"I Couldn't Be Annoyed" by Marlene Dietrich

Drawn from the same movie, Blonde Venus (1932), as yesterday's Hot Voodoo - only way less old-fashioned, attitudinally speaking - it's I Couldn't Be Annoyed; I couldn't post that film's third musical number, a jaunty little ditty called You Little So-and-So, since it doesn't appear anywhere on YouTube, about which I definitely could be annoyed. That is, if I didn't already own the DVD.

As shocking as Marlene Dietrich's appearance in a tuxedo was here - and it was shocking - it wasn't the first time she'd sashayed across the stage in male apparel; she'd originally committed this naughty bit of cross-dressing in Morocco (1930), only in that one a) it was an actual man's black tux, rather than a sparkly white woman's one, and b) while in it she planted a kiss on another lady!
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Remembering... Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich the icon was created entirely out of the whole cloth of herself, an amazing transformation that went way beyond the tweezing of a few eyebrows and a liberal application of peroxide. From a mousy frump who both sang and spoke with a squeak emanated a sylph-like temptress with a voice like wood smoke; that the transformation should have occurred on film is just one of the miracles of the modern age.

By the time the film The Blue Angel was being shot at UFA in 1930, she was already being molded by the legendary Josef von Sternberg; by the time of her appearance later that year in Morocco the American Dietrich was complete.

Born on this day in 1902, Dietrich contrasted a worldly persona onscreen with a more homely one in real life; the reality was somewhere between the two.

Maximilian Schell's 1984 documentary Marlene captured her, cranky and embittered, toward the end of her life (she died in May 1992); for a bit of contrast, may the Pop Culture Institute recommend The Glamour Collection, 5 movies from the era 1930-1947 (Morocco / Blonde Venus / The Devil is a Woman / The Flame of New Orleans / Golden Earrings) which showcase her at the other end of her life, before the awful toll her celluloid transformation had taken on her psyche began to show.
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Happy Birthday Sarah Vowell

Like many mid-career authors of popular history, what Sarah Vowell really wanted to do was be a cartoon character; appearing as Violet in The Incredibles made that dream a reality, and hopefully introduced her (and her work) to a whole new audience in more ways than one...

Born on this day in 1969 (alongside a fraternal twin sister named Amy) Vowell moved from Oklahoma to Montana to Chicago in pursuit of her education, and now resides in Manhattan, where she is a sought-after author and commentator on shows like This American Life on Public Radio International, as well as a popular guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as well as more serious fare such as Nightline.

Her most recent books - 2002's The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Assassination Vacation (2005), and The Wordy Shipmates from 2008 - look at history from a personal angle, often in the form of travelogues.
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