Archive for May 2011
The Master meets the Godfather…
“From high art to low trash, and back again!”– Media Funhouse has been dishing it out on Manhattan cable access and on its blog for over a decade-and-a-half. The work of Ed Grant (editor of The Motion Picture Guide and Movies on TV), it’s a continuous stream of appreciations, oddities… an enthusiast’s delight.
Consider, for example, this recent episode:
A Deceased Artiste tribute to three very talented individuals. This time out, it’s three individuals who took a powder at the very end of last year. First up, I salute Eartha Kitt with her sexy performances from the stilted but invaluable musical New Faces (1954). Then it’s on to an auteur who was known as a specialist in “Southern children” pictures and portraits of moon-eyed horny teenagers, Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Summer of ’42). My favorite film by Mulligan, featured here, is the underrated, low-key neo-noir The Nickel Ride (1975) starring Jason Miller. From Mulligan’s doomed noir hero, we move on to the man whose plays were landmarks in English (and world) theater, the master of modern mis-communication and strategically-placed silence, Harold Pinter. Despite his stylization, Pinter’s confrontations are as raw – although not as verbally violent – as those of his successor, David Mamet. The Deceased Artiste department of the Funhouse is one of the few places these folks could meet, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That said, there were other places that unlikely folks met. Consider The Mike Douglas Show:
The show was 90 minutes long and on five days a week, so the guests had to be stacked up like cordwood, and very often they had nothing whatsoever in common with the week-long “cohost”… [the clip below] features a [1969] daytime talkshow appearance by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch has nominally come on to promote what might be his worst American film Topaz, and gets to shake hands with the three guests who are already on the panel: bestselling poet and songwriter Rod McKuen (“Seasons in the Sun,” Listen to the Warm), Joan Rivers (when she was a mousy housewife comedian you could look at without wincing), and the One and Only James Brown. Yes, the two legends from completely different disciplines were on the same stage, just because the bookers decided that was the best day to get ’em both on the air.
More wonderful weirdness– essays, clips, podcasts– at Media Funhouse. [TotH to @jessedylan]
As we Say it Loud! I’m Fat and I’m Proud!, we might refrain from mowing the lawn in birthday tribute to Walt Whitman; he was born on this date in 1819. Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, where over time he moved from printing to teaching to journalism, becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He began experimenting with a new form of poetry, revolutionary at the time, free of a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, that has come to be known as “free verse.” In 1855, Whitman published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass— which was revolutionary too in its content, celebrating the human body and the common man. Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and enlarging Leaves of Grass; the ninth edition appeared in 1892, the year of his death.
Whitman and the Butterfly, from the 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass (source: Library of Congress)
Top of the Pops…
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
– Robert Benchley
From the always-amusing Mental Floss, a current read on The All-Time Best-Selling Books. The top spots are held by volumes either instructional or devotional:
1. The Bible (6.7 billion copies)
2. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Tse-Tung (900 million)
3. The Qur’an (800 million)
4. Xinhua Zidian (400 million — a Chinese dictionary, first published in 1953)
5. The Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer
6. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
7. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Foxe
8. The Book of Mormon, Joseph J. Smith, Jr.
But two works of fiction round out the Top Ten:
9. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling (107 million — UK title was …and the Philosopher’s Stone)
10. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (100 million)
Read the full list (and find links to top lists of videos, games, and albums) at The All-Time Best-Selling Books… dive more deeply into the rankings at Wikipedia— which observes: “This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.” To put it politely: note, e.g., that Tale of Two Cities and Tolkein’s work probably belong in MF’s Top Ten… Still, it’s fun…
“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.
– Mark Twain
As we turn the page, we might recall that it was on this date in 1593 that poet and playwright (Shakespeare’s nearest rival) Christopher Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl. Marlowe reputedly supplemented his income as a spy; in any case, he ran afoul of Queen Elizabeth’s government when, earlier in the month, his roommate, playwright Thomas Kyd was grilled by authorities. Kyd insisted that the “heretical” papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who was subsequently arrested, but was able to use his connections to arrange bail. While out Marlowe became involved in a fight– ostensibly over a tavern bill, but believed by many to have been a set-up– and was stabbed to death.
The 1585 portrait discovered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1953, believed to be of the 21-year-old Christopher Marlowe. The inscribed motto is “QVOD ME NVTRIT ME DESTRVIT,” “that which nourishes me destroys me.” Indeed. (source)
We might note too that (as the Library of Congress recalls) it was on this date in 1868 that Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order Number 11 designating May 30 as a day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
The first national celebration of the holiday took place on that day at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. Originally known as Decoration Day, at the turn of the century it was designated “Memorial Day.”
Interior Decoration Notes: Sweet!
Gummy Bearskin Rug (Brock Davis)
[TotH to Laughing Squid]
As we resolve to redecorate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 that fifteen young female employees were fired by Curtis Publishing, publisher of the Ladies Home Journal, for dancing the “Turkey Trot” during their lunch break.
Female employees not dancing at Curtis Publishing (source)
Adventures in Cosmology: Starting out Simply…
Why was entropy so low at the Big Bang? (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Back in 2010, SUNY-Buffalo physics professor Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues made a simple– a radically simple– suggestion: that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).
The core idea is that the dimensionality of space depends on the size of the space observed, with smaller spaces associated with fewer dimensions. That means that a fourth dimension will open up — if it hasn’t already — as the universe continues to expand. (Interesting corollary: space has fewer dimensions at very high energies of the kind associated with the early, post-big bang universe.)
Stojkovic’s notion is challenging; but at the same time, it would help address a number of fundamental problems with the standard model of particle physics, from the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity to the mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
But is it “true”? There’s no way to know as yet. But Stojkovic and his colleagues have devised a test using the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, that could shed some definitive light on the question in just a few years.
Read the whole story in Science Daily, and read Stojkovic’s proposal for experimental proof in Physical Review Letters.
As we glance around for evidence of that fourth dimension, we might bid an indeterminate farewell to Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Laureate whose work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility led to the identification of self-organizing systems, and is seen by many as a bridge between the natural and social sciences. He died at the Hospital Erasme in Brussels on this date in 2003.
Prigogine’s 1997 book, The End of Certainty, summarized his departure from the determinist thinking of Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger in arguing for “the arrow of time”– and “complexity,” the ineluctable reality of irreversibility and instability. “Unstable systems” like weather and biological life, he suggested, cannot be explained with standard deterministic models. Rather, given their to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, probabilistically.
source: University of Texas
By the numbers…
The 2010 Census results are in. The headlines: men are living longer; marriage isn’t.
Some highlights…
Since the 2000 census, the number of men in the U.S. increased by 9.9 percent. Woman grew 9.5 percent. There are more men than women under the age of 34, because “more boys than girls tend to be born.”
But above age 85, the number of women is double that of men. Female life expectancy is 80.8 years; male, 75.6 years.
Baby boomers are aging: The 45-plus group grew 25.6 percent since 2000, while the under-45 group only increased 1.4 percent. The median national age was 37.2 years, from 35.3 in 2000. Seven states now have a median age of over 40. Maine is oldest, at 42.7; Utah is youngest, at 29.2.
The share of U.S. households with married couples fell to 48.4 percent, down from 51.7 percent in 2000– the first time the number dropped below 50 percent. In 1950, married couples made up 77 percent of households.
More descriptive demographics in this AP report and at the Census Bureau’s site.
As we do our best to age gracefully, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Walt Disney’s edifying fable “Three Little Pigs” was released. Winner of the 1934 Academy Award for Best Animated Short, “Three Little Pigs” was ranked #11 on the list of 50 Greatest Cartoons, and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (source)
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