(Click on title to play video)
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Charlton Heston: Ultimate Movie Star
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; 4:00 PM
He was the hawk.
He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.
And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 83, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.
He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.
Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star's trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land -- like Moses.
Was he great actor? Many think not, and few would rank him with contemporaries like Brando, Dean, even Widmark or Wayne. But at the same time his talent was much underrated, as it frequently is for people who enjoy the blessed gift of great beauty. For the purposes of the movie industry in the '50s, at the height of its patriotism and Western-centrism, he was a perfect fit and always gave solid, professional work. Can anyone imagine either "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur" without him?
And he was in a number of first-rate and even a few great movies. His greatest film, "Touch of Evil," featured Heston as a Mexican narcotics detective, probably his biggest stretch and not really an outstanding performance. But he was invaluable in getting Universal to put up the money for Orson Welles' s great shaggy dog. Its greatness may be incidental to Heston's performance, but its existence certainly isn't incidental to his behind-the-scenes efforts.
Then there's "The Ten Commandments," such a perennial that even today, half a century after its creation, it gets a ritual primetime network unspooling. Nobody ever accused its director, Cecile B. DeMille of greatness; DeMille was more entrepreneur, logistics expert, visionary, and carny barker than true artist. And the movie he made remains a monument to kitsch, particularly the orgy sequence unleashed by Edward G. Robinson. (Now, would you go to an orgy hosted by Edward G. Robinson?) And DeMille's concept of Moses wasn't particularly deep either: he saw the great conduit between man and God as a kind of Mount Rushmore head, given life atop Heston's lanky frame and posed heroically against dramatic skies. The best performance in the picture was by Heston's hair, which grew into a lion's gray mane with Susan Sontag highlights (boy, was that scary!) But he functioned there as he did in "Ben-Hur" essentially as the rock upon which the church of giant '50s pop religiosio-amen-chorus moviemaking was built. He may not have really parted the Red Sea but he got millions to part with their bucks to the greater glory of the big studios and that was sermonizing Hollywood could understand.
It's easy to make fun of these two behemoths. Of the two, "Ben-Hur" is vastly the superior and again it's Heston's natural instincts for the heroic, as opposed to the pompous or the self-dramatizing, that help the movie to work so well. He mastered horse-team driving, no easy thing, for the still-classic chariot race, many people's choice for the best action sequence in movie history. He looked great in a toga, Roman armor and a Jewish robe, he was able to convey Judah Ben-Hur's suffering, anguish and heroism without overstating it, or fighting the scenery or giving the film an unsavory narcissistic center. In the end the movie stands for a certain kind of glory and grandeur that have passed from the scene and the screen, except in occasional nostalgic retro-wallows like "Gladiator."
Heston made a number of other extremely good films as well. His favorite was 1968's "Will Penny," a hardscrabble western with director Tom Gries, set in an anti-romantic west of hungry, starving people, inarticulate heroes who never saw the inside of a bathtub. I know it was his favorite film because he sent me a copy after we met at an NRA event many years later. And it was a great performance in a very good film, and it showed what he could do: Who could believe the same man could make you enter the private lives of Michaelangelo and Will Penny, genius with chisel and brush, good hand with frying pan, lariat and Winchester.
In fact, his later films let him be more actor and less icon. He was always pursuasive, except in the football movie, "Number One," where slow motion revealed that he lacked a professional athlete's grace and power; he was only big. But in "The Omega Man," "Soylent Green" and "The Last Hard Men," all humble B movies, he was extremely impressive (in "Soylent" he played a great scene with orgy-master Edward G. Robinson, another woefully underappreciated actor).
But his last great film was probably Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee," playing the title role as a Union officer in the Southwest who, short of men, recruits some Confederate cavalrymen (led by Richard Harris) to cross into Mexico in search of an Apache band raiding the frontier. It's got Peckinpah's native grit, insight into male violence, and sense of scrubby western reality, and Senta Berger in a completely ludicrous role as a European doctor (!) in a tiny Mexican village (Hollywood! Don't you love it?). But the real issue is Harris vs. Heston. Harris, desperate for attention, turns into a magnificently neurotic, self-dramatizing, deathwish-driven troubadour of Nineteenth Century "honor," while Heston is stuck in the thankless role as the practical military guy with a hard problem to solve. In other words, Harris is Doc Holiday, poor Chuck the dreary Wyatt Earp. Interpretations will vary, possibly driven by political considerations, and maybe I'm in the bag for the big guy, but I give it to Chuck on points in the late rounds.
One of his earliest films was a noir entitled "Dark City," but his face and frame were entirely too free of neurosis for the world of film noir. In almost no time, he moved to center ring roles -- "The Greatest Show on Earth," as a circus boss in 1952, for DeMille. By 1953 , he was Buffalo Bill Cody in "Pony Express," his first iconic role. It just seemed to get better and better and certainly by the time of "The Ten Commandments" he had arrived. That role also cemented him in place as Mr. Monument to the Great Western Way.
If you pine for some hint of scandal or even minor weakness, Heston's life isn't the place to look. He married early (to Lydia Clarke) stayed married, had kids and seemed never to make the gossips.
In his private life, he was given to follow that strange calling that is half public service and half self-aggrandizement with the distinction frequently blurred. He was six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, an early celebrity marcher in the civil rights crusade, and his beloved status in Tinsel Town was certainly validated when he received the Academy Awards' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1977.
Why then, it must be asked, did he take the leadership of the NRA, never the most popular of lobbying outfits in Washington? One cynical explanation is that the old star was looking for an audience that would treat him as he had been treated in the late '50s and early '60s, almost as a god.
President Reagan with Charlton Heston at a meeting with the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities in the cabinet room. 6/15/81.
But the abuse he took! The anger he generated. The fury he absorbed from a Hollywood and a critical community that were turning ever more liberal in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Good Lord, he didn't need that at all.
The only answer can be: he believed. His had to have been a ramrod sense of the Second Amendment and he never varied from it. Hate his politics or love them, you have to say: There was a man.
When I met him at that NRA event (I am a member; he had read some of my novels), I was disappointed. He was -- no other word will do -- old. He had an old man's stooped posture and an extremely tentative way of speaking, as if clarity were an issue. His features, once so mythic, now seemed fragile, draped with a loose parchment of delicate, spotted skin. He didn't walk so much as shuffle, as if he were already wearing those hospital paper shoes; it was as if he had a walker with an oxygen tank attached.
We exchanged cordialities and banalities (can't remember a word of it), and then it was time for him to address the crowd. He shuffled slowly into the big room, and the spotlight came on him, and it was as if with each step he tossed off a decade. His shuffle became a stride and then almost a strut. His posture went from the question mark of age to the exclamation point of youth. His lungs filled, revealing the full breadth of his wide shoulders. He neck turned iron, his chin came aloft, his vision sharpened and the years just fell away like leaves. When he spoke he boomed in Moses' triumphant baritones, delivering the Tablets to the believers.
I thought: Good for Chuck. Magnificent to the end.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; 4:00 PM
He was the hawk.
He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.
And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 83, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.
He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.
Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star's trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land -- like Moses.
Was he great actor? Many think not, and few would rank him with contemporaries like Brando, Dean, even Widmark or Wayne. But at the same time his talent was much underrated, as it frequently is for people who enjoy the blessed gift of great beauty. For the purposes of the movie industry in the '50s, at the height of its patriotism and Western-centrism, he was a perfect fit and always gave solid, professional work. Can anyone imagine either "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur" without him?
And he was in a number of first-rate and even a few great movies. His greatest film, "Touch of Evil," featured Heston as a Mexican narcotics detective, probably his biggest stretch and not really an outstanding performance. But he was invaluable in getting Universal to put up the money for Orson Welles' s great shaggy dog. Its greatness may be incidental to Heston's performance, but its existence certainly isn't incidental to his behind-the-scenes efforts.
Then there's "The Ten Commandments," such a perennial that even today, half a century after its creation, it gets a ritual primetime network unspooling. Nobody ever accused its director, Cecile B. DeMille of greatness; DeMille was more entrepreneur, logistics expert, visionary, and carny barker than true artist. And the movie he made remains a monument to kitsch, particularly the orgy sequence unleashed by Edward G. Robinson. (Now, would you go to an orgy hosted by Edward G. Robinson?) And DeMille's concept of Moses wasn't particularly deep either: he saw the great conduit between man and God as a kind of Mount Rushmore head, given life atop Heston's lanky frame and posed heroically against dramatic skies. The best performance in the picture was by Heston's hair, which grew into a lion's gray mane with Susan Sontag highlights (boy, was that scary!) But he functioned there as he did in "Ben-Hur" essentially as the rock upon which the church of giant '50s pop religiosio-amen-chorus moviemaking was built. He may not have really parted the Red Sea but he got millions to part with their bucks to the greater glory of the big studios and that was sermonizing Hollywood could understand.
It's easy to make fun of these two behemoths. Of the two, "Ben-Hur" is vastly the superior and again it's Heston's natural instincts for the heroic, as opposed to the pompous or the self-dramatizing, that help the movie to work so well. He mastered horse-team driving, no easy thing, for the still-classic chariot race, many people's choice for the best action sequence in movie history. He looked great in a toga, Roman armor and a Jewish robe, he was able to convey Judah Ben-Hur's suffering, anguish and heroism without overstating it, or fighting the scenery or giving the film an unsavory narcissistic center. In the end the movie stands for a certain kind of glory and grandeur that have passed from the scene and the screen, except in occasional nostalgic retro-wallows like "Gladiator."
Heston made a number of other extremely good films as well. His favorite was 1968's "Will Penny," a hardscrabble western with director Tom Gries, set in an anti-romantic west of hungry, starving people, inarticulate heroes who never saw the inside of a bathtub. I know it was his favorite film because he sent me a copy after we met at an NRA event many years later. And it was a great performance in a very good film, and it showed what he could do: Who could believe the same man could make you enter the private lives of Michaelangelo and Will Penny, genius with chisel and brush, good hand with frying pan, lariat and Winchester.
In fact, his later films let him be more actor and less icon. He was always pursuasive, except in the football movie, "Number One," where slow motion revealed that he lacked a professional athlete's grace and power; he was only big. But in "The Omega Man," "Soylent Green" and "The Last Hard Men," all humble B movies, he was extremely impressive (in "Soylent" he played a great scene with orgy-master Edward G. Robinson, another woefully underappreciated actor).
But his last great film was probably Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee," playing the title role as a Union officer in the Southwest who, short of men, recruits some Confederate cavalrymen (led by Richard Harris) to cross into Mexico in search of an Apache band raiding the frontier. It's got Peckinpah's native grit, insight into male violence, and sense of scrubby western reality, and Senta Berger in a completely ludicrous role as a European doctor (!) in a tiny Mexican village (Hollywood! Don't you love it?). But the real issue is Harris vs. Heston. Harris, desperate for attention, turns into a magnificently neurotic, self-dramatizing, deathwish-driven troubadour of Nineteenth Century "honor," while Heston is stuck in the thankless role as the practical military guy with a hard problem to solve. In other words, Harris is Doc Holiday, poor Chuck the dreary Wyatt Earp. Interpretations will vary, possibly driven by political considerations, and maybe I'm in the bag for the big guy, but I give it to Chuck on points in the late rounds.
One of his earliest films was a noir entitled "Dark City," but his face and frame were entirely too free of neurosis for the world of film noir. In almost no time, he moved to center ring roles -- "The Greatest Show on Earth," as a circus boss in 1952, for DeMille. By 1953 , he was Buffalo Bill Cody in "Pony Express," his first iconic role. It just seemed to get better and better and certainly by the time of "The Ten Commandments" he had arrived. That role also cemented him in place as Mr. Monument to the Great Western Way.
If you pine for some hint of scandal or even minor weakness, Heston's life isn't the place to look. He married early (to Lydia Clarke) stayed married, had kids and seemed never to make the gossips.
In his private life, he was given to follow that strange calling that is half public service and half self-aggrandizement with the distinction frequently blurred. He was six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, an early celebrity marcher in the civil rights crusade, and his beloved status in Tinsel Town was certainly validated when he received the Academy Awards' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1977.
Why then, it must be asked, did he take the leadership of the NRA, never the most popular of lobbying outfits in Washington? One cynical explanation is that the old star was looking for an audience that would treat him as he had been treated in the late '50s and early '60s, almost as a god.
President Reagan with Charlton Heston at a meeting with the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities in the cabinet room. 6/15/81.
But the abuse he took! The anger he generated. The fury he absorbed from a Hollywood and a critical community that were turning ever more liberal in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Good Lord, he didn't need that at all.
The only answer can be: he believed. His had to have been a ramrod sense of the Second Amendment and he never varied from it. Hate his politics or love them, you have to say: There was a man.
When I met him at that NRA event (I am a member; he had read some of my novels), I was disappointed. He was -- no other word will do -- old. He had an old man's stooped posture and an extremely tentative way of speaking, as if clarity were an issue. His features, once so mythic, now seemed fragile, draped with a loose parchment of delicate, spotted skin. He didn't walk so much as shuffle, as if he were already wearing those hospital paper shoes; it was as if he had a walker with an oxygen tank attached.
We exchanged cordialities and banalities (can't remember a word of it), and then it was time for him to address the crowd. He shuffled slowly into the big room, and the spotlight came on him, and it was as if with each step he tossed off a decade. His shuffle became a stride and then almost a strut. His posture went from the question mark of age to the exclamation point of youth. His lungs filled, revealing the full breadth of his wide shoulders. He neck turned iron, his chin came aloft, his vision sharpened and the years just fell away like leaves. When he spoke he boomed in Moses' triumphant baritones, delivering the Tablets to the believers.
I thought: Good for Chuck. Magnificent to the end.
Bruce Springsteen revives 'Glory Days' in San Jose
By Jim Harrington
Bay Area News Group
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/06/2008 08:55:25 AM PDT
CARLOS GONZALEZ cgonzalez@startribune.com March 16, 2008 St. Paul, MN
Bruce Springsteen was taking requests.
The Boss and his most legendary group, the E Street Band, most certainly had a carefully planned set list written out when they visited HP Pavilion in San Jose on Saturday night. A large percentage of what was heard in concert, however, was decided on the fly and by a committee of thousands.
Five songs into the set, New Jersey's favorite son began taking cues from the crowd. He'd reach into the masses for a sign, one requesting a certain song, and then wave the banner to the band. Ten seconds later, the E Streeters would be cranking out that number.
Welcome to the second leg of Springsteen's "Magic" tour, a vastly more spontaneous and satisfying place to visit than what crowds experienced during the first go-around. Thank goodness. Springsteen's last visit to the Bay Area, back in October at Oracle Arena in Oakland, did very little to add to his legend as one of rock's all-time best performers.
It's hard to say what exactly has changed in the last six months. Whatever the reason, Springsteen just seemed like he was having a blast being onstage on Saturday - in a way that wasn't apparent back in October - and that translated to a raucous good time for fans in San Jose.
The 58-year-old vocalist-guitarist and his eight-piece band - all of whom were dressed completely in black - had the crowd at "hello" as they opened with the fan favorite "Out in the Streets" (from 1980's "The River").
Moving forward, these Jersey boys (and one girl, violinist-guitarist Soozie Tyrell) could do no wrong as they mixed sensational versions from the new album, "Magic," with more nostalgic offerings. It was far from being a "greatest hits" night, but everything they played sounded like it was - or should have been - a chart-topper.
Of course, it didn't hurt that these fans thought they had a real chance of hearing their favorite songs played on this night. The first request Springsteen took, scribble out on a bright neon orange sign, was for "Something in the Night" (from 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town"), but he would also say yes to such suggestions as "Fire" and "Incident on 57th Street."
The concert's most memorable moment came during the encore when the Boss brought a man from the audience onstage. The guy had scrawled "Glory Days" across his bald head and Springsteen rewarded the effort by playing a killer version of the song. Bet on that lucky fan remembering his moment of fame for a long time - especially since it sure looked like he'd scribbled his request using a permanent marker.
Set list:
"Out in the Streets"
"Radio Nowhere"
"Lonesome Day"
"Gypsy Biker"
"Something in the Night"
"Magic"
"Trapped"
"Reason to Believe"
"Prove It All Night"
"Livin' in the Future"
"The Promised Land"
"Fire"
"Incident on 57th Street"
"Devil's Arcade"
"Last to Die"
"Long Walk Home"
"Badlands"
Encore:
"Detroit Medley"
"Born to Run"
"Glory Days"
"Bobby Jean"
"American Land"
Bay Area News Group
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/06/2008 08:55:25 AM PDT
CARLOS GONZALEZ cgonzalez@startribune.com March 16, 2008 St. Paul, MN
Bruce Springsteen was taking requests.
The Boss and his most legendary group, the E Street Band, most certainly had a carefully planned set list written out when they visited HP Pavilion in San Jose on Saturday night. A large percentage of what was heard in concert, however, was decided on the fly and by a committee of thousands.
Five songs into the set, New Jersey's favorite son began taking cues from the crowd. He'd reach into the masses for a sign, one requesting a certain song, and then wave the banner to the band. Ten seconds later, the E Streeters would be cranking out that number.
Welcome to the second leg of Springsteen's "Magic" tour, a vastly more spontaneous and satisfying place to visit than what crowds experienced during the first go-around. Thank goodness. Springsteen's last visit to the Bay Area, back in October at Oracle Arena in Oakland, did very little to add to his legend as one of rock's all-time best performers.
It's hard to say what exactly has changed in the last six months. Whatever the reason, Springsteen just seemed like he was having a blast being onstage on Saturday - in a way that wasn't apparent back in October - and that translated to a raucous good time for fans in San Jose.
The 58-year-old vocalist-guitarist and his eight-piece band - all of whom were dressed completely in black - had the crowd at "hello" as they opened with the fan favorite "Out in the Streets" (from 1980's "The River").
Moving forward, these Jersey boys (and one girl, violinist-guitarist Soozie Tyrell) could do no wrong as they mixed sensational versions from the new album, "Magic," with more nostalgic offerings. It was far from being a "greatest hits" night, but everything they played sounded like it was - or should have been - a chart-topper.
Of course, it didn't hurt that these fans thought they had a real chance of hearing their favorite songs played on this night. The first request Springsteen took, scribble out on a bright neon orange sign, was for "Something in the Night" (from 1978's "Darkness on the Edge of Town"), but he would also say yes to such suggestions as "Fire" and "Incident on 57th Street."
The concert's most memorable moment came during the encore when the Boss brought a man from the audience onstage. The guy had scrawled "Glory Days" across his bald head and Springsteen rewarded the effort by playing a killer version of the song. Bet on that lucky fan remembering his moment of fame for a long time - especially since it sure looked like he'd scribbled his request using a permanent marker.
Set list:
"Out in the Streets"
"Radio Nowhere"
"Lonesome Day"
"Gypsy Biker"
"Something in the Night"
"Magic"
"Trapped"
"Reason to Believe"
"Prove It All Night"
"Livin' in the Future"
"The Promised Land"
"Fire"
"Incident on 57th Street"
"Devil's Arcade"
"Last to Die"
"Long Walk Home"
"Badlands"
Encore:
"Detroit Medley"
"Born to Run"
"Glory Days"
"Bobby Jean"
"American Land"
Charlton Heston, 84; Oscar-winning actor played larger-than-life figures
The Oscar winner played Moses and Michelangelo, then later became a darling of conservatism.
By Robert W. Welkos and Susan King, Special to The Los Angeles Times
April 6, 2008
GREAT MEN: In a 1995 interview covering his film career and political activism, Charlton Heston said: "The egalitarian world view now considered politically correct makes us uneasy with the idea that one individual is better than the rest of us. But having played several great men, I can tell you that they are better than we are ...."
Charlton Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who achieved stardom playing larger-than-life figures including Moses, Michelangelo and Andrew Jackson and went on to become an unapologetic gun advocate and darling of conservative causes, has died. He was 84.
Heston died Saturday at his Beverly Hills home, said family spokesman Bill Powers. In 2002, he had been diagnosed with symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease.
With a booming baritone voice, the tall, ruggedly handsome actor delivered his signature role as the prophet Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 Biblical extravaganza "The Ten Commandments," raising a rod over his head as God miraculously parts the Red Sea.
Heston won the Academy Award for best actor in another religious blockbuster in 1959's "Ben-Hur," racing four white horses at top speed in one of the cinema's legendary action sequences: the 15-minute chariot race in which his character, a proud and noble Jew, competes against his childhood Roman friend.
Heston stunned the entertainment world in August 2002 when he made a poignant and moving videotaped address announcing his illness.
Late in life, Heston's stature as a political firebrand overshadowed his acting. He became demonized by gun-control advocates and liberal Hollywood when he became president of the National Rifle Assn. in 1998.
"TOUCH OF EVIL": Heston played a Mexican drug agent involved in a deadly game of cat and mouse with corrupt U.S. lawman Orson Welles in the 1958 film.
Heston answered his critics in a now-famous pose that mimicked Moses' parting of the Red Sea. But instead of a rod, Heston raised a flintlock over his head and challenged his detractors to pry the rifle "from my cold, dead hands."
Like the chariot race and the bearded prophet Moses, Heston will be best remembered for several indelible cinematic moments: playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with Orson Welles in the oil fields in "Touch of Evil," his rant at the end of "Planet of the Apes" when he sees the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, his discovery that "Soylent Green is people!" in the sci-fi hit "Soylent Green" and the dead Spanish hero on his steed in "El Cid."
The New Yorker's film critic Pauline Kael, in her review of 1968's "Planet of the Apes," wrote: "All this wouldn't be so forceful or so funny if it weren't for the use of Charlton Heston in the [leading] role. With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle."
For decades, the 6-foot-2 Heston was a towering figure in the world of movies, television and the stage.
"He was the screen hero of the 1950s and 1960s, a proven stayer in epics, and a pleasing combination of piercing blue eyes and tanned beefcake," David Thomson wrote in his book "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film."
Heston also was blessed by working with legendary directors such as DeMille in "The Greatest Show on Earth" and again in "The Ten Commandments," Welles in "Touch of Evil," Sam Peckinpah in "Major Dundee," William Wyler in "The Big Country" and "Ben-Hur," George Stevens in "The Greatest Story Ever Told," Franklin Schaffner in "The War Lord" and "Planet of the Apes" and Anthony Mann in "El Cid."
HIGH SPEED: In the 1959 movie "Ben-Hur," Heston drives his chariot toward the finish line to cap off one of cinema's legendary action sequences. The rugged actor won an Oscar for the performance.
"Four or five of those men would be on anybody's all-time great list," Heston said in a 1983 interview. "And if I picked up one scrap, one piece of business, from each of them, then today I would be a hell of a director."
John Charles Carter was born Oct. 4, 1923, in Evanston, Ill. His father, Russell Whitford Carter, moved the family to St. Helen, Mich., where Heston lived an almost idyllic boyhood, hunting and fishing.
He entered Northwestern University's School of Speech in 1941 on a scholarship from the drama club. While there, he fell in love with a young speech student named Lydia Clarke. They were married March 14, 1944, after he had enlisted in the Army Air Forces. Their union was one of the most durable in Hollywood, lasting 64 years in a town known for its highly publicized divorces, romances and remarriages.
Theatrical name choice
After the war, he went on countless auditions as a stage actor in New York. His professional name was a combination of his mother's maiden name, Charlton, and the last name of his stepfather, Chester Heston.
He made his Broadway debut opposite legendary stage actress Katharine Cornell in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" as Proculeius, Caesar's aide-de-camp.
Heston found steady employment in the new medium of television. His big break occurred in 1949, when he appeared in the CBS live "Studio One" production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."
In 1949, he attracted the attention of veteran film producer Hal Wallis. Without an audition, Wallis signed Heston to an independent contract for five pictures with the option he could accept other roles.
Heston's first picture for Wallis was the 1950 film noir "Dark City" opposite femme fatale Lizabeth Scott. He played a troubled World War II veteran, and the film did respectable business.
TIME TRAVELER: Heston gets some rough treatment from a guard in the 1968 classic "Planet of the Apes."
But it was his chance meeting on the Paramount Pictures lot with DeMille that propelled Heston to stardom. The role that the flamboyant director wanted him for was the rugged circus manager in the 1952 big-top spectacular, "The Greatest Show on Earth," which won the Academy Award for best picture.
Over the next three years, Heston made 11 movies, playing Buffalo Bill Cody in "Pony Express" and Andrew Jackson in "The President's Lady."
Then DeMille entered his life again, casting Heston as Moses in "The Ten Commandments."
"My choice was strikingly confirmed," DeMille wrote, "when I had a sketch made of Charlton Heston in a white beard and happened to set it beside a photograph of Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses. The resemblance was amazing; and it was not merely an external likeness."
He wasn't the only Heston in the film. His baby son, Fraser, made his screen debut as the infant Moses who is carried downstream in a basket.
"The Ten Commandments," a blockbuster hit, was followed by "Touch of Evil" and "The Big Country."
Then came "Ben-Hur."
Ironically, though it was arguably Heston's most famous role, and the only one that earned him an Oscar, he was not the first actor considered. Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman and Rock Hudson were under consideration for the role of heroic Judah Ben-Hur.
The film's breathtaking chariot race, directed by legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, took five weeks to film and required 15,000 extras.
The film went on to win 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director for Wyler.
Playing larger-than-life heroes seemed to carry over into real-life politics for Heston. He was one of the major Hollywood stars who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights era.
But Heston's politics soon veered right and he became an admirer of conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was the Republican Party nominee for president in 1964.
"My politics haven't changed -- it was the Democratic Party that changed," the actor said.
STRIKE: Walking the picket line, Heston waves to fans outside Paramount Studios in Hollywood during the Screen Actors Guild strike in August 1980.
Always a political animal, Heston relished his role as a lightning rod for criticism over his passionate defense of gun ownership. He once told the Times of London, "In this country, if someone breaks into your house, you can shoot them. And I would do that in a second if my wife were back there sleeping and someone broke in."
In 1998, with his acting career waning, Heston became president of the National Rifle Assn. and instantly became one of the more politically polarizing figures in America.
During his five-year reign as NRA president, Heston vowed to push the group "back into the mainstream" of American politics.
His name was so synonymous with the defense of guns and gun owners that Michael Moore sought him out for an interview in his 2002 Academy Award-winning documentary "Bowling for Columbine." But the aging Heston walked out of the on-screen interview as Moore peppered him with probing questions about the nation's gun use, and the usually unflappable actor seemed angry and flustered.
Heston was not afraid of taking on entertainment corporations such as the giant Time Warner, which in 1992 came under scrutiny for releasing rapper Ice-T's controversial CD "Cop Killer." Heston, who owned several hundred shares of Time Warner stock, stood up at the stockholders' meeting in Beverly Hills and read every profane lyric in that song as well as another explicit cut from the rap album.
Though his film work occupied most of his career, he never abandoned his theatrical roots. He was a mainstay for years on stage, especially at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, tackling everything from Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons" and "Macbeth" with co-star Vanessa Redgrave.
Although Heston had fond memories of working with Welles, Wyler and DeMille, he didn't always get along with filmmakers, especially the scrappy, hard-living Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in the 1965 intense western "Major Dundee."
As Heston recalled it in his autobiography, the actor took umbrage after Peckinpah changed directions and swore at the actor for disobeying his command. Heston drew his saber and rode full-speed at the director, who leaped aside only moments before the sword-wielding actor galloped past him.
"I can't believe I would have actually ridden Sam down, let alone sabered him," Heston wrote. "But I was as angry as I can remember being in my life." Heston would call "Major Dundee" a "disappointing" film.
EPIC: Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic, "The Ten Commandments."
After "Ben-Hur," Heston had an uneven film career. In the 1960s, he continued to play historical characters in lavish epics such as Michelangelo in "The Agony and the Ecstasy" and Gen. Charles "Chinese" Gordon in "Khartoum." But none of them were as successful critically as "Ben-Hur."
Then, in 1968, he appeared in two roles vastly different from what his fans were accustomed to -- one that brought him box office success and the other critical kudos.
Heston brought a quiet strength and dignity to his role as an aging cowpoke in the character-driven western "Will Penny," directed by Tom Gries. Though the film wasn't a commercial success, reviewers admired his understated turn. Leonard Maltin called it one of the best films on the cowboy-loner ever to come out of Hollywood.
But Heston scored his biggest post-"Ben-Hur" success with his first foray into science fiction, playing a no-nonsense, heroic astronaut whose space capsule crashes on a planet ruled by intelligent, English-speaking apes and where humans were treated like chattel. Although he had often shown his buffed physique on screen, "Planet" marked the first time he appeared in a nude scene.
Though many of his films in the 1970s did well at the box office, like the sci-fi thriller "Soylent Green" and the nail-biters "Airport '75" and "Earthquake," the reviews were abysmal.
Return to television
The 1980s marked his return to television, starring in ABC's "The Colbys," the short-lived spinoff of the prime-time soap opera "Dynasty," and several TV movies and miniseries.
Despite his granite-jawed, Moses-like image, Heston was not above poking fun at himself. In the twilight of his career, he was a jovial two-time host of "Saturday Night Live," and had a cameo as "the good actor" in "Wayne's World 2," and even appeared as himself in a 1998 episode of the hit NBC sitcom "Friends."
Although his days as the leading man were over, he worked steadily in small but interesting roles, including the one-eyed CIA director in James Cameron's "True Lies," the Player King in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet," a high-powered football commissioner in Oliver Stone's "On Any Sunday" and an uncredited appearance in ape attire in Tim Burton's 2001 remake of "Planet of the Apes."
Throughout his life, Heston was active in various areas of the entertainment industry. Besides serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he also was chairman of the American Film Institute, head of President Reagan's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, and involved in several charities. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the Council on the Arts, the executive body controlling grants made by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In addition to his Oscar, Heston received numerous U.S. and international awards and honors, among them the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.'s Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2003, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.
ACTIVIST: Heston addresses gun owners as president of the National Rifle Assn. at a 2002 rally in Manchester, N.H.
In later years, Heston battled physical ailments. In 1996, he underwent hip replacement surgery and two years later he was treated for prostate cancer. In 2000, he revealed in the National Enquirer tabloid that he had entered a rehab clinic for a drinking problem.
In addition to his wife and son, Heston is survived by a daughter, Holly Heston Rochell; and three grandchildren.
Services will be private. His family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund, 22212 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 300, Woodland Hills, CA 91364. Details: www.mptvfund.org.
susan.king@latimes.com
King is a Times staff writer; Welkos is a former Times staff writer.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Mark Steyn: Looks like last call for Hillary
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Orange County Register
"Three o'clock in the morning
And it looks like it's gonna be another sleepless night … "
That's Crystal Gayle from the opening of her hit song, "Talking In Your Sleep," No. 1 on the Billboard Country charts in 1978. No, hang on a minute, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton's new campaign theme.
In Crystal's case, her sleepless night was caused by her husband lying next to her, talking in his sleep, moaning in ecstasy and whispering sweet nothings to some other gal. But Hillary learned to snore through that a long time ago. In the Clinton scenario, the 3 a.m. sleeplessness is caused by the presidential hot line on the nightstand, alerting her to some sudden global crisis.
In her first three-o'clock-in-the-morning ad, the phone was ringing because of a national security emergency: al-Qaida had hijacked nuclearized passenger jets or some such heading our way. Who do you want answering the 3 a.m. call? A tough experienced battle-hardened president like President Rodham Clinton, who landed by plane during a nuclear strike on the Balkans in the mid-1990s yet still managed to have a smile and personalized greeting for each of the fourth-graders there to greet her with radioactive floral bouquets? Or some callow untested youth like Barack Obama, whose experience of taking international phone calls is very limited due to the fact that in his Jakarta boyhood President Sukarno was the only guy in Indonesia with an outside line?
Well, the answer turned out to be: Neither of the above. The McCain campaign gleefully told reporters they'd be happy for Hillary to carry on running the ad for another six months: If incoming-at-three-in-the-morning is the issue, Sen. McCain's your man, and he was very grateful to the Clinton campaign for funding his most effective TV ad to date.
So Sen. Clinton has now released another electrifyingly vivid three-in-the-morning scenario:
"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic. Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering.
"John McCain just said the government shouldn't take any real action on the housing crisis; he'd let the phone keep ringing. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs.
"It's 3 a.m., time for a president who's ready."
Jeepers, will all business during this Clinton administration be transacted at 3 a.m.? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? "Home foreclosures mounting"? We'd better wake the president. There are now so many foreclosures the banks can no longer foreclose on everyone they need to foreclose on during normal banking hours. "The First National Bank of Dead Skunk, Maine, has begun issuing midnight foreclosure notices, Madam President."
"OK, nuke 'em."
"Er, well, maybe this can wait till the regular afternoon meeting."
It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Kim Jong-il No Dong missiles are heading for every major West Coast city, but the president's not picking up because at 2:57 a.m. the Secretary for Soccer Moms called to alert her to the growing crisis caused by the lack of federally mandated children's bicycling helmets. When the powder keg goes up, who do you want in the White House? Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose customized MCI Friends & Family & European Foreign Ministers & Overseas Dictators plan allows her to receive unlimited incoming calls between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.? Or John McCain, who'd bawl out the White House operator for waking him up to take a call from the Director of the Federal Bike Path Agency?
As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, in the real dark night of the soul, it's always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. And so it goes in the real dark night of the Clinton campaign, day after day. When Hillary got into her wee spot of bother over her concoction of the corkscrew landing under enemy fire in Tuzla, she wiggled out of it by putting it down to sleep deprivation. Is she spending too many nights up at three in the morning? In the latest ad, when she picks up the phone at 3 a.m. to take the emergency foreclosure breaking-news update, she's got perfect hair and makeup, and she's immaculately dressed. Is having to get up at 2 a.m. to put her face on for the 3 a.m. campaign ad causing her to retreat into Bosnian war fantasies?
My radio pal Hugh Hewitt drew my attention the other day to a BBC report on Hillary. Asked about the candidates' experience, Sen. Clinton replied: "I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
Whoa! That's quite a line. But it's a measure of Hillary Rodham Clinton's increasing isolation that she has to use it herself. If she were running against Bush in 2000, the media would have used it for her. If she were in better shape for '08, aides and supporters would be deploying the line against Obama. Geraldine Ferraro acknowledged a simple truth about Barack – that a white guy with this thin a resume would be hooted off the stage – and instead she's the one who got hooted off the stage. Last week, Randi Rhodes, the excitable anchorette of the flailing liberal radio network Air America, dismissed Mrs. Ferraro as "David Duke in drag," and for good measure called Hillary "a big f---ing whore."
Sen. Clinton was the establishment candidate running in a party addicted to novelty (in candidates, that is; its policies remain mired in the 1960s). Hill calculated that, given the Dems' deference to identity politics, her gender would give her enough novelty to sail through. But Obama trumped that, and now it's eternally three in the morning, and the phone doesn't stop not ringing. She's like Frank Sinatra in Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's all-time great saloon song:
"It's quarter to three
There's no one in the place except you and me … "
Superdelegate Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey and an early supporter of Hillary, now says that if she doesn't win the overall primary popular vote he'll switch to Obama. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont says she needs to throw in the towel for the good of the party.
"Well, that's how it goes
And Joe, I know you're getting anxious to close … "
They're locking up the joint, and no matter how many nickels she drops in the jukebox it won't play "Hail to the Chief." Any minute now she'll be caught off-mike, reprising the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" line. But this is the way the Clinton era ends, not with a bang but a self-pitying whimper:
"We're drinking, my friend
To the end of a long episode
Make it One For My Baby
And one more for the road."
It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your campaign is?
Orange County Register
"Three o'clock in the morning
And it looks like it's gonna be another sleepless night … "
That's Crystal Gayle from the opening of her hit song, "Talking In Your Sleep," No. 1 on the Billboard Country charts in 1978. No, hang on a minute, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton's new campaign theme.
In Crystal's case, her sleepless night was caused by her husband lying next to her, talking in his sleep, moaning in ecstasy and whispering sweet nothings to some other gal. But Hillary learned to snore through that a long time ago. In the Clinton scenario, the 3 a.m. sleeplessness is caused by the presidential hot line on the nightstand, alerting her to some sudden global crisis.
In her first three-o'clock-in-the-morning ad, the phone was ringing because of a national security emergency: al-Qaida had hijacked nuclearized passenger jets or some such heading our way. Who do you want answering the 3 a.m. call? A tough experienced battle-hardened president like President Rodham Clinton, who landed by plane during a nuclear strike on the Balkans in the mid-1990s yet still managed to have a smile and personalized greeting for each of the fourth-graders there to greet her with radioactive floral bouquets? Or some callow untested youth like Barack Obama, whose experience of taking international phone calls is very limited due to the fact that in his Jakarta boyhood President Sukarno was the only guy in Indonesia with an outside line?
Well, the answer turned out to be: Neither of the above. The McCain campaign gleefully told reporters they'd be happy for Hillary to carry on running the ad for another six months: If incoming-at-three-in-the-morning is the issue, Sen. McCain's your man, and he was very grateful to the Clinton campaign for funding his most effective TV ad to date.
So Sen. Clinton has now released another electrifyingly vivid three-in-the-morning scenario:
"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic. Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering.
"John McCain just said the government shouldn't take any real action on the housing crisis; he'd let the phone keep ringing. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs.
"It's 3 a.m., time for a president who's ready."
Jeepers, will all business during this Clinton administration be transacted at 3 a.m.? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? "Home foreclosures mounting"? We'd better wake the president. There are now so many foreclosures the banks can no longer foreclose on everyone they need to foreclose on during normal banking hours. "The First National Bank of Dead Skunk, Maine, has begun issuing midnight foreclosure notices, Madam President."
"OK, nuke 'em."
"Er, well, maybe this can wait till the regular afternoon meeting."
It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone ringing in the White House. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Kim Jong-il No Dong missiles are heading for every major West Coast city, but the president's not picking up because at 2:57 a.m. the Secretary for Soccer Moms called to alert her to the growing crisis caused by the lack of federally mandated children's bicycling helmets. When the powder keg goes up, who do you want in the White House? Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose customized MCI Friends & Family & European Foreign Ministers & Overseas Dictators plan allows her to receive unlimited incoming calls between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.? Or John McCain, who'd bawl out the White House operator for waking him up to take a call from the Director of the Federal Bike Path Agency?
As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, in the real dark night of the soul, it's always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. And so it goes in the real dark night of the Clinton campaign, day after day. When Hillary got into her wee spot of bother over her concoction of the corkscrew landing under enemy fire in Tuzla, she wiggled out of it by putting it down to sleep deprivation. Is she spending too many nights up at three in the morning? In the latest ad, when she picks up the phone at 3 a.m. to take the emergency foreclosure breaking-news update, she's got perfect hair and makeup, and she's immaculately dressed. Is having to get up at 2 a.m. to put her face on for the 3 a.m. campaign ad causing her to retreat into Bosnian war fantasies?
My radio pal Hugh Hewitt drew my attention the other day to a BBC report on Hillary. Asked about the candidates' experience, Sen. Clinton replied: "I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
Whoa! That's quite a line. But it's a measure of Hillary Rodham Clinton's increasing isolation that she has to use it herself. If she were running against Bush in 2000, the media would have used it for her. If she were in better shape for '08, aides and supporters would be deploying the line against Obama. Geraldine Ferraro acknowledged a simple truth about Barack – that a white guy with this thin a resume would be hooted off the stage – and instead she's the one who got hooted off the stage. Last week, Randi Rhodes, the excitable anchorette of the flailing liberal radio network Air America, dismissed Mrs. Ferraro as "David Duke in drag," and for good measure called Hillary "a big f---ing whore."
Sen. Clinton was the establishment candidate running in a party addicted to novelty (in candidates, that is; its policies remain mired in the 1960s). Hill calculated that, given the Dems' deference to identity politics, her gender would give her enough novelty to sail through. But Obama trumped that, and now it's eternally three in the morning, and the phone doesn't stop not ringing. She's like Frank Sinatra in Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's all-time great saloon song:
"It's quarter to three
There's no one in the place except you and me … "
Superdelegate Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey and an early supporter of Hillary, now says that if she doesn't win the overall primary popular vote he'll switch to Obama. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont says she needs to throw in the towel for the good of the party.
"Well, that's how it goes
And Joe, I know you're getting anxious to close … "
They're locking up the joint, and no matter how many nickels she drops in the jukebox it won't play "Hail to the Chief." Any minute now she'll be caught off-mike, reprising the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" line. But this is the way the Clinton era ends, not with a bang but a self-pitying whimper:
"We're drinking, my friend
To the end of a long episode
Make it One For My Baby
And one more for the road."
It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your campaign is?
Friday, April 04, 2008
Film Review: "Shine a Light"
Only Rock ’N’ Roll, but They’re Still at It
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times
Published: April 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com
As you scrutinize the aging bodies of the Rolling Stones in Martin Scorsese’s rip-roaring concert documentary “Shine a Light,” there is ample evidence that rock ’n’ roll may hold the secret of eternal vitality, if not eternal beauty.
More About This Movie
Trailers & Clips
View Clip...
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, the quartet’s three skinny members, certainly look their ages. But there is nothing stodgy about them. The strenuous rock ’n’ roll life has left them sinewy and lean, like longtime marathon runners. (The staid, above-it-all drummer, Charlie Watts, is the exception.)
Jacob Cohl/Paramount Classics
Keith Richards with Martin Scorsese in the concert documentary “Shine a Light.”
Mr. Jagger’s lined face, with its deflated balloon lips, suggests a double exposure of Dorian Gray and his infamous portrait, at once defiantly youthful and creepily gaunt. The simian Mr. Richards, whose upper arm flesh has shriveled, resembles an old madam chewing over her secrets. As he plays, his lips dangling a cigarette, he leans back into his snarling guitar and a joyful grin spreads across his face. He could be the world’s happiest young older man: Peter Pan as a wizened Gypsy fortuneteller.
For the Rolling Stones appear supremely alive inside their giant, self-created rock ’n’ roll machine. The sheer pleasure of making music that keens and growls like a pack of ravenous alley cats is obviously what keeps them going. Why should they ever stop? At the heart of the gizmo, Mr. Jagger whirls, leaps, struts, wiggles his tiny hips and sashays around like an androgynous tart prowling a street corner at 3 a.m.
Ultimately the movie is Mr. Jagger’s show. If his long-running circus act is ridiculous when you analyze it, conjoined to the Stones’ music, it becomes a phenomenal high-wire exhibition of agility, stamina and cheek. He was 63 when the concert was filmed over two nights at the Beacon Theater in New York in the fall of 2006. From certain angles, when the blazing lights hit his face, he suggests an agitated zombie with a full head of hair. But if you squint until your vision blurs, he is the same tireless, taunting cock of the walk that he has always been.
The film, which used 18 cameras, many operated by eminent cinematographers, is an unabashedly reverent tribute to the Stones made in the same spirit as “The Last Waltz,” Mr. Scorsese’s elegiac 1978 movie of the Band’s farewell concert, and his more recent Bob Dylan biography, “No Direction Home.” That said, it is far less ambitious, and less overtly romantic.
This is a concert film with frills that places you on the stage with the band and, with a finely trained eye, observes the musicians’ interactions with one another and with the audience. The visual rhythms and unobtrusive editing reflect the contradictory status of the Stones as a majestic rock institution and a gang of down-and-dirty bad boys thumbing their noses at propriety while scooping up all the girls.
Although there is no frantic cutting back and forth, the cameras are continually on the move. As the movie artfully shifts its gaze, it helps you see much more than you could if you actually attended the concert. The audience is largely ignored.
Mr. Scorsese is a besotted rock ’n’ roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology. Its scruffy guitar heroes and roustabout rebel-prophets are the musical equivalents of the hotheads and outlaws who populate so many of his films. Almost every shot of “Shine a Light” conveys his excitement.
Prefaced by preconcert footage and interwoven with excerpts from television interviews from the Stones’ younger days, going back to 1964, “Shine a Light” makes no attempt to explain the Stones or to tell their story. All it wants to do is to give you the best seat in the house and the best sound you could possibly hope for.
The program is a best-of selection that concentrates on Stones classics, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Shattered,” “Some Girls,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Start Me Up” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The only misfire is the quaint, quasi chamber-pop ballad “As Tears Go By,” a hit for Marianne Faithfull in 1964, which sounds incongruous in Mr. Jagger’s parched delivery. Otherwise, the full-tilt rock concert roars along like a steam engine. A horn section, a keyboardist (Chuck Leavell), a bass guitarist (Darryl Jones) and three backup singers augment the band.
There are three special guests: in ascending order of interest, Jack White, who trades vocals with Mr. Jagger on “Loving Cup”; Christina Aguilera, who shares the vocals on “Live With Me” and bestows demure pecks on the cheek to the musicians as she leaves the stage; and the great blues guitarist and singer Buddy Guy performing an old Muddy Waters song, “Champagne and Reefer.” (There is also the Clinton family in the audience, on hand to celebrate Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday.)
Like Muddy Waters, whom I saw in the Beacon Theater shortly before his death in 1983 at 70, Mr. Guy, 70 when “Shine a Light” was filmed, is a mighty blues presence, one who puts the Stones in historical perspective. Muddy Waters was an ominous force of raw blues aggression. Mr. Guy, though equally imposing, is a more benign, patriarchal figure.
Beside him, Mr. Jagger and company are mischievous bohemian whippersnappers churning up variations on their elders’ musical bedrock. It is obviously a thrilling game to play into your 60s and beyond, if you’ve still got the juice. And the Stones have the juice. But it is ultimately just a game.
“Shine a Light” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for drug references in the songs, and smoking.
SHINE A LIGHT
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Martin Scorsese; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by David Tedeschi; music by the Rolling Stones; produced by Victoria Pearman, Michael Cohl, Zane Weiner and Steve Bing; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times
Published: April 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com
As you scrutinize the aging bodies of the Rolling Stones in Martin Scorsese’s rip-roaring concert documentary “Shine a Light,” there is ample evidence that rock ’n’ roll may hold the secret of eternal vitality, if not eternal beauty.
More About This Movie
Trailers & Clips
View Clip...
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, the quartet’s three skinny members, certainly look their ages. But there is nothing stodgy about them. The strenuous rock ’n’ roll life has left them sinewy and lean, like longtime marathon runners. (The staid, above-it-all drummer, Charlie Watts, is the exception.)
Jacob Cohl/Paramount Classics Keith Richards with Martin Scorsese in the concert documentary “Shine a Light.”
Mr. Jagger’s lined face, with its deflated balloon lips, suggests a double exposure of Dorian Gray and his infamous portrait, at once defiantly youthful and creepily gaunt. The simian Mr. Richards, whose upper arm flesh has shriveled, resembles an old madam chewing over her secrets. As he plays, his lips dangling a cigarette, he leans back into his snarling guitar and a joyful grin spreads across his face. He could be the world’s happiest young older man: Peter Pan as a wizened Gypsy fortuneteller.
For the Rolling Stones appear supremely alive inside their giant, self-created rock ’n’ roll machine. The sheer pleasure of making music that keens and growls like a pack of ravenous alley cats is obviously what keeps them going. Why should they ever stop? At the heart of the gizmo, Mr. Jagger whirls, leaps, struts, wiggles his tiny hips and sashays around like an androgynous tart prowling a street corner at 3 a.m.
Ultimately the movie is Mr. Jagger’s show. If his long-running circus act is ridiculous when you analyze it, conjoined to the Stones’ music, it becomes a phenomenal high-wire exhibition of agility, stamina and cheek. He was 63 when the concert was filmed over two nights at the Beacon Theater in New York in the fall of 2006. From certain angles, when the blazing lights hit his face, he suggests an agitated zombie with a full head of hair. But if you squint until your vision blurs, he is the same tireless, taunting cock of the walk that he has always been.
The film, which used 18 cameras, many operated by eminent cinematographers, is an unabashedly reverent tribute to the Stones made in the same spirit as “The Last Waltz,” Mr. Scorsese’s elegiac 1978 movie of the Band’s farewell concert, and his more recent Bob Dylan biography, “No Direction Home.” That said, it is far less ambitious, and less overtly romantic.
This is a concert film with frills that places you on the stage with the band and, with a finely trained eye, observes the musicians’ interactions with one another and with the audience. The visual rhythms and unobtrusive editing reflect the contradictory status of the Stones as a majestic rock institution and a gang of down-and-dirty bad boys thumbing their noses at propriety while scooping up all the girls.
Although there is no frantic cutting back and forth, the cameras are continually on the move. As the movie artfully shifts its gaze, it helps you see much more than you could if you actually attended the concert. The audience is largely ignored.
Mr. Scorsese is a besotted rock ’n’ roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology. Its scruffy guitar heroes and roustabout rebel-prophets are the musical equivalents of the hotheads and outlaws who populate so many of his films. Almost every shot of “Shine a Light” conveys his excitement.
Prefaced by preconcert footage and interwoven with excerpts from television interviews from the Stones’ younger days, going back to 1964, “Shine a Light” makes no attempt to explain the Stones or to tell their story. All it wants to do is to give you the best seat in the house and the best sound you could possibly hope for.
The program is a best-of selection that concentrates on Stones classics, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Shattered,” “Some Girls,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Start Me Up” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The only misfire is the quaint, quasi chamber-pop ballad “As Tears Go By,” a hit for Marianne Faithfull in 1964, which sounds incongruous in Mr. Jagger’s parched delivery. Otherwise, the full-tilt rock concert roars along like a steam engine. A horn section, a keyboardist (Chuck Leavell), a bass guitarist (Darryl Jones) and three backup singers augment the band.
There are three special guests: in ascending order of interest, Jack White, who trades vocals with Mr. Jagger on “Loving Cup”; Christina Aguilera, who shares the vocals on “Live With Me” and bestows demure pecks on the cheek to the musicians as she leaves the stage; and the great blues guitarist and singer Buddy Guy performing an old Muddy Waters song, “Champagne and Reefer.” (There is also the Clinton family in the audience, on hand to celebrate Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday.)
Like Muddy Waters, whom I saw in the Beacon Theater shortly before his death in 1983 at 70, Mr. Guy, 70 when “Shine a Light” was filmed, is a mighty blues presence, one who puts the Stones in historical perspective. Muddy Waters was an ominous force of raw blues aggression. Mr. Guy, though equally imposing, is a more benign, patriarchal figure.
Beside him, Mr. Jagger and company are mischievous bohemian whippersnappers churning up variations on their elders’ musical bedrock. It is obviously a thrilling game to play into your 60s and beyond, if you’ve still got the juice. And the Stones have the juice. But it is ultimately just a game.
“Shine a Light” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for drug references in the songs, and smoking.
SHINE A LIGHT
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Martin Scorsese; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by David Tedeschi; music by the Rolling Stones; produced by Victoria Pearman, Michael Cohl, Zane Weiner and Steve Bing; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.
Remembering and Misremembering Martin Luther King Jr.
April 4, 2008Remembering, and Misremembering, Martin Luther King Jr.
By Richard John Neuhaus
From left to right: Andrew Young, Dr. King, Richard Fernandez, RJN. (The crease is a newspaper fold, as we were not able to obtain the original photograph.) This was a news conference on April 4, 1967, precisely one year before Dr. King’s death.
This is a week of remembering. Wednesday evening I celebrated and preached the Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral recalling the death of John Paul the Great three years ago April 2. This Friday, also at St. Patrick’s, I will concelebrate–Edward Cardinal Egan celebrating and Father George Rutler preaching–the memorial Mass for William F. Buckley Jr. In 2005, April 2 was the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday, and John Paul’s last words were, “Let me go to the house of the Father.” In the issue of First Things that subscribers will be receiving this week, I have an extended reflection on my friendship with Bill Buckley. In our last conversations, it was evident that he heard the Master calling and readily went.
And then there was the killing of Dr. King on April 4 in that apocalyptic year of 1968. For all the horror and heartbreak of the time, there were sustained moments in which one thought with Wordsworth, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.” For those of us who were there, it not easy to recognize that, had he lived, Dr. King would now be seventy-nine years old. Not to mention that John F. Kennedy, killed in 1963, would be ninety-one, and Robert, also killed in 1968, eighty-three. But the memories still break out of amber and renew the luster of a liberalism that was.
I have in First Things several times offered reflections on the times with Dr. King. One has no choice but to risk the use of the much-abused term prophetic in describing his historic role in addressing what Barack Obama and many others have called, politically speaking, America’s “original sin” of slavery, along with its aftermath. I am in a distinct minority in believing that the best single book for getting an honest feel for Dr. King and the movement he led is Ralph Abernathy’s When the Walls Came Tumbling Down.
Nobody was closer to Dr. King than Ralph Abernathy, who had recruited the young preacher to lead the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. His book, published in 1989, was much criticized at the time and has long been out of print. The ostensible reason for the criticism is that he gave a candid account of King’s inveterate womanizing. That was not news. J. Edgar Hoover’s use of tapes of King’s multiple trysts had been given prominent attention in the national media. In 1970, John Williams had published The King God Didn’t Save, with sordid depictions of King’s sexual indulgences. I wrote a sharply critical critique of Williams in the New York Review of Books. In retrospect, I am somewhat embarrassed by that review. It was an exercise in damage control. I didn’t want to believe this seamy side of Dr. King’s life, or at least I didn’t want to believe that it was quite so seamy. More important, I didn’t want it to besmirch the memory of a man whom I greatly admired and loved.
I believe that the real reason for the savaging of Ralph Abernathy’s book was that his account of King and the movement he led was an embarrassment to those who were using that legacy for their own ideological purposes. Numerous books have been written depicting King as an apostle of Gandhian nonviolence or, alternatively, as a quasi-Marxist revolutionary. In these versions, and especially in the latter, the soaring sentiments of the “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington are treated as the American soft soap that he employed to sell his cause to the general public, and to disguise his more radical purposes. That claim is voiced to this day also on the fringes of certain right-wing circles.
As Abernathy tells it–and I believe he is right–he and King were first of all Christians, then Southerners, and then blacks living under an oppressive segregationist regime. King of course came from the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta in which his father, “Daddy King,” had succeeded in establishing himself as a king. Abernathy came from much more modest circumstances, but he was proud of his heritage and, as he writes, wanted nothing more than that whites would address his father as Mr. Abernathy. He and Martin loved the South, and envisioned its coming into its own once the sin of segregation had been expunged.
“Years later,” Abernathy writes that, “after the civil rights movement had peaked and I had taken over [after Martin’s death] as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” he met with Governor George Wallace. “Governor Wallace, by then restricted to a wheel chair after having been paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, shook hands with me and welcomed me to the State of Alabama. I smiled, realizing that he had forgotten all about Montgomery and Birmingham, and particularly Selma. ‘This is not my first visit,’ I said. ‘I was born in Alabama–in Marengo County.’ ‘Good,’ said Governor Wallace, ‘then welcome back.’ I really believe he meant it. In his later years he had become one of the greatest friends the blacks had ever had in Montgomery. Where once he had stood in the doorway and barred federal marshals from entering, he now made certain that our people were first in line for jobs, new schools, and other benefits of state government.” Abernathy concludes, “It was a time for reconciliations.”
Others who claimed the mantle of Dr. King were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day. When making his birthday a national holiday was being discussed, a black preacher friend remarked to me, “Well, if we can’t have Malcolm or Huey, we might as well settle for Martin.” The reference, of course, was to Malcolm X, originally of the Nation of Islam, and Huey Newton, the latter being the founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966 who was killed in a dispute over a cocaine deal in 1989. They were figures much more to the liking of those who construed the civil rights movement not as the rectification of a great injustice but as the precursor to a revolutionary new order.
Then, and still today, there are some for whom Dr. King was not “black enough.” That note was sounded already in the mid-1960s with the rise of the “black-power movement.” Now-forgotten figures such as Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) derided King as “d’Lord.” White radicals, and radicalized liberals of the political class, cheered them on as they declared that King’s day was past. King was accustomed to receiving death threats from whites, but now he was receiving death threats from blacks who accused him of being an Uncle Tom. When Dr. King was killed in 1968, many on the left said privately, and some said publicly, that it was just as well, since he had outlived his time.
And now, exactly forty years later, these arguments are being revisited. Last Friday in this space, I wrote about Senator Barack Obama’s Philadelphia address on race. While criticizing some of the more bizarre statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the senator said, “I could no more disown him than I could disown the black community.” Whatever Obama’s intentions, the implication is that the Rev. Wright is representative of the black community. Thus, however inadvertently, did he and some of those who wrote in defense of his speech reinforce an ugly stereotype of blacks being just a little, and maybe more than a little, crazy. The suggestion is a vile slander of the great majority of black Americans.
The question of black identity is maddeningly complicated. In an extraordinary new book, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard), Jonathan Rieder details the different cultures and subcultures to which Dr. King tailored his message with striking success. He could, in turn, be raucous, smooth, erudite, eloquent, vulgar, and even salacious. This does not mean he was a chameleon or a hypocrite. Rather, says Rieder, “he had an uncommon ability to glide in and out of black, white, and other idioms and identities in an elaborate dance of empathy.” He adds, “The constant for King lay beyond language, beyond performance, beyond race. The core of the man was the power of his faith, his love of humanity, and an irrepressible resolve to free black people, and other people too.” From his actions on the public stage and from our times together, that is how I remember Dr. King.
Forty years later and the argument is by no means settled whether Martin Luther King Jr. was black enough to be part of “the black community.” That in no way detracts from his greatness. As long as the American experiment continues, people will listen and be inspired by his “I Have a Dream,” and will read and be instructed by his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and will once again believe that, black and white together, “We shall overcome.”
John Paul the Great, William F. Buckley, Martin Luther King. It has been an extraordinary week, marked by sorrow and gratitude. I count it a gift beyond measure to have known each of them as a friend. Each was great, albeit in very different ways. The life of each awakened us to the possibilities of life lived greatly.
References
“The Theses of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” February 1991
“The Way of Revolutions,” The Public Square, January 1999
“Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.,” October 2002
“The Strange Ways of Black Folk,” Daily Article, March 28, 2008
Sharia-Compliant Finance Funds Jihad
by Deroy Murdock
http://www.humanevents.com
Posted: 04/04/2008
Palani Mohan for The New York Times
The Citibank building in central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A number of big banks are adding Islamic banking businesses, in line with the Koran’s prohibition against charging interest. Money is lent with a set profit margin for the lender.
Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerages sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisors as free of “Jewish profits” from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale’s.
In turn, a percentage of such funds’ gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth.
Seventy years hence, an analogous outrage grows on Wall Street, only this time for real.
Sharia-compliant finance (SCF) is expanding among banks and securities houses eager to absorb the hundreds of billions of petrodollars cascading into the Middle East, thanks to $100-per-barrel oil. To lure this cash, financial companies increasingly offer vehicles that neither pay interest nor benefit from gambling, entertainment, alcohol, pork, or anything considered “haram” or “un-kosher” in Islam. Bahrain’s International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) counts $97 billion in Islamic bonds in circulation with another $66 billion forecast through 2008 -- and SCF is not limited to the bond market.
SCF goes far beyond marketing to Muslims and Middle Easterners. IIFM lists “wider sharia acceptance” among its goals. Selling sharia-compliant investments legitimizes a barbaric theocratic orthodoxy that should be defeated, not promoted.
Turn your clock back 1,300 years. According to the Koran, sharia means that, with disobedient women, men should “admonish them, and send them to their beds and beat them” (Koran 4:34). For those having sex outside marriage: “The fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them with a hundred stripes” (24:2). “Cut off the hands of thieves, whether they are male or female, as punishment for what they have done” (5:38). Instead of celebrating gay sex with parades and rainbow flags, “kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done” (“Reliance of the Traveler” -- Abu Dawud 4447). How do you handle an adulteress? “Khalid Walid came forward with a stone which he threw at her head, and when the blood spurted on his face, he cursed her” (“Reliance” -- Muslim 4206).
Western financiers have no business complying with this.
Nevertheless, SCF advisors help these funds remain sharia-compliant. Unfortunately, these authorities often are Muslim extremists who appear mainstream by consulting for such powerhouses as Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor’s.
*In 2002, Caribou Coffee had to explain the ties between its Atlanta-based sharia-compliant owner, Arcapita, Inc., and Arcapita’s sharia advisor, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. He had defended “our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their souls willingly in the way of Allah.” Qaradawi eventually resigned from Arcapita.
*Sheik Muhammad Taqi Usmani advises the Dow Jones Islamic Index. He has written: “The purpose of Jihad…aims at breaking the grandeur of unbelievers and establish[ing] that of Muslims.”
* The North American Islamic Trust owns 69.8 percent of the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. The Justice Department identified NAIT last June as an unindicted co-conspirator in supporting Hamas’ murderous anti-Israeli terrorism. NAIT also owns Albany, New York’s Masjid As-Salam mosque. In April 2007, its founder, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, and imam, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, received 15-year prison sentences for assisting an FBI sting operation to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in Manhattan with a shoulder-fired missile.
Sharia-compliant funds usually donate 2.5 percent of profits as “zakat.” While such money assists peaceful Muslim causes, some of it has gone ka-boom.
*The Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, and Global Relief Foundation, all major Muslim charities, were shuttered in December 2001 for allegedly supporting Islamic terrorism.
*According to “The Tax Lawyer,” Yasin al-Qadi -- an investor in one Hamas-connected, sharia-compliant company called BMI (not the perfectly legitimate Broadcast Music, Inc.) -- transmitted $820,000 to Chicago’s Quranic Literacy Institute in 1991. QLI employee Mohammad Salah confessed in 1995 that he trained recruits to handle assorted toxins and “basic chemical materials for the preparation of bombs and explosives.”
“This is bad for America, bad for capitalism, and good for jihad,” says Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, which is sounding the anti-SCF claxons. CSP’S legal analysis by David Yerushalmi richly details SCF’s dangers.
The last thing America needs is jihad with tailored suits and Excel spreadsheets. It’s time to stop the clock on this deadly idea.
Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
http://www.humanevents.com
Posted: 04/04/2008
Palani Mohan for The New York Times The Citibank building in central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A number of big banks are adding Islamic banking businesses, in line with the Koran’s prohibition against charging interest. Money is lent with a set profit margin for the lender.
Turn your clock back 70 years. Imagine that Wall Street banks and brokerages sold Nuremberg-compliant bonds and stock funds in 1938. American Nazi sympathizers bought financial instruments certified by Berlin-based advisors as free of “Jewish profits” from, say, Salomon Brothers and Bloomingdale’s.
In turn, a percentage of such funds’ gains underwrote pro-Nazi charities, like the German-American Bund, and similar organizations in the Fatherland, like the Hitler Youth.
Seventy years hence, an analogous outrage grows on Wall Street, only this time for real.
Sharia-compliant finance (SCF) is expanding among banks and securities houses eager to absorb the hundreds of billions of petrodollars cascading into the Middle East, thanks to $100-per-barrel oil. To lure this cash, financial companies increasingly offer vehicles that neither pay interest nor benefit from gambling, entertainment, alcohol, pork, or anything considered “haram” or “un-kosher” in Islam. Bahrain’s International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM) counts $97 billion in Islamic bonds in circulation with another $66 billion forecast through 2008 -- and SCF is not limited to the bond market.
SCF goes far beyond marketing to Muslims and Middle Easterners. IIFM lists “wider sharia acceptance” among its goals. Selling sharia-compliant investments legitimizes a barbaric theocratic orthodoxy that should be defeated, not promoted.
Turn your clock back 1,300 years. According to the Koran, sharia means that, with disobedient women, men should “admonish them, and send them to their beds and beat them” (Koran 4:34). For those having sex outside marriage: “The fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them with a hundred stripes” (24:2). “Cut off the hands of thieves, whether they are male or female, as punishment for what they have done” (5:38). Instead of celebrating gay sex with parades and rainbow flags, “kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done” (“Reliance of the Traveler” -- Abu Dawud 4447). How do you handle an adulteress? “Khalid Walid came forward with a stone which he threw at her head, and when the blood spurted on his face, he cursed her” (“Reliance” -- Muslim 4206).
Western financiers have no business complying with this.
Nevertheless, SCF advisors help these funds remain sharia-compliant. Unfortunately, these authorities often are Muslim extremists who appear mainstream by consulting for such powerhouses as Deutsche Bank and Standard & Poor’s.
*In 2002, Caribou Coffee had to explain the ties between its Atlanta-based sharia-compliant owner, Arcapita, Inc., and Arcapita’s sharia advisor, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. He had defended “our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their souls willingly in the way of Allah.” Qaradawi eventually resigned from Arcapita.
*Sheik Muhammad Taqi Usmani advises the Dow Jones Islamic Index. He has written: “The purpose of Jihad…aims at breaking the grandeur of unbelievers and establish[ing] that of Muslims.”
* The North American Islamic Trust owns 69.8 percent of the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. The Justice Department identified NAIT last June as an unindicted co-conspirator in supporting Hamas’ murderous anti-Israeli terrorism. NAIT also owns Albany, New York’s Masjid As-Salam mosque. In April 2007, its founder, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, and imam, Yassin Muhiddin Aref, received 15-year prison sentences for assisting an FBI sting operation to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in Manhattan with a shoulder-fired missile.
Sharia-compliant funds usually donate 2.5 percent of profits as “zakat.” While such money assists peaceful Muslim causes, some of it has gone ka-boom.
*The Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, and Global Relief Foundation, all major Muslim charities, were shuttered in December 2001 for allegedly supporting Islamic terrorism.
*According to “The Tax Lawyer,” Yasin al-Qadi -- an investor in one Hamas-connected, sharia-compliant company called BMI (not the perfectly legitimate Broadcast Music, Inc.) -- transmitted $820,000 to Chicago’s Quranic Literacy Institute in 1991. QLI employee Mohammad Salah confessed in 1995 that he trained recruits to handle assorted toxins and “basic chemical materials for the preparation of bombs and explosives.”
“This is bad for America, bad for capitalism, and good for jihad,” says Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, which is sounding the anti-SCF claxons. CSP’S legal analysis by David Yerushalmi richly details SCF’s dangers.
The last thing America needs is jihad with tailored suits and Excel spreadsheets. It’s time to stop the clock on this deadly idea.
Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Obama and King
By JUAN WILLIAMS
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page?refresh=on
April 4, 2008
Martin Luther King Jr. died at age 39; today, the 40th anniversary of his death, is the first time he has been gone longer than he lived.
Figures such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have tried to claim his place on the American stage. But at most they have achieved fame and wealth. What separated King from any would-be successor was his moral authority. He towered above the high walls of racial suspicion by speaking truth to all sides.
Corbis
Martin Luther King, Jr. during the march on Washington.
Now comes Barack Obama, a black man and a plausible national leader, who appeals across racial lines. But to his black and white supporters, Mr. Obama increasingly represents different things.
The initial base of support for Mr. Obama's presidential campaign came from young whites – who saw in him the ability to take the nation to a place where, to quote from King's "I Have A Dream" speech, "we shall be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."
Black voters rallied to Mr. Obama after whites in Iowa and New Hampshire showed they were willing to vote for him. Mr. Obama spoke directly to charges that he was not "black enough," that he was not a child of the civil rights movement because he grew up in Hawaii and has an Ivy League education, that he is too young, it is not his time, and even that his campaign is too risky because white racists might kill him.
Mr. Obama, his wife Michelle and supporters such as Oprah Winfrey make the case to black voters that he is the fruit of the struggles of King and others. They argue that this generation of black Americans does not have to wait for their turn to reach for the ultimate political power of the presidency.
Mr. Obama has carried a message of pride and self-sufficiency to black voters nationwide, who have rewarded him with support reaching 80% and higher. His candidacy has become, as the headline on Ebony magazine put it, a matter of having a black man as president "In Our Lifetime."
Among his white supporters, race is coincidental, not central, to his political identity. Mr. Obama is to them the candidate who personifies the promise of equal opportunity for all. But as black support has become central to his victories, this idealistic view has been increasingly at war with the portrayal, crafted by the senator to win black support, of him as the black candidate. The terrible tension between these racially distinct views now surrounds and threatens his campaign.
So far, Mr. Obama has been content to let black people have their vision of him while white people hold to a separate, segregated reality. He is a politician and, unlike King, his goal is winning votes, not changing hearts. Still, it is a key break from the King tradition to sell different messages to different audiences based on race, and to fail to challenge racial divisions in the nation.
Mr. Obama's major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he'd sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton's relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.
Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama's campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.
While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.
When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming "ourselves with dignity and self-respect." He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from "assuming primary responsibility" for achieving "first class citizenship."
Last March in Selma, Ala., Mr. Obama appeared on the verge of breaking away from the merchants of black grievance and victimization. At a commemoration of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights, he spoke in a King-like voice. He focused on traditions of black sacrifice, idealism and the need for taking personal responsibility for building strong black families and communities. He said black people should never "deny that its gotten better," even as the movement goes on to improve schools and provide good health care for all Americans. He then challenged black America, by saying that "government alone can't solve all those problems . . . it is not enough just to ask what the government can do for us -- it's important for us to ask what we can do for ourselves."
Mr. Obama added that better education for black students begins with black parents visiting their children's teachers, as well as turning off the television so children can focus on homework. He expressed alarm over the lack of appreciation for education in the black community: "I don't know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs were something white. We've got to get over that mentality." King, he added later, believed that black America has to first "transform ourselves in order to transform the world."
But as his campaign made headway with black voters, Mr. Obama no longer spoke about the responsibility and the power of black America to appeal to the conscience and highest ideals of the nation. He no longer asks black people to let go of the grievance culture to transcend racial arguments and transform the world.
He has stopped all mention of government's inability to create strong black families, while the black community accepts a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate. Half of black and Hispanic children drop out of high school, but he no longer touches on the need for parents to convey a love of learning to their children. There is no mention in his speeches of the history of expensive but ineffective government programs that encourage dependency. He fails to point out the failures of too many poverty programs, given the 25% poverty rate in black America.
And he chooses not to confront the poisonous "thug life" culture in rap music that glorifies drug use and crime.
Instead the senator, in a full political pander, is busy excusing Rev. Wright's racial attacks as the right of the Rev.-Wright generation of black Americans to define the nation's future by their past. He stretches compassion to the breaking point by equating his white grandmother's private concerns about black men on the street with Rev. Wright's public stirring of racial division.
And he wasted time in his Philadelphia speech on race by saying he can't "disown" Rev. Wright any more than he could "disown the black community." No one has asked him to disown Rev. Wright. Only in a later appearance on "The View" television show did he say that he would have left the church if Rev. Wright had not retired and not acknowledged his offensive language.
As the nation tries to recall the meaning of Martin Luther King today, Mr. Obama's campaign has become a mirror reflecting where we are on race 40 years after the assassination. Mr. Obama's success has moved forward the story of American race relations; King would have been thrilled with his political triumphs.
But when Barack Obama, arguably the best of this generation of black or white leaders, finds it easy to sit in Rev. Wright's pews and nod along with wacky and bitterly divisive racial rhetoric, it does call his judgment into question. And it reveals a continuing crisis in racial leadership.
What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church.
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News.
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page?refresh=on
April 4, 2008
Martin Luther King Jr. died at age 39; today, the 40th anniversary of his death, is the first time he has been gone longer than he lived.
Figures such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have tried to claim his place on the American stage. But at most they have achieved fame and wealth. What separated King from any would-be successor was his moral authority. He towered above the high walls of racial suspicion by speaking truth to all sides.
CorbisMartin Luther King, Jr. during the march on Washington.
Now comes Barack Obama, a black man and a plausible national leader, who appeals across racial lines. But to his black and white supporters, Mr. Obama increasingly represents different things.
The initial base of support for Mr. Obama's presidential campaign came from young whites – who saw in him the ability to take the nation to a place where, to quote from King's "I Have A Dream" speech, "we shall be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."
Black voters rallied to Mr. Obama after whites in Iowa and New Hampshire showed they were willing to vote for him. Mr. Obama spoke directly to charges that he was not "black enough," that he was not a child of the civil rights movement because he grew up in Hawaii and has an Ivy League education, that he is too young, it is not his time, and even that his campaign is too risky because white racists might kill him.
Mr. Obama, his wife Michelle and supporters such as Oprah Winfrey make the case to black voters that he is the fruit of the struggles of King and others. They argue that this generation of black Americans does not have to wait for their turn to reach for the ultimate political power of the presidency.
Mr. Obama has carried a message of pride and self-sufficiency to black voters nationwide, who have rewarded him with support reaching 80% and higher. His candidacy has become, as the headline on Ebony magazine put it, a matter of having a black man as president "In Our Lifetime."
Among his white supporters, race is coincidental, not central, to his political identity. Mr. Obama is to them the candidate who personifies the promise of equal opportunity for all. But as black support has become central to his victories, this idealistic view has been increasingly at war with the portrayal, crafted by the senator to win black support, of him as the black candidate. The terrible tension between these racially distinct views now surrounds and threatens his campaign.
So far, Mr. Obama has been content to let black people have their vision of him while white people hold to a separate, segregated reality. He is a politician and, unlike King, his goal is winning votes, not changing hearts. Still, it is a key break from the King tradition to sell different messages to different audiences based on race, and to fail to challenge racial divisions in the nation.
Mr. Obama's major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he'd sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton's relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.
Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama's campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.
While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.
When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming "ourselves with dignity and self-respect." He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from "assuming primary responsibility" for achieving "first class citizenship."
Last March in Selma, Ala., Mr. Obama appeared on the verge of breaking away from the merchants of black grievance and victimization. At a commemoration of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights, he spoke in a King-like voice. He focused on traditions of black sacrifice, idealism and the need for taking personal responsibility for building strong black families and communities. He said black people should never "deny that its gotten better," even as the movement goes on to improve schools and provide good health care for all Americans. He then challenged black America, by saying that "government alone can't solve all those problems . . . it is not enough just to ask what the government can do for us -- it's important for us to ask what we can do for ourselves."
Mr. Obama added that better education for black students begins with black parents visiting their children's teachers, as well as turning off the television so children can focus on homework. He expressed alarm over the lack of appreciation for education in the black community: "I don't know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs were something white. We've got to get over that mentality." King, he added later, believed that black America has to first "transform ourselves in order to transform the world."
But as his campaign made headway with black voters, Mr. Obama no longer spoke about the responsibility and the power of black America to appeal to the conscience and highest ideals of the nation. He no longer asks black people to let go of the grievance culture to transcend racial arguments and transform the world.
He has stopped all mention of government's inability to create strong black families, while the black community accepts a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate. Half of black and Hispanic children drop out of high school, but he no longer touches on the need for parents to convey a love of learning to their children. There is no mention in his speeches of the history of expensive but ineffective government programs that encourage dependency. He fails to point out the failures of too many poverty programs, given the 25% poverty rate in black America.And he chooses not to confront the poisonous "thug life" culture in rap music that glorifies drug use and crime.
Instead the senator, in a full political pander, is busy excusing Rev. Wright's racial attacks as the right of the Rev.-Wright generation of black Americans to define the nation's future by their past. He stretches compassion to the breaking point by equating his white grandmother's private concerns about black men on the street with Rev. Wright's public stirring of racial division.
And he wasted time in his Philadelphia speech on race by saying he can't "disown" Rev. Wright any more than he could "disown the black community." No one has asked him to disown Rev. Wright. Only in a later appearance on "The View" television show did he say that he would have left the church if Rev. Wright had not retired and not acknowledged his offensive language.
As the nation tries to recall the meaning of Martin Luther King today, Mr. Obama's campaign has become a mirror reflecting where we are on race 40 years after the assassination. Mr. Obama's success has moved forward the story of American race relations; King would have been thrilled with his political triumphs.
But when Barack Obama, arguably the best of this generation of black or white leaders, finds it easy to sit in Rev. Wright's pews and nod along with wacky and bitterly divisive racial rhetoric, it does call his judgment into question. And it reveals a continuing crisis in racial leadership.
What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church.
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Knock, Knock, Knocking on Europe's Door
Geert Wilder's Campaign to Save The West April 3, 2008
Demonstrators hold banners during a protest against Dutch politician and anti-Islam filmmaker Geert Wilders on Dam square in Amsterdam, March 22, 2008. REUTERS/Ade Johnson
The War for Europe is heating up. Despite the somnambulism of many Europeans themselves, immersed in comfortable lifestyles, immigration realist Geert Wilders is stirring the pot to arouse the public before it's too late.
And there's nothing like telling the truth about Islam to arouse people.
Wilder, a member of the Dutch Parliament, recently released a long-awaited (and dreaded) short film called Fitna (strife, in Arabic) to reveal that violence was built into Islam from the start.
Fitna is brief, only 15 minutes long, but it packs a lot into that time. The point is unmistakable: murderous terrorism is not the result of a noble religion being "hijacked" by extremists who misunderstand the teachings. Islam's history is filled with war and bloodshed because its holy book has numerous instructions for followers to deal violently with non-Muslims.
Exhortations to slay the unbeliever are common. Among the major faiths, only Islam needs to define itself constantly as (in George W. Bush’s words) a "religion of peace"—because it isn't. Fitna leafs through pages of the Koran, with pertinent verses highlighted followed by an act of terrorism as an example of Koranic sensibility in action.
The film opens in the first seconds to Surah 8, verse 60...
Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry ye are able of gathering to strike terror to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, of Allah and your enemies.
That scripture is followed by a film clip of two planes flying into the World Trade Center, with a trapped woman's frantic call to an emergency operator: "I'm going to die, aren't I?... Yes, I'm going to die... I'm going to die. Please, God... It's so hot. I'm burning up."
The scene then switches to the horrific Atocha train station bombing in Spain, with religious comments from imams.
What makes Allah happy? Allah is happy when non-Muslims get killed. Annihilate the infidels and the polytheists. Your (Allah's) enemies and the enemies of the religion. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one, and don't leave even one.
See for yourself: Fitna (linked at JihadWatch).
Wilders wanted Fitna to be shown on Dutch television, but no stations were brave enough to broadcast it. He turned to the internet and persuaded Liveleak.com to post the film. In a short time, it was pulled because of "threats to our staff of a very serious nature". In a couple days, it was back, so presumably precautions were taken.
When it comes to telling the truth about the culture of Islam, no good deed goes unpunished, and the appeasement brigade has been in full activation mode. The Secretary General issued a press release condemning "hate speech." The Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen [Send him mail] denounced the film and said he found the "expressions extremely offensive." Dutch PM Jan Balkenende said he rejected the interpretation that "equates Islam with violence." Support for the free speech that undergirds representative government has been sadly lacking among Euro-elites in this episode.
Intimidation works against those who don't value freedom.
In a recent survey of the Arab world, 55 percent polled believed that offensive words were a permissible excuse for violence [Arabs find issue of religious extremism exaggerated: poll, Gulf Times, March 31 , 2008]
To sign a petition in support of Geert Wilders and his right to free expression, click here.
In our society, based largely although imperfectly on reason, it is easy to lose track of the primitive nature of Islamic fanatics, their characteristic cruelties and rigid belief in Muslim superiority. The public can easily forget Islam's goal of world domination under a caliphate, when the ACLU and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are working to undermine America.
Geert Wilders doesn't want us to forget what's important—saving western civilization in Europe.
A little background is in order. On Nov 2, 2004, Dutch artist Theo van Gogh was assassinated on an Amsterdam street by Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri because of van Gogh's film Submission. The film, made in partnership with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, used Koranic verses to illustrate Islam's integral brutality toward women.
At that time, a handful of public figures of the Netherlands put aside their country's usual PC reticence to state the truth about the shocking murder: a well known Dutch artist was killed because Muslims thought his ideas were insulting to Islam.
One of those people speaking out was Geert Wilders. Shortly after he began discussing the cultural background to the van Gogh assassination, he received so many death threats that 24/7 police protection was required. Wilders still needs bodyguards today, now that even more members of the Religion of Peace want him dead.
Wilders is not an alienated cultural bomb thrower, but is an elected member of the Netherlands government. He is a political leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), where he "has the most loyal following of all political parties in the Lower House" according to polling earlier this year. He was recently voted the most popular politician in the Netherlands. He is providing much-needed leadership on a vital issue that many elites prefer to sidestep. He has chosen an unusual venue—film—to make his point. But living with constant police protection has deprived him of the normal ways in which a politician communicates.
Let’s compare Geert Wilders, political leader, to another elected official on the thorny problem of leadership in the war for civilization:
George W. Bush has been worst possible war President. He launched a trillion-dollar military adventure on foreign soil, while leaving the homeland's borders wide open and the public unconnected to the ideas underlying the larger clash of cultures. To be effective, a President must name the enemy and warn the American people about what happens if the bad guys win. Instead, Bush has honored the ideology of the adversary in the White House in his annual Ramadan dinners, with little criticism from the MainStream Media [MSM].
In comparison, Geert Wilders has showed us the brutal nature of the Islamic foe, revealed by their own unapologetic words and actions. But other critics of Islam also focus on its objectionable beliefs and ideology. Wilders understands those things don't matter as much as the idiocy of allowing a fifth column to establish itself in your national home. Unwise immigration can pose a serious danger to a country's safety.
In earlier centuries, Muslim attacks on Europe were beaten back in military victories at Tours (732), Lepanto (1571) and Vienna (1683). Today Islam is accomplishing the goal of conquest through "terror and migration" as explained by scholar Bernard Lewis in a 2007 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute:
“In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms and two in particular: terror and migration.
“The subject of terror has been frequently discussed and in great detail, and I do not need to say very much about that now. What I do want to talk about is the other aspect of more particular relevance to Europe, and that is the question of migration.
“In earlier times, it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to a non-Muslim country. The jurists discuss this subject at great length in the textbooks and manuals of shari`a, but in a different form: is it permissible for a Muslim to live in or even visit a non-Muslim country?”
One of the best things about the nation-state is its boundaries that ideally keep out people who have hostile intentions and antithetical values. Multiculturalism, however, rejects that bit of common sense. It asserts that if we all hold hands kumbaya-style, then human differences will magically disappear.
But someone from the diversity committee forgot to tell the Muslims, because they are still bent on blowing us up.
Multicultural immigration, particularly Muslim (which has been increasing), has brought enemies into our midst. The European diversity disaster should scare us silly, but Political Correctness has prevented the prudent precaution of denying immigration to certain groups on a national security basis.
The poet Robert Frost famously defined a liberal as someone "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel".
Similarly, liberal societies are too broadminded in a multicultural sort of way to admit that the West really is better than Third-World backwaters of cultural cruelty, misogyny and dysfunction.
"I really believe that the Koran is a fascist book and Islam—which is more ideology, according to me, than religion—is something that is at least very bad for our values and our society. I’m not a cultural relativist. I believe that we should be proud of our culture. Our culture is far better than the more retarded Islamic culture."
Fitna is his plea that the West stop committing suicide through Muslim immigration. We should watch and listen.
Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. she hopes the success of Fitna spurs the production of more short documentaries on immigration-related subjects.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)