Pop History Moment: The Pilgrims Landed On Plymouth Rock

It truly is a miracle that the Plymouth Colony was successful at all...

First, the Pilgrims' departure from England was twice delayed by leaks in one of their ships, the Speedwell (later discovered to be the work of sabotage by her crew), forcing them to leave in September and arrive in winter rather than arrive in September as had been the original plan; the remaining ship, the Mayflower, had previously been used mainly in the transport of cargo, and so had all the amenities one would expect of such a vessel - which is to say none at all. Still, 102 passengers and 30 crew led by Captain Christopher Jones clambered aboard and made their perilous way west.

Then, the Mayflower was either blown off course or else her passengers made the determination to settle in a wilder locale (with commensurately wilder weather) so as to be further removed from British influence; instead of landing in the slightly more hospitable climate of Virginia they landed instead at the very tip of Cape Cod, served by the same currents that make the south coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland such ideal swimming grounds.

Once they arrived at Provincetown Harbor in November 1620 it took nearly a month to repair and then reassemble a shallop, which would make further exploration easier; they also signed the Mayflower Compact - considered the first American constitution - to quell dissension between the portion of the settlers who were religious and those (namely the crew) who were more secular.

Then, rather than going native, they insisted on eating English food, which ran perilously low, wearing English clothes (unsuited for the raw wilderness in which they'd found themselves) and then building English houses and farms. That first winter they stayed mainly in the ship while preparing homes and a stockade on shore.

The entire story is told far better than I can in the scope of this blog in the book Mayflower, by Nathanial Philbrick, who follows the lives of these intrepid Christers through the various trials and tribulations of their first American generation; consider it revisited history, rather than revisionist, if you must, but it is definitely worth the read.

As for the ship itself: in 1623 the Mayflower was disassembled at Rotherhithe, and legend has it the Mayflower Barn outside of Jordans was built from its timbers; a replica called Mayflower II is berthed at Plimoth Plantation outside the town they founded on this day in 1620.
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POPnews - December 21st

[When Elvis Presley visited Richard Nixon in the White House he gave the President a gift: a hand gun. It was accepted but for security reasons not presented, depriving the King of an ideal opportunity to do us all a favour.]
69 CE - The Year of the Four Emperors occurred when Vespasian was proclaimed the fourth Emperor of Rome within twelve months - following Galba, Otho and Vitellius.

1192 - England's King Richard I - better known as Richard the Lionhearted - was captured by forces loyal to Leopold V of Austria outside Vienna and held captive for 16 months at Dürnstein Castle before legend has it he was rescued by the troubadour Blondel.

1598 - At the Battle of Curalaba in southern Chile Mapuche warriors, led by cacique Pelentaru, inflicted a major defeat on the Spanish troops of the royal governor Martín García Oñez de Loyola, who died in battle alongside all but 2* of the 350 men in his party.

*Only a priest, Bartolomé Pérez, and a badly wounded soldier, Bernardo de Pereda, are known for certain to have survived, although since some 300 of his men were auxiliaries of Amerindian descent, their fates could possibly have gone unrecorded.

1844 - England's Rochdale Pioneers opened their cooperative for business.

1872 - The HMS Challenger, commanded by Captain George Nares, sailed from Portsmouth in order to undertake the Challenger Expedition... Over the next four years those on board would sail nearly 70,000 nautical miles (130,000 km) surveying and exploring, and in doing so bring to light some 4,000 previously undocumented species; these findings were published by John Murray, in a work rather windily entitled Report Of The Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873-76 in December 1911. Not only did the voyage lay the groundwork for the modern study of oceanography, the vessel on which it occurred has since leant its name to various successors in exploration including the Space Shuttle Challenger.

1883 - The first Permanent Force cavalry and infantry regiments of the Canadian Army were formed - namely, The Royal Canadian Dragoons and The Royal Canadian Regiment.

1898 - Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium.

1913 - The first crossword puzzle, created by Arthur Wynne, was published in the New York World.

1937 - Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles.

1958 - Charles de Gaulle was elected President of the French Fifth Republic; his Union des Démocrates pour la République received 78.5% of the vote.

1962 - Norway's first national park was established, at Rondane.

1964 - Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity and sentenced to four months in the workhouse.

1967 - Louis Washkansky, the world's first recipient of a heart transplant, died at Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital 18 days after his groundbreaking surgery on December 3rd.

1968 - NASA launched the Apollo 8 mission, its first to the moon.

1969 - The Gay Activists Alliance was formed in New York City by dissident members of the Gay Liberation Front following that summer's Stonewall Riots.

1970 - President Richard Nixon met with Elvis Presley in the Oval Office to discuss the war on drugs.

1971 - Kurt Waldheim was elected to replace U Thant as Secretary-General of the United Nations - on his 54th birthday.

1979 - The Lancaster House Agreement - an arrangement whereby Rhodesia would gain its independence - was signed in London by Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, Sir Ian Gilmour, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and S.C. Mundawarara.

1988 - Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing everyone onboard and 11 on the ground - 270 in all. Although one might think the Scottish Government would like to hold those responsible to account for the crime, in August 2009 the only man ever found guilty in conjunction with the Lockerbie Bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was released from jail and returned to Libya.
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"Beyond The Sea" by Bobby Darin

Midcentury masculine grace had no better paragon than Bobby Darin; such a straightforward delivery, and what poise! That Robbie Williams could learn a thing or two from this guy*...

Here he is, singing just one of his classics: Beyond the Sea. The lyrics are pop elegance itself, as sleek and simple as his delivery of them - in all, the ideal blend of singer and song.

*And probably has!
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The Late, Great Bobby Darin

From an early age, Bobby Darin knew his days were numbered...

Raised on Home Relief in The Bronx during the Great Depression, as a child he suffered from multiple bouts of rheumatic fever, which seriously weakened his heart; in fact, he wasn't supposed to live past the age of 16.

Yet not only did he outlive his diagnosis by 20 years, he packed those years with hit records, movie roles, and nightclub appearances a-plenty. His is a story of the power of art in the life of an artist; self-medicated by his capacious creativity, he lived his career with a single-mindedness rare among young talent, especially these days. The charisma he oozed onstage, though, often belied the bellicose douchebaggery for which he became known in his private life.

For all that he must have been aware he was living on borrowed time, onstage Bobby Darin was a paragon of cool; he never could even play flustered successfully, let alone be it, though he often tried, to great comic effect.

Bobby Darin died on this day in 1973.

Bobby Darin has been memorably portrayed on film by Kevin Spacey, who mastered Darin's delivery so as to sing all his own songs, in the film Beyond The Sea (2004).
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Remembering... John Steinbeck

As far as reading is concerned, I guess you could call me pretty lucky; the novels I was 'forced' to read in school (as if I ever had to be forced to read, especially in school) are today some of my all-time favourites. Surprisingly, this was not the experience of most of my friends...

Among the formidable works I assayed in Mrs. Horsfall's class - 1984, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Tin Flute to name just three - one in particular stands even above these masterpieces in my recollection: John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1945). As an exile from the West Coast in the cultural (not to mention meteorological) aridity of Saskatchewan I often found myself gasping for moisture; opening the front cover of Cannery Row for the first time, then, was akin to peeling a grapefruit in the shower.

It isn't a vast sweeping epic in the sense some of his works - The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or East of Eden (1952), for instance - are; it's a slice of life rich in characterization - not unlike Tortilla Flat (1935) or The Wayward Bus (1947) - yet even more sensitively rendered than they. Its sequel, Sweet Thursday (1947), finds the same characters the same number of years older as their author - some jaded, some embittered, some the same old happy-go-lucky - and provides a bittersweet bookend to its predecessor.

John Steinbeck's career, naturally, extended into the movies; Of Mice and Men (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Tortilla Flat (1942), The Red Pony (1949), East of Eden (1955), The Wayward Bus (1956), and Cannery Row (1982) were all adapted for the cinema before Of Mice and Men was remade in 1992. In addition, he wrote an original screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock entitled Lifeboat (1944).

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, in 1962 John Steinbeck was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; plus, as the image shows, he was a handsome devil - which is surely the sweetest prize of them all. He died on this day in 1968.
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"Don't Answer Me" by Alan Parsons Project

This is, hands down, one of the best videos of the Eighties; it rarely ever got shown on shows like Video Hits at the time, though, because they were too busy playing Duran Duran - seriously, how many times did they play The Reflex anyway? That Samantha Taylor's really got a lot to answer for... Anyway, I saw this clip once on Friday Night Videos more than twenty years ago, and never forgot it; seeing it again reminds me of the indelibility of art, and the responsibility that falls to the artist because of that.

From The Alan Parsons Project - and on the occasion of Mr. Alan Parsons' 62nd birthday - it's Don't Answer Me, from the 1984 album Ammonia Avenue.
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The Death of Sacagawea?

The details of her short life are scarce, and the only proof we have that she might have died on this day in 1812 at the age of 25 is a vague entry in the log of a fur trader named Henry Brackenridge at the Fort Manuel Lisa Trading Post: '…the wife of Charbonneau . . . died of putrid fever.' Then again, the entry could have been referring to her husband's other wife, Otter Woman; or else she might have had enough of him calling her 'squaw', and her husband lied about her death to cover his shame at having been deserted by her.

Either way, like Pocahontas - her forbear in the forbearance of white men - Sacagawea's contribution to the European conquest of her homeland has often been neglected, especially by those whom it benefited most. Yet as the only female member of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery (serving as their translator, along with her husband, a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau) the young Shoshone would prove time and again that she was the only woman for the job that only a woman could do; for a young woman with a baby to be traveling safely with a group of white men was to serve as a powerful emblem of their peaceful intentions to every tribe they encountered over the next two years.

Joining the expedition at a Hidatsa village near the present-day Washburn, North Dakota, in November 1804, after giving birth (to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau) Sacagawea and her family moved into the temporary Fort Mandan; by April 1805 the group of explorers was ready to set out across the Rocky Mountains. In May of that year, after her quick reflexes saved the journals of Lewis and Clark from a potential watery grave, they named the Sacagawea River after her.

It was in August, though, that Sacagawea's presence would come in handiest; as the expedition neared the Columbia River, they found a tribe with whom they wished to trade. It turns out the chief of that tribe was Sacagawea's long-lost brother, Cameahwait, whom she hadn't seen since she was stolen from their village when she was 12 (circa 1800) and the trade was arranged. Reaching the Pacific Ocean in November 1805, the group wintered at Fort Clatsop, in Oregon.

On the return trip in 1806 Sacagawea suggested that they take a different route, and cross into the Yellowstone River basin at what is now known as Bozeman Pass; after subsequent exhaustive surveys of the entire cordilleran region, hers was the route chosen as the optimal one for the Northern Pacific Railway to cross the continental divide. Following the return of the expedition to where she and her family had first joined it, they remained there for three years, moving to St. Louis in 1809, and thence into the fort where she may have died in 1812.

Still, legends persist... The most persistent of these is that Sacagawea died at Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation in April 1884 at the age of 96, having changed her name from the Hidatsa name she is best known by to the Shoshone name Porivo (meaning chief woman); a monument to Porivo (aka Sacagawea) was erected at her graveside near Lander, Wyoming, in 1963.

Sacagawea lives on in two works of fiction: one written in 1933 by Grace Hebard, the other written in 1984 by Anna Lee Waldo; both are called Sacajawea.
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¡Feliz Cumpleaños! Infanta Elena, Duques de Lugo

Her Royal Highness has previously merited a mention on the Pop Culture Institute due to her unprecedented marital arrangement; in November 2007 it was announced that she and her husband - banker Jaime de Marichalar y Sáenz de Tejada - had separated, and would henceforth maintain separate households...  Following a November 2009 divorce, the Duke was officially stripped of his title in February 2010 and is now no longer considered a part of the Spanish Royal Family.

Although the eldest child of Spain's King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía was briefly catapulted into the headlines around the world at the time, in the years since she's managed to maintain a far lower profile, while still keeping busy engaged in charity work and undergoing the usual royal round. If you'd like to know what she's been up to, and you can read Spanish, you might want to click here for a glimpse at her calendar of events.
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Remembering... Irene Dunne

Born on this day in 1898, Irene Dunne was one of the most beloved film stars of the Thirties and Forties; her career began and ended in the theatre, and Hollywood was little more than a diversion for her. 'I drifted into acting and drifted out,' she once told an interviewer. 'Acting is not everything. Living is.'

An early role in Cimarron (1931) - only her second movie - earned her the first of five Academy Award nominations (none of which she won); Dunne is often cited as the best actor to never win an Oscar, which puts her in company with Alfred Hitchcock, the best director who never won one either. She also distinguished herself in, among others: Back Street (1932), The Age of Innocence (1934), Roberta (1935), Show Boat (1936), My Favorite Wife (1940), Penny Serenade (1941), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), Life with Father (1947), and I Remember Mama (1948). Her last film role was It Grows on Trees (1952).

Most memorably, though, she appeared in The Awful Truth (1937) with Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, a film which has been screened more times than I can count at the Pop Culture Institute; this near-perfect frisson of passion and whimsy features the ideal element for romantic comedy which, alas, is too often missing from it - namely witty banter.

Dunne died in September 1990, at the age of 91.
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Pop History Moment: "A Christmas Carol" Was Published

On this day in 1843 A Christmas Carol - that timeless tale of redemption, which brought to life one Ebenezer Scrooge - was first published by Chapman & Hall of London. Illustrated by John Leech, who created such images as Scrooge meeting the Ghost of Christmas Present (shown, below), the novella was an immediate success both financially and critically; after the disappointing reception and sales of Charles Dickens' previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, the popularity of A Christmas Carol must have been as gratifying to the author as its impact would have been to the juvenile Dickens, upon whose experiences it was based...




Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

[READ MORE...]

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"Too Shy" by Kajagoogoo

Before I was a blogger I was a pretty apathetic sort... Take this song as a for instance: I've been listening to it for more than 25 years now, and it wasn't until several minutes prior to writing this that I even gave a rat's ass who wrote it, who sang it, or what circumstances surrounded its creation. Say what you will about blogging, but it definitely has its plus side, especially when faced with a blank screen and a compulsion to write about pop culture.

Too Shy was recorded and released by Kajagoogoo in 1983 - in my humble opinion one of the greatest years in the history of British pop music; it was produced by Nick Rhodes (of Duran Duran fame) and that band's in-house producer Colin Thurston, responsible for Duran Duran's early sound (as in their first single Planet Earth). The song appeared on the Kajagoogo's debut album, White Feathers; it's being sung by Limahl, who was born on this day in 1958.
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Happy Birthday Michelangelo Signorile

I first read the work of Michelangelo Signorile way back in the day - back when gay press outlets like The Advocate were still relevant to the lives of most gay men outside of Chelsea and West Hollywood, which should give you some idea how long ago that was*. Of course, back then the gay community still existed largely in the shadows, and the cultural workers who toiled there did so in what looked like it would always be a niche market. Few could have foreseen how mainstream both the gay community and one of its mouthiest members would become, let alone how quickly...

The oppressive backlash gay men encountered due to AIDS then - like the ongoing demonization by evangelical Christians over our uppity insistence on equal rights today - has brought about unprecedented recognition and even political leverage to the gay community, for which we** owe bigots as far back as Anita Bryant and as current as Rick Warren our eternal gratitude. The same phenomenon also catapulted Signorile from his cozy corner as a scribbler on queer social issues to one of the foremost opinion-makers of our times, and all because of an encounter he had in 1988 with a particularly vile bigot named Joseph Ratzinger.

Currently host of The Michelangelo Signorile Show, on Sirius Satellite Radio's OutQ channel, he's also the author of four books, all of which arose from his work as a columnist for both The Advocate and Out Magazine. From the hot-button issue of outing, which was the first to give him national exposure as a major contributor to OutWeek, to the struggles experienced by gays in the military and even the casual homophobia we as gay men encounter daily, Signorile can be counted on to have his own take on any issue, and a deliciously liberal one as well. No doubt as he gets older, which he does by one year today, he'll have something to say about that and much more besides.

*Like, the early Nineties...
**And by 'we' I mean groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation (which Signorile co-founded) as well.
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Gratuitous Brunette: Jake Gyllenhaal

Born on this day in 1980 - obviously a very good year - Jake Gyllenhaal was not only the Pop Culture Institute's Hottie of the Year for last year, but also next year, the year after that, and any old year he wants really...
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Bonus Video: "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush

Wuthering Heights appeared on Kate Bush's debut album, 1978's The Kick Inside, and was also her first single; it spent four weeks at Number 1 in the UK, a first for a female singer-songwriter.

This is just one of the videos that were made to accompany the song; because I felt this one was a) wackier, and 2) more colourful - plus seasonal, what with all that red - I chose it over the other one. Just in case you were wondering.

And of course, it's all in honour of Emily Brontë - author of the novel Wuthering Heights - who died on this day in 1848.
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Pop History Moment: Death Stalks Haworth Parsonage

When I first read about the Brontë brood - Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, Anne - I remember thinking how cool it must have been to grow up in a house full of writers... Then I met other writers. The real irony is that the parsonage in such a devout parish could be so thoroughly infested with these demons, with all their demons...

Death visited Haworth Parsonage often, and came for Emily on this day in 1848. Always frail - which the weather in Yorkshire did precisely nothing to ameliorate - she caught a chill while attending the funeral of her brother Branwell in September and three months later she was dead herself, of tuberculosis.

Emily Brontë wrote only one novel; that it should be Wuthering Heights more than excuses the paucity of her oeuvre. Reading it practically killed me, so I'm compelled to admire the fortitude of anyone who could write it - especially in longhand, several times over, by lantern light in a draughty house.

The following year Anne Brontë died, after which there was a six-year gap before the loss of Charlotte; of the six children sired by Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell following their marriage in December 1812, all of them (and his wife besides) died before the parson did, in June 1861.
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Remembering... Jean Genet

It was not too long ago - within the past 50 years - that the homosexual male was an outlaw, a rebel standing against all that was bourgeois and therefore contemptible about life. Well, Jean Genet could make the best of them look like powdered poodles; in fact, he even made the outlaws look like sell-outs...

Born on this day in 1910, he spent his first year of life in the brothel where his mother worked; given up for adoption he spent an idyllic childhood in the countryside. His idyll was shattered when, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to Mettray Penal Colony; initially intended to be lenient (not unlike the borstal system in England, with a focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment) by the time Genet was there - as chronicled in his novel The Miracle of the Rose (1946) - it was a pretty brutal place.

Upon his release he joined the French Foreign Legion, but was soon drummed out for committing a homosexual act - which to me pretty much seems the whole point of joining the French Foreign Legion in the first place, but the authorities obviously felt otherwise. Genet spent the postwar years whoring around Europe, as recounted in his book The Thief's Journal (1949); in the same year he wrote his most famous play, The Maids.

By 1950 Genet's work had, for some reason, been banned in America, which naturally made him a huge star in France; lauded by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida this should have been the most productive time of his life, and would have been had he not been depressed. When a relationship in the mid-1960s with a tightrope walker named Abdullah ended in suicide, Genet almost made it a double.

Instead, Genet became even more political (if such a thing is possible) than he was before, frequently appearing at rallies in support of that perennial French bugbear, immigrants. In 1970, at the behest of the Black Panthers, he spent three months in the United States, lecturing and writing; in 1982 he was in Beirut at the time of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, and visited shortly thereafter, later writing an essay called Quatre heures à Chatila (Four Hours in Shatila) about the experience.

Jean Genet died in Paris in April 1986, ostensibly of cancer, but a fall and subsequent blow to the head may have hastened his demise; he is buried in Morocco, in the Spanish Cemetery at Larache.
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"Milord" par Edith Piaf

From an appearance in 1959 on The Ed Sullivan Show, it's a song about a prostitute admiring a dapper gentleman walking past her; good thing most people in the Sullivan audience didn't speak French...

Milord, also called Ombre de la Rue (A shadow of the streets) was written in 1959 by Georges Moustaki (with music by Marguerite Monnot); according to Wikipedia (and, you know, they're always right) it has also been sung by Cher, meaning I won't rest until I possess that version as well.
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In Memoriam: Edith Piaf

I think of her whenever I see a little sparrow hopping across the concrete in search of a few crumbs... Instead of food, though, the crumbs Edith Piaf (born on this day in 1915) sought were love. Her adopted surname, of course, meant 'sparrow'; certainly those qualities of frailty and doggedness must have been there when Louis Leplée - the nightclub owner - first laid eyes on her, singing in the street for coins, in 1935.

Leplee's murder the following year would be the first down in a career of ups and downs for Edith Piaf, as she was questioned by police in relation to the case; the mobsters who killed him were known to her and her involvement, however cursory, did not sit well with her new fans. She survived the scandal, as she would always do; in 1940 her new friend Jean Cocteau wrote her a role in his play Le Bel Indifférent. It was a success, and once more she was on her way.

Despite crippling stage fright, Piaf performed extensively throughout the war, but the song most often associated with the era (and her) - La vie en rose - would not enter her repertoire until 1946. Amazingly, she managed to escape the Nazi occupation with her reputation intact; so many, in the interest of self-preservation, either collaborated or gave the appearance of collaboration, and Piaf was no different. She would later claim to have aided the Resistance, but as they kept very inadequate records, the truth of that may never be known.

A post-war tour of the United States, undertaken with the then-unknown Charles Aznavour, saw both of them acclaimed across North America; naturally, she was on top of the world when, in October 1949, her lover Marcel Cerdan was killed in a plane crash. In 1951 she and Aznavour were in a car accident; although they survived, Piaf came away from it addicted to morphine, which was not helped by two subsequent crashes. In 1952 she married Jacques Pills, whose main job seems to be taking her to rehab; they divorced in 1956. She took a second husband, Théo Sarapo, in 1962, who performed with her towards the end.

Edith Piaf died of cancer in October 1963, the same day as her old friend Jean Cocteau; she was 47. In 2007 it was as if she'd come back to life when Marion Cotillard portrayed the singer in the hugely entertaining biopic, La Vie En Rose, for which its star was awarded a Best Actress Academy Award.
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The Death of Kirsty MacColl

Kirsty MacColl was riding high on this day in 2000; her album Tropical Brainstorm was being critically acclaimed and selling well, in an industry where the two are often mutually exclusive, while its single, In These Shoes, was turning into her biggest hit in fifteen years...

Taking a well-earned break in the Mexican resort of Cozumel with her partner James Knight and two sons, she decided to go scuba diving in an area which was restricted to watercraft. Emerging from a dive, MacColl saw a powerboat speed into the restricted area toward her son Jamie; she managed to push him out of its way, and he suffered only minor physical injuries. Kirsty, however, was struck and killed instantly.

The boat in question was owned by Mexican supermarket mogul Guillermo González Nova, who was aboard with his own family at the time, but not at the helm - or so he claims. An employee of his named José Cenyam readily confessed that he was piloting the boat at the time of the accident, but eyewitnesses disagree; they also disagree that he was, as he claimed, travelling at a speed of one knot when he collided with MacColl.

Cenyam was sentenced to a prison term of 2 years 10 months on a charge of culpable homicide, but paid a fine of $90 (and $2150 in damages to MacColl's family, an amount based on his wages) rather than serving time; there is every indication that Senor Nova paid his employee to take the fall. Ever since the accident the Mexican government has been 'unable' to find him for questioning.

Today marks the first day of the eleventh year her family has been trying to get Justice for Kirsty; the BBC released a documentary by Olivia Lichtenstein entitled Who Killed Kirsty MacColl? in 2005, which featured new evidence and interviews with Kirsty's family, including her partner James, son Louis, and 80-year-old mother Jean. Like this blog post, it's all part of a concerted effort to keep this case in front of the public until there is, at last, some justice for Kirsty.
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Remembering... Chris Farley

It was on this day in 1997 that day the world lost one of its brightest comedic talents, when obesity, drugs, and alcohol finally got the better of Chris Farley...

Not that he didn't try to battle his demons; in the last four years of his life he is said to have entered 31 programs to combat his alcoholism and help him get a handle on his weight. None of them worked, of course; an autopsy revealed that when Chris Farley died his system contained quantities of cocaine and heroin. He was found in his Chicago apartment, already dead, by his brother John.

Farley joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1990, and was almost immediately lauded for his fearlessness; his were neither quiet nor subtle characterizations - my personal favourite is ersatz motivational speaker Matt Foley - and quickly his larger-than-life appeal was translated onto the silver screen. Following his departure from SNL Farley (along with fellow castmember David Spade) made Tommy Boy (1995) and Black Sheep (1996), which remain cult classics to this day.

For my money, though, it's those old SNL classics that take me back to those halcyon days of my early 20s when I'd spend my Saturday nights... At home, watching television.

Now you know why there isn't more sex on this blog; all those nights when I shoulda been out getting some play I was home watching this guy. Oh well, at least I wasn't living in a van down by the river!
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