Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Woody Allen - Apropos of Nothing - Notes

First of all, the book has large type.  Easier on senior eyes!

Second of all, the memoir is very entertaining.

Most of all, I have long been a fan of Woody Allen.  His style of humor with the funny one-liners referencing literature and philosophy is my style of humor,  but he points out correctly that he is not an intellectual.  This is because his knowledge appears to be superficial just like mine.

He grew up in a Jewish environment in Brooklyn.  Woody Allen is New York thru and thru.  Of course now he lives at 84 in his beloved Manhattan with his beloved wife 30 plus years his junior.  His feet rest best on concrete rather than any part of nature.  One of his lasting quips is that he is at two with nature.
He claims a lower-middle class upbringing.  P. 1

He flunked out of New York University.  I am not surprised.  Again, not really an intellectual.

Began as a comedy writer.  This is his most basic talent.  King of the one-liners.
He worked on the Sid Caesar TV show in the 50's called "Your Show of Shows," which I have seen referenced many times over the years as classic TV with a super talented group of comedy writers.  Woody worked with Carl Reiner on this show.

Also did magic early on.  A lifelong lover of magic.

Had a run as a stand-up comedian.  This is what I remember when I read years ago that he was going to make movies.

Woody Allen's first of three wives was named Harlene. She was 17 and a philosophy student at Hunter College and Woody at 20 was just starting out as a comedy writer.
In retrospect he knew he married too young, but one incident early on was the tip-off.
"She taught me philosophy and I developed a crush on it. But the arguments we had over philosophy---free will and monads---weren't nearly as combative as the arguments within our marriage.
I knew I was in trouble, when, in a philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn't exist."
Philosophy can be dangerous stuff. Handle with extreme care.

Woody is a prolific name-dropper.  In this book he must mention every famous person he has ever met, and he seems to have met everyone.

He is a big NY Knicks fan as he carries 4 season tickets.

The greatness of S.J. Perelman.
He made Woody improve his vocabulary.  P. 96

He praises Mort Sahl, a comedian before my time.
Like Babe Ruth, you had to be there.  P. 104
Whatever he did as a stand-up was inferior to Sahl.  P. 105

He says that Philip Roth was a genuine intellectual whereas Woody was just a comedy writer turned movie maker.  Woody was interested in Roth to the extent that he provided Woody with comedy material.  This is a good point about Woody Allen.  He makes it clear that in his comedy was his main concern even though he made a few serious movies.  P. 180

He plays clarinet in a jazz band for many years.

Proud to proclaim over and over that he is an existentialist pessimist.

The biggest section of the book is his defense of Mia Farrow's charges that he abused their daughter Dylan.  No doubt Woody was publicly smeared in the matter.  Innocent Mia gets credit for adopting so many vulnerable kids, including Soon-Yi, and yet Woody describes the horrible way she treats them, including his wife.  He points out that every investigation of the matter clearly proves that he  did not molest Dylan.  He seems to have an ironclad case.  Woody is innocent.

One of the surprising things I learn in this book is the many, many, movies he has made over the years.  I had no idea he had produced so many films.  Most of them apparently never appeared in Birmingham.

His young wife Soon-Yi is a wonder woman.  He says they have been happily married for over 20 years and have adopted two kids.

Idealizes Tennessee Williams.  The thing he most envies?  Writing Streetcar.

Finally:



Shared with Close FriendsWoody Allen summarizes his life in his marvelous just published autobiography, combining serious with humor. He is my writing hero. I identify totally with this man. My humor role model.

"How would I sum up my life? Lucky. Many stupid mistakes bailed out by luck. My biggest regret? Only that I've been given millions to make movies, total artistic control, and I never made a great film. If I could trade my talent for another person's, living or dead, who would it be? No contest---Bud Powell. Though Fred Astaire's right up there. Who in history do I most admire? Shane, but he's fictional. Any women? There have been so many I've admired, from standards like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman to Mae West and my cousin Rita, I'll finally say Soon-Yi. Not because if I don't, she'll kneecap me with the rolling pin, but because she hit the cruel streets alone at five to try for a better life, and despite dreadful obstacles made one for herself. The thing I most envy? Writing "Streetcar." If I had my life to do over, would I do anything different? I would not purchase that miracle vegetable slicer the guy advertised on TV. And really, no interest in a legacy? I've been quoted before on this, and I'll leave it this way: Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment." P. 392



Shared with Close FrienWoody Allen summarizes his life in his marvelous just published autobiography, combining serious with humor. He is my writing hero. I identify totally with this man. My humor role model."How would I sum up my life? Lucky. Many stupid mistakes bailed out by luck. My biggest regret? Only that I've been given millions to make movies, total artistic control, and I never made a great film. If I could trade my talent for another person's, living or dead, who would it be? No contest---Bud Powell. Though Fred Astaire's right up there. Who in history do I most admire? Shane, but he's fictional. Any women? There have been so many I've admired, from standards like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman to Mae West and my cousin Rita, I'll finally say Soon-Yi. Not because if I don't, she'll kneecap me with the rolling pin, but because she hit the cruel streets alone at five to try for a better life, and despite dreadful obstacles made one for herself. The thing I most envy? Writing "Streetcar." If I had my life to do over, would I do anything different? I would not purchase that miracle vegetable slicer the guy advertised on TV. And really, no interest in a legacy? I've been quoted before on this, and I'll leave it this way: Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment." P. 392


By - No comments:

Saturday, June 27, 2020

Lincoln's Complicated Legacy


Lincoln’s motivation was to save the union. According to the Library of Congress, in response to a challenge in the New York Tribune by the journalist Horace Greeley that he take a clear stance on abolition, Lincoln had provided a response stating, “If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
In his speech at the 1876 statue unveiling, Douglass exposed Lincoln’s legacy. “Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory,” Douglass said, “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
-De Neen Green/WaPost
By - No comments:

Friday, June 26, 2020

James Carville on Biden's VP pick

"I’ve said before in a kind of exaggerated way, I don’t care. Pick Sarah Palin. I’ll be for her too. I just want to win this thing."
By - No comments:

Five Crises


America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once

This is not the time to obsess about symbolism.
Opinion Columnist
Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.
Second, all Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. This education is continuing, but already public opinion is shifting with astonishing speed.
Third, we’re in the middle of a political realignment. The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The most telling sign is that the party has even given up on itself, a personality cult whose cult leader is over.
Fourth, a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology: History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed. Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Fifth, we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression. State and household budgets are in meltdown, some businesses are failing and many others are on the brink, the continuing health emergency will mean economic activity cannot fully resume.
These five changes, each reflecting a huge crisis and hitting all at once, have created a moral, spiritual and emotional disaster. Americans are now less happy than at any time since they started measuring happiness nearly 50 years ago. Americans now express less pride in their nation than at any time since Gallup started measuring it 20 years ago.
Americans look around the world and see that other nations are beating Covid-19 and we are failing. Americans look around and see state-sponsored violence — rhetorical and actual — inflicted on their fellow citizens. America doesn’t seem very exceptional.
In times like this, you’ve got to have a theory of change.
The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement. This movement emerged from elite universities, and its basic premise is that if you can change the cultural structures you can change society.
Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to language, statues, the names of buildings. They pay enormous attention to repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age of social media because it’s very performative.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
The Social Justice activists focus on the cultural levers of power. Their most talked about action is canceling people. Some person, usually mildly progressive, will say something politically “problematic” and his or her job will be terminated. In this way new boundaries are established for what has to be said and what cannot be said.
The Social Justice activists sometimes claim that if you don’t like their tactics then you are not fighting for racial equity or economic justice or whatever. But those movements all existed long before Social Justice affixed itself to them and tried to change their methods.
The core problem is that the Social Justice theory of change doesn’t produce much actual change. Corporations are happy to adopt some woke symbols and hold a few consciousness-raising seminars and go on their merry way. Worse, this method has no theory of politics.
How exactly is all this cultural agitation going to lead to legislation that will decrease income disparities, create better housing policies or tackle the big challenges that I listed above? That part is never spelled out. In fact, the Sturm und Drang makes political work harder. You can’t purify your way to a governing majority.
The Social Justice methodology is ultimately not a solution to our problem, it’s a symptom of our problem. Over the last half century, we’ve turned politics from a practical way to solve common problems into a cultural arena to display resentments. Donald Trump is the ultimate performer in this paralyzed arena.
If you think the interplay of these five gigantic changes is going to fit into some neat ideological narrative, you’re probably wrong. If you think we can deal with a racial disparity, reform militaristic police departments and address an existential health crisis and a prolonged economic depression by taking the culture war up another notch, I think you’re mistaken.
Dealing with these problems is going to take government. It’s going to take actual lawmaking, actual budgeting, complex compromises — all the boring, dogged work of government that is more C-SPAN than Instagram.
I know a lot of people aren’t excited about him, but I thank God that Joe Biden is going to be nominated by the Democratic Party. He came to public life when it wasn’t about performing your zeal, it was about crafting coalitions and legislating. He exudes a spirit that is about empathy and friendship not animosity and canceling. The pragmatic spirit of the New Deal is a more apt guide for the years ahead than the spirit of critical theory symbology.
By - No comments:

Sunday, June 21, 2020

The CSA


GETTY / THE ATLANTIC
Americans are now debating the fate of memorials to the Confederacy—statues, flags, and names on Army bases, streets, schools, and college dormitories. A century and a half of propaganda has successfully obscured the nature of the Confederate cause and its bloody history, wrapping it in myth. But the Confederacy is not part of “our American heritage,” as President Donald Trump recently claimed, nor should it stand as a libertarian symbol of small government and resistance to federal tyranny. For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. The C.S.A. was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent.
The Confederates built an explicitly white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and antidemocratic nation-state, dedicated to the principle that all men are not created equal. Emboldened by what they saw as the failure of emancipation in other parts of the world, buoyed by the new science of race, and convinced that the American vision of the people had been terribly betrayed, they sought the kind of future for human slavery and conservative republican government that was no longer possible within the United States. This is the cause that the statues honor.
The decision of slaveholding states to secede, to separate from the United States, was the culmination of a 30-year effort to protect the right to hold property in persons—the institution of slavery. It came in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election, the first of an openly antislavery candidate and party. From December 1860 to April 1861, seven states left the Union, led by South Carolina; four more did so after the war began, in April 1861, while four slaveholding states remained loyal. The architects of secession knew that there was no recognized constitutional right to secede and that they risked war. As one Alabama opponent put it, “No liquid but blood has ever filled the baptismal font of nations.” The seceded states immediately went on a war footing, seizing federal forts and arsenals and launching massive arms-buying campaigns in the U.S. and Europe.
Nascent Confederates were candid about their motives; indeed, they trumpeted them to the world. Most states wrote justifications of their decision to rebel, as Jefferson had in the Declaration of Independence. Mississippi’s, called the “Declaration of Immediate Causes,” said bluntly that the state’s “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” The North, it said, was advocating “negro equality, socially and politically,” leaving Mississippi no choice but to “submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money or … secede from the Union.”
In late February 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, the seven breakaway states formed the C.S.A.; swore in a president, Jefferson Davis; and wrote a constitution. That constitution aimed to perfect the original by dispensing with all the issues about slavery and representation that had plagued political life in the former U.S. The document recognized the constituent states as sovereign entities (though it did not confer on them the right to secede, confirming Lincoln’s point that no government ever provides for its own dissolution). It put the country under God and mandated a one-term presidency, of six years. It purged the original of euphemisms, using the term slaves instead of other persons in its three-fifths and fugitive-slave clauses. It bound the Congress and territorial governments to recognize and protect “the institution of negro slavery.” But the centerpiece of the Confederate constitution—the words that upend any attempt to cast it simply as a copy of the original—was a wholly new clause that prohibited the government from ever changing the law of slavery: “No … law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” It also moved to limit democracy by explicitly confining the right to vote to white men. Confederates wrote themselves a pro-slavery constitution for a pro-slavery state.
Shortly after this constitution was written, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the C.S.A., offered a political manifesto for the slaveholders’ new republic. Training his sights on the eight upper-South states that were still refusing to secede, he offered a blunt assessment of the difference between the old Union and the new. The original American Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” he explained. But “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural … condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great … truth.” A statue of Alexander Stephens now stands in the U.S. Capitol; it is one of a group that includes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, targeted for removal.
The war brought a terrible reckoning for the Confederate States of America, subjecting it to the military test of the Union armies and the political judgment of its own people. The C.S.A. was a nation built on a slim foundation of democratic consent: Of its total population of 9 million, only about 1.5 million were white men of voting and military age; the rest—white women and the enslaved—formed the vast ranks of the politically dispossessed. Political consent, and popular support for the war effort, were accordingly shallow.
The C.S.A. was a fraction of the size of its enemy. The Union had 10 times its manufacturing capacity, and its population of 22 million dwarfed that of the Confederacy. It quickly became clear what such imbalances meant: The Confederacy had to exert unsupportable demands on its population, and to build up a powerful central-state government to do what the private sector could not.
After one year of war, the Davis administration was forced to adopt the first conscription act in American history. Because enslaved men were not available for military service, it was forced to mobilize a far higher proportion of white men. By the end of the war, a staggering 75 to 85 percent of white men ages 15 to 55 had served. Combined with the exemptions the government was forced to make for slaveholders, conscription quickly gave rise to charges that it was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”
The C.S.A.’s level of military mobilization was unsupportable in an agrarian society. By 1863, the government faced a starvation crisis and a wave of food riots organized by white soldiers’ wives protesting the government’s military policies. The Confederacy adopted a series of highly intrusive taxes, labor regulations, and impressment policies. Nobody loved Jefferson Davis when they had to live under his government. The modern embrace of the C.S.A. as a symbol of states’-rights government is particularly ironic in light of its history.
The Confederate States of America went to war against the United States to secure the enslavement of people of African descent into the indefinite future. Confederate leaders claimed that slavery would prove a strength in wartime, but it did not. To the contrary, enslaved men, women, and children seized the opportunity the war offered to make their own history, turning the war to save the Union into a war of liberation. They made their military value abundantly clear. One Confederate officer complained that the South was waging war with the Union army in front and “an insurrection in the rear,” advising the leadership to try to win the loyalty and military service of the enslaved with promises of freedom. The Davis administration would belatedly make some abortive efforts to recruit enslaved men to save the slaveholders’ republic, one telling indication of how incoherent the national project had become. But it was the U.S. government and armies that won enslaved peoples’ allegiance and service—securing, in return, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the defeat of the Confederacy.
The Confederacy went to war against the United States to protect slavery and instead brought about its total and immediate abolition. By April 1865, the C.S.A. was in ruins, its armies destroyed. The cost in human life was devastating: at least 620,000 dead—360,000 from the U.S. and 258,000 from the C.S.A. On April 9, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant accepted the unconditional surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia.
Whatever way you look at it, it is impossible to turn this history and its leading figures into a part of American heritage. Founded in an act of treason against the government its leaders had sworn to protect and serve, the Confederate States of America and its white-supremacist government waged a four-year war against the United States of America and the principles Americans value most highly.
This is the cause that Confederate statues commemorate. This is why white supremacists arrive armed to prevent their removal, as they did in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2015. And it is why they are a target of Black Lives Matter protesters in their campaign for racial justice and a crucial part of the conversation about the legacy of slavery in American life.
By - No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)