High School, Frederick Wiseman's 1968 follow-up to 1967's mental-hospital/human warehouse cinéma vérité Titticut Follies, is almost as nightmarish (the Philadelphia school board made what Wiseman refers to as "vague noises" of lawsuit, and settled for Wiseman agreeing to it not being screened in Philadelphia or suburbs...which, as it happens, continued to be the case till just before it was presented on PBS as an episode of the POV series in 2004). Filmed at the large and theoretically prestigious public Northeast High School in Philadelphia (still largely "racially" segregated as late as 1968), it manages to gather examples of petty cruelties and gross distortions offered in the name of education and discipline, small glimmers of hope here and there among the students and faculty in the sea of perfunctory if usually well-meant, negligent going through the motions. I first saw it while attending a pompously, would-be slightly progressive private high school in Honolulu, and was struck by the similarity of the institutional experience a decade and change later, not the message, I suspect, it was hoped I'd take away.
The students seem largely alienated from their coursework and teachers, chivvied by martinets among adult hall monitors and other disciplinarians, marking time and awaiting their fates (one discussion between a young returned Vietnam vet and a teacher about who among recent graduates became a casualty of war to one degree or another certainly is among the most chilling offhand bits); the more enthusiastic of the kids are often engaged in such Time-Honored Good Fun as bizarre transvestite mockery of cheerleaders by cheerfully misogynist sports-team members, which leads off this clip, segueing into a sex-miseducation session for the boys by the kind of male gynecologist who almost perfectly sums what's wrong with certain aspects of his era (and that he's in the educational position he's in is both unsurprising and flabbergasting):
Even a few seemingly hopeful signs prove misleading at closer inspection, such as the near-juxtaposition of an older teacher rattling off "Casey at the Bat" humorlessly (and to kids several years older than might be the ideal target audience for even a good reading) as an example of Instruction in Literature with this, a younger teacher hoping to Reach the Kids with the self-conscious, kitsch lyrics of Paul Simon's "The Dangling Conversation," the substitution of a contemporary mediocrity for a "classic" one:
Some of it is simply too perfect, such as the Frank Rizzo-wannabe administrator telling a boy, who is protesting what he sees as being singled out for excessively harsh punishment, that the Mark of A Man is the ability to Take Orders. The engagement of some of the kids in a special program, where they get to work with astronautical gear, simply highlights how thoroughly most of the rest of what they face fails them, and therefore everyone. And in most inner-city schools since and not they alone, that kind of institutional failure certainly has not been reversed, certainly not to any sufficient degree. A sequel of sorts, High School II (1994), is about one inner-city program that is trying and to some extent succeeding in succeeding with very disadvantaged students, instead.
Available on DVD from Wiseman's own label...a bit steep, but perhaps your strapped local library can be encouraged to consider it, or get a loaner from another strapped library.
Meanwhile, as the larger networks in the US do their annual dance for sponsors, the "upfronts," there's remarkably little that's too remarkable about the upcoming season in the US...even if two "period"/historical dramatic hours are clearly inspired by the little-watched, passionately-loved cable series Mad Men: NBC's The Playboy Club and ABC's Pan Am (CBS had already tried their luck with this kind of thing with the summer series Swingtown a couple of years back). Like the CBS entry, they hope to combine the nostalgia with prurience, as much as one can get into that on broadcast tv, and perhaps gain at least the kind of audience that was able to sustain the slight Las Vegas series for several seasons. Comedian Whitney Cummings is deeply involved with two different sitcoms on two networks (she stars in one); Chelsea Handler has one based loosely on her alcohol memoir...I foresee that none of them are likely to hang around long, and that might even be a pity if they were allowed to break out of typical sitcom tropes (which at least the pilot of Whitney isn't).
Antenna TV and This TV, the digital broadcast networks that sprang up in the wake of Retro TV, continue to offer an interesting (though not always watchable) mix of older films, to supplement particularly the awful array of old sitcoms on Antenna (All in the Family being one of the few bright spots there, while Maude, Sanford and Son, The Monkees and Too Close for Comfort are as good as that network gets otherwise), with This mostly plundering the MGM vaults and Antenna the Sony/Columbia (hence, of course, endless piles of Three Stooges), but it is fun, in a way, to see such things as the Ziv TV syndicated staples Sea Hunt and Highway Patrol again...and note how, if sometimes backhandedly, feminist those Ziv series were...the women characters are rarely fragile flowers, whether heroines (under attack, since the stars were usually all men) or villains, such as the female gang member plugging away as energetically if ineffectually as her male counterparts at the Highway Patrol in one episode I caught recently.
Speaking of our smaller commercial broadcast networks, Ion TV (founded as Pax, and extending their little pun by referring to themselves as "positively entertaining") will begin broadcasting the second season of Men of a Certain Age tonight at 10p ET...as cable series continue the long march onto broadcast tv, as repeats as well as in sharing partnerships. As someone who's been missing this series since jump, I might well give it a try this way...though I suspect Ion might be more sensitive to language matters than its cable home, TNT, is. You might not have a This TV or Antenna TV affiliate too nearby (though you probably do) but it's hard in the US to not be within antenna or cable distance of an Ion station.
Or, as Dave Langford has it as his running subhead in his sf/fantasy fanzine Ansible, "As Others See Us" (and such variations as "As We See Ourselves"):
1. From the Letters column of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1963, into the period when it was edited by my favorite of its editors, and my default choice for my favorite writer of any kind, Avram Davidson; or, why I'm not much of a D&D guy, most likely:
"Lately, I and my friends have been somewhat disappointed with F&SF. Mr. Davidson leaves something to be desired as an editor. Therefore, I am declining your kind offer to renew my subscription to your magazine."--E. Gary Gygax, Chicago, IL
2. From Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest, a 2009 episode with Mike Phirman and Maria Bamford, who asks, and is reassured by the others that she's thinking of "steampunk":
"'Cyberpunk'...is that where you have a typewriter, and make a heavier typewriter?"
(Tuesday's Overlooked Films and Other A/V tomorrow. Be here or be otherwise!)
This is another of those books so seminal, so omnipresent in my youth, that it's hard to imagine that it's out of print. But, even with the Da Capo 1993 paperback reprint, it is.
Leonard Feather was a British boy who apparently taught himself to play piano, listening to all the early jazz he could find, and his love of the music took him to the States in 1939 (not, on balance, the worst year a Briton could've chosen to emigrate, even if not a jazz fan). He soon became one of the most prominent of jazz reviewers, critics and historians, as well as a minor composer (more of Feather's songs were covered more often than, say, Steve Allen's) and performer (my own major primary exposure to Feather the composer is through the Langston Hughes jazz and poetry album, Weary Blues, where half the album is Hughes backed by Feather and his one-off band, the other half by Charles Mingus's group--yes, of course this is out of print as well, insanely). Feather became co-editor of the sadly vanished jazz magazine Metronome (JazzTimes kind of holds its place these decades, or Cadence) and Feather gained both the envy and the slightly aggrieved respect of fellow jazz writers by striking a deal with a number of labels...the going rate for liner notes on jazz albums was something along the lines of $25 each in the 1950s; Feather reportedly offered several labels a package deal, wherein he would do all their albums for a flat $15 each...if indeed he got all their business. Which, for several labels, for a while, he did.
But this might be his first masterwork, reasonably comprehensive and strenuously attempting evenhandedness in its assessments of nearly all the important players in the jazz world from its beginnings up through the end of the 1950s (before his death in 1994, he would produce two more volumes as supplements, covering the 1960s and 1970s) and even providing contact addresses (one almost blanches at the thought of all those home addresses being provided in these post-John Lennon, post-Selena days) which might or might not've helped with getting at least a few gigs for the still-active artists. That's the bulk of the book, which is led off with several appreciative forewords by Ellington, Goodman and the CBS Records guy John Hammond (as opposed to his son the musician) and several brief but informative essays about the nature and history of jazz. The back of the book offers several more specific supplementary texts, including Gunther Schuller's essay on jazz, classical and therefore Third Stream music, and the "Blindfold Test," which Feather brought over to DownBeat magazine after Metronome folded where it continues in his memory (JazzTimes does something similar, "Before and After").
Still a valuable resource, long after the home addresses have been made rather inutile except for pilgrimages...
For more of today's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
And, frankly, these things make it easy to not eat them. [And, as of late 2012, the corporate management of Hostess, which had been plundering their corporation while whining endlessly about unions which demanded their members not be fired, from what the directors would insist were redundant jobs...and surely the management had absolutely none of those among its vice presidents in charge of golden-parachute rigging...made sure the option of eating Drake's or Hostess or Dolly Madison cakes has not been available, by shuttering the business.]
Drake's Cakes and Hostess Cakes are made by the same folks these days, Intercontinental Baking (which is trying to phase out the Drake's brand in favor of incorporating the Drake's products into the Hostess line, as they did previously with the [oddly, traditionally even worse] Dolly Madison line of snacks)...and one of their major competitors is the discount snack-baker Little Debbie (aka Little Debris among those who've forgotten how similarly bad most Hostess cakes are in comparison...Gross-test, as they have been infrequently referred to in my ken). Drake's products are and have been consistently better than their corporate sibling's through the decades, as Hostess has consistently been willing to use lard in such products as Twinkies, and generally just chooses to make a lesser product...and that's certainly true here, where among the three cake and cream twists, the Hostess product is actually the worst of the three (despite costing as much as the Drake's, and roughly twice as much as the Little Debbie). The cream and cake in the Hostess was the blandest and the least chocolate-flavored (though the LD was close in the lack of cocoa or substitute flavoring); the Hostess was a bit crisper in its theoretically chocolate coating than the mushy LD, but not as crisp as the Drake's. The Drake's was easily the most flavorful as well as having the best crispness and "mouth-feel," while not being up to the quality of contrast of their Devil Dogs (essentially a non-coated devil's food "sandwich" with cream filling) or Funny Bones (a coated devil's food cake with a light peanut-butter filling). The Little Debbie, by flavor if not texture and relative lack of expense for what's at best a mediocre product, is certainly a less ridiculous choice than the Hostess; the worst that can be said for the Yodels is that, like most Drake's cakes these years, the cake part of the roll is a bit dry.
But none of these products are up to the work of a genuinely good bakery, nor up to the best of the Drake's line (even now, much less what Drake's was producing in, say, the 1970s)...even Little Debbie's peanut butter/chocolate cookies are a bit better. I'm not sure Hostess manages anything better these years, since I won't eat lard (they have managed to not put lard in Ho-Hos these days, perhaps so that they can manufacture them with the same equipment used to make Yodels).
As usual, thanks to everyone who has participated this week, as contributor and as reader and/or commenter...this might be the best set of items we've had so far, salted with some insufficiently appreciated classics as it is, as well as the genuinely obscure ranging from good to brilliant. If I've missed your contribution, or you'd like to make one today and haven't yet, please let me know in comments. And please spare a good thought for contributor Ian Covell, who wrote up the Dali/Disney collaboration "Destino" in March, as he recovers his health.
