April 2018 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Columbine plus 19 – school walkout

They’d rather go to class than get shot.

There were school shootings before April 20, 1999, when two high school students opened fire at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20.

In 1927, the Bath School disaster in Michigan took place, when 38 elementary schoolchildren and six adults were killed by Andrew Kehoe, the 55-year-old school board treasurer.

The University of Texas tower shooting in 1966, which I wrote about in this blog, as one of the earliest events of pure horror I remember quite vividly. Yes, there was the JFK assassination in 1963, but that was one man killed, and another wounded. This saw 13 dead and 31 wounded before police killed Charles Whitman.

It wasn’t until Columbine that there were double digit fatalities again. It was followed by Virginia Tech April 16, 2007, with 32 killed, 17 wounded. At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, December 2012, 26 plus the shooter ended up dead, including 20 young children, with two wounded. And that doesn’t count the many “lesser” horrors.

It’s the Parkland High School survivors who have mourned the 17 dead, and want to support the 17 physically wounded, and a far greater number wounded emotionally, who have changed the narrative from “thoughts and prayers.”

Today, on the 19th anniversary of Columbine, students will walk out of classrooms in an estimated 2600 schools across the United States to protest for gun reform. The organizers for the National School Walkout intend to call attention to the broken promise of “never again,” yet the mass shootings continue.

Students are encouraged to leave their classrooms and gather at 10 a.m. to hold a moment of silence for the victims of gun violence, setting aside 13 seconds to honor those killed at Columbine.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve read pieces suggesting that the students are partying under the guise of protest. I’ve even seen articles that equate the action with the unofficial cannabis holiday today, that the kids are just slackers that would rather get out of math than go to school.

It is the incorrect pairing. They’d rather go to class than get shot. Some action, notably in Florida, has taken place, but more needs to be done.

Movie review: Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)

The dystopian visuals are nevertheless beautiful, so as to make you almost forget how trenchantly political it is.

Isle of Dogs. “I love dogs.” When we finished watching this stop-motion-animated film at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, I asked my wife what she thought the movie was a metaphor for. It may have been the wrong question.

It was, we decided, a response to a lot of things such as the abuse of power – by Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) and the manipulation of the masses in a government conspiracy, mechanization, plus a whole lot of other interesting things. Your list may vary.

Still, it was, in the end, primarily about a 12-year old boy named Atari (Koyu Rankin), nephew of the mayor, looking for his beloved pet on an island of trash. He meets some amicable, helpful canines, Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum), and the less friendly street dog Chief (Bryan Cranston).

The voice cast also includes Scarlett Johansson as the dog Nutmeg, Tilda Swinton as Interpreter Nelson, and Greta Gerwig as Tracy Walker from Ohio, with the dulcet tones of Courtney B. Vance serving as narrator. Plus Akira Takayama, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Ken Watanabe, Liev Schreiber, and Yoko Ono as Assistant-Scientist Yoko-ono.

Interesting to me is that even some of the more positive reviews (91% on Rotten Tomatoes) thought the film was distant. Mick LaSalle wrote: “We stay on the outside, admiring its originality and all the talent that went into it, without ever really finding our way in.” Not our experience at all.

The dystopian visuals are nevertheless beautiful, so as to make you almost forget how trenchantly political it is. There is taiko drumming at the beginning and the end that we found absolutely hypnotic.

I’m not savvy enough about the Japanese references to ascertain whether director Wes Anderson should be chastised for cultural appropriation. I will note that the female dogs didn’t have as much to do with the storyline.

Nevertheless, we liked Isle of Dogs a lot.

Hope & Fury: MLK, The Movement and The Media

Not only is the promised land he glimpsed still over that mountaintop, the mountain is much higher than any of us could have imagined.

There are uncomfortable parallels between the deaths of Emmett Till and Philando Castile, as the special “Hope & Fury: MLK, The Movement, and The Media” pointed out. The special was broadcast on NBC-TV March 24, but I didn’t get a chance to watch it until a week and a half later.

Emmett Till, who narrator Lester Holt suggested every black person in America knows about – is that true? – was a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago who was visiting his uncle in rural Mississippi. He was lynched on August 28, 1955, after a white woman said that she was offended by him in her family’s grocery store. She has only recently recanted that tale.

Philando Castile was shot and killed by a local Minnesota police officer after the car was pulled over on July 6, 2016, with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in the vehicle.

In the Till case, it was the decision of Emmett’s mother Mamie to allow, nay, insist on photographers to take pictures of her now-misshapen son. In the Castile case, girlfriend Diamond Reynolds had the wherewithal to livestream ten minutes of video via Facebook.

The MLK special also noted the fickle nature of the mainstream press. It was only the black press that covered some of the seminal stories of the civil rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955/56.

“When MLK’s peaceful protests aren’t covered by the national media in Albany, Georgia, he organized a children’s march in Birmingham, Alabama, making for some of the most powerful, iconic imagery of the civil rights movement.”

In general, the MSM was attracted if the action included white people – the freedom riders, e.g., or they can establish a clear good guy/bad guy narrative, as in the children’s march, when dogs and fire hoses were unleashed.

“Hope & Fury” pointed out the parallels between the bloody Selma march of March 7, 1965, and the demonstrations occurring after some young black children and men, with the social media-savvy demonstrators willing to challenge the accepted narrative in the latter case.

As Arthur noted: “The USA has so very far to go before achieving Dr. King’s dream. Not only is the promised land he glimpsed still over that mountaintop, the mountain is much higher than any of us could have imagined.”

O is for being optimistic, in spite of myself

More women are running for office in the United States

I’m pretty much on the record that “being optimistic” and I are at an arm’s length relationship.

This past Friday, I was feeling particularly satisfied at work, as I got five reference questions and two or three blog posts done. I was really enjoying the eclectic music I was playing, which included Al Green, Willie Nelson, Joss Stone, Ella Fitzgerald, Iggy Pop, and Glen Campbell, all of whom have April birthday, plus latter Johnny Cash. What a rush.

So naturally, the ride home was EXTREMELY annoying. This woman was on her cell phone, screaming at her off- and on-again boyfriend “Rodney.” Not only did I hear her, ten rows away, the whole damn bus heard her imaginatively vulgar, eight-minute rant that I wished I had recorded, it was so memorably obscene. Well, everyone heard it except, apparently, the bus driver, who drove on obliviously.

Isn’t it always the way? When I’m feeling good, something has to come along and ruin it? But just as I was looking at this as a bummer of an event, harshing my mellow, I discovered something else. There was this odd camaraderie among the passengers, at least the ones within my line of vision.

And we analyzed aloud, since she couldn’t hear us over the sound of her own voice, the nature of her relationship with Rodney. She kept saying – no exaggeration, at least a dozen times – that she didn’t care about him. But that were the case, why not just hang up on the jerk?

About four stops after she got off, some guy comes on the bus and announces, to no one in particular, that passengers on a bus represent a “microcosm of society.” Several of us laughed and said, “You have no idea!”

Earlier that day, I happened to run into a woman I’d met in a bookstore, a friend of a friend. I told her that I needed to write something for my blog by Tuesday, that usually I’ve written SOMETHING long before then. But she said she was optimistic that I would get it done.

Initially, I was going to write about things that make me feel optimistic, such as the healing, and persistent, power of kindness or how Great Britain is now a Fox News-free zone or how more women are running for office in the United States.

But I was optimistic that I could get to 300 words without describing those sentiments at great length. And I did.

For ABC Wednesday

Monsieur Verdoux by Charlie Chaplin

The film Monsieur Verdoux was met with controversy when it was released in April 1947.

Charlie Chaplin was a beloved film actor for many years, though by the time he made Monsieur Verdoux, not so much.

He portrayed a character eventually known as “the Tramp” as early as 1914. Chaplin designed him as a “contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large… I added a small moustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression.” The persona became a worldwide marketing phenomenon.

He fought for, and won, more control of his films, wanting to spend more time on his creations. He joined forces with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith to form a distribution company, United Artists, established in January 1919.

He spent much of the 1920s and 1930s making his classic silent features such as The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times, eschewing the talkies. He also was personally becoming more political in both in Modern Times and 1940’s The Great Dictator, for which he used spoken dialogue.

His personal life, often messy, became more so with the FBI indicting him for allegedly violating the notorious Mann Act, which “prohibits the transportation of women across state boundaries for sexual purposes” with a young woman named Joan Barry. Though acquitted, Chaplin had to pay her child support.

“The controversy surrounding Chaplin [age 54] increased when, two weeks after the Barry paternity suit was filed, it was announced that he had married his newest protégée, 18-year-old Oona O’Neill – daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill,” his fourth wife. “The couple remained married until Chaplin’s death [on Christmas Day 1977], and had eight children over 18 years.”

“In April 1946, he finally began filming a project that had been in development since 1942. Monsieur Verdoux was a black comedy, the story of a French bank clerk, Verdoux (Chaplin), who loses his job and begins marrying and murdering wealthy widows to support his family. Chaplin’s inspiration for the project came from Orson Welles, who wanted him to star in a film about the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. Chaplin decided that the concept would ‘make a wonderful comedy’, and paid Welles $5,000 for the idea.

“Chaplin again vocalised his political views in Monsieur Verdoux, criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction. Because of this, the film met with controversy when it was released in April 1947; Chaplin was booed at the premiere, and there were calls for a boycott.

Monsieur Verdoux was not popular in the United States. It was more successful abroad, and Chaplin’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. “He wrote in his autobiography that it was the cleverest and most brilliant film I have yet made.’

“He was publicly accused of being a communist… Chaplin denied [it], instead calling himself a “peacemonger”, but felt the government’s effort to suppress the ideology was an unacceptable infringement of civil liberties.”

In that context, watch some of Monsieur Verdoux, which 30 of 31 critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave positive reviews.

Marilyn Nash with Chaplin

Monsieur Verdoux’s seduction technique

Monsieur Verdoux Ending Scene [SPOLER ALERT!]

MONSIEUR VERDOUX – Charles Chaplin [2 hours]

Also: Charlie Chaplin Documentary – The Forgotten Years (2003)

Today is the 129th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s birth