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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"To Sir, With Love" by Lulu

Before she was Edina Monsoon's only client she was a fresh-faced gamine with a taste for interracial hanky-panky; in recent years, Lulu has endured failed marriages - first to a Bee Gee then to a hairdresser - and performances with Take That to become a bonafide fame survivor.

Happy Birthday Lulu!
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Roseanne, Bar None

When she first burst onto the scene in the late 1980s, courtesy of the era's comedy club boom, hers was a decidedly working class shtick; calling herself the 'domestic goddess' and dressed in schlumpy clothes, Roseanne Barr wowed the audience and host alike during her first appearance at The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and almost overnight, it seems, she had hit the big time...

As sitcoms go Roseanne was unrepentantly working class, an ethos which was as evident in the wardrobe and set design as it was in the writing. The blend of family and workplace scenarios on the show was unprecedented, and served to highlight just how hard working class people - especially moms - struggle to balance the two. Plus, the first season of the show features occasional appearances by a young George Clooney - with a head of hair you could lose a hand in!

The show became as famous for its backstage politics and Barr's own tussles with the network as it was acclaimed for the quality of its writing and acting, especially by Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman; Barr's midseries marriage to Tom Arnold - while it served to amp up the tabloid headlines - eventually threatened to disrupt the success of the show.

After Roseanne had run its course, Barr tried her hand at a variety of other TV formats, including the potentially career-killing talk show; yet two years as host of The Roseanne Show only served to sharpen the lady's perspective. Always a magnet for controversy - who can forget the national anthem debacle? - it's inevitable that anyone that outspoken seemingly without shame will occasionally give offense; for my part, I can't wait to see who she's going to offend next, even if it might be me.

Born on this day in 1951, Roseanne Barr has lately made a return to the stand-up stage, in addition to recording music for kids and appearing as a panelist on the sorts of shows where opinions matter most - from The View to Real Time with Bill Maher.
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Remembering... Marie Rudisill

From my perspective, there's nothing better than a dirty talking old lady - that's comedy gold, right there... Half the fun is in the shocked audience reaction, as if a person could get to the age of 70, 80, or 90 and not have already heard and said everything. Hell, I'd got there by the age of 12; if you think anything I say is shocking now, wait 'til I'm 80 motherfucker.

Marie Rudisill, who passed away on this day in 2006 at the age of 95, was one such lady - a fearlessly outspoken woman with impeccable comedy timing, who began appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2000; what I didn't know until I began researching this post, though, is that Marie Rudisill was Truman Capote's Aunt Tiny, about whom he frequently wrote - not much of it nice. I have to admit, that kinda blew my mind a little bit.

Rudisill wrote a book about life with her famous relative - which is how she came to be invited on The Tonight Show in the first place - entitled Fruitcake: Memories of Truman Capote & Sook; another book - The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote - followed. In all Rudisill published 8 books late in her life, including cookbooks and juvenile fiction.
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Happy Birthday Dylan Moran

Irish comedian Dylan Moran spent eight years in the comedy clubs of Dublin honing his conversational, absurdist mumblings before he hit the big time with the BBC's Black Books in 2000. In 1996, he was the youngest person to win the Perrier Comedy Award, the highest honour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and now, as the highlight of his career, a coveted profile on the Pop Culture Institute.

(Okay, so that last one isn't true... But the rest is!) Breithlá Sona Duit Dylan Moran!
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POPnews - November 3rd

[A few hours after returning from her history-making space flight Laika died from stress and overheating, which fact wasn't made public for decades; while her presence in pop culture has long been felt, now not only does she appear in bas-relief on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space (built in 1964) at Russia's Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in November 1997 a plaque honouring Laika was unveiled at the Star City cosmodrome, and since April 2008 a statue of her has adorned the military facility near Moscow where she'd been prepared for her fatal adventure.]
1493 - Christopher Columbus first sighted the Caribbean island of Dominica.

1783 - John Austin, a highwayman, was the last person to be publicly hanged at London's Tyburn gallows.

1793 - French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror for criticizing the tyrannical regime of Maximilien Robespierre as well as daring to write Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

1817 - The Bank of Montreal, Canada's oldest chartered bank, opened in, of all places, Montreal.

1838 - The Times of India, the world's largest (in terms of circulation) English-language daily broadsheet, was founded as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce.

1868 - Ulysses S. Grant was elected 18th US President over Democrat Horatio Seymour.

1896 - William McKinley was elected 25th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1908 - William Howard Taft was elected 27th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1930 - The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was opened to traffic.

1935 - Greece's King George II regained his throne following a plebiscite.

1936 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Alf Landon.

1954 - Gojira - the first in the Godzilla series of films - was released in Japan.

1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2; onboard was a dog named Laika, a 6 kg (13 lb) stray abducted from the streets of Moscow.

1964 - Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected 36th US President over Republican Barry Goldwater.

1970 - Salvador Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile.

1978 - Dominica gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

1979 - Five members of the Communist Workers Party - Sandi Smith, Dr. James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cause, and Dr. Michael Nathan - were shot dead and seven were wounded in 88 seconds by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during a 'Death to the Klan' rally in what came to be known as the Greensboro massacre. One of the gravest miscarriages of justice in American history occurred without the presence of the police, who normally would have been present; of the 40 thugs involved only sixteen were arrested, only six of them were ever brought to trial and all were acquitted.

1986 - The Federated States of Micronesia gained its independence from the United States of America.

1992 - Bill Clinton was elected 42nd US President over Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot.
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"Right Back Where We Started From" by Maxine Nightingale

Birthday wishes go out today to Maxine Nightingale, whose 1975 hit Right Back Where We Started From is oh-so emblematic of those heady times... Nightingale later had hits in 1977 with Love Hit Me and in 1979 with Lead Me On, while her success with this particular number continues unabated...

The song - written by written by Pierre Tubbs and J. Vincent Edwards - was featured prominently in Paul Newman's 1977 film Slap Shot, and has appeared in numerous other films over the years as well; it's also been covered by Sinitta, Marcia Hines, and Cleopatra.
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Pop History Moment: The Coronation of Haile Selassie

[This gorgeous gold medal was struck in 1955, to commemorate of the 25th anniversary of Haile Selassie's coronation.]
It's always been a matter of curiosity to me how exactly an Emperor of Ethiopia could become a potent religious symbol, first to the people of Jamaica, and thence to the Rastafari movement - which currently numbers some 600,000 people worldwide. Clearly there is much more than meets the eye in Haile Selassie I, for although he was an eminently civilized and cultured person there is nothing in him that would, outwardly at least, seem to inspire the fervent devotion to HIM*. Imagine: a cult of personality formed around a modest, devout figure!**

Selassie's reign actually began in the reign of his aunt, Empress Zewditu, when he was elevated to the rank of heir apparent and eventually came to serve as regent from 1916 onward. While serving as Crown Prince, Selassie (then known as Ras Tafari) continued the modernization begun under Menelik II, and certainly Selassie's rejection of colonial norms and support for pan-Africanism must have struck a chord with blacks everywhere, especially in the 1920s. Nevertheless, there were constant power struggles between aunt and nephew, culminating in a near-coup over Selassie's brokering of the Italo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1928.

Zewditu's death, in April 1930 - under mysterious and never satisfactorily explained circumstances - set the stage for Ethiopia's greatest moment of glory - the coronation of Haile Selassie and Empress Menen, on this day in 1930; held at the Cathedral of St. George in Addis Ababa, the splendid affair (with a rumoured price tag of $3 million) was attended by royalty and dignitaries from around the world.

The introduction of the country's first written constitution in July 1931, providing for a bicameral legislature, would give the Kingdom an all-too short-lived crack at modern democracy; the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and ensuing war of 1935-6 was a brief interruption (during which HIM lived in exile in the UK, at Bath's Fairfield House), but a brief coup in 1960 which installed his son Asfa Wossen as Emperor, the deposition of the Emperor in March 1974 following the Wollo Famine and the 1973 oil crisis, tenure of Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, and a severe famine in the 1980s*** all served to undermine what Ethiopia could have become, as well as what it dreamt of becoming on that day.

*Rastafarians refer to Selassie by many names, including HIM, the acronym of His Imperial Majesty.
**Sarcasm! Selassie's Christ-like attributes are made abundantly clear on any number of Rastafarian websites.
***No doubt caused or at least exacerbated by central planning - which does. not. work.
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In Memoriam: Marie Antoinette

Born in Vienna on this day in 1755 and raised under the stern gaze of Empress Maria Theresa - one of the most formidable monarchs in European history - Marie Antoinette, as she came to be known, had a sheltered, regimented childhood; her only value, as must have been made clear to her again and again as a girl, was as a pawn in the royal marriage game.

And so it was. In 1767 she was formally betrothed to the Dauphin of France (later the hapless Louis XVI), and finally married by proxy in 1770 following three years of negotiations over dowries and the other fine points of royal marriage. Then the shy yet regal girl began her journey from the heart of Europe to Versailles - out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Court life at Schönbrunn and Hofburg was downright private compared to the same at her new French home, where anyone from peasant to noble might just wander into the palace seeking an audience. It was a highly political place (in both senses - namely, concerned with the politics of the country and the world yet riven with its own factions and issues) and Marie Antoinette was no politician. Had she been, she might have survived what was to come.

Originally much beloved by the people, especially for her patronage of the fine arts (especially music) - her former teacher, Christoph Willibald Gluck, went on to much fame - as history was to show it didn't take long for that mob to turn ugly, blaming all the failings of its French politicians on its most high-profile Austrian possession. Outrageously slandered throughout her lifetime and for many years afterward, it's taken centuries for the light of truth to be shone on the life and character of Marie Antoinette.

The quintessential revisionist text (and I use the word here in its most positive sense) is Lady Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette, The Journey (2001) which, with solid research and sterling insight, offers a glimpse into the life of a woman tragically caught in the crossfire of history.
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"Free" by Ultra Nate

For every Jennifer Hudson (who can't seem to make up her mind when it comes to how she feels about gay men) there is an Ultra Naté, who knows that 'black girl, gay guy' is the most fabulous combo since chocolate and peanut butter.

Can it really be more than a decade now since Free turned out untold dance floors? Girl, I am old.

From the album Situation: Critical (1998) here is the forever young diva whose birthday it is today; go ahead, play the video. I dare you not to dance.
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Happy Birthday Your Majesty

Erudite and multi-lingual, Queen Sofia of Spain (born on this day in 1938) has been a constant, serene presence at the side of her husband King Juan Carlos during turbulent times...

Born in Athens the eldest child of King Paul I of the Hellenes and his wife Queen Fredericka, Sofia's childhood witnessed the many travails which have beset that royal house from its inception in 1863 (the main one being, of course, that they are Danish and therefore merely squatters). A great deal of uncertainty shaped Her Majesty's childhood, including two bouts of exile, the first one during World War II and finally, for good, in 1964 (which, naturally, didn't affect her, except as a family matter).

Yet with the fortitude (or sense of entitlement) which is a family trait of the House of Schleswig Holstein Sonderburg Glücksburg, she ended up not doing too badly for herself. In 1954 she met and enchanted then-Prince Juan Carlos on a Mediterranean cruise, she competed in the 1960 Olympics (representing Greece in sailing), and in 1962 she married her Prince, who assumed the throne in 1975 after the death of Francisco Franco.

Since then she has concerned herself with charity, the rightful occupation of royalty. Through her Foundation she carries out numerous engagements, and is in particular interested in refugee relief, the treatment of drug addiction, fine arts, and micro-finance (working closely with Muhammad Yunus the Nobel laureate in the process).
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In Memoriam: James K. Polk

I must confess that I didn't know anything about the 11th US President until I heard the song about him by They Might Be Giants, from their 1996 album Factory Showroom. The song itself is a triumph of pop - not just music but culture - presenting history as it does in such an interesting and memorable way; hear it once, I guarantee you'll be humming it forever. A real earworm, as Mr. Barr would say.

Considered the best solution to an impasse in the Democratic Party, the former Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee James K. Polk (born this day in 1795) was one of the first so-called dark horse candidates when he was nominated. Once elected, rather than merely serving as a caretaker president, he became one of the young nation's solidest leaders, fulfilling the Manifest Destiny inherent in President James Monroe's famous doctrine by completing most of the contiguous 48 states during his single term in office, save for the tiny Gadsden Purchase, which was finally bought for $10 million in 1853.

Neither the first slaveholding President nor the last, his position on slavery (especially involving the prevention of its expansion into new territories north and west of Missouri) made him equally unpopular among slavers, abolitionists, and compromisers alike; Polk favoured the extension of the Missouri Compromise over implementation of the Wilmot Proviso.

From the start Polk was resolved to serve only one term, and he set four clearly defined goals for his administration: the re-establishment of the Independent Treasury System, the reduction of tariffs, acquisition of some or all the Oregon boundary dispute, and the purchase of California and the Southwest from Mexico. It was also during his term that the Republic of Texas was admitted to the Union.

He did all of that in the time he allotted himself, kept to his word by shirking his incumbency, and then to seal the deal, died in June 1849, just three months after leaving office; the Presidency has been shown time and again to take its toll on those who assume it, but it took even more from the once-handsome Polk, who worked tirelessly to implement his agenda, even while reportedly suffering from cholera. At the time of his death he was only 53.

His home is now a museum, in Nashville.
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"Constant Craving" by k. d. lang

It was 1992 when the pride of Consort, Alberta, revealed that she was a lesbian; soon enough the same town that had once praised her shamed itself with hateful graffiti... The place that had already defamed itself once before - when lang came out as a vegetarian - did it all over again, only this time with homophobia. Footage of a billboard featuring her picture scrawled with the words 'Eat Beef Dyke' was shown all over the world.

k. d. lang was one of the first big stars to come out mid-career, and to do so involved a terrible risk; career suicide is what people (usually 'straight' record executives - if they can be considered people) called it. Small town and corporate bigots alike be damned; Ingénue became her biggest selling album to date, and Constant Craving was the biggest single on it. Suddenly the shame of Consort, Alberta, was the pride of the world.

It was the end of May; I remember because the issue of The Advocate in which she came out - now one of the most sacred relics in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute - was (and still is) dated June 3rd. I was then co-hosting a show at Dalhousie University's CKDU-Radio called The Word Is Out, when the producer - the inimitable Brenda Barnes (which, with a Halifax accent, is one hell of a name) - called me half off her nut with excitement to break the news.

I suggested that we should host a coming out party for k. d., she loved the idea, and so that's what we did; I quickly came up with a playlist of songs both old and new, wrote some thoughtful but humourous commentary to intersperse between them, and together we produced a half hour of college radio gold. Unwittingly - and more than a dozen years before the Pop Culture Institute was born - its style emerged, fully-formed and rarin' to go.

Not unlike k. d. lang herself, I might add, who emerged not so fully formed but still rarin' to go on this day in 1961.
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Pop History Moment: The Murder of Theo Van Gogh

On this day in 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street corner by a terrorist named Mohammed Bouyeri; the cause of Bouyeri's rage against Van Gogh was (at least in part) due to a film he made, in collaboration with Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, entitled Submission, which was justifiably critical of the fundamentalist Islamic treatment of women...

Van Gogh was shot eight times with an HS 2000 handgun, and died on the spot; Bouyeri then cut his victim's throat, nearly decapitating him, and stabbed him in the chest. He was apprehended later the same day, after himself being shot and wounded by police. In the days to come many fellow members of the Hofstad Network, a Dutch Islamic terrorist organization he had co-founded, were also arrested. In July 2005 Bouyeri was sent to prison for life.

The violence of Van Gogh's death reverberated through Holland for weeks, resulting in many unfortunate counter-attacks against mosques and counter-counter-attacks against churches; for a country still reeling from the 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a Dutch politician who was a) openly-gay, and b) an outspoken critic of what he viewed as the intolerance imported into Dutch society by Muslims in particular, Van Gogh's martyrdom to the cause of free speech was a bitter blow.

That Van Gogh was intemperate - even bigoted - in his criticism of Islam is unfortunate, mainly because a well-spoken and thoughtful critic who is killed under such circumstances is a far more effective martyr than one who throws around words like geitenneuker (goat-fucker) as Van Gogh often did when describing Muslims. That his bigotry was born out of a perfectly understandable frustration with the hatred fostered by fundamentalist religion of all kinds did not give him permission to add to the problem with harsh words and hatred of his own; indeed, understanding, not to mention compassion, might have saved his life.

A memorial to Theo Van Gogh entitled De Schreeuw (The Scream) - unveiled in March of this year - now stands in Amsterdam's Oosterpark, a short distance from the corner of the Linnaeusstraat and Tweede Oosterparkstraat where he was murdered. It stands as a reminder that the current Islamic crusade against Western Civilization isn't merely aimed at our Western-ness - our politicians, laws, and institutions - but also at our civilization - our artists, philosophers, and dreamers - as well.
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POPnews - November 2nd

[The Chicago Tribune's premature headline on the morning of November 3rd, heading a story by Arthur Sears Henning, gave the world this iconic image; only a few hundred copies of the paper were printed before it was changed, but it was enough to give the President the photo-op to end all photo-ops.]
1852 - Franklin Pierce was elected 14th US President over Whig Winfield Scott.

1880 - James A. Garfield was elected 20th US President over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.

1889 - North and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states.

1917 - The Balfour Declaration proclaimed support for Jewish settlement in Palestine.

1920 - Warren G. Harding was elected 29th US President over Democrat James M. Cox.

1930 - Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia, an event still celebrated by Rastafarians.

1936 - The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was established as a radio network on the same day the British Broadcasting Corporation initiated the BBC Television Service; both channels are still in operation to this day.

1947 - Howard Hughes piloted the maiden (and only) flight of the Spruce Goose (aka the Hughes H-4 Hercules), the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built, at Long Beach, California. Today it resides at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

1948 - Harry S. Truman was elected* 33rd US President over Republican Thomas E. Dewey despite a rift in his own party caused by Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond.

*Because he'd initially become President after his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office in April 1946, this was Truman's one and only Presidential victory.

1963 - South Vietnam's President Ngô Ðình Diệm was assassinated following a military coup.

1964 - King Saud of Saudi Arabia was deposed by a family coup, and replaced by his half-brother King Faisal.

1965 - Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker, set himself on fire in front of the river entrance to The Pentagon to protest the use of napalm in the Vietnam War.

1976 - Jimmy Carter was elected 39th US President over Republican Gerald R. Ford, becoming the first US president from the Deep South since Reconstruction.

1982 - The UK's Channel 4 was launched; within five years it had established itself as the best English-language television network that ever was.

1983 - President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating Martin Luther King Day, currently the only national holiday honoring an individual American; due to opposition from crackers and bigots, January 17th, 2000, was the first time it was celebrated officially in all 50 states.

1984 - Velma Barfield became the first woman executed in the US since 1962; she was also the first US woman executed by lethal injection. She died at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, for poisoning 4 elderly patients in her care.

1988 - The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, was created at Cornell by Robert Tappan Morris but launched from MIT as a ruse. Morris is now an associate professor at MIT.

2000 - The first crew arrived at the International Space Station, consisting of US astronaut William Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev; since then the ISS has been continuously occupied.

2004 - George W. Bush was elected to a 'second' term as US President over Democrat John Kerry.

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"Witness" by Bo Bice

[WARNING: If you are Gavin of Y|O|Y, you may want to skip the story and just enjoy the video; if you do choose to proceed, don't say I didn't warn you. This post is definitely NSFG*.]

While I am generally at a loss for new and better ways to excoriate the televised karaoke dreck-fest that is American Idol (not to mention its ilk of many nations, which are spreading through the music industry like carefully pre-packaged cancers) every so often even I have to admit that occasionally a unique and compelling talent manages to shine through, which is certainly the case with birthday boy Bo Bice.

Of course, he may have been too unique and compelling, which is why he was only a runner-up, while winner Carrie Underwood has gone on to inspire a generation of girls to get on up out of that trailer park and make something of themselves - providing they're pretty, stacked, and can convincingly sound like every other female vocalist in the country format.

Witness is the first single from Bice's 2007 second album See the Light; the video was directed by Ramon Boutviseth, who won an online contest held by the band Incubus to direct the video for their song Dig.

*Not Suitable For Gavin, guh!
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POPnews - November 1st

[The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - created under the patronage of
Pope Sixtus IV - contains many iconic images such as this one, which
depicts God giving life to Adam; rendered in a naturalistic style
which had begun emerging as a result of the High Renaissance, the
ceiling thus contains even more dicks than the College of Cardinals.]
1179 - France's Phillip II was crowned junior King at the behest of his ailing father Louis VII; the ceremony took place at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Rheims and was conducted by Archbishop William Whitehands.

1512 - The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo, was exhibited to the public for the first time, despite its having been completed in 1480; located within the Apostolic Palace, the Sistine Chapel is where papal convocations are held. Since their restoration - unveiled by Pope John Paul II in April 1994 - the frescoes have been so popular the Vatican is now attempting to curtail access to them.

1520 - The Strait of Magellan - the passage immediately south of mainland South America, connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in the vicinity of Antarctica - was first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan during his global circumnavigation.

1604 - The first known performance of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello was given, at Whitehall Palace in London.

1611 - The first known performance of William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest was given, at Whitehall Palace in London.

1755 - Lisbon was destroyed by a massive earthquake, tsunami, and fire beginning at 9:40 AM - killing between sixty thousand and ninety thousand people as they attended church services.

1800 - President John Adams became the first US President to live in the Executive Mansion (later renamed the White House).

1894 - Nicholas II became the new Tsar of Russia after the death of his father, Alexander III.

1918 - The worst rapid transit accident in US history - the Malbone Street Wreck - occurred under the intersection of Malbone Street and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn; at least 93 died.

1922 - Mehmed VI - the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire - abdicated.

1938 - Seabiscuit faced War Admiral at a horse race dubbed 'The Match of the Century' - in which the 5 year-old stallion, facing long odds in more ways than one, came from behind to eventually win by four clear lengths - events thrillingly recounted in the 2003 film Seabiscuit*, starring Tobey Maguire as Seabiscuit's jockey Red Pollard and Jeff Bridges as his owner Charles S. Howard.

*Which was itself based on Laura Hillenbrand's 2000 book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend.

1950 - Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman, who was living at Blair House while his usual digs were being renovated. Police officer Leslie Coffelt was killed in the attack, but not before himself killing Torresola; Collazo was shot in the melee, captured, and sentenced to the electric chair, but Truman commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in 1952.

1954 - The Front de Libération Nationale fired the first shots in the Algerian War of Independence.

1963 - The largest radio telescope ever constructed - the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - officially opened.

1968 - The Motion Picture Association of America's film rating system was officially introduced, originating with the ratings G, M, R, and X.

1973 - Leon Jaworski was appointed as the new Special Prosecutor to look into the Watergate Scandal.

1981 - Antigua and Barbuda gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

1991 - Three faculty and one staff member of the department of physics and astronomy, along with one administrator, were killed when physics graduate student Gang Lu went on a shooting rampage at the University of Iowa.

1993 - The Maastricht Treaty took effect, formally establishing the European Union.
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Parting Shot: Jack O' Lantern

Many thanks to Gavin over at Y|O|Y, for this bewitching seasonal image... I have no idea where it came from, but I do love it. I've even seen it being used by a few of my Facebook friends for their profile pics, so I figured it was safe to lift it.
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Now Showing: "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"

Because not only wouldn't it be Hallowe'en without The Great Pumpkin, I wouldn't let it be Hallowe'en without the It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!



I make no secret of my affection for the work of Charles M. Schulz, nor of my opinion that his work with the Peanuts characters achieved its apex when Schulz's ideas, Bill Meléndez' vision, and the music of Vince Guaraldi came together - as witnessed by this utterly charming bit of animation.



Because of the numerous similarities* between myself and perpetual schmuck Charlie Brown it can be difficult at times for me to watch; providing I can keep myself from over-thinking things, this (along with A Charlie Brown Christmas) has been my favourite seasonal ritual for as long as I can remember.

*Chief among them being that I would probably resign myself to the fact that all I got for trick-or-treating was rocks, like he does, rather than using them to break every window in the neighbourhood. Remember: no one makes you into a victim without your permission, a message present whenever and wherever Charlie Brown appears.
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Happy Birthday King-Father Norodom Sihanouk

One of the things I like best about blogging is the learning I get to do; before writing this, for instance, I had no idea that the former King of Cambodia holds the Guinness Book's world record for the person who's held the greatest variety of titles in one government. In this case, these include: two terms as king, two as sovereign prince, one as president, two as prime minister, and one as Cambodia's non-titled head of state, as well as numerous positions as leader of various governments-in-exile.

A close second, though, involves the surprises; I had one such surprise today, while researching this post, and it involves His Majesty's support for same-sex marriage. Given the reverence in Cambodia for the 87-year-old King-Father (a term not unlike Queen Mother) his support gives marriage equality an invaluable boost in Southeast Asia.
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In Memoriam: John Candy

In the all-too-brief 15 years that spanned the career of John Candy, it can be safely said that he made no enemies, but only friends; and while it looked, a few years ago, like his memory might fade from the public consciousness altogether, the advent of DVDs means that much of his work has been re-released and is enjoying something of a renaissance...

Born on this day in 1950, John Candy got his start with Toronto's famed improve theatre troupe, The Second City; while there he also appeared in many low- or no-budget films, as well as small (usually uncredited) roles in larger films, such as Class of '44. The characters he developed at Second City became mainstays of that sketch comedy alternate universe Second City Television (SCTV).

As the 80s progressed, so did Candy's career... An appearance in 1979's Steven Spielberg comedy 1941 soon led to greater and greater roles in films like The Blues Brothers, Stripes, and National Lampoon's Vacation. While his role in Ghostbusters ultimately went to fellow SCTV alum Rick Moranis owing to a clash over artistic differences, Candy got his big breakthrough that summer anyway, when he appeared in Splash.

From there the roles came fast and thick: Spaceballs, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Who's Harry Crumb?, and Uncle Buck to name just four; nearly devoid of ego when it came to billing, Candy had no problem alternating between leading and supporting roles, even performing the occasional cameo if it appealed to him. Despite a few critical bombs, Candy entered the 90s as both the guy audiences wanted to see, as well as the one other actors wanted to work with, which made him a rare breed...

While his weight had always been a problem, Candy had also been a heavy smoker, and the combination of the two (as well as the heart disease to which he was genetically predisposed) soon caught up with him; he died in his sleep in March 1994 while on location in Mexico shooting Wagons East!. He was 43. Candy was survived by his wife Rosemary and Jennifer and Christopher, in addition to distraught former colleagues, friends, and fans the world over.
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Onion News Network: Has Hallowe'en Become Over-Commercialized?

I've long been an admirer of The Onion, whether in its tree-hating paper version, snazzy online incarnation, and lately courtesy of their YouTube channel; to a certain degree* it was The Onion's snarky, appallingly honest, and alternate dimension approach to news that inspired the work I've tried to do here at the Pop Culture Institute.

This, then, is their take on Hallowe'en...

*Although not to such a degree that I might be subject to prosecution, word...
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Pop History Moment: The Death of Houdini

Pop lore states that Harry Houdini died of multiple blows to the abdomen delivered by a McGill University student, J. Gordon Whitehead, following a performance in Montreal on October 22nd, 1926. Modern medical science, however, discounts that Houdini's acute appendicitis was caused by any physical trauma; it appears that the blows he suffered were not fatal, but aggravated an existing undetected illness.

When Houdini arrived at Detroit's Garrick Theatre two days after what would be his fatal blow, for what would be his last performance, he had a fever of 40°C (104°F); despite his condition, Houdini took the stage.

Afterwards, he was taken to Room 401 of Detroit's Grace Hospital, where he died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix at 1:26 PM on this day in 1926, at the age of 52. After taking statements from witnesses, Houdini's insurance company concluded that the death was due to the incident on the 22nd and paid double indemnity.

Probably the fact that Houdini was a believer in spiritualism (combined with the fact that he died on the day he did) has given his death the eerie connotations it has picked up over the years. For a full decade after his death Houdini's widow Bess used to hold a seance every October 31st, hoping to contact his spirit; she discontinued the practice in 1936, after he steadfastly refused to show up. Death proved to be the one thing from which Harry Houdini couldn't escape...

Still, it all makes for a suitably ghoulish story for bloggers to rehash every Hallowe'en, so I think in the spirit of the season I'll just go with it.
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Gratuitous Brunette: Michael Landon

For an amazing thirty years, Michael Landon was a fixture on American television, starring on three hugely popular series back to back to back; first he played Little Joe Cartwright in Bonanza from 1959 to 1973, then Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie from 1973 to 1984, and finally Jonathan Smith in Highway To Heaven from 1984 to 1989 - representing more than 700 hours of television, all of it on NBC.

Landon (born this day in 1936) was universally revered in Hollywood; that good-guy image he portrayed was no act. Warm and caring, with an ever-ready smile and a heart as big as the outdoors he loved, his early death in July 1991 was greeted with genuine remorse.

He also had a wicked sense of humour, and loved to play practical jokes, especially on Johnny Carson; having heard that Carson ran over a cat with his car, Landon invited him to dinner at a restaurant where he'd had many of the menu items changed to include the word 'cat'.

Former Little House co-star Melissa Gilbert has said that Landon was like a second father to her, especially after her own father died when she was just 11; Landon had nine children of his own, so opening his home and heart to a tenth must have been the easiest thing in the world for him to do. Gilbert and her husband Bruce Boxleitner named their son after him in 1995.

Despite a fit physique and a positive attitude, though, Landon was a heavy smoker and ate a poor diet, all of which caught up with him at the age of 54. He was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer which quickly spread to his lymph nodes, and in what seemed like no time at all he was gone...
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Johnny Marr Describes Meeting Morrissey

If Morrissey gave The Smiths their voice, Johnny Marr gave them their pulse; although The Smiths were only together for five years (1982-1987) in that time their partnership - along with Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce - created some of the best British pop music ever.

Here then is a little clip of birthday boy Johnny Marr describing how he met Morrissey, and how they bonded over a shared love of Motown girl groups; if, after you're done watching, you haven't sated your need for him, here's the link to his own website.
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"To Autumn" by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
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In Memoriam: John Keats

The poetry of John Keats was the subject of much critical derision over the course of his short life; clearly, this means he must have been on to something... People who are popular in their own day* often tend to be considered old-hat quite quickly after their death - if not long before - and fade inevitably into oblivion. Keats' work, on the other hand, is still finding new ways to inspire more poets and lovers than ever nearly 200 years after he died - no mean feat in an age rife with such defiantly unromantic fare as hardcore porn and gangsta rap!

Keats - who was born on this day in 1795 - had bigger things to worry about, though, than the bitterness of the failed poets who typified his critics. His life was afflicted by tuberculosis long before he was; his mother died of the disease in 1810, after which Keats went to live with his grandmother. Within the decade she would also be dead, and he would be in charge of his brother, who was by then sick as well...

Tom Keats succumbed to his tuberculosis in December 1818; afterwards, Keats went to live at the home of his friend Charles Armitage Brown in Hampstead. Over the next 12 months, which Keats scholars refer to as 'The Great Year', the poet would produce much of his most famous work; it's also the year he met the love of his life, next-door neighbour Fanny Brawne.

As is often the case, the poet's passion provided more stress than solace, likely because in this instance it may have been an unrequited love, and was at best very complicated. When, by 1820, Keats was also showing signs that he, too, had contracted TB, he removed himself to Rome with his friend Joseph Severn. Brawne's diary rather brusquely recorded his departure thusly: 'Mr. Keats has left Hampstead.' Nevertheless, their romance is the subject of Jane Campion's 2009 film, Bright Star.

Keats settled into a house at the foot of the Spanish Steps (now a museum to him), but despite a drier clime and attentive medical care didn't last long, dying in February 1821, aged 25; he was buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery beneath a tombstone bearing a bitter epitaph written by Charles Brown and Joseph Severn:

^{'This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.'}

As it states, only the final phrase was requested by Keats himself...

Still, those in Keats' circle insisted (as in the words of Lord Byron) that their friend's life was 'snuffed out by an article' - in this case, a scathing review of his work Endymion (thought to have been written by William Gifford but later proved to be the work of John Wilson Croker) which had appeared in the Quarterly Review shortly before his death; clearly it wasn't as yet well-understood that in order to be an artist one must be sensitive, but to survive as an artist one must be made of cast-iron, a dichotomy easily spoken but not easily lived, and as it turns out well-nigh impossible for John Keats...

*You know the type I mean - the 'flash in the pan'...
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"Quicksand" by Ethel Waters with Count Basie

Taken from the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen, here then is Ethel Waters (who was born on this day in 1896) singing a little ditty called Quicksand with the Count Basie Orchestra.
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Pop History Moment: The Assassination of Indira Gandhi

Having ordered Indian troops to fire upon the holiest Sikh shrine in India - the Harimandir Sahib (or Golden Temple) at Amritsar - during the disastrous and ill-considered Operation Blue Star in June 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi continued to employ Sikh bodyguards - for what reason I cannot possibly fathom.

It was on this day, just shy of five months to the day after Operation Blue Star had been carried out, Gandhi was walking in the garden of the Prime Minister's Residence (now a memorial to her) on New Delhi's Safdarjung Road, on her way to be interviewed by the British actor Peter Ustinov. As she passed a wicket gate, guarded by two of her bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, they opened fire with machine pistols. A melee ensued, during which her two attackers and one other guard were killed.

Gandhi died on her way to the hospital, in her official car, but wasn't declared dead until many hours later; she was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where doctors operated on her and reportedly removed 31 bullets from her body.

Almost the instant her death was announced, India erupted in anti-Sikh rioting, during which thousands were killed or injured, most of them Sikhs. Of this violence, Gandhi's son and successor Rajiv later said: 'When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake.' She was cremated on November 3, near Raj Ghat at Shakti Sthal, which means 'Place of Power'.
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The Death of River Phoenix

River Phoenix often hinted at a childhood marred by sexual abuse, later claiming to have blocked it out; as a child his family belonged to the Children of God cult, about whom Phoenix subsequently had nothing good to say, and around which rumours of child abuse of every kind have always swirled...

Despite the best intentions of the conscious mind, however, the subconscious never forgets. As good and well-meaning as Phoenix was in the present he was still being stalked by an awful trauma from the past; prone to fits of depression, he gradually began to self-medicate in order to deal with feelings of which he may not even have been aware.

Not helping matters was the matter of young fame, renowned for its toxicity, as well as having been raised after leaving the cult as a hippie (which he himself likened to the role he played in 1986's The Mosquito Coast); insufficiently vaccinated with the antibodies to fame that eventually saved his contemporaries from their own self-immolation, Phoenix quickly spiralled out of control.

More than just a lovely young man (both inside and out) died on this day in 1993 - at the age of just 23 - on the pavement outside the Viper Room... A promising career went with him as well.

From his early appearances in 1986's Stand by Me, to his shot-in-Vancouver A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), to later work in My Own Private Idaho and Dogfight (both 1991), Phoenix's fifteen movie roles are imbued with a certain compassion for the suffering which is inherent in the human condition. There's no telling what he might have accomplished had he lived, only wondering...
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen

It seems oddly appropriate for Hallowe'en that Bohemian Rhapsody was released this day, seeing as it is itself an opera disguised as a pop song...

Despite being released as long ago as 1975, it also has a video; this, then, must surely count as one of the earliest music videos, as it was created specifically for promotion (and not merely excerpted from some program or other, like a lot of the available musical performances from the 1960s and 70s).

It's name doesn't appear in the lyrics, it's got no chorus but more bridges than Venice, and the lyrics may or may not contain some cryptic meaning; nevertheless it is consistently cited as one of the greatest pop songs ever. Like the bumblebee - that shouldn't be able to fly, yet does - Bohemian Rhapsody soars on Freddie Mercury's vocals and is kept aloft by Brian May's prototypically head-banging guitar riffs alike.
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POPnews - October 31st

[America's love affair with the open road resulted in the Lincoln Highway, which passes through 14 states, 128 counties, and more than 500 cities, towns, and villages over its 3389 mile (5454 km) length.]
475 CE - Romulus Augustulus - often considered the last Roman Emperor - was proclaimed.

1517 - Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg - or so the legend has it.

1822 - Mexico's Emperor, Agustín de Iturbide, attempted to dissolve the Mexican Empire.

1864 - Nevada became the 36th US state.

1912 - The first gangster film - D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley - premiered.

1913 - The Lincoln Highway Association dedicated the Lincoln Highway, the first continuous automobile road across the United States; the highway also became the first national tribute to fallen president Abraham Lincoln, nine years before the opening of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. The road, which came to be known as 'The Main Street Across America', connects New York City's Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.

1918 - The short-lived Banat Republic was founded as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing.

1923 - The first of 160 consecutive days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded at Australia's Marble Bar.

1926 - Magician Harry Houdini died of gangrene and peritonitis that developed after his appendix ruptured.

1940 - The Battle of Britain ended when the United Kingdom prevented a German invasion.

1941 - After 14 years of work, drilling was completed on Mount Rushmore; alas, its creator Gutzon Borglum did not live to see it completed, having died seven months earlier; work was finished by Lincoln Borglum, the sculptor's son.

1959 - Future presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to renounce his American citizenship at the US Embassy in Moscow.

1961 - Joseph Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's Tomb.

1968 - Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson offered the nation its first October surprise when he announced that he had ordered a complete cessation of 'all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam', effectively ending the Vietnam War; while Johnson's announcement was intended to improve the Democrats' chances electorally and therefore the outcome of the 1968 presidential election, Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon handily defected Democrat Hubert Humphrey and American Independent leader George Wallace anyway.

1973 - Seamus Twomey, J.B. O'Hagan, and Kevin Mallon - three Provisional Irish Republican Army members - escaped from Dublin's Mountjoy Prison aboard a hijacked helicopter that landed in the exercise yard; a band called the Wolfe Tones later wrote a song celebrating the escape called The Helicopter Song.

1975 - Queen released their most famous single, Bohemian Rhapsody.

1984 - Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh security guards - Satwant Singh and Beant Singh - in retaliation for her ordering a military offensive against Amritsar's Harmandir Sahib during Operation Blue Star.

1986 - The 5th Congress of the Communist Party of Sweden opened, during the course of which the party name was changed to the Solidarity Party and a program of non-communist policies was adopted.

2003 - Mahathir bin Mohamad resigned as Prime Minister of Malaysia after 22 years in power.
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