And the seas are rolling easy as they did so long ago
My access to LJ has been on the fritz for hours [edit: apologies for any duplicate crossposts that may result]. I had a wonderful time seeing the solstice in with poetry, song, pomegranates, and biryani at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sairaali's last night. kythryne brought her guitar and led "Turning Toward the Morning," "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Give Yourself to Love," and other sunward songs. One of Saira and M.'s landlords, home for the holidays, set up a stockpot of Feuerzangenbowle over the restaurant-quality stovetop and I can vouch for its sheer entertainingness as a tradition that combines the best aspects of Christmas punch and lighting a plum pudding on fire. The results taste like very good mulled wine with a slick of recently flaming rum floating on top. Saira has also successfully reconstructed one of the cocktails from Sarma—the Aslan's Reviver, with yogurt, raki, and green chartreuse—and I just sort of wandered around with one of those for a while. I got a glimpse of B. visiting from the D.C. area and of gaudior's Fox, who is just two months old now and huge. I got home after midnight and have spent the majority of today either working or helping my mother make batches of her traditional holiday fudge. More than five things totally make a post. Mostly political.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rinue: Don't Be a Sucker! (1947). A strikingly timely short film made by the U.S. Department of War following World War II, explicitly recapitulating the history of Nazi Germany in order to warn against racist and fascist tendencies in America. It's of its time and it's still relevant. The metaphor is con artistry, a shell game of flattery and blame, splintering a potential majority opposition into vulnerable factions in order to isolate scapegoats and get a clear shot at the marks who can be persuaded that they are the "real" Germans/Americans, though the film's internal narrator (a mustache-less, bespectacled Paul Lukas, himself Hungarian-Jewish; real-life German-Jewish refugee Felix Bressart appears similarly in flashback as an anti-Nazi professor) acutely makes the point that when you add up the discountable, destroyable minorities, the target audience ends up being very far from demographically dominant, which of course only makes them feel more like the righteous, embattled defenders of the "real" Germany/America. "Hans and thousands of others like him, all playing a sucker's game. They gambled with other people's liberty and of course they lost their own." The lesson, obviously, is to stick together despite axes of difference and rhetorical efforts to divide. Don't get distracted. Don't fracture. Lines about union-smashing and the "abolition of truth" may also resonate these days. Frankly, for all the simplification of Hitler's rise to power and the propaganda of America as an egalitarian nation of diversity, it is still a more sophisticated discussion of the subject than I had expected to find in this country not two years after the end of the war, which only means that I underestimated the past. "Remember when you hear this kind of talk, somebody's going to get something out of it and isn't going to be you." And still people ask, "But if we allow it to go on, what's going to become of us real Americans?"
2. Relatedly, please enjoy Chuck Wendig swearing about reality.
3. Less enjoyably, like most people I know I have been following the situation with the neo-Nazis in Whitefish. I appreciate that the Daily Inter Lake's editorial call for resistance and support does not rely only on the Christmas holiday to invoke interfaith solidarity. I hope the next attempt to address the situation publicly does not also get canceled. Comments full of anti-Semitic trolls, obviously.
4. In memory of Marion Pritchard, great-grandmother of my ungodchild and a seriously badass human being.
5. Taking a break from Nazis: I appreciate Obama's invocation of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect Atlantic and Arctic waters from offshore drilling and his—finally—decision to dismantle NSEERS to protect Muslim and Arab residents of the United States from Trump's promised registry and deportations. I hope we have a federal court and some remnants of government that will uphold these actions in the coming year.
6. Donald Trump wants more nuclear weapons. I was just coveting a book about Werner Heisenberg's letters to his wife Elisabeth "Li" Schumacher during World War II. He didn't want to give the A-bomb to the Nazis, it now really looks like. I didn't want to give them to Trump long before his pick for national security advisor started fraternizing with Austria's FPÖ. Look, we're back to Nazis. Couldn't we just revisit the really cool parts of the twentieth century instead?
7. Michèle Morgan has died. I don't think I ever saw her in anything other than Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), but she is excellent there. I should look up some of her other films.
Okay, so a mostly political post these days looks crazily depressing. So while reading about Gabriel Byrne pursuant to a discussion I'm having withheliopausa about the characterization of Professor Bhaer in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994), I discovered that he got the role in no small part because he kept calling Armstrong for an audition: Alcott's original novel was one of his childhood imprints and he desperately wanted to be part of a screen version. That delighted me to no end (and explained a point which had puzzled me for twenty-two years: not having seen Byrne before, I assumed from the film that he was German and was then extremely confused to find out he was Irish). This gallery of stills quite seriously suggests that I may unconsciously have attempted to adopt some of his sartorial choices. I can live with this.
sairaali's last night. kythryne brought her guitar and led "Turning Toward the Morning," "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Give Yourself to Love," and other sunward songs. One of Saira and M.'s landlords, home for the holidays, set up a stockpot of Feuerzangenbowle over the restaurant-quality stovetop and I can vouch for its sheer entertainingness as a tradition that combines the best aspects of Christmas punch and lighting a plum pudding on fire. The results taste like very good mulled wine with a slick of recently flaming rum floating on top. Saira has also successfully reconstructed one of the cocktails from Sarma—the Aslan's Reviver, with yogurt, raki, and green chartreuse—and I just sort of wandered around with one of those for a while. I got a glimpse of B. visiting from the D.C. area and of gaudior's Fox, who is just two months old now and huge. I got home after midnight and have spent the majority of today either working or helping my mother make batches of her traditional holiday fudge. More than five things totally make a post. Mostly political.1. Courtesy of
rinue: Don't Be a Sucker! (1947). A strikingly timely short film made by the U.S. Department of War following World War II, explicitly recapitulating the history of Nazi Germany in order to warn against racist and fascist tendencies in America. It's of its time and it's still relevant. The metaphor is con artistry, a shell game of flattery and blame, splintering a potential majority opposition into vulnerable factions in order to isolate scapegoats and get a clear shot at the marks who can be persuaded that they are the "real" Germans/Americans, though the film's internal narrator (a mustache-less, bespectacled Paul Lukas, himself Hungarian-Jewish; real-life German-Jewish refugee Felix Bressart appears similarly in flashback as an anti-Nazi professor) acutely makes the point that when you add up the discountable, destroyable minorities, the target audience ends up being very far from demographically dominant, which of course only makes them feel more like the righteous, embattled defenders of the "real" Germany/America. "Hans and thousands of others like him, all playing a sucker's game. They gambled with other people's liberty and of course they lost their own." The lesson, obviously, is to stick together despite axes of difference and rhetorical efforts to divide. Don't get distracted. Don't fracture. Lines about union-smashing and the "abolition of truth" may also resonate these days. Frankly, for all the simplification of Hitler's rise to power and the propaganda of America as an egalitarian nation of diversity, it is still a more sophisticated discussion of the subject than I had expected to find in this country not two years after the end of the war, which only means that I underestimated the past. "Remember when you hear this kind of talk, somebody's going to get something out of it and isn't going to be you." And still people ask, "But if we allow it to go on, what's going to become of us real Americans?"2. Relatedly, please enjoy Chuck Wendig swearing about reality.
3. Less enjoyably, like most people I know I have been following the situation with the neo-Nazis in Whitefish. I appreciate that the Daily Inter Lake's editorial call for resistance and support does not rely only on the Christmas holiday to invoke interfaith solidarity. I hope the next attempt to address the situation publicly does not also get canceled. Comments full of anti-Semitic trolls, obviously.
4. In memory of Marion Pritchard, great-grandmother of my ungodchild and a seriously badass human being.
5. Taking a break from Nazis: I appreciate Obama's invocation of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect Atlantic and Arctic waters from offshore drilling and his—finally—decision to dismantle NSEERS to protect Muslim and Arab residents of the United States from Trump's promised registry and deportations. I hope we have a federal court and some remnants of government that will uphold these actions in the coming year.
6. Donald Trump wants more nuclear weapons. I was just coveting a book about Werner Heisenberg's letters to his wife Elisabeth "Li" Schumacher during World War II. He didn't want to give the A-bomb to the Nazis, it now really looks like. I didn't want to give them to Trump long before his pick for national security advisor started fraternizing with Austria's FPÖ. Look, we're back to Nazis. Couldn't we just revisit the really cool parts of the twentieth century instead?
7. Michèle Morgan has died. I don't think I ever saw her in anything other than Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), but she is excellent there. I should look up some of her other films.
Okay, so a mostly political post these days looks crazily depressing. So while reading about Gabriel Byrne pursuant to a discussion I'm having with
heliopausa about the characterization of Professor Bhaer in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994), I discovered that he got the role in no small part because he kept calling Armstrong for an audition: Alcott's original novel was one of his childhood imprints and he desperately wanted to be part of a screen version. That delighted me to no end (and explained a point which had puzzled me for twenty-two years: not having seen Byrne before, I assumed from the film that he was German and was then extremely confused to find out he was Irish). This gallery of stills quite seriously suggests that I may unconsciously have attempted to adopt some of his sartorial choices. I can live with this.
no subject
The 1994 Little Women isn't my favorite film adaptation of the book (mainly because I don't buy Winona Ryder as Jo), but I do love Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer and Claire Danes as Beth. I was just watching the 1949 version last night, which is my favorite, casting-wise, except for the rather jarring choice of Rossano Brazzi as Bhaer. (Speaking of Paul Lukas, I rather like his version of Bhaer in the 1933 film.)
no subject
Me too. I wish Alcott had let herself write a Bhaer like that.
Nine
no subject
Me neither. I associate him first with To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Ninotchka (1939).
Don't Be a Sucker! is very well done and all too relevant.
When I found it on Facebook, I said, "Thanks for the breadcrumb trail, past Nazi-fighters!"
The 1994 Little Women isn't my favorite film adaptation of the book (mainly because I don't buy Winona Ryder as Jo), but I do love Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer and Claire Danes as Beth.
I'd like to see it again; I saw it once in the theater, of which I have a vivid memory despite being able to remember not that much about the plot. Most of what I can recall is Jo and Bhaer and the subplot with her writing, so I'm guessing Ryder worked all right for me; my mental default, however, thanks to early childhood exposure, remains Katharine Hepburn.
I was just watching the 1949 version last night, which is my favorite, casting-wise, except for the rather jarring choice of Rossano Brazzi as Bhaer.
I don't think I've ever seen the 1949 version. Talk to me about the casting?
(Speaking of Paul Lukas, I rather like his version of Bhaer in the 1933 film.)
I think I liked him fine, but Gabriel Byrne somehow wound up being definitive.
no subject
The 1949 version of Little Women has Margaret O'Brien as Beth, and she's perfect. Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh are also great as Amy and Meg. June Allyson doesn't seem to get many kudos for her portrayal of Jo, but she does a great job at capturing Jo's tomboyish physicality. Peter Lawford is surprisingly good as Laurie.
Gabriel Byrne as Bhaer is hard to beat, even if he diverges fairly wildly from the novel.