Another 85 degree day, and super windy again, 20-25mph all day long. I'm sorry but I've gotta very quickly get my complaining out of the way, so I'll say that I hate wind so much that I'd take freezing cold December weather over unending wind. It's been blowing for 10 days now. Enough already. End of complaint. :)
Elizabeth, if you are reading, that was another great picture this morning. I mean - wait a minute! - who the heck has pictures of themselves, in a field in Iceland, standing with a group of characters that includes a Four Horned Ram?
I mean, who would have such a picture but you? :)
I love the Four Horned guy. He is looking straight at the camera, and the look in his eye, combined with his horns, give him the aura of a Mythical Beast out of an ancient epic. Or, he could be in the front row at a Metal concert. That's his look and image. But as you say, he is a nice guy in reality. Animals are so wonderful, so full of soul when you get to know them. And only you could have met such a guy as that...... :)
I also have to give props to the guy on the far left of the photo. He or she has no horns, and is a bit stubby. He probably knows that Four Horns is the main man. But he's looking right at the camera anyway, like "hey, I'm in this picture too".
I would love to hang out with those guys, and maybe even bring a dog. A dog would say, "how're you guys doin'"? And things would transpire from there. Discussions, perhaps. The dog would steer the talk toward food....
I joke, but if you look at the animals as people, so to speak, then it is fun to put personalities to them. And you can kind of see it in their eyes, too.
Well, tonight was the final night of the Buster Keaton retrospective at CSUN. Last week, we missed Buster's MGM movie "What, No Beer?" because of the campus closure due to the fires. I was hoping we'd have a marathon tonight, and see "Beer" with the already scheduled program for this evening, but we did not, and I will have to see if I can find a copy in the Library system. We did see some of Buster's late TV work, however, including the only serious role he ever played, in an episode of a dramatic show called "Rheingold Theater", which was also known as "Douglas Fairbanks Presents" as per the show's host, Fairbanks Jr. I had never heard of this show before, and for folks who have never seen television from the early 1950s, it can be a revelation because first of all, it's hard to imagine when TV was brand new, and it really wasn't all that long ago. TV and rock n'roll emerged at around the same time, in the early 1950s, just about 7 years before I was born. And the medium of TV, when it was new, was high quality and very serious where dramatic programming was concerned. I have written about the need for the brand new medium of television to show that it could compete with the established format of motion pictures, which were presented in theaters. So here was TV, in only a few homes at first, on small black and white screens....and they had to deliver.
And so they did, with very high quality dramatic programming.
I know I just went off on a tangent. The subject was Buster, but I had to get in a plug for early TV. My Dad came to Los Angeles in 1951 was involved in TV almost from it's inception. The funny thing was, Dad called it "the Boob Tube", even back then. Dad, even though he was a TV and Motion Picture executive for most of his life, was essentially a Book Person. History was his thing. Show Biz was just "what he did". But for me, being a little kid, I really picked up on it, and as a result now that I am older, I have wanted to explore and write about (at least in short occasional blogs) the movie and TV business of the old days, as I remember it from being around my Dad as a kid.
I also write about it because of the almost complete degeneration of television since then.
I'll spare you a tirade. You don't need one from me, you can see it for yourself. But for comparison, just for the heck of it, look for old shows from the early days, when drama anthologies were popular. And what you will see, beyond the new (at the time) medium of television, was the serious element in American Artistic Culture.
Television was especially serious, and very artistic. Shows in those days explored all facets of the Human Condition, and did so without resorting to anything base. Crudity and stupidity were unheard of.
The 1950s in general, were - despite the conservative reputation of that decade - a period of serious artistic reflection. This was the era of Method Acting, i.e. the study of emotion, an "inward" study. And at the same time you had the breakout of Rock 'N Roll, an outward expression if there ever was one.
So much was expressed in the 1950s, so much drama on the brand new TV system, and so much exuberance in the music of the brand new Rock 'N Roll.
But no stupidity was involved, and that is a point I want to really emphasize, because we see - since the 1950s - how both mediums have been corrupted, both television and popular music. Both have been extremely dumbed-down.
We all know the reason for that.
But I think that, because we have restorations of old TV shows, and because we have the music, we can hold on to that era. People of my generation already know it. And we know we had crooked politicians in those days too, like LBJ, and Nixon.
But in those days, as bad as things were, with the Vietnam War, and before that WW2, at least the American Artistic Culture was holding up, holding to high standards. The highest standards. We could look to our movies, our music, and our new medium of television to bolster us. Our allies were the great artists of these mediums, the actors and musicians, the producers and directors and writers.
I know I've gone far off my original topic of the night, of Buster Keaton and our final showing at the Cinematheque. But it was Buster who got me on the tangent, because of that episode of the Douglas Fairbanks TV show that we saw tonight.
I will finish by suggesting that you should study the culture of past decades, of the 1960s and 1950s, and the 40s and 30s. Study the American Culture of those days so that you will know what America once was, before the age of Trump.
I believe we can return to a Culture Of Thought and Uplift. It was the path we were on, the path that America was on, for all my life until about 9/11 or so.
Maybe we can get back to that path.
Sorry for the tangent, Buster.
See you in the morning! :):) xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
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