POPnews - December 10th

[There are few things as crushing to the human spirit as a coal mine, and likewise few things as poisonous to the planet (not to mention the human body) as coal; anyone who tells you coal is still a viable energy source today is on the take from the coal industry, and must be stopped before their greed kills us all. In the meantime, for a sensitive look at the life and travails of coal miners, read George Orwell's 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier.]
1041 - Zoe, Empress of Byzantium, elevated her husband's nephew - whom they had adopted as their son - to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire as Michael V following the death of her husband and his uncle/father Michael IV.

1394 - A son was born to Scotland's King Robert III and his queen Annabella Drummond at Dunfermline Palace who would ascend the throne in April 1406 as James I.

1508 - The League of Cambrai was founded by Pope Julius II, France's Louis XII, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and Ferdinand II of Aragon in order to balance the power of the Republic of Venice; initially successful, with so many princely egos at the table it was bound to fail, which it did in 1510.

1541 - Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn for their alleged adulteries with Catherine Howard, the 'fifth' wife of Henry VIII; Howard herself would be confined to the Tower of London and executed in February 1542.

1665 - The Royal Netherlands Marine Corps was established by Michiel de Ruyter.

1684 - Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, was read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.

1817 - Mississippi became the 20th US state.

1864 - Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's Union Army troops reached the outskirts of Savannah during Sherman's March to the Sea.

1865 - Widower of Britain's ill-fated Heiress Presumptive Princess Charlotte and favourite uncle of Queen Victoria Léopold I, first King of the Belgians, died; he was succeeded by his second son, who assumed the throne as Leopold II, his elder son Louis-Philippe having died in May 1834.

1898 - The Treaty of Paris was signed, officially ending the Spanish-American War.

1901 - The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on the fifth anniversary of the death of their benefactor, Alfred Nobel.

1906 - President Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win any Nobel Prize; in his case, the Nobel Peace Prize.

1907 - A nighttime battle in London's Trafalgar Square between 1,000 medical students and 400 police - which came to be known as the Brown Dog Riots - was actually the culmination of an escalating struggle over a memorial to animals used in vivisection, which had been heavily vandalized before being secretly taken down in 1910; a new memorial was finally erected in Battersea Park in 1985.

1927 - The Grand Ole Opry premiered on radio under that name, having debuted on Nashville's WSM as WSM Barn Dance in October 1925.

1932 - Thailand's new constitution was signed by King Prajadhipok, making him both the last absolute ruler and the first constitutional monarch in that country's history; the event is still celebrated in that country as Constitution Day.

1948 - The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the day is now celebrated as Human Rights Day around the world.

1968 - The biggest heist in Japanese history - the 300 million yen robbery - was committed against a branch of the Nihon Shintaku Ginko bank in Tokyo's Kokubunji district by a man dressed as a police officer; despite seven years of investigation, also the largest in Japanese history, the crime was never solved.

1993 - The last shift left Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland; the closure of the 156-year-old pit marked the end of the old County Durham coalfield, which had been in operation since the Middle Ages - or more than 800 years!

2007 - Led Zeppelin reunited for the first time in three decades when they appeared at the Ahmet Ertegün Tribute Concert; nearly thirty years after the band's dissolution following the death of John Bonham in September 1980, the seat behind the drum kit for this legendary gig was occupied by his son, Jason Bonham.
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Pop History Moment: The Debut of 'Coronation Street'

On this day in 1960 Coronation Street made its television debut on Granada Television (now ITV Studios)...  The very same episode was placed here on this day in 2010, on the occasion of the show's 50th anniversary.  Nearly 7,500 episodes and 50 years later the show is heaped with superlatives, including Britain's longest-running soap opera and the world's longest-running dramatic programme among many others.



Set in Manchester's fictional working class district of Weatherfield - itself based on the City of Salford - the brainchild of Tony Warren was initially rubbished by critics but embraced by audiences, who'd made it the number one show on British television by 1961. This dichotomy probably best illustrates the class divide in Britain; ITV was basically founded in an effort to put the working class majority and their stories on television, in direct competition to the shows aired by the middle class, pro-Establishment BBC.



From its beginning Coronation Street sought to combine the aesthetics of kitchen sink drama popular in British cinema throughout the 1950s with those of the American soap opera; among its other innovations was the presence of strong female characters, such as Ena Sharples (Violet Carson), Elsie Tanner (Patricia Phoenix), and Annie Walker (Doris Speed) - proprietress of the Rovers Return Inn. The original cast are mostly gone now... Only one remains, namely Ken Barlow (William Roache).
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Happy Birthdame!

I first became aware of her when the sitcom she made, As Time Goes By, began appearing on our local PBS affiliate; alongside her old friend Geoffrey Palmer - himself a Britcom stalwart - Judi Dench added a kind of gravitas to the proceedings that, if anything, made the show funnier.

Then came Mrs. Brown (1997), a little movie about a little woman that plays a huge part in bringing the character of the reclusive Queen Victoria to light; together with Palmer, Antony Sher (a revelation as Benjamin Disraeli) and Billy Connolly, the film portrays the creation of an imperial matriarchy that saved the British throne at a time of crisis.

At an age (a radiant 76) when most people are slowing down to enjoy their dotage, Dame Judi Dench appears to be full steam ahead, never making a misstep in the choices of roles - whether onstage or onscreen: Tea with Mussolini (1999), Chocolat (2000), The Shipping News (2001), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006)...

She just keeps getting better and better, which makes celebrating her birthday a no-brainer for the Pop Culture Institute!
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"I Know What Boys Like" by The Waitresses

The Waitresses were among my favourite bands when, back in the day, I and my hair were all about the New Wave; in memory of their vocalist Patty Donahue, who died on this day in 1996 of lung cancer, it's their biggest hit, from the 1982 album Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful.

It's not available on CD; for that you'll need to get The Best of the Waitresses; the band is shown here performing it on BBC2's long-running music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test.
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Remembering... Margaret Hamilton

Sooner or later, every pretty girl becomes aware that her looks won't last forever, meaning she must develop talent or personality or some other such thing to compensate... For all that plain girls may dream of beauty, the nightmare of losing it never need trouble their sleep.

Margaret Hamilton - born on this day in 1902 - was one of the hardest working actresses in Hollywood, precisely because she wasn't pretty; glamour girls are almost always the flavour of the month, whereas a classic like vanilla is a perennial favourite.

Famed for her portrayal of The Wicked Witch of the West, Hamilton assayed a variety of maids, nurses, schoolteachers, and New England spinsters during the course of her long career, from Zoo in Budapest (1933) to her final appearance nearly fifty years later on a 1982 episode of the television show Lou Grant.

Rumour has it (and true or not it has a nice ring to it) when Gregory Maguire wrote his great novel Wicked, he made Elphaba (the name he gave to the Wicked Witch of the West) concerned about the ill-treatment of animals as a tribute to her; throughout her life, Margaret Hamilton's charitable works always supported children and animals.

She was, to all who met her, a beautiful lady indeed...
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Happy Birthday Your Imperial Highness

In another life Masako Owada could have been a diplomat, as she was before her marriage, and as her father Hisashi Owada is; no doubt in her next life - as Empress of Japan - she will not only be among that country's foremost ambassadors but a superlative one at that, owing to her background. If, that is, she can get the Imperial Household Agency to stop hectoring her over her failure to produce a male heir - as if bullying someone were any good way to get what you want!

Born on this day in 1963, Crown Princess Masako - bright, beautiful, beloved - has instead turned into something of a spectre within Japan's Royal Family, seldom venturing out on public duties, nursing the wounds that result from the particular misogynies of royal life. For a woman as worldly as Her Imperial Highness, the paternalism of Japanese society - especially in its upper echelon - has proven especially hurtful.

Not that she didn't expect it; stories abound about how many times she refused Crown Prince Naruhito's proposal and (setting aside all romantic notions about his persistence during their courtship) it's a darn good thing he's stood by her as resolutely through her trials as he has. Even more so than with most married couples, her problems really are his problems.
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"Willow" by Joan Armatrading

Birthday wishes go out today to Joan Armatrading, the anglo-Caribbean singer whose smoky voice has no doubt proven the ideal soundtrack to many a steamy night...

I chose this song because it was featured on the soundtrack for the film Boys on the Side, which for three months in the mid-90s never left my CD player. It's the song of hers with which I'm most familiar and, having since experienced a broader spectrum of her music, in my opinion shows her full range of talents well.

Plus, it's got a great message; what more could you want?
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POPnews - December 9th

[P. B. S. Pinchback was many things - newspaper publisher, gambler, orator, speculator, dandy, and mountebank; although racially he referred to himself by the quaint term quadroon, he chose to take pride in his accomplishments (over which he had some degree of control) rather than anything as arbitrary as the colour of his skin.]
1425 - The Catholic University of Leuven was founded as a Studium Generale courtesy of a papal bull issued by Martin V.

1531 - The Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have first appeared to Juan Diego in the Mexican town of Tepeyac.

1824 - Patriot forces led by General Antonio José de Sucre defeated a Royalist army under Viceroy José de la Serna and José de Canterac at the Battle of Ayacucho, putting an end to the Peruvian War of Independence.

1872 - Louisiana's P. B. S. Pinchback became the first black governor in US history; his tenure in Baton Rouge lasted 35 days.

1897 - The feminist newspaper La Fronde was first published in Paris by Marguerite Durand.

1905 - In France, a law separating church and state was passed.

1917 - In Palestine, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire.

1922 - Gabriel Narutowicz was elected the first President of Poland by the Sejm.

1931 - The Constituent Cortes approved the constitution which established the Second Spanish Republic.

1935 - Walter Liggett, an American newspaper editor and muckraker based in Minneapolis, was killed in front of his family in a gangland murder; Liggett had recently exposed the connection between gangster Kid Cann and the administration of Minnesota governor Floyd B. Olson. His daughter Marda Liggett Woodbury would grow up to write a book about her father's crusading work against corruption entitled Stopping The Presses: The Murder of Walter W. Liggett.

1946 - The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials began with the Doctors' Trial, which prosecuted Nazi doctors alleged to be involved in human experimentation.

1952 - The dense mixture of fog and coal smoke that had first descended over London on December 5th finally cleared, although the impact of the Great Smog would be felt for months.

1958 - The John Birch Society was founded in the United States.

1960 - The first episode of Britain's longest running television soap opera Coronation Street was broadcast.

1961 - Tanganyika gained its independence from the United Kingdom; today the East African territory is better known as Tanzania.

1965 - During the Kecksburg UFO Incident a fireball was seen in the skies over Michigan and Pennsylvania; witnesses later reported something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. In 2005 NASA admitted that it had examined an object as a result, but changed their story from its having been a meteor to some kind of Russian satellite instead.

1979 - It was announced that the virus which causes smallpox had been eradicated.

1990 - Lech Wałęsa became the first-ever directly elected President of Poland.

2008- Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested by federal officials for a number of alleged crimes including attempting to sell the US Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
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"A Little Jive Is Good For You" by Martha Tilton

Although hers was the go-to voice when it came time to dub such actresses as Barbara Stanwyck, Martha O'Driscoll, and Anne Gwynne on film, here Martha Tilton (who died on this day in 2006) is all herself - to spectacular results!  Also appearing are the Slate Brothers, whose limited filmography belies their success as raconteurs; for years they ran a club on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.

This precious little nugget of pop culture comes to us courtesy of Soundies - those grand-daddies of the music video that used to feature in the cinemas of yesteryear, which have been given a new lease on life courtesy of YouTube.
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In Memoriam: Martha Tilton

Of all the purveyors of ear candy in an era renowned for pure tones and elegant phrasing, few had a patch on the Liltin' Miss Tilton...

Born in November 1915, Martha Tilton got her start performing with the vocal group Three Hits and a Miss, before hitting the big time as the girl singer with Benny Goodman's Orchestra on their radio showcase Camel Caravan. It was with them she recorded her breakthrough hit And the Angels Sing, and she was with them when they played their legendary gig at Carnegie Hall in 1938 - considered by many to be the beginning of the Swing Era.

As a recording artist, Tilton was lucky (and talented) enough to be signed by Capitol Records, which was established at the height of America's involvement in World War II, and not only survived but thrived (despite the wartime rationing of vinyl) owing to the superior artistry of the acts it signed.

Tilton's talents have also been preserved in a visual medium, thanks to her many appearances in film and Soundies shorts, which have gained a whole new life thanks to YouTube.

Martha Tilton died on this day in 2006, and may be gone but as long as there is music will never be forgotten...
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Gratuitous Brunette: Teri Hatcher

Once upon a time this image of birthday gal Teri Hatcher - taken when she portrayed Lois Lane in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - was the hottest thing on the Internet, having been downloaded some 20,000 times...

I know this doesn't seem like much today, but in 1995 it was enough to make the shot legendary and Hatcher among the world wide web's first viral sensations. Having made a similar pop culture sensation via an episode of Seinfeld after the cancellation of Lois & Clark in 1997, Hatcher landed the role of accident-prone Susan Mayer on Desperate Housewives, which in 2004-5 was the hottest thing on TV. She remains resident on Wisteria Lane to this day...
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"Black Boys on Mopeds" by Sinead O'Connor

From the much-loved 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got by Sinéad O'Connor, it's Black Boys on Mopeds, done here live.

Breithla Shona Dhuit Sinéad!
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Christina: The Girl King

She was born, on this day in 1626, under what astrologers all agreed was an auspicious star; hers was to be the reign to end all reigns... Raised by her father Gustav II Adolf as a Prince (until the age of five, anyway) from 1632 to 1654 Christina reigned as King of Sweden; they called her the Girl King.

Thing is, she wasn't very good at it. Damn astrology...

Bored of life in the relative cultural backwater of Stockholm, Christina abdicated her throne at the age of 28 in favour of her cousin, who became Charles X Gustav. She then exiled herself to Rome, where her palazzo became for a time a grand literary and artistic salon. While there she also converted to Catholicism; as the most famous convert of her day, she became a thing of fascination to Papists, this one woman counter-reformation whose father had once led the failed Protestant charge during the Thirty Years' War only to fall at the Battle of Lützen. Never a devoted Catholic, she was nevertheless a committed one.

Having lavished her immense fortune on the famously rapacious aristocracy of Rome, after just two years Christina realized she was broke, and so was forced to take her show on the road in an effort to drum up funds. Her assertive manner and masculine dress scandalized the ladies of Louis XIV's Versailles; while at Fontainebleau in 1656 she and the wily Cardinal Mazarin hatched a plot to make her Queen of Naples, which might have succeeded but for the murder of her Master of the Horse marchese Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi in 1657 at the hands of two of her servants and by her order. Although technically legal, it was to make her very unpopular indeed.

Having burned her bridges in France she was rebuffed from visiting Cromwell's England and so made a humiliating return to Sweden in 1660 to ask for her old job back following the death of Charles X Gustav, even though the one thing that could have restored her popularity - a penis - was not to be possible there for another 300 years. Not only did the Swedes prefer to be ruled by the new Charles XI (a four-year-old boy) while there she was forced to sign a new instrument of renunciation, giving up all claim to a throne the vast majority of her former subjects didn't want her to have anyway.

Thus humbled, she returned to Rome, where she died in April 1689; she is buried at the Vatican, in St. Peter's Basilica.
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Rethinking Mary, Queen of Scots

That history is written by the victors is especially true when considering the life and achievements of Mary, Queen of Scots... Born on this day in 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Mary ascended the throne of Scotland at the age of six days following the death of her father James V; even though most agreed he died of grief - some said over recent losses to his uncle Henry VIII at the Battle of Solway Moss, others that his hoped-for heir had been a girl - the official cause was cholera. She was raised thereafter by her formidable French mother, Marie de Guise.

To her contemporaries (not all of them fawning sycophants and courtiers) there was much that was commendable in and about the lively girl with the lush chestnut hair and long limbs; yet Mary's reputation has, until recently, suffered from the slings and arrows of scholarly hacks.

True, she made some terrible decisions in her life; then again, who hasn't? The trouble is, when you're Queen (and Mary was twice a Queen, having also been Queen of France from July 1559 to December 1560) your lousy decisions tend to blow up in your face not just in front of everyone but when everyone's watching you as well; since the state is only as infallible as the monarch, too much of this tends to be quite unnerving, and an unnerved governing class never governs well, so an unnerving sovereign is usually gotten rid of forthwith by hook or by crook.

Anyway, as if the events leading up to her abdication in July 1567 weren't bad enough (and they were) her ill-starred escape from Scottish custody at Loch Leven Castle, military defeat at the Battle of Langside, and inevitable capture by the English at Carlisle (all in May 1568) seem to pale in comparison to the humiliation of her two decades in English custody; a Queen almost from birth, her captivity may have cut her dignity as deeply as her death sentence, deeper in many ways than even the blade that would one day separate her head from her body.

The compatriots of Mary's archnemesis Elizabeth I and their successors have tended to remember the vanquished Queen (beheaded at Fotheringay Castle in February 1587) as everything their own mistress wasn't: frivolous, easily flattered, and a slut. Had things worked out a little better for the lively and passionate Mary, Queen of Scots - had she not been quite so gullible in her relationships with men, just as a for instance - it might be the reputation of her brittle, ambivalent cousin that would need rehabilitation today, and not the other way around.

Mary's reputation, though, has been in recovery for nearly forty years, ever since the appearance of Lady Antonia Fraser's epic 1969 biography, and is probably as good as it'll ever be today given the circumstances. In the 2007 film Elizabeth: The Golden Age Mary's death was given its rightful context as the event which triggered the Spanish Armada; Jane Dunn's excellent book Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens revisits both women with unabashed fascination and adds both shading and dimension to the received view that, while Mary was crafty, Elizabeth was also crafty. Plus cunning, savvy, Machiavellian even...

(Everything, in other words, Mary was not but shoulda been to survive. ~ MSM)
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"Imagine" by John Lennon

Imagine was written and recorded by John Lennon in 1971, and was the first single from the album of the same name; it is the official anthem of all people who hope for a better world tomorrow than the one they knew yesterday.

Frequently criticized by the people it criticizes, the song has also suffered jibes from the cynical over the years; yet all the song asks of us is that we imagine, a task which is rendered impossible by cynicism, apparently.
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Pop History Moment: The Killing of John Lennon

Exactly what Mark David Chapman hoped to accomplish by killing John Lennon on this day in 1980 has never been made clear; obviously the product of disordered thinking, psychotic, and influenced by delusion, Chapman's violent murder of a person whose life was devoted to peace is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. Much of Chapman's 'excuse' for killing Lennon revolved around his fondness for the nihilistic novel The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger; that Chapman had hoped to model his life after the book's protagonist - a self-absorbed douchebag of epic proportions by the name of Holden Caulfield - goes a long way towards pointing at serious mental illness on Chapman's part.

Lennon was returning home to The Dakota from a recording session at Manhattan's Record Plant Studios at 10:50 PM when he passed Chapman - for whom he had signed an autograph only the day before - on the sidewalk outside the building. After calling out 'Mr. Lennon' Chapman fired five hollow point bullets at his supposed idol, hitting him with four of them, causing major damage to his internal organs, including a severed aorta which would eventually cause Lennon's death from hypovolemic shock.

As Lennon staggered into the building, Chapman withdrew his copy of the book, sat down, and began reading; when he was finally arrested he put up no fight. Lennon, meanwhile, was declared DOA at Roosevelt Hospital at 11:15 PM.

Although he was given no funeral, John Lennon has been given a memorial; Central Park's Strawberry Fields Memorial, situated across the street from where Lennon was killed, opened in October 1985. It is one of the most popular scenes of pilgrimage in New York City.

Despite the fact that Chapman had planned his crime for years, and even spoken about it to friends and family, he was charged with second degree murder; he has been denied parole six times, thanks as much to a grassroots effort by fans as it is to the efficacy of Yoko Ono's legal team.

Mark David Chapman is currently incarcerated in seclusion at Attica.
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POPnews - December 8th

[The Monument of the Hand was erected in the Cretan prefecture of Chania to remember those who died when the car ferry SS Heraklion sank off Falkonera en route from the port of Souda to Piraeus near Athens.]

1609 - The reading room at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana opened its doors in Milan; after Oxford University's Bodleian Library - which first opened its doors in November 1602 - it was the second public library in Europe.

1660 - Margaret Hughes became the first actress to appear on an English public stage when she assayed the role of Desdemona in a production of Shakespeare's play Othello by Thomas Killigrew's new King's Company at their theatre, Gibbon's Tennis Court, in London's Vere Street.

1854 - Pope Pius IX proclaimed the Roman Catholic dogma of Immaculate Conception, which holds that the Virgin Mary was born free of original sin.

1869 - Timothy Eaton founded the T. Eaton Co. Limited at 178 Yonge Street in Toronto, which would eventually run the tony Eaton's department store chain throughout Canada before his heirs ran it into the ground in August 1999.

1886 - The American Federation of Labor was established in Columbus, Ohio.

1889 - The Royal Netherlands Football Association was founded.

1904 - Denmark's Konservativ Ungdom (Young Conservatives) was founded by Carl F. Herman von Rosen; still in existence today, not only is it that country's oldest political youth organization it's believed to be one of the oldest in the world.

1907 - King Gustaf V acceded to the Swedish throne following the death of his father, Oscar II.

1914 - Near the beginning of World War I the German Kaiserliche Marine under the command of Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee was engaged by Britain's Royal Navy under Doveton Sturdee in the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

1941 - The US Congress declared war on the Empire of Japan following the latter's bombing of Pearl Harbor the previous day.

1953 - Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN General Assembly.

1966 - The Greek ship SS Heraklion sank during a storm in the Aegean Sea, killing over 200.

1974 - A plebiscite in Greece abolished that country's monarchy for the second and final time since it had been established in 1832.

1982 - Activist Norman Mayer threatened to blow up the Washington Monument, before being killed by United States Park Police; future White House Press Secretary George Stephanopoulos - then an intern at the nearby Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - made his first appearance on Nightline that evening to discuss the incident.

1987 - Melbourne was rocked by news of the Queen Street Massacre, a shooting spree by Frank Vitkovic which killed 8 and injured five - but not Con Margelis, the one he was gunning for - at the Queen Street offices of the Australia Post; after finally being disarmed by Frank Carmody, Vitkovic jumped eleven stories to his death. The involvement of Australia's Church of Scientology in this incident has never been satisfactorily investigated...

1993 - The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law by US President Bill Clinton.

1995 - Philip Lawrence, headmaster of St. George's Roman Catholic School in North London's Maida Vale district, was murdered by Learco Chindamo of the mostly Filipino local street gang Wo Shing Wo; Lawrence had come to the aid of one of his pupils, William Njoh, who was seriously injured in the attack.

2004 - Darrell Abbott - known professionally as Dimebag Darrell, lead singer and founding member of such heavy metal stalwarts Pantera and Damageplan - was shot and killed by deranged fan Nathan Gale on stage at Columbus, Ohio's Alrosa Villa while performing with Damageplan. The band's drum technician, John 'Kat' Brooks, and tour manager, Chris Paluska, were injured in the fray, while their head of security, Jeff 'Mayhem' Thompson, Alrosa Villa employee Erin Halk, and audience member Nathan Bray (who'd been performing CPR on Abbott) were all killed; as for the shooter, he was handily despatched by Officer James D. Niggemeyer (shown, at right). The entire story is told in Chris Armold's 2007 book A Vulgar Display of Power: Courage and Carnage at the Alrosa Villa.

2008 - Kirsty Williams was elected leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, making her the first female leader of a political party in Wales.
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"Hold On" by Tom Waits

To complete today's birthday video hat trick here's Hold On, a track from Tom Waits' 1999 album Mule Variations - which featured such instant classics as Big in Japan, What's He Building?, Picture in a Frame, and Chocolate Jesus.

Coming seven years after its predecessor - the 1992 album Bone Machine - Mule Variations is an almost perfect synthesis of the Asylum Years and the Island Years in one elegantly produced little package, a pristine copy of which holds pride of place in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute.
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"Romeo Is Bleeding (live)" by Tom Waits

From Tom Waits' 1978 album Blue Valentine, it's Romeo is Bleeding, shown here performed live - the way it oughta be...

I am an unabashed fan of Waits' work during the so-called Asylum Years, and depending on the day or the time of year (and occasionally even the time of day) Blue Valentine is my favourite of his albums from that time.
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"Temptation" by Tom Waits

From his 1987 album Franks Wild Years, it's birthday boy Tom Waits with Temptation, a song more properly called an aria, since the album from whence it issues was written to accompany a play - and is in fact subtitled 'Un Operachi Romantico in Two Acts'.

The play Franks Wild Years was first produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company and had its world premiere in June 1986; a song of the same title originally appeared on Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones.
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Happy Birthday Tom Waits

With a yelp and a growl, a shudder and a wail, Tom Waits does more than sing a song, he inhabits it... His songbook currently comprises an unparalleled achievement in American music; spanning more than thirty years chronologically, sonically as well the music of Tom Waits not only reaches back into a neverland of 1940s bluegrass, 1930s crooning, and 1920s blues, but since 1983 has also managed to offer a forceful, if dystopian, futurism. One thing a Tom Waits song never sounds like is today, which is surely why his entire catalogue seems as timeless as it does.

Born on this day in 1949, Tom Waits began his musical career in 1965, singing with a band at a pizzeria in San Diego, a scenario which sounds very much like an early Tom Waits song; he signed with Asylum Records in 1972, and then proceeded to craft and release a veritable tapestry of songs which are not only rich in character (a trait too-often lacking in contemporary music) but which tend to shed light into dark corners and onto even darker events in the American psyche with an uncompromising compassion. His first album, Closing Time, was released in 1973; it was followed yearly by The Heart of Saturday Night, Nighthawks at the Diner, Small Change, Foreign Affairs, and Blue Valentine. Two years later - in 1980 - came the final album of the period known to Waits scholars as The Asylum Years, the nearly perfect Heartattack and Vine.

It was while recording the soundtrack to One from the Heart, a Francis Ford Coppola film for which he supplied several duets with Crystal Gayle and for which he was Oscar-nominated, that Waits met his future wife and collaborator, Kathleen Brennan. He also found himself a new label - Island Records - and a new sound as well. In fact, what happened next to Tom Waits was described by him - and he should know - as nothing less than a paradigm shift.

Waits' next album, Swordfishtrombones, was a radical departure from his previous works, and featured an experimental sound both musically and vocally; it was also around this time that Waits began acting, including a memorable turn in Ironweed. Ever since, Tom Waits has straddled that line between sentimentalist and futurist; having found a new outlet for the seedy underdogs and cocky grifters who characterized his early music in acting has freed him up to take his music (including his voice) deeper and deeper into idiosyncrasy, with altogether memorable results.
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Pop History Moment: The Bombing of Pearl Harbor

On this day in 1941, the United States was sucker-punched by the Empire of Japan when 350 Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers destroyed 5 American ships and 188 aircraft, killing 2,388 and injuring 1,178 in under ninety minutes.

The raid, which began just before 8 AM, came in two waves; the first targeted the ships, such as the USS Arizona and the USS Utah, the second the nearby airbase and fuel tanks. The majority of the deaths that day were aboard the USS Arizona.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a rhetorical flourish even better than his usual, dubbed it 'a date which will live in infamy'; in these post 9-11 days, the academic and critical focus on the attack has shifted from the sheer horror of it to who might have known it was coming and did nothing to stop it, even though in the opinion of the Pop Culture Institute comparisons between Pearl Harbor and 9-11 are specious at best, and the very best of Republican obfuscation at worst.
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POPnews - December 7th

[As these things go, it's a third-rate planet in the boondocks of the
galaxy, but I like it better than any place I've ever lived thus far.]
43 BCE - Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was assassinated.

1696 - Connecticut Route 108 - one of the oldest extant roads in the US - was completed through Trumbull; it was then known as the Farm Highway, and is now called Nichols Avenue.

1724 - Religious unrest following the execution of nine Protestant citizens and the mayor of Thorn (Toruń) by Polish authorities resulted in the Tumult of Thorn, an event still observed in remembrance there at St. Mary's Church.

1732 - The Royal Opera House opened at London's Covent Garden.

1776 - France's Marquis de Lafayette attempted to enter the American military as a major general through the American agent in Paris, Silas Deane.

1787 - Delaware became the first state to ratify the US Constitution, making it the first US state.

1889 - Gilbert & Sullivan's comic light opera The Gondoliers premiered at the Savoy Theatre in London.

1916 - David Lloyd George was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain.

1930 - W1XAV in Boston broadcast video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers; the broadcast also included America's first television commercial, an advertisement for I.J. Fox Furriers, who sponsored the radio show.

1946 - A fire at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta killed 119.

1955 - Clement Attlee stepped down as leader of Britain's Labour Party to be created Earl Attlee and Viscount Prestwood by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II ten days later.

1963 - Instant replay was used for the first time at an Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

1965 - Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras simultaneously lifted mutual excommunications against their respective positions that had been in place since 1054.

1972 - Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, was launched; during the flight the crew took the photograph known as The Blue Marble.

1982 - Charles Brooks, Jr. became the first person executed by lethal injection in the United States.

1987 - Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 crashed near Paso Robles, California, killing all 43 on board, after a disgruntled passenger shot his ex-boss traveling on the flight, then shot both pilots and himself.

1993 - Colin Ferguson murdered 6 and injured 19 during the so-called Long Island Railroad Massacre.

1995 - The Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.

2006 - A tornado struck Kensal Green in North West London, seriously damaging around 150 properties - none of which were mobile homes.
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Happy Birthday Steven Wright

Steven Wright's deadpan delivery and surreal take on life set him apart from the typical 1980s standups, with their recycled jokes about airline food and various skirmishes in the battle of the sexes; in a decade in which every third person seemed to be peaking on cocaine, Steven Wright came across like he was mainlining NyQuil.

Born on this day in 1955, Steven Wright began doing stand up in 1982, and in 1989 won an Academy Award for his short film The Appointments of Dennis Jennings; one of the few performers of his era not to have had a network sitcom based on his act, in 2006 he made Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away, his first stand-up special in 16 years.
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Remembering... Agnes Moorehead

Having been a sensation in such acclaimed black & white films as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Dark Passage (1947), and Johnny Belinda (1948), not even Agnes Moorehead herself (born on this day in 1900) could have predicted what impact colour would bring to her career... Anyone who doubts it should watch and compare the first season of Bewitched to the second.

Being a serious actress, Moorehead disdained the 'hack' scripts of situation comedy, refusing to see Bewitched for the trenchant social commentary it was. She had a clause in her contract that she would only appear in eight of every twelve episodes filmed long after it was obvious that she was the fan favourite.

In the time-honoured sitcom tradition, though, it was second-fiddle Endora who made that show as great as it was; without her the show would have had no tension - no 'situations' and therefore no comedy - no raison d'etre. Still, comedy is used to getting the short shrift; as important as making people laugh is, too many still consider the considerably easier task of making people cry to be the more important one.

Moorehead's devout Christianity also gave the show a touch of verisimilitude; in any of the scenes she has with Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) replace the word 'witch' in her dialogue with 'Christian' or 'Presbyterian' and you'll see what I mean. Endora is the most evangelical of witches, and therefore the most complex character on the show, heart and soul.
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In Memoriam: Ryan White

At a time when AIDS and HIV bore an even greater stigma than they currently do, it took a teenager named Ryan White to dispel many of the myths regarding these infections...

Born a hemophiliac on this day in 1971, in 1984 Ryan White received a tainted batch of Factor VIII; having nearly died from a bout with pneumonia, he was diagnosed with HIV in December 1984 and given six months to live.

The fact that Ryan White lived another five and a half years is fortunate; not only did it give him the chance to finish high school, it also gave him and his mother Jeanne time to battle the school board and the good people of Kokomo, Indiana, who refused to allow his attendance.

Despite the fact that he was thirteen at the time of his diagnosis, many of his fellow students (and not a few of their parents) had subjected him to vicious homophobia, including vandalism of their home; yet Ryan White never turned homophobic - as some hemophiliacs were known to do in the early days of AIDS - nor did he care to think of himself as an 'innocent victim'. In fact, his mother later credited Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City with prolonging Ryan's life by suggesting experimental treatments which were as yet unknown in the Midwest. Eventually Ryan would be allowed to attend Hamilton Heights High School in nearby Cicero, thanks to the school's particularly enlightened principal, Tony Cook, and superintendent Bob G. Carnal.

As is usually the case in these stories, the more the bigots tried to fight, the more attention Ryan's story got, and whenever Ryan White was allowed to speak for himself he usually won the day; his testimony at President Reagan's too-little-too-late AIDS commission in 1988 was the only testimony to receive applause from the committee members.

By the time he died in April 1990 much had changed regarding the public perception of AIDS and the people who live with it; four months after his death, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, which today pays for half a million people a year in the United States who would not otherwise be able to afford it to receive treatment for their condition.
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The Halifax Explosion: A Canadian History Minute

The following spot was produced by Canadian broadcasters in an effort to rescue Canada's history from the depredations of deadly dull historians; the Pop Culture Institute celebrates any effort by anyone to make history interesting even if, as is the case with this clip, the events don't quite match the historical record...

Vince Coleman has long been considered one of the heroes of the disaster; had he abandoned his post for safety the death toll could have been much higher. The fact that his post was located in the middle of the railyard, not next to a busy downtown street as is shown here is almost beside the point. Coleman's heroism - as depicted in this Heritage Minute and in the miniseries Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion - was considerable, and he perished when the Halifax Explosion destroyed the city's Richmond Station.
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Pop History Moment: The Halifax Explosion of 1917

Halifax is one of Canada's loveliest cities, but its picturesque harbour, with a quaint blend of old and new, was once the scene of the greatest man-made devastation prior to the atomic age...

On this day in 1917, the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc collided with the Norwegian ship Imo laden with relief supplies for Belgium in Halifax Harbour; the ensuing fire on board the Mont-Blanc ignited 2.6 million kilos of explosives in her hold, which just after 9 AM exploded.

The fireball from the explosion rose 1.6 km into the air, raining both hot shrapnel and carbon soot on the city. The force of the explosion swamped the waterfront under an 18m wave, and the force of the blast flattened buildings in every direction in a 1.6 km radius. The blast was felt and heard as far as 360 km away, in Cape Breton, and debris from the Mont-Blanc flew as far as 5.5 km into neighbouring Dartmouth.

The official death toll was 1,950 but could have been much lower; the day after the explosion the area was hit by a rare December blizzard, which brought 40 cm of snow. Untold numbers of people who survived the blast buried under rubble likely perished due to the harsh weather; in all, more Nova Scotians died in this blast than in the combat of World War I. 9,000 people were injured, 6,000 of them seriously - the majority of the injuries were caused by flying debris, and resulted in 600 incidences of partial blindness.

Hugh MacLennan's 1941 novel Barometer Rising is among the first depictions of the disaster in popular culture; a miniseries, entitled Shattered City (2003), has also been made. Of a slew of books written about the Halifax Explosion the best is probably the latest - Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion 1917, by Laura M. MacDonald.
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POPnews - December 6th

[Anyone who thinks the Florida Everglades are safe simply because they've been preserved as a park has clearly a) underestimated the contempt of so-called conservatives for the natural world, b) naively relinquished their grasp on reality in favour of impractical idealism, and/or c) never read the works of one Carl Hiaasen.]
1060 - Béla I was crowned King of Hungary.

1534 - Sebastián de Belalcázar founded the city of Quito in Ecuador.

1648 - Colonel Pride of England's New Model Army purged the Long Parliament of MPs sympathetic to King Charles I, in order for the King's trial to go ahead; the event came to be known as Pride's Purge.

1768 - The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published.

1849 - American abolitionist Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery on the Underground Railroad.

1865 - Ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution ended the legal sanction of slavery in America.

1877 - The Washington Post was first published, apparently.

1884 - The capstone was set in place atop the Washington Monument, signifying the end of work; originally begun in 1848, a lack of funds and the intercession of the US Civil War prevented Robert Mills' obelisk from being completed earlier. Dedicated in February 1885 and opened in October 1888, it became the world's tallest structure (after Cologne Cathedral) until 1889, at which time it was surpassed by the Eiffel Tower.

1907 - 362 were killed by an explosion at a coal mine in Monongah, West Virginia.

1917 - Finland declared its independence from Russia.

1920 - The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in London.

1921 - Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Irish Free State became a sovereign nation.

1933 - U.S. federal judge John M. Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's novel Ulysses was not obscene.

1941 - The United Kingdom declared war on Finland in support of the Soviet Union during the Continuation War.

1947 - Florida's Everglades National Park was established.

1969 - Meredith Hunter pulled out a gun during The Rolling Stones' performance of Under My Thumb at their infamous Altamont Free Concert, and was stabbed by Hells Angel Alan Passaro, who was there acting as security; at his trial Passaro claimed self-defense, and was later acquitted. The event was captured on film, and became a key scene in the documentary Gimme Shelter; it also made the pages of Rolling Stone magazine as Rock & Roll's Worst Day, by John Burks.

1978 - The current constitution of Spain was approved by a national referendum.

1989 - Marc Lépine massacred 14 women in an anti-feminist spree at Montreal's École Polytechnique.

1992 - 200,000 Hindu extremists in India demolished Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya, which had been used as temple since 1949.
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