When I was first in the Twin Cities, producing for Don Vogel, we’d occasionally joke about where and how far we wanted the show to go.

Someone’d occasionally chime in “…and someday, we wanna beat Steve Cannon”.

Then everyone would get a good laugh.  Beating Steve Cannon – who’d been doing afternoon driver forever on WCCO even then – was pure fantasy. Cannon – a throwback to an age in radio that seems completely foreign to the casual listener today – dominated afternoons in the Twin Cities for a generation.

Anyway, Cannon passed away yesterday at age 81.

the 1970s and ’80s, when WCCO dominated the airwaves, Cannon held court as the gruffest, most gregarious of the “Good Neighbors,” making his voice as recognizable to many Midwesterners as everyone’s cantankerous but lovable uncle who never skips the cocktail hour.”It’s awfully tough comparing the 125 people in our hall of fame, but in terms of sheer talent, does anyone stand out above Cannon?” said Steve Raymer, managing director of the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park, which honored the legend in 2002.

Cannon was famous for doing his show with three “co-hosts” – all of them characters he voiced himself, live and on the fly.

Ron Silver has passed away at 62.

Silver was a capable actor who became, arguably, more famous for bucking Hollywood’s dominant liberalism after 9/11, fighting a war of conscience that consumed his acting career but brought him new appreciation from a different breed of fans.

Little did anyone know until very recently that, as Roger L. Simon notes, that battle was just a piker. Silver has had stomach cancer for several years:

Somewhere around a year ago we were having breakfast in New York. He wasn’t looking good, hair thin from chemo, sallow complexion, etc. His energy, however, as always, was spectacularly high and he was filled with plans for his new Sirius radio show. But something was wrong. It wasn’t just the cancer, but it was related to the cancer. Ron was, above all things, an actor, a fantastic actor. And the cancer made him unable to do that work. He told me he had just been offered the lead in Coriolanus at the Long Wharf, but didn’t think he could do it. He would be too tired with his illnes to play a Shakespeare lead. His artistic work was all over for him. It was the one time in all the recent years I saw him on the edge of tears.

I’m starting to cry myself as I type this, so I’m going to shut up. What a great man.

Simon’ll be back with more.

I’ve been head-down on work and family stuff this past week, so I’m mortified to see that I didn’t catch this until today; Dennis Newinski passed away two weeks ago.

Former state legislator Dennis Newinski was a man who had strong beliefs, a positive outlook on life and a vision about what was important. He also had an inspiring personality, sincerity and common sense.

As a blue-collar worker, Newinski had no political aspirations, but many felt he would be the perfect candidate and asked the longtime union machinist to run for office, said his wife of 43 years, Sharie.

Newinski won a seat in the Minnesota House in 1990 and nearly made his way to Washington, D.C., in 1994 as a representative from the state’s Fourth Congressional District. That year he nearly beat incumbent Bruce Vento in a district that had long been held by Democrats.

It’s a sad irony that Mesothelioma claimed both Mr. Newinski and Vento, the former CD4 congressman against whom he campaigned. 

I knew Dennis from CD4 politics for many years.  Sharp and astute, a great conservative as well as Republican, Dennis was the last Republican to make a genuine go of it in the Fourth.  For a guy who – as the Strib notes – was a blue-collar working stiff who’d not been grooming himself for politics his whole life, Dennis was both a refreshing change from the masses of canned DFL hacks that dominate the east metro, and, despite all that, a sharp, impassioned, convincing speaker who had a natural knack for connecting with people. 

He was also the kind of guy that I suspect the Fourth District GOP would have a very hard time recruiting to run at all, these days.

The state, and especially the East Metro, need a lot more like him.  He is sorely missed.

I’m shocked and saddened to see Dean Barnett has passed away, apparently due to complications from Cystic Fibrosis.  He was only 41.

A few years back, he wrote one of the better essays on Cystic Fibrosis – and his battle with the disease – that I’ve ever seen.  At the time, he’d just participated in a promising treatment:

But regardless, this treatment has given me time – time to spend with my wife and family and friends. Time to hit golf balls (usually sideways, but even that’s alright). Time to chase my dogs around the house. Time that frankly I didn’t expect to have. There could be no greater gift, and it’s a miracle in so many ways.

The miracle has its roots in my persistent father who got Joe O’Donnell involved in the fight against CF. It continues through the incredible courage shown by Joey O’Donnell, who fought CF with such bravery that he inspired his family to fight the disease long after Joey succumbed. And it finishes with Joe O’Donnell and the rest of the amazing O’Donnell family who have given so much of themselves in so many ways and to such great effect.

There are indeed heroes out there. And miracles, too.

His many friends and admirers are a living memorial, of course – one of the greatest legacies someone can leave. 

Words fail, other than to say Dean’s wit, courage and grace were inspirations.  Please pray for the Barnett family. 

Longtime Pink Floyd keyboardist and Roger Waters’ kicktoy Richard Wright is dead at 65.

I’m a longtime Pink Floyd non-fan – but not because weren’t amazing musicians in their way. Pink Floyd in its prime was like The Who, in the sense that it was four distinct musicians who were very different, but depended on each other.

Behind David Gilmour’s languid, fluid guitar, filling up the spaces behind Roger Waters’ indifferent thumping and scowling and in front of Nick Mason’s dirgeline plodding lay Wright’s keyboards, especially his work on the Hammond B3.  Gilmour – either the world’s slowest great guitarist or the world’s greatest slow guitarist (and no insult is intended, because I play a lot like Gilmour) was the band’s outcry; Mason and Waters were the cholesterol-clogged heartbeat; Wright, like the late Danny Federici and the still-thankfully-alive Benmont Tench was the atmosphere; where that atmosphere for Federici was the big roaring heart of Jersey Shore soul, and with Tench was the tear in Tom Petty’s beer, in Wright’s case it was usually foreboding and menace.

Wright was almost always in the background – never moreso than when Waters engineered his ouster from the band, demoting him in effect to a paid sideman for the band’s last tours in support of The Final Cut.

One of my favorite Wright moments.  Hard to concentrate, given the dynamic stage performance, but the song is mostly Wright, and it’s one of Pink Floyd’s best moments.
(Via Flash)

A few years back, a mass of bloggers participated in the “2996 Project”, writing blog commemorations of each of the victims on 9/11.

Sheila got Michael Pascuma, and did her usual amazing job, then and now.

Me?  Well, I never got the invite, but I took one anyway – Ann Nicole Nelson, of Stanley, ND.  Practically a neighbor in that big wide-open place, and she looked like she’d not gotten a writer (I was gratifyingly wrong).

I wrote about Ms. Nelson two years ago.   I was honored – and a little overwhelmed – to see her mother left a comment way back when.

8:46:26 a.m (Eastern Time): American Airlines Flight 11 impacts the north side of the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) of the WTC between the 94th and 98^th floors. American Airlines Flight 11 was flying at a speed of 490 miles per hour.

Isaac Hayes dead at 65:

With his muscular build, shiny head and sunglasses, Hayes cut a striking figure at a time when most of his contemporaries were sporting Afros. His music, which came to be known as urban-contemporary, paved the way for disco as well as romantic crooners like Barry White.

And in his spoken-word introductions and interludes, Hayes was essentially rapping before there was rap. His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show “South Park.”…

Hayes was born in 1942 in a tin shack in Covington, Tenn., about 40 miles north of Memphis. He was raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother died and his father took off when he was 1 1/2. The family moved to Memphis when he was 6.

Hayes wanted to be a doctor, but got redirected when he won a talent contest in ninth grade by singing Nat King Cole‘s “Looking Back.”

He held down various low-paying jobs, including shining shoes on the legendary Beale Street in Memphis. He also played gigs in rural Southern juke joints where at times he had to hit the floor because someone began shooting.

RIP.

Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn is dead at 89.

Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Along with Paul Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevskii and P.J. O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn was one of the authors that paved the way to my becoming a libertarian-conservative, 25 years ago.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS’-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

Sheila O’Malley:

Shaking my head. Strange. How it feels like a personal loss.

The world was a better place, a more honorable place, a place where bravery was possible, and where truth was always louder than lies … because he was in it.

Jay Reding:

His influence helped foster in the end of the Soviet empire and the dawn of a new age of freedom. His willingness to speak out against the evils of the Soviet system helped forge the moral case against Communism. 

Read Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag. Great stories, great lessons – and history that mankind will forget only at its immense peril.

UPDATE:  One thing that’s important to remember about Solzhenitzyn; he was Russian, first and foremost.

While The Gulag was a key motivator that helped bring down the USSR, Solzhenitzyn also endorsed the authoritarian Putin, and supported many of the former KGB officer’s crackdowns and power-grabs.  This is not out of character with the “Russian personality”, of course; in a land that’s been a kick-toy for invaders for millenia, security trumps “liberty” in the traditional western sense, and Solzhenitzyn embodies this trait.

Cancer finally took Tony Snow:

Tony Snow, a conservative writer and commentator who cheerfully sparred with reporters in the White House briefing room during a stint as President Bush’s press secretary, died early Saturday of colon cancer. Snow was 53 years old.

“Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of our dear friend, Tony Snow,” Bush said in a statement. “The Snow family has lost a beloved husband and father. And America has lost a devoted public servant and a man of character.”

Snow, who served as the first host of the television news program “Fox News Sunday” from 1996 to 2003, would later say that in the Bush administration he was enjoying “the most exciting, intellectually aerobic job I’m ever going to have.”

Back when Snow was first diagnosed, I sent him a “get well soon” email.  He responded to me – a nobody, schmuck blogger and weekend talk host – with a thoughtful, involved thank-you that addressed and elaborated on the things on my original note.  That Tony Snow – at the time a talk radio and cable heavyweight – would take time out from his professional life, to say nothing of his onrushing health news and, naturally, his family, to not only respond to a schnook from Minnesota, but in a form that gave me years of food for thought, amazed me.

He certainly made press conferences interesting; I could see me trying to do the same thing as a press guy, albeit not nearly as well.

My prayers and best wishes are with the Snow family.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez has much more.

Marie Castello – “Madame Marie” from the Asbury Park New Jersey boardwalk – died last Friday:

The psychic reader and adviser was in her mid-90s.

Castello told fortunes on the Asbury Park Boardwalk since the 1930s.

She became famous worldwide in 1973 when Bruce Springsteen paid homage to her in the song, “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”

Didja hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie
for telling fortunes better than they do?
For me this boardwalk life’s through, babe.
You oughtta quit this scene too…

The song – and her appearances in stories Springsteen would tell onstage (most notably during his extended band introduction during “Tenth Avenue Freezeout” over the decades) made her a bit of a celeb; she’s popped up in all sorts of other pop culture references (including an appearance on Chef Anthony Bourdain’s TV show).

George Carlin, dead at 71:

Jeff Abraham says Carlin went into St. John’s Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. Carlin died at 5:55 p.m. PDT. He was 71.Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. It was announced Tuesday that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Carllin – on cassette and eight-track tapes, on school road trips – was my first exposure to edgy comedy.  In the late seventies, he was pretty vogue.  And then, in the early eighties, I saw an HBO retrospective on Carlin’s very, very long career – his road from fairly “straight” comedian to “counterculture” icon, and realizing how very, very good the guy was.  Angry and dyspeptic, to be sure – but amazingly funny.
Of course, one of his bits was a useful mnemonic for me:

The dean of counterculture comedians, Carlin constantly pushed the envelop with his jokes, particularly with a routine called “The Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV.”

I remember seeing Carlin performing in the early-mid nineties, and thinking “this is kinda sad” – it was like he’d lost his comedic mojo somewhere along the way.  But when he was on, he was surely on.

Sh*t,, T***, P**s, F**k, ***t, C********r, M**********r.  Now I’m sad.

Tim Russert dead at 58 of an out-of-the-blue heart attack:

Russert was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” program when he collapsed, the network said. He and his family had recently returned from Italy, where they celebrated the graduation of Russert’s son, Luke, from Boston College.

No further details were immediately available.

While Russert’s politics were rarely in question, he differed from so many of the hamsters that clog TV news (and news in general) today by having a facility for detaching himself from the story, and actually acting for the good of the story itself. NBC’s initial obit for Russert sums up Russert’s sadly-rare approach:

Of his background as a Democratic political operative, Russert said, “My views are not important.”

“Lawrence Spivak, who founded ‘Meet the Press,’ told me before he died that the job of the host is to learn as much as you can about your guest’s positions and take the other side,” he said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine. “And to do that in a persistent and civil way. And that’s what I try to do every Sunday.”

And, as a fire-breathing Republican speaking of a former Democrat operative, it is a sincere compliment when I say Russert did it well. 

In this dismal season for the media, he will be missed.

Bo Diddley is dead of apparent complications from a stroke:

Bo Diddley, a founding father of rock ‘n’ roll whose distinctive “shave and a haircut, two bits” rhythm and innovative guitar effects inspired legions of other musicians, died Monday after months of ill health. He was 79.

Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., spokeswoman Susan Clary said. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.

The legendary singer and performer, known for his homemade square guitar, dark glasses and black hat, was an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, and received a lifetime achievement award in 1999 at the Grammy Awards. In recent years he also played for the elder President Bush and President Clinton.

The 1988 inauguration, indeed, featured the memorable lineup of Diddley, Sam and Dave, and Lee Atwater.

Diddley appreciated the honors he received, “but it didn’t put no figures in my checkbook.”

“If you ain’t got no money, ain’t nobody calls you honey,” he quipped.

Working in radio as a kid, I was aware of Diddley bright and early – but I didn’t really know Diddley until he toured with The Clash, around 1979-80.

His first single, “Bo Diddley,” introduced record buyers in 1955 to his signature rhythm: bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp, often summarized as “shave and a haircut, two bits.” The B side, “I’m a Man,” with its slightly humorous take on macho pride, also became a rock standard…Diddley’s influence was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Buddy Holly borrowed the bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp rhythm for his song “Not Fade Away.”

The Rolling Stones‘ bluesy remake of that Holly song gave them their first chart single in the United States, in 1964. The following year, another British band, the Yardbirds, had a Top 20 hit in the U.S. with their version of “I’m a Man.”

Let’s not forget Warren Zevon’s “Bo Diddley’s a Gunslinger” and, best of all, Springsteen’s “She’s The One”.  The NYTimes has a list of songs that reference the signature beat.

Diddley was also one of the pioneers of the electric guitar, adding reverb and tremelo effects. He even rigged some of his guitars himself.

“He treats it like it was a drum, very rhythmic,” E. Michael Harrington, professor of music theory and composition at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., said in 2006.

Diddley’s influence was always very underrated.

Via Centrisity, I note that a celebrated footnote in “progressive rock” has passed away; John Rutsey, original drummer for “Rush”, is dead at age 55:

Rutsey was famous for playing on Rush’s 1974 debut album, including the song “In The Mood,” before deciding to leave the group due to health concerns. Rutsey suffered from diabetes and was unable to go on extended tours with the group.

Rutsey was sort of the Pete Best of the “progressive” rock scene; Rush replaced him with Neal Peart – the famously-technocratic drummer who is to percussionists what Dungeons and Dragons is to weekend recreation – on the brink of their big leap to fame as the leading Heinlein/Ayn Rand/Tolkein-based rock band of its era.

Or any era, I guess.

Footnote:  My first “real” band – which included a reasonably-frequent commenter on this site – played “Working Man”, the best song from that first album (shaddap about “Finding My Way”), as defined by a guy who has never been a big fan of the genre, but knows great musicians when he sees them… 

Anyway – condolences to the Rutsey family.

Someday if I ever made a movie of my own life,  most of the soundtrack would probably be Springsteen songs.  I associate one song or another with most of the big milestones of my life – teenage angst, love found and lost, hope, determination, grief, whatever you got.

The E Street Band is just a tad greater than the sum of a bunch of great parts; the beating heart of the Weinberg/Tallent rhythm section, Miami Steve’s raw, sloppy-yet-perfect backup vocals, the Big Man’s sax garnishing the whole thing…

…but under and around and occasionally soaring above it all was the soul of the E Street Band’s sound – Danny Federici and his Hammond B-3.

Federici passed away yesterday at age 58 from complications of skin cancer after nearly forty years of playing with Springsteen:

It was Federici, along with original E Street Band drummer Vini Lopez, who first invited Springsteen to join their band.

(“Child”, with Springsteen, Federici, Vinny “Mad Dog” Lopez and Vini Roslin)

By 1969, the self-effacing Federici — often introduced in concert by Springsteen as “Phantom Dan” — was playing with the Boss in a band called Child. Over the years, Federici joined his friend in acclaimed shore bands Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and the Bruce Springsteen Band.

Federici became a stalwart in the E Street Band as Springsteen rocketed from the boardwalk to international stardom. Springsteen split from the E Streeters in the late ’80s, but they reunited for a hugely successful tour in 1999.

Federici and Springsteen were half of “Steel Mill”, a first-generation metal band (of all things) that predated the E Street Band by a couple of years, and whose bootlegs have been for thirty years among the most sought-after in the boot business. 

  It’s no accident that the Springsteen moments that I remember the most are, most often, the ones most keenly-accented by Federici’s raw, understated, yet always dead-on playing:

• The figure in the chorus of “Incident on 57th Street” (The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle); it’s only three notes repeated eight times, dissolving into a high, fat wash of chords keening above the raw longing of Bruce’s vocals; “Puerto Rican Jane – oh won’t you tell me…”, but without it, it’d be just another lovelorn guy baying at the moon; Federici’s part adds and accents the tension, the hope, the passion. 
• “Jungleland” (from Born to Run);  The huge swell as Bruce roars “From the churches to the jails, tonight all is silence in the world…” signals that this song is going downtown to rumble.
• “Sandy”, from E Street Shuffle, featuring Danny on an unforgettable accordion part

• The Farfisa part that propels the choruses of Born in the USA’s “Glory Days” (and is virtually a sample of the even cooler part on “I’m a Rocker” (The River).
• “Backstreets” (from Born to Run); Federici does two things that stand out in this song – one of my favorites, and easily the best “breakup” song of all time.  From the bridge (“Endless juke joints and Valentino drag…”) to the end, of course, Federici’s B3 howls with all the anger and longing that this angry, longing song deserves; the organ is the atmosphere.  But it’s at the beginning – the long intro Federici shared with pianist Roy Bittan – that is the most ingenious.  The organ part starts low, mournful and sad, with broad chords behind Bittan’s eighth-note riffing.  But then, when the band comes in, Federici swells up into a higher register, playing a nervous, jittery pentatonic counterpoint behind the rest of the band.  It’s so subtle you have to listen hard for it – and you usually sense it rather than hear it.  But it adds the angst-y undercurrent to the intro; while the rest of the band broadly thumps away, the organ twitches and twists in the background like all the unanswered questions behind any lousy breakup. 
• “Jackson Cage” (The River) – Federici is the propulsion behind this, one of Bruce’s rawest sprints, almost challenging Weinberg to keep up. 

And of course, the entire album Darkness on the Edge of Town.  Dave Marsh once wrote that Born to Run belonged the Clarence Clemons and Roy Bittan – but Darkness belonged to Federici (and the low end of Weinberg’s drum kit, the toms and bass).   Marsh was right, as he usually was (when not writing about politics, anyway); Federici has almost too many great moments to catalog; the burst of howling joy in “Badlands” (especially the roaring swell in the second verse – “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king…”), the fatigue-ridden last-call motif on “Factory”, the indigo atmospherics in the title cut…

…and, perhaps best of all, “Racing In The Street”, which constantly dukes it out with “Darkness…” for the title of my favorite Bruce song.  The song is the flip side of “Born To Run” – it’s about growing up and realizing after you’ve driven your suicide machine through the mansions of glory, that party’s got a morning after – the rest of your life. 

And the final coda, after the last chorus – “tonight my baby and me are gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands…” – is entirely driven by Federici; slow and mournful at the beginning, and then brightening like the sun rising in the east over The Shore, as another day begins as things pick up tempo and life starts up again.

Federici was the quietest member of the band, the one who stayed the most in the background, the one whose career was most-closely tied to the band.

  Unlike Nils Lofgren, he had no previous solo career; he never forged much of a second career, like Steve Van Zandt’s acting or Max Weinberg’s now-long career as a bandleader, or for that matter Gary Tallent’s as a producer; he didn’t have the force of a supersized personality like Clarence Clemons to boot doors open.  His single solo album, the jazzy and largely instrumental Flemington, was and remains obscure.  He reportedly took the E Street Band’s extended hiatus, from 1990 to 1998, the hardest; rumors among the E Street fan hive had it that he had a bit of a drinking problem; the band’s reunion and tour in ’99 was, the rumors had it, a huge boost to his life. 

Whatever.  The fact remained that whatever the rest of the E Street’s bands parts brought to the table, Federici added the atmospherics, the foreboding, the tingle of anticipation…the soul of the band.

RIP, Danny Federici.

The Roosh family has had a loss:

On Monday morning, we lost my wife’s mother, Louise. She battled respiratory illness for many years; the last year and a half were the hardest.

Louise raised three healthy, happy children who have all gone on to have families of their own; ten grandchildren. Our Jujubee shares her middle name with her grandmother and of our three, is the most touched by the loss.

Louise’s husband, strong and stoic, lovingly cared for her every need these past few months. He kept every promise. I don’t know a better man.

The caregivers at North Memorial Hospice were so wonderful to Louise. It was evident, they loved her too.

Best wishes to the whole Roosh family.

Go ahead and pick your Heston:

The academy award-winner?

Ben Hur was probably the first “serious” movie I sat through as a kid – the first time I ever got that a movie could be more than simple yuks and scenery, that a story could mean more than what was being put in front of you. Heston won his Oscar almost fifty years ago, before I was born – and the movie still amazes me.

Heston was an amazing actor. Brad Carlson links to an excellent video retrospective of Heston’s film career.

And nobody, anywhere, writes about actors like Sheila O’Malley does:

My brother Brendan and I watched The Ten Commandments on the night before Easter, and expressed amazement, for the 100th time, how incredible Heston is, how inevitable. …even today, lulled to sleep by CGI effects, there is something stunning and terrifying about the Red Sea parting, well done! – but none of it would matter a whit if it weren’t for Heston’s commanding (pun) performance. He had no fear. He embodied courage, and was able to portray it larger than life. This is something NO actors have today – NONE – it is no longer the “style” of acting, and no longer in vogue. And that’s fine. Things don’t have to stay the same forever. But at least we could look back at one of the greats and say, “Ah. There. That is how it was done. That is how it should have been done.”

Absolutely true.

How about the “other” Charlton Heston, the man that stood for his beliefs at every turn – the one who marched on Washington in 1963 with Martin Luther King, at the height of his career…

…at a time when social activism was not the fashion in Hollywood.

Joel Rosenberg:

In 1961, he attended a premier of one of his movies in Oklahoma.  The theater was segregated; he joined the picket line.  At a time when it was by no means politically expedient to do so, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr.  He was, throughout his adult life, a staunch opponent of communism, McCarthyism, and racial segregation.

A quarter-century later, Heston went on to spend the last fifteen years of his working life tirelessly fighting to protect the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans…

…which, for many people who were born too late to see Heston’s glory years on the big screen, was the Heston they knew best.

The Charlton Heston that drove more than a few people over the edge, helping cement the career of at least one polemicist, and assuring that he’d never do lunch in Hollywood again?  That was him.
Gary Miller:

Few did more than Charleston Heston to keep the stinking paws of the damned dirty apes off the firearms of law-abiding Americans.

Just like the patriarch Moses he played in the magnificent 1956 Cecil B. DeMille classic, he did not live to see the promised land. But if an originalist majority on SCOTUS prevails in the soon-to-be-decided Heller case he will have died just short of the River Jordan.

Of course I owe that Charlton Heston – the guy who helped galvanize millions to turn the tide on two issues that mean a lot to me and many like me, civil rights that are seen as two sides of a coin, but should not be – something, too.

Or maybe the guy in a city and business and society full of libertines and faux libertarians, who achieved far beyond anyone’s dreams and ascended to the pinnacle of a career that he’d stumbled into and yet mastered, and devoted a fair chunk of his life to doing what was right and, at the end of the day, stayed married to his high school sweetheart for an entire lifetime?

How do you reconcile all those different Charlton Hestons?

You don’t. You appreciate the entire package on its own terms. Back to Sheila, who comes up with the words I was flailing at trying to find on the show yesterday, to capture an ideal that as usual Sheila nails without effort. I’ll be slathering on the emphasis:

The most stunning tribute of all, it takes my breath away to this day, is Richard Dreyfuss’ tribute. He wrote it for National Review – obviously a publication with political leanings that has nothing to do with who Richard Dreyfuss is, and how he votes. But, as I have said repeatedly on my blog, as I have chased people away from my site who seem constitutionally unable to play by my rules, as I have stated in my comment policy: when you are dealing with art, and the appreciation thereof, politics must take a backseat. At least if you want to have a worthwhile conversation. And then there are those who say, “I liked Charlton Heston BECAUSE of his politics” and that is just as idiotic. His work transcends. He was an actor, first and foremost, a “great pretender”. So talk about his work, please – there is plenty there to keep us chatting for 100 years at least! Nobody “owns” Charlton Heston. Nobody “owns” John Wayne. The most flaming liberal in the world could appreciate and love Red River, and those who put politics at the forefront are completely missing the point. What we are talking about here is love. And these actors who touch us, who get beneath our skins, who create something indelible … transcend all of that. The editors at National Review knew that, and so did Richard Dreyfuss.

I agree – and am awash in profound respect for a man that worked so tirelessly at the love he had for his craft, his country and its principles, and his family. Whose entire life is a monument to his love for all three.

As with Ronald Reagan (an underappreciated actor, albeit nowhere near Heston’s league), the different parts went together to make the whole man. You can – you have to, as Sheila correctly notes – appreciate them separately, and keep your art and your politics in separate silos. As Richard Dreyfus does, in the piece Sheila called out, and that you need to read. Written right after Heston’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s was made public five and a half years ago, it’s almost too full of perfect quotes. I’m going to grab two of them

I believe that films like Ben Hur were conceived because Heston was there to make them. He allowed these stories to be told because he was there to play the parts. …When I saw Charlton Heston as a kid, he took me far, far away, to places few actors could go. The only other American actor so comfortable outside of this era was Wayne, and Heston could time travel farther. Both held the magical alchemy that made me forget the commonplace of here and now completely. John Wayne allowed us into our American past. Heston, because of his perfectly male face, the depth of his voice, the measured almost antique rhythm of his speech, the oddly innocent commitment that allowed him to dive without looking into the role, took me farther, before the common era, as they say.

Somehow he was able to cut the myriad strings that connect us to our current lives, so he could inhabit our imagined past and imagined future so perfectly. So well did he do this that his discomfort was obvious when he played in the Now (actually, make that my discomfort, because he more than likely had a ball in the rare instances when he played something current). If it wasn’t the past it was the future. I could never have gotten to Ancient Rome without him, nor Ape City.

And…:

It has become fashionable to characterize his politics; almost as if his politics were a separate thing, like Diana’s popularity. People are either defensive or patronizing (if not contemptuous). I can only say I wish all the liberals and all the conservatives I knew had the class and forbearance he has. Would I be as patient or serene when so many had showed me such contempt, or tried to make me feel stupid or small? I doubt it, truly I do. This is dignity, simply and completely. A much more important quality than political passion at the end of the day, and far more lacking, don’t you think?

That may be the biggest thing to take away from Heston; to love what you do, to fight for what you believe in, to live a life you’re proud of, and to do it all with grace.

In remembering the man, his life, his accomplishments, his impact on this world – and as Dreyfus noted, the man in which they were all wrapped up and and coexisted so famously – you can note them all in parallel, and fondly remember them all.

And so I do.

And rest in peace, great American icon. You will not be forgotten.

I’ll take all of the Charlton Hestons. Thanks.

(more…)

Missed this over the weekend; Brad Carlson’s father in law passed away.

Condolences, prayers and best wishes to one of the first couples of the Twin Cities blogosphere.

If there was a person I was hoping to meet at this fall’s GOP convention (besides Angie Harmon), it would have been William F. Buckley, the godfather of the American conservative media.

Sadly, it’s not going to happen. 

Author and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. has died at age 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges says Buckley died Wednesday morning at his home in Stamford, Conn.

I remember watching the erudite, unflappable Buckley driving liberal commentators to near-aneurisms as I was just starting to question my own left-of-center assumptions as a college kid, and thinking – showing the prejudice that I still rail against in too many on the left – “wow – he’s pretty smart for a Republican”. 

I’d so hoped he’d make it to the NARN reception…

Leo at Psychmeister’s Ice Palace reprints the eulogy he gave at his father’s funeral.

Very worth a read.

Leo “Psychmeister” Pusatieri’s father Leo Sr. passed away last Thursday after a long illness.

Keep Leo and his family in your prayers.

And hang in there, Leo.

I don’t get to all that many movies these days.  It’s a rare treat, indeed – I haven’t been in a theater since the last entry in the “James Bond” franchise, and that had been a while since my previous venture.

So I’m not so hip on who all the kids are watching these days.  Except Scarlett Johnannson.  And while she’s a fine actress (fantastic in Lost in Translation, among a few others), well, let’s just say my critique isn’t all that clinical, if ya catch my drift. 

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  Heath Ledger.  I know I’ve seen a movie or two of his, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember which.  I know that in the back of my mind I knew “he’s not a crappy actor” – quite the opposite. Very good.

So I’ll just link to two people I know who do know their movies; First Ringer:

 Unlike [James] Dean, Ledger may not find posthumous Oscar glory unless a weak supporting actor field and a sympathetic Academy find something as mainstream as a Batman sequel worthy of a slice of acting immortality.  Despite all the logic against doing so, here’s hoping they do.

Surprisingly even to me, I find Ledger’s untimely death deeply disturbing on a personal level.  At 28 years of age, and as a struggling filmmaker who could only wish for 10% of Ledger’s professional success, I find myself tragically drawn to Ledger’s passing for reasons even I don’t yet fully grasp.  Having worked with plently of actors and other “talent” who vastly overestimate their skill, I am reminded of the few I have known who possessed genuine acting ability – and how so many of them wasted it on drugs, drink or a simple lack of ambition.  I’m also reminded – and horrified from seeing it firsthand myself – of the rigors that method actors like Ledger could put themselves through merely to entertain. 

and Red:

 I never ever had that thought [that he was “just acting”] with Ledger. And I remember, too, his couple of scenes in Monster’s Ball, another deeply portrayed kind of awkward guy, not used to speaking much – and given the right circumstances that character would probably be an awesome husband, partner … But as it was, he was relegated to isolation, stoic silence. I hadn’t seen Knight’s Tale when I saw Monster’s Ball, so that was my first impression of Ledger, and it has pretty much stuck.

And now, I’m impressed.

I was – it should shock nobody – a big geek in elementary, junior and (most of) senior high school. I read. A lot. I had my library card maxed pretty continuously from when I got one – in 1970, at age six – until I graduated from high school.

Mostly, I was a history buff; I read pretty much every bit of history Jamestown’s library offered. Now, in reading as in everything else in life, I’m not as a rule a systematic guy. My style: I’d pick a subject, and go on a jag of from a week to several months reading about it incessantly (not unlike someone we all know). And those subjects were all over the waterfront.

But there were two threads that made the biggest impression on me, then and now.

One was Ernest Shackleton and the “Endurance” expedition of 1916-1919. Shackelton was a British explorer whose ship, Endurance, was crushed by pack ice during a hard Antarctic winter. He led his men for two solid years, surviving on the pack ice and then, as hope seemed to fade, on a couple of nearly-impossible treks across the superhumanly-turbulent South Atlantic, sailing hundreds of miles without sophisticated navigational gear in what amounted to open boats, in a climate where “dead of winter” and “heat of summer” aren’t really all that different. He made it, saving himself and his entire crew, in a feat that borders on mythic. Whenever life’s gotten difficult – or “difficult” – for me, I’ve looked back on Shackelton’s example, put my chin up, and kept on plodding.

My other big reading jones, from age 11 to maybe 16, was escape stories.

There were many, of course; during World War II, tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were held prisoner in conditions that varied from bad to atrocious, even with the protection of the Geneva Convention; all of them fared better than the Russian POWs (the USSR never signed the Geneva Convention, and neither Germany nor the USSR honored its terms with each others’ prisoners); all fared better than the concentration camp and extermination camp inmates, whose fate is a matter of shameful record.

And their stories – full of ingenuity, wit, hope, and above all endless perseverence in the face of near-impossible (and, in the case of concentration camp inmates, brutal and lethal) odds – inspired me, then and now.

Many of the stories should be household names, taught to students in our history classes as examples of the best of humanity. In 1944, the inmates of the German extermination camp at Sobibor, Poland – perhaps a thousand Jews and Russian POWs, there to work the machinery that consumed over a quarter-million lives, plotted to overwhelm and kill their guards and escape to the woods to try to meet the oncoming Soviets. A few hundred made it to the woods. A few dozen survived the German pursuit and the depredations of Polish civilians (who largely hated Jews more than Nazis). The story was made into a pretty good TV movie, of all things, in the mid-eighties, with Rutger Hauer, Alan Arkin and Joanna Pacula.

There was also the story of British Sergeant-Major John Coward, captured near Dunkirk, who escaped from several camps and infiltrated Auschwitz. He testified at Nuremberg.

But the biggest – and best-known – body of work on POW escapes was by three British authors – Paul Reid, Eric Williams and Paul Brickhill. Their work was closely related.

Brickhill, an Australian fighter pilot captured after being shot down over Tunisia in 1943, wrote Reach For The Sky, the story of Wing Commander Douglas Bader – one of Britain’s top aces in the Battle of Britain, despite having two artificial legs. Bader was the subject of many books. Held at a number of camps, including the infamous castle at Colditz (documented in Reid’s Escape from Colditz, among others), where many “high-value” and “incorrigible” habitual POWs were held, Bader still attemped several escapes, despite his “handicap”.

Williams was a navigator on a British Short “Stirling” bomber shot down early in the war. Held in a camp on the Baltic coast of Poland, he attempted several escapes (memorialized in his book The Tunnel); afterward, transferred to Stalag-Luft III near Zagan, Poland, he carried out one of the most ingenious escapes ever, chronicled in his book The Wooden Horse: he and two other POWs built a wooden vaulting horse; the other inmates carried the horse, the inmates inside, to the same spot in the compound every morning. Camouflaged under the spot was a trap door, which led to a tunnel the men dug, patiently, with kitchen knives and condensed milk cans, every day for months. Finally, Williams and his two compatriots escaped. Improbably, all three made it back to the UK – one (Oliver Philpot) via Switzerland, and Williams and his partner John Phillips via Sweden.  All three wrote books – Williams’ is the essential one (and was made into a movie in the UK in 1950, something I expect only Lileks to know…)
Williams’ feat was mentioned in the other major book on the subject, Brickhill’s The Great Escape.  Brickhill’s book – a true story – covered perhaps the greatest POW camp break of all time, which took place at the same camp, about a year later. This story isn’t unfamiliar to Americans; it was turned into a major motion picture in the sixties which, if you leave out Steve McQueen’s role completely (Americans were involved in the beginning of the escape, but were transferred to a US-only camp early in the digging), wasn’t all that inaccurate by silver screen standards.

But don’t forget Steve McQueen’s role entirely. It returns in a bit. Sort of.

The escape itself was epic in scale; the idea was to dig three tunnels – “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry” – from the camp, allowing all 1,000+ inmates to escape. It went well beyond digging, though; the inmates – using jury-rigged, extemporized and smuggled materials – had to forge identity papers, create imitation civilian clothing, escape maps, iron rations for carrying on the road, and routes and tactics to get the escapees from the tunnel exit to freedom, for the POWs. (Brickhill was a POW at Stalag III at the time; barred from the escape by his claustrophobia, he particpated in other preparations).

And before any of that was an issue at all, they had to make the tunnels usable. Public TV’s Nova covered an archaological dig on the site of the old camp a few years ago. The soil in that part of Slaskie is thin, runny sand; Brickhill and Williams both spoke of the difficulties of digging through it, but it wasn’t until you saw it on Nova that you caught the full gravity of the engineering challenge it posed. The sand was a thin, yellow slop, resembling a combination of beach sand and diarrhea. The archeaological crew nearly lost a backhoe down a pit, when the side walls gave way; it would have been hard to build a useful sand castle in that slop. And yet, the Brits tunneled thirty feet down, building tunnels two feet wide and over 200 feet long, shored up with smuggled bunk boards and ration tins. They even built a trolley system on crude wooden rails, to ease the load of hauling the tons of sand – which then had to be distributed around the camp (it looked yellow and muddy until the sun could dry it, meaning that the inmates had to devise elaborate ruses to hide the stuff).

In the end, in March of 1944, 241 POWs entered one of the tunnels (one had been discovered, and the other used to hide sand); before the escape was discovered, 76 got out. 73 were recaptured (two Norwegian and one Dutch pilots made it to the UK); of the rest, 50 were murdered on Hitler’s orders.

I remember that story, like Shackleton’s, whenever I think something is impossible, or just too damn hard.

The above is a long, long lead-up to the actual story of this post.

The four great British POW escape books – Escape from Colditz, The Tunnel, The Wooden Horse and finally The Great Escape – all had one name in common; a young British officer, captured in the early days of the war, who attempted escape more than any known man. Steve McQueen’s motorcycle-jumping wise-cracking Yank in the Great Escape movie was said to have been loosely modeled after the real life exploits of Squadron Leader ‘Jimmy’ James, who passed away last week at age 92. S/L James particpated in the Great Escape – he was the thirtieth man through the tunnel on the night of the big break – as well as many earlier and later attempts. None of thsoe attempts got him back to the UK – he was rescued by American soldiers at the end of the war, as SS guards debated executing him and a group of other POWs that were bein held as hostages.  But all of which made him a legend among British POWs.

James was one of the few to escape execution after the Great Escape, and joined two others at the notorious death camp at Sachsenhausen, from where he made another daring escape by tunnel, only to be recaptured 10 days later.

Read the whole long, fascinating story.

And if you learn nothing else from his example, learn tenacity.

I’ve written a lot about my mother’s father, Don Hall. 

In his almost ninety years, I learned a lot about him.  He’d been a superstar athlete at Jamestown College in the thirties; he’d worked on a CCC project to build the college stadium that still stands there.  He coached the last undefeated regular season/playoff/championship string (1940, Grand Forks Central) in the history of North Dakota high school hoops.  I drove with him at least once as he drove about the hinterlands of western North Dakota, selling drugs [*].  I had the benefit of being nearly forty when he died; I spent plenty of time with him; long enough to introduce him to his great-grandkids. 

I was never that lucky with my Dad’s father, Oscar Berg, who’d be celebrating his 114th birthday if he were alive today.  He – along with my grandmother – was the proprietor of “Berg Studio”, a photography shop in Jamestown for 30-odd years.  Oscar was a great photographer; some of his work still floats around central North Dakota, in thousands of senior photos and wedding pictures hanging on walls crammed with shots of peoples’ grand and great-grandparents, and panoramic shots of towns and National Guard units and Masonic Lodge picnics hanging in local museums and city halls.

He died, apparently of a heart attack, in March of 1942, leaving my grandma to run the photography studio and raise Dad.  I know him only from photographs; my brother Jim inherited the looks, the lucky sod (and my son Zam got his eyes, I think). 

He’d done a bunch of other things – I’m still not entirely sure about what, although I know he lived in Saint Paul for a while; my Dad has an old photo of him in a streetcar conductor’s uniform. 

 He was born on this date in 1893.  It’s strange, sometimes, thinking I’m just two generations removed from the nineteenth century. 

[*] to pharmacists, of course.