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Home » Open thread 7/18/23

Open thread 7/18/23

The New Neo Posted on by

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Vera-Ellen is very skillful, with remarkable strength and energy, and she’s got great legs. On the other hand, I just don’t like the choreography or the style. But you have to admire that toe-tapping, which reminds me of Georgian male dancers:

The Georgians, yikes!:

Comments

Open thread 7/18/23 — 39 Comments

  1. The thing I regret most in dance is never getting into tap.

    Another thing I regret is having to learn the kazotsky for a production of The Grand Duke. I felt like I was walking uphill for two weeks.

    The ‘coffee grinder’ and ‘spread eagle’ were much easier. No idea what their names are.

  2. On the tap style in the first video, I think that was mostly for musical movies which I was addicted to at a young age. Trailing camera, jump levels, etc. My absolute favorites were The Nicholas Brothers. STAIRS!

  4. neo writes, “I have mixed feelings about this.”

    That is a privilege of your gender. No red-blooded male could watch Vera Ellen and have mixed feelings. 😉

  5. Oligonicella,

    As a favor to a friend who was starting a dance studio my mother put me in tap classes for a few years. I was quite young, but enjoyed it quite a bit. I think a lot of children, especially boys, would enjoy it. Boys are often tapping things with their hands and feet and have trouble sitting still. I found it easy to follow in class and enjoyed practicing on my own.

    I wonder if any schools include it as part of arts and/or physical education?

  6. Loved Vera Ellen in “White Christmas”. Love Danny Kaye too – as a comic actor. No way he could keep up with her dancing so they had to bring in a ringer for her big dance numbers. The on-line trivia says Donald O’Connor, he of “Singin’ in the Rain” fame, was supposed to have that role. The mind boggles. Just found that there was an Ellen-O’Conner pairing in “Call Me Madam”. Gonna have to find that and watch.

    In “White Christmas” it’s been noted that all of Ellen’s costumes had a high neckline almost up to her neck. No one knows why, but interesting to see in this video that’s not true.

  7. I was going to skip the Georgian dancers video, but I’m glad I didn’t. That’s insane. I would have thought it to be a physical impossibility.

    That is a privilege of your gender. No red-blooded male could watch Vera Ellen and have mixed feelings. — Rufus

    Amusing and I agree with general sentiment of the statement, except … You don’t get a great look in the video, but she is just too thin.

    I find a variety of body types sexy, including the slender, althetic, and slightly muscular ones; but a woman’s body is biologically programmed not to go below something like 15% body fat without entering into the danger zone.

    neo was speaking mostly about the dancing and not the dancer. The dancing is very impressive and athletic, and it’s fine as Hollywood entertainment. I’d agree with the notion that it isn’t an exemplar of beauty, style, and grace.

  9. Rufus T. Firefly on July 18, 2023 at 10:51 am

    You have hit the nail directly on the head and driven it down in a single blow.

  10. Add the ticketing company, Eventbrite’ to your list of bigoted, leftist companies canceling normal people.

    “Eventbrite blasted for removing ‘Let Women Speak’ event over ‘hateful’ content

    Eventbrite is facing blowback for taking down an event page for women advocating on behalf of single-sex spaces on the grounds that it violates the platform’s policy against hateful content.

    Independent Women’s Network chapter leader Michelle Evans, organizer of the Aug. 12 Texas-based event Let Women Speak Austin, said her gathering was “intentionally misrepresented by Eventbrite as hate speech.”

    “Eventbrite‘s team of Trust and Safety experts politely communicated to me that they were capitulating to the trans ideologues, the loud minority who are perpetually offended by women speaking out against their intrusion into our sports and private spaces,” said Ms. Evans in a statement

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/15/eventbrite-blasted-removing-let-women-speak-event-/

    The Independent Women’s Network seems like a great organization. Here is their website. Perhaps you can write about them Neo as a break from your relentlessly negative articles (except for dance and Beegees of course)

    https://iwnetwork.com/

  11. I love watching Vera Ellen dance. At least one viewing of White Christmas each season has been a family tradition for decades. Continues on to the next generation.

  13. Give humans a chance to create, perform and inspire, and they will. They may even exceed expectations.

    I wouldn’t be nearly so far down the pike of appreciating dance without neo’s posts.

  14. Re: Indy 5 flop

    All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

    Indy 5 is flopping hard. Disney/Lucas has promised that IJ5 would hit their box office targets of $1bn, then $800mn, then $600mn and now $500mn.

    Comrades, the chocolate rations been increased to $500mn!

    I love Big Sister!

  15. Speaking of Big Sister…

    Kathleen Kennedy, current Prez of Lucasfilm, is now leaking blood in shark-infested waters.

    In the aftermath of the Indy 5 flop the pro-Kennedy and anti-Kennedy forces in Disney/Lucas are lining up and having it out. Kennedy is down but not out.

    However, she is losing D/L projects and according to the rumor mill she is being blacklisted, on strictly financial grounds, from most other major studios. So Kennedy is trying to launch her own studio.

    Best of luck, KK!

  18. TommyJay:

    Indeed, I was speaking about the dance and not the dancer, and in particular I was speaking of the choreography.

    Although as Yeats said “how can we know the dancer from the dance?” I get the point he was making, but I think that, technically speaking in the case of actual dancers and actual dance, we can.

  20. Talk about wasting police and the court’s time, I’ve just recently run across a whole bunch of Youtube videos about police encounters with “sovereign citizens.”

    This deluded bunch of people have apparently listened to any number of Internet gurus who have sold them a alternate world view, one based on peculiar readings of old treaties and other documents, in which no U.S. governments—whether Federal, State or local—are legitimate and therefor, they have neither jurisdiction nor power over them.

    If stopped they say that they cannot be stopped because they are not “driving,” they are “traveling,” and they often cite the U.S. Commercial Code.

    They refuse to comply with police requests—soon to escalate to orders–to produce their driver’s licenses, saying that they are not required to have one, and sometimes they either have no license plate on their car, or they have a phony one that they bought off the Internet. Similarly, they often have phony I.D.s identifying them as a member of some strange alternative entity. Sometimes they claim to have “diplomatic immunity.”

    Moreover, from what I’ve seen on these videos, such” sovcits” often have a folder containing a whole slew of various phony documents, including documents that they say the police must fill out if they want to talk to them, with attached penalties, in “silver or gold dollars,” of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    They also claim that police cannot touch their cars since they are their private property, etc.

    If arrested and headed for trial they then often insist on filing a blizzard of supposed legal paperwork, none of which is legitimate.

    You can see how this group of people can waste police time that could otherwise be used to fight real crime, and similarly waste the courts time as well, dealing with all sorts of phony pleadings and motions.*

    A similar group are the blacks who claim to be members of some kind of indigenous Moorish nation and, thus, also not under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government or of the police.**

    See here one apparently comprehensive explanation of the Sovereign Citizen phenomenon at
    file:///C:/Users/owl19/Downloads/Sov%20citizens%20quick%20guide%20Nov%2013.pdf

    ** See https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/washitaw-nation-and-moorish-sovereign-citizens-what-you-need-know

  21. Add the ticketing company, Eventbrite’ to your list of bigoted, leftist companies canceling normal people.
    ==
    They’ve pulled stunts like this before. In a just world, the company would go under.

  22. Rufus T. Firefly on July 18, 2023 at 10:51 am said:
    neo writes, “No red-blooded male could watch Vera Ellen and have mixed feelings.

    Yes!!!

  23. Art Deco,
    Great dance scene. I’m a big fan of Kim Novak. If I were to get past noticing Kim, and consider having “mixed feelings” about her performance, I’d say that her dancing is well rehearsed but not exactly natural. Who wants to do that though?

    Here is another sexy little dance scene. A silly one in a silly little movie starring Ronald Reagan and Rhonda Fleming.

    At time 1:05:20.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYSUyvRE2No

    I like the part at the beginning when the music starts and she looks down at herself and you can imagine her thinking, “Oh, look. My hips have a life of their own!”

  24. Market watchers may have noticed that Microsoft is up big today.

    Apparently, they are going to include an A.I. bot in Office 365 that people can use for the considerable price of $30/month. Now MSFT has a long history of fumbling cutting edge technology. But this could be the beginning of something big and possibly not very wonderful.

  26. “Biden” Sinister….
    “The US Government’s New ‘Ministry of Truth’: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency”—
    https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19806/cisa-new-ministry-of-truth
    H/T Powerline blog.
    Opening grafs:
    “A new interim report from the House Judiciary committee highlights politically motivated mission creep where we might least have expected it: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
    “The agency went, for example, from, ensuring the digital security of American voting systems to censoring criticism of those systems.
    “After the Biden administration was sued in federal court, CISA outsourced its censorship operation to a non-profit group funded by CISA itself….
    “…There is more to see here, however, than just a thwarted attempt by a government bureaucracy to police the political speech of the American people in violation of the First Amendment. It is the use of funded or politically affiliated non-profit groups to do the government’s dirty work for it.
    “This parallels the behavior of the Justice Department under then Attorney General Eric Holder during the Barack Obama administration    ….” [Emphasis mine; Barry M.]

  27. P.S.— You might imagine all of the extra time a traffic stop which turns into an arrest of a sovcitizen takes from the get go, as the sovcit starts by refusing to concede that the law and cops have any authority over him, spending a lot of time over whether or not he will exit his car, his demand that a supervisor come to talk to him, screeching about how the cops have to sign his paperwork to even talk to him, etc., etc.

    If the cop knows about sovcits and their schtik, and is hard-nosed, this thing can be wrapped up in, say, 15 minutes, but it could drag out for far, far longer.

  28. Snow on Pine:

    The sovereign citizens are generally delulu but each state has its own laws on stop and ID. Many require the police to be engaged in actively pursuing an actual offense to demand ID. Just walking up and demanding doesn’t cut it. The cops most commonly get their wrists slapped when walking up and demanding ID from someone recording in public on public property.

    Always keep your dash cam on.

    Back to Vera and White Christmas. She suffered from anorexia and you can see it in WC.

  29. “The agency went, for example, from, ensuring the digital security of American voting systems to censoring criticism of those systems.
    ==
    We shouldn’t have digital voting systems, and I can pull up an article by a computer science professor published in 2006 explaining why we should not have them. The agency was manufactured to police an artificial problem. Now they’re a problem for a different reason. Everything the Democratic Party gets its hands on is ruined.
    ==
    BTW, this agency is another Homeland Security turd. Another reason, in case you needed one, why the foundational agencies of DHS need to be scattered among a menu of successor departments and the agencies actually created since 2001 need to disappear.

  30. I’d say that her dancing is well rehearsed but not exactly natural.
    ==
    Since when is dancing ‘natural’?

  31. Olgonicella–In the Youtube videos I have seen, in each case the cops looked like they had some “probable cause,” i.e. no license plate or phony plates and, then, on inspection, a phony ID.

    Notably, the cars these sovcitizens were driving looked none too clean, and were often filled with food wrappers and a lot of other trash.

    In another video, a man who identified himself as member of the “Moorish nation of Washitaw” was found at 3 A.M., asleep in his car with the engine running, and parked behind a business, and when the cop came up to the driver’s side window, you could see this guy had an open bag of white powder sitting between his legs.

  33. “Where are you going?” is not an infraction. Those do exist. I’m not saying there’s any great number of them. Any instances of police fabricating a charge is unacceptable.

    As I said, i know the sov’s are delulu.

  34. Snow on Pine and Oligonicella:

    Regarding Sovereign Citizens; they range from the USA to Australia, and provide ample fuel for an entire YouTube genre. They are a diverse crowd; young, old, white, non white, male, female. An underlying theme is the concept that they are above the law. Which law? All laws.

    Anyway, here is an example:

    Sovereign Citizen Arrested by a No-nonsense North Carolina State Trooper – Van Balion

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzXfahy9uAc

  35. Some dancers give the illusion of naturalness. I think Ginger Rogers was especially good at that.

  37. hes a shallow stupid child (and no fidel doesn’t have of those) he will go after the polish pastor, but remember he gave the child terrorist, a very nice settlement,

  38. I watch ‘White Christmas’ just about every year around the holiday but Vera-Ellen disturbs me. She looks anorexic to me and I think about the energy she has to expend doing her dance routines. Weird to think about I know!!!

  39. I had a crush on Vera Ellen as a kid. I thought she was “really pretty”. I don’t see anything anorexic about her. She obvious did a lot of work to be able to perform at the level shown in that clip. It was a pleasure to see only 4 cuts, as opposed to movies today in which a 3 minute number has 40 or 50 cuts, probably because the performer can’t get more than 5 seconds of the routine correct at a time. I agree the the choreography is not good. It seems like a Frankenstein piece, stitched together haphazardly out of different styles. The kiddie head shake is especially jarring. Even so, it an amazingly athletic performance. The muscle control necessary to produce the rapid toe taps near the end is a combination of gift and practice

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