Here’s a short documentary about the making of Superfly. Good to see most of the cast and crew interviewed all these years later because several are no longer with us. And yes, all acknowledge that it was Curtis’ contribution that made a somewhat awkward film into something special that transcended the technical flaws and gave the film cinematic depth, resonance and class.
Love the story behind THE Caddy . . . our man is still with us and had a movie highly fictionalized Hollycrap movie made about him.
Here’s a fantastic post by the one and only Ricky Riccardi. To my knowledge no other 20th Century genius ever provided such an intimate (not stage managed) window into their life — but that was Pops! Given the description of Slivovice (see link below) it might as well be a legal version of Skokiaan, the eponymous tune of course brilliantly covered by Pops.
Louis sounds very relaxed and friendly. But there was something else present that made for the relaxed atmosphere: a bottle of Slivovice plum brandy Armstrong brought back from Europe earlier that year. Slivovice (now known as Slivovitz) is still around as an online search quickly shows. Louis and Lucille both testify early on about the powers of Slivovice. They warn Dan and Jack that it’s pretty much going to knock them on their asses. Dan and Jack are up for the challenge, so the bottle of Slivovice is cracked open.
Generally speaking, those who pursue political philosophy feel an affinity with Mill more than with Oakeshott at this point. It is not that Oakeshott stands in the way of change; on the contrary, he accepts change as natural to humanity; the real objection is that he does not glorify change, or indeed particular changes, and that he is skeptical about proposals for change. The pursuit of intimations is a description that avoids endorsements.
He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.
“Where’re you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.
“Ithaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was nice. (She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.
It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All have been fraudulent and ephemeral. Yet the attempt continues in atheist movements today, which claim that liberal values can be scientifically validated and are therefore humanly universal.
Here are a couple of documentaries sketching out the genius of these two musicians. Much of what they wrote and sang about is as salient now as it ever was. Of course, the “intelligentsia” or the “guardians of free speech” would not approve of their “ghetto talk” that eventually went onto influence hip-hop and rap, something that they definitely don’t approve of.
Bobby Womack. Yes, a complicated and controversial private life to say the least. I recall being transfixed, listening to a late interview with him in a Saskatoon supermarket carpark late one night when he was plugging The Bravest Man in the Universe.
There is such mixture of heaven and hell coming at you. You can’t but hear the church and the streets . . .
It was BW songs that gave the Stones their early “attitude”, did left-handed things on the guitar before Hendrix, and to my mind defined the gritty 70s with “Across 110th Street”:
Curtis Mayfield. That voice and that funk makes the hair stand up on the back of one’s neck, sheer beauty and depressing corrosiveness all intwined. A man of great intelligence and principle and so articulate without being heavy-handed as is the likes of the Rev. Bono. Percy would assent to Mayfield’s lyrics:
We’re all built up with progress
But sometimes I must confess
We can deal with rockets and dreams
But reality, what does it mean
It just so happens that while writing on Herbert Simon today I was reminded of Russell who, on hearing from Simon about his “thinking machine” that proved theorems from Principia Mathematica,responded:
“I am delighted to know that ‘Principia Mathematica’ can now be done by machinery. I wish Whitehead and I had known of this possibility before we wasted 10 years doing it by hand.”
Irvine, A. D. (2009). Russell’s Logic. In: Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 5: Logic from Russell to Church (eds.) Dov M. Gabbay and John Wood. Amsterdam: Elsevier / North-Holland, p. 24
The implication is that those of us who think that science and religion can coexist harmoniously are in some sense selling out. The New Atheists have appeared on the scene,and in a classic example of what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences,” while they may hate science deniers like the Creationists and(their more recent incarnation) the Intelligent Design theorists, they sure hate people like us—the independence types—a lot more.
