OW random issues of interest

[Oliver Oddball]

Thanks Glenn this was extremely helpful!

[tony]

Setting the record straight on Hearst

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR
Kenneth Whyte's book on William Randolph Hearst's early years redeems the publishing magnate's reputation.


You might call Kenneth Whyte's book chronicling the early years of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst a sort of "Kane" mutiny.

Whyte, publisher and editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine, chose as the subject of his first book the titanic clash between the young upstart Hearst and venerable newspaper giant Joseph Pulitzer during a golden age of newspapers in the late 19th century in New York City.

Over the course of three years – from 1895 to 1898 – the West Coast playboy poured millions into the underdog Journal, poached much of Pulitzer's top talent and eclipsed his rival's World in the process.

But what The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst also does – even to Whyte's surprise – is partly redeem Hearst's reputation as a gifted newspaperman and a genuine champion of the public good, a view that runs counter to his biographers and late actor/director Orson Welles's negative portrayal of the barely disguised Hearst in his film classic Citizen Kane.

Biographies of Hearst and Pulitzer glance over that crucial period: an aging, petulant Pulitzer in declining health and a tireless Hearst on the cusp of creating a 20th-century media empire, Whyte said.

"I wanted to read a lot more about what happened back then when Hearst comes into New York virtually unknown and takes on Pulitzer, who's as big as any publisher's ever been in any city. And within three years, Hearst has supplanted him as the leading force in the New York newspaper world. I wanted to know how he did it. That's what got me started," Whyte said.

"(The book) was going to be about the conflict, but the more I looked into it, the more Hearst began to emerge as the central character, mostly because he just wasn't anything like what I'd been led to expect in reading other biographies and journalism histories, and watching films like Citizen Kane and all of the other cultural baggage around (Hearst)," Whyte said.

Part of the problem was that Hearst himself, the only child of a wealthy California senator and a socially ambitious wife, remained enigmatic throughout his long life.

"There's no autobiography, there's very few interviews that he did during his life and he rarely answered his critics," Whyte said.

But Hearst left behind a trove of personal letters, particularly to his mother, Phoebe, who tightly controlled the purse strings after his father's death.

Whyte also managed with difficulty to read every copy of Hearst's Journal, as well as his competitors and the various trade journals, which tracked the struggle between the two titans.

The term "yellow journalism" was first coined at the time and applied in equal measure to both Hearst and Pulitzer, criticizing their coverage of crime as unseemly and immoral and their willingness to bend the truth to beat the competition.

Whyte quotes (and debunks) the most famous allegation against Hearst – levelled by one of his own reporters, James Creelman – who cites a telegram in which Hearst allegedly tells illustrator Frederick Remington to stay put in Cuba: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

In fact, Hearst's Journal was instrumental in persuading a reluctant U.S. administration to declare war on Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to rescue Cuba where ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands in "reconcentration camps."

"It was a heroic fight that Hearst led ... and should be looked at as one of the great moments in journalism history rather than dismissed as this horrible episode in which Hearst mindlessly led a country to war. That just bears no relation to the facts," Whyte said.

Whyte, founding editor-in-chief of the National Post when it launched in 1998, shows no hesitation in commenting on parallels between Hearst and other 20th-century media moguls, such as former boss Conrad Black, currently serving time in a U.S. prison for fraud.

"They both (Hearst and Black) loved the business and they both had a strong sense of personal destiny and saw themselves as great men," Whyte said.

And while Hearst was somewhat reclusive, "Conrad has a much larger and more pugnacious personal profile," Whyte said.

"Conrad liked journalism a lot and was good at it and knew good from bad, but he was, I think, a businessman first," Whyte observed.

"Hearst, no matter how bad things got, never let his newspapers go. Even in the worst times, no matter how bad his balance sheet was, how bad the economy was, he held on to his newspapers. They were his first love and nothing came between them."

[tonyw]

[quote="Tony"]Setting the record straight on Hearst


Whyte quotes (and debunks) the most famous allegation against Hearst – levelled by one of his own reporters, James Creelman – who cites a telegram in which Hearst allegedly tells illustrator Frederick Remington to stay put in Cuba: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

In fact, Hearst's Journal was instrumental in persuading a reluctant U.S. administration to declare war on Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to rescue Cuba where ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands in "reconcentration camps."

"It was a heroic fight that Hearst led ... and should be looked at as one of the great moments in journalism history rather than dismissed as this horrible episode in which Hearst mindlessly led a country to war. That just bears no relation to the facts," Whyte said.

Whyte, founding editor-in-chief of the National Post when it launched in 1998, shows no hesitation in commenting on parallels between Hearst and other 20th-century media moguls, such as former boss Conrad Black, currently serving time in a U.S. prison for fraud.

"They both (Hearst and Black) loved the business and they both had a strong sense of personal destiny and saw themselves as great men," Whyte said./quote]

This sounds like many of these revisionist works that have appeared in the last two decades like David Irving's "historical" studies of the Holocaust, Ann Coulter's defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a recent biography defending the right-wing tendencies of John Wayne. I also see parallels between the "weapons of mass destruction" ploy and Hearst's own version of a pre-emptive strike,

Perhaps this author will soon work on a positive biography of George W. Bush, facilitated by Oliver Stone's weak, politically vacuous bio-pic? I'm sure if he works on late Hearst we will see the resurrection of the "crazy Welles" discourse.

[tony]

Tonyw:

Is it possible that this guy has done a lot of research and is pretty objective? It seems that he was surprised by the facts he discovered which debunked many of the stories around Hearst; how much original research have you done so that you can hold such an unbending attitude toward Hearst?

Is it possible that he may be correct?

[Alfred Willmore]

The Beatrice Welles who was devoted to Orson Welles insisted that he spend a great deal of time on the violin as a child.

Could that have influenced his overall artistic development?

In the current edition of Harpers, Dr. Oliver Sacks is quoted:

what is beyond dispute is the effect of intensive musical training on the young, plastic brain. Although a teaspoon of Mozart may or may not make a child a better mathematician, there is little doubt that regular exposure to music, and especially active participation in music, may stimulate development of many different areas of the brain. Takako Fujioka and her colleagues, for example, looking at children with a single year of violin training (compared to children with no training), recorded striking changes in activity in the brain’s left hemisphere. In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

[Lance Morrison]

I think you're correct. Of course in this instance the so-called Mozart effect--often reduced in practice to the simplification that merely hearing some gentle classical era music will spur on certain areas of brain development--is to be distinguished from developing a life with music, as Mr. Welles did, or was led to do. I feel strongly that his early experiences with music were rather formative and influential on the rest of his life. This applies i think to the development of his aesthetics, as well as his intellectual capabilities. I'm thinking of the linguistics in particular.

In a purely music sense, i think the man had developed a great ear. "...a man of great musical culture", as Hermann said. Something i've noted about Welles is that he seems to have been open to wider musical influences in his pictures than most directors / film composers were, particularly within the large tradition of western musical practices that are imprecisely named "Classical". Clearly he was deeply involved with the creation of scores to his films, and was able to find some great collaborators. I really wish i was a fly on the wall when he and Hermann discussed music. It seems that Welles encouraged Hermann to invest Kane with a variety of rich musical gestures, many traceable back to folks like C. Ives, Debussy, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg. The significance here is that these musical languages were still considered quite new at the time (and indeed are still considered to be new / too much by some people). Hollywood music was generally going strongly with very 19th Century idioms (up through R. Strauss and Mahler) until this point. There came increasingly more references to idioms of the great modern composers, but these are generally to my ear almost always so inept and watered down as to be parody, Hermann being the only major film composer around this time to use them with dignity and authenticity. Look at what happened to parts of Ambersons when the score was no longer kept sacred--they bring it back to hackneyed "tender" harmonically 19th century music. Welles was using works of G. Antheil for "the Lady from Shanghai" before the clichéd score was appended...I only wish that the scenario for 2001's music--the score being abandoned for prewritten works--had had a precedent here.

[mido505]

horseatsposter.jpg

[mido505]

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[mido505]

Keats:

You may be right. The source for the posters is the amazing IF CHARLIE PARKER WAS A GUNSLINGER, THERE'D BE A WHOLE LOT OF DEAD COPYCATS. You can spend years in there. Here is the link: http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/

The subsection ART OF THE WPA can be accessed here: http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/search/labe ... 0the%20WPA

[Steve Kostelecky]

In Bogdanovich's book on page 385 under the Sept. 1 entry he mentions OW that "During this period, he stands in for FDR in a debate with Thomas Dewey at the Hotel Astor." Is there any confirmation of this? I am finally working on my thesis on OW's political life and can't seem to find a confirmation. By the way, I went through some of the Lilly Library and University of Michigan stuff during winter break and had a grand old time.
Thanks, Steve

[RayKelly]

An interesting take on piracy by Salik Shah of Nepal, which cites his appreciation of Orson Welles:

Piracy is typically portrayed as the vice of only those who wish to steal media for the sake of self-indulgent entertainment. But 'file sharing' is also, for some, the only means of gaining access to educational material or information censored by oppressive governments, let alone revolutionary inspiration.

"... When I heard (Orson) Welles’ interview, which was broadcast on the BBC fourteen years before I was even born, I identified with it immediately. With great patience, I had downloaded the interview from a file-sharing website. The Orson Welles Sketchbook, produced by the BBC in 1955, and his 1982 interview with Leslie Megahey for Arena (last repeated in 1995 on BBC2) are a treasure trove for any film historian or enthusiast. I wasn’t there when these interviews took place and certainly wasn’t there when Welles was struggling to make his films, but now I have access to his films, his interviews, and his books. I could study him continually at home and in various cities, dividing my time between my day job and watching his work, and all because a serious community of cinephiles taped those broadcasts and shared them with people like me. Think about it: if it were not for torrent trackers and numerous file-sharing hosts, the way our world is, 99% of the film audience would have little or no access to what remains available of the genius of Orson Welles. Without them, we would have to give in to the 1% of the ‘film’ people at the top who control the distribution of these films.
The internet has played a crucial role in my life and countless others of my generation all over the world."

Read the full article at http://www.opendemocracy.net/salik-shah ... hird-world

[Glenn Anders]

Salik Shah's article suggests the great diversity of learning which may spread around the World by way of computers, electronic devices, and the popular arts. He singles out a number of artists who have influenced him, one of the most prominent being Orson Welles. The limitation of access and utilization of the internet is a thorny issue. Intellectual and Artistic properties must be protected, but certainly some compromise should be reached whereby billions of people worldwide may take advantage of the learning and culture so easily conveyed by computer.

Thanks for posting this piece, Ray.

Glenn

[I=Eye]

Pia Zadora says OW grew pot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiJCoqq3tsQ

[Wellesnet]

"Almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. New theories lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe and our place in it”. - Stephen Hawking

Astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson was accused of being a "Philistine" for his recent comments dismissing Philosophy as a waste of time. But Welles might have been on his side, judging from this 1970 interview with Dick Cavett:

CAVETT: What would you study if you could go back to school now?

WELLES: That’s a good question. If I wanted to study something seriously and get good at it, I think it would be Anthropology. Don’t you think that’s a fascinating subject?

CAVETT: Yes. I might study Philosophy as well.

WELLES: I’m suspicious of Philosophy. I have a real philistine doubt about it’s worth, but Anthropology fascinates me. It seems to be at it’s beginnings, whereas Philosophy seems to be at it’s end.

Interesting excerpt from a thread on the old Welles board concerning an essay called "Citizen Kant: Themes of Consciousness and Cognition in Citizen Kane" :

Dave L.:
"Citizen Kane shares structural similarities with Immanuel Kant's epistemology (theory of knowledge). The film’s narrative structure, characterization, and manipulation of space and time acts as a correlative to Kant's "transcendental idealism", itself an attempt to bridge the impasse between Hume's empiricist skepticism (wherein the phenomena of consciousness or 'sense of self' is construed as no more than a rapid series of sensory stimuli) and Descartes' rationalist "cogito" argument (wherein the senses, which can deceive, cannot be trusted and the 'thinking self' is a kind of 'substance' which acts as the ultimate source of all genuine knowledge). In short, I argue that the "News on the March" segment represents the Humean model of consciousness (of the 'self' as no more than the sum of observable phenomena), Thompson's pursuit of the meaning of 'Rosebud' parallels Descartes' (and most of western science's) failed attempts to find the 'essence' of personal identity (or 'self-hood'), and the film's omniscient opening and closing scenes represent Kant's idea of the "noumena" with respect to consciousness (that is, the "transcendental unity of apperception" which Kant deduces 'must' exist if we are to account for our continuous senses of self across time and space)."

*

Jez:
These ideas are interesting... it's nice to know that others see Welles films as being philosophically rich as well... every line, every scene, every piece of music jolts the mind from place to place and idea to idea...

I don't necessarily think Welles would have had Kant/Hume/Descartes in mind when he made the films, and in this sense he can be considered a philosopher of considerable stature himself - after all, it's all about (re)presentation isn't it?! By this I mean that Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida etc have all dealt with epistemology in different styles but with a constant thread running through the middle, and I think Welles also sits on this thread, using film/fiction (or art/truth) as his medium.

I think that the "Declaration of Principles" in Kane is central to the movement of the Kane identity: history/character is recorded, Kane deviates from it... why? How? Can we know?

Of course, while these characters are born of his own character, Welles constantly reminded those who asked that they WERE NOT biographies, and how right he is!

There is a brief section in Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in which he discusses the connection of his characters to himself, concluding that (rather than being autobiographical) they are in fact studies of the many POSSIBILITIES that could have affected his own life. They stem from him, but they are not him. I think this is very close to Welles' style.

*

Dave L:
I don't believe that Welles had Descartes/Hume/Kant in mind when he made Citizen Kane either. While there is little evidence that anyone involved in the making of Citizen Kane knowingly attempted to infuse the film with epistemological reflections, I believe that most 'timeless' art which deeply resonates with people does so because it taps into potentially universal 'truths', which might otherwise only be reached via a complicated systematic philosophical endeavor.

While I am much more aligned with 'analytic' philosophy, I do believe that Jung's theory of the collective unconscious (as he applied it to the world of the artist) gets to the heart of the matter. Jung describes the artistic process as "a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument… Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events."

With this in mind, I think many artists are not fully 'aware' of the power their work has in activating the audience's imaginations.

FWIW, here's John Houseman 's generous but brutally honest (?) presentation of Orson Welles' "intellectualism" --
"For all his undoubted intelligence, Welles was never an intellectual, in the theatre or out of it. He was a quick reactor, a brilliant improviser, a vivid visualizer, but he seldom cared to stop and think, and hardly ever gave his audiences time to do the same. In a way, the live theatre was his ideal medium, the perfect form for the prestidigitator's magic, since you never see exactly the same thing twice. It is surprising that he was later to make films which could stand up triumphantly to the most minute and frequent analysis… [Taylor, p. 30-31].

It's also worth noting that "F For Fake" contains some relatively sophisticated 'arguments' relevant to philosophical aesthetics and issues of what makes art 'art'.

Regarding Orson Welles' Nietzschean influence:
"At various periods in his youth he made a study of Nietzsche." [Naremore, p. 3].
According to the Saturday Evening Post's 1940 article on Welles, "The Education of Orson Welles (Who Really Didn't Need It", Welles also is said to have written a scholarly essay on Nietsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra."

"Bright Lucifer", Welles' earliest original work (written when he was 18), was apparently very autobiographical and also echoed some rough Nietzschean themes. According to James Naremore, the main character, Eldred Brand, outwardly resembles Welles himself. Naremore (who has seen the script, itself not otherwise published) describes Brand as "a devotee of Nietzsche" (p. 5) and one who "models himself on the Devil" (p. .

It is interesting that Welles would go on to play the Clarence Darrow-like role in the film "Compulsion", a thinly-disguised version of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, wherein two precocious young men, under a Hitler-ized reading of Nietzsche (e.g., the superman is beyond moral codes of good and evil, yada yada yada), decide to commit murder for no other reason than as an 'experiment' to realize their perverted version of Nietzschean moral philosophy and also to demonstrate what they believe is their 'superior intellect' and ability to commmit such a crime without getting caught.

There are Nietzschean themes in "Heart of Darkness" as well and the following excerpt of Kurtz dialogue from Welles' screenplay for a film version of Conrad's novel are illustrative:

KURTZ: I'm a great man, Marlow -- really great... The meek -- you and the rest of the millions -- the poor in spirit, I hate you -- but I know you for my betters -- without knowing why you are except that yours is the Kingdom of Heaven, except that you shall inherit the earth. Don't mistake me, I haven't gone moral on my death bed. I'm above morality. No. I've climbed higher than men and seen farther. I'm the first absolute dictator. The first complete success. I've known what others try to get… I won the game, but the winner loses too. He's all alone and he goes mad." [as quoted in Naremore, p. 144].

KURTZ: Understand this much -- Everything I've done up here has been done according to the method of my Government. Everything. There's a man now in Europe trying to do what I've done in this jungle. He will fail. In his madness, he thinks he can't fail-but he will. A brute can rule only brutes. Remember the meek, -- the meek. -- I'm a great man, Marlowe -- really great -- know the strength of the enemy -- its terrible weakness, the meek -- you and the rest of the millions -- the poor in spirit. I hate you -- but I know you for my betters -- without knowing why you are except that yours is the Kingdom of Heaven, except that you shall inherit the earth . . . . [From "Revised Estimating Script for Heart of Darkness," pp. 161-63, box 14, Welles collection, Lilly Library, as quoted in "Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences", by Robin Bates with Scott Bates, in Perspectives on Citizen Kane, p. 313].

http://listverse.com/2011/02/19/top-10- ... n-history/

[F. Scott]

WELLES: I’m suspicious of Philosophy. I have a real philistine doubt about it’s worth,

I agree with Welles that mere word-banter, e.g., "How many angels can fit on the end of a thumb drive," is fruitless. However, he seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Reflection is the ability of the mind to make its current or past activity a future object of inquiry -- such reflections are the raw data of philosophy. Specific examples: Whenever one, as a scientist, does a meta-study (comprehensive review and evaluation of studies) or engages in reflection on methodology (be it quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-design) he/she is engaging in epistemology and logic -- components (of course) of philosophy. Whenever a scientist, or a user of scientific findings, considers the impact of those findings on people's lives, he/she may be engaging in ethics -- another branch of philosophy. Inasmuch as reflections such as these are (hopefully) part of a person's or society's scientific endeavors, there will necessarily be philosophical inquiry. One simply cannot escape doing philosophy, because we are sentient, self-aware beings. The important question, I think, is not "What good is philosophy?" but: "Is one doing philosophy badly, in a mediocre fashion, or well?"