Posted on 06/05/2004 8:19:15 AM PDT by Pokey78
I bought a Glenn Miller CD the other day. Impulse purchase. I'd careered off the highway and into the mall to grab a big geopolitical analysis book I suddenly needed and, as I dashed in the store, I ran straight into a new best-of-Miller compilation they had on display. I had a long drive till past midnight ahead of me and it seemed just the thing.
They'd had a lot of it on the TV last weekend: featurettes about Washington's new World War II memorial, plenty of interviews with veterans and plenty of period music in the background. Though, of course, if it's your period, you don't think of it as period music. I'd caught a snatch of that marvelous, confident bounce of ''Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree (With anyone else but me)'':
''. . .I just got word
From a guy who heard
From a guy next door to me
The girl he met
Just loves to pet
And it fits you to a tee. . .''
For younger readers, I probably ought to explain that Glenn Miller was a bandleader, and when America joined the war he persuaded the brass to let him run an Army Air Force band to pep up the spirits of the boys far from home. He died in December 1944 when his plane came down over the English Channel en route from London to an engagement in France.
For older readers who've been watching the D-Day anniversary celebrations, I don't need to explain a thing. I shoved the Miller compilation in the CD player and up came his theme tune, ''Moonlight Serenade.'' I was driving through the mountains on a beautiful blue moonlit night, which ought to fit the tune perfectly. But it doesn't. That warm, sweet sound is linked to wartime forever, even for those of us who weren't there and know it only as the incidental music to films and TV drama. The serious jazz guys are sniffy about the Miller sound. That clarinet lead with the tenor saxes playing along an octave lower can sound awful cloying in large doses, but, if the mood's right, it's gorgeously romantic. It's the music oozing across a crowded floor in the dying moments at a palais de danse in southern England, and you're pressed together till the final bar because tomorrow you're shipping out . . .
Flash forward 60 years: The old Allies are gathered at Normandy for the D-Day anniversary at a time when we're well into a new war. This time around, the only pop star in uniform is Madonna. On her current world tour, she wears a blue burqa and, when she disrobes, as she inevitably does, she's wearing a U.S. army uniform underneath. Geddit? The Taliban and the Bush administration are both equally oppressive, see?
Not so long ago, Madonna knew her place. It was hanging naked over a wall with her bottom in the air and a German wolfhound giving her the come-hither look while a gay dance troupe cavorted in the background. See Page 67, if memory serves, of her 1992 picture book Sex. If only Madonna went to as much trouble to take a novel position when it comes to war. But no, there's only the usual lazy vapid soul-deadening equivalism: Bush, Saddam, Ashcroft, Mullah Omar, what's the diff? The herd mentality of celebrity ''dissent.'' Would it kill 'em once in a while to dissent from their dissent and try something other than the stultifying orthodoxy of Hollywood cardboard courage?
Sixty years ago, it wasn't just the love songs. James Lileks wrote a column last week about an old Disney cartoon in which Donald Duck gets drafted and assigned a million potatoes to peel. So he carves the skins into the word ''PHOOEY.'' As Lileks says, ''It takes a confident culture to take the average gripes of the enlisted man and put them front and center.'' A ''confident culture'' is exactly the right expression: so confident it could acknowledge soldiering as a disruption both comic (KP) and painful (faraway sweethearts). It's not fake, it's not rah-rah, but it's in tune with the moment.
Once again, flash forward six decades: We've been in the new war now for almost three years, and, unlike Donald Duck and Bogey and Bergman, and Eleanor Powell tapping her patriotic heart now, Hollywood has absolutely nothing to say on the subject, except for a couple of Michael Moore crockumentaries.
I went to see ''The Day After Tomorrow'' the day before yesterday, and it's a hoot, highly recommended -- the best enviro-doom comedy I've seen in years. The director, Roland Emmerich, has made an entire career showing famous Washington and New York landmarks getting destroyed by space aliens (''Independence Day'') and underwater monsters (''Godzilla''). Before 9/11, this was cheesily opportunist. Now it just seems perverse. When the Chrysler Building comes crashing down due to a freak cold snap brought on by Dick Cheney (I hope I'm not giving any plot details away), it's the reductio ad absurdum of the lengths Hollywood's willing to go to avoid saying a word about the fellows who actually did bring down a New York landmark.
Even when some hapless studio exec accidentally options a property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it -- like Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears -- the first thing they do is change the enemy to German neo-Nazis. Imagine it's 1943, you're in a script meeting about ''Casablanca,'' and Jack Warner says, ''I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we reset it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?''
Something has gone badly wrong when (with the exception of a few country songs) our popular culture visibly recoils from the biggest event of our time. Hollywood has plenty of ''courage'' when it comes to Michael Moore conspiracies or Madonna's bottom. But ask them to make a post-9/11 thriller in which Americans are the good guys and the enemy is, well, the enemy, and they'd tell you there's no audience for it. Just like they told Mel he'd lose his shirt on ''The Passion of the Christ.'' It's not about economics, it's about the loss of that ''cultural confidence'' James Lileks wrote about.
Which is a big problem, because the smarter Islamists have figured out that's the way to beat us. Imagine our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at ceremonies 60 years from now: Where's the soundtrack?
This is sad, and more than a bit frightening. When the majority the media do not believe we are the good guys, it becomes more difficult for the general public to remember that we are, in fact, the good guys.
Date conservatives.
Another problem with producing good Art, is that a lot of what needs saying has already been said many, many times. Sure, you can find myriad ways to express age-old themes, but who's really living the age-old themes? Who really would like them to be revived? Not near the majority, if you ask me.
The theme of love is virulently manifested in the inability of 1/2 of the population to stay true to their commitment, their word, and they don't want to have the theme of an all-enduring love brought back around, IMO; too much to think about, too much of an indictment against the call for them to live a life of abandon, be filled w/self-esteem, etc. This of course doesn't apply to the men and women who are divorced, but would have given everything to tough it out, if the other partner had been willing. Unfortunately, I don't think these people represent a large portion of that 1/2 of the population.
Maybe we produce bad art, because a whole lot of people don't really want it, they see it as harsh judgement.
Pure grain alcohol and rainwater.
Didn't the band Three Doors Down do a video featuring US servicemen and women for their song "Here Without You?"
Many. But it's your relationship, not mine. :-)
And if there was a song from The War, it was "I'll be seeing you."
Like everybody who wasn't gimpy, Johnny Carson served. His last week on the air, he put on some amazing shows. One night, Bette Midler performed not one, not two, but four songs, accompanied by some comely ladies in mermaid suits. I always forget one, but I recall "Miss Oda Regrets," "One for My Baby," and in closing, "Here's That Rainy Day." I could have sworn I saw Johnny wipe away a tear at the end of that song, but he did it in such a subtle way, I've never been absolutely certain.
The last night wasn't a normal show at all, but a camera following Johnny around for a typical day of producing the show. As far as I'm concerned, the penultimate show was his send-off. He had the surviving performers who had been his guests on his first show, in 1962 -- Mel Brooks and Tony Bennett. Bennett gave a beautiful, perfect rendition of "I'll be Seeing You," which was Carson's favorite song.
Thanks, Pokey!
"ask and you shall receive"
If he's anything like me, he drinks whatever he fancies.
Steyn is on target again. I refuse to listen to today's "popular culture". I'm listening to a compilation of Irving Berlin songs right now.
Thanks for the link - but it did not link to what I wanted to ready ie. what Steyn was refering to. It must be in the archives I guess ~ Do you know the name of it?
Country sure is different from days of old. I recently discovered it via XM. I find much - not all - of it to affirm the values I believe in, and also to have a very high level of creative musicanship.
Thanks one more time for the unexcerpted Pokey Ping! Steyn for--well, for the highest office he qualifies for.
Best. Column. Ever.
LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!
I'm glad you were able to work MY favorite line into your tag! Steyn is brilliant, as always.
I have only seen the ads on TV, don't plan to see the movie, but would like to see your comments on the "flood" scenes. The twenty-story high waves coming around the corners of New York skyscrapers seemed eerily similar to the waves of smoke and debris that hit New Yorkers on Sep 11, 2001.
Since it is INNNSENNsitive to show video of the real 9/11,(At least that is what the controllers of TV-footage have told us!), I think this moviemaker is mocking Americans during these scenes. How did they affect you seeing it on a big screen?
Well, I have a strange way of looking at scenes like that - I was thinking about all the complex computer programming and design that went into trying to make the waves look authentic :-).
But one thing that struck me as odd was that no buildings collapsed. You would surely think that the kind of force represented by those waves would collapse a lot of buildings and turn NYC into a pancake. It's quite possible that the filmmakers consciously decided they didn't want to create another 9/11, but it's equally plausible that making the city a pancake would have so obviously killed everyone in the city, including our heroes, that it was just not viable as a plot device.
You might remember that the 1993 attack on the WTC was supposed to cause the tower to fall horizontally towards the other tower, destroying them both. This didn't happen, and in the case of 9/11, the two towers collapsed with remarkably little damage to the surrounding area. In the case of a giant tidal wave affecting New York, I can't see the buildings not collapsing into each other, in a remarkable echo of was was supposed to occur in the 1993 plot.
The point many reviewers made was that the people who died were like ants and props, and you really didn't feel anything for them. My opinion was identical to the reviewers. There's something ugly about such a huge desensitization of death.
In thinking about your question with the tidal waves being echoes of 9/11, I didn't think about it at the time, but there were some scenes that did look remarkably similar. That's only in reaction to your question, though. I was more involved in the moronic actions of the characters at that time than anything else. It's likely, though, that the events are not comparable because The Day After Tomorrow was made on such a grandiose scale - even the World Trade Centre towers are pretty small compared to having the whole island of Manhattan as your canvas.
The plot was so poorly thought out and riddled with inconsistencies as to make even the special effects feel oddly moot. If your suspension of belief doesn't work for the plot, the special effects are likewise diminished for you. At least that's how I saw the movie.
Did that help?
D
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