♪ Putting the pressure on much harder now
To return again and again ♪
Red Rain
Red rain is coming down
Red rain
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
Hey, we touch
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm
Red rain is coming down
Red rain
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
Well I've seen them buried in a sheltered place in this town
They tell you that this rain can sting and look down
There is no blood around, see no sign of pain
Hey, no pain
Seeing no red at all, see no rain
Red rain is coming down
Red rain
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
Red rain
Oh! Oh!
Putting the pressure on much harder now
To return again and again
Red rain
Just let the red rain splash you
Let the rain fall on your skin
Red rain
I come to you, defences down
With the trust of a child
Oh!
Red rain coming down
Red rain
Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
And I can't watch anymore
No more denial
It's so hard to lay down in all of this
Red rain coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I see it
Red rain coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm bathing in
Red rain coming down
Red rain is coming down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm begging you
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Over me in the red, red sea
Over me
Over me
Red rain.
All down the line ...
Across Turkey in 24 hours on the Dogu Express | DW Documentary
The Dogu Express travels across Turkey from Ankara to Kars. During the nostalgic journey, the train travels at about 70 kilometers an hour and needs a full day for the 1,310 kilometer trip. Young people especially are clamoring for tickets.
A ticket costs less than 10 euros - but because they're in short supply - bootleg fares can be more than sixteen times that price. Sometimes it takes months to get a ticket. Almost 300,000 people use the train annually. This documentary joins young devotees of the Dogu, who prefer it to low-cost airlines. They say they make the journey to slow down. The young couple, Melve and Atalay, are no exception: They booked the trip to spend quality time with one another. Conductor Hüseyin Celik has been working the route for many years and still loves his job, and the views of the beautiful landscapes the train travels through.
‘All right, Mr DeMille. I’m ready for my closeup’ …
Sunset Boulevard at 70: we’re all
Norma Desmond now
Sunset Boulevard showed the damage wrought by fame.
Seventy years on, popular culture is more obsessed than ever
with being seen
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Tom Joudrey
Published on Tue 4 Aug 2020
"On its release in August 1950, Sunset Boulevard punched its own industry in the face. Showbiz royalty, normally enclosed in an echo chamber of self-congratulation, sputtered into a rage. At a star-studded private screening on the eve of the film’s debut, MGM studio mogul Louis B Mayer lambasted the film’s Austrian-born director, Billy Wilder: “You befouled your own nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and feathered, goddamn foreigner son of a bitch!” Wilder’s response: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
Audiences, however, piled into cinemas. Serendipitously released in the same year as Joseph L Mankiewicz’s All About Eve – a ruthless dissection of the American theatre world – Sunset Boulevard became a landmark statement on the perils of celebrity culture. But 70 years later, at a time when visibility has been weaponised as a tool of social change, the film is no longer just an indictment of Hollywood’s vanity but of a whole cultural ethos that values “being seen”.
Every domino of the plot falls in the direction of the onlooker-ringed final spectacle. Norma Desmond has just gunned down Joe Gillis in a spasm of jealousy. Now marooned in cinematic delusions, she glides triumphantly down her grand staircase, the news press agog, and ecstatically intones: “All right, Mr DeMille. I’m ready for my closeup.” Substitute “Mr Zuckerberg” and she’d be right at home in the Instagram age."
"Sunset Boulevard seems strangely tailormade to skewer our contemporary culture. In some ways, Norma is, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe, a tattered but resilient icon of womanhood who fell victim to the studio system. We learn that she was infantilised by handlers and pumped full of barbiturates in her early days, then cast aside as she aged out of her nymph-like beauty. Twenty-first century Hollywood, meanwhile, continues to weather fierce blowback for putting female actors not named Meryl Streep out to pasture around the age of 40.
Sunset Boulevard also mirrors our political rifts. In a tribalised era, Norma Desmond has for both partisan factions the complexion of the enemy. For liberals, she epitomises super-rich self-delusion. Cocooned in privilege, she fancies herself a meritocratic success story. The fantasy of her self-made triumph is abetted by an information silo that she doesn’t even know she’s trapped in. Her sycophantic enabler – erstwhile director, ex-husband, and now butler, Max von Mayerling – showers her with forged fan letters, as though anticipating the echo chamber that would manifest under the banner of Fox News. “Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount studios,” she imperiously declares, discounting the swarm of worker bees buzzing around the lot. When Gillis describes her as a has-been (“you were big”), she snaps back, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” capturing the toxic mix of arrogance, nostalgia, and resentment that feeds into the Maga battle cry. President Trump telegraphed as much last February when he touted Gone with the Wind and Sunset Boulevard in a nativist harangue against the multicultural modernity that the popularity of Parasite represents."
‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small’ … Norma surrounded by reporters
"Conversely, for conservatives, Norma is the trauma-broadcasting, victim-centred hysteric. Immune to irony and armed with snobbish entitlement, she preps for her starring role with fanatical earnestness. Oscar Wilde once observed that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”, and Norma’s faith in her screenplay is, well, genuine. Meanwhile, whenever she senses Gillis’s attention waning, she sounds off about her frayed nerves, wielding guilt as a tool to gag his misgivings. It’s a prescient caricature, from the perspective of the right, of the modern-day theatrics that thrive in grievance culture. Had Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand gurus been on the job in 1950, they’d have called Norma’s extravagances “self-care”.
In fairness, though, whatever is vile in Norma is what the gaze of the crowd made of her. She’s the vampiric femme fatale feasting on the adulation of others and crowing that “no one ever leaves a star”. Yet there she is, Gillis observes, “still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by”. That’s the real tragedy the film explores – not the noxious effects of ageing or wealth, but the surrender of selfhood that comes from living as a spectacle. When fans stop gawking, her loneliness forces her to invent phantasmic replacements, so that her psychic survival finally depends on her insanity.
Here’s where a chasm opens between 1950 and 2020. Sunset Boulevard indicts fame. By contrast, 21st century popular culture extols the virtue of maximised visibility. So widely shared is this belief that it passes as a banal truism: “being seen” constitutes both a form of personal therapy and a social justice imperative. “So, I want you to know that I see you,” wrote Hillary Clinton in the heat of the 2016 campaign, as though rescuing supporters from the dark fate of anonymity. Meanwhile, the largest organisations advocating for LGBTQ acceptance have made media visibility and identity representation the fulcrums of social progress.
And no doubt visibility politics does strip back prejudice. But Sunset Boulevard forces us to contemplate the cost of needing to be seen – namely, the unquenchable thirst for external validation that festers beneath a culture of exhibitionism."
A poster for Sunset Boulevard featuring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, William Holden as Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer as Nancy Olson.
"The final decades of the 20th century showcased the depredations of celebrity. From the infantilied, rhinoplastied, and blanched persona of Michael Jackson to the crucified rebel-from-royalty that was Princess Diana, fame built and toppled global icons. In the aughts and teens of the new century, Lindsay Lohan scraped rock bottom but survived; Amy Winehouse didn’t.
But amid this wreckage, celebrity status didn’t fall into ill-repute; instead, it became the average person’s ambition. Social media enabled anyone and everyone to be digitally seen. Influencers proliferated. YouTube stars opened their bedrooms to the public. Clicks, likes and retweets transformed into a cryptocurrency. Lady Gaga’s mega hit Paparazzi from her debut studio album The Fame captured the zeitgeist: sure, fame shatters you, but it forges resilience and gives a platform to the abject. By bearing their wounds for all to see, Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato announced that naked visibility had congealed as the basis for self-esteem and community belonging. The ideal of self-exposure went viral.
And that’s the most unnerving revelation of watching Sunset Boulevard in 2020: what ails Norma Desmond is what defines today’s popular culture. How’s that for an influencer?
Still, it’s worth remembering that the studio era’s “greatest star of them all” was the inscrutable eccentric who turned her back on the frothing fandom of the masses. With her shocking exit from the industry in 1941, Greta Garbo clawed back her privacy and never again relinquished it. In a strange way, the occult heroine of Sunset Boulevard is one who never occupies a single frame. In 1948, Wilder summoned Garbo to his home at 704 North Beverly Drive for a drink. His plan was to entice her to accept the lead part in his embryonic film. Offer he did, but her answer was no.
Wilder’s ballsy film notwithstanding, it was Garbo who, faced with the blandishments of renewed fame, delivered the most authentic “go fuck yourself".
Source:theguardian.com
Last edited by Gio, 5th August 2020 at 12:07.
Presenting an alternative to the alternative community.
Will share this here and well worth the listen ...
Found Voices : Ex Slaves talk about Slavery in the USA
Descriptive:
'A full broadcast story done by ABC News in 1999 about slavery as told by people who were slaves. A very unique 'Nightline' program that introduces us to voices from the past. These are actual slave recordings done in the 1930's and recently digitized. Crafted beautifully by Producer Karen Dewitt. Field Producer & Camera-Fletcher Johnson, Audio- Wayne Boyd.'
29:46 minutes
Note does contain commercials, though
the ads are also uniquely/strange to
hear 21 years ago now.
In Japan, young people rush to document
Hiroshima survivors' memories
PBS NewsHour
It has been 75 years since the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, leveling the city and killing some 150,000 people. The horrifying aftermath of that attack, and one on Nagasaki three days later, has been described to the generations since -- now with special urgency as the population of survivors dwindles. Special correspondent Grace Lee reports.
The first atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Just three days later, a second atom bomb flattened the city of Nagasaki, even though Japan had long been ready to capitulate.
Conventional wisdom holds that these two atomic explosions - the only use of nuclear bombs in the history of war - brought the Second World War to an end. Yet an increasing number of historians are critical of this interpretation. International experts say it is a myth and say it glorifies an war crime that killed more than 100 thousand civilians. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa argues that the Soviet Union’s unexpected declaration of war on Japan is what really pushed Tokyo to surrender. He says that Japan had been hoping that Moscow would step in to broker a diplomatic end to the conflict. Research in Russian archives has discovered that the United States knew that, so why did it drop the bombs at all? Especially the second one?
We want to do a lot of stuff; we're not in great shape. We didn't get a good night's sleep. We're a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.
Jerry Seinfeld
I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake.
Lewis Black
Presenting an alternative to the alternative community.