Tony Curtis (June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010)
Born Bernie Schwartz, working class Bronx kid. For all his fame and popularity, an underrated actor. And, by all accounts, a decent human being. The New York Times obit is here.
As ‘Shell Oil Jnr’, wooing Marilyn a la Cary Grant.
.
An atypically serious role, with Sidney Poitier.
.
Probably his finest performance.
In 1998, he founded the Emanuel Foundation for Hungarian Culture, and served as honorary chairperson. This is for the restoration and preservation of synagogues and 1300 Jewish cemeteries in Hungary. He dedicated this to the 600,000 Hungarian victims of the Holocaust. (see his Wikipedia entry)
Matgamna on the present state of Labour
Maybe the bourgeois press isn’t that wide of the mark…
The AWL’s Sean Matgamna is surprisingly up-beat about recent developments and the prospects for the “reclaimation” of the Party:
What is new about Ed Miliband’s Labour?
That New Labour would be shaken up by electoral defeat, and that defeat would allow “old Labour” and trade-union discontent with what Blair and Brown had done to the Labour Party to emerge, has been obvious for a long time.
That the shake-up would within four months of the general election and New Labour’s defeat produce the transformations expressed in the election of Ed Miliband – the trade unions’ candidate – as leader of the party, and in his speech to conference on Tuesday 28 September, is nevertheless startling. The speed, scope, and (in a limited sense) completeness of the change is startling.
Although the press has not reported this, and as we write even the delegates have not been formally told the result of the card vote, we understand that the conference voted, on trade-union initiative, to restore to unions and local Labour Parties the right to send (a limited number of) motions to annual conference.
This reverses the decision of 2007 conference to end completely the old practice of having conference act as a forum and parliament of the labour movement, and to turn it into a rally instead.
That 2007 decision had been a sealing-off and completion of the rule changes introduced in 1997 that destroyed the structures that had allowed the rank and file and the affiliated unions to function – however inadequately – in politics.
The reversal of the 2007 decision (again, assuming the report is true) can be made the beginning of a reconstruction of the Labour Party, and its reclaimation by the trade unions and Labour Party members.
Read the rest here.
Now That’s What I Call Sibling Rivalry!
David and Ed…
… ain’t got nothing on this (Boris Karloff, The Black Room, 1935):
Breaking Broken Britain
If Britain has an official narrative it’s of the Great Decline. This once great nation degenerated into a Third World country where the good are paralysed by political correctness and the lazy and evil live high on the sweat of the few remaining working men. The story of how we went from the spirit of the Blitz to a selfish, hedonistic wasteland has captivated highbrow conservatives, policy units and libertarian bloggers alike. In some ways this miserable romance has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has hardwired self-pity, parochialism and resentment into the UK’s political discourse. It’s a climate where mainstream newspapers publish the most fantastical conspiracy theories and incitements to racial hatred while clerics make high-profile pronouncements about the End Times like doomsayers wailing in the street.
A key part of the Great Decline narrative is immigration. The hatred for immigrants in our culture has now become a national pathology. Migrants in reality tend to be dispossessed and vulnerable yet they are somehow responsible for taking both our jobs and our benefits, depressing wages, and destroying social cohesion. If they come from Islamic countries they are said to be imposing their native culture upon this small island. It’s this last point that Edmund Standing focuses on in his report ‘Debunking the ‘Islamisation’ Myth‘. ‘Are we now to seriously believe,’ he asks, ‘that Britain is finished because a religious minority, many of whom are poor and powerless, and very few of whom are found at the heart of our economy and our political process, has arrived on our shores?’
Standing begins by putting the Great Decline narrative in historical context, tracing it from Melanie Phillips back to earlier apocalyptics like Spengler and the Nazi theorist Max Nordeau. He then goes on to knock down the conspiracy theories of the contemporary British right. Standing takes apart the demographic basis for the Eurabia idea, and could have pointed out that it rests on the sinister fallacy that future generations will believe exactly the same things that their parents did, as if belief and culture were hammered into the genetic code.
Standing’s an atheist and considers Islam itself to be harmful and stupid. A lot of people will object to his report for these reasons alone, but for my money it’s a stronger, finer attack on the current bigotry against British Muslims than anything produced by the far left.
(Image via John Rentoul)
Miliband on the Labour Party
“…(T)he Labour Party will not be transformed into a party seriously concerned with socialist change. Its leaders may have to respond with radical-sounding noises to the pressures and demands of their activists. Even so, they will see to it that the Labour Party remains, in practice, what it has always been – a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted. That system badly needs such a party, since it plays a major role in in the mangement of discontent and helps to keep it within safe bounds; and the fact that the Labour Party proclaims itself at least once every five years but much more often as well to be commited not merely to the modest amelioration of capitalist society but to its wholesale transformation, to a just social order, to a classless society, to a new Britain, and whatever not, does not make it less but more useful in the preservation of the existing social order.
“It is very likely that the Labour Party will be able to play this highly ‘functional’ role for some time to come, given its overwhelming preponderance as ‘the party of the left’ in the British political system. There is at present no party or grouping which is capable of posing an effective challenge to that preponderance; and this helps to explain why so many socialists in the Constituency Labour Parties, in the trade unions (and for that matter in the Communist Party) cling to the belief that the Labour Party will eventually be radically transformed. But the absence of a viable socialist alternative is no reason for resigned acceptance or for the perpetuation of hopes which have no basis in reality. On the contrary, what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative: and one of the indispensable elements of that process is the dissipation of paralysing illusions about the true purpose and role of the Labour Party.”
(The excerpt above is from the Postscript to the second edition, April 1972).
The Minor Drag: Fats Waller (a quiz)
…or was it ‘Harlem Fuss’?
Above: Waller on the right, and Condon (second from left).
Eddie Condon’s description of this recording session (the morning after a major drinking session with Fats Waller, whom he was supposed to be ‘minding’ for the record company), on 1st March 1929:
“We stopped at the Riverside Towers and I got my banjo. At ten minutes before twelve we walked into the Leiderkranz Hall at Fifty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue. Mr Adams (boss of the Southern Music Company – JD) was waiting for us.
“‘I see you are punctual,’ he said to me. ‘Congratulations.’ To Fats he said, ‘Well, Mr Waller, what is it to be this morning?’
“‘ Well, Mr Adams,’ Fats said, ‘this morning I think we’ll start with a little thing we call ‘The Minor Drag.’ It’s a slow number. Then we got a little ol’ thing for the other side we call – he hesitated – ‘Harlem Fuss’…
“…When we finished Mr Adams came of of the control-room. He didn’t say anything. We listened to the playback.
“I had a difficult time believing what I heard because it sounded wonderful. I looked at Mr Adams. He was smiling.
“‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘what careful rehearsal will do? You have performed your job excellently.’
“I walked over to Fats. ‘What are we going to play for the other side?’ I whispered. ‘What is Harlem Fuss?’
“‘It’s just a little blues in a major key,’ he said.
“We made it. When the master was cut Mr Adams was delighted.
“After that the Southern Music Company, with careful planning and preperation, brought out the record on a Victor Label with the titles reversed: ‘Harlem Fuss’ was called ‘ The Minor Drag’ and ‘ The Minor Drag’ was called ‘ Harlem Fuss.’ I got my seventy five dollars.”
Quiz question: what was racially/socially ground-breaking about Fats Waller’s “Harlem Fuss/ Minor Drag” 1929 recording session?
Prize: any Eddie Condon or Fats Waller CD you wish copied from my collection and posted to you free of charge.
PS: Stroppy remembers Jimmy Hendrix – like Waller a short-lived, wayward musical genius – 40 years on.
Labour leadership: Ed by a whisker?
Susan “Grimmer Up North” Press keeps her ear to the ground on Labour Party matters, so I trust her judgement on this:
…I should be at work today but I am dosing myself up with antibiotics and paracetamol in a bid to ward off a disgusting lurgy which came from nowhere to knock me for six.
Dagenham: the film may be crap, but these women were (and are) heroes!
I’ll review the film itself as soon as I can. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer:
