A Blog of My Own

Adam Bernstein writes a good obituary of TV producer and director Dwight Hemion in today’s Washington Post.

In the 60s and 70s, it seemed that if a TV musical special displayed intelligence, respect for the viewer, superb musical values, and beautiful visual values, it was almost guaranteed to have the names of Hemion and his partner Gary Smith attached to it. Sometimes he achieved his results through a deceptive simplicity. His Sinatra: A Man and His Music special and its sequel, Sinatra: A Man and His Music Part II, dared to present Sinatra against a white sweep, singing with the band on camera behind him, conducted by Nelson Riddle or Gordon Jenkins. You could hear Hemion saying to you, “Nothing could be better than this.”

Here’s a complete list of Hemion’s credits. He was nominated for 47 Emmys–more than any person in television history, in any category.

A clip from Color Me Barbra (the second Streisand special) at YouTube gives you a taste of his work. If you have the patience to sit through Barbra’s two minute introduction (not directed by Hemion)—and I can understand if you don’t—she gives you a glimpse into Hemion’s process. If you’d prefer to skip that, just advance to around 2:16. The clip is non-embeddable, which means I can’t present it to you within this post, but if you click here, you can see it.

Be someplace where you won’t mind if goosebumps start sprouting and tears start falling…

Thanks.

Link to story.

Watch as Bill Clinton gives a non-sequitur answer for the sole purpose of linking a black leader unpopular among whites–Jesse Jackson–with the way too popular among whites for Bill and Hillary’s comfort Barack Obama.

They really will stop at nothing.

I’m really unhappy with how the Clinton campaign is misrepresenting Obama. Obama (correctly) characterized the Republicans of the eighties as “the party of ideas” in the sense that they had the most ideas that seized most of the public’s imagination in that time. He was saying the Democrats would be well-served to find a way to communicate their ideas in as effective a fashion. In no way did he say that the Republican ideas were the right ideas, or that his ideas emulate the content of those ideas.

Yet that is how the Clinton campaign, in its speeches and its advertising, is portraying what he said. The Clintons are not stupid. If I am able to understand Obama’s argument, they are. That only leaves one possibility—that they are deliberately misrepresenting him because they believe that anything that gets them to a win is justified.

In doing this, they are helping me to stop being an undecided voter.

Here’s a video from a Chicago women’s rights advocate, expressing disappointment in Hillary for related reasons:

As you can tell from this Huffington Post article today (No More Mr. Nice Guy: Obama Mocks Hillary in Stand Up Routine), Obama is doing a terrific job of using humor to deflect the criticism he’s received for his “office management” debate gaffe–and even better, to turn it back on Hillary as a question mark on her ability to talk straight. And it’s effective; he’s convincing me that the honesty in his answer was more of a plus than the content of his answer was a minus, and he’s making me look at Hillary again with a jaundiced eye. This will probably last until the next time Hillary makes a positive impression on me, but in any case, Obama probably should keep doing the humor thing. He’s good at it, and it’s working for him. Reading his remarks at this event, I was reminded (no kidding) of Franklin Delano Roosevelt–with whose speeches I am familiar from reading them and listening to them on record. FDR was a master at using humor to boomerang attacks aimed at him into back-atcha attacks that were sharper and hurt his opponents more. And look what happened to him.

I want to continue to love Obama. And much of last night’s debate from Las Vegas gave me reason to. But–

1. That thing–where he was trying to draw a contrast between an inspiring President (him) and a wonkish, detail-oriented, micro-managing President (her)–when, probably thinking he was being charmingly self-effacing, he said words to this effect:

I don’t know where anything is in my office–and I never know what I’m doing until someone puts a piece of paper in my hand two minutes before I have to do it.

Um, excuse me, but I kind of want my President to be more organized than that. It reminded me of his response on Meet the Press on November 11, regarding some records from his time as an Illinois state legislator: that he didn’t have them, because he didn’t keep those kinds of records. Which I believed, and which gave me concerns. Frankly, his delineation last night of the kind of President he’d be reawakened those concerns. It also played (unnecessarily and stupidly) into Hillary’s characterization of him as long on inspiration but short on ability to execute.

2. When John Edwards asked Obama his excellent question,

Your campaign gets millions from drug companies and insurance companies. What do you think those companies expect for that money? Good government?

And Obama gave one of the lamest (and most transparently false) answers ever. “That money is from ordinary folks who just happen to work at drug and insurance companies and who believe in my campaign.” Awful! I’m still wondering what the real answer to John Edwards’ question is.

Added at 11:17 PM: I wondered if anyone else in the blogosphere was seeing Obama admission’s of organizational inadequacy as the potential disaster I did. Nobody I read this morning seemed to. But as of 2:53 this afternoon, Mickey Kaus at Slate did.

Added at 9:12 AM Thursday: Now The New York Times is on it. Can I claim to be the first person in the “media” to have commented on this with my post yesterday morning? Let’s put it this way: to my knowledge, the claim remains unchallenged!

It is impossible not to like Diablo Cody (Juno screenwriter) after watching this interview from 2006. In fact, I defy you not to like her! Defy, I tell you!

I don’t know about you, but I’m ordering her memoir about being a stripper, Candy Girl, from Amazon right now. (Two minutes later) OK, I just ordered it.

In life, people make their own choices. So in fiction, characters need to seem to make their own choices, or they won’t seem real. We know with fiction that authors are pulling the strings, but the art is in concealing the strings.

The potential for sensing an author’s agenda–especially in a teen pregnancy story–is as enormous as a belly in the third trimester. The beauty of Juno is that you never sense it. Juno (played by the wonderful Ellen Page) always seems to be making her own choices.

You can intuit an identity between screenwriter Diablo Cody (love her, hate the fake name) and her lead character. Look at how both names are unique and quirky and end in “o.” Look at how both names come from theology, with one the Spanish for devil and the other a Roman goddess. But on the screen, Juno has her own life force. I haven’t talked to a person yet who has seen the movie who hasn’t responded to it, and I’m happy to join the crowd.

Thanks to Mark Contorno of Chicago for sending me this video. “The goofiest, funniest suspense game,” indeed. Why, nothing’s goofier than wretched self-mortification!

Despite politician-holding-baby being a cliché as old as photography itself, maybe you can tell something about a person by how he or she responds to a baby (and by how the baby feels about the whole thing). Freelance writer and filmmaker Darren Garnick made it his business to get his daughter Dahlia into the arms of every presidential candidate in New Hampshire, and posted a photo essay of his results in Slate. I’ve excerpted some of the nicer photos for this post. All of these make me feel good about whose hands our country’s future might be in.