4 part series.

Airing on PBS this week.

So far so good. Liking it.

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/muhammad-ali/

maybe the best Burns documentary I have watched

I only really knew Ali in the post prime, Cosell years. His life was more interesting earlier.

The NOI stuff is particularly interesting. It seemed like Ali was seen as a pawn by the organization. I don't think Spike Lee really captured the level of dislike of X by Elijah Muhammad in his movie.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I've enjoyed it quite a bit. I've seen a bunch of Ali docs so I was hesitant but I watch pretty much everything Ken Burns does.

And this is the best one. He covers things I didn't know either. Pretty deep dive in the NOI stuff gives the best depiction of what that time was like from any of the other docs I've seen.

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You know me like that.

Ken Burns is like the filmmaking version of my late Aunt who one Thanksgiving gave everyone in the family a 600 page book she wrote about our family genealogy.


That's when I learned that one my relatives was the first ever Jewish lumberjack.

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Your relative was Saul Bunyan?

Cool.

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You know me like that.

Outstanding

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Now that, thats getting it done

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

That's high praise. I haven't checked it out yet, but I will. Burns really benefits from covering a topic that gives him the ability to use video and popular music. Baseball and The Civil War were great but, in my personal opinion, The Vietnam War was the best because he wasn't limited to panning the camera over black and white photographs and using music that blended into the background.

You should check out Blood Brothers on Netflix. It's a documentary about the relationship between Malcolm X and Ali. It was so interesting that I had no use for watching the Baltimore Kansas City game.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

THIS....Blood Brothers was very interesting.

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He had an axe to grind.

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I’ve disliked Ali since reading Ghosts of Manila.

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Interesting, that is why I think Civil War is so amazing. Other than the interviews and nature shots, he has no moving pictures. Yet I feel like I have watched Civil War battles unfold as if they were on motion picture.

I read all the Saul Bunyan & Babe The Big Lox Adventures as a kid.

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You know me like that.

Awesome.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

This documentary had me looking into Nation of Islam a little more. I didn't know those brothers believe that Allah will return in a spaceship to eliminate whitey. They alluded to it in the documentary when Ali was training at a remote lake and spent nights with his family looking up at the sky for the mothership. I thought it was some inside joke from the 70s I didn't understand. I always thought they were distinctly muslim with a pan african perspective, like a liberation theology. It appears that while some of its adherents are muslim, its more of a new age offshoot. I doubt mainline islam could agree with their belief that there were many iterations of Allah through the centuries all who started as human. It sounds like black mormonism. You never hear it being lumped in with the different derivative religions created in the US over the past 150 or so years.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

You wouldn't believe some of the crap they were on back in the day.

For awhile my parents had me thinking that they were going to send me to the University of Islam for middle school. I spent a month in a near panic.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

"In Defense of Cassius Clay," by Floyd Patterson.

Written in 1966. Really interesting.

Patterson kind of buries him early on, but closes by sticking up for him.

Clash of worlds here. The Patterson-Ali thing was a real culture war and has always fascinated me.

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Good one, but I prefer when Ali punished Ernie Terrell for continuing to call him Clay.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

What I wonder is what Ali's reaction to that article was.

I mean, Patterson stood up for him, but overall, it didn't seem respectful. Or if not disrespectful, then paternalistic or something.

It seemed like Patterson was talking the way Ali did--just the low key version.

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