SONY, PARAMOUNT PICTURES, NORTH KOREA, “THE INTERVIEW” AND “TEAM AMERICA”

So, here it is December 19, 2014, the middle of the second decade of the 21^st Century. Cool stuff is supposed to be happening, like we all ride around in personal-pan helio-copters that repel themselves away from the earth and (one hopes) each other, as we flit around and do Important things, wearing our onesies that are made out of a combination of tin-foil and Queen Latifah's weave and that also self-repel dirt. We all wear Johnny Quest's friend's Race Bannon's style of sunglasses indoors and out, because, well, we're cool. This is all of the cool stuff I remember from about 1960, and what I thought the world would become. How'd I do?

I don't remember my vision of the future being this blah, or sepia-toned, but heck, I can't draw this well, so it'll have to do.

Apparently, not very well in the prognosticating department, since we still have jacklegs like Kim Il Jung running rogue Dictatorships AND sticking their noses in OUR cultural bidness, which is even worse in the whole “America is a place where you can say what you want, and depict what you wish in the movies, as satire, with the complete understanding that IT IS SATIRE!” Nope, can't even do that any more and no one, who ACTUALLY matters, (I'm looking at you Mr. Obama*, and you, people who run Sony and Paramount Pictures) are willing to take a stand and say “look here, you little worm! We are going to make fun of you, whether you like it or not! So what if we take your head off with a chainsaw? It's all in good, clean fun, and besides we're showing it in OUR country to OUR people. Take a hike, Kim!”

*As of 2:30 A.M. EDT on 12/20/2014, Huffpo published an article stating that Mr. Obama condemns Sony Pictures' Heads decision to bow down to the request of the Dictator of North Korea. All nice I guess, but shouldn't Mr. Obama have been out AHEAD of this and taking up for the "Freedom of Expression" crowd before now? Just a thought.

No doubt I'm on someone's shit list now; but, when am I not? I'll just hunt me up a chorus of "Team America, F*ck, Yeah!" and march bravely off to. . .  whatever.

(note: That is also a team name of one of our better SETI@home teams and with whom we fight with on a regular basis for 64th or 72nd position; I forget which one.)

1^st Lt. Glenn Wallace, U. S. Air Force

Granted, the man LOVED to fly, but he also served in WW II in Okinawa, as did both of my mom's brothers, my uncles, Stan and Nile. They were in the Navy in the South Pacific.

But, that didn't happen. I realize I've just jumped right here in the middle, with no explanation, not mention aforethought and no context, but this is really just unbelievable to me. I can just hear my father, who lived through all the shit of the Joseph P. McCarthy era, - with Stalin laughing, saying, “I don't have to do anything to weaken America, she does it to herself!" - in the early 50s, after he left the Air Force and I can remember him talking in hushed tones about professors of his who did lose their positions because people were afraid, and people talked, and cast aspersions, even if they weren't true. Some people took their lives. Were my dad alive today, he would say what I thought when I was reading the article; a quote by Joseph Welch that was televised, when Senator McCarthy began to insinuate a witness was a long, long-ago member of the American Communist Party, “Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

B-29 Wing, over Korea, circa 1951

Have we no shame nor decency, that we can let the freedoms that were won so hard for us over the centuries and the decades go so easily? Are we really that willing to just brush it off? Or, are we that knavish and craven that we believe the North Koreans and the anonymous hackers are capable of 9/11-era attacks BECAUSE OF the showing of something like the previews for “The Interview” or a midnight showing of “Team America: World Police”, a movie that has been out for TEN years?

At least George Clooney had the gumption to stand up and attempt to do the right thing. He tried to get other actors and people of note to sign a petition backing the Sony Pictures, but was unsuccessful in his attempt. The media did little as per usual; their modus operandi of late has been to run around with their hair on fire making everything seem far worse than it is, and they do little to bring calm, reason, parity and a fair perspective to anything I've watched in many a year.

As far as I am concerned, we should NEVER bow down to dictators, never negotiate with terrorists. Once we start down that road, it is simply too easy to get us to give in on bigger things. It is the “slippery slope” that lawyers and lawmakers and diplomats worry about. Were it up to me? I'd be showing that bastard “Team America: World Police” for free in EVERY THEATER in the country! It's just a movie for crying out loud! (You can watch the damn thing on NETFLIX, which I intend on doing for the next week!)

#A-TO-Z CHALLENGE – LETTER “S” – SATIRE

SATIRE

Satire done well, is probably one of my very favorite forms of humor. The very best satirists will showcase a weakness, or something that is utterly foolish within a society or government, to an extreme. It is an extremely sophisticated form of humor and one that is hard to pull off, whether it be in a movie or in books.

sat· ire noun \'sa-,tī(-ǝ)r\

: a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc. : humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a peson, government, society, etc.

: a book, movie, etc., that uses satire

Two of the finest examples of this interestingly enough, lampoon both Russian government and Russians themselves. The first is the awesome Love and Death, a 1975 movie by Woody Allen. 

 

Love and Death, theatrical trailer. The musical score is by Sergei Prokofiev and is the Lt. Kije Suite, in itself a satirical piece about a Lieutenant who never existed in the Russian Army.

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls is one of the most interesting reads in Russian Literature. First published in 1842, Gogol died before finishing it, and parts of it were destroyed, but from his notes, it's an amalgam of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and the third part was to have been a poem. Gogol destroyed part of it, before his death. Gogol himself saw it as an epic poem in prose. I rather thought it like a sort of anti-Candide, but then Gogol's main purpose was to expose the moral rot of the Russian landowner and the exploitation of the serfs, despite what modernist critics like Vladimir Nabakov had to say. They felt that the book was not satirical in tone or content, regarded the work as unimportant and Gogol as a great writer.

Nevertheless, the plot belies such statements. Chichikov is the modern equivalent of a middle-class gentleman. he arrives in an unnamed village and turns on the charm, to quickly make friends with the local officials and important townspeople, but without letting on what he's about. 

Chichikov in the house of M. Korobochka, dickering for her Dead Souls.

The government would tax landowners on the number of serfs (or 'souls') the landowner possessed, determined by the census. Censuses in these periods were infrequent, so landowners were paying for souls that no longer existed. Chichikov was seeking to buy these dead souls, existing on paper only, telling the current owners that he merely has a use for them, and that the landowners will be spared the burden of paying for souls that they no longer own. 

He travels to surrounding estates and manages to purchase 400 such dead souls. Upon his return to the village and turns on the smarm. Thinking that the locals are really buying into this, when they agree to throw a celebration for his purchase of 400 dead souls, he begins to spin more and more elaborate yarns, which then become misinterpreted for everything from "He's Napolean!" to "he's going to marry so-and-so's daughter!" Chichikov is summarily run out of town on a rail, until he pops up somewhere else with another get-rich-quick scheme. In reality, Chichikov is a disgraced mid-level government worker, always trying to make a quick buck.

The locals are no dumber or smarter than any found in any other country. Gogol's satire is pointed squarely at the government, and he, no less than Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Pushkin would lampoon and satirize the government, until it became lethal to do so. 

                                                                                                                                                                     courtesy: The Nation

I don't know if satire has ever changed a government, or society, but as one who lived through eight years of George W. Bush, I can honestly say, as much as it was a disaster, it was a field day for the comedians and satirists in this country. About as much fun as the Brits had with Edward Heath, I understand.

 

#A-TO-Z CHALLENGE – LETTER "E" – BOB ELLIOT AND RAY GOULDING, “BOB AND RAY”

BOB ELLIOTT AND RAY GOULDING

BOB & RAY

Bob Elliott (born 1923) and Ray Goulding (1922-1990) were an American comedy team, whose career spanned five decades. In a career that saw a successful transition from radio to television, their comedy was derived from the media in which they performed. They would conduct radio or television interviews, with off-the-wall dialogue, that would be presented in a deadpan (deadpan, adjective. 1. marked by or accomplished with a careful pretense of seriousness or calm detachment; impassive or expressionless: deadpan humor.) style as though it were a serious broadcast.

"Matinee with Bob and Ray" sounded better than "Matinob with Ray and Bob," according to Ray Goulding. Just a taste of the odd-ball and off-the-wall comedy the pair would perfect.

They began their professional careers as radio announcers in Boston with separate radio programs; Elliott was a disk jockey and Goulding a news reader, but they would visit one another's shows while on-air. Their informal badinage was so appealing that the radio station, WHDH would call on them to provide entertainment, when Red Sox baseball games were rained out. The pair would improvise comedy routines throughout the afternoon, and joke around with the studio musicians. They were not yet known as “Bob and Ray”.

Elliott and Goulding's brand of humor caught on, and WHDH gave them their own weekday show in 1946. Matinee with Bob and Ray was originally a 15-minute show, but soon expanded to a ½ hour. When explaining why Bob was billed first, Goulding said it was because “Matinee with Bob and Ray” sounded better than “Matinob with Ray and Bob”, which is just a sample of some of the off-the-wall comments the two uttered over the years. Their trademark sign-off was “This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work”, and “Bob Elliott reminding you to hang by your thumbs”.

The continued on the air for over 4 decades on NBC, CBS and Mutual networks and on New York City stations WINS, WOR, and WHN. From 1973 to 1976, they were regular afternoon drive hosts on WOR, doing a 4 hour show and in their last incarnation, they were heard on NPR, National Public Radio, ending in 1987.

They served as stand-by on NBC's Monitor, often going on-air at a moment's notice if the program's planned segments developed problems, and thus were heard in a surprising variety of formats and timeslots.

Ray, Audrey Meadows and Bob in a skit on the Bob & Ray Show in 1951.

They made the move easily to television, and in the early 1950s, had their own 15-minute TV series on NBC, called simply Bob & Ray. During the second season, the title changed to Club Embassy and was joined by Cloris Leachman, who replaced series regular, Audrey Meadows who left to join the cast of The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS. The actresses took the roles of Mary Backstayge and Linda Lovely in the Soap Opera parodies, that Bob and Ray were becoming known for, along with the characters that they created:

Bob Elliott's roster of characters included:

• Snappy sportscaster Biff Burns – “This is Biff Burns saying this is Biff Burns saying goodnight!”
• Tex Blaisdell, a drawling cowboy singer, who also did rope tricks on the readio
• Cyril Gore, a Boris Karloff sound-alike who often appeared as a butler or a doorman; his catchphrase was “Follow me down the cor-ree-dor.”
• Peter Gorey, a character similar to Gore with a Peter Lorre-type voice. He would appear as a news reporter reading the same gruesome stories: “Three men were run over by a steamroller today...” each time he appeared.

Any script calling for a child's voice would usually go to Elliott.

"The Handyman," featuring Bob Elliott's "Fred Falvy, Do-It-Yourselfer"

Ray Goulding's characters included:

• Webley Webster, a mumble-mouthed book reviewer and organ player, whose reviews of historical novels and cookbooks were usually dramatized as seafaring melodramas
• Steve Bosco, a sportscaster (who signed off with “This is Steve Bosco rounding third and being thrown out at home,” parodying Joe Nuxhall's signature sign-off of “the old lefthander rounding third and heading home”)
• Charles the Poet, who recited sappy verse (parodying the lugubrious Chicago late-night broadcaster Franklyn MacCormack and to a lesser extent, the Ernie Kovacs character Percy Dovetonsils) but could never get through a whole example of his bathetic work without breaking down in laughter

All female characters; while originally employing a falsetto, Goulding later used the same flat voice for all of his women characters, of which perhaps the best-known was Mary Margaret McGoon) satarizing home-economics expert Mary Margaret McBride), who offered bizarre recipes for such entrees as “ginger ale sale” and “mock turkey.” In 1949, Goulding, as Mary, recorded, “I'd Like to Be aCow in Switzerland”, which soon became a novelty hit and is still played by the likes of Dr. Demento.

Every generation seems to re-discover Bob and Ray. My father introduced me to them when I was about 18 and I avidly watched for their appearances on the Comedy Channel, along with repeats of "Clutch Cargo" and "Supercar" in the late 80s when I still lived in Detroit at the age of 35. They can best be summed up perhaps as zany, an old-fashioned, quaint word, but they were talented and held appeal for several generations. Ray Goulding died in 1990, but Bob is still alive and acts occasionally. He is the father of comedian Chris Elliott and the grandfather of actress/comedian Abby Elliott, who joined the cast of Saturday Night Live for the 2009-2010 season.