Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1935 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer drama film directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, based on the 1932 Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall novel Mutiny on the Bounty.  The movie contains several historical inaccuracies.  Captain Bligh was never on board HMS Pandora, nor was he present at the trial of the mutineers who stayed on Tahiti.  At the time, he was halfway around the world on a second voyage for breadfruit plants.  Fletcher Christian's father had died many years before Christian's travels on board Bounty, whereas the film shows the elder Christian at the trial.  The movie was always presented as an adaptation of the Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, which already differed from the actual story of the mutiny.  Bligh is initially depicted as a brutal, sadistic disciplinarian, only becoming more sympathetic during the voyage to Timor.  Particular episodes include a keelhauling and flogging a dead man.  Neither of these happened.  Keelhauling was used rarely, if at all, and had been abandoned long before Bligh's time.  This film is, as of 2019, the last Best Picture winner to win in no other category (following The Broadway Melody and Grand Hotel).  It is the only film to have three Best Actor nominations.  As a result of this, a Best Supporting Actor category was created for the Oscars, beginning with the following year's awards ceremony.  A 1962 three-hour-plus widescreen Technicolor remake, starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Capt. Bligh, was a disaster both critically and financially at the time.  Nonetheless, the remake was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and has come to be re-evaluated by current critics.  In 1984 Mel Gibson played Christian opposite Anthony Hopkins as Bligh in a film (based not upon the Nordhoff-Hall novels but on an historical work by Richard Hough) called The Bounty.  This latest version, which gives a far more sympathetic view of Bligh, is considered to be the closest to historical events.  The 1935 version was itself not the first film account of the mutiny.  In 1933 an Australian film entitled In the Wake of the Bounty, with the then-unknown Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian, was released, but was not successful and received few bookings outside Australia.  Flynn noted in his autobiography that whenever he mentioned that he'd played Christian in an Australian version of Mutiny on the Bounty two years before Gable, no one ever believed him.  There was also an even earlier film, the 1916 Australian–New Zealand film, The Mutiny on the Bounty directed by Raymond Longford.  Friz Freleng's cartoon Mutiny on the Bunny casts Yosemite Sam (called Shanghai Sam) as a foul-tempered skipper who shanghais Bugs Bunny, only to see Bugs rebel.  Also, in one scene in Freleng's earlier Buccaneer Bunny, Bugs dresses up as Capt. Bligh (including a visual and vocal impression of Charles Laughton) and barks out orders to Sam (called Seagoin' Sam).  The 1967 Lost in Space episode "Mutiny in Space" features Ronald Long imitating Charles Laughton in the role of spaceship captain "Admiral Zahrk."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty_(1935_film)  In ninth grade, the Muser attended a school that showed the 1935 version of Munity on the Bounty every Friday afternoon.  Attendance was a requirement and teachers went up and down the aisles, apparently to stave off rowdiness.  

Tableaux vivant is often referred to as a playful pastime, but it has also provided a great amount of purpose in the cultural history of the United States.  Translated from French, tableaux vivant means ‘living pictures.’  The genre peaked in popularity between 1830 and 1920.  During a performance of tableaux vivant, a cast of characters represented scenes from literature, art, history, or everyday life on a stage.  After the curtain went up, the models remained silent and frozen for roughly thirty seconds.  Particular emphasis was placed on staging, pose, costume, make-up, lighting, and the facial expression of the models.  Sometimes a poem or music accompanied the scene, and often a large wooden frame outlined the perimeter of the stage, so as to reference the frame of a painted canvas.  During the early 20th century, tableaux vivant was used as a form of protest.  It was an especially fitting genre for women to use during suffrage protests because it was a familiar form of expression for them.  They took on many poses from art including Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc and Raphael’s Madonna to symbolically convey their desire for women’s right to vote.  Shannon Murphy  Read more and see pictures at https://artmuseumteaching.com/2012/12/06/tableaux-vivant-history-and-practice/ 

Milton Glaser (1929–2020) was an American graphic designer.  His designs include the I Love New York logo, the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University, and Brooklyn Brewery.  In 1954, he also co-founded Push Pin Studios, co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker, and established Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974.  His artwork has been featured in exhibits, and placed in permanent collections in many museums worldwide.  Throughout his long career, he designed many posters, publications and architectural designs.  He received many awards for his work, including the National Medal of the Arts award from President Barack Obama in 2009, and was the first graphic designer to receive this award.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Glaser 

Guy C. Wiggins was born in Brooklyn in 1883, the son of Carleton Wiggins, who had a long and highly acclaimed career as a landscape painter.  The younger Wiggins, who first studied with his father, continued the American landscape tradition, winning many prestigious prizes from 1916 on.  Around 1900, Guy C. Wiggins studied architecture and drawing at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, but went on to study painting at the National Academy of Design.  Early recognition came at age 20, when he was the youngest American to have a work accepted into the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Old Lyme, Connecticut became Wiggins's summer home around 1920, and he became one of the younger members of the group of painters in Old Lyme who were developing their version of impressionism by fusing French technique with American conventions.  Though American art was moving more and more toward realism, Wiggins was dedicated to maintaining his own style; it was based on French impressionism but influenced by Childe Hassam and other American impressionists of The Ten.  Wiggins earned a fine reputation in the 1920s for his city snow scenes, often painted from the windows of offices in Manhattan.  His Washington's Birthday (1930, New Britain Museum) expresses the feeling of snow quietly hushing the bustling city street.  In her American Art Review article of December, 1977, Adrienne L. Walt said of Wiggins that "his resolution was to constantly emphasize color, elevating it above all else and achieving luminosity through it . . . "  In 1937 Wiggins moved to Essex, Connecticut and founded the Guy Wiggins Art School.  During the following years, in addition to teaching, he traveled widely throughout the United States and painted scenes of Montana, Massachusetts and Connecticut.  With the permission of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he completed two paintings of the Executive Mansion from the lawn of the White House, one of which eventually was placed in the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, Kansas, after hanging in the president's office.  Wiggins died in Florida in 1962.  http://www.guycwiggins.com/bio.html

Boon (“a timely benefit; a favor”) is a fairly old English word, dating back to the 12th century.  In light of this one might be excused for thinking that words such as boondocks ("a rural area") and boondoggle (“a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft”) are of similar vintage.  However, not only are both of these words much newer than boon, they are not related to it (or to each other), except by a coincidence of spelling.  Boondoggle is believed to have been coined in the 1920s by the American scoutmaster Robert H. Link as a name for the braided leather cords that are made and worn by Boy Scouts; it took on the “wasteful project” meaning sometime after.  Boondocks is also a word from the early 20th century:  it comes from the Tagalog word for a mountain, and was brought to English by the U.S. military forces who had occupied the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boondocks

Americans are separated by race, place and platform.  Lines are drawn between them by politicians and people’s media diets, with partisans convinced that the other side is the enemy.  More than a century ago, Henry Adams defined politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds."  That's no less true today.  This article analyses Politics of Personal Attack, Pleasures of Hating, Politics of Resentment, and Politics of Place.  Alan Greenblatt  January 5, 2021  https://www.governing.com/now/It-Took-Decades-for-America-to-Become-This-Divided.html  Thank you, Muse reader!   

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? - Kahlil Gibran, poet and artist (6 Jan 1883-1931) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2309  January 6, 2021