This web site officially hopes all its US readers had a happy Memorial Day. It was wet, here--badly needed rain--all night and in the morning, with a bit of sunshine for some relatives who came up to maintain their parents' graves. (Most of my elders didn't want to be buried near where people lived and raised crops, but a few of them reserved a small field for that purpose.)
It's another day with lots and lots of e-mail, nearly all of it boiling down to "read my book," and more music links than any other kind.
Movie
Free on YouTube, but probably not for long since Disney can still get money out of it, is Eddie Murphy's Distinguished Gentleman, a 1992 comedy about what might happen if some young people from a gritty city neighborhood happened to get into Congress. Eddie's character, Thomas Jefferson Johnson, meets Congressman Jefferson Davis Johnson at a party where TJ and friends are working a scam on a rich older man. The party is a celebration of Congressman Johnson's successful surgery; whe he says "I never felt better," early 1990s audiences knew he'd be sicker or dead in the next scene. He's dead. Ballots with his name on them have already been printed. TJ obtains the Congressman's widow's blessing to campaign as"Jeff Johnson, the Name You Know." He wins. While he and his friends are frantically studying How a Bill Becomes a Law and other things most Washingtonians learned in grade twelve, young Jeff Johnson has to think hard about whether he's there to get rich, or to do good in a way that will impress a cute, earnest staffer.
For Eddie Murphy it's a surprisingly clean script--Murphy was known for what might then have been fresh, creative use of formerly unprintable words. There are scenes where it's obvious that people are misbehaving, but it's a Disney movie. We see couples with their clothes on incompromising positions, but no bare skin and no serious hitting. TJ Johnson is about as good as his slinky female cousin at impersonating the "Girls of Many Nations" who get a dollar a minute for smutty phone chat and get even more by threatening to tell clients' wives about their calls, but we hear only a few silly, suggestive lines.
It's a nostalgia trip, ofcourse. In the early 1990s movies premiered in theatres, and all Eddie Murphy movies stayed in theatres for months on end; everybody wanted to watch them. And maybe, just maybe, the nostalgia might remind some people who are in our Capitol...it's easy to be no worse, ethically, than some Congressmen and their staff have been in history, but it's also possible to use those offices to help people.
MAHA! Do it for your grandmother! (By the way, most readers have probably seen the trailers for the CHD documentary about military personnel who rejected those new, untested COVID vaccines. If you have a group that rents theatres, you might offer The Courage to Disobey as a feature and The Distinguished Gentleman as dessert for those who sat through the grim facts...)
Music
Lee Greenwood.
George Harrison.
Sam the Sham.
Queen.
Wu Fei.
Mark Knopfler.
Bing Crosby.
Enya.
Glen Campbell.
Mannheim Steamroller.
Handel...I think the thought has more to do with Memorial Day than some want to admit.
Albert Hash.
Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.
Hillary Klug. I'm fairly sure the story is a tall tale.
Advertisement for a guitar teacher, I think.
The Weakerthans. Warning: some depressive people rate this one depressing.
Pentangle.
Buffy Sainte-Marie. Warning: if you listen to the words, this one really is depressing.
Sam Hinton.
Beethoven. Definitely not depressing.
Isaac Harris.
Gordon Bok.
War Story
This:
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