WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Something Wonderful: The wonderfully obscure “Gene Kelly-GOTTA DANCE!!!”
byVanderleunonFebruary 8, 2022
The management respectfully suggests Full Screen and Speakers Up!
What a boost! And such a strange brew of perfectly cut clips rocking to a cut from The New Radicals all carried in fading film images which make it all seem as if it were happening just next door to now, in a mirrorverse of watercolors.
Gene Kelly’s choreography and dancing are absolutely American. That is the reason I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, who was too suave, too slick, too much “top hat and tails.” But Astaire had an eye for genius in others as well. He called this Nicholas Brothers dance number “the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen.” The Brothers did it unrehearsed and in only one take. They had also danced with Kelly in the film “The Pirate”. Gregory Hines, no slouch himself, said this of their dance routine:
“…if their biography were ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because no one now could emulate them.”
Ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov called the Nicholas Brothers “the most amazing dancers he had ever seen in his life.”
Read up on Kelly, he said he’s blue collar and Astaire is white collared.
Said they each have different styles and are not compareable.
I agree.
Same with guitar players, guns, cars, etc.
The time wasting argument list is long…..
I don’t dance but appreciate those that do as long as they do it well, and that mostly doesn’t include anything in the last 30 years.
gwbnycFebruary 9, 2022, 7:20 AM
Nicholas Brothers-
Donald O’Connor wouldn’t leave home without ’em.
LeslieFebruary 8, 2022, 7:37 PM
Love it.
NoriFebruary 8, 2022, 8:59 PM
The life-affirming exuberance of dance. God bless us,amen.
Watch “Casablanca” with her. I would wager that she would have the same question.
RichardFebruary 9, 2022, 7:59 AM
Gene Kelly exuded an “Everyman” quality with which most people could identify. The dance sequences he and Leslie Caron did in “An American in Paris” were – and continue to be – stunning.
“Singing in the Rain” is one of my “go-to” movies when the world is a little too much with me. And, of course, Kelly’s dance in the rain will always be iconic.
What an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Here’s another clip of them from the same movie.
Cyd’s legs are absolute perfection and she is a visual delight in that “bridal” costume. https://tinyurl.com/2p89yvt5
Sorry guys, the clips and cuts, didn’t work for me.
Dance numbers, like Singing that Mike linked above, or Kelly & Shirley McLaine, What A way to Go: https://youtu.be/5y76ctjpOn0
oh yea!
& nope, Shirley ain’t no Cyd but strut her with Kelly….
I saw MacLaine in “The Turning Point” and with Robert Mitchum in “Two for the Seesaw”. Enjoyed them both. Her dancing is pedestrian. Kelly had to really tone it down so that she could keep up. She is no Cyd Charisse. And besides, MacLaine is one of the weirdest people on earth.
Another GREAT short guy!!
When comparing Kelly and Astaire–the easy way is to just attribute difference in “styles”. However, I believe that Astaire never had the technical skill that Kelly had and he never had the strength that Kelly had AS WELL AS Kelly’s pure love of the music!!
WITH REGARD TO WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY: It is fair to ask if we were led down the slippery slope by Hollywood?
I believe that Hollywood is a symptom, not a cause. For decades it produced extremely patriotic films. Men were shown as men and women were shown as women. When the culture changed, Hollywood changed. It now reflects the madness, despondency, infantilism and depravity that has overtaken our nation.
DeNihilistFebruary 9, 2022, 9:28 PM
In those times, whether a comic, or dramatic, almost every actor/ess could also sing and DANCE.
See Danny Kaye in the clip.
Of course I almost fell out of my shoes the first time I watched Yankee Doodle Dandy and saw my favourite tough guy, Cagney, dancing like he did it every day!
Wonderful clip Gerard, thanx for sharing!
Many of the greats could act, dance and sing—Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra for example. Many others could only do one thing—John Wayne and Clark Gable for example—but they did it well.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
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Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
thats great!
I wasn’t going to take the 5 minutes to watch that. I’m glad I did.
Get What You Give is a great track by them.
Freedom is undefeated and will win again.
Great!
…um, the “soundtrack”.
Gene Kelly’s choreography and dancing are absolutely American. That is the reason I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, who was too suave, too slick, too much “top hat and tails.” But Astaire had an eye for genius in others as well. He called this Nicholas Brothers dance number “the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen.” The Brothers did it unrehearsed and in only one take. They had also danced with Kelly in the film “The Pirate”. Gregory Hines, no slouch himself, said this of their dance routine:
“…if their biography were ever filmed, their dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because no one now could emulate them.”
Ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov called the Nicholas Brothers “the most amazing dancers he had ever seen in his life.”
And away we go…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMbeDhG9fU
Read up on Kelly, he said he’s blue collar and Astaire is white collared.
Said they each have different styles and are not compareable.
I agree.
Same with guitar players, guns, cars, etc.
The time wasting argument list is long…..
I don’t dance but appreciate those that do as long as they do it well, and that mostly doesn’t include anything in the last 30 years.
Nicholas Brothers-
Donald O’Connor wouldn’t leave home without ’em.
Love it.
The life-affirming exuberance of dance. God bless us,amen.
I just realized I haven’t seen nearly enough of Gene Kelly’s movies.
My daughter is now wondering why they don’t make movies like that anymore.
Watch “Casablanca” with her. I would wager that she would have the same question.
Gene Kelly exuded an “Everyman” quality with which most people could identify. The dance sequences he and Leslie Caron did in “An American in Paris” were – and continue to be – stunning.
“Singing in the Rain” is one of my “go-to” movies when the world is a little too much with me. And, of course, Kelly’s dance in the rain will always be iconic.
Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in “Singing in the Rain”. Begins at 1:36.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gry8mj8Zql8
What an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Here’s another clip of them from the same movie.
Cyd’s legs are absolute perfection and she is a visual delight in that “bridal” costume.
https://tinyurl.com/2p89yvt5
She is truly unbelievable.
Richard, you have good taste in women. Cyd’s legs could lead me into Mortal Sin.
Sorry guys, the clips and cuts, didn’t work for me.
Dance numbers, like Singing that Mike linked above, or Kelly & Shirley McLaine, What A way to Go: https://youtu.be/5y76ctjpOn0
oh yea!
& nope, Shirley ain’t no Cyd but strut her with Kelly….
I saw MacLaine in “The Turning Point” and with Robert Mitchum in “Two for the Seesaw”. Enjoyed them both. Her dancing is pedestrian. Kelly had to really tone it down so that she could keep up. She is no Cyd Charisse. And besides, MacLaine is one of the weirdest people on earth.
Cyd, she may not be, but she’ll do.
So, any port in the storm?
Another GREAT short guy!!
When comparing Kelly and Astaire–the easy way is to just attribute difference in “styles”. However, I believe that Astaire never had the technical skill that Kelly had and he never had the strength that Kelly had AS WELL AS Kelly’s pure love of the music!!
WITH REGARD TO WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY: It is fair to ask if we were led down the slippery slope by Hollywood?
I believe that Hollywood is a symptom, not a cause. For decades it produced extremely patriotic films. Men were shown as men and women were shown as women. When the culture changed, Hollywood changed. It now reflects the madness, despondency, infantilism and depravity that has overtaken our nation.
In those times, whether a comic, or dramatic, almost every actor/ess could also sing and DANCE.
See Danny Kaye in the clip.
Of course I almost fell out of my shoes the first time I watched Yankee Doodle Dandy and saw my favourite tough guy, Cagney, dancing like he did it every day!
Wonderful clip Gerard, thanx for sharing!
Many of the greats could act, dance and sing—Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra for example. Many others could only do one thing—John Wayne and Clark Gable for example—but they did it well.
When I was a kid I thought dancing was for girls, but Gene Kelly’s energy and quirk persuaded me otherwise.