Michelle Legrand, Film Composer, 1932-2019

It didn't get a lot of press in the U.S., but famed French film composer Michel Legrand died last week, with President Emmanuel Macron hailing him as an "indefatigable genius."   Legrand had three  Academy Awards.  At 86, an obit remarks, "Legrand last performed on stage just last month, and was still composing and practicing piano an hour a day."  See LA Times here.  NYT here.  NPR here.

His most famous works include the theme to Summer of '42 and "Windmills of Your Mind," from the film The Thomas Crown Affair.   From Youtube clips, Summer here, Windmills here.

Personal favorites of mine are the haunting theme and variations from "The Go-Between" and the whole soundtrack of the not-well-known "Young Girls of Rochefort."

Memories

When I was in the Stanford MD-PhD program, around 1984 I was working late in the lab and the classical FM station was on.  The theme of "The Go-Between" was played, and I either wrote down the name or may have even called the station to find out what it was.   Theme and variations here.

When we lived in Chicago 1997-2002, there was a screening of the semi-forgotten film "Young Girls of Rochefort," which got a stellar review from the free weekly, Chicago Weekly, in November 1998, here.  I saw it, dragged my wife to it the next night, and got a DVD a few years later when they became available.  The songs in Young Girls are diverse but try one or two; the song of Maxence, here; the art store here.

Footnote

See the opening minutes and closing minutes of Summer of 42, here and here.  (Unrelated to music, the Summer of 42 pharmacy scene here, with priceless character actor Lou Frizzel, see also here.)

BOOK LIST CY2018

Highlights from 2018 reading. 

For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.

For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here.  This year, for the first time, I include a few unusual and outstanding movies or miniseries as well.

Discussed are:

Society and Politics

Dreamland. (opioids in America).
Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller.  (German pastor, 1930s).
Hitler's American Friends.  (Pro-German politics in the US, 1930s).
The 2020 Commission.   (Look back on the nuclear war of 2020).
God's Bankers.  (Vatican finance, 1700s to 2000s).

Business, Medicine, Strategy

The Alchemy of Air.   (Discovery of nitrogen fixation; impact on war and agriculture)
The Tangled Field.  (Scientific sociology centered around geneticist Barbara McClintock).
Never Split the Difference.  (Negotiation from an FBI hostage expert).

Memoir and Fiction

Nothing to Be Afraid Of.  (Memoir, Julian Barnes).
Dear Los Angeles.  (Diaries and Letters about LA, 1700s-2010).
Living With Monks.   (Young business entrepreneur goes off the grid for a month)
Dear Committee Members.   (Parody of academics).

Brief Mention
   Farsighted (science author Steven Johnson). 
   The Judge Hunter (light novelist Christopher Buckley).
   Avoid Boring People (James Watson).
   The Square and the Tower.  (Vertical vs flat organization and management in business and society).
   Bad Blood (Theranos scandal).

Books are discussed in more detail below, after I touch on cinema and streaming.

Cinema

Instead of repeating descriptions of the big top ten films that are likely familiar (A Star Is Born, etc), I'll touch on a few that were memorable but off the beaten trail.

I really liked Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly in "Stan and Ollie," about Laurel and Hardy in the last phase of their career. 

There were three wonderful documentaries about people in their 80's and 90's:

• Rose Marie, who had an amazing life story and was still around in her 90s when the documentary "Wait For Your Laugh"  was made.   (I often walk by her star on the Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame).   
• Wim Wenders, a German director I met briefly in college around 1980, made a film about Pope Francis, "A Man of His Word."   
• And best known, the documentary "RBG" about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  

Television/Streaming

I enjoyed HBO's "The Young Pope," a somewhat fantastical miniseries starring Jude Law.   YouTube clip here and here.  HBO also gets two Honorable Mentions:  Brexit (docudrama with Benedict Cumberbatch) and King in the Wilderness, MLK 1964-1968.

I lived in Oregon around 1985, in the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh period, and enjoyed Netflix' six-part documentary "Wild Wild Country."   

In fiction, I loved the 1920s-era German TV series, on Netflix, "Babylon Berlin" (16 episodes).  I wrote a detailed "fan blog" about it here.   It's hard to watch a 12-hour series with subtitles when it's available dubbed in English, but I recommend trying 15 minutes in German with subtitles, because the original actors' voices are so perfect.  Trailer here.

I also went head over heels for the Coen brothers movie "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs."  Also Netflix.  I wrote a detailed "fan blog" of Easter eggs and surprises in it, here.   Youtube clips here followed by here (pair).

Deeper Dive:

Society and Politics 

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic. Sam Quinones.  Sometime in the year I saw a really gut-wrenching documentary about opioid epidemics in downtrodden parts of the US.  This book takes you through it, from the Mexican border to the hardest-hit parts of Ohio and West Virginia.

Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis.  Matthew D. Hockenos.  Martin Niemöller was a German pastor from a conservative, nationalist family, who said little about the Nazis early on.  By the late 1930s, he couldn't stay quiet - and ended up in a series of prison camps, finally Dachau, which he survived.  Niemöller wrote the famous poem, "They came for the communists - I was silent...They came for the Jews...I was silent...They came for me..and no one was left."  (Here).   I had no idea - that was ACTUALLY his life.    The book is also notable for the social history of Germany from 1880 through the 1920s, which provides a setting for what follows.  (For an online article about Niemöller, here.)

Hitler's American Friends.  The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States.  Bradley W. Hart.  See also a sister book to Hitler's American Friends, which is set in the U.S., see also "Travelers in the Third Reich," Julia Boyd, what Americans and others made of the 1930s.

I have a collection of old books about the 1930s (many $5 on Amazon).  There were a lot of people who hated Roosevelt.   There were a lot of people who liked Fascism, especially given the global chaos of the Depression and the revolution in Russia.   I have two vintage 1930s books that give the con and the pro perspectives from the contemporary pages.  "Nazi Means War" by Leland Stowe, 1934, told about the jaw-dropping social changes in Germany.   "The Wave of the Future," by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1940, talks about how Fascism in Spain and Germany has some drawbacks, but we'd best fly with it.   For the 2017 book, "Hitler's American Model" - US law and Nazi race law - by Yale professor James Whitman - see my 2017 book list.  For another angle on the 1930s in Berlin, how Germany viewed itself in the 1930s, from the perspective of German authors today, see here.  I mention all these because the highly polarized 1930s provide some map for a highly polarized US and Europe today.

Which leads us to:

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States.  Jeffrey Lewis.   Written in the form of a Warren Commission-type government report on how we stumbled ass-backwards into nuclear war in 2020.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power in the Vatican.  Gerald Posner.  This is a continuous history, but it's almost like two books, one from 1700s to 1950s, and another, half the book, focused on a complex scandal in the 1970s into the 1980s (including quite a few murders or very suspect suicides).   I particularly liked the fast moving first 100 pages about the older history.

Business, Medicine, Strategy

The Alchemy of Air. A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler.  Thomas Hager.  A few years ago I really enjoyed "The Leviathan and the Air Pump," by Shapin and Schaffer, about the discovery of the vacuum and the development of the early modern approach to science.  And "The Invention of Air," about the discovery of oxygen, by Steven Johnson.   Here, we have the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which revolutionized both agriculture and bomb-making.  Without nitrogen fixation, we would have starved in the early 1900s; without it, WW-I would have been a fraction as destructive.

The Tangled Field.  Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control.  Nathaniel Comfort.  Back in early med school, I read "A Feeling for the Organism," about little-known and remarkable Cold Spring Harbor geneticist Barbara McClintock (1984).  Here, Comfort, a Hopkins professor of history of science, takes a deep dive approach to McClintock's complex science, and the response to her ideas.   There's a fair amount of the person and the biography, but it's not the main point. Tangled Field reminds us that at any time, there may be far more going on in biology (or biomedicine) that we want to suspect.

Never Split the Difference.  Chris Voss.  There are bookshelves of books on negotiating; this one is a new spin (from a hostage negotiator turned longtime business consultant) - nice airplane read.

Memoir and Fiction

Nothing to Be Afraid Of.  Julian Barnes. One of my favorite books ever, from the mid-80s, the British author's Flaubert's Parrot.  Here, Barnes gives us a memoir of his parents' lives, his lives, aging, death, and what to make of it, or try.   There's a tie-in to the Stan and Ollie movie, which similarly asks, what do we do with our lives, when the end is no longer far out of sight.

Dear Los Angeles.  The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542-2018.  David Kipen.  Several centuries of diary extracts, letters, and other sources from the unknown and the famous decorate the long life of my adopted hometown, Los Angeles, which have lived in the middle of since 2003.

Living With Monks. What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me About Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus.  Jesse Itzler.  Young successful business entrepreneur goes off the grid for a month.  One of my early possible career choices was joining a Benedictine monastery (or alternately, joining the Jesuits and being a college professor).  I stayed four times at the now-gone Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota, and I've stayed several times at St. Andrew's Abbey north of Los Angeles.  Many good memories of these visits and I'm sure they'll be some more overnights at places like this.  (A picture of the Blue Cloud abbey on the prairie has been my iPhone screen saver for several years).

Dear Committee Members.  Julie Schumacher.   Parody of academia in the form of windy recommendation letters from a perpetually disgruntled professor.  See also the 1980s comic novel Small World by Brit author David Lodge.

Brief Mentions

Farsighted (science author Steven Johnson).   One of my favorite books ever is the author's "How We Got to Now," which also became a wonderful PBS series.   This book on decision-making science is good, but on my second tier.

The Judge Hunter (light novelist Christopher Buckley).  I really loved his, "Relic Master" a year or two ago.  This is another comic novel, now set in the 1700s not 1500s.  A nice book on the second tier.

Avoid Boring People (James Watson).  Watson must be on many people's bottom-ten lists (along with, say, Attilla the Hun and Louis CK)  for his senile comments on race and genetics.  This 2007 book was enjoyable and readable for me, covering his life including flyovers of matters he treated elsewhere (e.g. 1953 and the double helix).  I wrote a short blog about this book, where I also discuss the absolutely wonderful movie with Jeff Goldblum about The Double Helix, which sadly is too hard to find.  I read Avoid Boring People because a PBS documentary about Watson's life just aired in January 2019.

The Square and the Tower.  Niall Ferguson.  Vertical vs flat organization and management in business and society, from a viewpoint that spans several centuries.  Nice reading; second tier.

Bad Blood.  The story of the Theranos scandal by investigation journalist John Carreyou of the WSJ.

___

Extra Notes

Bill Gates' December 2018 book list is here.

Also good airplane reading on political polarization, Amy Chua's "Political Tribes."   (Especially remarkable is the chapter on Chinese in Vietnam.)  Sam Rosenfeld, a historian at Colgate, assesses how we shifted from overlapping parties in the 40's 50's 60's to the extreme polarization of today (The Polarizers).  Sen. Ben Sasse, a PhD historian, gave us "Them" about fragmentation of social groups.

Another take on what can be learned from monasteries today: "Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks" by August Turak.

When do I read/watch this stuff?  120,000 actual flight miles / 500 mph = 240 in-air hours or 6 x 40 hour weeks...

James Watson's Third Memoir: Avoid Boring People (2007)

James Watson's Third Memoir: Avoid Boring People (2007)

For a number of years, Nobel Laureate James Watson, now in his 90s, has been on most Least Popular lists because of his views on race and intelligence.

That understood, I ran across his third volume of memoirs, Avoid Boring People (2007) and read it recently.   Famously, Watson wrote his first memoir, The Double Helix, in 1968, and his memoir of the later 50s and 1960s, Genes Girls Gamow in 2001.    His 2007 book covers his whole life again, from childhood until sometime after he stepped down from Harvard to lead Cold Spring Harbor full time in 1976 (having served at Harvard 1955-1976).   He was pushed into full retirement from CSH in 2007 due to racial remarks.

PBS has just run the new documentary American Masters / Decoding Watson, in January 2019.

My favorite movie about science and one of my favorites in the overall biopic and documentary category is Race for the Double Helix (also released as Life Story), a 1987 BBC film starring Jeff Goldblum as Watson.   It's not available as a conventional DVD or commercial streaming.  IT's not even available as a used VHS on Amazon.  A fuzzy DVD is available at the "ioffer" website (here).  At least in 2018, the movie streamed fuzzily in two parts here and here.  I make the effort to list all this since - it's one of my favorite movies, period.

Back to Watson.  In his third memoir, Avoid Boring People, he simply goes quickly (a few pages) over some of the years he devoted much more text to in Double Helix and Genes Girls Gamow.  Discovering DNA in 1953 gets around 5-10 pages in Avoid Boring People.

Most Amazing Thing

I found the book entertaining, bogging down mostly in a few later sections where he detailed minor steps in the career of a postdoc I'd never heard of.   The most amazing thing was the people I had heard of - many of whom he met very early in his career, before they or he were famous (or nearly as famous).   Many of these characters are in Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation, a history of molecular biology from the 1940s to the 1960s and early 1970s, which came out in 1978, when I was early in a college biology major.  I still have the hardcover I bought then.   These names include Gunther Stent, Seymour Benzer, Salvador Luria, Sydney Brenner, Leo Szilard, most or all of whom he knew before discovering DNA in 1953 at age 25.  

Snippets

Watson's acerbic wit (or worldview) is in evidence throughout the book.  I've jotted down a few by page - (259) Edward Tatum, head of CSH before Watson, was a "plodder" kept aloft by coauthors or students; (255) The Stanford Biochemistry Depart is "Arthur Kornberg's ever self-congratulatory biochemistry department," (234) He kept records of lawyer's bills preceding The Double Helix ($5.75 for postage), a nice picture of his office on p. 219; (207) Trying to lure Hubel & Weisel, the vision pioneers, from HMS to Harvard University; (196) Still annoyed about not getting a raise in the early 1960s; (266) How he married a much younger wife (he was about 40, she 19); (276) He buys Syntex stock on the recomendation of Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the OCP; (277) Graduate students could avoid the Vietnam draft only if they switched from biochemistry to cancer research; (309) His resignation letter from Harvard to pursue CSH full time; (303) He shows up at a party with Truman Capote; (316) Some sharp remarks on chased-out Harvard president Larry Summers (nothing distinguished his time in office like the leaving of it...a nod to Macbeth).  Additionally, Watson was a cousin to Orson Welles.

Watson ends each chapter with five or six "rules for living," some grand, some quotidian.  Fitting the pun, he uses "Avoid Boring People" as a rule twice, the first time to avoid conversation, the second time to avoid yourself being dull to others.

An open access article on the path to DNA, Nature, here.

___

Personal notes.

I saw Watson once, when he was a visiting professor at Stanford Med School in the 1980s.  I saw Crick at least once or twice and probably heard him lecture on his theory of dreams in the 1980s.

I heard a lecture from Gunter Stent (mentioned several times in Watson's book here) one evening in college.  I loved Stent's book Paradoxes of Progress (1981) and still have an original copy.   Later, I got a copy of Stent's little-known autobiography Nazis Women and Molecular Biology, much of which is about his wartime experiences in Berlin in the 1940s and just after.   My copy is signed to "Bea and Gunther", likely Gunter Steinberg, a schoolmate of Stent's in Berlin who also ended up living in California, like Stent.  Stent lived 1924-2008.

I was wandering Harvard Square around 2007 and saw a poster that recently ejected president Larry Summers was giving a talk on campus; jotted down the building and room; spent an hour listening to him talk about his Harvard presidency and the leaving of it in an audience of about 15.

____

Watson mentions a number of books.  One he has mentioned before is Schrodinger's What Is Life.   He was influenced by Unresting Cells by his U. Chicago physiology professor R.W. Gerard.  He also mentions "Christ stopped at Eboli," by Italian concentration camp survivor Carlo Levi (no relation, or very distant, to Primo Levi).

Unresting Cells was published in 1941 and reprinted without updates in 1949; Gerard mentions research during the war years was limited.  It was also reprinted in 1961, without changes.   The genetics chapter, as young Watson read it in college, is in the cloud here.

Joy and Perseverance: Two Interesting Youtube Channels

I ran across two remarkable personalities in 2018 based on their Youtube channels.  Both bring an enthusiasm and joy to their pursuits which I find inspiring.

Dana Newman / Wanted Adventure

In the first example, Dana Newman is a young woman from Florida, who finished college and immediately moved to Prague in search of adventure abroad (2008).  She had to renew a visa in Munich, which she happened to meet a young man who soon became her husband.  Her channel, Wanted Adventure, has over 200,000 subscribers and over 400 videos; 53M total views.  Nearly all the vlogs are in English, and she describes the miracles, puzzles, and curiosities of living in Germany.  (Water heaters in apartments are so weird!  The post offices are unlike any other country!).   There are a few videos where she speaks German the whole time, and others where she marvels at the puzzles of the German language.  (Mark Twain wrote a wonderful article about the bizarreness of German). 

Here's my choice for a first video.  I shared it with my offspring, who took to high school language class about the way a cat takes to a bath.   In this video, Dana marvels with cheer and wit about her frustrations with some German word pairs that are hard to figure out and remember.   It's hard to recall anybody who's as enthusiastic and charming about anything.  Watch at least the first minute or two!

HERE.

Besides her channel, she's also written a book just published in German about her experiences (You go me on the cookie!, in German, here).  (It's actually her second book after a 2012 novel in English).

Martin Molin   / Wintergadan

Martin is a young Swedish musician whose channel started in 2012 and has 175M total views, with over 1M subscribers. Here.

The showpiece video is Marble Machine, a music instrument built of thousands of parts and playing one melody by using 2000 marbles on a xylophone and other instruments.   The earworm melody has been played over 90M times.   The machine was years in the making (the first one was retired and he's making a second one) - the channel holds dozens and dozens of nerdy, enthusiastic, carefully made videos about the design and construction.   (After watching several of them, I think it would have been easier to make a House of Cards twenty feet high...)

Find this viral music video
  HERE.

Interview with Martin here, Wikipedia here, music website here.

_____

Check out both channels for T-shirts available as branded merchandise.

Named link as

https://tinyurl.com/joyandperseverance

Easter Eggs in Coen Bros. "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

Netflix has released a new full length Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.   I'm not a Coen Brothers groupie - I can remember when Blood Simple came out in the mid-80s, and I loved Fargo (and Raising Arizona and Barton Fink), but other films like Miller's Crossing I could take or leave.

Buster Scruggs has grown on me.  I wasn't impressed by the idea when I first head it.  Or by the trailer.  I kind of dully downloaded it for an airplane trip, and even on first viewing I thought it was a lot of clever-and-craft but maybe not that enjoyable.

Best Ten Lists

Along the way, I've now seen most of the film several times and I find it fascinating now.  National Board of Review named it one of the Ten Best Films of 2018.

Six Chapters, Six Genres

The movie contains six chapters, all set in the Old West and with styles varying from comedy to fantasy to realism to ghost story.   The six Western genres are:

1. The singing cowboy.
2. The bank robbery.
3. The traveling entertainment show.
4. The lone prospector.
5. The pioneers on a wagon train west.
6. Stagecoach, bringing together unexpected travelers.

Easter Eggs and Tidbits

Below I've pulled together some callbacks and Easter Eggs, including from Entertainment Weekly and Reddit, here and here.  Note - not much plot is here, but I haven't avoided spoilers.

• The opening theme music is Streets of Laredo; in the last segment, a character sings a funereal song to the same melody. 
• Streets of Laredo is also the closing-credits music.
• Both the first chapter and sixth chapter contain characters breaking into song.
• The well known historical lyrics of the song Cool Clear Water include a horse named Dan.  
• Buster Scruggs opens the movie by singing Cool Clear Water, and his horse is named Dan.
• In Chapter 2, we have the opposite character, a bank robber dressed in black head to toe; his horse is named...Timmy.
• The French card player in the first chapter - whom the camera focuses on several times for no clear reason - is a younger man who will be seen again at 70 years old in the final chapter, the stagecoach.  But you might not realize this on first viewing.
• When Buster shoots the gambler in the second saloon, after the three shots, we hear a coin spinning down to a stop.   After a couple seconds, the gambler tumbles to the floor, and we once again hear...a coin spinning down to a stop.
• The third segment contains a counting chicken; in the fourth segment, a character asks, "How high can a bird count?"   
• Having a legless man recount the Ozymandias poem (about a legless statue; in the third segment, the entertainer), is one of the most bizarre images in recent film.
• There are fine details hidden in the set design.  
• The six filmed stories are presented like the coming-to-life of chapters in a book.  Intercut we momentarily see the first and last page of each chapter; only readable on freeze-frame, the text pages can add interesting color.
• In the first chapter, Buster is dealt "The Dead Man's Hand," supposedly the same set of cards that were the last dealt to Wild Bill Hickok.   
• In the Stagecoach segment, or ghost story, the travelers arrive at a hotel which has an angel left of the door and a devil right of the door.  But they're glimpsed only for a moment.
• When the stagecoach arrives at the Hotel, the twilight buildings opposite are "clearly just shells" although you have to watch several times to be convinced.  
• Actors from where?  Brendan Gleeson, a bounty hunter in the sixth chapter, was a lead in "In Bruges."  The jibbering banker, played for laughs in Chapter 2, is Stephen Root, revered as goofy Milton in "Office Space."  (Root also plays Michael Hader's low-rent crime boss in HBO's Barry and a Harvard Law prof in On the Basis of Sex.)  The grizzled Trapper in Chapter 6, Chelcie Ross, has a long resume' including Basic Instinct, Major League, and Hoosiers.  Zoe Kazan (as Brave Pioneer Woman) is granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan.
• By far the biggest star in the cast, with the grandest stage voice, is Liam Neeson, who is given a fifteen minute nearly non-speaking role.
• Four different characters are shot in the middle of the forehead.  
• Two gunslingers and the Singing Cowboy in Chapter 1; the heroine in Chapter 5.
• Both a saloon hooligan in Chapter 1 and the prospector in Chapter 4 are shot through, but "the bullet doesn't hit nothin' vital" in either case.
• In the ghost story, the woman several times reverses her speech in describing her husband as "is" or "was."  Also in the ghost story, a metaphysical debate on human nature circles three or four times to rest on the same debate point:  "People are like ferrets."  "People are not like ferrets."
• As the film closes, the stagecoach driver rides off with the characters' luggage, at high speed in the direction he'd come from, but the characters have other things to worry about by that time.  The Frenchman, the last to enter the ghostly hotel, does so finally with shoulders up, confidence, and a sharp tap on his hat.

____

Part Two - Tidbits That Didn't Make The List Above

Buster Numerology

• There are four references to France:
• French card player in Chapter 1
• Frenchman's Gulch western town in Chapter 1
• Story about prior bank robber "from France" in Chapter 2
• Recurrent French card player (now older) in Chapter 6
• There are two references to Greek mathematics:
• Buster's methods "might be downright Archimedean" in Chapter 1
• Chicken is "Peckin' Pythagorean" in Chapter 3

Chapter Timing...

To Learn More...

• Wikipedia here.  
• IMDB here.   
• Reviews are easy to find via Google; an especially interesting one by John Podhoretz at Weekly Standard, here.
• Buster - Tim Blake Nelson - on Marc Moran WTF, December 3, 2018, here.  
• Tim enjoys Hebrew and Latin and majored Phi Beta Kappa in Classics at Brown (1986). 
• Joel and Ethan Coen on Terri Gross Fresh Air, November 19, 2018, here.
• Two articles on the photography and CGI - Variety here, Art of VFX here.
• Youtube review, from Discarded Imaging - MUBI, see it here.

Closing Tidbits

German Dub of Old West Language.  I'm a lifelong German hobbyist; the soundtrack is dubbed in a number of languages including German.  In Chapter 6 you can learn the German word for bounty hunter is "Kopfgeldjaeger" - head-money-hunter.  Also tricky when you think about it, they have to try to convey the elevated, odd, quasi-Shakespearean speech across all the dubbed translations.

Radio Play.  If you've seen the video once, one chapter, the sixth or Stagecoach chapter, is interesting to listen to as audio-only, like a radio play.

Midnight Caller.  Chapter 6 we hear the beginning of a ghost story, The Midnight Caller.  In the earlier Coen Brothers movie, True Grit, a character offers to tell the Midnight Caller story, but never gets started.  I've seen Buster commenters cite to a Midnight Caller described at Luke 11:5-13, but it seems irrelevant to me.  (in Luke: Man asks his friend for bread at midnight; asked to go away; asks again; gets the bread, hence, "Ask and you shall receive.")

Callbacks Across Films: Shot in the Middle of the Forehead.  Miller's Crossing ends with John Turturro shot in the middle of the forehead; this happens four times in Buster Scruggs, as noted earlier.    Character names are shared between True Grit and Chapter 5, The Girl Who Got Rattled.

Little Callbacks:  Dead or Alive.  In Chapter 1, Buster holds up a poster that he's wanted, "Dead or Alive."  The bounty hunter repeats this phrase in the Stagecoach, Chapter 6.

Art of Minor Characters.  For a short Youtube video on the Coens' art of creating the finest minor characters, including those in Buster Scruggs, here.

Professor Betjeman.  In the final chapter, the woman is married to a Dr. Betjeman, a noted Chataqua speaker on morals.  The 1970s Poet Laureate of the U.K. was John Betjeman.  See a statue of him at Paddington Station.

This blog as:
www.tinyurl.com/busterscruggseastereggs
   or www.tinyurl.com/busterEE

Snapshot of Lois Weber, 1915 Hollywood Producer: New DVD Set

• On December 7, 2018, Los Angeles Times reviews a new award-winning DVD set of films by Hollywood's great early female directors and producers, like Lois Weber.  Most are from the 1914-1920 era.  
• LAT Article here.  
• 6-DVD set, website here.
• See Lois Weber at Wikipedia, here.  
• She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 6518 Hollywood Blvd, dating from 1960.  Here.  
• It's on the south side and 1.5 blocks west of Cahuenga.
• In 2017, one of my high school age daughters and I saw a one-woman play, "Tea with Lois," in North Hollywood, bringing Lois Weber to life on stage.   
• We saw it in an audience of about six...but I still remember much about Weber from that evening.

Anita Hill Interview, NYT Dec 7 2018

‘Clearly the Tide Has Not Turned’: A Q&A With Anita Hill

“I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic.”CreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Image

“I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic.”CreditCreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

By Susan Chira

• Dec. 6, 2018

There may be more women heading to Congress this year, but Anita Hill isn’t cheering yet. The woman who faced down the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 does not see transformative change on sexual harassment emerging from any branch of government in Washington for the time being.

During a lengthy conversation at Brandeis University, where she is a professor, Ms. Hill reflected on the aftermath of her own testimony, and of Christine Blasey Ford’s before the committee this year, and the unglamorous slog of what it would really take to confront and redress sexual harassment.

She was alternately tart and deliberative, contained but occasionally allowing a flash of anger to break through her carefully composed sentences.

For now, she said, she is placing more hope in the private sector to police sexual harassment and to avoid the blows many industries have already absorbed to their reputations and morale. As head of the Hollywood Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality, convened a year ago by some of the most powerful players in Hollywood, she is working on best practices that extend beyond preventing and punishing sexual harassment to foster broader cultural change. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Q. We’re at a bookend moment — two women who endured public exposure and attacks, two Senate hearings that ended with the accused nominees’ confirmation. Has the tide turned and the momentum of the #MeToo movement slowed?

A. If you define the tide by the Senate Judiciary Committee, you’re missing a whole lot. Clearly the tide has not turned either with the outcome of the hearings or the process. That is really inexcusable. It’s as though they stuck their heads into the sand and assumed either it didn’t matter or they didn’t need to pay attention to it. I think that was the problem 27 years ago. The political question is whether or not they are in touch or not with the reality of our lives to be representing us.

Q. When you look at the myriad institutions that have been wrestling with this, what would it take to really implement changes?

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Ms. Hill testified during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times

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Ms. Hill testified during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times

A. 1991 was one of those experiences that was really horrifying for a lot of women. I don’t use that word lightly. I see women today who are still in pain and reeling from 1991 and then revisited it and brought up more memories in the Kavanaugh hearing.

The 1991 hearing had a peculiar impact. People predicted that women would never come forward, and just the opposite happened. They came forward in record numbers. Rules and practices were put into place, people started having conversations, lawsuits were filed, more cases went to the Supreme Court in the next three years. There had only been one Supreme Court case before 1991. On the political front, women ran for office because they felt they weren’t being represented.

Something did happen, but there was also backlash. You saw the rise in these forced arbitration agreements. Nondisclosure agreements took hold and started to rise in the ’90s. Increasingly, class action lawsuits were more and more difficult.

Increasingly as well, organizations started to look at the response to sexual harassment as an effort to make sure there was a compliance with the law and not an effort to solve the problems that existed. This experiment of how we’re going to address harassment — it failed.

Q. So what should be done?

A. It’s not the glamorous, headline-making work, it’s the day-to-day examination, combing through and interrogating things that people have just assumed were the only way things could be done.

Ms. Hill then ticked off a list of what needed to change:

• A process of reporting harassment where it is clear to every employee where to turn and how they will hear about the outcome. Those will have to be public, even though companies cite employee privacy, to build trust and prevent violators from being passed off to other workplaces.

• Investigations that are independent, often by third parties, particularly if the accused are senior executives or rainmakers.

• Training that includes implicit bias coupled with bystander training, creating a workplace culture where everyone feels responsible for calling out harassment.

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• Preventing the retaliation that now hounds the majority of those who complain.

• Leaders who publicly commit to fighting harassment and creating a diverse workplace.

Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the committee in September.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

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Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the committee in September.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

Q. Do you see a backlash against #MeToo from women as well as men?

A. We are just wedded to a culture of accepting this behavior, not being willing to make the tough calls and stick with them. There are very few problems where we make rules based on the possibility of false accusations. If we paid more attention to that in this society we wouldn’t have the death penalty.

The bigger problem is not false accusations. The bigger problem is the harassment. I agree that everyone in a fair process has a right to be heard, whether accuser or accused. What I cannot accept is the notion that many people have that women cannot be trusted to tell the truth about these violations.

Q. Will Dr. Ford’s experience deter other women from coming forward?

A. I have only one experience to base this on, but it was a pretty egregious and horrific process. And yet women said, ‘I didn’t even know I had this right. I’m not going to suffer in silence.’ I do think there will be more people coming forward. So I think it could have the same kind of countereffect that it did.

Q. Are you in touch with Dr. Ford?

A: I am. I’ll just leave it at that.

Q. Is it comforting for her?

A. I hope so. I know how important it was for me.

Q. When you look at the government, there are now two justices who were accused of sexual harassment (both of whom deny the accusations) and a president who boasted on tape of being entitled to grab women. How do you assess this?

A. They sort of feed each other. The Senate supports the compromising of the Supreme Court. The president compromises the presidency. The legislative bodies that support him or don’t call him out are enabling him to make comments that suggest he believes that he is entitled to be abusive to whomever he wants. And we should have known that eventually it would get to the courts, too. How it compromises the legal system — as a lawyer, that is so deeply troubling to me.

I will say this, too. The notion that Susan Collins [the senator from Maine] spread about the burden of proof, innocent until proven guilty and applying it to a Judiciary Committee proceeding, a political proceeding, compromised our legal standards. The legal standard is a high principle of our legal system, a start to protecting us against wrongful convictions. It should not be denigrated or used to cover political choices.

But I’m ever hopeful. Political bodies change, leadership changes, people can make better choices.

Q. You’re hopeful?

A. I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic. It has to do with my whole background. My parents were born in 1911 and 1912. My mother lived into her 90s, my father until his 80s. I measure change by what happened in their lifetimes. My grandfather was a slave, certainly his mother was a slave. I’m only two generations at most from slavery. I think I have the right to be hopeful. Because I see how far we’ve come. I’m very clearheaded about how far we have to go