Lena Horne

I'm guessing most tributes to Lena Horne will include the 1943 version of "Stormy Weather", but it's interesting to compare that young girl's intuitive understanding with a bluesier version sung later in life. Not a false caesura in either version, by the way, which ought to teach pop idols the difference between genuine emotion and sentiment, but probably won't.



The other two songs, "Moon River" and "It's Not Easy Being Green", I posted for myself. I'd like to know what went through her head while rehearsing "Green". With that voice and those impossible cheekbones, this woman could have run the table as Hollywood's Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Sally Hemings or the Queen of Sheba-- but in that benighted time, she couldn't even hang on to the part of Julie in Showboat. The studio cast Ava Gardner in the "controversial" role of a "high yellow gal" passing for white in order to marry the man she loved.

So Lena finally said to hell with Hollywood, went home to New York and became a chanteuse instead. Ironically this was a winning decision: Hollywood discards its leading ladies quickly, whereas jazz and blues singing, like painting, rewards longevity and depth.

The Violent Death Index

Awake at three in the morning. Plane crash in Buffalo on TV; 49 souls gone. But who knows how many-- the people who loved them-- who might be still asleep and don't yet know that their lives just stopped, too? I wonder about all the violent deaths in this country, more murders in one month in our larger cities than Japan has in a year, and does all that sorrow left behind add up in some way, accumulate like an invisible pollutant in the atmosphere? What kind of creatures feed off of that sorrow? What kind of thing thrives in an environment like that?

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered."

The summer I was 11 or 12, Animal World with Bill Burrud was on CBS, and of course I watched that. Immediately after was another summer replacement show, a British series called The Prisoner, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan. And now Pat tells me Patrick McGoohan has died at age 80.
From the opening credits, I was entranced, stolen away to Faery by paranoid elves. I didn't understand half the things that were being said, like a kid overhearing an argument between grown-ups, but The Prisoner crawled into my bones and became part of my soul. Orwell had an intellectual understanding of the modern state in Animal Farm and 1984, but McGoohan understood it intuitively. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
1984 caught that in prose, Animal Farm has the power of fable, but The Prisoner was poetry. And this Winston Smith was an Irishman, a combination of anger and wit that was going to be a lot harder for Them to step on.
Apparently it started with an anecdote about a village populated by retired spies, a community of people who knew too many secrets for the government to ever let them out of its sight. You could tell your more literal minded friends that The Prisoner was a sequel to McGoohan's Danger Man series (Secret Agent over here). What was that line in the Johnny Rivers theme for Secret Agent? They've given you a number, and taken 'way your name.
What if the The Village had a sinister purpose? What if John Drake was taken prisoner, who knows by what side? Whose side was anyone on? An old naturalist Andre Gregory met told him that the modern metropolis was a model for the new concentration camp, where the prisoners police themselves and are very proud of the prison they've built around themselves.

It just occurred to me how often Number Six is a trickster hero, for all the storms of anger and secret agent fisticuffs: situation hopeless, no escape, keeping one step ahead of a crooked house and a sardonic smile that he saved for himself.

Sometimes it was "Invictus" staged by Dali, and sometimes the metaphor was more obvious. A Wild West episode was banned in America because Number Six's refusal to carry a gun might be seen as a rebuke to the war in Vietnam, which tells us more about Americans than it does about The Prisoner. The last episode descended into Magical Mystery Tour indulgence, but what the hell. The damage was already done.
All I knew, God break my bones but never bend me, was which side I was going to be on whenever forced to choose between bully or underdog, between the push-button mentality and the human act. I am not a number; I am a free man. And let them laugh. As Gordon Lightfoot suggested, if we cannot beat the Devil, we can try to give him a few unpleasant memories.

"A Good Many Things Go Around in the Dark Besides Santa Claus." (Herbert Hoover)

Michael (Mike) Connell (standing above left), the I.T. guy for Karl Rove and the Bush administration, the fellow who "lost" those Justice Department e-mails, who admitted that the 2004 vote in Ohio had been rigged, has died in a small plane crash, leaving a wife Heather and four children. Probably an accident, but certainly the most convenient death for an outgoing administration since William Casey slipped into a coma during the Iran-Contra affair.

Goodbye, Bettie Page

Living archetype and artists' avatar Miss Bettie Page has passed away at 85. I've written about her twice before-- just last year because of the early death of her greatest benefactor, Dave Stevens-- and we shall not see her like again.

"All the sad sweet funny pretty girls in comics, from Sophie Bangs as Promethea to Francine to Maggie Chascarillo, owe a debt to Bettie Page."

Of all the money e'er I had, I spent it in good company;
And all the harm I've ever done, alas was done to none but me;
And all I've done for want of wit, to memory now I can't recall,
So fill me to the parting glass, goodnight and joy be with you all.

Of all the comrades e'er I had, they're sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts e'er I had , they wish me one more day to stay,
But since it falls unto my lot that I should go and you should not,
I'll gently rise and softly call, goodnight and joy be with you all.

North Carolina's Standards Laboratory Penalized for Setting Standards

A state employee in North Carolina refused to lower the flag to half-staff for Jesse Helms, and chose early retirement rather than follow the governor's order. I'm a "speak no ill of the dead" kind of guy, at least in print (in person I've been known to follow Alice Roosevelt's rule "if you can't say something nice, come sit next to me).
When Helms died last week (he actually died on the 3rd, but the family myth-makers pressured the nursing home to say he died on the 4th), I ignored it as befits a man who devoted his public life to using hatred as a tool; "let his blood fall on stone and nourish nothing".
Now comes this news of L.F. Eason, the employee at North Carolina's Agriculture Department Standards Laboratory, who couldn't let it go. And the mass media seems bent on the Disneyfication of Jesse Helms, as though he was a quaint old Southun Senahtuh who was at times "controversial".
No, he wasn't. Helms was a guy who ran with slogans like "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?" and called the University of North Carolina "The University of North Carolina was "the University of Negroes and Communists", and not in the 1950s, but in 1993. He thought it was funny to sing "Dixie" to the first black senator since Reconstruction, explaining "I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries." And in foreign affairs, where he was supposedly above the influence of tobacco, race and politics he could be downright perverse. I've already wasted too many words on the fellow. I've no idea if L.F. Eason did the right thing, or if he should have followed the wise fool Nasrudin's advice to practice invisibility in such affairs, lower the damn flag, let the Stone Mountain rejects have their isn't-it-pretty-to-think-so, voice my dissent like Galileo calling over his shoulder, and move on.
A comment on Wonkette got it right: "I respect nothing more than someone willing to call people on their bullshit."

Mark Twain's Rules for Funeral Etiquette

Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is given.

Make no remarks about his equipment. If the handles are plated, it is best to seem to not observe it.

If the odor of the flowers is too oppressive for your comfort, remember that they were not brought there for you, and that the person for whom they were brought suffers no inconvenience from their presence.

Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.

If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized, let it pass -- do not interrupt.

At the moving passages, be moved -- but only according to the degree of your intimacy with the parties giving the entertainment, or with the party in whose honor the entertainment is given. Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief. Where the occasion is military, the emotions should be graded according to military rank, the highest officer present taking precedence in emotional violence, and the rest modifying their feelings according to their position in the service.

Do not bring your dog.

Tom Snyder

I'll miss him. After Cavett was cancelled in 1975, Tom Snyder was the only antidote to Johnny Carson's, and Letterman's, and Leno's approach of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Yeah, this country needs more starlet interviews and more smirking hosts. I still remember him having Alfred Hitchcock on for an entire show at Halloween to tell ghost stories, at least one of which is still scarred on my brain. I remember him asking John Lennon about what was new in music, and Lennon predicting a big future for a sound we'd never heard called "reggae", and Harlan Ellison complaining that when he handed in a Star Trek movie script in which the universe was destroyed, the studio told him "Not Big Enough!".

As easy as he was to parody, with the laugh, and the cigarettes, and his obvious enthusiasm for talking about sex with Nancy Friday, and the other sins that televised flesh is heir to, you always felt Snyder was sincere in his curiosity. He had an endearing ability to laugh at himself and at celebrity culture, even if more people recognized the parody than had ever seen the show.

The blow-dried haircut was of his era, but he had an old-fashioned broadcaster's sense of hanging out with the old timers like Murrow and Red Barber and the rest of the journeyman. A guy who knew him remembers that Snyder celebrated his first power lunch with the big network brass in 1972 at Cassell's Hamburgers in Koreatown. He never pretended the studio furniture was anything other than foamboard and pretty colors, and for every television actor interview skipped over, there was Harlan Ellison and Ken Kesey and Joan Jett (for men of a certain age, everybody's favorite Girl You Know Would Be Bad For You) and Hitchcock and the Ramones, Sam Ervin, and the rest of the Watergate figures (and on the dark nutball, shudder-provoking side, Charles Manson and Ayn Rand and Timothy Leary).

Harlan Ellison:


Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia, et al:


The great animator Ward Kimball:

The Happy Death of Children

I'm reading Mozart's Women by Jane Glover, and came across this letter by his father Leopold, describing his daughter's fight with intestinal typhoid: "Whover could have listened to the conversations which we three, my wife, myself and my daughter, had on several evenings, during which we convinced her of the vanity of this world and the happy death of children, would not have heard it without tears." Maria Anna survived, living to be 79-- but at least five other Mozart children died in infancy. Has anyone done any research on the theology taught to chldren during an era of high mortality? In our age, a child's first experience with death is often that of an elderly relative, but in the 18th century it seems more of them would be exposed to the loss of playmates and their younger brothers and sisters. How much of what the parents told them, about littlest angels and tender souls too good to live, was passed on for the parent's comfort and how much to comfort a frightened child? "If I should die before I wake..."