“… names will never hurt me.”
September 16, 2009
Rep. JOE WILSON
Well, the least that can be said of Joe Wilson is that he didn’t know what he would be unleashing when he pulled the cork out of that bottle — the bottle being his indiscreet mouth.
Not only has he been accused of racism for his heckling of President Obama from the floor of the House of Representatives, but he has been branded as a symbol of a latent racism far bigger than he. As though Congress weren’t already in a state of self-paralyzing partisanship, it was divided even more deeply by the vote to reprimand Wilson. Meanwhile the latter-day No-Nothings have adopted him as their hero. Can a Wilson-Palen ticket be far behind?
The mind races back to the first quarter of the 19th century — well, mine does, at least.
WILLIAM H. CRAWFORD
William H. Crawford of Georgia, the secretary of the treasury, is at the White House demanding to know what President James Monroe intends to do about a list of political appointments Crawford has recommended.
“That,” Monroe — perhaps injudiciously — tells Crawford, “is none of your damned business.” To which provocation Crawford responds by lunging at Monroe with a cane, calling him “you infernal scoundrel.” Monroe goes to the fireplace and grabs a poker to defend himself, and the secretary of the treasury is forcibly removed from the executive mansion, apologizing on the way out.
“You lie!” “You infernal scoundrel.”
At least Crawford had some style.
Netflix Update No. 18: “Nothing in Common”
September 14, 2009
TOM HANKS
We watched “Nothing in Common,” a 1986 film directed by Garry Marshall, starring Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint, Sela Ward, Bess Armstrong, and Hector Elizondo.
Hanks plays David Basner, who is on a rapid rise in the advertising industry; he has money, friends, women. What he doesn’t have is any sense of self, thanks to a dysfunctional upbringing by parents — Eva Marie Saint as Lorraine Basner and Gleason, in his last role, as Max– whose marriage limped along for more than 30 years without a raison d’etre, and now, at a critical moment in David’s career, has collapsed. Both parents bring the issue to David, who has kept his distance since he left home and has never developed a relationship with either of them.
Bess Armstrong plays a high school friend and one-time flame to whom David often turns for understanding or simple emotional release. Sela Ward plays Cheryl Ann Wayne, a hard-nosed but seductive agency executive with whom David becomes entangled, in more ways than one, as he tries to land a major airline account. Elizondo is David’s boss, and Barry Corbin is the head of the airline and Wayne’s father.
JACKIE GLEASON
All of these actors turn in strong performances. Hanks gets a chance to show his full range, from borderline nuts to pensive and insecure. Gleason, conceding a year before his death that he is an old and infirm man, uses just enough of the Charlie Bratton bombast and the Poor Soul pathos to make Max a complicated and interesting character. Gleason avoids what to him was always a temptation to chew the scenery. When he had it under control, Gleason had an intuition for drama, and he puts it to work here, particularly in brief passages in which he doesn’t speak. Eva Marie Saint, who I think is among the most unappreciated of actresses, is very moving as the broken-hearted wife and mother.
EVA MARIE SAINT
This movie takes on some difficult, almost embarrassing themes — the reasons for the failure of this marriage and the impact of a bad marriage on the child it generated — and it deals with them realistically, not looking for easy answers.
Marshall managed to achieve a delicate balance between comedy and drama that in some ways is almost tragedy. This film hasn’t got a lot of attention, but it should.
“. . . better to burn than fade away …” — Neil Young
September 13, 2009
KURT COBAIN
Old Man Trouble can’t stay away from Kurt Cobain’s door. The huzzerai over the plaque honoring him in his hometown in Washington seems to have died down, but now there is a problem with how his image is used in the video game Guitar Hero 5.
Courtney Love, who was married to Cobain at the time of his death in 1994, gave Activision, the publisher of the game, permission to use Cobain’s image, but she says she did not know or agree that the avatar could be activated so as to sing other writers’ songs. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, Cobain’s Nirvana-mates, are also annoyed. Love says there will be legal action against Activision if the game isn’t altered so as to restrict the use of Cobain’s image to songs associated with him.
SHIRLEY BOOTH
There have been similar blowups in the past, including one involving the great stage and screen actress Shirley Booth, who played the housemaid Hazel from 1961 to 1966 in a TV series based on Ted Key’s cartoon character by the same name. After the show left the air, in 1971, Key gave Colgate-Palmolive permission to use the Hazel image in a commercial for a detergent called Burst.
The sponsor or its ad agency hired an actress named Ruth Holden to provide the voice in the commercial, but the voice sounded exactly like Shirley Booth’s voice, as I recall myself. Anyone who was familiar with Booth and saw that commercial would have assumed the voice was hers.
Shirley Booth thought so, too. She sued the sponsor and its ad agency in federal court, but the court didn’t agree with her complaint.
For now, you can see the Kurt Cobain avatar and read a Christian Science Monitor blog about Courtney Love’s objections, both at this link:
“Trust me — like it says on the money” — line written by Larry Gelbart for George Burns in “Oh, God”
September 12, 2009
LARRY GELBART
While we were distracted by other matters, Larry Gelbart slipped away. I didn’t know Gelbart; I wish I had.
He had an ear for language, for how real people talk, and he combined that with a unique wit to produce some of the most memorable dialogue ever heard on the stage or screen. There is no better example than “M*A*S*H.” That show may have gotten bit too aware of itself but the writing when Gelbart was still working it was some of the best television has ever offered. Fortunately, that show is still being rerun, and when I watch it I marvel at how it never ages, never loses its edge.
Alan Alda and Larry Gelbart were a perfect match, and I think that’s because Alda has a classic sense of comedy – not the what-can-I-get-away-with drivel that passes too often for comedy today but the literate, witty kind of comedy one associates with S.J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman.
ALAN ALDA
Alda — particularly in the role of “Hawkeye” Pierce — has often been compared to Groucho Marx; in fact, he has been accused of aping Groucho Marx. But Marx was never the comic actor Alda is and, in that sense, any similarity in their delivery is more a compliment to Groucho than it is to Alda. I think that perception had to do with Gelbart, who brought that wise-ass attitude we saw in Groucho Marx to a much higher plain in Alan Alda.
The loss of someone as singularly talented as Gelbart is bad enough in itself, but it also is a reminder of how the quality of writing for television in particular has declined over the decades. Gelbart wrote for the “Duffy’s Tavern” radio series, for Bob Hope, and for Red Buttons, and he was a member of the legendary stable of writers on Sid Caesar’s television show. Most writers today don’t have that kind of background, but that’s what Gelbart brought to “M*A*S*H” and “Tootsie” and “Oh, God,” and “Sly Fox” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”
GRETCHEN WYLER
Back when I was still considered employable, I wrote a column taking note of the death of Gretchen Wyler, whom I did know and admired very much both as an actress and as a human being. We had seen Gretchen in “Sly Fox” when the cast included Vincent Gardenia and Jack Gilford, and I mentioned that in the column. I don’t know how Larry Gelbart found out about it, but he sent me two e-mail messages thanking me for remembering Gretchen and expressing his own respect and affection for her. The fact that Gelbart, when there was nothing in it for him, took the trouble to respond to a relatively obscure writer spoke to his loyalty as a friend and colleague.
Larry Gelbart was 81. A detailed obituary is at this link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-larry-gelbart12-2009sep12,0,2812430.story?page=1
“Have you no shame, sir?” — Joseph Nye Welch
September 11, 2009
JOHN KERRY
We all know — Don’t we? — what the Democrats in Congress would be saying if it were Republicans who were trying to change a term-limit law to assure passage of legislation. And they’d be right. The campaign in Massachusetts to legislate a Democrat into the Senate by giving the governor the power to appoint a replacement for Edward M. Kennedy is unseemly, a terrible example of governance.
I am in the camp that believes that health-care reform is long overdue and that it should be passed while the Obama administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress — such as they are — are in place. But I can’t stomach the desperate measure now in the works in Boston, an act of expediency that should embarrass everyone involved — including Sen. John Kerry, who is promoting it.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
This measure is of the same stripe and odor as the action taken last year by the New York City Council to alter the law that would have prevented Mayor Michael Bloomberg from running for a third four-year term. Bloomberg, who asked for the change, signed the bill himself with nary a blush.
Although it’s none of my business, I don’t object to Bloomberg serving as mayor another four years or, for that matter, another eight years. But the law should be changed based on some intrinsic principle, not based on the near-term needs and desires of a politician or a political party.
MITT ROMNEY
As for Massachusetts, the hypocrisy of what is under way there is astounding. The executive power to make an appointment to a vacant Senate seat was rescinded five years ago by the Democratic majority in the legislature in order to prevent Republican Gov. Mitt Romney from filling the seat if John Kerry had been elected president.
It should go without saying that self-interest is the worst motive for changing the law. The grim implication of these shenanigans is that Congress is unable to function except as a partisan cock-pit and that there is not enough political leadership or political will in the legislature or the executive department to overcome the extremism and bullheadedness. A fine nation we have become if we can reform a broken health system only by sleight-of-hand.
Down the hatch
September 9, 2009
Fratelli Branca, Milan
Something I just read reminded me of the only remedy my paternal grandmother swore by: Fernet-Branca. If you’ve never tasted it, you don’t know what you’re missing — and I say that without prejudice one way or the other.
Fernet is a liquer concocted of a couple of dozen herbs and spices and heavily laced with alcohol. There is more than one brand, but Fernet Branca — distilled by the Fratelli Branca in Milan — is the only one most people know.
Well, actually, I’m not sure most people know about Fernet at all, but to the extent that some people do, most of them know Fernet-Branca. I haven’t had Fernet in many years, but even when my memory of it was fresher I’m not sure I could have described the taste. The website romefile.com calls it “a cross between medicine, crushed plants and bitter mud,” but I don’t think that does it justice.
Fratelli Branca, Milan
As I implied, I was introduced to Fernet-Branca by Teresina Giordano Paolino, my grandmother, who kept it on hand to cure ailments of the stomach. When I was a kid, the combination of free range in our grocery store and my grandmother’s determination to kill me with food resulted in frequent attacks such as George Ade used to call “the stomach-ache.” If she got wind of such a calamity, Grandma would summon me to her kitchen — we had two, like all good Italians — and force me to swallow a shot glass full of Fernet-Branca. I say “force me.” That was only at first. After a while, I developed a taste for it — my first “acquired taste,” I suppose. It hits the belly like a shotgun blast — garlic, aloe, gentian root, rhubarb, gum myrrh, red cinchona bark, galanga, zedoary, and heaven knows what else simultaneously colliding with gastric acid. And the alcohol — oh, my. Depending on where one buys it, the alcohol content of Fernet-Branca can exceed 40 percent. It should come as no surprise that the firewater works — every time.
Fratelli Branca, Milan
When Pat and I were on our honeymoon in Bermuda, my stomach started barking after a few days of high living. I was complaining to Cappy, the hotel bartender, when I spied a Fernet-Branca label among the bottles behind him. It was like spotting an old friend in a crowd. I got Cappy to pour me a shot, although he was convinced it would make me sicker, but nothing doing — I was ready to resume the feast in about five minutes.
From what I’ve read on the Internet, Fernet-Branca, which has been around since 1845, is very trendy these days, particularly in Argentina, where many folks like it mixed with cola. In fact, it’s the subject of a song, “Fernet Cola,” by the rock group Vilma Palma.
There’s a Chicago Tribune story about the Argentine connection at this link:
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2008/jan/02/news/chi-0102argentinacoke_filljan02
“Hear the word of the Lord” — Hosea 4:1
September 7, 2009
I see by the papers that the publishers of the New International Version of the Bible are preparing a new edition of the scriptures that is likely to re-ignite the debate about sexist language.
I was discussing sexist language with one of my English classes the other day. The text for that class advises students to use the construction “his or her” in order to avoid expressing gender bias. So, for instance, students are advised to write. “A person who has been drinking at a party should surrender his or her keys to a sober friend,” rather than, “… surrender his keys to a sober friend,” which is grammatically correct, but some say not correct in other ways.
Several years ago, a translation called Today’s New International Version was introduced in which many gender references were changed in order to avoid what the publishers felt were unwarranted or unnecessary male nouns or pronouns. For example, a verse from the Gospel According to Matthew was altered from “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye ‘ ….” to “How can you say, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ ….” That doesn’t seem to alter the meaning of the verse, although I don’t know why the translator, if he or she wanted to alter that verse didn’t resort instead to “How can you say to your sister or brother ….”
An even more curious change affected a verse in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.” That was changed to: “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a human being.” The first man referred to was Adam – who was incontrovertably male – and the second man referred to was Jesus – also incontrovertably male, so that change seems unnecessary if it does not actually obscure Paul’s meaning.
The committee working on the new translation has explained that every gender reference in the Bible will be reviewed, but the outcome remains to be seen — sometime in 2011.
This aspect of Today’s New International Version was controversial. Some Christians who rely on this version argued that the text should stick as close to the original as possible, for reasons of authenticity and scholarship. Some objected to the tinkering with gender references as a disingenuous bow to political correctness. And some, including the translators, argued that those and other changes were designed to make the Bible more attractive to a younger audience and more accessible to all English-speaking people.
My own view as a reader of the New American Bible is that a book that is presented to the reader as the Bible should reproduce as closely as possible the language and meaning of the original writers and traditions. Reading the scriptures without historical context is always a risky business, and not just with respect to gender bias. Serious readers of the scriptures should know enough about the cultures in which they were written to understand that the status of women was very different from their status in the 21st century and even more different from the status they should occupy in the 21st century. There are many popular and scholarly commentaries on the Bible that explain the contents and background of the scriptures from a variety of religious perspectives and for a variety of audiences.
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post report on the revisions to the New International Version of the Bible is at this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/01/new-international-version_n_274299.html
Netflix Update No. 17: “October Sky”
September 5, 2009
JAKE GYLLENHAAL
We watched “October Sky,” a 1999 film based on the real life of Homer Hickam Jr., who became a NASA engineer after initially experimenting with rocket flight against his father’s wishes.
Homer is played by Jake Gyllanthaal and his father — called John in the movie — is played by Chris Cooper.
John Hickam is a supervisor in a West Virginia coal mine, and he expects Homer to follow him into the trade, as most boys in the town have followed their own dads. The unexpected launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in October 1957 inspires Homer to work with some of his friends to build and fire a succession of rockets, gradually refining the devices. Homer’s open desire to escape from what seems to him the pointless existence in his hometown — and specifically to enter a national science fair in order to get a college scholarship causes increasing tension between him and his father.
CHRIS COOPER
This movie is a little melodramatic, but it presents a stark picture of the lives of people in a company town that depends for its mean existence on a failing mine.
Cooper gives a credible performance as a man whose own courage and determination with respect to protecting the mine and the livelihoods of his employees does not help him recognize his son’s courage and determination, though directed at a different goal.
Laura Dern plays the idealized role of a high school teacher whose mission is to help the boys and girls in these grim surroundings to pursue their dreams.
“You’ve been more than a daddy to me” — Henry Burr
September 4, 2009
BRIGITTA JACOB-ENGELKEN
The BBC marked the anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany with a story about the last survivor of the bunker in which Adolph Hitler killed himself.
The survivor is Rochus Misch, 92, a resident of Berlin, who was an SS officer serving as a body guard, a telephone operator, and a messenger. The report included an interview with Misch’s daughter, Brigitta Jacob-Engelken, who recalls the day in 1953 when her father returned from the gulag where the Soviets had confined him after the Red Army invaded Berlin. The homecoming was joyful, but father and daughter didn’t get along.
ROCHUS MISCH
Their relationship wasn’t improved when Brigitta’s maternal grandmother informed her that her mother — Misch’s wife — had been Jewish, something Misch refused to accept.
Brigitta accepted it, learned Hebrew, spent time on a kibbutz, and used her architectural talents to help restore synagogues in Germany.
She says she doesn’t hold her father’s wartime role against him, because the work he did was “harmless.” “Harmless,” of course, was a relative term during the Nazi era. Compared to ordering and carrying out the deaths of tens of millions of defenseless people, protecting the life of the worst dictator in history may seem mild.
Misch didn’t talk about his place in Hitler’s inner circle for many years, but now he discusses it freely — including his first view of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.
The BBC stories are at this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8237708.stm
ROCHUS MISCH DURING THE WAR
Talkin’ baseball
September 3, 2009
DEREK JETER
Derek Jeter is on the verge of accumulating the most hits by any member of the New York Yankees – surpassing the record of 2,720 held since 1939 by Lou Gehrig. Gehrig would have had more, of course, had he not come down with ALS and died before he was 37 years old. That’s not Jeter’s fault; he got his hits one at a time like everybody else, and he deserves whatever recognition comes with them.
This not the kind of record that is subject to rationalization by people who don’t like the player — like those who say that Alex Rodriguez built up his records by driving in runs when his team didn’t need them. When a man gets 2,700 hits, there’s only one reason for it. He’s damn good.
LOU GEHRIG
Still, there will be some hint of melancholy around the hit that breaks Lou’s record. Maybe this is a generational thing. I don’t remember Gehrig, but I didn’t miss him by much, and my father — who saw him play scores of times throughout his career — kept the memory alive in our house. Younger people may not feel the regret that someone my age will feel when Lou is no longer Number One on that list.
One of the charms of baseball has always been that everyone who has ever played is still in the game. Today’s players compete against yesterday’s players in statistics and in memory. I wonder, though, if that is waning. I notice, for instance, that the frame of reference for the play-by-play and color announcers usually extends back only as far as they can remember. References to people like Gehrig are rare, and they often sound like references to fictional characters.
BILL DICKEY
I was in the Yankee clubhouse with Ed Lucas one day about 15 years ago, and Ed was talking to a young player who had come up from the farm for a cup of coffee. In the conversation, Ed mentioned Yogi Berra. Ed is blind, but I noticed the blank look on the player’s face, and I said, “You know who Yogi Berra is, don’t you?” The guy said: “I’ve heard of the gentleman.” I guess there would have been no point in asking the young man if he knew who Bill Dickey was — the Hall of Fame catcher who preceded Berra on the Yankees.
People of my generation lived through the phenomenon of grieving a record when Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 to break the mark set by Babe Ruth in 1927. I was rooting for Maris, partly, I suppose, because Ruth’s transcendent place in the game doesn’t depend on any of his individual records. But a lot of people resented Maris and said so. If anyone broke that record, it should have been Mickey Mantle, a legitimate power hitter year after year and a lifetime Yankee. That was the feeling. We were at Yankee Stadium the day Maris broke that record; the excitement was muted, to put it mildly, Phil Rizzuto notwithstanding. Henry Aaron went through something similar when he broke Ruth’s lifetime home run mark — and there was a strong racial ingredient in that — but Aaron was such a great all-around player for so many years, that only cranks were against him.
CARL HUBBELL
Speaking of Bill Dickey, he came to mind the other day when a friend of mine mentioned Carl Hubbell’s well-known feat in the 1933 All-Star Game, striking out in succession Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Al Simmons — all future Hall of Famers. Hubbell, a Hall of Fame pitcher himself, was a screwball-throwing left-hander and one of the best of his time — many would say all time.
It doesn’t come up often, but the batter who followed Simmons was Bill Dickey, who got a hit to break Hubbell’s streak. The next batter was Lefty Gomez, a pitcher with the Yankees and one of the great humorists of the game, and a notoriously bad hitter in the days when American League pitchers were fully employed and took their turn at bat.
LEFTY GOMEZ
Gomez struck out, and when he went back to the dugout, he was ripping mad at Dickey.
“What did I do?” asked Dickey, who was flabbergasted. “It’s going to go down in history,” Gomez told him, “that Hubbell struck out five of the greatest hitters in baseball. If you had had the decency to strike out, it would have been seven, and I would have been one of them!”
The Times has a story about Jeter’s achievement in the context of the end of Gehrig’s career. It’s at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/sports/baseball/04gehrig.html?hp
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