Old slogans revisited

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South of the border, down Muinchille way ...

Today's Irish Times property section must be provoking a collective drool:


The inside's not too bad, either:


And it's in a location to die for:


Plus a thousand acres from Cavan up into Monaghan Your own lake, river, woodland. Asking price: €7.5 million, at Knight Frank Ireland. And worth all of it.

For once Malcolm has no hesitation in a bit of unofficial advertising. Sphere: Related Content

Momento mori

It's one of those senior moments: the report of a death which ... doesn't seem quite timely.

The New York Times has a neat reflection, by Charles McGrath, on the death of Fess Parker:

If you grew up in the 1950s, then the character Davy Crockett, played by Fess Parker, who died at 85 late last week, is an essential part of your mental furniture. His ballad most likely still plays over and over in your head, especially the fourth line, with its odd Appalachian spelling and suggestion of folk tale strangeness: “Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3.” Cosseted in your urban or suburban television room in Eisenhower America, how could you fail to be impressed by a feat like that?

It was, as Malcolm can testify, nearly as impressive in Eden/Macmillan East Anglia.

McGrath continues:

In truth, Davy Crockett was less the “king of the wild frontier,” as the song goes on to say, than the king of a merchandising juggernaut that convinced millions of children that they needed to own Davy Crockett pajamas and lunchboxes and coloring books and official Davy Crockett coonskin caps. We actually wore these little ratty-looking toupees with no irony or embarrassment at all.

For the Seattle Times, Dennis McLellan expands on this commercial epiphany:

TV's "King of the Wild Frontier" also touched off a merchandising frenzy: 10 million coonskin caps were sold, along with toy "Old Betsy" rifles, buckskin shirts, T-shirts, coloring books, guitars, bath towels, bedspreads, wallets — anything with the Crockett name attached.

Viewers also fell in love with the show's catchy theme song. Bill Hayes' version of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" soared to No. 1 on the hit parade and remained there for 13 weeks.

"It was an explosion beyond anyone's comprehension," Mr. Parker recalled decades later. "The power of television, which was still new, was demonstrated for the first time."

Even Disney was taken by surprise.

Disney planned three Davy Crockett adventures, with the hero dying heroically at the Alamo as the conclusion of the third. Sticking with McLellan:

"We had no idea what was going to happen to Crockett, " [Disney] later said. "Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero."

Crockett and McLellan (both names from Galloway, both among the Border reivers), Parker (the North of England), McGrath (Donegal and, as McGraw, the County Down) ... is there a pattern developing here?

The title of the NYT piece, by the way, is:

An Enemy of Raccoons but a Friend of Marketeers.

The death of innocence

Malcolm recalls a time when any Norfolk moggie or squirrel went in fear of imminent re-invention as pre-adolescent headgear. Television came late to our part of the world. Image-making pyjamas and lunchboxes were bourgeois steps too far, too grand, too alien for our comprehension. But wildlife and the neighbour's pet pussy ... that's what catapults were for. After that, and a bit of amateur taxidermy, you, too, could act out the last episode. With added verisimilitude and confidence, if all other heads were crowned with mere rabbit pelts.

The Walt Disney Corporation (which Carl Hiaasen, much later, properly nailed as Team Rodent) was already getting into commercial exploitation of the dream-factory, and thereby of the impressionable young to be separated from their limited loot. Disney apparently withheld Parker from more grown-up pictures, working with John Ford (Jeffrey Hunter's part in The Searchers) or Marilyn Monroe (Don Murray got that one), for fear of contaminating the brand.

And thereby hangs another tale

McGrath's delicious punchline is:

It seems entirely fitting that in later life, having come to the end of his acting career, Mr. Parker reinvented himself as a successful vintner. Once an idol of baby boomers, a model of coonskin fortitude, he now became for them a source of middle-aged balm and solace, making wine they could sip in the evening as the shadows lengthened. Davy would probably have abstained, but he lived in an America where people were nobler and firmer of purpose.

So, Ave atque Vale! Fess Elisha Parker.

We shall not see your like again. It doesn't sell in the 21st Century.

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A great day at the Oval ... but woo-hoo

Malcolm writes the following in recognition that a cousin was a "professional" on two MCC tours of Australia, and even has the odd street named there in his honour.

We've had several weeks of Sky TV and roadside posters telling us how significant the England-Australia cricket tournament was. Can' t think what the Murdoch interest amounted to here, beyond exclusive rights.

That said, and the inevitable Victory bus-top tour around London taken for granted, we have a classist problem.

Britain (i.e. the English authorities) populated Australia from prisons and felons. Most of the transportees (including, doubtfully, Malcolm's distant x-times uncle -- a second offender for poaching) got there on a one-way ticket.

On that basis it becomes something more than a national competition.

It becomes retribution, class-warfare, revenge.

Yet, this was a good game:

• A moderate score on the first innings:
• a curious collapse thereafter;
• a decent performance in response for the third innings;
• an honourable fourth innings against an impossible target.

Enough to fill seats for four days, though never likely to feature among the greatest games of all-time.

All that remains to be answered is whether a good leftie should be cheering for home or away. Sphere: Related Content

Another way with words

Country Life, that noble glossy, is notable for its property ads.

Proof-read this one for them:

This handsome period property dates from the 18th century and has a lovely main façade. The property was formerly part of the Badminton Estate and is now situated within the village conservation area. The house has very well proportioned accommodation with three good sized reception rooms, two with terrific open fireplaces.

The kitchen/breakfast room has an AGA and a lovely Belfast stink while the ground floor also has a large reception hall, utility room, and the first floor has the master bedroom suite with bathroom and dressing room and two further double bedrooms and a family bathroom. The second floor has another bedroom suite as well as a further two bedrooms and a bathroom.

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Whore's soapera

Rousting out junk cupboards, the most peculiar things (and memories) emerge. Malcolm's brain seems to work on a similar arrangement.

Wakened, no doubt, by the 4.30 a.m. flight from Hong Kong arriving into Heathrow, the synapses began to snap into contact. Out of nowhere, Malcolm found himself recalling a film from 1979.

One stimulus might be those misplaced Willie Nelson mp3s he located the previous evening, when fossicking around his back-up hard drive. The film he recalled was Nelson's first outing as a credited film actor: The Electric Horseman, from thirty years ago. It is an essentially ideological movie.

Malcolm attempts a film-synopsis

The story-line is simple: Robert Redford is the lead, Norman "Sonny" Steele, a champion rodeo rider now on the skids. There is nothing complex about these rôle-namings. Steele is converting his Ampco Corp brekkie-cereal sponsorship into a hard liquor habit. Another on the Ampco hay-roll is champion horse, Rising Star. Falling Steele and Rising Star are brought together in Las Vegas. Steele realises the horse is being bulked with steroids while being tranquillised to disguise a tendon injury. He liberates himself and the horse by riding out of the Las Vegas show, through the casino, along the neon-lit-Strip, wearing his eponymous illuminated suit, and then -- lights out -- into the wild:



Ampco have a public relations disaster on their hands. Revelations about their treatment of the horse endanger a take-over bid. Steele and Rising Star must be found; and any hostile publicity suppressed (the Ampco baddy is named, pointedly, as "Hunt Sears"). Cue the statutory Hollywood chase:



The romantic interest is played by Jane Fonda, as a celebrity television reporter, Hallie Martin (is that an echo of the naïf "Holly Martin" of The Third Man?). She has made her name, and her fortune, by exposing media manipulation and hype. She uses her wiles to locate Steele: having escaped one form of media exploitation, he doesn't want another.

Big Biz has other ideas: to denigrate Steele, on the grounds of his alcoholism, thus neutralising his threat to the Ampco's reputation. So Martin, the Fonda character, gets her story, representing Steele as an archetypal Western hero.

The reporter needs the icing on the cake: Steele filmed in the moment of releasing Rising Star into the wild. In the process of Martin's and Steele's journey into

Land, lots of land, and the starry skies above

Steele takes her video-camera (this is late '70s technology, so it's a hefty avoirdupois, besides having symbolic weight) and throws it away.

Deprived of her lens, Martin starts to see him as a person, not another story; and emotional bonds develop. She agrees to keep secret where Rising Star is released. Back in the wider world, her earlier efforts have won Steele public support, and Ampco are obliged to fall into line, with a face-saving approval of Steele's horse-napping. Hence the opening credits (see below) and the emotive moment when Rising Star is shown racing across the grasslands to join wild horses.

"Old West" versus new Glitz

What the director, Sidney Pollack, establishes is a parable of media manipulation. The motif is itself an artifact, the core of the whole Western myth: the cowboy. The story invites us, the manipulated audience, to share Steele's journey from image to nature, out of illusion into some sort of "reality", out of falsehood and manipulation into simplicity and honesty.

Beyond that, the corruption of the media is being depicted -- not argued -- by the medium which most corrupts. The message is being promoted at an emotional, not an intellectual level. Specifically, the news media are depicted as distorter (but, at heart, well-intentioned), while the dream-merchants (who invented the "Wild West" in the first place) are ambiguously corrupt (Ampco) or upright (Fonda's Martin).

So we have squared the ideological circle. The media can manufacture a false image (Ampco exploiting Steele and Rising Star) or it can expose the reality behind the false image (Martin), while the film about this (directed by Sidney Pollack) is both revelator and manipulator. And the fourth participant is the public, who are manipulated alike by Ampco, by Martin, and by Pollack's movie.

And then there is Malcolm's take, here, on the whole thing. Another level of manipulation.

Still, Nelson is something different:



Oh, and Malcolm did find a video of The Electric Horseman, at the bottom of a pile, in the attic. Sphere: Related Content