Donna Summer sings Protection, a song Bruce Springsteen wrote for her. She was more than a disco queen. This song is from my favorite album of hers, Donna Summer produced by Quincy Jones.
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December 17, 2011
A Friend Has Died: Eleanor Hamerow: 1920 - 2011
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
-- Henry Adams
men·tor: [men-tawr, -ter], noun
1. a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
2.an influential senior sponsor or supporter.
A friend of mine died this past week. She was 91 years old. She was a teacher, a filmmaker, a chemist and pharmacist, a dancer, a communist and atheist, a lousy cook and one hell of a person. They don’t make them like that in New York City anymore.
I met Eleanor Hamerow when I attended NYU’s Graduate Film Program back in the 1980s. She was my teacher and we were terrified of her gruff New York accent and attitude which was only a veneer for a caring and intelligent woman.
The heyday of the NYU Program was slipping fast, mostly due to the enormous popularity of film schools across the country. NYU was becoming a money-making corporate entity and some of the old timers like Ellie seemed to be in the way of a new image the school wanted to portray. Her last years at the school were a constant political battle for students and the art of film.
She hung in there as long as she could showing Orson Welles and John Ford movies and La Belle et la Bête and teaching film editing. She was a film editor and documentary filmmaker of some renowned.
(CBS News (She was fired for including President Eisenhower's "beware the military, industrial complex" speech in their televised documentary of his life.), Martha Graham: An American Original in Performance, A Dancer’s World, An American Family...)
Film Editing was her second profession after her early years as a chemist. Teaching was her Third Act.
She got a small auditorium named after her at NYU...but when she finally retired, the soul went out of the school along with all the increasingly antiquated film equipment, like hand-cranked sound synchronizers, moviolas and film splicing blocks...and the old projectors that chewed up old French new wave or Italian neo-realist film prints...
After I finished school, Ellie gave me a job working for her to help me pay off my student loans and I was able to work on her last documentary...appropriately about a teacher.
Somehow...and it is probably worth a novel in itself, I travelled to Moscow with her in 1989 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the VGIK Film School started by Eisenstein in 1919. One brief story I’ll share is we went in search of the Moscow Arts Theater...home of ‘The Method’ and Stanislavsky...the mythical directing and acting philosophy that breathed life into Marlon Brando, James Dean, Lazlo Benedict, and Elia Kazan...and the NYU Gradate Film Program under Ellie Hamerow.
We found the old theater in the early afternoon and walked into the empty lobby. The doors were open, but the place seemed deserted. A man in a dark suit handed Ellie a rose and escorted us into the theater...on the stage was a casket with a large photo next to it of one of the actors from the theater troupe. They assumed Ellie had come to pay respects...she looked born and bred...her boots, her head popping out the top of a heavily-scarfed, long black coat...all 5' 1" of her...so we joined the line of mourners.
We had a young interpreter from the school with us and he found the administrator of the theater and told him that Martin Scorsese (me) and a famous American film producer (Ellie) were here. So he came to see us and though we didn’t fool him, we scored some tickets to the theater the next night, and Ihe gave me a poster for the 100th anniversary of The Seagull.
The next night, we got to see a play that was banned since the 1930s by Stalin himself. Ellie was in heaven. There we were sitting in the front row at the Moscow Arts Theater watching a play in Russian. Our translator was there, kind of filling us in on what was being said and of course there was Ellie's running commentary as though the performance was taking place back at NYU in one of her classes...
Again, a story for another time...but Ellie had written a speech for the VGIK Film School celebration in which she was going to scold the Russians for Stalin and ruining the promise of communism...
After Ellie retired and the years started piling up, some of her contemporary friends began to get ill or even pass away. I would get a phone call from her telling me that Mimi or Ruby couldn't make the performance tonight at Lincoln Center and would I like to go...I saw my first Shostakovich with her and my first Tudor ballet...and my first opera...(a four-hour Semiramede where I didn’t realize that Marilyn Horne was supposed to be playing a man).
She introduced me to the Manhattan cocktail...she couldn't drink anymore, but she wanted me to order one so it sat on the table through dinner so she could smell it...she ordered it the way she liked it: gin, dry vermouth, a dask of bitters and a twist lemon peel.
She was a teacher, but also, always a scholar. Into her eighties she was taking classes at Columbia University. In her late seventies she decided she needed to read the Bible and took a class. I would get a call from her. “What do you know about The First Nicene Council?” or “Have you read Aquinas? Let’s have a nosh and talk about it.” So I would wrap up in a scarf and coat and gloves and take a cab from my East 55th Street apartment to her West 89th Street penthouse and we’d get coffee and something to eat and discuss religion and inevitably movies.
I moved to Los Angeles over twelve years ago and only corresponded with Ellie at first by phone and letters and then dwindling to a few emails and a long Holiday card.
I wasn’t there for the dementia or the need to put her in a home, or for the end where I am told she simply refused food and shortly after, died.
To live such a life and to take it to age 91...Not bad Ellie, not bad at all. You are remembered and cherished...tonight over a Manhattan, Ellie-style.
December 04, 2011
November 14, 2011
October 22, 2011
October 16, 2011
September 18, 2011
September 11, 2011
September 08, 2011
August 07, 2011
July 24, 2011
July 03, 2011
July 01, 2011
June 26, 2011
June 23, 2011
June 19, 2011
June 12, 2011
June 06, 2011
June 05, 2011
May 29, 2011
May 28, 2011
Saturday Musings: "Bringing It All Back Home' Edition
Where to begin...
This is awesome… The United States Congress didn’t know about these loans nor did the governments of the country where these banks are located…
So who controls the Fed? Where does the Fed’s money come from?
This is America; we don’t get to ask those questions.
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But what we do get is a Democratic President that signs an extension on the Patriot Act from Europe… yes the Patriot Act, one of the those hopey, changey things the folks who voted for President Obama thought he was going to help us out of… like Banking De-regulation and Health Care Costs and ending the wars in the Middle East with his all powerful Nobel Peace Prize... the list is growing...
Oh well, what does he care, look what is running against him in 2012, the GOP is mounting the field with a pack of morally degenerate, financially spoiled, politically disingenuous , morally corruptible and intellectually devoid candidates.
What would John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin make of these mopes?
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Speaking of morally degenerates, Pope Benedict the XOXO’s First Officer of The Pedophilia Inquisition… (I have to go for the link to this one.)
Like shooting fish in a barrel… or like putting the fox in charge of the hen house… or like putting Barack Obama in charge of re-regulating Wall Street…
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Oh, sorry, I’m not done with Barry O, yet… now on to Israel and the Second coming speech he made over there... this ‘1967 borders’ speech did not go over so well with our allies in Israel... Welfare Queen Bibi Netanyahu is not interested in anything America is selling right now... don’t get him wrong, America’s global socialism is always appreciated, but don’t try to dictate to dictators and keep your nose out of Jerusalem.
It seems to me Obama’s Israeli/Palestinian peace initiatives may be coming from Secretary of State Clinton and Obama is simply relaying the message. There is no love lost between a Clinton and a Netanyahu… what a mess. A lot of unfinished business there.
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Madam Secretary Clinton is also over in Pakistan trying to sweep up some of the collateral damage done by her boss’ decisive move to kill Osama bin Laden, with no help from the previous President who cannot and will not speak ill of the dead…
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If only Clinton had a stronger President, the work she is doing could be so much more focused on actively changing things for the better instead of trying to keep them from spinning out of control.
President Obama’s failure, and the single thing that will keep him from achieving anything except keeping the Oval Office chair warm for the next Republican President, was not taking control of the Financial Industry reform when they broke the world and were on their knees.
That was the moment... the once in a generation moment when Progressive politics could set the rules… it doesn’t last and the chance doesn’t come often, but our laissez-faire economy does have its cycle… the Great Depression brought on the New Deal, which enabled America to become the greatest nation on earth for a while, ending the Depression and fighting World War Two with a dedicated, united and determined middle class… the pendulum swung back, Republicans moved in and the world almost ended… and President Obama didn’t do the heavy lifting required for change…. Unless you count the bags of money he helped carry out of the United States Treasury…
Anyway… here we stand… heading into President Obama’s re-election… I’m more interested in what Hillary Clinton’s next move will be.
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HBO’s Game of Thrones is getting better each week and stranger…. If you have not read the books by George R. R. Martin, you are in for some crazy television over the next month… winter is coming…
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Books: I’m kind of trapped in the post-World War Two world of both fiction and non-fiction… I’ve been nostalgic for New York City lately and have been looking for books that take place or are about the city that never sleeps… two left of center novels, Gore Vidal’s In A Yellow Wood and James Baldwin’s Another Country offer a look at life in New York City, basically at the same time, but from two very different viewpoints.
Vidal’s book follows a waspish, white WW2 vet into his post war life on Wall Street … with an option for something else that he may have left behind in Europe…
The Baldwin novel follows a black man living in Greenwich Village and the civil rights movement is only beginning to stir in the public consciousness… he too has to choose between staying in America and making his life work, or heading off to Europe…
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Music has drawn be back to these times as well… I got a hold of The Miles Davis Quintet’s’ four album cycle Workin’ Cookin’, Relaxin’ and Steamin’ that came out of the 1956 sessions with Rudy Van Gelder.
Also, Bob Dylan at 70…?! And still crazy after all these years… in fact, as I write this, Bringing It All Back Home is playing for the neighbors to hear.
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So have a relaxing and thoughtful Memorial Day Weekend comrades, rest you weary feet, listen to some good music, smoke some smoke, drink some drink and eat unhealthy food… we have a long summer ahead of us… and Gingrich and Palin and our Republican Congress ain’t going nowhere…
May 27, 2011
May 26, 2011
May 18, 2011
May 15, 2011
May 14, 2011
Saturday Musings: 'Petunia Pig Is Back and He's Running For President' Edition
The Republican Party is demanding, and acting with their votes, to protect the right of people on the FBI terrorist watch list to buy guns. God Bless America.
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And for God’s sake, are we really going to have to hear what Newt Gingrich (aka Petunia Pig)is thinking every day between now and Election Day 2012? As an American, this is embarrassing.
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Speaking of God blessing things, the Chosen People have lost an advocate this week with the resignation of George Mitchell as the President’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. He had to call it quits because both sides are run by nuts and people who feast on violence, hate and war. What can you do with that? Go with God, George Mitchell.
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So if opening oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t reduce the price of gas at the pump, can we throw stones at oil executives and their families? That should actually be in the legislation.
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The television spokes people for the Republican Party and their leading Presidential candidates have lost a major moral ally in the Catholic Church. Global climate change denial and Republican Party fiscal policy are now actions that are considered sinful. What’s a sexually promiscuous Catholic politician to do? They have needs and pressures to protect America… give a brother a break…
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It’s a shame that our national media is unwilling and frankly, unable to cover world news properly. There is a dynamic, divergent, complicated, scary, dangerous and inspiring global democracy fueled revolution happening… oh, man Aston Kutcher is replacing Charlie Sheen?!!!!!?!! WTF! I'm so Tweeting this shit.
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Still haven’t figured out what to do with my iPhone4 beside check my work email at home without having to turn on my computer.
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Cell phones have changed the way we communicate so pervasively that even old people are driving cars and checking their text message at the same time.
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I have been listening to a Miles Davis album that is freaking me out a little: Filles De Kilimanjaro, probably because I don’t completely understand it, but I am really into it… it seems the same can be said for the musicians… what the hell are they up to…? that and the fact that I am reading James Baldwin’s Another Country make me want to visit to Manhattan this summer... it’s been twelve years since I thought about that old rock. I’m sure it is nothing like how I left it.
I heard there was a Cuomo in the Governor’s Mansion again, but this apple may have fallen far from the tree.
DeRosaWorld has been facing the Pacific Ocean with his back turned to the rest of the country for too damn long… and now the waves are filled with flash mobs of dead fish off the pier at the end of my street.
Winds of change are blowing...
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
-Robert Frost
May 08, 2011
May 07, 2011
Saturday Musings: "Allergies and Assassinations" Edition
Why was Madam Secretary Clinton the only person in the room asked to defend her face during the assassination of Osama bin Laden?
The President looked like he was taking a shit in the corner.
And how many Nobel Peace Prize winners have ordered the assassination of their enemies?
It’s starting to look like gloating Mr. President…
I wish President Obama had shown this side of himself in the days after taking the oath of office… maybe we wouldn’t still have this sinking feeling in country that the Republicans still run the place.
And no, I don’t think in this land of free speech, in which the enemy hates us because of our freedoms, we should ever stop questioning the events of 9/11.
The Bush, Jr. /Cheney Administration never spoke an honest word including “the” and “and”.
Where is the track record of truth? That anything said by them wasn’t the complete opposite… a total lie?
So I’ll keep asking until someone can tell me why and how Building Seven was pulled, so I can sleep better at night.
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William & Kate and Osama have kept American televisions free from news for over three weeks now.
How are our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen going… did I miss any? should I be saying ‘hotspots’?
And all this bin Laden is DEAD analyzing seems to have justified our government’s pass on the Middle Eastern revolutions in Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain… where even Senator John McCain can see that the incredible power of satellites, smart phones and social media can spark democracy with the same raw power of lighting striking Ben Franklin’s key and kite… while in modern America, we download 'Angry Birds’ and pop music and occasionally email pictures of our asses to each other.
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Clouds are forming over the ocean in time to ruin any hope of a sunny weekend… so it is Jameson’s Irish whiskey and the new Emmylou Harris album for me.
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Oh, and remember to support Bill Nye, The Science Guy... The Inquisitors are after him for defying the Book of Genesis.
May 01, 2011
April 30, 2011
Saturday Musings: 'I Tweet, Therefore I am' Edition
I woke up to NPR this morning to hear a Republican politician criticizing President Obama’s statement on oil industry profits and executive bonuses vs. gas prices, etc..
All very conservative/psychotic/corporate/anti-American… NPR says the above Republican asshole’s statement were in response to the President’s Saturday address… so they lead the story with the Republican response?!
And don’t allow the President a sound-bite…?
When all you have left is the fall, the fall matters…
If the Republicans in Congress told NPR they would stop picking on them only if Ari Shapiro were dead… we would find Ari Shapiro floating in the Potomac River with Hillary Clinton’s scarf in his pocket.
To make it worse, they followed this Republican/Corporate/Oil Company propaganda with Newt Gingrich and fucking Rick Santorum criticizing the Obama Administration about… you know,?.. I’m not even sure… they were just both going on about how badly managed America is under Obama… and this time, NPR didn’t even mention a Democratic response… the story simply was about giving Gingrich and Santorum a platform….
The next segment was NPR asking for money.
I wish the public humiliation wasn’t so public… Don’t ask me to pay for it.
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I cooked Mario Batali’s recipe for Lamb: Roman Style… except I used Newman’s Own Caesar Dressing for the lamb marinade instead of following Mario’s recipe which basically had all the same ingredients as Newman’s Own Caesar Dressing.
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When the tornado ravage victims of the Confederacy line up for FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) assistance this week, they should be required to show a long form birth certificate before receiving any Federal/Tax payer funds… What if we need them for a corporate bailout or bank failure?
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I was sick last week and sat on the couch watching Sam Peckinpah movies. The kids today think SAW, SAW II, SAW III, SAW IV, SaW V, SAW VI and SAW 3D are violent and that Ludacris, Vin Diesel and that wrestler-Rock guy are tough,.. How about I unleash a little fucking Warren Oates on your ass!
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia will make your girlfriend get up and walk out the door. .. But if you watch The Getaway, you will know how to get her back and behave herself… Ali McGraw her ass and she’ll be putting the DiGiorno in the oven and popping the cap off your beer.
It started with Major Dundee, a film I haven’t seen in decades. TCM was showing a ‘director’s cut’ of sorts with footage and scenes cut out by the studio before the film’s original release. I enjoyed the acting, the cinemaphotgraphy, the directing, the script. I must have needed a little macho, Americano… From there I had to watch The Wild Bunch and then Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. (Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado!!!)...
Oh the violence… poetry and death in slow motion… and the scripts are smarter than I remember. Lots of interesting history going on in the background. Clint Eastwood can bite me… Little Bill, my ass.
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I’m finding myself drawn-in to the Game of Thrones series on HBO. Kind of like Lord of The Rings, but without elves, orcs or hobbits… there is a dwarf, but he is a real dwarf, not a mystical, magical nanny dwarf or anything like that. And there is lots of HBO-sex, too… boobies and butts.
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I’ve been interested in the Republican Town Halls that have been going on this recess… Republican Congressmen getting booed and hissed at and not answering questions, or holding the meetings in churches so they can arrest and mace Democrats from their districts and get away with it…
Where is the media coverage that captured the Tea Party Express as they interrupted Democratic Congressmen and Congresswoman Town Halls in 2010? Not interested anymore?
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And on the technology front. I got an iPhone 4… and have no idea what to do with it. It sits there and I watch it and I wait for it to do something. Once in a while it buzzes and that means I got an email, but when I’m at work I am sitting in front of my computer, so I know I just got an email… and I refuse to touch the fucking thing if it buzzes while I’m driving home on the 405 freeway doing like 70 miles an hour… although that does not seem to stop my fellow commuters… and the text key pad is too small for my fingers, it takes me four or five tries to get the word ‘the’ written.
Some of the younger co-workers have these things sewn into the palms of their hands. They gave me a list of “apps” I simply must have… So I bought … yes bought the Twitter app… but DeRosaWorld has been on Twitter for a while and I can’t see the difference between the Twitter app and the Twitter website, other than one is on my lap top and one is on my phone, now… which is I guess the point, so I can tweet when I’m not in the office… or at home… or just because I can on my phone, now… which I would pay for as part of my data plan… instead of for free on my laptop…
One of the younglings got frustrated trying to explain to me how to use one of these apps and said: “You sound just like my mother when I brought her an iPhone… just use it.”
I’m told it will change my life.
All I know is when I was a kid… TV was free, I owned the records I bought and I didn’t have to sign a multi-year contract to make a phone call.
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Speaking of records...A bunch of old-timers have come out with ‘releases’… we don’t say albums anymore, I’m told, in just the last two weeks: Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis, Robbie Robertson, Greg Allman, Paul Simon, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams… to name a few. Where are these artists get played today? Satellite radio? Or do they just jump on iTunes and hope someone will find them.
April 23, 2011
April 17, 2011
April 10, 2011
April 03, 2011
March 23, 2011
March 20, 2011
March 13, 2011
March 05, 2011
Saturday Musings: 'Charlie Sheen Said What?!' Edition
Secretary of State Clinton said this week that American news sucks.
She's right, of course… but it does more than not inform, it is harmful to the vast majority of American citizens for the lies it delivers, the lack of coverage of important news citizens need, and its spewing out of a poisonous, corporate, conservative propaganda into American living rooms daily.
I would go far as to say it is an Enemy of the State… and the pundits on television, the producers behind the programming and the corporate magnets who manage the American version of news should be dealt with accordingly… kind of like Bradley Manning... I would suggest.
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So... Republicans in the United States Senate have introduced a bill to de-fund National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting… Bye.
Sorry… NPR and the CPB should have been leading the charge all these years against corporate-conservative radio… but instead of mounting an effectively challenging voice for progressive… and yes liberal policies… they have cowered, shaking and flinching in the corner and have allowed conservative pundits to poison the public’s airwaves… NPR and the CPB have performed self-immolation on their programming and made the progressive audience of Americans have to listen to it.
Look around… all around… enough is enough… it is time to fight or die. NPR and the CPB have chosen to lie down and die. If there was ever an example of "If Now Now, When?"... they are it.
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Why don’t the people of Wisconsin and Ohio and other Republican held portions of America, just show up with pitch forks, tar and feathers and be done with it. That is the point where this American democratic experiment in corporate conservatism has led us to. Off with their heads!
Oh and by the way… where has what’s his name been?... The President… Why has he not gone to Wisconsin? Here is my 2012 mantra for Obama’s reelection campaign. “Get The Fuck Out!”
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Thank the maker there is a new Lucinda Williams album out.
