Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood Back of this Golden Age was an education based upon this idealism that made such leaders in government, art and thought as Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. The youth was taught from the heroics of Homer to honour his State first, his father and mother second, and himself last. He was taken to the music master, where he was trained in body rhythms. He was taken to the master of the games to make his body strong and co-ordinated. He was taken to the Theatre of Dionysius to join the Choral Odes that are like our Community Sings to-day, and the dances and processionals that are like our pageants . . . etc. . . . etc. . . . In the revival to-day of our pageants, community sings, our community players, and art associations, of art as a civic force, we may see the promise of greatness to come. . Alhambra, at the forefront of the revival, is placing before its people a bond issue to build a great art centre with an amphitheatre that will seat 15,000, music and art studios and galleries for painting and sculpture. Here the city's pageants and singing festivals may be held, and art may become a vital force in the upbuilding of a richer city life. ..." The italics are our own. Age of Pericles ? Choral odes ? Community sings concentrate on Old Black Joe or Santa Lucia. ... A community art, dominated by the standardized products of the talkies as a theatre, by the Saturday Evening Post or Liberty as literature, and by the hoarse howlings of the commercialized and advertising radio as music, controlled by watch committees that burn publicly any outspoken book, by the police who would arrest Socrates without a warrant, and put him through the third degree as an I.W.W. if he showed his nose in the city limits, and by the twenty-six taboos of the film industry. • ••••• Yet Hollywood, embedded in Los Angeles, is not of Los Angeles. Jo used to call them the Cavaliers and the Round [142]