POPnews - January 1st

[Vancouver's sylvan Point Grey neighbourhood (in the foreground) is possessed of some of the city's finest homes, which are themselves occupied by some of the city's most insufferably stuck-up people - and that's really saying something, given the massive influx of nouveau-riche douchebags the city as a whole has seen over the last decade.]
1804 - French rule ended in Haiti, which became the world's first black republic and the first colony in the West Indies to gain its independence, under Jean-Jacques Dessalines - one of two generals who served under Toussaint L'Ouverture. (The other was Henri Christophe.)

1810 - Major-General Lachlan Macquarie officially became Governor of New South Wales.

1880 - Ferdinand de Lesseps began the French phase of construction on the Panama Canal.

1912 - The Republic of China was established.

1929 - The former municipalities of Point Grey and South Vancouver were amalgamated into Vancouver.

1950 - The state of Ajaigarh was ceded to the Government of India.

1956 - The Republic of the Sudan gained its independence from the Egyptian Republic and the United Kingdom.

1959 - Fulgencio Batista, president of Cuba, was overthrown by Fidel Castro's forces during the Cuban Revolution.

1960 - The Republic of Cameroon gained its independence from France and the United Kingdom.

1962 - Western Samoa gained its independence from New Zealand and changed its name to the Independent State of Western Samoa.

1965 - The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was founded in Kabul.

1966 - Following a coup, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa assumed power as president of the Central African Republic.

1982 - Peruvian Javier Pérez de Cuéllar became the first Latin American to hold the title of Secretary General of the United Nations.

1986 - Aruba gained its independence from Curaçao, though it remains in free association with the Kingdom of the Netherlands to this day.

1994 - The Zapatista Army of National Liberation initiated twelve days of armed conflict in the Mexican State of Chiapas.

1997 - Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan was appointed Secretary General of the United Nations.

2000 - As the world celebrated, no major crisis arose from the dreaded Y2K computer 'millennium bug'.
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Happy 2011!

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"On The Radio" by Donna Summer

Whether or not Donna Summer - born on this day in 1948 - ever said AIDS was a punishment from God* in the early Eighties, the damage to her once-stellar career was done. Her core fan base gone, the string of hits that made her the undisputed Queen of Disco evaporated almost as quickly as disco did; only the rock-flavoured She Works Hard for the Money managed to climb the charts in 1983 before she appeared to be washed up.

Nevertheless, at her peak she could do no wrong; Love to Love You Baby (1975), I Feel Love (1977), Last Dance and MacArthur Park (1978), Hot Stuff and Bad Girls (1979), and On the Radio (1980) are among the dozens of singles she released which form the greater part of the era's soundtrack.

In 1989 she returned to dance floor dominance - even in gay clubs - with This Time I Know It's For Real, from the album Another Place and Time, and in 2004 she was among the first inductees in the Dance Music Hall of Fame.

*And there are those who weren't even there who'll insist she did, even though she has been vehemently denying she said it ever since she is alleged to have said it. For the record, the Pop Culture Institute is willing to believe her version of events.
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Happy Birthday Bebe Neuwirth

Although for many of us, our first encounter with Bebe Neuwirth came when she portrayed Lilith Sternin, the romantic foil to Frasier Crane on Cheers - for which she earned Emmy Awards in 1990 and 1991 - she was a respected member of the Broadway community first, having made her stage debut in 1980 as Sheila in A Chorus Line; she's also appeared in such movies as Say Anything (1989), Green Card (1990), and Bugsy (1991).

However, I could listen to her performance of Velma Kelly in the 1996 revival of Chicago all day long - I know because I often have.

A graduate of Juilliard, Neuwirth was honoured with a Tony Award for her role in Chicago, as well as for her performance in the 1986 revival of Sweet Charity; she was also hailed in the 1994 revival of Damn Yankees and most recently became the latest in a string of actresses to portray Morticia Addams in the Broadway version of The Addams Family opposite Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams.
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POPnews - December 31st

[Except for New Year's Eve 1962, during which heavy snow caused the pendulum to detach and forced it to ring ten minutes late, and New Year's Eve 1976, which was interrupted due to major damage to the clock mechanism earlier that year, Big Ben has rung in the new year in the British capital every year since it was first built in 1859.]
1229 - An army commanded by Aragon's King James I - who was known as 'the Conqueror ' - entered Medina Mayurqa (which he promptly renamed Palma) thus completing the Christian reconquest of the island of Majorca.

1600 - The British East India Company was chartered by England's Queen Elizabeth I.

1687 - The first Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, set sail for the Cape of Good Hope.

1831 - Gramercy Park was deeded to New York City by Samuel B. Ruggles; the oldest private park in the United States, it's gated, and local residents are able to buy keys.

1857 - Queen Victoria chose Ottawa for Canada's capital over the likes of Toronto and Montreal, both of which have been over-compensating for it ever since.

1862 - The USS Monitor sank off North Carolina's Cape Hatteras.

1879 - Thomas Edison demonstrated incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, at Menlo Park.

1904 - The first New Year's Eve celebration was held in Manhattan's Times Square, then still known as Longacre Square.

1909 - The Manhattan Bridge opened.

1923 - The chimes of Big Ben were broadcast on BBC radio for the first time to mark the arrival of the New Year.

1929 - Guy Lombardo performed Auld Lang Syne at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City for the first time; coming as it did just two months after the Wall Street crashed must have given it the utmost poignance.

1960 - The farthing coin ceased to be legal tender in the United Kingdom.

1963 - The Central African Federation officially collapsed, splitting into Zambia, Malawi and Rhodesia.

1981 - A coup d'état in Ghana removed President Hilla Limann's PNP government and replaced it with the Provisional National Defence Council led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings.

1986 - A fire at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, killed 97 and injured 140.

1987 - Robert Mugabe assumed office as President of Zimbabwe; he clings to power still, but for how long...

1992 - Czechoslovakia was dissolved, resulting in the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

1999 - Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in charge.

2007 - Boston's massive Big Dig construction project ended.
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"Hold On Tight" by Electric Light Orchestra

Birthday wishes go out today to Jeff Lynne, founding member and principal songwriter for the Electric Light Orchestra, who are also known as ELO; Lynne's career also incorporates the Eighties super-group Traveling Wilburys, to which end he recorded two albums with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.

Hold on Tight originally appeared on the band's 1981 concept album Time. I choose to post it here because of its obvious New Year's overtones; having completed another year of striving on behalf of the Pop Culture Institute, another year of coming into my own, and of having to hold on tight as things are finally starting to take off...
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Pop History Moment: The Fall Of A Tyrant

I have to admit, I never thought they'd do it...

I never thought anyone would have the guts to actually execute Saddam Hussein; I figured they'd just drag it out until he died in custody, Milosevic-style. When I awoke to the news of it on this day in 2006 I went back to sleep, only to dream that he'd then been reanimated and was on the loose inside the Green Zone, until Dick Cheney started shooting at him and he turned into a giant Zombie pinata.

This is what happens when you eat Slim Jims before bed, kids. Especially when high.

A n y w a y...

Maybe it was naive of me to think that the respect for human life so amply demonstrated by the US and Iraqi governments over the years would apply to even the greatest of villains; in fact, I know it was naive of me to think that, stupid even - albeit hilarious - which is probably why I did it in the first place.

Still, I was shocked - shocked! - when I heard that he'd been hanged, at Camp Justice. It was only a matter of time (in fact it was in the very same news cycle) that bootlegged footage of the execution itself, botches and all, had been released. Ironically, for as high as he'd gotten, it was an all-too-short fall that provided better justice for Saddam Hussein than he had ever shown his people.

All in all, it made for a real yikes of a day...
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"Runaway" by Del Shannon

Vintage footage of birthday boy Del Shannon here, performing his smash hit Runaway circa 1961, which features the first sustained synthesizer solo, in this instance provided by the Clavioline. The song's success would not only electrify audiences, but its electrification would change the sound of pop music forever...
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POPnews - December 30th

[Back in the olden days robber barons capitalists like James
Gadsden used their influence within the federal government
to line their own pockets... Thank goodness that kind
of corruption doesn't occur anymore!]
1066 - A Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, crucifying the city's Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacring most of the Jewish population of the city in what came to be known as the Granada Massacre.

1460 - During the so-called Wars of the Roses the Battle of Wakefield pitted the House of Lancaster's Margaret of Anjou against Richard, Duke of York - aptly enough of the House of York.

1853 - The US paid Mexico $10 million for the Gadsden Purchase, which works out to about 53 cents an acre for a parcel of land in southern Arizona and New Mexico which would become the final addition made to the lower 48; it was bought at the behest of James Gadsden, who negotiated the deal, then used the land to complete his transcontinental railroad.

1896 - José Rizal was executed by firing squad in Manila; widely considered a martyr of the Philippine Revolution, his death is currently celebrated as a holiday in the Philippines.

1903 - A fire at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago killed 600 just 37 days after it opened; the club's promotional advertising had promised it was 'absolutely fireproof'.

1905 - Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg was assassinated near his home in Caldwell, possibly by Canadian-born labour leader Harry Orchard.

1916 - The last coronation in Hungary was performed for King Charles IV and Queen Zita.

1922 - The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed.

1927 - The Ginza Line, Asia's first subway, opened in Tokyo.

1943 - Subhash Chandra Bose raised the flag of Indian independence at Port Blair, apparently.

1947 - King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate by his new Soviet-backed Communist government; it was revealed 60 years later that His Majesty was told if he didn't 1,000 students would be executed, so he did.

1948 - Cole Porter's Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate - based on William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew - opened at the New Century Theatre; originally starring Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison, it ran for 1,077 performances, as well as becoming the first show to win the Best Musical Tony Award.

1965 - Ferdinand Marcos became President of the Philippines.

1977 - Ted Bundy escaped from his cell in Glenwood Springs, Colorado; it was a clean getaway, as his captors didn't notice he was missing for 17 hours. While eluding capture in Florida Bundy managed to kill Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman (as well as sexually assaulting Levy) and severely injure Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, all Chi Omega sorority sisters. He also crippled Cheryl Thomas before abducting, raping, and murdering Kimberly Leach, before he was recaptured, accidentally, by Pensacola police officer David Lee in February 1978.

1986 - A bus chartered by the Swift Current Broncos - a junior team in the Western Hockey League - crashed during bad weather outside of their hometown, killing 4 players and injuring 1. At the time of the crash the team was on its way to play a game in Regina, where I was living at the time, against the Regina Pats. Among the players who survived the crash was Joe Sakic, the future Hall-of-Famer who currently plays with the Colorado Avalanche.

1994 - John Salvi murdered Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney during shootings at two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts; despite being sentenced to serve two consecutive life sentences for his crimes, these convictions were overturned by the sentencing judge - Barbara Dortch-Okara - following Salvi's November 2006 jailhouse suicide, invoking the legal principle that a conviction may not stand if the accused dies before his appeals are exhausted.

1995 - The lowest temperature ever recorded in the UK was recorded in Scotland; no surprise there. A bone-chilling -27.2°C was recorded at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. This equalled the record set at Braemar, in Aberdeenshire, in February 1895 and January 1982.

2004 - A fire in the República Cromagnon nightclub in Buenos Aires killed 194.

2006 - 2 people were killed and 26 injured when Madrid's Barajas International Airport was bombed; the separatist organization ETA later claimed responsibility.
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"Love Is All Around" by Sonny Curtis

The theme tune for The Mary Tyler Moore Show - entitled Love Is All Around - is probably the most famous song Sonny Curtis ever wrote; I say probably not merely out of my predisposition for using weasel words but because armed only with my puny human brain I can't possibly gauge the fame such songs as Walk Right Back (made famous by the Everly Brothers) let alone I Fought the Law (covered by everyone from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to The Clash) might have attained.

Anyway, I've posted it here in honour of the woman it was written to celebrate, namely Mary Tyler Moore, whose portrayal of Mary Richards made her the first feminist sitcomedienne, and who today turns 74.

If you're up to it, may we suggest tossing a woolen hat in the air to celebrate.
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Happy Birthday Mary Tyler Moore

She can turn the world on with her smile, something that's been in evidence since well before Sonny Curtis wrote the words to Love Is All Around, which was used to introduce Mary Tyler Moore to TV audiences most Saturday nights from 1970 to 1977...

Initially a dancer, in 1961 she was cast (from a field of 60) as Laurie Petrie in the classic sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, where her pert personality (and even perkier ass) set a new standard for TV wives; playing a young married couple, she and Dick Van Dyke had some serious carnality in their chemistry.

When that show went off the air in 1966, Moore made a few movies and did some theatre - including a turn as Holly Golightly in a notorious 1966 flop musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's on Broadway, and the truly bizarre film Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) - while waiting for the perfect vehicle to bring her back to television; she found it in 1970.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show touched a nerve in American life, giving the nascent Women's Movement a telegenic and well-loved proponent, as well as blending the two halves of the sitcom (domestic and workplace) even more handily than had her previous gig. It also spawned a number of spin-offs, such as Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant, as well as featuring the abundant comedic talents of Edward Asner, Gavin MacLeod, Ted Knight, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Betty White, and Georgia Engel.

Since that show ended in 1977, Moore has made an Oscar-nominated appearance in Ordinary People (1980) and was memorable in David O. Russell's 1996 film Flirting with Disaster, a movie so good even Patricia Arquette and her dead eyes couldn't ruin it.
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Paul Rudnick: When It's Laughter You're After...

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was a fan of Paul Rudnick's long before I'd ever heard his name...

As Libby Gelman-Waxner, Rudnick has been reviewing movies for Premiere magazine since God was in short pants, or so it seems anyway. Rudnick/Waxner's take on the modern cinema is so incisive, I have no idea why all the other critics haven't long ago packed it all in; 61 of their finest collaborations are collected in If You Ask Me: The Collected Columns of America's Most Beloved and Irresponsible Critic.

Born in Piscataway Township, New Jersey, this multi-talented writer and humourist is responsible for the novels Social Disease (1986) and I'll Take It (1989), as well as the plays I Hate Hamlet (1991) and Jeffrey (1993); he's also written the screenplays for Addams Family Values (1993), Jeffrey (1995), In & Out (1997), Isn't She Great? (2000), Marci X (2003), and The Stepford Wives (2004).
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"Rasputin" by Boney M

From their 1978 album Nightflight to Venus, it's Boney M's classic song Rasputin.

Because how could I not post this today?
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The Death of Rasputin

If all you knew about the life of Grigori Rasputin was that he had spooky eyes and held the Russian Royal Family in a kind of a thrall - and even that you learned from the 1978 song about him by Boney M - that would be all you needed to know. The details of his life, influence, and especially death have all been muddied to the extent that sorting the truth out of the lies may well be impossible at this late date...

While initially engaged by the Tsaritsa Alexandra to heal her ailing, hemophiliac son, the Tsarevich Alexei, he soon came under the scrutiny of the court for his profligate ways, some or even all of which rumours may have been slanderous. After a dozen years as confidante to Tsar Nicholas II and his family, other nobles at court had had enough, especially one Prince Felix Yusupov (who presumably was jealous that the Romanovs were lavishing so much attention on a peasant).

Luring Rasputin to Yusupov's Moika Palace near Saint Petersburg on this day in 1916, they plied him with wine and cakes laced with 'enough cyanide to kill five men' by Vasily Maklakov, to no effect. Yusupov then got a gun and shot Rasputin in the back; when even this didn't kill the monk he got his friend (and, some say, lover) Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich to handcuff Rasputin and throw him into the icy Neva River, which seems to have done the trick.

Of course, Yusupov's subsequent versions of these events varied to the extent that no two accounts match, which makes him an unreliable source at worst, and a talented fabulist at best; a 2004 autopsy of Rasputin located no active poison in his stomach, nor any water in his lungs. He'd obviously been stabbed, shot, and assaulted, but even this evidence contradicts reports given by Yusupov in 1916, 1917, 1927, 1934, and 1965.

All in all it was the perfect crime; despite numerous admissions that he had shot and killed Rasputin, Prince Felix Yusupov was never charged with any wrongdoing in connection with his death.
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Pop History Moment: Murder In The Cathedral

Kings, as people, are used to getting what they want, especially the medieval ones; feeling themselves imbued with the blood royal, stalking the Earth as God's representative, it's easy to see how someone could develop a really severe entitlement complex. Provided the King in question was reasonably diplomatic, and his courtiers suitably acquiescent, everybody could get what they want and no one would get hurt. Alas, this sort of thing almost never happened.

Would that Henry II were one particle as diplomatic as his Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket; not that for all his reputation as a holy man, Becket wasn't as capable of towering arrogance and even bluff cruelty as his Lord and Master. It's just that Henry was a general first, and was used to either getting what he wanted or else killing whomever he had to to get it, and then taking it.

One day the King had had enough of Becket's intransigence and, raising his feverish head, from his sickbed called out: 'Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?' Not specifically an order, but for four of his knights - Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton - already attuned to doing the King's will, it was enough.

Away they went to Canterbury, where they found the priest at prayer amid some monks, and brutally slew him, on this day in 1170; by all accounts, Becket faced his murderers calmly. A clerk named Edward Grim was visiting Canterbury Cathedral at the time, and was slightly wounded in trying to save Becket's life; he later wrote a biography of the slain cleric, including a firsthand account of his murder.

The site of Becket's murder quickly became a shrine for pilgrims; Henry II himself was one of the earliest penitents, which may have set the trend, visiting first as he did in the midst of the Revolt of 1173–1174. Over the next two centuries untold numbers followed in his footsteps; Geoffrey Chaucer's book The Canterbury Tales was the earliest account of this activity, written two centuries hence. Becket's quickly became the richest shrine in England, until it was broken up in 1538 and seized for the treasury of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

In fact the later Henry's struggles with the Pope over matters of spiritual and temporal authority, which bore fruit upon the creation of the Church of England, may have done so from seeds sown by his ancestor on this day.

Becket's life and death have also been adapted for the stage by T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, Jean Anouilh's play Becket (both later made into films) and in print by Ken Follett's historical novel The Pillars of the Earth.
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"Broken English" by Marianne Faithfull

Birthday wishes go out to the grandmother of all show business survivors, Marianne Faithfull...

Her relationship with Mick Jagger in the Sixties, when they were the golden couple, should have done her in; it didn't, and she went on to record this, without question her biggest single. From her 1979 album Broken English, it's the title track.
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Happy Birthdame!

For me, at least, nothing clears up a case of the blues like watching Maggie Smith...

Whether portraying the scheming Duchess of York in Richard III (1995), Gunilla Garson Goldberg - the snob with a heart of gold - in The First Wives Club (1996), the bitchy Lady Hester Random in Tea With Mussolini (1999), or the acidulous Countess of Trentham in Robert Altman's brilliant Gosford Park (2001), she may prefer to call the characters she plays 'grotesques' but to me they're just what the doctor ordered, as long as what the doctor ordered is a bit of a laugh to forget all about - as the kids say - yo' shit.

For nearly fifty years, Maggie Smith's appearance in a film has been a guarantee that an enjoyable performance is on its way; she can even deliver a badly written line well (which skill I was grateful for about ten minutes into Sister Act 2, believe me). In addition to those previously mentioned, her resume contains several notable highlights, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Travels With My Aunt (1972), Death on the Nile and California Suite (1981), Clash of the Titans (1981), A Room with a View (1985), Sister Act (1992), Keeping Mum (2005), and Becoming Jane (2007) among dozens of others.

And let's not forget her sterling performance as Minerva McGonagall...
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"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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