March 5

A little late in posting today. I'm in the middle of one of Turner Classic Movies's clever thematic evenings, "Air Disasters," which unites the parody Airplane! with three of its inspirations -- Zero Hour! (particularly), The Crowded Sky, and Crash Landing. This represents a heavy dose of my favorite Dana Andrews, who's in both Zero Hour! (as Lt. Ted Stryker, the model down to the name for Robert Hays's Ted Striker in Airplane!) and The Crowded Sky. I am also quite taken with his co-pilot in The Crowded Sky, John Kerr, who came to prominence in Tea and Sympathy and South Pacific, but bowed out of films after 1961, continuing in television for a while but making a move into the legal profession in his thirties.



http://www.dpriol.com/John-Kerr.html

It is striking, in watching these aviation films, first, how precisely Airplane! follows Zero Hour! -- a lot of the dialogue is exactly the same -- and second, how good and tight a little black-and-white film Zero Hour! is, compared to the clunky color Crowded Sky made only three years later in 1960.

There is a strong correspondence between The Crowded Sky and Crash Landing, too, on the issue of "pilot perfectionism" and how it effects their wives and (especially) sons, in whom they will not tolerate any mistakes. Combined with the frequent absences the profession demands (now as well as then), it doesn't always make for the happiest family life, which provides a useful source of plot tension in these movies.

A charming detail in Crash Landing is that the plane for a 25-passenger trans-Atlantic flight in 1958 has a lounge. Those were the days!

Crazy Times in Education: In many states and municipalities the teacher layoffs this spring and summer are going to be, as this article states, "cataclysmic":

Los Angeles Unified officials are expected to approve a mass mailing of nearly 4,700 layoff notices for teachers, administrators, counselors and nurses today as they work to close a crippling $640 million budget deficit.

Recommended by district financial staff in a report to be reviewed today by the school board, the move would virtually eliminate school nurses and librarians, increase all class sizes, including a high of up to 44 students in middle school, and boost counselor loads to 1,000 students each.

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_14494767

Anyone who has ever taught even 25 middle schoolers in a classroom could only react to the prospect of 44 the way Peanuts characters used to react to disastrous scenarios: "Aaugh!"

The Chinese expatriate artist Yun-Fei Ji has an exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery in New York under the evocative title "Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts."

I use landscape painting to explore the utopian dreams of Chinese history, from past collectivization to new consumerism.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36327

http://www.jamescohan.com/exhibitions/2010-02-19_yun-fei-ji/

Peter Kostelov's Volga House in Russia is a fresh interpretation of a "summer cottage":

http://www.archdaily.com/51025/volga-house-peter-kostelov/

Steve Donoghue at stevereads is delightfully responsive to the South Pacific writings of Robert Louis Stevenson:

It’s the oddest thing about Stevenson as a writer, and it stands eternally to his credit: despite the fact that he had mastered the fine art of capturing the public taste with light, deceptive adventure stories, he was always yearning for new literary forms, for fresh and dangerous challenges. The books he dreamt of writing but never did form one of the most intriguing ghost-canons in all of literature, and in the South Seas, he dreamt big.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/03/penguins-on-parade-rls-in-the-south-seas/

Among the notables born on this date are novelists Frank Norris, Josephine Herbst, and Leslie Marmon Silko, children's writer Howard Pyle, Irish dramatist Lady Gregory, cartographer Gerardus Mercator, revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, The Fall frontman Mark E. Smith, magician Penn Jillette, painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and actors Rex Harrison, Dean Stockwell, James B. Sikking, and Elaine Paige, and film director/novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini. Villa-Lobos is one of those incredibly prolific 20th century composers -- Darius Milhaud, Charles Koechlin, and Bohuslav Martinu are others -- who could compose every day at a very high level, as a matter of Mozartian habit. No creative blocks with these fellows!