~ firefly-dreaming a virtual home to learn (or teach!) alternative methods of solving problems we find facing us each day. By sharing ideas & knowledge on living with less stress, more joy & embracing tolerance & compassion we are working towards building a sustainable future for all living beings.
The entertainment industry has both change and continuity .... even when you're not expecting it ....
FATHER-SON? TV/film star Dan Aykroyd ....
and film star Justin Theroux ("American Psycho", "Mulholland Drive").
Help get the month of December kick-started: stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
ART NOTES - the first exhibition in the museum's 'Recognition of Art by Women' series presents works by Jenny Saville at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida to March 4th.
FIRST it was Kathleen Parker musing about the GOP candidate intelligence gap; then (and more surprisingly) it was Rich Lowry noticing the same thing.
IN a DIFFERENT FORUM last night, I took a look at the infamous 1989 English soccer stadium Hillsborough Disaster - and how the Murdoch empire is still apologizing for its patently false coverage of it, twenty-two years later.
TUESDAY's CHILD is Dixie the Cat - an English kitteh who disappeared in 1999 and whose family believed was dead ..... but located in 2008 due to a microchip.
ART NOTES #2 - the cover artwork for the Rolling Stones' 1969 album Let It Bleed - featuring (among other things) a cake created by the then little-known chef Delia Smith, instructed to bake the gaudiest cake she could - is expected to fetch up to $60,000 (US) at auction in London next month.
POLITICAL NOTES - historically under-represented in Canada's parliament, its native peoples - who make up almost 4% of the population - have become increasingly involved in politics.
ART NOTES - the exhibition Seeing Impressionism is at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, Washington through February 25th.
NOT ONLY HAS this year's NBA season been salvaged: a Broadway play about the two legendary Laker and Celtic stars to be titled Magic/Bird has begun casting, with a March, 2012 opening foreseen.
IN a PROFILE of the Saturday Night Live/Bridesmaids comic star Kristen Wiig - she declares that her next movie will be "a 'Porky's' prequel".
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is shown in a painting called Little Miss Hone - with that 'Get me outta here!' look - that I saw recently at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
An interesting note: the painter was the Boston-born Samuel Morse - yes, of the telegraph and Morse code fame - who was a painter working in Paris before he delved into other fields.
HAIL and FAREWELL to the English drummer Keef Hartley who has died at the age of 67. He was John Mayall's drummer for several years in the 60's-70's, and I saw him with his band Dog Soldier in 1975. Finally, he is the answer to a trivia question: who replaced Ringo Starr as the drummer for the band 'Rory Storm and the Hurricanes' (when Ringo left them to join the Beatles)?
SEPARATED at BIRTH - TV host 'Dr. Drew' Pinsky and musician Art Alexakis (from the band Everclear).
CHEERS to a wonderful long weekend. Visiting my sister in New Jersey, Thanksgiving dinner at her in-laws in eastern Pennsylvania, Friday in Manhattan and Saturday on my native Long Island, New York (all with fantastic weather) and suffice it to say: I feel refreshed as can be.
TWENTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK the actor Ralph Bellamy died at the age of eight-seven. How long was his career? He acted in 1931 with Jean Harlow ... and nearly 60 years later (in 1990) with Julia Roberts.
ART NOTES - works by George Inness in the exhibit Private Treasures are at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey through April 1st.
DEBAUCHERY CENTRAL - scientists have created the world's first movie of the female orgasm - a series of brain scan images as it approaches, experiences and recovers from one.
IN a PROFILE of the singer Kate Bush - who has released her first album in six years - it was noted that her 1978 debut single "Wuthering Heights" was the first British #1 to be both written and sung by a woman.
THURSDAY's CHILD is Sassafras the Cat - a Pennsylvania former shelter kitteh featured in a story of how people come to be owned by their cats.
FOR 2011 - France's Académie Française has declared the 'Word of the Year' as 'attachiant(e)' - someone you cannot live with but cannot live without. Last year's was 'phonard' - someone who is glued to their mobile phone all the time.
ALTHOUGH YOU MAY ONLY know his work on "Fritz the Cat" or other cartoons: it turns out that the late R Crumb also produced a series of album covers - many for jazz and blues artists - now, an anthology of them has been published.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Israeli actor-singer Eli Gorenstein and the jailed financier Bernard Madoff.
GLAD to SEE that the nation of Brazil has established a truth commission to investigate crimes committed during its 1946-1988 military dictatorship - which only seems fair since Brazil's president (and her two most recent predecessors) were either tortured, jailed or forced into exile.
MUSIC NOTES - the French-born film star Julie Delpy is to make a biopic of Joe Strummer - the late rhythm guitarist and singer of The Clash - who died in 2002.
FRIDAY's CHILD is the logo of a pretty good pizzeria in New Hampshire's largest city, Manchester.
A look at the menu of the Alley Cat Pizzeria shows that they have cat-themed names for their specialty pizzas: the "White Cat" (for no sauce), "Attack Cat" (for a meat-lover's pie that Herman Cain would love) ... but it appears they have discontinued their old Everything pie with the title .... "Cat-astrophe".
......and finally, for a a song of the week ........................................ an unlikely songsmith to emerge in the 20th Century was Cole Porter - whose grandfather was the richest man in the state of Indiana. J.O. Cole was upset that his daughter first sent her son to Worcester Academy at age 14 (wanting him to stay in Indiana) and then (after graduating from Yale) that young Cole had left Harvard Law (where he was roommates with future Secretary of State Dean Acheson) to enter its music school. Along with other parts of his life, this story has never been verified, but Porter said that the school's dean (Ezra Thayer) had advised him to do so; saying that his talent for music dwarfed his potential anywhere else.
That talent had already been displayed as an undergraduate at Yale, where he composed 300 songs (some of which, including the football song, are still played nearly 100 years later). But his first efforts on Broadway (circa 1915) were failures, and he became part of the American expatriate Lost Generation in Paris; selling songs and living off an allowance from his family. Although officially listed as part of the French Foreign Legion during WW-I, he did only minor work for the Duryea Relief Fund.
In 1919 he married a wealthy American divorcée who was fully cognizant of his sexual orientation. In a 2004 biopic (to be mentioned later more fully) they discuss the matter in one of the film's highlights:
Cole Porter: So you know that I... that I have other interests... interests some may see as unfair to you?
Linda Porter: You mean ..... men?
They led the good life in Europe through the 1920's, yet he continued to write and two composers helped convince him to try again. One was Richard Rodgers who heard his work in Venice and was puzzled as to his lack of notoriety on Broadway. The other was Irving Berlin, who recommended Cole to the producers of the Broadway play "Paris" (appropriately enough) and the Porters returned to the US in 1928.
That play proved a success, with "Let's Do It" becoming the first classic that Cole Porter was ever to write. And for the next thirty years, Cole Porter wrote music for scores of Broadway plays (including "The Gay Divorce", "Can Can", Anything Goes and - something of a comeback for him in 1948 - "Kiss Me Kate"). He had luck in Hollywood as well, with Fred Astaire films, then "High Society" and "Les Girls".
It sounds like a "Behind the Music" twist, but at age 46 in 1937, Cole Porter was thrown off a horse and was in severe pain the rest of his life. He was one of the first who underwent electro-shock therapy, and eventually had one of his legs amputated. Further depressed by the death of his mother (in 1952) and his wife (in 1958) he never wrote after 1958.
But wotta catalogue. Just a few of his songs that became classics include "What Is This Thing Called Love?", "Love for Sale", "Anything Goes", "You're the Top", "Begin the Beguine", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Just One of Those Things", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Too Darn Hot" and an unlikely hit in Don't Fence Me In that was for an unreleased film that came into the public eye a decade later via ..... Roy Rogers. And uncommonly for the era, he was both the composer and lyricist for his songs.
Cole Porter died of kidney failure in October, 1964 at the age of 73. An instant choice for the Songwriters Hall of Fame - he was profiled in two films: "Night and Day" (a quite sanitized 1946 film starring Cary Grant) and the aforementioned 2004 film De-Lovely - starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd as his wife) which, despite being critically panned I truly enjoyed despite its flaws. One of the highlights was seeing many contemporary singers (Robbie Williams, Diana Krall, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Cole and others) appearing in period dress throughout the film, singing those tunes.
Of all of his works, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye - from a 1944 musical revue - is one of my favorite love songs of all time. A great instrumental version by John Coltrane is at this link - for a vocal version, at this link - is one from the Eurythmics' Annie Lennox.
Everytime we say goodbye
I die a little
Everytime we say goodbye
I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
That they allow you to go?
When you're near
There's such an air
Of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere
Begin to sing about it
And there's no love song finer
But how strange, the change:
From major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye
