Nobody Puts Jennifer Grey In A Corner

Okay, okay... So the title's a bit twee, even for me - especially since I may be the only person of my generation who hasn't seen the movie Dirty Dancing. But hey, I'm running a business here, and my instincts have been pretty good so far, so there you have it.

A n y w a y... It goes without saying that today is Jennifer Grey's birthday and that, given my previous revelation, I'm most familiar with the work she did in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - which I saw eleven times in theatrical release, owing to a certain schoolboy crush I once had (and may still have) on one Mr Matthew Broderick.

In the mid-1990s she portrayed Mindy, the best friend of Rachel's who took up with Barry after he was left at the altar - which incident had been the plot device for the greatest American sitcom ever, Friends.

Practically the only other thing I know about Jennifer Grey is that she had a nose job which changed her appearance to such a degree that even casting directors stopped recognizing her; such a scandal was this that it was the lead story on Entertainment Tonight several days running. Ever intrepid, Grey spun the story into a short-lived sitcom, 1999's It's Like, You Know... in which she poked fun at herself and her career; she's recently appeared on the dramedy John from Cincinnati, which is all about surfers or something and may one day make my personal watchlist since a) I get into a very LA head space during the Vancouver winter, and b) surfers are hot.
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"Jaded" by Aerosmith

I would be remiss if I let today pass without marking the birthday of rock and roll legend Steven Tyler, lead singer and founding member of Boston-based rockers Aerosmith; amazingly, Tyler is still rocking out despite his eligibility for AARP membership, which bodes well for me as I scream - and I do mean scream - past the big 4-0.

Although the band had their first hit as long ago as 1975, with Sweet Emotion, as recently as 2001 Aerosmith were still on the charts with Jaded, which Tyler co-wrote with Marti Frederiksen for the band's 13th studio album Just Push Play. Jaded was rolled out with considerable hype at both that year's American Music Awards and Super Bowl XXXV.
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Gratuitous Brunette: T. R. Knight

In the interest of full disclosure I am compelled to confess that I've never seen an episode of Grey's Anatomy - not even a partial one* - although I have had several dreams featuring one of its stars, Eric Dane, which I am nonetheless unable to discuss under the terms of the Access to Too Much Information Act; what I know of birthday boy T. R. Knight, then, is what I know owing to a seeming inability to avert my eyes from celebrity media...

All of which means that T. R. Knight owes his prestigious appearance here as a Gratuitous Brunette - and a fair measure of his current fame besides - to the scandal frenzy whipped up by Isaiah Washington in 2006-7 over Washington's use of some unfortunate vocabulary during a heated onset argument with their co-star, Patrick Dempsey.

Still, even though it seemed for awhile like it was going to be the scandal that wouldn't die, and while I don't approve of Washington's use of 'the other f-word' (since I have no doubt he would have shouted loudest and longest if Knight had used the n-word against him, after all) Washington - a straight man - had played a gay man in Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus long before Knight had even bothered to come out. Oddly enough, none of this emerged during the extended furore - which was less about homophobia than African-American homophobia**.

Anyway, the entire event is about to pass into the annals of pop culture lore... Knight's portrayal of George O'Malley came to an end following the 2008-9 season of the show, and only time will tell whether either of their careers will survive - with or without another beneficial injection of scandal.

*I don't seem to have the attention span to watch an hour-long drama, even though I can watch an entire box set of a sitcom in one ten-hour sitting. Maybe it's the soap opera histrionics I don't like, although that doesn't seem likely either. I guess it comes down to the sluices of fake blood inherent in a medical drama, which in me at least induce genuine nausea.
**Yes, there is a difference.
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POPnews - March 26th

[You see, kids... Once upon a time there was an American president who cared about peace in the Middle East. I know, I know, you think I'm shitting you, but it's really true! Look - here's a picture to prove it.]
1026 - Pope John XIX crowned Conrad II - first King of the Salian Dynasty - as Holy Roman Emperor.

1130 - Norway's King Sigurd I died without a legitimate male heir, precipitating a civil war that persisted until 1240; in the meantime he was succeeded by his illegitimate son Magnus IV and his half-brother Harald IV.

1212 - Portugal's King Sancho I died, at which time he was succeeded by his eldest son, who reigned as Afonso II.

1552 - Guru Amar Das became the third of eleven Sikh Gurus, following in the footsteps of Guru Angad Dev.

1636 - Holland's Utrecht University was founded.

1812 - An earthquake destroyed Caracas in the midst of the Venezuelan War of Independence.

1839 - The Henley Royal Regatta was first proposed by Captain Edmund Gardiner.

1958 - The US Army launched Explorer 3 to explore the Van Allen radiation belt.

1969 - American novelist John Kennedy Toole - best remembered today for his epic work A Confederacy of Dunces, for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 - committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning near Biloxi, Mississippi.

1971 - East Pakistan declared its independence from Pakistan to form the People's Republic of Bangladesh, inciting the Bangladesh Liberation War.

1975 - The Biological Weapons Convention entered into force.

1976 - Britain's Queen Elizabeth II sent out the first royal email - from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment - apparently.

1979 - Following the Camp David Accords Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter signed the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in Washington, DC.

1982 - The groundbreaking ceremony for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was held on Washington, DC's National Mall.

1990 - American fashion designer Halston - an icon of the 1970s - died in San Francisco of AIDS-related complications following a lifetime of legendary debauchery.

1997 - Thirty-nine bodies were found in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, belonging to members of the Heaven's Gate cult; the followers of Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles had been brainwashed into believing that a spaceship following the Comet Hale-Bopp would take their souls with them. Whatever you believe, they were definitely taken for a ride...

1998 - During Algeria's Oued Bouaicha massacre 52 people were killed with axes and knives, 32 of them babies under the age of 2.

1999 - The so-called Melissa worm infected Microsoft word processing and e-mail systems around the world, but not those of Apple. Suckers...

2005 - The Taiwanese government called on 1 million of its citizens to demonstrate in Taipei, in opposition to the Anti-Secession Law of the People's Republic of China; between 200,000 and 300,000 actually attended the walk.
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Pop History Moment: The Assassination of King Faisal

On this day in 1975 Saudi Arabia's King Faisal died following a gun attack by his half-brother's son Faisal bin Musa'id during a majlis, a kind of mass audience in which the King opens his palace to his subjects to hear their grievances; despite the efforts of doctors to keep him alive he'd been shot point-blank, and died soon after.

As for the King's assailant, he attempted to flee but was captured, imprisoned, tried, declared insane, and executed in fairly short order. The reason he gave for shooting the King was his brother's having been killed by members of the Saudi Defense Force during a demonstration in 1965.

King Faisal was succeeded by his half-brother Khalid, who reigned until his own death in June 1982.
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Happy Birthday Sarah Jessica Parker

Of course, to me she will always be Carrie Bradshaw, one of the few writer characters on TV you actually saw writing; but I first saw her in Square Pegs, so in my own little twisted pop culture way Patty Greene will always be Carrie Bradshaw in high school...

In the intervening years SJP made memorable turns in movies such as when she ran amok amok amok in Hocus Pocus and was so charming in Steve Martin's winsome L.A. Story, in which she played SanDeE*, likely the only character in the history of film with an asterisk in her name. And of course, who could forget her performance under the villainous tutelage of Maggie Smith in The First Wives Club, playing a second wife?

She's had a lot on her plate since I first published these birthday wishes three years ago; in addition to wife-and-motherhood - celebrating a thirteenth anniversary with Matthew Broderick in May and little James' eighth birthday in October as well as the arrival of twin daughters Marion and Tabitha (delivered by surrogate) in June 2009 - she's already finished a second much-anticipated Sex and the City movie following the monster success of the first one in 2008.

On a more cruel note, 2007 also saw her winning the un-coveted title of Maxim magazine's Unsexiest Woman on the Planet; Mrs. Broderick spoke out against the award, an unusual move for a celebrity put into such a position. The Pop Culture Institute would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Sarah Jessica Parker for somehow managing to maintain her individuality in a profession where many of her contemporaries seem determined to morph into each other; although we're a little peeved that she had her signature mole removed, we're also sure she had her reasons.
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Pop History Moment: The Scottsboro Nine Are Arrested

On this day in 1931 nine black men (Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Roy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charles Weems, Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery, and Eugene Williams) were accused of raping two white women on a Southern Railroad freight train, somewhere between Chattanooga and Memphis...

What actually happened will likely never be known, but the picture that emerges from various testimonies is that among the many illegal passengers in that boxcar was a similar group of white youths, out to make trouble, and a pair of white prostitutes named Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. After the white group was ousted by the black one it seems the two women wanted to show their gratitude, and did so in their best manner.

Unbeknownst to them, the white youths complained to the stationmaster, who wired ahead to the next stop - which was Paint Rock, Arkansas - and all were taken into custody; before the day was out, they'd been taken to nearby Scottsboro, and by nightfall the National Guard was protecting the jail from an ever-growing lynch mob.

The ensuing trials - for there were many - kept the Depression-era public well entertained; along with the Lindbergh Baby trial, the cases of Sacco & Vanzetti and Leopold & Loeb in the 1920s, and numerous tales of outlawry from John Dillinger to Bonnie & Clyde the general lawlessness and cruelty of the times makes for a fascinating study. Thought to have at least partially inspired Harper Lee's masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird, the convoluted story of what happened next to the Scottsboro Nine (also known as the Scottsboro Boys) is better illuminated in James Goodman's book Stories of Scottsboro than I could ever hope to do in the space allotted to me here...
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"Come On And Get My Love" by Cathy Dennis (with D-Mob)

Birthday wishes go out today to Cathy Dennis, the British singer-songwriter and Simon Fuller acolyte who scored a major dance floor sensation of her own in 1990 with D Mob, providing guest vocals for the single C'mon and Get My Love; the song provided my friends and me with some superlative cardio for the two months or so it held the DJ's attention at Top Drawer, which is the club in Ottawa I used to frequent, way back in the day.

Taken from the album Move To This, it got as high as #15 on the UK singles chart, and even higher - #10 - in the US on Billboard's Hot 100.

She's had much better luck as a songwriter, with seven of her compositions attaining the #1 spot in the UK, including Toxic (recorded by someone named Britney Spears) and Can't Get You out of My Head, which made Kylie Minogue a big deal in the United States again after twenty years of massive success everywhere in the English-speaking world but there.
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Pop History Moment: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On this day in 1911 as many as 141 young women employed as seamstresses by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company died when their workplace caught fire; the death toll would eventually climb to 148, as a few of the survivors later succumbed to smoke inhalation in hospital.

Located on the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building at the corner of Washington and Greene streets (east of Washington Square) in Manhattan - theirs is the uppermost sign on the corner of the building in foreground of the photo - the sweat shop employed as many as 500 women, most of them under the age of 25 and some as young as 12, for wages of $6-7 per week. As well as seamstresses, the company also employed floor walkers, who kept an eye out for theft, in addition to guarding locked exit doors and occasionally sexually harassing the workers.

The fire broke out on the eighth floor of undetermined causes; some said it was a carelessly discarded cigarette, others an ember from one of the stoves used to heat the presser's irons, and still others from the heat of the irons themselves - not for nothing were these called sweatshops, as even in the middle of summer stoves were kept blazing. What is known is that the fire spread quickly, due to the amount of flammable fabric, tissue paper, and chemicals stored on the site.

Early on in the evacuation the building's single flimsy fire escape buckled under the weight of those attempting to flee; more than 60 young women trapped on the 9th floor chose to break the windows (which had been nailed shut) and throw themselves to their deaths rather than being burned alive, horrifying onlookers who'd begun to gather on the street below. Others pried open elevator doors only to tumble to their death; one survivor was later found nearly drowned in a puddle of water at the bottom of the shaft.

The litter of bodies on the street made the fire department's job even more difficult; they'd showed up promptly, ready to do their brave duty, but as they had only six story ladders their efforts to bring the fire under control were severely hampered. In the meantime Blanck and Harris had fled to the comparative safety of the building's roof while on the street below Frances Perkins - FDR's future Secretary of Labor - was among those in the crowd watching the tragedy unfold.

No sooner was the fire doused than a firestorm of controversy began to rage in the Press; the catastrophe highlighted several deficiencies of the era, from labour laws to safety codes. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union gained the most political clout from the tragedy, as situations of this nature only serve to prove the shortcomings inherent in unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory wasn't the first of its kind, but the outrage it prompted insured that it was one of the last, at least in the United States.

The Asch Building survived the blaze; renamed the Brown Building, it's currently serving as the chemistry building for New York University, having been entered into the National Register of Historic Places and made a National Historical Landmark in 1991, as well as a New York City Landmark in 2003. Two plaques on the front of 23-29 Washington Place commemorate the victims of this terrible event. The fire has served as the basis for both fiction and nonfiction books, as well as poetry, and inspired both a 1979 movie - The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal - and the 1986 musical Rags.
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POPnews - March 25th

[On this day in 1957 Allen Ginsberg (pictured above, with his longtime lover Peter Orlovsky in a raggedy toque) stared down the forces of censorship and won both the public relations battle and the latest skirmish in the war on freedom of expression over his poem Howl with the able assistance of attorney Jake Ehrlich. The story of the trial and the issues it raised is rumoured to be receiving the celluloid treatment, with über-hunky Jon Hamm as Ehrlich.]
1199 - England's King Richard I (better known as Richard the Lionhearted) was wounded by a crossbow bolt while attempting to suppress a revolt by Aimar V of Limoges at the castle of Chalus-Chabrol in France; the King's injury resulted in his agonizing death from gangrene eleven days later.

1306 - Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scotland by Isabella MacDuff.

1655 - Saturn's largest moon, Titan, was discovered by Christian Huygens.

1802 - The Treaty of Amiens was signed as a 'Definitive Treaty of Peace' between France and United Kingdom; as a 'treaty of peace' it broke down almost instantly, which is what made it so 'definitive'.

1807 - The Slave Trade Act became law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire; it was an important step in the abolition of slavery throughout British territory, which occurred in 1833 with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act.

1811 - Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University College, Oxford, for his publication of the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism; Shelley's friend (and future biographer) Thomas Jefferson Hogg was also expelled for his involvement in the matter.

1894 - Coxey's Army, led by Jacob Coxey, departed Massillon, Ohio, for Washington, DC; protesting the widespread economic recession brought on by the Panic of 1893, it is thought that their story was later adapted allegorically by L. Frank Baum in his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

1908 - Brazilian football club Clube Atletico Mineiro was founded in Belo Horizonte.

1918 - The Belarusian People's Republic was established.

1941 - The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Axis powers when Prince Paul - that country's regent - signed the Tripartite Pact; his actions inspired a coup, and two days later the 18-year-old King Peter II seized power.

1949 - An extensive campaign known as the March deportation was conducted in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to force collectivization by way of terror; all told, Stalinist authorities deported more than 92,000 people from the Baltic states to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

1957 - US Customs officials seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl as obscene, bringing charges against its publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his business, San Francisco's iconic City Lights Bookstore, for publishing it.

1958 - Canada's legendary jet fighter, the Avro Arrow, made its debut flight.

1969 - During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their first Bed-In for Peace in the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam; a publicity stunt designed to exploit media interest in their recent marriage, it lasted until the end of March.

1975 - Saudi Arabia's King Faisal was shot and killed by his nephew Faisal bin Musa'id, who was immediately captured, declared mentally ill, found guilty of regicide, and beheaded in Riyadh in June; the King was succeeded by his half-brother Khalid.

1979 - The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

1988 - The Candle Demonstration in Bratislava was the first mass demonstration of the 1980s against the communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia; it is commemorated today in Slovakia as the Struggle for Human Rights Day.

1990 - A fire set by Julio González at the illegal Happy Land social club in the Bronx killed 87 people, many of them Hondurans celebrating Carnival.

2006 - During the Capitol Hill massacre Kyle Aaron Huff killed six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood; it was one of the largest crime scenes that city had ever seen.
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"Cruel To Be Kind" by Nick Lowe and Rockpile

Appearing here on Top of the Pops with Rockpile, it's birthday boy Nick Lowe, whose vocals rocketed Cruel To Be Kind up the American charts in 1979.
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Pop History Moment: Elvis Presley Was Drafted

If I live to be a hundred*, I'll never believe that the drafting of Elvis Presley on this day in 1958 wasn't an attempt by the US government to stifle the social dissent amongst young people being caused by rock and roll, of whom Elvis was even then the greatest icon. It failed, of course, as subterfuge of this kind inevitably does; it did, however, shift the axis of popular music from the US to the UK**, and so bring about the British Invasion of the early 1960s.

Reporting for duty at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas, Presley was accompanied by a media whirlwind, which seems to have taken the base's information officer Captain Arlie Metheny entirely by surprise. For his part the singer undertook his military service studiously, despite the fact that he could have easily fought for and won deferment. 'The Army can do anything it wants with me,' he is reported as saying.

Despite his training at Fort Hood, Texas, and service in Friedberg, West Germany - during which time he developed hankerings for amphetamines, karate, and 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu - between the time of his induction and his discharge in March 1960 Presley had ten Top Ten hits, including Wear My Ring Around Your Neck, the best-selling Hard Headed Woman, and One Night in 1958, and (Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I and the number one A Big Hunk o' Love in 1959.

*At the rate I'm going, not even a remote possibility...
**Which has a professional army, untainted by conscription or 'selective service', to use the odious euphemism of the US government.
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"Pity The Nation" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Today marks the 91st birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers and one of the last surviving members of a scene which shook the literary establishment in the 1950s.

Best known for A Coney Island of the Mind, first published in 1958, Ferlinghetti's scorching indictment of the American bourgeoisie has been drawing criticism that the left is anti-American for half a century now, despite the fact that his has always been a criticism meant to inspire self-improvement of both citizen and state rather than the mindless devotion to national symbolism, which without vigilance is as prone to entropy as anything.

Or, y'know, whatever...
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Remembering... Queen Mary

Her Majesty Queen Mary - consort to George V and the current Queen's grandmother - died in her sleep at Marlborough House after a lengthy (and secret) battle with lung cancer on this day in 1953, just ten weeks before the much-anticipated coronation of the new Elizabeth II; one of her last acts was to insist that her death not be allowed to postpone the ceremony, and indeed it wasn't. Even as London was being scrubbed down and hung with bunting, mourners were filing past her coffin in Westminster Hall or else lining the route along which she was taken to be buried next to her husband in St. George's Chapel, Windsor.

Initially she'd been brought to England in 1891 as a prospective match for Queen Victoria's eldest grandson - and thus the heir presumptive - Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence; he promptly died, six weeks after their engagement was announced, and she ended up marrying the Duke of York instead, thanks to a bit of matrimonial switcheroo the Royal Family has used on occasion before although - as with the case of Catherine of Aragon - usually with tragic results for the bride. By all accounts, though, theirs was a love match; George V famously took no mistresses. She became Princess of Wales following the accession of her father-in-law Edward VII in January 1901, and Queen upon his death in May 1910.

In character and bearing, Queen Mary was a Victorian; even as the first half of the 20th Century wrought immense changes to the United Kingdom - and not a few to her own family as well - hers was the sort of stalwart presence currently represented by her granddaughter. Her diligence restored to the once great Royal Collection the possessions of the Crown - which rightly belong to the people, and are held in trust by the sovereign - that had over the past century been pilfered and stashed throughout the Nation's noblest homes; she was also inordinately fond of jewellery, and the precious stones she was able to secure in her lifetime are considered every bit as prestigious (not to mention priceless) as the Crown Jewels themselves. Her duty compelled her to continue with public life, despite having outlived three of her six children, even as it compelled her to shun one of the surviving ones - The Duke of Windsor - for the damage she felt his abdication had caused to crown and country.

The biography of record remains Anne Edwards' exceptional Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor, first published in 1984.
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Pop History Moment: The Death of Elizabeth I

Her reign - coming as it did after a brief but vicious period of religious tyranny under her aptly nicknamed half-sister Bloody Mary - was greeted by the populace as nothing short of the start of a Golden Age; poets and playwrights sang her praises, and as her procession approached Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation she met the cheering, exuberant crowds who lined the route with cheering and exuberance of her own. Given those initial high expectations, then, it's almost inevitable that her reign should close on a disappointing note; as exceptional a figure as she was, not even Elizabeth I could live up to that kind of hype.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 - without a doubt the apogee of the Elizabethan era - had come at a terrific cost; fifteen years later, as the queen who'd so bravely rallied her troops at Tilbury was dying in Richmond Palace the people were still paying for it. At the same time, some of the worst weather of the century had plagued the harvest during her final years. No doubt many of her subjects - still prone to superstition either of the heathen of Christian variety - blamed the queen herself, either for not marrying and providing an heir or for otherwise refusing to clarify the matter of the succession.

Of course, she was right to leave her thoughts on the matter private; given that the idea of a queen regnant - let alone the idea that one could be successful - was still a revolutionary one in much of Europe, she had every reason to believe that upon naming her successor she might find herself rather callously despatched. Having spent her entire reign as the subject of plots and conspiracies to separate her body from her throne (not to mention her life from her body) and having only recently succeeded in putting down a rebellion by the Earl of Essex - a former favourite - she'd come by her paranoia honestly; 45 years as a Queen will do that to a person.

As much for the good of the kingdom as for his own career, it was her secretary of state Robert Cecil who finally took matters into his own hands, conducting secret negotiations with Scotland's King James VI (son of Elizabeth's great rival Mary, Queen of Scots) to provide for a smooth succession when the time came. Having been well-schooled by his father - the great statesman Lord Burghley - in the ways of dealing with the recalcitrance of this particular monarch, Cecil was particularly diplomatic in his persistence; having also picked up a few pointers from the Queen's famous spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham likewise ensured he wouldn't be caught playing both ends against the middle and thus risk execution for treason.

Meanwhile, following the February 1603 death of her friend Catherine Carey, Countess of Nottingham - her once-handsome beauty ravaged by age, a near-fatal bout with smallpox in 1592, and tooth decay - the Queen sank into what was called a 'settled and unremovable melancholy'; for two weeks before she died she either sat propped up against cushions or stood all day, lost in contemplation, seemingly without sleep and taking very little food. Her last recorded words, on the day before her death, were 'I wish not to live any longer, but desire to die,' following which she allowed the Earl of Nottingham to carry her to her bed. When Robert Cecil approached her bedside and persisted in his enquiries concerning James VI she responded by holding her hands above her head in the shape of a crown.

Elizabeth I, who'd once breathed fire at her brother-in-law Philip II and his ill-fated flotilla, breathed her last shortly before 3 AM on this day in 1603, aged 69; she was discovered - still warm - by her attendant Lady Scrope. Although news of the Queen's death met with grief up and down the country, there was also a sense of relief that her moribund reign had come to an end. With the closing of her once-bright eyes, so closed the vivid chapter of English history that was known as the Tudor dynasty, born 117 years earlier with her grandfather Henry VII on the battlefield at Bosworth...
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Pop History Moment: The Exxon Valdez Disaster

On this day in 1989 an oil tanker, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground in Prince William Sound off the Alaskan coast, spilling 240,000 barrels (42,000 m³) of crude oil into the sea; given the remote location of the accident and the time of year, the cleanup effort was severely hampered. Rumours have continued to dog the ship's master Joseph Jeffrey Hazelwood that he was drunk at the time of the accident...

The story has an interesting Vancouver angle; my buddy Nyac (pictured) was rescued from the muck and brought to live at the Vancouver Aquarium as a pup - where she lived, alongside her buddy Milo, until her death in 2008. Although Nyac was 20 years old when she died - twice the age she could have expected to attain in the wild - when she died she was the first sea otter ever to have been diagnosed with leukemia - likely as a reult of her exposure to crude oil as a pup all those years ago.

In fact, for years I had a picture of them linking paws on my keychain, as well as pictures of the two of them cavorting on my hard drive which are now treasured mementos.

In another one of those spooky coincidences that occasionally happens, another oil tanker (this time the Amoco Cadiz) caused another, much worse, oil spill off the Brittany coast of France on the same day, only in 1978.
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POPnews - March 24th

[The tarring and feathering of Mormon leader Joseph Smith - shown here in a scene by C. C. A. Christensen - was all well and good for 1832, but today's modern Christianist wingnut has become attuned to such treatment, and might even liken it to the tortures endured by Christ; in fact, methinks some of them even get off on it a little bit, and their battery-operated underwear or whatever it is they wear simply cannot cope. For their egregious support of Proposition 8, for their interference with and denial of the civil rights of others, for their refusal to believe anything but the bunkum taught from their pulpits without any critical thinking being employed whatsoever, only the mockery and derision of the modern Internet will do.]
1455 - Pope Nicholas V died; he was succeeded by Pope Callixtus III on April 8th.

1603 - James VI of Scotland became James I of England following the death of Elizabeth I, although the so-called Union of the Crowns was to be a personal rule only; the Acts of Union in 1707 - ratified under his great-granddaughter Queen Anne - would be needed to formalize the arrangement.

1765 - The first Quartering Act - which required householders in the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops - received the royal assent of King George III; one of the so-called Intolerable Acts issued in direct response to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 - along with the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, and the Administration of Justice Act - their heavy-handedness virtually assured the inevitability of the American Revolution.

1832 - A group of men tarred and feathered Mormon leader Joseph Smith, Jr. in Hiram, Ohio.

1868 - The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was formed.

1878 - The British frigate HMS Eurydice sank off the Isle of Wight; only 2 of the 378 on board survived.

1882 - Robert Koch announced the discovery of mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.

1900 - Mayor Robert Anderson Van Wyck broke ground at the corner of Bleecker and Greene streets in Greenwich Village for a new underground 'Rapid Transit Railroad' that would link Manhattan and Brooklyn; in what seemed like no time at all the New York City Subway was the largest in the world.

1934 - The US Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act allowing the Philippines to become a self-governing commonwealth.

1958 - Elvis Presley was officially inducted into the US Army as Private #53310761, having been granted a deferral the previous December to complete work on the film King Creole; he completed his basic training at Fort Hood, in Texas.

1959 - The Party of the African Federation (PFA) was launched by Senegal's Léopold Sédar Senghor and Modibo Keita of Mali.

1965 - NASA's Ranger 9, equipped to convert its signals into a form suitable for showing on domestic television, brought images of the Moon into ordinary homes before crash-landing exactly as planned in the crater Alphonsus.

1976 - Argentina's military deposed President Isabel Perón and started the National Reorganization Process.

1980 - Archbishop Óscar Romero was killed by government troops while celebrating Mass in San Salvador; an outspoken advocate of liberation theology, Romero had embraced Marxist ideology but had also run afoul of the Vatican for his attempts to help the poor in a 20th Century fashion as well as his support for human rights.

1981 - Fugitive Ronnie Biggs - who was kidnapped from his home in Brazil by John Miller and Patrick King among others and transported to Barbados in hopes that his captors could claim the reward on his head - was rescued and returned to Brazil. Despite its status as a Commonwealth nation, Barbados has no extradition treaty with the UK, rendering the entire operation a total failure. Biggs, of course, was best known for his role in the Great Train Robbery of 1963; he escaped from HM Prison Wandsworth in 1965, but returned voluntarily to Britain in 2001.

1989 - After running aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound the Exxon Valdez spilled 240,000 barrels (or about 20% of its total cargo) of petroleum; far from the largest in terms of volume, the Exxon Valdez oil spill nevertheless united environmentalists and sportsmen alike against the carelessness of oil companies when transporting their hazardous material through otherwise pristine wilderness areas. At the time of the accident ship's master Joseph Hazelwood was in his cabin, allegedly drunk.

1992 - Britain's satirical Punch magazine - founded in July 1841 - ceased publication after 150 years; it was revived in 1996 by Mohamed Al-Fayed but folded again in May 2002.

1998 - At the Jonesboro massacre Andrew Golden, aged 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, fired upon teachers and students at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas. All told five people were killed - Natalie Brooks (11), Paige Ann Herring (12), Stephanie Johnson (12, no relation), Brittheny R. Varner (11), and Shannon Wright (32) - and ten were wounded; both shooters were released from custody on their 21st birthdays, having essentially gotten away with murder.

1999 - 39 people died when a Belgian transport truck carrying flour and margarine caught fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel which connects France and Italy beneath the Alps.
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"Liebestod" from "Tristan und Isolde" by Eileen Farrell

The death of Eileen Farrell, on this day in 2002, put to rest any possibility she would either perform or record Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde in its entirety - one of the great tragedies in a genre which itself excels at great tragedy. The opera, of course, was based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, which is thought to pre-date (and therefore inform) much Arthurian legend.

Here Farrell performs Mild und leise, the opera's closing aria, in which the Irish princess Isolde mourns the death of her knightly lover Tristan in one of opera's greatest moments.
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In Memoriam: Cedric Gibbons

For every high-strung flash-in-the-pan pretty face in front of the camera, Hollywood has had a long-haul hard worker (or ten) behind it. They may be as obscure as you or I; they may be as celebrated as - or, in some cases, even more celebrated than - those they painted, clothed, or lit simply because their jobs didn't rely on looks alone but talent, fortitude, and discretion...

Cedric Gibbons - born on this day in 1893 - was one such technician; he began working in the art department of Samuel Goldwyn in 1918, and when Goldwyn later merged with Metro and Mayer Gibbons went on to work with the fledgling MGM from 1924-1956 - a 32-year career under the thumb of Louis B. Mayer, a feat of the utmost endurance. During his tenure there the famed art director personally oversaw 150 productions and had his name on ten times as many - a feat which I can safely say will never be replicated.

As Head of the Art Department at MGM, Gibbons was one of 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an initiative by that studio to give itself trophies for work from which it already made obscene amounts of money. He even designed the Oscar statuette - a knight (whose physique was based upon that of Emilio 'El Indio' Fernández, a friend of Gibbons' then-wife Dolores del Río) standing atop a film canister with five spokes (one for each of the founding creative branches of film - namely actors, writers, directors, producers, and technicians); the work was then sculpted by George Stanley from Gibbons' design. From the day he designed it until the day he retired he earned 11 of them for his work, out of a total of 39 nominations.

It was said of Gibbons' work that if he was called upon to design Paris for a movie, it could out-Paris Paris; the films he worked on are simply redolent with style. I can single out one - Gaslight (1944) - that depicted a Victorian London so lavish that an actual Victorian would have been appalled by its exuberance. No slave to sentiment, he was also the first designer to use modern architecture in film, being especially fond of Art Deco and Art Moderne styles. For viewers, though, whether they knew it or not, his sets were a big part of the enthralling experience that was movie-going in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

After Gibbons and his ilk began retiring from the grinding schedule that was the film business during the studio era Hollywood underwent a sea change that took a full three decades to correct; while his successors in the 1960s and 1970s favoured a greater naturalism in film, their successors since the 1990s have begun to return to the more lavish style that made American cinema so great in the first place, many of them consciously honouring the work of great artists like Cedric Gibbons in the process.
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"Parklife" by Blur

Birthday wishes go out to Damon Albarn, the brains behind Blur, and lately Gorillaz as well; n between times he's been involved with yet another side project, the critically acclaimed The Good, the Bad and the Queen.

I chose to feature Parklife - rather than, say Girls & Boys or Song 2, which are equally good - because the song's quintessential Englishness meant it didn't get played in North America much; whereas quintessential Englishness makes whatever it is a dead cert to be published here. Plus, I adore the song's estuarian sprechgesang, almost as much as I love typing the phrase estuarian sprechgesang.

The title track to the band's third album (a smash after the predictably sluggish reviews for their sophomore effort Modern Life is Rubbish) Parklife - the album and the song - catapulted the band back into relevance in 1994, debuting at Number One and remaining on the charts in the UK for 90 weeks.
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