all SET PHOTOGRAPHERS always lie : and never more so than in the 1940s...

If your knowledge of pre-1950 cinema is mostly limited, like mine, to the still photographs used to illustrate articles about them in magazines, journals and books, the Internet has probably been a distinct movie revelation.

Not so much the movies themselves (when viewable on Youtube) as much as the Internet’s hundreds of amateur GIFs featuring famous actors in famous scenes, made directly from movies of that era. 

GIFs, as most know, are brief (two to four seconds) silent motion loops taken from the movies themselves.

Because a GIF, until activated, is a still image to the viewer, it presents a very different take on those famous wartime cinema scenes than what the 1940s set photographer presented.

Compared to the tiny 35mm half movie frame exposed to a moving subject at a shaky 1/24 of a second, a set photographer’s tripod-mounted big 4x5 or 8x10 negative, of a subject asked to sit still, and shot at a high speed of 1/250 a second, was inevitably going to be much much sharper, for technical reasons alone. 

The shots indeed do look crisp, sharp, mostly distinctly black and distinctly white : as they had to be , to be reproduced successfully on coarse absorbent newsprint by the then crude newspaper half tone printing technology. 

So 1940s newspaper images of  films looked very different, not only compared to the actual film itself, but also to those same set photographer’s image when reproduced on the 1940s’ mirror smooth coated paper of the up-scale magazines and books, using their superior halftone printing technology. (The technology still used to reproduce them today.)

Back to the GIFs and the actual movies themselves.

Generally, the GIF and movie shows the actor(s) and the background behind them in a much softer and dimmer, greyer, focus.

The effect is rather like (by deliberate design) the photographic effect professional and amateur art photographers aimed to achieve between the 1860s to the 1930s :  now known to historians as the “Pictorialism” Movement.

Photographs that were much closer to the rather soft focus achieved by painters of all eras due to the comparative bluntness of brushes and fingers compared to the effect of tiny light photons exposed to tiny specks of silver compounds.

In the 1930s to 1950s, Hollywood and its global rivals retained this Pictorial Look even as the elite world of still photographers moved on to their new objective of sharp focus all over the image left to right, front to back.

You might suspect that the soft focus look flattered the stars and stars sell movie seats. True, but the real reason it was retained was the immense costs it saved.

Movie lighting equipment is built like a tank and can easily last decades, its capital costs spread widely over hundreds of films and adding little to the budget. Nor was the cost of extra electricity more than a pittance.

It is true, high illumination was hard on the eyes during long sets and the heat in summer couldn't be reduced by noisy fans.

However the truly costly part of extra lighting was the much longer set up time required for each scene : and labour costs, from star down to stage hand, was the major expense in every film ever made.

Studio bosses and their bean-counters demanded that light levels be kept low to reduce set up time (remember : time equals money) and that to balance this, lens were to be set wide open to gather as much light as possible and then the development time of the film negative was to be extended to compensate.

So the camera operator focused on the actors’ faces as accurately as he could, from close up, with the backdrop left neglected. But a len used wide open, at its biggest aperture, is probably only sharp in the middle - aimed at the actor’s eyes and mouth. The actor’s face and body are nicely, gently, blurred.

The backdrop, again by deliberate design, was set well back in the shot and was well blurred and dim, ensuring our eyes naturally focused on the sharpest brightest part of the overall image : the actor’s eyes and mouth.

What sex there was in these Hays Office era  heavily censored movies - and there was plenty ! - was almost all found in those same eyes and mouth, together with hands and hair.

As a big cost-saving bonus, a backdrop that was to end up drastically blurred and dimmed on camera required much less effort, time and material expense to render realistic !

Once we notice this on the still GIFs, we tend, I believe, to notice the effect in the movies themselves.

By the 1950s, this soft focus effect was disappearing for a variety of reasons. The old guard of cinematographers were retiring, dying or being laid off by the studios. 

Color films of that era required more lights and much flatter lighting —- TV even more so.

 The move to shooting out in the real world meant that backdrops were set even further back than inside a sound stage but the intensely bright sunshine still rendered them in sharp focus.

 The trend to super wide screen movies also tended to find viewers thinking a super-wide blurred background was now too much of a good thing.

The main reason though was that the art photography was, once again, again distinctly out of sync with the larger ideological world around it.

Pictorialist photography bloomed ( a great word to describe it, in the circumstances) at the height of the steel-hard Machine Age, at the height of Reductive Modernity.

“Reductive Modernity” was the resulting ideology/hegemony when middle class educated elites world wide concluded - (mis) led by scientists - that reality as something that fundamentally, in its most basic smallest forms, was something stable and simple and predictable and knowable and controllable.

Reality was ‘clear-cut’, a favourite term of leading modernist Howard Florey, simple straight-forward, clear, laid out in stark black and white.

Pictorialism reacted against this view, presenting instead a world of grays and fog and dim light, of uncertain shapes and boundaries : a pre-Modernist view of the world in fact.

Typical of photographers, who are generally an apolitical lot, the bulk of photographers began moving to clearcut black and white stark Modernist photography just when much of the air in the tires of Reductive Modernity began leaking out, around 1945, when Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb suggested modern reductive science had its limits.

Greyness and fog and obscurity and blurred uncertainty began coming back intellectually, what we today call Post-Modernism for lack of a better word.

I am definitely a post-modernist, not a modernist - and I suspect Henry Dawson was too.

So I want the still images in my digital book on Martin Henry Dawson and his WWII penicillin-for-all crusade to be actually wartime film-like, Pictorialist, intellectually pre or post modern, not at all like the Modernist set photographers’ work of that time or like other Modernist stills of that  era.

But because my images are stills, not motion images, I want rather a mix between the look of the actual Pictorialist movie themselves and of Pictorialist styled still photos, which can look very much like a paintings.

In a word they are mixed media - part a photograph taken by a machine and part the result of a human mind and a human finger altering the machine’s efforts to achieve an effect.

And reproducing the look of GIFs of that era seems the best way to go about it...

Internet allows human brain to bypass the bottleneck of the birth canal, along with age-old institutional & financial bottlenecks

                                 HGT : Fungi & bacteria do it, so why not humans as well ?

Long ago, science fiction writers thought they had a solution to allow the human brain to grow ever smarter and more powerful.

They realized that human anatomy, the birth canal, in particular was would restrict the new born’s head (and hence the human brain inside) from getting any bigger.

Already human births were much more difficult & dangerous than that of their ape counterparts who settled on smaller heads and smaller brains in their newborns.

The sci fi writers saw humans being conceived in test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks with no limit on the size of the infant brain size.

The top half of old fashioned human adult skull built of bone would be removed, leaving an enormous exposed brain pulsating like a heart, above a small and underdeveloped body.

Turns out of course that the measure of intelligence is not brain size but the density of brain connections and yes there seems to be a physical limit on increasing density much more.

Humans - as individuals, out of the womb, -aren’t likely to get much smarter.

But human societies have no real limit on their collective intelligence.

They are simply using an idea they recently (circa 2000 AD) copped from the microbes who have been using it to ensure their dominance of the world for the last four billion years  : the globe-wide horizontal (free) transfer of invaluable information , on a need to know basis.

The Meek aren’t about to inherit the Earth in the Future : they are inheriting now , as in the past and as they will in the future.

The microbes have always dominated the representation of Life on Earth not in spite of being small and weak , but because of being small and weak.

We have all heard of the single invisible bacteria cell that divides every 15 minutes and in theory could cover the earth a few feet thick in a matter of days.

We dont hear enough about the single bacteria cells that take 15 million years to divide, lying low until times improve.

That really matters. For just as even the CONs can govern in good times, even megafauna like humans do well during good times on Planet Earth.

But they quickly go extinct when times get tough and their huge daily energy requires outruns the available food and heat.

And yes, I agree - partially - with your argument before you make it : the bacteria cell that reproduces every 15 minutes is not the same one as the cell that reproduces once in 15 million years.

But they are related - intimately.

Because microbes reproduce non-sexually, they do not hive off to produce separate species : their genetic boundaries remain fluid.

Microbes use the abundant DNA from other dead microbes (remember microbes are mostly DNA not muscles and bone) for many things : as bedding and barriers in bio-films, as food and also as a library book with a new-to-them recipe for survival when the environment changes to extreme.

Its brute force method : incorporating foreign bits of DNA into one’s own genome is like playing with plutonium but while billions of microbes routinely die trying out new DNA patterns, there are trillions times trillions of them left.

And if even if just one cell hits upon a startling good new feature, at 15 minutes a throw, it soon out competes all the others in its area in the race to survive and reproduce.

We now know that bacteria can survive inside tiny particles in the winds high up in the atmosphere to be quickly spread over every continent.

Let us be clear : they are generally not creating something totally new with this additional DNA chunk : they are generally putting a working subunit to a new use.

Think of it in the same way computer programs ‘call’ on an pre-assembled activity in a software operating system library to put to a somewhat new use in a new app.

The reason why microbes have so much DNA sub-assemblies to work with in the first place is because compared to humans, they are very tolerant of failures, defectives, deviants, cripples, handicapped, challenged (whatever non-PC word is current this week).

Often these microbes would seem to have a no chance to survive in normal conditions but more often than not, along the shore of the vast sea of normal conditions with its trillions of normal microbes, there are little backwaters were the conditions are weird enough to allow tiny numbers of every freak imaginable to survive, sort of, just barely.

When conditions turn weird all over, the freaks or at least their DNA, allow some bacteria to survive and perhaps even flourish under the ‘new normal’.

Darwin, being an upper middle class rich Victorian couldn’t see this.

He was as consumed with the issue of the proper inheritance of family wealth and honour within the family as every other well off Victorian.

If you’ve ever read any Victorian novels, you already know this.

The precious inheritance of genes, to him, were strictly passed down - VERTICALLY - from mom and dad to child, strictly within the species: and dissolute living could quickly destroy it, while new genes came along at a glacial pace - millions of years in the making. The inheritance of genes was private, internal to the family, and was family property like a copyright or patent.

You had to pay a dowry to buy his son’s valuable genes, or show evidence of a very good job, to buy his daughter’s valuable genes.

Just as libraries in his day were either private, for internal use only or run for profit as lending libraries.

The idea that many living beings can borrow freely, from any and all species, valuable species as needed - and that they let others borrow their genes as well - was morally repugnant to Darwin, as a Victorian.

As a scientist ?

We’ll never know : it wasn’t until 1929-1930 that Dr Martin Henry Dawson raised the possibility that gene exchange among pneumonia germs had any wider biological implication. Darwin was long dead by then, but his Victorian values lived on for another 100 years or more, inside the mings of most scientists.

Microbes superior to humans in the race to survive and reproduce ? Ridiculous !

Even more annoying was Dawson and his followers’ claim that the microbes were superior because of their tiny size and physical weakness, not in spite of it.

Human scientists of the Modernity clan, just feel it in their bones, as much as corporation CEOs do, that bigger is always better.

Time therefore to look at the opposing argument favouring smaller as better.

Humans are massive and big energy consumers because they practise a very private property oriented autarky.

They want to do it all themselves, to be all around handymen.

We can swing a 15 lb hammer at concrete one minute and adjust the tiny screw in a pair of eyeglasses the next. Unlike other species with one very good (superior to us) sense and four others not so good, we demand to be pretty good with all five senses.

We have powerful muscles and delicate muscles, and tons and tons of brains.

Inside that brain we have tons of skills and knowledge and while we might lend some of it out in the form of written or verbal communication, we decide when and how.

And when we die, all that brain knowledge and skill dies with us - except that our kids might inherit our skills but our memories - unless verbally discussed, die with us.

We relatively rarely out-source things until we need them : we dont have thick coats of hair all year around in case it turns Arctic cold, but we do put them on in the winter (parkas) and do without them in the  tropic sun (string bikinis).

This is flexible, so we can live anywhere when times are good , but if it turns cold and we dont have clothes, we freeze to death.

Bears, with thick coats year around avoid the hottest summer-sun and hide in warm caves in the coldest part of winter. They don’t do well on tropic beaches.

All this requires masses of precious energy : the average North American uses so much energy that it now literally threatens all life on earth to provide by traditional fossil fuel means.

By contrast, individual bacteria are not good all arounders. They specialize.

And they economize.

They are small and round so that their food doesn’t need energy to be gathered up and consumed : it drifts in by diffusion and by definition, is already bite size or it won’t be able to drift in. Their poop drifts out the same way.

Any bigger and a bacteria would need muscles to go out and gather food as diffusion doesn’t work at distances greater than half the width of a traditional tiny microbe.

So no energy is needed to create bones and muscles and fuel them.

Instead almost all of the time a microbe spends reproducing is devoted to making DNA. Bacteria are mostly all DNA.

 Inside the incredibly tiny bacteria is, in effect, the science writer’s giant brain.

 Even so much of the time, the newly created DNA is unused :tightly coiled up, consuming no energy. It only gets used when circumstances change and chemical levels sets some genes into motion.

It may only take 25 minutes to reproduce a new bacteria offspring filled with DNA , versus humans taking 25 years before they send their offspring off into the world, but natural selection is merciless.

If another bacteria can ditch a third of its rarely used genes, it could reproduce in 15 minutes and hence out-breed its slower companion with the bigger genome.

But if - when - times turn tough, lacking those suddenly useful, hitherto useless, genes could be fatal.

So its a dynamic process for bacteria - making their genomes either too big or too small.

Their backup Ace-in-the-Hand is their ability to incorporate, splice-in, bits of DNA lying about in the liquid environment around them. HGT : Horizontal Gene Transfer. Not from your own mom or dad, but from unknown moms & dads from distant species.

The trillions times trillions of microbe are all - everyone of them as much as all of us - subtly different : they all contain unique knowledge.

They are all ‘authors’ of potential library calls, to use programmer jargon.

At the time time, they can all potentially borrow library calls off other unique microbes’ DNA.

They are all potential ‘borrowers’.

The winds connect the global microbe library together : a new microbe formed of bits of its old self combined with bits of others can quickly spread itself around the world and in time will die and its new gene substructure can be taken up by a different type of microbe, via HGT.

And so on and so forth.

Traditionally we humans couldnt or won’t do this - much.

Greed makes us want to patent or copyright our secret new knowledge - people must pay to use it.

Or barriers (costly barriers) prevent the diffusion of new knowledge : the cost of reading a book in a new language or travelling thousands of miles to learn a new skill.

Or the knowledge itself required hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery to put to use.

Scientists tried hard to make new knowledge available to all : they created norms that said secret scientific knowledge was morally bad unless freely published and they tried to convey it in the book of easily transportable books or articles written in a common language : first Latin then French,German and now English.

But equally, scientists worked to restrain other scientists from freely publishing new kowledge : their norms also declared that science wasn’t really science unless it had been vetted by other powerful scientific leaders. Generally you had to publish within the general consensus of your field or your work was effectively ignored, if seen at all.

And most scientific knowledge was never seen by , even by most scientists. Those books and articles were very very expensive and so a great research university, until recently, did not mean it had great researchers to act as mentors, or lots of research grants, but simply that it had a huge library of the best books and articles.

So expensive was the process that few famous ‘research’ universities had real strength across the board : their library collections tended, in practise, to excel in this but not that.

But I am a songwriter, not a scientist, so let me tell you how the human move to emulate the microbes global library of reader-writers has affected my trade.

Growing up in one of Canada’s six regional capitals (Halifax Nova Scotia) I had two radio stations that played top 40 pop rock and two TV stations that showed performers a few hours a week.

The mid Sixties and early Seventies saw an explosion of well researched books on the origins of the current pop rock scene - great for me and well timed as it was these earlier eras I was particularly interested in.

But I could not hear any of the fabulous but little known songs that featured in these books : if they weren’t on a compilation album that made it to my two or three records stores, I was out of luck.

Any trip out of town to another province or country meant a visit to as many records stores as possible to bring back rare records.

Books on the mechanics of songwriters were nowhere to be found : the few books to be available, generally on country music or Tin Pan era pop, tended to be longer on autobiography and songwriting business practises than on motifs and inside notes.

Demoing my songs would have been easy if I had lived in the world’s handful of recording and publishing centres : Paris, London, New York, Nashville or LA. I’d walk in, based on my gift for gab, into the publisher’s rep’ office and sung my tune or perhaps unspool a tape recording of it.

But I knew that generally, preparing an expensive demo and then making copes and mailing it off at great expense, cold turkey, from the boonies into NYC or London’s publishers was a total waste of time.

The best I could hope for was to peddle the song to a passing music star and hope they’d record it. This was a time honoured and well accepted route but pretty hit and miss in a city well off the usual touring routes in every genre.

Today, I won’t need an expensive demo as the free Garageband app on every Apple product would produce a finished record better sounding than any Pop Era studio could do with a million dollars of equipment.

Posted on Youtube as a music video - again  for free - it would be available to all potential customers : performers or publishers., worldwide.

I’d still have to make those all-important personal connections, but could do so via the internet, rather than moving to Nashville for years.

And today there is a vast array of songwriting advice for free on the internet - even better all the songs you can want on on Youtube : the original demo, the first non-hit versions, the hit version done live and all the varied covers ever since. Together with free access to the lyrics, sheet music and MIDI file.

These together present a songwriter education a college degree couldnt provide.

And I am not just a borrower : on GarageBand forums I offer up my limited but unique knowledge of some features others haven’t noticed. Forums that provide a world-wide community.

I feel like a microbe - and it feels good...

ECLECTIC : Carey Anne Farrell

 Your ‘cover’ of an earlier hit better not be that : better not be a perfect cover or copy.

Do it different and hopefully better : just similar enough for people to recognize it but different enough for people to see and hear something new and unexpected in the original they didn’t know was there.

A classic case in point is the Animals cover of Nina Simone’s version of DON’T LET ME  BE MISUNDERSTOOD.

Great song, great singer with a great variant of that song.

But someone in the Animals camp, probably Chas Chandler, heard a tiny little bit of nothing, a arranger’s throwaway counter melody buried deep in the dying seconds of the fade-out.

In the blogging biz, we call that ‘burying the lede’ !

The Animals’ team put that tiny bit of nothing in the front and centre and then beat the poop out of it over and over —- making the song a worldwide smash and enduring classic.

And today, nobody but nobody would  think to perform the tune - and no punters recognize the tune - without that hypnotic riff.

The Shangri-Las are usually seen as the girl group to end all girl groups - not the best singers or with best songs and production, but still far and away the most ‘high school girl’ of the lot.

I CAN’T GO HOME ANYMORE is probably their best.

So trying to cover the best of the best is no easy challenge.

But I think Chicago singer-songwriter/author Carey Anne Farrell has done it.

Pause and give it a listen, before or after re-hearing the original. Listen to Nina Simone’s original of Don’t let Me be Misunderstood and then the Animals’ take as well.

Carey’s selection of musical covers is the very definition of eclectic and not all work for me - but this one really does. 

Carey’s voice - though not her visual appearance - says high school lonely better than the original singers who really were just high school kids !

Meanwhile her accompaniment track retained memories of the original bombastic backing track but this time, nicely subdued and subtly spread all over the background.

I could see her version becoming a Spotify hit, the sort you’ll hear in heavy rotation in every retail outlet on the globe for the next decade..

Can you tell difference ‘tween the NB Irving newspapers & CBC NB’s non-coverage of the formative years in Moncton that produced our country’s worst mass killer, Gabriel Wortman ?

I can’t.

Instead, it is left to a Halifax Nova Scotia newspaper and a Halifax reporter, Andrew Rankin, to give us the inside story of the horribly warped upbringing of Gabriel Wortman, replete with tons of Moncton area family photos and tons of Moncton area family informants.

Any New Brunswick born and bred reporter, with a lifetime of contacts could have - should have - done this story months ago.

And with all that home team advantage, done it better to boot.

There is an awful lot of things wrong with New Brunswick : Gabriel Wortman’s upbringing is only one of them....

preserving History : its not the size of the vial, its the size of the Hope : Pfizer Penicillin March 1942, Pfizer Covid vaccine December 2020

 

Today, in December 2020, museums all over the world are rushing to preserve the tiny precious vial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine that was first deployed in their area, keenly aware of the historical significance of those first shots.

Yes, seven shots and seven people vaccinated against Covid, like a single swallow, do not a summer make : not with seven billion of us left to jab.

So those museum-preserved vials does not represent a large dose of the vaccine, rather instead a huge dose of Hope, as Laura Bennett, director of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History so rightly observed.

Just as the Nova Scotian doctor who gave the first needles of penicillin on October 16th 1940 to usher in our current Age-Of-Antibiotics definitely knew.

They were a huge dose of hope mixed with an incredibly small amount of penicillin. 

But how did he know that? For penicillin, like insulin, is measured by its biological activity, not is chemical activity so that early researchers had a devil of a time determining their product’s potency.

It was rather simple, really.

Consult any lavishly illustrated book on common drugs, as found in any good pharmacy school library and you can’t help but notice that the drug samples shown all look boringly alike : like table salt or table sugar.

Table salt and table sugar are typically the only pure as pure compounds we ever see in daily life - if we did see others, we’d see that they too are crystal clear.

It is in fact the mere sight of transparent regular crystals of a compound that tells us it is indeed finally 100% pure.

So our Nova Scotian doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, knew by looking at the first penicillin powder he dissolved and then injected into Charles Aronson and Aaron Leroy Alston, that this thick rusty sticky mess had to be miles away from being pure.

In fact his team later estimated that first injection was about 8 units of penicillin per gram, instead of pure penicillin’s 1.6 million units per gram.

So what he was injecting into those two dying young men was .0005% pure penicillin - and 99.9995% pure HOPE.

His tiny team had home brewed that historical first penicillin - not a good sign that the rest of the world’s seriously ill would get any doses.

So it was another historical Red Letter Day when the world’s first pharmaceutically-produced clinical penicillin was injected into another of Dr Dawson’s dying patients.

It too was not pure - at best, it offered up just 1% penicillin and 99% Hope - but hope it did indeed offer up, not just for that patient but for our whole world.

 For on D-Day’s beaches and for most of 1944, 80% of all the world’s clinical penicillin came from just one company and just one site alone : Pfizer and its Marcy Avenue plant.

Go ahead - misname it Mercy Avenue - I won’t scold you.

Now that historic Pfizer vial, first used on March 6th 1942, unfortunately was not preserved for the museum record.

But it looks like a second time around, Pfizer is having better luck...

July Collins’ performances : popular versus great

 Judy Collins’ version of SOMEDAY SOON has been a great success, with millions of amateurs and bar bands attempting ,usually successfully, to carry the song off in the half century since it was released.

Judy Collins’ version of THE RISING OF THE MOON is sixty years old and has no one attempt to cover it - not even Collins herself : as she grew older she lost the brio needed to carry it off successful.

Songwriting experts - a money grubbing lot - think her version of SOMEDAY SOON far the more successful song, because of the offers it generated in a song she did not write, at least paid off in all the concert tour offers she received as a result.

But I think her version of THE RISING OF THE MOON one of the artistic wonders of the 20th century - one that will be played a 100 years after she dead and buried.

If it sounds a bit like Franz Schubert’s more war-like lieder, it may not be a coincidence. RISING too was originally written as a poem to be read, later converted by a musician (here Judy) into a dramatic recital in two voices, with the instrument ( here a guitar, not a piano) playing a very active role continuously commenting on the text.

So now let me put it this way, the failure of the opera LA BOHEME to be able to be taken home and played on the guitar by any amateur, after a few hours of rehearsing is a failure, sure, but one failure : it has many other successful artistic qualities. 

I am NOT arguing against shortness and simplicity and in favour of length and complexity as a sign of great art :  Collins’ RISING OF THE MOON is not at all long or complex : but as I said, it requires an apparently rare quantity and quality of brio to pull it off successful.

You have all heard Collins’ SOMEDAY SOON zillions of times : few of you have ever heard her version of THE RISING OF THE MOON.

Give it a listen and tell me if it isn’t truly great great art...

‘$705,000 cash in an AMMO box’ : the twin obsessions of mass killer Gabriel Wortman : guns & money

Gabe’s twin obsessions : GUNS & MONEY

As a poet, lyricist, headline writer or as copy writer, one always looks for those phrases that say the most with the fewest words.

So the news that mass killer Gabriel Wortman kept a small fortune in cash, $705,000, in an ammo box was like a Godsend to me.

It seemed to accurately describe the complicated life-long arc of this complicated killer in as few words as possibly.

Even as a kid, friends remember him as obsessed with guns. His criminal career to make money also began as a kid : stealing building supplies.

It only broke down on the night of April 18th 2020 : when he left all that money in his home he was burning down, before proceeding out with a 1000 rounds and his guns, to lay waste to as much of the world as possible before suiciding-by-cop....

Worse than dying at 27 - far far worse - is peaking at 27 and then facing a half century or more of a sharp decline in quality

Still touting youthful rebellion - at age 77....

 A half century ago, when most of the Rolling Stone members were around age 27, the band was recording its (a) greatest album or (b) its last great album : either way, EXILE ON MAIN STREET.

People tell me they have done some good things in the fifty years since.

I guess.

Haven’t heard much of it though.

But I do like “MISS YOU”.

At least gold winning Olympic athletes are allowed to retire at their peak (often around age 27) and allowed to become sales managers or something.

Scientists often do their most creative thinking around age 27 as well, but are allowed to become scientific sages and department and lab heads despite their best days long behind them.

But great artists of all sorts are expected to go on being creative, not just to give us journeyman-level art until they die.

For some, writers of books fictional and truthful, it doesn’t seem a problem being fruitful into their old age : these books often require the wisdom that comes with age.

With visual artists much the same.

Often the same with  dramatic performers, if agism doesn’t restrict them to mostly non-leading roles.

Dancers are often more like athletes : the spirit willing and eager but the body is weak. 

But poets and musicians who gain fame for writing and singing lyrical material with a youthful energy-filled, hopeful naive quality, find it hard to write and sing something new in that mood beyond their forties.

The talented Chuck Berry could no longer write  and sing the popular Chuck Berry  style songs a dozen years after he started while the much less talented Jerry Lee Lewis was singing as well in the 1980s as he had in the 1950s.

Chuck wrote his own stuff and after a while he ran out of things to say and new ways to sing them and play them.

Jerry Lee never wrote his stuff and new songwriters gave him new stuff to sing in new ways.

This was the problem with the Stones, or U2 or REM etc : being a self contained band of composer-performers they found it hard to really do new things despite trying very hard to re-invent themselves.

They didn’t really want to be re-invented and neither did their fans really want that of them.

They became a human jukebox, forced to play all (& only) their old favourites, forever, to the generation that first heard them.

Dying at 27, picked at the peak of perfection, starts sounding not half bad...

Lots of Canadians got very rich during the GREAT DEPRESSION : Gabriel Wortman would have been one of them

 

Canada’s Pollyanna Press doesn’t like to discuss it, but lots of present day Canadian zillionaire families first got their wealth during the GREAT DEPRESSION, feasting upon the weak and vulnerable in a time of near universal disaster.

If all your wealth wasn’t liquid and gone down the drain on the stock-market, if it was instead in something solid like residential real estate, you could do quite well out of the GREAT DEPRESSION.

In general, wages and other costs fell : albeit along with consumer demand.

Except in one crucial area : residential rentals. Many people had to give up living in their own individual house and now had to rent a part of a house instead.

But lets start at the beginning.

New house building starts fell basically to zero and many current working class house-occupiers either couldnt pay the mortgage or had the mortgage paid up but urgently needed money to feed the family.

If you had a little loose capital and no heart, you simply offered them ridiculously low prices on their homes, knowing they badly needed cash, any cash - even unfair cash, - and would probably then go double up with relatives for their new accommodations.

Their single family homes, after a bit of slap-dash partitioning, would be added to your slum-landlord holdings and would be profitable, even at low rentals, because your buying price was also so very low. 

And you could maybe even stiff the original owners a little : delivering the half of the price quickly and then stalling, stalling on the other half knowing they had no money to waste on a court case.

This is how we have seen Gabriel Wortman operate : offer the poor & vulnerable a pittance on their properties and then stiff them as they unlikely to sue.

In the case of Aaron Tuck, we now see a new wrinkle : actual violence & threats of violence to convince a stubborn land owner to sell up on the cheap and get outa Dodge to protect their families.

Aaron didn’t budge, figuring Gabe would only go just so far with his violence.

Like most everybody else who came across Gabriel Wortman, he guessed wrong....

Pfizer goes it alone on COVID vaccine in 2020, just as it did with Penicillin in 1944 !

the UPJOHN COMPANY has a website devoted to its WWII medical supplies production that would get an A+ from any historian or archivist !

Pfizer did not “make” its penicillin all by itself, anymore than Ford “makes” its cars all by itself. This grimy bit of machinery was something Pfizer lacked and the Upjohn company had in spades : so much of Pfizer’s penicillin powder actually arrived to the end user inside a Upjohn labelled bottle : supply chains really do matter.

It is hard to believe that a corporate memory can extend back over 75 years, but Pfizer’s recent actions brings that into question.

Pfizer in 2020 chose to remain at the very outer edges of Trump’s OPERATION WARPSPEED just as it did in 1944 with the OSRD-led obsession ‘to take as long as we have to synthesize penicillin and patent it, before we deliver to WWII’s dying troops and civilians’.

Pfizer marched to a different drummer : seeing natural (patent-free) penicillin as cheaper, quicker and easier to make than the delusion of synthetic patent-able penicillin.

(And they were proven right, time & again : Penicillin still hasn’t been commercially synthesized 90 long years after this ‘synthetic autarchy’ obsession began !)

Thus Pfizer took none of Trump’s money (er the American taxpayers’ money) and shared relatively little production information with his Covid team. Just as it did in 1943-1944.

It simply promised to (A) deliver a safe effective vaccine as quick as it could and to (B) sell as much of it as possible to Trump’s government as the government wanted. 

(A) it did - in spades.  As it did in the Spring of 1944 - delivering 80% of the entire world’s penicillin - including almost all of the stuff that landed on the D-Day beaches. Many of us are here today solely because grandpa got some Pfizer penicillin when he really needed it.

But regarding (B) : Trump, his nose badly out of joint, declined the initial offer from Pfizer and now his team is playing catch-up - now willing to use the War Production laws to force suppliers to focus all-in on getting materials that Pfizer needs to really up production.

But don’t hold your breath :  Republicans are generally loath to force businessmen to do anything, even when lives depend upon it : in WWII as in 2020...

In World War II, the difference from being an occupied territory and a ‘forced’ ally wasn’t always clear and seemed to vary day by day

The stupidest thing he ever did : declaring war on the USA when it had no intention of doing the same to him...

A previous post mentioned that probably the majority of the world’s territories were not actually free to decide whether to be Allied, Axis or Neutral : they were - legally - dependent colonies and protectorates.

But was Egypt, for example, really free to decide? There was a lot of grey areas where the formal - nominal - power to choose was totally constrained by real world politics.

Of course, as soon as the warring powers began invading, they added a lot more grey into the situation.

Poland was quickly divided into three legally different zones : France into two.

Was Vichy France really a willing partner in New Order Europe ?

Was Iceland and Greenland really eager to be occupied by Britain ?

And how willing were countries like Finland and Bulgaria to be co-belligerents with the Axis ?

After May 1940 in Europe and May 1942 in South East Asia it got much harder to be a genuine Neutral.

The time to display truly independent action was probably much earlier when both sides were more even.

I firmly believe that if neutral Sweden had a treaty with Poland, France and the UK to defend Poland from war aggressors, Hitler would not have invaded Poland and also that Stalin would have walked away from any plans to share conquered Poland with Hitler.

Sweden’s large and close land mass was the only real way Britain and France could directly intervene in Poland, not merely annoy Germany’s outer edges to the West.

Spain on the Allied side and Turkey on the Axis side were big enough to alter the war’s course. Noway actively  on the Allied side might also have altered the war’s course.

The biggest Neutral of them all : America, could have decidedly altered the war completely if it had entered the war in September 1939 : even better, threaten to in August 1939...

Despite Hollywood producing a Trumpworld like definition of the truth about America in  WWII, the USA would NEVER have entered the European war, until Hitler first declared war on them.

America’s largest ethnic originating group, far and away, are Germans and 1941’s Congress & Senate simply won’t have voted to declare war on Germany, Pearl Harbour or not...

WWII’s colonies had no independent, official, position on whether to be Axis, Allied or Neutral

Canadians are continuously surprised to learn that Newfoundland never declared war on Germany in 1939.

Newfoundland had given up its independent Dominion status, as equal to Canada or Australia, during its terrible version of the Great Depression. It was a British Colony, an odd legal form of a colony, but a colony nonetheless.

So when Britain declared war, all her colonies were automatically at war.

That is a huge chunk of the world without an official say so on the moral course of the war.

But wait ! There is more, lots & lots & lots more.

In 1939, most of the world was a colony of some major or minor nation.

France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Italy all had  huge colonies & protectorates overseas. As did the USA and Japan.

Colonies overseas are always the clearest cut : colonies that are contiguous with the colonial power are less so. But Russia and Germany also had (contiguous) colonies, unofficially if not officially. China too.

I have probably let out some other colonial powers circa 1939 : comment below to correct my errors and to add other colonial powers to the list.

If we get into the weeds, large (& small) ethnic minorities often feel they are left out in their nation’s majority’s rush into war or neutrality : Quebecers or Afrikaners for example differed wildly from their nation’s official position.

I believe that Canada’s first nations, like Australia’s aboriginals, were generally pro the decision to go to war. But all ‘darker peoples’ had plenty to complain about as the war proceeded and they always got the short end of the stick, without any real say in the matter.

But more importantly, each and every adult individual, as some point during the six year old world war, had their own personal opinion on the course their nation/colony was officially taking on the war.

For this war was intensely ideological : many people were (semi) privately more or less pro or anti Fascism, broadly defined, than their own government.

WWII was thus a globally, albeit generally civil, civil war.

By this, I mean many Americans quietly approved of the way Germany mistreated Jews, but were not willing to put on a brownshirt and openly rebel with arms against FDR’s government.

Both the Free French and the French units that served in Hitler’s campaign against communist Russia, for an example, were a tiny fragment of the entire French population at home and abroad.

Resistance was often reduced to ‘going through the motions’ on whatever course your government wanted you to do. People generally went to war because they felt they had to : no rush to the flag in this war, anywhere.

WWII, in this sense, was totally unlike WWI....

a DRAM is a micro-drama , conducted internally within an individual or a small tight group

Virtually everyone who casually asks for a wee dram of whiskey would be shocked and insulted if their host actually delivered upon their request.

If you filled a very tiny, baby-sized, teaspoon to the level top that would be a dram : about 1/8th of an ounce of liquor.

It thus delivers us a sharp history lesson : whiskey for a very long time was extremely scarce and extremely expensive.

Drinkers at their dram shops could only afford to drink - slowly ! - a tiny teaspoon every now and then.

Dram has had many meanings over the centuries : a small coin in ancient times, then used by pub owners for wet measure of alcohol and by doctors and druggists for dry measure of medicines. 

(DRAM, (D-RAM), a form of computer RAM, obviously, has no connection to the older term.)

I have extended, invented, an additional meaning for the ancient term : as a very small drama, a micro-drama.

A drama as far away as possible from the huge nation versus nation dramas usually found in Grand Opera.

Or is it ?

For my micro-dramas, DRAMs, occur mostly inside one person’s conscience, or inside the conscience of a small tightly knit group.

“Should I Go or Should I Stay ?” by the Clash would be a classic pop DRAM.

The construct would generally run along those lines : ‘should I (we) do X...or... should I (we) do Y’ ?

So one could well see a US president, as well as the inner circle around a US president, debating internally about what to do as the Russian freighter filled with atomic bombs steams towards Cuba.

Oops ! That story has been done.

But you see my point : the art form has the potential to tie something as small and as personal as the thoughts inside one’s head, with globe-altering events outside.

In my book ,the dying Dr Dawson has to daily decide whether to quit his quest and take up the quiet life so he can live long enough to have his young son really know him - or whether to plow on and stop penicillin being used solely as a weapon of war and private profit, to instead see abundant cheap natural (PD) penicillin available to all in need throughout the world...

when we are receiving hospital care, we are all DEMOCRATS ; when it comes to paying for that hospital care, we are all REPUBLICANS

 Do you recognize anything of yourself, or that of friends & relatives, in some of my medically-oriented potted biography ?

I have been in hospitals as a PATIENT many dozens of times over my 70 years - thankfully only twice overnight. The worst was when I was 18, after I got Strep A related glomerulonephritis (kidney disease) so bad that one of my chemical imbalances was so literally ‘off the charts’ that it broke the mechanical recording pen!

 Since my brother had strep related Rheumatic Fever and my sister strep related Scarlet Fever, I was an extremely worried patient, particularly as my mother also had a strep infection that damaged her kidneys. In her case, it was bad enough to give her life-long life-threatening kidney disease and hyper high blood pressure. 

I knew, even as an 18 year old, that  there was some genetic connection to these severe auto immune reactions to relatively mild strep A infections.

Mostly as a result of my mother’s severe illness, I got used to sometimes being one of those PARENT-close relative-close friends who have a high emotional involvement with the patient being visited.

Yes I admit it, many other times, my hospital visits to see others involved little emotional involvement.

And at all times, I was an emotionally involved (cross-torn ?) PAYER of others’ hospital bills. In my province, the sale tax which is on pretty well everything but the air that we breath, is nominally assigned to pay our provincial health costs. In Canada, our income tax paid also has a big chunk handed over to additional pay for health costs.

Emotionally involved as a payer, in the sense that health costs are our governments biggest single expenditure and none of us likes to see so much of our our hard-earned pay going on possibly wasteful hospital spending.

In my case, unlike our Republican voters to the south, I don’t resent my tax dollars being spent on colored folk who “don’t bother to put enough aside to pay for adequate private hospital insurance”.

My resentment, instead, is mostly directed towards those Canadians who smoke, drink, take drugs or indulge in risky behaviour in their sporting activities !

I have never been a hospital administrator, where any personal empathy towards sick and dying people is usually dissolved by an overriding occupational need to prevent the hospital from going into bankruptcy by spending too much...on those sick & dying patients !

But I have been a political candidate, in fact once I ran solely to protest changes in hospital administration - so I have had to publicly stake my career on my public opinions on hospital costs. So yes, at times I have very much been a penny pinching hospital bill payer.

Most of us have donated on behalf of someone sick or dead we were close to - a few of us have also pushed a cart about, or danced with patients, as a hospital volunteer. (I have done all three.) We sign donor cards (me too) or donate blood (not yet).

But quite a few of us have got even closer to the very sick and dying, as a front line health care PROVIDER. And very few of us don’t have some close friend or relative that aren’t or were nurses or doctors.

In my case, my mom was a hospital lab tech and my youngest sister a certified nursing assistant. A cousin was a doctor, another cousin’s kid is about to become one. Among my in-laws, many worked throughout the entire hospital system from cleaner or laundry staff to emergency ward nurse.

I myself was a psych nursing aide, a ward-level front line provider, for four years, in two mental hospitals, on six different types of wards : locked quasi-forensic, severely disabled ‘children’, geriatric, open, acute admission - even in the ‘hospital’ (physical issues) ward.

Your emotional involvement naturally tends to be constantly high with patients who are largely admitted because of their emotional issues : deaths were rare but they do happen and you feel them intensely in patients you have gotten to know very well over the years.

In all of my four ‘medical’ roles : PATIENT-PARENT-PAYER-PROVIDER, I have always been heavily cross-pressured : helping people in need versus cutting costs.

I am always the person most scared when watching TV : its a family joke. I feel tremendous empathy for each and ever character right down inside my bones. This excessive empathy is both a curse and yet a blessing, as a writer.

Like you, I find myself always wearing four or more hats on pretty well any major decision I must make.

So, for instance, while I don’t mind my tax dollars going to be spent on me or my mother as the patient, but I do resent it when a distant in law isn’t willing to pay a taxi to the hospital because Veterans’ Affairs pays for an very expensive and very unneeded ambulance instead.

However, my empathy, my ability to sometimes think like a life-saving Democrat and sometimes like penny-pinching Republican, I think, will serve me well as I attempt a history of wartime penicillin ( and yes, and even WWII itself) as largely an internal conflict between most humans’ empathy for others in need and most humans’ reluctance to put themselves out much to help others, if it costs money, time or physical discomfort and danger.

So this will not be the classical explanation of WWII as a clash between Good and Evil.

This will be an account of WWII that sees the bulk of humanity was morally well intentioned but morally fundamentally lazy.

My tale will be the clash between being morally well meaning and morally lazy : a conflict not just limited as being between individuals in all sorts of nations, Allied Axis & Neutral, during WWII , but also a conflict within most of us, all of the time.

So, if in each very different book chapter and micro-drama (DRAM), I seem to take the side of the protagonists involved in that chapter, it is not an ‘act’.

I have held all of their various views, albeit perhaps in a very muted form, at various times of my life...

Pfizer was first to have PENICILLIN on the beaches of Normandy & now about to be the first to have COVID VACCINE in the arms of Londonderry

The grim-faced man on the left, Pfizer President John L Smith, was an ultra cautious man, moving fast only once in his life : in late summer 1943.

 That was enough, as his nine month long non-stop effort helped win the day on D-Day as only his firm had combat-ready penicillin in time for the the medics’ supplies packs on the Normandy beaches.

Pfizer was supplying, for a time, 80% of the wartime world’s penicillin....

 The employees and share-holders of MERCK , the arch-rival of PFIZER on D-Day and again during Covid-2020, can only rage as their top executives again bet on the wrong horse....