zing

i watched the civil war one again recently, it was absorbing and affecting, not trite imo

that’s actually the only one i’ve ever seen tho, the others suck for all i know

oh actually i’ve seen the roosevelts too

i liked that one!

ashokan farewell, the civil war theme song, can bite my ass

3.17: API changes to support Zing

― stet, Wednesday, 9 May 2018 00:38 (eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

his docs are dece from an entertainment and factoid perspective, his politics and analysis are awful tho, poor history

the civil war and vietnam ones are particularly egregious in their apologetics for genuinely awful people/regimes

which is too bad! since theres not a lot of ppl out there making ten part series abt important historical events

politics could be worse, and i would think it could be argued that striking a more equivocal tone allows him to reach a larger audience etc

i don’t know much about historiography tho

So this morning my wife and I were both teleworking and I’m upstairs and she’s downstairs. She likes her background noise when she’s not doing conference calls and so she puts on a movie that’s full of explosions and shouting (that’s all I can hear anyway) and after a little while I asked (hollering from the study) WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? And I hear “Civil War, (garbled)” and I thought, wow, damn, I haven’t seen that series in forever, did it have cool sound effects and I forgot? So I say THE KEN BURNS THING?!? And she says CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR and I’m like, oh.

I watched a couple eps of Civil War a couple years ago but I didn’t retain anything (my fault) and I really can’t in good conscience listen to a single word from the mouth of Shelby “Lost Cause” Foote

He’s an alum of my alma mater though, kind of. I don’t think he graduated.

politics could be worse, and i would think it could be argued that striking a more equivocal tone allows him to reach a larger audience etc

― the late great, Tuesday, May 8, 2018 11:29 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if the politics were worse then it wldnt hit that sweet spot of appearing reasonable while seeking to humanize monstrous actors and obfuscate their awful motives in defense of american exceptionalism

also prob wldnt work as daddy dozing entertainment to give a full account of the brutality of our history

the west is a lot more frank than his other work in the depiction of how awful our policy of westward expansion was towards the indigenous peoples who lived there, pretty tough to watch compared to his other work

well, that’s good

i haven’t seen the vietnam one but i remember during the civil war one thinking it was good that he didn’t seem to pull any punches about slavery

y'all should get in on the popular thread Ken Burns' THE VIETNAM WAR documentary, started by ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius) in september of 2017

i’m not caping for ken burns here, i just personally enjoyed the civil war show and am genuinely interested in your take on it

xp as a rule i avoid those threads

the main crime of the civil war one was as sibly said giving time to shelby footes lost cause theory which says that the south really fought for honor and tradition and so forth and not that much for slavery, a theory which became wildly influential and which really got its first wide mainstream dissemination through that extremely popular ken burns documentary, i bought my dad* the damn coffee table companion book of it for his birthday he was so obsessed with that shit at the time

*my dad is not at all a confederate apologist but he was crazy for the series all the same

ultimately burns prob just believes very deeply in the mythos of american exceptionalism

Thinking about @SenJohnMcCain today and how empowering his love for our country is. So proud to call him a friend.

— Ken Burns (@KenBurns) May 6, 2018

sick burns

lost cause theory which says that the south really fought for honor and tradition and so forth and not that much for slavery ... really got its first wide mainstream dissemination through that extremely popular ken burns documentary

it was a pretty good documentary tho by the standards of the 1870s

i see

i wouldn’t expect it to be otherwise

(low standards)

can’t believe lagoon’s dad is a confederado

i mean dont get me wrong ive watched that shit all the way through twice at least but i also have a shameful dad history documentary habit, its cool how he lays all the events out but its just unserious and sometimes bad from an theory standpoint

lag∞n otm like crazy (sounds like i shd watch The West)

Burns' haircut sez a lot about him

the Baseball doc was p good about Ruth and Jackie Robinson, but it's hard to fuck that up

stevie's endless love for my being shot at is touching

haircut criticism very valid

the proprietor of my go-to online etymological dictionary recently started blogging for the first time, and out of nowhere what it turned out to be was a whole lot of lost cause stuff, mostly working the "but what did we lose with the imperial triumph of industrial finance capital" angle (feudalism, iirc) but sloooowly backing himself into literally arguing that democracy requires an unfree labor class to function. i was like holy shit. can't trust anyone

if he said capitalism instead of democracy he might be on to something

:O

https://i1.wp.com/www.neh.gov/files/humanities/articles/2015_0910_webimages_31_civilwar-ken.jpg

stevie's endless love for my being shot at is touching

that ain't it i just love you being shot at for when you criticise things you haven't seen, it's beneath you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM_R1R28kLM

ps my dn is one of your lines Morbs and perhaps the funniest thing I've read on ilx

Shelby foote sucks insanely hard in civil war but otherwise its p great imo. i watched first 5 episodes of vietnam on a plane and it was insanely good and i couldn't tell what parts were apologism tho maybe that's more in the later episodes, also i'm ignorant

Guys, pls quit fighting amongst yourselves over the Civil War.

in vietnam the american leadership was depicted as well intentioned hard decision makers rather than the soft brained war mongers they were and the war itself was depicted as an intractable civil war rather than the imperial adventurism it was

The Vietnamese talking heads mitigated much of the blather from the American side. Maybe it's an example of American journalism's penchant for both-sides-do-itsm.

I have no stake in Burns' documentaries – I haven't even watched the Civil War one. Too long!

wait, did we migrate the ken burns talk to the zing thread or is my web browser screwed up

yes

a "ken burns" is good name for a long, several part zing imo

Walking zing imo:

http://www.tennesseetheatre.com/lib/image/shows/719603_tt1.jpg

style provocateur

i will never watch baseball or jazz u cant make me, fave one was maybe prohibition? relatively minor but with lots of good infos

oh yeah! I learned a lot from that one (i.e. tax policy and its connection to Prohibition, Progressivism + temperance movement).

yeah that one's good, the small town vs city stuff also made the whole experiment seem a lot less out of the blue

I wanted a multi-part doc on Al Smith.

i loved the story about how americans were all day buzzed on hard cider then when distilled spirits were adopted ppl just drank them at the same rate and were insanely drunk

Is your aversion to the baseball one about not trusting KB on race issues?