Why Is He Doing This?
Why is Jesse Jackson criticizing Barack Obama, apologizing, and doing it again?
Kid’s stuff
A local children’s ministry is doing ads for a special outreach on the talk radio station to which I generally listen.
From what I know of the ministry, it’s a good one that does fine, much-needed work.
But I find their promotion very odd.
They’re raising funds to get kids backpacks and supplies for school. Their ad features a kid getting his stuff together at the start of the year. He finds out his mother hasn’t bought him a new backpack, and he pitches a fit, saying all the kids will laugh at him because he’s using last year’s backpack.
Maybe I’m a heartless jerk, but there are a lot of things in the world I worry about more than kids having to use the same backpack two years in a row. I got laughed at a whole lot when I was a kid, and I’d have been pretty relieved if it’d had only been a matter of derision of my school supplies.
I keep wondering if this is some kind of head-fake. I’m sure the people who carry on this ministry have to deal with kids whose parents are neglecting them due to drug use, or sexually abusing them, or pimping them out. I wonder if they’re doing this backpack thing because they’re afraid to tell about the real needs they have to try to fill.
But if that’s true, they’re being dishonest with their donors, which I hope would not be the case.
So I just don’t get it.
Speaking of school kids, it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody’s done a folklore study of children’s traditional poetry.
I don’t mean the stuff written for children, like A Child’s Garden of Verses or the books of Dr. Seuss.
I mean the stuff composed by children, who knows how long ago, and passed down through generations from kid to kid?
Poems like “I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms,” and “________ and __________, sittin’ in a tree,” and little girls’ jump rope rhymes. And parodies like, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”
It seems to me this is an example of a purely oral tradition, still alive in our literate culture. I’d think much could be learned by tracking those poems over the years and generations, observing how they change and stay the same.
Maybe somebody’s done that. But I can’t find anything about it on the web.
Marvel Heroes Are Better Than DC Comics Heroes
Not that DC Comics, now a part of Warner Brothers, does not have interesting properties. It just that their great heroes of old aren’t as appealing as those from Marvel’s minds. Sure, Batman is the best one, and Superman has carved his niche, but Aquaman? News is there’s a Wonder Woman movie in the works, and people are developing storylines for Flash and Shazam.
But my point from the title is that people identify more with regular guys thrust into extraordinary circumstances than they do with gods and aliens defending the world from other gods and aliens.
N Case U Missed It
Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of this t-shirt.
What are you saying? I find your lack of faith disturbing.
The Mark of Zorro
I picked up a couple DVDs of old silent movies this weekend, yielding me a total of five Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. films to get acquainted with. I started with The Mark of Zorro, the 1920 film in which Fairbanks established himself as Hollywood’s definitive action star. It was also the first Zorro movie ever made. Fairbanks picked out the obscure hero of a single pulp magazine story and turned him into an icon, to his own and the author’s great profit.
(Note to Hollywood: My books are still available. Better move now.)
Silent movies have to be taken on their own terms. Naturalism wasn’t what they were about. They were almost a form of interpretive dance, in which the actors used their faces, their eyes and their whole bodies to convey their “lines,” only sparsely supplemented by those black dialogue cards. The great D. W. Griffith did a lot of pioneering work using the camera to assist in his storytelling, but little of that kind of artistry is apparent in this film. Basically they set the camera in one spot and shot the scene in front of it.
Modern treatments of Zorro fall prey to Hollywood’s deep-seated need to be relevant and significant. Fairbanks had no such pretensions. He picked the vehicle because it offered lots of scope for the gymnastics at which he excelled, and that’s how he used it. There’s talk of “justice” and “oppression” (Zorro is described, among other things, as a defender of the “natives,” something I haven’t seen emphasized in the more recent adaptations, though I missed the second Banderas film), but that’s set dressing. It’s really a movie about a really agile guy running rings around the plodding villains, and laughing at them while he does it. It’s one notch of seriousness from being a full-fledged comedy.
And it’s a lot of fun, taken on its own terms. Continue reading The Mark of Zorro
Zero to Lightspeed with Less Fatting
Duff of Ace of Cakes has made The Millennium Falcon cake. The detail is incredible, and they actually served it up.
Untitled or What Do You Know?
Mary DeMuth asks what we know about writing and art, if anything. She says:
I am finally reading My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. I wish I would’ve read it sooner. I’m halfway through the book where the young Asher Lev, an undiscovered but brilliant artist, meets with his soon-to-be mentor. This is what the mentor says to Asher:
“This is not a toy. This is not a child scrawling on a wall. This is a tradition; it is a religion, Asher Lev. You are entering a religion called painting. It has its fanatics and its rebels. And I will force you to master it. Do you hear me? No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it. Do you understand me, Asher Lev?”
Then she asks several questions I’m not qualified to answer.
Exhibition of Forgeries
The Brooklyn Museum plans to exhibit art forgeries next year. The curator said, “‘The idea of connoisseurship’ — how scholars examine a work of art in order to determine its authenticity and proper attribution — ‘has a lot of general appeal.'”
Postmortem on a good weekend
Taken all in all, it was a pretty nice weekend.
My major problem was with an earworm. I got intrigued by Coldplay’s song, “Viva La Vida,” as heard on the iPOD commercials. So I checked it out on YouTube, and found the lyrics. Religious references. Interesting.
So I dug deeper, and discovered (as I should have guessed from the beginning) that it’s an anti-Christian song (or at least anti- any form of religion that teaches damnation).
Apparently, in Chris Martin’s world, people who believe there’s a Hell think they rule the world. Believing in final Judgment is arrogant. Believing, on the other hand, that you’re your own supreme authority and will never have to answer to God, testifies to a becoming modesty.
(By the way, the line that says, “Now I sleep alone” is a lie. I know I’m unreasonably criticizing a perfectly good metaphor. I’m sure he doesn’t sweep streets either. But in my opinion any guy who’s married to Gwyneth Paltrow gets diminished tolerance for complaints about his sleeping arrangements.)
So I played the video for Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time” a couple times to wash the earworm out. The apotheosis of Doo-wop, that song.
Robbinsdale held its annual Whiz Bang Days celebration this weekend, and in connection with my usual walk to the Chinese buffet for lunch, I also browsed through the merchant tables. I came away with some cheap DVDs and a touch of dehydration which (I suspect) caused the passing hip pain I endured Saturday night.
Sunday I was all better again, and that was good, because it was another Viking day. Norway Day at Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis. And yes, we did some fighting. I started poorly, but improved as the day wore on. Which goes to show that if I ever get called on to fight with real swords in a post-EMP* world, I’ll do fine as long as I can survive being killed in the first few fights. Continue reading Postmortem on a good weekend