Gibbon’s great work presents a staggering parade of crimes and horrors throughout the “civilized” world over the course of a thousand years or so. It makes the crimes and horrors of ISIL seem mild and contained by contrast — but also gives a harrowing preview of what the world could easily become again if fanaticism and negotiation through unrestrained violence take the upper hand. Throw in the crimes and horrors that will ensue from the effects of global warming, and The History Of the Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire becomes essential reading to prepare ourselves for a new millennium of ubiquitous human catastrophe.
You and I will see only the beginning of this epoch of catastrophe, but it will go harder with ours than with later generations because we will remember a time before the calamity became irreversible.
Paul Zahl finds the time to tell her and reports on it here:
About Paul and Mary’s Excellent Adventure
It came upon a midnight clear! It came so suddenly clear that I knew I had to do something.
It was that song, that old forever song: “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You”.
I’ve always wanted to sing it to Mary, “in the morning, when we rise” (Donovan) and at “The End of the Day” (Kinks). That single song’s enough to make babies and make you say, “I do”.
What was the name of the group again? Wait a minute. It was Orpheus. The name of the band was Orpheus. So when a promo ad on WNEW (Boston) said that Orpheus, seed-bed for the greatest love-song ever sung, was going to play a one-night set, with orchestra even, at the Berklee School of Music, well, “I’m already gone” (Eagles).
It had to be a surprise, though. Mary couldn’t know. If possible, she had to be swept off her feet. At least that was my idea.
Well, I did get her to Boston. It wasn’t easy, and she kept saying, “Why are we going north on 95 when we’re supposed to be going south?”
We finally arrived. Just two blocks down from Commonwealth Avenue, which is pure Tarkington on the Back Bay, was the Berklee Performance Center. The line wasn’t long — this wasn’t going to be The Last Waltz. But there were enough people. They were all Orpheus fans.
Can I just say something about Orpheus? Orpheus was a band headed by Bruce Arnold and produced by Alan Lorber in the late 1960s. Orpheus made four great records, the most popular single from which was “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You.”
Bruce Arnold said that his two strongest influences were Elvis Presley and Henry Mancini.
I’d say especially Henry Mancini.
These are hard songs to sing, hard songs to perform, hard songs even to understand. Lots of orchestration, good melodic hooks, off-sides lyrics with a little mysticism thrown in, and the steady theme of boy-meets-girl-and-is-changed-forever.
You listen to the songs for more than five minutes and you want to kiss somebody. Just YouTube the other ones — “Big Green Pearl”, “Music Machine”, and “Love Over Here”. Everything’s on iTunes.
The concert itself? Mary and I were in the sixth row. I would say it had its good points, especially the concluding signature number. We’d both also say that the band’s resources were a little thin in relation to the aspiration. Orpheus’s songs are big productions, with many elements inter-locking. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and 30 guitars and keyboards could barely do these songs justice live. So the hopes of the audience and probably the hopes of the performers were not quite realized.
Except at the end, when sweet Bruce Arnold, basically alone on a tall stool, sang, and sang, then sang again, “Can’t Find the Time to Tell You”. Every couple in the place was leaning into each other by the time he finished.
The ushers, too.
Mary and Paul had their picture taken with Bruce, above, and Paul had a brief chat with him:
“That’s just it!” Bruce is saying. “I’m an Episcopalian, too!”
Which goes to show you never can tell, as Chuck Berry once reminded us, and it’s the same with kids today — you never can tell what they’re going to get up to, even when they’ve been married a zillion years, with three kids and enough grand kids to field a baseball team.
Perhaps there are more haunted houses in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world. They are haunted by the fears of their former owners. They smell of divorce, broken contracts, studio politics, bad debts, false friendship, adultery, extravagance, whiskey and lies. Every closet hides the poor little ghost of a stillborn reputation. ‘Go away,’ it whispers, ‘go back where you came from. There is no home here. I was vain and greedy. They flattered me. I failed. You will fail. Go away.’
I’ve watched the new Blu-ray edition of Gone With the Wind twice now, once on its own and once with Rudy Behlmer’s excellent and informative commentary.
The film, for all its flaws, is incredibly entertaining, but the sheer visual beauty of it has at times almost reduced me to tears. The beauty is not rooted in its expressive style but in its technical virtuosity — the Technicolor photography, rendered with unprecedented precision through digital restoration, is simply breathtaking.
The techniques of lighting and framing and camera movement are as brilliant, in their way, as any performance in the film, as any passage of dialogue, as any achievement of art direction — the craftsmanship on display in the photography is as moving as the story.
It’s easy to see Vivien Leigh or Margaret Mitchel or David Selznick as Gone With the Wind‘s crucial auteurs, but if you don’t see Victor Fleming, the film’s principle director, and Ernest Haller, the film’s principle cinematographer, as auteurs of equal importance, you’re just not looking hard enough.
Legendary reporter Adela Rogers St.Johns once asked legendary boxer Jack Dempsey what qualities were needed to be a champion. Dempsey said, “There are only two. You’ve got to be able to do it at ten minutes after ten in Madison Square Garden on a Tuesday night, and you’ve got to be able to get up off the canvas when you can’t.”
I met Dempsey once in the 1970s and got his autograph at his restaurant on Broadway in New York City. Saying that feels like saying that I met Achilles once and got his autograph down by the Greek ships at Troy.
Such men no longer exist in our world and may never exist in the world again.
Well, for one thing they’re all chick flicks of one sort or another, The Exorcist being the least conventional of them — a horror film but a chick flick all the same, with two females, a mother and a daughter, at the center of it and all the male protagonists in supporting roles. The others are romances told principally from the point of view of women.
They also represent six of the ten highest grossing films of all time, in adjusted dollars.
Think about that, consider it in light of contemporary Hollywood’s deep, almost instinctive mistrust of chick flicks. You realize that this mistrust is not rooted in commercial calculation but in the prejudice of the collapsed males who run Hollywood — not in money but in the fear of strong women by men with little teeny tiny dicks.
Edgar Allan Poe had a good death. He was found lying in a gutter in Baltimore, wearing someone else’s clothes, too delirious to explain how he’d gotten there in that condition. He died in a hospital four days later, never recovering sufficiently to explain the course of his latter days. He kept crying out for “Reynolds”, a person whose identity has never been established.
Gone With the Wind arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina on 26 February 1940. The whole world was abuzz about the film, which was already on its way to becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, in adjusted dollars. (The Birth Of A Nation may well have made more money but complete box office records for it have not survived, so we will never know.)
Nowhere was the buzz more intense than in the South, anxious to experience the romantic vision of antebellum Dixie that lived, however preposterously, in most Southern hearts. Young Southern women were going to see the notorious Scarlett O’Hara in action, courted by none other than Clark Gable, the screen’s premiere heart throb, as Rhett Butler.
An advance ad for the film in Wilmington’s The Morning Star read, “Wilmington and East Carolina Welcome Gone With the Wind With Open Arms!”
My mom (pictured today at the head of this post), who grew up in Wilmington, was 14 years-old at the time and she and some girlfriends had plans to go downtown to see the film on its opening day. It would not be like any other trip to the movies.
The film was playing at The Carolina, Wilmington’s premiere movie palace, located on the corner of Market Street and Second, just blocks from her father’s, my grandfather’s, men’s clothing store on Front Street. The Carolina had a marble-faced lobby and a whites-only policy — it was too classy to admit blacks, even in a special segregated section.
Gone With the Wind would be playing in a modified road-show presentation, carefully negotiated by the film’s producer and part-owner David O. Selznick and its distributor and part-owner MGM. There would be two “continuous run” showings per day, at 10am and 2pm, priced at 75 cents a ticket, three to five times the price for a regular movie. (Continuous run meant that you could go into the theater in the middle of the first show and sit through the first half of the second show — the seats weren’t reserved.)
At night it was reserved seating only, with tickets priced at $1.10. (These could be bought in advance at a furniture store downtown.) Because the movie ran nearly four hours, a transportation company had arranged for special buses to ply the regular city routes after hours, picking up patrons in front of the theater at 11:45 at the end of the 8pm show.
It was an event, a big event. My mom was beside herself with excitement about it. But the night before the opening, her father decided that he would not allow her to see the movie. He was a fairly strict Baptist, who would not permit card playing in the home on Sundays and did not approve of movies, even the grand Southern epic that was Gone With the Wind. My mom was devastated.
In her 80s she still remembered the moment vividly. “I went to sleep that night,” she told me, in hushed tones, “thinking I wasn’t going to see Gone With the Wind.” The dashed dreams of a 14 year-old girl are not small things, and they don’t grow smaller after a mere 70 years.
The next morning, however, her father had changed his mind — he relented and let her go see the movie with her friends, and she became one among millions enchanted by that marvel of popular art when it was brand new.
Her impressions of that first showing — she’s seen it several times since — are vague, but she always remembered that it had an intermission. An intermission!
In a press release issued with little fanfare, The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has confirmed that it’s possible to contract Ebola through reading about it online or watching CNN’s coverage of the epidemic.
Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers, insists there is no cause for undue concern as long as people moderate their online reading and CNN viewing and keep a careful watch for symptoms.
