Correspondence
Peewee Marquette Victor Gold erroneously refers to "Shorty, Birdland's midget m.c." ("Cool Diz and Me," TAS, March 1993). The Jazz Corner of the World's dyspeptic host, Peewee Marquette, upon...
...How long will the siege continue...
...His is truly a Martian analysis of this extraordinary movie about two laymen (in things medical) who buck foundations, medicine, and science to find a remedy to a cruel disease doctors could only shrug their shoulders at...
...Driving Miss Daisy—and Star Wars too—are chock-full of recognizable human situations in spite of the old-fashionedness or outlandishness of their stories...
...Alan 0. Ebenstein Santa Barbara, California Honeymoon in Boulder Ben Stein's definition of Baby Boomers (a miscreant nobility which I have the great misfortune of being a member of), contained in his April 1993 Diary "Two Steps Forward," is the best I've seen to date...
...abiding interest in socialism...
...Gold in the posterior with his lit cigar, which he used as a weapon against the world, filled with people he was forever doomed to look up at...
...Tom Garlock Knoxville, Tennessee Victor Gold replies: You're right...
...high schools in ethnicity—that is, two-thirds of L.A...
...The Word on Slobo Special congratulations to Jeffrey Gedmin for his profile of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian dictator and architect of genocide in Bosnia ("Comrade Slobo," TAS, April 1993...
...I'm all for Salk and Pasteur in the world of actual diseases, but if they appear in a work of art they are obliged to be believable in a way they are not in real life...
...In the sea of ink that has been dedicated to the war, Gedmin is among the very few to recognize that this war, in the end, has much less to do with past grievances, particularly the oft-cited sufferings of Serbs in World War II, than with the desire of Milosevic and his gang to remain on top...
...In publishing Gedmin's article and reproducing Minor's work, TAS has demonstrated, ironically enough, that the authentic successors of the fine old tradition of American moral protest are to be found today very far from the leftist milieu...
...William E. Laughlin Wichita, Kansas L.A...
...I'm also amused to see the magazineutilizing the classic antiwar cartoons of Robert Minor (same issue, page 31...
...The situation in Lorenzo's Oil, though based on fact, is not believable in this way...
...No, I doubt I'll ever be an old woman with a black chauffeur...
...Yet that supposed distance.doesn't seem to stop people from enjoying everything from Star Wars to Driving Miss Daisy, all of which deal with unlikely or impossible plots...
...he might have to recognize the limitations of the way he was brought up...
...Stephen Schwartz San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, California Taking to Terrill I was on the verge of dismissing William McGurn's review of Ross Terrill's China in Our Time as another lengthy exercise in dry book-review journalism that I could live without—until something caught my eye, and forced me to read the entire piece (TAS, April 1993...
...Unified School District high schools have ethnicity figures greater than 71 percent...
...advocacy of multiculturalism and an activist, interventionist government...
...contempt for conventional morality...
...It is articulate and succinct, and will no doubt find its way into a dictionary one day...
...That such a connection is essential, or even possible, is what the multiculturalist mafia would deny, which is why conservatives should stand up for human—as opposed to black, feminist, gay, or disabled—audiences...
...Numbers Edward Norden's interesting and perceptive article on Fairfax High School in Los Angeles ("International Studies in Los Angeles," TAS, March 1993) neglects to mention one significant fact: at 71-percent combined minority student enrollment, Fairfax is actually in the bottom third of L.A...
...He was a founder of the American Communist Party, and became one of its leading and most tragic figures, abandoning his art for a career as a Stalinist functionary...
...Stand up and take a bow, honey...
...Will some future historian, in chronicling the "Clinton Era," echo the Peking professor's tragic observation—"All the old ethics were destroyed, but nothing new has come...
...Clearly, as Norden so well points out, the demographic transformation that California in particular is experiencing is enormous...
...The film takes a recognizable human situation—the imminent death of a loved one—and transforms it into an unrecognizable one by introducing a deux ex machina in the form of a cure (or at least a palliative) for the disease...
...I'm wrong...
...egotism...
...Texas born, he became nationally famous as a daily newspaper cartoonist, then yet more famous for his radical journalism and his pacifist works during World War I. The last cost him his position in what today we would call the mainstream media...
...Ghastly tastelessness...
...A yuppie denial of death...
...Perhaps Salk's and Pasteur's works offend Bowman, leading as they have to longer, more comfortable lives for countless people...
...and his egalitarian ringside table celebrity intros ("We're real proud to have here tonight one of the world's mos' popular great ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt...
...If you wish to predict the effect the Clinton administration will have on this country, have a look at the reign of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Canada—a once-great nation that he almost single-handedly ruined (and from where I have escaped, only to find a man of the same ilk inhabiting the White House...
...Imagine the real-life protagonists of Lorenzo's Oil actually having the gall to try to help their child slip his ailment's horrible effects and eventual fatal triumph...
...This creates an emotional distance between it and the large majority of people who, finding themselves in that situation, do not have that option available to them—to say nothing ofthose who, given the fact that Lorenzo will remain a virtual vegetable for the rest of his pathetically prolonged life, would not even want it...
...Though he will certainly never be an old lady with a black chauffeur, he might have to change in old age the way that he has treated other people all his life...
...Likewise, he takes my criticism of the philistinism of the moving picture called Lorenzo's Oil, made by George Miller, Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, and various other non-Pasteurs, to mean that I oppose real-life medical science...
...It's always a pleasure to read a review by someone to the right of Trotsky, but there is a danger that the reviewer may have weird ideas of his own...
...This is unsurprising, given that minority high school student enrollment in the district as a whole is 86 percent...
...Marquette was renowned for his malapropish introductions ("And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Birdland proudly presents: the great Count Basie, with Joe Williams and His Orchestra...
...he might find himself befriended by someone who started out despising him...
...My pet peeve about the movie business these days is that, in its fascination with fantasy, it seems sometimes almost to have forgotten how to touch the nerve of a real, human, adult, non-minority audience--or why it should be trying to...
...But after forty-plus years my memory seems to have come up short...
...He also tap-danced on raie occasions, and when egged on enough by Dizzy, Basie, or Ella Fitzgerald, could be prevailed upon to offer a nifty rendition of "South of the Border...
...Philistinism" is a term used only in relation to art...
...Alive and Lorenzo's Oil are relatively poor in such situations, or they do trite or improbable things with them that make the audience's sense, of connection with them difficult to establish...
...Gedmin seems to be the first to have enunciated the obvious fact, "Milosevic wants war . . . because he needs war to stay in power...
...My apology to Peewee, wherever he may be...
...If that's philistinism, then so is all of medicine and any other effort to improve the hand nature dealt us...
...James Bowman's peculiar thesis in the March issue—that movies such as Alive and Lorenzo's Oil don't rope us in because of the unlikelihood we'd ever find ourselves in the same situations—applies to just about every movie I can think of...
...Intellectual aptitude...
...Fascinated by the irony throughout, I came away regretting the scarcity of other similar "conversions" of seventies left-liberals to sanity in these days of American socialistic experimentation...
...The Jazz Corner of the World's dyspeptic host, Peewee Marquette, upon hearing this misnomer, would no doubt have jabbed Mr...
...and a loony wife are but a small number of the meritorious qualities these two gentlemen have in common...
...Minor's career is fascinating...
...avoidance of military service...
...Bizarrer yet is Bowman's blather about Lorenzo's Oil...
...his triumphant weather reports ("I know y'all are glad to be at Birdland tonight, because outside it's freezin' cold, but down here it's warm . . . and it's cool...
...He died in obscurity...
...Avrom E. Howard Boulder, Colorado Snake Oil One of the best things about TAS is the movie section...
...God help the USA...
...A fixture at Birdland until its demolition, Mr...
...Ross Nelson Milwaukee, Wisconsin James Bowman replies: Ross Nelson suffers from what we critics call "literal-mindedness...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
