1915

Birth of a Nation was released. It was the most profitable American film of all time until Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarves (1937). In this critical darling, director D.W. Griffith dramatically depicts a mid-19th century south plagued by mulattos and abolitionists who scheme to keep the white man down and raise up the black man in what is, to its intended audience, an obviously grotesque perversion of natural order. In government sessions, the reconstruction-empowered black politicians (played buffoonishly by white actors) take off their shoes and feast on fried chicken. Luckily, the chivalric Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.

This version of history was angrily disputed (famously by W.E.B. Du Bois among others) but remained pretty much the accepted version of history until well after World War II. The NAACP, founded just five years earlier, organized nationwide protests. There were riots in Philadelphia and Boston. Cities in Illinois, Minnesota Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania refused to show the film. In Indiana, a white man murdered a black stranger and blamed it on having seen Birth of a Nation. However, the film received a special screening at the White House where president Woodrow Wilson supposedly remarked, "It [the film] is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The quote was later argued to be from someone else but the film was still marketed as "Federally-endorsed."

It is still widely praised for decades for it's pioneering technical achievements which arguably, are exaggerated to excuse its bafflingly continuing popularity. Nearly all of these achievements have since been discovered in earlier films and yet even mainstream critic Roger Ebert considers it a great film, stating, "'The Birth of a Nation' is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s 'Triumph Of the Will,' it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil." This from a guy who doesn't like Blue Velvet or A Clockwork Orange because of the subject matter. I guess racism is OK when it's old. You know, they just didn't know any better back then.

  
The Flag of Australia                                             The Australian Aboriginal Flag        The Flag of Torres Strait Islanders




Australia was discovered about 45,000 years ago when they either walked or made short sea-crossings from Papua to the north in what is now the Torres Strait. In Australia they grew into diverse cultures with around 250 languages spoken by nations such as the Koori, Murri, Noongar, Yamatji, Wangkai, Nunga, Anagu, Yapa, Yolngu and Palawah who together may've numbered around 3 quarters of a million.  43,830 years later (give or take a few thousand) it was claimed, like a quarter of the planet, by the tiny, faraway island of Great Britain.



    Initially, it served as a penal colony set up at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788 which is why it's Australia Day today. 50% of the indigenous population died from smallpox within the following years. Massacres and land seizures reduced the indigenous population another 30%. Often the convicts sent to Australia were charged with minor offenses. In the 1850s, the Gold Rush began and with it, an Americanization of the language. For example, "bonanza" (borrowed from Spanish) became "bonzer." By 1827, Australian English was already diverging significantly from British English. Author Peter Cunningham noted a distinct vocabulary and a non-rhotic accent that owed heavily to Cockney. It is typically divided into three accents which owe less to region than UK English or US English.

There are so many shows still not on DVD. For years there was a daily chorus of "Where's Martin!?" or, sometimes, "Where's Mar' in!?" So, as a DVD guy who's supposed to have the answer to all of life's most pressing questions I went searching for answers. I found a website devoted to TV shows on DVD. It's called TVshowsondvd.com. If you sign up, they'll let you know ages before anyone else when a show is coming out. That's how I knew about Newhart way before any of the more reputable blogs.

So, sign up at  www.tvshowsondvd.com and start crying out for your shows. With the never-ending writer's strike, now seems like a good time to start  laying  those golden eggs of yesteryear. Here are a few I've been pining for for a while now.



Highway Man debuted in 1988 on NBC. It had a truck with a built in helicopter. I like the way both the travel of distance and time are conveyed in the credits by the passing of hitch-hiking skeletons and road signs. And, you may recognize co-star Tim Russ as Tuvok Shakur from STV (or Star Trek Voyager).



Max Headroom from Channel 4 was amazing. If you didn't watch it you probably think of Max Headroom as a shill for Coca Cola and little more. But this show from 1987 was much more. It made me want to be a (bigger) computer nerd. Suddenly, playing Sabotage on my Apple ][e wasn't enough. I needed to surround myself with wires and screens. And I "fancied" Amanda Pays to use a Britishism (you know, how real critics do when they're writing about British stuff).

It's award season which can only mean one thing, it's time for the Amoeba's 5th annual Seabiscuits! Let me back up for a second. For those who have never worked at Amoeba, our jargon can sound (in my Mr. T voice) confusing, confounding and sometimes downright curious. As a customer, you may have found yourself being told by one of our helpful staff to "check the 'hat' adjacent to the 'blueline waterfall' while I go check 'Wally',"  leaving you scratching your buzzing noggin in psychedelic wonder. Well, one of those jargon words we use is "evergreen" which, somewhat counter-intuitively, refers to titles that will always be in demand (and not to titles that will only sell on "the Green Tag Island" where we exile bargain titles to.

When Seabiscuit came out on DVD, right before Christmas of 2003, there was an audible buzz (or "nicker," in horse language). It was released in widescreen and fullscreen, a sign of its broad appeal to both film-lovers and people who "don't like it when they cut the heads off with those black bars." Several films attached themselves like filmic remoras to the Seabiscuit's celluloid whale shark, hoping to feed off of the crumbs of interest - or maybe be to be purchased by the confused and functionally illiterate. There was, as there often is, debate about whether or not the film would be an evergreen. It didn't prove to be ... But let's go merrily back in time to the early oughts, back to 2003. It was the year a second space shuttle blew up, SARS was discovered, Bush landed on a ship flying a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," the last vocho rolled off the assembly line in Mexico, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) admitted to killing 48 women and Jacko was charged with being a chester (again). And in the dream factory the year of the Sheep proved, in fact, to be the year of the horse.

I caught a “local news” story the other day on one of the local stations. Under the headline “Desert Wonderland?” they ran footage of snow in Iran and (with those slightly robotic chuckles that all newscasters are able to activate thanks to their Hillary Clinton Brand emotion chips) they talked about what was made out to seem a freak occurrence, or at least a newsworthy event. I mean, weather in Tehran isn't exactly local.



I admit, before I ever watched an Iranian film or visited Tehrangeles, I had only the vaguest notions of what the country and it’s people looked like.  I kind of reckoned that the middle east was one big sandy desert sparsely populated with turbaned Arabs and veiled harem girls. I am, after all, a product of Hollywood stereotypes and American public schools where we prefer to teach about 1000 years of Dark Ages serf rebellions in Europe rather than even mention the developments in math, science, technology, literature and the arts occurring at the same time in the Muslim world which helped jump started the Renaissance.

Our country’s relationship with Iran has been prickly ever since the 1953 CIA-orchestrated Project Ajax, in which their elected (and secular) leader Mohammed Mosaddeq was removed from power after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry, knowing full well that Iran’s oil belonged to England! Perhaps because of this (despite Iran frequently being in the news over the decades since) it has felt like there’s a ban on showing any actual images from the country, lest the American people start to recognize it as an actual country and not the hatred-stirring bogeyman it’s made out to be by politicians and the media when it's time for uniting we the people in mistrust and xenophobia.