Potpourri

[sartorias]

Just did a podcast, a first for me. If I don't sound like too much of a gasbag and a whacktoon, will post link when it goes live.

Sirens is putting out the call for programming. This excellent, excellent con that focuses on women in fantasy draws its programming from its members. If you've ever wanted to organize a panel, present a roundtable

Comments

[anonymous]

The wartime ruins lasted a lot longer than 1948. The big rebuilding efforts didn't even get started until the 1950s. My parents were born in 1938 and 1942 respectively and both had "playing in the ruins" as a formative childhood experience. It sounded so much fun that I was sometimes a little sad that I didn't have any cool ruins to play in as a child.

Bremen still has a handful of wartime ruins almost seventy years after the end of WWII and there were more when I was a kid. Though they are hidden away behind billboards and largely invisible. In the late 1980s and 1990s there was a deliberate push to build new houses on the remaining ruin plots (mostly empty plots of land among row houses and the like), but some remain empty, most likely because the ownership is unclear.

I've never seen "I was a male war bride" to my knowledge, though I do have family in Heidelberg. But I adore "Footlight Parade" for the stunning musical sequences, particularly "By a waterfall" which is one of the most insane scenes ever put on film. The "Shanghai Lil" number is also good and James Cagney is always worth watching, even in rather plotless musicals. Though oddly enough, I didn't appreciate Cagney at all as a teenager (and "White Heat" probably wasn't the best film to start with) but when I chanced to watch one of his films as an adult I realized what a great actor he was and deliberately sought out his films.

Cora

[sartorias]

Oh, I know that the ruins lasted longer. What I was trying to point out that three years after the end of the war there was still a great deal of ruin to see. (For those who don't know much history, and are used to seeing things tidied within a year after a localized disaster)

Very true about Footlight Parade. Busby Berkeley choreography was pretty strange stuff, glitzy to the max.

[maryosmanski]

I can remember seeing the bullet holes in the sides of buildings in residential parts of West Berlin in 1967 when I spent a summer there living with a family. And of course there were still many ruins in East Berlin if you (the non-West Berliner of course) took the S-Bahn over there to see the museums, concerts, opera, and the Brecht theatre.

What was hard for me to realise when I was in Berlin again (2010) was that my first time there had been only 20 or so years after the end of the war, and the current visit was just about twice that distance in time from my first time there.

[sartorias]

Yes--it really wasn't that long. (I was in Vienna in '71-2) and the shadow of the war still stretched over people, both in residual stuff and of course in living memory. But to us young folks it seemed impossibly long ago.

James Cagney

[filkferengi]

Have you seen him in either "Yankee Doodle Dandy" or "Man Of A Thousand Faces"? He shines in both biopics!

Re: James Cagney

[sartorias]

Yes! He's terrific.