Pete Seeger, folksinger, activist and longtime radical has written a new protest song about the disastrous BP oil spill. Seeger, born in 1919, isn't content to grow old quietly. He still gets riled up about injustice. Back in the day, Pete rode with Woody Guthrie throughout the country singing at rallies and barn dances and picket lines, at civil rights meetings and peace marches, and he was beaten and jailed but he didn't shut up. As an original member of the Weavers (with Woody) he was blacklisted by McCarthy in the fifties, but he didn't shut up. Now he's ninety one years old, his voice is rough and old age is wearing on him, but he still won't shut up.
"When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill," he sings in his gravelly voice. "God's counting on me, God's counting on you."
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie back in the day
Pete performed the new song at a fundraising concert for the Gulf Restoration Network and Global Green USA. "It's a strange, strange song," he said to Rolling Stone. "I performed for 40 newspaper and radio reporters," he said. "It made sense down there, too. When there's a great big problem lets get together and do something about it."
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was an anthropomorphic rabbit created by Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney in the 1920s for Universal, but after a disagreement in 1929 (Disney requested an increased budget from Charles Mintz, and Mintz suggested Walt take a twenty percent budget cut) Disney left to create another character--based on Oswald but changed enough to avoid litigation--called Mickey Mouse. Perhaps you've heard of him. At any rate, Mintz opened his own studio (mostly of former Disney employees) and produced more Oswald cartoons, and then finally the production of Oswald fell to Walter Lantz (who would later create Woody Woodpecker) and Lantz produced a whopping 140 Oswald cartoons in the next decade. The character got a makeover in Lantz's hands (a cuter face and Mickey-style white gloves) and the race was on. Eventually, in 2006, the rights to Oswald and many other small assets were acquired by the Walt Disney Company.
This short film from the Walter Lantz Studios shows how animated films were made back in the 1930s and 40s. In this "Going Places" documentary, we follow the creation of an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit episode.
The political dramas of cartoonland continued after the age of cell animation morphed into the present age of computer animation. Pixar, one of the most succesful animation studios in the modern world (they made "Toy Story," "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille" and recently "Up") started under Disney's wing but had differences over "Toy Story 2," resulting in a new agreement. Pixar wanted to control production entirely and own the resulting film properties, collect 100% of the profits and pay Disney ten to fifteen percent for distribution. Disney made faces. The conditions were unacceptable to Disney, but Pixar--now highly successful and feeling some clout--refused to budge. Steve Jobs (yes, that Steve Jobs) told Michael Eisner, Disney head, that he would actively look for other partners. To make a long story short, Disney ended up buying Pixar for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal.
The following behind-the-scenes look at Pixar seems a stark contrast to the glimpse of the workaday world of the Lantz studios above, but don't let the gaudy luau shirts and razor scooters fool you; these Pixar people are highly trained professionals with the power and connections to create beautiful mind-blowing animation--and to crush rivals like the warlords of yesteryear. In spite of all the cute little animals and funny stories, the animated film industry is a multi-billion dollar global business that looks out for itself--as it always has. Under that white three-fingered glove is an iron fist.
The Avett Brothers play "I and Love and You" on the David Letterman show. This is mountain music all dressed up for a big New York City television show, but at heart these two brothers from North Carolina are country boys. Their guitar-picking and harmonies come from the hills and hollows of another time.
Summer is a time for big outdoor music festivals. Bonneroo is a more relaxed setting than the NBC studios. Here we go backstage and onstage with the Avett Brothers for some nice, acoustic fingerpicking in the sunshine. Give a listen.
"Howl" and beat poet Allen Ginsberg get the Hollywood treatment. Shocking for its boundless unguarded stream of consciousness ranting and its graphic and disturbing imagery when it was first published in 1956 (and still shocking to some, even in this age of no-holds-barred internet porn and relatively relaxed attitudes about language and sex) "Howl" landed Ginsberg in a huge obscenity trial. Not surprisingly. This game-changing poem was a crazy headlong visionary jam howled by a bearded, pot-smoking, gay, weirdo, communist, hallucinating Buddhist, and it provided an easy target for the so-called moral guardians of the day. Still, the question remains: should an adult in a free society be allowed to read what he or she wants?
Watch these clips from "Howl," the movie:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York...
Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false summations (“her star shone brightly,” “never to be forgotten,” “he liked jazz”), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some genetically modified future- turkey.
So begins the new book by Gary Shteyngart. And now for the commercial.
Gary Shteyngart is an hilarious novelist with great production values. Few could match his darkly comedic skills--not to mention his big budget for self promotion. Is this how it's done? Well, maybe. Shteyngart, the author of the much-acclaimed "Absurdistan" (2006) and "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" (2003) hardly needs the publicity, but maybe he does. The public isn't buying fiction, after all. The novel is dead.
Dead or dying, anyway, according to the alarmists. Maybe they're crying wolf. At any rate, it's been a long slow death. José Ortega y Gasset gave us an early diagnosis in Decline of the Novel in 1925. Walter Benjamin agreed in 1930. Vidal and Barthes and Sukenick published their condolences. Tom Wolfe sent flowers. Robert B. Pippen sent a wreath. People got dressed for a funeral, but somehow the patient survived.
Lately, the funereal phalanx has returned. Lee Siegel, writing in theNew York Observer, caused quite an uproar recently when he publicly lamented the loss of great novels and novelists--Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald--and informed us that fiction has become culturally irrelevant. He attacked the New Yorker magazine's controversial "20 under 40" list of luminary fiction writers (coincidentally, Shteyngart made the list). "Ordinary civilians" no longer read serious writing, says Siegel. There was an existential urgency "with which people used to respond to novels by Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud-the list goes on and on."
Carolyn Kellogg takes him on, point by point, in the LA Times' book blog, Jacket Copy. In "Fiction is Dead. Again" she tears him a new one. "Siegel's piece flogs a tired horse, that fiction is less central to our culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, and not as good. It's hard to figure out which is more problematic: how poorly Siegel's argument is made, or how many things he gets wrong in the process."
Vanessa Thorpe, writing inTheObserver (of the Guardian UK) jumped into the fray. "Siegel smears the whole literary pack as being damagingly self-referential and led by the nose by publicists."
Alastair Harper, in the Guardian Books Blog, wonders if big books are simply too hard to read. He admits he might be lazy, but wonders why anyone should read a difficult, challenging book. In this age of easy entertainment, worlds at our fingertips, he may have a point--or at least he may speak for many people out there.
Gary Shteyngart. He's no Tolstoy. (Read his short work at the New Yorker archive)
You don't have to read Herbert Marcuse to realize that advanced industrial society creates false needs which integrate individuals into a system of production and consumption. In other words, mass media and advertising sell you things you don't need. Advertising creates insecurity it then promises to alleviate--for a price.
We're obviously helpless without their products
On top of making us into good little consumers, Marcuse argues that the system attempts to eliminate negativity, critique, and opposition, resulting in a society of obedient, silent "one-dimensional" men. Advertising does its best to sell products, of course, but by hammering away at us constantly it undermines our aptitude and ability for critical thinking and oppositional behavior. It takes some work avoiding such conditioning, and we all feel critical of overt commercial brainwashing, yet such a constant barrage of commercials must have an effect on our psyches. What's the mental cost of such exposure?
There I go again, getting heavy. Sorry. Go ahead and buy useless crap you don't need--it makes America strong. Get some cigarettes and some of that colored sugar water and something loaded with corn syrup and polyunsaturated fats, or better yet buy an SUV. Buy the lifestyle, or risk looking foolish or ugly or lacking in sex appeal. Besides, if you don't consume in mass quantities, the terrorists win. Resistance is futile.
It's really so easy to operate...
Even so, it's nice to see advertisers screw up--which used to be common on live TV, though it's rare these days. The best place to look for hilarious foul-ups are in the insidious "infomercials" that batter out consciousnesses late at night--or all day long, on the shopping channels. They don't have billion dollar budgets like Coca Cola or Budweiser so their machinations are even more apparent. Have a good laugh at these foul-ups. And don't believe everything you see on TV.
This is a training film for the Lockheed P-38 Lightning shown to aviation cadets in the US Army Air Corps (the forerunner of the US Air Force) during World War II. I've been researching the air war for a writing project I'm working on. We know fighter pilots from the movies--romantic characters like Errol Flynn looking dashing in their flak jackets and crushed caps, silk scarves flying, risking it all in the skies--but, aside from guts, what did it take to become a fighter pilot? Consulting the USAAF Handbook 1939-45, I was surprised how extensive the training was for all aviation cadets--but especially fighter pilots.
Flying training took up to 36 weeks--12 each for primary, basic and advanced training--and at any point a cadet could "wash out" and get sent to gunnery school. That would be a one-way ticket to the infantry.
Pre-flight training took 1-5 months, depending on test scores, and a barrage of physio-motor tests and a 64 exam: from here--if you didn't get bounced--you would be classified to begin training as a navigator, a bombardier or a pilot.
Aviation cadets continued with Primary Training. Primary consisted of 225 hours of ground school instruction and 65 hours of flight training. Advanced training took ten weeks, with 70 hours flying, 60 hours ground school, and 19 military. Based on performance and choice, cadets were earmarked for heavy or medium bombardment, transports, troop carriers or twin-engine flyers--which could be large bombers or a twin-engine fighter plane like the P-38. At the end of advanced training, the cadet received his silver pilot's wings and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant.
The 55th Fighter Group, in flight
But it wasn't over yet. From there, pilots trained in a five week transition course with the plane they would be flying. Up to now, they had trained in single-engine planes, but those destined for flying P-38s would now fly P-322s (modified P-38s). Through this course, pilots would become well-versed in landings and take-offs (every cadet landed 175 times) and expected to exhibit precision control in flying elementary 8s, lazy 8s, pylon 8s, barrel rolls, Immelmann turns and chandelles. From there, they formed fighting teams and then it was off to the war.
I've shown the essentials, there is plenty more, all part of becoming a fighter pilot. In their crushed caps and flak jackets, the flyboys made it look easy, but behind all the glamor they were highly trained professionals. During the war, air crews had a higher mortality rate than even the infantry, hovering around 50% during its peak. The number of combat missions required of an aviator grew from 25 to 30 and then finally 35. The odds were never good, but every time our required nerves of steel with flak guns and enemy fighters trying to shoot you down.
My uncle, Lt. Albert Albino, talks with the ground crew in front of his P-38H, "The Spirit of Aberdeen." He flew with the 55th Fighter Group, 38th Squadron of the Mighty Eighth Air Force based in Nuthampstead, England. He was shot down (killed in action) on November 29th, 1943.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie back in the day
