Advice for the New Year

Merry

Comrades

A bevy of true humans and actual progressives (Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté, Ben Norton, Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal, Diego Sequera) rap for three hours about the soon-to-be-installed War Sissy Reich.

Blue Christmas

Chris Hedges and the great Diana Johnstone: "Wrecking the Left"

250!

Happy Birthday, Ludwig!

A fine appreciation by Verena Nees and Peter Schwarz.

Claudio Arrau's immortal "Appassionata."

 

Dark Holiday

James Harvey -- along with Chris Fujiwara, Tom Gunning, David Bordwell, and Raymond Carney (except when Carney's writing about Capra) -- is one of my film writer/historian Gods. There is so much to learn from reading (and re-reading) Professor Harvey's three masterpieces, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood (1997), Movie Love in the Fifties (2002), and Watching Them Be (2015). Word is that Harvey's currently wrapping up a history of the Western to be published by Farrar Straus, and based on Movie Love's astonishing analysis of Johnny Guitar and The Lusty Men it is a release devoutly to be wished for.

The knockout punch for me in first reading Movie Love was the chapter on a forgotten and very hard-to-find (thank you, Karagarga) WWII noir called Christmas Holiday, directed by my favorite noir director Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady, Cobra Woman, The Suspect, Spiral Staircase, The Killers, Dark Mirror, Criss Cross, Cry of the City) and written by the ever-strange Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Perhaps Siodmak's most famous sequence, Phantom Lady (1944).



Or maybe the opening to The Killers (1946).



James Harvey:

The script that Herman Mankiewicz supplied for Siodmak's Christmas Holiday had some resemblances to his Academy Award-winning Citizen Kane screenplay. It has the same skewed chronology, the same overlapping flashbacks; and entering it is a bit like stepping into a labyrinth (one of Welles's favorite movie metaphors), mostly because it begins so far away from its main story and characters. It's almost fifteen minutes before the star and central character appears or is even spoken of. In the meantime, there are (the opening scene) an OCS graduation ceremony (even a speech); a scene in the barracks with a young lieutenant (Dean Harens) getting a Dear John wire from his fiancée; a passenger-plane flight through an electrical storm; a forced landing in New Orleans; and the soldier getting a room at a hotel where people are all sleeping in the lobby (it's wartime and it's Christmas Eve). In the hotel bar he meets a friendly, half-soused newspaperman, Simon Fenimore (Richard Whorf). You got troubles? I'll take you to the Maison Lafitte, says the newspaperman. What's the Maison Lafitte? "It's a -- well, let's face it -- it's a kinda joint a little way outta town."

It looks like a Wolf Man outtake when we get there: a crumbling porticoed mansion in a raging night storm, overarching trees bent by wind and rain in the foreground of a long shot, as the two men emerge from their car and struggle through the storm onto the front porch. But inside the entrance hall, it's light, with a Christmas tree by the door at the foot of a stairway, and a crystal chandelier overhead, as a maid in cap and apron takes their coats and lightning flashes through the windows, while a Dixieland band rides and rollicks on the soundtrack. And after all the neutral, generic places we've been looking at before this (from the parade grounds to the hotel room), getting to this one -- lush and lively and tacky all at once -- makes you feel the way a good song does when it finally gets to the chorus. Now, we know, we're really at the movies.

Buy the book.

Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday (1944).

Nothing

Chris Hedges:

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.         

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.

The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Anthony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as Secretary of State? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling” as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House’s economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?

 More.

100!

Happy 100th Birthday to the incomparable Dave Brubeck.