Prayer

The fuzzy man over there in the corner, gazing away from his iPhone 6: Is it Lee Harvey Oswald?

That question has been the raging controversy within the JFK research community since the 50th anniversary of Dallas. Called "Prayer Man" because he seems to have his hands together as if in prayer, what we are looking at are the front steps of the Texas School Book Depository building 15 to 20 seconds after the fatal head shot(s). If that is LHO on the TSBD entrance, then obviously he is not six floors up firing bullets into Kennedy.

On this, I've done a 180. First I thought: no way. Prayer Man is just too stocky, too short, and too balding to be Oswald. Now I'm sure it is Oswald. Watch this movie by Australian researcher Bart Kamp and I think you'll be convinced as well.

(WARNING: very arcane, inside-baseball stuff regarding the assassination.)



For those wanting more, here's a brilliant two hours between Mr. Kamp and brother Rob Clark.

The Doctor

First broadcast two weeks after the dawn (the dusk) of Raygunism, Dr. Johnny Fever -- faced with the choice of soul and struggle vs. stupidity and cash -- makes the right move. We weren't so lucky.

A beautiful (and one-hour) WKRP in Cincinnati from February 7th, 1981.

White Heat

She is darkness, love, magic, passion, spirit, mystery, lustre, the sacred -- from a world where the blood has a different throb. And what is she (Simone Simon) tortured and finally murdered by? White bread efficiency and workload, Park Avenue psychoanalysis, the daily, the practical, the shadowless. She murders too: a preposterously roué analyst who sets up a secret rendezvous with her, but cannot come close to satisfying her lust. Irena’s refusal to sleep with Oliver (Kent Smith), her husband, is a blank space in the movie. For he is sexless (or gay), yet she seems to truly love him. Or perhaps it’s merely her fatigue toward being separate and alone. Her real tragedy. And ours ~ the literal driving lust out of the wind and out of the attic, out of all the lost primitive places.

Cat People (1942) is Jacques Tourneur’s first masterpiece and bears comparison to his greatest work, Out of the Past from five years later: Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) is also destroyed by the pull between the darkness of Kathie (Jane Greer) and the bland safety of Ann (Virginia Huston). It was made during the fatal turn the culture took from the screwball gangster Berkeley 30s toward the Mrs. Miniver/Going My Way 40s, when Hollywood (with major, major exceptions) moved strongly toward Greer Garson and Gregory Peck, away from Cagney and Lombard. As the husband, his future wife (Curse of the Cat People), and the soon-to-be-devoured psychiatrist bloodlessly decide to put Irena away, so too did movies lock away the speed, joy, mad love, and wit that made them great, as we shifted into the ever monotonous and slowing Forties. (With major exceptions.)

Comfort

So let us celebrate our sure-to-be-snowy and frigid New York Spring with a beautiful episode from a perfectly beautiful first season. The show did shift over time. They lost and added too many characters. Mary Richards became too much of a (pre-)Yuppie. Too many boyfriends marched in and marched out. . .

But that's the future. This is where it began and the cheer, kindness and gentility of the first years seem to be from another dimension. A masterpiece of popular art, when it was great.

American pop culture was once as sweet and human as this? My gosh. . .