“Moonlit Seascape With Shipwreck”

Ivan Constantinovich Aivasovsky (1884)

Vienna, Virginia (2014)

From FB:

“This whole debacle with Bowe Bergdahl has led me to a lot of thinkin’. (A dangerous proposition, I know…)

One of the best classes I ever took in college was “Literature and Film.” We would read a novel, then watch the film upon which it was based and compare the two.

One of the novels we ended up reading was Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and I’ll always remember the character of Franz.

In the movie, he’s a married liberal Swiss academic who begins an affair with Sabina (Lena Olin). Franz decides to abandon his wife and family for Sabina, but after hearing Franz’s declaration of love for her, Sabina abandons him, feeling he would emotionally weigh her down.

What the movie failed to show (not surprisingly) was that Franz was a naïve and idealistic fool who imbued his affair with Sabina with a type of revolutionary romanticism.

Franz is portrayed as a dreamer who lives to be seen and appreciated. This leads him to join a demonstration to Cambodia in his quest to participate in something.

The demonstration is a fiasco, with the idea of liberal solidarity destroyed as French and Americans compete for leadership.

A movie star and a pop singer use the march for publicity, and feel proud of themselves when a journalist is accidentally killed. Disgusted and shaken, Franz is mugged and killed in the streets of Bangkok.

I’ve also been thinking of Sean Flynn, only son of the famous movie star Errol Flynn.

Sean Flynn, who was said to be exceedingly handsome, followed his parents into acting, but when he retired from acting, Flynn became a freelance photojournalist covering the Vietnam War and other conflicts.

He was a bit of a daredevil and was said to be constantly trying to find his way out from the shadow of his famous father.

On April 6, 1970, while traveling by motorcycle in Cambodia, Flynn and journalist Dana Stone were captured by communist guerrillas at a roadblock on Highway One. They were never heard from again and their remains have never been found. Both were believed to have been executed by the Khmer Rouge.

Someone once said a Conservative is simply a Liberal who got mugged by reality.

Bowe Bergdahl, on his idealistic and fatuous quest to desert his unit in combat and walk to India, would have been well served to have paid better attention to the examples of Franz and Sean….”

Goals

Bro, Do You Even 80s?

From FB:

“Now there’s something that will be unfamiliar to anyone under the age of thirty.

Hell, I’m 44 and I’d completely forgotten about its existence until this 1982 Billboard item rekindled those old, mostly unpleasant memories.

The portability cassettes brought to the music realm was a double-edged sword for retailers, who had to adopt either a time-and-labor intensive ‘behind plexiglass’ request policy or have their inventory slip into the pockets of sticky-fingered teens and out the shop’s door. The ‘spaghetti box’ (a new-to-me term) was the environmentally unfriendly solution to that problem, by passing the hassle onto the consumer.

They were favored by department store chains and other retailers who didn’t have (and didn’t care to hire) music aisle staffers. Most of the dedicated music chains preferred actually recyclable hard plastic shells that would be unlocked by the checkout clerk and put aside for reuse…”

“A More Perfect Union”

“So we’ll rally around the flag
Rally around the flag
Rally around the flag, boys,
Rally once again
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom…”

LINK