Lance Mannion

“Mesmerizing the day”

Early morning milk run to the convenience store.  Greeted by a smiling man drinking his coffee in one of the booths by the windows.  Not drinking.  Sitting with.  He’s slouching back in the booth, his arms stretched across the orange table top, his coffee cup at the tips of his fingers.  His smile isn’t personal.  Everybody who comes in the store benefits.  His eyes aren’t with his smile.  The smile stops at the door.  His eyes look far beyond that, gazing on blue skies and children playing and lovers holding hands.  Totally blissed out, in other words.  Guy’s in his early forties, I’d guess, short, roundish, with a blond fu manchu, wearing a tank top and a paint-stained white baseball cap.

A tall old man turns from the counter with his own freshly poured cup of coffee.  Meets the smile head on.  He reminds me of our old family doctor so I hear a diagnostic note in his question to the blissed out housepainter.

“Are you all right?”

The painter pulls his gaze back from the blue skies, children, and lovers, focuses on the old doctor.  His smile actually broadens.

“I’m fine.  Lost in thought.”

“I can see that,” the old doctor says and this time I hear the diagnosis made and see him clamping his mouth shut against asking the housepainter what he took to aid him in getting lost in his thoughts.

The housepainter continues to smile.  His spins his coffee cup between the tips of his fingers.

“Just sitting here mesmerizing the day,” he says.  “Mesmerizing the day.”

My job is more of a job than your job

BP’s whining that curtailing offshore drilling will cost jobs.

You know what costs jobs?

Killing fish.

Polluting beaches.

Ruining the tourist industries of four or five states.

The A-Team steers clear of Hill Street and avoids St Elsewhere and Cheers

The A-Team movie is a big noisy mess, but that was the point.  The best thing about the movie is the way the four leads conjure up the spirits of the heroes of the TV show without resorting to impersonations.  There are moments when Liam Neeson actually seems to have been replaced on screen by the ghost of George Peppard and Bradley Cooper looks more like Face than Dirk Benedict ever did, which is kind of like saying that Bradley makes a better Dirk Benedict than Dirk Benedict.  If the movie sparks a revival of interest in the TV show I suspect that a lot of people are going to see Benedict as the impersonator.  This is not a tribute to Cooper’s acting or a knock on Benedict’s, because neither one was particularly challenged by the role.  It just says something about the difference between a movie star and a television star.

Sharlto Copley as Howling Mad Murdock is somewhat more howling mad than Dwight Schultz who always left open the possibility that his madness was an act or at least partly an act.  There’s no question that the movie’s Murdock is completely crazy.

If I’d written this right after seeing the movie the other day I’d have probably said something similar about Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as B.A. Baracus as I said about Cooper as Face, that he was better at being Mr T as B.A. than Mr T.  But it turns out that Mr T was better at being Mr T than I remembered, and I’ll get to that as soon as I finish up talking about the movie, which won’t be long since I’ve already said more about it than probably needs to be said.

Neeson, Cooper, Copley, and Jackson’s main acting challenge is to look as if they believe what they’re doing without over-selling it, slipping into parody going one way and camp going the other being the only serious technical hazards they had to overcome.

Otherwise, whatever comes close to real acting is handled by the two villains and by Jessica Biel as the movie’s token female lead who has to act as if her character’s being as beautiful as Jessica Biel is irrelevant to her role while still looking as beautiful as Jessica Biel.

The movie is about four overgrown boys having fun while blowing things up, which is what the TV show was about, and whether or not you’ll enjoy it depends on your mood and your tolerance for that sort of thing.  I was in an undemanding mood and I can tolerate that sort of thing, if it’s done competently and with a sense of humor.

Another factor that might come into play is what you felt about the TV show.

I wasn’t a fan.  There wasn’t a chance the movie was going to disappoint me by not being as “good” as the show or not being true to its spirit.  But there wasn’t a chance that it would surprise me by being “better” or somehow truer either.

But I suspect that if you were a kid and a fan in the 1980s, like the two women in their thirties who were the only ones besides the blonde and me who stayed through the end credits to see the joke for fans waiting there, the movie’s greatest pleasure will be how much it reminds you of how you felt when you used to watch the TV show when you loved it best.

Now…

The Mannion guys got a kick out of the movie.  But they’d never seen a single episode of the TV show and in fact only knew of the show as the source of a thousand Mr T jokes.  The movie made them curious, and as it turned out, the show is available to watch instantly on Netflix.  So Sunday night, that’s what we did.

I now understand why there were so many shots of cars flipping over in the movie.

Like I said, I wasn’t a fan of the show.  I had nothing against it.  Just never got in the habit of watching it.   I can’t swear to it, but I probably never watched more than a handful of episodes all the way through.  I saw what I saw of it by accident, in snatches, because it was on somewhere, in a bar, or at a friend’s place when I happened to passing through.  So I don’t have strong memories of what the show was like.  My sense was that it was sort of a poor but muy macho man’s Mission: Impossible with jokes and car crashes and many more things blowing up.

Somebody would find themselves in an improbable scrape, they’d hire the A-Team to get them out of it, Hannibal would come up with a plan that would require B.A. to build something, Murdock to fly something that wasn’t meant to do barrel rolls or nose dives and make it do barrel rolls and nose dives, and Face to charm or con someone, the plan would go awry, a new plan would be improvised, that wouldn’t quite do the trick, and then the A-Team would shoot, punch, and detonate their way out.

We watched the pilot, a two-parter, and I was stunned.

It was a big, noisy mess.

The movie’s a big noisy mess, but that was on purpose.

The pilot was just sloppy.

It looked as though it was made with the aesthetic of an Ed Wood film, as if the producers said to the crew, “We don’t have a script and we’ve got zero budget, but we’ve got this much film, we’ve got these costumes, we’ve got this location, we’ve got this many hours of daylight left, and we’ve got three cars we can wreck.  What can we do with it all?”

At certain points it looked as though the storyboard was put together from snapshots of producer Stephen J. Cannell’s kids playing with their army men.

“How did your guy get up there?”

“He jumped.”

“He jumped twenty feet straight up?”

“Maybe he used a rope.”

“Where’d he get the rope?”

“It was just lying there.”

“Ok.  Makes sense to me.  But how did he get the rope anchored up top?”

“Grappling hook?”

“Where’d that come from?”

“He made it out of this crowbar that was over there!”

“Cool!  How’s he get down?”

“Helicopter!”

“Way cool!”

The hokey, jokey dialogue sounded as if it had been written on the spot, the writer, the producer, and the director leaning over scrap paper on the trunk of a car while they figured out what the characters needed to say to explain how they happened to be in the position of needing to punch, shoot, or detonate their way into or out of a situation that had been created solely for the purpose of having the characters needing to punch, shoot, or detonate.

It’s not as though I was expecting great art.  But I wasn’t expecting something so cheerfully and casually under-written.

Were all the episodes like that?

It didn’t take me long to figure out why I was surprised by the lackadaisical production values.

It was because it had been a long time since I’d watched any television that didn’t aspire to be more than…um…television.

The A-Team premiered in 1983, a year after Cheers and St Elsewhere, two years after Hill Street Blues, a year ahead of Miami Vice, the fall after M*A*S*H said goodbye, farewell, and amen.

There had always been well-written, well-directed, and well-acted television shows.  What made these shows different was that all at once TV audiences were presented with a group of shows that were more like movies in a particular and significant way.

The characters and their situations changed.

Not just from season to season either.

From episode to episode.

If you missed last week’s episode, you started this week’s somewhat lost.

That’s why some version of this became a feature of the opening of so many shows:

“Previously, on Hill Street Blues…”

Something began to be built into TV shows that had never been there before.

An ending.

And endings meant beginnings that set things in motion towards those endings.

Stories.

Stories that continued through individual episodes.  Stories that existed apart from individual episodes.  Stories that individual episodes were designed to advance.

Television had changed.

For the better.

And apparently the change is permanent.  At least it has continued up to now.

The passengers of the S.S. Minnow were never going to get off that island.  The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815…well, lots of them got off their island the hard way as Lost made its way towards its storyline’s end.

After twenty years Marshall Dillon was still keeping the peace in Dodge City, with each episode not picking up where the last one left off but starting at pretty much exactly the same point where the last episode started.

I can’t even begin to catalog the changes in Seth Bullock’s personal and professional lives over the course of three seasons of a mere twelve episodes each.

It wouldn’t have mattered if the show had lasted twenty years and the original Battlestar Galactica never made it to Earth (although, didn’t it finally?).  But right from the first episode of the updated Battlestar Galactica we knew that the fleet was either going to make it to Earth or that it would fail to, spectacularly and disastrously, but that either way that would be the end of the series.  The old show had the job of postponing its promised finale.  The new show was about reaching its ending, whatever that would be. 

What this meant is that TV shows were being produced with the expectation that audiences would be paying attention.

And audiences who were paying attention were going to demand that what they were paying attention to was worth the attention.  They would notice when the producers tried to slip things by them.  They would want shows to reward them, not cheat them, for their time.

Pretty much, they would want what they got when they went to a decent movie.

Wasn’t long before they were getting more than they were getting from movies, but that had to wait for the 1990s when the A-Team had gone off the air.

This improvement in quality wasn’t universal.  Chewing gum for the eyes was still manufactured on network assembly lines.  The A-Team shared the TV Guide listings with the shows I mentioned but also with Air Wolf, Knight Rider, The Love Boat, The Fall Guy, and Who’s the Boss?

But even lighter fare, like Magnum P.I., Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, and Moonlighting included story arcs and were more tightly written and more smartly directed than similar shows of a decade before, and I’m thinking of some of the better shows of the 70s too, The Rockford Files and Columbo, not just Police Woman and Starsky and Hutch.

I don’t know all the factors that contributed to this improvement, which of course wasn’t universal---television as a whole didn’t get that much better, there was just more of the better stuff on television---but I’d guess that cable and VCRs had a lot to do with it.

All of a sudden audiences had choices.

Network TV shows no longer competed only with each other for eyeballs.  They competed with re-runs of classic TV shows and movies.  A show competed with itself in that now that it could be taped and watched whenever viewers had the time and the desire and that meant they could fast-forward through the commercials which producers and networks wouldn’t want because that would make advertisers unhappy.

So shows had to give viewers a compelling reason to watch in real time and sit through the commercials.  More had to be going on.  There had to be something to talk about the next day with other people who had watched in real time.

On the other hand, you now had an audience that could pay attention because they could watch a show they’d taped when they had time to pay attention and they needed something worth paying attention to so they would remember and bother to watch shows they’d taped.

Story arcs, multiple story arcs, two and three parters, cliffhangers, new characters coming, old characters going,  all these became more common, and because they gave the producers, writers, and actors more to work with that mean better acting, better writing, better directing, and higher budgets.  Higher budgets don’t automatically translate into higher production values but they usually did.  More and more TV shows began to look like movies.

Like I said, these changes and trends weren’t universal.  And there’s still Fox and the CW and reality shows and the CSI franchise and far too many vampires.  But over the last twenty years, and more so over the last ten, I’ve gotten used to watching certain kinds of shows, shows that require attention and that reward that attention by not making me feel as though I’d have been better off watching a movie or reading a book.  Not that all I ever watch are shows on the level of The Sopranos or The Wire---of which there have only been two anyway, The Sopranos and The Wire---I have favorites I watch just for the escapist fun of it.  But it’s been a long time since I’ve watched anything like The A-Team, which judging by what we saw the other night was a show made to be watched the way I watched it back in the 80s---in snatches, with half an eye, as a time-waster, and purely for the fun of what it offered.

Big, noisy messes made by overgrown boys playing army and having the time of their lives. 

Jim Wormold’s chipped edges

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust.  You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked.  You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.  But somehow, through no virtue of his own, he had never taken that course.  Lack of character perhaps.  Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges.  His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character---only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art.

---from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.

Another view from my “office”

Forgot I took this one.  Work took me here last week.  Monday morning, around ten.  June 7, 2010.

For today’s active man

“Today’s active man” looks a little too much like he’s doing a screen test for the part of Count Zaroff in a remake of The Most Dangerous Game.

In the next commercial he’ll be out on his private island hunting Edie Adams and the guy who walks a mile for a Camel.

No, I’m not talking about Ernie Kovacs.  Watch the ad.

Ok, for this morning’s adventure in amateur semiotics:  It’s interesting that Dutch Masters was selling packaging as much as cigars and I’m also wondering whether there was ever a world in which a lawyer or an accountant or an insurance agent lit up a cigar in the middle of a meeting with a female client who appears to be in mourning---she’s dressed formally and all in black; she’s either a widow or a spy, but if she’s a spy then the lawyer/accountant/insurance agent would be offering her a cigarette instead of reaching for a slim-down pack of stogies for himself, wouldn’t he?

But back to Count Zaroff there by the fire in his cabin with his dog and his gun.

This probably aired in 1957 or 58 and the optics were most likely dictated more by budget and scheduling than by the artistic choices of the mad men who came up with it.  The actor’s wearing whatever was in stock that looked enough like hunting gear to get by in five seconds of screen time and the important thing would have been pockets.  The pitch is that the Slim-Down 5 Pack fits in any sized pocket, so today’s active man can carry his Dutch Masters cigars with him in his shirt and the lawyer/accountant/insurance agent can slip them into the breast pocket of his suit coat, and what more do you want out of a cigar than that it’s not broken when you reach for it when you’re out hunting or back in the office getting a client to sign on the dotted?

So maybe the makers of the ad didn’t have time to notice or care that the ideal of today’s active man they were presenting was a middle-aged militarist with no use for the company of women, family, or even other active men.

Even allowing for the way the fashions, hair styles, and habits of expression, carriage, and demeanor made people of that generation look older to our eyes---take a close look at Kovacs himself, he’s not even forty at the time, and the other night I watched an episode of Burn Notice in which the guest star was the actor who plays Harry on Mad Men and it took me half the show to recognize him because he looked at least ten years younger, which is a testament to how good the designers of Mad Men are at capturing the look of the period---“Today’s Active Man” appears to be a good decade older than I’d have thought was the target audience, men in their thirties not in their late forties or early fifties.  Did Uncle Bob smoke more cigars?

And the reason I call Uncle Bob a militarist isn’t the fetishistic way he’s handling his shotgun.  It’s that he appears to be wearing a uniform.  This is twelve years after World War II.  I suppose that’s long enough for vets to have grown nostalgic for the way they looked and felt in their combat fatigues, although as I said Uncle Bob here looks a little old.  If he served in the War it was because he was already in the Army when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  Considering that a lot of those men, the ones who took office jobs when they came home, had exchanged one uniform for another and become the men in the gray flannel suits, it’s easy to imagine that remembering the days when they were truly active men and went to work risking life and limb without ties and with their collars open might have seemed like a dream of heaven, provided they could remember those days without also remembering the blood.

And of course that’s one of the pop psychological truisms about that generation of men, that they were able to repress and compartmentalize their memories of the war to the point that when it came time send their sons off to what should have struck them as an unspeakable and purposeless and immoral parody of what they’d gone through they not only did it stoically if not gladly but when those sons came home broken and angry they offered them no sympathy.  And they weren’t much more empathetic with their daughters, remaining emotionally detached, at best, remote for the most part, and cold and uninterested too often, mentally alone in the hunting cabins in their heads with the doors locked against intrusions by demanding women of all ages.

This was one of the original themes of Mad Men.

Don Draper is a veteran of the Korean War but that’s only so that the character can be in his early thirties in the early 1960s.  In all other respects he’s a pop psych classic World War II veteran as husband and father.   Of course, he has other issues and his main reason for not wanting to be reminded of his experiences in his war is that the defining moment of his life was the moment when another man died so he could be reborn. 

Draper has compartmentalized and repressed so many of his memories, and along with them all attendant feelings, that none of his life seems real to him.

It shouldn’t matter that he created that life on the basis of a lie.  Self-reinvention is as American as apple pie.

Dick Whitman’s reinvention of himself as something other and better than an orphaned farm boy began when he ran away from home to join the Army.  The mortar round that killed the real Don Draper just speeded up the process.  You can argue that, thanks to the GI Bill, a great chunk of that generation, the World War II vets and their younger brothers who served during the Korean War and the early part of the Cold War, reinvented themselves at the same time as Draper and just as drastically, although without resorting to the name change and the total estrangement from their pasts.

So the once and never to be future Dick Whitman shouldn’t have to feel that his life as Don Draper is such a total fraud that he can’t commit to it.

He feels that way---he is that way, uncommitted to being Don Draper---because he can’t feel the other way.  What he feels is an absence of feeling.  He can’t feel the reality of his life as Don Draper so it’s no wonder he “feels” free to leave that life behind any time he wishes and, often, when he doesn’t wish it---he regularly drifts away from it into another sort of life despite his best intentions.  He’s not emotionally anchored anywhere.  His escapes from Betty and the kids and from Sterling Cooper are no more real to him than the life or lives he’s escaping.

This is a way of saying Don lives as if in a dream.  To him the world exists not outside himself but only inside his head.  That’s what makes him like the World War II veterans of pop psychology and pop cultural iconography.  They are so cut off from their real lives of family and work that they might as well be living in dreams.  They are at home only in the solitude of the hunting cabins inside their heads.

And this, my friends, is called riffing on a theme.  It’s not meant to be an analysis of that ad because I don’t have a clue as to what the people who came up with it more than fifty years ago were thinking and seeing at the time.  “Today’s Active Man” appears to me to be wearing a uniform and because of the period it’s from I automatically think of World War II and I’m off to the races.

But I’m not sure that people back then would have seen what he’s wearing as a uniform.  The Mannion guys and I have been watching Ken Burns’ The War and one thing I’ve noticed is that in the film clips and photographs of American soldiers and Marines when they’re not in combat or on parade is that they look to be barely in uniform.

America did not have much of a military tradition when we entered the War.  The standing Army was astonishingly small.  (I’ll do the google search for the actual numbers later, unless one of you want to do it for me.)  We had to put a million troops in the field overnight and had to equip and outfit them as best we could with what was available and it would have made sense and been most efficient to just adapt whatever was on hand that could do the job.  In the case of combat uniforms that would have meant using the patterns and features of standard work clothes.  After all, what was a solider doing but manual labor? 

Looking at black and white photographs or films of soldiers without their helmets, ammunition belts, and field packs, you might find it hard to differentiate them from pictures and films of factory hands or construction workers until you picked out the faces of the women in the latter.

Combat fatigues were standard work shirts and work pants dyed olive drab.

Even the way pants were tucked into boots was the same for soldiers and civilians.  Combat boots were only work boots with black and brown polish, which is why they were worse than useless for long marches, winter fighting, and jungle warfare.

These days combat fatigues aren’t even called combat fatigues.  They are called ACUs.  Army Combat Uniforms and they are undeniably uniforms.  Never mind the camo.  Soliders in ACUs have distinctly different silhouettes than any civilians.  Up through the Vietnam era, soldiers wore their clothes like everybody else.  Now nobody wears clothes like a solider except to look like a soldier.  And up through the Vietman era it didn’t take much in the way of personal modification to make their uniforms not uniform, which infuriated Patton and which I can’t help suspecting was part of the reason for the redesigns in the 1980s that have resulted in a look that to my eyes, trained by old war movies, is more reminiscent of Rommel’s Afrika Korps than Patton’s Third Army even when his troops were dressed according to his regulations.   The idea was to have an army of professional warriors who looked like professional warriors and not like carpenters and spot welders and definitely not like hippie college kids.

In other words, I’m looking at the guy in the ad from the wrong one of two possible points of view.  I see a guy dressed up as if he thinks he’s in a war movie, but maybe I ought to be seeing a guy who when he was younger could have been in one of those photographs and films in the War, wearing a uniform that wasn’t much of a uniform.  Adopting that point of view might bring me closer to the view of people watching the ad when it aired at the time.  They might very well have not noticed anything about the way he’s dressed except that he’s not wearing a suit and tie and focused instead on the fireplace, dogs, and log cabin walls. 

I see a guy who if he was around today would be volunteering to patrol the Mexican border of Arizona but they saw a guy who was conspicuously not in an office.

I’d have thought that in 1957 “Today’s Active Man” would have been actively playing tennis or golf or taking his family to the beach or otherwise actively engaged doing something that put him in the company of a pretty youngish actress model who might be a wife, a daughter, a girlfriend, or just a pal.  But market research might have shown that men who were active in that way didn’t smoke cigars.  (Jack Kennedy was four years away from being President.)  I’m too focused on the gun and the dogs and absence of human company, male or female, when all Dutch Masters wanted my grandfathers---who were both around 50 in 1957---to see was the absence of bosses, customers, and paperwork, not to mention lawn mowers, broken washing machines, and cars whose engines were making funny noises.

Oh, and pockets.

_____________________

Tricky to read ads out of the context of the times in which they were made.  Tricky to read them within that context too.  For instance, I’m not even going to try to figure out what either Kovacs or Dutch Masters thought they were doing with this one:

________________

I came across both of these because I watched Our Man in Havana last night and I wanted to post a clip of Kovacs in that.  Casting him as the corrupt and vicious Cuban police captain known as the Red Vulture struck me as inspired until I remembered how often Kovacs the absurdist, iconoclastic comedian appeared in movies playing establishmentarian authority figures straight.  Still, he was great choice for Captain Segura.

Doctor Hasslebacher’s secret defense

“Do you never worry about anything?”

“I have a secret defense, Mr Wormold.  I am interested in life.”

“So am I, but…”

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us---I’m sorry; I wasn’t referring to your wife.  But if you are interested in life it never lets you down.  I am interested in the blueness of cheese.  You don’t do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold?  I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end.  I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have an experiment concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion---although one dreams that perhaps a time might come…One day I must show you my laboratory.”

“I must be going, Hasselbacher.”

“You should dream more, Mr Wormold.  Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

---from

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.

Winnie the Pooh: Not science!

Next they’ll tell me real bears don’t sing or hunt heffalumps either.

More bear news.

Beekeeper stung by bears

Apiarist's brood under attack by furry marauders

NEW PALTZ — It's not as if bees — and beekeepers — didn't already have enough problems, but now one of the region's best-known apiarists has a new problem: bears.

Self-described "bee doctor" Chris Harp — whose organic ways have kept his hives from suffering from the notorious colony collapse — has found out the hard way that bears are indiscriminate in their love of bees and honey. Organic or not, they love the stuff.

A little more than two weeks ago, after 20 years of keeping dozens of hives on his nearly four acres on Plain Road, Harp suffered the first of what apiarists call a nocturnal "bear hit." Several of the caps of his wooden hives had been popped by a dessert-seeking bear.

The experience left him slightly embarrassed, as well as surprised.

"I've taught people for years to strap down their hives and take precautions against bears," he said Tuesday. "Now I wish I'd practiced what I preached."

And in the Learn Something New Every  Day Department, there’s this:

And, Winnie the Pooh notwithstanding, bears aren't even drawn to hives because of the honey; they're drawn by the hive's protein-rich bee larvae, or the hive's "brood."

Read all of Jeremiah Horrigan’s story about the bears and the bees in the Times Herald-Record.

And you’ll enjoy this video report by THR’s Tracy Baxter, especially if you’re thinking, “Hey, Lance didn’t make any bear or bee puns!  What gives?”

Not even Kevin Costner can save you when a coffee spill starts to spread

Idiot America

Discussion underway in the comments.  Keep hitting refresh/reload.

The Mannionville Dailly Gazette Book Club meets tonight at 9:15 Eastern.  Please join us right here.

If you can’t be here tonight, feel free to leave a comment ahead of time or later.  It’s really kind of an open thread.

We’ll be looking for a way to talk about Idiot America without getting sucked into hopelessness and rage and without spending a lot of time on the Tea Party or Sarah Palin.

How might that be done?  By talking about the Texas State School Board, of course.

Here’s author Charles Pierce himself, writing before the cranks down in Texas decided to re-invent history as a conservative fractured fairy tale:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

And thus a dentist with delusions of grandeur can decide his version of history should be taught to schoolchildren in place of what every professional historian would have them taught.

Here’s a review from the New York Observer.

And here’s PZ Myers’ review at Pharyngula.

Got a Kindle?  Want to read Idiot America now?  Buy the kindle edition at Amazon.

No Kindle and you don’t mind waiting a few days.  Buy the paperback.

Challenged and gifted: A lesson on dyslexia from Orlando Bloom | Need to Know | PBS

“I was an angry, angry child at times,” Bloom told me, reflecting on the challenges he faced growing up with a learning disorder. “Somewhere in me I knew I was smart, but I was really struggling … My creative outlet, performing — that was what got me through."

Read the whole post: Challenged and gifted: A lesson on dyslexia from Orlando Bloom | Need to Know | PBS

Self-Styled Siren: For the Love of Film: The Big Reveal

Our favorite film blogger, the Self-Styled Siren, along with a bunch of others of her ilk and cinephilliac passion, deserves a big pat on the back for this:

A little earlier this evening, the New York Times published news of 75 silent films, previously thought lost, that have been discovered in New Zealand and are being restored through the efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Among them are Upstream, a backstage drama by John Ford--and aren't you dying to see what he did with that genre? There's an early Clara Bow feature, Maytime--and right now Operator_99, Donna Hill, Flapper Jane, Robert Avrech and David Cairns and my other silent-film peeps must be turning cartwheels. And there's also the earliest surviving film directed by and starring Mabel Normand--hoorah for women pioneers! hoorah for Mabel Normand, so much more than a footnote in an infamous murder.

This was all over Twitter and the blogs in record time.

Well, here's something they aren't saying.

At least two of the films being restored are ours. And that includes the very first one, called The Sergeant, a Western from 1910, shot on location in Yosemite Valley before the National Park Service even existed.

What do I mean by ours? We raised the money for them in February, $13,500, through the blogathon we did for the NFPF, For the Love of Film.

Read the whole post and follow the links, gosh darnit!

Self-Styled Siren: For the Love of Film: The Big Reveal

The view from outside the narrative

Not sure how conservative, incumbent, and corporate stooge Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Walmart) winning her primary yesterday in a conservative Southern state that is pretty much a fiefdom of the Walton and Tyson families is a sign sullen voters are rejecting the DC establishment.

Maybe because she was opposed by the dirty hippies and unions and we all know they run the Democratic Party these days.

Guess it has to be spun that way since the alternative is that her winning is a victory for President Obama and there is no official narrative that allows that as part of its storyline.

I’m also not sure how two rich business types promising Republican voters nothing but the usual voodoo economics of tax cuts for the rich and cuts in services and aid for everybody else winning Republican primaries in California represent some blow to the establishment either.

Must have something to do with their being women which I’d have thought was far less relevant to their politics than the fact that they are both garden-variety corporate predators who made their fortunes in the good old-fashioned American way of the late 20th Century by running their companies into the ground and putting thousands and thousands of Americans out of work.

But that’s my fault for living outside the Beltway Narrative, which is like living outside of Hogwarts.  We poor muggles can’t see the magic happening all around us.  What looks to us like a bunch of vain, fussy, badly dressed eccentrics vying for the power to steal money legally from taxpayers and stirring up the rubes by lying to them is really an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil---good being those who pay for the advertising and those who buy what the ads sell and evil being those who think magic ought to be used to help people or at least shouldn’t be used to hurt them too much---with the Beltway Media types reporting on this narrative all in the employ of the Daily Prophet.

Book Club News

Remember, the first meeting of the Mannionville Daily Gazette Book Club is this coming Thursday, June 10, at 9:15 Eastern. 

We’ll be discussing Idiot America by Charles Pierce.

Lemonade and cookies are supposed to be served by the Friends of the Library, but the Friends aren’t feeling very friendly these days.  Somebody said something about somebody else’s favorite author being over-rated and sides were taken.  Last I checked, none of the Friends were talking to each other, so maybe you’d better bring your own refreshments or be prepared to go out for pizza after.

Hope to see you Thursday, and for the record, that author is over-rated.

Not Pierce.  That Notebook guy.  Pierce has yet to be rated---by us, at any rate.  We’ll see how he fares Thursday night.

Robins Hoods

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is not the story of Robin Hood.

It’s a Robin Hood story.

Some of the time.

When it’s not Braveheart or Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven or Lord of the Rings or Saving Private Ryan or The Lion in Winter.

For one brief, inexplicable, and borderline insane moment it’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but never mind.

It’s all those other movies for more minutes at a stretch than it’s Robin Hood and, actually, the best parts of this movie are when it’s The Lion in Winter, which is a problem because Robin Hood isn’t in any of those scenes.

I should say Russell Crowe isn’t in any of those scenes.  Robin Hood isn’t in other scenes that Crowe’s in.

Movies in which the best scenes are ones without the leading man and you don’t miss him usually star Adam Sandler.

When this movie is about Robin Hood---that is when the story is about the character named Robin Longstride behaving as if he might be or become Robin Hood, as opposed to behaving as if he’s Robert the Bruce, Maximus Meridius, Aragorn (Think it’s a coincidence that Aragorn’s also known as Strider?), or John Cleese---it works as the tale of a real man whose life and adventures became the basis from which the legend of Robin Hood evolved.  If Robin Longstride is to Robin Hood what David Crockett is to Davy Crockett, then Longstride compels our attention by the ways he is not like the Robin Hood we know and his story is intriguing for how circumstances and other people force him to act like our Robin.

That story might have made an interesting movie, if only Scott had been content to focus and tell it.

As it is, those parts of the movie are the parts I actually enjoyed.  I appreciated the Lion in Winter pastiches.  Robin Longstride is a worn down and disillusioned man who has lost all his self-respect fighting for a king who had himself become worn down and disillusioned and lost his self-respect and I liked the story of how this man who is barely more than a thug in his own eyes learns how to be noble and good and virtuous again by pretending to be someone else.  And of course part of my enjoyment was due to my knowing that the person Longstride is pretending to be is going to become yet another person, an even nobler and more heroic person, known as Robin Hood.

Unfortunately, Scott not only fails to give this story his undivided attention, he fails to finish it. 

Even if he had, though, that wouldn’t have been enough to make this a Robin Hood story for me.  What makes what’s there a Robin Hood story is the bloom that returns to Cate Blanchett’s cheeks.

I wasn’t looking forward to this movie and had resolved not to see it because I thought Blanchett and Crowe are far too old to play Marion and Robin.

Because he’s kept his hair and some baby fat in his cheeks he doesn’t look it, but Crowe is forty-six, the same age Sean Connery was when he played Robin Hood as an old man.

Old for his time, at any rate.

Even if he was younger, Russell Crowe would not look like my ideal Robin Hood.  My Robin cuts a more dashing figure.  He doesn’t look exactly like the thirty year old Errol Flynn, necessarily.  But he’s taller, lither, keener-eyed, sharper of feature and more given to smiling, charming, flirting, scheming, and joking his way into and out of trouble than any character Crowe has played at any age.

Basically, my ideal Robin looks like N.C. Wyeth’s version…

 

Crowe looks more like Howard Pyle’s Robin.  Brawnier, stouter of limb, broader of face, more of a brawler than a fencer, as likely to punch his way out of trouble as to think his way out and more tempted to.

Both Robins are highly intelligent leaders, inclined to rely more on their wits than on their skill with a sword or a bow and arrow.  Wyeth’s Robin looks to me like more of a schemer and a plotter.  He likes to make plans and see them through.  Pyle’s Robin prefers to think on the fly and enjoys making it up as he goes.

And both Robins have terrific senses of humor.  Wyeth’s Robin is wittier.  Pyle’s Robin prefers a good practical joke and tells ribald stories in mixed company and gets away with it.

And both Robins are more likely to smile and laugh out loud than any character played by Russell Crowe, including Jack Aubrey and Jim Braddock, the only two happy men I’ve seen Crowe play.

That doesn’t mean Crowe can’t do merriment, just that I don’t picture him as a particularly merry character.

He does do anger, however, a quality of Robin’s that is very important to Pyle’s version of the legend.  In many of the retellings, Robin becomes an outlaw by killing one of the king’s deer.  He either does it out of hunger or out of youthful exuberance or in solidarity with the poor and hungry of Notinghamshire, but he does it, he breaks the law, and the law is unforgiving.  But in Pyle’s version, Robin’s killing the deer is the prelude to his real crime.  He kills one of the king’s foresters.

It’s self-defense.  The man had bet that Robin couldn’t hit the deer let alone bring it down with a single arrow and he was so infuriated at losing the bet that he tries to kill Robin by shooting him in the back.  The arrow barely misses him.  Robin reflexively notches his own arrow and lets fly and that’s it, he’s a murderer---in his own eyes as well as the law’s.  He takes to the woods to escape his own shame more than any legal punishment.  He can’t face his own family.

Pyle’s Robin has a quick and fiery temper and a strong sense of guilt and Crowe has no problem portraying either.

But Pyle’s Robin commits this murder and becomes Robin Hood the famous outlaw when he is eighteen.

This is prologue.  Pyle picks the story up a few years later, but only a few, no more than ten, and so when the tales we know as Robin’s main adventures begin Robin Hood is in his mid to late twenties.

Pyle’s Robin, Wyeth’s Robin, Errol Flynn’s Robin, my Robin, practically everybody’s Robin is a young man!

His youth is part of the eternal attraction of his story.

Robin doesn’t swing from chandeliers, scale castle walls, drop from trees on the sheriff’s men just because it looks exciting on film.  He swings, climbs, leaps, pounces, and vaults every chance he gets because he can’t resist.  He’s too full of energy and exuberance.  And, besides, it’s fun!

Robin Hood doesn’t have to be a kid but he has to be young because his story is a summer’s tale.  It is always June in Sherwood Forest, even at Christmas.

By the way, Scott barely gives us a glimpse of Sherwood Forest.

Robin and his merry men are in the summers of their lives.  They are young but not kids, in their primes, at the peak of both their strength and their skills.  But more importantly they are free of responsibilities.  They haven’t started families yet.  They don’t own farms or shops.  (If they had them, they were taken from them by Prince John and the Sheriff.)  They are in their twenties, even the ones who get played by middle-aged actors in the movies, and you are never as free in your life as you are when you are in your twenties.  When you are younger, you are too dependent on other people.  When you are older, too many other people are depending on you.

The essential appeal of Robin Hood is his freedom and that freedom is inseparable from his youth.

In his review of Robin Hood, Anthony Lane looks into the question of the legendary Robin’s social status.  I thought the question was settled.  Robin Hood is an aristocrat, Sir Robin of Loxley or Robert Earl of Huntington, take your pick.  Lane points out that in the earliest known ballads and stories in which Robin appears he’s lower middle-class, a yeoman, from a family of farmers who owned and worked their own small estates.  He’d have had some political rights and not much money, although with reasonable expectations of acquiring more, as long as the crops come in and the king doesn’t decide to raise taxes and go to war, taking your sons and hired hands with him.

So, he doesn’t have much to lose when he takes to the woods as an outlaw and he has much to gain in the way of freedom and pleasure.

Somewhere along the way Robin picked up a title and a lot more land and money and in becoming an outlaw he gives up quite a bit.  He also changed the nature of his outlawing business.  He always robbed from the rich but he only shared with the poor, when they asked for help.  Charity work was a consequence of his turning outlaw.  When he became Sir Robin turning outlaw was a consequence of his charitable and democratic nature.  He sided with the poor and the downtrodden against his own class and the members of his own class brand him a traitor and set out to punish him.

The idea of someone rich and powerful taking sides against the rich and powerful is naturally very appealing to more liberal and democratic times and it’s worth noting that Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood is a product of the Progressive Era and Errol Flynn’s Robin is a blatant New Dealer while Kevin Costner’s post-Reagan Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves turns the aristocratic part of the legend upside down by telling a simple revenge tale and putting the poor on the side of the aristocrat in his personal vendetta to get his money, land, and status back.  That isn’t all that makes Prince of Thieves a terrible movie but it doesn’t help to ask audiences to root for a Robin who is robbing from the rich in order to give to himself.

The reason for bringing up Robin Hood’s class background is that Scott’s Robin---Russell Crowe’s Robin---is emphatically not an aristocrat.

He’s not even a yeoman.  His father was a stonemason, which would have made him part of a rising urban middle class, but he was killed when Robin Longstride was a boy and Robin grew up an orphan fending for himself.  This is fine.  Legends are told one way for ages, then some storyteller or poet or balladeer or screenwriter adds a twist that catches on, and suddenly the legend is told a new way that audiences accept as if it was always part of the legend.  They even rewrite the legend in their own memory to include it.  If Scott’s Robin Hood had been a better and more likeable movie, we might have a new and different Robin Hood legend to tell for a while.

The point is that pushing Robin down the social ladder isn’t a violation of the legend and it had the potential of adding something interesting.  The movie implies that Robin and two of his merry men, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlet, have been living the life of the legendary Robin Hood for some time already when we meet them.  Longstride’s problem is that he has been living this life to no purpose except survival and, a born idealist, he wants and needs a higher calling.  He apparently thought he’d found it in signing on to King Richard’s Crusade, but this hasn’t worked out so well for Robin or the king.

Now, what does all this have to do with the bloom in Cate Blanchett’s cheeks?

When the usual sort of improbable plot twists force Robin Longstride to assume the identity of a dead nobleman, Robin is reborn.  Scott includes a symbolic baptism in case we’re slow on the uptake here.  What follows is Robin’s sentimental education.  He learns manners, politics, refinement, and, most important, empathy and responsibility.  He begins to see that he could have a life that has purpose.  He is, of course, learning how to be the Robin Hood we know from the legends.

And the closer he gets to becoming Robin Hood, the younger or at any rate the more youthful he grows.

His spirits lighten.  His smile broadens.  His eyes light up and his step quickens.  He isn’t about to swing from chandeliers or scale castle walls, but he moves with more energy and grace.  He even dances!

And in the process of growing younger he takes Marian---Lady Marian.  As she informs Friar Tuck, it’s a very long time since she was a maid---with him.

Marian has been as worn-down and worn-out and disillusioned by the war as Robin.  For all intents and purposes, she’s been living at home as a widow for ten years but unlike Penelope in the Odyssey she has given up waiting for her missing husband to return and buckled down to the grinding and soul-sapping task of trying to make her farms and fields pay, not an easy job when most of what it produces is taken by the crown to support the army.

Her heaviest burden, though, is her loneliness.  She has hundreds of people depending on her and not a single person she can depend on herself.

When Robin shows up at her door and, thanks to even more improbable plot twists, goes to work helping her run the estate, her burden is immediately lightened and her spirits lift.  She isn’t quite reborn too, but she is rejuvenated, and like Robin and along with him she begins to look and act younger.

Neither Crowe nor Blanchett are meant to be playing their true age.  I would peg Robin and Marian as about ten years younger than the actors playing them, Robin in his mid-thirties and Marian about thirty, which in the context of their time, would have put both of them well past the springtime and even the summer of their youth.  They are in the early autumn of their lives.  What they are granted in the movie is an Indian summer.

This is what makes the movie a Robin Hood story.

Robin Longstride and Lady Marian have their spirits refreshed by the telling of the adventures of Robin Hood.  Of course they don’t know that story and they certainly don’t know they are being used to tell that story, but the story affects them the way it affects everyone who hears it and loves it.  It makes them feel young and vital and good-hearted and happy and noble and heroic and, best of all, free!

It’s too bad that just as he gets this story underway, Scott lets himself be distracted by the sudden attack on Gondor by the orcs and the Scots rallying to repel them on the beaches of Normandy.

_______________

You’d never know it from this movie, but one reason Robin and his men are so merry in the legends is that they are living a comedy.

Think of his most famous adventures.  His first meetings with Little John and Friar Tuck, the archery contest, even the moment when the disguised King Richard reveals his true identity to the outlaws.  These are comic stories.  And Robin’s adventures end happily, with the rightful King’s return, good rewarded and evil punished, and Robin and Marian living happily ever after.  The story of Robin’s death is sad but it’s an epilogue.  And it happens when Robin is well into middle-age, almost an old man.  Forty, at least!

And the point of that story is to begin the story all over again.  See my post Robin’s Last Arrow.

And they all called themselves Spartacus

Graveyard for Roman gladiators revealed in Yorkshire

DOZENS of decapitated skeletons discovered on a site earmarked for housing have posed a baffling puzzle for even the most eminent archaeologists over the last six years.

The remains of 80 men were discovered on the land in York in 2004, but only now have the gruesome bite marks inflicted by a lion, tiger or bear been revealed by experts.

Initially it was thought the skeletons, some of which were found where a patio was to be laid, were the victims of a Roman cult because they had been beheaded while still alive.

But now it is believed that the bizarre cemetery found on the site under Driffield Terrace, near The Mount, was part of the world's best -preserved Roman gladiator graveyard…

Read the whole article in the Yorkshire Post.

What’s this device with the keyboard on my desk for again?

Dang!  Can’t remember if I read this article all the way through or if I gave up after two paragraphs because the writer was taking too long to get to the point.

Pelicans, Back from Brink of Extinction, Face Threat From Oil Spill - NYTimes.com

via www.nytimes.com

FORT JACKSON, La. — For more than a decade, the hundreds of brown pelicans that nested among the mangrove shrubs on Queen Bess Island west of here were living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could come back and thrive.

Read the whole story in the New York Times.

Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist.

My “Office”

For reasons not worth going into work took me here the other day.  Mid-afternoon. Thursday.  June 3, 2010. Taken with cell phone camera.

Why would you want to belong to a club that wouldn’t have you as a member?

And in the political news from the land of Bedlam known as South Carolina:

[Gubernatorial race] Front-runner [NIkki] Haley, an attractive "pro-family" candidate who has the backing of the tea party movement and Sarah Palin, has been the target of not one but two claims of infidelity to her husband — both lodged by conservative political operatives who claim to have slept with her. And on Thursday a state senator who is supporting one of Haley's opponents casually referred to her as a "raghead" and claimed that she is a Manchurian candidate launched by a "network of Sikhs" to take over the governorship.

During a visit Thursday to "Pub Politics," an online political chat show hosted from a bar in Columbia, S.C., state senator Jake Knotts said: "We already got one raghead in the White House; we don't need a raghead in the governor's mansion." Haley's parents are Sikhs of Indian descent; she has converted to Christianity but still attends Sikh religious ceremonies on occasion out of deference to her parents.

According to the Columbia Free Times, Knotts also claimed that Haley was a plant being controlled by nefarious handlers:

“Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.”

This is despicable, of course, but the irony is that Haley is the chosen darling of the Tea Party whose know-nothing, anti-immigrant rank and file actually think this way about President Obama.

Haley’s parents are immigrants.  But they speak English and made lots of money so I guess that makes them different from those others.  I don’t know why Haley or any brown-skinned person would want to belong to the Republican Party, let alone the Tea Party, these days.  But apparently there are a lot of people who, apparently misunderstanding Groucho who wouldn’t want to belong to any clubs that would have him as a member, are desperate to join the clubs that don’t want them.  Plus, Haley appears to be another one of those rich business types who get into politics in order to cut their own taxes.

Also, Haley is anti-tax, anti-union but pro improving education---just not by “throwing dollars at it.”  Which means she wants to pay teachers next to nothing while expecting them to do better simply because they’ve been told to, like workers on an assembly line who’ve been ordered to turn out more widgets.

And as the daughter of the right kind of immigrants, she’s all for pulling up the ladder behind her, but at least she’s proposing “stiff penalties for businesses and individuals that further illegal immigration and employment in South Carolina [that] will hit violators in the pocketbook.”

No wonder her fellow Republicans don’t like her.