A few days ago, thanks to my friend Sam, I learned about Sherman Hemsley and Gong.
Let me back up a little bit. Sherman Hemsley, as most of you reading this probably know, played patriarch George on the beloved 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons. Little information on his private life is to be had, but it appears he was an unusual cat. He was also a musician; here he is on Soul Train:
Gong, meanwhile, were a group of European freaks who played psychedelic rock/jazz/prog/whatever. Hemsley apparently was a fan. According to Gong leader Daevid Allen, as quoted on Dangerous Minds,
It was 1978 or 1979, and Sherman Hemsley kept ringing me up. I didn’t know him from a bar of soap because we didn’t have television in Spain (where I was living). He called me from Hollywood saying, “I’m one of your biggest fans and I’m going to fly you here and put flying teapots all up and down the Sunset Strip.”
Only recently did I realize how much the producers of The Apprentice (the TV show — not the movie, which I can’t decide if I want to see) are responsible for our current national nightmare. By showing the world an idealized version of That Fucking Guy who appears to be a smart, successful businessman — when in fact he is only, barely, the last of those — they created a monster.
Americans believe what we see on the Sacred Box.1Smash cut to TFG saying that of course they’re eating the dawgs — I saw it on TV!I think that a lot of TFG’s voters still see the slick boardroom shark, not the gibbering idiot who goes on at length about Arnold Palmer’s junk. (I saw an extended clip from that rant yesterday, and it stood out how the audience — who at first are delightfully scandalized by the racy subject matter — quickly get bored and by the end seem to be having existential crises. When you’re losing people with dick jokes, you’re really bombing.)
Lately when I flip on CNN or MSNBC they’re all fascist this and TFG hearts Hitler that. And I’m like, congratulations, you finally figured it out! A little late, but welcome to the party.
I do wish they’d spend a little time explaining to people exactly what “fascist” means. Americans by and large are not much for history; we know vaguely that fascism is bad but would be hard-pressed to define it. I myself feel uneasy with my grasp of the history, which is why I’ve been carting around The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and even occasionally reading it.
I just watched a great Colbert Report segment on Shepard Smith, who is Brian Williams’ only legitimate competition for world’s most entertaining “legitimate” newsman. In the course of it they had a clip of him saying the following – and I don’t know the context of this, I don’t want to know, I just want to sit back and enjoy it as the pure freaky word jazz it is:
Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau in 'A Face in the Crowd.'
Maybe my favorite sequence in A Face in the Crowd is one I couldn’t find on The YouTube, and since I am not yet a smart enough monkey to capture my own video off a DVD, I’ll have to just tell you about it.
It begins about 26 minutes in, just as Lonesome Rhodes is making the leap from small-town radio in Arkansas to a TV show in Memphis. There’s a great shot of Lonesome (Andy Griffith) as his train pulls away from the station in Pickett, AK where hundreds of fans are seeing him off. He waves goodbye with his hat, looking back at the admiring throng, but then turns to face forward, into the camera. In that moment he gives a look that has something really profound in it. It’s hard to say what exactly. It’s more than just hope, or expectation, or confidence; it’s a look that says this guy is going to fucking eat the world. He is America circa 1957: a hungry predator, an unstoppable force. That was a long time ago. (more…)
The old calendar on the wall tells us that Dec. 23 has rolled around, and that means only one thing: time for Festivus once again. What’s your favorite part of the holiday? The Airing of Grievances? The Feats of Strength? I myself have a great admiration for the clean, modern simplicity of the Festivus Pole, but honestly there’s no part of the tradition that I don’t love. Happy Festivus, everybody!
