WATCHING WAR MOVIES

We love war movies because we feel the thrill of battle, the life or death consequences of every move, the exhilaration of violence. It's a trick played by actors and directors and cinematographers. For a few moments, with their help, we can forget the exigencies of the day, the worries of the workplace, the horrors of the daily news--storms and floods and oil spills and actual wars--and vicariously struggle with the warrior. The DVD plays, and we take a hero's journey. The best war films, from Casablanca to Apocalypse Now, Platoon to African Queen, give us people we care about. The best war movies keep the mystery and confusion of war, and don't ennoble violence or glorify it. That jingoistic John Wayne crap may stir the blood and increase enlistment, but it's not great film as much as propaganda.


Tim O'Brien on war movies. "I’ve often thought what a cool movie, for example, if you go to a war movie and out of the screen came real bullets."

The best war movie we've seen in ages is Ken Burns' seven part World War II documentary, "The War." This riveting series follows a handful of common people from four American towns, sent from Main Street to all corners of the globe.


"Above all, we wanted to honor the experiences of those who lived through the greatest cataclysm in human history by providing the opportunity for them to bear witness to their own history. Our film is therefore an attempt to describe, through their eyewitness testimony, what the war was actually like for those who served on the front lines, in the places where the killing and the dying took place, and equally what it was like for their loved ones back home. We have done our best not to sentimentalize, glorify or aestheticize the war, but instead have tried simply to tell the stories of those who did the fighting -- and of their families. In so doing, we have tried to illuminate the intimate, human dimensions of a global catastrophe that took the lives of between 50 and 60 million people -- of whom more than 400,000 were Americans." - Ken Burns and Linn Novick



For more about the series, click here.

NOW FADE AWAY

General McChristal

General Stanley McChristal is out of a job--as you know. Obama fired him. His remarks in Rolling Stone magazine derailed his powerful position and he'll be checking Craig's List for Jobs for Generals. Well, not really. He'll be shuffled somewhere else, no doubt. Maybe he'll retire. Old generals never die, after all, they just find a nice place to play golf.

In case you don't read the glossy rock magazine, you can read the original article that got the man bounced here.

Lara Logan

CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan thought the article went too far. On CNN's Reliable Sources show Sunday, she accused Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings of violating an unspoken agreement and printing offhand remarks that should have been kept from the public.

Matt Taibbi disagrees. Taibbi, an outspoken journalist who often writes for RS among other publications, jumped on Logan.

"Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag. And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him...."

Read the rest of Taibbi remarks here.

Matt Taibbi

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HOWLIN' WOLF

Chester Arthur Burnett, better known to blues fans as Howlin' Wolf, was born June 10th, 1910, in White Station, Mississippi. He would've turned a hundred this month. He stood as tall as a live oak and weighed nearly a ton. Some say he had power of a runaway locomotive, maybe the locomotive in this song.

Howlin' Wolf ran away from home quite young. After soaking up all the mystery and pain of the Mississippi Delta, he drove to Chicago and became one of the premier bluesmen in the 1950s. His voice was unique. While others were busy crooning, he howled with a voice that was a force of nature, a voice someone once compared to "the sound of heavy machinery operating on a gravel road." His only true rival was Muddy Waters, who also electrified the Delta sound and brought it north, and together they became the twin towers of Chicago blues.

Listen. The music is raw and unadorned, terrifying even, but there is a powerful groove that makes you move and tap your feet. Can you feel that? Here he's playing with Hubert Sumlin and Willie Dixon, one of the greatest blues songwriters of all time. Give a listen. This is the real deal.

ON A RATTLESNAKE SPEEDWAY

Some kids race around a Utah speedway. They dream of getting away someday, but the cards are stacked against them.

You can hardly blame them. Utah is a terrible place full of scorpions and uppity polygamists. My grandfather mined coal there in Carbon County back in the 1920s. I was thrown in jail there for hitchhiking in the 1970s. Other than some beautiful canyons and rugged mountains, and a lake that is too salty, there is nothing to recommend this godforsaken scrubland.

Bruce Springsteen is a master storyteller. He maps the hidden world, the working world, and makes heroes out of unlikely scrappers. He tells this story without the sentimental Hollywood crap and the false morality. His stories are rough and meaningful without the sappy strings, and because of that they ring true.

GET HAPPY

How are you? Fine. That's the standard response. Could you be any happier?

Sure you could.

Tal Ben-Shahar, Psychology Lecturer at Harvard, has spent his career studying very specific things people can do each day that are proven to increase happiness. Unless you're too happy already, you should listen to this.

BREAKING DOWN THE MUSIC

Artie Shaw gives a music lesson in swing in 1939, just seventy-one years ago. Like any recipe, the magic is more than the sum of the ingredients--it's adding a little heart and soul to the mix. Shaw has fun breaking it all down for us--and yes, that's Buddy Rich beating on the skins. In addition to hiring Rich, Shaw hired Billie Holiday as his band's vocalist in 1938. Not only did Shaw make a good choice, he became the first white bandleader to hire a full-time black female singer to tour the segregated South.

Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, music requires a listener to experience it--and all listeners are different. Some dig swing, some don't. Some like Chinese food, some like Thai. Do you like this?

Here's another musical recipe full of heart and definitely soul, from another era altogether--Sly and the Family Stone in 1968 (just forty-two years ago). After singing "Everyday People" ("different strokes for different folks...") the band launches into "Dance to the Music" and breaks it down like Artie Shaw, naming the various ingredients of the tune. The outfits and attitudes may seem dated (just like in the Artie Shaw clip) but the truth behind the lesson remains the same. This is an upbeat dance tune--how does it make you feel?

ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE

We just came across this great clip of Eric Burdon, formerly of the Animals, performing Bob Dylan's classic, "One More Cup of Coffee for the Road." Burdon is famous for his rough bluesy voice on such sixties working class anthems as "We Gotta Get Out of this Place" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," as well as a traditional blues song Dylan covered on his first album, "House of the Rising Sun." A few years later, Burdon made it a huge hit.

Here is Eric Burdon, performing live in Germany in 1976, the same year the song came out on Dylan's album, Desire.