Watcha Lookin' At?

     . . . . The other night I was still sleepless* at 3:30 AM.  So -- Highlander (1986).

Set in the then contemporary NYC of the mid-1980's, and very early 15th century Scotland.

* Could the sleeplessness be caused by seemingly SUDDEN shock of actually doing things Outside in all sorts of venues, and SEEING people, socially and professionally, Face to Actual Face in the Real World?  It did seem as though we were continuing with pandemic life of quiet, solitude and distance and then it was like Wait! Bang!  We're back!  Sort of back anyway. We continue masking indoors and in crowded situations.  But with the warm > hot > HOT weather and out-of-town visitors and well, just wooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! We've been vaccinated for nearly two months and so have just about everyone else we know, well, it's like we finally recognized what FULLY VACCINATED means, and have believed in it. And we are BUSY.

Too, I have dear friends who are gravely ill. 

And one of my email accounts got hacked (fixed in about 3 hours thanks to el V -- what do people without an el V do when these things happen? -- among other matters that might be keeping me awake.

There is good news too. Evidently the distilled white vinegar was more than effective in ridding my computer desk of an attempted invasion by very teeny tiny brown ants.

Cuba's own vaccine is now approved.  They expect to have all of Havana fully vaccinated by the end of August.  Probably sooner in the country and the less densely populated areas!  Plus both universities that wanted Postmambo to do projects in Havana in 01/2021, have confirmed to do them in 01/2022.

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I saw this movie once before, long ago, maybe at a revival house, when we still had the vestiges of such things? This is quite an historical era artifact, as it encapsulates pop culture aspects of the mid-late 1980's, early 1990's. This is particularly clear with the choice made as to where and when the film opens, at  one of those fake, costume wrestling nights at Madison Square Garden. The days of Jesse Ventura "the Body" -- who went on in the '90's to get himself elected governor of Minnesota (which seems to have taught the voters nothing).

That this film experience is going to be more than a bit bonkers is indicated by the music choices alone: “New York, New York” lyrics sung by Frank Sinatra, as part of the soundtrack, is a Highlander running joke. 1985-6 isn't that long since the 1977 Blackout and NYC’s 1975 bankruptcy crisis, so the City’s still damned raw. We’re in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), not Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). The mise en scéne is full out punk era, with the Big Bad Kurgen antagonist channeling the theatrics of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and Iggy Pop, plus the tagged background in so many of the scenes.

But for sheer delirium, we’ve got as primary sound track continuity, World Wide Wrestling’s fave, Queen, and its fusion of Freddie Mercury’s glam rock, heavy metal and loads of other sorts of rock and other musical forms too.

What this mid-1980’s New York City soundtrack pointedly does not have, is Black and Brown. There is no Salsa, no Boogaloo, no Black music, not even HipHop, about to birth a subgenre of its own, Gangsta Rap, despite 1986 being the peak year of HipHop's pop culture golden age. Despite the omnipresent tagged scenery, despite the brief appearance of a single Black immortal, whom the Kurgan takes out, naturally, Highlander’s New York City is as White as you can get.

In the movie's favor, the landscapes and crowds of the16th century scenes in Scotland were filmed live action, not cgi pretense thrown up against a blank mud blue screen.  So those scenes have that reality intense quotient now too that we miss so much in what action superhero franchise flix have devolved into.

However, none of this conceals the fact, no matter how often the first installment has been edited, this movie is deliriously bonkers. It’s astonishing actually, how this movie make no sense whatsoever, which is probably part of its appeal, particularly at age 15, when nothing makes sense anyway. Movies like this weren’t as common in 1986. By now though, mixed tone and genre are the norm . Russell Mulcahy, Highlander’s director, came out of music videos. MTV Channel had hit in 1981 (“video killed the radio star’), so again, if one was 15, there was a sensibility here that would likely be working for ya, or at least forming an imprint of expectation.

Which is the only reason that can explain why something this badly done was able to become a franchise, throwing off one after another even worse movie in this "There Can Be Only One universe."

What a thrilling experience this movie must have been for a kid in those days (those who saw it  – box office didn’t make back investment), anywhere in the range of 11 - 20 range maybe? What could compete with that opening sequence that concludes with the most prolonged, explosive, largest ejaculation ever experienced in the history of the planet -- no wonder it is called "the Quickening." 

Sidebar:

Way back, sometime after 2003 but before 2010, I watched via dvd some of the 6 seasons of the Highlander tv series (1992-98) spun off from the movie. Which naturally did not carry the same electric excitement and interest of the movie. But there was a lot more emphasis on romance in the series, which tv audiences loved. In the UK this was kids’ stuff, but in the US the audience was adults.

Influenced by: MTV (1981) – Music videos, murky lighting, fast cuts w/o continuity worries (see also, alas HBO GOT); 

every melodrama, every movie ever made with the girl screaming while men duke it out, plus, you know, King Kong -- the girl in the pitcha is there to scream; the self-conscious snark of The Terminator (1984), tying up the screamer to the logo sign of Silvercup Studios, home to NYC's largest film and tv production studio, etc.

Influences on: Outlander (1991); Buffy – the Chosen One, and via the Highlander tv series – multiple potential immortals.

 

Reading and Listening: Black Nerdom

      . . . . In a sad way, because in this absolute white supremacist historical nation, the common denial that this subject even exists is as normal as mass gun fire massacres. But though I am anything but a nerd of any kind, much less one who is Black, I still feel a sense of personal skin in this game. 

This is due to an incident that happened at the last sf/f gathering I attended, which happened to be a reading, in the early aughts of this, the 21st Century.*  A White man, ended threatening me with rape and murder because he insisted that Black people did not and never did have anything whatsoever to to do with sf/f and its peculiar** visions of the past or the present or the future. He slammed a chair on a table when I tried to draw attention to Afro Futurism and African American musical vision in funk, jazz,  including as early with, but not limited to, Sun Ra.

 He screamed I was a liar, that I'd made-up Afro Futurism.  There was no such thing, and certainly not in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  For one thing HE had never heard of it, and he knew science fiction and fantasy inside out,  because he was now 50 and had been reading it all HIS life.

Alas, we are certainly still holding on with fang and claw to that peculiar* white version of sf/f -- and all the other related pop cultural expressions and experiences.

Long read article in the New York Times Magazine.  As the NYT is paywalled, here is the url:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/t-magazine/black-nerds-culture.html

The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture by Adam Bradley

"By pushing back against centuries-old stereotypes, a historically overlooked community is claiming space it was long denied."

The piece is a fine run-down of pop culture sf/f nerdom and Black expression.  However, this is my favorite part, which is equally essential information for White nerds who are BLM allies:

....A BRIEF HISTORY of Black nerds dates back to before the Revolutionary War, to Phillis Wheatley, the young Black woman born a slave who was the first person of African descent to publish a collection of English poetry — only to have to prove her authorship, as well as her knowledge of the works of Homer, Ovid and Virgil, to a panel of “the most respectable characters in Boston,” as the 18 white men described themselves in a note “To the Public” that introduces her “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” (1773). The Black nerd also lives in the pages of Charles W. Chesnutt, whose short-story collection “The Conjure Woman” (1899) reads like a late 19th-century iteration of Peele’s “Get Out,” where the resources of the Black imagination overcome the sunken place of white mythmaking and domination. And it lives in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952), whose nameless Black male protagonist is a self-described “thinker-tinker” writing the story of his life from his underground lair fitted with precisely 1,369 light bulbs; even the novel’s title evokes H.G. Wells’s science fiction classic “The Invisible Man” (1897), repurposing invisibility as a metaphor for the erasure of Black identity under the racist white gaze....

 

Alas, unmentioned are two early expressions -- these would be very early even if the author was White -- of sf/f imaginings, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances E. W. Harper, and, even prior to the War of the Rebellion and abolition, Blake; or The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba (1859) by Martin Delany.

(Anyone who knows me or el V can see why this discovery excited us so much.  Ha!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the meantime, even though The American Slave Coast has been out of print in print for months, due to the covid-19 aggravated shortage of print and production plants, Robert Christgau was moved to give the book his current Substack space, And It Don't Stop.  He told us yesterday, when informing us it was going up, that he'd been working on this 'stack' for weeks.  It also took him years to read Slave Coast because the content is so painful to read.  But it is a permanent, large, part that is our nation's history. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*  This incident had a great deal to do with my removal of self from the field.

** See the classic history by Kenneth E. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956). The book was revelatory still at the end of the 1980's when I read it first.  It is still most worth reading, particularly if one is beginning a program of self-education into these matters, in hopes of being a better informed ally of BLM.

Ammunition -- Surely They Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank - HBO Confederates

     . . . . Even on the ASOIAF forum HBO's announced next project with D&D alternate history in which the southern antebellum slaveocracy successfully seceded has set off a sh*t storm, on the order of "Bad Idea or Worst Idea?" with loads of people weighing in with all the cliched, stereotypical expected responses, which basically say --

Woo! slavery's so haut!

It's just entertainment what's your problem?

How can you condemn something that hasn't even been written yet?

The Civil War wasn't about slavery.

Antebellum slavery couldn't industrialize because it was a feudal system not a capitalist system.

The north didn't care about slavery.

There were very few abolitionists (and evidently, judging by these comments, not a single person of color -- or white woman -- was in favor of abolition or against slavery, and this was wholly a white man's war).

Why not just have let 'em have their part of the country and all would have been fine.

Slavery would have just withered away.

Blahblahblahblah.

To be able to combat these idiocies coolly and effectively, one needs to be armed -- and trust me, those thoughtlessly regurgitating these cliches are not.  One must point out particularly what the slavocracy's objectives were (number 1: expansion of slavery) there are a few books one can read to make one competent. One should read them too,  because what most people think they know about antebellum slavery, "the underground railroad," abolition and the roots of the War of Southern Aggression are at best out-dated (such as slavery was a feudal system), and at worst,  just wrong (the north didn't give a damn about slavery).

For example, Eugene Genovese's thesis that slavery was feudal not capitalist, has been dismantled by vast scholarship in the last twenty - thirty years. Enormous amounts of scholarship has gone into the history of antebellum slavery in all its aspects since the Civil Rights Movement, and historians everywhere have been reaping the benefits of this in the last 2 - 3 decades.  The same is true for the war effort itself.

Here is a very short list of books than anyone who wants to speak of the system of antebellum slavery and The War of the Rebellion should read:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself;

Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley (Keckley was the US's first African American 
couturier -- right before secession she dressed both Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Davis. She became socially isolated Mary Todd Lincoln's White House confidant. the book is a mixture of authentic memoir and fiction;

Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged  by William C. Davis;

General Lee's Army: From Victory to Defeat by Joseph Glatthaar;

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matt Karp;

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned and Constance Sublette -- which runs down in a chronological, fast-reading narrative the latest scholarship about slavery in North America from the earlier colonial era to Emancipation, including the influence and effects the system within the larger European and hemispheric historical context, but the focus is on the economics of the enslaved bodies themselves -- without which the South had no wealth;

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement by Fergus M. Bordewich;

Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey -- an interesting contrast to how the Union State Department was seeing the situation with England in particular through the experiences of the US minister's mission to Saint James;

Mary Chesnut's Civil War; the carefully edited after-the-fact diary of a the wife of the South Carolina senator James Chestnut Jr., until secession, after which he served as an aide to Jeff Davis and a brigadier general in charge of South Carolina's reserves (though not seeing action, of course, being such a slavocracy nabob);

The Free State of Jones by by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer -- Mississippians (the state with largest number of millionaires in the country prior to Emancipation) who were neither segregationists nor secessionist, nor were they nabobs -- they suffered and they resisted and fought back.

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams.  He writes of his first hand experiences at the highest levels of England's and France's government during the first years of the war, as private secretary to his father, Francis Adams, as minister to Saint James.

Two things we must never forget about antebellum slavery and the War of Southern Aggression /K/ A it's official name in the records of the United States, The War of Rebellion: African Americans played an immense role in abolition and emancipation.  Escaped slaves and free people of color founded newspapers, wrote books, spoke at endless meetings, organized a relief and assistance for those who managed to escape.  They labored endlessly to keep the issues of the Fugitive Slave Act and Dred Scott in the forefront of progressive minds.  Here we see the first nexus of authentic cooperative action -- not just words! -- of black and white, male and female. Never underestimate the power of people with god-given mission for moral improvement (look at how the evangelicals etc. have managed to just about disappear not only abortion, but any woman's reproductive health care from so many places in this nation, even though it is all legal).

And we must never forget that while the north for the most part, as well as the Union, when the time came, though deeply white supremacist, was also deeply antagonistic to slave labor, for it undercut wages across the board for everyone (as keeping the wages of Haitians at a few cents an hour is the benchmark for wages throughout the hemisphere currently)-- as well as threatening having work at all.  With this half of the 19th century receiving boatloads of immigrants every day, the competition for jobs was fierce.

Having slavery forced upon free soil states was not in their interests -- just as the Fugitive Slave Act was antithetical to their interests, economically, politically, and socially.  Anyone could point to your daughter and son, declare her, him a runaway slave and there was no legal recourse -- and you were supposed to help them.

Don't forget by now there was a large percentage of legally enslaved who had white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair, thanks to generations of white men raping African American women for both fun and profit -- every slave child born provided the slave owner with at least another $50 of credit, in a culture that didn't have money per se, only credit, vastly based in the bodies of their slaves.

So skin color was not a final defense by any means -- nor was an accused runaway allowed to have or speak a defense!  People in the north did not like this.  This brought more people into the anti-slavery factions than anything else, and did it so fast the south couldn't believe it was happening.

You have to know all this and much more besides, and know it inside and out, viscerally, before you can write successfully about anything to do with the history of the war, slavery, and what happened. And the more one knows -- seeing from the benefit of hindsight-- the more one knows it couldn't have happened any other way.

What cannot be white washed away in any kind of entertainment is that slavery = rape and every kind of violence perpetrated on people who have no legal right to object or fight back. Which is why so many can't seem to let it go (see above -- slavery's haut! How dare you object to what turns us on?).  They want and revel in with all their being, the joy of feeling dominant, doing whatever they wish (or their fantasy surrogates do to women and others whatever they wish), to deliberately make people suffer both physical abuse and emotional abuse.

We see this particularly in the many stories or program that involves artificial intelligence / androids. There is no fun in hurting and degrading a sentience that doesn't feel abused and degraded, that in really has no free will or feeling. Thus all the plot lines is giving the androids a/is actual humanity or having them develop it -- so they can feel humiliated and degraded. (A rare exception to this is Ex Machina, an adroid who does feel outrage, but is also entirely sociopathic, lacking all the human feelings and values -- just like slave owner.  She gets hers, and is now unleashed upon the world of poor unsuspecting male victims. O noes!)

We say, for the sake of the story, so people can have identification with the characters we have to give them human feelings.  I.e. we need that dominance from built in abuse.  Which is why this will not help and will make things worse.  D&D have a track record, and that track record is out there for all to see and read.

Entertainments have civic, ethical, social, political and historical responsibilities too.  To say "it's only for fun," -- just think about what that fun consists of.

Then there's this, that so many of us find the entire concept sickening on so many levels, delights the ilks that are D&D -- it means they won, which is supremely depressing.

Reading Wednesday -- Charlemagne

It's not easy finding histories published in English about  the kaleidoscopic geopolitical  arrangements among religions  and regions, when the strong men of those we tend to call Merovingians took control of the old Gaulic Empire (5th - 8th centuries). We can glibly recite the names: Charles Martel, Clovis, Pepin, Charlemagne, but how little we know of what went on then -- or how large parts of Gaul became part of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire.

This summer seemed a good idea to fill in some details.

In possession of a gift certificate, off to the Strand I went, certain there would be shelves of books in the European section on these matters.  Well, no. Feudalism in France, there were many, many books, all of which began with a short introduction that explained what we already know: that structural roots of what is understood as pure feudalism began with Charlemagne's administrative organization of his own empire, for taxes, for defense and law-giving.  Feudalism is FRENCH in origin. Well, yah, we know that.

Derek Wilson's Charlemagne (2016)  was only book in the whole enormous place that had Charlemagne as the subject, front and center.  Charlemagne, by Brit popular historian, Derek Wilson, who specializes in biographies of colorful monarchs for trade - commercial publishing, not academic. The books are dense with information, though they are on the prestige end -- not quite coffee table books, but have full-color, beautiful art reproduced to illustrate. It was first published in England (Hutchinson Press). Doubleday reprinted here, but as I said, this isn't a subject of  interest to U.S. trade publishing. 

My reasons for reading Charlemagne  (2006) by Derek Wilson were many..  Most of them were not satisfied, for reasons of length (it's short) for reasons that the work was more geared to dealing with what seems to have been Charlemagne's character.  

However, Wilson's book did reveal something important to me, both personally and for the project in which I am currently engaged. Wilson, methodically, providing excellent sources throughout, debunked the mythology which is what almost all of us know about this first western Roman emperor.  In other words almost everything we think we know about him, no matter how little we know we know, is false -- phony history, deliberately constructed as PR both in his own time and later, for all sorts of reasons.  Best of all, Wilson describes how Charlemagne himself, his scribes and advisors, and those who followed them, employed minstrels / singers / poets to do this. 

Another way of putting it is that these powerful elites engaged in deliberate revision of history for the purpose of convincing those over whom they ruled that things that were not, were, and what had happened, didn't happen.

My copy, acquired for Senior Honors Comp. Lit course.

All of the purposes for which popular culture was deployed to change history find their nexus, naturally, in La Chanson de Roland.

For purposes of brevity, cut to the chase: 

Q: Why was Charlemagne in Spain and the borders of the Gaulish provinces in the first place?

A: To keep the Moors from invading Christian Gaul.

Well, no. 

At that time the Abbasid Caliphate had prevailed over much of the strict religious Umyyad Caliphate, Iberia -- Spain, the western edge of the Muslim world was much divided, with the Umyyads under siege by the Abbasid factions.  (There were other splinter groups as well within Islamic Spain, just as there were splinter groups among the precariously hanging on Christians in northwestern Spain.  One of the Umyyad groups invited (with money payment as a carrot) Charlemagne and his forces to come and help them against the largest Abbsid group. And he did.  That's what he and his forces were where they were -- not fight Saracens, but helping one group of Saracens against another group.

The interpenetration of Muslims in Charlemagne's kingdom was so common in terms of living, trade, marriage that everyone pretty much got along -- particularly for the sake of trade and taxes.

Bet this hadn't been heard by most of us before, who aren't actual scholars of the era and read the languages of the documents . . . .

But the rep of Charlemagne as Christ's Defender of the Faith, who held off the defeat of Europe's heart by the Spanish Saracens holds to this day.  As to a somewhat lesser degree, does Charlemagne's great efforts in taking Jerusalem from the Saracens.  Not true, he never went there, of course.

Mostly he fought other Christian warlords, while all fought with each other, and maneuvered, most often with military might, to overcome his warlord, rivals -- and not infrequently even the Pope himself (who wasn't in Rome at this period).  But Charlemagne had greater vision than all of them.  

This is where he and the western Church came together.  Charlemagne had more than glimmers of Christiandom -- which could be viewed as a spiritual version of the Eurozone.  However many bastards he sired, etc.,  Charlemagne's faith and belief in Christianity and the Church were as deep as his drive to power and control, and both were equally sincere.

He divided his kingdom for the sake of peace in his later years. None of his heirs had his faith, his talents or charisma, and what he built fell apart quickly (rather like what seems is happening with the Eurozone?)

Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor.

Napoleon coerces the Pope to crown him emperor.. Though being Napoleon he places the crown upon his own head, and further crowns Josephine empress himself.  The creation of the portrait of this event, who was included and what action was depicted, was carefully overseen and dictated by Napoleon.

For his time and place, the scope of his vision of Christendom was exceptional.  It became a dream ideal, a foundation of the equally dream ideal of Chivalry,  that all of those west of the Adriatic were part of something that was unto itself -- special, under God's and Christ's particular, protection and affection. Which drove crusades and other incursions unto this very day.  Charlemagne's empire was the foundation of what later became the Holy Roman Empire, often more an idea or a claim than an empire at all.  But it lasted until WWI finally put it forever in its well-earned coffin.

I understand rather better now why Charlemagne is the patron saint of the very idea of Europe, even though much of his sainthood is founded in faux deeds and deliberately created romance.

I still am unable to outline all the steps along the way though, from the 5th century through that of the 11th.

Orphan Black - Season 3 Part II -- Discussion Back-and-Forth + Jessica Jones

NO SPOILERS

Here's a response from Elsewhere to the business of Orphan Black that I also posted here:

Orphan Black, Season 3 Episode 7 "Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate"

At Elsewhere an amigo commented:

Having watched the whole season, this episode is the one I shall nominate for next year's Hugo awards.

For me, the adding of the Castors adds to the depth of the stories & also provides a contrast. The creators of Orphan Black aren't afraid to keep extending themselves by adding more elements. One thing that seems apparent to me is that despite having the male clones, it's still very much told from the PoV of the the sisters.

To which I responded after watching the final two episodes too:

I hear what you're saying here.

However, from a writer's standpoint -- and a critical viewer / reader's standpoint -- merely adding more elements, unless they are fully integrated in the arc, or at least the seasonal arc in which they appear,  drives an extended work off the cliff. This unintegrated element compromises the structural integrity of an espisode, a season, a series.

In print fantasy (e-book or paper) we're often encountering writers who cannot resist behaving like gaming writers, where story structure and integrity don't necessarily matter, and certainly not as much as the conflict and their levels. Character after character, culture after culture, place after place, and everything else that catches their magpie attention, without considering what this means to the structural coherence of the entire endeavor, or even the rhythm and pacing.

There has to be a consciously understood endgame in mind for these additions, particularly for television, which is done by several people in a single room. Think of how many series have gone off the rail this way, in terms of satisfactory narrative arc and plot. The Good Wife is one of these. Battlestar G was another -- which happened at the point where it got particular about women as actors and agency. The show went for rape, made the biggest baddie a woman, and refused to allow the female pilots, who were as perfectly qualified as any, to perform the rescue. The show never got back its footing after that, because it couldn't even imagine women as the Heroes for the oldest trope in screen action, saving the damsel in distress.

In fantasy, as a single example, there's Pullman's Dark Materials. As soon as the boy showed up, Lyra became secondary, in her own story! But he was the male, he had the knife.

This is why Buffy remains the outlier and exception despite the hundreds -- thousands? -- of supernatural/sf/f series since. The core always remains, is always central, and the lodestone is always Buffy. No matter who comes and who goes, ultimately it's she who is driving all their action and reactions. In each season she needs to learn more about herself in order to have any chance at all to save the world again.

But this constant addition of more and more of the same is a very dangerous path to take, structurally speaking, as dangerous on screen as it is on the page.

So I have concerns about the boy clones -- especially as their great danger is to their brains, while for the women, it's about their reproductive capacities. Right there we've hit a very dangerous gender expectation, an all too unexamined, presumed gendered assumption -- that a man's center is governed by his brain and a woman's by her uterus. That women have uterii [?] and what this has meant for women throughout history in which so much of the time they are entirely governed by men, and that this is considered right and proper because they have a uteruses, and their reproductive capacity is men's right to harness for their own profit in any way they deem right -- this is what the show was about. And its essential.

I've spent going on 6 years now on this very subject in a racial and historical context. That's not to say that I am particularly qualified to speak to this, but that this subject is so vast and so integral to everything from the development of a capitalist society to legal identity, that one can easily spend 6 years researching and writing just a single aspect of it!

On the other hand, speaking specifically to Orphan Black, there is this consideration.

The traditional trope for adventuring children, and particularly adventuring females, is the dearth of family. This is how it is possible for a female adventurer to exist, because she has no family ties, no family support, due to bad luck (poverty and illness) or because a Big Bad destroyed her family -- and maybe even raped her, leaving her for dead. Then she's got the overwhelming drive to avenge these crimes to justify her adventuring. At least with European and U.S. historical - cultural traditions this is so, particularly when it comes to popular entertainments with an adventure slant.

So often within these entertainments too, when it comes to the USian Romantic Individual Hero, he too is a solitary, without family ties or even back story. He just is, like The Man With No Name.* Though often lazy writers motivate the fellow with a dead wife/lover/family, who are then never again mentioned, but do for justifying his violence -- he, sensitive fellow, has been hurt and must fix the hurt by killing.

Spoiler Alert -----

Regarding Orphan Black, the addition of Mrs. S's own mother to the cast, has revealed a solid platform for "The Original" for all the clones' genome -- as well as adding to the family. Which was appropriate for this season 3, which kept hitting us over the head with the information that this season is about FAMILY!

It also is fairly clear that exceptionally gifted or not, in the variety of ways these clones are, motherhood still creates all these dilemmas for adventuring and fighting, that can only be dealt with by sending away / hiding the child, i.e. separation from the mother-daughter bond. So much of what Sarah does could not be done with her daughter on hand, even if her daughter wasn't one of the prizes all the big bads salivate to control and possess. And Sarah's daughter Kira, is always a lever against Sarah, thus the big bads want Kira too, beyond even what they could harvest from her genetics -- and whatever powers of prescience she seems to possess.

So it's hiding the child or doing what what Mrs. S did: gather her chicks, run like hell away and hide. But They always find you again, it seems. But then, that's story telling, yes? One's good deeds as much as one's sins return to haunt you. Look at Mrs. S's own mum.

Lovely show, but I do not like the boy clones -- they are a distraction, particularly as they have their own Mother, the dark reflection of Mrs. S. Recall what was remarked above about adding to add and the detrimental effect on structure and also on pacing and rhythm. As in fantasy, if there's a magical flying creature, do not have a second, different magical flying creature. It's clunky composition.

The response, then to the above is this:

Thanks for your crunchy response which contains much intriguing stuff to consider.
I hadn't considered the female/reproduction: male/intellection contrast, which when you pointed it out made me facepalm: how did I not see it before? 

I'd been thinking more about how the brain defect causes loss of identity before eventually, death, which is also a powerful element, identity being a major theme of Orphan Black. (Personally, I'd rather lose my ability to reproduce than my sense of self.)

 I don't know if the creators have an endpoint in mind, I hope they do and they don't screw up the ending. It's definitely a challenge when creating an episodic work; you can't go back and change earlier episodes because they're already out there, part of canon.

The Crystal question is an interesting one too because you could argue that they are protecting their sister be leaving her out of the circle, though that may change in coming episodes. Knowing one is a clone comes with a cost.

Thank you for thinking this is "crunchy."

We miss this stuff all the time -- f=heart/uterus/feeling and the undifferentiated primative, while it's male=head/brain/intelligence/rationality/meaning and significance -- or, as you have noticed, Real Identity, unlike the heart/uterus -- which is just icky non-rational, non-creative >!< blobness -- which justifies any kind of exploitation for the benefit of the real people, men, particularly wealthy men.

It's interesting here, to think of Buffy and her family, particularly her relationship with her own mother, Joyce, and then with Dawn, for whom Buffy will sacrifice anything -- Dawn's her sister, but she feels for her like a mother much of the time.

This business of the clone club and sisters, particularly as it is expressed via Helena, who, with Sarah, is the only one of them who can have babies -- gets more interesting all the time.  Even though I do fear the writers fear exploring these gendered matters very deeply, Orphan Black is vastly superior to, say the over-hyped Jessica Jones, which concentrated entirely upon abuse and victimization. The Orphan Black women are very different, including those, like Mrs. S, who are not clones.

All this is in such contrast with Jessica Jones, maybe the most over-hyped series in a year of a large number of over-hyping series.

Jessica Jones is part of a bloated bunch of comic franchises.  As such, like all its siblings, JJ's rhythm is that of thud. Orphan Black is an original, which by the grace of its actors and writers, can handle a variety of rhythms and to. Even the solo star turns reference those of the other characters, particularly the primary Clone Clubbers (the club references and locations thus have an authentic purpose among OP's many other spaces).

Some have criticized Helena's character as a cartoon -- because, she isn't evidencing enough suffering from her abuse.

If one isn't seeing Helena's actions partly in light of what she's suffered, one is looking rather blindly, one might think, yes?  Why is she so obsessed with the entire concept of sisters and babies?

Moreover, as with episode 8 in season three -- much of this is played deliberately as comic relief (see, as in Hamlet) in contrast with heart wrench betrayal of a non-member of Clone Club that follows. Much of this depends on the impeccable timing the actress and supporting actors possess, along with the writers, to riff off many ancient comic tropes starting with Greek and Roman theater. Also with other of these tropes such as the Mexican cantina, and the entrance of Mrs. S in the best classical grade B western manner, the moment after Helena declares she's going to kill Mrs. S, then their showdown, with Mrs. S's secret superweapon -- love. It's a brilliant episode that rings so many changes. The plodding JJ, mired in superhero graphix/comix tropelandia, was incapable to getting anywhere near this snap crackle and pop in any episode.

This sort of episode was present in OB from the first season. These scenes in which the writers and actors -- and audience -- can relax from threat for a few beats are essential, otherwise the very weight of what they are all up against is too heavy for the show to dance -- and then it would be just another comix franchise thudder. There is more than enough authentic suspense and fear for our characters in peril provoked in us, the audience.

This is something that Buffy did so well as well.

Morevoer this broad comedy is consistently anchored by Alison and her suburban milieu (which works beautifully to be played for laughs, even though the laughs remind us of the gravity of what's at stake -- even, for pete's sake exploring how a marriage can derail and yet be saved, and even become stronger and better than anyone previously could have imagined -- this stuff really happens!). This is also the case to a lesser degree with Helena, within different contexts.

 Dancing and singing along to pop music in a group and as individuals as relaxation, blowing off steam and celebration has also become a continuity marker of group or individual fleeting moments of perfect well-being, as also happens when Helena and Alison's contexts interpenetrate the previous separating boundaries between them. It's beautiful in season 3, seeing Alison and Donny jumping on the bed, playing together with their ill-gotten gains, and later seeing Helena singing and dancing by herself while making soap.

Bringing ng Helena to live with Alison, Donny and their family was a brilliant move. And then -- we get the blood, a la River from Firefly (another pop culture television reference by the writers who revel in these, and who know their audience) thanks to Helena, who is all about saving the family. For me this stuff is brilliant, and it is executed beat - pace perfect.

To me, the most salient point of difference between Jessica Jones and Orphan Black is that OP explores what one's class background growing up means for each of the characters. They all came up differently, other than Sarah and Fe, who grew up learning street smarts and griftering fairly naturally considering Mrs. S's own capacities in these areas, as well as her skills with violence. Which is why season 3 bringing in Alison's mother and Mrs. S's mother works.

All the women have different gifts, and they are learning to wield them to work for their own futures as autonomous, rather than property.

Whereas, Jessica Jones is situated within a locus of hopelessness, the sense of no future, that the genuine poor possess, whether they have successful friends and acquaintances or not.  Yet here are successful, connected, wealthy friends that make a great deal possible for Jessica that she couldn't do for herself. That's the single part of JJ that felt right to me, even though geographically the locations, i.e. mise en scèene, are mostly all wrong.

The thing is, that even among the authentically poor, there are moments of happiness and relaxation.  Look at the children playing in refugee camps.  Thus even Helena is changing, thanks to her sisters.  Well, to a degree.  Man, that bloody white coat and blood up that dangling machete and up to her elbows -- but if you have a River, its good to have her on your side, yes?  :)

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* This has changed to a degree within genres of all kinds, as writers, producers, publishers desperately seek franchise expansion. Back story! unleashing the plague of prequels upon the land!

Acadiana - HBO True Detective, Season 1

The first HBO series of True Detective is located and shot in Louisiana's cajun Acadiana.  The friend we visited in Breaux Bridge highly recommended I watch, as he pointed out various places and views as being in the HBO series. The program had conveniently arrived dvd, so after getting back home, I ordered up on netflix.

What did I get?

Immediate references to the traditional practices in Acadiana of Santería, which is claimed to be the serial killer's theatrical set-up of the discovered victim. (In fact, that antlered crown blahblahblah looks a whole lot more like some idiot's fantasy of ancient European earth sacrifices or something). Speaking as someone who knows what Santería is, in the Caribbean and in Brasil, and in its mother non-syncretized practice as Lucumi in Nigeria's Yoruba land -- who knows personally the initiated and the "priestly" class -- who knows which African and Afro-Caribbean groups came to Louisiana, which parts and when, she howls: NO! NOT IN LOUISIANA -- NOT EVEN IN THE U.S.!

Next, immediate reference to Voodoo, also part of the serial killer's display. WHAT? This reference means nothing, nor is anything made out of it in the script. Nor is whatever is called voodoo in New Orleans the Vodún of Haiti, or the practice in Dahomey -- Benin.  For reasons, again, that have to do with who came in the inward San Domingue and Cuban migration to Louisiana during the Napoleonic era, and when. Again, I personally know practitioners, houngans and mambos, from both Haiti and Africa. I also am acquainted of what is called voodoo in New Orleans, and thus am qualified to make this call.

The signature twisted branch, vine and bone forms found with the victims of the serial killings, if there is an actual African-derived underpinning to them, it would be from the religion that in Cuba is called Palo, and which comes ultimately from what we now call Mbanza-Kongo, Angola. Captives from this region are the fundamental layer of all New World slavery populations: South America, the Caribbean and North America. This region of Africa was slaved first and longest, from beginning to the end of slavery in the New World. Thus these spiritual practices were continuously refreshed, until, of course 1808 in what was now the U.S. when the constitutional ban on importing Africans came into place, as protectionism for the Upper South's dominance of the domestic slave trade.  But there is not a word about any of this in the script.  Nor, of course, would a Palo practitioner be using it as an excuse to be a serial killer.

In fact, the theatrical set-ups of the victims are much more like some fantasy of old European earth magic sacrifice, than anything that would come out of Africa.

Marty Hart 2012

This viewer never stopped being thrown out of the show by protagonist Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) straining all his words through a mouth fist-full of gravel. I kept thinking of the guy who plays Deacon on Nashville, who also delivers his lines through his teeth, meanwhile plumping up his cheeks like a squirrel's filled with nuts.

Rust Cohle 1995

Rust Cohle/Matthew McConaughey's way of delivering his lines is equally odd, though in a different sort of way.  It is even hypnotic, as one would expect from someone the script continually hints is as equally psychopathic in his violence as the serial killer(s).

These delivery styles are supposed to convince the viewer that Martin is a native Louisianan, and Rust used to live in Texas? I kept thinking of all the very bad Brit television shows that always make the U.S. characters come from Texas or somewhere in the South, because evidently that's the only way actors can think of to talk like a USian, and how preposterous they sound.  Certainly not like a Texan or any Southerner ever born.

Marty Hart 1995

Rust Cohle 2012

That's the deal -- true detectives not only refuse to give up detecting. They never give up their partner either.  Most importantly they have the capacity and the skills to deliver most explosive violence. Equally important  as detective partners their preferred form of violence and their drive to commit it must be different ,yet complementary. One must be tormented by good vs. evil, the other must be less philosophical.  Rust is always ready to intone his philosophy of the Evil World.  Best line thus

is delivered by Marty, "I've got an idea. Let's make the car a place of silent reflection from now on, all right?" Prime time crime novelist, James Lee Burke, with his has worked this vein deeply in his long-running Robicheaux- Purcell series.

In the middle of the series comes the episode in which our two heroes infiltrate a biker drug gang -- every member of which has hair to ass in the back and down to his nipples in the front. Our Heroes have clean chins and cop  haircuts. WHERE IS THE UNDERCOVER?  This was a fairly pointless episode, evidently included  for the sake of a lot of shooting, and o did the reviewers adore it,

In the final episode both Heroes impossibly survive a knife to the gut (Rust Cohle/Matthew McConaughey) (hoisted into the air on that knife and held there) and a hatchet into the chest (Martin Hart / Woody Harrelson). James Lee Burke’s Dave Robichaeux and Clete Purcell, moved from New Orleans to Acadiana, never die either (though wives and girlfriends do), not from the most ghastly wounds, meat-grinding vehicular crashes or fire blazing explosions. Whatever knocks them out, evidently the air of Acadiana can preserve Heroes to fight the Real Evil another day.

Brothel in the swamp, right where you want it.  Mosquito joy.

Women in True Detective.  Hmm. What are women? Evidently to be female is to be non-dimensional cray-cray, hapless victim, prostitute -- ALWAYS HAVE PROSTITUTES -- or  bad wife who coerces sex from her husband's partner because she has learned her husband serially cheats on her, and though she tells him to get out, he won't leave.

To quote from Vulture:

It’s made from equal parts film noir, Chinatown-style corruption parable, serial-killer potboiler, 3-a.m.-in-the-dorm-room-with-bong-hits philosophical inquiry, and buddy-cop comedy. And it climaxed with a bloody, ridiculous, yet kind of awesome installment that

presented its hero, Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, as some kind of cornpone risen Christ.

True Detective was beautifully photographed, and it is engrossing. McConaughey's cheekbones are particularly mesmerizing.

The most interesting aspect of the series for me is how it slides through time, the past and present, and the musings of the future.  Katrina is the breaking place between their shared past and their present encounter, which is absolutely true for Louisianans -- and then Rita, in Acadiana, following Katrina.  So much is lost, not least pre-digitized criminal records. Having them encounter each other again after that break shows how the two men changed and how they did not, and how certain actions (and irritations) between two allies can follow all the way up

The reason the viewer isn't interested in these killers.  The others get away with it.

the time line -- but forgiveness can be achieved.. The killers remain the same, but we're not interested in the killers, or even the victims. They are the pretext to present us us two very different men, and their relationship, and how their trust in each other ultimately is put to the greatest tests, and transcends whatever irritations and wrongs may have been committed.

Starting off the drive around the region, our Breaux Bridge friend took us to have breakfast at a local establishment that would be at home anywhere with a hipster population: local artists' work on the walls, and for sale; designer coffee drinks made to order, local baked goods from bread to muffins to sinful desserts, sandwiches and salads and other dishes, none of which was priced much or at all below what an NYC place would charge.  Wi-Fi.  An associated art gallery.  After breakfast he took us on an itinerary of music clubs, museums, art - performance spaces, theaters.

On our way to the local artisnal brewery I asked, "Is this place as filled with truly evil people as James Lee Burke writes about or in True Detective?"  (I was meaning right now, not the horrific slavery past of sugar plantation-prisons; our friend knew what I meant.)

He was silent.

Then he said, "Yes."

We Went to Georgia -- Tbilisi, That Is + Another Piece of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story

After attending Another Piece of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story again,* with our London amigo and his Brooklyn Girlfriend, we got in a cab and London Host directed the driver to his undisclosed destination.  He said, "We're going to a new restaurant in your neighborhood which I guarantee you've never been to, and haven't heard about."

He spoke truth.  Tbilisi, named by the immigrants for the capital of their natal land, it had just opened.

The next best thing for getting an authentic sense of a place one knows nothing about, after going there oneself, is to have a good friend, who has excellent powers of observation and a good memory, who is bold and adventurous culturally and linguistically, who also has native guides, to tell you about their journey and experiences.  London Host and Girlfriend are all of these.  As well, since he's a music professional, like all musicians, he slides effortlessly into local non-tourist experience.  Music and food are two of the very best ways to get to know a strange place.  They are also the fastest ways -- particularly as they are part of the language of the place.

London Host and Girlfriend had spent some splendid days in Georgia as he conducted a Masterclass in London's Underground Music of the 60's at the Batumi International Art-House Film Festival, Georgia.  He's also doing a massive study of the conceptual underpinning of "world music" thus he has been visiting points east of Europe frequently lately.  That's the story of how we got to this restaurant.

Meat-centric, the menu didn't have the appeal for me that other sorts of nationality cuisines might, nevertheless it mattered not, as it was the company.  The wines are what are interesting, as this region, on the Black Sea, sharing borders with Turkey, has been producing wines since ancient times, while also since ancient times, been on the trading routes among Europe, the Middle East and Asia -- and even Africa, re Egypt. London Host and Girlfriend were excellent guides to the wine menu.

We got home around 1:00 AM.  Lo and Behold, the modem lights were all on.

I'd just about adjusted to being internetless and thinking it was OK -- except I was worried about winter and how cold the walk would be to the library, and would I slip and fall on ice, while carrying my computer?

Nine days.  Will we ever learn the truth of what happened?  After I called TW once again late yesterday afternoon, after several runarounds, which meant starting all over again each time, I got connected to a real person who told me the problem was -- get this -- a scheduled outage, in order to upgrade the cables and wires throughout our neighborhood.  The work for this project was scheduled to be completed by 7 PM last night and our services would all be resumed.  She would call me around PM, when that happened, if I liked.  But I was going to be in the theater, so my phone would be off.

If -- big if -- that was true, why weren't we informed this was going to take place, so we could have made plans and not pulled out our hair and wasted endless minutes of our cell phone service on phoning TW over these last 9 days?

Is the answer because as customers we must, in person, to a real person, demand we not be charged for the days without service?

But -- is what I was told even true?

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* It was so much fun to see this show this time in London Host's company, because he too knows why Jerry Wexler is the satan of this tale.  If you know anything at all about American pop music in the 20th century, you know the moment Jerry Wexler appears in the life of an artist or a label, it's the trump of doom for the artist and the label.  What a thug.

This time around JS informed BS's kids, who are instrumental in this jukebox musical getting produced, and are now attempting to raise money to take it to Broadway, that we'd be there.  So we learned when they called out el V by name, and wanted to talk about the show and music with him and with London Host as well.  They are so stoked about this show.  Very nice people.

Their mother, Ilene Berns, hasn't seen it yet.  Bette Midler told them the other night when she attended that their mother is going to shoot them ....  I hope not. The amount of ovarian power in music on that stage, particularly in the second half,

in which the singer-actress, Linda Hart, playing Mrs. Berns, does her let-it-rip blues, "Liar," ought to make her feel redeemed.

Another Observance From May 5 -- Metropolitan Museum's Annual Costume Institute Gala Fund-Raiser

It seems whatever era we are in things remain the same: ridiculous, useless wars, financial panics and depressions as the ruling elite gets richer and richer and the poorer grow ever more poor and in numbers -- and frivolity and frou-frou remain for the richer and richer.  Yesterday's date hosted a most important event in NYC, the annual Met Costume Institute fund raiser gala (complete slide show of the attendees and their sartorial choices included at the link).  Each gala observes the glories of fashion as displayed by the most wealthy social classes of the past via what this year's social - celebrity elite chooses to wear.

Cecil Beaton's portrait of women in Charles James's gowns 1948

Charles James 1958

This year it honored Charles James's (1906-1978) post WWII gowns that themselves honored

Sargent - "The Wyndham Sisters" (1899-1900)

Ena and Betty, Daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Asher Wertheimer (1901)

the Gilded - Edwardian age of John Singer Sargent's (1856 - 1925) women of the elite classes, their billowing clouds of skirt, sleeves and / or deep décolleté.

The First Lady opened the newly re-named for Anna Wintour (forever editor of Vogue) Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute earlier in the day.  She was the ribbon cutter.  She wore a plain and simple a-line dress, to the knees, and teeny heels.  The most dressy thing about the dress was that the fabric was a print. It was no gown at all.  So she must not have attended the gala.  Surely she could have, if she'd wanted to.  A scheduling conflict?

I clicked through all the photos of the celebrities who attended the gala, to which this years the men were instructed to wear tails -- which almost none of them did, saying tails made them look like short, tubbby schlubs.

However, Johnny Depp went tails all the way, including walking stick and white gloves, all just slightly exaggerated, just a bit off, retaining his dark glasses, a presentation true to his signature demented persona.

Cumberbatch looks to the tails born.

For the first time I wondered: can you use the bathroom while wearing this? Some Red Carpet walkers must have been sew into their dresses. Does that mean they went without eating or drinking for three days before (typical for Victorian and Edwardian women for ceremonial occasions such as being presented at court)? Or subjected themselves to a severe cycle of purging? Neither one is good for one's health, and is particularly bad for the complexion, one might think. On the other hand it seems to be an actress these days means never eating.

The women who looked the best, i.e. natural, in some of these gown-extravaganzas, naturally, were the professional models.

Sarah Jessica Parker's acres of Oscar de Laurenta gown covered her foot gear. However, it was big news here in NYC last year when it was revealed that Ms Sex in the City had to give up heels forever because of the damage to her feet. Then there are the shoes.  Women's feet these days all look like ballerina feet, and those feet are ugly!  Doubtless this is from a couple of decades of stumbling about in ever-more ridiculous high stilettos.

What Lupita Nyong'o was thinking -- well, we all make sartorial errors. When you're been called on as constantly as she has been to be on view on red carpets since 12 Years a Slave began its film festival screenings -- that she blew it this time, no thing. Besides it's the Costume Institute gala and attendees have traditionally gotten "creative."

Nor was she the only one, by a long shot.  A lot of these! And look at those poor feet!

Though Madonna's bandage costume this year got banned by Wintour, so Madonna stayed home.  Which is just as well.

For what it is worth, which is nothing, I liked this look (on her) a lot. Also, so not Charles James.

Back when I was young enough to wear anything and chose to wear mostly nothing (but with a tan! it was warm! it was the desert!) who would have thought I'd come to enjoy looking at Red Carpet photos of fancy dress? I've never been a consumer of fashion magazines -- unless they were from periods prior to about 1920. Now clothes from the past have always interested me. This was part of which developed me the historian, from my earliest years, pouring over illustrated books and magazines stored in my great-grandparents' basements, their photo albums, even the art illustrations in my piano practice books. After I moved to NYC I've always attended the Met's exhibits in the Costume Institute. In fact, the first, or at least among their first costume exhibits was The Horse, the catalog of which was very useful to me while writing my Horse Girl Fantasies. Since then I've always been clear there were connections between art and fashion though art and fashion are not equivalents -- just as pop culture is not the equivalent of culture.  As well as being pop culture mad, this  city has always been fashion mad, -- though generally seldom what one could call elegant. And, finally, I've come to know a few fashion designers. So those are probably the reasons I now enjoy looking at Red Carpet photos.

Muscle Shoals

Unlike Sun and Stax, and even Blue Note for Jazz, at Muscle Shoals, whether the original Fame Studio or the Jerry Wexler - Atlantic Records steal-way of the Swampers from FAME for Muscle Shoals Sound Studios (memo: never get in bed with Jerry Wexler; guess Rick Hall hadn't paid attention to what happened with Stax) -- there were no women involved at FAME or Muscles Shoals.  It was a boys club all the way around.

No wonder that mess happened with Aretha -- those guys didn't know how to treat women.

No wonder the Stones recorded there.

Or that it was the birthplace of we-wave-stars-and-bars  Country Rock (the Allmans).

Forbidden City USA

Forbidden City USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970 by Arthur Dong chronicles the Chinese nightclub scene in San Francisco and NYC. The book is published this weekend by DeepFocus Productions.

Mr. Dong, whose award-winning trilogy of documentaries about discrimination against gays includes “Coming Out Under Fire,” began researching the clubs while working on his 1989 documentary, “Forbidden City, U.S.A.” “I love the big band era, I love Busby Berkeley musicals,” he said. “And the fact that these were Chinese-Americans doing this made it even that much more exciting.”

This San Francisco nightclub scene was the inspiration for the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American writer, C.Y. Lee, which in turn inspired Oscar and Hammerstein's eighth stage and screen musical. They hired Gene Kelly to direct the first stage production (1958; film 1961).  From the New York Times article on Forbidden City USA and Mr Dong:

Mr. Dong discovered seven nightclubs in San Francisco, as well as a lone outpost in New York, the China Doll, where patrons could indulge in pagoda punches and Tibet coolers “fit for a Buddha.” Owned and operated by Tom Ball, a white stage producer, China Doll played up the Asian angle in ways unseen in the San Francisco clubs, which were all Chinese owned. “At the Forbidden City, you had the Gershwin revue and the Gold Rush show,” Mr. Dong said. “At China Doll, you had shows like ‘Maid in China’ and ‘Slant-Eyed Scandals.’ ”

Mr. Dong also discovered that a lot of the performers at these “all-Chinese” cabarets were not really Chinese. Many were Japanese-American, including the M.C. Pat Morita (“The Karate Kid”) and the comedian Jack Soo, who would go on to star in “Flower Drum Song,” the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical inspired by the Forbidden City nightclub.

This is a fascinating part of the history of American popular music,particularly the Big Band erea, which hardly any of us know.  So we thank Arthur Dong for making it available.