Tonight we are doing Bruckner's 1st, which is sounding pretty majestic so far. I think after this one we will have heard 'em all, so we'll be looking for more symphonies by other composers, or maybe even music in other formats, like string quartets. Mainly we're just looking for new stuff that is lengthy and therefore "good to write to".
Ironically, I don't have much to write about tonight, because Grimsley came over and I didn't watch a movie. I did have time to sneak in a "Tales Of Tomorrow" episode beforehand, and I will describe it in a moment, but it won't be a long review and therefore I may have to resort to rattling off some lists or simply jabbering away about nothing in particular.
The "Tales" ep was actually pretty spooky given the subject matter. Keep in mind that this episode was broadcast in 1951, sixty years before a notorious event took place. 60 years is almost a lifetime, but...
The show, which you will remember was broadcast live, begins with a scene in a hospital room. A patient (Zachary Scott, handsome '40s actor) is waking after surgery to find himself in a sinister situation. His nurse is very tense and trying to give him hints that something is wrong. His doctor has a foreign accent, likely Russian, and a military officer keeps entering Scott's room. "What is going on"?, Scott wonders. The Russian officer asks the same thing of him. "We know you are a spy. If you confess it will be easier for you".
Scott is indeed a spy from Army Intelligence. Somehow he has landed in a hospital in Russia, but he has partial amnesia of how he got there. His nurse (Barbara Joyce) informs him that he was shot several times. She is terrified of something and ends up confiding in Scott, despite the danger to herself with the Russian colonel wandering the halls.
What is she so frightened of? A terror plot, and I - your reviewer - have gotta cut in here to say that this plot is so eerie - especially given what I am currently reading about - that I wasn't sure I wanted to write about it. But here goes anyway.
Again, the show was aired in 1951. The plot is set in the future, 1960. And it is about a terror attack on the US using airplanes as weapons. After the opening scenes in Zachary Scott's hospital room, we cut to the Oval Office in Washington D.C. The President is conferring with his own military leaders about how to face down the developing and very serious situation.
The enemy (never identified as Russia but the inference is certain) has landed approximately 35 planes in major cities across the United States. The planes are the size of large passenger jets and have been flown in by robots, i.e by remote control.
I have to butt in again to say, "man, that is spooky", given what I am reading about the 9/11 attack in the book by Christopher Bollyn. There is little doubt that a form of remote control was used, at the very least, on the plane that hit the Pentagon, unless you believe that a guy who couldn't fly a Cessna suddenly turned into Top Gun, and even the best military pilots have said what he supposedly did was not possible. So yeah, remote control was used on 9/11, and in this episode of "Tales From Tomorrow" (in which the tale being told will happen "tomorrow", meaning in the future), the same thing happens with the 35 Russian planes that land in the United States. They are all flown in by robots.
Now, each plane is loaded with something called heterodyne bombs. The sound on these old shows is somewhat muffled, so I had to replay the scene a couple times to make sure I heard the word correctly. I even Googled it to make double sure it was a real word, and sure enough - heterodyne, a term I had never heard before tonight, is a real word having to do with electromagnetic radiation.
So, man......this "Tales From Tomorrow" was getting pretty scary, and then the President gets an ultimatum from the Russians : "either surrender or else". 1951 was the height of the Cold War, so the President is shown standing up to the threat. He tells the Russians to stick it, but as a secret team of agents attempts to drill through the body of the plane that has landed in Denver, the whole thing goes KaBOOM!, and the city of Denver is no more.
This is the kind of subject that not only made it to prime time network TV in 1951, but was featured again and again as a main storyline. The end of the world was contemplated every week in shows such as this. That's how serious the issue of nuclear weapons was during the Cold War era.
Even I can remember, as a kid in the mid-1960s, having to go through "drop drills" in elementary school. This would be around 1967 or 68, so I was 7 or 8 years old. Every month, there would be a random day when the teacher would tell us, as we arrived in the morning, that there was going to be a "drop drill" that day. The drill would always happen at any time during the day, with no warning. You might be in the middle of a lesson at 9am or 11:20, or after lunch or even the end of the schoolday around 2:30, and out of nowhere the teacher would yell "Drop"!!
And we students, eight years old, would jump out of our chairs and hide under our desks with our arms over our heads and our heads to the floor. This was how it was in America as late as 1968. Kids had Drop Drills on a monthly basis (as if our desktop was gonna protect us from a hydrogen bomb, lol).
Of course, we didn't know the magnitude of why the drills were taking place. We did know about bombs, and I remember kids on the playground talking about the difference between "A-Bombs" and "H-Bombs" in the same simplistic way that kids talk about anything involving one-upsmanship and exageration. "Oh yeah?, Well, H-Bombs can blow the whole world up"!
The good thing about being a kid was that you would only talk about H-Bombs for a minute and then go right back to talking about regular kid stuff. We really didn't know anything about the adult world except for a few talking points, but when I see a sci-fi episode like tonight's, I can better understand the fear of the doomsday scenario that was a preoccupation of the populace during the postwar period.
I guess what I am most impressed with in seeing a show like this, from 68 years ago, is that the issue wasn't being dodged but was faced head on. This could be the end of the world, and we are living in the time of such a possibility. That's what the show is saying, and it's a prime time drama produced by ABC, big time corporate stuff.
Later on down the road, the imminent nuclear threat faded and the tension was eventually diffused, at least for the public eye, and thereafter television became big business, the broadcast hours filled with sitcoms like "I Love Lucy", which we all love indeed and which also began in 1951.
Man, what a strange time it must have been. They were still indoctrinating kids into Atomic Bomb Danger as late as 1968, but back in the early 50s it was a real possibility that the world could end, or at least that was what was being promoted with the Cold War threat.
Well anyway, it's a fascinating time capsule into the topical entertainment of 1951, and again what stands out is that the threat was so real and was being promoted by politicians as possibly imminent, that the tv producers of the era just put it out to the public in all it's raw fear.
It makes for very effective TV, even seven decades later. ////
And now, for a quick list, just cause I said I was gonna do one :
Top Ten Pianists, in no particular order except for the Top Three :
1) Dinu Lipatti
2) Vladimir Sofronitsky
3) Wilhelm Kempff
4) Alicia de Larrocha
5) Martha Argerich
6) Arturo Benedetti Michaelangeli
7) Glenn Gould
8) Alfred Cortot
9) Claudio Arrau
10) Valentina Lisitsa
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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