Song Lyric of the Day (Landesman and Wolf, on “All the Sad Young Men,” With Applicable Thoughts on the Great Recession)

“All the sad young men

Choking on their worth

Trying to be brave

Running from the truth.”--“The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” by Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf

Yesterday, driving around my hometown, the “space available” signs, both for office and retail space, were in far more plentiful supply at this time of the year than I’ve seen in ages.

Yet the Great Recession, I think, may have its most indelible effect elsewhere, on the MBAs who came out of grad school with visions of making a grand killing with one of the major financial institutions, only to find now that they’re out of a job. The hard times call into question all the assumptions they may have had about the business world in which they hoped to play a major role. Dreams die hard.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, on the Weather)

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”—Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

Hey Bob, sometimes the weatherman has trouble knowing which way the wind blows!

How else to explain this past weekend in my neck of the woods, when Northern New Jerseyites such as myself were warned sternly by newscasters to batten down the hatches—only to see some areas pummeled, while others (such as mine!) emerged with barely a flake (except the human variety that already existed in force anyway)? In some cases, as a guy standing in a foot of snow said on the Weather Channel on Saturday, “It’s only a matter of miles” between hours of backbreaking shoveling and being home free.

You’d think, after all these years, that weather personnel would figure all this out. After all, on this date in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law an act establishing the U.S. Weather Bureau (renamed a century later by what it goes by now, the National Weather Service).

For once, Congress got it right, instructing the Secretary of War, in its original Joint Congressional Resolution, “to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms."

There it is, present at the creation, the agency’s reason for being: predicting storms. Only over the years, they’ve had a little bit of a hard time with that.

Weathermen, see, have all kinds of contingencies linked to their forecasts. If the cold front from Canada meets the cold front from Ohio…if the hot air from the Gulf Stream meets that nor’easterer…if temperatures drop to 32 degrees when that Midwest storm hits the Mid-Atlantic…

If…If…If….What’s with all the ifs? What am I, listening to a Rudyard Kipling poem or something?

Actually, no. All the ifs serve a rational purpose: the continued gainful employment of people who study a “science” in college but, for all their unaccountable lack of success at predicting sun vs. rain, might have been better off sticking to alchemy, the subject that Sir Isaac Newton pursued in secret for decades. (With good reason: ever since biographers ferreted out this hobby, modern scientists have continually asked: What was he, nuts?)

Invariably, because of all those “ifs,” we’ll hear something about a “50% chance of a blizzard.” That kind of a dodge, meteorologists think, enables them to preserve their aura of scientific credibility.

But I’m afraid that all it does is create a lot of meteorological agnostics—people who, after one too many watch-that-blizzard or watch-that-hurricane prediction that doesn’t come true, even adopt a skeptical attitude.

People, that is, like the New Yorker I heard on the radio this morning who, when told of the latest Major Meteorological Event coming our way, enunciated the frustrations of many: “They said it was gonna be a blizzard the other day, and there ain’t no blizzard.”

And this is for 24-to-48-hour forecasts. Five-day forecasts, under these circumstances, become positively laughable. I bet that more than a few of the irate consumers of weather information are global-warming skeptics, too.

(Me, I don’t know—like 99% of adult Americans, I never studied meteorology in college. I don’t pretend to know if we’re on the Road to Climate Perdition. But isn’t it better not to take a chance with Mother Nature?)

Local TV newscasts have been wise for years about the growing orneriness of viewers. Their marketing professionals have been cluing them in that, rather than see some high-forehead, high-IQ guy getting people seriously ticked off about a storm that’s will alter plans for the weekend, viewers would much rather watch someone with a –pardon me!—sunny disposition, just in case the worst doesn't happen.

In other words, a lot of guys sitting in front of their TV sets won’t mind being had so long as some eye candy is involved. A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down, as the song goes.

This Day in Film History (Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” Released Amid Controversy)

February 8, 1915—Posterity knows D. W. Griffith’s epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction as The Birth of a Nation, but its original title when it opened at Los Angeles’ Clune’s Auditorium gives a far better idea of its incendiary nature: The Clansman.

When I saw the film for the first time in a New York City revival house in the 1980s, many members of the audience giggled helplessly at moments undoubtedly intended to be serious by director-producer Griffith. You couldn’t blame them—the stereotypes about carefree slaves, freedmen turning state legislatures into chaotic dens of corruption, and dastardly carpetbaggers were ridiculously out of place in a nation utterly transformed by the 1960s civil rights revolution.

But this silent masterpiece was more than a cinematic catalogue of the alleged abuses of Reconstruction. In its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man, it is one of the most blatantly racist films in all of cinema.

Its enormous success (from 1915 to 1946, approximately two hundred million people viewed the film in the United States and overseas) helped spark the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as riots by outraged African-Americans at its Chicago and Atlanta premieres.

Yet, though the film served as a dismayingly effective promotional vehicle for the KKK, it also raised the profile of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then only six years old. NAACP leaders initially urged Griffith to edit objectionable scenes. When his response proved inadequate, they mounted protests against the film. (The L.A. premiere only came off at all because Griffith got a sympathetic judge to overturn a ban urged by the NAACP.)

As I briefly mentioned last month in my post on Gone With the Wind, a film that covered much the same ground as Griffith’s, producer David O. Selznick went to great lengths to avoid the controversy that plagued Birth of a Nation As much as anything, the later Oscar-winning blockbuster represented the attempt by novelist Margaret Mitchell, despite her racial prejudices, to see African-Americans as human beings—an ability utterly beyond the skill set of Thomas Dixon, author of the original source material on which the film was based, or, to a lesser extent, Griffith.

Griffith’s sensibility might have been immersed in hammy Victorian melodrama, but by delivering it in a package containing the most revolutionary elements of a nascent visual art form, he made audiences think they were seeing something fundamentally new: their history rendered in unprecedented verisimilitude. Such is the magic—and illusion—of cinema.

Griffith’s three-hour movie—the longest feature film up to that time—sought to recreate with painstaking accuracy such events as Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Lincoln’s assassination in scenes labeled “Historical Facsimiles.” To film the battle of Petersburg with greatest accuracy, he even called on surviving Civil War veterans to lay out his set and to plan troop movements.

Such realism was so unexpected that President Woodrow Wilson reportedly called the film “history written by lightning.”

Lessening the impact of these scenes is the fact that the major historical figures in them seldom interact with the Stonemans and Camerons, the two principal fictional families in the film, who are really only representative figures of the North and South, not fully rounded characters with whom all audiences can identify.

Birth of a Nation is the first prominent example of Hollywood's tendency to endow the antebellum South with the same tragic grandeur of another fallen civilization: Homer’s Troy. Undoubtedly, much of this retrospective support arises from Americans’ affection for the underdog—in this case, a people who lost almost everything in the war. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that some of this fascination also results from what historians have called “the Southern myth” or “the myth of the Lost Cause.”

The Lost Cause took wing in the popular romances of novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, a former North Carolina Baptist minister. Their work, in the words of David Asbury Pryor, a biographer of Margaret Mitchell, “chronicled the lives of aristocrats associated with vast estates, slavery, and the knightly order of noblesse oblige.”

This vision of wisteria-and-magnolia gentility comforted generations of Southerners with the thought that their civilization was worth all the blood and all the dashed hopes. In picturing Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as unblemished heroes, it became a kind of civic religion.

Yet, just as most religions have demonologies, so the “Lost Cause” myth stigmatized Yankees who had crushed the South beneath the heel of its industrial might, blacks who were freed at the end of the conflict, and Southern soldiers such as General James Longstreet who were accused of failing the cause at critical moments.

For his tribute to the Lost Cause, Griffith turned inevitably to two novels by Dixon: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (1902), and The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). As a result, the movie, as noted by James Baldwin in his book-length film essay, The Devil Finds Work, “is really an elaborate justification for mass murder.”

Baldwin moves smoothly from the searing criticism of the above remark to the elegant satire of the following consideration of the film’s miscegenation theme:

“Neither of the two mulattoes had any sexual interest in the other; given what we see of their charms, this is quite understandable. Both are driven a hideous by a hideous lust for whites, she for the master, he for the maid; they are, at least, thank heaven, heterosexual, due, probably, to their lack of imagination.”

Griffith’s propagandistic historical fantasia nearly quadrupled its original $40,000 budget, but it more than made up for it with its box office: nearly $18 million made by the start of the talkies. Shrewdly, The Birth of a Nation was not launched so much as a movie as an event. For tickets of $2 apiece—jaw-dropping at the time—viewers could see a film that incorporated all of the following, and far more:

* subtitles that counterpoint imagery;:
* employment of fade-outs and cameo-profiles
* extensive cross-cutting
* use of parallel action and editing in a sequence.

The film's $18 million take by the start of the talkies made it the most profitable film for nearly two decades. But the price in Americans' historical understanding was outrageous.

Quote of the Day (Elmore Leonard, on Work)

“If work was a good thing the rich would have it all and not let you do it.”—Elmore Leonard, Split Images (2002)

Quote of the Day (Rowan Williams, on Theologians and Economists)

“You say theologians don’t talk about the real world. But sometimes in recent years, it’s the economists that don’t talk about the real world.”—Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, at “Building an Ethical Economy,” a three-day conference held at New York’s Trinity Church, pointing to “more and more recondite, metaphysical, unreal forms of wealth,” quoted in Paul Vitello, “Archbishop of Canterbury Challenges Wall Street on Its Home Turf,” The New York Times, January 30, 2010

Quote of the Day (Ethel Barrymore, on When You Grow Up)

“You grow up the day you have your first real laugh—at yourself.”—Actress Ethel Barrymore (1879-1959), quoted in Reader’s Digest, September 2009

In London, early in her career as an actress, Ethel Barrymore turned down a proposal from a smitten young man. Despite the fact that his family traced all the way back to one of England’s greatest generals, that his mother was a Brooklynite from a well-to-do family, and that he himself possessed considerable talent with words and aspired to be a politician like his father, she rejected him. It had something to do with her thinking he didn’t have much of a future.

The young man was Winston Churchill. After she herself was divorced, her judgment in men, I suppose, was one of the things she learned to laugh about.

On the other hand, it’s fairly easy to see what the future Last Lion saw in her. There was the sense of humor, hinted at in this quote. There was the family good looks (kid brother John was The Great Profile before drink ruined him, and the picture here reminds me a little of grandniece Drew).

And there was the shining talent, mostly glimpsed on the stage, but long enough on film that she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as the dying cockney mother worried about her aimless son in one of Cary Grant’s best films, None But the Lonely Heart.

Quote of the Day (Mike Lupica, on the Knicks’ Dick McGuire)

“Dick McGuire was the city game when it started with a good pass, with a good passer changing everything. He was the old 69th Regiment Armory on Saturday nights, the old Garden, he was Garden doubleheaders, college and pro. He was St. John's, Class of '49. Mostly he was a gentleman of his time in pro basketball, someone who worked for the New York Knicks for only 53 years.”—Mike Lupica, “Dick McGuire Was a True New Yorker and Knick Until the End,” New York Daily News, Feb. 4, 2010

Columnist Mike Lupica is at his best in this tribute to a virtual lifer at Madison Square Garden, a player, coach, scout and, at his death this week, senior consultant at the cathedral of basketball.

I’ve given up on the Knicks during this last lost decade of front-office mismanagement, coaching embarrassments, and player indifference that matched their bloated salaries. In contrast, the reserved Dick McGuire represents, as Lupica puts it, “the old kind of grace in sports, the best kind, the kind of grace where the top guys don't have to thump their chest and tell you all about it.”

A song called “When New York Was Irish” paid tribute to the Celtic impact on Gotham’s construction, politics and public safety. For what seems now like a brief, shining moment, Dick and Al McGuire—the only brothers in the Basketball Hall of Fame—made the city game Irish, too.

Al, with that Cagneyesque confidence and verbal energy, did it courtside with Marquette and in the broadcast booth, while Dick did so on the court, with precision passing and an unselfish style of play that led the Knicks to three successive NBA finals in the 1950s.

When his playing and coaching days were done, he continued to scout. He was responsible for the Knicks picking one of the building blocks of their Seventies championship teams, Clyde Frazier, as well as a point guard who eventually passed him among the team’s leaders in assists, Mark Jackson.

These days, when the Garden feels like a tomb, raise your eyes to the ceiling, where you’ll spot McGuire’s retired #15 (later worn by Earl Monroe), and hold in your mind, for as long as you can, the game at its best.