Author: hugh

Mary Poppins Remixed

The Mary Poppins soundtrack is one of my earliest musical memories. Back in the 80s, I laid out my vision for a sampled 60s world of dance music but my partners wouldn’t buy it so it’s gratifying to see that the musical on Broadway etc. has made it happen. My parents and relatives took me to a lot of movies as a kid. Were it that Julie Andrews got as much recognition as MJ, I would be a less cynical person.

Quitters Stick With It. Winners Quit.

Party on the roof (not), Park Slope, Brooklyn

Via TPM, that’s the take-away from Sarah Palin’s speech. On twitter, Ezra Klein advises ambitious bloggers to comb through the speech for other internal contradictions. The headline says it all for me and I hope we’re done with this hack. John McCain was an idiot for putting her on the national stage.

After the jump, there’s a long compilation of Richard’s forwards from the past weeks. Many of the links posted aren’t just opinion pieces from various political blogs… several are legitimate stories from respected news sources. Continue reading “Quitters Stick With It. Winners Quit.”

Up the Yangtze

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I recently had a dinner with a cousin who is working in China. He said any businessman worth his gold watch should be asking himself and every business associate he meets with, “What’s your China angle?” That night I watched Up the Yangtze, a most remarkable documentary about how the Three Gorges Dam project is affecting the lives of people who live along the Yangtze River.

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Everyone in this film, from the tourists to the tour guides to the exiled shack family, has swallowed some sort of Kool-Aid. (I use Kool-Aid not in the Jonestown sense but in the sense that it isn’t complete nutrition. [Kool-Aid must hate either usage.]) There’s a quote from Confucius in the opening titles: “By three ways may we learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; third, by experience, which is the bitterest.” The movie shows the main characters doing all three, however, when they’re doing the first staring off into space, they often look as though they’ve been hit by a truck.

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The main protagonist is a young farmer girl forced to work on a tour boat because her grades weren’t good enough for a scholarship and her family can’t afford to send her on. They need her income yesterday. None of her scenes appear in the deleted scenes section of the DVD. The Times praised the movie for refusing to editorialize, and so it’s telling watching the deleted scenes which feature the most middle-class, ambitious characters –the senior tour guide and bellboy. They are praising China and assuring themselves of success in a way which is charming, convincing, and naive all at the same time.

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