Remembering... Norman Mailer

When I was a little queerling (this was fifteen years ago now) Norman Mailer was considered the enemy of the gay community; always a macho posturer, Mailer had once allegedly made some offhand comment about how gay men had somehow taken the easy way out by opting not to be with women. Given the humourless tone of gay officialdom in those days (unlike today, he wrote, rolling his eyes so hard he almost gave himself a stroke) Mailer's comment wasn't even permitted enough context in which to grow, let alone be understood...

Fast forward a dozen years, when what should cross my desk but an old paperback copy of Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of many of Mailer's earliest essays. Among them was an article he wrote in 1955 entitled The Homosexual Villain regarding a pair of homophobic characters (among others) he had written - General Cummings, in his famous bestseller The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Teddy Pope in his forthcoming book The Deer Park (1955); the essay was unique in at least two respects.

Firstly, it was written specifically for the pioneering gay publication One (which had split from the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society in 1952) and when the article appeared Mailer's was far and away the most famous name ever to appear in its masthead. Secondly, the essay offered a profound apology for the laziness that went into making these characters, and for his own attitude, which had previously equated homosexuality with evil reflexively and without any introspection.

At the time, Mailer was the pre-emininent man of American letters, whose lofty fame offered an inbuilt protection from attacks by the lowly and oppressed. Although he later disdained the article as the worst he'd ever written the fact is that at least he wrote it; not only that, when the time came, he republished it. His own bravado meant that he was willing to say something poorly rather than not saying anything at all. Mailer's excoriation of homophobia - however mild - was well-publicized, and stands today as one of the earliest works by a straight man defending his gay brothers.

Mailer had a conflicted relationship to homosexuality; he was relatively comfortable with individual homosexuals and was an early defender of James Baldwin, to the extent of supplying Baldwin's explicitly gay novel Giovanni's Room (1956) with a quote for its jacket; he later even admitted to being a 'latent homosexual' himself, qualifying the statement by saying that he 'chose to be heterosexual' - a pretty provocative statement, then as now.

The fact is, he may have only said it to rile up the women's libbers, whose goat he loved to get at the height of their 1970s humourlessness. That they had already branded him an utterly masculine writer - 'without any spark of the female in him' - ought to have made him a kind of icon for the all-male world, rather than its sworn enemy. Unfortunately, centuries of relentless anti-gay violence have rendered the gay community immune to any comment by straight men, a situation which endured up to an indeed beyond this day in 2007, the day Norman Mailer died...


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'Torchin' For Bill" by Ann Reinking

Here we see birthday gal Ann Reinking vamping it up as 'Troubles' Moran, in a little number called Torchin' for Bill, from the 1978 movie Movie Movie, directed by Stanley Donen and starring George C. Scott, his wife Trish Van Devere, and featuring a very scrummy young Harry Hamlin.

Movie Movie doesn't appear to be available on DVD DVD - sorry, I couldn't help myself - and more's the pity, since from watching this clip I am so plotzing! I think I ultimately chose it for its obscurity and the fact that it carries echoes of another favourite of ours, Marlene Dietrich's performance of Hot Voodoo from Blonde Venus.
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Happy Birthday Ann Reinking

Born on this day in Seattle in 1949, Ann Reinking originally trained for the ballet; she later took Broadway by storm, though, both as a dancer and as a choreographer - first as protege, then later as lover, and finally as heir of Bob Fosse...

Beginning with a part in the chorus in Coco (1969) Reinking gradually rose through the ranks through a combination of hard work, talent, and bendiness. Early roles in Pippin (1972), Over Here! (1974), and Goodtime Charley (1975) led to bigger roles in the original run of Chicago (1975), A Chorus Line (1975), and a revival of Sweet Charity (1986).

Reinking made her film debut in All That Jazz (1979), which was a thinly veiled account of the life of Bob Fosse; she also appeared onscreen in Annie (1982) and Micki and Maude (1984).

As curator of Fosse's legacy, Reinking's greatest triumph to date remains her choreography (in the style of Fosse) and performance as Roxie Hart (based on real-life murderer Beulah Annan), opposite Bebe Neuwirth as Velma Kelly in the revival of Chicago (1996), which is still running on Broadway in addition to West End and touring productions. In 1999 Reinking conceived, co-directed, and co-choreographed the musical revue Fosse; in addition to a Tony Award and a Drama Desk award for Chicago, Reinking has also won a Bob Fosse Award for her work as a choreographer.
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In Memoriam: William Hogarth

The modern world owes much to William Hogarth; considered the first artist to create sequential drawings in pursuit of a storytelling aim, he can be considered as the father of the comic strip and thence the graphic novel. As skilled a painter as he was an engraver, his works staked out a place in the middle class where they could both entertain and enlighten the whole of the social strata...

Born in London on this day in 1697, it was William Hogarth's good fortune to be born in interesting times. The rise of industrialization and urbanization gave his biting satire much on which to chew; they were prosperous times as well, and a burgeoning leisure class was willing to pay good money to be immortalized by him, even if it meant also being lampooned into the deal. When he was paid the then-exorbitant sum of £200 for a single portrait in 1746 - which represented several years' wages for a working man - it wasn't a royal or other aristocrat who ponied up the dough but one of the new aristocrats - an actor, David Garrick.

Hogarth's works (as all great art must) both commented upon and influenced society and its attendant culture; A Harlot's Progress and its companion A Rake's Progress (both 1731) demonstrate the corrosive effects of capitalism upon morality, while also functioning as a stern rebuke of the dangers inherent in a dissipated sexuality. Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) shows the difference between the happy English society that was and the miserable one that replaced it when the public's favour shifted from beer to gin; in the same year The Four Stages of Cruelty limned one of Hogarth's favourite subject, namely man's inhumanity to man (and, by extension, animal and planet).

About the only field of endeavour in which he was not successful was as a history painter, although, in the years since his death in October 1764 these paintings of his have come to be well-appreciated, proving that not only were his works timeless but ahead of their time as well.
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"Amampondo" by Miriam Makeba

It was with a heavy heart on this day in 2008 that the Pop Culture Institute announced the death of South African music legend Miriam Makeba...

Makeba's art was at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid throughout the 1960s and 70s; as this clip amply demonstrates, Makeba's artistry combines considerable stage presence with mastery over her vocalist's instrument.

Mama Africa, you are still very much missed...
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POPnews - November 10th

[When David Livingstone was discovered alive by Henry Stanley - on this day in 1871 - their initial meeting was responsible for one of the Victorian era's most indelible catch-phrases...]
1444 - At the Battle of Varna the crusading forces of King Vladislaus III of Varna* and János Hunyadi were crushed by a Turkish army commanded by Sultan Murad II, during which action His Majesty was also killed - thus ending the Crusade of Varna, and eventually leading to the fall of Constantinople in May 1453.

*AKA Ulaszlo I of Hungary and/or Wladyslaw III of Poland!

1520 - Following his successful invasion of Sweden in September, soldiers loyal to Denmark's King Christian II executed some 82 high-ranking Swedes (many of them members of the Sture Party) over a three-day period, in what came to be known as the Stockholm Bloodbath.

1766 - The last colonial governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, signed the charter of Queen's College (which was later renamed Rutgers University).

1775 - The United States Marine Corps was founded.

1793 - A Goddess of Reason was proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Pierre Gaspard Chaumette; a statue of the goddess - modeled on and by Thérèse Momoro, wife of the printer Antoine-François Momoro - was then placed on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris.

1821 - The so-called Gesture of Rufina Alfaro set into motion a revolt which eventually led to Panama's independence from Spain (which occurred just in time for Panama to immediately thereafter become part of Colombia).

1847 - The passenger ship Stephen Whitney was wrecked in thick fog off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 92 of the 110 on board; the disaster resulted in the construction of the Fastnet Rock lighthouse.

1865 - Major Henry Wirz - the Confederate superintendent of Camp Sumter - became the only American Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.

1871 - Henry Morton Stanley located the missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone, in Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika, uttering the now-famous phrase 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?'

1898 - The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 - the only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in US history - began in Delaware; originally considered a race riot, it is now more appropriately termed a coup d'etat.

1924 - Dean O'Banion, leader of the North Side Gang, was assassinated in his flower shop by members of Johnny Torrio's gang, sparking a bloody gang war which would dominate life in Chicago for the remainder of the 1920s.

1928 - Michinomiya Hirohito was crowned the 124th Emperor of Japan; since his January 1989 death he's been known by his posthumous name, Emperor Shōwa.

1938 - The founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, died.

1944 - 3,800 tons of ordnance on the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood (AE-11) exploded while the vessel was docked in Seeadler Harbor at Papua New Guinea's Manus Island; all 350 men aboard ship were killed in the blast, as well as 82 members of the crew serving on the USS Mindanao (ARG-3), and some 22 other boats moored nearby were either sunk or severely damaged.

1954 - US President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated the USMC War Memorial (also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial) in Arlington National Cemetery.

1958 - The Hope Diamond was donated to the Smithsonian Institution by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston.

1969 - Sesame Street - created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Jim Henson - made its television debut on National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS.

1995 - In Nigeria, playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), were hanged by government forces.

2007 - The ¿Por qué no te callas? incident occurred, pitting Spain's King Juan Carlos I against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Try and guess whose side the Pop Culture Institute was on during this particular contretemps...
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"Stars" by Bryn Terfel

As a respite from an abundance of tenors, why not try a baritone? In this case, Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, seen here working his vocal magic on the timeless classic Danny Boy... He's seen here performing it on ITV's The Alan Titchmarsh Show.

Born on this day in 1965, the pride of Pantglas, in Gwynedd, now lives in nearby Caernarfon with his wife and three little Welshlings.

Go on... Have a listen. You know you want to.
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Pop History Moment: Kristallnacht

On this day in 1938 Nazi Germany's war on its Jews began in earnest, with a frenzy of looting and burning now known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass; this allegedly spontaneous outburst of anti-Semitism that purportedly took Nazi authorities by surprise was in fact organized by them as early as 1937, to be carried out by Hitler Youth and other such organizations when a suitable provocation could be found to justify it.

As a scapegoat, the Nazis chose Herschel Grynszpan, whose attack on a Paris-based German diplomat named Ernst vom Rath two days earlier - which was itself prompted by the expulsion of his family from Germany during mass expulsions which took place on October 18th - was used to justify the Nazi's extremism. In a classic bully move Grynszpan was not only roundly condemned as a murderer by the Nazi press but by extension all Jews became murderers; in this manner did the murderous Nazis routinely deflect such charges from themselves.

In all, more than 200 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes were similarly looted or burned, 92 Jews were murdered outright and as many as 30,000 were sent to concentration camps before the destruction ended the following day; reports vary, but the Führer himself may have even personally led the assault in München. According to eyewitness accounts, members of the public also assisted in the destruction* by throwing old newspapers, kerosene-soaked rags, and other such flammable items on their nearest conflagrations-in-waiting. Others looked on in horror, unable to act as their neighbours - many of whom had fought for their country in World War I - were displaced from their homes or arrested.

The events of Kristallnacht were widely condemned by the British and American media of the time, although their outrage in this instance didn't exactly move their governments to accept more Jewish immigrants, owing to the widespread anti-Semitism of the times.

Only recently, as the 70th anniversary of the event approached, an Israeli journalist named Yaron Svoray, himself an acclaimed hunter of Nazis and neo-Nazis, discovered a midden in the Brandenburg district north of Berlin - itself the size of four soccer pitches - which contains much of the night's plunder.

The story of the night's events are told in the slim yet thrilling volume, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction by Martin Gilbert.

*Likely the same people whom, after the war, claimed not to know Hitler was genocidal - the same ones whose children and grandchildren now claim the Holocaust never happened, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
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The History of Sex: Hedy Lamarr

The legendary beauty of Hedy Lamarr has never been questioned; in the years since her death, though, it's the beauty of her mind that's come increasingly to the fore...

Early in her career she starred in what is popularly considered the cinema's first nude scene - in the Czech film Ecstasy (1933) - which is actually notorious as the first to depict sexual intercourse and female orgasm on screen, not nudity (although it does have a prime example of that). Later, at the height of her fame, she and her second husband Gene Markey patented spread spectrum, an essential component of today's mobile phone technology, which plans she developed with her first husband, the Austrian arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl.

Born on this day in 1913, she made her film debut in 1930; Lamarr, who was Jewish, escaped her fascist first husband and the Nazi threat in 1937, dripping in the jewels he'd given her and the plans they'd worked out together. Legend has it that during her flight she hid in a brothel, and had sex with a client there in order to conceal her identity. Arriving in London, she obtained her famous surname from Louis B. Mayer, who named her after the tragic silent movie actress Barbara LaMarr; previously she'd been known professionally as Hedy Kiesler.

Newly renamed, Hedy Lamarr's first American movie was Algiers (1938) opposite Charles Boyer; her biggest film role was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) with Victor Mature. She also appeared in Tortilla Flat (1942), based on the novel by John Steinbeck. Frequently cast against type, she often portrayed devastatingly beautiful temptresses.

Having made off with hearts (and technology, and jewellery), Lamarr was subsequently arrested for shoplifting, first in 1965, and again in 1991; she died in January 2000.
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"Looking Out My Back Door" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Late birthday boy Tom Fogerty started Creedence Clearwater Revival with his older brother John Fogerty in 1968, and although tension between them would prompt Tom to leave the band in 1971, in the intervening years they were responsible for a string of hits with a distinctive swamp rock sound, including Bad Moon Rising, Down on the Corner, Fortunate Son, and Travelin' Band.

One such song was Lookin' Out My Back Door, from their 1970 sixth album Cosmo's Factory; although the band's reputation has led many critics since to consider the song a paean to drug use for its illusory imagery, the song's author John Fogerty claims he was inspired by having read Dr. Seuss's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street to his young son. Of course, there's no reason to think this has to be a case of either/or.

Tom Fogerty died of AIDS-related complications to tuberculosis in September 1990, having received tainted blood transfusions during back surgery in the early 1980s.
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Remembering... Earl Thompson

On this day in 1978 a promising literary career ended, just as it was gaining momentum...

Although Earl Thompson only published three novels while alive - A Garden of Sand, Tattoo, and Caldo Largo - and a fourth one (The Devil To Pay) posthumously, what novels they were! So bristling with rage and contemptuous of taboo are they that I hesitate to say how autobiographical in nature they are. I began A Garden of Sand at the behest of Mr. Christiansen*, and was at first enthralled by its sterling depiction of Depression-era Wichita; very quickly, though, I found myself drawn into the characters' inner lives in a way I hadn't been since I started reading Steinbeck.

*One of the members of the brain trust here at the Pop Culture Institute.
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Introducing Dorothy Dandridge

The history of show business is littered with the remains of those who were unable to deal with its attendant pressures; despite what it may look like to those of us on the outside, such adulation comes with a price too steep for many to pay, and so they pay with their lives...

Dorothy Dandridge was one such casualty of fame; a raving beauty, gifted actress, and acclaimed cabaret performer, her 25 years in the public eye exacted the ultimate toll on her. She died in September 1965 at the age of only 42; whether she was murdered or overdosed - or whether that overdose was intentional or accidental - hardly matters now. Only the loss remains; that, and the legacy she left behind.

Born on this day in 1922, Dorothy and her older sister Vivian (along with Etta Jones) performed on the Chitlin' circuit, a kind of black vaudeville, first as the Wonder Children and later as the Dandridge Sisters. Dorothy's mother Ruby was a lesbian, involved with a woman named Geneva Williams; scurrilous rumours abound that Williams molested her lover's daughters. Whether or not that was true, she was a stern taskmaster, working the girls hard both onstage and at home.

Hard work landed Dorothy successively larger roles in various movies, but it wasn't until she was 32 that Dandridge got her big break in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1955); for her troubles she was nominated for an Oscar, only the third African-American so honoured and the first in the Best Actress category. She lost the award to Grace Kelly.

The final ten years of Dorothy Dandridge's life were a study in contrasts; she broke many barriers and received much acclaim in front on audiences and cameras, but suffered from a downward spiral of addiction and abuse in private. Following her death she seemed destined to fade into oblivion, and would have too, if not for the cherished place she held in the hearts of two successive generations of black actors like Cicely Tyson, Jada Pinkett, Janet Jackson and Angela Bassett.

Halle Berry didn't so much play her as channel her in the HBO film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and the Emmy she won for the searing performance both revived interest in and in a way vindicated the memory of a gifted performer and a sensitive soul lost to fame.
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Happy Birthday Tony Slattery

Comedian Tony Slattery - born this day in 1959 - has always been frank about the source of his darkness and his light: a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, as confessed on-air to Stephen Fry in the landmark documentary The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive.

Okay, so this is one of his darker moments; it's here because it also happens to be one of his cuter moments as well. Taken from the Cambridge Footlights Revue in the 1980s, the same show that unleashed the comic talents of Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson - among many others - is a happy little ditty called Shoot Somebody Famous.
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Remembering... Marie Dressler

MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer called her 'the most adored person ever to set foot in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio', and he was a man who'd never blow smoke unless he could find a way to put it on film and charge two-bits admission!

Born in Coburg, Ontario, on this day in 1868, Marie Dressler was a big girl who grew into a big woman with an even bigger talent; although her initial ambition was to appear in the opera, it was undoubtedly her splendid sense of comic timing that brought her instead to vaudeville. There she befriended Mack Sennett and Edward Everett Horton, both of whom would later feature prominently alongside her in the early history of Hollywood.

Already popular in silent films - a medium famous for its FACES! - by the time she appeared in talking pictures she had her routine by rote, and indeed much of it involved making faces. In films like Anna Christie (1931) her mug-happy antics threatened to wipe even a ham like Greta Garbo off the screen.

Dressler was awarded an Oscar for her appearance in Min and Bill (1931) with Wallace Beery; onscreen they shared not so much chemistry as physics. Altogether she would make 40 films; her penultimate, Dinner at Eight (1933), shows Dressler at the top of her game, despite her obvious illness. Castmates later reported finding her vomiting violently or else coughing up blood in her dressing room, only to emerge and film take after take of a flawless performance fraught with comedy and drama in equal parts...

Dressler's memoirs were entitled The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling, but the Pop Culture Institute would like to offer a posthumous revision: A Swan By Any Other Name.
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In Memoriam: Edward VII

An ageing heir to the throne, unpopular as his mother was revered, who attracted the public's ire by preferring the company of his mistress to that of his younger wife - a neurotic beauty viewed by the public as an almost holy icon... There are few writers as bereft of original ideas as History.

Yet for a man who was viewed as a dissipated dilettante right up until the moment he became King, the life and times of Edward VII offers many potential lessons to his modern-day counterpart. Though his apprenticeship was long and his subsequent reign short, he accomplished much in the just over nine years allotted to him on the throne, not least of which was the rehabilitation of his own image. The age in which he reigned was given his name - the Edwardian - and it stands as a last golden hour before the horrors of the 20th Century beset Europe.

Born on this day in 1841 at Buckingham Palace, the second child of Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consort, he was created Prince of Wales a month later - a title he would hold for nearly sixty years. He was known within the family as Bertie as his name at birth was Albert Edward.

His marriage in March 1863 to his fourth cousin Princess Alexandra of Denmark (daughter of the future Christian IX) was arranged in the fashion of the day, supervised by his elder sister Victoria, Princess Royal, the future Queen of Prussia. In no time at all a fashionable social set formed around them, with its twin foci at their London residence, Marlborough House and in the Norfolk countryside at Sandringham House. After December 1861, and because of his mother's melodramatic widowhood (during which she refused to appear in public) he endeavoured to carry out many of the royal duties the grieving Queen would not. In this sense he can be said to have saved the monarchy by keeping it from becoming too remote. The Princess of Wales, too, carried out many engagements on behalf of children and the sick; she was also a renowned patroness of the arts.

Always a ladies man, the Prince maintained a stable of mistresses throughout his lifetime, including actress Lillie Langtry, Lady Jennie Churchill (mother of Winston and wife of Lord Randolph), Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, actress Sarah Bernhardt, dancer La Belle Otero, and wealthy humanitarian Agnes Keyser; the one who was at his side when he died, however, was Alice Keppel, whose great-granddaughter Camilla Parker Bowles succeeded in snaring herself a royal mate where she had failed.
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"Follow Me" by Uncle Kracker

Birthday wishes go out today to Uncle Kracker, who in 2001 scored a massive hit with the song Follow Me, from his debut album Double Wide; although initially best known in the Detroit area as a turntablist and rap artist who worked in Kid Rock's posse, as this single demonstrates, by the time he'd begun recording Uncle Kracker had abandoned hip-hop in favour of a country sound.

On a personal note, Uncle Kracker is at least partially responsible for what was at the time the most offensive joke I'd ever told*; upon hearing the news that he was marrying, I let fly with the brilliant quip that her professional name was likely to be Aunt Spread. Upon closer reflection, that was probably not a good thing to say in a room full of extremely earnest female writers, as I did. On the plus side, it got me out of there, so it wasn't all for naught.

*That was 2002; I've since surpassed it *at least* half a dozen times.
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POPnews - November 9th

[After it was destroyed by war in 1993, Stari Most was rebuilt almost immediately, and reopened in July 2004.]
694 CE - Egica - Visigoth King of Hispania - showed his utter ignorance in matters spiritual at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo when he accused Jews of aiding Muslims, and thereafter sentenced all Jews to slavery for something that not only never happened but never could or would happen.

1688 - William of Orange captured Exeter during Britain's Glorious Revolution.

1851 - Kentucky marshals abducted abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and returned him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave named Tamar to escape from her owner, A. L. Shotwell of Louisville, who had recently hired her out to a Judge Purtle of that city. The following year Fairbank would be sentenced to 15 years hard labour, but was eventually pardoned in 1864.

1867 - The Tokugawa Shogunate handed power back to the Emperor of Japan, bringing about the so-called Meiji Restoration.

1872 - A fire destroyed much of Boston; ignited around 7:20 PM, within 12 hours it had destroyed 65 acres of the city's downtown including 776 buildings, and was responsible for at least 20 deaths, although a citizen's brigade managed to save the Old South Meeting House.

1888 - Jack the Ripper killed Mary Jane Kelly, his last known victim.

1906 - Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting US President to make an official trip outside the country when he went to inspect progress on the Panama Canal.

1907 - The Cullinan Diamond was presented to Britain's King Edward VII on his birthday; at 530.2 carats, it was not only the largest finished diamond in the world until the 1985 discovery of the Golden Jubilee Diamond, it's also officially the best birthday present ever given.

1918 - Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated - effectively ending the German Revolution - following which the country was proclaimed a republic.

1921 - Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect.

1923 - In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crushed the Beer Hall Putsch; the failed coup was the work of the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, and members of the Kampfbund.

1938 - Kristallnacht, Nazi Germany's first large-scale act of physical anti-Jewish violence, began.

1961 - Brian Epstein attended a gig by a new band called The Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club; by December he was managing the band and history (not to mention some bloody great pop music) was being made.

1965 - 22-year-old Catholic Worker member Roger Allen LaPorte, protesting against the Vietnam War, set himself on fire in front of the United Nations building - one week to the day after Norman Morrison did the same thing in front of The Pentagon.

1967 - The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published.

1979 - Four men now better known as the Bridgewater Four - Patrick Molloy, Jim Robinson and cousins Michael Hickey and Vincent Hickey - were found guilty of murdering 12 year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, which crime occurred outside Stourbridge in September 1978; their convictions would be overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1997 after it came to light that police fabricated evidence in order to extract a confession from Molloy - a confession around which the entire case against the four was.

1985 - Garry Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion by beating Anatoly Karpov.

1989 - Communist-controlled East Germany opened checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany for the first time since 1961, at which point the city's citizenry began the demolition that resulted in the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

1993 - Stari Most, the 'old bridge' built spanning the river Neretva in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1566, collapsed after several days of bombing.
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Happy Birthday Parker Posey

The Queen of the Indies - born on this day in 1968 - had the privilege of portraying one of my favourite characters in contemporary fiction...

In Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1993) Posey played Connie Bradshaw, one of the most dynamic characters in the legendary series of novels, who goes from the quintessential good-time girl to a tragic figure of redemption almost in a broken heart-beat. Although she is a minor character, her actions reverberate through the story and touch me still; the single mention of her in this year's Michael Tolliver Lives reduced me to tears. (Not that there's any chore to that, me being all in touch with my feelings and that.)

There have been other impressive turns - Dazed and Confused (1993), The House of Yes (1997) A Mighty Wind (2003), and a hilarious run on Will & Grace - but it was as Connie Bradshaw that she wormed her way into my heart.

[Need more Parker Posey?]
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"Loving You" by Minnie Riperton

For all that it may have obscured her past successes and inhibited her future ones, Loving You still manages to serve as a superlative showcase for the numerous gifts of Minnie Riperton.

Released by Epic Records in January 1975 with The Edge of a Dream on its B-side, it was also included on her second album, 1974's Perfect Angel; the song hit #1 in the US, #2 in the UK, and was a crossover hit as well, attaining the #3 spot on the R&B chart.
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Remembering... Minnie Riperton

The curse of a smash hit single is that it obscures whatever success came before, and often makes any future success impossible; it's a curse that Minnie Riperton knew all too well. Despite having had a number of singles on the R&B chart before she released Loving You, it's that song for which she's most often remembered today.

Born on this day in 1947, Riperton was possessed of a rare gift: a five-octave vocal range (which may even have been five-and-a-half), including the ability to sing and clearly enunciate in the whistle register. Additionally, she was a student of drama and dance, and briefly pondered a career in opera until she was discovered by Chess Records, where she worked as a secretary.

Married to composer Richard Rudolph, she is the mother of the talented comedian Maya Rudolph, whose own exotic beauty is an echo of her mother's, and whose abilities as a singer and impressionist prove there might be something to this DNA business after all.

In 1976 Riperton revealed that she had breast cancer. Having undergone a mastectomy in an effort to combat the disease, it was too late; the cancer had already spread to her lymphatic system. Refusing to give up, she became an advocate for cancer research and continued to tour until just weeks before her death, in July 1979, at the age of 31.
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In Memoriam: Esther Rolle

Best known for her portrayal of Florida Evans - first on Maude, then later on Good Times - Esther Rolle was as ill-suited to the shallow vocation of the sitcom as CBS was to giving that sitcom challenging storylines...

Born on this day in 1920, the 10th of 18 children (strangely enough, in Florida) Rolle moved to New York City to attend school - first Hunter College, then Spelman College, and finally the New School for Social Research.

She made her acting debut onstage in 1962's The Blacks, and thereafter acted with Negro Ensemble Company. In 1972 she was cast in Maude, and after one season her character - slightly reworked - was spun off into her own show, Good Times.

Good Times was a trail-blazer for network TV; set in a black household in the Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago, the show costarred John Amos as Rolle's TV husband, Jimmie Walker as J. J., Bern Nadette Stanis as Thelma, and Ralph Carter as Michael. For comic effect, Florida's best friend and neighbour Willona Woods was played by Ja'net Du Bois. Both Rolle and Amos absented themselves from later seasons when it became clear that the network was prepared to squander the opportunity it created to be socially relevant, preferring to exploit the popularity of Jimmie Walker. It would be a rare lapse in judgement for the show's pioneering producer, Norman Lear...

Rolle took occasional roles through the 1980s and 1990s, both on stage and screen; she died in November 1998, nine days after her 78th birthday.
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"I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt

I remember reading an article in a magazine once that said this song was the most dysfunctional love song ever; I remember thinking 'Uh, whuh-HUH?' If anything, this is the least dysfunctional love song ever... This is what I get for reading music reviews in Mirabella!

I Can't Make You Love Me was a monster hit for birthday gal Bonnie Raitt in 1991, from her breakthrough 11th album Luck of the Draw; it was later covered by George Michael, among others.
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POPnews - November 8th

[The distinctive round shape of the Bodleian Library amidst the splendour of Oxford's medieval quadrangles makes it a must-see destination for tourists, but belies its importance as one of six deposit libraries in Britain and the only deposit library for the Republic of Ireland within the United Kingdom.]
680 CE - The Sixth Ecumenical Council commenced in Constantinople.

1519 - Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlán as the guest of Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, who welcomed him with great a celebration; over the next few years Cortés would repay the hospitality by despoiling the city, plundering the country, and enslaving those who'd welcomed him.

1602 - Oxford University's Bodleian Library was first opened to the public. And by 'public' I mean certain scholars willing to undergo a spot of minor bureaucratic rigmarole for the privilege.

1619 - The former Princess Elizabeth of Scotland and England - daughter of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark - was crowned Queen of Bohemia as consort to Frederick I, three days after his own coronation; best known to history as the 'Winter Queen', regular readers might also remember that Her Majesty had earlier been the focus of a misguided attempt to restore a Catholic monarchy to England when, at the age of only nine, the Gunpowder Plot was foiled in November 1605. Oddly enough, it would be her Hanoverian descendants who became the saviours of Britain's Protestant monarchy after the demise of the House of Stuart with the death of Queen Anne in August 1714.

1793 - The Louvre was first opened to the public as a museum, during the French Revolution.

1864 - Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat George B. McClellan.

1889 - Montana became the 41st US state.

1892 - 22nd US President Grover Cleveland - a Democrat - was elected 24th US President over Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison and Populist James Weaver; Cleveland remains the only US President elected to non-consecutive terms.

1895 - While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-ray.

1904 - Republican Theodore Roosevelt was elected 26th US President over Democrat Alton Brooks Parker; having succeeded to the Presidency following the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901, Roosevelt became the first 'accidental President' to be elected of his own accord.

1923 - Adolf Hitler's abortive Beer Hall Putsch began, in Munchen.

1932 - Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected 32nd US President over Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover.

1933 - US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled plans for the Civil Works Administration.

1939 - Adolf Hitler escaped an assassination attempt by Georg Elser in Munchen, during a celebration of the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch.

1960 - Democrat John F. Kennedy was elected 35th US President over Republican Richard Nixon.

1966 - Edward Brooke became the first African-American elected to the US Senate.

1971 - Led Zeppelin released Stairway to Heaven, from their album Led Zeppelin IV.

1973 - The right ear of kidnapped oil heir John Paul Getty III was mailed to a newspaper along with a ransom note; Getty's abduction has been thought to be the work of 'Ndrangheta, but their connection to the crime has never been proven.

1977 - Archaeologist Manolis Andronikos uncovered the tomb of Philip II of Macedon at Vergina.
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The Death of Steve McQueen

Twenty-nine years after his death - on this day in 1980 - Steve McQueen remains an icon of cool; one of an elite group of anti-heroes, his performances in films such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), Bullitt, and The Thomas Crown Affair (both 1968) are classics of the action-adventure genre. McQueen's only Oscar nomination, though, was for his role in The Sand Pebbles (1966).

He came by that tough-guy persona naturally, having run with gangs as a teenager, spent time at a home for wayward boys, and served a hitch in the Marine Corps. A racing enthusiast, McQueen did many of his own driving stunts in his movies (or at least as many as the insurance company would let him do); whether cars or motorcycles*, if it went fast, he wanted to be on it.

He died as fast as he lived, of a heart attack following surgery to remove a tumour from his lung; it was suspected the mesothelioma from which he'd been suffering was caused by exposure to asbestos. He'd received extensive exposure to the stuff during his years as a Marine, then latterly on soundstages and in racing togs.

*Or, indeed, actresses!
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"Mountain Of Love" by Johnny Rivers

Birthday wishes go out today to Johnny Rivers, one of the most versatile performers of the 1960s; his adeptness at American music extended to rock and roll, country, blues, and folk. Mountain of Love first appeared when it was released as a single by its songwriter, Harold Dorman; Rivers' version was a huge hit in 1964, going all the way to Number 9 on the US charts.
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The History of Sex: Tom of Finland

When Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen in May 1920) died on this day in 1991, he left behind him a legacy few artists would have dared; a body of work as oversized as the bodies his work depicted - 3500 drawings in all - the vast majority of them explicitly gay in nature. Love them or hate them (there seems to be no middle ground) they represent a huge risk taken by the artist who drew them, and for many years a similar risk for the men who possessed them.

Informed by an early attraction to working men, Laaksonen gradually morphed into the grand-daddy of the leather scene, demonstrating an unabashed appreciation for tough guys, uniforms, and even - horror of horrors! - 'sexualizing the enemy' (which is a phrase professional homosexuals use). If nothing else, he helped to disabuse the notion that gay male sex was some lavender-scented thing that happened between two hairdressers but an all-male activity - unlike those butch straights, whose boinking always includes at least one delicate female.

With all this talk about man-on-man action (not to mention the research I was forced to do) I have to go now and... Uh... Lavender-scent my hairdresser.
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In Memoriam: Albert Camus

Albert Camus devoted his life (which began on this day in 1913) to the battle against nihilism, the idea that life has no meaning; 'All of us, among the ruins,' he said, 'Are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it.'

Existentialism, the philosophy with which he is most often - and, in his opinion, wrongly - associated, can be a bleak and unforgiving place, but only if you let it. Our existence, he argued is what we make it. What Camus made of his existence is a tidy little career in which he ventured into all areas of writing except poetry, which tidy little career had a major influence in his lifetime, an influence which has continued to grow ever since his death, in January 1960.

Those of us who've read his works and been moved by them in the years since might be skeptical at his assertion that the things we do in life are meaningless; the mere fact that he can speak to us thusly from beyond the grave is the sternest rebuke human mortality ever had.
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"Coyote" by Joni Mitchell

Here then is my favourite Joni Mitchell song, Coyote, from my favourite Joni Mitchell album Hejira (1976); her performance is taken from the landmark 1978 documentary The Last Waltz, by Martin Scorsese, which chronicled the final concert appearance by The Band, recorded live at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, November 25th, 1976.
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Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell

There are only a few Canadians who make me proud to be a Canadian, and Joni Mitchell is chief among them; her soul-searching poetry, set to enticingly complex music, sets her apart from the many singer-songwriters she has inspired as surely as her willingness to take risks at the expense of her popularity elevates her above the rest...

Mitchell (born on this day in 1943) is what I call a 'total artist'; not content expressing herself in only one medium - namely music - she is also a gifted painter, with a flair for colour and form which gives her work a variety of moods, from melancholy to piquant. Coincidentally, this is the same range of expression found in her music; the painterly quality of her songwriting and the lyrical quality of her painting seem to serve as refractions of each other.

Rising to fame during the folk revolution of the late 1960s Mitchell penned the immortal anthem Woodstock, then really hit her creative stride in the first half of the 1970s. Taken together Ladies of the Canyon (1970), Blue (1971), For the Roses (1972), Court and Spark (1974), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), and Hejira (1976) constitute a musical achievement of which any recording artist would be proud.

During the latter half of the 1970s, Mitchell's sound took on a more jazz-infused sound, which diminished her popular appeal while further endearing her to critics, save for the album Mingus (1979), which is a challenging listen even for a rabid fan such as myself.

By the 1980s, she'd made a resurgence into a pop sound; despite what might be considered the mainstreaming of Joni Mitchell during these years, her experimentation and eclectic approach continued both lyrically and musically. At an age when many of her contemporaries were settling into their groove (or rut) Mitchell neither lost nor abandoned her creative restlessness. Mid-career albums like Dog Eat Dog (1985), Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (1988), and Night Ride Home (1991) reached their zenith with Turbulent Indigo (1994), a collection of songs as elegant and eloquent as Mitchell at her early-70s peak.

Outspokenly critical of the record industry from day one, Joni Mitchell has thankfully persevered, managing to produce a body or work meant to stand the test of time, rather than simply being a flash in the pan. Whenever I hear that someone is 'just getting into Joni Mitchell' my heart fairly thrills, for I know what utter bliss lies ahead of them; I greet each new album from her with the same sense of joy, for I know it will be a challenging new chapter in the life's work of a living legend.
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Happy Birthday Judy Tenuta

A two-parter for the kids today, it's Judy Tenuta as she appeared in the classic 1980s HBO special Women of the Night, which was hosted by Martin Short and also featured Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, and Rita Rudner. This part features Judy's famous accordion love song for the Pope... It could happen!



The second part features a paean to Judy's father which is definitely Not Suitable For Father's Day!
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POPnews - November 7th

[Actually, Sir Donald Smith had to drive in two last spikes on
this day in 1885, as he bent the first one; fortunately he
only financed the railway, and didn't build it.]
1492 - The Ensisheim Meteorite - the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact - struck the Earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, in the Alsace region of France; it is still preserved there in the Regency Palace.

1665 - The London Gazette - the official record of the British government and the oldest such publication extant - was first published.

1786 - Pupils of the composer William Billings founded the Stoughton Musical Society in Boston, making it the oldest musical organization in the US.

1848 - Whig Zachary Taylor was elected 12th US President over Democrat Lewis Cass.

1876 - Rutherford B. Hayes was elected 19th US President over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.

1885 - Construction - begun in 1881 - ended on the Canadian Pacific Railway with the driving of the Last Spike by Sir Donald Smith, in Craigellachie, British Columbia. The promised railroad had been key in bringing Canada's westernmost province into Confederation in 1870.

1916 - Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Charles Evans Hughes.

1929 - New York City's Museum of Modern Art opened to the public.

1932 - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century aired on radio for the first time.

1933 - Fiorello H. LaGuardia was elected the 99th mayor of New York City.

1940 - In Tacoma, Washington, the middle section of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (known as 'Galloping Gertie') collapsed in a windstorm, a mere four months after the bridge's completion.

1944 - Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as US President over Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

1967 - Carl B. Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, making him the first black mayor of a major American city.

1972 - Richard Nixon was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat George McGovern.

1983 - A concealed bomb exploded inside the U.S. Capitol Building outside the Senate Chamber, causing $250,000 in damages and ruining a portrait of Daniel Webster; since the Senate had been adjourned for nearly four hours at the time the corridor where the explosion occurred was empty, and no one was injured or killed. Marilyn Buck, Laura Whitehorn, and Linda Evans were later sentenced for their part in the blast, as well as other bombings at Ft. McNair, and the Washington Navy Yard.

1989 - Douglas Wilder won the gubernatorial election in Virginia, becoming the first elected black governor in the United States.

1990 - Mary Robinson was first woman to be elected President of the Republic of Ireland

1991 - Magic Johnson held a press conference to announce that he was infected with HIV; he thereupon retired from the NBA.

2000 - George W. Bush was 'elected' 43rd US President over Democrat Al Gore (although the controversial results would not be verified until January 6th, 2001, when the electoral college votes were ratified during a raucous joint-session of Congress - just two weeks before the inauguration); in the same election Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the United States Senate, becoming the first former First Lady to win a public office in the United States.
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Michael Cunningham: A Homo at the End of the World

Handsome, erudite Michael Cunningham is the author of five novels - Golden States (1984), A Home at the End of the World (1990), 1995 Flesh and Blood (1995), The Hours (1998), and Specimen Days (2005) - plus an acclaimed work of nonfiction, Lands End: A Walk in Provincetown (2005) which blends history and creative nonfiction to create a portrait of the fabled resort town he loves.

Born on this day in 1952, Cunningham attended Stanford University, and later the University of Iowa, where he was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop; his early short stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.

Although openly gay, Cunningham resents (as well he should) being pigeon-holed as a 'gay writer'; despite this, he has always been out. Understandably, there is still a tendency in the conservative book trade to treat a 'gay writer' as a niche writer, to only promote their work in the gay press, and to only stock their works in gay bookstores - stores which are dwindling in number as big box bookstores continue to gobble up their smaller counterparts in an attempt to create a monopoly.

Cunningham, though, has found a wide readership, and deserves much credit for being a gay writer who brings gay characters into the larger mainstream context (despite the threat of being labeled 'hetero-normative' by militants in the blogosphere and beyond). His novel The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award; it was also made into a smash-hit movie, which won an Academy Award for Nicole Kidman (who played Virginia Woolf in it). He also wrote the screenplay for a film version of A Home at the End of the World.

Partnered for nearly 20 years, Cunningham teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and in the creative writing MFA program at Brooklyn College. He lives in New York City.
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Remembering... Brad Davis

Politically, Brad Davis has served the AIDS movement well, since he is widely regarded as the first well-known heterosexual man to die of AIDS; Magic Johnson notwithstanding, the myth that men can contract the disease exclusively through heterosexual sex has largely been debunked.

Although Davis (born on this day in 1949) technically died of an assisted suicide in September 1991, he did have AIDS at the time; whether or not he was strictly heterosexual, though, remains a matter for debate. His widow insists he was, but then she would; Davis had been addicted to needle drugs prior to his sobriety in 1981, which in theory could have led to a relapse and accounted for his infection.

Or he could have dabbled in the man-on-man action; judging by the photo he certainly would have been given ample opportunity. Certainly he was no stranger to it, having been an actor in New York in the 1970s and having appeared in 1978's Midnight Express (which featured a graphic prison rape) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1983), as well as playing the lead in the original run of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), which was about AIDS.

Davis kept his illness (along with many other things) secret right up until the end; in his last film appearance he played himself in The Player (1992).
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Happy Birthday Sally Field

Amazingly, Sally Field today turns 63; even more amazingly, she still looks like Sally Field, rather than a Frankenstein's monster version of Sally Field, a fate which has befallen many of the women of her generation in Hollywood. (This means you, Joan Van Ark...)

Although renowned for such comedy fare as TV's Gidget (1965-1966) and The Flying Nun (1967-1970), and later for films like Punchline (1988) and the hilarious Soapdish (1991), Field has also excelled at drama, turning in a searing and prescient performance in Not Without My Daughter (1991).

Still acting, Field returned to TV recently in the show Brothers & Sisters, which was created by the well-respected gay playwright and all-around wunderkind Jon Robin Baitz. Then, in 2007 Field won an Emmy for portraying Nora Holden Walker on Brothers & Sisters, which was given an unexpected boost of publicity when Fox censored anti-war remarks she made during her acceptance speech.

The two-time Oscar winner - for Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984) - will always have a place in my heart for her portrayal of M'Lynn Eatenton in Steel Magnolias (1989), which I mention so often on this blog it's in danger of becoming an inside joke.

That's right: we like her! We really like her! (Aw, c'mon; you didn't think I'd write a post about Sally Field and not go there, didja?)
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"The Goonies Are Good Enough" by Cyndi Lauper

It's not Cyndi Lauper's birthday or anything, but the earlier Glenn Frey video got me thinking about music videos tied to the promotion of movies and television; You Belong to the City was obviously tied to the TV show Miami Vice, and this one to the Steven Spielberg movie The Goonies.

In many ways (not all of them good), the film was a watershed for Cyndi; hired as its musical director she got to choose the music for the soundtrack from the bands she admired most, including a spot of early exposure for The Bangles. She worked so hard on the project though that she was hospitalized, although the reason for this was not entirely the movie's fault.

I love the song and its video to bits (even though Cyndi's continuing involvement with professional wrestling nearly spelled the death of her career). Old-school wrestlers such as The Iron Sheik, Captain Lou Albano, Roddy Piper, André the Giant, 'Classy' Freddie Blassie, The Fabulous Moolah & Nikolai Volkoff appear, along with the cast of the movie (including a cameo by Spielberg himself!), members of The Bangles, Cyndi's then-boyfriend and manager David Wolff, and Cyndi's mom Catrine, who also appeared in Girls Just Want to Have Fun with Albano.

She cut The Goonies 'R' Good Enough from her set list in 1987, but reinstated it in 2006, to much acclaim from her fans. It's enduring fame resides in the fact that it was the first two-part music video, although the second part is rarely seen these days.

Except, of course, on the Pop Culture Institute... Enjoy!
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The Death of Tchaikovsky

Born in 1840, the musically precocious child who would become Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at the age of five, and within three years had surpassed his teacher; despite this epic talent, he was trained as a civil servant at the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg.

It was his mother's death from cholera when he was 14 that caused him to turn to music for solace; whether he found it there is a matter of debate, but a month after she died he'd composed a waltz in her honour, and from that point he never stopped composing.

By 1862 he had convinced his father to support him, quit his civil service job, and joined the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied under his cousin Nikolai Zaremba and Anton Rubinstein.

In July 1877, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Miliukova, despite a frank assertion that he did not love her and never would; the composer's homosexuality has been much debated, mainly by those whose agenda cannot allow its admission. Nevertheless, five days after his marriage, he attempted suicide - a sure sign that not all was well on the honeymoon; six weeks after marrying they separated for good. She died in 1917, having spent the last twenty years of her life in an insane asylum.

For a time the suffering caused by coming to terms with his sexuality seems to have given Tchaikovsky's work the poignant melancholy for which it is renowned; as successful as his career would become, though, it was a palace built of clouds, and could not last.

That year, Tchaikovsky acquired a patroness, named Nadezhda von Meck, whose beneficence allowed him to quit the Conservatory and focus on composing; over the next 13 years they would exchange more than 1200 letters but, despite a couple of chance encounters, never spoke. Instead they treated the 1884 marriage of Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Lvovna Davydova to von Meck's son Nikolay as a symbolic substitute for a marital union of their own. Von Meck withdrew her patronage and friendship suddenly in 1890, citing bankruptcy.

Tchaikovsky died nine days after the debut of his Sixth Symphony - the Pathétique - under mysterious (or at least peculiar) circumstances. Although his death has been attributed to cholera, it may have been that he drank cholera-tainted water on purpose, so as to end his life. One theory, which is gaining much popular traction, is that he had been condemned by a 'court of honour' of his old classmates at the School of Jurisprudence; either he could suffer the public revelation of his homosexuality, the ruin of his reputation, and exile to Siberia, or kill himself. In the end it may have been arsenic poisoning - whose symptoms resemble cholera - that did the deed.

Stricken ill, Tchaikovsky repeatedly refused to see a doctor; in his final delirium, he called out only for his old friend von Meck. He died in his brother's apartment at about 3 am on this day in 1893. He was 53.

Tchaikovsky's funeral was arranged and paid for by the Tsar, Alexander III, which shows the high regard in which he was held (but which may support another theory, that it was the Tsar and not the court of honour who had ordered his suicide). 8,000 people attended his memorial service at Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, chosen from a list of 60,000 who expressed a desire to attend. He was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

20 years later, Russians were still commemorating the day Tchaikovsky died.
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In Memoriam: Harold Ross

The founding editor of The New Yorker was a mass of contradictions; his brash personality and occasional philistinism clashed with the sophisticated tone and intellectualism of the magazine he created and launched in 1925. He was, in the words of his successor, 'a genius in disguise'...

Born on this day in 1893, Ross began his career as a journalist writing for newspapers beginning in high school; by 1918 he landed a job with Stars and Stripes, where he made many influential contacts that would come in handy later: Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife in addition to helping him co-found what was then an entirely new kind of publication. Through Woollcott many members of the Algonquin Round Table would come to write for him as well.

The New Yorker was a success nearly from its inception; having survived six turbulent months at the outset, the magazine went on to weather the worst years of the Great Depression with an increase in both subscriptions and ad revenues, mainly due of course to the exceptional talent on staff, including James Thurber, E. B. White, Katharine S. White, S. J. Perelman, Janet Flanner (aka 'Genet'), Wolcott Gibbs, John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. Much of Ross' success as an editor can be credited to his knack for spotting and nurturing talent in writers, although he often did so in a bullying manner.

Ross died in December 1951, at which time he was replaced by William Shawn; during his tenure as editor, Harold Ross personally oversaw 1,399 issues of The New Yorker.

In 2006 the whole of the magazine's output - 4,109 issues published over 80 years from February 1925 - were put onto DVD-ROM and sold as a set, one of which was snapped up by the Pop Culture Institute for its archive; it currently resides next to a companion coffee table book and CD-ROM collection of cartoons from the landmark publication, released the previous year. Together they bring to light not only Harold Ross' brilliant idea - that being a New Yorker is a state of mind rather than a geographical situation - as well as his life's work.
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"You Belong To The City" by Glenn Frey

What day couldn't be improved by a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline? And what video couldn't be improved by the inclusion of a little Crockett & Tubbs?

As promotional tie-ins go (and there were so many of this kind of video in the 80s they're practically a sub-genre unto themselves) I think this one is done pretty well, especially in how it integrates the footage from Miami Vice, giving the video a sense of time (the show aired at 10 pm Friday during its first 2 seasons).

Birthday wishes go out today to Glenn Frey, whose musical impressive musical resume before and after he co-founded the Eagles includes this little ditty, You Belong to the City, from 1985.
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"An Address to the People on The Death of the Princess Charlotte" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I. THE Princess Charlotte is dead. She no longer moves, nor thinks, nor feels. She is as inanimate as the clay with which she is about to mingle. It is a dreadful thing to know that she is a putrid corpse, who but a few days since was full of life and hope; a woman young, innocent, and beautiful, snatched from the bosom of domestic peace, and leaving that single vacancy which none can die and leave not...

With these words did poet Percy Bysshe Shelley attempt to assuage the immense national grief at the passing (on this day in 1817) of the Heiress Presumptive, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales; of course, the fact that he later went into a bit of political rant on behalf of the perpetrators of the Pentrich Rising is neither here nor there...

[READ THE REST]
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POPnews - November 6th

[The Hawker Hurricane was as instrumental in winning
the Battle of Britain as the brave flyboys who flew them.]
1528 - Shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the first known European to set foot in Texas, apparently.

1789 - Pope Pius VI appointed Father John Carroll as the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, to serve the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

1844 - The Dominican Republic adopted its first constitution.

1860 - Abraham Lincoln was elected 16th US President over Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Unionist John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.

1861 - Jefferson Davis was elected President of the Confederate States of America.

1865 - CSS Shenandoah, commanded by the Confederate Navy's Captain James Waddell, became the last combat unit of the American Civil War to surrender - to the HMS Donegal's Captain James Aylmer Dorset Paynter of Britain's Royal Navy - after circumnavigating the globe on a voyage during which it sank or captured 37 vessels; the Shenandoah fired the last shots of the war off the Aleutian Islands.

1869 - Rutgers College defeated Princeton University (then known as the College of New Jersey) 6-4 at the first official intercollegiate American football game, held in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

1888 - Benjamin Harrison was elected 23rd US President over Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland.

1900 - William McKinley was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1928 - Herbert Hoover was elected 31st US President over Democrat Al Smith.

1935 - The first flight of the Hawker Hurricane occurred at Brooklands, during which the prototype fighter plane was flown by P.W.S. 'George' Bulman.

1942 - Carlson's Patrol - undertaken by the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion under the command of Evans Carlson during the Guadalcanal Campaign - began; lasting until December 4th, the patrol would prevent troops of the Imperial Japanese Army under Toshinari Shōji from escaping the island, inflicting losses of around 500 while sustaining only 16 fatalities.

1947 - Meet The Press - which had begun on radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1945 - made its television debut, before settling into a weekly schedule by September 12th of the following year. The show's first moderator was Martha Rountree, who had created the show's format along with Lawrence E. Spivak.

1956 - Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

1975 - The Green March began when as many as 350,000 unarmed Moroccans converged on the southern city of Tarfaya and waited for a signal from King Hassan II to cross into Western Sahara with the aim of putting pressure on Spain to hand over the province to Morocco; the terms of the Madrid Accords, which were signed by Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania, did not solve the impasse over Spanish Sahara, and the region remains in political limbo.

1977 - The Kelly Barnes Dam - located above Toccoa Falls Bible College near Toccoa, Georgia - failed, killing 39.

1984 - Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat Walter Mondale.

1999 - Australians voted to retain Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia in a referendum, although there remains some debate as to whether or not Her Majesty or Her Majesty's Governor-General is currently head of state there.

2004 - An express train collided with a stationary car near the English village of Ufton Nervet, killing 7 and injuring 150.
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"Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel

The title track from Simon and Garfunkel's final album Bridge over Troubled Water has long been renowned for its healing properties; the combination of kind words and angelic vocals have assuaged untold broken hearts and frazzled nerves in the past...

The Pop Culture Institute is proud to post this song today as a public service both in celebration of the birth of its vocalist Art Garfunkel (for once, without the harmonies of Paul Simon) and in the hopes that it can provide some measure of healing from the numerous wounds of the past eight years.

The clip is taken from the duo's highly popular Concert in Central Park, held in September 1981.
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Pop History Moment: The Gunpowder Plot

The most serious terrorist threat in British history wasn't last month or even last year, nor was it even remotely Islamic in nature; in fact, it was over 400 years ago - and it was a band of Roman Catholics, fine Christians all, who were responsible for plotting mass murder most heinous...

On this day in 1605 a certain Justice of the Peace named Thomas Knyvet discovered Guy Fawkes in the undercroft of the Houses of Parliament among 36 barrels of gunpowder, kindling, and touchpaper. Although he said his name was 'John Johnson' when he was captured, Fawkes didn't try to deny what he was doing; the point of the Plot was to kill the King and Queen along with most of the Protestant aristocracy at the State Opening of Parliament, then install the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic monarch.

Typically, the thwarted plot unleashed a wave of hatred directed at all Catholics in Britain, who were persecuted for more than 200 years as a result; the hatred of Papists was then imported to the American colonies, where it lasted a hundred and fifty years longer still. Although England had been on the threshold of Catholic Emancipation the day before it, the day after the Gunpowder Plot such an action had become unthinkable. The terrorists had, in true terrorist tradition, succeeded brilliantly in undermining their own cause even as they failed to undermine Parliament in any way.

The plot itself had been masterminded by Robert Catesby, who was by then no stranger to treason; four years earlier he had conspired with the Earl of Essex to assassinate Elizabeth I, but because his role in that matter was minor he was merely deprived of his property and not his head as was Essex. Immediately after the arrest of Guy Fawkes, Catesby (along with a few of his fellow plotters) fled to Holbeach House near Kingswinford in Staffordshire, where he died two weeks later during a fracas with arresting officers under Richard Walsh, the sheriff of Worcester.

Other plotters included Thomas Winter (also spelled Wintour), Robert Winter, Christopher Wright, Thomas Percy (also spelled Percye), John Wright, Ambrose Rokewood, Robert Keyes, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, Father Henry Garnet (the group's confessor), and Catesby's servant, Thomas Bates; for his part, Fawkes was the demolitions expert, having had much experience in the use of explosives when he served as a mercenary in the army of Archduke Albert of Austria, during the Dutch Revolt.

Had the plot been successful it would have not only destroyed the Palace of Westminster but the equally priceless Westminster Abbey as well, and would have blown out every window in a 1 km radius; as it is, the old palace stood for another couple of centuries, when in October 1834 it was destroyed by an accidental fire.

Amazingly, Fawkes was rated #30 on a 2002 list of the 100 Greatest Britons, which shouldn't surprise me since Oliver Cromwell came 10th, but it does dismay me nonetheless; I wonder if, 400 years from now, Britons will feel the same about Abu Hamza al-Masri or even Osama bin Laden...
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Good Riddance: The Death of Robert Maxwell

Normally, of course, I love a rags-to-riches story; it gives me something to think about as I'm sitting here in this pile of rags. Whenever the ascent of a person from poverty to wealth and fame involves perseverance, creativity, and even good fortune, it gives me at least a reason to cheer. There is, however, a dark side to the myth of a self-made man...

Of course, ambition in and of itself is not so bad; in the case of Robert Maxwell (whose capacity for rapacity is well-documented), when ambition comes with a side-order of ruthlessness and cruelty, that's not so good. Perhaps his years in Westminster (as a Labour Party MP for Buckingham of all things, from 1964-70) rendered him physically incapable of telling the truth; no matter, as scandal dogged him throughout his endeavours in the book trade he made the leap into newspapers, purchasing the UK's Daily Mirror, where having to tell the truth would be less of a bugbear. Even his attacks on Rupert Murdoch - which normally would be enough to make me admire anyone, even Hitler - do nothing to assuage the smarminess and corruption of the man in my eyes.

In this instance I am with Ian Hislop (although I'm sure I'd hate to know what he'd think of me and my little enterprise), TV personality, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, and the only person in British media at the time with the stones to take him on; as such, the magazine was successfully sued by Maxwell several times. One of those times Private Eye said that Maxwell looked like a criminal, for which he was awarded a substantial sum; no word yet on what happened when it turned out the criminal actually was a criminal. Not that it would have mattered, as by the time it was revealed that the criminal in question had engaged in stock manipulation schemes, diverted pension funds into his own pocket, and generally mucked about in the favourite pastimes of the kleptocracy (a la Lord Black, another swell guy) he was dead.

The end came on this day in 1991, at the age of 68; Maxwell is presumed to have fallen overboard from his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, while cruising off the Canary Islands. Whether you think his death was an accident, suicide, or murder probably says as much about you as how you feel about him. Whatever fate befell him, he was lauded by the mucky-mucks and given a veritable state funeral in Israel, even though rumours that he was killed after trying to blackmail Mossad still linger; as do allegations that at the time of his death Germany had been investigating him for his role in possible war crimes committed there in 1945.

Perhaps, then, it's not so far-fetched an idea that this was one self-made man who could also have merely self-destructed...
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"Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter" by Herman's Hermits

Birthday wishes go out today to Peter Noone, the face and voice of British Invasion stalwarts Herman's Hermits, whose songs weren't the hits they might have been, considering their enduring popularity to this day...

One such tune is Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter which, like the video clip above, hails from 1965; it, along with another of the band's signature numbers, I'm Henry VIII, I Am, were never even released as singles in the UK even though both would end up topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.
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In Memoriam: Vivien Leigh

For all that actors decry being type-cast, there may be something to it; in Vivien Leigh's case, it gave her a deep well from which to draw... Whether playing Ophelia in Hamlet on the West End stage or Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) - which was neither her first role nor even her first notable role but nonetheless the one that made her a star - Vivien Leigh's chillingly honest portrayal of moody women made her so much more than just a pretty face, which otherwise might have been her fate.

Even when cast against type - as, say, a prostitute in Waterloo Bridge (1940), or a higher class of prostitute now called a socialite, Emma Hamilton in That Hamilton Woman (1941) - she brought hidden depths to these roles that the general public could scarcely fathom. Those who worked with her, though... They knew. They knew that she could be happy and smiling one moment and then turn on a dime into a shrieking harpy. Temperament, they called it in those days; today we call it bipolar disorder.

Even though manic-depression occasionally affected her career, she continued to act through the Fifties and Sixties, in such classic films as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and the oft-overlooked classic Ship of Fools (1965); in all three (but as Blanche DuBois in Streetcar especially) she brought equal parts fury and frailty to her portrayals which make them simultaneously difficult to watch and impossible to ignore.

In another time, our own for instance, she could have served as a great role model for people who are similarly afflicted; her second husband, Laurence Olivier, gave her credit for how hard she struggled to control and conceal her condition. As it was, the stigma attached to mental illness would have surely ended her career before it had begun, had she not had the good fortune to be born one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. The standard wisdom is that her looks hampered her career, while it is my opinion that they allowed her any career she did have at all, possibly even sparing her a lobotomy and life in an institution.

Born on this day in 1913, Leigh died of tuberculosis in July 1967, aged only 53.
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Happy Birthday Sam Rockwell

This is not an age in which quirky actors do well, which makes the success of Sam Rockwell all the more satisfying; his choices are daring and varied, his portrayals go further than they need to, and his fans - myself, obviously, among them - reap the reward.

Rockwell's films, which veer wildly between indie and studio fare, include Galaxy Quest (1999), The Green Mile (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000), and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005); all four currently reside in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute.

In Charlie's Angels he plays a seemingly meek dot-com industrialist who morphs into a venal LA douchebag so convincingly I found myself in the theatre scratching my head as to why they'd cast two different actors to play the same role; in Galaxy Quest he turns the role of the thankless ensign who gets killed early on in the episode into a star turn; in The Green Mile he plays a racist psychotic named 'Wild Bill' Wharton, who watches an innocent man preparing to die for a heinous crime Wharton committed; and in Hitchhiker he plays one of the greatest characters of modern times, Zaphod Beeblebrox, with the exact quantities of aplomb and arrogance necessary.

Expect more of the same from Sam Rockwell in the years to come; which means, of course, not knowing what to expect except that it'll be different from anything else he's ever done...
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"Cuts Like A Knife" by Bryan Adams

Seen here rocking out on stage at Live Aid in July 1985, it's birthday boy Bryan Adams at just about the peak of his cool; shortly thereafter his work would devolve into moribund balladry, culminating with a spot of blah intended to clarify the matter of his sexuality, courtesy of a single with a laughably rhetorical title, Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?. In recent years, only Cloud Number Nine and When You're Gone have come close to re-capturing the sound he'd once had.

Cuts Like a Knife was the title track to Adams' 1983 third album, which also spawned the monster hit power ballads Straight from the Heart and This Time; while he'd already had a modicum of success in Canada with his first two albums - 1980's Bryan Adams and You Want It You Got It from 1981 - both the Cuts Like a Knife album and its successor Reckless elevated Adams into the ranks of international superstardom.
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POPnews - November 5th

[Sometime between 1892 and 1896 editorial cartoonist Charles Lewis Bartholomew rendered this amusing image pertaining to the Election of 1872, in which suffragist Susan B. Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant, despite his protestations against women being allowed that very right; she's seen here chasing him while Uncle Sam laughs in the background. For her temerity, Anthony was arrested two weeks later; little more than a hundred years later, she could have paid the fine she eventually got with money bearing her image.]

1530 - St. Felix's Flood destroyed the Dutch city of Reimerswaal; the oft-flooded city was completely abandoned by 1632, and today nothing but the name remains, preserved as the name of a municipality in that country's province of Zeeland.

1605 - A plot led by Robert Catesby to blow up the English Houses of Parliament was thwarted when Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes amid barrels of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the Palace of Westminster; the event is still celebrated in England and the more English parts of the Commonwealth (such as Newfoundland) as Bonfire Night.

1688 - The so-called Glorious Revolution began when William of Orange landed at Brixham, in Devon; the invasion had been ready to go sooner, but was delayed to coincide with the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, giving England's anti-Catholic movement the necessary symbolism to mollify its sectarian warmongering.

1768 - The Treaty of Fort Stanwix - the purpose of which was to adjust the boundaries between Indian lands and white settlements set forth in the Thirteen Colonies' Proclamation of 1763 - was signed by Sir William Johnson and representatives of the Iroquois Six Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) at Fort Stanwix in Upstate New York .

1831 - Nat Turner, leader of an abortive-yet-bloody slave rebellion the previous August, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

1872 - Ulysses S. Grant was elected to a second term over Democrat Horace Greeley*; the Equal Rights Party had also nominated Victoria Woodhull to the presidency with former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. The first election held after the foundation of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (both in 1869) it was during this election that suffragist Susan B. Anthony, in defiance of the law, voted for the first time. She was later fined $100 for her effrontery, although her uppity-ness remains priceless...

*Who died on November 29th, less than a month after the election.

1895 - George B. Selden was granted the first US patent - US patent 549160 - for an automobile; Selden's hideously polluting invention would later most famously bring an end to human life on the planet, and in the meantime cause untold suffering and destruction.

1912 - Woodrow Wilson was elected 28th US President, defeating Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Progressive former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

1913 - King Otto of Bavaria was deposed by his cousin, Prince Regent Ludwig, who assumed the title Ludwig III.

1916 - The Everett Massacre took place as mis-communication led to a shoot-out between IWW organizers and local police in Washington state, killing as many as 12 and wounding more than 20.

1925 - British secret agent Sidney Reilly - considered to be among Ian Fleming's inspirations for the super spy James Bond - was executed by the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union.

1940 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term as US President over Republican Wendell Willkie.

1942 - The Second Battle of El Alamein was won by an Allied force under Britain's Harold Alexander and Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein, in Egypt; Axis commanders Ettore Bastico of Italy and Erwin Rommel of Nazi Germany escaped the hostilities unscathed, while Rommel's countryman Georg Stumme perished in the fighting.

1967 - The Hither Green rail crash killed 49 people in the United Kingdom; among the survivors was Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.

1968 - Richard M. Nixon was elected 37th US President over Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Independent George Wallace.

1987 - Govan Mbeki was released from custody at Robben Island after serving 24 years of a life sentence for terrorism and treason; one day his son, Thabo Mbeki, would follow his fellow prisoner, Nelson Mandela, into the presidency of South Africa.

1990 - Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the far-right Kach movement, was assassinated after a speech at a New York City Marriott hotel; his suspected killer El Sayyid Nosair was later acquitted of murder but convicted on gun possession charges. Later he and Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman would receive life sentences for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; their defense in that instance was funded by Osama bin Laden. In December 2000, Kahane's son and daughter-in-law would also be assassinated, but their five daughters were somehow spared in the same attack.

1995 - André Dallaire made a (thankfully) lacklustre attempt to assassinate Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien at the Prime Minister's official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, but was thwarted when the PM's quick-thinking wife Aline encountered Dallaire and rushed back into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. While waiting for the RCMP detail on duty to get their shit together - it took them as long as seven minutes to respond - one or the other of the Chrétiens is said to have been armed with a particularly pointy bit of Inuit sculpture, just in case...

1996 - Bill Clinton was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Bob Dole.
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Happy Birthday Kathy Griffin

The all-too-meagre birthday wishes of this rinky-dink blog can't mean a hill of beans to D-List superstar Kathy Griffin, but that's not going to stop me from offering them...

I never would have thought - all those years ago when I was glued to the television watching Suddenly Susan in order to perv on Nestor Carbonell - that a decade later I would instead be hanging on every word the red-headed office loudmouth had on offer, not least of which appear on Bravo's Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.

Here Kathy Griffin appears on one of the last talk shows that'll still have her - The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson - in order to show off her growing family of Emmy Awards, dish the dirt, and generally be fabulous!
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"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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Remembering... Wilfred Owen

The idea that war is somehow glamourous is not an opinion common among fighting men, no matter what the politicians who wage it at their expense would have us think; for striking a killing blow at the heart of such a misguided notion we have men like Wilfred Owen to thank.

In verses like Anthem for Doomed Youth, Owen decries the horrors of modern warfare in no uncertain terms. Thematically daring, Owen's works are also structurally innovative; although only five of his poems were published during his lifetime, he is now generally thought of as one of the foremost poets of the era. To a large extent, Owen used poetry to help him recover from the worst effects of war which, in addition to its value in disabusing society at large of the nationalistic and patriotic brainwashing behind every bullet and bomb, makes his a very great talent indeed.

Born in March 1893, and enlisting in October 1915, by January 1917 he was back in England, suffering from shell-shock; when his friend and hero Siegfried Sassoon returned from the Front with a head injury, Owen decided it was his duty to take his place, so as to continue cataloguing the inhumanity of humanity's oldest sport at close range.

Alas, he got a little too close; Wilfred Owen was killed in action on this day in 1918, at the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal - one of the last Allied victories of World War I - just a week before the Armistice was signed. He was 25. As the bells of peace were ringing, his parents were receiving the telegram that their elder son wouldn't be coming home; he is buried in the communal cemetery at Ors, in France, near where he fell.

After Owen's death his brother and literary executor Harold Owen tried to eradicate all evidence of Wilfred Owen's homosexuality, failing miserably as this post attests; in doing so, Harold Owen gave aid and comfort to the myth that a man who loves men cannot be noble. It is a testament to Wilfred Owen's friends Robbie Ross, Osbert Sitwell, and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (not to mention Siegfried Sassoon himself) that, even half a century before there was a community to do so, there was a culture that would nurture his whole memory.
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In Memoriam: Will Rogers

Maybe it's just my natural cynicism talking, but there's something about the homespun aw-shucks folksiness of Will Rogers that's never sat right with me; he is most famous for saying 'I never met a man I didn't like', yet every time I hear it my bullshit-detector starts a-quiverin'. I mean, I am well into men, and I've met thousands of them I fairly despise...

Of course, he is a product of a different time and place than I am, which is the same Will Rogers-esque homily I often use to explain away any incongruities I might encounter, wherever whenever and in whomever I might encounter them.

Born on this day in 1879, Oklahoma's favourite son never let a lack of interest in book-learning slow him down; he left the Dog Iron Ranch where he was born (near present-day Oologah, Oklahoma) in 1901, setting out for Argentina, where he planned to be a gaucho. When that plan fell through, he headed to South Africa, where he broke horses for the British until the end of the Boer War.

Once his services were no longer needed, he hired himself out to a series of circuses - visiting Australia in the process. By the time he returned Stateside a few years later he was already a seasoned performer, doing tricks with a lariat while discussing the news of the day in a gentle, conversational tone and with a commonsensical insight which was in every way wiser than (and therefore preferable to) the more overtly intellectual (and therefore somewhat off-putting) approach favoured by the other pundits of that era.

By 1915, Rogers was appearing in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, a nightly revue at a cabaret built on the top floor of the fabled New Amsterdam Theatre in the heart of Times Square, which was then the epicentre of American show business; contacts he made there quickly became fans, and those fans in high places were to serve him very well indeed as he made his way from stage to screen and then to radio.

Friend to Kings and cowboys, Presidents and postmen alike, when Rogers died in August 1935 at the outset of a round-the-world flight with his friend Wiley Post, it was said to be the greatest single outpouring of public grief America had seen since the death of Lincoln; to this day tributes to him abound throughout Oklahoma and beyond. He's been revived on Broadway (portrayed by Keith Carradine) and lives on through the magic of DVD, even within the collection of the Pop Culture Institute, which is curated by none other than cynical old me.
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POPnews - November 4th

[Anyone who thinks former California governor Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter on this day in 1980 is too much Republican red for their liking should definitely not click on the image and see the mandate he was given upon his 1984 re-election over Carter's former Vice President Walter Mondale.]
1501 - Catherine of Aragon met Arthur Tudor - to whom she'd been betrothed and married by proxy for years - at the Hampshire village of Dogmersfield; they were married at St. Paul's Cathedral ten days later, and following Arthur's death in April 1502 she married his younger brother, who would grow up to become Henry VIII.

1677 - The woman who would later become England's Queen Mary II married William, Prince of Orange; during their brief co-reign (less than six years) they would be known as William and Mary, and after her death in 1694 he would reign alone as William III.

1737 - The Teatro di San Carlo was inaugurated; built by Giovanni Antonio Medrano and Angelo Carasale for Charles III of Naples it was the largest opera house in its day, seating 3,300, and today it is the oldest still-active opera house in Europe.

1856 - James Buchanan was elected 15th US President over Republican John C. Frémont and former Whig president Millard Fillmore of the Know-Nothing Party.

1861 - The University of Washington opened in Seattle as the Territorial University, just a decade after the arrival of the first white settlers to the area.

1884 - Grover Cleveland was elected 22nd US President over Republican James G. Blaine.

1918 - The German Revolution began when 40,000 sailors took over the port in Kiel, and ended just days later with the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1921 - Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi was assassinated in Tokyo.

1922 - British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men found the entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt's Valley of the Kings following a fifteen year search, although he would wait three weeks for his patron, Lord Carnarvon, to arrive before opening it.

1924 - Calvin Coolidge was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat John W. Davis and Progressive Robert M. La Follette, Sr.. Also in that election, both Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam 'Ma' Ferguson of Texas were elected governor of their states; since Ross was inaugurated 16 days before Ferguson, though, she wins the title of the first female governor in US history.

1928 - Arnold Rothstein, New York City's most notorious gambler, died of injuries he received the previous day when he was shot while playing poker at the Park Central Hotel.

1952 - Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected 34th US President over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

1960 - Filming wrapped on the troubled production of The Misfits - written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston - starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter. It would be the last film for Monroe and Gable.

1970 - 'Genie', a 13-year-old feral child whose actual name is Susan Wiley, was seized by the authorities in Temple City, California, having been locked in a bedroom for most of her life.

1979 - The Iran hostage crisis began when Iranian radicals, mostly students, invaded the US embassy in Tehran and took 90 hostages (53 of whom were American).

1980 - Ronald Reagan was elected 40th US President in a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, independent John B. Anderson, and Libertarian Ed Clark.

1993 - Jean Chrétien took office as Prime Minister of Canada.

1995 - Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extreme right-wing Israeli opposed to Rabin's support for the Oslo Accords.

2008 - Barack Obama was elected 44th US President over Republican Senator John McCain.
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