… and what’s more, they believe it.
May 5, 2009
CARRIE PREJEAN
The blather that is issuing from the controversy over Carrie Prejean and her view of same-sex marriage might set a record even in this blather-soaked age. I have paid only passing attention to this story until today – most of my attention has taken the form of amusement over the talking heads discussing it with straight faces as though it were really important – but today I came across the report in the San Diego News that photos of Prejean modelling in a state of near nakedness have started showing up on the Internet, and that some of her critics are saying those photos cast doubt on her claim to be a Christian. Given the wide application and interpretation of the word “Christian,” that in itself is a example of the silliness that has infected this incident.
This is a bit of what the San Diego paper reported:
Alicia Jacobs, a judge at the April 19 Miss USA pageant during which Prejean made her highly publicized statement opposing same-sex marriage, said the pictures go beyond what the Miss California pageant says are appropriate.
“I can assure you they were quite inappropriate, and certainly not photos befitting a beauty queen,” Jacobs, a reporter for NBC’sLas Vegas affiliate, told NBC News.
ALICIA JACOBS
Alicia is in a position to make such judgments about what is or is not appropriate, because she herself is a former “beauty queen” who has graduated to her present status as one of those jewels of 21st century journalism, an “entertainment reporter.” According to her home station, KVBC:
Alicia’s revealing one-on-one interviews with A-listers read more like comfortable chats between friends. Celebrities have come to trust her journalistic integrity, & viewers have come to expect Alicia’s easygoing way, to showcase the “real” side of their favorite celebrities.
That’s a reassuring thing in these troubled times when life can get so hard to understand.
Farrago of this kind is being circulated because of Prejean’s answer when she was asked her opinion of same-gender marriage, and her answer sounded like it could have come from the governor of Alaska:
“I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage,” Prejean said. “And you know what? I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”
Huh? What’d she say? She’s glad Americans have the choice, but she doesn’t want them to?
PEREZ HILTON
Perez Hilton – another wonder of celebrity journalism – asked the question of Prejean in the first place and then turned on her, complaining – according to the San Diego paper – that Miss USA is supposed to unite Americans, not divide them. What century does he live in? The very fact that an anachronistic beauty contest was the launching pad for a debate that trivializes a subject that deeply affects the personal lives of millions of men and women is in itself a sad commentary on the state of public discourse in this country.
While you weren’t looking, Perez, Bert Parks died.
Netflix Update No. 7: “The Notebook”
May 4, 2009
RACHEL McADAMS
We watched “The Notebook,” a 2004 film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. The film stars Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, James Garner and Gena Rowlands, and is directed by Rowlands’ son, Nick Cassavetes. The premise is that an elderly man (Garner) living in a nursing home regularly reads to a fellow resident (Rowlands) from a romantic story handwritten in a notebook. Flashbacks that make up the bulk of the movie tell the same story, a romance that began in 1940 in Seabrook, South Carolina, between teenagers Noah Calhoun (Gosling) and Allie Hamilton (McAdams). It becomes clear almost immediately that Garner and Rowlands are the older manifestations of Noah and Allie, and that the older Allie – suffering from dementia – is absorbed in the story but seldom remembers who she and Noah are or that this is the story of their own relationship.
RYAN GOSLING
This movie is well cast, well performed, and beautifully filmed and directed. Gosling and McAdams could not be more appealing as the quirky lumber yard worker and the vibrant young socialite. Garner and Rowlands are credible and moving as the aged couple. The only reservation I had was that I couldn’t connect Noah as played by Gosling with Noah as played by Garner. The two men are so dissimilar that it is difficult to make that leap and accept them as the same person. I thought it was particularly ill-advised at a certain point in the film to flash a montage of black-and-white photos of the young Jim Garner, who was nothing at all like Ryan Gosling. Still, the movie as a whole is absorbing and entertaining and avoids the mawkishness into which such a story could easily descend.
“Pssssst! ‘Farrah Fawcett.’ Pass it on.”
May 3, 2009
HOPE DAVIS
I’m taking a break from the usual blogging today to put the WordPress system to the test. I have noticed what I think are odd results in the list of terms that readers ostensibly searched in order to reach my journal. By now I have dozens of entries in this blog, but the readers who come in through search terms seem to have an inordinate fixation with Hope Davis, Farrah Fawcett, and Andrew Johnson – the latter having been the 17th president of these United States.
Now, I think the world of Hope Davis as an actress, I sympathize with Farrah Fawcett for her health problems, and I have a perhaps inexplicable fascination with Andrew Johnson. However, I have referred to Hope Davis and Farrah Fawcett only once each in this journal, and I may have referred to Andrew Johnson twice or, at the most, three times. And yet those terms show up every day on the report, and the journal entry that mentioned Hope Davis – it consisted of my comments on one of her movies – has become my “all-time leader.”
So I have deliberately referred to all three of those personalities in this little rant to see if this entry, too, causes activity in the report on search terms.
More about this when the results are in.
Ike as in “like”
May 2, 2009
DWIGHT EISENHOWER
I just finished reading “Ike: An American Hero,” the 2007 biography of Dwight Eisenhower by Michael Korda, a former RAF pilot whose books include a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. This book seemed almost as long as the Second World War, but it provides a lot of insight into the military realities of the allied campaign for control of North Africa, Sicily, and ultimately the European mainland via the beaches of France.
Korda, who is British, tries to sort out the conflicting judgments about Eisenhower’s military leadership, which varies in direct relationship to which side of the Atlantic it comes from. That’s an interesting point in itself, because what Korda finds to be the key to Eisenhower’s genius is that he was able to manage and manipulate the constant head-banging among allied leaders – Winston Churchill, Charles DeGaulle, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt – who seemed to have few common interests beyond defeating Nazi Germany, and – on the other hand – who had many interests that were in conflict.
Scholarly rankings of the presidents – a pointless exercise in many respects – usually place Eisenhower among the top 10. Korda – while acknowledging several embarrasments and failures in the administration – gives Eisenhower a balanced report card for his eight years in office, but devotes most of the book to Eisenhower’s military career and particularly to the war. He emphasizes a point that may be lost on later generations, namely that as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Eisenhower exercised – and successfully – what was arguably the greatest measure of military and political power ever placed in the hands of a single person, before or since. He acted in some cases – for instance, in dealings with Stalin – as though he himself were a head of state.
Korda discusses Eisenhower’s analysis of the Korean War – namely that it couldn’t be won without an American military commitment that probably would have sparked another world conflict; his refusal to send American combat troops into what he considered the French colonial war in Vietnam, and his caution against American military involvement in the Middle East – a bitter lesson for Eisenhower himself in Lebanon.
I got to see Eisenhower in person in 1964 or 1965, when I was a graduate student at Penn State. I was working in the public information office and heard there that Eisenhower, who lived in Gettysburg at that time, was going to visit State College to address a group of high school students. Eisenhower was the first person to be protected under the Former Presidents Act, but you couldn’t tell it from his appearance at Waring Hall. I had no business there, but no one stopped me from going in and sitting in a balcony looking down on Eisenhower as he stood alone on the stage talking to those teenagers.
PORTRAIT OF EISENHOWER
He spoke to the students about civic responsibility, about not exercising their democratic rights by standing on the sidelines of political life. He was in his late 70s then and had suffered some serious health problems, but he stood ramrod straight with the military bearing that had been drilled into his DNA. He also had that good-natured ease of manner that Korda repeatedly argues contributed as much as anything else to Eisenhower’s success in the Army and in civilian life.
Ducks on a Pond
May 1, 2009
static.howstuffworks.com
Mike Adamick, blogging for the Los Angeles Times, says his three-year-old daughter has become fascinated with the jargon of baseball. For instance, she loves the term “dying quail,” which refers to a fly ball that suddenly loses steam and drops to the ground. “Where are the quails?” the little one asks whenever a ball is hit into the air. She also likes “worm burner,” a hot ground ball that skids across the grass. “Poor worms!” she says after every hard grounder.
I recently gave a short talk about this subject as part of a job application process. I asked the group I was speaking to if any of them were baseball fans, and several hands went up, but none of them could decipher the terms “can of corn” (an easily caught fly ball), “cup of coffee” (a player’s short stay in the major leagues before returning to the minors), or “cutting the pie” (deliberately rounding first or third base without touching the bag). They were befuddled by the hypothetical statement: “Jeter tried to shoot the cripple with ducks on the pond, but he started a Lawrence Welk,” which means that, with the bases loaded, Jeter tried to get a hit off an ineffective pitcher but grounded into a double play from the pitcher to the catcher to the first baseman – a play that is scored one-two-three (a-one and a-two and a-three).
My audience was able, however, to distinguish between the hot dog who shows off making one-handed grabs and the hot dog that costs six bucks at the concession stand.
La dolce vita.
April 30, 2009
VERONICA LARIO
The defection of Arlen Specter, the impending confirmation of Al Franken, and the general disarray of the Republican Party all make for absorbing political drama. But for humor, the bunch in Washington have nothing on the Italians. The latest Over There is that Veronica Lario, the wife of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has publicly repudiated what she construes as her husband’s plan to trot out a team of female TV stars and a former beauty queen as candidates in the June elections in the European Union.
Lario, a former actress who knows about such things, said her sposo was exhibiting a “lack of discretion in his exercise of power which offends the credibility of all women.”
And she’s not being selfish about this. “I want it to be quite clear that my children and I are victims and not accomplices in this situation,” she said. “We have to endure it, and it makes us suffer.” (Note to the stimatissima signora, keep a close eye on those kiddies when they’re surfing the web. Some of those photos of you senza vestiti could be counterproductive while you’re protecting their moral character.)
SILVIO BERLUSCONI
Berlusconi’s version of this is that his party wants “to renew our political class with people who are cultivated and well prepared” — unlike the “malodorous and badly dressed people who represent certain parties in Parliament.” Not that it’s all about appearances – capisce?
According to The Times of London, this isn’t the first time the two have had – come si chiama? – “political” disagreements in public. Two years ago, it seems, la Prima Donna wrote an open letter to Berlusconi demanding an apology “after he was overheard telling Mara Carfagna, a former topless model and variety show presenter, that if he were single he would marry her straight away,” the Times reported today. Berlusconi did apologize, but he then included Carfagna as a candidate in last year’s national elections, and, when the party had won, appointed her – no doubt to demonstrate his committment to gender equality – minister for equal opportunities.
“Bother!”
April 29, 2009
The death of character actor Peter Dennis calls to mind the seemingly inexhaustible appeal of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” books. Although, I often wonder how many people know Milne’s characters – which have been thoroughly exploited – without knowing them in their original context. Peter Dennis used to tour with a one-man show that consisted of him reading from the Pooh books and other works by Milne. He maintained – and the large crowds he drew seemed to confirm – that Milne’s stories weren’t just for children. That’s certainly true. Superimposed on the tales themselves is a kind of harmonic of humor and philosophy that only adults are likely to perceive. The same is true of Kenneth Graham’s “The Wind in the Willows.” It is so much true of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books that there probably is more for adults in their pages than there is for children.
PETER DENNIS
Or, at least, there would be more for adults if adults are still reading these books. It’s prophetic that in the last scene of the second Pooh book, Christopher Robin tells Pooh that they can’t continue their previous relationship because “they won’t let you” – the “they” being humorless grownups. There is a similar passage in another of Graham’s books, “Dream Days,” in which a family of children go out in the dead of night and bury in the yard some toys that the adults – the narrator calls them Olympians – have packed away because the children, in the view of grownups, have outgrown them. “As we turned to go,” the narrator says, “the man in the moon, tangled in elm-boughs, caught my eye for a moment, and I thought that never had he looked so friendly. He was going to see after them, it was evident; for he was always there, more or less, and so it was no trouble to him at all, and he would tell them how things were still going, up here, and throw in a story or two of his own whenever they seemed a trifle dull. It made the going away rather easier, to know one had left somebody behind on the spot; a goodfellow, too, cheery, comforting, with a fund of anecdote; a man in whom one had every confidence.”
“Come away with me, Hernando ….”
April 28, 2009
1952 De Soto
My father had two De Sotos – a ’48 and a ’52. The ’48 is the first family car of ours that I can remember. Chrysler stopped making the DeSoto in 1961. The car was named after Hernando De Soto and many models had a nifty likeness of De Soto as a hood ornament. Perhaps school kids are still taught that De Soto discovered the Mississippi River in 1542. Actually, he led the first European party to find the Mississippi River. A few folks had already seen it, but hadn’t sent word far enough East to reach De Soto, whose achievement was put into even sharper context by Jerry Seinfeld: “Yeah, like they wouldn’t have found that anyway.”
But I digress.
HENRY J
Joe Engel drove a Henry J. That was a more or less compact car manufactured by Kaiser Frazer, beginning in 1950. The car was named after the head of the company, Henry J. Kaiser. The Henry J disappeared from the market in 1954. Under the terms of a federal loan Kaiser had received in 1949, specifications for the Henry J were dictated by that harbinger of efficiency, the federal government. Under those terms, the basic Henry J had to sell for no more than $1,300, including federal tax and dealer prep charges. It had to accommodate at least five adults and be able to sustain a speed of 50 miles per hour. In order to meet those standards, the Henry J was bare bones. For instance, there was no trunk. Well, there was a trunk, but to get to it, a person had to pull out the back of the rear seat. There was no access from the outside; that was to save parts. The basic model also had no glove compartment, no arm rests, no sun visor on the passenger side, and no ventilation of outside air. It wasn’t a success, especially since a driver could buy a better car from another manufacturer without spending much more. Frank Zappa once rode across country in the back seat of a Henry J, and lived to tell about it.
I heard that Joe Engel had once played for a Yankee farm club in Binghamton. That was when the Yankees had a farm system that developed so many good players that …. But I digress again.
I’m thinking about the De Soto and the Henry J because of the news about discontinuing the Pontiac line. The layoffs and the impact on ancillary businesses and industries will be murder, but a decision like this is a reminder that one thing healing the economy should not be about is preserving business models and government practices that contributed to the false prosperity that recently collapsed around our heads. Over-production and over-expansion were among the wrongheaded practices, and the goal should not be to get back to making those mistakes. I don’t have such fond memories of the Pontiac anyway. The only one I ever drove was a ’56 that my brother let me borrow for a date. The driver’s side door wouldn’t open from the inside. Every time I wanted to get out, I had to roll down the window and reach the outside door handle. Naturally, it rained that night, so I spent the date with a drenched left arm. Fortunately, I’m right handed.
Netflix Update No. 6: “The Grass Harp”
April 27, 2009
PIPER LAURIE
This is your life?
April 26, 2009
FANNY BRICE
Last night, after watching a two-year-old Barbra Streisand concert on CBS, we switched to American Movie Classics to catch most of “Funny Girl,” the 1968 film starring Streisand and Omar Sharif. This is still an entertaining film in its way, but it seems interminable. Like it or not, it’s a shame that this film is responsible for the impressions most people today have of Fanny Brice and “Nicky” Arnstein, because the story line might as well be about two other people entirely. The characterization of Fanny Brice – her upbringing, her personality, her love life, her relationship with Florenz Ziegfeld – none of it is true.
JULIUS "NICKY" ARNSTEIN
What’s even farther afield is the portrayal of “Nicky” Arnstein, who is presented in the film as a handsome, cultured, lovable rascal whose pride wouldn’t allow him to accept his wife’s financial help when his gambling luck ran out. In actual fact, Arnstein was a louse who shamelessly sponged off Brice for years. Brice – who had two other marriages – lived with Arnstein for six or seven years before they married, and he took full advantage of her resources and her status. He did time in Sing Sing before they married – this is not mentioned in the film – and he did 13 months in Leavenworth during their marriage after he was caught trying to transport stolen securities into Washington, D.C. Brice spent a lot of her money trying to defend him from the federal charge, and then he dropped her cold when he got out of stir. Why someone with Fanny Brice’s talent wanted to associate in any way with Arnstein I am not aware.
Apparently there were at least two reasons why the movie – and the Broadway show that inspired it – departed so far from the facts of Brice’s life. One was that the writers were trying to create good entertainment, not a documentary. The other was that Arnstein was still alive when this material was written and was known to be prepared to litigate anything derogatory said about him.
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