There’s a holiday crisis. Informed of the situation, A prepares to ride to the rescue. [Silent]

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I was shooting some footage in a supermarket in Virginia. A young boy looked up from the toy-car/shopping cart he was sitting in to wave to me. It only lasted a moment. [Silent]

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The “mystery” behind New York’s KENNEDY FRIED CHICKEN food joints has finally been solved. Thank you, investigative journalists! The establishment you see above is the one I used to live near.

CHICKEN LITTLE
By Steven Kurutz

The Afghan counterman at the Kennedy Fried Chicken on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, radiated a look of despair.

“I need another job, a new job,” he said, the beads of sweat collecting around the edges of his dark beard. “The customers here are demanding. Last week someone was shot across the street. Every day I have a headache.”

To reinforce the point, he disappeared under the counter and came up with a Ziploc bag full of aspirin.

“The customers say, ‘Give me a napkin!’ ” he continued. “I don’t hear ‘please,’ I don’t hear ‘thank you.’ Just ‘give me.’ ”

Fast-food employees typically occupy a lowly station in the work force, but there is something almost tragicomic about being a Kennedy counterman in New York, such is the eatery’s strange and furtive place on the urban food chain.

For those unfamiliar with the institution, a brief primer. Kennedy Fried Chicken is a New York-born outfit that is owned and operated largely by Afghan immigrants, and its shops are typically found far from the well-traveled canyons of Manhattan – on Webster Avenue in the Bronx; in Flatbush; near the Queens Plaza subway station. Devotees say Kennedy serves a good bird, not too oily, not too dry. But its true notoriety comes from being a kind of second-rate imitation of the popular Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, right down to the same red and white colors and those familiar initials.

Such similarities could naturally lead Kennedy Fried Chicken to be confused with the other KFC. But not if the original KFC can help it; that company filed a lawsuit in New York federal court in 1990 for trademark infringement, and continues to pursue legal action today. Responding to a recent query, Kentucky Fried Chicken said in a statement that it was “aggressively pursuing the cessation of all confusingly similar use of the famous KFC trademarks and trade dress by Kennedy Fried Chicken.”

Despite such hurdles, Kennedy has managed to prosper. This year marks what many employees call its 25th year in business, although given the company’s sketchy history, the founding date is in question.

Having started with one small outpost, the company now has roughly 50 branches around the city. The brand has also spread to Maryland, Connecticut and Massachusetts. And former Kennedy employees operate the Crown, Royal and Mama’s Fried Chicken franchises in New York and beyond. While keeping an army of Kentucky Fried litigators at bay – and battling escalating rents and the vagaries that come with staking ground in the city’s rougher neighborhoods – Kennedy has risen to become, improbably, a fried chicken king….

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The photograph posted above is the property of Satan’s Laundromat.

An impromptu dance in a Civil War battlefield prompts M’s family to retreat in shame. [Silent]

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Quotes from “The STROMBOLI Affair”
in MY METHOD: ROBERTO ROSSELLINI –

We ask Maestro Renzo Rossellini, the director’s brother, also present at the interview, about the working conditions in Hollywood where he was himself at work on the soundtrack of STROMBOLI. “The studios’ technical facilities are far superior to ours, he answers, “but the level of education and intelligence of their managers is way below that of any of our ushers. And that’s not all: intelligence is carefully screened out of Hollywood, and the production of a film, in all its stages, is fully entrusted to whoever seems to be the best businessman. Movie audiences have decreased, in certain places down to half of what they used to be, and films are produced on the assumption that the average mentality of the public is that of a twelve-year old. This is a law it’s absolutely forbidden to break.”

Roberto Rossellini picks up where his brother left off: “Indeed, I believe that my film was boycotted because no one could understand what it meant, the ideas that I was trying to express cinematically. An RKO executive, that is, a company committee, which therefore would have everything to gain from a sound promotion of the film, has instead released a statement containing the most absurd judgments: that Ingrid Bergman is not very ’sensual’ (though the posters of the film they have decided to print to lure the public are practically pornographic), that STROMBOLI is not a real film but a documentary, and all this before the film’s opening date. My version of the film, the one that’s going to be shown in Europe, has been amputated of a good thirty-five minutes; it has been entirely re-edited, and I have discovered at my own expense how brutal and uncivilized Hollywood’s methods really are.* But there is one more reason for the boycotting that goes quite beyond any evaluation of my work and Ingrid’s: ‘We shall never forgive her, and she is going to pay for it.’ This is what they have said about her in Hollywood.** As for me, they will never forgive me for the films I have made unless they manage to make the public forget them.

And I am not the only victim, as the case of English cinema, literally brushed off by Hollywood, clearly proves. With the help of money, Hollywood is trying to get rid of all its most dangerous competitors. As far as I am concerned , they thought it would be easy to keep me in check since I’m small and Howard Hughes is powerful. Materialistic as they are, it never occurred to them that I would give up all my American box-office receipts in order to preserve my artistic integrity. They underrated me and clearly proved they were in the wrong. The STROMBOLI that was shown in the U.S. with my name on it is not my film. I refuse to recognize it as such and am ready to face all the legal consequences of the fact. I am a living proof of Hollywood’s brutality. And I’m not at all surprised to hear that the American press, which, by the way, has made a point of underlining my precise position, has given STROMBOLI a very lukewarm reception.”

* The European version of STROMBOLI is 105 minutes, whereas the American one is only 81.

** In 1949 Bergman met director Roberto Rossellini. She fell in love with him while performing in his film Stromboli (1950). Bergman left both her husband, Dr. Aron Petter Lindström and their daughter Pia Lindström for Rossellini, and they married and had 3 children, including twin daughters actresses Isabella Rossellini, Isotta Rossellini, and a son, Roberto Ingmar Rossellini. The affair caused a scandal both in Hollywood and with the public; Bergman, who was pregnant at the time of the marriage, was branded as “Hollywood’s apostle of degradation” and forced to leave the States. [Courtesy of the Ingrid Bergman entry at Wikipedia]