Uncle Dave's House of Useless Crap

Quick update

Last weekend Al, Remy and I met Glenn Richards and Christina Fong with Ogre/Ogress Productions in Grand Rapids (nice folks! please buy all their records!) and then ventured to Muskegon to see pianist Mia Chung play with the West Shore Symphony. Mia Chung is awesome, and doesn't concertize widely or much, so if she comes to your town, make plans to see her. She is one of the greatest unsigned piano virtuosi in the world.

Either I didn't say it good, or Al didn't hear it right

Somehow Al and I got talking about ringtones, even though neither of us own a cell. I stated that I know exactly which ringtone I wanted, one of my own compositions naturally - the "Crab Canon" from the "May Sonata.*" Al said - "what? Did you say 'e Crab Can't Get Out of the Mason Jar'?"

* The May Sonata is a Trio Sonata, scored mostly on two staves and begun in May 1986 - it is still unfinished. It runs to many, many bars. Midway in the second movement there is a "crab canon" a portion which repeats forwards and backwards several times. So far it's the only part of this Sonata which is scored on three staves, but it's only in 2 voices.

Overheard from a Televised Dog Show on Cable

Dog Judge, commenting on the winner of the top prize: "But overall there is just something very exciting about this bitch."

Tomorrow Morning from 6 to 9am ET

I'm on air again, and it's pledge time. Persons donating $15 or more will get the specially made "show" CD, "Just What the Doctor Ordered." One time only. On WCBN-FM 88.3 in Ann Arbor or www.wcbn.org wherever you may be.

And Finally, Potemkin

I am subscribed to a list of professional film archivists. The subject came up of a newly restored version of Sergei Eisenstein's classic "Battleship Potemkin" about to premiere in Berlin. It has all known censored scenes restored, including a title card bearing a quote from Trotsky removed even in Russian prints, and the little flag flying above the Potemkin is now painted red, as it was in the premiere in 1926.

In 1958, "Battleship Potemkin" was voted the "greatest film ever made" by an international corsortium of film critics meeting in Belgium.

Here is the conversation, with my comments:

I had written:

I believe that the jury vote in 1958 was reflective of the influence left-wing politics played among film critics of that day - perhaps today the opposite is more true. What single jury can be trusted to make such a decision anyway?

Someone else answered:

Potemkin, regardless of your political affiliation, is an extremely important film for socio-historical and aesthetic reasons. To negate the influence Eisenstein and in particular Potemkin had on contemporary intellectuals and filmmakers is to pervert history.

***
(Uncle Dave):
This implies that my comment was an observation motivated by right-wing bias. Not so. It is also a perversion of history to ignore the role the left played in lionizing Eisenstein and Potemkin, and further than that to not acknowledge what has happened since 1958. It's still a great film, historically and aesthetically. But things have changed. The average Russian "contemporary intellectual" of today does not regard Eisenstein as a cultural hero; in some circles he is almost as unmentionable as D. W. Griffith is here in the United States.

Eisenstein continued to sing the song of the Soviet government even as Stalin went about the business of butchering 37 million Russian citizens, among them scores of intellectuals. The current view holds that Eisenstein didn't do enough to intervene, either with Stalin or with his many friends overseas, to try and stop the bloodshed. Now, mind you, I don't know what he, nor I, nor you COULD do in the face of such chaos and atrocity. But Eisenstein is still held responsible, and not just in eyes of a few, but among many educated Russians. Needless to say, the fact that he his work had to endure the vagaries of Russian and German censors is small potatoes compared to this massive national hemorrhage of people.

In 1958 the left was still reeling from even the guarded revelations then made about the scale of this human disaster. But in the West there was still a large scale disdain about the abuses of capitalism among intellectuals. The vote in Knokke-le-Zoute (I think that's where it was, at the first International Congress of Film) was in part an expression of solidarity with the idealism represented in Potemkin.

The left did not always treat Eisenstein so well - they picketed "Thunder Over Mexico" in 1934 because this edit of the "Que Viva Mexico" footage was made without his consent. Hindsight shows that this was a much better film than that assembled by Alexandrov in 1985, which turned Einsenstein's unfinished masterpiece into a dreary travelogue. "Thunder Over Mexico" is a film that could really use some attention - it has a soundtrack that is in such poor shape that it's barely intelligible. So even with Potemkin put into what is an apparently final form we are still far from being out of the woods with Eisenstein and his tiny oeurve.

All that said, the blurb written up for the Berlin premiere is in poor taste. One cannot market Potemkin in the same way as for Metropolis. I am not negating the socio-historical impact of Potemkin, but let's show some responsiveness to those whom it impacts in other ways. If you were rolling out a brand new restoration of "The Birth of a Nation," you wouldn't put in the ad copy the fact that for sixty years it was considered the highest grossing film of all time.

Uncle Dave Lewis
udtv@yahoo.com