Oh damn. 2016 just keeps getting worse.
by digby
George Michael has died. He was only 53.
His “Last Christmas”
"what digby sez..."
Month: December 2016
Yum, yum Christmas feast
by digby
After pulling a probe thermometer from its thigh and tasting a piece of crispy golden-brown skin, Pope Francis began carving a slow-roasted 18-pound cherub for the Vatican’s annual Christmas feast, sources within the Holy See reported Sunday. “The cherub came out perfect this year! Look how tender that cheek meat is,” the pontiff said as he drizzled a generous ladleful of the gravy he had made from the divine pan drippings over several freshly cut slices of white meat, remarking on how moist and flavorful the angel had turned out after being brined overnight in a blood-of-Christ marinade.
“Who wants a wing? I got wings, thighs, you name it. And be sure to grab some host for sopping up the juices. Remember, whatever we don’t finish tonight will make for great sandwiches tomorrow.” Sources confirmed the cherub was the tastiest heavenly being the pope had prepared since last summer’s cookout in St. Peter’s Square, when His Holiness made beer-can seraphim on the grill.
Yes, it’s The Onion. Of course.
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
.
We’ll have to muddle through somehow
by digby
I’ve heard the song a million times and had no idea:
True, it’s not by Beyoncé or Adele or Rihanna. It’s not even by anyone still alive. But I would like to nominate “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as song of the year, because if any single tune reflects the miseries of 2016, and the anxious uncertainty with which we greet 2017, it is this 72-year-old holiday chestnut.
The song was introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a picture that was itself looking further backward, to the turn of the last century. If this sounds like a Russian nesting doll approach to nostalgia, well, that’s only one facet of the song’s 2016-ness.
Like you, I’ve probably heard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” dozens of times since Thanksgiving, and hundreds if not thousands of times more across previous holiday seasons. (Mileage will vary depending on how much time you log at Starbucks and CVS.) With its pretty, winding, bittersweet melody, which its co-author likened to a madrigal, and its lyrics about making the best of a rocky present with hopes for a better future, this unusually ambiguous Christmas song falls on the melancholy side of the moody-merry Yuletide music divide (the so-called Guaraldi Line).
To my taste, that is the side to be on, but until last weekend, I hadn’t paid much more attention to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” than I had to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” or the odious “Frosty the Snowman.” The occasion was one of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s annual Big Band Holidays concerts, where I found tears running down my cheeks during an especially plaintive version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” sung by Catherine Russell and arranged by the tenor saxophonist Victor Goines. Introducing the song, Ms. Russell mentioned that she was going to use its seldom-sung original lyrics, and indeed they proved not only unfamiliar but also — surprising in this generally jolly context — provocative.
The most common version of the song begins:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
Instead, Ms. Russell sang:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
That’s not just melancholy or bittersweet; that’s bleak, more “A Raymond Carver Christmas” than “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
[…]
The lyrics Catherine Russell sang at Jazz at Lincoln Center were the ones the songwriter Hugh Martin first tried to sell to MGM producers Arthur Freed and Roger Edens, who laughed when he played it for them, telling Martin, according to his autobiography, that he was “on the track of something good” but that the song “shouldn’t be a dirge.”[…]
“Meet Me in St. Louis” premiered in late November 1944, when the wars in Europe and the Pacific, though nearing their endgames, were far from over; the brutal German counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge would begin just a few weeks later. Amid loss, separation and uncertainty, lyrics from Martin’s softened rewrite such as “Someday soon we all will be together / If the fates allow” were poignant enough.
“Not quite all, we know that,” the critic David Thomson has written of what he calls “the saddest Christmas song there ever was.” When Garland performed it at the Hollywood Canteen not long after the movie’s release for an audience of soldiers and sailors who were soon to ship out, she brought the house to tears, or so legend has it.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has used the original lyrics before, including on the 2015 album “Big Band Holidays,” so it’s not as if someone fished them out of the trunk 72 years later to make a tart postelection point. I’m also well aware that our current challenges pale in comparison to fighting a world war with civilization in the balance. Let’s say we are somewhere on a continuum between that and facing a move from St. Louis to New York. Still, I have to confess the “it may be your last” line captured my near-apocalyptic mood — and maybe yours as well.
But the lyric that moved me to tears is the line that follows “If the fates allow” (and remained in Martin’s final lyrics):
Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
How prosaic, even homely as pre-rock era songwriting goes, and yet how perfect. Muddling through, somehow, may not sound particularly inspirational, but perseverance is often the best option at hand, when just moving forward, one inch or foot or yard at a time, can be a kind of heroism. At least that’s how it struck me listening to Ms. Russell, her deeply felt performance offering a subdued and cleareyed but still genuine optimism.
Is that a lot to hang on a single line from a Christmas song? Maybe. Frank Sinatra, feeling the lyric was too grim, asked Martin rewrite it when he recorded the song for his 1957 LP “A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra.” Martin came up with “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” a line that many other performers have used since. (Josh Groban bellows it on his lugubrious new recording of the song, which just hit #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart.) I prefer the older version, but there’s an implicit defiance in the Sinatra variant, a kind of valiant optimism — or maybe it’s go-down-swinging panache — which also suits blue-state moods this December.
In “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the catalyst for a happy ending: Tootie’s backyard rampage prompts her father to change his mind about the move, and we cut to a dazzling climax at the 1904 World’s Fair, electric lights and handsome beaus suggesting a fine future for all. Happy endings seem a little more remote in 2016 — miles away, as they say, or at least as distant as the next election. In the meantime, we muddle through. It’s a start.
It’s a good reminder that we’ve been through worse.
So far …
Nobody does it like Old Blue Eyes:
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
The most poorly worded official statement of the year?
by digby
I think this from the RNC today might just be it:
WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus and Co-Chair Sharon Day released the following statement celebrating Christmas:
“Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.
Actually that would make Trump more than a new King. Apparently, he’s the Second Coming.
And he seems to be angry:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2016
* Yes, they meant to refer to the “original” Jesus. But with these people you just never know. After all, Trump has been acting like he’s anointed by God.
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
Merry Christmas & Happy Hannukah
by digby
Peace on earth, good will toward men and a sense of humor.
We’ve never needed it more.
.
Beware of “Streets” bearing gifts
by Tom Sullivan
Photo by Pam Broviak via Creative Commons.
Are you tired of paying high prices? Are you interested in a little high-class beef? Do you want a bargain? Tell you what I’m gonna do.
Step up a little closer I don’t want to block the traffic.
Now, you look like a smart dame.
What’ll it be? I got sirloin, tenderloin, T-bone, rump, pot roast, chuck roast, oxtail stump.
I got a special on T-bone, 79 cents a pound.— Lucy and Ethel sneak into a butcher shop to sell beef out of a trench coat in “The Freezer” (I Love Lucy, 1951)
Water. It’s the next gold rush. Wall Streeters wants their cut. Trump administration infrastructure plans likely will include public-private partnerships whereby private equity will partner with beleaguered local governments. Municipalities reluctant to issue their own debt and starved of revenue by decades of “lower taxes” fever have let maintenance and capital expenditures slide. Public-private partnership deals promise “cost savings for citizens,” improved service, lower overhead, greater efficiency, “all without a tax increase or public expenditure,” the New York Times reports.
It sounds too good to be true and is. Taxpayers/ratepayers naively believe this means they will reap cost savings. But private equity firms add something to the drinking water municipalities don’t: profit margin. That profit is often guaranteed by contract, and in the range of “anywhere from 8 to 18 percent, more than what a regular for-profit water company may expect.” Public-private partnerships are premised on handing over the means for generating that profit — essential public infrastructure in the billions — to private equity firms and having them sell it back to the taxpayers who built it.
Are you tired of paying high prices? Do you want a bargain? Tell you what I’m gonna do.
To see how these deals are working out, the Times looks at three such deal, in Bayonne, New Jersey, and in Rialto and Santa Paula, both in California:
Water rates in Bayonne have risen nearly 28 percent since Kohlberg Kravis Roberts — one of Wall Street’s most storied private equity firms — teamed up with another company to manage the city’s water system, the Times analysis shows. City officials also promised residents a four-year rate freeze that never materialized.
In one measure of residents’ distress, people are falling so far behind on their bills that the city is placing more liens against their homes, which can eventually lead to foreclosures.
Those foreclosures come after unpaid debts are sold to collection agencies.
In water infrastructure alone, the nation needs about $600 billion over the next 20 years, according to federal estimates. And yet federal spending on water utilities has declined, prompting state and federal officials to try to play matchmaker, courting private investors to fix what needs fixing.
For years, the Obama administration has been cheerleading public-private partnerships. In a statement, the White House said it backed them “when they are well structured, include strong labor standards, and when there is confidence that taxpayers are getting a good deal.”
Federal officials, like their municipal counterparts, are taking the word of the same sophisticated pitchmen, many offering cash up front to government officials struggling to make ends meet. But ask Chicago about its Skyway and its parking meters. Ask Gov. Mike Pence about Indiana’s bankrupt, foreign-owned toll road. You can read more about public-private partnerships here and here and here and here.
Supposedly the “wave of the future,” public-private partnerships are failing from Bayonne to the South Bay. But are they really failing for Wall Street? These deals will protect investors before taxpayers and seem financially engineered to fail leaving holding the bag. As Randy Salzaman writes about highway deals:
Beginning with the contracting stage, the evidence suggests toll operating public private partnerships are transportation shell companies for international financiers and contractors who blueprint future bankruptcies. Because Uncle Sam generally guarantees the bonds – by far the largest chunk of “private” money – if and when the private toll road or tunnel partner goes bankrupt, taxpayers are forced to pay off the bonds while absorbing all loans the state and federal governments gave the private shell company and any accumulated depreciation. Yet the shell company’s parent firms get to keep years of actual toll income, on top of millions in design-build cost overruns.
As we head into a Trump administration eager for a wave of new infrastructure projects to Make America Great Again with, it’s a good idea to ask: For whom? And that’s not just a simply a racial or class question. Beware of “Streets” bearing gifts.
This post will remain at the top of the page. Please scroll down for newer material.
The challenge going forward
by digby
Once again, think you so much for your support for this year’s Holiday Fundraiser. It’s a privilege to be able to write this blog every day and I could not do it without you.
For the next four years we are going to be facing an unprecedented political challenge. We are led by a cretinous demagogue and an extremist political party that has been empowered at a moment of peak destructive impulse. The combination is no accident, the latter made the former possible. But here we are.
It’s a very dangerous moment, but it’s not hopeless. The key is to keep ourselves engaged, awake and clear-minded about what’s going on. As much as all the fake news and propaganda makes that difficult, social media can also be a blessing. We can find trustworthy voices from all over the world to help us understand and gain clarity and perspective. I look for them everywhere and try to bring those voices into my work here on the blog. I know that my co-bloggers do the same.
And we’ll keep doing it as long as they let us.
So thanks again for the support. If you’re of a mind to throw a little something in the Christmas stocking, you can do so here or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column.
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
.
Saturday Night at the Movies
After my date with tragedy: Jackie ****
By Dennis Hartley
In his 2009 Vanity Fair article, “A Clash of Camelots”, Sam Kashner gives a fascinating account of the personal price author William Manchester ultimately paid for accepting Jackie Kennedy’s invitation to write an authorized account of JFK’s assassination. Death of a President sold well, but by the time it was published in 1967, Manchester had weathered “…a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy.” Among other things, Kashner’s article unveils Manchester’s interesting take on Jackie K. herself:
On April 7, 1964, Jacqueline, dressed in yellow Capri pants and a black jersey, closed the sliding doors behind her in her Georgetown home, and Manchester came face-to-face with the president’s widow for their first official meeting. “Mr. Manchester,” she said in her soft, whispery voice. Manchester was struck by her “camellia beauty” and thought she looked much younger than her 34 years. “My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great, tragic actress.… There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness,” he later wrote, and Jacqueline Kennedy had “provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s First Lady.”
That particular aspect of Jacqueline Kennedy’s persona – the “very great, tragic actress” – is a tragedian’s dream, an opportunity seized by director Pablo Larrain and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, who take it and run with it in the speculative historical drama, Jackie.
The film is fueled by a precisely measured, career-best performance from Natalie Portman in the titular role, and framed by a (fictional) interview session that the recently widowed Jackie has granted to a probing yet acquiescing journalist (Billy Crudup), which serves as the convenient launching platform for a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards.
Most of the narrative focuses on the week following the president’s assassination, as Mrs. Kennedy finds herself immediately thrown into the minutiae of moving her family and belongings out of the White House, planning her husband’s funeral, and preserving his presidential legacy; all while still reeling from the horror and shock of what happened in Dallas just days before (which I’m certain would be enough to completely crack anyone).
Therein lies the genius of this film. Who among us (old enough to remember that day) hasn’t speculated on what it must have been like to be inside Jackie’s head on November 22, 1963? You wake up that sunny fall morning, you’re beautiful, glamorous, admired by millions, and married to the most powerful leader in the free world. By that night, you’re in shock, gobbling tranquilizers like Pez, standing in the cramped galley of Air Force One in a daze, still wearing that gore-spattered pink dress, watching the Vice President being sworn in as the new POTUS…while realizing you are already getting brushed to the side.
No one but Jackie herself will ever truly know what it was like to be inside her head in the wake of this zeitgeist-shattering event, and she took that with her to her grave. That gives the film makers much creative leeway, but there are still many points grounded in reality. For example, it’s no secret that Jackie fiercely (and famously) guarded her privacy; so the insinuations that she shrewdly cultivated her image (in one scene, she demands the right of final edit for the journalist’s article) are not necessarily exaggerated.
That said, the narrative (and crucially, Portman’s performance) is largely internalized; resulting in a film that is more meditative, impressionistic and personalized than your standard-issue historical drama. Two films came to mind while I was watching Jackie that I would consider stylistic cousins: Francois Girard’s 1993 Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould and Satoshi Kon’s 2001 Millennium Actress; the former for its use of episodic vignettes from its subject’s life to construct a portrait, and the latter for doing the same, but with the added similarity of using a journalist’s interview for a framing device.
Larrain also evokes Kubrick, in his use of classical-style music, meticulously constructed shots (with lovely photography throughout by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine) and deliberate pacing. The film ultimately belongs to Portman, who may not physically resemble Jackie, but uncannily captures her persona, from her “soft, whispery voice” and public poise, to her less-guarded side (replete with chain-smoking and sardonic wit). There is excellent supporting work from the aforementioned Crudup, Peter Sarsgaard (as Robert F. Kennedy), and a cameo by the always wonderful John Hurt (as Jackie’s priest).
Understandably, the question of “why now?” could arise, to which I would reply (paraphrasing JFK)…why not? To be sure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s story has been well-covered in a myriad of documentaries and feature films; like The Beatles, there are very few (if any) mysteries about her life and legacy to uncover at this point. And not to mention that horrible, horrible day in Dallas…do we really need to pay $15 just to see the nightmare reenacted for the umpteenth time? (Spoiler alert: the President dies at the end).
I think that “we” do need to see this film, even if we know going in that there was no “happy ever-aftering” in this Camelot. It reminds us of a “brief, shining moment” when all seemed possible, opportunities were limitless, and everything was going to be all right, because Jack was our king and Jackie was our queen. So what if it was all kabuki, as the film implies; merely a dream, invented by “a great, tragic actress” to unite us in our sadness. Then it was a good dream, and I think we’ll find our Camelot again…someday.
Previous posts with related themes:
A sad sequel: The American assassin on film II
–Dennis Hartley
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
All the fun we had last year
by digby
I’m feeling nostalgic for happier times this Christmas. This was the final performance of a great tradition:
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
A sweet nuclear Christmas Eve story (yes it really is!)
by digby
This Christmas Eve people all over the world will log on to the official Santa Tracker to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.
Shoup’s children, Terri Van Keuren, 65, Rick Shoup, 59, and Pam Farrell, 70, recently visited StoryCorps to talk about how the tradition began.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.
“This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ “
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
Good for him.
It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
.