. . . and so am I
From Freak Out!, the 1966 debut album of The Mothers of Invention, the recording that unleashed Frank Zappa on an unsuspecting world. The double-album contains at least four other classic Zappa tunes; Who Are The Brain Police?; Trouble Every Day; Hungry Freaks, Daddy; Wowie Zowie; and Motherly Love. It was also the high point for the use of the kazoo in rock music.
In The Danchenko Motions, I wrote:
I've reviewed the government motions in limine and the response of defendant Igor Danchenko, a US based Russian national. Read together they reinforce my notion that the government will have a difficult time convincing a jury, particularly one in the DC area, to find Danchenko guilty (and they may very well be correct in that conclusion). At the same time, the motions reinforce my confidence in the underlying accuracy of the real story behind the Russia collusion hoax:
I was correct regarding Danchenko's acquittal while the trial testimony reinforced confidence in the underlying accuracy of my views expressed on this subject since 2018. In fact, it turns out the degree of collusion to invent and maintain the collusion hoax was more than I originally thought possible.
Key points from the trial:
1. Danchenko estimated that he was the source for 80% of the factual statements and 50% of the analysis in the Steele Dossier.
2. Danchenko's defense was based not on the accuracy of the information he passed on to Steele, but on the contention he accurately portrayed to Steele, and later the FBI, that he was merely passing on gossip and unsubstantiated rumor.
3. In October 2016, the FBI offered to pay Steele up to $1 million if he could provide verification for the claims made in the dossier. He never did so.
4. In January 2017, the FBI interviewed Danchenko, who informed them of the unreliability of the claims in the dossier.
5. The FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, serving as the direct contact with Danchenko, confirmed the agency was never able to corroborate Danchenko's claims.
6. Despite this, in October 2016, and January, April, and July of 2017, FBI and DOJ officials certified to the FISA Court regarding the reliability of the claims made in the dossier, which were incorporated into the FISA warrant application and its renewals. Remember that, according to the Inspector General's report, the warrant would not have been issued without the claims regarding the dossier. It turns out we had a word game being played in which the FBI and DOJ claim their certification was simply that they had verified Danchenko passed the claims on to Steele who reported them accurately, not that the claims themselves were reliable.(1)
7. Even with the dossier information, the FBI/DOJ was initially advised by the FISA Court reviewer, who reviews and comments on draft applications, that the warrant would probably not be approved unless the FBI/DOJ included information on the overall reliability of Steele's sources. In response, the final warrant application cited Steele's Russian informant network developed when he worked for British intelligence, implying the same network was the source for the dossier. This was false as Danchenko and Steele's other sources were unconnected with that earlier network.
8. In his Congressional testimony, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, repeatedly asserted that the Steele Dossier was "beyond his purview", and indeed his report made no mention of it in the section reporting on possible collusion by Trump and his associates, only making a footnote reference in the second part on possible obstruction of justice. This was an inaccurate statement. Testimony at trial revealed that the Special Counsel had an entire team investigating the claims made in the dossier. It seems the dossier was not mentioned in the final report because Mueller's team could not verify the claims.(2)
9. In the course of investigating the dossier, the Mueller team rejected the recommendation by an FBI agent, assigned to the Mueller investigation, to interview Charles Dolan, once she discovered he was a source for Danchenko. Dolan is a DC lobbyist, who has worked on Clinton campaigns throughout the years, and was supporting Hillary in 2016. The recommendation to interview him came after the FBI agent realized that Dolan also handled PR in the United States for the Kremlin and was personally meeting with Vladimir Putin's spokesperson. The Clinton partisans serving as Mueller's legal team clearly did not want to touch anything that connected Hillary Clinton with Putin, so avoided interviewing Dolan.
The trial testimony further confirms (1) there was not enough reliable evidence to justify applying for the FISA warrant on Carter Page; (2) by late January 2017, the FBI had interviewed the primary source for the Dossier, who could not verify the accuracy of its contents, nor had Christopher Steele provided any further information regarding its accuracy; (3) by the time of Robert Mueller's appointment in May 2017, no further support for the reliability of the dossier had been uncovered. Yet, for two more years, the Steele Dossier continued to exist as a boogeyman for the media, used to scare unsuspecting readers and viewers, all in furtherance of its narrative regarding Donald Trump.
At this point all one can say is that Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Adam Schiff, the New York Times, and Donald Trump (the latter for his post-2020 election insanity) could not have done more to damage the United States and its institutions than if they'd been paid agents of Vladimir Putin.
As for Durham and his investigation, who knows what's next? Will they issue a report? Will there be any further prosecutions?
At the risk of sounding more and more like Cato the Elder, who ended each speech in the Roman Senate with "Carthago delenda est", I continue to ask, "will no one tell me who Josef Mifsud was working for?"
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(1) This word game reminds me of what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop in the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign. As soon as the New York Post reported on the laptop, 51 former intelligence officials issued a statement saying the story had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation". That was enough for most of the rest of the press as well as Facebook and Twitter to ignore the story and suppress it from circulation. Now that Biden has been elected, it apparently has become permissible to acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop. Its contents raised questions not only about Hunter Biden, but what his father knew of, or possibly derived financial benefit from, his son's Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese connections. Once the authenticity of the laptop became evident, 50 of the 51 officials have declined to comment. The one who did told the press that their statement merely said the story had "hallmarks of Russian disinformation", not that the story actually was Russian disinformation, and it wasn't his fault if people can't read. That's okay since it served its purpose, signaling to a press predisposed to favor Biden that it was okay to suppress the story.
(2) I don't know if Mueller deliberate misled Congress. By the time of his testimony he seemed to be mentally worn down and his appearance was embarrassing. It's possible his Clinton supporting legal team manipulated and misled Mueller during the preparation of his testimony, and perhaps throughout the entire investigation.
It looks like we are headed to a Philadelphia/Houston World Series. I don't mind that the Phillies have won, with the Astros very likely to, as I always enjoy seeing the Yankees lose and quite dislike the Padres best player, Manny Machado.
In the case of the American League, the best regular season team, the Astros, is now almost certain to make the World Series, while the Yankees had the second-best record in the league. It's a different story in the National League where the 5th and 6th best teams ended up playing for the league championship - and it wasn't close - they were 22 and 24 games behind the team with the best record (the Dodgers) and 12 and 14 behind the teams tied for second (Mets, Braves). The regular season record of the Padres against the other playoff team in their division (Dodgers) and of the Phillies against the Mets and Braves in their division was a combined 17 wins and 39 losses. And it wasn't like either team was particularly hot in the second half of the season. The Padres played below .500 ball after June 16, while the Phillies closed the season by losing 20 of their last 35 games.
Upsets have always occurred in baseball, going back to the 1906 series when the 93 win White Sox beat the record setting 116 win Cubs team, but as playoffs get more extended it becomes more and more likely we will not see the "best" regular season teams in the World Series. Baseball playoffs present a different picture than football or basketball. The baseball season is 10X as long as football and 2X longer than basketball allowing for a better sorting of true skill level. And performance distribution in baseball is more evenly distributed. It's rare to have a baseball team win 2/3 of its games, while this routinely occurs in the other two sports. Another way to look at distribution is to examine the last two full regular seasons for each sport.
Baseball had 60 team seasons (30 teams x 2 seasons), of which 8 teams won at least 60% of their games and 8 teams won less than 40% of games. Basketball also had 60 team seasons, with 15 teams winning more than 60% and 14 winning less than 40%. Football had 64 teams seasons, in which almost a 1/3 (21), saw teams winning more than 60% of the time and 19 seasons of winning fewer than 40%.
It will be interesting to see what the expanded baseball playoffs bring us in future seasons.
While looking at this data, I got interested in the longer-terms aspects of baseball competitiveness during the regular season, and looked at the data for the last three seasons before the 1994 strike. In those three years, there were 78 team seasons, with 4 teams winning at least 60% of games and 6 teams winning fewer than 40% or 13% representing 60+ or 40- seasons, compared to 27% in 2021-22. We've had periods in the past with competitive inbalance like the National League in the first two decades of the 20th century, perhaps we are in another such era. If I get around to it, I'll take a more comprehensive look at the historical data.
A song that could only have been written in that brief interval between 1945 and the end of mid-century America in November 1963. The opening:
I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axis
Of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails
And those ending lines:
I'll live a lush lifeIn some small diveAnd there I'll be
While I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too
Composed by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's frequent collaborator.
Vocal by Ella Fitzgerald, who effortlessly handles the difficult melody. Oscar Peterson on piano.
Our monthly speaker at the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable this Tuesday was Ethan Rafuse, professor of military history at the US Army Command & General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr Rafuse spoke on George McClellan and the Peninsula Campaign of March-July 1862, with a focus less on the tactics and specific battles of the campaign and more on the overall strategy and McClellan's concept of not only how to win the war, but what the war should be about.
(McClellan)
For those not familiar with the Peninsula Campaign, in late March 1862, General McClellan transferred the bulk of the Union Army from its camps around Washington DC to the tip of the Yorktown Peninsula. From there he began an advance towards Richmond, the Confederate capital, the fall of which, he was convinced would end secession. By the end of May the Union Army was within a few miles of the capital while the Confederate commander, Joseph E Johnston, had been wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines and replaced with Robert E Lee. While McClellan continued his very slow and very methodical advance, Lee became the aggressor and, in what is known as the Seven Days, launched five attacks and pushed the Union Army away from Richmond to its base on the James River. In August, Lee began a rapid advance into northern Virginia and, in response, the Union Army abandoned the peninsula, moving north and not returning to the Richmond area until June 1864.
(The advance on Richmond)
Dr Rafuse emphasized several key points in his presentation:
McClellan was a Unionist who wanted to bring the seceding states back into the Union and thought the best way to do so was to guarantee the status quo - preserving slavery. He, and his mentor, General Winfield Scott, believed that this needed to be accomplished quickly because the longer the war went on, the more radicals (in their characterization) on both sides would be empowered, as casualties and destruction mounted. McClellan believed a decisive victory and the capture of Richmond would bring about a quick end.
McClellan and Scott's observation regarding the implications of a lengthy war were accurate and reflected in American, and global, military history. Wars tend towards more violence as they lengthen and both military and civilian leaders feel justified in the use of violent measures they might not have supported at the outset; a good example being the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities in the last months of World War Two.(1) Indeed, the Civil War itself provides such an example as it would have been hard for anyone to contemplate something like Sherman's March to the Sea in 1861. Its duration also resulted in a more radical result as positions hardened on both sides. President Lincoln spoke to both aspects in the sermon we know as the Second Inaugural Address, "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained . . . Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding".
Rafuse argued that McClellan's way of war also played to Union strengths and on Confederate weakness. A student of the type of war practiced in Europe since the 17th century, McClellan followed a methodical approach, emphasizing siege tactics, artillery, and engineering, which along with the navy and greater manpower and economic resources were Union strengths. He did not seek a war of maneuver which would play to the Confederate strengths in infantry and cavalry. Indeed, his advance up the Peninsula, though agonizingly slow, forced General Johnston to acknowledge it played to Union strength, pinning the Confederates into a static defense around Richmond.
Robert E Lee refused to play by McClellan's rules, taking the offensive, playing to Confederate strengths, and preying upon McClellan's personal weakness as a battlefield tactician, causing the Union army to fall back from the gates of Richmond. McClellan would be relieved of his command by President Lincoln in the fall of 1862, run against the President as the Democratic Party candidate in the election of 1864, campaigning as the peace candidate, and decisively losing.
In recent years, Lee's generalship has come under increasing fire, being criticized for its aggressiveness and the high casualties suffered by the Army of Northern Virginia, with critics proposing that a defensive posture might have provided a path to victory for the South. I took Dr Rafuse's point to be that while Lee might have made some tactical mistakes (for instance, at Gettysburg) his offensive strategy provided the only potential path to victory, as a permanent defensive posture would inevitably have led to the Confederacy being slowly ground down by the material advantages of the North.
In support of that thesis, Rafuse pointed out that the decisive moment in the war occurred in June 1864, when General Grant, reached the Yorktown Peninsula, though by a different route than McClellan, and crossed the James River, pinning Lee into a static defense of Richmond and Petersburg. Though it would take nine months, Lee knew at that moment he'd permanently lost the initiative, and it was only a matter of time until the end.
Rafuse concluded by asserting that the Civil War actually ended on terms closer to those sought by McClellan than that of his opponents in the North. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the white North and South began reconciliation, while the black population (95% of which lived in the former slave states) though free, was to remain under the control of whites. At the same time, much of the South was to be an economic backwater until well into the 20th century.
I enjoy speakers like Dr Rafuse who provide different and provocative views of the Civil War, demonstrating how even 150+ years later there is much to learn and think about those events and how they reverberate today.
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(1) This is on my mind having recently read Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, by James M Scott, a riveting account of those events.
There is no political solutionTo our troubled evolution
From Ghost In The Machine, the 1981 album from The Police. The suitable atmospherics for the song provided by Sting's bass and synthesizer (for which both Sting and guitarist Andy Summers are credited), along with Stewart Copeland's distinctive drumming.
Prehistory is an exciting field, fueled by advancements in genetic research and new archeological field activities and investigation techniques. We are beginning to get hints of the history of human development before the first "historic" civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The time range goes back from before the emergence of homo sapiens to about 3000 BC. In the early part of the period, 21st century work indicates a much more complex story about human evolution than the one-time "Out of Africa" scenario posited only thirty years ago, with multiple pulses of emigration out of Africa and the emergence of other of earlier human species in Asia, including species that existed at the same time as sapiens.
Within the past 15,000 years there is new information available about sites like Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (modern Turkey) that seemed to have existed prior to the development of agriculture, confounding theories about the start of civilization. The history of the settlement of Europe may also be in the course of being rewritten. Decades ago I learned that it was thought the agriculture began in Europe with the migration of farmers from the Anatolian Plateau into the Balkans, from their spreading to the Atlantic and Baltic, beginning around 9,000 years ago. It still appears that migration occurred but about 5,000 years ago, peoples from the Eurasian steppes, known as the Yamnaya, entered Europe, and may have killed most of the male Anatolian migrants they found in the new lands, establishing a new culture in Europe. One good source for finding a lot of this research is via Razib Khan's substack and twitter feed.
Another example comes from Jacob Shell, the geography professor about whom I wrote just a couple of days ago. Take a look at this map:
Map of North African during its late "humid" period, i.e. roughly 8000-4000 BC. I'd put chances that a big archaeological discovery remains to be found under the sands of the Sahara at better than 50%. pic.twitter.com/JmcOw9MhZG
— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) October 14, 2022
It portrays the era of the green Sahara, pastoral, full of lakes, and fertile. As the local climate dried and warmed, the desert began to encroach, and the population of the interior migrated in different directions - to coastal North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Nile Valley from which emerged the civilization of the pharaohs around 3000 BC.
This green period also explains why elephants, rhinoceros, and lions were found in North Africa during the Classical period. It was only because the Sahara was once verdant that these animals were able to migrate from south of the Sahara to the shores of the Mediterranean.
As Shell notes, there's a substantial likelihood of fascinating evidence of those times lies beneath the desert, an even more intriguing possibility given that the origins of permanent human settlement appears to go back much further than thought a couple of decades ago.
Can't wait to see this. Banshees reunites the stars of In Bruges (Brendon Gleeson, Colin Farrell) with its writer-director, Martin McDonagh. In Bruges is one of those films that is great on first viewing and even better on rewatching. Gleeson also starred in the searing Calvary, written and directed by Martin's brother John Michael. Extra added bonus is Banshees co-stars Kerry Condon, better known to me as Mike Erhmantraut's daughter in law in Better Call Saul. The film has received glowing reviews in the UK.
The first European expedition to traverse the Amazon from its tributaries to its mouth, from which it emerged on August 26, 1542, was led by Francisco de Orellana. Born in Spain, Orellana arrived in the New World in the late 1520s, seeking his fame and fortune. In 1533 he joined Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of the Incas and the subsequent civil wars among the conquistadors. Sent to Ecuador, he was appointed second in command of an expedition under Francisco's brother, Gonzalo, to locate the "Land of Cinnamon" supposedly located on the east side of the Andes. The expedition quickly fell apart as most of the 4,000 Spaniards and Indians gathered for the trek died or deserted, and Gonzalo returned to Quito. However, Orellana, with about 50 men, decided to push on, using a river which proved to be a tributary of the Amazon about which they knew nothing, leaving in December 1541. Over the next eight months Orellana and his men traveled over 2,000 miles.
(Map from Wikipedia)
Two years later, Orellana left Spain with a substantial expedition to conquer and exploit the Amazon basis, a voyage that ended in disaster with Orellana's death.
The significance of the expedition is in what Orellana verbally reported seeing and was reported in a book by Gaspar de Carvajal, the Dominican missionary who accompanied the expedition, which was not published until 1895, an account that was disbelieved until recent decades because it contravened the belief that the status of the peoples of the Amazon, encountered when European settlement and exploitation of the area began more than a century after Orellana first saw it, had always existed in that state. Europeans entering the Amazon basin in the late 17th century reported encountering no substantial settlements with a scattered and small native population living precariously in the jungle. In contrast, Carvajal reported, according to Wikipedia, " large cities, well developed roads, monumental construction, fortified towns, and dense populations". The impossibility of Carvajal's report was further demonstrated by 19th and early 20th century scientists concluding that the soils of the basin were of too poor a quality to support large scale agriculture.
That story began to change in the late 20th century with the discovery of evidence of large scale landscape manipulation by the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Amazon basin, terra forming that allowed for sustainable agriculture, a tale that first received larger public recognition with the publication in 2005 of Charles C Mann's 1491, an excellent account of the populations of the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus.
I was reminded of this by a recent thread by Jacob Shell, a geography professor at Temple University, who writes of even more recent findings supporting the existence of a more sophisticated and populous Indian existence in the 16th century. You can read the thread below:
A historical account which is as tantalizing and mysterious as they come: Gaspar de Carvajal's description of the peoples along the Amazon River in 1542. Possibly one of the last glimpses of a living "El Dorado." 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sbnqjplYLW
— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) October 16, 2022
What happened to cause such a contrast between what Orellana and Carvajal saw in 1542 and what was observed in the late 1600s? The most likely culprit were the diseases that accompanied the European explorers, diseases to which the Indians did not have immune defenses (in 1491, Mann explains the details of the immunological differences which made Indian populations in the Western Hemisphere so vulnerable). The waves of diseases like smallpox may have killed 80-90% of the pre-Columbian population, leaving the survivors with little ability to support and maintain a more settled and agriculturally based life. And that level of death would have a shattering impact on the social life and structure, a subject I wrote about regarding the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
While estimates of the population of the pre-Columbian Americas vary greatly, it is generally agreed that about 95% lived south of the current border of the United States. But even in the U.S. we have evidence of a similar impact from contacts with the first Europeans.
At the same time Orellana was exploring the Amazon, Hernando de Soto was leading his disastrous expedition (1539-42) through what is now the southeastern U.S. The accounts of the survivors report large, well organized Indian communities, living in substantial towns surrounded by wooden walls. The next wave of explorers, more than a century later, encountered nothing of the sort. Once again, disease had taken an enormous toll.
This also echoed the experience of the first English settlers in New England. Plymouth was founded in 1620 on the ruins of an abandoned Indian village. What the Pilgrims didn't realize, but we now do, is that the Europeans who fished the Grand Banks, starting in the late 1500s, often landed to dry their catch and trade with the natives, unwittingly spreading the diseases which killed most of the local population.
There is a lot more to discover about the pre-Columbian populations and societies.
Every year when we are in Maine, I wonder about the town names. So many of which are of foreign cities and countries and not those from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, or derived from the Bible or Greek history. And it's not the entire state. Almost all are concentrated in a limited area, inland from the coast, not in the top half of the state, and not beyond a line about 10 miles east of Augusta/Waterville in the central part of the state.
In addition to the towns shown in the photo above (from the Maine Public Radio story linked below), we have:
MoscowBelgradePalermoRomeViennaLisbonWarsawEtnaDresden
I remember how exciting it was to hear this song when it appeared on the radio in early 1968 and it's still fun and refreshing all these decades later. We'd never heard of this band before. A unique sound at the time. They had a good 3-4 year run before it all fell apart. Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart) had been a DJ and record producer, among others he recorded were the Beau Brummels and Grace Slick's first band, The Great Society.
On the night of October 8, 1871, a long dry spell ended as strong depression and wild winds spread across the Midwest. There were two large fires that night. One was in Chicago where, as the tall-tale would have it, Mrs O'Leary's cow supposedly kicked over a lantern, starting a massive fire that ultimately killed 300 people. The Great Chicago Fire remains famous. The other fire is remembered less frequently; centered on the logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, north of Green Bay, that fire burnt out an area the size of Delaware and killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people, the largest loss of life in any fire in American history.
The logging industry left discarded wood and timber everywhere in the area, which served as kindling. Though the source of the fire is unknown, once started, the strong winds aided its development and spread, creating a firestorm. Approximately half the population of Peshtigo perished (500-800 people), while at least a dozen other settlements were burned to the ground. Peshtigo burned in less than an hour, with many of the survivors seeking refuge in the nearby river, along with panicked domestic and wild animals.
Because of the remoteness of the region, it took days for help to arrive.
This article, published by the local paper on the 50th anniversary of the fire, contains more details.
The short video below provides a good summary of that horrible night.
Interesting article on why, in recent years, so much movie dialogue has become incomprehensible. For a while I did think it was me as my hearing is declining and now wear hearing aids. From my review of Wind River in 2017:
Awards:
Most incomprehensible dialogue in a non-Christopher Nolan film. Perhaps they speak a different language in Wyoming. I saw it with four other people. None of us could decipher much of the dialogue. Should have had subtitles.
I'm relieved to hear it isn't me, or at least it's not only my hearing.
Here's how Ben Pearson starts his recent article in Film:
I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.
Reasons the author attributes to this trend:
1. It's deliberate. Naturalness is in.
2. It's the trend in acting.
Karen Baker Landers, whose credits include "Gladiator," "Skyfall," and "Heat," among many others, has her own term for it. "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that."3. Technology
The anonymous sound pro also pointed to what they view as an increase in the amount of music in modern movies compared to older films, bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as "pushing emotion" on audiences and the way music and dialogue are forced to jostle for prominence in the mix. "The technology we have today is so vastly improved that there is no limit to what can be added: whatever the director wants, for months on end. We literally have hundreds of tracks at our disposal ... in a final mix, we therefore have a lot to deal with. Unending score smashed up against hundreds of tracks, with the client asking to hear every nuance above every other nuance."4. The Cinemas
One of the most fascinating things I learned when speaking with these folks is the gulf in quality that can sometimes occur between what a film sounds like in the mixing stages and what it can sound like when it plays in a multiplex.
Several blame the transition to digital projection and the lack of projectionists who understand how to handle sound.
5. Mixing sound for streaming is different than for the cinema.
Oh, and as I mentioned in the Wind River review, Christopher Nolan.
It's subtitles for me!
I found this oddly compelling - Ben Crew did a silent movie version of Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman. Saw the movie when it was released and thought it okay, nothing more. This is much more interesting.
This is kind of cheating, but I edited Tim Burton's Batman (1989) into a silent film and I rewatch it so often. One of my favorite creative exercises I've ever done, speaks to Burton's visual genius that the film still works so well without sound. https://t.co/N9yF8OmQYd pic.twitter.com/awj0Wn48QI
— Ben Crew - Muppets Gatsby (@BenjaminCrew1) September 29, 2022
By the Danish artist Gustav Vermehren (1863-1931); titled, A Little Girl and Her Grandmother, Seen Through a Doorway. What, you thought I'd post an Eagles song? This is much better.
Harvest Moon over Castiglione di Sicilia on September 15, 2022. Photo by Dario Giannobile and found at Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here's what the town looks like in daylight.
If you're looking for a little getaway in the area, I've got something for you. The town is in the southeast corner of Sicily at an altitude of 2,000 feet. I'd like to visit Sicily sometime.
We've been on a bit of a binge lately watching older movies, some we've already seen, some unknown to us until recently (like Army of Shadows). Among the ones we'd already seen were a couple of Paul Newman films; Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, which seemed kind of flat - I've no desire to see it again, and The Verdict (which we'd not seen since it was released in the early 80s), which was outstanding, much better than I remembered. Others in the never seen before category were The Day of the Jackal, a terrific thriller, and the film we watched last night, The Long Good Friday, released in 1981.
This was the film that made Bob Hoskins a star and it also features Helen Mirren, which is always a good thing. Until I did a little research after viewing, I hadn't realized the love the critics had for it at the time. Here's an excerpt from Roger Ebert's review, after he'd called it a "masterful and very tough piece of filmmaking":
And I have rarely seen a movie character so completely alive. Shand is an evil, cruel, sadistic man. But he's a mass of contradictions, and there are times when we understand him so completely we almost feel affectionate. He's such a character, such an overcompensating Cockney, sensitive to the slightest affront, able to strike fear in the hearts of killers, but a pushover when his mistress raises her voice to him. Shand is played by a compact, muscular actor named Bob Hoskins, in the most-praised film performance of the year from England. Hoskins has the energy and the freshness of a younger Michael Caine, if not the good looks, of course.
This movie is one amazing piece of work, not only for the Hoskins performance but also for the energy of the filmmaking, the power of the music, and, oddly enough, for the engaging quality of its sometimes very violent sense of humor.
Hoskins plays a mobster who controls much of the London underworld and is attempting to go legit with a large property development in the dockyards of East London. He's hosting a senior Mafia guy from the U.S. who can provide the key financing, but things start to go awry with bombings and murders.
A fascinating aspect for me was the conflict between "traditional" gangsters like Shand and political gangsters like the IRA about which the film revolves.
And, in his first film role, an incredibly youthful looking Pierce Brosnan appears briefly in two scenes that you won't forget, and the last scene will stay with you for a long time.
