Hipster – Honkey – It’s All Rock And Roll To Me

I have seen many comments made because rich “Ghetto Blaster” Director and Writer Spike Lee is not happy to see so many white people living in his old Fort Greene Brooklyn neighborhood.

As for gentrification, I for one don’t see how to stop it short of restoring a lot of old so-called obsolete Capital Gains Taxes and apply them to real estate.

In a way, a lot of the beauty of nineteenth brownstones restored is expensive and now upper class. In a way it is unfair that value is now given to a place that was devalued over time simply because African-Americans ended up there and inhabited the cast-offs of a bygone era. Spike in giving value to his own memories is entitled to his 140 character opinions without all the new rich white trash in Fort Greene getting into a tizzy and spreading it like Brie cheese and or dog shit all over the media. 

Who you calling rich white trash, boy? Who you calling boy, boy? Kind of like the giraffe calling the zebra "Zoo" as I see it. 

I can remember thirty-five years ago when some of the cheapest rents in New York City were advertised in the Village Voice in Fort Greene. And I also heard the horror stories of people seeking decent affordable housing in a decaying part of the city and not being able to live there in Fort Greene because of constant burglaries while at work in Manhattan.

I am sorry that Spike cannot open his eyes without getting a rosy glass filtered image of the place he grew up which was in fact a living hellhole by most middle class standards when America was allowed the luxury of middle class standards, of and by their own origins, and not standards now imposed on us from above by corporations.

I for one am jealous when I see photos of Spike courtside at a Knicks game and have to wonder how much money that kind of shit costs. But as J.P.Morgan once said to riff-raff and middle class trash (like me) – “If you have to ask, you cannot afford it.” lol

Spike’s bitter pill of words is sometimes reflected I think in the environment of his youth that is perhaps too candy coated in memory to touch reality compared to the new global culture.

I have also taken a lot of Spike Lee’s bravado over the years with a big grain of salt. I remember an interview of years ago about why there is no great slavery movie(s) and he responded that American Blacks were not ready for it. In other words not interested in digging up the nasty past. And or a middle class black POV? Valid point then or now?

I see that a front runner for the Oscars this weekend is “Twelve Years A Slave”. I have to wonder if Spike has in any way invested in such an old Brownstone of an idea as a producer in such a film. 

Your guess is as good as mine.

.

RIP Shirley Temple - On the Good Ship Lollipop

.

Catholic Fascism in America – 1933 – the Movies, Media and Mind (Crowd) Control

Future Seat of Power in United States? Washington DC

Reading some of the data below made me recollect that I never saw my father go to the movies.  Our mother took us to the movies on occasion but for the most part it was just us siblings that made the trek to the local art deco palace, the Midway Theater in Philly, on most Saturday afternoons.

Midway Theater Philly under construction 1932

In fact my father never had a kind word for Hollywood when the topic would arise and his non-praise of the industry often contained descriptives that were in fact anti-Semitic.

Having done some research, apparently there was a cultural divide whereby I think the impact of talking motion pictures in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the standard violence of gang mob movies of the era got combined in the minds of the consumer with movies about divorce and infidelity.

The Christian Right was a little behind on this curve back then and it was the Catholic Church at the point in trying to gain control over the “artistic” abilities of a new industry.  These days, many complaints about videos games, violence, sex and the product does not fit into any old standard niche. Which leaves some to protest and want to control Content.

The movie industry that was new was trying to sell a product and did not want control from the church crowd or even the FDR big government crowd.  Somewhere in all the cultural war over movies came the Catholic Legion of Decency out of Chicago. But it did not have any legs or arms until outsiders came into play and manipulated the scene to gain power over the present then situation.

Having grown up in Philly, I had heard about the mighty Cardinal Dougherty who apparently did not issue a mere appeal for a Movie Code but a full Catholic Fatwa in 1934 against the whole movie industry, forbidding all Catholics to totally boycott all cinema.  A fatwa that he never bothered to rescind.

Ironic that about this time in 1935, Dougherty bought his humble forty plus room palace on the Philadelphia Main Line with its nine acres of privacy that had a private movie theater for hisself and his cronies to watch Hollywood movies.  Hypocrite!

Cardinal Dougherty Palace - Philadelphia

  

My father, the son of a church sexton, do doubt had the fear of God of being seen anywhere near a movie theater.  His father’s reputation and possible livelihood rode on the shoulders of a young teenager, a feeling I think that never left him. This looking over your shoulder is a feeling I think a lot of people in the present world, the recent and past world, speaks against the concept of freedom and for a government controlling the lives of its people in a fascist state. 
   

Hollywood picked up on the sexual laxity in the country and began making movies that depicted scenes that offended the Church. American Catholics were used to being told when to stand, sit and kneel, so when Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Pennsylvania declared that Hollywood’s movies were entirely based on sex and violence and forbid all Catholics to attend movies on pain of serious sin. Catholics listened and movie attendance dropped dramatically. Catholics did what they were told. 

When the movie moguls threatened to close all movie theatres in Philadelphia and put 15,000 people out of work in the time of the depression, the Cardinal said–Good, close them! They didn’t! The ban remains in effect to this day. The League of Decency came into being as Catholics drifted back to the theatres to face the threat of placing one in a state of an occasion of sin. 

That the guiding force that gave the American Catholic Bishops the push to do the most and take on Hollywood was none other than the recently appointed Papal Nuncio Amleto Giovanni Cicognani.  Cicognani was appointed Nuncio to coincide with the new FDR administration by Pius XI, the pope who signed a treaty with Mussolini to settle territory disputes from 1870 and to create the bizarre political state of the Vatican.  Pius XI also gave away Catholic political rights in Germany to the new Hitler Administration in exchange for private church perks and privileges. 

Papal Nuncio Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (center)

The German Concordat and the Lateran Treaty gave legitimacy to Italian and German Fascism by the Catholic Church for the sake of the private political agenda of the global Catholic Church.  Many say these two treaties are the basis, remote enabling factor, of the 50 million deaths in World War Two including the estimated six to twelve million victims of the German Concentration Camp Archipelago.

During World War II, Cicognani expressed reservations about Zionism. In a letter dated June 22, 1943 to American representative (to the Vatican)  Myron C. Taylor, he said: "It is true that at one time Palestine was inhabited by the Hebrew Race, but there is no axiom in history to substantiate the necessity of a people returning to a country they left nineteen centuries before …… If a 'Hebrew Home' is desired, it would not be too difficult to find a more fitting territory than Palestine. With an increase in the Jewish population there, grave, new international problems would arise.”

The fact that a Papal Nuncio was the spark to an internal secular matter regarding the movie industry controlled largely by banks and Jewish CEOs and managers makes me think that in the early thirties the RCC could do favors for Italian government and German government power agendas courtesy of an accommodating pope.

After more than three years of unholy and unwholesome screen fare, Catholics formed an organization to beat back the plague. Its official name was the National Legion of Decency—morally upright Protestants and Jews might enlist as well—but the group was known as the Legion of Decency or, more ominously, simply “the Legion.” 

A notion that had percolated in Catholic circles for years, the Legion took formal shape in October to November 1933, after Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (American Papal Nuncio), speaking at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York on the authority of Pope Pius XI, denounced “the incalculable influence for evil” exerted by the motion picture screen. 

“Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops, and the priests to a united front and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals,” said the bishop. Within a matter of weeks, the Legion of Decency congealed into the most feared of all the private protest groups bedeviling Hollywood. 

Backed by a coordinated network of Catholic weeklies whose front-page headlines, editorial broadsides, and scare-mongering cartoons fueled parishioner outrage, the Legion lanced Hollywood’s hide with pitiless zeal. It had numbers, focus, energy—and a blunt instrument. “Worn out by promises, tricked by pledges, deceived by codes, and dismayed by filth, the Church has finally decided to take action in the one way left for it—boycott,” warned Chicago’s Catholic weekly, the New World. 

The Legion was as good as its word, and it put its word into writing with a brilliant tactical device, the Legion pledge. A prayer-like pact, the Legion pledge was a contractual avowal signed by parishioners and recited in unison at Sunday masses, Knights of Columbus meetings, Ladies Sodalities gatherings, and parochial school assemblies. 

“I condemn absolutely those debauching motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land,” affirmed the pledger. “Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.”

The picture at the top of the page is the Papal Embassy in Washington DC, home of the current Papal Nuncio / Embassador Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò who you might remember is persona non grata these days in the Vatican and the basis of a great deal of dissent within the Vatican Curia regarding the dictatorial and extremely corrupt Bertone/Ratzinger administration, framed in the media under the title "Vatileaks".  

Which means the control from Rome no longer filters through a papal embassy but rather directly to the papal foot soldiers of the USCCB ready to take away our secular civil liberties through fascist propaganda “religious liberty” PR campaigns and such.

While I do not think that the RCC will ever have the dictatorial powers of a Cardinal Dougherty to attack the “Jews in Hollywood” like the 1930s, the RCC Rome can send millions of dollars into PACs and try and manipulate the American Election in 2012 via bishop/cardinal puppets, Dolan etc. following allegiance not to the United States but the King of Rome, Benedict XVI.

Cicognani BTW was American Papal Nuncio for twenty five years. He was instrumental in helping my cousin, his one time protégé, to carve out five counties of the Philadelphia Archdiocese into the new duchy diocese of Allentown Pennsylvania.  

The Allentown Diocese was a consolation prize for my cousin for not getting the Cardinal’s chair in Philly.  (Or so the family oral history states.)  That Philly chair in terms of papal and American politics got taken away from the traditional Irish American holder of said territory in favor of a new ethnic/economic center of power in America, perhaps negotiated by a Papal Nuncio, in the form of the Polish American future king/pope maker, John Krol.

452 Madison Ave NYC, Archbishop's Townhouse
(Residence of the President of the USCCB)

 *   *   *

Agora – Alejandro Amenabar – Hypatia of Alexandria

I caught an interesting flick on cable the other night.  It is called Agora (2009), (the Greek name for the Latin word Forum).  Set around the year 391 A.D., it is about the last days of paganism in the historic city of Alexandria in Egypt.

While it plays tricks with history, it is a beautifully filmed cinematic wonder, but not quite in the league with past big Hollywood blockbusters like Ben Hur and Cleopatra.  But close.

The grittiness of the sand and sun in Egypt is everywhere in this film.  And even if the Agora or Forum with its public buildings, markets and temples are probably made of paper mache, the sense of recreating these buildings is itself a refreshing attempt to reenact ancient history.   One has to wonder how much of this movie set is real and temporarily built and how much is computer aided design illusion.

While the set satisfies me as to accuracy, the history depicted in the film is questionable.

Because real history back then comes down to us in sparse pieces, historians have speculated and added to those sparse fragments to paint a picture that can be interpreted in many ways and at different times in history.

The film is directed by Chilean/Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, whose Oscar winning best foreign language film in 2005, The Sea Inside, was based on real life quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro’s almost thirty year struggle to have an assisted suicide.  That movie starred Javier Bardem in what I believe was his breakout role that got him his next big exposure in the American flick No Country for Old Men (2007).

Director Amenabar is openly gay in Spain.  I do not know if he is an atheist.

Much of the criticism of this movie Agora in the catholic blogosphere is shaped as “anti-Catholic”, presumably anti-Roman Catholic which is the predominate Christian sect in western Europe.  If anything it is framed as anti-Christian.  The pagans are now a minority in Alexandria in 391 and the Emperor in Constantinople outlaws all religions except Christianity.  You know what hits the fan.

There are of course riots.  Pagans against Christians and Christians against Jews in this final push for power of Constantine’s church here on this earth.

There is a certain anti-clericalism in movies made in Europe.  I am reminded of the German movie about the first female pope, Pope Joan (2009), or so the legend goes.

Agora is bent to show the final victory over the victory of the Christian faith over the disillusioned declining pagan faiths of the old Roman and Egyptian empires. 

Rather than do some scholarly history about what is what in 391 Alexandria, a lot of myth is repeated and no doubt a great deal of what the public might perceive in the historic female philosopher/mathematician Hypatia comes from modern sources such as the Atheist American Astronomer Carl Sagan in his TV series Cosmos in 1980. 

Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.(Sagan, p. 366)

Is this movie anti-catholic?  Not really.  Is it anti-Christian?  No.  Is it perhaps a bit anti-Byzantine Orthodox or anti-Coptic?  But you must remember that many sides in the day had to have their own thugs to protect their own interests in the day.

Even the last segments of a Roman Army cannot control the mobs that control and swarm over Alexandria. 

Hypatia (played by Rachel Weisz) is out of her league in terms of probable history.  Hypatia was likely over sixty when she was killed by a mob.  Hardly the likely love interest of a young Christian slave boy.  

That the mob happened to be Christian and she was a well known member of the pagan Alexandria aristocracy, so she was well known enough to incite anger, jealousy or political rage. 

Besides the age thing, the movie has Hypatia researching gravity and the sun as the center of the solar system.  Possible but not probable. 

There is of course one scene where the supposedly surviving annex of the previously destroyed Library of Alexandria is sacked by a Christian mob.  This is what I see most mentioned in blogs.  The Catholics don’t like that scene in particular, though in reality a small defunct library had once probably existed in the Serapeum, a temple complex devoted to the Ptolemaic Greek/Egyptian fusion/invented god Serapis – and destroyed after the Byzantine Emperor’s anti-pagan edict.

I may be just another dumbed down American who was taught no real history in twelve years of catholic education before George Washington and his cherry tree or Ben Franklin and his kite.

Never heard of Hypatia before a few days when I saw the flick Agora on cable TV.  I am a Rachel Weisz fan.  Loved her in that Kabbalah inspired movie The Fountain (2006).

The Movies from day one have fractured history in order to get the story into an allotted time along with standard movie story telling technique.

I like revisionist history.  The first time I hear about history stuff is usually in the movies such as the Inquisition lasting in Spain until the nineteeth century – Goya’s Ghosts (2006).  Etc.

It stimulates me to research the moments mentioned and get a better handle on the reality of the fantasy depicted in the movie.

Movies can be powerful things.  Powerful tools of entertainment and also potentially powerful tools of propaganda if you don’t like the way your ancestors are depicted by a director passionate about his craft.  That craft is telling a story.

I see that Agora was virtually shut out of American theatres with maybe a dozen screens going through a season.  Have to wonder if the Catholic League got through again and got their way again in suppressing ideas more so than cinematography in this very interesting piece of visual “cultural” history?

Looking at the bottom line and the lack of interest of the Vatican and or the Catholic League in this film, I would guess that Amenabar was not looking for or could not find an American distributor for this small gem of film in 2009.