Eddie Pensier writes:
Sexy sequence from “On An Island With You” (1948), with Cyd Charisse and Ricardo Montalbán. If you only know Montalbán from Fantasy Island, Star Trek, and “Corinthian Leather”, this may surprise you. He’s a terrific partner as well as a great dancer in his own right.
Enjoy.
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Fenster writes:
I wrote here, here and here about people who were quite famous in their day, now more or less down the memory hole. With that in mind, I note the passing of playwright/poet/provocateur Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones), and wonder if and how he will be remembered decades hence.
I saw Mr. Baraka once. It was at a conference I attended in 1968–the annus mirabilis of a long-ago era. That bundle of contradictory forces that now goes by the name of The Sixties was just about to pop. But for the moment it was still tentatively holding together. And so a “conference” at Buffalo State College was capable of being many things: a rogue’s gallery of all the top psychedelic leaders like Tim Leary and Ram Dass talking about new religion, a concert by the white revolutionary rockers the MC5 and a platform for the discussion of black rebellion. All were welcome and it seemed all came. And in the moment of course it all seemingly cohered.
The assembled crowd was also made giddy by the unexpected arrival of the New York City anarchist collective Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. The group burst into a presentation by a blissed-out Leary on the virtues of turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The were dressed for their parts as heroic vanguardists and inhabited them fully. The men were determined, resolved and more than a little menacing. The women wore long flowing dresses and babushkas, carrying their revolutionary babies close to their breasts. Thus fitted out, they rushed the stage and commanded it, adopting a steely socialist realist posture
and proceeded to give Leary a good shellacking. Capitalist roader!
The audience might have espied problems ahead for the putative allies in the counterculture. Leary himself was a few years away from his own erratic embrace of Eldridge Cleaver and violent revolution, an embrace that soon fell away. For the most part I suspect the audience felt the whole shebang could hang together somehow. And it made for great theater.
On into the night the MC5 rocked, with the largely white, middle-class, college student population going from ecstatic dancing to what appeared to be hive formations–a proto-rave I guess.
Late in the conference Baraka showed up. The same white college students, having recovered from their brave shenanigans with the MC5, now sat meekly awaiting a pronouncement from this tribune of the revolutionary black vanguard as to what the future might hold, and what part they might play in it.
He came to the podium and just looked at the audience, waiting for a very, very long moment before saying anything. The crowd grew a little tense. Sure we were white middle class kids, but we were here to support him in . . . whatever. Just let us know, Mr. Baraka!
Finally, a small smile from Baraka. Then, in a sing-song voice, proto-rap:
“Can you SING with me?”
The audience, relieved, shouted back as one.
“Yessss!!”
Another long pause.
What is he up to?
“Can you SING with me?” This time louder, more dramatic, more rhythmic.
“Yesssss!!”
Now it was being set up as a call and response. The clapping started to set up a groove. Back and forth Baraka and the audience went.
“Can you SING with me?”
“Yessss!!!”
“Can you SING with me?”
“Yessss!!!”
This went on quite pleasurably all around for a couple of minutes. What was not to like? Baraka was entertaining, he was fun and he was obviously delighting in what appeared to be his proffer of an olive branch to emerging revolutionaries.
But then he came to a full stop and once again simply looked out over the crowd. The rhythmic applause petered out. Wha . . . ?
Then, with a steely look also borrowed from socialist realism, he continued on in his sing-song way, this time without a smile:
“You can’t sing with me.
You’re the EN-E-MY!”
And with that he walked off the stage.
Paleo Retiree writes:
Early blaxploitation, directed by William Crain and starring William Marshall as an 18th century African prince who, bitten by Count Dracula, wakes up in 1971 L.A. It’s a surprisingly straightfaced movie — far less of a spoof or a goof than I expected, with Marshall giving a genuinely suave, dignified and intense performance. That said, on the technical and budget level the film is like cheesy ’70s TV. I enjoyed the picture’s gaudiness, its performers (among them: Vonetta McGee, Thalmus Rasulala, and Charles Macaulay), its style and sensibility, and its unhurried storytelling … until the climactic action scenes, which, alas, I found dull, and which finally put me to sleep.
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Fenster writes:
My son in a selfie. Prague, 2011.
Eddie Pensier writes:
…Dutch actress Lotte Verbeek, best known for indie film Nothing Personal, and as Giulia “La Bella” Farnese in Showtime’s The Borgias.
Eddie Pensier writes:
Domin: Ah now, young Rossum; that was the start of a new age. After the age of research came the age of production. He took a good look at the human body and he saw straight away that it was much too complicated, any good engineer would design it much more simply. So he began to re-design the whole anatomy, seeing what he could leave out or simplify. In short, Miss Glory . . . I’m not boring you, am I?
Helena: No, quite the opposite, this is fascinating.
Domin: So young Rossum said to himself: Man is a being that does things such as feeling happiness, plays the violin, likes to go for a walk, and all sorts of other things which are simply not needed.
Helena: Oh, I see!
Domin: No, wait. Which are simply not needed for activities such as weaving or calculating. A petrol engine doesn’t have any ornaments or tassels on it, and making an artificial worker is just like making a petrol engine. The simpler you make production the better you make the product. What sort of worker do you think is the best?
Helena: The best sort of worker? I suppose one who is honest and dedicated.
Domin: No. The best sort of worker is the cheapest worker. The one that has the least needs. What young Rossum invented was a worker with the least needs possible. He had to make him simpler. He threw out everything that wasn’t of direct use in his work, that’s to say, he threw out the man and put in the robot. Miss Glory, robots are not people. They are mechanically much better than we are, they have an amazing ability to understand things, but they don’t have a soul. Young Rossum created something much more sophisticated than Nature ever did – technically at least!
Helena: They do say that man was created by God.
Domin: So much the worse for them. God had no idea about modern technology.
— “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)”, the 1920 play by Čapek that introduced the word robot into the world. (Translation: David Wyllie)
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Bessie Smith appeared in only this one movie; it has an all-black cast and runs 16 minutes. Whatever one might say about the limitations of the story line, derived from the W.C. Handy song by the director, Dudley Murphy, and Handy himself (who served as musical director), seems irrelevant. Even in this folklorish film, made when sound recording was still primitive, she comes through. Here she is, the greatest of all our jazz singers, all 5 feet 9 inches and 200 pounds of her, crowned with a little 20s hat, and when she lets out her harsh, thick voice, full of gin and sensuality and humor, she’s one of the most beautiful images that ever filled the screen.
— Pauline Kael
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 