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Raoul Walsh's Colorado Territory (1949) is a cool noir Western starring Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Dorothy Malone, Henry Hull and others. I really like its twists and turns, and seamless inclusion of American Indian and Latino/Hispanic characters. Virginia Mayo's character, Colorado Carson, is supposed to be part Indian. McCrea is sort of like the Humprhey Bogart character in High Sierra, a 1941 film also directed by Raoul Walsh; Henry Hull plays a Southerner hoping to make a better life out West; his attractive, disgruntled daughter is played nicely by Dorothy Malone. French title above: La fille du désert.
Henry Hull, Joel McCrea and Dorothy Malone in Colorado Territory publicity shot. What works for you in a Western film?
Today's Rune: Journey.
Archaeology and geophysical survey work. Because it's an ongoing project site, I'll identify it in general terms as a former hamlet area on the grounds of an important battle of the American Revolution. The device above reads beneath the surface and records its field data for later analysis in a lab.
The scanning device is mounted and maneuvered on three wheels over the ground; roots at the base of large trees -- and cellphones -- interfere with its capabilities. A small copperhead snake guards a nearby woodpile; nicknamed Babyface George, it's the site "mascot."
Back in the computer laboratory, 3D scanning results are compared with field notes, looking for patterns, anomalies and features.
There are two types of scanning going on. This readout looks sort of like the surface of the Moon, but it's the same site. Here, apparent anomalies seem more pronounced.
Concurrent archaeological grid. This is traditionally how the artifacts are recovered -- carefully, and meticulously recorded. I saw some artifacts in the field and in the archaeology lab, including a trigger probably beloging to a Pennsylvania long rifle and some animal bone fragments. Also found: brickwork, ceramic and pottery sherds, a smashed (fired) musket ball, a button and a single grape shot.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
In going through Ruth Benedict's influential anthropological study Patterns of Culture (originally published in 1934), I came to a passage that seems remarkably pertinent to today's world, bearing on very rich and powerful people who abuse their station (mostly men -- Trump being one caricaturish example -- but not all men: think Palin) ranging from Wall Street types to dictators and demogogues and beyond. She puts her finger on the problem, while also noting that artists tend to pick up on this (usually from the margins of socio-economic power), and observing furthermore that the customary status quo is what makes it possible for people such as she describes to be elevated into power in the first place:
Arrogant and unbridled egoisists as family men, as officers of the law and in business, have been again and again portrayed by novelists and dramatists, and they are familiar in every community. Like the behavior of Puritan divines, their courses of actions are often more asocial than those of the inmates of penitentiaries. In terms of the suffering and frustration that they spread about them there is probably no comparison. There is very possibly at least as great a degree of mental warping. Yet they are entrusted with positions of great influence and importance . . . They are sure of themselves in real life in a way that is possible only to those who are oriented to the points of a compass laid down in their own culture. . . In every society it is among this very group of the culturally encouraged and fortified that some of the most extreme types of human behaviour are fostered (pages 277-278 of the "Sentinel Edition").
Most of the book is about other things: Pueblo culture in the American Southwest, "native" cultures in the American Northwest and Melanesia, and ideas about cultural relativism. Benedict here and elsewhere argues strongly against racism and ethnocentrism in a time when segregation and xenophobia were the order of the day. She also took up the idea of synergy, another concept pertinent to the twenty-first century.
Today's Rune: Possessions.
And so hurricane season 2011 begins. A tornado clipped downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, today, which seems a bit weird, but then 2011 has been a real weird one in many of its transgressions. One report stated that Springfield's last tornado occurred in 1954, a fitting segue for today's post, because Hurricane Hazel of 1954 is the first named cyclone I remember being recalled by eyewitnesses.
Now, visiting with my parents in the Tar Heel state, I asked them about the 1955 hurricane season and subsequent flooding of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where I "hail" from. Hurricanes Connie and Diane (whose names have since been retired because of their destructiveness, along with Hazel '54) hit one right after the other in August of '55.
At the time, the greater family was scattered due to work and vacation schedules. My Mom was working as a Bell Telephone operator in Stroudsburg, my Dad was working at Vacation Valley and my paternal grandparents, aunts and then-baby sister Vickie were "Down to Shore." Everything in the region was disrupted by flooding. Fifty kids camping along Broadhead Creek drowned. My Mom was ferried by helipcopter to the telephone switching center, and everyone else was stranded where they were for quite a little while. The event was traumatic enough that people were still talking about it when I was a little kid in the 1960s; they still do more than half a century later.
The 2011 hurricane season may be another big one. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose, adding the new names to the historic roll call. As for systematic naming, it began in 1950; starting in 1979, female and male names were alternated. Hurricane Bob '79 was the first "sporting" the latter.
Today's Rune: Protection. Original images source: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This is precisely how a documentary about the American Civil War should look. Adrian Moat's Gettysburg, a mixed documentary/"docudrama" produced for The History Channel by Ridley Scott and Tony Scott, uses Gettysburg intensely as a contextualized microcosm of the entire war. It's a truly stellar production, fast-paced yet well-detailed, wisely sampling the vast 1863 battle through several compelling points of view without trying to be exhaustive or romanticizing.
Not only is Gettysburg unflinching in its tight closeup direction: it furthermore takes the time to delve cyclically and efficiently into period technology (including both small arms weapons, artillery, communications and the raw state of medical treatment and painkillers); the paramount stakes of the war for African Americans in particular; underlying issues of socio-economic class, ideology and motivation in the soldiery; women during the war; and the primal brutality of battlefield conditions. Wow: impressive. Should appeal to anyone even slightly interested in history, war or life on this planet. Caveat: scenes of gory carnage. Given it's the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, Gettysbug will be re-aired several times.
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
Many layers of meaning attach themselves to Memorial Day and its worldwide equivalents. Soldiers, military veterans, wars -- of course. Mortality and contemplation. The meaning of life and the worth of a life. Loss. Remembrance.
In the past century, the technology of war has become increasingly sophisticated, greatly expanding in possibility through air power, advanced communications, high exposive armaments, submarines, tanks, laser-guided munitions, remotely piloted attack drones, poison gas, atomic weapons, mass electronic propaganda and mediated filtering. And, when nations coalesce together to fight "Total War" or "assymetrical war," everything is brought to bear against perceived enemies, including children, animals, woman and men together, not to mention their combined social spaces.
Given mass killing realities like the 9/11/2001 attacks, the Holocaust, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Nanking, the Armenian Genocide, indiscriminate firebombings of great cities, the Great War, and the U.S.-Vietnam War -- just to recall a handful of grisly atrocities perpetrated by human societies or tribes or groups in the past century -- it may be wise to expand the official scope and acknowldgement of Decoration Day, of Memorial Day, to include all societies touched by war and massacre, to think beyond the uniformed.
But hell, what do I know? In the spirit of John Lee Hooker, "I sing the blues every Decoration Day."
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
I like Cuban cuisine: Cuban sandwiches, plantains, empanadas, rich Cuban-style coffee, anything and everything. Fifty years into this ridiculous US embargo, the popularity of Cuban cuisine is spreading. One can get at it in Fort Worth, in Detroit and Ferndale, in Cary, North Carolina, and in Durham, just to give a handful of examples. Good! It costs no more than fast food, so it's really just a matter of preference in the 21st century. Now how about some Cuban cigars legally available in the USA?
How about you -- are their any types of cuisine you like that were rare or little known when you were growing up but that you now can find without too much trouble?
Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
