Interesting Exchange

Patrick Murtha: I am trying to pin down a recollection. In the early Seventies, one of the networks -- I believe it was ABC -- ran a summer series of classic black-and-white movies over several weeks. Two of them were definitely Portrait of Jennie and The Spiral Staircase. Can you or any of your readers help me identify which other films were screened in this series? It was my introduction to classic Hollywood as a young adolescent, and I have always been grateful for it.

RGJ, Webmaster, TVObscurities.com: I am incredibly impressed with your memory. ABC aired a four-week series called The Movie Classics of David O. Selznick during the summer of 1971. This was the first time any of the films had been seen on television. Here are the four films that were shown and their air dates:

"Intermezzo"
Tuesday, June 22nd, 1971

"The Spiral Staircase"
Tuesday, June 29th, 1971

"Portrait of Jennie"
Tuesday, July 6th, 1971

"Made for Each Other"
Tuesday, July 13th, 1971

Again, I am amazed that you were able to remember so much about this brief summer movie series.

Patrick Murtha: Thank you so much for the detailed information! Up till now, I have never met anyone who remembers the series besides me. I was 12 that summer, about to enter the 8th grade, and seeing these movies was a revelation that turned me into a lifelong fan of classic film. I was particularly blown away (pun intended!) by the storm climax of Portrait of Jennie.

As I recall, ABC's promotion of the series was vigorous and captured my attention. They made it a showcase event.

Little Richard

JazzWax: You taught Paul McCartney your signature falsetto "Wooo" in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962, before the Beatles were the Beatles.
Little Richard: Oh yes. Paul’s my buddy. He’s a real gentleman. He’s beautiful. The Beatles were barely known then. They opened for me at the Star-Club [laughs]. I had gotten the inspiration for that 'Wooo' from gospel singer Marion Williams.

JW: What about Elvis?
LR: Elvis was a good friend. One of the sweetest gentlemen. A good singer, especially with gospel.

JW: Which jazz musicians told you they enjoyed your music?
LR: Tab Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae—all of them. Peggy Lee used to come to hear me.

JW: So, did Little Richard kill jazz?
LR: Kill jazz? Oh no, no, no. I don’t believe rock 'n' roll could kill jazz. Nothing can kill jazz. Jazz is an original. Jazz is beautiful music. I don’t believe that. Jazz is still here. Real rock 'n' roll musicians love jazz. A real musician loves all types of music.

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/08/interview-little-richard.html 

The Future of Dressing Well

[Also from a few months ago, posted at Style Forum; still pertinent.]

I am concerned about many aspects of the future -- who isn't? -- and one of them, of minor import perhaps but still interesting, is the future of men dressing well. I am not concerned for the usual reasons put forward -- that younger men are not interested in sartorial matters (actually, some of them are) or that "business casual" has destroyed the culture of dressing well for work. Rather, I am concerned that we are not producing enough of the sort of men that will take to dressing well as professional statement, self-expression, and pleasurable hobby. It seems to me that the inclination to be a sartorialist depends on two main underpinnings besides sheer taste: Confidence, and money. Those in turn rest largely on the opportunity to make a good career for oneself, and that is where I think the problem lies. Certainly we are in an economic contraction now, and just as certainly we will "come out of it" eventually; but we may be emerging into a vastly different, just-in-time world where the possibility of a stable professional career is a mere dream for most. If there is no job to dress for, no job to feel pride in, and no job to provide the disposable cash for buying, the sartorial bent loses its relevance to many potential adherents.

My unscientific guess based on reading the menswear boards is that the sartorial habit is strongest among lawyers, bankers, and business executives, with a smaller but still significant appeal to certain academics, journalists, politicians, public officials, medical professionals, and "creative types." Unfortunately, there is a contraction of career opportunities going on in many of those fields; for example, the difficulties that current law school graduates are having in finding decent legal employment have been widely reported (and yet, such is the nature of human hopefulness, the number of law school applicants and attendees continues to go steadily up, further crowding the field for future job-seekers).

The economic prospects for university graduates -- not just in America, but around the world, such as in Korea where I am now living -- are, to put it as mildly as possible, not what they once were. The sartorial inclination does not absolutely require a sizable income, as many wily buyers who post here at Style Forum can attest -- but without doubt, sizable incomes are a great boon to the hobby and help it to thrive. If fewer men have access to that type of income, that undoubtedly has its effect on the way they dress. And if employment and incomes are not steady, but contingent and intermittent, that goes a long way toward destroying the confidence that dressing well expresses. If you feel like crap about your life, the panache of your tie knot doesn't matter much.

My personal experience is perhaps slightly instructive. Although I have three degrees from excellent universities, I never aimed for the big money, and I never made it. However, I definitely had stretches of time when I was quite comfortable, and therefore an enthusiastic consumer. In the past ten years, though, a series of changes in fortune variously attributable to mergers, business closings, shrinking commissions, governmental financial crises, etc., have economically marginalized me to the extent that I am now out of North America altogether, teaching ESL to adults at a private academy in Korea. My career prospects are much better in the world-at-large than at home, and I expect to be teaching at a Korean university after my current contract ends; going abroad seems to have been a smart move, and I am encouraged by that. Still, I am at the point right now when a hundred dollars is a lot of money to me, and that is just not a circumstance that encourages sartorialism.

However, at least I do have a job and some forward prospects. I suspect that there is a reasonably big group of los desaparecidos from the menswear boards who simply stop posting because the economy has taken them away. A lot of highly educated and experienced people that I know have taken a lot of whacks. The loss of confidence that I see in them is quite distressing. And an unconfident society is unlikely to be a sartorially distinguished one.

POSTSCRIPT: The responses at Style Forum were largely uninteresting. Readers today seem largely unable to engage with whole arguments; they seize on particles of arguments. This is partly because of mental incapacity, but also because, in the time of the Web, they do not read word for word. Skimming is perilous, and when most reading is skimming -- watch out!

Paul Hindemith's Cardillac

[Written back on October 20, 2010, but what the heck.]

I am always excited to read about stagings of important but little-performed 20th century operas, so the news that the Vienna State Opera is having a hit with Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, based on a story by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), is very welcome. The third link below has an extensive selection of photographs of the production.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ge0eZrR5N1aDN9S9rw2qTlE2_RWQ?docId=CNG.39d86b87288610357aedef0bdb96a13e.d81

http://www.france24.com/en/20101019-cardillac-rings-new-era-vienna-state-opera

http://opera.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo_Coverage_Dress_rehearsal_of_Hindemiths_opera_Cardillac_in_Vienna_20101013

I have not yet heard Cardillac, although there are several recordings (including one with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the lead) and even a couple of DVD performances (I'm really just starting to catch up with the whole opera-on-DVD category). But I became acquainted a few years ago with another major Hindemith opera, The Harmony of the World, in a CD performance on the Wergo label led by conductor Marek Janowski, and I was blown away by it. Hindemith has long been a particular favorite of mine, and although his reputation as a great modern composer is secure, I seldom come across a real fan, which is too bad. He is the equal of a Prokofiev, with whom he in fact has some affinities.

Companion Animals

All my pets are doing well with the arrival of the new year. Benjamin Bunny was scheduled for neutering surgery a few weeks ago, but he escaped the knife when our vet Dr. Kim determined by manual examination that both his testes were undescended. They probably never will descend, and since he is presenting no behavioral difficulties at all, there is no need to go into his abdominal cavity to try a much riskier surgery to remove them, as they might be undeveloped and difficult to find. So Benjamin is safe as houses.

Benjamin is also delighted that the upcoming Chinese/Korean year is the Year of the Rabbit. He'll have you all know, it's his year!

My Birman, Claire, really seems to have benefited from the additional stimulation that Ben provides. I was a pretty predictable presence for her, but he is not, and I honestly think it has given this 15-year-old cat a new lease on life. She has become more playful and even more affectionate, and she is demonstrably fond of her rabbit friend except when he is being a little too persistent about sniffing her hindquarters.

Tugger the hedgehog has been a great addition to the household. The other animals are curious about him, and he seems not to be afraid of them. I take Tugger out for handling every night, and I also gave him a teeshirt with my scent for bedding material. The result has been that he has become very comfortable in my hand, not balling up or prickling at all; you can tell a relaxed hedgehog because his spines are completely down and smoothed out. Tugger is a gentle soul who loves to sniff; hedgehogs proceed mainly by sense of smell. He is thriving on his diet of special hedgehog chow, freeze-dried mealworms, and silkworm pupae. The latter are a popular Korean snack for people, available in every store, but I can't develop a taste for them; they have a very strong and peculiar smell that lasts for hours as an aftertaste. Tugger, however, loves them. He is an insectivore after all.

So my long-standing Doctor Dolittle tendencies are finding a good outlet here in Korea. Could there be a cockatiel or some other bird in the future? Possibly -- a cat and a bird together are challenging, but I've managed it before, and Claire is a very peaceable feline. I've got room for a bird-cage on top of the refrigerator (wink) -- we shall see.

POSTSCRIPT: It is interesting that many people with my level of OCD and neat freakiness might have problems with one pet, let alone a larger group. But I seem to do fine with it. Of course my pets are usually pretty fastidious themselves. And their emotional demands are quite "neat" and predictable, unlike those of people. I think that's key for me. Once you have routines with pets, you can and should be very regular with them. They like the predictability, too.

Korea Is Just a Gig

I'm starting my eighth month teaching adult ESL at a private academy in Korea, and although I do plan to stay in this country and get a university job -- unless a better such job beckons elsewhere in Asia -- I have to say that living in Korea has become rather uninteresting. I registered plenty of new impressions during my first three months or so, but after a while there is little more I can discover from personal observation as a lowly ESL teacher in a regional city. Everything new I am learning about Korea now is coming from books. Personal experience is really quite limited as a basis for learning about most things; our personalities tend to find narrow grooves in our environments. Books are potentially far less limited.

Culture shock was slow to set in and I wondered whether it would manifest itself at all, but ultimately it did quite strongly. The Korean-slash-Asian emphasis on the family, hierarchy, conformism, motivation by negative rather than positive reinforcement, leader worship, etc. -- in short, the Confucian elements -- don't especially resonate with me, as a Westerner or as an individual. I have not found my time here to be a Kumbaya experience, partly because Koreans demarcate a clear bright line between themselves and non-Koreans, and if you are not inside that line, frankly you just don't count. I have had occasions when I thought I had built up good-will by my efforts, only to find that it crumbled at a touch -- that there was no genuine reciprocity. I may be painting with a broad brush, but I would say that although Koreans can be quite kind to non-Koreans in certain superficial (but not the less welcome for that) ways, they simply do not define them as worthy of true consideration. North Korea's pronounced isolationism is an expression of a deep tendency in Korean character generally, not just some anomaly. This used to be called the "Hermit Kingdom," after all; it was the last Asian nation to open to the West, and the undoubtedly justified suspicions of and intense alarm at any sign of colonialism continue to this day (and were strongly exacerbated by the Japanese Occupation from 1910 to 1945).

Korea is a plucky nation with a somewhat unfortunate geographic position, pinned forever between the two great powers of China and Japan -- and these days South Korea is virtually an island geographically, since North Korea cuts off its land access to the rest of Asia. South Korea is dependent on the United States for its very existence -- if American troops pulled out, North Korean troops would push in -- and its citizens are simultaneously grateful for that and resentful of it (most Koreans when asked will tell you that its government's strings are pulled by American puppeteers). An American here, placed in a classic double bind, can easily feel as if s/he is living inside someone else's psychological complex, and that is always wearying.

I have been reading a lot of Korean history -- very compelling history it is, too -- and although that gives me a good context for Korean attitudes and a certain sympathy toward them, I'm never going to overcome a base antipathy toward the relentless, slightly cruel edge of the culture. Koreans work and study what must be the longest hours in the developed world --"diligent" is the adjective of choice here -- but the workplace and school can be phenomenally unpleasant settings, with psychological and corporal bullying both prevalent. ("Back to hell," one businessman student of mine says as he leaves my morning class for work.) Korea has a ridiculously high suicide rate made much worse by the social unacceptability of seeking help for mental health issues. A student in discussing the idiom "rat race" said matter-of-factly, "When a Korean is tired of the rat race, he just kills himself." I looked alarmed and said as reasonably as I could, "You know there are some intermediate steps that could be taken?" She smiled. "Oh yes, we know, but that is still what he would do."

There is of course lots positive to be said about this country too -- adults here are so much more aware of world affairs and geography, for example, it makes me positively embarrassed to think about their American counterparts who can't find Canada and Mexico on a map. I admire some of what I see. But I would be less than honest if I didn't admit that overall, the experience of living in a truly different culture (I don't think I would find most European-based cultures this different) has made me a little more skeptical about the prospects for multiculturalism, and a little less complacently "multicultural" myself. It is so easy to say that you are multicultural, but a little harder to live it. I'm critical of America and the West, sure; but I'm an American and a Westerner through and through, and I'm also proud of that. If I had been a British civil servant in 19th century India, I hope I wouldn't have been an unthinking colonialist; but I doubt very much if I would ever have "gone native," either. At best I would have absorbed and tested some new concepts. I'm one body with one lifetime, and to the extent that there is any "there" there, my cultural definition and limitations are part of it, for better or worse.

POSTSCRIPT: One Korean trait I strongly admire is their relaxed attitude about religion. Buddhist, Christian, shamanist, atheist, no one cares what you are. Politicians are not required to perform any ritual obeisance toward religion; it is not an issue. About one-third of Koreans are non-believers, and will tell you so candidly; no stigma attaches to it. My Korean students do not "get" American religious controversies and culture wars, and I like them for not understanding, because those idiocies of my culture are not worth understanding. The idea, for example, that anything other than hard science including evolutionary theory would be taught in a school is simply preposterous to a Korean.

About the worst thing I can say about religion in Korea is that sometimes the Christian proselytizing can be a little much. There is one guy who has been knocking on my door for months and who waits in the street outside my house to ambush me with the good news -- a stalker for Christ.

Restrepo (2010)

I haven't seen this acclaimed Afghanistan documentary yet, but it is a Spirit Award nominee and was on the National Board of Review list of the five best documentaries of 2010; it also won the prize for best documentary at Sundance 2010. This interview with film-makers Sebastian Junger (famous for his book The Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington is exceptionally good:

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/12/bearing-witness-in-afghanistan.html

Public Enemies (2009)

I'm not sure what I think about Michael Mann anymore. He was responsible for two of the most stylish and influential television series of the 1980s, Miami Vice and Crime Story. He started his big-screen career with a bang with the hypnotic Thief and carried through on its promise with Manhunter and Heat. He was still in good form on The Insider. (I have not seen The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, or the feature version of Miami Vice.) He has a tremendous visual gift, both pictorial and energetic, and is especially good with the expressive uses of color cinematography. He began as a writer and can be a good one, as he demonstrated with the screenplay for Heat.

And yet, Collateral was just a genre doodle with a few good performances and scenes, and the most recent Mann film, Public Enemies, is far worse than that.

Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies is a complex, thrilling, contrapuntal account of the simultaneous and overlapping careers of six of the great American criminal gangs in 1933 and 1934, and the sometimes laughably inept attempts of the nascent FBI to bring them down. I can't recommend the book highly enough; it's got everything. Including, apparently, too much plot for Michael Mann, who stripped the story down from six plot-lines to one -- John Dillinger's. The Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson stories only come in as throwaways, with their facts completely altered; Alvin Karpis of the Barker-Karpis gang makes a brief appearance; Machine Gun Kelly and Bonnie and Clyde are not mentioned at all.

Mann shows a contempt for his factual sources that is not justified by what he puts up on the screen. I have some problems that way with Bonnie and Clyde, too, particularly the over-glamorization of the ratty-in-real-life protagonists, yet there is no doubt that what Arthur Penn created is a great movie. Public Enemies takes the wrong lessons from Bonnie and Clyde, putting slick photography, studied performances, and meticulous period re-creations in the service of a meretricious re-writing of history, and without gaining any entertainment value thereby. Mann pumps up the violence, pumps up the body counts, glosses up everything, and yet the result is still deeply dull.

If a film-making team wanted to stick to Dillinger, OK, but the result would be far more interesting if they followed the facts where they lead, and made the movie in a grungier, messier, less perfectionist style. Think The Honeymoon Killers, or Altman's Thieves Like Us; but Mann could never direct a film like that. Mann puts Dillinger in a glass case, and for all his camera dynamism, the movie is dead on the screen. He wastes his most game performer, Marion Cotillard, by re-conceptualizing Dillinger's moll Billie Frechette as a comparative innocent, when in fact she was a gold-digger who was already married to a convicted robber! That is a lot more of a compelling character proposition; and I have no doubt that Cotillard could have played it, and that it might have sparked Depp to better work. He's fine physically as Dillinger -- unlike Clyde Barrow, John D. was a wickedly handsome, well-dressed guy -- but both he and Christian Bale as G-man Melvin Purvis are stiff as period actors, not loose and alive the way you need to be to make the past into a present.

Given that this is a big-budget film, it represents a criminal waste of resources. A film like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate is often criticized for wasting resources; and indeed, it went ridiculously over its already astronomical budget, and on a scene-by-scene basis, it doesn't "work" any better than this movie of Michael Mann's. And yet -- it is personal, it has compulsion written all over it, it is what Pauline Kael used to admiringly call a "folly." That is one point on which I utterly agree with Kael; she memorably said that "The tragedy of movie history is not the follies that get made, it's the follies that don't get made." (Come back, Pola X, all is forgiven!)

Public Enemies is something of a disaster. But it is not that kind of a folly, alas.

Ferenc Erkel

This is exciting news. The Los Angeles Opera is going to present what is said to be the American premiere (although I have a feeling it isn't) of Ferenc Erkel's classic 1861 Hungarian opera Bank Ban, under the baton of music director Placido Domingo:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/la-opera-to-present-us-premiere-of-19th-century-hungarian-opera-bank-ban.html

It is not clear if it going to be performed in Hungarian, although one would hope so; if not, then a performance in English translation would be preferable to one in another language. The opera has been recorded by conductors Vilmos Komor, Janos Ferencsik, and Tamas Pal.

Here is more on Erkel (1810-1893), who composed nine operas in all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Erkel

At least one other Erkel opera, Hunyadi Laszlo, has been recorded complete.

Opening for an Essay I Decided It Would Be Too Depressing to Write

My last five significant jobs (including the current one), along with quite a few earlier jobs, have been thoroughly unpleasant experiences, which either means that I am exceptionally unlucky, or, more likely, that I am not cut out for the working world; since I think many jobs are like that, or would be for me.  [Really, you can imagine the rest!]

Decline in Living Standards

Not that this is a surprise, but the New York Times reports that even those who have found work after a period of unemployment aren't feeling so cheery. 70% of those who switched fields took pay cuts; even 45% of those who stayed in the same field took cuts. And of course, they can all easily get laid off from their new jobs and face yet another search.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/business/economy/01hires.html

One worker reports, "I’d love to go back to what I was doing...But when I talk with the unemployment office here in Michigan, they tell me the chances of going back and using the same skill set I had before are pretty farfetched." Well, of course. A career with a forward path would allow this man some stability, and as Jacob Hacker describes in his book The Great Risk Shift, stability is precisely what the forces in power are intent on denying him. There is something almost vindictive in the way this is playing out, as if the plutocrats were punishing the rest of us for not being plutocrats ourselves. "Take that, loser!"

I am reminded of a quotation from Edith Wharton's great novel The House of Mirth: "If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level." I feel that way often myself.

Overlooked Movies

Scott Mendelson posted an interesting list of overlooked 2010 movies at his blog. Mendelson is a capable, opinionated writer that I have mixed feelings about, because, like many of the other capable movie writers out there, from Manohla Dargis to Mike D'Angelo, from Glenn Kenny to Jeffrey Wells, he seems to lack any frame of reference whatsoever outside film and pop culture. But this is still a pretty good piece.

http://scottalanmendelson.blogspot.com/2010/12/2010-in-review-good-movies-you-missed.html

Follow-up point: In my observation, not that this is surprising, book bloggers are a much more intellectually engaging lot than movie bloggers. The good book bloggers tend to be aware and informed about movies, all kinds of music, the visual arts, history, philosophy. It bothers me that movie writers are more closed-off. It could be that, for book bloggers, books function as a window onto the world; while for many movie writers, movies function as a mirror, reflecting their pre-existent enthusiasms back at them. This is not the fault of the movies themselves, of course, but it is an unfortunate tendency in discourse about the movies.

"Is America a plutocracy?"

Well, my answer would be, It certainly seems to have become one (and not for the first time, either). Historian and political economist Francis Fukuyama gives the question full consideration in this exceptionally interesting article. 

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=906

His conclusions are a bit softer and more tentative than mine would be, especially when it comes to this bit:

At some level, corrupt developing-country elites know they are getting away with murder (sometimes for real); they rarely try to justify their self-enrichment to themselves in moral terms. American elites, however, tend to believe they are helping society as a whole even as they help themselves. Thus the centrality of the efficient market hypothesis: Financiers proudly see themselves as “value creators”, not as highbrow pickpockets of widows and orphans.

I suspect that many of this type do privately see themselves as....well, maybe "highbrow pickpockets" is not the term they would use, but perhaps "clever self-enrichers"? They are true globalists in this sense: The welfare of the United States and its citizens means not a whit to them, except insofar as America is usefully the land where "a sucker is born every minute." They have offshored not only the jobs at their companies but also, to the extent they can, their own money, and their own responsibilities under American laws. In short, I think that they are generally far more cynical than Fukuyama lets on, and that they do not care much about "value creation" except as it applies to their own bank accounts. Of course, promoting concepts such as "value creation," "trickle down, " and Schumpeter's "creative destruction" is helpful to the elite class rhetorically, but we should not be misled by that.

Nonetheless, Fukuyama's essay is an important contribution, and I recommend it strongly.

A Single Man (2009)

I finally saw A Single Man, after urgings from friends -- I snapped it up at my local Korean bookstore the minute I saw the DVD on sale. Interestingly, although Koreans ostensibly disavow homosexuality as a Western import, they do seem to have a particular fascination with it, which made me less than surprised to see this DVD on offer. The second-highest grossing Korean film of all time, The King and the Clown, is a gay historical romance, as is another popular movie here, A Frozen Flower. In one of my classes on national cultures just last week, a female student demonstrated extensive familiarity with Tchaikovsky's love life....

But I digress. I liked A Single Man, especially for Colin Firth's wonderful lead performance. but I did not love it and would not rank it very high as a piece of cinema. For me, a gay romantic construct gets no special points just because it is gay. More to the point, is it true? The problem I have with A Single Man (which may go back to the Christopher Isherwood novel, but I'd have to check) is that the dead lover is improbably perfect -- a pure fantasy figure (especially for the era). As incarnated by the incredibly handsome Matthew Goode, he is heart-stoppingly attractive, funny, sensitive, intelligent, hot, dog-loving, comfortably way ahead of his time -- I mean, it's just too much. I can enjoy this as a Boy's Own Romance number -- the flashback depicting the lovers' first meeting is particularly delightful ("I think I'm taken") -- but as a director and co-scenarist, Tom Ford does nothing to complicate the romantic template even a little bit. A truly complex gay film such as the late Bill Sherwood's 1986 Parting Glances -- which features very handsome men, too, but puts them to much more interesting use -- is far ahead of A Single Man even though it came out 23 years before. A Single Man is pleasurable but ultimately rather regressive, I think.

As an instance of that regression, the "looks fascism" of the fashion industry where Ford resides is very much in evidence throughout the film. There is no one on significant display who is less than sexy and stunning (except for the maid, and who cares what the help look like, right?). Tom Ford's vision will not admit that anyone could be short or overweight or average-looking. The film would have been so much truer if the student-in-pursuit had been ordinary and unremarkable instead of a young male model type. Why should the professor kill himself, when he has two knockout sexual opportunities in one day (the other being the hustler), the likes of which most of us wouldn't encounter in ten years? Come on.

A Cautionary Tale

I recently unsubscribed from the YouTube channels of a popular vlogger, whom I will not name directly here, as the point is not to attack or embarrass him. He covers the Korea and Japan beats, and since I live in Korea and am interested in Japan, this was an attraction. The vlogger's manner is charming and he is rather a handsome fellow, which always gets my attention. But as I watched more of his videos, I realized that there was no point of view being expressed, and therefore no real content. There was only the appealing delivery, which grows thin after a while. Everything was "cool" or "awesome." You can only coast for so long on two adjectives that convey little more than a general attitude.

So the caution is this: Before you seek to engage people's attention, make sure at least that you have something to say. It's kind of a minimum.

James MacArthur

Famed television actor James MacArthur, Lieutenant Dan Williams on Hawaii Five-O, passed away on the 28th. I was a big Hawaii Five-0 fan when I was a boy (still am), and a particular fan of MacArthur; I sort of idolized him at age 12. In recent years he has maintained a very nice personal website and "digital scrapbook," worth checking out:

http://www.jamesmacarthur.com/

His likable personality comes across strongly at this site. He was an interesting, thoughtful man, and he led a very interesting life (including his rearing as the adopted son of actress Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur). There has been quite an outpouring of affection for MacArthur in many forums these past couple of days.

As with virtually any actor, if you dig through MacArthur's IMDB credits you find some offbeat items. Although the young MacArthur was generally a wholesome presence, in films like Third Man on the Mountain or Spencer's Mountain, in his very first film, The Young Stranger, he plays a somewhat troubled kid. In a 1961 Untouchables episode, he is a punk gangster. Later, he goes all-out Sixties in The Love-Ins (a thinly disguised telling of the exploits of Timothy Leary) and The Angry Breed, my personal favorite, in which he plays Deek Stacey, the arrogant, sexy leader of a neo-Nazi biker gang! No, you didn't misread that.