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THE FUNNY PAPERS: PEANUTS
Complete runs of most of the great strips from the Golden Age of American comics have been or are being issued in excellent editions by the likes of Fantagraphics Books, IDW Publishing and Sunday Press Books. I’m a collector of many of these reprint series, working my way through them with great pleasure. Here’s a report on my progress through The Complete Peanuts:
I’m in early stages with this strip, in the middle of 1953. The tone of the strip at this point, wry and genial, is still a bit bland. The center of the strip, Charlie Brown, has taken full shape as the good-natured but anxiety-ridden everyman he will remain, but the characters around him have yet to coalesce into iconic figures, though Snoopy is closing in on iconic status.
Charles Schulz, Brown’s creator, still seems to see the strip as a series of observations on childhood, not on Life Itself — in short, the universe of the strip has not yet become mythic. But it’s getting there.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
. . . won’t be showing you this image, the cover of the first post-massacre edition of Charlie Hebdo. Keep in mind that The New York Times also failed to expose the WMD fantasy that the U. S. used to justify the war in Iraq, or the Wall Street corruption that led to the crash of the world economy in 2008.
Isn’t it time for The New York Times to just go away? The moral and professional collapse of the Times is more disturbing to me than Islamist assaults on the free press.
As R. Crumb recently put it, “You don’t have journalists over there [in America] anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.”
That’s the great irony of the Islamist assault on the free press in the West — it’s attacking a hollow puppet of the plutocracy.
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FIRST KISS
. . . from Intolerance — maybe the sweetest and most touching in movie history.
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R. CRUMB
. . . who lives in France, is putting his life on the line publishing cartoons like this.
But, hey — we in the West are hypocrites, with plenty of innocent Muslim blood on our hands. Who are we to condemn radical Islam for placing a great artist like Crumb in that kind of jeopardy?
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PITTSBURG 1938
With thanks to Paul Pearson . . .
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ESSENTIAL
D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, from 1916 is — not to put too fine a point on it — the greatest movie ever made, maybe the greatest movie that ever will be made.
Pauline Kael summed up the film eloquently and passionately when she wrote:
Intolerance is like an enormous, extravagantly printed collection of fairy tales. The book is too thick to handle, too richly imaginative to take in, yet a child who loves stories will know that this is the treasure of treasures. The movie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium — lyrical, passionate, and grandiose. No one will ever again be able to make last-minute rescues so suspenseful, so beautiful, or so absurd. In movies, a masterpiece is of course a folly. Intolerance is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography — to do alone what all the other arts together had done. And to do what they had failed to.
Fabrizio del Wrongo of Uncouth Reflections, who understands Griffith’s art as well as anyone currently writing about film, recently praised the the new Cohen Entertainment high-def restoration of Intolerance, so I bought the Blu-ray of it and it has exceeded all my expectations. It’s just miraculous — almost as good as watching a fine 35mm print in a theater.
Griffith’s images make you want to jump out of your chair and into the magical spaces they conjure up, and this Blu-ray makes you feel you could actually do it.
A copy of it belongs in every civilized home. It’s the most important Blu-ray that has ever been released.
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A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
A PICTURE FROM THE ROAD
. . . by Jae Song.
In Big Bend National Park, Texas.
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R. CRUMB WEIGHS IN
With thanks to Sir Barken Hyena . . .
FAREWELL
. . . to a steady, reliable, charming actor.
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WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW
A miraculous Christmas present — an album of four songs from the soundtrack of The Bells Of St. Mary’s, on two 78s pressed in 1946. Some surface noise after a perfunctory cleaning but otherwise a rich, full sound, at least as good as the sound of an LP.
THE CHRISTIAN LEGACY OF RELIGIOUS TERRORISM
Western Christians should not be smug about radical Islam. John Calvin was a religious terrorist and murderer every bit as vile as the Muslim gunmen who killed twelve people in Paris on 7 January. Today, he is revered as a saint by the Anglican Communion.
We rightly urge Islam to condemn the horrific acts done in its name, but those who continue to revere the monstrous Calvin cannot rightly join in this call. Their hands still drip with the blood Calvin caused to be shed in the name of Jesus.
John Calvin was a sinner, like the rest of us, as deserving-undeserving of forgiveness as the rest of us, but celebrating him as a saint is one reason Christianity remains a moral joke in the modern world, with no authority to condemn the religious murders carried out by Muslims.
Incidentally, Martin Luther, even more revered than Calvin by modern Christians, did not believe in murdering people for harboring private beliefs he considered blasphemous. He did believe in murdering them if they expressed their beliefs in public utterances. He and the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo staff were thus on the same page, morally speaking.
FAITH
. . . that can’t tolerate ridicule or abuse is planted in shallow, stony soil.