Friend of the Toast Alexis Coe’s book Alice + Freda Forever is going to be a MOVIE and it’s going to be directed by Jennifer Kent, who directed The Babadook and I am very, very excited and only moderately jealous.
“Jennifer’s debut film was one of the most accomplished I have ever seen and I’m thrilled she shares the same passion for telling this powerful, intense and unfortunately still timely story,” producer Sarah Schechter told Variety.
(tiny tiny screams)
What Ever Became Of Radio Voice:
The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. Queen Elizabeth doesn’t say car, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor did the newsreel announcers or movie actors of his day. But Labov said that in post-World War II New York, fancier people started becoming rhotic, and recovering their Rs. This brings us back to the “why things changed” question.
2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. A reader writes:
I’ve wondered about this myself when I see old Jimmy Cagney movies—and the date of his last starring role might give us a hint towards the date range of the change: “One, Two, Three” in 1961. (What else happened that year??? See below!) I’d like to offer a speculation, for what it’s worth.
My suspicion is that the shift might have begun in the switch away from the two paired styles in American movies, the classical acting of the British School and the rapid patter of popular American actors (Marx Brothers, Cagney, Powell and Loy, etc), and over to the Method Acting style of the Strasberg/Brando/Dean school. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?)
The enormously popular speech styles of Brando and Dean (and I could add Elvis Presley) clearly pushed vernacular style into a kind of mainstream acceptability, then desirability. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? A little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didn’t, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brando’s. His high Boston accent might have been heard as an influential transitional hybrid, and it’s interesting how prominent parodies of the speech of Brando, Dean, and Kennedy were at the time: seems a sign that we were noticing a marked change.
So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? A heuristic approximation!
Can’t talk about Locust Valley Lockjaw without Gloria:
“And I STEPPED on the PING-PONG ball!”
Ask, and it is given.
STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS FOR EVERYONE:
“The U.S. Department of Education on Monday announced a series of new debt relief measures that could assist tens of thousands of students affected by the collapse of Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges Inc.
The provisions may allow thousands more students to wipe out their student debt.
Until now, only 16,000 students — those that attended schools that suddenly closed in April — have been eligible for debt forgiveness. The new policy allows other students to seek debt forgiveness if they believe they were victims of fraudulent marketing and recruiting practices, regardless of when their school closed.”
Everything about this story has been incredibly sad.
Last day of cat-sitting the wee cotched kitten before his rightful owner Liz comes back. Thank God, because I can’t stand another minute of this shit.
An idler, a trifler, a blood-sucker, and a non-producer. Get out of my house, man.
