If you're ever feeling jaded, read a disaster account. No, I'm serious. My favorite teacher put it this way: you don't know what an ant colony is all about until it's kicked over. Reading about tragedies shows you what people are really made of, and it usually doesn't disappoint.
So you think you're having a bad day
Some tragedies get a lot of play in the media, like the sinking of Titanic. But others, while still familiar, aren't widely depicted. One such event was the torpedoing of the Lusitania. A number of famous and important people had the bad luck to be in Allied waters in 1915, one of whom was this man:
Dustin Hoffman, Time Lord.
Charles Frohman, who was played by Dustin Hoffman in Finding Neverland, was the producer of Peter Pan's original run and was an international entertainment mogul. When the torpedoes struck, he was smoking a cigar on the ship's veranda.
I'd have cast someone a little less Dustin Hoffman-y for the role
According to some accounts, Frohman and millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt spent the remaining minutes of their lives strapping life jackets to infants in the nursery (Vanderbilt was a hero: numerous reports say that Vanderbilt and his valet grabbed children, carrying two at a time to the life boats and distributing life jackets). Rita Jolivet, who survived the sinking, was with Vanderbilt and Frohman just before a "green cliff" of water crashed through the ship. As they were standing by Lusitania's marble staircase, Frohman calmly quoted a line from his most famous production, still smoking his cigar:
"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."
We're all spending our lives learning how to be human. And a situation like this illustrates how to be human at the end of our time on this planet. Be kind, be calm, and walk boldly into that next beautiful adventure.
I watched The Secret of Nikola Tesla today and want to at least get a blog post out of it so that I don't feel like it totally wasted my time. Here are the broad strokes:
Orson Welles plays JP Morgan. I think he just stayed in costume after playing a film executive in The Muppet Movie and occasionally changed out cigars.
The standard Rich and Famous Contract, Mr. Tesla?
Sure, his presence adds a little credibility and gravitas to the production, but the real JP Morgan looked like the love child of John McCain and Papa Smurf. The movie was ridiculous anyway; they could have at least provided a goofy prosthetic nose.
Taken just prior to the public caning of Gargamel
A pointless love interest shows up. Though charming in social contexts when he needed to be, Tesla stayed clear of female company in real life. In the film, however, he has a weird, muted romantic connection with Katharine Johnson, the wife of one of his longtime friends.
Why
A stupid environmentalist message that has nothing to do with anything pops up everywhere. In the film, Tesla continuously voices his quest for energy that is "in line with nature." This is accompanied by some shots of smoggy Los Angeles in 1980, even though the bulk of the story takes place at the other end of the twentieth century.
There is one redeeming moment where Thomas Edison squares off with Tesla about their approaches to science. The drama of this disagreement could have lent sufficient thematic juice to dramatize Tesla's life and conflict with Edison. Instead, it's an excuse to wallow in Orson Welles' presence.
You can see in the first few seconds of the video that it's personal for Edison, who had to stubbornly keep trying solution after solution in order to make progress because of his lack of formal education. This movie could have played on themes similar to the ones that show up in Amadeus where diligent mediocrity is frustrated by the presence of transcendent genius. And even in that movie, many of the facts are fudged. But it's okay because it tells a story worthy of its subject. Hell, even The Prestige is a better Tesla movie than this one, even though he's portrayed by Ziggy Stardust himself.
Contemplating the electro-cloning of Bing Crosby
With another Tesla biopic on the way in 2014, I hope someone has figured out how to milk this guy's life for all it's worth, in terms of an enjoyable narrative. You would think that it's impossible to get something boring out of a real-life wizard's biography, but you'd be astounded.
"It's about horses"
Check out my serial "Buzzards Over Carson" at Jukepop Serials for a Tesla-related story that has nothing to do with Orson Welles. Yet.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
My favorite aspect of history is how completely the world can change within a single lifetime. A 95-year-old in 2013 was born in a world where the Ottoman Empire still existed, many Americans lived in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or indoor plumbing, and Presidents wore top hats.
But let's push that timeline back a little and look at the life of Emmett Dalton:
Born in 1871, Emmett worked as a posseman for his brother, U.S. Marshal Frank Dalton. In the Old West, Marshals had the authority to assemble posses, which were gangs that worked for the government. Think privateers vs. pirates. Frank died while pursuing whiskey runners and, depending on whom you believe, a false accusation of train robbery turned Emmett and his brothers to lives of crime.
Their reputations grew to such an extent that they were blamed for train robberies that they could not have possibly committed. After years of pursuit, they decided to do one last job before they disappeared that would cement their names in legend: rob two banks at once, in broad daylight.
They accomplished their goal, while also cementing their names in tombstones. The robbery in Coffeyville, Kansas left four of Emmett's brothers dead. Emmett himself received twenty-three gunshot wounds and survived to receive a life sentence.
He was paroled in 1907 and went on to act in movies, including one based on his experiences with his brothers. In fact, you can visit his IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0198276/
In his later years, he became a real estate agent and died in Hollywood.
Dalton's story boggles my mind. One of the most feared men in the West was in a movie that you could probably track down and watch, then settled down to a chummy domestic existence in the 1940's.
We think of decades as islands, set apart by their aesthetics and what they come to mean in film and fiction. And so the rapid mutation of a time like the Old West into the Golden Age of Hollywood comes off as surreal, and men like Emmett Dalton or this guy, or really any old person seem to be time travelers within their own lifespans.
What any of us will live to see is a mystery, but let's hope we don't get twenty-three bullets in the chest on the way there.
