pandemonium on a good night

the Club Imperial in St. Louis, 1956

In his recorded interview for the 1986 memoir I, Tina, nightclub owner George Edick said, "By that time the big bands had all become small bands...."

        The book's co-author Kurt Loder discusses that:

------------------ [excerpt] ------------ There was a new kind of music playing by 1954:  rhythm and blues.  The intermingling of black and white music in America had begun in slavery days, when African rhythmic sensibilities were plopped down amid traditions of song and harmony that had originated in Europe.  

The subsequent welter of black field hollers and spirituals and backcountry dance music (often performed on improvised instruments) had evolved by the turn of the century into intriguing new hybrids.  

        The blues - a raw secular outgrowth of the call-and-response style of black gospel singing - spread throughout the cotton fields and turpentine camps of the South by itinerant singer-guitarists.  

At the same time, the cakewalk, a dance initially done to the strut-inducing rhythms of black marching bands, became a vaudeville craze and paved the way for the rise of ragtime, an intricately syncopated piano style forged in the all-night milieu of black saloons and bordellos.  

In New Orleans, Dixieland bands combined the harmonies of the blues with the rhythms of ragtime, then added a spirit of improvisation and began (along with musicians in many other cities) to create jazz, the soundtrack of the Roaring Twenties.  

        By the thirties, jazz music - now played by both black and white ensembles - had become one of America's most popular exports.  With the breakthrough of Benny Goodman in 1935, the swing years began.

        As swing music exploded, jazz bands grew bigger, and arrangers were called upon to organize the interplay of the ever-increasing number of instruments - a development which tended to limit freewheeling improvisation.  Gifted bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie maintained an improvisational spark, but in the hands of more pop-inclined white orchestras jazz was processed into simple dance music.

        With America's entry into World War II, many swing stars began departing the scene for military service, and the swing era began to ebb.  Black jazz musicians began reclaiming the field with hot black R & B groups that applied the horn playing of the big bands to stripped-down combos led by frantic saxophonists and blues-shouting vocalists.  

        The result, on a good night, was pandemonium - and hit records, at least in the circumscribed "race" market to which such music was consigned.

        Live radio shows were piped out over the "Delta Network" across Arkansas and Mississippi. ... -------------------------- [end / excerpt]

__________________________________

-----------------------------------------------

(In Bob Dylan's book, Chronicles, he recalled listening to blues music from a radio station far away that only came in at night - from New Orleans, I think - during the 1950s when he was a young teen in Hibbing, Minnesota, a small town up on the Iron Range.

        In that same time period, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were seeking blues and rhythm-and-blues music to listen to and learn from.  But of course those Southern radio stations in America were not powerful enough to reach across the Atlantic to England - not even at night!, ha - so they had to go looking for records, mostly 45s, wherever they could buy them, sometimes even having to send away for them from stores in the U.S.

        Life before the Internet....)

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jitterbug nights

 --------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina - by Tina Turner and Kurt Loder] ---------------------------- By this point, the Kings of Rhythm were the talk of the town.  Word about the band began to reach across the river, spread by fearless white fans who would brave the rowdy East St. Louis clubs to catch the hottest black acts.  

        George Edick, owner of the white, teen-oriented Club Imperial on West Florisson Street in St. Louis, decided to start booking the Kings for his popular Tuesday jitterbug nights.

        George Edick:  By that time the big bands had all become small bands and they went to jazz.  Jazz wasn't good for me; I had to have good swinging music for the dancers.  Black groups were the best, so I started booking them.  

Well, the Imperial held about a thousand people, and we packed 'em in.  People would come from all over on Tuesday nights.  Then one of our jitterbug champions told me about Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm.  

        He'd seen them at this colored place in East St. Louis.  He said, "You oughta hear this band they got over there."  So I brought them in one night, and the kids just loved them.  I said to Ike, "You want to work here every Tuesday night?"

-30-

better than Vegas

 As the Tina Turner (originally Anna Mae Bullock) life story goes forward, after she graduates from high school, her mother comes back for the funeral of a family member, and she invites both her daughters, Alline and Anna Mae, to come to St. Louis and live with her.

"And so I decided to go," Tina writes.

        The book's background narrator continues:  

[excerpt from I, Tina] ---------------- St. Louis in the mid-fifties was a fairly sedate place - especially in comparison to East St. Louis, its sister city across the Mississippi River.  East St. Louis had action, and it never seemed to stop.  

There were cathouses and gambling dens and an infinity of clubs that ranged from lavish nightclubs to nondescript roadhouses at the end of anonymous dirt roads.

  

The whole area was awhirl with night life, from places like the Blue Note and the Bird Cage, the Sportsman and the Lakeside, and all kinds of jazz clubs to Perry's Lounge in Eagle Park, Kingsbury's and Garrett's Lounge in Madison - the list seemed endless.  

        "Some of those places didn't even have keys to the front door," says Gene Washington, a local drummer at the time.  "They just stayed open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year."  

Adds Clayton Love, the Clarksdale singer who got his first sight of the St. Louis area around this same time:  "It was better than Vegas.  There was every kind of entertainment you could want.  And on the East Side, it was just ridiculously happy."

Anna Mae Bullock, sixteen years old and fresh from the backwoods of Tennessee, knew nothing of such high life upon arriving in St. Louis to live with her mother.  She would soon learn, however - entree was provided by her sister Alline, already employed as a barmaid at a local club.  

        Like an extraordinarily large number of other local young women, Alline would rave about what she considered the hottest band in town:  the Kings of Rhythm, led by a wiry little guitarist named Ike Turner.

the Macarthur Bridge over the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to East St. Louis

-30-

magazines and books and culture

 ----------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina] --------------------

There was a whole family of Wrights...and some of the women were beauticians.  These people were very interesting to me, being a country girl.  They didn't work in the fields or any of that.  They worked in beauty shops, that was their business, and they did well, had their own homes.  

And that was when I really started to realize that there was another way of living.  Not in those little houses we had in the country, with the linoleum floors and the dirt yards, but in a neighborhood, with paving on the streets and grass lawns out front, white houses with green shutters.  

        And with nice furniture inside, and hardwood floors and carpets.  That was the first time I really saw that, what life could be like.  I was fourteen.

        But we weren't living with Florence Wright, we were living with Cousin Ella Vera, and that became hard.  You see, after my parents left, there was never any contact with either of them.  When my mother left us, she didn't send back money for food or clothes or anything, not a card or a letter.  

And when Daddy left, it was pretty much the same.  He had sent a bedroom suite along with us, and he sent money to Cousin Ella Vera for a while, but it wasn't a lot.  So we were forced to become independent.  That's when I started working for the Hendersons, a white family in Ripley.  And the Hendersons changed my life....  

        The Hendersons were typical young white people.  They'd gotten married and bought their first house - had it built for them, a nice brick place - and had a baby.  Miss Connie Henderson had been a teacher in the elementary school before she got married.  Her husband was Guy Tucker Henderson, who owned the local Chevrolet franchise in Ripley, and their baby's name was David. 

I started working for them after school, taking care of the baby and helping Miss Connie around the house.  I learned how to wash David's diapers and fold them and all that, and how to clean, how to organize things.  Before long, I was basically living with the Hendersons.  

        I'd stay with them on weekends, and on Saturday nights Mr. Guy would drive me in to the movie, and when it was over, one of them would pick me up....I was learning about this other world...with magazines and books and culture....

 

I worked for the Hendersons and I cleaned for them, but I wasn't just a maid.  I was a part of their life; I lived there.  And it was from being around them that I started thinking about marriage, and what it might be like.

 I had never thought about marriage before - not when I was living with my parents, with all their bickering and fighting.  But the Hendersons' marriage was different....And I realized that that was what I wanted, too - I wanted that kind of affection and caring and commitment.  A real romance, you know?  

        The Hendersons just being the way they were, opened my eyes.  They taught me so much, those people.  They were really like parents to me, and they corrected old patterns of mine.

       

 

{I, Tina - written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Hardcover edition published in 1986 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.  Copyright 1986, 2010 by Tina Turner.}

-30-

big wheel keep on turnin'

 

---------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina - Tina Turner's memoir] ------------ At the Poindexters', Anna Mae [Tina Turner] caught glimpses of something that was missing in her own home - easy affection, solicitous commitment. ... But in her own home she felt frozen out, barely there.  It was more than just the pall that hung over Richard and Zelma's marriage.  They managed to find time for Alline between wrangles, it seemed.  But for Anna Mae there was little of the hearthside intimacy of a loving home life, only a grudging toleration.

        For it had been her misfortune to be the last, unwanted child of a foundering union.  As Richard and Zelma turned away from each other, their puzzled daughter, stranded in the middle, began to turn away too.  In those hours unoccupied by schooling, or later by work stints alongside her family in the cotton and strawberry fields, she took to roaming the pastures and the woodlands, searching for strength in solitude.  This, she came to suppose, was simply the way things were.

        But despair was never in her nature.  If there was pain, it would pass.  Another day would come, with a new sun to warm it.  Her life was just beginning, and as the 1940s took form she managed to pry a little girl's pleasures out of her uncomplicated backcountry world.  Despite the emotional dislocations, there was a redeeming sweetness to life then too, looking back.

-30-

highway number 19 - the people keep the city clean

 

1939

movies:  Gone With The Wind

               The Wizard Of Oz

music:  Cab Calloway's record, "Jumpin' Jive" came out

             also - "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday

             that summer, a young black Oklahoman named Charlie Christian popped up in the Benny Goodman Sextet in New York brandishing an unsettling instrument - an electronically amplified guitar

theater:  Ethel Waters became the first black woman to star in a Broadway drama (Mamba's Daughters)

-------------------- Jane Bolin became America's first black female judge

--------------------------- black voters defied Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings to cast ballots in Miami

____________________________________

----------------------------- [excerpt] ------------------ Anna Mae Bullock [Tina Turner] was born on the morning of November 26, 1939, at Brownsville's Haywood Memorial Hospital, a two-story building whose basement was relegated to the tending of black patients.  

She was quickly transported back up Highway 19 to Nut Bush, home:  a four-room shotgun house ensconced amid the vast and bountiful Poindexter acreage.

Her father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was resident overseer on the Poindexter farm, supervising harvests and hands for the property's white owners.  

        A deacon of the Woodlawn Baptist Church, Richard (as everyone called him) was also (as everyone knew) a man in constant conflict with his wife.  Zelma Bullock, Anna Mae's mother, was a black Indian of high spirits.  

Anything but a homebody, she had been smoking cigarettes and shooting .45's since the age of ten, and was not - as Richard had come to be painfully aware - a woman to be trifled with.  

Richard and Zelma's fights, real wall-rattlers, were the dominant feature of the domestic landscape.  There was one other child at home - little Alline, almost three - and she greeted her new sister as an ally. ---------------------- [end / excerpt - I, Tina, written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Copyright 1986, William Morrow; Copyright 2010, Tina Turner]

Church house, gin house

School house, outhouse

Highway number nineteen,

The people keep the city clean

They call it Nutbush,

Oh, Nutbush,

They call it Nutbush City Limits

Nutbush City --  

Ike and Tina Turner in a 1971 television performance of "Nutbush City Limits"

Ethel Waters

-30-

islands in an autumn stream

a poem

minute-hand of the seasons

The end of Summer and

the beginning of Autumn pass

each other with hardly a glance,

Moving inexorably forward, to

the next month, year, decade -

Oblivious of human beings' plans,

schemes, and wishes - 

bearing down on the future

with calm, terrifying equanimity

-30-

knowledge and information

 

When we have the Internet, we can look stuff up all the time.  If I'm listening to (or watching) a TV series or a show, and I notice an actor or actress who did a particularly great job, I can pause the show, click on the "G" and look up the actor, see their life story - born in New York, one marriage or 55 marriages (whatever), what other shows they were in, what their name was originally, before they changed it for show business, etc.

        I like to do it - I like to have that information at my fingertips.  But then there's also this reality of doubt around the edges - - - is the information - correct??

Like - what good is it, if it might be wrong, right? Ha.  

Sometimes, you can "Google" something and get conflicting information.

If your phone gets wet, there are people advising you to put it in rice, the rice will soak out the moisture.

        Then, the latest thing on Google on that topic is, ----- Don't put it in rice, because the rice can leave a "starchy dust" that can turn into a "glue-like paste" that will mess up your phone.  Or - re-mess it up, because it's already messed up from being wet....

Ooooohhhhh - kay ... original mess getting - messier. ...

Not the goal.

But then again, maybe that's not true.  Maybe rice would fix the problem, but the people putting information on the Internet don't want your phone to start working again, they just want you to have to buy a new phone.

So it kind of becomes a question of - what, if anything, is actually true??

        I remember when I first began to get familiar with the Internet (in early 2000s) and I mentioned to a local veterinarian that I read something on the Internet, and she emphatically stated to me, "Don't take advice for your cat or dog from the Internet, there's a lot of bad, and wrong, information on there!"  [words to that effect]

She didn't want any animals to suffer because of lies on the Internet.

I agreed with that, and was glad she was giving that advice to people.

        The bottom line being:  'OK, there's information, but don't trust it. ...'

So - what good is it??!!

WHAT - IS - THE - POINT - ???!!!

A couple of months ago, I had a wedding to go to.  I had not been to a wedding in a long time - I looked in my closet - what am I going to wear?  I went through a couple of outfit ideas, and then thought the best idea was a simple ensemble of black slacks and pink top (plus buy some shoes to wear that aren't clunky).

        I got the shoe conundrum solved, non-clunked.... but wondered if it's OK to wear black slacks to a wedding, because I have heard you mustn't wear black to a wedding.

        But it would be black that isn't up by your face, so it isn't making any kind of negative statement, it's just slacks.

So I Googled - can I wear black slacks and a pink top to a wedding? - and "it" answered me, saying, 'You're good to go!'

So - I wore that outfit to the wedding, and I didn't get - ejected, so it worked out.

-30-

it has a "ring to it"...

 

On The Golden Girls episodes, I started to notice that, on Betty White's left hand, on her ring finger, is a ring with a big sapphire in the middle, and surrounded by diamonds.

        It's just like Lady Diana Spencer's engagement ring from Charles, the Prince of Wales, in February of 1981.

Once I noticed it, I started watching for it, and kept seeing it.

Googled - didn't have time to read the whole thing, but yes, it's a ring like Princess Diana's.

        A headline on the Internet said that Diana's engagement ring "started a trend."

Betty White and Allen Ludden

-30-

fashion of the early 1980s

 

        A video about then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983.  That's the year when they took their first trip to Australia.  They had been married for two years, and had their first child, Prince William - they brought him with them on the trip.

Diana's dresses:  pie-crust collars abounded!

I wanted to wear dresses like that!

        At the age I was, then, I kind of wanted to wear - everything.  Dreaming, and yearning, and wanting.  Wanting everything (well, not really, but you think  you do)....

        ---------------- Making an exception, perhaps, for the hats.  It's a British Royal Family tradition - ladies wearing hats.

-30-

in a subterranean chamber

 One of the people on that Kennedy Library panel discussing Jackie Kennedy's "literary life" is Greg Lawrence, author of Jackie As Editor, copyright 2011, Thomas Dunne Books - St. Martin's Press.

------------------------ [excerpt] ------------ {the narrator here is Eugene Kennedy (no relation to the Massachusetts Kennedys); he's a Catholic priest from Chicago who worked with Jackie on a book about Mayor Daley} -------------------- "I was her escort at the Democratic Convention in 1976. ... She had talked to me in advance about going with her and whatnot, and it was quite an experience.  

I was traveling with Mike Royko and a group from the Chicago papers.  What occurred that night, first, of course, we came into the hall, and it was mayhem as soon as she entered.  

        She was extremely calm, and I walked with her, and I didn't have my collar on or anything like that, and I went to these seats that had been reserved for her.  And her sister was there.  And then all these people came streaming over to say hello to her - the actor Lorne Greene and the Carter family came down.  Everybody wanted to be seen with her.  It was highly amusing, in a way, because you could see why she did want to walk fast....

"Here we were at the heart of the Democratic Convention, and she had asked to meet Daley, who was a delegate.  We talked to the guy that was the chairman of the party then, Robert Strauss, from Texas.  So he set up this meeting, in a lower level of Madison Square Garden, in some subterranean chamber.  

And here's Dick Daley in his blue suit, and I knew the way Daley would react.  She went over to talk to him, and he just listened, very happy to see her.  But even to her...as far as a book, he was very self-protective and protective of his family.  

She wanted him to know she was having a book written about him.  She was very straightforward.  She told him that she had commissioned a book, and he said something like, 'We'll look into it.'

        "He died the next December.  Now while he was alive, nobody would talk.  They feared for their lives and their jobs and so forth.  It was very interesting, the control he exerted.  After he died, I ended up talking to dozens and dozens of people, who knew him in various ways, some of them in a very intimate way, and they were very helpful.  

Jackie was fascinated by all this, and her support never wavered.  

Before Daley died, it didn't matter to her that he wasn't going to give any direct support.  She understood, if you were on to something, if she felt you were on the right track, she would encourage you to keep going along that track.  If she thought you were diverging from it, that's when she would intervene and say, 'Well, I'm not sure about that.'  She did it so nicely."

-----------------------------------------------------

On You Tube:

World Turning

> Fleetwood Mac

...and play

Lorne Greene

-30-

"I'm a senior editor at Doubleday"

 Oh! - you can find this on You Tube, video titled:

The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

channel / uploader:  John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

------------------------------------- I've never seen this, before.  It's an hour and 38 minutes, so if you put it on when you have some work to get done, it will last for a bit - you don't have to keep stopping what you're doing to find something else to play.

        One panelist tells the story of getting invited to dinner at the home of New York City Mayor Ed Koch.  The guy arrived at the mayor's apartment and the 20 people who were there didn't seem to know each other.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was one of the guests.

        When they all sat down at the dinner table, Mayor Koch asked everyone to go around the table, each person introducing themselves.

        ("I'm Jacqueline Onassis; I'm a senior editor at Doubleday.")

I think people for whom English is a second language will enjoy this video, as well as people whose first language is English.

        In our economy, I cannot help but notice, there are many things that aren't good and are expensive, while at the same time there are things like this "literary Jackie" video that are really good, and - free of charge - !  LOL.  It's like some kind of absurd, unexpected miracle....

Ed Koch, mayor of New York City, 1978 - 1989

-30-

...when the conditions are right...

 One time at work a few years ago, I was telling a guy about a book that I thought he might find interesting.

        He said, Yeah, that sounds good - it would have to be raining out, for me to read it.

I hadn't thought about activities as being able to be participated in only if the weather conditions are right.  Although, yes - it can be that way.  We cannot ski if there isn't any snow... what other examples are there?  ...

        I was reminded of that convo recently when re-reading a passage from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan:

------------------------ [excerpt] ---------- I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment, to turn on the black-and-white TV.  Wagon Train was on.  It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country.  

I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door - a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library.  

I switched on the lamps.  

The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.  Up until this time I'd been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.  

Brando.  James Dean.  Milton Berle.  Marilyn Monroe.  Lucy.  Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro.  Little Rock and Peyton Place.  Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio.  J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse.  

        The Nelsons.  Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys.  Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy.  Levittown.

        Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke.  There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies....Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus.  Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General - a narrative which would give you chills. ...

Endless rows of books - Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods.... Alexander the Great's March into Persia.... There was Simon Bolivar's biography, too.  I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. ----------------------- [end / Chronicles excerpt] ----------------------

Bob would have to be in a rest home ... my former co-worker would need some rain....

-30-

a thin, translucent coating

 That gossip columnist we wrote about here in the last post, Nigel Dempster (that's  his photo at the top), was quoted saying, "There is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breakup."

        Nice guy.

----------------- ...the sentences and phrases that Tina Brown writes tend to fascinate me:

the two tabloids that have "a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability"

"sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced"

"screaming populist tabloids"

"daily blizzard of headlines"

"from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity..."

"a swashbuckling editor"

"fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal"

..."scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes" - and here, of course, she isn't even talking about actual weather, she has made a series of metaphors to describe escalating media intrusion on people whose images grab attention....

        Such prose could knock you flat.   It's a plush, dynamic writing style.

        Tina Brown sort of does with words and language what Julia Child did with food.

One thing to bear in mind - Ms. Brown's description of print media in Great Britain, which is quoted and excerpted here in this blog, was from a book that was published in the year 2007.

        We had the Internet back then, but social media had not yet "taken over" to the extent it has now, so all that information about Britain's "voracious" readers buying newspapers might need updating here, nearly 20 years later.

Fleet Street - the heart of the British newspaper and printing industry for nearly 500 years

-30-

total recall

 

[excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown] --------------- Lady Diana Spencer took her bow at the nexus of a national malaise.... The plebeian tabloids - The Sun, the Mirror, and the Star - no longer had the field to themselves.  

Under a swashbuckling editor, David English, the Daily Mail converted itself to a tabloid format in 1971 and quickly eclipsed a wilting Daily Express as the enduring bible of middle England; English's successor, Paul Dacre, has only increased its power.  

(By 2006, the Daily Mail was selling more than two million copies a day.)  

        The magic formula of the Mail was a combination of curtain-twitching class envy and strident rightist politics, with the added spice of the most waspish gossip columnist in London, Nigel Dempster, whose scoops from the highest circles of the Establishment were read at every upper-class breakfast table like a ransom note.  

Dempster had a thirty-year reign of terror until he was felled by ill health.  He was a miniaturist in tabloid takedowns.  His demonic social energy seemed to take him everywhere at once; in a car he always drove at a hundred miles an hour with the horn blaring.... He was dapper, fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal, and blessed with total recall.

-30-

so much good writing

 ------------------ [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown.  Copyright 2007, Broadway Books / Random House - paperback.  Hardcover - Doubleday.] -------------------------- In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world.  

Their relative positions along the spectrum of sensation have remained consistent, but the entire spectrum has shifted sharply toward the garish, a trend accelerated by the resort to checkbook journalism - a practice of buying sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced.  

Three of the nationals - the "red tops" of The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star - are screaming populist tabloids, on most days almost entirely devoid of anything resembling serious news.  Two more tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, compete in the same mass market but with a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability.  

        The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, and now the Independent, are supposed to occupy the high ground.  Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  

That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television.  

When all the papers are on a rampage against some public figure, which nowadays is always, they invade your life.  They are billboarded at every newsstand.  They leap across your screen.  

They buzz around in your head all day like a low-grade fever.  

Paradoxically, it is the flair of the British tabloid press, its superb professional elan [the "e" in the word elan should have an accent mark over it, I don't know how to do that on my Chromebook, begging your pardon...], that makes it so feared by its subjects and targets.  

        So much good writing and theatrical presentation goes into mounting the daily crucifixions.  So much competitive professional pride goes into finding just the right killer adjective.

        The Royal Family used to be exempt from routine abuse.  But in thirty years the tabloid view of royalty moved from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity in between. ----------------- [end / excerpt]

-30-

much ado about nothing?

 Harry and Meghan moved back to England several weeks ago, and the ongoing, relentless talk-and-commentary about the move is unbelievable.

        But then, I think, well of course it's believable - this is what British newspapers and chat-videos always do constantly.

I guess the word "unbelievable" is a word that comes to my mind when I see some phenomenon as being kind of "a bit much."  Or - as The Bard would call it, "much ado about nothing."

So - not literally "unbelievable."  Rather - a lot.

 

        Royal commentators and experts talk and talk, and then the listener finds herself or himself wondering, OK, what did they say??  What is the substance of all this?

Some critics say the various forms of media just take famous names and images, splatter them on paper or video or whatever, and build stories around them.

The stories come in several forms:

--  true, but exaggerated

--  there's a grain of truth, but the rest is made up

--  completely made up.

        It would be like if I made up a story, right this minute, about someone famous:  U.S. President Donald Trump is buying a library in China, and its shelves are going to be filled with books about him.  (All complimentary, of course.)

        Grains of truth:  1) The president of the U.S. is currently Donald Trump; 2) China is a country that exists.  

        The rest of that - I just made up.

        This is an example of what they do. ...

And that is what a lot of what is published and recorded in England is: made up and put out there because people watch it or buy it.  It's catering (pandering?) to an audience, for profit.

-----------------------------------------------

Listening to a video on You Tube titled "Why have the Sussexes suddenly decided to move back to the UK?" - one person on the panel spoke about the nature of the British press, saying -

"I think, if anything, the reaction from certain sections of the press who may have been sued in the past, some successfully, some unsuccessfully - it's going to be even worse.  

        You know, and that is an issue I'm not sure that they've completely taken on.  Because, trust me, the U.S. media is extremely tame, compared to the U.K. press.  So I don't know how that's going to be managed...."

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        In order for us to contemplate the media in England, I want to have an excerpt, here, from The Diana Chronicles, written by Tina Brown.

----------------------- [excerpt] ------------- Just before Diana Spencer began to emerge so vividly into public life, a kind of journalistic global warming was altering the eco-balance between the British press and the British Royal Family.  

The sunshine of publicity in which Diana would at first be happy to bask, posing and smiling for the cameras, grew steadily hotter and harsher.  

As the superheated imperatives of an invasive press bumped up increasingly against the milder human necessity of privacy, scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes.  

        The ultimate tragedy of the disaster in the Paris tunnel in 1997 was that Diana herself had accelerated the climate change that ended up making her life literally impossible.

        For Americans used to local newspapers homogenized by the stingy monopolies of big chains and no national newspapers except the inoffensive USA Today, the staid national edition of the New York Times, and the staider Wall Street Journal, the volume and variety of the British print press feels bewilderingly promiscuous.  

In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world....

Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television. ---------------- [end / excerpt]

        

Tina Brown

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a side-table for your garage

 

The You Betcha channel on You Tube has a couple of videos about tools:

"I Bought Tools Reddit Told Me Never To Buy"

"I Bought TEMU Tools, So You Don't Have To"

        He had a video about "Man Caves."

He discussed drill bits purchased from Amazon.

He uses some of the tools on-camera.  Testing them.

He discussed a portable project center that sounds cheap if you clank the pieces together.

        I started thinking, people who are mechanics could watch these videos and they would understand more of this person's video "content" than I do....  -  then realized actual mechanics probably already know all this stuff, and hence don't need the videos....

Maybe the videos are appropriate for people who have an office job or something, but in their free time they want to fix some things, or build some things, at home.  In their man-cave, maybe....

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"I continue to be stunned"

 

You Tube viewer comments:

||    The "whelp" with the double knee slap when it's time to go.

||    "How were the roads"?  Classic when they arrive

||    "Ope.  Sorry, just gonna sneak right past ya."  Gotta have that "sorry" in there.  It's important for the "not being an inconvenience" complex.

||    Canadians have sorry locked down.

||    The Midwest goodbye, "well I better get going" proceeds to talk for another 3 hours.

||    "Twenty-below isn't so bad if the wind would stop blowing"

||    "I dunno about all that" = "That's dumb"

||    "Well, that's different." = I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns

||    "It is what it is" could be the slogan of any small town in the Midwest

        ----------------------------- No joke my (central Minnesota) High School senior class wanted to make this our class motto last year.  Principal vetoed it.

||    As a Midwesterner engaged to a Canadian:  No, yeah

||    My Minnesota family's favorite form of small talk is asking which route you took to get to the place where you met them.  

        Did ya take 94 the whole way, or did ya take the back roads?"

        Nothing excites them quite like navigation.

||    100% my dad any time we visit and no matter which way you go he always knows a better route lol

||    If you could just run to the store for us real quick, but if not, it's no biggie

||    Felt the, "rather suffer alone than ask someone to do something they don't want to do" in my f-cking soul

||    Also because frankly aggressive volumes of community service as default is both a religious / cultural value and expected, and will eat every last moment of your waking hours if someone doesn't give you an out on something.

||    "If not that's totally fine" is an everyday one for me lol

||    Suffering alone instead of bothering somebody for help, is the cornerstone of Japanese society, surprised to see it in the Midwest

||    "You guys" is the Midwest version of "y'all".

||    Way back when, Wisconsin had a brand of cash machine called "Tyme".  When I moved to Chicago one day I was frantically looking (and asking people) if they had seen a "Tyme" machine.... got very funny looks!

||    I'm from Minnesota and I went to Colorado a few years back.  We got an Uber back to the hotel and the driver guessed where we were from by the "yea no's" alone

||    I just used "ope, let me sneak past ya" the other day.  They just looked at me and said "sawrry".

I love the Midwest.

||    I can totally relate, with pushing my emotions and feelings deep down and never reveal them, just let it out slowly over time victim by victim!!!

||    My old man is a born and raised Finnish Minnesotan.  He complimented me for the first time when I was 38 years old.  It was beautiful but brief...and never happened again.  Midwest emotions, ha!

||    I continue to be stunned at how similar Midwestern and Norwegian culture is

||    I was in Germany for work and the "Yeah, No, Yeahs" definitely caused some confusion a few times.  They spoke perfect English too.

        --------------------- Europeans often learn British English or Hollywood English, any other localism will throw them off.

||    When you think about it, the Yeah no Yeahs are a derivative of the don't wanna inconvenience you lol

||    I was born and raised on Long Island.  I've lived my entire life in the Northeast.  I absolutely LOVE saying "ope".  I've yet to pair it with "lemme sneak right past ya" but my goal is to get there one day.

*[the name of the channel is You Betcha.]

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