Tag: Roger Ebert

D is for Death

Death is such an uncomfortable subject, even though most of us will experience it eventually.


When someone significant in my life dies, I like to mention him or her in this blog. They don’t have to be people I actually met, but are usually people who inspired me in one way or another. The late Roger Ebert’s birthday was June 18, and I had a passing recollection of how well he wrote about issues other than movies in the latter stages of his life.

Paul McCartney, who shared a birthday with Ebert – both were born in 1942- put out an album in 2007 called Memory Almost Full. The penultimate song was The End of the End [LISTEN], which had these lyrics:
“On the day that I die, I’d like jokes to be told And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets That children have played on and laid on While listening to stories of old.” He said on the audio commentary disc to the album that the song was inspired by someone who said, “I wish you a good death.” This initially startled him, but then he started to think of the tradition of the Irish wake, and he gained a greater understanding of the sentiment.

Death is such an uncomfortable subject, even though most of us will experience it eventually. I’ve been to LOTS of funerals in my time, quite a few fellow church members from my last two churches. I’ve come to the conclusion that being there trumps almost anything one can say because almost anything said can be taken wrong:
“Well, she lived a long life.” True, she was 92, but they wanted her to be there at 93 and 95.
“He’s in heaven now.” Even if all the parties believe this – some don’t – I’ve seen it used as an attempt to shortcut the grieving process, some theological variation of “Get over it.”
“It’s for the best,” usually said of someone who passed after a lengthy and/or painful illness. While this may be true, it’s not for YOU to say. On the other hand, you can say, “If you want to talk…” And let THEM talk.

This article about former BeeGees singer Barry Gibb losing all of his “brothers without being friends with them” is very sad because it is not unusual. Someone dies and issues remain permanently unresolved.

Whereas I enjoyed the story about National Public Radio’s Scott Simon chronicling his mother’s last days on Twitter. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it, but given his mom’s show biz past, it was appropriate for them.

I really liked the poem included in this blog post, which also includes this narrative: “For a time, it feels like the whole world should stop, when a loved one dies. I remember experiencing that feeling so strongly… Perhaps the nicest thing you can do for someone who has lost a part of their world, is let your own world stop, if only for a moment.”
***
It occurred to me I never gave props to Helen Thomas, pioneering White House correspondent, mostly because I had nothing to add to what others said.

I’ll also mention John Palmer, NBC’s White House correspondent, and later, a newsreader for the TODAY show, back when it was still doing news.

Michael Ansara was an actor who “specialized in playing American Indians and aliens”; he was actually born in Syria and was married for a time to Barbara Eden.


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

She was loved (Annette), hated (Maggie)

I have no recollection that the deaths of Richard Nixon (1994) or Ronald Reagan (2004) generating anywhere near the same level of vitriol as Margaret Thatcher’s passing.

I was feeling as though I wanted to write about a couple of recent deaths, but I needed an angle. Then it came to me.

Annette Funicello, who appeared on the Mickey Mouse Club, was my first TV crush, as I have previously noted; I was hardly the only one – e.g., see Ken Levine’s piece. Heck, my wife said she had a little crush on her. And it wasn’t just my generation: Cheri remembers her as well.

I watched Annette in a number of Disney programs, and almost certainly in Make Room for Daddy with Danny Thomas. Here’s a story about her in Salon. And enjoy this Parade magazine photo flashback.

But the best love letter to Annette I saw was from Chuck Miller, who even included a clip of the Disney comedy called ‘The Monkey’s Uncle,’ where she performs the title song with the Beach Boys!

Almost everyone loved Annette.


Margaret Thatcher was another matter. I had mixed to negative feelings about her tenure as Prime Minister of Great Britain. I agree with these complaints about her: presiding “over the Falklands War with Argentina, provided critical support to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and famously labeled Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” while backing South Africa’s apartheid regime.” She opposed the reunification of Germany, while, at home, was a union buster.

Arthur from New Zealand, by way of the US, wrote: “They say if you can’t say something nice about a person who’s just died, you shouldn’t say anything. Not very useful advice for a blogger.” Meanwhile, Shooting Parrots from the UK damned her with the faint praise of thanking her for the way that spin has become an end in itself.

These were mild complaints, though, compared with these: The woman who wrecked Great Britain and A terror without an atom of humanity.

Apparently, Margaret Thatcher inspired a whole unique genre of British culture: “We can’t wait till Margaret Thatcher dies”, years ago, including songs by several musicians. Now that she is deceased, Brits have sent “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” into music charts.

There have been American politicians who were reviled by certain segments of the population. But I have no recollection that the deaths of Richard Nixon (1994) or Ronald Reagan (2004) generating anywhere near the same level of vitriol. I have two not mutually exclusive theories about this: 1) the world has gotten even nastier in the past decade, and 2) the politics in the UK is more rough and tumble; if you’ve ever watched the debates in Parliament, with the Prime Minister in the thick of it, you’d know it’s measurably different from the way US Presidents are generally treated.

Certainly, it must have been difficult being a woman in a very male-dominated field, as the movie Iron Lady made clear. I thought that film, picking up her story in her dotage, was rather unfair, even though finely acted by Meryl Streep, who got her well-deserved Oscar. Speaking of unfairness, I found it very distressing that she has repeatedly been referred to by the c-word; amazingly sexist.

I should note that Mikhail Gorbachev said that she helped end the Cold War. You can read Parade magazine touts her accomplishments.

Racialicious’ take on Roger Ebert. I must say getting the Westboro Baptist Church to fuss at his funeral must be a badge of honor.

Evanier has more about Carmine Infantino.

The Idle Chatter award

Lots of songs make me cry.

Cheri at Idle Chatter has been kind enough to nominate me for a Liebster Award, whatever that is.

I’ve been doing this blogging thing long enough to do a few things with awards:
1. Accept them graciously.
2. Struggle with the random facts, but find some anyway, ideally, ones I hadn’t mentioned before.
3. Totally ignore the part about passing it on, on the theory that some people get really ticked off by it. I don’t, but I’ve long learned that my reaction to stimuli is not a universal.

{1} Each blogger should answer the questions the tagger has set for you.

Not only will I do that, but I’ll also even answer the questions Jeannie had for Cheri:
Butter or margarine?

Olivio, which is an olive oil-based product. I grew up on margarine, but now prefer butter, which I will cook with.

Fact or fiction?

Fact. Truth is stranger…

Musical or Action film?

Musical. Grew up with LOTS of soundtracks of my mother’s.

Realist or a dreamer?

Realist. Yet, I hold out hope…

Do you read between the lines?

I try to take it at face value until proven otherwise, which happens a LOT.

Are you as tall as you want to be?

At my tallest, I was 5 feet, 11 5/8 inches. I couldn’t get an extra half an inch? That said, I don’t much care.

Pet peeve?

Bad drivers who imperil pedestrians and bicyclists. The latter act badly, but car hitting a person is more likely to harm the person than the vehicle, or the person inside it.

Introvert or extrovert?

If you ask me, introvert. If you ask most people I know, extrovert. Make of that what you will.

Favorite quote/movie or song?

“So here’s another question up for interpretation. Favorite quote, movie, or song?” Favorite quote from a movie: “I’m walking here!” from Midnight Cowboy. Or about 99 others. Favorite song from a movie? Even more difficult. It could be the Sharks women singing America from West Side Story, or Streets of Philadelphia by Neil Young from Philadelphia. The first thing that came to mind today was the wistful optimism of When You Wish Upon a Star by Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio.

How many projects do you have going right now?

There’s the FantaCo project (bibliography), the attic project (now that it’s finished, a lot of rearranging), and a work project.

What is your “One Thing?” (City Slickers)?

I dunno – music. Or fairness.

And now for my questions from Cheri:

Do you like amusement park rides?

I did as a child. But last summer, I rode a few, and they gave me a wretched headache.

What’s your pet peeve?

The assumption that because YOU experience it this way, EVERYONE does. (Yeah, I answered it differently above. I do that.)

If there was a movie about your life, who would you want to play you?

Roger E. Mosley. It should be a Roger, right?

Last movie you saw at the theater?

Quartet, if we’re talking full length. But I did subsequently see the Oscar-nominated live-action short films for 2012.

Morning person or night owl?

That’s a problem: night owl by nature, but I must, and more to the point, my WIFE has to get up in the morning. I’d go to bed at 11 or 11:30 on my own, but that 5:30 alarm comes TOO early.

What song makes you cry?

Lots of songs make me cry. Crying by Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, for just one.

Realist or dreamer?

Realistic dreamer.

Believe in love at first sight?

Probably not love. Lust, maybe.

Do you play the lottery?

When it gets over $300 million if I think of it. I didn’t last time…

Beach or mountains?

Water. I mean, I’m not going to hang out in the sand, but I’d rather be where a lake, or river is.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Got to answer this recently: flight.

{2} Choose 11 new bloggers to pass the award on to and link them in your post.

Nah. But if you want to self-select, be my guest.

{3} Create 11 new questions for the chosen bloggers.

Feel free to steal any from here.

{4} Go back to their page and tell them about the award.

Not applicable.

{5} Each blogger should post 11 random facts about themselves.

1. When I was in junior high school – before they started calling it middle school – we decided to go by our middle names, mostly. I was Owen, Ray was Albert, etc.

2. Ever since I was in Prince of Egypt, some guy in the choir has started calling me Jethro, the name of one of my characters,. Others are calling me God, my other role.

3. I listen to music at work (on headphones, most of the day). I love music but am loath to use headphones, or earbuds, on the bus, or when I get home.

4. I’ve been a janitor on two separate occasions, once in Binghamton, NY once in New Paltz, NY.

5. I love to engage Jehovah’s Witnesses in theological conversation when I have the time and energy.

6. On the first day of my March Madness pool, I was in 10th place, out of 10th, on the first day. After the weekend, I had risen all the way to 8th, but still with a chance to win.

7. There are certain accounts I have I use so infrequently that I ALWAYS forget the password and have to get a new one.

8. I tend to play music based on the artists’ birthday – a lot of Elton John and Aretha Franklin and James Taylor in March, e.g.

9. I never answer my telephone at home unless I know who it is, and it’s someone I want to talk with. That’s why God created the answering machine. Conversely, I ALWAYS answer the phone at work, if no one else does.

10. I’ve never not voted in a local, state, or federal; election. I might have missed a school board election in my first couple years, but haven’t missed one of those since 1976.

11. I “follow” people on Twitter, then never actually read what they have to say; time is not fungible. I’m only vaguely better on Facebook.
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Roger Ebert’s A Leave of Presence, released earlier this week, is a wonderfully optimistic piece, despite the return of his cancer. (I could not get to yesterday afternoon for a time, probably because the server was overloaded.) It was likely the last thing he published before his untimely death this week. I once again highly recommend his autobiography; an excerpt, about his death, can be found HERE. The Chicago Tribune obit.

Mark Evanier on the deaths of comic book greats Carmine Infantino and George Gladir.

Film and race: Song of the South, Holiday Inn, Django Unchained

I had, in a bad way, a jaw-dropping reaction to the Lincoln’s Birthday segment of the 1942 movie Holiday Inn.

I had heard for a long time how awful and offensively racist D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, was. It’s good that I saw it, but I’m glad it was as an adult so that I could appreciate it in the historic context in which it was made. I’m not much on banning movies, but there is something to be said about seeing it at the right point.

A couple of blog posts I’ve seen recently reminded me of this point. Ann from Tin and Sparkle used Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah for her ABC Wednesday post. I have never actually seen the 1946 Disney film Song of the South, and it has been quite difficult, at least for me, to get a chance to view it. The website dedicated to the movie describes the controversy. I think I’d be interested in seeing it. Incidentally, the very first version of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah I ever owned, or maybe it was my sister’s album, was by the Jackson Five [LISTEN] from their 1969 debut, a swipe of a Phil Spector arrangement for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans in 1963.

Conversely, about 15 years ago, I got to see the 1942 film Holiday Inn for the first time, which stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. I had, in a bad way, a jaw-dropping reaction to the Lincoln’s Birthday segment. SamuraiFrog had seen it recently and described the song “Abraham” as “the most bizarre outpouring of disturbing blackface [by Crosby, Marjorie Reynolds, and others] I’ve ever seen. Surprised to see that. I mean, I know it’s of the time and all that, but I just found it deeply, deeply unsettling.” Yeah, that was MY reaction, too, plus historically inaccurate portrayal of the 16th President, to boot. I’m just not ready to let my daughter see it. But if YOU want to see it, click HERE, and go to the 44:50 mark; better still, go to the 42:30 mark to get a little context.

Roger Ebert wrote about the recent death of Jeni le Gon: The first black woman signed by Hollywood was livin’ and dancin’ in a great big way. I have seen her work but never knew her name. A telling anecdote about Ronald Reagan is included.

ColorOfChange notes Sundance winner “Fruitvale” examines the last days of Oscar Grant.

I was contemplating whether to go see the controversial current movie Django Unchained. It’s gotten some pretty good reviews, and Oscar-nominated for best picture, among other categories. I’m thinking that I probably won’t, at least for a while. It’s not that it’s too long. It’s not the apparently frequent use of the N-word. It’s my, and my wife’s, aversion to lots of cinematic violence. We saw both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino, but this sounds like a new level, and we are just not ready for it.

From Roger Ebert’s review: (This is a spoiler, I suppose, so you can use your cursor to highlight the text if you want) …we visit a Southern Plantation run by a genteel monster named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who for his after-dinner entertainment is having two slaves fight each other to the death. It’s a brutal fight, covered with the blood that flows unusually copiously in the film. The losing slave screams without stopping, and I reflected that throughout the film there is much more screaming in a violent scene than you usually hear. Finally, the fight is over, and there’s a shot of the defeated slave’s head as a hammer is dropped on the floor next to it by Mr. Candie. The hammer, (off-screen but barely) is used by the fight’s winner to finish off his opponent.

That’s the kind of scene after which I might want to get up from the screen for a while and take a time out.

Incidentally, the movie is mentioned in this article about the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, being ratified to preserve slavery.

 

Past/future

If Hitler never lived, then does Stalin take over Europe?

 

Film critic Roger Ebert had a blog post Did you choose your religion? But the original title, as one can see in the URL, was “Would you kill Baby Hitler?”

The original entry began: Of course, you would have needed to know on April 20, 1889, that the little boy would grow up to become Adolf Hitler, and would commit all of the crimes we now know he committed. The only way you could know that, apart from precognition, would be to have traveled backward in time from a point when Hitler had committed all his crimes and you knew about them.

This was in context with a discussion of, among other things, the new film Looper, for which a big-time spoiler alert should have been stamped.

But this is a popular theme. There’s some current CBS show called Person of Interest about a computer that foretells crime. There was a previous CBS show(what was that called?) about a guy who would get tomorrow’s newspaper today and had the day to stop some heinous event from happening; a cat was somehow involved. I have actually never seen either show nor read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. The piece generated very interesting and enlightening points, unlike most comment threads these days.

The problem, if one COULD go back in time, would be the unintended consequences. If Hitler never lived, then does Stalin take over Europe? These are obviously unanswerable questions, but they fascinate me.

Dustbury points to a variation on the theme:

>Steve Sailer…has imagined two different scenarios in which we’d already had a black President:

Walter Mondale picks Tom Bradley for the Veep slot in 1984, manages to beat a rattled-in-the-debates Ronald Reagan, and is killed when Air Force One crashes;
Colin Powell, urged on by Mrs. Powell, defeats Bob Dole, then Bill Clinton, in 1996.

Given either one of these scenarios, Sailer asks:

In either alternative history, does Barack Obama become the second black President? If there had already been a first black president, would anyone have ever even considered Obama to be Presidential Timber? Would you have ever even heard of Obama?

It’s been my contention that a President who is black (or Hispanic, or a woman) may be held to a different standard, higher by at least some so that the viability of a second black as President would be inextricably linked to the success or failure of the first. That said, if there HAD been a previous black President, would Obama have played such a huge role in the 2004 Democratic convention? Possibly not.

What thinkest thou?
***
Making the case for future voter fraud.

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