Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge. For more Doonesbury, Ben Sargent, Pat Oliphant, Mother Goose and Grimm, Tony Auth, Tom the Dancing Bug, Tom Toles, and Zippy, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here...

JUST A SONG: Los Lobos' "Will the Wolf Survive"--

A wonderfully conceived allegory, "Will The Wolf Survive" tells the story of a working man envisaged as an endangered species beset by social forces ("Hunters hard on his trail") beyond his control. Considering that the song was written 25 years ago, its bridge is remarkably prescient in its depiction of the shrinking middle class...

When I was a small boy growing up in New Hampshire, the Boston Red Sox radio broadcast team of Curt Gowdy and Ned Martin were my constant companions. The Sox radio sponsor in those days was a Massachusetts beer called Narragansett (after the Bay). I can still hear Curt and Ned extolling the virtues of this "Bay brew" and closing their promos with a hearty "Hi, neighbor -- Have a 'Gansett!" Today, the beer is long gone, but the legacy remains. Here's photo from the Boston Craft Brew Fest (thanks, Bill!):

An Oregonian recalls his working class roots...

Cliff's Crib turns the spotlight on black fathers...

Hell0, cowgirl in the sand...

Dust-to-Digital: Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography...

Premium T. finds a skull in an unusual place (scroll down)...

Congratulations, Reilly!...

The older I got, the smarter my father became. Here's a Father's Day thought from Mark Twain (thanks, Clever Pup!):

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years...

A Father's Day Message from Lakewood, OH...

Sailing on Lake Ponchartrain...

New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore of Galactic anchors the CD by Tom Morello's new project, the Street Sweeper Social Club...

Sunday Gospel Time: Mahalia Jackson and Nat King Cole "Steal Away":

Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge. For more Tom the Dancing Bug, Ben Sargent, Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury, Tony Auth, Tom Toles, and Zippy, go here, here, here, here, here, here, and here...

JUST A SONG: Woody Guthrie's "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)":

To Guthrie it is the "they" who took the money, who "chase us like outlaws," who are the anonymous ones, hiding behind legalisms to rob and exploit the migrants until there is nothing left but "dry leaves to rot on my topsoil." The use of the word "my" implicates all of us in the fate of the migrants, for it is we who eat "the good fruit."

Friday, Premium T. and I watched Robert Altman's Nashville. It was her first time and my sixth or seventh. As one of the top movies of the Seventies, arguably the best and most important ten years of American cinema, Nashville's place in film history is secure. I won't try to review it here because there's little I could add. But...

...talk about an opportunity to watch the hand of a master at work: Nashville is Altman at the absolute top of his game. Too often today, post-production is where movies go to die: A mediocre soundtrack and literally hundreds of cuts a minute mask a weak script and pedestrian direction. With Altman, though, post-production is where rough cuts became art. The overlapping dialogue is carefully mixed and the editing brings to bear his myriad abilities to direct everything from sprawling set pieces -- such as the opening of the film when all of the characters arrive at the Nashville airport and wind up in a mult-car highway crash -- to intensely personal moments such as Barbara Jean's (Ronee Blakely) on-stage breakdown. Most impressive of all is the club scene in which Altman distills a multi-character set piece down to Keith Carradine singing "I'm Easy" to Lily Tomlin while three other women think he sings to them:

Now watch the scene again. Notice how the slow, nearly unnoticeable zooms and almost casual pans set up the one quick cut towards the end of the scene. This cut enables the impression of Carradine and Tomlin looking at each other across a crowded room as if no one else were there. It is brilliant, meticulous film-making, the kind that most of today's directors have neither the skill, emotional insight, or artistic courage to pull off...

Here's the scene where Blakely, as a Loretta Lynn type, follows her heartbreaking song "Dues" with the on-stage breakdown:

Incidentally, the actors in Nashville wrote and sang their own songs. Blakely was the only real singer of the group, but whatever price Altman paid for that was more than made up for by the

immediacy of the various vocals. It certainly had a way of committing the actors to the scenes in which they sang...

Living in the Henhouse...

Terlingua ghost town cemetery...

Angels and people/Life in New Orleans: Repetition of form...

The Ladder...

Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge. For more Mike Keefe, Tom Tomorrow, Tom Toles, Pat Oliphant, Doonesbury. Ben Sargent, Mother Goose & Grimm, and Tony Auth, go here, here, here, here, here, here, and here...

Just A Song: Austin singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves "Drinkin' Days" are over, but he's still trouble bound...

Sean, what are you waiting for? This is your chance to support the troops and show that water boarding isn't torture. Don't let us down. Sign the petition demanding that Sean Hannity put his money where his mouth is here...

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney says that art helps people through troubled economic times...

Apothecary D'Orleans...

Ever wonder what would happen if a bull got loose in your neighborhood grocery store? The people of Ballinrobe, County Mayo now know....

Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans...

Sunday Gospel Time: Leonard Cohen sings "Hallelujah" last June before an appreciative Dublin audience:

Eostre Sunday Funnies & Arts

Happy Eostre!

As always, click to enlarge. For more Doonesbury, Pat Oliphant, Mother Goose & Grimm, Tom Toles, Zippy the Pinhead, Tony Auth, and Tom Tomorrow, go here, here, here, here, here, here, and here...

Just A Song: Luka Bloom's "Diamond Mountain":

Unlike emigres from most other European countries, the Irish viewed leaving their homes as a form of exile, even amidst the starvation and disease of the Famine. In "Diamond Mountain" -- one of his best songs -- the Irish singer/songwriter Luka Bloom captures this sense of dislocation...

Opening Day at Fenway Park, Boston:

Ima Wizer reveals the Big Fat Idiot in all his malevolence and deceit:

Citizen K. can't wait to hear what the BFI makes of the rescue of the ship captain from the Somali pirates: Rushbo was on Obama's case about he so hilariously called "merchant marine organizers" all last week...

Vintage sugar...

Susanna Powers' close-up of Resurrection Ferns has an abstract quality...

Marcella's Cookery brings genuine New Orleans cooking to Seattle...

New Orleans (1947). D: Arthur Lubin. Arturo de Cordova, Dorothy Patrick, Richard Hagerman, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Woody Herman. By any definition a low-budget B movie with C-list Hollywood talent, New Orleans is nonetheless worth watching for the brilliant jazz performances of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and for its tentative (and possibly subversive) treatment of race and art. Set against the backstory of the closing of Storyville, New Orleans tells the story of gambler Nick Duquesne (Cordova) and the WASP-ish Miralee Smith (Patrick), a classical music singer who falls in love with Nick and with jazz, both to her mother's (Irene Rich) consternation.

The direction of the film plods until Armstrong and Holiday appear, at which point it perks up considerably. Holiday's performances of "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans" and "Farewell to Storyville" are luminescent. There's an extraordinary sequence during which Armstrong introduces his band while prowling and slithering among them, the camera following and looking over his back the entire time.

At the same time, the film remains mired in 1940's attitudes toward race and music. Certainly, one must applaud it for Armstrong's and Holiday's performances and interesting scenes like the one in which Holiday takes Patrick slumming in Storyville. But jazz is finally acceptable only when Patrick, the white Woody Herman, and a classical musical orchestra perform "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans" in a Carnegie Hall knockoff. It's only then that Miralee's mother relents in her opposition to the romance with Duquesne the gambler turned jazz promoter. Jazz has become safe, acceptable to the middle- and upper-classes, perhaps even reinforcing their staidness.

Much of this rises not from any particular ideology on the film's part, but from the producer's interpretation of what the film needed to present in order to make money. The film's presentation of Armstong's and Holiday's material is so superior that it's possible that the actual message is more subversive: We're giving you this white bread because we have to, but make no mistake about where the nutrition is. Thus, it's to New Orleans' credit that it provides plenty of actual jazz even while bowing to the pressures of profit. It's said that no one can serve God and Mammon, but New Orleans makes a worthy attempt...

The credits and opening scene of the film telegraph its dilemma. A chorale group sings "Do You Know What It Means" over the opening credits. Upon their completion, the camera immediately cuts to a Storyville afternoon graced by Armstrong's "West End Blues":

Sunday Gospel Brunch: It's not exactly gospel, but this performance of "Stand By Me" assembled by Playing For Change sure has the feeling: