Mailbag
Posted: November 22, 2013 Filed under: mailbag Leave a comment
Carla in Texas writes:
Dear Helytimes, I found your blog because I have a news alert set for my hometown of Balmorhea, Texas (go Bears!). I am a retired educator with the BISD now living the sweet life AKA retirement. Had to write after I LOL’d about your description of Ron’s lizard & reptile show, Ron is a very sweet man an admired eccentric we all love him in our community .
Bone to PICK with you: you are way off on Vertigo. I first saw it when I was ten and it scared the DAYLIGHTS out of me. AS for sexy WRONG AGAIN that movie gets me horny as hell. [TMI, Carla?] Not Kim Novak — JAMES STEWART. Are you kidding? He we a bomber pilot who flew over 200 missions. [20 says wikipedia].
You are right though about Midge.
Keep writin’,
Carla
Thanks Carla, and thank you for reading.
Please address all letters for the HelyTimes mailbag to helphely at gmail dot com.
Kennedy Exaggeration
Posted: November 21, 2013 Filed under: Kennedy-Nixon 1 Comment
From The New Yorker blog:
In 1962, the Trillings were invited to the White House for a dinner honoring that year’s Nobel laureates. Jacqueline Kennedy, Trilling wrote, was “a hundred times more beautiful than any photograph had ever indicated”
Start reading about the Kennedys and you’ll never stop.
… the greatest thrill I had in my life was when the President’s wife, Mrs. Kennedy, addressed a corwd of about 600 people at this Michelangelo School when he was running for the senatorship against Lodge, and the gracious lady stood up before the big crowd and the Italian people, the elderly people, were there, didn’t know who she was, and when she opened her mouth and introduced herself in Italian, fluent Italian may I say, as the wife of Senator Kennedy, all pandemonium broke loose in the hall. All the people went over and started to kiss her, and the old women spoke to her as if she was a native of the North End.
So says William DeMarco, JFK’s first campaign manager, in this oral history you can read at the Kennedy Library. DeMarco says this happened during the campaign against Lodge, 1952. Is his memory off? The Kennedys didn’t get married until Sept. ’53.
Things like this come up all the time if you get deep in Kennedyana. How could it not? The basic facts of his life are absurd. While he was president he essentially raped a nineteen year old. He could’ve easily died of various ailments before World War II, during which he ended up stranded on a straight-out-of-cartoon desert island:
Massive insurance but if you haven’t seen Errol Morris’ eight minute documentary The Umbrella Man do yourself a favor.
(Cartoon swiped from here)
One of my bitch older sisters
Posted: November 19, 2013 Filed under: history, New England 1 Comment
emailed me just to mock me by saying she got to go see the dinosaur footprints out in western Mass.
which I’ve NEVER SEEN.
I’m telling you: they’ve been doing shit like this to me my whole damn life.
Vertigo Sucks
Posted: November 16, 2013 Filed under: film, the California Condition 14 Comments
1) I like many old movies.
Many of them* are “still” good, even though now-movies are faster louder and full of incredible innovations.
2) The cause of encouraging people to enjoy old movies is hurt when we pretend bad old movies are good.
If you’re on the fence about old movies, and you hear about one that’s supposedly good, and then you watch it and it’s boring nonsense, you might conclude “old movies are boring and shitty.”
3) Vertigo sucks.
It is boring to watch. The plot is ridiculous and implausible, multiple times over. This plot is explained in tedious, boring ways.
I absolutely concede that Vertigo might have been AMAZING when it came out in 1958, full of crazy innovations and sexiness. This shot, say – still very cool:
As cool as the paintings on old rides at Disneyland.
4) People pretend Vertigo is good for some reason. This is destructive.
It’s possible that these people just have different taste than me.
But I don’t think so. That’s how much I hated Vertigo. I believe it is either 1) old people who remember seeing Vertigo in 1958, and having their minds blown, which, fine I totally concede or 2) people who for some micro-cultural reason have bought into liking Vertigo as some kind of status indicator or something. Possibly uncharitable, I know, but understand: I hated Vertigo.
I don’t even not like Hitchcock. I would say Rope is 2x better than Vertigo. Psycho is better than Vertigo. So is North by Northwest which also doesn’t make a ton of sense. Rear Window is way better than Vertigo.
Disclaimers:
1) I only just saw Vertigo a couple days ago, maybe I would’ve liked it more if I saw before I’d seen, say 12 Years A Slave, Gravity, and The Counselor.
3) I’m wrong all the time
But I think this is an important cause.
Vertigo was voted in first place in Sight & Sound‘s 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time, both in the crime genre and in general, displacing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane from the position it had occupied since 1962.
Ok: lists are stupid, deliberately provocative, Sight & Sound is a British magazine so maybe they are biased, and also who cares, and maybe, as Sight & Sound editor Nick James says, it might just be that critics love j. o.’ing to the idea of disguised/impersonated movie stars (paraphrasing).
The problem is that Citizen Kane is good. I think if you’d never seen Citizen Kane tomorrow and you watched it it would still be interesting.
By hyping Vertigo to youths, we encourage them to watch a boring piece of shit, and their conclusion will be “don’t trust the fuckers who say old movies are good.”
5) Don’t believe anyone who tells you Kim Novak is “sexy” in Vertigo.
The sexy one is tragic, confused Midge.
Ants
Posted: November 15, 2013 Filed under: animals, heroes, Life, painting, people Leave a comment
Nice work boys.
Wilson got his start doing a survey of all the ants in Alabama.
There’s the question of, why did I pick ants, you know? Why not butterflies or whatever? And the answer is that they’re so abundant, they’re easy to find, and they’re easy to study, and they’re so interesting. They have social habits that differ from one kind of ant to the next. You know, each kind of ant has almost the equivalent of a different human culture. So each species is a wonderful object to study in itself. In fact, I honestly can’t…cannot understand why most people don’t study ants.
(source)
Plus look at the wild coolness on Bert Hölldobler:
Bert Hölldobler:
Whoa
Posted: November 11, 2013 Filed under: Winslow Homer Leave a commenta Veteran’s Day return to form from The Met’s Artwork Of The Day.
Last owner: Adelaide Milton de Groot, New York, by 1936–died 1967
Online you can really stick your nose in it:
Extremely good old article from The New Yorker for Veterans Day too.
Helytimes: filtering the filters.
The Fields Of Athenry
Posted: November 10, 2013 Filed under: Ireland Leave a comment
One Saturday afternoon in the East Village Boyland drank a couple beers and played this song a bunch of times and wouldn’t shut up about how great it was.
There were a couple of possible responses to this and I picked the correct one which was to drink a couple beers and agree with him.
Years later I was in Ireland. Dublin with RCK, then I rented a car and drove to Galway and points west.
On my way, I passed by signs for Athenry.
It looked boring. I took a picture for Sean but I never showed it to him. Why disappoint him?
It would not have surprised him anyway.
“Kiss her now!”
Posted: November 8, 2013 Filed under: love Leave a comment
I gotta read this new book by the amazing Tyler Cowen:
In the book, you write that algorithms might urge us to go out with apparently unlikely partners—they might even guide us during our dates, monitoring our heart rates and sending us text messages like “Kiss her now!”
Maybe most of the time it won’t go very well—you’ll get rejected quickly or you’ll look like a fool—and it’ll feel wrong to us. But if that risky behavior increases your chances of connecting with the right person quickly enough, before they end up meeting someone else, it might nonetheless be good.
And there will be Luddites of a sort. “Here are all these new devices telling me what to do—but screw them; I’m a human being! I’m still going to buy bread every week and throw two-thirds of it out all the time.” It will be alienating in some ways. We won’t feel that comfortable with it. We’ll get a lot of better results, but it won’t feel like utopia.
(reminding me of: Boyle’s horrifying impression of a fourteen year old girl about to get kissed. painting)
More:
Most people who write about inequality write in a tone of moral outrage, and make suggestions about how we might reverse its growth. You seem to have deliberately avoided that; you’ve written about it in purely predictive terms.
I do, in numerous places, point out things we might do to make inequality problems less severe. (Mostly we’re not doing them.) But I think that to dispassionately lay out the facts is often the best first thing to do, to open up that dialogue—to step back first, and view things more analytically, and then to apply our judgments.
Vollman vs. Munro!
Posted: November 7, 2013 Filed under: writing 3 Comments
vs.
Robert L. Caserio, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who has studied Vollmann extensively, thinks Vollmann deserves a far greater audience: “When I consider Vollmann’s gigantic energy and global reach, and consider that feeble, ill-writing Alice Munro has won a Nobel Prize, I am staggered by how pathetically shrunken our standards of magnitude have become.”
from this Newsweek article about William Vollman.
A personal counterpoint to that:
- I tried to read Vollman, many times, because he seems brave and his projects are fascinating. (Going out of my way to be nice here even though Vollman has said he does not read the internet)
- The Ice Shirt is interesting and ambitious (Jean and Hubbs got it for me for my birthday!) but I found that it was so wrapped up in elaborate Norse dream visions and stuff as to be unreadable (and I’m pretty into pre-Columbian North America)
- Ditto Imperial.
- Riding Towards Everywhere – a book about hobos, mind you – I failed to finish.
From the other corner:
- I once read an Alice Munro story, selected truly at random from the probably full yard of Alice Munro books on the shelf at a public library in Victoria, British Columbia. When I was done I had to wipe tears off my face with a coarse Tim Horton’s napkin. I put the book back and was like shit that was just one I picked at random, maybe not even a good one of these, of which there are – 200?
Anyway, no accounting for taste, huge respect to Vollman, whose latest thing was dressing up like an old woman named Dolores I just think Prof. Caserio came off sounding a bit catty.
(Vollman from Wiki, Alice Munro photo from here)
(readers should know I have a possible positivity bias towards Alice M. because I won £200 betting on her, through a London intermediary, to win the Nobel Prize)
Everything is something.
Posted: November 6, 2013 Filed under: America, Texas, the American West 4 Comments
The bartender said that the drive from Fort Davis to Balmorhea – forty miles or so – was “some of the prettiest state highway driving in all of Texas.”
Sold, obvs.
I don’t think my pictures do justice to the Wild Rose Pass. In fact, I know they don’t.
I was distracted listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which I’d never listened to:
I would say “Atlantic City” is my favorite song on this album. I was never super-into Bruce Springsteen. But: respect:
Initially, Springsteen recorded demos for the album at his home with a 4-trackcassette recorder. The demos were sparse…
Springsteen then recorded the album in a studio with the E Street Band. However, he and the producers and engineers working with him felt that a raw, haunted folk essence present on the home tapes was lacking in the band treatments, and so they ultimately decided to release the demo version as the final album.
Complications with mastering of the tapes ensued because of low recording volume, but the problem was overcome with sophisticated noise reduction techniques.
“Nebraska” itself is an interesting song, about Charlie Starkweather:
The song begins with Starkweather meeting Fugate:
- I saw her standin’ on her front lawn just a-twirlin’ her baton
- Me and her went for a ride, sir…and 10 innocent people died
Springsteen was inspired to write the song after seeing Terrence Malick’s movie Badlands on television. The portrait in the opening lines of the girl standing on her front lawn twirling her baton was taken from the movie.
Starkweather himself was [supposedly] influenced by James Dean:
After viewing the film Rebel Without a Cause, Starkweather developed a James Dean fixation and began to groom his hairstyle and dress himself to look like Dean. Starkweather related to Dean’s rebellious screen persona, believing that he had found a kindred spirit of sorts, someone who had suffered torment similar to his own whom he could admire.
Charlie Starkweather killed eleven people. Ban movies, I guess.
Fort Davis:
From 1854 to 1891, Fort Davis was strategically located to protect emigrants, mail coaches, and freight wagons on the Trans-Pecos portion of the San Antonio-El Paso Road and the Chihuahua Trail …
During the Civil War, Confederate States Army troops manned the fort which was attacked on August 9, 1861 by Mescalero Apaches. The native warriors attacked the garrison’s livestock herd, killed two guards and made off with about 100 horses and or cattle.
At Fort Davis they have an audio program, where they play announcements of the sort that would’ve been heard on the parade ground, years ago. The day I was there the audio program was a list of ceremonies and salutes to acknowledge the death of former president Andrew Johnson. Gun salutes every hour, and then at sundown.
In the reconstructed barracks, I came upon some National Park Service Personnel discussing the site, and the reproductions they’d used of guns and quilts and so forth. They got quiet and respectful when I came in, and said if I had any questions they would answer them. Then they got back to joking about how someday someone would sell the reproduced guns on eBay as “authentic! from Fort Davis!”
A poignant obituary:
At lunch a guy came up to me and mistook me for Dave. “You look just like Dave – in profile!”
A house I saw in Balmorhea. I sat right down in the middle of the road to take a picture of it.
In Balmorhea there’s a spring:
Between 20 million and 28 million US gallons (90,850 cubic meters) of water a day flow from the springs.
That’s crazy.
There was a sign nearby offering snorkel rental:
The cienega now serves as a habitat for endangered fish such as the Comanche Springs pupfish and Pecos gambusia as well as other aquatic life, birds and other animals.
I did not take a picture, because you can’t take a picture of everything. But here’s one from the Texas Parks Department:
Later a friend of mine described the drive from Marfa to Austin, seven hours away.
“The first time I did it,” he said, “I was bored because I thought it was nothing. But then, as I got used to it, I realized everything is something.”
In Fort Davis I wanted to visit the rattlesnake and reptile museum. I walked in, and there was no one there. So I walked around. A Spanish language radio station was playing. Then, as I was leaving, I realized it cost $4. I only had two singles or a twenty. I left the two dollars, and figured that was good enough since no one had been there to explain the various lizards and scorpions anyway.
But then I thought, “Steve, you know better. This man went to all the trouble of collecting these snakes. All he asks is four dollars.” I went back. The snake man was there. He’d been watching me the whole time, he said.
No end to learning
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: Clubs, history Leave a comment
Started out reading about the Hotel Nacional in Havana.
In 1933, after Fulgencio Batista’s coup against the transitional government, it was the residence of Sumner Welles, a special envoy sent by U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to mediate the crisis, and was the site of a bloody siege that pitted the officers of the Cuban army… against the non-commissioned officers and other ranks of the Cuban army, who supported Batista.
Sumner Welles:
A New York Times profile described him at the time he joined the foreign service: “Tall, slender, blond, and always correctly tailored, he concealed a natural shyness under an appearance of dignified firmness. Although intolerant of inefficiency, he brought to bear unusual tact and a self-imposed patience.”
He lived in this mansion, which is now the Cosmos Club:
The Cosmos Club is a private social club, incorporated in Washington, D.C. in 1878 by men distinguished in science, literature and the arts. In June, 1988 the Club voted to welcome women as members.
Since its founding, the Club has elected as members individuals in virtually every profession that has anything to do with scholarship, creative genius or intellectual distinction.
Among its members, over the years, have been three Presidents, two Vice Presidents, a dozen Supreme Court justices, 32 Nobel Prize winners, 56 Pulitzer Prize winners and 45 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
(yes, Carl Sagan is a member of the Cosmos Club)
Let’s not get distracted though. Sumner Welles went on to be Under Secretary of State from 1937-1943.
And then what happened?
In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the HouseWilliam B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited sex from two African-American Pullman car porters.
Hard to imagine when he had Mrs. Welles at home:
He resigned.
In 1956, Confidential, a scandal magazine, published a report of the 1940 Pullman incident and linked it to his resignation from the State Department, along with additional instances of inappropriate sexual behavior or drunkenness. Welles’ explained the 1940 incident to his family as nothing more than drunken conversation with the train staff
About that top headline
About Frank Sinatra as Tarzan of the boudoir I have no further info.
Sunday
Posted: October 27, 2013 Filed under: New England, painting, religion, Wyeth Leave a comment
And in the morning I took the Bible; and beginning at the New Testament I began seriously to read it,1920.
Illustration for Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
I can picture it.
Posted: October 25, 2013 Filed under: everyone's a critic 2 Comments
10.[Wes Anderson] became close friends with Owen Wilson because Owen Wilson just suddenly started acting as if they were close friends.
Anderson and his frequent leading man and sometime screenwriting collaborator took a playwriting class together at the University of Texas at Austin, but they didn’t hang out or talk. Then one day Wilson came up to Anderson in the corridor of a building in the English department. “We were signing up for classes and he started asking me to help him figure out what he should do, as if we knew each other. As if we had ever spoken before or knew each other’s names. I almost feel like he was taking it for granted that if we didn’t know each other yet, soon we would.”
(from Matt Zoller Seitz roundup of Wes Anderson trivia he learned writing his book. Huge soft spot for MZS here at Helytimes from back when he was a heroic drum-banger for The New World)
(photo stolen from this mess)
Now that ain’t right
Posted: October 24, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts
You MUST, MUST
Posted: October 24, 2013 Filed under: comedy Leave a comment
listen to Alec Baldwin interview Jerry Seinfeld on his podcast Here’s The Thing. FREE on iTunes!
Alec Baldwin: You don’t have any problems.
Jerry Seinfeld: No. I don’t. But I do relate very deeply to all of those people –
Alec Baldwin: Why? Why?
Jerry Seinfeld: – you describe. In fact, I was watching the Emmys – this is the only part of the Emmys that I like – when they do the comedy writing award and each comedy writing staff puts up funny pictures. And then when the actual staff comes up on the stage and you see these gnome-like cretins just kind of all misshapen, and I go, ‘This is me. This is who I am. That’s my group.’
(one of my absolute favorite least cretinous humans I know there third from left. If you told him to his face he was gnome-like he would laugh heartily and recommend three fantastic indie text games featuring gnome characters, plus a 700 page self-published graphic novel from Taiwan about gnomes)
Or how about this?
Jerry Seinfeld: Jackie Mason. Alec, I was doing comedy about three weeks, three weeks, and I mean stumbling. Nobody three weeks, I’m 19 years old, 20 years old, of going up on stage. It wasn’t even a stage. There was a restaurant where they take a table out and they would take one of the lights, a lamp, and they would take the shade off, and that was the show. He was in the audience – 15 people, right? It was one of these cabaret things on west 44th street. It was called the Golden Lion Pub. He crooks his finger at me and he says, ‘Come over here.’
Alec Baldwin:
Jerry Seinfeld: He takes me over to the bar. He says, ‘You have it.’ He says, ‘You are going to be so big.’ He says, ‘It makes me sick to even think of it, how successful you’re gonna be.‘ And I was just starting.
Jerry Seinfeld: Because of the precision wordplay. They were – see that’s where they went beyond – there was Laurel and Hardy, and then Martin and Lewis, but Abbott and Costello has this precision. ‘Who’s on First?’ –
Alec Baldwin: Sure.
Jerry Seinfeld: – is a piece of – it’s like that museum in Spain, the –
Alec Baldwin: The Prado?
Jerry Seinfeld: No. The other one, that what’s his name did?
Alec Baldwin: That Gehry did?
Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah.
Alec Baldwin: Right.
Jerry Seinfeld: Whose real name is Goldberg, by the way.
Alec Baldwin: Is it really?
Jerry Seinfeld: Yes, it is.
Alec Baldwin: Is it really?
Jerry Seinfeld: He changed it in college.
Alec Baldwin: Frank Gehry’s real name is –
Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah. What’s the name of that museum in northern Spain?
Big hat tip to cuz. Transcript available here.
(cant find a credit on that top photo, I found it here)
Cudjoe Lewis
Posted: October 23, 2013 Filed under: Africa, America, history 1 Comment
Excitement about how terrific John Jeremiah Sullivan is reached me long ago but it took me awhile to get to this book and believe it for myself. Now I’m a JJS belieber.
Enjoyed the book on a plane, a fine setting in all regards but one:
after you’ve finished reading the essay “Unknown Bards” – about certain mysterious bluesmen whose lives are vanished to history except for one recording – you have no way of listening to any of the songs mentioned, let alone the entire album Pre-War Revenants.
The collection’s only delimiting criteria would be that nothing biographical could be known regarding any of the artists involved, and that every recording must be phenomenal, in a sense almost strict: something that happened once in front of a microphone and can never be imitated, merely reexperienced.
On return to California a listening party was organized (thanks to Chennai office).
While listening to this amazing thing the question came up of: whether any people were alive in the American South at the time of these recordings (1910-1940, let’s say) who were born in Africa and brought over to the United States as slaves.
My expensive education paid off because I knew that the Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1808, the first year that the U. S. Constitution allowed it to be abolished. (Never hurts to remind your strict constructionists how much of what ‘the framers intended’ was “being allowed to own people.” See Article 1, Section 9).
BUT the story’s more interesting.
Wiki:
Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, or Cudjo Lewis (ca. 1840 – 1935), is considered the last person born on African soil to have been enslaved in the United States when slavery was still lawful.
Together with more than a hundred other captured Africans, he was brought on the ship Clotilde to Mobile, Alabama, in the United States in 1860 during an illegal slave-trading venture.
Cudjoe was the longest-lived survivor of all those who were brought aboard the Clotilde. He was believed to be the last slave born in Africa and brought to the United States by the transatlantic slave trade. Before he died, he gave several interviews on his experiences, including one to the writer Zora Neale Hurston. During that interview in 1928, Hurston made a short film of Cudjoe, the only moving image that exists in the Western hemisphere of an African transported through the transatlantic slave trade.
Hurston named the last eight of the Clothilde’s survivors as: “Abache (Clara Turner), Monachee (Kitty Cooper), Shamber, Kanko (who married Jim Dennison), Zooma (of Togo Tribe), Polute, Cudjo, and Orsey, or Orsta Keeby. Cudjo is the only one alive at present, a dignified, lovable, intelligent man.”
He died in 1935 at the age of 94, in Plateau (Africa Town), Alabama.
Could explore this forever. Was he named after this man?*
The Library of Congress has audio recordings of slave interviews.
* alert reader “DS” calls my attention to a more likely explanation: Lewis was born on a Monday
Trivia
Posted: October 21, 2013 Filed under: writing 2 Comments
Jane Austen died a virgin.
(so says John Sutherland in The Lives Of The Novelists. Portrait of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra).
Wiki:
In December 1802, Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane’s niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive — he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal.
“Four Centuries Of Pueblo Pottery”
Posted: October 19, 2013 Filed under: America, the California Condition Leave a commentMan, if you go see an exhibit called “Four Centuries of Pueblo Pottery” at the Southwest Museum legally all your property is forfeit to KCRW but I do like this picture.
Like most things involving the site, the show is fraught with uncertainty and controversy, none of it having to do with the artistry and cultural history on display.
Putzi Hanfstaengl
Posted: October 18, 2013 Filed under: history Leave a comment
Found this in The Wise Men: Six Friends and The World They Made by Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas:
McCloy was also responsible for the construction of The Pentagon, which became known as “McCloy’s Folly.” One of his greatest difficulties was getting the plans approved by Roosevelt, who fancied himself an amateur architect. He finally resorted to extortion. The President had gotten himself in a bind involving an old Harvard classmate, Putzi Hanfstaengl, a German refugee who had returned to his native country and acted for a while as a court jester for Hitler. Thinking he could pump useful information out of Hanfstaengl, Roosevelt had hims ent to the U. S. from England, where he was being held prisoner. Hansfstaengl, however, turned out to be a fool, and Roosevelt wanted to get rid of him. McCloy told a White House staffer he would find a safe sinecure for Hansfstaengl at an army base in Texas if FDR would approve the Pentagon blueprints. It worked. At a Cabinet meeting the following week, Roosevelt turned to McCloy and growled, “You blackmailer!”
This raises more questions than it answers and sent me to Putzi’s wikipedia page.
Hanfstaengl was so fascinated by Hitler that he soon became one of his most intimate followers, although he did not formally join the Nazi Party until 1931. “What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 2½ hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years,” Hanfstaengl said. “Because of his miraculous throat construction, he was able to create a rhapsody of hysteria. In time, he became the living unknown soldier of Germany.”
Throat construction. You can also read there the somewhat confusing story of a “prank” played on Hansfstaengl that led him to think he was about to get killed.
In 1944, Hanfstaengl was handed back to the British, who repatriated him to Germany at the end of the war. William Shirer, a CBS journalist who resided in Nazi Germany until 1940 and was in frequent contact with Hanfstaengl, described him as an “eccentric, gangling man, whose sardonic wit somewhat compensated for his shallow mind.”
Looks like a charmer.
In 1974, Hanfstaengl attended his 65th Harvard Reunion, where he regaled theHarvard University Band about the authors of various Harvard fight songs. His relationship to Hitler went unmentioned.
Anyway, this is a bit of a bummer post so here is a photo of sunny Florida:
Janet Yellen: Philatelist
Posted: October 10, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
This will be insurance to most Helytimes readers, but: Janet Yellen apparently has a stamp collection, inherited from her mother, worth $15,000-$50,000.
Previous Helytimes coverage of the philatelic arts can be found here.
(photo from John Cassidy’s New Yorker blog, credited to Charles Dharapak/AP.)
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