The MeToo Movement died last month. It bled out slowly as it limped to
the barn. It’s hard to say who the triggerman was behind the coup de
grace, but it wasn’t Joe Biden. That derelict beast is anything but a
feminist and this wound was clearly self-inflicted. My guess is the
artery was severed by Nancy Pelosi during a press conference when she
uttered the appalling epitaph, “Joe Biden is Joe Biden.”, officially
declaring the unspoken hypocrisy that certain rapists are above the law
by divine right of political convenience.
Nancy is hardly the reliable feminist herself, but at that moment she
appeared to be speaking for a movement that had collectively sacrificed
its conscience, in some sick ritual slaughter, to the gods of partisan
lesser-evilism. One by one, the majority of this grassroots movement’s
leadership capitulated to these gods, responding to the testimony of
their fellow survivor, Tara Reade, with a shrug at best and outright
character assassination at worst. Rose McGowan seemed to stand alone
again in her rage and indignation, this time abandoned by her own
sisters. I feel her rage. Though this is hardly the first time the
movement was ambushed by white cis-gender liberals and it probably wont
be the last, I have never been more ashamed to be a feminist.
-- Nicky Reid, "Because Imperialists Rape: Anarcha-Feminism In the Ashes of the MeToo Era" (COUNTERPUNCH).
Tuesday, June 09, 2020
Truest statement of the week II
The heights of the most shameful lies were reserved for Marc Morial , former New Orleans mayor and President of the National Urban League, and Susan Rice ,
former National Security Adviser. In separate interviews they both
accused the Russian government of instigating discontent. “If it is
white supremacists, if it is Russians, if it is other foreign actors
who’ve tried to exploit the pain and exploit legitimate protests, then
this is a new level in our country, and they should be arrested and
prosecuted as well,” said the overly dramatic Morial. Rice said the
protests were, “Right out of the Russian playbook.”
It is hard to believe that either of them really believes anything they said. They are opportunists and cynics and they are joined at the hip with the Democrats’ donor class. These black quislings obey everyone except their own people. Their con game is to give a pretense of black empowerment while doing the bidding of others. If that means repeating disproven propaganda, then so be it.
The underlings and their patrons are afraid. They know that if young black and white people find common cause they may march for other reasons too. They may lead general strikes, demand an end to war or try to resurrect the Occupy movement. It is better to cast aspersions now instead of risking needed change that would undermine their positions.
-- Margaret Kimberley, "Freedom Rider: Black Misleaders Seek to End Protest" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
It is hard to believe that either of them really believes anything they said. They are opportunists and cynics and they are joined at the hip with the Democrats’ donor class. These black quislings obey everyone except their own people. Their con game is to give a pretense of black empowerment while doing the bidding of others. If that means repeating disproven propaganda, then so be it.
The underlings and their patrons are afraid. They know that if young black and white people find common cause they may march for other reasons too. They may lead general strikes, demand an end to war or try to resurrect the Occupy movement. It is better to cast aspersions now instead of risking needed change that would undermine their positions.
-- Margaret Kimberley, "Freedom Rider: Black Misleaders Seek to End Protest" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
A note to our readers
Hey --
Tuesday.
Let's thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
And what did we come up with?
Peace,
-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.
Tuesday.
Let's thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.
And what did we come up with?
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- Editorial: War Hawk Joe is a threat to Muslims
- TV: Forget HBO MAX, HBO standard delivers right no...
- WIKIAPEDIA gets it wrong again
- Ty's Corner
- Video to catch
- The Forever War: From The Killing Fields
- To the graduating class of 2020, my message from h...
- This edition's playlist
- Highlights
Peace,
-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.
Editorial: War Hawk Joe is a threat to Muslims
Joe Biden's got a new hurdle, THE HILL insists, winning as a front runner. Don't get too excited Joe-hoos, Biden's been hiding for weeks. That tends to pump up his ratings. He has to be in your face constantly for you to grasp just how senile and stupid he is.
Mike chose him as "Idiot of the week" last week because, among other things, Joe shared his secret for addressing police violence -- have the police shoot us in our legs and not our chests.
Joe Biden, he's not afraid to look stupid.
And speaking of looks, it looks like Krystal Ball's edging on over to Joe. She's to be our come-to-Jesus moment. As she slowly makes and details her conversion, we're supposed to go along.
Sorry, it's not happening.
Just like RISING refuses to cover the fact that Joe's support is coming from his fellow War Hawks -- Bill Kristol, Collie Powell, Condi Rice, Bully Boy Bush, etc.
C.I. noted Monday:
Joe and that crowd sold the illegal Iraq War. They've never taken accountability. The closest Joe has gotten to accountability and an apology is to say Bully Boy Bush tricked him. That lie might work for the laughable Tulsi Gabbard but for those of us who aren't whores? Nope.
Anyone who says Joe is a safer choice -- with those allies -- is either a liar or someone who doesn't give a damn about Muslims. Joe Biden was part of an administration that terrorized Muslims. The Drone War? Did you miss it?
It's the height of self-involvement to act as though War Criminal Joe will be a 'safe' choice for the White House.
He won't address climate change, he won't end the wars and he is a known threat to Muslims around the world.
Are we not going to have this conversation?
Mike chose him as "Idiot of the week" last week because, among other things, Joe shared his secret for addressing police violence -- have the police shoot us in our legs and not our chests.
Joe Biden, he's not afraid to look stupid.
And speaking of looks, it looks like Krystal Ball's edging on over to Joe. She's to be our come-to-Jesus moment. As she slowly makes and details her conversion, we're supposed to go along.
Sorry, it's not happening.
Just like RISING refuses to cover the fact that Joe's support is coming from his fellow War Hawks -- Bill Kristol, Collie Powell, Condi Rice, Bully Boy Bush, etc.
C.I. noted Monday:
John Stauber offers:
I am hoping that Crazy Joe picks
for VP! All the despicable #WeaponsOfMassDeception gang on one ticket!
It's very telling who Joe Biden's constituency is. Neocons like Bill Kristol. Liars like David Frum.
Trash like War Criminal Colin Powell. Collie lied to the United
Nations in order to help start the Iraq War. (See Ava and my "TV Review: Barbara and Colin remake The Way We Were.")
He was part of a team of liars that also included Dick Cheney, Condi
Rice, John Bolton and Bully Boy Bush among others. He's gone on to lie
about his lies. And yet today he wanted to whine about Donald Trump
lying. Sarah Abdallah observes:
Colin Powell, who lied to the entire world about WMDs in Iraq, paving the way for an illegal war that killed and displaced millions of innocents, gave rise to ISIS, and destabilized the Middle East, is actually out here today lecturing us about lies.
Joe and that crowd sold the illegal Iraq War. They've never taken accountability. The closest Joe has gotten to accountability and an apology is to say Bully Boy Bush tricked him. That lie might work for the laughable Tulsi Gabbard but for those of us who aren't whores? Nope.
Anyone who says Joe is a safer choice -- with those allies -- is either a liar or someone who doesn't give a damn about Muslims. Joe Biden was part of an administration that terrorized Muslims. The Drone War? Did you miss it?
It's the height of self-involvement to act as though War Criminal Joe will be a 'safe' choice for the White House.
He won't address climate change, he won't end the wars and he is a known threat to Muslims around the world.
Are we not going to have this conversation?
TV: Forget HBO MAX, HBO standard delivers right now
HBO MAX has a lot of people talking about HBO these days. Sadly, not really a good thing. ROKU and AMAZON FIRE users, for example, are left out. Honestly, so are many HULU subscribers. If they're a HULU subscriber with a ROKU or FIRE stick or a ROKU TV, they're left out.
Sure, their icon changed to HBO MAX but that didn't mean they had access. These same paying customers can go to their tablets, phones, laptops, ect, install the HBO MAX app and stream HBO MAX on those devices. But they can't do it on HULU.
If you doubt us on this, find someone who pays for HBO LIVE TV with an HBO add-on and they have a ROKU TV. On the TV while pulling up HBO, the icon tells them it's HBO MAX but it's not. The easiest way to prove this is to search HULU for FRIENDS. The only result will be TBS. Search FRIENDS on a device that's not a ROKU TV and they can pull up all the episodes of FRIENDS.
HBO MAX is a huge disaster and not just for ROKU and AMAZON FIRE but also for HULU.
It's a shame because Anna Kendrick has a strong series, LOVE LIFE, on HBO MAX. A lot of people are missing that. A lot of people are missing a lot, in fact. as they try to navigate HBO in any variation.
We'd recommend those people check out YEARS AND YEARS -- a six-part mini-series that debuted in June of last year. The show has a strong cast including actors well known to US audiences such as the celebrated and acclaimed Emma Thompson as well as Russell Tovey who has starred on ABC's QUANTICO and in many Americans wet dreams.
In June of 2019, it was a strong show. Right now, it's even stronger.
YEARS AND YEARS was created by Russell T. Davies who also created QUEER AS FOLK, DARK SEASON, TORCHWOOD, THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES and he wrote the BBC and AMAZON PRIME series A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL starring Hugh Grant.
With YEARS AND YEARS, Davies is focusing on the Lyons family -- Russell Tovey plays the younger brother Daniel who is married to Ralph (Dino Fetscher) when the story begins but is also attracted to Ukranian refugee Viktor (Maxim Baldry). His olber brother Stephen (Rory Kinnear) is married to Celeste (T'Nia Miller) and they have two daughters -- Bethany (Lydia West) and Ruby (Jade Alleyne). Stephen and Daniel's youngest sister is Rosie (Ruth Madeley) who is raising her two children while the oldest sister is Edith (Jessica Hynes) who occupies her life with political activism. The adult children's mother is dead, their father is estranged. Presiding over the family is their grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid).
As the series begins, it's 2019 and Vivienne Rook is a business person who wants to be a Member of Parliament. Daniel can't stand her, Rosie thinks she's wonderful and Edith thinks Vivienne's incompetence will bring anarchy (which Edith welcomes). We then travel over fifteen years where a great deal happens -- including Vivienne's political success.
Vivienne's political success means doom for many people -- anyone not in the 1% basically.
Viktor ends up in a secret detention camp. Vivienne not only starts these, she sees it as a money making opportunity and wants to sell of the rights to run these camps. No one will ever be released, she explains, they'll just die there eventually -- from neglect.
But what would people think?
Vivienne doesn't see it as a problem. She invokes the name of Herbert Kitchener who ran the British concentration camps in South Africa. From WIKIPEDIA:
British concentration camps refers to camps which were operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War which lasted from 1900–1902. The term concentration camp grew in prominence during that period. The camps had originally been set up by the British Army as refugee camps in order to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for any reason which was related to the war. However, when the Earl Kitchener took command of the British forces in late 1900, he introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. An epidemic of measles killed thousands.[1] According to the historian, Thomas Pakenham, Kitchener initiated plans to flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined by a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children ... It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.[2]
As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy—including the systematic destruction of crops and the slaughtering or removal of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms—to prevent the Boers from resupplying themselves from a home base, many tens of thousands of men, women and children were forcibly moved into the camps.[3][4] This was not the first appearance of internment camps, as the Spanish had used internment in Cuba in the Ten Years' War, but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.[3]
Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps which were built for Boer internees and 64 additional camps which were built for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men who were captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers who remained in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children perished in these concentration camps.[5]
The camps were poorly administered from the outset and they became increasingly overcrowded when Kitchener's troops implemented the internment strategy on a vast scale. Conditions were terrible for the health of the internees, mainly due to neglect, poor hygiene and bad sanitation. The supply of all items was unreliable, partly because of the constant disruption of communication lines by the Boers. The food rations were meager and there was a two-tier allocation policy, whereby families of men who were still fighting were routinely given smaller rations than others.[6] The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable.[7] Coupled with a shortage of modern medical facilities, many of the internees died.
In 2001, Paul Harris (GUARDIAN) noted that the letters and photographs owned by South African Major Hamilton Goold-Adams was being auctioned off:
'It is an episode that British people very clearly want to forget and brush under the carpet. It was grim and reprehensible,' said Roger Westwood-Brookes, a documents expert at Dominic Winter Book Auctions, the firm that is selling the archive.
Some of the correspondence reveals the horrific death rate the camps caused. One letter, written at the end of 1901, lamented the fact that the death rate among young children in the camps was still not dropping. 'The theory that, all the weakly children being dead, the rate would fall off is not so far borne out by the facts,' Milner wrote. 'The strong ones must be dying now and they will all be dead by the spring of 1903.'
The tragedy was exposed by British campaigner Emily Hobhouse and caused a political scandal. She was labelled a 'turncoat' for her activities by politicians.
Mark Oliver (ALL THAT IS INTERESTING) notes:
By the end of the Boer War, an estimated 46,370 civilians were dead – most of them children. It was the first time in the 20th century that a whole nation was systematically rounded up, imprisoned, and exterminated.
But nothing tells the story as well as the photographs. In Emily Hobhouse's words: "I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It's just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing."
It's a dirty part of history and one that some very evil people try to refute even today. In the mini-series, Vivienne notes that most people don't know about the concentration camps and that they aren't taught about in British schools. This will be what happens, she insists, with the modern day concentration camps.
And she might have been right if a modern day Emily Hobhouse didn't exist among the characters.
As the fifteen years passes, there is flooding, there are lands that are no more and can't support populations, it's dystopian.
But unlike the various dystopian films of the last two decades, what happens in YEARS AND YEARS actually matters.
Let's look at a non-dystopian film for a moment: DARK PHOENIX. That film didn't matter. It was worthless. One film prior, a new cast was offered and Jean Grey didn't really stand out in X-MEN APOCALYPSE nor did her relationship with Cyclops. The love triangle that she, Cyclops and Wolverine were in the comics? Completely skipped over by the film and its follow up DARK PHOENIX. How are we supposed to care about a new character whose story has never been told?
And that's what the various teen dystopian films did as well. They failed to establish a world where losses mattered. YEAR AFTER YEAR creates true horror because when someone dies, for example, attempting to rescue a refugee, we know the character, we know why this matters and we know how the loss will impact the other characters.
YEAR AFTER YEAR is the best original content HBO has offered since the first season of BIG LITTLE LIES. It's an amazing and involving show -- one that grabs you by the heart while also engaging your brain.
If you're among the many paying for HBO but unable to utilize HBO MAX currently, take comfort in the fact that you don't need HBO MAX right now to access the best thing HBO has to offer currently.
Sure, their icon changed to HBO MAX but that didn't mean they had access. These same paying customers can go to their tablets, phones, laptops, ect, install the HBO MAX app and stream HBO MAX on those devices. But they can't do it on HULU.
If you doubt us on this, find someone who pays for HBO LIVE TV with an HBO add-on and they have a ROKU TV. On the TV while pulling up HBO, the icon tells them it's HBO MAX but it's not. The easiest way to prove this is to search HULU for FRIENDS. The only result will be TBS. Search FRIENDS on a device that's not a ROKU TV and they can pull up all the episodes of FRIENDS.
HBO MAX is a huge disaster and not just for ROKU and AMAZON FIRE but also for HULU.
It's a shame because Anna Kendrick has a strong series, LOVE LIFE, on HBO MAX. A lot of people are missing that. A lot of people are missing a lot, in fact. as they try to navigate HBO in any variation.
We'd recommend those people check out YEARS AND YEARS -- a six-part mini-series that debuted in June of last year. The show has a strong cast including actors well known to US audiences such as the celebrated and acclaimed Emma Thompson as well as Russell Tovey who has starred on ABC's QUANTICO and in many Americans wet dreams.
In June of 2019, it was a strong show. Right now, it's even stronger.
YEARS AND YEARS was created by Russell T. Davies who also created QUEER AS FOLK, DARK SEASON, TORCHWOOD, THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES and he wrote the BBC and AMAZON PRIME series A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL starring Hugh Grant.
With YEARS AND YEARS, Davies is focusing on the Lyons family -- Russell Tovey plays the younger brother Daniel who is married to Ralph (Dino Fetscher) when the story begins but is also attracted to Ukranian refugee Viktor (Maxim Baldry). His olber brother Stephen (Rory Kinnear) is married to Celeste (T'Nia Miller) and they have two daughters -- Bethany (Lydia West) and Ruby (Jade Alleyne). Stephen and Daniel's youngest sister is Rosie (Ruth Madeley) who is raising her two children while the oldest sister is Edith (Jessica Hynes) who occupies her life with political activism. The adult children's mother is dead, their father is estranged. Presiding over the family is their grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid).
As the series begins, it's 2019 and Vivienne Rook is a business person who wants to be a Member of Parliament. Daniel can't stand her, Rosie thinks she's wonderful and Edith thinks Vivienne's incompetence will bring anarchy (which Edith welcomes). We then travel over fifteen years where a great deal happens -- including Vivienne's political success.
Vivienne's political success means doom for many people -- anyone not in the 1% basically.
Viktor ends up in a secret detention camp. Vivienne not only starts these, she sees it as a money making opportunity and wants to sell of the rights to run these camps. No one will ever be released, she explains, they'll just die there eventually -- from neglect.
But what would people think?
Vivienne doesn't see it as a problem. She invokes the name of Herbert Kitchener who ran the British concentration camps in South Africa. From WIKIPEDIA:
British concentration camps refers to camps which were operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War which lasted from 1900–1902. The term concentration camp grew in prominence during that period. The camps had originally been set up by the British Army as refugee camps in order to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for any reason which was related to the war. However, when the Earl Kitchener took command of the British forces in late 1900, he introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. An epidemic of measles killed thousands.[1] According to the historian, Thomas Pakenham, Kitchener initiated plans to flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined by a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children ... It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.[2]
As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy—including the systematic destruction of crops and the slaughtering or removal of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms—to prevent the Boers from resupplying themselves from a home base, many tens of thousands of men, women and children were forcibly moved into the camps.[3][4] This was not the first appearance of internment camps, as the Spanish had used internment in Cuba in the Ten Years' War, but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.[3]
Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps which were built for Boer internees and 64 additional camps which were built for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men who were captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers who remained in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children perished in these concentration camps.[5]
The camps were poorly administered from the outset and they became increasingly overcrowded when Kitchener's troops implemented the internment strategy on a vast scale. Conditions were terrible for the health of the internees, mainly due to neglect, poor hygiene and bad sanitation. The supply of all items was unreliable, partly because of the constant disruption of communication lines by the Boers. The food rations were meager and there was a two-tier allocation policy, whereby families of men who were still fighting were routinely given smaller rations than others.[6] The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable.[7] Coupled with a shortage of modern medical facilities, many of the internees died.
In 2001, Paul Harris (GUARDIAN) noted that the letters and photographs owned by South African Major Hamilton Goold-Adams was being auctioned off:
'It is an episode that British people very clearly want to forget and brush under the carpet. It was grim and reprehensible,' said Roger Westwood-Brookes, a documents expert at Dominic Winter Book Auctions, the firm that is selling the archive.
Some of the correspondence reveals the horrific death rate the camps caused. One letter, written at the end of 1901, lamented the fact that the death rate among young children in the camps was still not dropping. 'The theory that, all the weakly children being dead, the rate would fall off is not so far borne out by the facts,' Milner wrote. 'The strong ones must be dying now and they will all be dead by the spring of 1903.'
The tragedy was exposed by British campaigner Emily Hobhouse and caused a political scandal. She was labelled a 'turncoat' for her activities by politicians.
Mark Oliver (ALL THAT IS INTERESTING) notes:
By the end of the Boer War, an estimated 46,370 civilians were dead – most of them children. It was the first time in the 20th century that a whole nation was systematically rounded up, imprisoned, and exterminated.
But nothing tells the story as well as the photographs. In Emily Hobhouse's words: "I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It's just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing."
It's a dirty part of history and one that some very evil people try to refute even today. In the mini-series, Vivienne notes that most people don't know about the concentration camps and that they aren't taught about in British schools. This will be what happens, she insists, with the modern day concentration camps.
And she might have been right if a modern day Emily Hobhouse didn't exist among the characters.
As the fifteen years passes, there is flooding, there are lands that are no more and can't support populations, it's dystopian.
But unlike the various dystopian films of the last two decades, what happens in YEARS AND YEARS actually matters.
Let's look at a non-dystopian film for a moment: DARK PHOENIX. That film didn't matter. It was worthless. One film prior, a new cast was offered and Jean Grey didn't really stand out in X-MEN APOCALYPSE nor did her relationship with Cyclops. The love triangle that she, Cyclops and Wolverine were in the comics? Completely skipped over by the film and its follow up DARK PHOENIX. How are we supposed to care about a new character whose story has never been told?
And that's what the various teen dystopian films did as well. They failed to establish a world where losses mattered. YEAR AFTER YEAR creates true horror because when someone dies, for example, attempting to rescue a refugee, we know the character, we know why this matters and we know how the loss will impact the other characters.
YEAR AFTER YEAR is the best original content HBO has offered since the first season of BIG LITTLE LIES. It's an amazing and involving show -- one that grabs you by the heart while also engaging your brain.
If you're among the many paying for HBO but unable to utilize HBO MAX currently, take comfort in the fact that you don't need HBO MAX right now to access the best thing HBO has to offer currently.
WIKIAPEDIA gets it wrong again
We call it CRAPAPEDIA for a reason. See if you can spot the error below in the list of Diana Ross compilation albums:
Did you catch it?
Here's a clue.
DIANA ROSS SINGS SONGS FROM THE WIZ -- reviewed here by Kat -- is not a compilation album. It does not gather recordings from various albums and put them all on one album.
This is a studio album that Diana recorded at the end of the 70s with the intent of it being released at the start of 1979.
From the MOTOWN press release:
Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz was originally scheduled for release on Motown Records in January 1979, after the film version of the hit Broadway musical premiered in October, 1978. After filming, Ross had entered the studio in Los Angeles at the request of Motown, which commissioned producer/arranger Lee Holdridge to record her singing cover versions of the songs from The Wiz, assuming all the roles, delivering what we now can hear as a tour-de-force performance. Recreating not only her part as the naive Dorothy on the smash "Ease on Down the Road," which she performed as a duet with a young Michael Jackson in the film, the signature "Is This What Feeling Gets?" and the Luther Vandross-penned show-stopper, "A Brand New Day (Everybody Rejoice)," Ross also took on the goofy Scarecrow ("You Can't Win"), the yearning Tin Man ("Slide Some Oil To Me"), the tough, but tender-hearted Lion ("[I'm a Mean] Old Lion"), the endearing mother figure Aunt Em ("The Feeling We Once Had"), the eccentric Wiz ("So You Wanted To Meet the Wizard"), the Evil Witch ("Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News") and the heroic Good Witch ("Believe In Yourself").
"We literally ran into the studio in a great hurry to do this," recalls Holdridge, who had previously worked with Ross handling orchestrations and arrangements for the feature film Mahogany, and co-produced the album with Suzanne dePasse and Ross. "We knew all the keys and stuff like that, so we tried to emulate what some of the film tracks were like. Diana was excited about it."
It had been a long-standing dream for Diana Ross to play Dorothy, and singing all the songs for this album was a tribute to her versatility as a vocalist. Her emotion can be felt on two ballads that didn't make the movie's final cut, including "Wonder Wonder Why," written for the original stage show, but deleted before opening, and Ashford & Simpson's "Is This What Feeling Gets?," with music from Quincy Jones, which was recorded for and included in the film soundtrack, but deleted from the movie itself. Until the belated release of Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz, the only track that had been available was "Home," as part of her 2001 Motown Anthology compilation. That song remained a staple of Miss Ross' stage show for years, along with, for a short while, a truncated performance of the album in which she played all the parts, just as she does on this long-unavailable release.
Ross's solo take on the project was intended to complement the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of The Wiz, which was produced by Quincy Jones and Ashford & Simpson. The soundtrack was a commercial success reaching gold status in the US and spawning the top 40 single, "Ease On Down The Road" featuring Diana Ross and a 20-year-old Michael Jackson.
As explained above, this is a studio album. Diana went into the studio and recorded each track with the intent of this being MOTOWN's WIZ album.
CRAPAPEDIA. There's a reason so many of us don't trust it -- it can't even get the basics right.
Compilation albums
| Title | Album details | Peak chart positions | Certifications | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US [1] |
US R&B [1] |
AUS [2] |
CAN [3] |
NLD [4] |
UK [5] | |||
| Greatest Hits |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 34 | |
| Diana Ross' Greatest Hits[A] |
|
13 | 10 | 47 | 6 | — | 2 | |
| 20 Golden Greats |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 2 | |
| To Love Again |
|
32 | 16 | — | — | 39 | 26 | |
| All the Great Hits |
|
37 | 14 | — | — | 24 | 21 | |
| Collection |
|
— | — | 27 | — | — | — | |
| Diana's Duets |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 43 | |
| Love Songs |
|
— | — | 86 | — | — | 5 | |
| Anthology |
|
63 | 44 | — | — | — | — | |
| Portrait |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 8 | |
| Love Songs |
|
— | — | — | — | 10 | — | |
| Dance Songs |
|
— | — | — | — | 24 | — | |
| Love Songs (with Michael Jackson) |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 12 | |
| The Diana Ross Story |
|
— | — | 40 | — | — | — | |
| Motown's Greatest Hits |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 20 | |
| Forever Diana: Musical Memoirs |
|
— | 88 | — | — | — | — | |
| One Woman: The Ultimate Collection |
|
— | — | — | — | 55 | 1 | |
| Diana Extended: The Remixes |
|
— | 68 | — | — | — | 58 | |
| Voice of Love Gift of Love (in Asian markets) |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 42 | |
| Greatest Hits: The RCA Years |
|
— | — | — | — | — | — | |
| 40 Golden Motown Greats |
|
— | — | — | — | — | 35 | |
| Love & Life: The Very Best of Diana Ross |
|
— | — | — | — | 100 | 28 | |
| Diana Ross & the Supremes: The No. 1's |
|
72 | 63 | — | — | 18 | 15 | |
| Soul Legends |
|
— | — | — | — | 86 | — | |
| The Definitive Collection |
|
— | — | — | — | — | — | |
| Playlist Your Way |
|
— | 100 | — | — | — | — | |
| Complete Collection |
|
— | — | — | — | 5 | — | |
| The Greatest |
|
— | — | — | — | 97 | 24 | |
| Icon |
|
— | 72 | — | — | — | — | |
| Upside Down: The Collection |
|
— | — | — | — | — | — | |
| Playlist: The Very Best of Diana Ross |
|
— | — | — | — | — | — | |
| Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz |
|
— | 36 | — | — | — | — | |
| Diamond Diana: The Legacy Collection |
|
30 | 18 | — | — | — | — | |
| Supertonic: Mixes |
| — | — | — | — | — | — | |
Did you catch it?
Here's a clue.
DIANA ROSS SINGS SONGS FROM THE WIZ -- reviewed here by Kat -- is not a compilation album. It does not gather recordings from various albums and put them all on one album.
This is a studio album that Diana recorded at the end of the 70s with the intent of it being released at the start of 1979.
From the MOTOWN press release:
Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz was originally scheduled for release on Motown Records in January 1979, after the film version of the hit Broadway musical premiered in October, 1978. After filming, Ross had entered the studio in Los Angeles at the request of Motown, which commissioned producer/arranger Lee Holdridge to record her singing cover versions of the songs from The Wiz, assuming all the roles, delivering what we now can hear as a tour-de-force performance. Recreating not only her part as the naive Dorothy on the smash "Ease on Down the Road," which she performed as a duet with a young Michael Jackson in the film, the signature "Is This What Feeling Gets?" and the Luther Vandross-penned show-stopper, "A Brand New Day (Everybody Rejoice)," Ross also took on the goofy Scarecrow ("You Can't Win"), the yearning Tin Man ("Slide Some Oil To Me"), the tough, but tender-hearted Lion ("[I'm a Mean] Old Lion"), the endearing mother figure Aunt Em ("The Feeling We Once Had"), the eccentric Wiz ("So You Wanted To Meet the Wizard"), the Evil Witch ("Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News") and the heroic Good Witch ("Believe In Yourself").
"We literally ran into the studio in a great hurry to do this," recalls Holdridge, who had previously worked with Ross handling orchestrations and arrangements for the feature film Mahogany, and co-produced the album with Suzanne dePasse and Ross. "We knew all the keys and stuff like that, so we tried to emulate what some of the film tracks were like. Diana was excited about it."
It had been a long-standing dream for Diana Ross to play Dorothy, and singing all the songs for this album was a tribute to her versatility as a vocalist. Her emotion can be felt on two ballads that didn't make the movie's final cut, including "Wonder Wonder Why," written for the original stage show, but deleted before opening, and Ashford & Simpson's "Is This What Feeling Gets?," with music from Quincy Jones, which was recorded for and included in the film soundtrack, but deleted from the movie itself. Until the belated release of Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz, the only track that had been available was "Home," as part of her 2001 Motown Anthology compilation. That song remained a staple of Miss Ross' stage show for years, along with, for a short while, a truncated performance of the album in which she played all the parts, just as she does on this long-unavailable release.
Ross's solo take on the project was intended to complement the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of The Wiz, which was produced by Quincy Jones and Ashford & Simpson. The soundtrack was a commercial success reaching gold status in the US and spawning the top 40 single, "Ease On Down The Road" featuring Diana Ross and a 20-year-old Michael Jackson.
As explained above, this is a studio album. Diana went into the studio and recorded each track with the intent of this being MOTOWN's WIZ album.
CRAPAPEDIA. There's a reason so many of us don't trust it -- it can't even get the basics right.
Ty's Corner
AMAZON. I pay for streaming music. It used to be AMAZON PRIME. Then they had a new program that was a few dollars more. Then . . .
So I pay. I pay for a lot of services. Most are just a waste of time and money. I don't feel that way with AMAZON MUSIC. This weekend, for example, my boyfriend and I were celebrating an anniversary and had some romantic stuff planned.
We both forgot music. So a quick GOOGLE of "romantic music" found Frank Sinatra popping up repeatedly. Not an expert on Frank. I know many of his films -- FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, GUYS AND DOLLS, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, OCEAN'S 11, TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME, OUT ON THE TOWN, THE DETECTIVE, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, ANCHORS AWAY, SOME CAME RUNNING, TONY ROME, LADY IN CEMENT . . .
But not his singing unless it was in a musical or the album IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING.
So we went with Frank and heard some solid albums: CYCLES; SINATRA SINGS DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, MOON RIVER, AND OTHER ACADEMY AWARD WINNERS (especially "Moon River"); SEPTEMBER OF MY YEARS; and STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT.
Great songs, solid albums and I only know them now because of AMAZON.
I like torch songs -- Sinatra also called them "saloon songs" in one live album we listened to.
A lot of people think they can sing them but they really can't.
Unpopular opinion, I'm sure, but Linda Ronstadt can't sing torch songs. She thinks she can -- or could. Doing three of them in the 80s only exposed how she can have wonderful arrangements but offer very little.
Carly Simon, in 1981 with her TORCH album, really kicked off the modern singers singing torch songs. Carly can do it. I don't care for FILM NOIR -- don't care for the keys the songs are in, don't care for most of the choices. But Carly has delivered with TORCH, INTO WHITE, MOONLIGHT SERENADE and especially MY ROMANCE.
It's on MY ROMANCE that you really grasp how Carly can do what Linda doesn't. Linda goes all over with the notes but her voice never seems full bodied. Carly's voice is full bodied and alive. It delivers.
We weren't impressed with FRANK SINATRA's DUETS album. The 1993 album found Frank recording his part and then other singers recording their parts. Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin, Bono, Tony Bennett, Liza Minnelli, Natalie Cole, Luther Vandross, etc. Great singers and also Bono. But the only track that worked for my boyfriend and I was "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry/In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning," the duet he does with Carly. It takes more than pretty notes, you have to believe and Carly clearly believes as she sings.
AMAZON's suggestions? I'm never very keen on them.
For example, after we listened to multiple Frank Sinatra albums, the new suggestion was Joan Baez. How is that related? Why would I want to hear Joan Baez after listening to Frank Sinatra? (Or why would I want to hear Joan Baez period? As an African-American, I recoiled over her appareance on THE LAURA FLANDERS SHOW where she kept referring to African-Americans as "colored" and thought she was cute to do so.)
But if there's someone a friend mentions or that I read about, AMAZON is a place I can go and immediately stream.
Video to catch
Two weeks ago, Corey Hart released a new version of his classic hit "Never Surrender."
The Forever War: From The Killing Fields
Marine Corps infantryman turned anti-war activist tells Abby Martin the hidden reality of the endless Afghanistan War. Keep Empire Files independent and ad-free: https://www.patreon.com/empirefiles FOLLOW // https://twitter.com/EmpireFiles LIKE // https://www.facebook.com/TheEmpireFiles MERCH // https://empirefiles.store MUSIC by Anahedron // https://open.spotify.com/artist/3tmcV... // https://twitter.com/anahedron
This edition's playlist
1) Diana Ross' DIANA ROSS SINGS SONGS FROM THE WIZ.
2) Frank Sinatra's CYCLES.
3) Fiona Apple's FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS.
4) Diana Ross' SWEPT AWAY.
5) Ricky Martin's PAUSA.
6) Harry Style's FINE LINE.
7) Sam Smith's IN THE LONELY HOUR DROWNING SHADOW EDITION.
8) Dionne Warwick's SHE'S BACK.
Highlights
This piece is written by Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Kat of Kat's Korner, Betty of Thomas Friedman is a Great Man, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz, Ruth of Ruth's Report, Marcia of SICKOFITRADLZ, Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends, Ann of Ann's Mega Dub, Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts and Wally of The Daily Jot. Unless otherwise noted, we picked all highlights.
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"nothing but love for stan" -- Rebecca notes Stan.
"Science post" and "Curiosity on Mars" -- Betty covers science.
"Chickpea Vegetable Soup in the Kitchen" and "Vegetable Salsa in the Kitchen" -- Trina serves up two recipes.
"Dianne Explains" -- Isaiah dips into the archives.
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"Cynthia McKinney, Diana Ross," "Laura Nyro," "nick jonas 'chainsaw'," "how barbra streisand killed her own hit singles," "As Tears Go By" and "Protests, LeBron, Drew Brees, Joan Jett and more" -- music coverage in the community.
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"That messy Debra Messing," "Roseanne and Fred Willard," "Clint" and "Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo, are they fools or ..." -- TV and film coverage in the community.
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