Hungry like the rabbit

THE SPECTATOR USA, January 2021

Hungry like the rabbit

In the darkest hour, there emerged a new light. It was 1940 when the double-barreled shotgun of the world first took aim at a little hole called home. At first, it seemed as if the hole’s inhabitant would be taken in by the old carrot trick. At least he would be careful enough not to stick his neck out. With an unblemished, white-gloved, four fingered hand, he feels around his immediate borders and takes the carrot.

Of course, it’s a trap to draw him out. Did he know that all along? He would soon enough. The next time, it’s not a carrot but the hard steel of a gun aiming straight down his burrow. He flicks the barrels with his finger — plink, plink, plink — just to be sure. He tosses back the half-eaten carrot and pats the gun, but it is too late. The instinct to stay out of trouble will no longer do. Something is up.

Just what, precisely, is up was the question on the world’s mind. It was July 27, 1940 when a bunny named Bugs had the audacity — one might say, the insouciant foolhardiness — to go and ask what’s up of the world’s more doctoral minds in ‘A Wild Hare’, his first Merrie Melodies cartoon for Leon Schlesinger Productions, distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures.

There was a lot of rabbit hunting going on that season. Far too much. Despite the aggressor’s warnings to ‘Be vawy, vawy quiet — I’m hunting wabbits,’ the time for silence is over. That ‘scwewy wabbit’ is about to reveal Elmer J. Fudd for the gun-pointing fool he is. A moment later and that shotgun is tied up in a bow. Butts get roundly kicked like the bell striker of a carnival strongman game. The hunter is now the hunted. At his wits’ end, Fudd relents — ‘Wabbits! Guns! Wabbit twaps! Cawwots’ — in abject defeat.

‘Can you imagine anyone acting like that?’ Bugs turns to ask the audience. ‘You know, I think the poor guy’s screwy.’ Channeling the ‘Spirit of ’76’, the rabbit then holds his carrot like a fife. To the tune of ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, he marches off stiff-legged back to his rabbit hole.

There are few American creations more endearing or enduring than Bugs Bunny. As voiced in the Noo Yawk accent of Mel Blanc, Bugs embodies a national character that combines street smarts with whimsy, reserve with reluctant but ultimately total engagement. He also emerged on the world stage at just the right moment in history.

Warner Brothers had been distributing short cartoon films since the early 1930s. Its two series, called Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were originally distinguished by their storylines and musical components (the Melodies were meant to promote Warner songs). By the 1940s, the distinctions quickly disappeared as Bugs became the breakout star of both franchises by presenting a new type of American hero. In ‘Super-Rabbit’ from 1943, echoing the finale of ‘A Wild Hare’, Bugs even ends up dressed in a Marine uniform — a ‘real Superman’, he says, with ‘important work to do’ — and heads off to ‘Berlin, Tokyo and points East’. Inspired by the episode, the US Marine Corps inducted Bugs as an honorary private. At the end of the war, he was discharged having achieved the rank of master sergeant.

Bugs appeared in over 150 Warner cartoons during the golden age of American animation. Directed by Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson and Chuck Jones, among others, and scored for a full orchestra by the musical-quoting Carl W. Stalling, the lavishly produced shorts were eventually eclipsed by cheaper television cartoons in the mid-Sixties.

In May, HBO launched its new Max streaming service with a relaunch of this vast Looney Tunes library. Last month, Warner added to the merrie trove by releasing a three-disc Blu Ray set, The Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection. Be forewarned: even such seemingly encyclopedic collections come to our censorious age with amendments and redactions. On HBO, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot. They are much harder to track down and see. When combined, copyright extension and political correctness are potent content killers, two of the horsemen of our oncoming techno-apocalypse.

‘All This and Rabbit Stew’, a 1941 Freleng episode, was among the original ‘Censored Eleven’ Warners shorts of 1931-44 that were pulled from syndication in 1968 for their ethnic stereotypes. ‘Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt’, a 1941 Freleng episode that was an Academy Award nominee, is also absent from the HBO archive. ‘Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips’ of 1944 and ‘Herr Meets Hare’ of 1945 established Bugs in full wartime mobilization as he outsmarts both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. These two historic episodes are nowhere to be seen as well. The latter episode, set in the Black Forest — Bugs gets lost on his way to Las Vegas — sees our hero face off against none other than Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. Was this episode pulled because it might upset today’s Axis viewers? In its use of Wagnerian music and imagery — Bugs mesmerizes Göring by riding on a white horse dressed as Brünhilde to the tune of the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Tannhäuser — Freleng’s ‘Herr Meets Hare’ serves as the key prelude to Chuck Jones’s ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ from 1957.

That episode, Jones’s masterpiece, has been called the best cartoon of all time. It was the first cartoon to be deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ by the Library of Congress. Here the melodies of Warner Brothers all come together in one Gesamtkunst-cartoon. Elmer Fudd now plays the antagonist as he and Bugs take on quick-changing Wagnerian roles. The music of the ‘Ring’, Tannhäuser, Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman are all woven into the tapestry of the score. For many children, including this former one, their first exposure to the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ was set to the libretto of ‘Kill the Wabbit!’

Jones’s ‘Rabbit of Seville’ (1950) similarly recasts Rossini with Bugs and Fudd. In ‘Hare Trigger’ (1945), Freleng introduced Yosemite Sam as a new Bugs adversary packing double the firepower of Elmer. Here it was the Old West versus the new East, as Bugs’s cool wit sets Sam’s bluster to boil. Meanwhile, Marvin the Martian, who had been introduced by Jones in ‘Haredevil Hare’ of 1948, became a new Cold War villain for the Space Age, as Bugs sets out to diffuse Marvin’s Earth-shattering ‘Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator’.

In 1950, for the rabbit’s 10-year anniversary, Warner released a tribute short about Bugs’s life directed by Robert McKimson called, appropriately, ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ The episode purports to tell the story of Bugs’s career on stage and screen as he goes from ballet school to the Broadway chorus. Eventually he is picked up by Elmer Fudd, a big vaudeville star, and the two take their act to Hollywood. Again, you won’t easily find the complete episode online. A brief cameo by Al Jolson saying ‘Mammy’ most likely tanked the full show. But non-offending clippings do readily exist, in particular the final ‘screen test’ with Bugs and Fudd adding words to the opening theme song that well sum up the antics that made Bugs the star he is:

‘What’s up, Doc? What’s cookin’?
What’s up, Doc? Are you’re lookin’
For Bugs Bunny bunting…?
Elmer’s gone a-hunting
Just to get a rabbit skin…
But now the rabbit’s gone again!’

There are many such looney gems in the tunes archive. The best are infused with melodies that are indeed merrie, featuring a rabbit who well knows the score.

Should dead men leave no reviews?

THE NEW YORK POST, October 12, 2019

Should dead men leave no reviews?

My father was dead less than a month when I received a letter from his funeral home. The mail was hand-addressed. Another sympathy card, I thought, very nice. But no, rather than a note of condolence, the letter turned out to be something else I should have anticipated: a form asking me to “visit our Facebook page and leave a review. We appreciate your comments.”

Having never administered a father’s death and interment before, I frankly do not have much to go on when I consider death services. My dad’s ashes seemed properly cremated. His remains were returned to me in a sealed plastic box in a timely manner; this is all true.

But after paying out thousands of dollars, isn’t that all just standard funeral home procedure? Is there an emoji that represents my feelings toward this final transaction in the cycle of life? Would the crying face, the angry face, the wow face — or perhaps the heart — reflect my impression of a business that turned a small profit over my dad’s demise?

What is clear is that the standard “like” button would just not do. Services rendered over the burial of a parent require an escalated Facebook response.

Like death and taxes, requests for “feedback” have become the unavoidable consequence of just about any interaction. My inbox is now inundated daily with such demands.

“Share your thoughts,” begins one email, from my freelancer-payment system, about which I have no thoughts. “We’d like your feedback!” exclaims another, this one from L.L. Bean; here my online “shopping experience” consisted of purchasing a pair of rain boots, about which I have little to “share.”

“Reminder: James, We Value Your Feedback,” Delta Air Lines writes with increasing urgency after a flight to Chicago — following up on a similar missive I deliberately ignored just three days before. After a series of concerts, Carnegie Hall “invites” me to consider a “favorite memory” and “share your story on social media” about these special and all-too-rare evenings out with my wife.

Long ago I gave up ranking my occasional Uber trips on its scale of one to five stars. It was nothing personal. The drivers have always been hard workers who conveyed me successfully from Point A to Point B.

It’s just that once my trip is over I tend to focus on other things rather than adjudicate my transit experience. Could my lack of feedback be why my own passenger ranking hovers at 4.6 and why nearby cars seem to ignore my requests?

Fortunately, for now at least, I can still summon my local radio car service by telephone, no follow-up required.

“Feedback” has become the unrecompensed currency of the digital age. (China has recently implemented an Orwellian “social credit system” to rank every individual and business with a centralized score that will determine everything from jobs to schools to internet speeds.)

The largely automated requests have little to do with genuine interest in personal experience. These interactions are rather the coins in the fountain of our search engine algorithms.

They are the wishes of good fortune and the offerings of appeasement from the gods of Big Data. Look, they say in their piles at the bottom of the pool, other humans were here, and they did things just as you do things.

By now, we all know these numbers can lie. Maybe someone’s nephew loves to leave reviews for his uncle’s takeout? Or some tech titan found another buyer to slice and dice my every move into bits and bytes?

Still, as though I were inspecting a diamond through a loupe, like most anybody else, I now pore over these online results before making even the most mundane decisions. Why does this hotel have more stars than that one? Why should this coffee maker have a thousand more reviews than some other?

Having suffered a series of strokes, my father lived his life blissfully unaware of these demands on contemporary life. For over a decade he did not have an email address or even an internet connection. So I was the one to administer his online bill payments, contest his charges through chats and field hundreds of requests for comments, likes and testimonials.

After 87 loving, fruitful and honest years as a veteran, architect and parent, he chose to leave this bitter earth at just the right moment. He avoided the exit survey.

What can the tech bubble learn from the art bubble?

James writes:

What can the tech bubble learn from the art bubble? I offer some thoughts in this piece by Gary Sernovitz in The New Yorker.

The art world knows about prices floating ever higher on abstraction and hope. The resonances aren’t completely coincidental. Both venture capitalists and art buyers are in the business of valuing the invaluable. Both stake their reputations on exquisite selection. Both nurture talent before it can support itself. Both have a soft spot for youth, for unbowed ego, for the myth of solitary genius, for the next new thing. Both operate in a world of frustratingly limited information and maddeningly unpredictable success. Both depend on consumer culture while holding themselves superior to it. And both the art market and venture investing have become increasingly winner-take-all games, with more clout to the companies and artists backed by the most powerful dealers or venture capitalists.

Complete article here.