Elizabeth Taylor passed away today at the age of 79. Her first movie I saw when I was a child was National Velvet, which is probably the first movie that many kids saw with her and is one of the great “horse” movies. One of the last movies I saw with her in it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features one of her best acting performances. In her later life, she did some of her greatest work for humanitarian causes such as Aids research, an issue she embraced before many others did.
Although she was known for her glamor and beauty, one of her greatest roles played against those strengths, as seen in this scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Richard Burton. She gives a frightening performance that won her a second acting Oscar.
Although she will probably be more remembered for the above movies, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Cleopatra for different reasons, one movie that should not be overlooked is Giant, where she starred with Rock Hudson, James Dean, and young Dennis Hopper. While far from a perfect movie, there is a lot to love in the messy epic.
Although a CNN anchor just tried to describe Elizabeth Taylor as her day’s “Angelina Jolie,” it is not a very good comparison. For better or worse, stars were different back then. Either way, it is great that we still have her work to enjoy. Rest in peace.
What is your favorite Elizabeth Taylor movie or scene? Leave a comment.
The federal trial of Barry Bonds began in March 2022 in San Francisco. Part of the trial focused on Greg Anderson, who started being Bonds’s trainer in 2000 and who allegedly supplied Bonds with steroids and then refused to testify against Bonds. Like Pres. Bill Clinton before him, Bonds had legal troubles that centered not on his actions but on the issue of whether he lied about them. The case examined whether Bonds lied to a grand jury when he said that he thought the substances Anderson gave him were legal. (UPDATE: Following the trial, the jury did not reach a verdict on the perjury accounts but found Bonds guilty of obstruction of justice and he was sentenced to probation.)
Outside the legal debate about perjury, though, an ongoing debate continues about Bonds’s baseball legacy. One of his biggest defenders has been Giants fan and singer-songwriter Dan Bern. In addition to writing some articles about Bonds, Bern has written at least four songs about the slugger: “73,” “Asterisk Nation,” “Rincon,” and “Year By Year Home Run Totals Of The Great Barry Bonds.”
Dan Bern’s Songs About Barry Bonds
My two favorites of these songs are “Rincon” and “Asterisk Nation.” “Rincon” is about a journey to a town to see where Bonds may or may not have a contact for buying steroids, or at least that is how I interpret the beautiful song.
“Rincon” paints the most complicated portrait of Bonds among Bern’s songs. It is a more personal story, more about the narrator than about Bonds, and its ambiguity also makes it one of Bern’s most human and best songs. Like all great songs, it is about something deeper than what you might hear upon the first listen.
“Asterisk Nation” is a much more pointed commentary, where Dan Bern tells us that if we want to point the finger at Bonds, then maybe we should also be pointing it at ourselves. “Asterisk doctors, Asterisk patients, Asterisk erections, Asterisk elections, Asterisk wars. . . Telling Asterisk truths to an Asterisk nation.” Don’t many of us take pills, caffeine, alcohol, medication, etc. to alter the way we exist? And, if so, is it so wrong that Bonds may have used a drug that was not illegal at the time to make him better at his job, like you having that afternoon cup of coffee?
Dan Bern’s song also evokes a new movie released just a few days before the trial of Barry Bonds begins. The movie Limitless (2011), starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, is about a man who is given a drug that lets him use 100% of his mind. If you could take a drug that would give you super-human abilities, would you?
There is not a video for “Asterisk Nation” on YouTube. But you may listen to the song from a Dan Bern live performance from 2006 below.
Finally, Dan Bern’s “Year by Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds” is brilliant for how simple it is. The song recounts exactly what the title suggests, listing those home run totals. While the 73 home runs in 2001 does stand out, the list illustrates that Bonds was smashing a lot of home runs even before the era where we suspect he was using performance-enhancing drugs.
In the video below, Bern performs “Year by Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds” as a sing-a-long at a school. (His lesson to the kids is how they may use a song to help them remember pieces of information, like a list of numbers.)
Defending Barry Bonds?
I do not completely buy Dan Bern’s defense of Barry Bonds. One must wonder whether or not it is fair for some players to use steroids against the rules when there is a limited number of spots for major league baseball players. If some use steroids, other potential major league players may lose their jobs to cheaters. And is it fair if someone who holds a record does not get credit because someone else did not play by the rules?
Still, Dan Bern does make me see Barry Bonds in a different light. I now see Barry Bonds as a tragic human being. During his run at perhaps the greatest record in baseball, he must have anticipated for years the glory of the moment. Instead, as the time approached and left, he was treated like a pariah, perhaps partly deserved, perhaps partly not.
Then, when he wanted to continue playing after the 2007 season, no team would hire him when he was still playing great baseball. And why is he so hated while Lance Armstrong is so loved? I am sure racial biases are at work, but there are other complex factors too.
Sure Bonds did whatever he did for himself, but we all gained the entertainment, both from his incredible playing and from later having fun debating about steroids. Ever since he was a kid with a professional baseball-playing father, Bonds learned that society would pay him large amounts of money to run around on a field and hit a ball with a stick. If society is set up so we pay millions of dollars to people who play games, while social workers and teachers barely scrape by and other people are homeless, is it such a great sin by comparison that he took some medicine to play better? Is his sin worse than ours for creating such a society?
Barry Bonds was always there for our entertainment, and like the rest of us, he is a flawed human being. His steroids helped entertain you, and I received a topic for a blog post today. And we do not even have to suffer the health consequences from taking the drug.
While I enjoy discussing the morality issues involved because I love baseball and debates about morals, what it ultimately comes down to for me is one question: Who am I to judge him? And perhaps the most interesting part for me is wondering whether he has any regrets and whether or not he would do everything the same if starting all over again. Maybe some day we will get answers to these and other questions from him, but probably not for a long time, if ever.
I am going to try to cleanse my mind of thoughts about tainted baseball records by watching a video from the 1996 Home Run Derby before Barry Bonds allegedly started using steroids, back when we were all much more innocent. Man, he was good against. . . Mark McGuire.
What do you think of Barry Bonds? What should be done with his home run record? Leave a comment.
For our readers who are country music fans, Chimesfreedom notes that Ferlin Husky passed away Thursday at a Nashville-area hospital from congestive heart failure. He was 85. You may know some of his famous songs, “Gone”, “A Dear John letter,” and “Country Music is Here to Stay.” Depending on your age, you may remember some of his television and movie appearances.
But you may not know this information about him, which is from Husky’s website: “Born near Flat River, Missouri, in a town so small it was prone to be mistaken for a fly-speck by map makers, he left home for a hitch in the Merchant Marines and D-Day found him under forty-eight hours of continuous battle-fire during the invasion of Cherbourg. He was later awarded a citation as ‘Volunteer Gunner’ as a result of his action during the battle.”
I did not know that he was there at D-Day. Most of what I know about him is from his recording of this song, “Wings of a Dove,” which is a country music classic.
Here’s to you Ferlin. May you be flying on the wings of a snow-white dove.
What is your favorite Ferlin Husky song? Leave a comment.
At the end of the outstanding documentary Anne Frank Remembered (1995), there is a scene that takes my breath away. It is a short clip of a home movie taken by people celebrating a wedding outside where Frank and her family lived before they had to go into hiding. The silent black and white home movie captures a window above for a few seconds, where one fleetingly sees Anne Frank as a happy girl leaning out watching the wedding celebration below. The scene is a testament to the power of video in capturing something unfathomable about the Nazi atrocities by merely showing a little girl on a balcony on a nice day.
The images in the movie A Film Unfinished (2010) — released on DVD this month — are different but haunting in a similar way. So that after watching it, I felt like I had not breathed for the entire 88 minutes running time. Yael Hersonski’s documentary examines an unfinished Nazi propaganda film taken of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, a few months before the people there started being sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Although that uncompleted propaganda film, called “Das Ghetto,” was found soon after the end of World War II, another film of outtakes found in 1998 revealed how much of the propaganda film was staged. The Nazis made the Jewish people in the film participate in staged scenes to highlight a contrast between the poor and those who appeared to be more affluent.
A Film Unfinished unveils the Nazi propaganda to reveal footage of profound suffering of people trying to survive. The footage is more disturbing knowing what awaits most people in the film in the months ahead of them. Hersonski makes wise choices about when to add explanation and when to let the scenes speak for themselves. Some of he power of the movie comes from hearing from some survivors as they watch the video (““What if I see someone I know?”).
Most of the movies we discuss on Chimesfreedom are moving in a way that the filmmakers designed. Here, although the exact propaganda designs of the original Nazi filmmakers of “Das Ghetto” are unclear to this day, the resulting movie has the opposite effect to those original plans. The portrait of history and human suffering revealed in A Film Unfinished is difficult, but essential, viewing.
After Homer Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, Plessy was then arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day this March 17, which also is the birthday of Homer Plessy, who was born in New Orleans on March 17, 1862 and is one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. His work and action of trying to take a train led to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.
Homer Plessy’s Train Ride
Thirty years after his birth, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on a Louisiana railroad on June 7, 1892. Plessy, who was part African-American, was working with the civil rights group Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans to challenge segregation laws.
The Committee had notified the railroad of what was happening. And when Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, a conductor asked him about his race. Plessy was then arrested.
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the case, Plessy overwhelmingly lost by a vote of 7-1. In the case, the Court upheld the state’s segregation law under a doctrine permitting “separate but equal” facilities.
Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority, claiming that if one views separate facilities for the races as implying one is inferior, that was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” (163 U.S. at 551.) Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was from Kentucky, was the lone dissenter on Plessy’s side.
“A Change Is Gonna Come”
Sam Cooke’s famous song, “A Change Is Gonna Come” may have been partly inspired by an incident similar to Plessy’s that happened in the same state. According to Peter Guralnick’s Cooke biography Dream Boogie, in 1963 Cooke and his band tried to check into a segregated Holiday Inn hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The clerk would not let them check in. Cooke argued with the clerk until his wife and others convinced him to leave because they feared reprisals. Soon thereafter, the police tracked them down and charged them with creating a public disturbance.
Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come” the same year as the hotel incident. In the song, Cooke wrote, “Somebody keep telling me ‘don’t hang around.’ / It’s been a long, a long time coming, /But i know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.” Other national factors also inspired Cooke to write the song, such as Bob Dylan’s songs and sit-in protests taking place in the south.
The Legacy of Homer Plessy
Homer Plessy died on March 1, 1925, so he did not get to see Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, overruled. But his cause did eventually win. The Supreme Court overruled the case in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, which was later followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Not long ago, the descendants of Homer Plessy got together with the descendants of Louisiana Judge John Howard Ferguson, the other named party in Plessy v. Ferguson. The two families created the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation to work for equality.
Around 60 years after Homer Plessy took a seat on the train, another person helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement like Plessy did, by refusing to give up her seat in 1955. In that year, Rosa Parks’s refusal led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark moment in the struggle for Civil Rights.
When years later Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Rosa Parks sought comfort in listening to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” She said Cooke’s voice was “like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” (Guralnick, p. 651.)
There is a little of Homer Plessy’s voice in the song too.
What do you think? Leave a comment and give a Stumble if you like.
Elizabeth Taylor passed away today at the age of 79. Her first movie I saw when I was a child was National Velvet, which is probably the first movie that many kids saw with her and is one of the great “horse” movies. One of the last movies I saw with her in it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features one of her best acting performances. In her later life, she did some of her greatest work for humanitarian causes such as Aids research, an issue she embraced before many others did.
(2010) — released on DVD this month — are different but haunting in a similar way. So that after watching it, I felt like I had not breathed for the entire 88 minutes running time. Yael Hersonski’s documentary examines an unfinished Nazi propaganda film taken of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, a few months before the people there started being sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Although that uncompleted propaganda film, called “Das Ghetto,” was found soon after the end of World War II, another film of outtakes found in 1998 revealed how much of the propaganda film was staged. The Nazis made the Jewish people in the film participate in staged scenes to highlight a contrast between the poor and those who appeared to be more affluent.
