It’s been a while since I’ve done anything music related.
“No Fun”, a BBC documentary on the birth of punk rock.
Bonus: “Punk ’76”, another punk documentary. It seems to me that “No Fun” has more coverage of punk in America, while “Punk ’76” is primarily English, and specifically about the punk scene around Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s store.
THR is now reporting the same thing TMZ was reporting yesterday: Tanya Roberts is not dead, in spite of a statement from her rep stating that she was.
Mike Pingel told THR on Monday, “I did get confirmation [of her death], but that was from a very distraught person [Roberts’ boyfriend, Lance O’Brien],” Pingel said.
Pingel added, “And so yes, this morning at 10 a.m. … the hospital did call to say that she was still alive but it’s not looking good. We will hopefully have information [soon]. It’s upsetting.”
If it ain’t a mess, it’ll do until the mess gets here.
Edited to add: The NYT is now officially reporting Ms. Roberts’s death.
Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Phyllis McGuire, last of the McGuire Sisters.
Ms. McGuire, with her older sisters Christine and Dorothy, shot to success overnight after winning the televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts” contest in 1952. Over the next 15 years, they were one of the nation’s most popular vocal groups, singing on the television variety shows of Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Andy Williams and Red Skelton, on nightclub circuits across the country and on records that sold millions.
The sisters epitomized a 1950s sensibility that held up a standard of unreal perfection, wearing identical coifs, dresses and smiles, moving with synchronized precision and blending voices in wholesome songs for simpler times. Their music, like that of Perry Como, Patti Page and other stars who appealed to white, middle-class audiences, contrasted starkly with the rock ’n’ roll craze that was taking the world by storm in the mid-to-late ’50s.
Ms. McGuire was also famously linked aromatically with Sam Giancana. Yes, the mobster.
Richard Thornburgh, former governor of Pennsylvania and Attorney General under Reagan and Bush.
It isn’t “I Saw Three Ships”, but I stumbled across this on the ‘Tube and knew I had to use it.
Werner Klemperer and John Banner sing. Plus Robert Clary.
Yes, you read that right. Colonel Klink and Sargent Schultz sing “Silent Night”. In German. And then Corporal LeBeau sings, too.
I would make fun of this, but I think all three of them are actually pretty good.
(I don’t think that part about the organ is true.)
Because it is a tradition, and because I really like this:
I like this, too:
This isn’t “I Saw Three Ships”, either, but it is a Christmas song that I like (and haven’t used before) from a totally unexpected source: Annie Lennox sings “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”.
Merry Christmas, one and all!
A couple of quick music related ones: Chad Stuart, of Chad and Jeremy.
Leslie West, of Mountain. (“Mississippi Queen”.)
Rebecca Luker, noted Broadway actress. She was only 59.
…
Lawrence tipped me off to the death of James E. Gunn, one of the greats in SF.
Gunn launched his career writing short stories for pulp magazines in 1949 and went on to author dozens of books, starting with 1955’s Star Bridge. He saw his 1962 short story “The Immortals,” about a group who discovers the secret to immortality, made into an ABC movie of the week in 1969 and become a 1970-71 hourlong series.
In addition to fiction, Gunn was known as an editor of anthologies and an author of academic works. He earned a Hugo for 1983’s Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, an exploration of famed author Isaac Asimov’s contributions to the science fiction genre.
…
That’s one part of his career that I’m afraid will get short shrift. As important as he was as a writer and critic, his most important contribution to the genre may have been as a teacher.
To clarify:
In mourning for Jim Gunn, who taught & guided me at the University of Kansas. He allowed me to take independent study courses along w/the regular coursework––i.e., I wrote stories. Then we’d meet in his office & he gave me critiques, suggestions, & support.
— Pat Cadigan (@Cadigan) December 24, 2020
I’m going to ride this Christmas donkey until it drops.
(No, that’s just a Rifftrax promo clip, that’s not the full movie. Though I believe you can find the full movie on YouTube.)
And now for something completely different: “Never Mind The Baubles – Christmas ’77 with The Sex Pistols”.
Bonus: I’m kind of marginal about “Retail Archaeology”, but “A Very Dead Mall Christmas” provided me with about 15 minutes worth of amusement.
Bonus #2: “Cooking for the Queen At Christmas”.
50 years ago today, on December 21, 1970, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, met with one of the greatest singers of all time, Elvis Presley, at the White House.
The story goes that Elvis requested the meeting with Nixon, as he wanted the president to appoint him a “federal agent at large” in what was then known as the “Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs”. (BNDD merged into the DEA in 1973.) Elvis believed he could be a force for good and fight drug use among the young people.
Smithsonian magazine has a slightly different version of the story (written by the great Peter Carlson):
…
Anyway, Elvis wrote a letter to Nixon (reproduced here, transcription here) asking for the position and a badge. There was some internal discussion at the White House, but presidential aide Egil “Bud” Krogh persuaded Nixon to agree to the meeting.
That personal gift Elvis mentions in his letter? It was a Colt .45. I have seen it asserted both that the Secret Service confiscated it before Elvis got in to see Nixon, and that Elvis got it past the guards and personally presented it to Nixon.
Nixon’s famous taping system had not yet been installed, so the conversation wasn’t recorded. But Krogh took notes: “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. The President then indicated that those who use drugs are also those in the vanguard of anti-American protest.”
“I’m on your side,” Elvis told Nixon, adding that he’d been studying the drug culture and Communist brainwashing.
Elvis asked for a BNDD badge, and Nixon basically said “Make it so.”
Before leaving, Elvis asked Nixon to say hello to Schilling and West, and the two men were escorted into the Oval Office. Nixon playfully punched Schilling on the shoulder and gave both men White House cuff links.
“Mr. President, they have wives, too,” Elvis said. So Nixon gave them each a White House brooch.
After Krogh took him to lunch at the White House mess, Elvis received his gift—the narc badge.
The meeting was kept secret at the time: Jack Anderson covered it a year later, but apparently nobody actually gave a tinker’s damn back then.
Today:
You can download copies of the photos from the George Washington University National Security Archive (their site has been a major help in writing this). NARA has a site devoted to the meeting, but it is annoying as all get out. You can order a print here, as well as some other related merchandise.
“Bud” Krogh apparently wrote a book about the meeting (called, fittingly, The Day Elvis Met Nixon (affiliate link)) which I believe is out of print but readily available from Amazon.
A handful of short and selfish videos today.
From the “Food Wishes” channel, a couple of things I’m bookmarking because I’d like to try them:
“Homemade Eggnog Recipe – How to Make Classic Christmas Eggnog”.
I just bought a bottle of 18 year old rum. But I’m lazy, so I may just purchase a good commercial eggnog (like the Promised Land Dairy one) and add rum to that.
Speaking of rum, “Hot Buttered Rum”.
Not food, just for grins: Mireille Mathieu sings “La Marseillaise” in 1989 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for its centennial. And it has English subtitles. I am currently immersed in the French Revolution block of the “Revolutions” podcast, so this is relevant to my interests.
Last one: “No Regrets: The life and music of Edith Piaf”, a short (about 15 minutes) documentary from France 24 English.
Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.
In the meantime, Charley Pride.
A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”
…
Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.
Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.
Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.
The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”
…
Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.
I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.
On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…
…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”
“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”
The holiday is only two weeks away, so here’s a little morning musical interlude to cheer you up and put you in the spirit.
She had a strong TV career, and an interesting theater one:
What would have been her Broadway debut — “The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake” (1967), a generation-gap comedy — closed in previews, reportedly because its Hollywood star, Jean Arthur, was ill. Ms. Dietrich’s first official Broadway appearance was also brief: “Here’s Where I Belong,” a musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” opened and closed on March 3, 1968.
Then her luck changed. Ms. Dietrich played a sensible older sister in Mike Nichols’s Broadway production of Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971). The play, starring Peter Falk and Lee Grant as Manhattanites struggling through a bad economy, ran for almost two years and won two Tony Awards.
She was most famous, though, as “Mother Nature” in those 1970s commercials for a margarine company. (“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”)
Ian Finkel, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest xylophonist”.
Mr. Finkel’s path took him from the borscht belt resorts in the Catskills to playing with the New York Philharmonic. He also worked as a composer and musical arranger for stars like Sid Caesar, Tito Puente and Ginger Rogers, his brother, Elliot Finkel, said.
As a percussionist, he worked in orchestras that accompanied the likes of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross and Tony Bennett.
Today, music.
To start with, something short-ish. I think this dates to 2011, and was produced by the Oklahoma History Center as part of an exhibit: “Pickin’ and Grinnin’: Roy Clark, ‘Hee Haw’ & Country Humor”.
And a longer bonus that I think is really cool: a 1969 documentary for Granada Television, “Johnny Cash In San Quentin”.
I had a long day and a late night yesterday. I had videos queued up for Tuesday and I have stuff queued up for the Thursday holiday, but I didn’t manage to get anything enqueued for today.
So here’s two longish things, one of which bends the rules a little bit:
“Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story” from the BBC in 2013.
Bonus video: this is my rule bending one, as it is actually a noir movie, not non-fiction. Lawrence mentioned this last night, and I thought I’d throw it up here since I don’t see that he’s blogged about it. This is also kind of a bookmark for me: I might watch this once I’ve caught up on sleep.
“Inner Sanctum”, from 1948. It’s only 62 minutes long.
In addition to this being a somewhat well-regarded noir film, it also features the great SF/fantasy writer Fritz Leiber as “Dr. Valonius”. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but are curious about Leiber, “Dr. Valonius” shows up almost immediately. (Edit: I was misinformed: the Fritz Leiber in “Inner Sanctum” is actually the writer’s father, not the writer.)
I thought today I’d post some stuff that I think is just pure fun.
South Texas Pistolero posted a few weeks ago about the Roy Clark Greatest Hits album, and then this popped up: Roy Clark and Johnny Cash play “Folsom Prison Blues”.
Something else that popped up: this excerpt from “The Seven Little Foys”, in which Bob Hope (as Eddie Foy) and James Cagney (as George M. Cohan) do a dance-off.
These two are obviously having so much fun – not just dancing, but playing off each other’s lines. I like this almost as much as I do the Nicholas Brothers routine from “Stormy Weather”. (And both men were in their fifties when this was filmed: that’s some darn fine dancing for men of that age.)
(Historical callback: Eddie Foy was backstage in the Iroquois Theatre preparing to perform when it caught fire. He famously ran out on stage and attempted to calm the crowd and keep them from panicking, even while chunks of burning scenery were falling near him. Foy was widely considered to be one of the heroes of the disaster. And this is dramatized in “The Seven Little Foys”.)
Bonus: I may be stretching other people’s definitions of “fun” here, but you know what I find fun? Advertising fiascos.
Once upon a time (the early 1980s) there was a chain called “Rax Roast Beef”. It was mostly based in the Northeast, but:
But selling roast beef sandwiches wasn’t enough:
This sounds like a company that is very confused about what their core mission is. But to make a long story shorter…
I find this guy kind of annoying (at least in the first 30 seconds or so) but the video is short: “The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain”.
The Mr. Delicious promotional video:
Question: is this the worst fast food promotional campaign ever? The first guy seems to think so, but: was it worse than Herb?
Or The Noid?
Or – and I’m pretty sure Lawrence would argue that this is the worst fast food commercial of all time – the “singing” rat creatures for Quizno’s? That pretty much killed their company, too.
Dan Baum, journalist and author.
He was somewhat famous for being fired by the New Yorker: more specifically, for tweeting about being fired by the New Yorker.
Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.
The media world, which always paid close-attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Mr. Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)
Mr. Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.
He went on to write several books. The NYT singles out Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (affiliate link) as his “most acclaimed” book. Among his other books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip (affiliate link), a book that great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn recommends.
NYT obit for Billy Joe Shaver.
In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body-check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice.
“It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body,” he recalled in a book, “Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage & Triumph,” written with E.M. Swift. “I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed.”
He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair.
College hockey is held in awe in Boston, its athletes worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy’s accident, more than 200 special church masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee.
That reverence for the younger Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research.
The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly $5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website.