Category: Uncategorized

Filmmaker Ken Burns turns 70

devastating — and distressingly topical

I’ve been watching films directed or co-directed by Ken Burns, for decades.

In an interview, possibly on 60 Minutes, he noted that his academic family moved frequently, including southeastern France, Delaware, and Ann Arbor, MI.

His mother, Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, was diagnosed with breast cancer when Ken was three and died when he was 11. He said that circumstances shaped his career. His father-in-law, psychologist Gerald Stechler, shared a significant insight: “He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.”

From the Wikipedia: “In 1977, having completed some documentary short films, he began work on adapting David McCullough’s book The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Developing a signature style of documentary filmmaking in which he ‘adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid, linear fashion [and] then pepped up the visuals with ‘first hand’ narration gleaned from contemporary writings and recited by top stage and screen actors,’ Burns made the feature documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981), which was narrated by McCullough, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States.”

The films

I saw Brooklyn Bridge well after the fact, and The Civil War (1990) ss it came out. But it was with Baseball (1994) that I fell in love with his style. Someone gave me the accompanying book, which is at arm’s length in my office.

I had to watch Thomas Jefferson (1997), Jazz (2001), The Central Park Five (2012), The Roosevelts (2012) – I even have the soundtrack),  Jackie Robinson (2016) and The Vietnam War (2017) because of my great personal interest.

Here’s the blog post I wrote about Country Music (2019).

Then Hemingway (2021), because I didn’t know much about him, and Muhammad Ali (2021), because I thought I knew almost everything about him, but I did not. Benjamin Franklin (2022) was not that engaging to me.

The U.S. and the Holocaust (2023), which I’ve begun watching, is an exciting choice. Had he not covered this territory in The Roosevelts and Defying the Nazis? But it is powerful stuff.

THR’s review called it “devastating — and distressingly topical. Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein’s six-hour PBS documentary explores what the United States did and could have done in response to the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust.” Here is A Conversation With Co-Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick On Authoritarian Parallels. A CBS Sunday Morning piece is interspersed with info re: wildflowers, but it’s easy to skip to the interview.

Ken Burns considers himself a patriot. When he appeared on Finding Your Roots in 2014,  he was pained to discover that he had a Tory sympathizer as an ancestor who fought for the British during the American Revolution.
In 2015, around the time of the rebroadcast of The Civil War, he noted on Morning Joe that the Confederate flag issue was not really about heritage.

In the fall of 2022, I received a mass email from Ken Burns.

It was a pitch to vote for incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) for reelection. She won in November 2022.

What I bought recently

J Alum Tee Shirt

My old blogging buddy Greg Burgas, who I’ve been following since late 2005, writes about what he “bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed.”

In that spirit, here’s what I bought recently. I mention this while, at the same time, I keep saying I’m not going to buy ANYTHING except consumables: food, dish detergent, et al. So if I purchase something, it should bring me joy, in the word of Maria Kondo.

 Jeopardy Contestant Season 1-38 Alumni Tee Shirt. I was on Season 15. I recently went to an ’80s trivia night with several local Jeopardy alums. It was in honor of the birthday of Jay, who was wearing one of those T-shirts. As one customer who bought one from the Etsy site wrote, “It was the perfect example of ‘I didn’t know I needed that until I saw it.’” Incidentally, we led through the competition but lost when we muffed the final question about the first CD pressed in Japan in 1982.

PBS

Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. I recorded this on the DVR in the fall of 2022, but it remained unwatched. I waited for my wife to view it with me until July 2023. It’s “a four-part series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people.”

While it addressed discrimination issues, it also lifted the sources of “Black joy,” from art, music, and literature to HBCU Greek organizations, barbershops, and beauty shops. I was so taken by it that I bought the DVD so my wife and/or daughter could watch it at leisure.

African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, 1778-1990 (paperback, 1992) by Emerson I Moss. I bought it solely because it mentioned my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Patterson, thrice, albeit briefly. He was a very impressive man, and I will write about him in due course. I’ve also purchased many other books, none of which I have read to date. I got the new Paul Simon album, Seven Psalms, which is very good. 

Sept 1972: Pete Seeger, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden

lettuce boycott

In two weeks in September 1972, I saw Pete Seeger, Jane Fonda, and Tom Hayden twice each.

Mon 11 Sep – Hitchhiked from New Paltz to Poughkeepsie to Nixon-Agnew headquarters to pick up some literature. [Even then, I always was interested in what the opposition was saying.]

Th 14 Sep – Congressman Howard W. Robison (R-Owego) was in town in his newly expanded district, supporting Nixon and the two-party system.

Mon 18 Sep – “I go to Nixon hq where I receive a warm reception.” [What was that about? Did they think I was a Nixon backer? Maybe they recognized me from my previous visit.]

My ex-roomie Ron, friend Mark, a guy named Bob, and I go to the Main Building auditorium. But the event is so significant that it’s moved to the Main Quad. There were several activists, including lettuce boycotters from the United Farm Workers. Jane Fonda talked about Hanoi. Tom Hayden said: “Unless Nixon thinks that down is up, we aren’t winding down the war.

Then the Okie, Mark, friend Alice and I went to a Kingston auditorium for another event with UFW reps, then a short play. Pete Seeger sang If I Had a Hammer, Land of A Thousand Songs, Songs For The Rifle, and Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag. Terry Morse (or Morris), “a black guy with a nice voice, but nervous,” sang A Better One and We Shall Be Relieved. He and Seeger sang Down By the Riverside.

An A.M.E. Zion pastor emceed and talked like a “Trinity A.M.E. Zion [my home church] pastor, including taking the collection.”

When Jane Fonda “discussed the anti-personnel weapons, I got very depressed and felt like crying.” The program broke up by 10:30 after Pete sang This Land Is Your Land.

Reportage

I checked the Kingston Freeman reportage on this. Yes, there were two different events on the same day. The first sentence in the story: “There is probably truth to the rumor that Jane Fonda had an easier time getting into North Vietnam than Kingston’s Municipal Auditorium.”

The bizarre story involved getting an insurance policy, which ended up in US District Court. Later, the agreement of a “12-hour period” of the policy wasn’t made clear, and the lawyer working on it was unavailable because of Yom Kippur. Ultimately, one of the organizers had to drive from Poughkeepsie to Kingston with the amended document and court order before the doors could be opened.

Given the fact that I remember SO many things clearly about 1972, I’m really surprised that seeing Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden TWICE in one day is not one of them.

On another matter, if you want to write to complain about Jane Fonda going to North Vietnam and posing on a tank, know that she has apologized repeatedly for that lapse, so I don’t feel the need to relitigate it here.

More Pete

Th 21 Sep – Mark and I went to see a speaker named Patrick O’Neill. “Anti SST, pro-NASA, anti-Lockheed type aid, pro-pot legalization, anti-pot decriminalization, likes Nixon only for his court choices, fears McGovern election like the San Francisco earthquake.”

Fri 22 Sep – Went to see Pete Seeger concert. He told tales about miners and farmers. Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag, Land of A Thousand Songs, Train to Nuremberg, Walk This Lonesome Valley, Vote Song, The Young Woman and the Lie, Turn Turn Turn, Peart Bog Soldier, Guantanamera, Wimoweh, Old Glory, Hobo’s Lullabye, Casy Jones, Little Boxes, , Banks Are Made Of Marble, D-Day Dodgers, The Farmer’s First Wife, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Yodel Song, The Water is Wide, If I Had A Hammer, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. Encore: This Land Is Your Land. I knew I had seen Pete a lot, but I didn’t realize it was twice in one week.

Other things were happening, including attending class, negotiating a marriage with the Okie, and hanging out with friends.

Lydster: trajectory

bus expert

The daughter at six

The trajectory of my daughter’s development has always been interesting. When she was in her first year or so, the experts had those milestones that babies should reach. I found them an okay reference but never fretted about them.

She was “cruising” -walking by holding onto furniture, like a sofa or coffee table, by seven months, typically at eight to twelve months. The term, BTW, is one I had never heard until her pediatrician used it.

She started walking when she was about 15 months, when “the book,” said it should be around 12 months. But we weren’t really sweating it.

I was more likely to worry about later issues, which I probably mentioned at the time. I specifically recall her learning to write by sounding out the letters in kindergarten, but she was very distressed that the words were not spelled correctly.

COVID was hard for all of us in the household, especially her. Her lost socialization was particularly difficult to rectify.

So it pleases me that, being home for the summer after her first year in college, she’s getting herself up instead of her father having to awaken her. She’s mastered taking the buses to work and home. Her experiences with co-workers, managers, and customers have been an education she shares most evenings.

BLM

It’s also interesting to see her through other people’s eyes. A medical professional I saw for the first time this month told me they saw my daughter at the Black Lives Matter rallies she helped organize after George Floyd died in 2020. They identified the nearby corner where the rallies occurred and were pleased that such passionate young people took up the future.

I’ll miss her more when she returns to college than when she went there in her first year. She is very engaging, smart, funny, and personable. When I tell her I love her, she’s willing to mutter that she loves me too.

Random unrelated thoughts

tumult

Kelly wrote a brief blog post titled Random unrelated thoughts that are actually quite related.

I had been musing on the same theme.  Specifically, his second point: “Americans are very, very, very bad at seeing how societal problems tie into one another.”

ITEM: Per this 2021 article:  “The gas tax has not been raised in 28 years, and America’s infrastructure network is suffering the consequences. The tax was last raised in 1993 from 14.1 cents to 18.4 cents per gallon, where it remains today.

“Because the gas tax is not pegged to inflation, its purchasing power has eroded significantly over the past 28 years, and the tax is now ‘worth’ 45 percent less than in 1993; if the tax had been indexed for inflation each year since 1993, it would be approximately 15 cents higher in 2021.”

This is why the vast infrastructure bill became necessary. And of course, certain people – OK, Republicans – are taking credit for a bill they voted against. But there would have been no need for the massive legislation if the gas tax had been raised periodically. 

Living wage

ITEM: The federal minimum wage for covered nonexempt employees has been $7.25 per hour since 2009. That is insane. Several states have a higher threshold.

When market pressure to raise wages occurred, the general argument was why that kid working at Mickey D’s should make $15/hour. It became a shock to the system for many employers. 

However, employers would have more easily absorbed the increase if the rate had increased incrementally.

A related topic: the ideal CEO-to-Employee Pay Ratio. This article notes that “The phenomenon of firms with overpaid CEOs and underpaid employees is not new. In 1977, the late Peter F. Drucker, arguably the most famous management thinker, suggested the pay ratio between CEOs and employees be a maximum of 25-to-1.

“However, in 2011, he scaled it slightly back to a ratio of 20-to-1. Drucker said at the time: ‘I have often advised managers that a 20-to-1 salary ratio is a limit beyond which they cannot go if they don’t want resentment and falling morale to hit their companies.'” Yet the ratio is ten times that.  Hospital executives are overcompensated, while nurses are underpaid, for example.

From THR. “A-list actors are known to pull in larger paydays, but SAG-AFTRA advocates for all of its 160,000 members, including background actors, singers, dancers, and stunt performers. Only 12.7 percent of SAG members make the annual $26,470 needed to qualify for union health insurance, according to some guild members. Actors made a median salary of $46,960 in 2021.”

Meanwhile, “when he re-upped at Disney as CEO, [Robert] Iger’s 2023 pay package was valued at $27 million. [Warner Brothers’ David] Zaslav’s 2022 compensation package hit $39.3 million.” So Iger is making over 500 times the median SAG salary, yet calls the unions’ demands “just not realistic.”

Democracy

ITEM: With more indictments of djt come more defenses by the usual suspects. The former prez speaks with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, “who leads the House GOP’s messaging efforts,” and their responses parrot their handler. The term “unpresidented” – I mean unprecedented  – is thrown around a lot. No president has been charged so often.  

But this article from Foreign Policy was helpful. “Trump is just one of 78 political leaders in democratic nations who have faced criminal charges since the year 2000.”

“In the past five years alone, South Korea has convicted two of its former presidents on corruption charges… Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of bribery in 2021…  Just last year, former President of Bolivia Jeanine Añez—who stepped forward as a proposed interim president in 2019 following the resignation of her predecessor, Evo Morales—was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She was accused of illegally taking over the presidency.

Bibi

Possibly most instructive: “Prosecuting a former leader can also ignite political tensions and destabilize domestic politics. One of the most contemporary examples is Israel, where the charges of corruption against Benjamin Netanyahu sparked a political crisis in 2019 that continues to run its course. It resulted in a tumultuous power swing that saw five elections in four years with Netanyahu returning as prime minister in December 2022 despite his legal troubles. It’s unclear whether he’ll be found guilty, or whether the courts could enforce a guilty verdict.

“Now back in power, Netanyahu has proposed a sweeping judicial overhaul that would give him final say over judge appointments and his government the power to overturn Supreme Court decisions. The proposal led to mass protests this year, and opponents call it a conflict of interest as Netanyahu remains a criminal defendant.”

When leaders aren’t held to account, bad things can happen to democracy.

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