An evening pause: Performed live at the 2012 Telluride Bluegrass Festival, demonstrating that there really is a link between baroque music and American bluegrass. The fiddlers who came to early America had been trained to play this kind of music.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen, who quite correctly notes, “Such an upbeat performance for such a downbeat title.”
An evening pause: Performed live in 1963 on the television show Hootenanny, at the very beginning of their career.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: DeMayo does not sing the anthem, but interprets it using American Sign language. I am posting this now, in defiance of the new NFL season, with its spoiled million dollar football players spitting on this country and its freedoms that made them rich.
Stay with it. If you watch closely you will begin to understand the sign language, and the power of the song’s words will then start to hit you, in a new way.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
An evening pause: From a James Agee poem:
Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand’ring far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: This does not go in exactly the direction you think it will.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: Rzeznik is from a band called the Goo Goo Dolls, for those who follow such things.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
An evening pause: From the 1964 Blake Edwards film, The Pink Panther. Written by Mancini with the actor Peter Sellers specifically in mind.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: A simple love song, as performed at Woodstock, August 1969. The moment in time is significant.
Go–
And beat your crazy heads against the sky.
Try–
And see beyond the houses and your eyes.
It’s okay to shoot the Moon.
On this day, September 11th, it is worthwhile taking this glimpse at what the American dream stood for, and still stands for — gentle love and allowing each person to follow their dreams to do wonderful things — versus those other extremist ideologies that brook no dissent and have killed thousands, on this day as well as before and after.
An evening pause: In watching this passionate 1999 performance of this anti-war song, I couldn’t help thinking that the only zombies present were the audience and the singers, locked into simplistic 1960s messages without thought. Nonetheless, it is a great performance and song.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
The filmmakers for the Neil Armstrong biography film, First Man, made a conscious decision to hide or obscure the American flag in certain situations.
This new information has been provided to me by a Washington consultant who, because of his own outrage over their decision to not show the planting of the American flag during the lunar landing, had been given the opportunity to see selected clips from the movie as well as ask questions to the production team.
According to that meeting, he learned that they had consciously made the decision to either reposition or remove American flags from the blue flight suits that the astronauts wore from day to day so that it would not be visible. The image on the right, from the movie, illustrates this, as the American flag was almost always sewn into the upper left shoulder of these suits.
The filmmakers also purposely repositioned the flag or filmed angles for many scenes that acted to obscure the flag on the astronauts’ white pressure suits.
The reasons the filmmakers gave for doing this was to enhance their foreign ticket sales.
To this I say, baloney. They might have had this financial excuse, but I think this holds little or no weight. By willingly admitting that they hid the flag in this petty way they have confirmed their political agenda, their desire to convince the world that this mission was not an American achievement but a “human achievement.” Both the film’s Canadian star as well as its director have made it clear they have a globalist vision of the Apollo program, and wanted to spread the credit of its achievement to all humanity. Consciously hiding the flag in this small-minded manner demonstrates their political motives.
Moreover, even though the director, Damien Chazelle, might have wanted to focus on “Neil Armstrong’s personal saga and what he may have been thinking and feeling during those famous few hours,” removing or obscuring icons of the United States serves no purpose other than to remove the United States from this decidedly American moment. Showing the flag on the flightsuits and pressure suits does not make this a jingoistic pro-American propaganda film. Nor does it do anything to prevent Chazelle from telling Neil Armstrong’s personal story. In fact, if anything, hiding the flag detracts from that goal, as Armstrong was very much doing this for his country (as numerous people who knew him have said), and to de-emphasize that reality is to rewrite history in a very dishonest way.
The pettiness of this entire action further outrages me. There is no doubt that sales would not have suffered in foreign countries, in the slightest, had the American flag been left where it belonged on these suits, and had been shown appropriately in other scenes. It accomplishes nothing positive for the film. What it does do is tell us what these Hollywood “artists” think of America.
So that there is no misunderstanding, I must add that neither my source nor I have as yet seen the entire film. It is still possible that these criticisms are unfair, and that the filmmakers might have shown the American flag appropriately in other scenes, and might even have shown it prominently.
Nonetheless, what we now know is that these filmmakers did made a conscious effort to rewrite history so that the United States no longer appeared as prominent in these events as it should have. Once again, it appears to me that these Hollywood filmmakers did this to express their disdain, almost hatred, of the United States and all that it stands for.
For this fact alone I think Americans should reconsider spending any of their hard-earned money on seeing this propaganda piece.
An evening pause: Very beautifully done, but I must admit that my back hurt watching some of this.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
The just released new Hollywood movie detailing the life of Neil Armstrong, First Man, has so far gotten rave reviews.
Sadly, however, there is one detail about the Apollo 11 mission that the filmmakers decided they couldn’t include, even though it was in many ways the entire point of the mission. They made a conscious decision to exclude any mention of the planting of the American flag on the surface of the Moon.
Star Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, defended director Damien Chazelle’s decision to omit the star-spangled moment when asked about it in Venice. “I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement [and] that’s how we chose to view it, ” Gosling said per the Telegraph. “I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.”
The Canadian actor added that based on his own interviews with Armstrong’s family and friends, he doesn’t believe the pioneering astronaut considered himself an American hero. “I don’t think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero,” Gosling said. From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite. And we wanted the film to reflect Neil.” [emphasis mine]
This is bunk. All the astronauts who flew to the Moon were very aware that they were warriors in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and communism, and did it very consciously so that the U.S. could win that space race, for the U.S. Planting the flag was thus for them a very important aspect of the mission, maybe in many ways the most important.
That these Hollywood filmmakers purposely excluded that moment only illustrates to me once again the hostility, even hate, that the modern elitist culture has for the United States and everything it has stood for since 1776: freedom, blind justice before the law, and individual responsibility. Here it appears they are making an effort to separate that very decidedly American culture, which made the lunar landing possible, from that achievement. They want to honor Armstrong as an individual, but do not want to give any credit to the country and culture that sent him to the Moon. Instead, they want to claim that the Apollo landings were merely “a human achievement.”
For shame.
This makes me very unwilling to spend any money to see this movie. Why should I support the work of such intellectually dishonest people?
I must add that I have already been emailed by several readers who are similarly outraged. I wonder therefore if this will turn into something that will actually hurt ticket sales. I suspect not, as too many Americans today do not care very much about these issues. They will go to be entertained, and many will buy into the lie that the Apollo missions was an achievement not of America but of the entire global world, working together in love and peace.
An evening pause: This pause is a bit more than a pause, since it is ten hours long. I don’t expect anyone to watch it all, as the first three minutes makes the point, quite hilariously, and well worth a few minutes of entertainment. As the filmmaker notes, “Fat cats are always funny…”
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: The video might think so, but not all changes are good. The key is to tell the difference.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Back to youtube. I am making it a policy to look to see if any youtube video is also available on other sites, like real.video. Unfortunately, this video was not available elsewhere.
If you want to send me suggestions, keep this in mind. Youtube needs some competition.
