"Back To The Future 1, 2 and 3 but it's only Stricklands' lines."

Posted by my son John, at Facebook, on the occasion of the death, at 94, of James Tolkan, who played Principal Strickland.

Goodbye to Frederick Wiseman.

"Frederick Wiseman, 96, Penetrating Documentarian of Institutions, Dies/He exposed abuses in films like 'Titicut Follies,' a once-banned portrait of a mental hospital, but ranged widely in subject matter, from a Queens neighborhood to a French restaurant" (NYT)(gift link).

And though he denied that his movies had any political agenda, he was no stranger to controversy. His directorial debut, “Titicut Follies” (1967), a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, remains the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security.... 

Understated sunrise without the sun.

We were there for this at 5:16:

Later, I continued my practice of sitting in the front-yard and reading an entire book. Sample page:

I showed that photo of the page to my son John, who said, "When I was a kid I loved that kind of understated humor" and sent me Salvador Dali's "Fried Egg on the Plate without the Plate":

Understated humor... and yet when the sun does something like that sunny-side-up egg, I consider it one of the most extravagant sunrises of the year. Like this, from last May:

Feel free to understate or overstate whatever you like in the comments.

And consider supporting this blog by purchasing a readable-in-one-sitting book by Edward Gorey using my Amazon Associates link. The book containing the threatened deviled egg is "The Betrayed Confidence."

"[H]e was returning home from school when he realized that a car was following him. He recalled that a well-dressed man... emerged from the vehicle..."

"... and asked him for his name. Having been instructed by his mother not to speak to strangers, Mr. Staiola did not respond. Mr. Staiola said [the man, Vittorio De Sica,] then followed him home, where his parents immediately recognized the film eminence but refused to allow their son to appear in his movie. Later, Mr. Staiola recounted, an uncle took him back to audition before De Sica. Still determined to cast Mr. Staiola as Bruno, De Sica returned to his parents, Mr. Staiola said, and offered the extravagant sum of 300,000 lire for two months’ work. At that point, Mr. Staiola said, his father turned to him with a smile and declared: 'If you don’t go to work tomorrow, I’ll kill you.'"

From "Enzo Staiola, child actor at heart of ‘Bicycle Thieves,’ dies at 85/He was 8 years old, with no acting experience, when director Vittorio De Sica cast him in the 1948 film that epitomized Italian neorealism" (WaPo)(free-access link).

ADDED: My son John wrote about "The Bicycle Thieves," with an update about Staiola's death, at his "101 Years of Movies" blog, here. It was his second favorite movie of the year 1948. (First was "Unfaithfully Yours," a movie I quoted a few years ago, here.)

"The New York Times: where Trump simultaneously bakes, builds, and blacksmiths the GOP with ingredients from three different metaphor aisles."

Notes John, at Facebook, displaying this:

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "The NYT has a headline with 3 metaphors: 'Trump, with more honey than vinegar, cements an iron grip on Republicans.' Give me 3 rewrites of the headline: 1. Sticking with honey and vinegar, 2. Adhering to cement, and 3. Clinging tightly to gripping."

Here's the NYT article.

Will the debate be balanced, sedate, and unimportant? Or is something exciting about to happen?

Let's watch together and talk about it here.

1. My son John is live-blogging at Facebook.

2. ...

Walz has the issue that tripped up Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries.

My son John just texted me this:

Here's the WaPo article, "Tim Walz is a bold, smart choice for Harris’s running mate/The Minnesota governor rightly argues that many progressive ideas are good and practical" by Perry Bacon Jr.

Did Bacon have a "Josh Shapiro is a bold, smart choice for Harris’s running mate" draft ready to go?

Today is my 73rd birthday, but, more importantly, 2 days from now is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of this blog.

That's a huge milestone! Is there anything I can do to mark the occasion? There are more than 71 thousand posts on this blog, quite evenly spread out over the years and days. It's not as though I can make a top 20 best posts list. 

Do I even have a favorite post from all these years? I used to say my favorite post — the post that exemplifies what I most hope will happen when I set out on a new post — was "Tattoos remind you of death." But that's from back in 2005. Surely, something in the succeeding years topped that.

I was just talking to my son John, and he urged me to include the post about "the Washington Post guy with the mustache." My post, from 2006, is here: "Of oversized things, MSM, and the internet."

John — wishing me a happy 10th bloggiversary (in 2014) — declared that it represented the "essence" of this blog.

So that gave me the idea to ask you, my dear readers, if you have some post — in there among the 71,000+ posts — that represents what you think is the best (or the essence) of this blog? I would like to learn something about what you think is the reason for doing this.

You don't have to like what you imagine is what I most want to do. Maybe you groan when I veer into tattoos-remind-you-of-death territory and wish I could give more clear answers about who should win the next election and how the Supreme Court should decide this or that case. That's okay. I'm just soliciting material for a blog post I feel I ought to write when we get to that milestone.

Here's a place to talk about the GOP debate.

Are you watching?

Here, my son John is live-blogging at Facebook.

Thank you, Gordon Lightfoot.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary, which says he wrote his first song when he was in high school, during the hula hoop craze. It contained the line: "I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time."

At Facebook, my son John wrote: "Here’s a live performance of his beautiful song 'If You Could Read My Mind' (1970), which he wrote about his divorce. In this video he sings, 'I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack,' which is in the original recording too. Later on when he played it live, he changed one word at his daughter’s request, instead singing '…the feelings that we lack.' He realized that the deeply personal subject matter had prevented him from being objective enough to think of that improvement."

Should a man run his writings past a woman to benefit from insight about what might offend women? We were just talking about a woman who gave a draft of her writing to her ex-husband and then rejected all his suggestions about how to soften the harshness toward him. The editor said his corrections would weaken the story. 

The song was "If You Could Read My Mind," so I don't know why it's a problem to be "prevented... from being objective." And why is subjectivity ever a problem for a singer? Imagine if Bob Dylan submitted "Positively 4th Street" to whoever the hell that song is about? Bob sticks to his point of view, which includes a wish that the person he's talking about could read his mind and know what a drag it is to see him.

Joni Mitchell said: "There came a point when I heard a Dylan song called 'Positively Fourth Street' and I thought 'oh my God, you can write about anything in songs.' It was like a revelation to me."

The complicated woman and the complicated man.

My son John comments on a NYT post at Facebook.

This is a variation on a point I've made a few times: The mainstream media present whatever is true of the woman as good. If the same quality were found to be true of a man, it would be presented as bad.

In this case — complicatedness — is something that — in a woman — feels intriguing and sophisticated. But what the hell is a "complicated man"? We're not wasting our time exploring his psyche. Screw him. He's an asshole.

But the complicated woman....

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

"Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall..."

"... a rural estate in southern England. He was 78. The cause was bacterial meningitis... During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking. In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like 'Shapes of Things' and 'Over Under Sideways Down' added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution...."

From the NYT obituary.

My son John, on his blog Music Is Happiness, goes into detail about Beck's musicianship.

"Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” — I had these as 45s when I was 15.  And this album... I played it endlessly when I was 14:

Goodbye to Christine McVie.

"Christine McVie, of Fleetwood Mac, Is Dead at 79/As a singer, songwriter and keyboardist, she was a driving force behind one of the most popular rock bands of the last few decades" (NYT).

The most popular songs Ms. McVie crafted favored bouncing beats and lively melodies, including “Say You Love Me” (which grazed Billboard’s Top 10), “You Make Lovin’ Fun” (which just broke it), “Hold Me” (No. 4) and “Don’t Stop” (her top smash, which crested at No. 3). But she could also connect with elegant ballads, like “Over My Head” (No. 20) and “Little Lies” (which cracked the publication’s Top Five in 1987)....

"Lamont Dozier said that he wanted to write 'a journey of emotions with sustained tension...'"

"'... like a bolero. To get this across, I alternated the keys, from a minor, Russian feel in the verse to a major, gospel feel in the chorus.' He developed the lyrics with Eddie Holland, aiming for them to sound “as though they were being thrown down vocally.' Dozier said that they were strongly influenced by Bob Dylan at the time, commenting: 'We wanted Levi [Stubbs] to shout-sing the lyrics... as a shout-out to Dylan.'"

That's from the Wikipedia article for the song "Reach Out I’ll Be There," which my son John says is his "favorite H-D-H song, and one of my favorite songs by anyone." That's at John's blog post "Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier has died." Goodbye to Lamont Dozier, who was 81. 

Had I ever thought of Bob Dylan in connection with "Reach Out I’ll Be There"?

 

I see that the "500 Songs" podcast episode about the 4 Tops brought it up:

"I don’t understand why the [Snopes] verdict is 'mostly false,' when most of this article is giving reasons why it would’ve made sense..."

"... for Lucille Ball to say 'don't gaslight me' in 1953. The word is based on the 1944 movie 'Gaslight.' The article cites a 1948 article that quotes a woman’s lawsuit as alleging that her husband gave her 'the Gaslight treatment.' That phrase was used on Lucille Ball’s TV show in the ‘60s, and in 1956 she did a parody of 'Gaslight' in a whole episode of her earlier show. She was a comedian who knew how to improv — don’t you think she would’ve been creative enough to turn a noun into a verb? People do that all the time, e.g. I probably started saying 'I’ll Facebook this' soon after I first got a Facebook account."

Writes my son John, at Facebook, commenting on a Snopes post about its article "Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of ‘I Love Lucy’? A stray piece of dialogue from the 2021 biopic 'Being the Ricardos' set off a fascinating online debate about a cultural anachronism." 

Snopes acknowledges that people back then knew the concept of "the Gaslight treatment" from the movie, but it blithely assumes that somehow, in the 1950s, we didn't fluidly and comically repurpose a noun into a verb:

"He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet 'For No One' is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as 'Hey Jude' has a contemplative side."

"John rightly gets most of the credit for 'A Day in the Life,' which many point to as the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream."

Writes my son John, in "Paul McCartney turns 80" (posted yesterday, Paul's birthday), in the first post of a new blog. The blog is titled "Music Is Happiness," and we'll see where that goes. 

John gives high marks to Paul's 2021 recording, "Deep Deep Feeling": 

"You think we imprison people on a whim? No, if you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing, that alone would justify your arrest."

Says a Stasi interrogator in the 2006 film "The Lives of Others." The "humanistic system" was East Germany.

I just watched for the first time, on the urging of my son John, who warned me that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel. John chose that movie as the best movie of 2006, noted on his blog about the best movies from 1920 to 2020.

William F. Buckley Jr. said it was "the best movie I ever saw."

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, got the idea for the movie from Maxim Gorky's description of a conversation he had with Lenin about music:

And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, he added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!

In the movie, a character quotes Lenin — about Beethoven's "Appassionata" —"If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."

"I had a mild case of covid-19 this past week. I was stuck at home for a week. I'm fine now."

"There are 3 thoughts I take away from the experience..."

Writes my son John (at his blog).

"Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins has died at age 50, reportedly from an overdose of some kind...."

"Hawkins was in the band from 1997 until his death — 25 years — and he played on their last 8 albums. I'm particularly sad about this news because I was really getting into his new supergroup, NHC. The H stands for Hawkins. The N stands for Dave Navarro, the legendary Jane's Addiction guitarist. NHC has only a few songs on Spotify, but I've been listening to one of them over and over: 'Lazy Eyes.' It's partly hard rock but partly more experimental. Hawkins does some amazing drumming on the song, and he handles the vocals well as the lead singer. I especially like the part that goes: 'Are we in love? What the hell does that mean anyway, if you start to hate me?' See my comment for the music video. Hawkins also played drums on Alanis Morissette's 18-month world tour for her beloved breakthrough album, 'Jagged Little Pill.' This is a terrible day for rock music."

Writes my son John at Facebook.