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kottke.org posts about John F. Kennedy

Going to the Movies with Jackie Kennedy

Carly Simon’s recent piece in the New Yorker about going to the movies with Jackie Kennedy (an excerpt of her book Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie) was unexpectedly moving. And funny. And thoughtful. Trying to avoid seeing anything related to Oliver Stone’s JFK โ€” “scarier, even, would be a two-minute trailer for ‘JFK’ inserted before the feature-length film we’d gone to see” โ€” the two opted instead for Warren Beatty’s mobster flick, Bugsy.

Every time a shot sounded on the screen โ€” and the film was plenty violent โ€” she reacted physically, dramatically, her body mimicking the victim’s.

How do you deal with trauma like that when society keeps reminding you of it, not only generally (with gunshots in movies) but specifically, with blockbuster conspiracy movies that depict in detail the exact moment when your life was torn apart? And how can you be a good friend to someone who suffered from PTSD (and perhaps never recovered)? How do you assure her that you’re a safe harbor for her thoughts and feelings, that you’ll help insulate her without isolating her?

P.S. Somehow, in everything I’ve read/seen about the Kennedys over the years, I’d never heard that Jackie had given birth to a premature baby boy named Patrick in August of 1963. The baby died 39 hours after his birth. Her husband was assassinated just 105 days later. I… Jesus.


Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series

NPR does this thing called Tiny Desk Concerts where they bring musicians and bands into the office to play behind a desk. Recent guests have included T.I., Erykah Badu, Dave Matthews, and the legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Ma played selections from Bach’s suites for cello, which he’s been playing for almost 60 years, and talked about the value of incremental learning.

Why did Laurence Olivier return so often to Shakespeare’s Othello? Why did Ansel Adams keep photographing the Grand Canyon? Obsessed or awestruck, artists revisit great inspirations because they believe there is yet another story to tell โ€” about life, about themselves.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma brought his great inspiration, and in turn part of his own life story, to an enthusiastic audience packed around the Tiny Desk on a hot summer day. Ma is returning, yet again, to the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, a Mount Everest for any cellist. He has just released his third studio recording of the complete set and is taking the music on a two-year, six-continent tour. Ma’s first recording of the Suites, released in 1983, earned him his first Grammy.

Amazingly, when Ma was only 7 years old, he played in a benefit concert for an audience that included President John F. Kennedy. Composer Leonard Bernstein introduced Ma, saying in part: “Now here’s a cultural image for you to ponder as you listen. A seven-year-old Chinese cellist playing old French music for his new American compatriots.”

Even though he’s only 62 years old, Ma is a great example of The Great Span in action, linking JFK and YouTube and Lil Buck together across seemingly disparate stretches of American history. When he plays a duet with the first virtuoso robotic cellist sometime in the next 20 years, Ma will have more than secured his spot in The Great Span Hall of Fame.


Stabilized Zapruder film in HD

I linked to a stabilized version of the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination a few years ago but Antony Davison has made a version that presents the whole film in panoramic HD, resulting in an amazingly clear representation of the event.


November 22, 1963, a short film by Errol Morris

Errol Morris and Tink Thompson share an obsession about the nature of photographic evidence. In a short film for the NY Times, Morris talks to Thompson about the photographic and filmic evidence of the JFK assassination, which Thompson has been investigating on and off since 1963.

Interesting that 1) there exists much more photographic evidence of the assassination than is commonly shown/known, and 2) Thompson very much has a theory of what the evidence shows but Morris doesn’t spill those particular beans:

Is there a lesson to be learned? Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated. Tink still believes in answers, and in this instance, an answer. He is completing a sequel to “Six Seconds” called “Last Second in Dallas.” Like its predecessor, this book is clearly reasoned and convincing. Of course, there will be people who will be unmoved by his or any other account.

See also Morris’ previous short film featuring Thompson & the assassination, The Umbrella Man.


The valuable and sad Zapruder film

Alex Pasternack goes long on the Zapruder film for Motherboard.

Dan Rather, a very young Dan Rather, whose career was about to be minted, was CBS’s Dallas bureau chief at the time. He called New York, asked for Don Hewitt, and told him that “a guy named Zapruder was supposed to have film of the assassination and was going to put it up for sale.” Exactly how interested was Walter Cronkite’s evening news program? Hewitt, the show’s executive producer-and the long-time producer of 60 Minutes-insisted it was very interested, and quickly decided the best approach would require a bit of, well, courage.

“In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot,” Hewett wrote, “I told Rather to go to Zapruder’s house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder’s house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get him for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder’s property. Rather said, ‘Great idea. I’ll do it.’


Clouds Over Cuba

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In commemoration of the event, the JFK Presidential Library & Museum presents Clouds Over Cuba, a tense and engaging presentation on the Crisis and, even more strikingly, a dramatization on what might have happened had things gone differently. This is really well done and worth taking 10-15 minutes to watch/listen. (via @alexismadrigal)


The Umbrella Man

On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Errol Morris talks to Tink Thompson about “The Umbrella Man”, a gentleman who was pictured in the Zapruder film standing with an open umbrella near where Kennedy was shot on a sunny day. The result is a nifty six-minute film.

For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

The Updike piece from the New Yorker is available here (subscribers only, but the abstract is informative):

For example, “the umbrella man”: though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curb just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now?

The film pairs nicely with Morris’ recent interview of Stephen King about the latter’s new novel based on the Kennedy assassination.


Kennedy’s catchy jingle

From The Living Room Candidate, a site which houses presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present, comes a 1960 commercial for John F. Kennedy. How the ad positions Kennedy reminds me of the delicate fusion that Barack Obama is attempting with his relative newness to politics and readiness for the job.

Do you want a man for President who’s seasoned through and through but not so doggoned seasoned that he won’t try something new? A man who’s old enough to know and young enough to do…

What a great ad…I wish they still made ‘em like this. You may remember seeing this on Mad Men.


How could Oswald have fired three shots

How could Oswald have fired three shots in such a short time in assassinating John F. Kennedy? Max Holland and Johann Rush suggest that a misunderstanding of the Zapruder footage is to blame.

If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective โ€” Oswald still did it โ€” it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.


Newly released footage of John F Kennedy

Newly released footage of John F Kennedy right before he was assassinated. Story here.


“Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled

Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled by rich anthracite coal deposits, has been burning beneath the mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.” This fire is almost old enough to have remembered where it was when JFK was assassinated. (thx, gerard)


Stabilized version of the Zapruder film

Stabilized version of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination. Stabilized means the camera movement has been digitally edited out…the video is super-clear now.