Third Estate Sunday Review

The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."

Monday, November 23, 2015

Remember, boys and girls, it's Crapapedia

WIKIPEDIA, where any lie can be falsely presented as truth.

Take their entry on the 1978 film THE WIZ:

When Motown star Diana Ross asked Gordy if she could be cast as Dorothy, he declined, saying that Ross—then 33 years old—was too old for the role.^[8] Ross went around Gordy and convinced executive producer Rob Cohen at Universal Pictures to arrange a deal where he would produce the film if Ross was cast as Dorothy. Gordy and Cohen agreed to the deal. Pauline Kael, a film critic, described Ross's efforts to get the film into production as "perhaps the strongest example of sheer will in film history."^[8]

Really?

Because Rob Cohen, who produced the film, told a different story to J. Randy Taraborrelli for his book CALL HER MISS ROSS. In the original hard coversion, it appears on pages 337 through 339.

Diana Ross calls Berry and says she wants to play the part. He tells her to forget it.

He then calls Rob Cohen

Rob agrees with Berry but tells him, "There's only one reason that it's right. [. . .] Universal will pay her $1 million to do it. And it'll mean getting this movie made."

Berry likes the one million notion and Rob's left to speak to Universal executive Tom Mount the next day to make good on his prediction of Diana getting a million to make the film.

Cohen states he then called John Badham who didn't like the idea and left as director of the film.

He then states he called Berry Gordy.

After which, Diana called Berry to restate that she wanted to play Dorothy and, after a moment of playing stand-offish, he tells her she has the role and Universal will pay her one million dollars for playing the part.

In his end notes (again, original hard cover version of the book), Taraborrelli explains that the source for these events is from "my interview with Cohen."

And Pauline Kael's quote?

She didn't write that.

But only at Crapapedia can you 'source' a Pauline Kael film review for THE NEW YORKER by referencing . . . a clip job biography of Ross.

Pauline Kael's review actually stated -- in fact opened -- with this on "will," "Diana Ross's determination to play Dorothy in the film version of the black Broadway musical 'The Wiz' is probably the chief example in all movie history of a whim of iron."

And that, boys and girls, is from page 138 of the October 30, 1978 issue of THE NEW YORKER.

That's how you source a film review -- that or by the Pauline Kael book of collected reviews the review appeared in. (Hint, can't use FOR KEEPS -- that collection contains only part of the review -- not the full review -- and doesn't contain the quote.)

You may notice, speaking of sourcing, that the false claim that Diana went around Berry isn't sourced at WIKIPEDIA.

But when telling and spreading lies about women, WIKIPEDIA never requires sourcing.

Jim's World (They never listen)

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us.

Like many, I will be spending it with family -- Dona and our child and our parents, etc.

So like many guys across the country, the weekend meant haircut time.

I hope my experience was different than others but, from conversations since, I think it was all too common.

When I showed up for my haircut, the woman looked at the computer and said, "You like it long on top, right?"

Right.

And it's in the computer because too often that's not what I get.

And it's not what I got.

I did get to hear about my stylist's ADD and her OCD.

I got to hear about the angry spat with her lover.

I got to hear about her ex as well.

I got to hear her drone on and on while she destroyed my hair.

She saved the top for last.

Before cutting it, she asked me how it looked.

And right then it looked fine.

And then she takes the scissors and whacks the front about an inch short.

As two inches fall to the floor, I ask her what she just did?

"Oh, right. Longer on top. Okay, okay, I can fix it."

She takes the shears, takes off the two guard and does the sides to the scalp.

On one side.

It did not make it look better.

Nor did it look any better when she had done the other side.

It looked like Jack Webb.

Thanks to this idiot who couldn't be bothered with paying attention to her actual job, I'll be seeing family on Thursday as I sport a Jack Webb DRAGNET haircut.

When I complained, and I did complain, she told her boss I hadn't objected during the haircut.

No, not until she lopped off two inches from the top.

More to the point, the computer clearly states that I like it long on top.

And since when is it my job to monitor her?

I drop the car off for new brakes, I don't have to sit there and watch them mechanic.

So my beef this go round is how some stylists want to bore you with all the petty details of their life and don't care enough about you the paying customer to cut your hair right.

I really think a new rule needs to be imposed: Shut your mouth and cut the hair.

Agree or disagree, you can weigh in via e-mail (thethirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com).

10 Reasons to Grab Songs From The Trees

Friday, Carly Simon's SONGS FROM THE TREES was available for download online and purchase in stores.

Here are ten reasons you should grab the album.

1) It's a double disc collection -- 31 songs in all.

2) You can purchase the discs for $12.99 at Amazon or download it at Amazon for $14.99 (prices are the most current as we write this piece).

3) The collection features two previously unreleased tracks, "Shutdown" recorded during the sessions for 1978's BOYS IN THE TREES album and "I Can't Thank You Enough" (written and performed with Ben Taylor).

4) The other 29 songs are previously released but all have been remastered for this collection.

5) It's the musical companion piece to her new memoir BOYS IN THE TREES due out Tuesday ($17.39 at Amazon currently).

6) The collection contains an 18-page booklet.

7) Singer-songwriter Carly has won the Grammy, the Golden Globe and a Grammy for her songwriting and has been inducted into The Songwriters Hall of Fame (though, being a woman, she still can't get into Jann Wenner's sexist Rock & Roll Hall of Fame).

8) Covering 12 of her first 13 studio albums (plus including a hit from The Simon Sisters -- her folk duo with sister Lucy Simon), the collection serves as a strong overview of Carly's early career.

9) SONGS FROM THE TREES contains over 20 tracks not included on previously released single and double disc Carly collections (we're not including the three disc retrospective CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE).

10) "CD wallet made from 100% recycled paperboard".

2015 book Cranky Clinton doesn't want you to read

Hillary really, really hopes you don't read this new book.

Bill and Hillary

So This is that Thing Called Love

Darwin Porter & Danforth Prince

Whereas Tabloid Kings Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince have already exposed the charismatic excesses of the Kennedys and the Reagans, they now aim their liberal and Democratic lasers onto dramas associated with their all-time favorite politicians, the Clintons.

In this hot new “I Love You Madly” overview of the most likely Presidential candidates for election in 2016, they examine the “conjoined-at-the-hip” love story of Bill and Hillary.

Tabloid Exposure and Timing: As America propels itself into 2016’s bloodthirsty search for presidential scandal, this book is rich in ironies associated with pandemic sex, vendetta, and subterfuge that’s naughtier than a Hollywood scriptwriter could ever have imagined.

Never in the history of the Republic have we heard such emphasis on the spirit and language of True Grit. Some of the dialogue reported by witnesses to the Clinton saga makes Richard Nixon’s taped rants seem like a script from Shirley Temple’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Presidential Politics: It’s all here, the glitter, glamor, sex, money, and power, but also the betrayals, the exposures, the epic fight for love and glory, a kick in the groin about high adrenaline sex.

Shadowy Figures from the Twilight Zone: It’s also a book about the men and women, and their hangers-on, who run the government, ultimately ruling over the free world.

As a contribution to the current political dialogues inundating the country, this hot new title will be available EVERYWHERE, online and in bookstores, in late October/early November.

Paperback 978-1-936003-47-1 • 1-936003-47-3 Trim size 6x9 Ppg 576

About the Author:

“Darwin Porter is the master of guilty pleasures. There is nothing like reading him for passing the hours. He is the Nietzsche of Naughtiness, the Goethe of Gossip, the Proust of Pop Culture. Porter knows all the nasty buzz anyone has ever heard whispered in dark bars, dim alleys, and confessional booths. And lovingly, precisely, and in as straightforward a manner as an oncoming train, his prose whacks you between the eyes with the greatest gossip since Kenneth Anger. Some would say better than Anger.” (as quoted from Alan W. Petrucelli’s THE ENTERTAINMENT REPORT at Examiner.com).

Porter began his career writing about politics and the entertainment industry for Knight Newspapers and The Miami Herald. Today, he’s one of the most prolific biographers in the world. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Howard Hughes, John and Jackie Kennedy, Paul Newman, Merv Griffin, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Michael Jackson have generated widespread reviews and animated radio and blogsite commentaries worldwide. Some of his biographies have been serialized to millions of readers in The Sunday Times of London and The Mail on Sunday.

Porter is also the well-known original author of many editions of The Frommer Guides, a respected travel guidebook series that’s among the most prominent and well-respected in the world.

Blood Moon Productions:

“Applying the tabloid standards of today to the Hollywood scandals of yesterday. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

Danforth Prince, President

This edition's playlist

1) Carly Simon's SONGS FROM THE TREES.

2) Sam Smith's IN THE LONELY HOUR DROWNING SHADOW EDITION.

3) Janet Jackson's UNBREAKABLE.

4) Aretha Franklin's ARETHA SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS.

5) Steve Grand's ALL AMERICAN BOY.

6) Ben Harper's BOTH SIDES OF THE GUN.

7) Tori Amos' UNREPENTANT GERALDINES.

8) Sade's SOLDIER OF LOVE.

9) Ben and Ellen Harper's CHILDHOOD HOME.

10) Adele's 25.

Moazzam Begg says, resist ‘the state of fear’

This is from Great Britain's Socialist Worker:

Moazzam Begg says, resist ‘the state of fear’

Moazzam Begg was a detainee in Guantanamo Bay. He spoke to Socialist Worker about the aftermath of the Paris attacks

Moazzam Begg (Pic: Guy Smallman)

“Once again Muslims are being blamed for the actions of people we reject. It’s as if we have to continually condemn something we don’t agree with, committed by people we have never known.

The self-censorship we have to put on ourselves says we shouldn’t comment on what caused Isis to become so deadly.

It means we feel we can’t talk about the reality—if you are bombing a country you can expect something to happen. This is what the security services have said all along. The likelihood of terrorist reprisals goes up because you are in a bombing campaign.

If you say these things, people think you are making a justification. You’re not because you know people who have been butchered by Isis. But because they are from the Muslim world, nobody really cares.

What would happen if the three million Muslims in Britain sat down together and had a big condemning session?

It wouldn’t prevent Isis attacks. Isis doesn’t care what Muslims in Europe think, it is responding to what it sees as an assault on itself. I think it’s important that everyone expresses sympathy with the victims in Paris. We should stand with them and their families, but not with the governments because they are exploiting the situation.

The prime minister’s “full spectrum response” has an impact on the ordinary person, so you see Islamophobic attacks.

The attacks are fuelled by politicians and many sections of the media.

They allow the creation of the state of fear in which Muslims are living.

There has been a response from a significant section of society who recognise that the backlash will be targeted against Muslims.

That’s something we should embrace. We also need to be prepared for the rise of the far right.

When a group of people feels frightened and isolated we need to form a cordon
around them and stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

Fourteen years ago George Bush and Tony Blair launched a war against terrorism to eradicate Al Qaida.

Al Qaida now has more franchises than a lot of fast food chains.

If the response to the atrocities in Paris is more invasions it may create the conditions for more terrorism.”

Moazzam Begg is director of Cage and was a detainee in Guantanamo Bay

Our job is to defeat imperialism, not Isis

This is a repost from Great Britain's Socialist Worker:

Our job is to defeat imperialism, not Isis

by Alex Callinicos

Positively the stupidest thing said about the Paris attacks came from the French president, Francois Hollande, when he denounced them as an “act of war”. Of course they were, but this war didn’t start on Friday of last week.

At the very latest it began with the Gulf War of 1990-91, the first in the present cycle of imperialist interventions in the Middle East.

This doesn’t make the shootings and bombings in Paris part of a legitimate anti-imperialist struggle.
Indiscriminate killing of civilians is wrong whether it is carried out by Isis and its sympathisers or by the US and its allies.

But it’s a mistake to see the conflict as a symmetrical one between two equal evils, as many on the left do.

Isis is a reactionary and counter-revolutionary movement. But it is a product of the destruction wreaked in Iraq by the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation and of the defeat of the Arab Spring.

The ultimate responsibility for its rise therefore lies with the Western imperialist powers and their local clients.

Labour shadow justice secretary Lord Falconer—as a cabinet minister of Tony Blair’s a supporter of the 2003 invasion—talked a lot about “defeating Isis” on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr show.

This phrase has been taken up even by the Stop the War Coalition, which mobilised so strongly against that invasion.

But “defeating Isis” is empty chatter given the present situation in Syria and Iraq, where it has its strongholds.

Patrick Cockburn wrote recently in the London Review of Books, “A couple of years ago in Baghdad an Iraqi politician told me that ‘the problem in Iraq is that all parties are both too strong and too weak: too strong to be defeated, but too weak to win.’

“The same applies today in Syria. Even if one combatant suffers a temporary defeat, its foreign supporters will prop it up: the ailing non-IS part of the Syrian opposition was rescued by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey in 2014 and this year Assad is being saved by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.”

Defeats

The same is true even of the imperialist powers—the US and Russia—now dabbling in Syria. After their defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, neither wants to commit ground troops on a significant scale. So they just lob bombs and missiles into Syria. The futility of these measures was summed up the day of the Paris attacks.

David Cameron held a special press briefing outside

10 Downing Street to preen over Britain’s role in the claimed drone killing of Mohammed Emwazi.
Within hours we had concrete proof that such “acts of self defence” offer citizens in the West absolutely no protection.

Isis has built up a formidable fighting machine based on a mixture of organised plunder and ideological zeal. It channels in a distorted way the anger and hatred provoked by Western intervention.

Lydia Wilson writing in The Nation magazine interviewed captured Isis fighters in Kirkuk, in Iraq. She describes them as “children of the occupation”.

“They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, Isis is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.”

Only a revival of the Arab revolutions can generate the social force strong enough to take Isis on—above all by offering a better way of resisting imperialist domination and overthrowing the local ruling classes.

Cameron made the connections crystal clear when he stood outside Downing Street a week or so before the Paris killings to greet president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the butcher of the Egyptian

Revolution.

Vowing to respond to the Paris attacks with “pitiless war”—as Hollande did—simply means that the vicious cycle of intervention and atrocity will continue, with escalating deaths and suffering in both the Middle East and the imperialist centres.

Here in the West, we can’t “defeat Isis”. But we can help break the cycle by building mass movements that put an end to our rulers’ imperialist bullying.