Why Freddy Fender? Why today?

Because any day is a good day to remember one of the brightest of the shining Tejano lights, a genre-crossing  star who — along with artists like Doug Sahm, Flaco Jiménez, and Augie Meyers — introduced Tejano music  to the world and combined it with everything from country to rockabilly.

And above all, there was his  voice. His  angelic voice.

For all his recordings in English, and recordings in Spanish and English, he never sounded more at home — more content — than singing the Spanish of his native South Texas.

Lost love is a major theme in Tejano, Conjunto,  Norteño, and Canción Ranchera music. I can’t think of any other musical forms where tougher guys produce more tears.

And no “lost love”  song I know tugs at the heartstrings — mine, at least — more than Freddy’s “Before the Last Teardrop Falls.” He recorded several versions, but my favorite was done completely in Spanish. The best I could find combines Spanish  and English. The song was actually written as a country song by Vivian Keith and Ben Peters, but Freddy’s recording — the most famous — gave it the full-Tejano treatment.

Si te quiere de verdad

si te da felicidad

les deseo lo mas bueno a los dos

pero si te hace llorar

a mi me puedes hablar

yo estare contigo cuando triste estes

And here is Freddy, accompanied by the greatest living Conjunto accordionist — Flaco Jiménez — singing  el más grande de todas las canciones de amor perdido — “Volver, Volver.”

No one is going to use the  term “cutting-edge” to describe a  guy whose list of great songs in films includes a couple Judy Garlands, one Georges Guétary, and  Anton Karas.

In fact, I have always been embarrassingly far from the edge, having – for example — taken 47 years to fully appreciate Jimi Hendrix,  50  years to get into Georges Guétary, 60 years to “discover ” Eddie Cantor, and a full 38 years to become a Ramones fan.

Mr. Cool.

But for about two years, I have been mulling over the possibility that a more recent group of musicians might have snuck past everyone  else and seized a place near the very top of the “song in film” heap.

And so I now add #9 to the “Great Songs in Film” list, the mind-bogglingly exciting and “defibrillator required in the auditorium” Dropkick Murphys, whose song I’m Shipping Up to Boston is the soundtrack for an early, explosive sequence in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece “The Departed.”

Film met song and song met film and the result was perhaps one of the 2 – 3 most exciting sequences I have seen in any film at any time. In fact, I retired  the already trite phrase ”heart-pounding” as having been so fully realized that it never required re-use.

I am sharing the trailer and the Dropkick Murphy music video. You’ll need to see the film for the actual sequence.

In years of watching documentaries, especially vérité or quasi-vérité, there have probably been hundreds of moments in which – after the supposed “action” is complete — a filmmaker lingers and keeps the camera running.

I was just watching Herzog’s Grizzly Man yet again and saw a wonderful example. Without ruining the story of this extraordinary film, I can tell you that a fairly conventional interview with a character ends on an emotional note and – rather than end it “logically” or power down the camera out of some felt respect for the subject – Herzog keeps filming. Slowly the subject realizes the emotional implications of her words and the events she was describing. She says nothing but — in her silence, in her coming apart — reveals everything.

My point?

The action often takes place after the action. The main event is often not the main event.  The inner-life, the human steam animating the action,  is often only revealed in subtle glances and facial tics after all the talk is over.

Herzog never seems to forget this. And the Maysles Brothers, in Salesman, elevate the lingering lens to high art.

Keep the camera running.  Stay quiet. Allow the rich texture of inner emotional lives to trump “action.”

Photo Credit: Chip Cooper

Thirty years ago this month, I read The Man in the Water, an essay in Time Magazine by Roger Rosenblatt.  It instantly became one of my favorites and I have returned to it many times over the years.  It was heroic, deeply emotional,  and powerful writing of the highest order, yet disciplined enough to completely avoid Hallmark territory. It also, in the intervening years, has been anthologized, widely circulated, and praised as a profound and even shattering take on the life-long battle we all wage against forces that may or may not be beyond our control.

Nothing I had ever read to that point occasioned more tears or led to more contemplation about the human dilemma. But it also delivered a profound message about our potential for selflessness and heroism that has been with me ever since.

If you read it, let me know what you think.

Now, though, I have a problem.

Mr. Rosenblatt has written Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats, an account of the sudden death of his 39 year-old daughter from an undiagnosed heart ailment. And while I know I will have to read it, that I want to read it, the thought of this masterful essayist talking about his own relentless grief leaves me absolutely terrified about the emotions that might be unleashed.

Mr. Rosenblatt  is a writer who does not flinch, a word-craftsman incapable of false notes, a man who – over the years – has had an almost mystical feel for the nature of human pain and suffering.

Now, though, it is his pain and suffering.  In his voice.

I feel cowardly. Part of me doesn’t even want to face the fact that he – or anyone for that matter — has ever had to feel this kind of grief.

But I know that they have.  Roger Rosenblatt has. And so it’s time to read Kayak Morning.

Helen Frankenthaler has died.

Rejecting 19th century romanticism and ridiculing the cult of beauty was very much at the core of much of the modernist impulse in art. Some early movements and manifestos even argued that an authentic challenge to the cult of beauty required the creation of work that struggled not to be beautiful in a conventional sense.

Beauty, however, did not go gently.

And — as much as anywhere in the body of 20th century modern art — it can be found in the work of Helen Frankenthaler and other 20th century abstract expressionists.

Not all critics welcomed this kind of luminous work into a modern project intent on challenging and even destroying conventional aesthetics.

But by mid-century, Frankenthaler and others could be found simultaneously challenging, destroying, and creating works of sublime beauty.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1957

In this clip, he plays Träumerei (Dreaming), one of the 13 movements in Robert Schumann’s 1838 composition Kinderszenen. These 13 pieces were written as an ode to childhood, or — perhaps more precisely — to memories of childhood.

I wish I could say more, but — after several decades — I still lack the vocabulary to explain why this remains among the most emotionally overwhelming pieces of music I have ever heard.

Make room for me in that special circle of hell reserved for all the people who -  having lived and breathed and been nourished by film – nonetheless at some moment find themselves watching a movie on a phone.

And to think I used to think that the worst sin occurred when the Cineplex became the Megaplex became the Fiftyplex.

I remember going to see Fame almost 30 years ago in Times Square, and — by the time I walked through at least five different corridors — I arrived in Somethingplex 18 to find a screen smaller than today’s modest HDTVs.

It got worse. Through the years, I watched many new developments diminish the film experience. First came colorization, which happily never caught on. Then all the “arounds” — Sensurround, Shakearound, Twistaround and heaven knows what else. Saddest of all was watching the disappearance of the lost art of gorgeous black and white cinematography, perfected by some of the greatest film  craftspeople and artists of the 20th century  — John Seitz, Lucien Ballard, Joseph Walker, Robert Burks, Boris Kaufman and many others.

And now Blu-Ray, which – while a gorgeous platform for many new films – subjects older, beautiful and careful noir cinematography and sundry special effects to a level of resolution that was never intended, to a microscopic scrutiny that ruins its grain and texture.  I actually saw a Coppola-sanctioned remastering of The Godfather recently that was pumped up to such an intense and sharp resolution that – for the first time – Marlon Brando looked like a young man with bad make-up. I can’t believe that Gordon Willis, Dean Tavoularis, or Dick Smith was happy with the result.

And yet, for all my supposed respect for the medium, there I was, watching Midnight Cowboy on a tiny iPhone screen.

Something is very, very wrong here.

While the full details of the story may remain murky, Perez-Pena — in the admirable journalistic tradition of careful follow-up when new details are revealed — – wrote a subsequent story with the instructor’s version of events.

Without claiming that I now have a firm handle on the truth in this complex situation, I do feel obligated to state the following:

Virtually every complex human interaction imaginable defies easy description. First-rate writers and researchers can try, and perhaps come close, but it is inevitable that different parties and witnesses to an interaction will see things differently.  Perez-Pena, a skilled and distinguished  professional,  was forced — given the initial choice of the professor not to comment — to write the first  story without her version. Only days later, when she did agree to speak, Perez-Pena immediately wrote a follow-up.

The speed with which I angrily chastised the instructor and the institution for this incident, while born of a deep anger and sensitivity to discrimination against people with disabilities, clearly should have awaited a fuller  account including the professor’s version. I still may not agree with what I now know was  the professor’s judgement, but the point is that my reaction preceded my even having any idea what that  judgement was.

The fault was allowing my indignation about discrimination  (an indignation that is alive, well, and still white-hot) to lead me to temporarily reject even the possibility of an alternate version of events.  I should have thought more carefully before allowing anger to trump caution.

Isn’t it just like complexity to come along and ruin certainty and clarity?

Anton Karas’s “Third Man Theme” – an instrumental played on Greek Zither that opens Carol Reed’s 1949 film masterpiece The Third Man — has always mystified me.

The tune is absolutely hypnotic, and it works with the film almost perfectly, but how in the world was someone imaginative enough — perhaps Carol Reed himself — to think that music on a Greek folk-instrument would work in a post-war, Vienna-based, spy thriller?

I’d love to know the actual film history here, but what I have always imagined is that – with the annihilation of so much of Europe and the crumbling of national boundaries — cities like Vienna and Rome and Paris became magnets for all sorts of travellers from diverse ethnic and national identities.

Yes, there was rebuilding to do, but – as The Third Man shows so powerfully – there was also a lot of money to be made in smuggling and the underground economy.

It has always  seemed to me  that Greek music in Vienna signaled this ethnic crazy quilt that – at least for a while – characterized the wanderering and the seeking of so many of the lost souls of post-war Europe. The theme seemed to imply that this was a time of confusion and opportunism in which anybody could show up anywhere. The way, for example, that the mysterious Harry Lime just “shows up.”

Why not a Greek Zither in a Vienna spy film by an iconic British director?

Any fair system includes procedures to rectify those mistakes, reverse those inevitable errors, and provide some remedy to those who ave been harmed.

While these errors might upend lives and unfairly stigmatize individuals, they can be reversed. Unjust decisions and sanctions can to some extent be undone.

Only one grievous error in a criminal justice system – the execution of an innocent person – is completely irreversible under any circumstances.

No subsequent discovery of  a mistake or an error can be reversed after a person is dead.

Of course, a perfect system incapable of error could – at least theoretically —  include an irreversible sanction. But such perfection is impossible. Perfect systems do not exist.

Thus, it is impossible to have a death penalty in any  imperfect  system that sincerely aspires to fairness.

Obviously, the whole concept of “the best of” is inherently problematic. Something is always missing from any  ”best of” list that immediately renders the list suspect.

But earlier this month, ProPublica, the non-profit investigative reporting organization, provided about as complete and perceptive a list as I can imagine of the best investigative reporting of the events of 9/11.

Lois Beckett, Braden Goyette, and Marian Wang compiled the mini-anthology, and they call it The Best, Most Damning Reporting of the 9/11 Era.

Check it out, and assume the inevitable  that some piece of superb work was – for no reason other than the volume of possible choices — omitted. By the way, ProPublica is the kind of organization that I know would welcome additional suggestions for inclusion.

I strongly recommend Jane Mayer’s The Black Sites  (The New Yorker, 2007),  Seymour Hersh’s Torture at Abu Ghraib (The New Yorker, 2004), and Lawrence Wright’s masterful book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

A personal observation: As is my frequent yet almost always futile impulse, I immersed myself in this literature several years ago with the hope that I could beat its heinous incomprehensibility into submission. I could, I imagined, study it into clarity. And while I did learn a lot , I now realize that I was really looking for the kind of existential and philosophical answers that no amount of history or social science could provide.

To be sure, the political and social behavior of individuals and institutions , even the complex and intersecting web of those institutions that can lead to a catastrophic event like 9/11, can be understood in all their galling intricacy.

But if, like me, you are also haunted by questions of evil and cruelty and the blood lust that seems to fuel so much nationalism and religious fundamentalism,  a whole set of other disciplines including philosophy, literature, theology and the arts might be more fruitful places to turn.

Usually,  before I recommend any media or news content to my students,  I think carefully about why I want to share it. What is it in the content that I think is instructive or revealing about human behavior or the  functioning of media organizations? I like to have a reason.

This time I’m not sure. The content is extraordinarily painful to hear, and it chronicles tense moments on a catastrophic day. The 10th anniversary oif 9/11  might or might not have been a good time to release these tapes. But, with full caution that you think carefully about whether or not you want to hear the conversations that were recorded, I want you to know about today’s New York Times feature The 9/11 Tapes: The Story in the Air. (Subscription probably required)

While so much about those events has been exhaustively researched, somehow the actual conversations between personnel on the hijacked planes and officials on the ground remained unreleased until this week.  They almost, as you will read in the accompanying story, were never heard at all.  Take a look at the  text accompanying the audio files in the Times story and, only if you feel comfortable, listen. Certainly, if you had some contact with these events that led to a painful aftermath and recovery, speak to someone you trust before you listen, even if you are curious.

It took me 4 hours to decide whether or not to listen.  Enough of my writing and research has dealt with catastrophic situations that I no longer feel any obligation to see and hear each and every item remotely related to the diverse horrors that mark our age. I am absolutely comfortable protecting myself from profoundly disturbing episodes, and you should feel the same way.

This  time, though, my marginal proximity in Manhattan to the events of that day,  and what I felt in some strange way was a way to pay respects to those forced to act spontaneously in such horrible circumstances, led me to listen.

If you do, and if you feel up to it, I would be deeply grateful for any observations you have about the audio files and, indeed, about the larger decision to make them public.

Finally, and I repeat this again and again during the semester, please know that I share this news story and audio ( and much content about human beings acting in extremis) as a way to struggle to understand who we all are as richly complex human beings.

This is not, or was , theatre.

It was life.

I need to make a brief, yet agonizing, departure from the usual topics discussed on Media and Mayhem, especially directed at all my current and former (and perhaps future) students at Hunter College.  And I need, for the first time since I began doing this blog for students, to request that you consider the following a required assignment.

Sometime in the last two days, a 21 year woman – a friend of my daughter’s – committed suicide. I can’t tell you her name, but — to avoid any unnecessary concern on campus – I can say that she did not live in New York and is not a Hunter student.  As I scramble to come to terms with this, there is something very important I wanted to say.

I know that humans and human relationships defy easy categorization or diagnoses.  We may share traits with others, but each of us has a unique narrative, and those narratives are packed with unique dreams, hopes, fears, pain, and more. That is why I am always reluctant to make any blanket statement about what others should do or feel  in complex circumstances that I have neither lived nor felt.  

So this time I am going to make a simple request.  Please read this page on the web site of the National Mental Health Association.  NMHA is one of the best of many extraordinary organizations devoted to helping young people and others contemplating suicide.

And think for a moment, if you will, about a young, precious soul who — even in her unbearable pain and hopelessness — should not have had to choose this ending.

 Many people know the song “Dos Gardenias” from the film Buena Vista Social Club, in which it was sung by the great Ibrahim Ferrer. This is one of the most famous of the bolero songs and was written by the legendary Isolina Carrilo in the 1930s.

 The classic performance of this impossibly romantic song was by the Cuban singer and band leader Antonio Machin.

Imagine how I felt when I found a video of Machin’s performance. It reminds me that one of the most thrilling consequences of the digital age is that it has allowed the resurrection and wide distribution of classic, long hidden  performances. 

Watch how subtly and minimally Machin moves. The bolero singers were a special breed, masters of romance. He works his magic with his voice rather than any elaborate body movement.

Antonio Machin was impossibly cool. I am not sure I have ever seen anyone fit into such a superbly tailored suit with more grace and natural elegance.

I think my new personal “field of dreams”  fantasy is to wake up a band leader in a Havana nightclub, circa 1935. 

There will be time for more thoughtful analysis later. For now I wanted my students in particular to check out how today’s bombings in Mumbai are playing out in various social media.

I suggest you search Twitter using hashtags such as #MumbaiBlasts, #Mumbai, and — believe it or not — #here2help. You should also look for other video and accounts on YouTube and Facebook.

And remember: this flood of messages is inevitably packed with everything from the ridiculous to the sublime, from false claims to painful and urgent truths. When I suggest that you get a feel for the role that social media can play in events like these, I am not making any claim about accuracy. They simply are a fact of global social life in the 21st century.

The sad fact is these types of tragedies do seem to reveal so many of the potential uses and abuses, opportunities and dangers, of social media. And every so often, some truly profound development finds its way through the confusion and crowd of the digital world,  and quickly commands global attention.

The trick will be for all of us to give up our passivity and see the flood of messages from social media as a resource that requires us to actively be our own editors — to evaluate, curate, edit, and ultimately accept or reject what we discover.

It’s worth a look.

I know a lot will be said about Peter Falk, who passed away today in Los Angeles. I probably wouldn’t have said anything were it not for the fact that, when I saw the news, I flashed back to several early films by John Cassavetes.

A gutsy experimenter and improviser like Cassavetes was bound to leave  an uneven  body of work, but one thing he did do was create settings in  which extraordinary actors could perfect their craft and do some of their best work.

Falk did mesmerizing work as part of the Cassavetes Rep. Company,  along with Gena Rowlands, John Marley, Seymour Cassel, and Val Avery.  And if a  film like “Husbands,”  with Falk’s extraordinary turn as Archie Black,  never quite came together into a coherent whole,  it was definitely both a daring experiment and a master class with Falk and several remarkable film actors. 

Dim the lights.

The result was this column in tomorrow’s Chicago Tribune.

I don’t like “gotcha” media criticism, especially the kind that attempts to elevate some completely human error – either intentional or not – into a mortal sin. Some sins – especially of the journalistic variety – do have serious consequences for the victim of the inaccuracy or typo, can mislead and confuse, and can plant seeds of fear and anxiety in communities already reeling from one trauma or another. Not good.

But I really need to see intentional malice or serious negligence to go from annoyance to indignation.

Yesterday afternoon, in quick succession, I received several news bulletins about 30 dismembered bodies that had been found buried outside Houston. The news bulletins, which I include here, came from serious news organizations, and were phrased with language implying enough certainty that I immediately forwarded the news to some colleagues at John Jay College’s Academy of Critical Incident Analysis, a research group in which I participate. Among other things, we are interested in the impact of sudden high profile catastrophic incidents on public attitudes, behavior and the larger social order.

Most of you already know how it ended. It was a completely inaccurate report that had originated with nothing more than a tip from a psychic. It should never have been elevated to the status of an urgent bulletin. Even worse, in this case, is that several of the bulletins were neither hesitant nor qualified. Bodies had been found.

The serious news organizations that made this bizarre leap will certainly examine how and why this happened and determine how to avoid it in the future. It was not a routine mistake. It was bad. Real bad. First there were bodies and then there were none.

But less than focusing on the mistake, I think we need to think carefully about a newsgathering environment that has elevated speed to such importance that time for contemplation and evaluation may have slowly slipped away. Speed, of course, has always been part of the highly competitive journalistic enterprise. The 20^th century began with bloody battles between Hearst and Pulitzer over who could get the first and second and third extras to the newsstand first.

Since then, though, speed as a term has almost completely lost its power to describe the “speed of sound” global news environment. One piece of news, launched on the most appropriate channel, can be global in minutes. Rather than being something that can be pulled back or reconsidered, an inaccuracy is now launched into permanent orbit and circles and circles the globe even after it has been throroughly debunked. And sometimes the subsequent “debunking” gets infinitely less play that the initial nonsense.

So?

We are now in a world where caution isn’t simply important, it is absolutely required of anyone who reports anything, including each of us as we report things to each other.

Yesterday, lots of people in lots of places – fearing being slow in the age of the fast – skipped the caution. And the result is that there will be a pit of dismembered bodies outside Houston for a long, long time.

Even though it really isn’t there at all.

I saw the strangest thing Friday.

While visiting an assisted-living facility for the first time  (I,  happily,  am not – at least for now  – the potential resident!),  we were  taken to a model room designed to show off the place to its best advantage. One touch that immediately caught my eye was a pile of books, obviously placed to stress the amount of time that would be available for quiet reading.

This would have been no big deal were it not for the fact that the “prop” book on the top of the pile was John Updike’s shattering Rabbit at Rest, the last of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels that tells of Rabbit’s  turbulent and emotionally charged Florida retirement. Without spoiling any of the plot,  his is a retirement in which any looking back is at a trail of unrealized dreams, infidelities, and opportunities missed.  Rabbit in Florida has not completely run out of what filmmaker Tom Joslin called “the steam of life,”  but the voracious sexuality and mischievousness of his youth is a distant memory.

Rabbit at Rest as an incentive to signing up for assisted living? Probably not a good choice.

But this did remind me of John Updike, who died in January, 2009  after a distinguished and prolific career as a critic, novelist, and poet.

I grew up in an middle-class  Southern California suburb in the 1960s,  and  for most of my late adolescence had no idea that any serious writers either had ever placed their characters and their conflicts in suburbia.  The fiction we read  conjured a distant, turbulent, urban world where people were expansive and outraged, a place where hyperventilating people gesticulated  and exaggerated.

We of the “ticky-tacky boxes” were condemned to talk of lawn furniture. Our “epic journeys” ended at shopping malls.

Everyone else, I remember thinking, got to live in places with grit and pain and authenticity. We, though, were simply too drab to be worthy of a novelist’s attention.

The result was that many of us high-tailed it out of the burbs in search of that authenticity. We were escaping a place that only seemed real in biting social satire like Malvina Reynolds’s Little Boxes.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same

Then — in New York City, long after fleeing the little boxes  – I found Updike.

And I learned for the first time what writers like Updike and John Cheever had been saying all along and what filmmakers like Sam Mendes, David Lynch, and Tim Burton would later  suggest in their riveting, suburban-themed work:  It’s not that nothing was going on in West Covina, California.

It’s that we weren’t paying attention.

We shopped in strip malls and lived in matching  houses that were for the most part invisible in our literature.  We certainly saw nothing of ourselves in the work of the  “ruralists” (Faulkner, Steinbeck,  and Morrison) and were even less visible in the work of the “urbanists” (Dickens, Dreiser, Mailer, Ellison, Roth, Bellow).   We were the conformists, we were the strivers, and – most shamefully  — we were beside some mysterious, larger point.

I devoured Updike. I remember one marathon weekend reading what was then still the Rabbit trilogy, and flashing back on every nameless gray-flannel guy I knew as a kid in 1950s suburbia. Of course, I realized, some of those suits had to have been the veneer for turbulent and desperate  inner lives.  Some had to have felt pain in the days before they told their kids of disintegrating families and failed businesses and cocktail hours that had become cocktail lives.

There were only a few seedy and secluded bars down near the railroad tracks, but some of those men had to have been stopping there to anesthetize something inside.  One attractive  young mother,  a dead giveaway for June Cleaver with a permanently plastered smile, could not have watched her son’s legs atrophy from polio without wrenching  agony. And one day the happy family three doors down  woke up to find an  empty closet, a missing car, and only a few remnants of a father who never, ever came back.

No Tom. No note. No Dad. Ever.

The point is that our little boxes held as much potential for emotional turbulence and longing as Steinbeck’s central valley or Dreiser’s Chicago.  Updike knew that and produced a body of work that mined middle class life for all the adultery, anger, and angst he could find. And all I can say is that — when I read Rabbit, Run, Couples, or Rabbit Redux, when I read the Maple stories – I knew that he knew.

One of the great ironies that I discovered only years later was that at the same time , two small towns over in the slightly hardscrabble town of Duarte, California, a kid eight years older than me was watching the same scene,  seeing all the rage to which I was oblivious (thanks to a family that apparently served up generous portions of it), and imagining stories he might someday write that would tear away the veneer. His name was Sam Shepard.

I still remember Rabbit Angstrom’s last words to his son in Rabbit at Rest.

“Well, Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kids looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe.  Enough.

It takes a lot to genuinely shock me, but this is too much. Are they suggesting that the Kardashian sisters upcoming novel might be ghost–written and not actually their own work? Two writers with such potential paying someone else to think up the actual words?  It just can’t be.

Well, you learn something new every day.

Next thing you know, someone will try to convince me that politicians don’t even write their own speeches or maybe even their own apologies for bad behavior or — heaven forbid — that Britney Spears didnt actually write her 2000 book Heart to Heart.

Songwriters Harry Warren (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) — composers of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” — are revered by Tin Pan Alley enthusiasts, but the wider public has never been adequately aware of these masters of the American popular song. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter are the names on the tips of most people’s tongues, but other deserving members seem to have a hard time finding their place in the public consciousness.

Most people have no idea just how many American songwriters belong to this extraordinary and exclusive club. Sticking only to personal favorites who come instantly to mind, and in no particular order, the group includes Harry Warren, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Johnny Mercer, Scott Joplin, Jimmy Johnson, Jules Styne, Arthur Schwartz, Ralph Rainger, Leo Robin, and the incomparable Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

And on and on.

My latest choice for great songs in film was written for the film “The Harvey Girls.” At one point, Director George Sidney casually mentioned that he needed a train song. The story is that Harry Warren immediately began to hum the sound effect of a chugging locomotive, slowly added a melody, gave the melody to Johnny Mercer for lyrics, and the result was a classic.

America at the turn of the century was such a crazy quilt of bias, prejudice and resentment that — at one time or another — virtually every ethnic and religious group took its turn at being despised. This meant that the Tin Pan Alley pantheon is packed with changed names. Irving Berlin was born Israel Baline. And Harry Warren, born during a period of virulent anti-Italian sentiment, was born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna.

And — but you almost certainly know this already — Judy Garland, the luminous star of “The Harvey Girls,” was born Frances Gumm.

Climb aboard.

Many of my students who read Media and Mayhem may never have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The great Farley Granger, who starred, died today at the age of 85.

See it. Now. Especially if you’ve recently found yourself feeling that your college routine has not been supplying enough tension, trembling, or terror.

Granger is joined some of the very best screen actors of the 40s and 50s, including Ruth Roman (also underappreciated), Leo G. Carroll, Pamela Hitchcock (Alfred’s daughter and a wonderfully quirky actor in her own right), and Robert Walker ( my choice, along with Mitchum, as one of the greatest of them all at playing strange, creepy, menacing characters).

I think you would also enjoy Granger in Hitchcock’s Rope.

I was about to say how versatile an actor Granger was, able to excel in roles boith charming and creepy. But that’s not quite right.

The charm and the creepiness usually came in the same character.

Dim the lights.

Sometimes when I am babbling on, in the back of my mind a little voice is shouting: Steve, for heaven’s sakes, someone with half a brain could use three words to say what it just took you 15 minutes to express. Often, after the fact, I realize what those three words might have been.

Well,  today I heard the playwright Tom Stoppard make a comment that is at once incredibly simple and astoundingly profound. It puts in one sentence so much of what I have struggled to say about making documentary films and art in general.

I may not get the quote right, so I am including a link to the radio program on which he said it.  But what he said was essentially this:

Accuracy is not the same thing as truthfulness.

Accuracy is not the same thing as truthfulness

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

The search for precise facts and documentation is extremely important, especially when some form of unethical or possibly illegal misconduct might be involved.  But doing this well requires that you be accurate.

Truthfulness, as Stoppard described it so beautifully,  requires reaching for the richer complexities and human contradictions that are embedded in sheer and mundane accuracy.

And that is why I have always felt that the question of what is true in a documentary is, while certainly important, not as important as the ability of the filmmaker to grasp and share the underlying truthfulness that gives those accurate facts deeper meaning.

You might want to listen.

Later, I came to love the Ukelele-rich music of the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau, whose founder — Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole — went on to an extraordinary solo career  (widely known as Iz) until his untimely death in 1997 at the age of 38.  His version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is still played extensively. My favorite is  Henehene Kou Aka:

And today, I saw the future of  Ukelele. His name is Jake Shimabukuro. Remarkable. Just remarkable.