Category Archives: Video

TGIF: Al Franken

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jG2Vp9XKDc

SNL alum Sen. Al Franken challenges a representative of the Hudson Institute during the recent health care reform hearings on her claim that reform will lead to more medical bankruptcies.

This is our Friday comedy slot.  But it’s also a good occasion to see what happens when a very funny man becomes a senator whose primary interest is serving his constituents rather than big business.

After the jump, Al Franken uses humor to show up someone who only thinks she is funny, Ann Coulter — although her ongoing effort to rehabilitate her “hero” Joseph McCarthy is chuckle-worthy.

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Frye and Detective Fiction

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahe372Rzf0g

The conclusion of the 1939 film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Further to Professor Mondo’s earlier post, here is one of  a number of Frye’s observations in the notebooks on the detective story, via Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned.

I don’t think that I have either a highbrow or a lowbrow pose about detective stories, but I don’t really quite understand why I like reading them.  I read them partly for the sake of the overtones.  I’m not a connoisseur of them: I can never guess what the hell’s up when the detective pulls out a watch and shouts: “My God, we may yet be in time!”, shoves the narrator and half the country’s police force into a taxi, dashes madly across town and finds the girl I’d placidly thought was the heroine all equipped with a blunt instrument & an animal snarl.  I’m always led by the nose up the garden path in search of a false clue, and I never notice inconsistencies.  And I always get let down when I find out who dun it.  As I say, I like overtones.  A good style, some traces of wit & characterization, a sense of atmosphere, and a lot of the professional intricacies of the game can go to hell.  Yet I want a good novel in that particular convention & no other.  The answer is, I think, that I’m naturally a slow & reflective reader, & make copious marginalia.  In the detective story I live for a moment in the pure present: I’m passively pulled along from stimulus to stimulus, and, ignorant & idle as that doubtless is, I’m fascinated by it.  Yet I seldom finish with disappointment. (67)

National Post: “The Overrated”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5qalNX5G94

Elaine in the episode of Seinfeld where she hates The English Patient but must see it multiple times.

In case you missed it, here’s the National Post’s ten most overrated Canadian authors (yes, Michael Ondaatje is in there).

For entertainment purposes only.

To be fair, Michael Ondaatje’s lovely poem, “The Cinnamon Peeler” (with video), after the jump.

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“We must love one another or die”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMflhlXeCNA&feature=PlayList&p=66FF5019C82DB7B1&index=0&playnext=1

German newsreel footage of the invasion of Poland (with English subtitles).

On this date in 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War in Europe.

This is one of those rare occasions where a terrible historical event inspires a major literary work that is contemporaneous with it.  In this instance, a poem with the date of the event as its title and published just 48 days later.  That makes it is a good opportunity to consider the prophetic power of literature to confront history.

Here’s W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (after the jump a recitation of the poem with the stanzas displayed):

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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Henry V

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAvmLDkAgAM

Shakespeare’s Henry V, the St. Crispin’s Day speech before Henry and his outnumbered English forces win the Battle of Agincourt: “We happy few, we band of brothers.”  Once again, like Edward III’s victory at Crecy (post here), this is an English victory in the Hundred Years War with France they will eventually lose.

On this date King Henry V died unexpectedly (1387-1422), throwing England into a virtual state of civil war for the next sixty years.

Frye in The Critical Path offers some incisive comments on the finely woven subtext of wanton violence and destruction beneath the nationalistic bravado of Shakespeare’s play:

Shakespeare also shows the identification with the audience’s attitude that the oral poet has.  On the level  of explicit statement, or what the play seems to be saying, he seems willing to accept the assumption, or implication, that Henry V was a glorious conqueror and Joan of Arc a wicked witch, that Shylock is typical of Jews and Judaism, that peasants are to be seen through the eyes of the gentry, that the recognized sovereign is the Lord’s anointed and can cure diseases in virtue of being so. . . . When we examine the imagery of Henry V, and listen carefully to the moods and overtones which that imagery suggests, we realize that the play is very far from expressing the simple-minded patriotism that it appears to be expressing.  (CW 27, 46-7)

In A Natural Perspective he reminds us that, thanks to the archetype of the wheel of fortune, the apparently comic resolutions of history are an illusion:

The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception: it is never genuinely a comic one, though a history play may achieve a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel half-way.  Thus Henry V ends with triumphant conquest and a royal marriage, though, as the epilogue reminds us, King Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed. (120)

And in Words with Power he observes that a “history play” has ultimately very little to do with history and much more to do with play:

So we cannot say that, because it is a historical play, Henry V is “following” history, with a few alterations allowed only to poets.  If we look at the total myth, or whole story, of the play, we get a history with another dimension of meaning.  As he goes on, Shakespeare tends to leave English history for the more remote and legendary periods of Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, where the titanic figures of tragedy can emerge as they could not have emerged from the battle fields of Agincourt or Tewkesbury.  In time these periods are more remote from us; in myth they are far more immediate and present. (CW 26, 46)

Glenn Beck: “There will be rivers of blood”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSFCoT2et_s

A mashup by Media Matters for America of Beck’s appropriation of the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech on Saturday, including a long string of incendiary lies and provocation from his radio and Fox News shows.

A taste of those lies and provocation: “I can tell you there will be rivers of blood.” “Very dark dudes are coming for us.” “There are Satan worshipers who are in office.” “That’s when the arrests start . . . that’s when the shootings start.” “Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsucker.”  And much, much more.

He’s no Martin Luther King.

Where I come from, we call that “eliminationist rhetoric.”

You decide.

The Beatles, Candlestick Park

beatles

Today is the 44th anniversary of the Beatles’ last concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.

Fifty-five seconds of lousy video that nicely captures what it must have been like to be there, here.

This was the Beatles’ last concert but not their last public performance, which didn’t occur till three years later on January 30th 1969.  A much better clip of that event after the jump. (Notice how Austen Powers-y London looks: check out Ringo in his red plastic mac.)

Frye in discussion with Robert Fulford and Marty Gross on the ritualistic element of Beatles concerts:

[Fulford discusses the human need for ritual, as seen for instance in the intense emotion of the audience at a Beatles concert where the music could not be heard above the audience’s screams.]

Frye: You need different rituals at different times.  There is something in the pantomime, where you don’t hear the words, that has a very direct childlike appeal.  So it didn’t matter whether you heard the Beatles, as long as you saw them.  The response to the aural stimulus is something that develops much more gradually. (CW 24, 542)

Perhaps that’s what makes the next clip so poignant.  There’s no more Beatlemania, no more adolescent girls screaming like Bacchantes.  The Beatles’ last audience was just a random collection of people (including a number of noticeably middle-aged Londoners, who are somewhat stiff and formal but evidently still fans) who found their way to nearby rooftops so that they could watch and hear the Beatles in public for what turned out to be the last time.

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Saturday Night Documentary: “Outfoxed”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok01hJHvobM

Today is the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial (video here).  Self-confessed “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck chose to hijack the occasion to give a speech of his own on the very spot that great speech was delivered (or, as Beck hilariously put it in a smarmy show of false humility, “a few steps down” from the actual spot).  That makes this an opportune time to take a closer look at Fox News as the nihilistic propaganda machine it really is.

Louis Menand in a recent online posting at the New Yorker writes about the documentary scene after Fahrenheit 9/11, including this powerful, widely viewed but never distributed indictment of Fox News, Outfoxed.

Here’s Menand:

One common reaction to “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that it shows you things that have never been seen before—the “Pet Goat” and “Now watch this drive” clips, scenes of carnage and brutality in Iraq, Saudi-schmoozing, Ashcroft singing, Al Gore being forced to reject repeated petitions by black representatives to contest the official counting of the electoral-college votes in the 2000 election. It may be that most of these things were shown somewhere, but the movie is designed to make audiences feel that they have never been seen, or that, having been seen, they have been deliberately suppressed. Robert Greenwald’s “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” a movie that has yet to tempt a distributor but has been exhibited in special screenings, and that circulates, samizdat style, on videotape and DVD, is a forceful reminder of how vicious the cheerleading is. “Outfoxed” ought to be a redundant exercise. The right-wing bias of Fox News, whose laughable motto is “Fair and Balanced,” is not something that ought to require a documentary to uncover. But where is the mainstream media? The answer is that the mainstream media is a place where Tucker Carlson is identified as a “political analyst.” Reporting on television is now accompanied by so much partisan yapping disguised as analysis, and there is such a panic to get anything on the air that comes over the transom regardless of the source (like pictures of John Kerry in a silly hat), that the other networks have to feel uncomfortable about accusing anyone else of confusing news with opinion. “Outfoxed” suggests, in fact, that competing news organizations, like CNN, having seen that flag-waving attracts viewers, are starting to imitate Fox.

There may be a few viewers out there who continue to confuse Bill O’Reilly with Eric Sevareid. “Outfoxed” will disabuse them.

The rest of the film after the jump.

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Edward III

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBHDEoBWja0

The sword of Edward III

On this date in 1349 Edward III led the English forces to victory over the French in the Battle of Crécy, one of many battles fought during the Hundred Years’ War through the reigns of four English kings — Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V — and which ultimately ended in English defeat after Joan of Arc appeared on the scene to rally the French in their cause.

Frye on Blake’s “King Edward the Third”:

“King Edward the Third” is an exercise in the idiom  of Elizabethan drama, just as the songs are, if more successfully, exercises in the corresponding lyrical idiom.  It is a very curious piece.  Apparently, if one believes that England has always been the home of democracy and constitutional government, and France — at least until the Revolution — a hotbed of tyranny and superstition, one can also believe that the Hundred Years’ War was a blow struck solely in the interests of progress.  The English are famous for transforming their economic and political ambitions into moral principles, and to the naive mercantile jingoism of the eighteenth century, which assumed that freedom of action was the same thing as material expansion, there seemed nothing absurd in thinking that the unchecked growth of England’s power involved the emancipation of the world.  At any rate, Akenside, in his Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England, seems to have had a vague idea that war with France is somehow connected with the principles of Freedom, Truth and Reason as well as Glory, and refers to the Hundred Years’ War as a crusade in favor of these principles.  Akenside was a Whig; Thomson and Young, who wrote a good deal to the same effect, were also Whigs, the liberals of their time, and it is not really surprising if the young Blake, looking for a historical example of the fight of freedom against tyranny, should have selected the exploits of Edward III.  A good deal of the poem is simply “Rule Britannia” in blank verse. . . . (Fearful Symmetry, 179-80)