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Home » Open thread 5/4/21

Open thread 5/4/21

The New Neo Posted on by

I hadn’t seen Ray Bolger as anything but the Scarecrow. The way he gets up from the split – impressive:

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Open thread 5/4/21 — 20 Comments

  2. I haven’t seen much of Bolger outside of Oz either but was aware that he was considered a quite talented dancer.

  3. Thanks, Avi. I remember having seen this live back in the days of Steam Television.

  5. I would describe his style as apparently-uncoordinated dancing. Perfect for a scarecrow who has never walked before.

  6. Those are some seriously high kicks. But I still think for spectacular dancing no one beats the Nicholas Brothers.

  8. Angelo Codevilla, unlike many here, recognises the radical situation of the day. He says that because we now live under oligarchy, we are thus no longer citizens. Oligarchs rule-making is self-validating. We are Ex-citizens.

    Codevilla echos the recent thoughts of I Am Spartacus (See his important comments on“The FBI’s War in The Right” by Neo, his comments begin HERE https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/05/01/the-fbis-war-on-the-right/#comment-2553269).

    Acknowledge this fact, deny their legitimacy, and reject their authority. Find the like minded and autonomous who recognise your citizenship, a God given natural right, and band together with them. Keeping us unorganised is the oligarchs’ number one job.

    EXCERPT:
    “Americans struggle to understand what is happening because we still regard ourselves as citizens, and imagine that those who run our republican institutions still respect them to some extent. We see persons whom the ruling class favors committing crimes with impunity, and complain of ‘a two-tiered justice system.’ But this is not mere corruption. We see corporations wielding government powers and complain that power is being franchised to favorites. But these are not mere favorites of the regime. This is the new regime being itself. Such things are not deviations from republican legality. They are the assertion of oligarchic reality. This is oligarchic justice, oligarchic normality. The republic was yesterday. The oligarchy is today.

    “Conservatives’ congenital mistake is to try conserving something that no longer exists by supporting institutions that now belong to a regime so alien to republican life that it treats attempts at citizenship as crimes against the regime. And so they are. They call today’s American regime ‘our democracy.’ It is ‘theirs,’ all right, but not ours. It is a classic oligarchy.
    _. _. _
    “The American people, divided as they are, cannot purge the oligarchs from what had been republican institutions. But those so minded have full power to defend themselves from them and to leave them to their own devices.” https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/03/oligarchy-and-remedies/

    Commenter Ian Deal summarises and expands on Codevilla by moving us towards the tactical reality we face: “Conservatism is dead for there is nothing left to conserve. [Which is why NR is utterly useless, today. As is the GOP.]

    “We are now insurgents, which means going on the offensive. Oligarchy is a dead-end street because millions of people make better decisions for themselves than a handful of powerful elites ever can.

    “As insurgents, our job is to recruit men and women of all races and backgrounds to take control of their lives and not be dependent on the state or ruling juntas for anything.

    “A nation of free men and women will always outperform a top-down governing coalition where decisions are routed through a small number of people….

    “We are back to 1776. Probably half the country can be considered patriots and maybe 15 to 25% are part of the oligarchy. Those in power are trying everything they can to keep us from coalescing. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Alphabet, etc. are trying to make sure we can’t organize. Think like an insurgent.”

    Study insurgent tactics and internalise them. We are Revolutionary’s to them because we want them gone from their illegitimate powers. Therefore, BE the change we need. Create and agitate for these needed changes!

  9. Amazing video. That man must have had leg muscles like steel cables.

  10. I used to think of myself as fairly athletic. Watching Bolger makes me hurt in places I would rather not come to my attention. Even rolling upright from his last falls is a feat.
    I imagine his tailor has to be pretty innovative.
    Not to mention his orthopedic guys.

  11. Eyeopening…

    TJ,

    I very much agree with one caveat, re: “Find the like minded and autonomous who recognise your citizenship, a God given natural right, and band together with them.

    While there is strength in numbers, publicly banding together enables the Left to target that group. Ala the Oath Keepers and Patriot Boys, whose members are being targeted as “extremists” and “domestic terrorists”. Organizing as cells within a larger group and conducting 4th Generation warfare is where we’re headed.

    Also, the Left doesn’t believe in God. So from where they stand there’s no justification for asserting there to be God-given natural rights, inalienable rights rest upon the supposition that we are all children of our creator.

    This is why ideologically, the left asserts there to be only human rights, determined by the current popular consensus.

  12. I thought this article about the EU screwing up their vaccine production effort was interesting.

    One of the European Union’s top bureaucrats has admitted that Brussels’ excessive bureaucratic demands held back the progress of the bloc’s vaccine programme, adding that Brexit Britain succeeded because it was willing to take a gamble by partnering with private industry.
    —
    He [Michel Barnier] also said that part of the problem was the EU’s “almost ideological mistrust of public-private partnerships”, adding: “We don’t know how to take risks.

    “The British took risks by financing the private sector. The Americans took risks. We don’t know how to do that yet.”

    The naive thought would be, how hard can this be? AstraZeneca has production facilities in the U.K. and elsewhere in the EU. Just pay them to replicate the U.K. effort.

    What do they mean by risks? Well, I believe the US gov. and Operation Warp Speed paid the Novavax corp. perhaps $2B up front, and so far they do not have a deliverable vaccine product. So we might have wasted $2B. I’m sure that sort of thing keeps EU bureaucrats awake at night.

    Several weeks ago is when I first heard that Operation Warp Speed was organized in part by Arthur Herman who wrote the great WWII book called Freedom’s Forge. Below is a tiny introduction to his OWS effort,
    https://www.hudson.org/research/16661-why-operation-warp-speed-worked

    I had also heard that Trump’s HHS Sec. Alex Azar, a former pharma CEO, was very helpful in understanding risk from a pharma corporation’s point of view.

    The contrast between the U.S. and the E.U. could not be greater.

  14. Back in the’80’s I worked for a gent (born 1912). He had connections to some L.A. entertainers and knew the Gum sisters early in their careers. He told me about Eccentric Dancers. Notably Buddy Ebsen, a real favorite of mine was an eccentric dance performer. Wikipedia claims its origins “as a result of the influence of African and exotic dancers on the traditional styles of clog and tap dancing“. Terms like legomania and rubber legs were coined to describe these non-standard movements. Wikipedia also claims this indirectly spawned the Charleston and much later the Shag. Fascinatin’.

  15. Wikipedia on Bolger:

    Bolger’s MGM contract stipulated that he would play any part the studio chose. However, he was unhappy when he was originally cast as the Tin Woodman in the studio’s 1939 feature film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. The role of the Scarecrow had already been assigned to another dancing studio contract player, Buddy Ebsen. In time, the roles were shuffled around. Bolger’s face was permanently lined by wearing the Scarecrow’s makeup.

    He may have had some regrets about that make-up job, but Wiki doesn’t mention them.

    I love Ebsen, but he didn’t have the flexibility that Bolger did (though he still had a lot!), and the producers made the right decision.

    You don’t remember Buddy in the cast list?
    There’s a reason for that.

    https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/Buddy_Ebsen

    Buddy Ebsen (2 April 1908 – 6 July 2003), born Christian Rudolph Ebsen Jr., was the actor who was originally cast as the Tin Woodman in the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz.

    At the time the movie was begun, Ebsen was in the second year of his second two-year contract with MGM, and was making $1500 per week. Ebsen was a talented dancer who’d had a noteworthy career on the stage. By 1939 he had appeared in eight films, and had danced with Judy Garland in the finale to Broadway Melody of 1938. He was originally intended for the role of the Scarecrow, but was eventually cast as the Tin Man and was involved in early filming in October 1938. On 21 October, nine days into the filming, he suffered a severe bronchial reaction from breathing the aluminum dust used in the character’s makeup. He was hospitalized for two weeks, and recuperated at home for a month after.

    Ebsen was replaced by Jack Haley, and aluminum paste was substituted for aluminum dust in the Tin Man’s makeup. All of the scenes in which Ebsen appeared were re-shot with Haley, so that Ebsen does not appear in the finished film; yet his voice occurs at one point in the soundtrack, when he, Ray Bolger, and Judy Garland sing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” after the Tin Man has been lubricated back to life.

    As I recall from another story about this episode, the producers didn’t want to (or couldn’t) re-tape the song, and I suspect no one in the audience ever noticed.

    This was not the only role change, nor the only accident.
    (Wikipedia)

    In 1939, [Margaret] Hamilton played the role of the Wicked Witch of the West, opposite Judy Garland’s Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, creating, not only her most famous role, but also one of the screen’s most memorable villains. Hamilton was cast after Gale Sondergaard, who was first considered for the role, albeit as a more glamorous witch with a musical scene, declined the role when the decision was made that the witch should appear ugly.

    She suffered a second-degree burn on her face and a third-degree burn on her hand during a second take of her fiery exit from Munchkinland in which the trap door’s drop was delayed to eliminate the brief glimpse of it seen in the final edit.

    Gale who?
    Bet she had some regrets.

    Hamilton’s stunt doubles also made trips to the hospital.
    OSHA would not have approved.

  16. Gale who?

    Gale Sondergaard made a career playing scarey women. You could look her up.

  17. tcrosse – the Wiki cross-reference pop-up was a one-liner from the top of her entry:
    “…is an American actress.” Those run to a half-paragraph on anyone of current note, so I did not pursue the research.
    Most of us, I suspect, don’t have a clue what else Hamilton did without looking her up; I certainly didn’t.

    On Sondergaard:
    “After the late 1940s, her screen work came to an abrupt end for the next 20 years.” Victim of HUAC.

    She really did do some good work in the 1940s (I’ve seen a couple of the films mentioned, in late night tv or on vhs – literally), but only as a supporting actress. However, those fallow years were the “golden age of stars” for those of us born in the 1950s; her movie days were over, and we didn’t have any sources for reruns back then.

    She missed the iconic role because she was “reluctant to wear the disfiguring makeup and fearing it could damage her career..”

    You only get one shot at those roles, I suspect, and you don’t know going in which ones they will be. The public is fickle that way.

  18. Most of us, I suspect, don’t have a clue what else Hamilton did without looking her up; I certainly didn’t.

    You’ve forgotten the Maxwell House commercials.

  19. Victim of HUAC.

    Collateral damage. Her husband actually was a Communist Party member and in contempt of Congress. IIRC, you only got a subpoena from that committee if you’d been named as a Communist (in public or in a confidential interview) by two independent witnesses.

    We’ve seen in our own time one cultural institution after another turned into a train-wreck of friend-hires-friend. Seminal knots of fanatics behave like parisitoid wasps. The HUAC was arguably bad, but remember there are all manner of bad actors and bad outcomes. (I would refer you to RWB Lewis’ brief account as to what it was like working in the publishing business ca. 1945. The red haze types had real influence over what went to market and what did not).

  20. That extreme flexibility is a genetic condition – hyperflexion. I had a friend, not at all athletic, who could wrap her legs around her head, do splits and Chinese splits. Things that made me, a former dancer, hurt to even watch.

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