10/7/23
Newsletter #481
The Crack of Dawn
My old girlfriend Robin is an elementary school art teacher (I recently ran into her at a cemetery in Florida and wow, she looks terrific). Robin lets each of her classes choose a song that they play during class. One class (with good taste) chose John Lennon’s song, Imagine, a particularly lovely, classic rock song we’ve all heard a million times. However, the kids’ parents got together and objected to the use of the song. Robin couldn’t even imagine what they could possibly find objectionable in that song. It turned out that they couldn’t live with the lyric, “Imagine no religion/It’s easy if you try.” You’re not even allowed to imagine?
Speaking of religion, this Jewish fellow known as Jesus Christ who hailed from Nazareth in Judea (now Israel), was not named Jesus Christ and did not speak Hebrew. “Christ” is from the Greek translation of the Old Testament Bible, known as the Septuagint, meaning seventy, which is in reference to how many rabbis worked on the translation. The word “Christ” derives from the Greek word krystalos, meaning crystal, or something that shines. “Jesus” comes from the Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, which comes from the same Latin word, vulgata, as “vulgar,” which means, “to make common.” The Vulgate, so they say, was translated from Hebrew and Aramaic by a man named Jerome in 342 AD. “Jesus” is the Latin form of the Hebrew name Joshua. Therefore, Jesus Christ was actually named Joshua ben Joseph (Joshua son of Joseph), and he spoke Aramaic, which is a derivation of Syrian. Given that, Jesus’s last words would have been, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” meaning, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
I am put in mind of Gordon of Khartoum, a British military hero. I have no idea if this is true or not, but in the movie Khartoum (1966), which is a truly dreary, piss-poor movie about an extremely interesting man, location and time period. Major General Charles Gordon is portrayed by the extremely American, completely-not-British, Charlton Heston. From Heston’s first line when we hear that he’s trying and failing at using a phony English accent, the movie is sunk. However, throughout the film, Heston keeps saying, “How about a B&S?” “Anybody for another B&S?” which was witty at the time for a brandy and soda. I first saw Khartoum on The NBC 9:00 Movie on TV when I was 12. I remember thinking, “Soda? Where are they getting soda in Sudan, Africa, in 1885?”
In 1783 in Geneva, Johan Jacob Schweppe began selling the world’s first carbonated soft drink, which was carbonated mineral water, or soda. Schweppe was able to do this because he had a bottle manufactured that was able to seal in the carbonation. Inside the bottle was a hollow glass marble. The pressure of the carbonation forced the marble up into a cavity in the bottle’s neck, sealing it, thereby saving the bubbles.
Meanwhile, back to the dreary, 1966 British production of Khartoum. During the vast amount of time my former writing-producing partner, Scott Spiegel, and I spent in our office in Ferndale between 1981-1986, we stumbled upon discussing Khartoum. We realized that we’d both seen it on that same network, NBC 9:00 Movie screening when we were 12 years old. We both embarrassedly confessed that though we could plainly see it was written “Khartoum,” since it sounded like “cartoon,” both of us deep down hoped that it was a cartoon. Except of course it wasn’t.
In the film Laurence Olivier is improbably cast as the great Arab leader Muhammad Ahmed, whose devotees proclaimed him the “Mahdi.”
Khartoum - The Mad Mahdi - YouTube
I couldn’t find the clip I was looking for, where the Mahdi first introduces himself. Olivier makes reference to the space between his teeth (a dental appliance), and he uses his baby finger to point it out. He’s not quite in blackface — brown face — and he has prosthetic scars, facial hair and eyebrows. Laurence Olivier regularly did blackface on stage as Othello (and in the film, Othello [1965]). Forgetting everything else, I just don’t buy it on a theatrical level and never did, but I admire him for trying. Doing Othello isn’t bullshit, that’s for sure, but the part was not written for a white guy, no matter how good he may be.
The question is, should Laurence Olivier have not even tried it because it looks so bad? Believe me, it didn’t look any better way back when. But I absolutely think he should, and I’m glad he did, even though I don’t care for it.
Yet, somehow, I accept Olivier as the Mahdi. Perhaps it’s because he also gave him a deformed upper lip. Makeup really set Olivier free on a certain level, a theatrical level, which it should to an actor. One thing is for sure, Laurence Olivier liked makeup. He was quoted a number of times saying that he never appeared without doing something to his nose, extending it, widening it, shoving things up his nostrils. I think his nose looks perfect in Spartacus (1960).
In any case, I never even got to the idea I started with, which was when T. E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) first meets King Feisal (Alec Guiness) in Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a brilliant scene, when the tent begins to creak in the wind, and Feisal says, “I think you are one of those desert-loving British, like Gordon of Khartoum and Doughty.” Then off I went on Gordon.
Doughty, by the way, was a British historian who wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta in 1888, which T. E. Lawrence loved and read many times.
This is an odd newsletter, even for me.
It’ll be dawn soon, I bet.
Thank you so much. Even I found it odd today.
The newsletter may be odd, but in the best of ways. I do enjoy reading it and the anticipation of it every morning! Thank you for writing it.