Transcendentalism. Last Days of Disco. HARP. Black Panthers. These are the words in my consciousness as I search now for a subject intense enough to drive a 600 word rant, to produce by 6pm today my 157th uninterrupted weeks of a V-Blog to 1000 people on 13 different lists accumulated over the years from my assorted people-encounters in America & Europe.
Last Days of Disco, a 1998 American film set in New York which I tripped upon at 5:30 am when I stopped with my DVD remote The Mating Season a 1951 film, my personal recording from TCM in which the main love interest is played by gorgeous Brooklyn-born 31 year old Gene Tierney & John Lund, and the more interesting-to-me secondary love interest, also Brooklyn-born, Thelma Ritter playing a middle-age widow courted by a widowed executive of a Midwest engineering company, ending with them driving off in his limousine into a rainy Akron Ohio night. Similar ending to Dustin Hoffman (Ben) and Katharine Ross (Elaine) driving off in the Mike Nichols directed 1967 The Graduate in a local bus, whom he has just rescued in a church brawl from a marriage ceremony in that upscale WASP Santa Barbara CA enclave.
Whit Stillman an American writer director referred to as the WASP society answer to Woody Allen’s New York Jewish world, with his films Metropolitan 1990, Barcelona 1994 and Last Days of Disco. Stillman is a dynamic intellectual writer whose characters deliver at racing speed penetrating dialogue on everything brewing in the brains and spewing forth in the mouths of his American WASP protagonists. He is a genius. Much as I’ve recently been balled over by the British genius film director Ken Russell of the 1969 Women in Love based on D H Lawrence’s novel set in 1920s England. The screenwriter is the famous LGBT and AIDS activist, the American Larry Kramer, Faggots 1978, still living at 81, married in 2013 to his long time partner, in New York.
[Wikipedia] Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1820s in the Eastern United States. The core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. It emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. It is the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Its best known proponents were Emerson Thoreau Fuller Alcott and Walt Whitman. Starting in 2012, I weekly attend such a Unitarian Universalist church in New York, and am currently finishing an 85 min film exploring how it helps heal my general depression and fear of death.
This month The Black Panther Party starts a one year commemoration 50th Anniversary from the brutal assassinations and suppression of Black political rights by the American police, headed by Hoover FBI Director, that destroyed the hopes and lives of thousands of Afro-Americans. A dozen members of that self-governing Black movement are still in prison after 40 years. Founded in Oakland CA, when Huey Newton met Bobby Seale to create a radical political party to fight oppression and injustice through grassroots community centers.
HARP. Home Affordable Refinance Program set up in 2009 by the Obama administration. Yesterday I closed on my condo refinance @ 3.75% 30 year Fixed Rate. My notary public was a young Black professional Miechia Gulley. Thank You Barack & Michelle, two of the best Americans since Franklin & Eleanor, and Bill & Hillary.
