotion. After they marry, Walter tries to pass off her paintings as his own, under the theory that art produced by a woman cannot be successful as a man's in mid-20th Century America. As the success of the "bright eyes" portraits reaches national and international proportions, Margaret struggles to reclaim her identity.</span><br />
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Burton does a good job stifling his usual penchant for the outlandish and the grotesque you might have seen in his "Alice in Wonderland" or "Batman" films. There is also a refreshing lack of snark about the art in question. Margaret's artwork is shown meeting with criticism and snobbery, but the film gives it her and her followers a proper respect. The style of the movie evokes a bohemian (but pre-hippie) San Francisco of the 60's that feels right, and the story is briskly paced.<br />
Here's the trailer from You Tube. Like too many "coming attractions" it gives away too much of what is good about the film so if you like surprises, please just view a minute or so of this. </div>
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-43157147788796070022014-01-28T14:51:00.001-08:002014-01-28T15:12:10.431-08:00Pete Seeger--Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and If I Had a Hammer <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It just happens sometimes---I found a CD of Mr. Seeger (the album) "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs", from 1967, and brought it home, setting it aside by my computer to play. Pete Seeger's performance of this song on the CBS variety show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1967 or so that gave prime-time network television a bit of dissent over the rapidly expanding American war in Vietnam. The "cultural wasteland" or genial but shallow situation-comedies, cop shows and and happy singing tune-stylists on other variety shows was invaded by Seeger's own brand of anti-war activism. And he and so many others were just getting warmed up.<br />
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Seeger earned his stripes travelling with the likes of Woody Guthrie and later facing Congressional disapproval during the Red Scare Era of the late 40's and 50's. One doesn't have to agree with everything an artist sings or writes or says to admire him or her deeply. As he got older, his strength as both a performer and an activist who believed music could change minds and make us all a bit more human to one another has left a marvelous legacy I hope others in his field can continue to follow. <br />
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Listening to the album this morning, after hearing of his death last night, I had a sense of how much his presence will be missed as much as his legacy will live on and on. <br />
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As Arlo Guthrie put it this morning, "Of course he passed away, but he's still around". <br />
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RIP Pete Seeger<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-74017919641320140232013-12-31T14:44:00.001-08:002013-12-31T15:14:33.701-08:00Book Review: "A Long Way Down" (Nick Hornby, 2005) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">“Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.'</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.'</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.” </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">― </span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2929.Nick_Hornby" style="background-color: white; color: #666600; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none;">Nick Hornby</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2961964" style="color: #666600; text-decoration: none;">A Long Way Down</a></i><br />
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Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" is my favorite novel of last year, never mind that it was published eight years previously. We rebellious spirits let a book rest on the shelf a while before headed to the second-hand book shop or the library to take it down. The novel concerns four disparate characters living in and around contemporary London who happen to meet on the top of a tower block in the metropolis on the same night (New Year's Eve) with separate intentions to jump off the top of the roof and end their lives.<br />
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The main characters are Martin Sharp, the former host of a popular British morning talk-show, who loses his high-flying career, his marriage and contact with his daughters after the tabloid press outs him for having a sexual relationship with a 15 year-old girl. The fact that she was 150 days from sixteen and just under the legal age of consent, also lands him in prison. When we meet Martin he feels he is at the end of his rope, reduced to hosting a talk-show on a network (Feet Up TV!) whose ratings are abysmal. Martin is the most well-educated and once-successful of the group, but to my mind a character as vulnerable as any of the rest with the added problem of being recognized by many strangers, some of whom are both jealous of his former success, and verbally reminding him of his fall from celebrity. <br />
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There is also Jess, the rebellious teen-aged daughter of a junior Cabinet Minister. She has issues with authority figures, says what is exactly on her mind at all times (in contrast to the circumspect father she dislikes) and has recently been dumped by her boyfriend. It is the quest to find Jess's loutish ex-boyfriend<br />
at a party that (and for her to confront him face-to-face with some direct questions and vulgar insults) that gets the four would-be suicides the initial quest which binds them together. <br />
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“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”<br />
― "Martin Sharp" , <i>A Long Way Down</i></div>
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J.J. is the one ex-pat in the group, an American and the former member of a rock band, The Yellow, which never quite made it and has now broken up, although one of the former members has now gone onto success as a solo performer. He is also shy one former lover, a girlfriend who be believes left him because he who longer fronted a touring band. Deprived of working in a recording studio and convinced that he has no chance to "be someone", JJ decides to end it all by diverting from his evening rounds, delivering pizzas from a London restaurant. <br />
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The fourth protagonist is a fifty-something single lady, Maureen ,who has given up her job to look after her severely disabled teen-aged son, a task that has given her no little private time whatsoever, and no hope that her son will ever progress beyond an almost catatonic and child-like state. (She checks the young man, Matty, into a clinic on her way to end it all and then, after a change of mind, she goes back to caring for him in her small flat.) She is the only religious character in the book, and never swears, the latter trait being much to the amazement of the others. <br />
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<span class="readable" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.4;">“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.”</span> --J.J.<br />
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In the hands of a more overly-sentimental writer, this might be a film that would take the easy route and show the reader that each of these character's sufferings could be alleviated by mutual support and good fellowship. But Mr. Hornby will not let us all the hook with such a well-trodden path. The sting of self-destruction and the hard-business of people putting their oft-desperate and damaged lives back together makes for a four -person journey that is both unique for each of the main characters and where their support for one another often backfires and brings them to get one one another's nerves as much as soothe their fears and compensate for their lonely or unfulfilled lives. <br />
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The book is quite funny at times and has its share of penetrating, common- sense insights into the human condition. Hornby has a matter-of-fact writing style that leaves no room for easy answers. But he also gives his characters in "A Long Way Down" an affirming sense that while suicide is a route taken by some, it is neither an inevitable destination for all who seriously consider it, nor are people as alone and unique in their distress as they might feel. Even in a dark rooftop at the top of a building in a lonely but crowded city, one distressed person or four might just find odd reasons (and odd people) to argue, laugh, frustrate and make happier for a time of a life with. <br />
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There will soon be a film version coming out in March of "A Long Way Down" with Pierce Brosnan as Sharp, Toni Colette as Maureen, and Rosamund Pike as Jess. One hopes it will be faithful to the original story.<br />
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-25339810562612210362013-12-21T20:37:00.002-08:002013-12-22T14:19:56.270-08:00Issac Stern Plays Erik Satie: Happy Holidays To All from Ashland Oregon! <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the most beautiful version of this famous piece by Erik Satie (Gymnopedis # 3.) I'm sending it out to those who are getting through the long winter nights in the Northern Hemisphere, and anyone else who might stop by from the Antipodes. (My thanks to Sheryl Lynn Bence for putting this video together.)<br />
Here a bit of the Snows of Ashland Oregon we had last week. Most of the US and Canada has had a unseasonably cold late Fall and, oddly enough, it's been a too-too dry December--these pictures were taken during a snow fall that hung around and turned to icy conditions with little of the follow-up rain we get to really fill the mountain passes for the Spring runoff. . Most of the heavy rain we get in this part of the West is concentrated in the last weeks of the old and first weeks of the New Year.<br />
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Here is hoping you have the Christmas/Solstice weather of your dreams wherever you are!<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-43025558410843406112013-12-14T13:35:00.001-08:002013-12-14T13:42:21.897-08:00Song for a Saturday: Aretha Franklin's "Say A Little Prayer" (1968) If you asked me in my twenties to name my three favorite superstar lady singers I would have said, Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and this lady:<br />
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Dionne Warwick is usually associated with ""I Say a Little Prayer" because of her long association with Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But the First Lady of Soul did quite a job with this song herself. Interestingly it was not originally seen as a potential hit tune. <br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">Here's some of the back-story on this great tune, courtesy of Wikipedia: "Intended by lyricist Hal David to convey a woman's concern for her beau who's serving in </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="The Vietnam War">Vietnam</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">, "I Say a Little Prayer" was recorded by Dionne Warwick in a 9 April 1966 session. Although Bacharach's recordings with Warwick typically took no more than three takes (often only taking one), Bacharach did ten takes on "I Say a Little Prayer" and still disliked the completed track feeling it rushed. The track went unreleased until September 1967 when it was introduced on the album </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windows_of_the_World" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="The Windows of the World">The Windows of the World</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> which largely consisted of older material; it was </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepter_Records" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Scepter Records">Scepter Records</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> owner Florence Greenberg rather than Bacharach who wanted "I Say a Little Prayer" added to that album." </span><br />
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Aretha's version came out a year later. It also hit the top ten on the US Rhythm and Blues charts. This is a terrific video that does justice to her beauty and talents. Which version is better? I'd just as soon listen and not judge. <br />
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-12478478790203370472013-12-11T14:03:00.004-08:002013-12-11T19:39:30.499-08:00Bill O'Reilly Fails Basic Logic and Economics <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The amazing Bill O'Reilly a man who is both an elitist and a claimant for the status of tribune of "the folks out there" has his admirers despite the fact that he rarely gives any critics on his show a chance to finish any sentences. His annual pretense of a "War on Christmas" every December is becoming a regular part o f the holiday festivities at Fox News, just the way some other networks do an annual presentation of movies like "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946) or "White Christmas" (1954). There is no arguing with Bill on his own show without his "Irish" getting up, so it's best for opponents to take his "talking points" and respond to them one by one so they can finish their thoughts, the way Bill-O does for himself but fails to do for others.<br />
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Here we see a classic logical fallacy: begging the question. Bill can "beg the question" (assume a premise is true without presenting verification of same) with the best of them. Some governments in Europe have a more developed social welfare state, ergo, it must be true that all economic problems are caused by domestic spending on health services,education and pensions. Richard Wolfe goes a way in setting that straight by pointing out that very solvent nations have the same benefits and are doing quite well. Even Ireland (one of Bill's dreaded "nanny states") is recently out of major debt problems, and although it had to pare down its public sector, it did stop abandon services.<br />
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O'Reilly is listed as having graduated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard but I doubt he would have made it past my Logic or Economics professors at community college with his "begging the question" tactics or for promoting a single-cause explanation for major events (the reasons various nations in Europe fell on hard times in 2008-9.)<br />
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If O'Reilly thinks the US economy is just Greece or Portugal writ large, he should check out how well the stock market and corporate profits have been doing lately, and also note how much of the gains have gone to the small dividend-grabbing crowd at the top at the expense of those average taxpayer guys and ladies of the middle and working class who paid off the debts of the major investment banks like AIG and Goldman Sachs or have been downsized into near or total poverty and are still waiting for all the good things to trickle down to Main Street. (It's better for Main Street than a year ago, granted, but not by much--such is the legacy of the worst economy since the Great Depression.) <br />
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The truth of the matter is that multinational financial capital run amok played as big if not as big a role in the disasters of the USA and Europe, disasters fueled in part by toxic Wall Street securities tied to the housing bubble in the USA. To ignore that equation is to forget there is more than one elephant in the room and it takes many a pachyderm to make a stampede.<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-80630473400185294912013-11-22T12:51:00.005-08:002013-11-22T20:10:13.579-08:00Thoughts on John Kennedy and the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"We were never innocent.</div>
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"That word is invariably used to describe what changed in America 50 years ago today when a dashing young president was murdered in Dallas. But the word has never been quite right.</div>
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"Anyone who was 40 years old the day John Kennedy died had already lived through global economic collapse, factories silenced, smokestacks stilled, bankers selling apples on street corners. She had seen the agricultural heartland dry up and blow away in towering black clouds of dust, the former tenants dispossessed and forced to flee. She had seen war on a scale that beggars the imagination, mass murder in numbers that blaspheme God and a nuclear sunrise over Japan. Just the year before, she had seen the world teeter on the brink of another nuclear catastrophe.</div>
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"We were not innocent.</div>
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"And yet, something did change when Kennedy’s motorcade executed that hairpin turn onto Elm Street and Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger of that mail order carbine. After that moment, something was different, something was lost — and it has haunted America ever since."--Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist Miami Herald. </div>
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<a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/19/3765118/jfk-assassination-what-we-lost.html">http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/19/3765118/jfk-assassination-what-we-lost.html</a><br />
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A lot has been written about John Kennedy lately. He is a man more memorialized in death than almost any other contemporary figure in the United States. He has been both made larger than life and cut down to size by details about his personal life and decisions he made in the 994 days of his Presidency. I have no personal recollection of what was once called "The New Frontier" but I grew up in the shadow of the events in Dallas fifty years ago, with my parents and many of my friends feeling that something was lost that could not be replaced.</div>
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JFK had a mix of charisma, intellect and courage. He was not universally liked by a long shot, but he seems in retrospect to have been growing towards becoming an important if not a great president who might have done more to bring the world further away from the threats pf nuclear destruction and started on the path to becoming the first President of the United States since Lincoln to use the "bully pulpit" of the White House to achieve a real new era in Civil Rights.</div>
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Too many questions remain unanswered about this man to say with certainty what the 1960's and the decades beyond would have been like had Kennedy lived longer. We just will never know. What we do know is that war abroad and riots and a loss of faith in government and all public figures came after his death. How would the personality and polices of John Kennedy have mitigated this loss of faith and national sense of optimism? We can only speculate and watch television and read articles and books and wonder. We who did or would support this man in office are left with a gnawing unknowable anticipation that, in the end, will never be fulfilled. <span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"> Even the events of his death provoke sharp debate and this I feel is not the day or the place for me to add to that. I mourn his loss for my parents who admired President Kennedy and for those friends who do remember the events of that terrible day fifty years ago. And I mourn for what might have been for my generation, a mourning without dewy-eyed sentiment but with a sense of something lost from a random and treacherous action. This president's cruel murder had nothing to do with courage or working for peace and equality and national security--things Kennedy I believe would have continued to strive toward, no matter what his poll numbers or his flaws would have revealed about him had he lived another thousand days or more. </span><br />
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-19731523639296405822013-11-20T14:33:00.002-08:002013-12-22T13:31:43.974-08:00Colin Woodward's Eleven "States" of The Americas <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For those who wonder why politics is so fractious in the United States, here is a map that does go some way to explaining how hard it is for a President and Congress to agree to a consensus on the role of government in health care law, or issues such as immigration, abortion, gay rights, taxes for large corporations, income inequality, et al. Indeed the very nature of government itself is a controversial topic in the USA more so than I think you'll will find in most post-industrial nations. To understand an event like a mass shooting in one part of America, one needs to reflect on how the majority of citizens in each region view the role of guns and regulations on them. It is rooted in a past that may or may not be resentful of what is viewed as outside agitation or overbearing authority.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">“To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.”--Colin Woodward</span><br />
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Here's link to an article in Market Watch which provides more information to Colin Woodward recent book, and a follow-up article in a Tufts University (Massachusetts) magazine. It gives a sketch of the 11 "nations" and how he believes they got that way. <br />
<a href="http://blogs.marketwatch.com/themargin/2013/11/15/understanding-the-u-s-s-most-divisive-issues-by-dividing-the-u-s-into-11-nations/">http://blogs.marketwatch.com/themargin/2013/11/15/understanding-the-u-s-s-most-divisive-issues-by-dividing-the-u-s-into-11-nations/</a><br />
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The first thing you have to do is throw out the state borders. As a resident of the state Oregon who has lived in both the Far West and Left Coast areas I can say there is a definite shift in political and even cultural hegemony when you cross over the Cascade Mountains that cut across the state from North to South. The Left Coast has its share of conservatism, but the Portland-Eugene-Salem metro areas are more in tune with the voters in "Yankeedom", the liberal-to-moderate New England/East Coast, 3,000 miles apart. Whereas if you are visiting places such as Klamath Falls and Bend Oregon on the "Far West" part of the same state you may feel you are closer to the more rural and conservative (and clannish) areas of the Rocky Mountain and Upper Midwest states. Folks in San Francisco and Los Angeles are more alike than some citizens who live closer in a geographical proximity to the respective cities in the Sacramento-Stockton part of the Central Valley, but there are differences (i.e., more of a Hispanic cultural force to the South, from the proximity to Mexico.)<br />
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Indeed the whole issue of international boundaries is less of a help on both North and South Borders. One living in Portland or Seattle and the liberal arts college and university towns to the south may well feel more akin to the politics of Vancouver, British Columbia, than to the eastern areas of the same state in the same nation. And surely many residents states like Idaho and Montana feel closer to the mining and ranching reaches of the Canadian Rocky Mountain provinces like Alberta than to the "Left Coast". <br />
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The American way of life will likely become more fractured if present trends in population diversity and income inequality spread. Our politicians will continue to try and "ride two horses" (or maybe three) at once in the great "Circus Maximus" that is the national arena. And more lucky pols some will just have to make one of these regions happy, and others (like the Obama Administration or any President afterward) will have to try to make the most of what little commonality there is on economic and social issues across the continent.<br />
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The institutions that thrive in this environment are not political, I would say, but rather the large international banking giants and the resource industries (oil, natural gas, shale, tar sands ) and those who make military hardware. The upper tiers of business likely have long accepted that the lines on a political map of North America are often just that----lines, and, allowing for some exceptions within these regions, more indicative of the nation than any official boundaries. Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-47504188312115190352013-11-11T15:13:00.000-08:002013-11-11T19:50:25.316-08:00In and Around (Random Photos of the Sites of Ashland Oregon) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A squirrel from just beyond the fence line near the backyard. I think he headed for greener pastures for better acorns near the park, or to find a mate.<br />
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Much the same angle from the backyard, just near sunset last month as Summer ebbed.<br />
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Lithia Creek in Lithia Park (Ashland Oregon)<br />
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A tree turning fall colors on our street at mid-October</div>
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The base of a redwood tree, planted in Lithia Park in 1922. </div>
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The view from the bottom of the twin redwoods. Majestic towers indeed! </div>
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" Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't!" </div>
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The Lithia Bandshell, where the Ashland City Band performs on Summer nights, and July 4th festivities. It also is where students from the local university, Southern Oregon, hold their graduations. </div>
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The Park again, this time near the Japanese Gardens. </div>
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Here's one not like the others: A fuzzy shot of me at the City Lights Bookstore, on Broadway in San Francisco, circa 1992. </div>
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A rather large mushroom (or toadstool), the most impressive fungus in the neighborhood. </div>
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The Elizabethan Stage at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Last year the eleven plays shown over eight months at the three festival stages averaged an 89% attendance rate. I saw "Taming of the Shrew here and there are also plays this year by Tennessee Williams and a variety of modern writers. This set was for "Cymbeline" I believe. </div>
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The plaza at the Elizabethan Theatre. Just to the right is the indoor "Bowmer Theatre", named for the festival founder, Angus Bowmer. The "Green Show" is an open-air presentation of various cultural music and dance productions on a rotating basis, available for free during the summer months. </div>
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The walkway up to the Bowmer Theater. The official name of the theater area was "Chautauqua Park". In the late 19th/Early 20th Century this area was set up for presentation of the annual Chautauqua adult lecture and musical entertainment circuit. The movement, which featured social, scientific and political leaders and experts expounding on topic of the day, and band and opera music. provided cultural diversions for people outside the major cities in the America Middle and Far West. The term was coined from where the movement started in the 1880s in Chautauqua, New York state. Here's some more information, courtesy of Wikipedia: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua</a></div>
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One of the older Victorian houses just south of downtown. </div>
Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-74634143084411994572013-10-28T21:00:00.001-07:002013-11-22T11:31:07.724-08:00Lee Marvin: The Wanderin' Star <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Film actor Lee Marvin (1924-1987) came across on screen as a quiet, intelligent but perhaps dangerous man who knew the darker side of life . He was not a stereotypical actor, his Oscar for a duel role in the film "Cat Ballou" (1965) came from his ability to play both comedy and menace with equal apparent ease.<br />
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Until his major success in films (after a stint as a supporting player and the lead of a early 60's Cop show called "M Squad") Marvin played a great variety of characters, from heroic parts in movies like "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), to the American black market fur-dealer in Michael Apted's Moscow -based crime drama "Gorky Park" (1982) to the anti-hero Walker in director John Boorman's "Point Blank", made in 1967. Marvin could hold his own on screen with all major actors he played opposite--including John Wayne, who probably wished he could had Lee Marvin real life biography. <br />
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The first clip is part of his unforgettable portrayal of a predatory frontier outlaw in John Ford's 1962 classic film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" with John Wayne and James Stewart. Neglected when it was first released, this I believe is in important film in understanding the tension between American cultural passions for "freedom" and the dangers of a society where lawlessness leads to terror and violence when some, through greed or brutality, abuse the vacuum of law and order in a civilized place. <br />
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Marvin knew a lot about terror and brutality. As a young man, he was a combat Marine in the Pacific Theater, and received a Purple Heart medal valor in the Battle of Saipan in 1944. The effects of the war left him, according to a recent biographer, with what would today be called post-traumatic stress disorder. He led a hell-raising, heavy-drinking lifestyle in the early post-war years--trying to erase the incredible terrors he saw on the faces of his comrades.. Returning to his hometown of Woodstock, New York, he worked as a plumber with his father and, as legend has it, found his way into a local theater company when he showed up to fix a leaky sink and the director saw the coiled potential for violence and raw energy he needed for the part of a tough guy in play set in a saloon. Whatever the truth of this, that streak of violence and rawness mixed with a quiet and believable authority worked. Twenty year later, Marvin, an international star, would return to Woodstock to care care of his ailing father and, after two failed marriages and several affairs with his leading ladies, reconnected with his high school sweetheart and married her. He turned his back on the Hollywood scene apart from his film roles and lived the rest of his life in New York state and a comfortable suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. <br />
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In this next clip Marvin waxes melancholy singing an off-key version of "I Was Born Under a Wanderin' Star" from the California Gold Rush musical "Paint Your Wagon". The film is uneven and too long, but it has its moments and Marvin "sells" this ballad of wanderlust with a great mix of sadness and gusto. Few actors other than Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney could have brought such conviction to this scene. </div>
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Marvin's quintessential role for my money is as "Walker" in John Boorman's film noir classic "Point Blank". The material is from a Donald Westlake novel. Walker is a determined man, a career criminal who has been double-crossed by his friends in a heist job. He comes out of prison looking to get his share of the money he is owed and extract a calculated revenge. Marvin's character is a man who only wants what is due to him. It turns out that the crime group he once worked for has gone corporate and crime is now in the hands of white collar operators who can't understand why a man would want butt his hard head against this new Corporate Crime Establishment? Why won't Walker change, and accept his place as part of The System? He is a man out of place in the new order of American White-Collar Crime. It is that unwillingness to do so that makes him an American Rebel, AKA, a figure to root for despite his violent nature.<br />
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Walker is a haunted man--an old-time robber lost in a world of the late 1960's Los Angeles psychadelica, with the criminals now faux hipsters toting wallets full of credit cards and living in penthouses, sheltered from their crimes by pay-offs to the law made with money managed by fat, sharp -eyed accountants who have twenty-year mortgages on a house in the valley, nice offices with corner views in the city and pretty secretaries. The world has moved on and his kind of "eye for an eye" restitution befuddles these suburban crooks and bagmen who just want a quiet life. Walker moves too fast, is too single-minded and unreasonable, and won't stop. He wants $93,000, what he feels is his due, and nothing more.<br />
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Marvin went on to other major parts and made a lasting mark in American cinema and with critics all over the world. There may be a few "Lee Marvin" types around today , but only one was the genuine article.<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-43402025412331374502013-10-10T13:38:00.000-07:002013-10-11T10:33:06.210-07:00"Big Sur" (2013) : Jack Kerouac's Retreat: Love, Fame, Pain and The Whole Damn Thing! <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A film version of the Jack Kerouac novel "Big Sur" was previewed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and is scheduled to go into at least limited release in North America next month. Being a fan of Kerouac's writings, I am looking to this one. Written in 1961, it follows an autobiographical path: Jack Kerouac (the Sal Paradise of his most famous novel, 1957's "On the Road"). The French-Canadian/American writer from Lowell Massachusetts finds his "instant success" overwhelmed him. To many young people, he is the new prophet, but to the establishment he is part of the "beat-nik" world conformists associate with sexual and countercultural excess. Robbed of the privacy he needs to work by the demands of fans and media hawks looking for a quick story and a quicker buck he needs a respite to continue his multi-volume Proust-like novels--known collectively as "The Legend of Duluoz". He flees from his public and takes a cabin in the woods near the famous California Coastal community to continue his writings, of which "Big Sur" stands as one of his most important, along with "Dharma Bums" and "The Subterraneans". <br />
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A still from the film, set partly in early 1960's San Francisco, featuring actors John Marc-Barr and John Lucas as Kerouac and Cassady, along with an insert of the real men.<br />
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The novel deals with a period a dozen years after the events of "On the Road"--the early post World War II America, where Jack Kerouac had finished his studies at Columbia and the New School for Social Research in New York City, ended one marriage, written a novel, "The Town and the City" (1950), that was not widely received and not in his true "voice" as a writer. He had met a group of literary friends (including the "beat" poet Alan Ginsburg and the eccentric, iconoclastic writer, William Burroughs) that would form the core of his peer friendships. He had also been heavily influenced by the vibrant outlaw, hobo, womanizing free spirit and hard-as-nails railroad worker, Neal Cassady, known as Dean Moriarty in "On the Road" and as "Pomeroy" in "Big Sur" . Below, an interview with the actor John Marc-Barr:<br />
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It was this relationship more than with any author or professor that fueled Kerouac's liberation from copying the style of Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe and toward a more revolutionary writing known as "spontaneous prose". America itself of course was an influence as well, the people Kerouac met as he hitchhiked and drove across the USA back and forth--tramps, cops, drug addicts, barkeeps, cotton pickrs, spiritual seekers, roving reprobates, hustlers, jazz cats and women looking for a man to both love for his exuberance and energy and tame for herself. He opens himself to experiences only he could translate into words with as much verve. There is a sense of desperate grasping for all "the mad ones" still plying the concrete and steel trails of the giant frontier nation before it sinks under the weight of its own material success. Further dimensions were fueled by his explorations into Buddhism and those then-unique "Bebop" jazz--he and other white hipsters hooked into. The African/American jazz clubs with sometimes anonymous sax and trumpet players exploring intimate recesses that their brethren in New Orleans decades earlier had pointed towards--it was all coming to a new experience in music from San Francisco to Chicago and New York and all points between. . <br />
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I haven't had a chance to see this film but from the reviews and the smart people who seem to be in and behind the camera I have some hope that this will be a film that may do justice to one of America's most influential authors. Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-55341888495622333482013-10-01T13:54:00.001-07:002013-10-01T15:21:13.406-07:00Doug's Site Special Report: "Fears and Phantoms Work Well for Demagogues...For a Time "Good evening Mr and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press",as the powerful and (for many) scary mid-20thcentury New York columnist , Walter Winchell, used to say on his national news and gossip radio show.. <br />
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First a bit about old Walter, courtesy of the invaluable Wikipedia:<br />
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"His newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday-night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. (One example of his profile at his professional peak was being mentioned in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rodgers" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Richard Rodgers">Richard Rodgers</a>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_Hart" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Lorenz Hart">Lorenz Hart</a>'s 1937 song "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Is_a_Tramp" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="The Lady Is a Tramp">The Lady Is a Tramp</a>": "I follow Winchell, and read every line.")</div>
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"Winchell, who was <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Jewish">Jewish</a>, was one of the first commentators in America to attack <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Adolf Hitler">Adolf Hitler</a> and American pro-fascist and pro-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Nazism">Nazi</a> organizations such as the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-American_Bund" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="German-American Bund">German-American Bund</a>. He was a staunch supporter of President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Franklin D. Roosevelt">Franklin D. Roosevelt</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="New Deal">New Deal</a> throughout the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_era" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Depression era">Depression era</a>, and frequently served as the Roosevelt Administration's mouthpiece in favor of interventionism as the European war crisis loomed in the late 1930s. Early on he denounced American isolationists as favoring appeasement of Hitler...Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell was also an outspoken supporter of civil rights for African Americans, and frequently attacked the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Ku Klux Klan">Ku Klux Klan</a> and other racist groups as supporting un-American, pro-Nazi goals. After <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="World War II">World War II</a>, Winchell began to denounce Communism as the main threat facing America.</div>
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"During World War II, he attacked the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maritime_Union" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="National Maritime Union">National Maritime Union</a>, the labor organization for the civilian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Merchant_Marine" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="United States Merchant Marine">United States Merchant Marine</a>, which he said was run by Communists.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-6" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a></sup> In 1948 and 1949 he and the influential <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leftist" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Leftist">leftist</a> columnist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Pearson_(journalist)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Drew Pearson (journalist)">Drew Pearson</a> "inaccurately and maliciously assaulted <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Defense" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="United States Secretary of Defense">Secretary of Defense</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Forrestal" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="James Forrestal">James Forrestal</a> in columns and radio broadcasts."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-7" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-7" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[7]</a></sup> Winchell also labeled African-American-French entertainer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Josephine Baker">Josephine Baker</a> as a communist after she took him to task for not questioning the racial-discriminatory policies of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork_Club" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Stork Club">Stork Club</a> in New York. His relentless campaign against Baker prevented her from getting her visa to enter the US renewed.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="line-height: 1em; white-space: nowrap;">[<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed"><span title="This claim needs references to reliable sources. (October 2010)">citation needed</span></a></i>]</sup></div>
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"During the 1950s Winchell favored <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="United States Senate">Senator</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Joseph McCarthy">Joseph McCarthy</a>, but he became unpopular as the public turned against McCarthy. He also had a weekly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-time_radio" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Old-time radio">radio</a> broadcast which was simulcast on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Company" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="American Broadcasting Company">ABC</a> television until he ended that employment because of a dispute with ABC executives in 1955.</div>
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"A dispute with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Paar" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Jack Paar">Jack Paar</a> effectively ended Winchell's career, signaling a shift in power from print to television.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-9" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-9" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[9]</a></sup></div>
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"During this time, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="NBC">NBC</a> had given him the opportunity to host a variety show, which lasted only thirteen weeks. His readership gradually dropped, and when his home paper, the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Daily_Mirror" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="New York Daily Mirror">New York Daily Mirror</a></i>, where he had worked for thirty-four years, closed in 1963, he faded from the public eye.</div>
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"The most controversial part of Winchell's career were his attempts, especially after World War II, to destroy the careers of personal or political enemies. A favorite tactic was to accuse them of being communists or of sexual impropriety.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-10" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-10" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[10]</a></sup> Winchell was not above childish name-calling: An example is his feud with New York radio host <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Gray_(radio)" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Barry Gray (radio)">Barry Gray</a>, whom he described as "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk". <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-11" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-11" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[11]</a></sup> When Winchell heard that Marlen Edwin Pew of the trade journal <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_%26_Publisher" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Editor & Publisher">Editor & Publisher</a></i> had criticized him as a bad influence on the American press, he thereafter referred to him as "Marlen Pee-you".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-TBR_5-2" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-TBR-5" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a></sup></div>
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"For most of his career his contract with his newspaper and radio employers required them to reimburse him for any damages he had to pay, should he be sued for slander or libel.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-12" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[12]</a></sup> Whenever friends reproached him for betraying confidences, he responded, "I know — I'm just a son of a bitch."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-TBR_5-3" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-TBR-5" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a></sup> By the mid-1950s he was widely believed to be arrogant, cruel, and ruthless.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell#cite_note-13" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[13]</a>"</sup></div>
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Ron Paul--son of Rand, and father of the Tea Party Fear Faction and Dissemblers, Ltd. <br />
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In other words, as he got older, Winchell more and more overplayed his hand and became narrow-minded and petty and cruel. He enjoyed being a maker and breaker of reputations in show business and politics for many years, until at last the public had enough of his bullying tactics and he fell out of favor.<br />
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Proving that justice does occasionally flow down like a mighty stream as Martin Luther King pointed out, Walter spent time in a Las Vegas lounge act, reliving his former glories as a mover-and -shaker in the Nevada desert, witnessed by an audience of bleary-eyed drunks, low-rent gamblers and curious types looking for a laugh at the once-mighty. Later the self-described Son of a Bitch was saved from late-career obscurity by being hired to narrate a popular ABC cops-and-crime show set in the 1920s called, ironically, "The Untouchables". <br />
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As long as people are scared, men like Winchell and Cruz gain in popularity. But there comes a time when the timidity of the crowd leads to skepticism and a return to fair play and process building. It might take a few years but the demagogues lost their appeal and we go forward as a nation, making up for the lost time we had when fear of "reds" or "socialized health care" fades away and people see things as they are, not what the angry and the grasping wish they were. <br />
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Bachmann of Minnesota, failed Presidential Candidate and one who predicts "mass killing of women and children" if Obamacare is implemented.<br />
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There are more than a couple modern-day Walter Winchells around today, and not all in the media. The most successful of which are currently Ted Cruz of Texas and all those who follow in his wake, as well as about two dozen Congresspeople of the tea party loony town including Ms. Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, Louis Gomert of Texas and, of course, Senator Rand (as in Ayn) Paul of Kentucky. They do not care about the reputations of their colleagues or about laws passed in other sessions or even vital government services for veterans and seniors and kids; these birds want power and to play to the worst fears of the public about the public sector. There is a market for such fear-mongering. The Winchells of today have found their target (The Affordable Care Act) and are keen to use their microphones to spread lies faster than any reasoned argument can rebut.<br />
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Cruz of Texas---Next stop the White House? Or Federal Psychiatric Ward? <br />
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The US government shut down yesterday for the first time since 1995. This was the end result of a struggle between Republicans in the minority tea party faction to delay and essentially repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which is now a law. There have been some 40 attempts to repeal this law, and none of them have been successful. The problem is that whatever reservations the public has about such a major piece of legislation, which changes an industry that accounts for between 15-17 percent of the GDP of the country, most people find some elements of the program acceptable and approve it by the defacto reelection of President Obama and VP Joe Biden in 2012. The Senate is in Democratic hands by a handful of votes, the direct result I would argue of the tea party wind of the GOP endorsing too many far-right candidates (like Richard Murdock of Missouri, who suggested that a woman being raped was just God's Plan for bringing more children into the world and other inanities.) Far-rightists who won primaries in states such as Indiana, Delaware (Christine O' Donnell in 2010) and Missouri proved unacceptable in a general election, allowing weakened Democratic incumbents to keep their seats. Had the GOP chosen more moderate tribunes to carry the party forward, the Senate might look different. But such is the course of the Republican Party these days it is hard to moderate a viewpoint without being called out as a craven coward by billionaires and Fox News-enraged voters. <br />
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Michael Gerson of The Washington Post put it this way in part of his September 29th 2013 column: <br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> the development of an alternative establishment — including talk-radio personalities, a few vocal congressional leaders and organizations such as</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a data-xslt="_http" href="http://www.freedomworks.org/" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Works</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">and</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a data-xslt="_http" href="http://heritageaction.com/" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">Heritage Action</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">— that creates a self-reinforcing impression of its</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-the-tea-partys-revolt-against-reality/2013/09/30/d21e5ca2-29f2-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html#" id="_GPLITA_1" in_rurl="http://i.txtsrving.info/click?v=VVM6MzY3MTU6MzcxOnBvd2VyOmZiMzBhZDYwZGNmNDhiMDFhZWE2OGQxMDJkZGQ4ZjQxOnotMTExNy04MjU0Mjp3d3cud2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tOjU0NDI4OjA0ZTQ0MTJmMjU0ZmM3NmU5MzM3OTA1NmM0OGU4MDYzOmE3ZWI1YzU4MjYwNTRjZTNiMDI1MTJiOGNjZmZlMmFj" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">power</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em;">to reshape politics (while lacking much real connection to the views of the broader electorate).</span>.<br />
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In other words, the big donors of the GOP are afraid things will improve too much for too many. <br />
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Cruz is apparently the de facto leader of the GOP right now, as the nominal leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, finds himself too afraid of the far-right base in the Bluegrass State to take him on. Among other things, Cruz has already called a former Vietnam War veteran, former Senator of Republican Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, a possible agent of the North Koreans and urges GOP members of the House to avoid any compromise with the White House that would leave the Affordable Care Act standing, despite it being approved and passed by a previous Congresss, signed into law and found Constitutional by the Supreme Court.<br />
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He is not in Washington to write or amend laws, but to serve his personal agenda which is to intimidate and insult his colleagues for the benefit of the tea-party crowd back home.<br />
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To their credit, this has not stopped Senators John McCain of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee from criticizing Canada-born Edward Cruz for his his blustery and bullying tactics. Nor did it prevent New York GOP Congressmen Peter King (hardly a liberal) from referring to Cruz as a nut. <br />
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No one would suggest the Affordable Care Act (Or "Obamacare") is a perfect law. No law that effects such a large number of people and had to pass muster with a sizable portion of the health insurance, hospital, doctor and pharmaceutical lobbying powers that ring Capitol Hill and all of Washington could ever be anything more than a series of compromises between corporate profits and consumer affordability. But it will allow millions to get some health care (along with their children) and thus promote the general welfare of a nation that has lagged behind other comparable nations in reaching out to those who have suffered for want of care for too long. A 2010 study by the Harvard Medical School revealed that upwards of 40,000 people, young and old, died due the lack of a better health system, many because they had to put off health care for too long and only went to the Emergency Room of a local public hospital as a last resort. Once there, they had to be sick enough to justify getting the care they needed, and many of which had developed advanced cases that could have been better addressed had they been able to access a primary care doctor weeks or months before. So the ACA is not a law in search of a problem, as the voting restrictions in Florida and North Carolina are. It is a case I would argue of the United States catching up with the rest of the developed world in treating health and the "right to life" itself not as a privilege, or something only concerning the unborn, but as a human right. <br />
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It will still leave many Americans without insurance and it no doubt has flaws which will need to be amended as goes forward, which I can say has been true of EVERY major law that has passed in Washington in the last few decades, no matter which party controlled the Senate or the White House. But this tea party crusade is not about amending anything--it is about tearing a law apart even though the votes to do it do not exist in either part of the current Congress<br />
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Also factor in the problem the Republicans are having with engaging Latinos, women, and independent voters of all races and genders and you have a party of purists who can hold seats in gerrymandered House districts in Texas and North Carolina and in ruby-red states in the "empty quarter" states like Wyoming and Idaho and Utah but who don't play as well in Florida, California, Illinois and New York. The demographic changes in the nation do not bode well for the Grand Old Party which might go a long to explain why they have tried to make voting laws more restricted in many states, despite little evidence that voter fraud is as wide spread as the draconian changes that are being put in place. . <br />
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The last time there was a federal shutdown it was in 1995, with a dispiriting battle royal between Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his personal bete noire, President Bill Clinton. At that time Speaker Gingrich was laboring under the notion that he had created a special new office for himself--Prime Minister of the United States. The success of the 1994 Congressional Elections for his party and the main-steam media focus had made him feel as if it was his inevitable role to lead the nation until such time as he could replace Clinton with himself or some hand-picked successor in the White House. <br />
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This did not come to pass. Gingrich essentially took whatever success he had and plowed it into the ground by being constitutionally unwilling to see that the government had a role in the economy. The shutdown lasted 28 days. In the end Gingrich did not survive his own tactics. Now the stakes are higher than so long ago because there.are fewer moderate Republicans about to temper the hawks and the need to raise the ceiling on federal spending (funds already spent) will appear soon and with it the threat of a market downgrade by the real powers in the economy, the banking titans, which would slow the economy. That many members of the GOP seem unconcerned about this dark development only illustrates the desire to the "let-me-have-it-all, or nobody-gets-anything" mentality of the extremists among us. <br />
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Jon Stewart put this all rather well in a recent segment of his "Daily Show" on Comedy Central. The link is here below.<br />
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http://www.hulu.com/watch/539756Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-41821712056109476322013-09-12T14:04:00.001-07:002013-09-12T23:15:55.890-07:00More From the 1960's--Serious Comedy from Master Director Richard Lester <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Richard Lester (pictured above) is an eighty-one year old Anglo-American director who made his place in new wave cinema with a short called "The Running, Jumping and Standing Still" film with Peter Sellers. He famously did The Beatles first two films, Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help" the next year. </div>
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He later made some spot-on satires like "The Knack...and How to Get It" (1965) about sexual mores among the middle-class young in a rapidly less austere landscape (London at the dawn of its peak in trends in fashion, politics and pop entertainment ). His masterpiece in my opinion was "Petulia (1968) with George C. Scott and Julie Christie, about a middle-aged San Francisco-based doctor whose affair with a "kooky" young woman is anything but casual. And then came "The Bed Sitting Room" (1969) , a likely box-office fizzle in the USA but film which captures the madness of nuclear war and its effect on the human psyche better than more serious films. </div>
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From Wikipedia: "The film is set in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="London">London</a> on the third or fourth anniversary of a nuclear war which lasted two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, including signing the peace treaty. Three (or possibly four) years after the nuclear holocaust, the survivors wander amidst the debris. Penelope is 17 months pregnant and lives with her lover, Alan, and her parents in a tube train on the (still functioning) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_line_(London_Underground)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Circle line (London Underground)">Circle Line.</a></div>
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"Other survivors include Captain Bules Martin, who holds a "Defeat of England" medal, as he was unable to save <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Palace" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Buckingham Palace">Buckingham Palace</a>from disintegration during the war. Lord Fortnum (Richardson) is fearful that he will mutate into the "bed sitting room" of the title. Mate is a fireguard, except that there is nothing left to burn. Shelter Man is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Seat_of_Government" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Regional Seat of Government">Regional Seat of Government</a> who survived the war in a fallout shelter and spends his days looking at old films (without a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bed-Sitting_Room_(film)#" id="_GPLITA_3" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6NDI3MTM6MTg6cHJvamVjdG9yOmQ3ZTJhZTFlMTM3MzgxYzE2YTM2NTJhY2ZiYzI2OTdkOnotMTExNy04MjU0Mjplbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnOjU2MzkzOmFjMDZhYzQ3ZjdiODQ2ODE2YTAzMjFhMmQ4NjU5ZWIyOjEzNzkwMjIxMDk5ODc" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">projector</a>) and reminiscing about the time he shot his wife and his mother as they pleaded with him to let them in his shelter. Similarly, the "National Health Service" is the name of a male nurse, although overwhelmed by the extent of the war. Finally, there are two policemen, who hover overhead in the shell of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Morris Minor">Morris Minor</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panda_car" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Panda car">Panda car</a>that has been made into a makeshift balloon, and shout "keep moving" at any survivors they see to offset the 'danger' of them becoming a 'target' in the unlikely event of another outbreak of hostilities."</div>
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Two clips (seen below), "Primitive London" and "London Raw", were very likely not made by Lester, but by some clueless twits who shall remain nameless and may well have been from San Jose, California, judging by their taste in cinema. <br />
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Not your usual light-hearted fare for a comedy. </div>
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After the 1960's fizzled out, Lester went on to make more commercial films like "The Three Musketeers" (1973), "Juggernaut" (1974), "The Four Musketeers" (1975) and "Cuba" (1979) with Sean Connery and Brooke Adams and "Superman II (1980), which was co-directed by Richard Donner. The disappointing and forgettable "Superman III" was his apex helming big budget Hollywood films--and also one of his least inspired. His very last feature film to date was, perhaps fittingly, a concert film for Paul McCartney. </div>
These films were put out by the BFI as part of a package of movies that highlight some of the highs and lows of British cinema in the 1960's. One of the highs (although not a great film, perhaps) was the black comedy "The Bed Sitting Room" 1969 about post-apocalypse UK where all concerns about class structure (or any structure) have gone away thanks to the rapid decline in population due to nuclear war. <br />
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Lester also made a thoughtful and direct anti-war comedy, "How I Won the War" (1967), with Michael Crawford, John Lennon and one of Lester's favorite actors, Roy Kinnear, who died sadly from an accident during the making of Lester's, "The Return of the Musketeers" (1989).<br />
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Among other things, "HIWTW" threw a light on the commercial and popular notions about World War II and showed some of the dirty business (the blight of commercialism, cold-blooded killing, stupid generals sending men to die on impossible or impractical missions, and the famous "ghost soldiers" in the film who are off to Vietnam in twenty years.) Here is the original trailer for the film: <br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-34184744311850204422013-09-05T14:34:00.002-07:002013-09-05T14:58:53.023-07:00"Stories We Tell" --An Artist's Journey into Her Identity and Her Own Family Secrets <br />
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Sometimes documentaries can be every bit as dramatic and exciting as the best fiction films. Sarah Polley's "Stories We Tell" is one such film. The film details the life of a marriage between a rather staid English-born writer (Mark Polley) and a free-spirited Canadian actress and casting director wife, Diane. The marriage produced some happiness, but also fissures of adultery and secrets known to some family members (and not to others) that sent reverberations decades later that reverberated to the lives of the grown children. Diane Polley (who died of cancer in 1990, when Sarah was just 11) is described by her daughter as having created a sort of tsunami that left the rest of her family in her wake. But the film creates such an intimate look at the total family ( via interviews and home movies and some recreations of events) and those friends around them that their lives were more touched than engulfed by the life energy that Diane, wife/mother/lover/friend/artist, bestowed on those she touched. <br />
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It is a film of strong dynamics, bringing together all of Sarah Polley's five siblings (two by her first marriage) into creating (through words and body language) an absorbing contrast into the various parallax of stories and remembrances that provide all families that common back-story that makes a shared fragment or identity with one another possible. <br />
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Ms. Polley is a Canadian film-maker known as a child actress in <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Avonlea" title="Road to Avonlea">Road to Avonlea</a></i>. At fourteen she left acting, moved out on her own and pursued a career as an activist for Canada's socialist New Democratic Party. She returned to her artistic career doing some commercial films like the zombie-inspired <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_of_the_Dead_(2004_film)" title="Dawn of the Dead (2004 film)">Dawn of the Dead</a></i>, <i><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splice_(2009_film)" title="Splice (2009 film)">Splice</a></i>, and <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Nobody_(film)" title="Mr. Nobody (film)">Mr. Nobody</a> while turning down other parts in major Hollywood films like the Bourne Identity series and others. She has stayed a mainly Canada-based film-maker, achieving </i>feature film work as an actress, director and screenwriter in award-winning films like <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_from_Her" title="Away from Her">Away from Her</a> </i>. Her third directorial effort is a documentary "The Stories We Tell". It is a critically well-received work that explores her own family in a quest for the truth about her paternity and the family dynamic that generated her rather unique situation. <br />
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"Her latest film, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_We_Tell" title="Stories We Tell">Stories We Tell</a></i>, is her first feature length documentary. It had its world premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, and its North American premiere followed at the Toronto International Film Festival.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6" style="line-height: 1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Polley#cite_note-6" style="white-space: nowrap;">[6]</a></sup> The Toronto Film Critics Association awarded it the $100,000 prize for best Canadian film of the year.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-cbc2013_7-0" style="line-height: 1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Polley#cite_note-cbc2013-7" style="white-space: nowrap;">[7]</a>" ----Curzon Films Website </sup><br />
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-10862963894498038132013-08-29T14:37:00.000-07:002013-08-30T11:43:00.425-07:00"Medium Cool": Politics and Cinema in the America of 1968 <div style="background-color: #f7f8fa; color: #666666; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; margin-bottom: 12px; padding: 0px;">
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<i><b>"Medium Cool</b></i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_in_film" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="1969 in film">1969</a>) is an American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Film">film</a> written and directed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Wexler" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Haskell Wexler">Haskell Wexler</a> and starring <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forster" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Robert Forster">Robert Forster</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verna_Bloom" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Verna Bloom">Verna Bloom</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bonerz" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Peter Bonerz">Peter Bonerz</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianna_Hill" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Marianna Hill">Marianna Hill</a> and Harold Blankenship. It takes place in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Chicago">Chicago</a> in the summer of 1968. It was notable for Wexler's use of<a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Cinema vérité">cinema vérité</a>-style <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Documentary">documentary</a> filmmaking techniques, as well as for combining fictional and non-fictional content.</div>
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"In 2003, the film was selected for preservation in the United States <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="National Film Registry">National Film Registry</a> by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Library of Congress">Library of Congress</a> as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".--Wikipedia </div>
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Much of the focus of the television news and political columns this week has focused on this being the week of the 50th Anniversary of the keystone moment in the Civil Rights Struggle, the 1963 march on Washington. The event drew over 250,000 marches and was mostly peaceful. Folk singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary appeared and both empowered and soothed the large crowd. The group was dedicated to a a march for "Freedom and Jobs" for African-Americans. Although it was not as largely noted by major newspapers like "The Washington Post" at the time, it was the 16 minute "I Have A Dream" speech by the 35-year old pastor, Martin Luther King. To me, it is fitting that this famous day has been commented upon in general positive tones and so commemorated. But... </div>
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When I (and I suspect many others) recall the Sixties and the struggles in that decade over the undeclared war in Vietnam and the struggles of black Americans and those of all colors who were poor the year 1968 looms up as a reminder how much division and chaos and violence tore at the nation and how these events still reverberate four and a half decades later. </div>
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A quick review: </div>
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Director/Cinematographer Haskell Wexler today. </div>
"1968, as it happened, quickly turned into America’s <em>annus horribilis</em>. In January the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive" style="color: #3d9a83; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Tet Offensive</a> was launched, with North Vietnamese forces overrunning major American military and diplomatic bases. In March President Johnson, having failed to grasp the huge anti-war sentiment developing in the country, announced he would not run as a candidate for his party in the election later that year. In April <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr." style="color: #3d9a83; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Martin Luther King Jr.</a> was assassinated in Memphis, resulting in destructive rioting in many of America’s cities, including Washington and New York, and two months later Robert Kennedy, the leading anti-war Democrat, was also murdered. Protests convulsed the nation’s campuses, including a week-long sit in at <a href="http://www.thestickingplace.com/film/films/a-time-to-stir/introduction/" style="color: #3d9a83; text-decoration: none;" target="_self">Columbia University</a> in New York."</div>
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So less than five years after the Great March, not only was King dead, but there were bloody riots and shootings in cities like Detroit, Newark, and parts of San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Chicago and other major cities. It was in the latter City of Big Shoulders, to use Carl Sandburg's phrase, that the fight to stop the war and bring peace and greater justice for all culminated at the Democratic National Convention. There Mayor Richard "Dick" Daley's cops engaged in what was later determined to be a "police riot" in Grant Park and areas around the convention. Part of these seminal events were captured by the great cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who wrote and directed an important "cinema verite" film, "Medium Cool". Many scenes in this film were actually shot against the backdrop of the convention and the tensions brewing up in the city between the young and old protesters as well as between whites and blacks in a city that was as seething with racial tension as many areas in the South, if not more. Martin Luther King himself said after a 1967 march through a white section of the Midwestern metropolis that he had never been more afraid anywhere in the South as he had in Chicago. </div>
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This is the original trailer for the film, which features Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention partially doing their song, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?". </div>
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Haskell Wexler: “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Robert_F._Kennedy" style="color: #3d9a83; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Kennedy was killed</a> a couple of weeks before we were due to start shooting, so I got a small crew together along with my two principal actors and we all went to the funeral in Washington, D.C. to shoot scenes that I thought would have a use in the final film, at that point still called <strong>The Concrete Wilderness</strong>. We also went to watch the Illinois National Guard who were preparing for the expected troubles in Chicago later that summer, and got some great footage of them training. The troops were split into two sides. Groups from each unit would dress up as hippies and protesters while the rest of the soldiers would be instructed in how to deal with these so-called deviants.”</div>
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Wexler's film succeeds as a document of the times. The story concerns a tough television reporter (Robert Forester, who also appeared in Quentin Tarentino's 1998 film "Jackie Brown".) who tries to remain tough and "objective--until he meets a young single mother (Verna Bloom) from the poverty-stricken rural mountains of Appalachia. A romance begins. He also sees how far the FBI and the Chicago police will go to maintain a lid on a major American city that has lost hope in its leadership. The March on Washington is a dim memory here: the "soldiers for peace" have been marginalized from Civil Rights advocates to "radicals" and "dirty hippies", "commies", et al, because many were either disillusioned by the assassinations of anti-war leaders like King and Robert Kennedy or dead-set against any more changes in the name of justice and equality. What was the Civil Rights Movement or the Women's Rights Movement or The anti-Vietnam movement to them, if they were not black, female or, like my mother, had a son in South East Asia? </div>
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Again, back to 1968: Remember that 550,000 Americans, draftees and volunteers, were at war halfway across the world. There was little end in sight, and neither of the main candidates for the Presidency seemed to have a verifiable plan to remove Americans from a seemingly unwinnable war. In addition there was an emerging and more militant Black Power movement that didn't follow Dr. King. To some blacks, the gains made by Voting and Civil Rights Acts had not moved the white political establishment to budge; they wanted the status quo in the cities for holding power, no matter what party they belonged to. <br />
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Haskell Wexler's film might not be the most nuanced or character-rich film of the 1960's, but its power is not in pleasing the mainstream viewer, but in its rawness and challenging look at the reality of a nation in crisis. It was released in 1969 with an "X" rating, meaning no one under 17 could see the film. Yet the film seems to be less shocking in nudity or language than it did as an unsettling political statement. (it was changed to an "R" rating within a year.) <br />
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Here is a link to an extended sequence from the film, showing how documentary and drama merged in Wexler's film. </div>
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-70475505290161597162013-08-16T12:19:00.001-07:002013-08-30T11:26:06.488-07:00The (Too?) Many Faces of Peter Sellers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: left;">If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.--Peter Sellers </b></div>
Without doubt, Peter Sellers was one of the great character actors and stars of his time, and remains unmatched in his ability to play a kaleidoscope of characters with just the right bit of comedic elan and ethnic or class identity. Arguably his most brilliant work was as a "multiple roles" actor in films like "The Mouse that Roared" (1959), "Dr. Strangelove" (1963) and as the guileless fool "Chance, the Gardener" in the movie "Being There" (1979). One of his popular remarks was that he had little if any personality of his own and that to put on a "mask" made him someone. How a man with such little self-esteem yet with world-wide recognition cope? Perhaps he was swamped inside by a profession where his stock in trade was being a chameleon on demand. <br />
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Peter Sellers was a troubled soul, a man given to following many quack-doctors, spiritualist fads, and restless pursuits of exotic places and beautiful women must have made the man who felt he had so little personality that he had to be "on" all the time a more than likely case for psychoanalysis. He had his share of affairs and marriages to beautiful women of course but on the record at least none ended well. It seems the women in his life found him too exasperating to achieve a level of normalcy with. His unsuccessful attempt to woo Sophia Loren after they worked together on the film of GB Shaw's "The Millionairess" (1960) , to cite one example, carried with it a touch of the everyman lost in the Olympian world of an international female beauty that no amount of clever wit or mimicry could have brought him so grandiose and yet so natural a personal desire.<br />
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Of course not all his abrupt courtships ended badly...for a time at least.<br />
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It is fortunate he was such a busy comic performer because no one in popular culture seems to have quite replaced him in broad appeal, although it appeared for a time that 'Saturday Night Live" alum Eddie Murphy had given Sellers reputation a run for its money. Both men could put on most any guise, play people of all races and genders. And they both made their share of movies where they were the best part of a uninspired presentation. <br />
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But Eddie Murphy's star seems to have ebbed. Sellers was afforded a stronger career boost in his fifties thanks to the success of his "Inspector Clouseau" films of the 1970s and the aforementioned "Being There". Hopefully Murphy will find such a role if he cares to. <br />
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The first clip to share is from a 1957 film "The Naked Truth", also known in the USA as "Your Past is Showing".<br />
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Here's Sellers as a Norwegian psychiatrist on<br />
an afternoon of domestic bliss in the sex farce "What's New Pussycat?", written (and co-starring) Woody Allen with Sellers sharing the star turns with Peter O'Toole, as a fashion photographer and male object-of-desire to Ursula Andress, Capucine, Paula Prentiss and quite a a few other ladies. Sellers became perturbed years on when he was sometimes mistaken in public for Woody Allen by film fans. </div>
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One thing for certain is the humor Peter Sellers brought to his work will be appreciated long after the personality assessments have any bearing on his work, which stands as some of the best humor we have to look back upon.<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-38581920610261869362013-08-06T15:09:00.001-07:002013-08-06T19:54:55.339-07:00"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut's Bittersweet and Honest Reflections on Growing Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) was already an important film critic in Paris by age 27 when he made one of the masterpieces of cinema, "The 400 Blows", his first feature film.<br />
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Truffaut was never a political film-maker per se, unlike his most famous contemporary Jean-Luc Godard. Having grown up partly in a childhood of occupied Paris, he adopted the notion that a cop was cop no matter what government was in control. An autodidact who never went to a university and struggled in school, the young man drew a great deal from his own experiences as a child estranged from his mother (who couldn't marry Francois biological father because he was a Jew and her family was anti-Semitic) and his adopted father. Roland Truffaut was a kind if distracted parent as far as Francois felt, an intellectual and mountaineer who never had much use for the boy when he discovered he wasn't too interested in climbing around the Alps or Kilimanjaro <br />
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What the boy he was interested in was cinema. After seeing his first movie at eight, he embarked a few years later on a a self-education program that included seeing three films a day and reading three books a week. Lacking money and time for the pursuit, he often slipped into movie theaters after skipping school in the afternoon, seeing the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the classics of Jean Renoir, and Marcel Ophuls, and various standard French films and Hollywood urban crime dramas. He managed in a pre-video age to see some films like "The Rules of the Game" and Marcel Carne's "Children of Paradise" a dozen times! As a critic in the mid-1950s, Truffaut was "adopted" by intellectuals in the Paris cinema and theater world and gained an entrance to Cashiers du Cinema" magazine on the strength of his writings. He interviewed almost every major film-maker who came to Paris, including Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. He later co-authored a book of extensive interviews with Hitchcock that cemented the older's man's reputation with critics as someone more than a "master of suspense", rather a true "auteur" of his movies. They remained life-long friends.<br />
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"Les Quatre Centsd Coups" (The 400 Blows) is a title that is close to a French phrase meaning "to raise a little hell", which is exactly what Antione ans his friends do in this honest and unsentimental look at a difficult childhood with small interludes of enchantment and wonder.<br />
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By sixteen he had somehow managed to start his own film club in one of Paris many movie theaters and even rented some movies from the MGM office in Paris with an older friend, but got into trouble when he had cash flow problems and had to be bailed out by his father. He spent time in juvenile centers for all the hooky playing and cash flow problems. After a generally disastrous year in the French Army, where at one point he unwisely volunteered to be be sent to Indo-China and deserted before being shipped to Corsica for more combat training , the young Francois used what connections he already had at 18-19 among influential critics like Andre Bazin and Jacques Cocteau to get released from the service after a stint in a military brig. For some young men, this would be a setback--to Truffaut it was a goldmine of life experiences that he would employ to great effect in many of his "Antoine Deloin" films, a semi-autobiographical series of five movies for which "The 400 Blows" (1959) and "Stolen Kisses" (1968) are indisputable classics. <br />
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This is one of the most haunting films about coming of age I ever saw. I wish I had seen it at 12 or 13 first rather than 21 years of age. It still had a profound effect on my psyche for its pure documentary style and lack of artifice any cop-out to a neat resolution. <br />
Like most young boys, I too went through these difficult times for most kids when they are stuck between authority and their own sense of justice and understanding. It is a voyage of one urban youth, under-loved and in the way at home and overdirected at school who tests his truth against the hypocrisies of parents, teachers and The Law. It is a film to be seen for all young people even 50-odd years on. Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-47581339254737543302013-07-31T14:04:00.005-07:002013-07-31T14:46:06.128-07:00April Stevens and Nino Tempo: "I Love How You Love Me" and "Hey Baby"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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An outstanding top tune in my view, sung by a popular brother/sister duo of the mid-sixties who started out life in Niagra Falls, New York. I have to admit it's the bagpipes that I really dig most of all here in the song above, with honorable mention to the voice of the charming April Stevens (1929-). Nino Tempo was no musical slouch either; he is a versatile musician who also had an acting career in films like "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and played alto sax at Carnegie Hall!<br />
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Their biggest hit as a duo (April had her own singing career as a single performer) was their Grammy winning version of the old standard "Deep Purple". It holds the sad distinction of hitting the Number One song slot on the Billboard charts the same week as the President Kennedy Assassination. This next tune gives us a chance to see April and Nino performing on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" with another standard, "Hey Baby".<br />
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-56002919667750402412013-07-19T13:53:00.000-07:002013-09-12T23:16:37.511-07:00President Obama On the Trayvon Martin Case and Race in the USA <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #4e5665; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><b>"Trayvon Martin could have been me..."</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">By now I'm sure many of you who might bother to read this have heard a great deal about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the "not guilty" verdict rendered by a court in Sanford, Florida, against the man who shot him, George Zimmerman, during an altercation for which he was the only witness to the full events of that tragic event. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;">Now we have this from the White House....What the President spoke about I feel goes beyond one event, one verdict, one news story that has received so much attention. I have known black co-workers, neighbors and friends and some of them have shared the stories of their struggles in daily lives, struggles with white-on-black profiling and police harassment that I as a white person have never had to experience. That is why I think what President Obama said is important; not because of one criminal case in Florida. He said things that needed to be said about race and identity in the USA that others would consign to the past or search for ways to excuse. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"> Say what you might about other issues and other actions by this President, but today he said something important, something beyond the partisan and transient, something that reflects a truth about our nation. This is what a leader is supposed to do. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px;"><br /></span>Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-28425607605450304182013-07-02T12:50:00.000-07:002013-09-10T09:45:18.508-07:00The San Francisco Music Scene: 1965-1970, Part Two of Two <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5jK9ZVIkoCL3iRUgsK7Yl8a1dxwziH_xSsFVXX76FtayCmNUQKqNTyRhei576CLyGpc1zX5il_OZcWxxbqSUKPoVuX8wgm5JRhuuy-LO5zKEPw71IPjAfF4j6Pc-tFBPFoibdF2oxR8M/s300/51J9BoG1ErL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5jK9ZVIkoCL3iRUgsK7Yl8a1dxwziH_xSsFVXX76FtayCmNUQKqNTyRhei576CLyGpc1zX5il_OZcWxxbqSUKPoVuX8wgm5JRhuuy-LO5zKEPw71IPjAfF4j6Pc-tFBPFoibdF2oxR8M/s400/51J9BoG1ErL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/n54kbhRIcwo?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe>"<span style="color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, 'Verdana sans-serif'; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 1.7em;">It kind of came at one time and then it spread out. One time I remember we were playing the Acid Tests at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, a big old open hall and Ken Kesey at the time was on the run for the police. We’d be doing Acid Tests with him for a few months, once a week at least. There’s all kind of costumes and all of sudden this guy comes walking up to me and Jerry and he’s in a space suit. Then he opens the visor and it’s Kesey. He’s hiding out from the cops but he doesn’t want to miss the trip. It was the San Francisco Trips Festival and there he was. He says, “You guys are going to get much more known than just around here.” And I kind of went, “Oh, maybe he’s right.”</span><br />
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It’s kind of obvious but that happened: a<br />
<span style="font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 1.7em;">guy walks up to you in a space suit raises his visor and tells you that you’re going to be more famous than you know and later on, sure enough…"--drummer Bill Kreutzmann on the early days of The Warlocks, the original name for a more famous band forever associated with San Francisco in the 60s. </span></div>
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By the time I came over to San Francisco as an adult to sample what was left of the Counter-Culture movement, the area known as the Haight-Ashbury District still had a "funky-vibe" to it some fifteen years after the fact of The Summer of Love. Of course there was the inevitable "gentrification" around the neighborhood and in the near-by environs---the result of the real estate boom of the 1970s which sadly replaced a lot of the low-income housing with condominiums, trendy restaurants with cloth napkins and dishes that the US/Euro-jet crowd could enjoy. Those lucky enough to benefit from the city rent-control laws still made it a mixed-income neighborhood so older and wiser refugees from Consumer America could still gather at local saloons and hear poetry and folk music or enjoy a reinactment of sorts of the free concerts that were held "on the green" from time to time at near-by Golden Gate Park. <br />
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Above, George Harrison and his wife Patty visit "the scene" in San Francisco.<br />
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Whereas some had come to in 1967 to "tune in, turn on and drop out" to use Dr. Timothy Leary, Godfather of the LSD movement, now it seem the drop-outs were more society outcasts than itinerant seekers of truth--the homeless and the destitute looked bereft of hope and just wanted food and a warm place to sleep in a doorway or in the parks. This was the fall-out from the handy work of first Governor and then President Ronald Reagan, a leader with an uncanny knack for stigmatizing people and emptying state mental health facilities of people who were far from equipped to deal with the unkinder and harsher America he and his proponents decided was the cure for an imaginary lack of morals among the young and the workers and veterans who didn't see things the new establishment way. I suspect some of these people wound up in the nihilistic cults of the 70's that climaxed with the frightening figure of the Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple who took 900 people out of San Francisco and into the jungles of Guyana on his paranoid race to perpetuate one of the greatest acts of mass murder-suicide in November of 1978. I was living in the Bay Area at the time and I vividly recall the utter terror of what a single human soul was capable of--so far from the liberating melodies of the best of the artistic community in the former decade.<br />
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Then there came a new group of folks around the Haight area--the "neat-niks", those slumming youngsters from the post "Flower power" era, most armed with money who came into San Francisco and dressed down to hide their wealth from trust funds or the fresh money they had made in the real estate and computer industry boomlets in the outlying parts of the Bay Area, especially the San Jose/Santa Clara/San Mateo County area south of of the wind-swept City by the Bay. These folks begat a new generation of faux counter-culture types who were more urban hipsters than revolutionaries of either material or spiritual values. I suppose it all had to end (and I felt more of a tourist myself than a part of any movement). But it was nice while it lasted and the music lives on, as does a spirit that might not have quite caught on in Middle America, USA, but still inspires millions in and out of San Francisco even four decades and more later.<br />
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(above) This is Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring the amazing soulful voice and ultimately self-destructive and tragic Janis Joplin, formerly of Port Arthur, Texas. <br />
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Before they became "The Grateful Dead", the group that became world-famous and typified the loosely-defined San Francisco Sound were known as "The Warlocks". Jerry Garcia didn't have his trademark facial hair yet, but the music a lot of their music was still infectious.<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">The Grateful Dead began their </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#" id="_GPLITA_1" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6NDA4NzI6MTQzMTpjYXJlZXI6Y2YzMTc1ZWZkYjZiYmU0MDU3ZTUyMDgwNTFkZmNjMGM6ei0xMTE3LTgyNTQyOmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmc6NTA4NDI6ZmI2ZTU5NTA2MjdjOWI2ZjVmNjViMWEzNmY2ZGVjZjI" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">career</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> as the Warlocks, a group formed in early 1965 from the remnants of a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto,_California" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Palo Alto, California">Palo Alto, California</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jug_band" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Jug band">jug band</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> called </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_McCree%27s_Uptown_Jug_Champions_(album)" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions (album)">Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-14" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[14]</a></sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> The band's first show was at Magoo's Pizza located at 639 Santa Cruz Avenue in suburban </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_California" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Menlo Park, California">Menlo Park, California</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> on May 5, 1965. They were known as the Warlocks although at the same time the </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Underground" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Velvet Underground">Velvet Underground</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> was also using that name on the east coast.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-15" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[15]</a></sup><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-rockument_16-0" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-rockument-16" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[16]</a></sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> The show was not recorded and not even the set list has been preserved. The band quickly changed its name after finding out that another band of the same name had signed a recording contract (not the Velvet Underground who by then had also changed their name). The first show under the new name Grateful Dead was in </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="San Jose, California">San Jose, California</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> on December 4, 1965, at one of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Ken Kesey">Ken Kesey</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">'s </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Acid Tests">Acid Tests</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-17" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-17" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[17]</a></sup><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-18" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-18" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[18]</a></sup><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-19" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-19" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[19]</a></sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> Earlier </span><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_tape" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Demo tape">demo tapes</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> have survived, but the first of over 2,000 concerts known to have been recorded by the band's fans was a show at the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fillmore" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="The Fillmore">Fillmore Auditorium</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> in </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="San Francisco">San Francisco</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> on January 8, 1966.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-20" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead#cite_note-20" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[20]</a></sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> Later on that month, the Grateful Dead played at the Trips Festival, an early </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_rock" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Psychedelic rock">psychedelic rock</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> show.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 19.1875px;">Above, Grace Slick and Janet Joplin.</span></span><br />
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Of course there were a lot of bands that didn't rock the world so to speak but they are certainly<br />
worthy of recall. Below here you can find Craig "Butch" Atkins and his band The Count Five, a "one-hit wonder" group that was formed in my home town of near- by San Jose, thirty miles south of San Fran.<br />
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From Wikipedia" "The band was founded in 1964 by John "Mouse" Michalski (born 1948, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Cleveland">Cleveland</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Ohio">Ohio</a>) (lead guitar) and Roy Chaney (born 1948,<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Indianapolis">Indianapolis</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Indiana">Indiana</a>) took over bass duties, two high school friends who had previously played in several short-lived outfits. After going shortly under the name The Squires, and several line-up changes later, the Count Five were born. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_%22Sean%22_Byrne" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="John "Sean" Byrne">John "Sean" Byrne</a> (1947-2008, born <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Dublin">Dublin</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Ireland">Ireland</a>) played rhythm guitar and lead vocals, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Atkinson" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Craig Atkinson">Craig "Butch" Atkinson</a> (1947-1998, born <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="San Jose, California">San Jose</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="California">California</a>) played drums. The Count Five gained distinction for their habit of wearing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dracula" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Count Dracula">Count Dracula</a>-style capes when playing live.</div>
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"Psychotic Reaction", an acknowledged cornerstone of garage rock,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-countfive-book01_1-0" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Five#cite_note-countfive-book01-1" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup> was initially devised by Byrne, with the group refining it and turning it into the highlight of their live sets. The song was influenced by the style of contemporary musicians such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Standells" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="The Standells">The Standells</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yardbirds" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="The Yardbirds">The Yardbirds</a>.<sup class="Template-Fact" style="line-height: 1em; white-space: nowrap;">[<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed"><span title="This claim needs references to reliable sources. (August 2012)">citation needed</span></a></i>]</sup> The band members were rejected by several <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_label" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Record label">record labels</a> before they got signed to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Los Angeles">Los Angeles</a>-based Double Shot Records. "Psychotic Reaction" was released as a single, peaking at #5 in the U.S. charts in late 1966. The band got along for about another year, but dropped out of view altogether when their only hit had fallen from public memory. Another setback to a potential career in the music business was the decision of the five members (who were between the ages of 17 and 19) to pursue <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Five#" id="_GPLITA_0" in_hdr="" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6MjcxMzg6MTEyNTpjb2xsZWdlIGRlZ3JlZXM6NzZkMGMwZWZkNWI0NGEyMGMyN2Y2NzhlZGFmZmM3NDA6ei0xMTE3LTgyNTQyOmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmc6NTc1ODU6OGZmM2RlMzU3ODkyYzM3NTNiYThiYzJlM2M0ZjM4NzU" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">college degrees</a>."</div>
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And no doubt some of those degree-seekers were trying to get deferments to stay out of the disaster that was the Vietnam War, a war without clear purpose that held a pall over the whole era. </div>
Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-533208248866473632013-06-29T13:52:00.003-07:002013-07-01T09:46:31.025-07:00Three from the 1960's San Francisco Music Scene (Part One of Two) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the best musical finds I've run across recently is a CD series put out by Rhino Records called "Love is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-70." It's basically a eighty song compilation featuring the type of music (folk, psychadelic, protest, even country-western) that came to be synonymous with the "San Francisco Sound" that helped transform American music. The most famous bands from that period include "The Jefferson Airplane", "Country Joe and the Fish", "The Grateful Dead", "Santana" and performers like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia. All were part of a time of great urban changes in America, where young people flocked to California (especially San Francisco) looking for a new life and a fresh start and maybe a revolution. Most didn't find it, and some people wound up disillusioned or dead. But most crossed some kind of personal Rubicon and this period became part of a separate identity from the epic militancy of the times coming out of the military industrial and consumerist America. Even if the world wasn't turned upside down the freedoms this place at the edge of a continent unleashed helped set the stage for a less puritanical America. The seeds of this movement in music and style help bring the fruits of greater tolerance in the larger society--from different ways of looking at the spiritual world to questioning the role of money and power from the Establishment, an entity that lost some of its hold on the youth in society thanks to consumerism, a seemingly unending South East Asian war and the racial and sexual awakenings of a generation. <br />
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The bad parts--the hard drugs and the rise in unhealthy cults of violence and total control---were there as well, but no movement for the better has ever been without its violent pariahs and false leaders. <br />
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The first song featured in the set of three here is from a group ironically titled "The Great Society". It was the first band Grace Slick was a part of before she came to The Jefferson Airplane. The song here was of course made famous by the latter group but there is something more earthy about this original rendition. <br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">From Wikipedia: "Slick's music </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Slick#" id="_GPLITA_4" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6NDA4NzI6MTQzMTpjYXJlZXI6Y2YzMTc1ZWZkYjZiYmU0MDU3ZTUyMDgwNTFkZmNjMGM6ei0xMTE3LTgyNTQyOmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmc6NTA4NDI6ZmI2ZTU5NTA2MjdjOWI2ZjVmNjViMWEzNmY2ZGVjZjI" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">career</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> started in 1965 in San Francisco when she and then husband Jerry Slick formed their own band, influenced by</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="The Beatles">The Beatles</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> as well as by a performance by the freshly-formed </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Airplane" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Jefferson Airplane">Jefferson Airplane</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> at </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_(club)" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="The Matrix (club)">The Matrix</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> and who, Slick realized, maintained an impressive revenue in comparison to her earnings as a model while having fun performing.</span><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Slick#cite_note-3" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a></sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> Grace and Jerry Slick and Jerry's brother </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darby_Slick" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Darby Slick">Darby Slick</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> and other friends named themselves </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Society_(band)" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="The Great Society (band)">The Great Society</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> after the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Great Society">social reform program of the same name</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">, beginning during the autumn of 1965 and by early 1966 becoming a popular psychedelic act in the Bay area. By the summer of 1966 The Great Society was recording, releasing one single in San Francisco, a precursor to the future Jefferson Airplane success "Somebody to Love", which was written by Darby. Grace provided vocals, guitar, piano and recorder and co-wrote a majority of the band's songs with her brother-in-law."</span><br />
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Below--Grace Slick (AKA, "The Acid Queen", "The Chrome Nun") and her "Airplane" crew. <br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent;">The next one comes from 1967. It's by a cheery melody by a group called The Sopwith Camels that constituted their biggest hit. Forty five years later, in July of 2012, many of the same band members reunited for a gig that was covered by The San Francisco Examiner:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent;">"</span>If you look at any vintage 60s concert poster, particularly with bands from the California coast, The Sopwith Camel were on the bill as part of what would come to be known as the San Francisco Psychedelic Ballroom Bands. The original Sopwith Camel was the name for a British fighter plane used in World War I. The unusual name was perfect for the band to adopt.</div>
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"The band released their first album in 1967 on Kama Sutra Records and their first single, “Hello Hello” found the Top 10 Billboard spot, marking what the band says is “the first national hit out of San Francisco psychedelic band scene.”</div>
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<a class="ocmap ocm-main-photo" href="http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/large_lightbox/hash/56/75/567558996fda1de78d8b66d4d12ec446.jpg?itok=5stTXi77" rel="#ex-upload-related-photo-overlay" style="color: #3e72a7; font-weight: bold;"><img alt="The Sopwith Camel returns to San Francisco Bay Area for two summer shows." class="image-frame" src="http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/imagecrop_large/hash/91/dd/91ddc9289c2bf4bb849de27b9f6401c6.jpg?itok=SYQEwAVL" style="-webkit-transition: all; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; padding: 3px; transition: all; vertical-align: bottom;" title="The Sopwith Camel returns to San Francisco Bay Area for two summer shows." typeof="foaf:Image" /></a></div>
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The Sopwith Camel returns to San Francisco Bay Area for two summer shows.</div>
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Sopwith Camel, Last Day Saloon web site</div>
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“Postcard from Jamaica” was also the title of their second single, and it brought on an East coast tour with the Lovin’ Spoonful, playing<a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/the-sopwith-camel-returns-to-san-francisco-music-scene#" id="_GPLITA_1" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6MjkwNDk6MTEyNTp0aGUgY29sbGVnZTo3NDhjNmVjYjE5NTFjZWUxYzEyYjlkYmNjYzljYWY1OTp6LTExMTctODI1NDI6d3d3LmV4YW1pbmVyLmNvbTo1MTE1OTo2ZDAyYzgzNzc2YTg1OGYwYWFjZDhlNDc1NGNkZjA3YQ" style="color: #3e72a7; font-weight: bold;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">the college</a> circuit primarily. A third single, “Saga of the Low Down Let Down,” was the single from the album of the same title, which concluded their contract obligations to the Kama Sutra label.</div>
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Two years earlier another group, We Five, came out with this big hit, something that seems to owe more to the lyrical phase of The Beatles in their "A Hard's Day's Night" phase and groups like "The Lovin' Spoonful" and Australia's own "The Seekers" than any hard-edged urban stuff from Haight-Ashbury. But it's always been one of my favorites so here it is:<br />
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From Wikipedia: "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stewart_(musician)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Michael Stewart (musician)">Michael Stewart</a> formed We Five after graduating from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomona_Catholic_High_School" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Pomona Catholic High School">Pomona Catholic High School</a> and attending <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._San_Antonio_College" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Mt. San Antonio College">Mt. San Antonio College</a>. He was the brother of <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_(folk_musician)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="John Stewart (folk musician)">John Stewart</a> of the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Trio" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Kingston Trio">Kingston Trio</a> and came from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont,_California" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Claremont, California">Claremont, California</a>.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Five#cite_note-1" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup> When Michael was a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Five#" id="_GPLITA_0" in_rurl="http://i.tracksrv.com/click?v=VVM6NDI1NTE6MTAzOTpzdHVkZW50OjM2NWYyY2RlMmEyYjU4OTZmOWY2YmQyYmEwMGU3YTgxOnotMTExNy04MjU0Mjplbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnOjU0NDAwOjAyZjA1NTdjOGUzYjllYWNiOTI4NWU3ZTQ2YTQ4Y2Ni" style="background-image: none; color: #0b0080;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">student</a> at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_San_Francisco" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="University of San Francisco">University of San Francisco</a> in 1964, he formed We Five as a quartet, although it soon added another member. The group played adult rock 'n roll, pop jazz,<a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_theater" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Broadway theater">Broadway</a> show tunes, and <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Disney">Disney</a> tunes. Stewart did all the arrangements, which ranged from "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Favorite_Things_(song)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="My Favorite Things (song)">My Favorite Things</a>", in a style which reflected <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Bach">Bach</a>, to <i>Very Merrily Un-birthday</i>. He put in several additional hours working on arrangements after the five band members worked together for five or six hours each day.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Five#cite_note-2" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a></sup></div>
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The ensemble played <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_guitar" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Acoustic guitar">acoustic guitars</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_guitar" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Electric guitar">electric guitar</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_guitar" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Bass guitar">bass</a> and sang multi-part <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonies" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Harmonies">harmonies</a>. The original quintet line-up, which grew out of a band called the Ridgerunners, included:</div>
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<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stewart_(musician)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Michael Stewart (musician)">Michael Stewart</a> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baritone" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Baritone">Baritone</a>-Bass, 5-String <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Banjo">Banjo</a>, 6-String Acoustic Guitar, 9-String Amplified Guitar)</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Bivens" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Beverly Bivens">Beverly Bivens</a> (Low Tenor to High <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprano" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Soprano">Soprano</a>, Rhythm Guitar)</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Jerry Burgan (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenor" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Tenor">Tenor</a>, 6-String Acoustic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Guitar">Guitar</a>)</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Peter Fullerton (Tenor, Acoustic & Fender Bass)</li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Bob Jones (Baritone-Tenor, 6-String Electric <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Jazz">Jazz</a> Guitar, 12-String Electric Guitar).</li>
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<br />Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-62944615052889421132013-05-17T13:54:00.001-07:002013-05-17T14:00:21.109-07:00The Azaleas Are In Bloom in Oregon! Oregon is a great place if happen to be a blooming plant, especially a rose or an azalea. The main city of the state, Portland, is called "The Rose City' and has a major annual parade to rival that of Pasadena's world famous New Years Day event. And we even have a town here in the southern part of the state called Azalea! There is a nice combination of rain and sunshine this time of year that makes everything grow, and this is time of year when for a few weeks when the azalea blooms are magnificent. Here are some examples.<br />
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This is just along the walkway to the front door. More on the flowers from the invaluable Wikipedia: <b style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">Azaleas</b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> (</span><span class="nowrap" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; white-space: nowrap;"><small>pron.:</small> <span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';" title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English">/</a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="/ə/ 'a' in 'about'">ə</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="/ˈ/ primary stress follows">ˈ</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="'z' in 'Zion'">z</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="/eɪ/ long 'a' in 'base'">eɪ</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="'l' in 'lie'">l</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="/i/ 'y' in 'happy'">i</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English#Key" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English"><span style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px;" title="/ə/ 'a' in 'about'">ə</span></a></span><span class="IPA" style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Arial Unicode MS';" title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none !important;" title="Help:IPA for English">/</a></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">) are flowering </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrub" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Shrub">shrubs</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> comprising two of the eight subgenera of the genus </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhododendron" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Rhododendron">Rhododendron</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">, </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutsuji" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Tsutsuji">Tsutsuji</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">(evergreen) and </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"><a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentanthera" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Pentanthera">Pentanthera</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> (deciduous). Azaleas bloom in spring in the Northern hemisphere and in winter in the Southern hemisphere, their flowers often lasting several weeks. Shade tolerant, they prefer living near or under trees.</span><br />
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A blooming azalea. It won't be out long but it's glorious while it lasts.<br />
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Another variety, planted just in front of the curb.<br />
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One more bloom. This one is a favorite of the bumble bees, who were too shy to come out when I came out with the camera to buzz about. </div>
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Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2503771624520315711.post-27320194352734917512013-05-17T12:21:00.001-07:002013-09-19T12:13:29.538-07:00"Take It As It Comes" (The Doors) and "Riot On the Sunset Strip" (The Stendells) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Originally released in January 1967, 'Take It As It Comes" showcased one of the great American rock bands, The Doors, a stand-out from other fine folk, rock, blues and psychedelic groups like The Association, The Mamas and the Papas, The Palace Guard, The Byrds, The Knack (American version), and others, including The Standells who appear in the opening of the 1967 American-International exploitation film about the Sunset Strip scene, featured here:<br />
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The mid to late sixties produced a major Los Angeles "Sunset Strip" music and counter-culture scene where teenagers came to taste the first fruits of adulthood. Thanks to problems with local politics, hard drugs and a hard-nosed police presence, the "scene" was not without its negatives aspects, as this film tries to highlight in a faux-gritty fashion.<br />
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Whatever your take on the past, the great music lives on and the spirit of a new freedom was not to be quelled. These bands got their main exposure from L.A. clubs like "Whiskey A Go Go", "Where the Action Is", "Fred C. Dobbs", "Pandora's Box" and other venues. The Doors (and especially Jim Morrison) were not beyond pushing the envelope. The music was a combination of earthiness, raw carnality and metaphysical imagery from all branches of world mythology, the African-American Blues giants of the past, Berthot Brecht and the ground-breaking 19th Century poets William Blake and Baudelaire .<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">From Wikipedia: "Although composition credit went to the band as a whole, the album's primary writers were Jim Morrison and Robert Krieger. "The End"'s Oedipal climax was first performed live at the Whisky a Go Go; the band was thrown out as a result of Morrison screaming "Mother...I want to f*** you!" towards the end of the song. "</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_Song" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Alabama Song">Alabama Song</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">" was written and composed by </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Bertolt Brecht">Bertolt Brecht</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> and </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Weill" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Kurt Weill">Kurt Weill</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> in 1927, for their opera </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Fall_of_the_City_of_Mahagonny" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny">Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> (</span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">); "</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Door_Man" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Back Door Man">Back Door Man</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">" was written by </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Dixon" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Willie Dixon">Willie Dixon</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;"> and originally recorded by </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howlin%27_Wolf" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="Howlin' Wolf">Howlin' Wolf</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">. The line "Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night" from "End of the Night" is </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_(album)#" id="_GPLITA_1" in_rurl="http://i.trkjmp.com/click?v=VVM6MjY0MjA6MTUxNzphIHF1b3RlOmNlYjY5MDhlMDE4YzEzZjRiYWViMGQ5ZTQ0NjdmNmViOnotMTExNy04MjU0Mjplbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnOjQ0MzY4OmRmOGQzM2MxZThlZjAwNDZmOGRhOTdlMjMwMjkyYWI3" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;" title="Click to Continue > by I Want This">a quote</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">from </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-decoration: none;" title="William Blake">William Blake</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">'s poem "Auguries of Innocence"</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.1875px;">The Doors were the cream of the great Southern California music scene of this time and they accomplished a lot in the five-six years they had to move popular music into new "doors of perception." </span>Doug's Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09219952832674415239noreply@blogger.com2